Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

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Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by kamnet »

As DanMacK has put forth effort to re-create the Sudrian Railways project, I felt it was only appropriate that our favorite animated trains have an appropriate place to play.

Welcome to the Island of Sodor!
Last edited by kamnet on 25 Apr 2011 08:04, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Isle of Sodor - Test Heightmap posted 04/21/2011

Post by kamnet »

This is the first test heightmap for the project. It is 2048x2048, which I think represents a good scale and presents plenty of opportunity for growth and expansion. According to the information I could find, the island is roughly 62 miles east-to-west and 50 miles north-to-south. The few decent detailed maps I could find scaled to approximately 2000x1500 pixels. Best as I can determine, the island has nine charted levels of height above sea level, which makes this usable in any version of OpenTTD.

The map is not perfect, as there is some antialiasing around the edges of the island that I have yet to eliminate.
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Re: Isle of Sodor - Test Heightmap posted 04/21/2011

Post by DanMacK »

I'd be tempted to do a 256X256 version for our TTDP friends :)
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Re: Isle of Sodor - Test Heightmap posted 04/21/2011

Post by lawton27 »

looks good, could we have some slopes on the Isle of man and Furness sides? You could just take that from a UK heightmap.
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Re: Isle of Sodor - Test Heightmap posted 04/21/2011

Post by kamnet »

DanMacK wrote:I'd be tempted to do a 256X256 version for our TTDP friends :)
I could give it a go, but seems awfully squashed to me. :-)
lawton27 wrote:looks good, could we have some slopes on the Isle of man and Furness sides? You could just take that from a UK heightmap.
I'll see what I can do. I only had the height information for Sodor itself.
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Second Test Heightmap posted 04/23/2011

Post by kamnet »

This is a second test heightmap. I spent almost 16 hours completely re-working the map as was not satisfied enough with my first effort, and I think it looks a LOT better. I've also included a heightmap of the Isle of Mann and I've moved the islands down on the image in order to fit more of Man in the picture. Man isn't entirely at exact scale since it wasn't drawn to scale on the maps by Christopher Edwards, so I've stretched it a little and moved it into the approximate position.

One thing that is apparent once you play the heightmap is that Sodor right now doesn't appear on the same height scale as Man. There's 13 height levels on Man, and only eight on Sodor. There are also three mountain peaks on Sodor according to the original maps, which wern't quite exactly showing up. In this test heightmap I have now given them peaks from height level 15 down to 6, which looks okay but not great. According to a scale on the Edwards III map that I'm using, each height level on the map is approximately 200 feet, while I believe OpenTTD's scale is 50 feet. I may compromise and make height levels represent 100 feet instead of 200, which would use up all of the height levels available int he came and give some better contour. But I may have to take some liberties in how those intermediate contours are shaped.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 2nd Test Heightmap posted 04/23/2011

Post by DanMacK »

Well, Culdee Fell is almost 4000 feet high :P
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Re: Island of Sodor - 2nd Test Heightmap posted 04/23/2011

Post by kamnet »

Oh, well that's going to be a problem. The maps I've got max out the scales at 2000 feet. *chuckle* But,that's okay, I've discovered another problem - either Edwards really paid no attention to where he was drawing England, or there's been some serious land erosion since 1970... and the entire island of England/Scotland/Wales has rotated 10 degrees to the west. Currently trying to line up Barrow-in-Furness to where it's placed on the Edwards III map and that leaves it in the middle of Morcambe Bay. Actually, according to Edwards, there is no Morcambe Bay... or Furness peninsula, even. :twisted:

EDIT: Or, perhaps, if I'm looking at the maps right, the Furness peninsula is actually the east coast of Sodor?
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Re: Island of Sodor - 2nd Test Heightmap posted 04/23/2011

Post by lawton27 »

I'm pretty sure you got it in the right place on your first heightmap.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 2nd Test Heightmap posted 04/23/2011

Post by kamnet »

The first heightmap I posted is taken entirely from the Christopher III map, from which I've discovered that neither England nor Isle of Man are drawn to scale. I think I can make it all fit, though. Right now I'm trying to resolve an issue where for some reason my graphics program is cutting everything to the right of my images off.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by kamnet »

Here's my third test heighmap. The major changes in this one is that I decided to include all of the Isle of Man. The downside to this is that I had to shrink Sodor by 23% in order to get everything to fit correctly, but now it does look more to scale in relation to Man and England. I'm not sure if this is a good move, though. AFAIK, Isle of Man was never used for any parts of the Railway Series, so I don't know how much should or should not be included.

