South Pacific Heightmap

[AntoninKyrene]

Hello all!

I am going to be "not mobile" for awhile (thank you bad back!) and I thought a good way to pass the time would be to try a South Pacific heightmap. However, I haven't found one. I can create one from scratch, but I'm not about reinventing the wheel if it's not necessary. Has anyone ever seen one? It would appear Tangram does not have sufficient detail to produce one for this region. Before I dust off MicroDEM 2010, I thought a cursory inquiry might be appropriate.

Thank you!

[kamnet]

I'm not aware of one, and besides it's never a bad idea to have a fresh set of eyes on something novel. Have fun!

[Chrill]

If you do get a map together, don't hesitate to share. This sounds like it could be a different type of challenge, very exciting!

[odisseus]

South Pacific as in "huge expanses of open water with an occasional tiny island in the midst"? No offence, but that sounds like an especially dull and stifling map. The water regions in OpenTTD are virtually useless for gameplay purposes, and creating a map that's mostly water is a particularly wasteful way to use the player's RAM.

On the other hand, if you focused on a particular archipelago, the result could turn out quite interesting.

[ebla71]

South Pacific as in "huge expanses of open water with an occasional tiny island in the midst"?

On the other hand, if you focused on a particular archipelago, the result could turn out quite interesting.

There are quite a number of scenarios and heightmaps in the online download for the general region of "Oceania":

https://bananas.openttd.org/package/sce ... on=Oceania

https://bananas.openttd.org/package/hei ... on=Oceania

This includes several maps of Australia and New Zealand as well as smaller island such as Guam, Tasmania, the Solomon Island, and Fiji (although there also seem to be a few fictional ones under this label, so need to check individually).

In particular some of the latest Australia and New Zealand scenarios are very detailed and I have really enjoyed playing them, as they offer a lot of options for ship, rail, and air transport along a wide range of landscapes. In particular the 4096x2048 New Zealand scenario is an excellent play and there are also some matching train sets.

Not to mention that there is an extensive Australia NewGRF content from a particular forum contributor

[kamnet]

The water regions in OpenTTD are virtually useless for gameplay purposes, and creating a map that's mostly water is a particularly wasteful way to use the player's RAM.

OpenTTD 14 is about to change this. Ships can now pathfind without waypoints using a much smaller, more efficient method, and ships will now be able to be coded to go faster than 127 kph.

[odisseus]

That's great, but my point still stands. As far as I know, each map tile has a memory footprint, even if it is completely empty. At the very least, larger maps take a longer time to synchronise when joining a network game. Besides, no amount of optimisation will change the fact that large water areas, especially along the map edges, don't contribute to the gameplay.

[AntoninKyrene]

@ebla71

Shameless promotion of regional NewGRFcontent? I like it.

It never crossed my mind to try Oceania. However, we may have found a better solution outside of OpenTTD. I have a collection of digital elevation files from Russia that we used a long time ago to create landclass and scenery files for older versions of Flight Simulator. They produced superb scenery files at the time. I haven't done cartographic work in two decades, but converting whatever projection was used into a 4k x 4k map is not rocket science. OK, at worst, maybe some spherical trigonometry. But for example...

The great circle distance between Long Beach and Singapore is something like 14,000 km, so one square in OpenTTD world will be...4 km, as we need some room around the edges for continental land masses. We might have to scale to 5km, depending on how those continental land masses fit. Viti Levu - the larger of the islands that make up Fiji - is about 150km x 100km. So...37 x 25 squares @ 4km resolution or 30 x 20 @ 5km resolution, with an area flat enough on the southeast quadrant to put a decent-sized airport, which is where the airport actually exists. But not the big intercontinental airport - takes too much space in relation to the island itself. And at 5k, we might have to reclaim, which means we have to earn those reclaimed squares in 5-year increments. Start small and grow...just like the real world.

(This is where 8k or even 16k would benefit. Did Bilbo's map mod go that large back in the day? I don't even remember anymore...)


@odisseus

Best way I could address your thoughts are to say 1) this is an attempt to realistically portray a large geographical area within the limits of the game, and 2) Co-op is not an intended target, as I am a lone-wolf gamer.

v14 will be the first chance we have to try this region the way it works in the real world: sea lift with some air cargo thrown in for good measure. Land on the fringes will represent major Far East and Oceanic ports (Singapore and Tokyo, for example) along with Long Beach, with all three feeding what can be fed into the Pacific Ocean ports and airports. Why, I might even add a South American port, too. Obviously, the oceanic cities cannot grow very large due to geographical restrictions, but that's the point: what is possible with such limited land and limited destinations?

And it's not going to be easy, either. The game rules will not allow for any meaningful terraforming. Reclamation is limited to one square per island every 5 years - a realistic balance between what is actually possible and what can be considered meaningful within the limits of a 4k x 4k map. Which is why we've decided to create a map from scratch. We have to find the right scale to allow for airports that would actually fit in the real world, which for some islands is not possible because OpenTTD does not have a 1x or 2x airport option for modern jets. I may have to finally break down and learn how to code - or pay someone here to do it for me.

As for RAM? This machine has 96GB. The machine next to it has ten times that amount. I am going to say with some confidence the words 'RAM' and 'waste' share no commonality here. I agree that network synchronization might be problematic - at least initially.

[Eddi]

i think you'd probably find better gameplay results, if you artificially inflate the islands in the heightmap (or shrink the distances, same effect)

[AntoninKyrene]

@Eddi

You're not kidding. Some of these islands are going to be tricky. Nauru is already proving to be impossible without a 1x airport. I may have to develop two maps: Reasonable, and You-Asked-For-It. Profiting without cheating in the latter may prove to be a significant achievement.