[OTTD] Southern Norway

[Kuhnovic]

My wife, who is Norwegian, recently got hooked on OpenTTD... man I love that woman . I thought it would be fun to play a map of Norway, but unfortunately I could only find a heightmap of West Norway. I wanted a larger piece of Norway on the map with a more recognisable coastline, and of course cities, lakes etc. So I went down the scenario creation rabbit hole, spent way too many hours on it, and this is what I have so far:

• Southern part of Norway. I roughly took the "Oslo - Trondheim - Bergen" triangle and base the map around that.
• "Temperate-with-snow" climate. Basically sub-arctic with a number of NewGRFs to get the temperate trains and industries back. The snow line varies with the seasons.
• Found an extensive list of cities/towns online. I then created a python script to fetch their GPS coordinates. I manually drew Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen on the map, noted their tile positions + GPS coordinates, and used those to triangulate the positions of all other towns. This allows me to batch process the town creation.
• Towns with city status are generated as cities, the others just as towns. The real world population is taken into account to determine the town size.
• Created a lake map which is used to generate any inland water. Low altitude lakes are lowered to sea level (looks better), high altitude lakes are created using river tiles.
• Created another script which combines the height map and lake data, and filters out some noise, i.e. 1x1 tile islands that clog up the map.
• Modified/h4ck3d the OpenTTD code a bit so I could import all of this stuff. Everything is just read line by line from .txt files, nothing too fancy.
• Industries are generated using the "Many random industries" feature in the scenario editor (clicked it twice)

I'm really glad I learned Norwegian, it would have been impossible to find some of this data in English

I still have the following things in mind:

• The heightmap I used only contains Norway, but there should be a small piece of Sweden on the right side of the map. I'm already working on this.
• A nicer / smarter way to generate industries. I might mess around with the source code to prevent industries above a certain altitude.
• Placing signs at key landmarks, i.e. lakes and fjords.

This is my first scenario, so any feedback is more than welcome! Don't hold back, I can take criticism . Please keep in mind that I want to do as little manual work as possible, scripting is the way to go for me

[Kuhnovic]

Version 0.2 is here!
- Small part of Sweden added
- Tweaked the lakes so they look smoother
- More towns, better spreading of towns
- Uploaded to BaNaNaS

https://bananas.openttd.org/package/scenario/00001907

[laban99]

I've been playing this map with a friend and really enjoying it.
A couple comments starting with the smaller stuff:
-There are a few places where small towns and larger towns seems to have been switched, a couple I remember on the top of my head because I'm familiar with the area like Lommedalen (Pop 11k) seems massive relative to Oslo while Sandvika (Pop 120k) is completely missing. Similarly the map has Blakstad (pop 3k) but not Asker (pop 60k).
-The inland has some mysterious large towns: Arna and Grønlund, as far as I can tell Arna should probably be Atna (Arna is a borough in Bergen which probably is where it got its population from) but I'm stumped on Grønlund.
-This is mostly cosmetic but adding signs for landmarks could be nice like for example Mjøsa (largest lake), Galdhøpiggen (tallest mountain), Sognefjorden (longest fjord).
Glomma, the longest river, isn't wide enough to be 1 square of water at this scale but it is kind of weird that it's missing, though you can kinda tell where it is just from looking at the height maps.
-Some significant/historical towns like Røros, Kongsvinger and Elverum are missing because they'd be just on the edge of the map (or just outside it), I'd suggest including a little bit more east but you say you want to focus on the Oslo-Bergen-Trondheim triangle so if you think this is outside the scope of your map then I understand.

In anycase this seems like the most detailed Norway map in terms of terrain that I've found so thanks for that.