Recreating San Francisco: Real Life Aside, October 1, 2009

[ldvger]

Introduction

Hello!  And welcome to my new Mayor Diary.  This MD may not be everyone's cup of tea but even though I have not built a single road or lot or anything really (yet) I am coming up against some struggles and solutions that I thought I might want to share with others.  But first some background.

I recently had the opportunity to travel through the SF Bay Area via air and was struck, once again, by the dynamic of the geography the bay area offers.  Flying over it really gives one a "bird's eye" view. 

As a result, this project started that weekend of May 28, 2009 when I flew from Seattle (my home for the past 33 years) to San Francisco to meet up with my sister, with who I then boarded a Greyhound bus and traveled south to Santa Barbara, CA for my nephew's wedding.  I had been working sporadically on a CJ over on the SimTropolis site off and on (did I already say sporadically?) for a number of years and had recently taken up my brush again but got sidetracked by the weekend out of town.  Still, having SC4R on my laptop (which I of course took with me) and having the opportunity to view the SF bay area from the air after recent game play gave me a very different perspective of the area, despite having flown in and out of SF many times. 

While in SB my sis and I stayed with my mom at a gated Montecito estate. Don't misunderstand this...we are not wealthy folks by any means but the woman who owns the estate is and she is a client of my mother's.  My mother is a custom clothier...she designs and sews custom clothing for rich people.  She's 74 now, semi-retired, lives in Idaho during the summer and flees south to SoCal once the snow flies and rents a basement room in the adobe home of this client of her's while she is there.  I don't know if the home is true adobe or not, but I suspect it is because there is no wireless reception anywhere indoors...one must leave the home to pick up signal. Which is why I went the whole weekend without internet access and why I started playing the game default San Francisco region late at night after my early bird mom and sister had gone to bed (I am a chronic insomniac and usually don't go to bed until at least 1 am.  I am also currently unemployed, so staying up late doesn't affect my work life, as I have no work life).

We ended up staying an extra day in SB due to changes in travel plans for Char (my sis) and I to head home so I was able to get a pretty decent start on building on the Maxis SF region.  As anyone knows who plays this game, most default regions of actual locations are terribly out of scale, by a factor of 4:1 or more.  So by the time I finally returned to Seattle, I had become determined to acquire a scale accurate region of the entire SF bay area.

I have a friend here online who is a fantastic map maker, perhaps you have heard of him?  His screen name is Heblem and he created my monster Copper River Region for me earlier this year and did a FANTASTIC job.  When I decided to try for a SF map, I first tried to make one myself and when that failed, I asked my buddy Heblem to create one for me.  He has a thread over on ST where he takes requests that can be found here:

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=120&threadid=106446&enterthread=y

You'll have to cut/paste this link if you want to check it out, as I don't know how to make links (yet). 

Heblem accepted my request and within a couple of days sent me a region map I could open in Mapper.  This is what it looked like:



I was ecstatic with the results and couldn't wait to start rending the region in game.  The region is scale accurate, 10 large city tiles wide from west to east and 13 large city tiles wide from north to south, for a total of 130 large city tiles.  It's a very large region, but smaller than my Copper River region, which is 16 large city tiles to a side for a total of 256 large cities.  Still, it takes some time to render them all, city tile by city tile, into the game.  This is what the region looked like after it had been fully rendered:



The snow on the mountains is not naturalistic for this area of central CA, so I knew I would have to address that, but more about that later.

So.  Besides being an insomniac, I am also deeply anal and OCD, so I approach any new project with the need for tremendous detail.  I've been working on the project for a couple of weeks now and think I am making some progress. 

Please understand I am trying to RECREATE this region.  To that end, I downloaded 43 scale accurate USGS topo maps of the area, then using both Photoshop and AutoCAD was able to synch the two to each other, kinda sorta.  They don't synch 100%, but they are close...close enough for me to start laying down tiles and saving as I go.

Now, to address the issue of snow in the mountains.  For my Copper River region, I had been using Cycledogg's Columbus Terrain mod with low snow. Copper River is Alaska and the Columbus mod fit perfectly.  My new region is central CA and Columbus does not work at all here, so the search was one for a new terrain mod.  I also figured I may need a new rock texture, as most of the hills and mountains around the SF area are heavily eroded sandstone.  And how do I know this?  I researched it, of course.  In fact I found out that because of the San Andreas fault running right down the middle of the area, most underlying rock to the south is sandstone while the rock north of the Golden Gate Bridge begins to transition to granite.  I can't use two rock textures at the same time, so I decided to look for sandstone. It's a game and compromises mst be made, but it was during this search for naturalistic central CA mods and textures that one of my back burner decisions was made...I would try to recreate the area as close to as it exists in RL now as the game would allow me to do.

