Cities on heightmaps

[Dakkus]

I love playing a very large real map, such as the Europe (v1). However, since it's not possible to use NewGRFs in a scenario, there is no usable way of having cities in their correct places.
This could be fixed by using a pixel in a certain colour or grayshade for marking locations of town centres on a heightmap. This way the cities could be placed in their correct locations, even if they would then have incorrect names.
Also using three or five different colours or shades for different sized towns might make sense.

I'd suggest using colours #00000, #010101, #020202, #030303 and #040404 to mark the cities, leaving #050505 for "full black". Because of rounding, this should make no difference whatsoever to what is considered deepest sea. It is very simple to choose colours #000000 through to #040404 in GIMP by using the "pick areas by colour" tool (or whatever it is called in English), setting tolerance to 5.0 and choosing #000000 as the desired colour. Another possibility would be to have a separate layer (saveable as a separate image, if so preferred) for the city location pixels. This would allow for setting city size also by making differently sized marks instead of grayshades. One pixel for a village, a circle two pixels across (so, actually a square) for a bit larger town, a circle three pixels across for a town yet larger, etc.

Both solutions allow for making heightmaps both with and without city pixels, so that existing heightmaps will not be affected and it will remain easy making heightmaps without defining cities:
1) If there are several neighbouring pixels of #000000, assume the heightmap of not having cities predefined with pixels.
2) Alternatively, a pixel can be considered to show the location of a city only if none of the surrounding pixels are darker than, say, #0e0e0e. This requires coastal cities to be marked one pixel away from the coast, but this should pose no problems. This way reshading the seas from #000000-#040404 to #050505 becomes unnecessary.
3) If a separate layer is used, this becomes trivial.
The player may be allowed to ignore the city location information when creating a map from a heightmap.

I personally would love this feature!

[Pyoro]

Various such suggestions have been discussed before:
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=61140
https://wiki.openttd.org/Terkhen/Scenario_format

Personally I'd feel that something like that would be pretty great, too, since, as you mention, the GRF problem is a huge one for scenarios. But, well. Someone would need to actually code it

[Wahazar]

Actually there is patch for reading cities, industries and rivers from the text file.

[skippern]

If heat maps could be loaded from formats maintaining layers, a TIFF file can keep the normal heat map as visible background and use a transparent overlay map for cities and industries, but that would require a set of rules how to evaluate these additional layers


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[Alberth]

A first specification exists https://wiki.openttd.org/Terkhen/Scenario_format
but no implementation, thus far.