USA 5120x3276 Scenario Project

[saaws]

Hey Everyone! This is a USA 5120x3276 Scenario Project called "Highway Revolts", where I placed all the major USA/Canada Metropolitan areas and pre-placed Interstate Highway of USA. It includes all of the main Interstate freeways (such as I-*0s and I-5,I-15,..I95) and additional important ones. (CA99, US101 in California for example.)

Download link is now up, hopefully it works for you guys.  You guys can help taking out the kinks of the scenario by testing it out.
Download Now!

First, Here is the screenshot of 1:1 Scale map (imgur.com has compressed the width from 5120 to 4096.)


(I think the screenshot actually is too big, link is here to open as a new tab. http://i.imgur.com/e1Yx8yQ.jpg)

I included literally 99% of USA cities. Population is scaled from 0.8x to 1.25x, such that 1 million population city will be 10,000 population in the game.  Bigger Metropolitan areas are represented with more than one 'city,' Because there can be more than one downtown.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago are four cities that I paid extra extra attention. I carved the Greak Lakes. It also includes select Central American Tourist Destinations with added curiosities as a vacation destination. Also It includes all major Canadian cities that the map can have.

The following is the stat of the entire map. Link to the Stats in Google Spreadsheet

Total Population : 2,507,257 (In real life number is 264,000,000 US Population + 17,500,000 Canadians + 1,350,000 Central Americans)
Total Cities: 311
Westernmost City : Victoria, British Columbia
Easternmost City : Halifax, Nova Scotia
Southernmost City : Liberia, Costa Rica
Northernmost City : Winnipeg, Manitoba

Save File Size: 62Mb with trees, 2M without any trees.
When running the game, the game takes about 1.1Gb System ram.
It requires pak128 to play. For my own play, I use addons like winery and cheese dairy but I didn't put any of them for people who don't use any addons.

Let's take a look at San Francisco, where I reside so I gave extra attention to presentation.




For Los Angeles I focused on including all of the many many small municipalities that add up to 13 Million people.



For Chicago, I made sure the underground tunnel road and Elevated Railroad ('El' Chicago subway.) bridge is set up for your convenience.





For New York, I tried to include every suburbian area of New York with Manhattan focused for extra details; West 12th avenue freeway and eastern FDR freeway, Lincoln tunnel, Brooklyn bridges and on. I widened the Manhattan a little bit and exaggerated its size as you can see.





The focus I had for this project is to blend micromangement and macromanagement on Simutrans. This crazy big map gives you enough space for details of big cities and more realistic distance between cities. Airplanes actaully take realistic time to move people from coast to coast.

You can start by transporting local traffic for each major metropolitan area. But Also if you want you can then have transcontinental flights / high speed rails or maglevs transporting people from New York to Los Angeles by A380, or Maglev from Boston to Washington DC.

Here is the link to the download of the save file Download Now!
Please let me know what you guys think!

[Combuijs]

Wow! Mindboggling! Amazing!

[saaws]

Wow! Mindboggling! Amazing!

Hey, I downloaded the ppm file from your Simutrans Map website. It was possible thanks to you and Kierongreen, who made the heightmap!!

[Sarlock]

Wow, that's a lot of work you've done... great job!

[isidoro]

Really amazing!  Congratulations.

[gauthier]

This is really impressive, you must have spent entire days on this map 

The focus I had for this project is to blend micromangement and macromanagement on Simutrans. This crazy big map gives you enough space for details of big cities and more realistic distance between cities. Airplanes actaully take realistic time to move people from coast to coast.

I like it

[saaws]

This is the premise of the scenario I wrote,  although I really don't know how to write a scenario file.
I am pretty much ready to release the save file, I am debating if I should add any more Mexican cities besides tourist destinations.
Also I have a link to Google Docs spreadsheet which I used for scaling populations.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhIJb2ngPuhQdGo2NzZtQzFYaXI0alFVX0ZsNG53SFE&usp=sharing

Highway Revolts

In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of USA, signed a law to build Interstate Highways, covering the entire nation with a web of freeways longer than 77,000 km.

