Madisonville Neighbor Connections

Okay, so last time I talked about moving more to a model where I focused more on accuracy with neighbor connections vs. worrying so much about which exact in-city tile a particular road or intersection was on.

So I moved a bit south from Madeira, into Madisonville. I already had the neighbor connections for Kenwood and Whetsel Roads, but I spent a bit of time going around to each border, plotting via Google Maps the tiles that some of the major roads come into Madisonville.

As I’ve defined Madisonville, it goes from 39.148 to 39.167 North Latitude, and from 84.408 to 84.385 West Longitude. So a little something like this.

Here was where I ended up

What do you think?

Next step will be to put in the basic roads and intersections

South Madeira

Okay so my next steps were to try and tie in some of the side streets off of Kenwood Road. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how the best way is to simulate these things.

Here’s what I’ve been doing

1. First, I use the config.bmp I created a few months ago. On that, I have each city square (4×4, 2×2 or 1×1), and the latitude and longitude borders of each square.
2. So based on that, I created an Excel spreadsheet, with a few formulas in it. I have the borders for each city in my region, so I can put in a latitude (in either decimal format like Google Maps or the minutes and seconds from an atlas), and it will tell me how many pixels from the top / bottom / left / right edges of the city.
3. So then usually I go to Google Maps, and mouse over a road intersection. That tells me what square that should be in SC4, and I put a sign or other indicator there. I do that a few times, and then that tells me where the road needs to be.

So here’s where that has led (compare to the real area)

I’m not entirely pleased. After taking a bit of a break to think about it, I decided that I should probably be less concerned about “to the tile” accuracy. Sure it’s important to get things pretty close, and any inaccuracies that I introduce have the risk of compounding. What I mean by that is if I put a road 1 tile too far to the east, then that means that its intersecting roads have to be 1 tile to the east, and then maybe an intersection of THAT road is 2 tiles too far to the east, etc., etc.

But I think where I’m at now is that I’ll try to get each of the neighbor connections accurate to the tile (as much as possible), and then be a bit more flexible within a particular city, focusing more on making things look nicer, with straighter roads, etc.

I also decided that since this is a part of town that I “care” more about, I’ll put it on hold for now until I know more of what I’m doing. Stay tuned for where I’m going next!!!

More Kenwood Road constructions

So I did a bit more work on Kenwood Road this evening, trying to solve (or at least mitigate the angled road problem I talked about earlier.

First of all, here was how things looked on my first try, where I was just using the default in-game jogs in the road

Pretty crappy, huh?

Then I figured out about the FAP (Fractional Angle Project), which has S-curves, which allow for slight (1 tile) jogs, as well as 18.4 degree angled roads, which let you go over 2 tiles for 8 tiles height. So I used a few of those, plus added some more touchups using the TULeP turning lane mods.

Here’s a closeup of Kenwood Road looking northbound as Dawson Road comes in from the east. The street that is coming in from the west is the entrance to Kenwood Country Club.

I haven’t quite figured out how (or if it’s possible) to connect streets to the TULeP pieces, or get rid of / adjust traffic lights for intersections. For instance, in this example, the country club has no traffic light and the intersection at Dawson only has a flashing yellow light, rather than a full stoplight. Astute viewers will also notice that there’s a bit of a weirdness where the left turn lane on to Dawson starts.

I’m trying to remind myself to be patient and not spend hours and hours on one little section. I figure there is plenty of time, and probably more important things to get right. I can always come back to touch this stuff up, especially considering that I don’t really know what I’m doing or what all tools are available to me.

I think it looks much better, don’t you?

The difference between NAM and RHW, and angled roads

Okay so the next morning after thinking about things, I realized that NAM (Network Addon Mod) and RHW (Real Highway Mod) are NOT the same thing. The RHW is a subset of NAM, and when I uninstalled my previous version of NAM, that had removed the RHW mod, and when I had installed version 29 of the NAM, I had not re-installed the RHW.

I posted about that over at SC4Devotion (which is a fairly active SC4 modding community) and the helpful poster had come to the same conclusion. When I was able to get back into the game after re-installing RHW, that did indeed fix the problem. So…. yay!

I also looked at the TULeP (Turning Lane Extension Project) project, which changes the behavior of the default road and avenues to add turning lanes and such. So after looking at some of the details, it looked like the best way to lay out Kenwood Road would be to make it an avenue, and add the TULeP pieces to put in the right turn lanes.

