[OTTD] New Netherlands 4096x4096 scenario

[ebla71]

As a big fan of large "real-world" maps, I'm happy to present to you today

New Netherlands

which is a 4096x4096 scenario that covers all of the Netherlands, a good part of northern Belgium, and the northwestern part of Germany, including the heavily industrialized Ruhr area.

Based on a 8k heightmap released in 2019 by Erato, I have "smoothed" the complete terrain, added a lot of missing rivers and channels, and placed more than 700 cities, towns, and villages at their geographically correct positions.

There is a large selection of rivers and sea-going ships added, together with Polroad for coaches and cars, and Dutch and Belgian train sets together with GETS v0.6 - the latter also limits the starting date to about 1890 since there aren't enough railway coaches for the German part available for an earlier date.

The industry set is XIS but there are no industries placed on the map yet, so you can change that to something else in the scenario editor before starting a game (I'm also planning to later release a version of the scenario with industries at the proper positions, but first have to finish a customized industry NewGRF that is also in the making).

In line with my preferences, by default, industries are set to "no open/no close" and have to be manually constructed by the player in the game.

Also, the time is "fixed" and you need to manually "forward" if you like.

Generally, the user level is "experienced" and you should be prepared to first adjust the settings and NewGRF list in the scenario editor before you start a game.

A preview of the map is shown below and the scenario is already available in the content download service

I hope you enjoy playing it and would be looking forward to see some screenshots of your games here.

Some more pictures will follow below.



[Disclaimer: Since the topic of languages is a bit sensitive in the area, in particular in Belgium, I have used those encountered first in Wikipedia or otherwise more familiar to me from a German perspective - there isn't anything beyond that in the choice and if you don't like it, change it yourself in the game]

[ebla71]

Scenario map without the town names, to better show the covered area:



Closer view of the Rhine/Maas/Schelde delta - can you spot the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerpen, and Brussels?

[ebla71]

Another even larger zoom on the far southeastern part of the map, showing the hill country of the "Sauerland" across the Rhine river from Cologne with its' many water reservoirs and quarries:



Lignite mining district between Aachen and Cologne with the largest pits highlighted in "sand color":

[Argus]

Perfect. I just don't know, does the Belgian train set even have carriages?
After consideration, I added 2cc trains in nml, limited to north-west Europe, and a 2cc bus set.

[ebla71]

Perfect. I just don't know, does the Belgian train set even have carriages?

No freight waggons at all and only a few passenger cars, the earliest being the "Nord Express" silver ones that become available in 1928 and then from 1977 a pair of passenger/mail cars in the iconic orange color of the SNCB/NMBS.

I guess for freight, you can simply use the ones from the Dutch train set and for pre-1928 also the Dutch passenger cars, although the earliest useful Belgian steamer is the "BSR type 7" introduced in 1921 anyway. "Le Belge" from 1835 is more for fun, I guess, and you could simply use the Netherlands set for anything earlier.

Would not mix with GETS, as this is much more detailed and looks strange when combined with more "pixely" other sets. Therefore, I tend to limit "cross-border services" to reduce that visual collision

[Argus]

Yes, Dutch trains are fully sufficient as freight trains.
I never mix wagons from different sets, sometimes it does weird things even if both sets are at the same resolution.
Personally, I have no problem using both styles side by side, even in Hamburg I had a pixelated international express from Prague.
Too bad CZTR can't be used with XIS due to incompatibility.
But it doesn't matter if the station is also pixelated.

[Argus]

As the city bus shows, we cannot avoid visual collisions anyway. And what about trams?

[ebla71]

And what about trams?

Dutch Tram set - what else

First vehicle available from 1905 and built for Den Haag - seems like I forgot to add to the scenario, thanks for pointing that out, but will only upload to the online content with another at least minor release.

[ebla71]

Dutch Tram set - what else
First vehicle available from 1905 and built for Den Haag - seems like I forgot to add to the scenario, thanks for pointing that out, but will only upload to the online content with another at least minor release.

