Not perfect – it’s about a year old and there are some differences.
After floating around messing with it for a few days, I came across a second tutorial – this one the awkwardly titled How to Make Scale Accurate Realistic Regions from USGS Dataĭespite the awkward wording, it actually proved to have pretty good content. Seems pretty good, right? Just what I needed? Unfortunately it didn’t really work for me. The first tutorial I tried to use was called Making Accurate-Scale Real-World maps. They both do different things but they’re fairly similar and compatible. One is called SC4Mapper and the other is SC4Terraformer. So the USGS has the data out there (for free), and there are programs out there that have been written to make this process a bit easier. Simplistically, black is water, and white is mountains, and the different elevations are different shades of grey. In case you are not aware, the way that SC does its “regions” is through use of greyscale images. There are actually a few tutorials on how to do that out on the various SC fansites, but they were mostly written quite a while ago and (sometimes) out of date. One is in My Documents\Sim City 4\Regions\Maxisland and is called City - TwinĬopy that file to My Documents\sims2\SC4Terrains.So I messed around quite a bit trying to get the real life Cincinnati into SimCity.
Open Windows Explorer or My Computer and find the file for this terrain - this