Then I ran into my first problem. Hamilton County is not straight. Here’s a quote from the Madeira Historical Society

“When the early surveyors mapped most of Hamilton County, including Madeira, they laid their section lines on magnetic north rather than true north. So Miami Road is about three degrees west of true north. By the time they got a few counties north of here, they were using true north. So we’re cocked a bit to the east.”

Curse you John Cleves Symmes!!!! So all my roads are crooked. So for instance Kenwood Road, which is a major North-South road (and I believe an original section line from the above quote) comes into “Madeira” at 93 pixels from the left. But by the time it gets to its intersection with I-71, it’s at 88 pixels from the left. And at Euclid it’s 86, Dawson 83 and Shawnee Run it’s 80 from the left. So every 8 or 9 pixels we go down it needs to go over 1 pixel to the west.

I briefly toyed around with somehow shifting the whole region over 3 degrees, but a) I don’t think that would work and b) I’m sure there are some roads that are laid out on true N-S or E-W lines, so if I shifted 3 degrees it would just mess up THOSE roads.

There is no current way (as far as I know) to make roads in SC4 at that slight of an angle. I know I can make 45 degree angles, and I think there are mods that will make 30 degree or maybe even 22.5 degree roads, but nothing at the 3-5 degrees that I need.

So I’m reduced to just making jogs every 8 or 9 pixels, which looks kind of crappy. I’m still noodling with that trying to figure out the best way to do that.

But rather than just bash my head on that, I moved on to something else. I started making the TULeP layouts for the Kenwood / Euclid intersection. In browsing the available TULePs, I came across a post from one of the main TULeP developers that had this image.

Exactly what I need for westbound Euclid! Alas, after trying to figure out how to place that in-game, I realized that it was only an “in-development” screenshot and as part of the “advanced” TULePs, not available yet. Boo :-(. So I skipped that one, and moved on to the Shawnee Run intersection. After awhile, I had it looking pretty good

Note too the giant crater that somehow I created while messing around. Not sure why that happened but hopefully it won’t be too difficult to fix. Overall, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Back with a new batch

Back with a new batch! (and a hatchet that I bought from scratch).

So I wonder how many blogs / projects / etc. are started on the Internet and then abandoned within a few weeks? A million? Anyway, this shall not be one of those (at least not yet).

After getting kind of frustrated trying to figure out the RHW and NAM mods and doing the downtown interstates, I decided to punt that for now and start with something “easier” (air quotes definitely intentional)

So I decided to work on the 4×4 (256 pixel by 256 pixel) large city that I called “Madeira”. This is a square going from latitude 39N 10.029 to 39N 12.264 and from longitude 84W 20.991 to 84W 23.826. So… somewhere around here.

It seemed like the logical first place to start would be to get the major roads coming in to Madeira and where they hit the border. I started with Interstate 71. I-71 is kind of weird here because it is going kind of east, then it turns north and then moves northeast through the square. I started out looking on Google Maps for where it crossed the southern border (39.16716 latitude), but then realized that actually it hits my square from the west, crossing the -84.3971 longitude at 39.17905 north latitude (sorry for all the geeky map numbers).

Anyways, I used my handy dandy spreadsheet (I built a spreadsheet that can convert Google lat/longs (in decimal format) to atlas lat/longs (which are in minutes and seconds to pixels. So 39.17905 is 81.75 pixels from the bottom of my 256×256 city. Since highways take up 2 pixels, I put a highway stub at pixel 81 and 82 from the bottom, on the west edge. I similarly stubbed out the highway where it leaves the north of the square (just north of Exit 12 – Montgomery Road).

Then I moved on to Kenwood Road, which hits the 39.2044 north border at a longitude of -84.37966, which is 93 pixels from the left. It was at this point that I realized that I had a bug in my spreadsheet that was switching the pixels from left and pixels from right (due to longitudes in the western hemisphere being negative).

I stubbed that out and ran the road south past Kenwood Towne Centre. I was trying to figure out the best way to do it. I started it as a RHW-4 (4 lane Real Highway) but that wasn’t working out for me. Then I swapped to an avenue (one of the original in-game road types) but that is more of a divided median type road, which wasn’t what I was looking for.

