Calibrating google earth for mapping references

[yecartes]

I'll just share how I use Google Earth to create a reference for drawing rivers in my map.

Data needed: screen resolution

Software stack:  Google Earth, an Image Editor and Sim City4 (of course!)

Steps:

1.  Compute how many meters your screen occupies.  For example, if the screen resolution is 1280x800, my monitor can cover 20,480 meters.  Let this value be x.

2.  Using the ruler tool, draw a horizontal line of length x.

3.  Maximize Google Earth.

4.  Zoom Google Earth until the two ends of the line snaps to the edges of your screen.

The exported image in Google Earth is now the same scale as those in SC4TF.  You can now manually create 16-bit png images by tracing the newly exported image.  Enjoy!

Here's the screenshot of Google Earth for my screen:

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