JGR Greenland 8192x16384

[Arnoud]

This is a scenerio for Greenland using the largest possible mapsize in openttd, please note that it is not possible to have such map sizes in standard openttd, you will need the JGR version, you can get it at the development version of this forum, you just need to download, unzip and then you can launch/play like the standard version.

I did not know how to get a heightmap of this size, so I used a smaller one and increased it's size, I then terraformed most of the coast and fjords by hand, excluding some ininhabited areas.
All 71 currently inhabited towns and villages of greenland are on the map, I used sattelite imagery to place them in the correct location. Their population is at or very close to their real world population.
The low lying coastal areas will become green during a short summer.

Greenland is the largest island in the world, it is mostly covered by an icecap, it's 56.000 inhabitants all live in the coastal areas.
I wanted to make such a large map so that players get a sense of the enormity of this island and the smallness of it's population.

This is the first version with no industries, I intend to make a version with industries next.
I probably allso need to do some fine tuning of the settings, I want to make this a difficult scenario, but not impossible. It should not be possible to build a large rail network ealy on.
In reality Greenland has neither a rail nor a roadnetwork.

[ebla71]

I did not know how to get a heightmap of this size, so I used a smaller one and increased it's size

Nice idea and unusual location, but the increase of size is a problem, since information once lost cannot be recovered and therefore the terrain looks very "squared"

[Arnoud]

I was allso not happy with the squary look.

I've started to redo the landscaping for the inhabited coasts of the map, I want to do the entire east coast (south on the map), and small parts of the west coast.
So far I have done the east coast from the southern (western on map) tip of the island all the way up to the capital Nuuk in the center.

I further smoothed out corners, eliminated straight lines and created mountain ranges along the fjords/coast to give the map a more realistic appearance.
I allso added Greenland's only natural forest.

I will finish the landscaping first and then add the industries, some like forests and farms will be limited to the far south only.

[Arnoud]

I've been working on redoing the area north of the Capital Nuuk, up to the town of Sisimiut.

[ebla71]

I've been working on redoing the area north of the Capital Nuuk, up to the town of Sisimiut.

Unfortunately, this still has the strange very regular "hills" all over the place, which are a result of the attempt to "upscale" a lower resolution heightmap to a larger scenario map.

Personally, I don't like this look and would not play such a scenario, so I'd carefully re-consider before putting a lot more work into this file.

I'm currently working on an equally larger (16k x 16k) scenario of Germany and the neighboring countries and thus faced similar problems.

My scenario was generated from the SRTM Digital Elevation Model for Germany which is a "GeoTIFF" file format that has to be processed with a proper software - I used QGIS

Then, I exported the map from QGIS to a regular TIFF with a size of about 18000x9900 pixel and rescaled/cut that with GIMP to 16384x16384 pixel for export as a PNG file that can be read with OTTD as a heightmap.

Another thing you also need to consider is the height setting in OTTD. The highest mountain on my map is somewhere in the French, Swiss or Austrian Alps at about 3600 meters, for which I used a maximum height of 40 to 50 in OTTD.

If you use a setting that is too low, the mountains appear too flat but if you choose it too high, the slopes of the valleys are too steep.

As the inner ice shield of Greenland is about 3200 meters high and the highest mountain at 3700 meters, I guess you'd need quite similar settings.

A recent (2014) elevation model for Greenland with a resolution of 1 km x 1 km can be downloaded here [LINK]

Very important in the processing of the PNG file is to set the sea level to RGB color [0,0,0] or black, as otherwise you'll have problems with the ocean assignment.

A PNG file generated this way is attached - however at 8192x16384 I found it still too "edgy". Only when the map is generated at 2048x4096 it looks nice but still the coastline will require quite a bit of re-working.

If you want a larger map, you definitely need a much higher resolution TIF