That's why I said, in my opening statement, that this MD may not be for everyone.  The creativity in this MD will come more from working within the limitations the game presents than from anything I dream up out of my head.  I will use tons of cheats and custom content, almost every lot will be plopped and it will be rare when I will allow the cities, when they are built, to run off the Pause mode.  I am not really building a city or a region...I am attempting to create a piece of computer art that apes an existing RL location. 

My approach to attempting this is multi-fold.  Once I find a terrain mod I like and a water mod and a PW mod, I will begin to transfer the information I have downloaded from the 43USGS topo maps into my game.  I am a deeply anal person, actually OCD, so the extreme attention to minute details is not an issue for me while it may drive others up a wall.  I am an architect in RL (when working) and our motto is "God is in the details". 

This MD is likely to be long on text and short on pics in the beginning...and maybe all the way through.  I'm a chatty gal in RL and that comes through in my online communications as well (ya think?). 

I need to stop for a while now and post this but I will be back soon to detail my search for mods to fit my landscape as well as pics of the RL maps I am using and the techniques I am using to recreate RL in my region.  I even have a tutorial stashed away for anyone who is as mental about details as I am on how to create RL region maps from USGS downloads.  Not sure anyone will be interested so if not I'll dump it into the recycle bin, but if you like extreme detail stuff, stay tuned.

  I'm not used to this interface, so I'm not sure these image will post, so I guess I just have to trust that they will.
I'm going to have to backtrack a bit to catch any readers up with where I am  now, but will do that next time around.  Right now I am sleepy and sleep is precious to me, so I grab it when it calls me...


I'll be back!

Lora/LD

[projectadam]

Lora,

I have been awaiting this post. I have been following along with your questions/concerns/comments over in the 3RR and was wondering when the first updates of progress to this region were going to come out. I am anxiously awaiting to see where your progress takes you. I am also just starting a massive region and like to look at Google Earth and take rl applications and try to convert them into the game.

I too have somewhat of an OCD nature and can relate to your frustrations. Hopefully, development is as smooth sailing as it can be. Good Luck!!!

[M4346]

I too have somewhat of an OCD nature and can relate to your frustrations.

Ditto!  Which makes me equally interested in what you do with this challenging region. Reminds me a lot of one of my current projects - developing the Cape Peninsula - and am therefore looking forward to see how you go about it here.

M

[girlfromverona]

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this develops. Your attention to detail will help make this region a stunner, I'm sure! 

[Nexis4Jersey]

I'll keep my eye on this recreation project, i think its the first on devotion 

[joelyboy911]

Did you rotate the map to make sure you could build the golden gate bridge?



Looking forward to seeing the development of the Bay.

[Sciurus]

It's a very big map Good luck to urbanize that

Guillaume

[eugenelavery]

Hi Lora,

I am really looking forward to seeing how this project develops.  I have always found Sim City a great way to deal with insomnia and OCD.

[Tomas Neto]

Great map, and nice start!!! 

[djvandrake]

I can relate.  We use SimCity in the same ways.  Sleep doesn't come easy for me either.

This is a very ambitious project and I'm looking forward to following along.  The region map looks wonderful. 

[calibanX]

You've embarked upon a very ambitious task here. I'm intrigued. I'll enjoy watching how you build your recreation. I tend to be a night owl as opposed to an insomniac but I enjoy the early morning hours. It's quiet and I use that time to wind down and to clear my mind. Sim City helps with that for me.

Looking forward to your project.

Geoff

[ldvger]

This post was originally a second introduction to my MD which I posted after completely spacing out the fact that I had already started this MD the week before.  The kind moderators here at SC4D combined my two MD's into one (thanks folks, and I'm sorry for being such a space case sometimes).  When I got bumped upsatirs to the Best Sellers list, I decided it was time to introduce some organization and so edited the original post that was here to combine it with what now is the "formal" Introduction above. 

Lora/LD

[GreekMan]

good luck this MD should be good! looking forward to it

[Albus of Garaway]

This sounds very interesting, Lora. I'm excited to see your solutions to the many challenges that await you.

[ldvger]

Update 1: Scaling RL Maps to Game Maps, Part 1

Ok, I'm back to continue the introduction but first many thanks to both GreekMan and Albus of Garaway for your comments. 

So, OK, I was talking about Terrain Mods.  There's quite a few of these out there but finding one to match what I saw from the airplane window as we were descending for landing in San Fracisco in May was going to be my first big challenge.  I also was uncertain how to uninstall my Columbus Terrain mod, as I had installed it manually, before it was updated and packaged with an installer, (and with no small amount of difficulty) many years ago.  I couldn't remember where all the various files for the mod were placed, so I had to ask around and then find and re-read the read me file that came with the original download.  It took a while, but I was finally able, after several sessions of play, to uninstall the mod.  I had not yet selected a replacement, so I left the region in "plain vanilla mode" for the time being.  I also uninstalled PEG's "Brigantine" water mod, as I thought the slatey blue color and choppy texture, while perfect for a subarctic region like my Copper River was not quite right for cental CA and an enclosed bay. 

