Creating A Real Life Map?

[AfxTwn]

Hi everyone,

I want to know how do you go about creating a map/city based on a real-life place? I know you can use a map editor and that it's not going to be 100% accurate or to scale but I was hoping someone could advise me on how to go about doing this.

I would like to create a map based on where I live which is approximately 4.5 Sq. Miles in size. I assume this won't really be possible on one of the default maps at the start of the game or by starting off with the default limited amount of money and roads etc that you have to get going with, so presumably I'd need a mod to give me free roam?

I have looked on Google Maps and can see the area I wish to build and what the road structure looks like and the rough zoning (although it's pretty mixed). It's a semi-rural area but with a motorway (highway) close by running North-North-East along the edge and then a few main roads coming off that and dissipating through the area into normal roads.

Ideally I'd like to make an accurate road layout and then try to zone areas as similar as possible but as I'm completely new to map editing of any kind, it would be great to get a guide on how to do this. I've seen there are a few maps on the Workshop that people have based on real-life locations so it would be great to have a go myself.

Thanks for any advice or help people can give.

[Mansen]

What people do is download "heightmaps", greyscale images that are based on topographical maps and scans. Black (dark) for deep and White (bright) for tall.

The most popular service right now for Skylines is Terrain Party - It shows you a preview of what size (scale) your map will be and downloads heightmap files based on the area chosen.

It's not the most stable website though - and the heightmaps are far from accurate in some countries.

[AfxTwn]

Ooh thanks very much, I'll go take a look. I'm in the UK btw so hopefully I'm not in one of those inaccurate countries.

[AfxTwn]

Well I had a look at Terrain Party and while it's great for creating a rough representation of the terrain for any searched area (I'm not sure exactly how accurate it is), from there creating an actual map is quite difficult.

Certainly creating one of where I live is proving to be a very difficult task and I feel this might be more suited to places where they are nearer to highways or have natural water resources. In the area of the UK I live, there aren't any close highways and the nearest one doesn't really suit the initial tools you are given for creating a map. Then from the starting tile in the game, I think it would be harrd to create an accurate representation of where I live. I would definitely have to put in many, many hours getting to a point where I would have enough money and unlocked resources to be able to start again and create the actual city I wanted.

I think this might be something to tackle further down the line once I've mastered general city building techniques.

[grapplehoeker]

Ok here's a quick basic introduction to the Map Editor and real life maps.
I've had loads of fun learning all about what this entails and devoted at least the whole of my 2nd day of play to it and many hours since then. It really is another type of game in and of itself. It is relatively easy to learn and master the steps in order to find and adapt a map to your own vision. It's easy to place all the required components; out of city connections, natural resources etc. What is harder and is the most time consuming is how much refinement of the map you want or need to do and getting the balance right. The water flow in particular needs very fine tuning in many cases.

You're ok with all that? So, where do you find the maps? First you have to learn a little bit of topography 101. The game uses 'height maps' and the tutorial suggests using the Terrain Party site. I personally, didn't find that site very user friendly and the variety was limited. So in order to find more you have to understand what a height map is and what it is also known by the rest of the world, or at least by the engineering/scientific communities.
A height map used by the game is a grey scale picture of an area with a 1081x1081 size (for scale). The maps you can use for this can be found by looking for a DEM or DTM of the area on Earth (or elsewhere) that interests you. So google search "DEM placename" will usually get you a choice of sites/images that you can check for usability.

Ideally, you require a 16 bit image, but most images are found with 8 bits and that's still ok.
Acquire the image. You may need to use an image editor to slightly adjust the scale and convert the image to the .png file format that the game recognises.

Start the game, open the map editor and click on the 'import' icon. In the import window, open the small folder icon. This is where the game stores its' height maps. Copy/paste your map from wherever you saved it, to this open folder. Close the folder and click on the name of the map you will now see in the import list and hit import. Your map is now ready to be edited.
Careful editing, nothing too extreme! Save regularly at each stage.

You will see a lot of surface distortion, but that can be corrected with careful use of the smooth tool.

