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**Triumphus Romanus** · February 3, 2001, 12:49

All I can say is....wow!

Now hurry up :-)

**MarkG** · February 3, 2001, 16:20

quote:

a 700x343 map in CTP2

exccellent stuff, but exactly how many turns can you play on that map before your computer turns off itself in protest?

**Harlan** · February 3, 2001, 16:55

Omni,
Great job, huge scale. However, I have one pretty important quibble. While the coastlines are perfect, the terrain types seem a bit wierd. The elevation is a tad strange, for instance almost no Appalachian Mountains. Elevation is hard to do, cos do you make it purely based on distance above sea level, in which case some flat but high places come out as Hill or Mountain when they shouldn't, or do you do it based on degree of change in elevation, which requires a ton of judgements calls and eyeballing? I think the second is better, but much tougher.

The greenery also seems a bit off. Like looking at England, you've got a huge forest right in the industrial heartland of England, so the map can't be based on current data, and most of Ireland looks like Kansas- flat plains, so it can't be based on older data when Ireland was very green.

I followed the link you're using for the raw data, and it seems there doesn't seem to be really good vegetation data there. I've got some maps you might find useful, that apear to be in the same projection, great relief maps. What era do you want to vegetation to be based on- modern day, with all the massive deforestation? Or how things look naturally, before we f**ked things up so much? Or some combo in between? For instance, I've got a great data set that covers all the world in CTP2 type categories and its based on about 1960 data, before the deforestation really got out of control. But the map projection isn't the same, so you'd have to do a lot of eyeballing to get it on your map.

**OmniGod** · February 3, 2001, 18:27

If I could get the 1960's data you have Harlan would be great. From the site there wasn't anything on vegetation only general geology which I traced back to a Canadian Geology Site. While it did refer to some vegetation it was more divided into various forestation types and planes. The data for the mountains is based on above sea levels. I agree this does have it's problems. But the reason some of the mountains of the East aren't there is because of the raw data that I had and when I coverted it to indexed colour. I had varying levels but had to decide which would be represented and which wouldn't. The hills I choose as the first level above the sea to decrease the total mountain area. For when I reach the S.E. Asia the mountains there are far above the ones in the Western part of NA. It was a judgement call to keep contrast between the West and East. But any comments you have are more than welcome and I would definately love the data you referred to so that I can improve the overall map picture. Thanks

Please also note that the England picture was based on pre colour coding and the image represents nothing done by me, only what was provided by the site. I agree there should be some hills in Ireland but none appeared on the elevation maps I had. If you have a site with beter data sets I sure would love to have it.

EDIT: I just fiddled with some of the datasets and came up with this. Is this more to the liking you were pointing out Harlan?

[This message has been edited by OmniGod (edited February 03, 2001).]

**MrFun** · February 3, 2001, 21:29

Omni - this is looking great!

**lago** · February 4, 2001, 01:02

I wish Activision had been this good.

Magnificent.

**OmniGod** · February 4, 2001, 01:23

I've been given a great lead on some sites for vegeation data and will be adding those to my map. For now I'm updating the topographical considerations with data just received from NGDC, you'll love it and I'll post the Mountain/Hill map when I'm finished, probably 1-2 hours.

This is going great now. Thanks Harlan for pointing me to some other mapping sites.
http://viz.globe.gov/viz-bin/map.cgi...0&DS=G1&e=topo
http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/glcc/na_int.html
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Earth
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/globegal.shtml

New preview of the topography map. This sample is 600x353 (didn't think when I made it )

[This message has been edited by OmniGod (edited February 04, 2001).]

**Unspeakable Horror** · February 4, 2001, 01:26

It´s really good!

------------------
"For each side the only acceptable outcome was the Total elimination of the other..."

**jackazzstudent** · February 4, 2001, 04:44

Very nice map omni! Its good to see someone paying attention to geology in their maps, although I'm somewhat biased on that. If anyone out there studies Geoscience, as I do, they hopefully find it irksome that diamonds are found on oceanic volcanoes in CTP2.

Adam

**CyberBadger** · February 4, 2001, 04:51

A Magnificent piece of work. I look forward to the finished article.

**Salvius** · February 4, 2001, 09:28

Comment/Suggestion:

What I've done, when using topographical data as part of the basis for a map, is base the hills & mountains on the slope -- that is, the change in elevation.

