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Map of Israel, Palestenian Territories and neighbouring countries

Started by choro, September 21, 2013, 06:26:12 PM

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choro

For some time now, I've been wanting to make this map. Finally I figured it's not hard at all to actually make it, so here it is.
It covers the whole of Israel and the Palestenian Territories, and some bits of Lebanon in the North, Syria is in the North-East, a part of Jordan is covered east of the Jordan valley from under the Golan Heights all the way South to the Red Sea, and a part of the Sini desert in Egypt is included in the map's South-Western corner.

Enjoy!



Link: http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/Israel.zip

Recommended settings are

Water level -6 (especially important because of the low area near the Dead Sea)

Winter Snowline 15

Desert 8
Tropical 5
Mediterranean 24
Temperate 5
Tundra 0
Alpine 5

These don't produce a perfectly realistic climate (i.e. too high desert areas, e.g. in Sini, are green and covered with trees, while the Galilee is quite a desert, but I think they're rather reasonable).

kierongreen

Per tile water height and climates might be useful on this map! :)

choro

Quote from: kierongreen on September 21, 2013, 06:33:27 PM
Per tile water height and climates might be useful on this map! :)

How do I make that? (Or were you saying if this feature existed...?)

kierongreen

Latest nightly have this if you load the map you can set water heights and climates in game.

Carl

Really nice map! :)

One item of constructive criticism -- the inland lakes probably don't want to be quite so deep -- this problem can be easily remedied by making them the same colour as the sea currently is in the heightmap.

kierongreen


choro

Quote from: Carl on September 22, 2013, 02:12:58 PM
Really nice map! :)

One item of constructive criticism -- the inland lakes probably don't want to be quite so deep -- this problem can be easily remedied by making them the same colour as the sea currently is in the heightmap.

Thanks for the comment - indeed as kierongreen said, they are actually lower. The Dead Sea (the bigger lake) is around 400 metres under sea level - lowest place on Earth, and the Sea of Galilee is around 200m under sea level, if I remember correctly. Ideally, sea level would actually be higher than the ground in the Jordan valley where both lakes are.

asaphxiix

great map, toda raba, shuqran!

The only thing missing is the Jordan River, but the outline is there so it can easily be "painted" by public player.

Are you from Israel? May I ask where you got the grey height map from? and/or if it's possible to enlarge the map X2 or X4? That way it can almost be played on a real scale :P

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 24, 2013, 12:53:03 PM
great map, toda raba, shuqran!

The only thing missing is the Jordan River, but the outline is there so it can easily be "painted" by public player.

Are you from Israel? May I ask where you got the grey height map from? and/or if it's possible to enlarge the map X2 or X4? That way it can almost be played on a real scale :P

Shalom shalom, bevakasha ;)
The map is from Wikipedia, I photoshopped it a little to make height levels grey scale. And yea, I personally like the in game canals/rivers, so with the terrain outline they can't be too hard to add. I used the map's original size, but I can enlarge it if you want a bigger version. Currently I'm running a game on this map with real world city positions, populations are 1/20 real world ones, and Gush Dan is already really small for its population, but I was afraid my computer wouldn't handle a larger map (running experimental).

If you want the savegame with city locations (very incomplete of course) let me know.

asaphxiix

I play experimental as well, please do share your save :)

And yeah, I think I could handle a map of, say, 4800*2583, or if you'd like to share the height map you edited and I can play with size that's cool too. what computer gear do you use? I've found that the most computationally difficult thing with large maps is creating them, but after that, at least before there are many thousands of convoys running, it's much less steep on the resources. But I use i5 CPU with 16GB ram (which of course isn't fully used). There were some discussions regarding this in the experimental forum, I think.

Yeah it'd be cool to play on a very large map, that way even with the new 0.125 km/tile you can play our country with almost real dimensions. Actually it seems that for a real size map you need about 3680 north to south (/8 = 460km).

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 24, 2013, 02:10:27 PM
I play experimental as well, please do share your save :)

And yeah, I think I could handle a map of, say, 4800*2583, or if you'd like to share the height map you edited and I can play with size that's cool too. what computer gear do you use? I've found that the most computationally difficult thing with large maps is creating them, but after that, at least before there are many thousands of convoys running, it's much less steep on the resources. But I use i5 CPU with 16GB ram (which of course isn't fully used). There were some discussions regarding this in the experimental forum, I think.

Yeah it'd be cool to play on a very large map, that way even with the new 0.125 km/tile you can play our country with almost real dimensions. Actually it seems that for a real size map you need about 3680 north to south (/8 = 460km).


I have a five years old computer, Core 2 Quad, 2.5 GHz, 3.24 GB RAM - but this is my first experimental game so I wasn't sure about it. I may have to re-make it ;) (Is there a way to transfer city locations to a new map?)

Game file with cities http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/ISR.sve
Game file with cities, almost complete rail network (electric - I couldn't find diesels that accelerate fast enough) and some unrealistic buses ;) http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/ISR_game.sve
Black and white relief map http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/Israel-reliefmap.bmp
I also have a photoshop file with a google map merged into the simutrans map for precise city locations, if you want.

.sve's are latest experimental version with latest Britain 128 experimental pakset.

If you want I can enlarge it for you, but only later since I must go now.

asaphxiix

cool, thanks a lot!

I'll try to play with the size myself, I've done it in the past I think it wasn't complicated.

