archemediesx

Greetings Simtropolis mapping community. I wanted to raise the question regarding the creation of geographical region maps. in the 'mapping-terraforming' section i found a tutorial about this put together in 2011, but it is unfortunately rather outdated and doesn't necessarily hold up to contemporary processes. I have been independently working towards the goal of taking DEM data and converting it into sc4 maps with varying levels fidelity and success. given the difficulty of the journey (many fruitless days spent scouring google searches and reading 5-10 year old tutorials full of links for websites that no longer exist) i though i would attempt to provide my own tutorial on the process i have undertaken. Before doing so i thought i should do a double check with the community just to ensure i haven't missed anything obvious (Perhaps a 2018 current mapping process for working with DEM's?). I can see that there has been a lot of discussion to this end including threads and tutorials started by @Izidor44 and @drunkapple, though many of those remain open ended, and that was many years ago. So, if anyone happens to have a contemporary tutorial process for processing geographic based regions i'll be pleased to see it. In the meanwhile i'll keep plugging along with my process i have started and will also be pleased to share it when i have all my findings completed. Edit: The first video in the tutorial series is complete and starts the process of describing in detail what is DEM data.

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

Rock and Roll @rsc0405 Those 3RRR mods are beautiful and deserve to be back out there in the mix. I'll be waiting patiently for their time to shine

Thanks for the prompt response Duco. To be honest the center pivot irrigation field is what i'm after. and have scoured search terms and come up with bubkiss. irrigation sc4 irrigation simtropolis center pivot sc4 center pivot STEX center pivot simtropolis circular farm STEX circular farm SimCity circular farm sc4 center pivot SimCity pivot simtropolis central pivot simtropolis rrp simtropolis chrisadams3997's irrigation simtropolis chrisadams3997's central pivot chrisadams3997's irrigation chrisadams3997's farm 3rr exchange sc4devotion 3rr exchange lex 3rr exchange simtropolis i'm guessing my only hope is someone who has the file buried somewhere in their downloads.

Hi Gang, https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=5603.0 i found this page called the three rivers region with several items including a pivot irrigation field, and a water culvert, but all the links on the page are broken. Are any of these rural items still out there?

None of the DEM data I've come across from the USGS or viewfinder'spanorama has included bathymetric data for sub sea level or lake information. What this results in is that if using a 16bit process the conversion retains relative height to luminosity information to directly maintain elevation above sea level. When using an 8bit process sea level in an image will set to black. And technically speaking the lowest point on an image in an 8bit process will set to black regardless of whether it is at sea level. So the problems with this arise when starting with and following an 8bit path. With that being the case in 8bit i would recommend making full use of the limited elevation gradation while processing the DEM into an image and only making corrections for sea level after. One could use fantasticoast to make alterations and smooth out the water contact areas, use SC4 Terraformer (which does work in Win10) to set a precise Raise terrain based on what elevation is showing below sea grade. Even if someone didn't want to use any more programs, they could simply open the map in SC4 proper, and using the god tool "raise terrain" button 6-7 times to uniformly raise the terrain 240-280 meters. In my earlier post i posed finding and overcoming limits and found a new one today. I created a new test region based the USGS DEM outside of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming following a 16bit path, and created the following scaled region. it's a 12x16km subsection of the mountain range outlined. the lowland and canyon at the bottom of the peaks sits at 1800m and the high peak on this range climbs to 3592m. for a elevation profile of 1792m What this test region demonstrates is that while it is possible to maintain precise scale accuracy of topography in conjunction with the spacial relationship, it becomes impractical to do so. With a base elevation of 1800m, the city tiles become harder to manage in rotation and view when in city mode because they sit so high in the view angle. The region is so high that the back corner of the region falls off the viewable display area. While preserving X and Y axis spacial relations doesn't have a detrimental effect on the mapping process, i see now that coming up with a relativistic approach to creating elevation scale that feels authentic but preserves play functionality is something that needs to be considered moving forward. Were this map only going to contain inland areas i think a good compromise would be to maintain the scale of the region, but uniformly offset the height down to about 500m to keep the city tiles low enough to keep them well within the game's view angle. Edit: I attempted to download those Fanticoast links but it looks like all the files have been deleted from that 2010 post. They were all 1kb files archives that wouldn't open.