But at what cost? Besides financial cost of $425 billion US Dollars, the nation was deprived of good public transportation as a result. In the past, well-connected streetcars provided local transportation to people of New York, Los Angeles. Transcontinental railroads were constructed to transport people from New England to San Francisco via Chicago. The grade separation and speed-friendly alignment demanded of the Interstate Highways came at the expense of the streetcars and transcontinental railroads'.

Now is the year 1965. The election of 1964 showed that many people were unhappy about the implementation of Interstate Highways; worse traffic, dismantled public transportation. Also, people realized that it takes 46 hours of non-stop driving from San Francisco to New York even at the speed limit of 110km. You are chosen here to improve the situation. Can you prove yourself that you can build a transportation empire to connect people from coast to coast without going bankrupt?

[dannyman]

The map projection looks a bit messed up: like it was centered on the Eastern US and the West gets kind of scrunched up and to the left.  Makes California look awfully cozy . . . .


Nice effort!  Would be cool for multiplayer.

[saaws]

The map projection looks a bit messed up: like it was centered on the Eastern US and the West gets kind of scrunched up and to the left.  Makes California look awfully cozy . . . .


Nice effort!  Would be cool for multiplayer.

Hey, I hope you are staying dry with all the rain in NorCal!  Well, at first I thought the map projection of the heightmap is pretty messed up too. and to a degree it still looks off, but actually Kierogreen (The original heightmap maker) used USGS' data for his heightmap, and actually USGS uses Alber's equal area projetion which does look very different from regular map projections.


http://maps.unomaha.edu/Peterson/gis/notes/MapProjCoord.html

If you look at this comparison map, you can actually see that the askewedness of Florida in Kierongreen's heightmap is similar to the Lambert Conformal Conic (Which is similar to Alber's equal area projection). So I actually ended up using Topo World OSM Cycle Terrain maps to locate cities and carve great lakes.

[IgorEliezer]

Map projections... mildly interesting:

"Why are we changing maps?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM

[nopeftw]

Wow, that's incredible! How long did it take to make all that?

[Carl]

Very nice-looking screenshots there -- an impressive project!


I especially like the Russian church in the appropriate place in Brooklyn

"Why are we changing maps?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM

Love this

[kierongreen]

Yes map projection gets quite tricky when you start dealing with continents. While I used USGS data I distorted it to try and ensure areas in the north and south were equal - the raw data is mercator (I think), but this looked very strange as distances in the north were huge. Incidentally this was one reason I didn't include significant areas of Canada - as the distortions would have increased even more. Latitude lines are straight and linear, but east/west placement of cities would have to rely on the surrounding geography. By the way, rather than carving the great lakes out in the latest nightly versions you'd be able to create them above sea level

[saaws]

Wow, that's incredible! How long did it take to make all that?

It took me about a month total. I always enjoyed 'drawing maps of towns and roads' since I was a little kid, so it was actually quite fun. I learned a lot about the geography of U.S. and how far things are between the two coasts!

Yes map projection gets quite tricky when you start dealing with continents. While I used USGS data I distorted it to try and ensure areas in the north and south were equal - the raw data is mercator (I think), but this looked very strange as distances in the north were huge. Incidentally this was one reason I didn't include significant areas of Canada - as the distortions would have increased even more. Latitude lines are straight and linear, but east/west placement of cities would have to rely on the surrounding geography. By the way, rather than carving the great lakes out in the latest nightly versions you'd be able to create them above sea level

Haha, I figured that the latest nightly version / upcoming new stable release includes half-heights and other features, but by the time I realized this I already carved more than half of the great lakes. It was a lot of fun carving the lakes comparing the minimap to the topographical map.

[The13thRonin]

Is it possible to have a copy of this that has the default starting money and possibly a 1960 start exactly? That'd be a dream come true.

[Spokkel]

So I just found this - years after the original post! Its pretty amazing job you did here! Wish i could find more similar maps around!

[TransportFanMar]

I can't get access.

[prissi]

This is from 2014. Given the livetime of typical content on the internet, the save assumption is that those are expired after 8 years.

[TransportFanMar]

This is from 2014. Given the livetime of typical content on the internet, the save assumption is that those are expired after 8 years.

Sad though.

[TransportFanMar]

Surprise! I asked for access and got it today!

[Dwachs]

Please upload