1OpenTTD Cuba Scenario

In this post I provide doc­u­ment­a­tion and sup­port for my OpenTTD Cuba scenario

So, I’ve finally got back to OpenTTD and got back to scen­ario mak­ing.  I’ve spent a few weeks tinker­ing with dif­fer­ent ways of gen­er­at­ing the best height­maps and have settled on a cubic func­tion.  The basic prob­lem is that OpenTTD only sup­ports 16 dif­fer­ent heights.  If you scale this evenly to your over­all ter­rain then you get rather large increases in height before you actu­ally go up a level in the OpenTTD world (e.g. — the UK’s highest point is Ben Nevis at 1344m.  Divided into 15 this is 90m per height increase).  This does­n’t pro­duce a ter­rain that seems real­ist­ic (e.g. the pen­nines between Manchester and Shef­field are only 5 OpenTTD tiles high at max­im­um — it is easy to build a rail line right over this!).  The first solu­tion is to use more appro­pri­ate height increases for each level, but this res­ults in the top of all hills and moun­tains appear­ing “carved off” which is far from ideal.  I real­ised that as you get highest, the amount of land at that height decreases dra­mat­ic­ally.  E.g. there is a lot of land between 0m and 50m above sea-level, but very very little between 1000m above and 1344m above.  Giv­ing each height equal import­ance isn’t necesary.  I real­ised I could use a scal­ing factor which has the effect of redu­cing this sharp peak effect.  Basic­ally what this means is that the height­map is more sens­it­ive to real height changes at low alti­tudes — so we get lots of detail at low alti­tude where most of the land actu­ally is.  We still take account of high­er peaks though and don’t carve the top off anything.

The real heights which res­ults in an OpenTTD level increase in the cuba height­map are

20, 70, 120, 170, 230, 290, 340, 410, 490, 570, 670, 780, 900, 1090, 1610

As you can see, 5 levels cov­er the first 250m real meters, 4 levels cov­er the next 250m, 4 levels cov­er anoth­er 500m and the final 2 levels are for heights above 1km.  From both a visu­al and game­play per­spect­ive this seems to provide a optim­al solution

Hope­fully feed­back for this scen­ario will be pos­it­ive (and so will my own play­ing of it) — if so I will be use this improved sys­tem for a new release of the UK scenario

Links

• The Scen­ario, Height­map, Height­map for Google Earth, the ori­gin­al DEM and the excel spread­sheet used for cal­cu­lat­ing heights as explained above are all avail­able on our down­loads page.
• The Scen­ario (v 1.00) and the Height­map (v 1.00) are also avail­able from BaNa­NaS, or via the in-game interface
• Dis­cus­sion thread on TT-Forums

Release 1.00, 3^rd April 2012

• Licence — CC-BY-NC-SA v3.0
• Pop­u­la­tions ¹⁄₂₅₀ of real figure
• Uses enhanced (cube func­tion) height­map from SRTM4 data
• Com­pat­ible with OpenTTD 1.1.0 upwards
• Requires ECS Vectors
• No oth­er New­GRFs enabled

• Approx 80 cities

• 4 Banks — in the only towns with big enough populations
• 5 Brew­er­ies — from RateBeer.com
• 0 coal mines
• 3 Oil refiner­ies — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_refineries#Cuba (Havana, Cien­fue­gos, San­ti­ago de Cuba)
• 1 Oil rig — off north coast — http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16642286
• 0 oil wells on land
• 3 gold mines (placetas, san­ti­ago de cuba, Pin­ar del Rio)
• 1 steel mill (las tunas)
• 0 iron mines
• lots of farms / fruit plant­a­tions — 30% of land area used and 20% of pop­u­la­tion work in this
• 3 shipyards (havana, san­ti­ago de cuba, guantanamo)
• 2 tour­ist cen­ters — varadero beach, cienfuegos
• 0 vehicle factories
• 0 power stations

• Anim­al Farms?
• Chem­ic­al Plants?
• Factor­ies?
• Fish­ing grounds?
• Forest?
• Fur­niture factories?
• Glass works?
• Paper Mills?
• Print­ing Works?
• Sand Pits?
• Saw­mills?
• Tex­tile Mills?
• Tin­ning factories?
• Water Sup­plies?

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