So then I noticed that they had upgraded to a new version of NAM – version 29. So I downloaded that thinking – but then something wasn’t working right, so I uninstalled everything and then installed the new version. That caused all of the RHW pieces I had put down all evening to disappear, and the RHW pieces to disappear from the menu (so I couldn’t even put any new ones down).

I was already feeling kind of bummed that I spent 2 hours or so on this and all I had accomplished was stubbing out 2 roads :-). So I quit for the evening. But don’t worry dear reader! In the next post, I will explain how I figured that out.

Starting with custom content

So like I’ve said before, I’ve been playing SimCity for a LONG time, and even SimCity 4 for quite some time (though not IN quite some time, if that makes sense). But one of the things that I never really got into is all the custom content that has been created by the various users.

So I started into that with the Network Addon Mod (NAM) and the Real Highway (RHW) system that I downloaded a bit ago to get some of the more realistic highways and such, but today I went a step further.

I was messing around with some of the stuff I had done on Union Terminal, and started looking for some parking lots. I browsed around to find a few options. One of the things I’ve learned is that you want to be somewhat careful in what all content you download. Because if you just willy nilly download everything you see, your “plugins” directory gets to be AWFUL full. And it’s hard to delete stuff, because some plugins have dependencies on other plugins, etc. etc. got Maven, anyone? 🙂

But after looking around, I settled on the parking lots built by the suavely named “hooha47. But then that made me have to download several other accompanying plugins, as well as some core game patches and updates. I also downloaded Shadow Assassin’s hole digging lots, which help you create sunken highways as well as terraform land with much more precision.

So I started up, and found that my hole digging lots wouldn’t work. After checking in, it seemed like I needed to download the NHP / Ennedi Slope mod. (See what I mean about all the dependencies?)

Then I booted SC4 back up and…. I couldn’t get it to work :(. Every time I plopped a hole digger and tried to connect it with a road, I got a message saying “Unsuitable area to build network”. Guess I’ll have to figure out what’s wrong. But that’s okay. Part of the “fun” of having this blog is cataloging my failures, in the hopes that a) they might help someone else and/or b) I can look back at them later and laugh at how noobish I was.

I did have a bit more success with my parking lots. Still not done, but I put in a few things over at Union Terminal.

Ignore the windmill in there as that’s just for temporary power. Still trying to figure out the best way to configure the parking lot or even the roads. Still, I do like the parking lot mod, as well as the taxi drop offs.

First steps – downtown and the interstates

So now that I have my whole region, and it’s (mostly) looking like I want to, I decided to start work on some of the basic transportation.

My thought is that I’ll get the main interstates up first, then some of the major highways, and then I can start laying out some of the cities.

I started with downtown. I mean, when you’re alone and life is making you lonely, where can you go? WHERE. CAN. YOU. GO?!?! (Down. Town.).

As a side note, people that upload videos to youtube of songs, and make the videos crazy parts of the lyrics just crack me up.

Anyways….

Here’s what I’ve got so far.

Downtown area – that’s 75 coming in from the north, and 71 coming from the northeast.

Here’s what in real life is the Lytle Tunnel – 71 south (and 71 north) go underground. I haven’t quite figured out how to make that happen yet in SC. That’s 71 north in the picture, and 71 south isn’t quite done yet. The elevated highway is where 71 north comes across Fort Washington Way and splits into two – the right most lanes go underneath and into the Lytle Tunnel while the left-most lanes cross over them and start I-471 across the “Big Mac” bridge into Newport, KY.

And here is what in real life is the Brent Spence bridge, where 71/75 join together to cross the Ohio River. I don’t think that SC4 / NAM support double decker bridges, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do there. For now, I’m just leaving it as is. For comparison, here’s what the real map looks like – click for Google Maps.

class=”alignnone” width=”552″ height=”449″ />

So what do you think? Not a lot to show, right? Why am I even bothering to make a blog post about it? Oh, because “all this” has taken like 2-3 hours of work! Kinda depressing when you get right down to it!!! But don’t worry, we’ll get there

Creating a config.bmp

Now that I had a map laid out, it was time to lay out the config.bmp information. If you’re new to SC4, config.bmp is the way that you can determine what size cities you have within your region.

As mentioned in my previous post, I created a “region” of Cincinnati that was 69×45. Each tile in SC is 64×64, so my “region” will have 4416×2880 pixels, which was conveniently (and not accidentally) the size of my greyscale BMP I saved and uploaded.

