dwringer

This is my second attempt at a large scale Martian terrain region. It is 20x20 km in-game, so It (like the last one) takes a while to render. This time, I started with the MGS data right off the bat, so things went more smoothly, I think... This piece didn't need perspective correction so all I did to the raw data was a levels adjustment in order to set the water level and mountain scale to a reasonable level. The cluster of islands at the very top is unreachable by bridge, but the ingame terraforming tools should let you build a causeway if you really wanted to, and I think every other area connects pretty well. (Making these configs is NOT something I enjoy...)

This is the more "proper" version of the region I already uploaded. It represents a portion of the martian terrain on the east side of the Argyre Planitia region, and it's 24x24 km ingame. I'm labeling it version 2, but it's in fact a different approach. I used the raw data from the Mars Global Surveyor and just used photoshop for perspective correction and a levels adjustment to place the water/peaks at the scale I thought would be appropriate. I also used google mars for reference points to use when applying the perspective fix (since it seems like they already did it on their images, at least for this region). You'll notice that this terrain is far less rugged for building than version 1, and this perhaps emphasizes that it's still probably a smaller region than it should be. It's still pretty large though, with a game size of 24x24 km, or 15x15 miles. This means it takes a while to render, but it does render faster than version 1 (or perhaps I'm just delusional from doing this for too long).

This is a LARGE region map and config (although the actual scale is just a guess) which represents a portion of the Martian terrain on the east side of the Argyre Planitia topological feature. I picked it for no reason other than that it seemed to have a nice variety of crater sizes all packed into a close space with what resembled a river. EDIT- Added 2-Aug-2007: This map has been superceded in terms of accuracy by version 2, which I have listed separately. If this is a problem with the mods, I'll happily take it down - I simply thought the terrain in this version is interesting in its own right, because it has a more rugged topography. It should not, however, be confused with the actual martian topography. The other version takes care of that. [Old description contd.:]This is a product of two days trying to figure out a procedure to extract a useful grayscale heightmap from the color coded shaded terrain images of the surface of mars. I managed to eliminate most of the extraeneous shadows and highlights, although there are still a few problems with hills "leaning" to the northwest. I don't think the problems that remain are significant, and you can use in-game terraforming tools to smooth things out a bit for city development - I like to think that it would be necessary to do so in the event that we were to colonize mars, anyhow. Just make a new region, paste the config into the region folder under My Documents\SimCity 4\, and then hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R at the ingame region screen to render the heightmap. Just point it to argyre_planitia.jpg and all should be well. Be warned! This map takes about 35 minutes to render on my P4 2.6GHz / 1024MB of SDRAM. This is because in game it takes up a 24x24 kilometer area, or 15x15 miles. The mosaic of the region that I made took 12 different photographs to assemble. Apologies that there is a small sign of civilization in the screen shot, I didn't have photos of the completely pristine landscape. It kind of gives you a sense of the scale, though, as the town appears pretty small in comparison to the craters. I hope you enjoy this, I just felt like sharing because it's the only thing I can really contribute, and I think this type of community is great.