The other major change is that I took a closer look at the Furness Peninsula on a real map (well, Google Maps) and saw that there is a Vicarstown which sits on the western edge of the sea, across from Barrows-in-Furness. Looking at all of the maps drawn, almost all of them appear to have Vicarstown, the Isle of Walney and Morecambe Bay as a part of Sodor. It's interesting that Rev. Awdry's original maps (and most of them descended) would actually have the Isle as the eastern coast of Sodor. So, I have stuck true to the original maps here and have merged the Isle as part of Sodor, which saves a little space.

Feedback appreciated to both parts of this. Depending on how everybody feels, it might sway future development one way or the other.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by SwissFan91 »

Good work, this. However, when I fired up the heightmap, I found this bit of the map quite annoying, with the map falling away here. Now, I don't know a lot about heightmaps, but is this possible to fix?
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by lawton27 »

Looking very good, now just gave it a quick test, will you be making a scenario based on this now or is that a job for someone else? :D

Edit: if there's one thing that annoys me it's that the fells in cumbria cut off aftter a cetain height, I suppose there's little you can do about that without making everything else more flat. Out of curiosity did you try that out?
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by kamnet »

SwissFan91 wrote:Good work, this. However, when I fired up the heightmap, I found this bit of the map quite annoying, with the map falling away here. Now, I don't know a lot about heightmaps, but is this possible to fix?
I believe that this is a flaw with importing heightmaps that go all the way to the edge. I can't remember if this was a problem that was supposed to be fixed or not. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the heightmap image itself which would be producing it. Easily fixed in the Scenario Editor and re-released as a SCN file.
lawton27 wrote:Edit: if there's one thing that annoys me it's that the fells in Cumbria cut off after a certain height, I suppose there's little you can do about that without making everything else more flat. Out of curiosity did you try that out?
It may improve if I can find a better heightmap for England, specifically for that area. The best heightmap that I could find to day, Cumbria and those parts of the land north of it were only a 150x300 pixel area from a 2000x2000 pixel map. Most of the heightmaps that I've found so far have been of southern England and Wales.

If somebody wants to do some extra work and put together some higher resolution SRTM3 files for this area, as well as Isle of Man, I'd certainly appreciate it.

But if it requires more adjustments to make certain land features stand out, I may decline. First, I'm trying to give more realism to the Island of Sodor, and not necessarily trying to provide yet another realistic UK map. As it is now, part of the Furness peninsula no longer exists in the UK ;-) Second, I'm not at all knowledgeable about UK geography and topography, mostly learning as I go.
lawton27 wrote:Looking very good, now just gave it a quick test, will you be making a scenario based on this now or is that a job for someone else? :D
I do plan on creating a 2048x2048 SCN, I will leave smaller-sized scenarios to those who wish to work on that, and they can include them here, and I'll link to them in the main posts.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by kamnet »

After a lot of consideration, I've decided that for right now I'm going to cut out the Isle of Man and most of England, just leaving in the part of England immediately east of Vicarstown. The main reasons for doing so are a) AFAIK Isle of Man was not actually a part of any of the stories, nor was anything in England and b) I'm having to shrink Sodor down in order to fit the other two land masses into a 2048x2048 map, which will then be scaled down for smaller map sizes.

To compensate, once I get my own Island of Sodor 2048x2048 scenario finished, I will work on a 4096x4096 map that will include Sodor, Isle of Man and England, playable on OpenTTD versions that support the larger map sizes.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by Ben1338 »

Sorry to bump an old thread of kamnet's, I did some re-working of the sodor map and released it with permission, and I think that it turned out really well.

I turned https://imageshack.com/a/img35/2883/mywl.png
Into https://imageshack.com/a/img35/2883/mywl.png

Enjoy.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by cogthecat »

Hello, all! I've actually bothered joining the forum after some time of lurking about specifically to post in this thread. I've been quite inspired of late (after having come upon a public library compilation volume of the first 14 Railways Series books) to get a scenario set up for this project, as accurate to Rev. Awdry's and his successors' canonical work as possible. Mappings, as was mentioned earlier in the thread, are a little inconsistent and vary between artists, so it's pretty well impossible to pin the details down as precisely as is desirable.

