Making a scenario - Bay Area (CA)

[Mibars]

Hey! I'm new to this forum!

I used to play a lot TT (and only few minutes with TTD) when I was younger, then after I got newer computer I almost forgot about it. Then thanks for OTTD working on XP, so I could play it again and learn how TTD should be played (I used to just connect indrustries with separated lines).
BUT now I'm creating a map-based scenario - Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont, San Jose, etc). I use few maps - main is AAA's road map of Bay Area (squares A-P 1-7 so it fits 128x256), Google Maps, few other maps found in web, but what I'm missing is a map with marked height of land (in Polish mapa topograficzna, I don't know it's name in Eng). Now I'm almost done with making coasts and bridges, but I can't make realistic mountains and hills without "topographical" (does this word exists in english?) map, so I dont't know if continuing has any sense...
Maybe someone has this kind of map, or knows where I can find it? (I live in Poland, so taking another map from AAA is impossible )

I'm attaching what I made yesterday

EDIT: Is that my map in scn format OK? Other are in sc0 and works with OTTD. Is this format compatible with sc0, and if not is there converter or sth to make it ok?

[Sacro]

Is Google Maps any good?

Yeah, topographical is the correct english word to use, and as far as i know, .scn is the correct type

[pmhtuk]

looking good, would be nice to build the bart system

[Mibars]

Goggle maps shows only road system.

Now my only way to get information about terrain level is Google Earth program (show terrain on), but... I can see it only when camera is tilted, so I can't place hills exactly where I want.

You won't be able to make BART, because TT has no option for building tunnels underwater...

Today I did nothing because I don't know if this map will be playable for orginal TTD players (for sure it needs some changes, like more space for airports, no roads on slopes etc), or if I have to start everything again.

[MeusH]

What version do you use? I tried r3397 and r3353 but all I see is lot of water, flat area, one city and a few bridges

[Mibars]

So everything is correct panie MeusH, because it is about 10%, albo mniej done. You should see a lot of terrain covered with grid, and on down left side coast and bay (with this bridges and tiny city placed on island between SF and Oakland.

I'm still worried about file formats... will be this map compatible with clean TTD?

Nice to see someone else from Poland playing Transport Tycoon

[DaleStan]

No. OTTD is not capable of writing scenarios that can be loaded in either TTD or TTDPatch.

[OczeQ]

So everything is correct panie MeusH, because it is about 10%, albo mniej done. You should see a lot of terrain covered with grid, and on down left side coast and bay (with this bridges and tiny city placed on island between SF and Oakland.

So, we're waiting for something more...

Nice to see someone else from Poland playing Transport Tycoon

I totally agree (może jakieś piwo <lol>)
_____________________
OczeQ vel Puchacz

[Mibars]

No. OTTD is not capable of writing scenarios that can be loaded in either TTD or TTDPatch.

What a pity...

OK But now i recognised, that my map won't be square, so it is impossible to convert it to TTD... So I'll continue OTTD version.

Unfortunatley I cannot find any more maps of Bay Area. Maybe someone lives there and have some school maps that shows terrain level?

[cccp]

The best thing to use to create US maps in OpenTTD is digital elevation data from USGS. There's currently no way to directly import it into TTD, but there are ways to convert it to a grayscale PNG and then use the PNGmap patch to load it.

The data does need some manual editing to produce good maps, but it can be done in a paint program such as Photoshop. For example, for the SF Bay Area data, a lot of the land is almost at sea level, which needs to be adjusted so that it's not filled with water. In the sample picture, I edited a lot of the land around the bay and the Sacramento Valley area, comparing the water borders with a map from Google.

I'm trying to make a simple converter that makes the process easier, and also trying to find data that's lower resolution so that larger areas won't need as much data to download. The data I used for the Bay Area map was almost 100 megs and about 7500x6000 pixels, which is excessive even for OpenTTD's large 2048-pixel maps. (Unless of course you wanted to cover a smaller area to begin with)

[Mibars]

...And i tried to make everything manually...
...when it can be done in just few clicks...
...in WAY better resolution (my map is 128x256)...

Only differences are that my map is not north directed to better fit square map, and to make most bridges horizontal, and vertical...

I'll try to make new map (maybe 1024x2048) using this converter, and some tricks in Photoshop.

Aaa... - Thanks for great site with terrain data... Only problem is that it is so slow, that now i wait 5 minutes for loading map...

[MeusH]

Mibars, that's no problem to rotate, rescale and darken your map in graphics format, so it fits nicely on any world size, even 128x256.
Use the imagination and have fun

[Mibars]

I did this with this posted bay area map (27 degree rotation), but i had no time till now to make bigger one from Seamless and make it fit 2x1 size. It'll take some time to place all the cities, factories and roads.