But as you are laying out your region, you can have “small” cities which are 1×1, “medium” cities which are 2×2, or “large” cities which are 4×4. A small city is 64×64, a medium 128×128 and a large is 256×256. There is no real distinction between the cities in SC4 (besides their size obviously) – you just need to make sure to architect them so that they all fit inside the region.

For my purposes, I wanted to make sure that the “bigger” areas were 4×4, and I wanted to try and do my best that larger landmarks were not “cut off” on the edges of my SC4 cities. For instance, I wanted Downtown to be a 4×4 region, and it had to include a little bit of the Northern Kentucky waterfront, because otherwise it would be impossible in-game to make bridges across the river.

Annoyingly, as you no doubt understand, most cities do not have conveniently “square” borders. In some cases I solved that by just making it a large 4×4 square and encompassing some of the surrounding real world areas, and in some cases I made several smaller cities and called them by the same name. I am unclear whether I prefer just calling them for instance both “Mason” or one called “Mason West” and one called “Mason East”. I guess I’ll have to play that by ear.

I mostly used a Rand McNally atlas to look at the real world city / neighborhood borders and convert those to my tiles. I set up a spreadsheet that tracked the real world lat / long data for each of the squares in the 69×45 region, and then I just did my best. As I mentioned before, there are some real limitations to doing this but hopefully it will all work out okay.

Another guiding principle I used was that I wanted to maximize Blue (4×4) sections wherever possible, especially on the outer regions (what we like to call the “Middle of Nowhere”). Even using all 4×4 cities, that is still nearly 300 individual cities that I’ll have to manage – in contrast, using all 1×1 cities would make it over 3000. I’m a glutton for punishment, obviously, but hopefully not THAT much of a glutton!!

Here is where I’m at with that (click for a larger view).

I was working on this late at night and my wife kept telling me that I couldn’t go to bed until I was finished with my “homework” but obviously I didn’t quite finish. Still, I’m happy with the result, at least so far. As you may have noticed, neither 69 nor 45 are divisible by 4, so each row and column will have to have at least 1 “red” tile. The colors come from the actual config.bmp. Once I’m done with this, the way to import it into SC4 is that you create an actual 69×45 pixel bitmap, coloring the 4×4 cities blue (making that corresponding area actually 4×4 pixels), the medium cities green and the small cities red.

Currently I am using the West / East convention for larger cities in some places (West Chester, Mason) while using the other convention for other places (Fairfield). I do kind of like how the different size cities are kind of “random” and break up some of the monotony. You can see the lat/lon information on the spreadsheet – we’re talking 38 and 39 degrees North and 84 degrees West. I’ve also not named some of the areas – in really rural areas there really is NOTHING but like 5-10 roads in that entire section.

Next up – finishing this and getting it actually into the game!

Creating SimCity 4 real world maps from USGS data

So I messed around quite a bit trying to get the real life Cincinnati into SimCity. There are actually a few tutorials on how to do that out on the various SC fansites, but they were mostly written quite a while ago and (sometimes) out of date.

In case you are not aware, the way that SC does its “regions” is through use of greyscale images. Simplistically, black is water, and white is mountains, and the different elevations are different shades of grey. So the USGS has the data out there (for free), and there are programs out there that have been written to make this process a bit easier. One is called SC4Mapper and the other is SC4Terraformer. They both do different things but they’re fairly similar and compatible.

The first tutorial I tried to use was called Making Accurate-Scale Real-World maps. Seems pretty good, right? Just what I needed? Unfortunately it didn’t really work for me. After floating around messing with it for a few days, I came across a second tutorial – this one the awkwardly titled How to Make Scale Accurate Realistic Regions from USGS Data

Despite the awkward wording, it actually proved to have pretty good content. Not perfect – it’s about a year old and there are some differences. First of all, it links to the Seamless USGS server, at http://seamless.usgs.gov/. But apparently they recently have rolled out a newer version, and so the instructions for how to download the data were not out of date and I could not figure out how to just select a rectangle, and download JUST that data. I tried doing it by 24K map, 100K map, county, etc. Nothing really gave me what I wanted. I’m certainly not ruling out user error on that one.

