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Comment by zenoprax | Hacker News Reader

I've attempted something similar for a city of 20,000 before using an overlay mod but map projection issues between the DEM and images along with city simulation scaling just yielded a stretched blob with 95% industrial traffic and a queue entering the city that never ended. I will check their tuning parameters and see how they handled it. It was fun to build regardless.

I've been waiting to try with CS:2 using aerial photo and lidar data of Vancouver that I've collected myself. Mod support is still weak compared to CS:1 but I'm hopeful that it's possible. I'd like to release a DEM, DEM+roads, and then the fully built version as three separate maps.

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Sadly, that happens. We use image overlay and exports off ESPG 4326 and tweaked the hell out of the coords until it worked. Even then there are still issues - which is why we're about 100m shorter than the real city. The overlays match perfectly, but in reality distances are always a few meters off across a large stretch. OSM imports broke completely, so I just ended up doing all the roads by hand with the maps on a second monitor.

There's always a point where you look at the automated solution and think "Okay but... how long would it take to just to do manually?"

I enjoyed your comprehensive write-up. I really like how you didn't get too lost in the details when the technical limitations cropped up and kept the focus on the interactivity and public awareness. Very fun project :)

Thanks!

C:S 1 has quite a few "thundering herd" issues, like perfectly cyclic deathwaves. This includes extreme industrial traffic if you zone it all in at once. The capacity of (all) buildings is also pretty extreme. Adding Realistic Population 2 and Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited brings it down to less gamey and more towards realistic, and you can tweak from there.

I should look into these mods, the death waves were annoying. I mean I get it, you build a big new residential area, people move in quickly and are all roughly the same age when they do, but they could've done something to fix it like randomize ages or have people move out of the city and replaced by a differently aged person.

Maybe this might help: the list of mods and what they do. You can pick what seems most useful for your game.

https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/mod-c...

Yup, we’ve got a big list of mods to help alleviate some of these issues. Due to the way we’ve modeled the corridors and daily population flow in and out of the city, we still get roving herds of ambulances…

Can you explain the projection issues you faced with the DEM? I thought something like gdal can reproject any data into a standard projection like web Mercator.

If I recall correctly Cities Skylines needs a UTM-like projection but I think I made an error with the input data and got the X/Y scaling wrong. It was a fairly amateurish attempt and my knowledge of coordinate reference systems has improved quite a bit since then so I hope to fix that for the next attempt.

Good news is you can even overlay screenshots of Google Earth (which uses high-res data, some of it at 30 cm2 per pixel). Will take some fiddling with the coords, but it works!

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