archemediesx

Well, no excuses for falling off the map. No excuses for bad puns either. I realized i had most of part 3 already produced and posted it in the fall. I still need to complete the final tutorial and i have a script in production so i should be able to get the final tutorial out shortly enough. It will cover the actual conversion portion of taking image data and making it look like a map. So for posterity, here is part 3 of the creating Geographically based regions tutorial series.

I ended up recording material to combine steps two and three together and decided to split them up in the end. so the good news is that episode 2 is complete and i already have a good portion of the next episode completed. i wanted to keep this tutorial series thorough for those who want to pick up the mantle of map building, but had to start at the beginning as i did. So the videos are focused on the 'what' more than the 'how'. How to Create a Geographic Based Region in SimCity 4 - Episode 2: Interpreting DEM Data

So far progress on the process of making regions has been coming along. I've been attacking both an effort to start mapping and figuring out what information to organize for the tutorial series. Here's a preview of the NW states map i've assembled. It's a composite of 1/3 arc DEM Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming exported at 16bit depth. At 1731.45km by 887.6km at it's widest extents. At 62.5 pixels per kilometer that makes for 6,003,282,600 pixels which as it turns out is a bit taxing on my system (Most large edits and saves take around 5-20 minutes). Photoshop can't realistically draw the image at that zoom level so the grayscale resolution looks compressed, but the data is unaltered. I spent some time researching what the limits are that i have map around. I patched all the programs with the 32bit 4gig patch to ensure they could access the maximum amount of memory which did increase their functionality by a signification amount as memory access seems to be bottleneck. Going from largest to smallest limitations: SC4 Mapper i was able to build a region 284km by 284km using the mapper. that is a 71x71 large city tile map. 71squared = 5041 large cities. I have a feeling no one is going to find the time to build that much terrain. But then again, Why not? right? SC4 proper has a nasty little limit with it's Horizontal and Vertical Scrolling. describing a map as a set of four corners, NW, NE, SE, SW, when starting from the NW corner and scrolling to the NE corner the map won't visually scroll past 31 tiles. A similar limit hits the Vertical scale when going from the NW to the SW corner hits a visual limit of 61 tiles. While a map bigger could be generated with SC4 mapper, portions of that map would be inaccessable, and unable to even render in-game textures for the region view. Below is an example of the effect of the horizontal scroll limit with a 38x38 large city region. Areas that are out of view are shaded in black. because the map scrolls at an angle the bottom of the map is accessable but the top is not. As the map became longer so would the area of inaccessability along the eastern edge. One could make irregular shaped regions that skirts the edges of this scrolling limit, but it would be held in check as it got larger approaching the 71x71 scale limit of SC4 Mapper. The final limit arrives with using SC4 Terraformer. i was only able to get a 110.59km by 110.59km region to remain stable in the program. this is a 27x27 large tile region. 27squared =729 large cities, which is still a very ridiculously large region to work on. While regions could bypass this limit to increase size, losing SC4 terraformer's better toolset at working precisely with minimum and maximum and scaling height values does limit the approaches that only using SC4 Mapper would create. The good news is that i know what all the boundaries that i'm working with are, i can start actually working on defining some region maps. Western states are much more unweildly than eastern states given that their is no way to represent them as regions with a 1:1 ratio with all the described limits. in order to make them into usable maps beyond city and county sized chunks appropriate ratios will have to be applied to preserve visual scale of landscape while compressing the scale into a region that can actually fit inside of the 31x61 SC4 scroll limit. I just about have enough of the information compiled to get started on part 2 of the map making tutorial so that should be humming along shortly.

Would that be directly accessible through that god mode keyboard control, or would one have to use a water level mod?

The great news is that both of those lots are available in the "landmarks" menu as default lots by Maxis