[WIP] Castelrenaudais : A countryside spot in France.

[ashwolf]

Hey guys.

The goal of this map is to reproduce as close as possible the region where I lived for many years. It's a Countryside spot based in France, centered on the town of Chateau-Renault and its surroundings.

I used a height map that I founded on this website : http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/Coverage%20map%20viewfinderpanoramas_org3.htm

which is very convenient to me because you don't have to look at google earth to find the map you want. You just click on the area you're interested on and get a few files ready to use.

After that, I used Qgis which can open DEM files and convert it to pictures readable by Simutrans. It's pretty easy to use. I didn't like to use MicroDEM cause of the GUI which is very complicated IMO and harder to install on Linux. So I got the picture I wanted.

Before reading the picture in Simutrans, I also used Krita to crop the picture, resize it up to have a larger map (the resolution doesn't matter too much since the DEM file i got was pretty good), and set a nice luminosity for a better scaling of heights in the game (Krita's a very nice free alternative to Photoshop, better than Gimp IMO but more focused on Digital Painting than Photo Editing) . After a dozen of tests I found a decent luminosity that makes the map pretty neat in Simutrans. So I finished my final image, ready to be read on Simutrans.

I've checked the scale and it's 1 tile = 20 meters, so it's pretty close to reality and it's a Large Scale map which allows me to reproduce ingame plenty of details.

The dimensions of the map are 1656 * 2300 tiles and from north to south it covers a region of 46 kilometers (2300 * 20 meters)

For all the data I needed in order to reproduce the map, I use Geoportail, which is a public geographical service for France that gives all kind of accurate data on a map, and that allows to show multiple layers with transparency. I found it much more useful  and efficient than Openstreetmap or Google maps because of the many options and the diversity of Data you can display

That's where the link is :
https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/donnees/carte-du-relief

for now i'm starting with reproducing all the rivers, since in my region mostly all the towns and villages are next to rivers.

Oh yeah, here is the map I made with the location of most of the towns of the region, much work to do !

https://tof.cx/image/uFVpC

South of the map, the big river is called la Loire, famous to be the biggest wild river in Europe  and for its castles (called Châteaux de la Loire). I've started to clean the river but It's not finished yet so the shape isn't nice at all.. 

And this is where the region is in the map of North West of France :

[ashwolf]

[RESERVED]

[ashwolf]

So i'm progressing in drawing the streets Network of the Highlighted town of my scenario : Chateau-Renault (a little tricky to reproduce but not the biggest town of my map to deal with)

Here is an overview of what i've done :


Here is how I work :

Explainations : from Geoportail I show 2 layers : one is a classical map showing roads, buildings, etc, (on high transparency setting) and the layer below is showing  heightmaps. From Simutrans i'm working so that the minimap look like geoportail. I'm reproducing 100% of the roads, maybe i won't reproduce all the buildings cause sometimes there isn't enought space to allow that.