tulip kelp
I'm working on a heightmap and associated .json files with coordinates of towns so that map makers and whomever else can customise a British Isles scenario with their choice of newgrfs, map size and amount of towns placed. This should allow a lot more flexibility for people wanting to create a scenario and won't require manual placement of thousands of towns each time.
Current progress is as follows:
British Isles - All cities
🇮🇪&NI - All towns
🏴 - All towns (In EN or CY)
🇮🇲 - All towns and villages
🇯🇪 - All towns and villages
🇬🇬 - All towns and villages
& some screenshots of current town placement
The heightmap itself is very high resolution but does need a lot of tidying up around the coastline
still charm
The east coast is a glimpse into the future of Lincolnshire 😔
tulip kelp
Don't worry I will raise England from the sea
tulip kelp
Today I finished plotting all 1483 villages in Eire 🙏 . Had to rename about 100 duplicates to disambiguate them. Takes a good 5 minutes to load the villages in from the .json. Will also be possible to choose to import all the villages in Gaelic instead (where available)
plain bramble
if youre planning to do that density for everything youre gonna run into the town limit (5000)
i applaud your efforts though
still charm
Luckily you can make some progress on cutting them down automatically since you're doing it data-driven.
tulip kelp
if youre planning to do that density for everything youre gonna run into the tow...
There's a town limit??
plain bramble
Chris sawyer
tulip kelp
good news, for my sake, you are wrong
plain bramble
Did it get lifted recently? I know new game only lets you do 5000
tulip kelp
🤷♂️
that would have ruined my entire day and week if it were true
but I actually already had 5,287 placed as of last night
plain bramble
You’re using json import right? I bet it bypasses the usual limit, I wonder if they’re all actually functional or if anything past 5000 is broken somehow
Yeah 5k is just new game limit, the actual max number is much, much higher
Learn something new everyday
tulip kelp
You’re using json import right? I bet it bypasses the usual limit, I wonder if t...
yes, I am. It takes many times longer to load the towns from a json than spawning them, when I did 5000 random towns it takes 1 second in the scenario editor, when I load 1500 villages it takes 5-10 minutes! Idk if that is a bug or not because it seems excessive
tulip kelp
In the meantime, I've been finding out how to correct the offset positions of towns that you get when trying to translate latitude coordinates onto a mercator projection such as a heightmap. Essentially this chart shows that while towns at the top and bottom of the UK would be placed correctly (Inverness and Truro), those in the middle would be in the wrong place by nearly 200 tiles vertically. But by comparing the correct locations of towns in-game with their coordinates, I established a clear function that defines the expected error for a town of any given latitude, which means I can subtract that error from each town's coordinates. This reduces the vertical error down to 2 or 3 tiles for the vast majority of towns 🙏
it works 🥹 one London is the one I plotted manually, the second is the one that was calculated automatically from its real-world location
Previously it would have been 100 tiles out without my correction function
tulip kelp
so, progress report. this is what 11,314 cities towns villages and suburbs imported on a 4k map looks like. (importing suburbs as towns is actually a bad idea, but I wanted to see what would happen)
I do have 3400 duplicate village/town names which is a slight problem
still charm
Are there any duplicates if you suffix the county name (but only for places with conflicts), like Gillingham (Essex) vs Gillingham (Kent)
tulip kelp
If there is, I can fix them manually
In Eire I only ended up with 1 instance of 2 villages in the same county with the same name (2x Ballingarry)
The problem is when I exported the data for England I didn't take any county data so I need to get that in order to automatically fix any duplicates
and it's hard to automatically assign a town to its parent county because of the mixture of ceremonial counties and administrative counties
What I will probably do is take each county's data individually and then I can add the correct county to each row
because I kinda want hamlet data also to have those as labels for more decoration which is not in the data export I took for England
this is the density I get for towns villages and hamlets where I live
tulip kelp
Good news, I now have a complete spreadsheet of all 12868 cities, towns and villages in England, with county suffixes added where there are two or more places with the same name. I also have all 16930 suburbs and hamlets so those can be imported as decorative labels.
tulip kelp
This is what a 4k map of England looks like with all 1189 cities and towns imported
& this is with all villages (attempted to be) imported. About 2500 failed due to the density of villages
clearly not a good idea on a 4k map
delicate plover
& this is with all villages (attempted to be) imported. About 2500 failed due to...
I can see my house from here!
Also why are the fens underwater
It isn’t 2040 yet
still charm
I think grooming the heightmap is waiting until the town data is captured
tulip kelp
Also why are the fens underwater
I haven't been bothered to fix the heightmap yet
It's a nice heightmap but it's not perfect when it comes to the coastline
tulip kelp
I did manage to import all the towns & villages onto a 16k map (took 1 hour to process). Aside from 2 villages that have names too long and some places that are underwater, everything was placed correctly
tulip kelp
thankfully a 16k map with 12000 towns has the exact same performance as one with two
I was worried it would be sluggish
still charm
I should have told you that'd happen lol.
plain bramble
thankfully a 16k map with 12000 towns has the exact same performance as one with...
yeah no the only things that really affect performance afaik is map sizze and number of vehicles