The Quest for the Ultimate Screenshot...

[EastChapel 115]

The holy grail of SimCity for me was always the 'mega screenshot' - a full large tile that you could zoom right into to see the minute details. In theory this has always been possible - it just took a lot of time - arguably days, not hours of work. Sure there were other workarounds (I plugged into my 50" TV for a bit to speed the process up in one of my attempts), but nothing quite convenient seemed to be apparent. There were two major time sinks. First was the problem of taking the screenshots. One had to zoom right up close and then scroll up and across taking into account the whole city. Second was the stitching of the shots together an even more laborious task. Surely there had to be a better way?

After stumbling across this Reddit post again of an AutoHotkey script that used the 3D camera, it suddenly occurred to me that the first part of the process could (potentially easily) be automated. With a bit of research and assistance from nos.17 's  tutorial, I tested a very simple AutoHotkey script:

!u::
Loop, 8
{
Sleep, 500
Send, #{PrintScreen}
Loop, 12
{
Sleep, 1000
Send, ^{up}
}
}
Return	

 

This very basic and possibly inelegant script had the desired effect. It would take a screen shot, move the camera up by '12' (whatever 12 means) and then take another screenshot. It would repeat 8 times but could be done more times as needed to take one screenshot of the entire 'row' of the map. Short 'waits' were added to give the map time to load if need be, but could potentially be reduced or perhaps even eliminated. While there was still work to be done on the script, the potential was there - you could effectively create a hotkey to screenshot the entire map at a potentially low zoom with the push of a button - all you would have to do is wait for the process to finish. This might take a bit of time, but a cup of tea in between and you'd be ready to crack on with phase two.

Phase 2 was a bit more tricky. Having stitched screenshots together manually, doing it on a full map even at greater zoom levels was tedious and time consuming - a sisyphian task if there ever was one. But we are in the year 2026. Surely someone had developed something that connected photos together. AI could potentially do a messy job with it, but there was probably an adequate tool out there designed to do this. Preferably a free one...

It saddens me that it didn't take long to find nor was it new software. After a few quick searches, and a couple of red herrings, someone in a forgotten Reddit post recommended Hugin, a 'photo stitcher' that could potentially create panoramas from still images. This seemed like it might be the one.... But it was designed for professional photographers - one of the mandatory options made me select my camera settings. It wasn't looking good. To my delight, however, it worked and worked extremely well. My first test image worked perfectly, two images side by side. I tried another series with four images, this time on top and to the side of each other and Hugin thrived. I threw a series of 10 screenshots at it, and simply and effortlessly it managed to piece them together - a process that used to take me hours. I was jubilant. The 'mega screenshot', for the first time, became very very real.

I am aware my research and this journey is incomplete - the script is a proof of concept and obviously needs extending before it could automate the full array of screenshots required. Perhaps someone here has the maths and precision understanding of the map coordinates to make this tool incredibly sharp? Perhaps there is something in this process that I might be missing too? Maybe the world moved on in my absense and these 'problems' have long since been solved.
Regardless, while some people here may not share the same goal, or may already be aware of these dark and beautiful programs and their uses, I thought my journey was worth sharing, just in case some other foolhardy Sim Mayor can use my learnings for their own evil purposes.

 

[EastChapel 115]

Now that I've got the proof of concept, I'm exploring avenues on how best to complete the process. I can easily program the camera to move along the whole map in a sort of squiggle, but that seems inelegant, and requires a bit of brute forcing. It would also require potential users to start their camera journey in the same place as me, which may cause some issues.

I was looking at the setviewtarget cheat as an option - AutoHotkey can automate cheat entry fairly easily. You'd then just need to program it sweeping up the map.

Problem is, while the x and z values are fine, the y value will be different on most maps which makes this option undesirable. Are there any ways around this? Ideally it would be good to setviewtarget to a specific tile rather than a point. @CorinaMarie do you have any suggestions on this? I did read somewhere that you'd done a bit of research into the setviewtarget cheat.

[Null 45 3,041]

32 minutes ago, EastChapel said:

Are there any ways around this? Ideally it would be good to setviewtarget to a specific tile rather than a point.

SetViewTarget has an argument format for tiles/cells: SetViewTarget cell <cell x> <cell z>

[EastChapel 115]

26 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

SetViewTarget has an argument format for tiles/cells: SetViewTarget cell <cell x> <cell z>

This is exactly what I need! Thankyou!

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 hours ago, EastChapel said:

@CorinaMarie do you have any suggestions on this? I did read somewhere that you'd done a bit of research into the setviewtarget cheat.

I did tinker with it long ago.   (That EPIC method could prolly be improved now that we know cell based is an option.)

 

3 hours ago, Null 45 said:

SetViewTarget has an argument format for tiles/cells: SetViewTarget cell <cell x> <cell z>

^ Bold added.

When I used it, I seemed to have accidentally discovered the non-cell based version because you can also have it jump to exact terrain coordinates. Instead of the word cell as the first parameter, just say anything else then pass x y z in meters.

Ofc, for  @EastChapel's project the cell-based version is the best.

[EastChapel 115]

Theres a long way to go, as the auto image stitching process is still not fully reliable, but we've got the core essentials working well. Here's the partial outcome of my work so far (i did try and post a gif, but there was an error for the uploading).

 

[Lab Rat 13]

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