Have an image close to hand of the actual area for reference purposes. Then use that to carefully edit your map, paying particular attention to the rivers, lakes and sea beds/shorelines. (I cannot stress the importance of the word, carefully, otherwise you will find CTRL Z will become your best friend ;)

Once the clean up is done, add the water source. It can take several minutes for the water to reach normal level, so be patient.

Then add flora (and fauna if you wish) and scatter the natural resources where you want them. I find using the different styles of brush here, provides a much better look that simply blocking the areas in.

Once that's all done, it's time for the connections. For more accuracy, you could try to roughly follow the actual major road and rail connections by referring to your real life map.

Here're some helpful links:
A definition of what a height map or DEM is and how it differs from a DTM or a DSM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_elevation_model
My own map as an example
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=411143321

I hope that all makes sense and is of help to you, good luck!

[grapplehoeker]

Advanced tip: If you can also get yourself a roadmap, ideally without any text on it, then you can get a very accurate road layout too. This will involve using an image editor to super impose the roadmap as a layer (opacity reduced to just visible) on top of the actual DEM. This will also mean a lot more careful clean up of the map. Mark out the major intersections with trees and then later use those as reference points for your own road layout.
This makes it a lot longer job and it's up to you, just how far you want to take it ;)

[AfxTwn]

Wow, thanks very much for all the detailed information you've provided. I've been trying to find a DEM for where I live and the surrounding areas (Greater Manchester/Saddleworth) but I'm struggling to find where to get them. Initially typing in DEM placename into Google search unfortunately yielded lots of results for the Liberal Democrats in my area lol. If you don't mind me asking, where did you find the DEM for London?

Another problem I may run into, is that unlike with say London, there aren't any major water sources where I live, other than a few rservoirs so I'm not sure how I could implement those into the game.

Your tip about a road map sounds very handy. So far I have been doing comparison maps between Google Earth and Google Maps so I can see where the roads are and which direction they run in (e.g. one-way roads, motorways etc) and where they are inrelation to buildings and farmland etc. I wonder if I could incorporate anything from Ordnance Survey? I know they do a lot of additional mapping and have some terrain/topographical software. I already have a subscription to their OIS Getamap service which I use for planning walks but maybe there's something else I can use.

I think this will be a very big project for me but could prove to be very rewarding.

[Robotica]

Making a map based on a real location will be difficult, especially if you want to try and produce the realistic buildings accurate to the location you are building.

I'm not sure if this was mentioned already or not, but another good idea for trying to replicate a realistic city is to use this mod:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=413748580&searchtext=

Basically with this you can generate a google map image of the area you want to build and then layer it onto your terrain in game. Once you do this you will be able to see exactly where and how to place your roads.If it's anything like the image overlay mod in SC4 I would highly suggest you do this, as it will make building your map much, much, MUCH easier..

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Robotica:

I'm not sure if this was mentioned already or not, but another good idea for trying to replicate a realistic city is to use this mod:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=413748580&searchtext=

I would highly suggest you do this, as it will make building your map much, much, MUCH easier..

That's great and no it wasn't mentioned, since the mod only appeared yesterday lol. This will save a lot of time faffing about with photoshop and layer compositing. The only thing you'll need to fiddle with is scaling, but that's ok. Thanks for the tip!

[grapplehoeker]

@AfxTwn
I don't honestly remember where I got the map for London from, but it wasn't a long search. Google images probably has it somewhere.
Saddleworth on the other hand was a little trickier but I have a good lead.
http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/acfa8955414aef710105ef640802b9aa
I've just emailed them and expect a reply within a couple of days. Fingers crossed we'll get a Lidar map from them ;)

[AfxTwn]

Oooh exciting times! Great find from you Robotica and thanks very much Grapple for going the extra mile and locating a possible map for Saddleworth for me. Hopefully this is the start of something big. It's a shame you can't do multiplayer city building as that way you could work on a bit of map and then maybe save it and upload it to the game's cloud or somewhere and then another player could download it, edit and add to it and repeat the process.

This would be fantastic and makes me think of model railway builders and how groups of them work together to create amazing scenes.