Thank you for putting that information out there @CorinaMarie. I followed the steps he out outlined to reproduce his results to see what he was working with. Here's the final image i created with his process I made a skinnier slice of the region vs that preview you have. Allow me to go over the details of what i observed. 1. viewfinderspanorama.org - Is a very straightforward website with the ability to select a landmass just about anywhere in the world. that's a big plus. The archives decompress into about 50mb of hgt data, which given the extent of the of some the cooridinates on some of the grids is not fantastic, but workable. they range from 1 to 3 arc second data based on regional selection. 2. his link to 3dem is still functional, and the program has basic functionality. I would say the best thing going for the program is its lack of complexity. So many of the other DEM manipulator programs are very easy to get lost in. Here's some notes on 3DEM: I followed the steps out lined by a. going to "geo Coordinates' menu and selecting "lat-long grid off". b. Going to Color Scale and setting the "shader relief" to 0 c. going to "color scale" and selecting "modify Scale" d. in the modify scale dialog i clicked on "Load File" and selected the downloaded graysacle.dat file that you provided. e. from here go to "file" then "save Map Image" and in the pop-up selecting a preferred image format I.E. .BMP .TIFF etc. Those were the steps outlined to you. A few notes and missing items: Step D: his grayscale resets 1m to a 0-255 level of 84. This unfortunately causes a lot of compression. 32% of usable elevation scale (while initially underwater, can be corrected in later steps of the mapping process) is now compressed out of the image. We of course need to correct sea level adjustment somewhere. but i feel that this might be the wrong step to be applying that to. Step E: Missing from the instructions: when exporting the image, it will export at the current view dimension. At default this will result in an image file from the DEM only being 1080x864 pixels. in order to scale this to get a more usable image go to "Operation" then "resize overhead view" (F7 button). as you adjust the slider it will let you know how many pixels the image is scaling to. the max is a 2x which will give you a 12002x9602 pixel region. The problem was that i could not go any larger than 1x 6000x4800 pixels, without the ocean taking on the 1m grayscale level effectively wiping out the coastal region. if i went back to the color scale and set sea level to 1m i could get blue to return to outline the coast, but with a loss of detail. Normally i would say that 6x4.8k is a good large image to start with. in the map i created the distance from the coastline to the far side of the mountain at the top of the map (Mt. Ranier) is over 180km. in order to get that distance scale accurate in SC4 i would expect that distance to be somewhere around 11250 pixels from coast to mountain. the DEM data extents are almost double that distance and at half the resolution. Unfortunately i feel that scale accuracy is not viable with this process, if that is an end goal. While there are limitations here, absolutely this is a successful quick path to producing a simple 'real world location' in SC4. and think we should all thank @Grumalg for providing this for the SC4 community who want to quickly build a new map based on a geographical location.

Greetings Again, thank you all for responding. Exciting to see some discussion rolling on the topic. @rsc204 You're absolutely correct that the process doesn't appear to have changed in the last decade, just the details. And as it always is, the devil is in the details. @CorinaMarie Is that region screenshot taken directly from sc4 or another program? I would be curious what that author considers "fairly simple and easy'. i have been following a path that has been neither. As far as making maps similar to the one you linked by the author, it boils down to a four step process: 1. Gather DEM data 2. Interpret DEM data 3. Image Construction and manipulation of interpreted DEM 4. Translate Constructed image into a SC4 configuration and map Using what information on those steps i could find floating around and filling in the gaps with trial and error i have been successful at map creation that replicates real world locations. Where I've gotten myself stuck is on the theory crafting and pursuing of a precise scale replica (or at least as precise as the tools available will allow). the entire process is riddled with a lot of arbitrary limits and inaccuracies. Take step 1 for example. Even with 1/3 arc DEM data i find there can be strange artifacts hidden in the data, mostly from urban environments, but sometimes natural phenomena. I've been working with the Seattle area N48xW113 as a testing region as it contains both sea level and mountainous areas giving about a 1350m height differentiation across the DEM. I've attached a comparison image of an artifact in the data showing a monument sized pillar (i have that map scaled to extended elevation range in SC4Terrarformer for the purpose of this demonstration), but on the satellite data it's simply a loading dock. Oddly enough nowhere in the skyrise section of the downtown do i find any artifacts like this one. My guess is that maybe when that DEM was being collected the dock or highway stretch next to it was under construction and there was a large enough crane to show up on the 30m DEM. And that's not meant to be a complaint, but simply a measure for the level of observation needed to understand that from the onset every step of the process is going to require interpretation. That's were I've been spinning myself in circles, is figuring out what level of interpretation needs to lean to absolute interpretation, and where to gravitate towards relativistic interpretation to create what looks and more importantly 'feels' like a precise replica. The goal of the tutorial I've been compiling is to help other would-be map makers make heads and tails of the four steps and be able to comprehend the nuts and bolts of of the process. i spent my day today in the think tank focused on the math behind step 4, running test regions based on 8bit elevation levels. i built a complete table of all 8bit elevation scale factor translations from 100m to 5000m. in 8bit imagery, If one wanted to create a replica of mount Everest they would be unable to represent true grade down to sea level in a single map. Even with the 5000m import, elevation at grayscale level 255 maxes out at 5247.9m, but the peak of everest is aprx 8848m. With Sc4 Terraformer having a ceiling of 6000m and SC4 having a hidden ceiling of aprx 2500m (though this can be fixed with a plugin to match SC4 Terraformer) for editing purposes, the boundaries of maximum elevation slope across a region have been established. While editing in 16 and 32 bit can be conducted, the bottleneck is always the common denominator and even if you have all 32768 gradations of a 16bit image to smooth out a slope, the artificial boundaries either through SC4, or the terraformer create the final constraints to that slope that have to be measured against. With absolute interpretation no longer a viable option that leaves the door open for relativistic options. knowing that the slope would need to encompass 8848m of elevation from sea level, 1/8848 = 0.0001301989150009 slope translation. taking 5247.9 x slope transition = .593117 or 59.3117%. That represents the factor that gradation levels 1-254 would need to be altered by in order to replicate the delta in elevation change. At least in theory that seems sound. it could be crafted in either a DEM editor or image editor based on toolset options. Anyways, that's a window into where my though process has lead me today.