I don't have any examples ready to put up, but I'll try to post an example later today. I've done this with NASA data of Mars, and with a fractal-generated world, and been pretty happy with it. I use a program called Wilbur to generate slope maps, which can be found at http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html

**Salvius** · February 4, 2001, 17:51

OK, after playing with the ETOPO5 dataset for an hour or so, I generated this using a slope map from Wilbur. I've left everything else as water and grassland, and I also left the mountains black, to make it easier to see where hills and mountains are:

I should point out that I made only the most basic attempt to adjust the slope map to get something that looked good, and only a rough attempt at setting sea level where it belongs. I also used Fractal Terrains as an intermediate step to get the data into a Mercator projection (just for fun) and crop off most of Antarctica. If I were doing this for real, I'd have used the GTOPO30 dataset (resolution of 1 km instead of 10), and been much more meticulous with things. This is for demonstration purposes only.
[This message has been edited by Salvius (edited February 04, 2001).]

**Harlan** · February 4, 2001, 18:12

Omni,
This Wilbur sounds really potentially great. Let me know how it goes. Also, let me know which of the data sets I pointed to you prove useful.

Also, as long as you're making a map, you might want to make two versions: one, a "terrain rich" version, and the second, using the regular terrain. By terrain rich, what I mean is using extra terrain types on top of just the ones the regular game uses. I wrote a post about this a while back... One can't add new terrain types with new graphics, but one can add new terrain types using the same data sets.

In the latest Alex scenario, I took advantage of this in several ways. One, I created two types of desert: a regular desert and a "Sand Dune" desert (the current "sand dune" type being renamed to what they really are: "desert hills"). The Sand Dune is completely desolate, lacking all trade goods or production value of any kind, hard to pass through, and only units with the "mountain" flag can even try. There's a slightly different terrain graphic set to use here, that is the same as regular except without the cactus, skulls and so forth.

As I posted in some other long-lost thread, one can do this with other terrain types. For instance, have taiga/boreal forests look like regular forest, but when you transform them you get plains instead of grassland. Or have two types of deep ocean, differing only by movement speed. A faster type would represent the Gulf Stream and other currents. Give them a much higher trade good movement value, and trade routes will tend to go along these currents, greatly increasing naval strategy. There are other potentials as well in using the same terrain graphics for more than one type, though if we went too gozongas with that, it could become very confusing.

Another thing I did in Alex is use Polar Mountain to represent any mountain area over about 20,000 feet. This makes this terrain type more useful, since otherwise the only place to use this would be Greenland and Antarctica.

Anyways, my point is, it would be easy now if you make a map including all of these distinctions, so I hope you include them as you make your map. Then its easy later to wipe out the ones you don't need- to convert all taiga to regular forest would take a couple of seconds in Photoshop, for instance. But its hard to go the other way. If you don't add them now, adding them later will be nearly impossible.

**OmniGod** · February 4, 2001, 22:10

Okay guys this is what I've gotten.

Topographical Map 86400x21600 http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/gltiles.shtml
Satelitte Image 12288x6144 http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Earth
Global Ground Cover (too small and would like larger)

Anyone have any good sites to large databases for ground cover, please don't worry about the size of the downloads. I've tried
http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/glcc/glcc_version1.html#Global http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/1KM/comp10d.html http://www.geog.umd.edu/landcover/1km-map.html

The Maryland site has great potential (Plate Carree projection), but when I download the files there and import to photoshop there is only a black image. I know it has to do with converting the file from .raw to another type. If anyone has any idea or can help me convert this it would be greatly accepted. The file itself is 889Megs big thus I don't suggest downloading it and converting it yourself. There is the following data included:

Platte Carre File Dimensions and Projection Information:

Image Size : 43200 pixels by 21600 lines
Projection : Geographic (lat/lon)
Earth Ellipsoid : Sphere, radius 6370997 m
Upper Left Corner : 180d00'00.00" W Lon 90d00'00.00" N Lat
Lower Right Corner : 180d00'00.00" E Lon 90d00'00.00" S Lat
Pixel Size (in Degrees) : 0.00833 Lon 0.00833 Lat
(Equivalent Deg,Min,Sec) : 0d00'30.00" Lon 0d00'30.00" Lat

8-bit unsigned integer

Any help or another site would greatly speed this project up and increase its accuracy. Thanks in advance.
[This message has been edited by OmniGod (edited February 04, 2001).]

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