I've just been working on one of my cities and think I have started to get the gist of traffic management now. A lot of my highway connections with their on/off ramps look pretty untidy but generally traffic flow is looking good now. I've kept my industry and commercial well away from the residential and used a lot of one way roads to ferry the trucks around and give them easy access to the highways. Also added my first cargo train station and track which should help too. Now I need to think about transportation for the actual residents in terms of trains, subway and buses.

On a slightly stupid note I had a massive problem with dead citizens and them not being collected despite having lots of cemetaries (not got crematoriums yet) and couldn't understand why and then realised it's because ages ago I lowered my healthcare budget to 50% as I didn't need to spend as much and unfortunately that had a mssive impact on the number of herses being deployed. Doh! As soon as I whacked the budget ack up again, boom! No more dead people problem.

[AfxTwn]

Just wanted to let you guys know about a new mod called Magic Mapper (WIP) by emf.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416064574
It's a fantastic mod which allows you to overlay OSM .map (Open Street Map) files onto your height maps from Terrain Party and it draws all the roads in for you! You basically get the area's co-ordinates from the Terrain Party's readme file, enter those into OSM and then export that file as a .map file which you can also import into Cities Skylines' map editor via the mod.

It's not 100% accurate and there are some issues with roads not lining up and overlapping but this is more to do with the issues of TP's inaccurate topography. By and large though the mod is brilliant and does a pretty good job of laying out the complete road system of any real world area you want.

[Robotica]

Originally posted by AfxTwn:

Just wanted to let you guys know about a new mod called Magic Mapper (WIP) by emf.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416064574
It's a fantastic mod which allows you to overlay OSM .map (Open Street Map) files onto your height maps from Terrain Party and it draws all the roads in for you! You basically get the area's co-ordinates from the Terrain Party's readme file, enter those into OSM and then export that file as a .map file which you can also import into Cities Skylines' map editor via the mod.

It's not 100% accurate and there are some issues with roads not lining up and overlapping but this is more to do with the issues of TP's inaccurate topography. By and large though the mod is brilliant and does a pretty good job of laying out the complete road system of any real world area you want.

Yea I was looking at this actually. Seems a bit unfinished at the moment, but definitely has a lot of potential. I am about to start a recreation of a real city too, and I am not sure if I should go with the new Magic Mapper, or the image overlay. I am thinking the image overlay, at least for now.

[AfxTwn]

Well I've tried the Magic Mapper and I'm quite pleased with it, it does a pretty good job. You still need to edit your map and tidy up the roads and do any smoothing/create water sections but it's great to get a useable layout and compare it to what you'd see on Google Earth.

The only trouble really with map making of real world locations, is the scaling and marrying that up to what you have to include in the game. For example, the game wants you to have a water source and a highway connection within your start tile but what if the real world location doesn't have any, or certainly none that fall within the restraints of the overall 25-tile map? I know you can just change where the start tile is but over the whole map, there might still not be anywhere that falls within the criteria.

Where I live, the nearest realistic water source is miles away from where most of the map tiles are in the game, same with the highway and so I'm having to turn what are little streams in the real world into useable water sources in the game and then having to adjust where the highway's are. Another problem is with zoning, there isn't any real industrial areas near where I live, aside from a few small farms and most of the real world zones are probably residential and a little bit of commercial.

I suppose I will have to make a lot of compromises, especially with regard to placement of utilities and services and at least get the road network and surrounding landscape to closely match up with the real thing and then just go into fantasy land for everything else.

Once I've got the main map tidied up and correctly laid out for roads and terrain (as well as natural resources, although not much of that where I live aside from a little farmland), I'll upload it and put it on the workshop so you'll all be able to take a look and let me know what you think.

[grapplehoeker]

@AfxTwn I have the approval to get the Lidar imaging for the Greater Manchester area, including as much of Saddleworth as is possible, given that Saddleworth wasn't covered as much by the scan. They were going to charge me £2k until I managed to get them to understand what the purpose of this was lol, so now it's free of charge.
Now what to do with it? I could send you the images via email, so feel free to add me and we'll work something out to transfer it.

[Capt.Luke]

this is what your looking for http://terrain.party/
but its not 100% accurate.