I found some people wanting a map of the UK.

[OpenTTD_IsMyFav]

I found some people wanting map of the UK so im just going to upload it here.

[kamnet]

To be fair, there's loads of UK maps of all sizes and types available via in-game download as well as in the Scenarios forum.

[audigex]

I think there's still value in UK scenarios, if they offer something different

Eg I'm yet to find one that has every town with a railway station, or that does a good job of representing London

[Redirect Left]

Eg I'm yet to find one that has every town with a railway station, or that does a good job of representing London

I've tried numerous times to start mapping a UK (well, England & Wales, Scotland is... quite challenging with its highlands and overall shape it adds to the island of Great Britain), but its really hard to know how much detail is too much, and how much is the opposite, too little.

You also have a lot of areas that are massively squeezed together, such as the majority of West & South Yorkshire (Leeds & Sheffield surrounding areas), as well as Greater Manchester & Greater London, which is hard to know how much to map as just 'Manchester', and how much needs individually adding nearby as Stockport, Sale, Oldham, Levenshulme. The same applies for London, its a giant place with the same banner of 'Greater London', so how much needs mapping as a giant London city, and how much gets added separately around it all squashed together for places like Walthamstow, Stratford, Brixton & Uxbridge, on a map they're a way out, but they're all just still 'London', just the 'Greater' part of it.

There's just such a massive difference in a lot of the UK that its hard to map, and that's before worrying about things like the many rivers & estuaries, or the backbone of England, the Pennine Hills and of course in Wales you have the Eryri National Park (or Snowdonia).

I keep trying to start mapping seriously, but sooo much tediousness is involved. Same reason I never get anywhere with AI

[audigex]

Eg I'm yet to find one that has every town with a railway station, or that does a good job of representing London

I've tried numerous times to start mapping a UK (well, England & Wales, Scotland is... quite challenging with its highlands and overall shape it adds to the island of Great Britain), but its really hard to know how much detail is too much, and how much is the opposite, too little.

You also have a lot of areas that are massively squeezed together, such as the majority of West & South Yorkshire (Leeds & Sheffield surrounding areas), as well as Greater Manchester & Greater London, which is hard to know how much to map as just 'Manchester', and how much needs individually adding nearby as Stockport, Sale, Oldham, Levenshulme. The same applies for London, its a giant place with the same banner of 'Greater London', so how much needs mapping as a giant London city, and how much gets added separately around it all squashed together for places like Walthamstow, Stratford, Brixton & Uxbridge, on a map they're a way out, but they're all just still 'London', just the 'Greater' part of it.

There's just such a massive difference in a lot of the UK that its hard to map, and that's before worrying about things like the many rivers & estuaries, or the backbone of England, the Pennine Hills and of course in Wales you have the Eryri National Park (or Snowdonia).

I keep trying to start mapping seriously, but sooo much tediousness is involved. Same reason I never get anywhere with AI

Yeah I completely get that

What I found worked surprisingly well for London etc was to figure out how far apart I can put towns (after setting the minimum distance setting to it's lowest value), and then zooming in/out on Google maps until the labels roughly lined up with the correct distance (since Google shows more/fewer locations as you zoom). I then just picked the ones I'd heard of...

ttd_scn_London.png

(1.08 MiB) Not downloaded yet

You can then fill in gaps with labels (Soho, , or label any particularly important places that are too close to a city centre to have their own town (eg I've labelled Temple Meads in Bristol), or where stops are too close together (eg the Barry Branch Line in Cardiff)

ttd_scn_Cardiff.png

(680.19 KiB) Not downloaded yet

I did that for major cities, and then for rural areas in between I basically just tried to place one town per train station so that it's possible to build the rail route. So somewhere like Blackpool ends up with enough to build the train stations and a tram line

ttd_scn_Blackpool.png

(682.43 KiB) Not downloaded yet

It does mean I end up with gaps without may towns currently (I could fill them in, I guess) but I think it works without being **too** overwhelming. I wouldn't recommend this map for a newbie, but for someone who's playing a "Gimme BRTrains, set the date to 2024, and build a realistic UK network", it's about the right level of detail, I think. Major cities are "busy" but with enough space to build for 6-12 car trains (admittedly this is the reason I added London Underground stock to BRTrains, and a passenger multiplier parameter) with most stations

[audigex]

And since I can apparently only add 3 attachments per post, the others I was talking about plus Settle for an idea of how this level of detail looks somewhere a bit more rural

London with labels to fill gaps

ttd_scn_London_labels.png

(1.51 MiB) Not downloaded yet

Manchester

ttd_scn_Manchester.png

(1.84 MiB) Not downloaded yet

Settle

ttd_scn_Settle.png

(1.01 MiB) Not downloaded yet

[2TallTyler]

Possibly relevant to this conversation: I am slowly working on a feature in OpenTTD that can import towns from a text file and found them in OpenTTD with the correct location, name, target population, and whether it's marked as a city. The data is intended to be created using an image editor to align a labeled map (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, etc) with your heightmap and use the labels to determine the right location for each town.

Here is the Pull Request with a sample data set, and here is the documentation for how the proposed feature works, including a brief tutorial on how to create the data.

[audigex]

Possibly relevant to this conversation: I am slowly working on a feature in OpenTTD that can import towns from a text file and found them in OpenTTD with the correct location, name, target population, and whether it's marked as a city. The data is intended to be created using an image editor to align a labeled map (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, etc) with your heightmap and use the labels to determine the right location for each town.

Here is the Pull Request with a sample data set, and here is the documentation for how the proposed feature works, including a brief tutorial on how to create the data.

Sounds like a nice feature for sure

My questions would be how it handles tightly packed towns - does it just place the ones it can and then drop anything that doesn't fit (with minimum town distance)? It would be nice if it tried to fudge things a little where possible, but I appreciate that's markedly more work

Also does it place all towns then loop back through and expand them? If not, can I suggest it does so, to ensure towns don't get in each other's way etc before being placed

[2TallTyler]

It currently searches a 33x33 square for a possible location (the target tile, then a radius of 16 tiles). This would handle towns that are almost too close, as well as sloped tiles or water tiles. If a town cannot be placed, it puts a sign with the town name at the target tile so the player can find it manually or diagnose a bad coordinate.

Currently it places and then grows each town. It wouldn’t be too hard to iterate through the data twice to separate the placing and the expanding. I’ll make a note to change that when I work on the PR next.