However, I used the following resources in my work and got what I believe are solid results:
  • The official map from the insert in the compilation I have from the library
  • The topographical map discussed earlier in the thread
  • A pair of fan-made maps, mainly for place-names and town sizes that were illegible elsewhere
  • A fan-made Simutrans heightmap that I had a better sense of how to play with than the one provided here
  • And, of course, the several delightful maps provided in this thread
I did not actually use the heightmap from this thread, as I couldn't quite get things to fit right according to the official maps - especially rivers - though credit must be given where it is due; your version of this map is singularly responsible for getting me interested enough to build my interpretation. Additionally, mine is only 1024x1024, rather than your larger version, which means that the one I've been working with is unlikely to be satisfactory for larger-scale play. But, nonetheless, it does indeed exist after all the time this thread has apparently sat, so hopefully there will be some life brought back into the project by those more capable than I.
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1024x1024 Heightmap
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Additionally, please note that I had several NewGRFs active and I honestly don't know what I'm doing with those pretty much at all, so it might require UKRS and a handful of other (mostly cosmetic I think) NewGRFs in order to work right. I don't think it should, but I find it best to warn you in advance.
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Tidmouth and Knapford. I marked every place-name I was able, according to the various maps. Some liberties had to be taken to account for OTTD industries that don't exist on Sodor and vice-versa, for example iron and coal mines substituting for quarries, and the factory at Tidmouth Ridge added in to fill a need for one. Depots can substitute for the Locomotive Works outside Crovan's Gate.
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I've also set up an "exchange" with The Other Railroad with secondary industries as a conservation of detail. Raw resources go to Barrow, goods trains come back because of manufacturing done in England. Douglas (the city, not the engine) is also included as some of the maps specify passenger ferry routes there and back; however, the rest of Man and England are empty because I had quite a difficult enough time getting what I did right thank you very much.

Lastly, there are some other points of interest marked with signs, such as Harold's airfield, which cannot be placed outside of actual gameplay. You'll have to add those in yourself if you want them. Some of them, I expect, cannot actually be added, such as Gordon's Hill, which as far as I can tell does not actually sit on a hill in any of the topographical renderings available - that is, Gordon's Hill is smack in the middle of a flat plain. Weird.

Anyway, here's hoping you all enjoy this labor of love!
Sodor 1.scn
Island of Sodor scenario (1024x1024)
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EDIT:
I'm sorry if posting this was in poor taste, since I haven't gotten Kamnet's go-ahead to do so even if I didn't re-use any of his original assets. I simply hope this will bring more attention to his project, especially since he did all of the real work on his version of the heightmap; I just yoinked mine from a fansite for another game. So, no offense meant and I hope this contribution is welcome here.
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Re: Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by kamnet »

I have no objections! It looks like the Simutrans map is actually my third test map, with sea cut in to make rivers.

Truly if there had been more interest in it, I might have taken it back up. Unfortunately I got discouraged when a hard drive crash completely wiped out all my previous work that I had not yet uploaded here. Plus, Dan MacKay was never able to get back around to his Thomas & Friends train set so everything just fizzled.
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Island of Sodor - 3rd Test Heightmap posted 04/25/2011

Post by cogthecat »

I'm very glad (and somewhat relieved) that you approve of my work on this!

If it is the same map, there was definitely some manner of change made, since the heights were scaled pretty differently on the one I used.

And it truly is a shame that the Sudrian Railways project never got further than the handful of sprites it had; I would have liked very much to see that finished, particularly with UKRS compatibility for other engines to help out in the background as suggested in the thread.

As for mine, I'd appreciate feedback, just to see if I did it right according to the other RWS aficionados in this forum. The only thing I don't think I did as well as I could've was using the marked locations of castles as transmitter sites; I put down a bunch of transmitters before it occurred to me to try that, so now there are a bunch of "invisible" landmarks not translated from the original maps.

At any rate, I'm eager to know what you think of the scenario as I've built it and maybe see your interpretation of the North-Western Railways once you've had some time to tinker with it. ^_^
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