But then after a day or two, I found the link to the “legacy” map viewer. The legacy map viewer was not very good – I can see why they upgraded it! I couldn’t figure out how to get exactly the data I wanted THERE either. But then I realized that when I DID select something to download off that legacy viewer, it took me to a separate download page, that looked something like:

http://extract.cr.usgs.gov/Website/distreq/RequestSummary.jsp?PR=0&CU=Native&ZX=-1.0&ZY=-1.0&ML=COM&MD=DL&AL=39.38,38.95,-84.09,-84.905&CS=250&PL=ND302HZ

I’m not sure what all of the URL query parameters meant, but I did notice 4 very suspicious numbers there! By changing those latitudes and longitudes into my bounding values, I was able to download 1 file that had all the DEM (Digital Elevation Model I think) data.

From there, the tutorial pretty much took over and was accurate. Well, “sort of” accurate – it also appears that the version of MicroDEM (the tool that converts the DEM data into a greyscale image) is different than the one from the tutorial – but I was able to figure things out. And some images that would have been AWFUL useful were not shown in the tutorial. Anyways, here are some of the key steps that I found useful (I was using MicroDEM Build 2010.3.23.2). Hopefully this can help anyone that follows after me.

1. There is no “Ocean Check” button under Reflectance, but I checked Sea Level check and Lake Check.

2. There was no Elevation colors option under right click – I found it under Display Parameters->Elevation. It didn’t have 2 separate dialog boxes to specify min and max altitude – instead it had a “Z range” button on Elevation. Because my map has no sea level, it had a min and max Z of 128 and 317 (in meters). So I added -314 and 619 to that, to get -182 and 747, which is what I entered.

3. I tried to use Paint but it was woefully inadequate – Irfanview worked great. One thing I noticed there is that my grid marks were not entirely square. I assume this has to do with the curvature of the earth or something (stupid earth!). So what I did was grab a 4×4 square in Irfanview and measured from the top left to the bottom right. It didn’t line up exactly with the grids, but probably gets you close enough. So my 4×4 square was something like 494 pixels wide by 527 pixels high, each corresponding to 4096m. I followed the tutorial’s instructions on resizing using that information, though I rounded up to the nearest “round” number (round in terms of 64s) – I went with 4417 wide by 2881 high, which gave me a 69×45 region (69*64+1 = 4417)

4. When saving the image out of MicroDEM, there were 2 legends on the top and bottom of the image, so I cropped those out. Well actually I first had to go download data that was a little bigger on the top and bottom than I really needed, and then cropped them out.

5. So then, I loaded it into SC4 Mapper and created a region out of a GreyScale. I just used a generic config.bmp at this point. This took awhile, and then I saved the region.

6. Then I imported it into SC4 Terraformer. For some reason the water was not showing up. I suspect that the tutorial’s instructions on altitude were a bit out of date. Rather than monkeying around with MicroDEM, SC4TF was much easier to use. I just used the Global tool “Lower terrain” until the rivers looked right (Usually around 13-20 units).

That got me to here:

The bigger boxes are 4×4 “cities” inside the region. And you can see the basic layout of the city, though I will do some hand terraforming especially in the river regions.

But next up – making config.bmp!

What IS Cincinnati?

Okay so my first challenge was trying to create a map. There are lots of maps of real world areas that have been created by various folks. In fact, there’s even one of Cincinnati stored on the STeX (SimTropolis eXchange) – see here (you may need to register there – I’m not sure). The problem with that map is that it is just too small in scale. It didn’t really capture all of what I consider to be Cincinnati.

Of course that’s a problem that I’ve tried to tackle before (over at Every Whatever – what IS Cincinnati? In the end, I wanted to go south into Florence (gotta recreate the Florence Y’all Water Tower!!!), north to Mason (for Kings Island), west to get Lawrenceburg, Indiana (and have a complete I-275 beltway), and then east to get a little past 275 on the east.

In the end, I decided to draw the line a little further west to capture all the bends of the Ohio River – if you look at the map below, you’ll see that a bit west of Cincinnati the Ohio bends back east a little bit, and I didn’t want to have non-contiguous sections of river. Moving the west border any further east would have cut off the section near Aurora, IN. In the east, I decided to go all the way out to East Fork Lake.

My final coordinates were
West: -84.905 or 84 54.3 W
East: -84.00 or 84 05.4 W
South: 38.953 or 38 57.18 N
North: 39.372 or 39 22.32 N

I feel that captured a pretty good idea of what Cincinnati was. Here is the (approximate) area as shown by Google Maps.

Next up – getting it into SimCity!