Just checked - Dutch tram set should be among the NewGRFs installed by default.

Maybe you are just a few years too early to have the vehicles available or somehow changed the NewGRF composition?!?

[Argus]

I know about trams, I like to use the Dutch tram set. I meant the visual collision with a tram passing a train from GETS Pardon, I meant the visual collision of a tram meeting a train from GETS Google Translate obviously has strange tendencies these days.

[Argus]

As I wrote above, trams are OK, but Google is confusing.

[Argus]

Since German and French trams are missing, I also added 2cc trams.
Brugge has grown nicely.

[Argus]

Everything works as it should, I'm enjoying the game, and I think the next step could be a whole Europe scenario and it would be awesome.

[ebla71]

Everything works as it should, I'm enjoying the game, and I think the next step could be a whole Europe scenario and it would be awesome.

Thank you very much for the feedback

Personally, however, I'm currently going the other direction and working on a smaller area scenario, but with a much higher level of detail even than "Hamburg" - on the resolution of like 1 tile = 1 house or tree.

Considering that France alone is more than 10x the size of the Netherlands, you'd need a map size not supported by standard OTTD at the moment for a "Full Europe" scenario - and a couple of years to "crave out" the landscape.

I did not record the time but I think "New Netherlands" took me several months of regularly working on it in the evenings.

There is for example "Bingo's 4K Europe" scenario but most I tried on this size I did not like, since trains were too long in relation to distance between cities.

[Argus]

And it was made even easier by the fact that Holland is more or less flat and the north of Germany too... The Czech Republic, Switzerland or the Alpine part of Austria and Germany would be worse. It's a fact that I often enjoy smaller scenarios more, because they are also clearer. I'm looking forward to it. Which city will it be?

[Argus]

Probably the only thing that bothers me about Bing's scenario of Europe is that he put American buildings there for some reason.
Otherwise, it's a nice scenario, but it's true that a train bigger than a city looks rather odd. It's even worse on maps showing the whole world There, sometimes the train goes through two states at once.

[ebla71]

And it was made even easier by the fact that Holland is more or less flat and the north of Germany too... The Czech Republic, Switzerland or the Alpine part of Austria and Germany would be worse.

Actually - and counter-intuitively - more rugged terrain with hills and mountains is much easier to "carve out" from a heightmap than flat parts of a map, since you can much more easily identify particular geographic features, like lakes, rivers, quarries, and other distinct feature.

Take, for example, a part of the bottom right (southeast) corner of the New Netherlands map around the city of Hagen in Northrhine-Westphalia.

The top picture is the original 8k heighmap from Erato scaled down to 4096x4096 - already here you can easily spot the Ruhr river on the center left and two valleys that extend to the right together with a large cavity in the center, which is a large and very distince limestone quarry in that area.

The picture below is the same area from the finished scenario with "smoothed terrain" and cities and towns added.

[ebla71]

On the other hand, below a part from the supposedly "easy" flat part - shown is the central east of the Netherlands where the cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen have to be placed on the Rhine and Maas rivers.

Nothing really helpful to see in the original imported heightmap in the top picture, so the placement of the rivers and also cities is much less accurate and a lot of guesswork:

[ebla71]

It's a fact that I often enjoy smaller scenarios more, because they are also clearer. I'm looking forward to it. Which city will it be?

Since I'm only about 50% done with it, it's possibly a bit too premature to tell

Still, I will give you a "sneak preview" below and two very nerdy hints:

The area in the focus of the scenario was - fittingly - home to a person very important for map making, with his invention still widely used today, but locally much more famous is a fictitious police inspector

If you recognize it, please give a "cryptic answer" to allow others also to guess.

BTW - bottom part of the picture shows the finished part of the map while the top part what has still to be "sculptured", since here, the basis of the scenario is not a heightmap but a topographical map.

[Argus]

Schimanski? Sorry, that was the commissioner, dammit.