I was intrigued by this post a few weeks ago and I have worked diligently to create Rhode Island. There are a few problems that I have noticed. 1. The USGS data (using techniques from the simtropolis omnibus - pardon the spelling) does not cover adding realistic lakes to a region. If you try to create lakes for this state you get a thousand random dots. To combat this I tried to keep the microdem program to detect oceanic water. This created more problems. Much of the shallow water in the RI area around Newport was missing. To combat these probs I used a combined technique where I combined the Lake and No lake maps to create an accurate region map. 2. The size of this region is larger than reality by a few miles to fit into SimCity 4. This being said- a map full of roughly 14 X 20 full sized cities does not phase my computer or processor. 3. The only actual roadblock to this project is most photo paint programs. A scale accurate region (That includes some of MA and Conn.) takes up something like 3395 PX by 4693 Px. The problem is that most paint programs have a limit of 4096 px. Period! Although windows paint can handle larger PX maps- it cannot save the map in proper grayscale format for SC 4. Until we can find a photo program that allows for works larger than 4096 PX on each side- we cannot create our beloved simnation. I got close- however the map looks cool at half scale though too. Mplex
