Largest Map?

[Kitsune]

I want something humungous ... like 150x150 large tiles... but I doubt it exists anywhere.  I know a map on the stex called Cyclone Lake thats 25x25... What are the largest maps available?

[apeguy]

I doubt you'll find anything near that size available for download, I think a map that size, even if it was just blank tiles, would exceed the STEX upload limit. Most maps I've seen are usually no larger than 20x20 tiles, so what I would suggest is to make your own 150x150 tile map, by making you own config.bmp for it. 150x150 would be 600x600 pixels. If you don't know how to make a config.bmp I can show you.

[noahclem]

If I remember right a computer's ability to render such a monstrosity is the limiting factor. I don't think it will be possible.

[vortext]

A friend of mine once made a region which, if I remember correctly, was 255x255 large tiles. He wanted something bigger still but it didn't compute. It's unknown if it was due to pc performance or somekind of inherent limitation. The largest region I've ever attempted was 100x150 large tiles. It makes for pretty awesome scrolling but there're a few downsides to consider though.

Both the TerraFormer and the SC4Mapper can't handle such large regions, nor can the RegionViewer. So you have to terraform by hand or render the region ingame, which may take a day or so. A nice regional overview will basically be a regional mosaic crafted manually. Other than that, did I already mention how awesome it is to scroll over a region literally minutes on end? 

Finally, the largest regions available I know of are Beaumont and Lake Charles, both smaller as the Cyclone Lake you mentioned though.

[cogeo]

@Kitsune: May I ask what you want such a map for? You will never be able to fill it. And you have to take into account performance issues. Those large 20x20 maps feature a long delay when entering and exiting a city. My Central Macedonia map, which is "only" 13x7 tiles large, takes a considerable time to load/exit cities. Maybe the program recalculates regional data and opens all cities, who knows?

@vortext: A map larger than 255x255 cities would require a large bitmap, with the pixel count in each dimension exceeding the number that can be represented as a 16-bit integer. Of course, the BITMAPINFOHEADER structure has 32-bit integers, but this is only in theory, many SW modules (probably SC4 too) have problems handling such a big image. An 8-bit map 256x256 cities large would require a bitmap file 4GB in size; even if it is RLE- or JPEG-compressed it will have to be uncompressed in memory to be processed. 32-bit applications (like SC4) have an adreess space of 2GB or 4GB, depending on the executable's options. That is, all the memory SC4 can access would be occupied by the bitmap alone.

@Kitsune: A 150x150 cities map would require an 8-bit bitmap ca 1.4GB large. Forget 16-bit for such a region (as vortext said, neither TerraFormer nor SC4Mapper could handle such a region, and SC4 can't import 16-bit bitmaps anyway). And such a map would have 22,500 large cities, lol!!! Only adding trees to all these cities would be a huge task itself (it's not done automatically). Imo for normal gameplay a 6x5 region is actually more than enough. Another problem, even the "crappy" 90-m DEM data come in TIFFs that are 6000x6000pix, ie some 135x135 cities max.

[Tarkus]

mightygoose and I did an experiment a few years back with Terraformer to see what the largest size it could support would be.  I got it to the point of taking an 84x84 bitmap (21x21) before it started getting wacky, as I recall.  The Iron Coast region that MG used for an MD/CJ was somewhere around that same size. 

Many of dobdriver's maps push that limit as well.

Really, a more feasible way to handle such a scale would be to not go square . . . rather, rectangular, if you want a large spread.  SC4Mapper can handle a 32x8, or a 64x4.

-Alex

[Swordmaster]

I think Toronto [linkie] is one of the largest square regions, being 24 or 25 each side.

Cheers,
Willy

[woodb3kmaster]

I wouldn't exactly call the Toronto map square, since all the water-only quads are omitted (and there'd be a lot of them if they had been left in), but yes, technically its outer dimensions are 96x96 (in small quads).

[Terring7]

I think that the largest map is Mars by DoggySpew, so large that you can build 128 huge cities

[GMT]

dobdriver n me tried us at a scale replica of the entire Los Angeles metro area. It was released as 4 parts and I fiddled them together into one map... well at least I tried it as I ran into 2 problems I couldn't get past:

1) the entire map was unscrollable, the eastern extends where simply cut of in region view, I didn't manage to scroll any further, losing quite a lot of the map.

and since i rendered 4 maps into one by inserting an existing city (little complicated but the only viable way)...
2) at a certain amount of saved cities, the game crashed creating the next one. While the blank region did load as no saved cities are present, once the imported (thus saved) city tile made the game crash.

all in all I lost about 30% of the map, so consider the limit of the game in this area.

oh and we're talking 864 large city tiles of course, the entireness would have been 36x24, so I recon the playable limit lies somewhere around 600 tiles EDIT: scrath that, I ommitted all the water aswell (the map streches quite a line towards malibu so there's loads of water)so it would be even less than that