Unfortunately there is no way to transfer city locations from a game that was started. The most practical solution (which I've yet to implement) is to mark city locations on the height map with a 1 tile lake or X shape or something, so they can be placed in each game, I might try to have a shot at this with this map.

Happy Holiday, and welcome to the forums!

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 24, 2013, 02:28:03 PM
cool, thanks a lot!

I'll try to play with the size myself, I've done it in the past I think it wasn't complicated.

Unfortunately there is no way to transfer city locations from a game that was started. The most practical solution (which I've yet to implement) is to mark city locations on the height map with a 1 tile lake or X shape or something, so they can be placed in each game, I might try to have a shot at this with this map.

Happy Holiday, and welcome to the forums!

Thanks. Enjoy (and be sure to update with your results ;) ). Chag sameah too


Fabio

There is a way to add cities to given locations in heightmaps, in an external text file, but not having done it myself I can't help you documenting it. Maybe someone else could help you here.

asaphxiix

This feature was much discussed, but never implemented to my knowledge...

asaphxiix

So I tried to increase the size of the map, the results seem right, except when I tried to use -6 water level I got land on the Mediterranean, only with -7 I got water there, but then I had water in the jordan, which is different from your map. sea water tiles and not a game generated river.  So I wonder if I did something wrong or not. Also it seems the bmp has some colors (green?), I was under the impression it should be R=G=B (shades of grey), maybe this is connected?

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 24, 2013, 08:09:57 PM
So I tried to increase the size of the map, the results seem right, except when I tried to use -6 water level I got land on the Mediterranean, only with -7 I got water there, but then I had water in the jordan, which is different from your map. sea water tiles and not a game generated river.  So I wonder if I did something wrong or not. Also it seems the bmp has some colors (green?), I was under the impression it should be R=G=B (shades of grey), maybe this is connected?

I'll have to try it myself then, I'll see what happens. The BMP is grayscale (in photoshop), so I doubt it has colours, but I'll try to resize and see. And I'm glad you liked the savegame - we're lucky to have just 6-7 national rail lines (which share many stations) rather than thousands :D (My project was actually inspired by Carl's stunning British network, but is much less grandiose).

@Fabio, thanks for your tip, I didn't even know that feature was discussed. Maybe I should start learning to code for Simutrans ;)

asaphxiix

yeah, this happened because I saved the bmp as 24 bit map after increasing it in paint. How did you save it, 256 color?

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 25, 2013, 10:51:41 AM
yeah, this happened because I saved the bmp as 24 bit map after increasing it in paint. How did you save it, 256 color?

I also saved 24 bit map, it didn't become colourful, that's probably a paint bug? I did have some other water level issues (colours changed during resize for some reason), but this should be fine now:
http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/Israel_large.zip - map file.
BMP is quite too large to upload, I think.

asaphxiix

So I marked city locations on the map itself with 2-tile-deep trenches :)

It's quite visible on plains, but not so on the mountains. You can mostly see where settlements should go :)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/xh9szj

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 26, 2013, 08:25:22 AM
So I marked city locations on the map itself with 2-tile-deep trenches :)

It's quite visible on plains, but not so on the mountains. You can mostly see where settlements should go :)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/xh9szj

Awesome! Do you have an original file with a merged map, or should I try to fit city names from google maps?

asaphxiix

yeah, the work was pretty manual, just flashing alt+tab between aligned maps... A good method, once I found it, only takes about an hour and can well be used for any other map.
At first I tried marking the names with one or two letters, but that wasn't very understood in the actual game. so you'll need to use a map to locate the settlements, doubtless it will be less easy for you since you didn't mark them in the first place, but it shouldn't be too hard. I mostly ignored small kibbutzim and yeshuvim, so that only leaves  arab and jewish towns and above (Also marked in Jordan and Syria). However, only the major cities and settlements in the west bank, because they are not very well marked on the map for some reason.

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 26, 2013, 05:06:48 PM
yeah, the work was pretty manual, just flashing alt+tab between aligned maps... A good method, once I found it, only takes about an hour and can well be used for any other map.
At first I tried marking the names with one or two letters, but that wasn't very understood in the actual game. so you'll need to use a map to locate the settlements, doubtless it will be less easy for you since you didn't mark them in the first place, but it shouldn't be too hard. I mostly ignored small kibbutzim and yeshuvim, so that only leaves  arab and jewish towns and above (Also marked in Jordan and Syria). However, only the major cities and settlements in the west bank, because they are not very well marked on the map for some reason.

Well, at least at the moment I won't do it - but if you happen to add the cities yourself, feel free to send me the savegame ;)

asaphxiix

i have placed all the cities in their location.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/furm47

I will try to open an online game so we can work together on the development, if you like.

asaphxiix

The server is open at simu.zapto.org

There is plenty of work to do - perhaps more places that are missing, road and rail networks, bus lines, industry links, and rivers.

you can use the public player to change whatever you like.

choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 27, 2013, 07:28:57 PM
The server is open at simu.zapto.org

There is plenty of work to do - perhaps more places that are missing, road and rail networks, bus lines, industry links, and rivers.

you can use the public player to change whatever you like.

Absolutely awesome! You'll probably find me there... for the next few decades.


choro

Quote from: asaphxiix on September 27, 2013, 11:04:01 PM
is your connection stable enough?

Mostly yes, though I just lost connection. Thought it was a sign I should just go to sleep ;)