What if I would download the exact map from Open Street Map and extract the rivers myself, to maybe later blend them into the heightmap? As a photographer, I often convert images to black and white and I realized if I would do the same with the map image, I’d get nice contrasts between land and water bodies on the map. The heightmap folder came with a text file where I saw the exact coordinates of the square I downloaded. But as a photographer, I got an idea, a really interesting idea. At this point, I thought there is no way I can continue with the project. How did that affect me? Well, the heightmap with 30 meters resolution absolutely didn’t display the rivers accurately. The authorities want you to pay a lot of money if you need 10- or 5-meter resolution, so you can not get these resolutions, at least not if you are working on a German landscape. For Europe, you can only get heightmaps for free with a resolution of 30 meters. This would result in a much more accurate scaling with the heightmap and the games engine.īut there was still a problem. But to get to the right scaling, I now had to change the canvas size to 96% (cutting the edges by 4%). That means, the first thing I had to do was to increase the 1081×1081 heightmap by 4% in Photoshop, which would result in an image with the size of 1124×1124 pixels. This is almost one-to-one but people discovered that Cities Skylines has 17.28 square kilometers. This website allows you to move a square on the Open Street Map and download an 18 square kilometer big heightmaps from that position. It was also helpful that the community already created some tools, such as Terrain Party, which is using the Open Street Maps API. Also, the fact that it wasn’t the first time I created modifications for a game. So, this month I started to work on it and my experience with different tools, especially graphic applications was beneficial. In this post, I want to show you my work in progress map but I also will talk about some methods that might help or inspire other map editors in Cities Skylines. What I was looking for was a one-to-one rendition of our city and there was only one way to get it, it would be to do it myself.

I’ve seen that a few users (probably living here too) created such a map already but I tested them and I didn’t like the quality. I always wanted to play on the landscape of the city where I live, it’s Lübeck. But there was still something that I couldn’t get out of my mind. On that way, I found maps that I enjoyed. So, at some point, I discovered the Steam Workshop where users can upload their own maps as the game has a map editor. I like city building games but there is something that annoyed me a lot. Some of you might know that I’ve been playing Cities: Skylines once in a while.

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