Store Page
Transport Fever 2
All Discussions Screenshots Artwork Broadcasts Videos Workshop News Guides Reviews

Transport Fever 2

Store Page
Transport Fever 2 >  Workshop > SoopahMan's Workshop
Not enough ratings
USA Mega blank
Description Discussions0 Comments7 Change Notes
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
Scenario: Dry
Map/Savegame: Map
File Size
Posted
75.066 MB
Jan 11, 2021 @ 5:58am
1 Change Note ( view )
Created by
SoopahMan
Offline
See all 14 collections created by SoopahMan and other people (some may be hidden)
2,236 Unique Visitors
444 Current Subscribers
13 Current Favorites

Subscribe to download
USA Mega blank

In 1 collection by SoopahMan
USA Mega
5 items
Description
Megalomanic size USA.

This version is blank - no cities or industries. For cities:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2358107849

For cities and select industries:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2358110248

For ready-to-play cities, and industries augmented with 100 random ones:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2358418621

Uses real heightmaps. Includes the countries offshore of Florida: The Bahamas, Cuba and Bermuda. Small parts of Canada and a big portion of northern Mexico.

Includes the Great Lakes. Note that the game does not allow water above sea level, so the depth of the Lakes has been slightly increased to ensure they still hold water.

The heightmap captured great details like the arm of Massachusetts, although some editing was required to ensure Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard made it in.

Includes the Mississippi River, which has the same water-level issue as the Lakes. In addition, the true size of the River relative to the map is about 1 house in width - not a Navigable water in game rules. You may want to expand it before playing. The version presented here is a middle ground between almost unnoticeable, true scaling, and completely unrealistic scaling that's Navigable.

Includes the Grand Canyon, which has been deepened to feature the river that runs through it.

Includes the bizarre Salton Sea in California, a man-made poison lake.

Includes Mt Hood and Mt Olympus in the Pacific Northwest.

If you're curious about scale, the Megalomaniac map size is 24km x 24km, or in the 2:1 setup as is used here, 33km x 16.5km:
https://www.transportfever2.com/wiki/doku.php?id=gamemanual:mapsizes

The United States is roughly 3000mi wide, although I include a fair bit of ocean so perhaps, 3500mi. That's about 5600km. That comes to a scale of about 170:1. So, that's why a single house in New York takes up all of downtown Manhattan. That said, this map is still big enough to get a Pioneer Zephyr leaving Chicago up to 110mph before reaching California.

Something is broken between Steam and the game, and I can no longer update this map. Consider this v0.9 of the map, and I'm unable to update it to 1.0. In particular, there are places where the map is very uneven and the look sort of comes apart, especially in the shallows around Florida and the Bahamas. There are a number of water speckles that get in the way of building. I'm going to file a bug with the TF2 team and see if I can update the map sometime in the future.
7 Comments
< >
SoopahMan  [author] Jan 12, 2021 @ 1:48pm 
It is built from a heightmap - see the comments below for links to the original heightmap data (as a 16bit grayscale PNG) and the final one I imported to create the map.

You are free to make your own maps with the heightmap! Might be useful in building Very Large slices of the US for example.
Nigel Jan 12, 2021 @ 11:13am 
Is it a heightmap?
SoopahMan  [author] Jan 11, 2021 @ 10:39am 
In addition, that usa-curved.png heightmap is after editing, to try to better suit TF2. The original, unedited version, is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/47q8yai3i93f4y6/usamegaheight.png?dl=0

That will get you the highest level of detail as it is unedited. However the edits I made were essential to having a good experience in the game:

1) I used the Curves tool to increase the midrange, because the Rockies were obscenely tall at their peaks; it was as though the heights were exponential not linear. The Appalachians are still shorter than I'd like and I think this exponential problem is related.

2) I had to transition from 8bpp to 16bpp, and so I applied a slight blur before and after curving, which provided more intermediate steps in the new, more detailed range. The original is from 8bpp source so it's going to look like topological steps when imported, and lead to more breaks in the LoD.
SoopahMan  [author] Jan 11, 2021 @ 10:33am 
If you have improvements you've made to this map and want to upload your own, go for it - I welcome improvements. You might also want to make your own custom slices of the US for smaller map sizes that well - crash the game less. Here's the heightmap I used:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f52z0gwol9lohi4/usa-curved.png?dl=0

That's a 4225x8449, 16-bit grayscale PNG, so to edit it as an image you'll need an editor like GIMP (free) that can handle it. The built-in Windows editor falls apart loading it. Note the US is rotated 90 degrees clockwise to meet the vertical format required by TF2 for rectangular map shapes.

That grayscale PNG was ultimate imported with -76 as the bottom and 224 as the top, and a water level of 0, to get things to import just right - though I still had to make the adjustments described in the comments, like lifting south Florida.

SoopahMan  [author] Jan 11, 2021 @ 9:58am 
Then there's LoD issues. Games like Transport Fever 2 handle zooming out by reducing the number of triangles rendered. This is called, LoD - Level of Detail - and it appears TF2 handles map LoD statically, meaning each reduction in triangle count is stored in the map itself. As you zoom out from super close up, highest detail (LoD 0), a square made of 8 triangles (4 squares) is reduced to a single square, of 2 triangles. Another step out and it repeats this reduction.

It appears the imported map caused a lot of breaks in this LoD, where the detailed map is one set of heights and next level of zoom out is quite different. I wish the game had a built-in feature to fix these. I'm going to spot-fix it with the Smooth tool for v1.0, being careful not to lose a lot of the detail the imported real-world map included.
SoopahMan  [author] Jan 11, 2021 @ 9:58am 
As you may know from reading about Global Warming, some key parts of the United States are technically underwater - including a lot more of South Florida than I thought (everything from Okeechobee, southward), but also, portions of Cape Cod Massachusetts, much of The Bahamas, and, Death Valley.

Since the game doesn't support varied water levels, and Death Valley truly is below sea level, but is behind so much desert, the ocean doesn't flood in, I had to raise Death Valley to keep it from being a weird California Lake. I also raised southern Florida.

And because sea levels are flat, and freshwater rivers by definition are above sea level, I had to lower the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
SoopahMan  [author] Jan 11, 2021 @ 9:58am 
Consider this a v0.9 of this map. I'll update here for subscribers when I get a chance.

Making this map was harder than anticipated. First, most heightmap tools don't want to give you something as large as the United States, so I had to stitch together many smaller heightmaps. I thought this hyperaccurate map would be enough. Nope.