Over the ensueing days I searched around for terrain, water, and PW.  But really the next big project was to name my cities.  In order to do that and have any degree of accuracy to RL, I had to learn what RL cities existed in the areas contained within my 130 city tiles.  Being an ex-Californian and having traveled in and around the Bay Area quite a bit over my adult life, I knew some of the names of some of the cities and approximately where they were, but there was no way I was going to be able to recall 130 names from my age-addled memory, so I was going to need maps...and lots of them.  And the best place to get free and highly accurate maps is the USGS web site, which can be found here:

http://www.usgs.gov/

More specifically, the page I downloaded my maps from can be found here:

http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/usgs/maplocator/(ctype=areaDetails&xcm=r3standardpitrex_prd&carea=%24ROOT&layout=6_1_61_48&uiarea=2)/.do

This is a fairly simple and easy interactive site that allows one to download free topographic maps of just about anywhere in the United States.  for each area the user defines on the map, a choice of downloadable maps pops up.  Being anal, I chose the most detailed ones, each of which  covered an arc of longitude of 7.5 minutes.  Each map is at 1:24,000 scale and downloads in Adobe PDF format and each is individually named.  Here is an example of one of the maps:



The maps show an area approximately 6.75 miles by 8.75 miles.  Here comes some math, so if your allegeric, skip this part.  A single game cell represents an area 16 meters square, which is approximately 52.5 feet.  A large city tile is 256 cells square, which makes it approximately 2.5 miles to a side.  My region, being 10 large tiles wide by 13 tiles in length is therefore about 25 miles by 32.5 miles square.  As my region doesn't conform to exact same boundaries as the maps I was downloading, I had to download maps all around the edges of my region to make sure I had the entire area covered.  I ended up downloading 43 maps.  The USGS doesn't survey the ocean (that's NOAA's job, I think), so I was spared having to download maps of those city tiles in my region which have no land mass.  Each map takes my slow wifi connection about 10 minutes to download, so you can maybe begin to understand how being OCD can be helpful to someone interested in extreme accuracy and detail. 

It took me several days to download all the maps.  It's pretty boring, so I tried to stay busy doing other things while I downloaded.  Eventually I had all the maps I thought I was going to need but now several new problems arose.  First was marrying all the maps to each other to create a single large map of the entire Bay Area.  I had tried to do this once before with my Copper River region using Photoshop, but the experiment failed rather miserably after many, many hours of work, so I decided this time to see if maybe using AutoCAD might work better.  And here a second problem arose as AutoCAD does not allow the user to import a PDF file into a drawing.  However, it does allow the user to import a raster image.  So, now I had to translate all 43 of my PDF maps into JPG's.  Fortunately that's not hard to do in Photoshop, as PS allows us to open PDF as then use the Save As buttom to create a new JPG of the PDF image.  Still, it's tedious and boring and I didn't want to do all 43 maps and then find out I couldn't manipulate them in AutoCAD the way I wanted, so I did one as an experiment.  And this is where I ran into yet another challenge.

Each PDF topo map is skewed from horizontal and vertical by a little bit and each map is skewed individually, i.e. not all the maps are skewed at the same angle.  In order to marry them up one to each other, I was going to have to unskew them and make thier boundaries horizontal and vertical.  AutoCAD allows me to draw over the imported raster image, so once the image is in my drawing, I drew a constrained straight line from the bottom left corner of the map to the top left corner of the map.  CAD also allows me to start a new perfectly vertical constrained line at the exact same spot I started the first line, so now I had a the angle of skew drawn.  CAD also allows me to measure that angle to any degree of accuracy I want, so I chose a decimal value of .00.  Once the angle was determined, I wrote that down on a piece of paper (actually an Excel spreadsheet I created to keep track of maps with) then removed the raster image from my CAD drawing and erased my work.  I then opened PS and the JPG file of the map.  PS allows us to rotate images, so I used the commands for that function and rotated the map the exact number of degrees I had learned is was skewed, which was generally in the area of 1.xx degrees counter clockwise.  Now my JPG map was plumb and level.

Also, each map has information along it's margins that I don't need and that will interfere with marrying the maps to each other, so each map needed to be cropped.  Again, that's fairly simple to do in PS, but again tedious.  Once cropped, I once again imported the image into CAD.  Repeat this series of steps 43 times, which time to carefully abut the maps to each other at very close zooms and eventually I had the entire region area mapped out in CAD.  I took many screen shots of this process and could, if anyone wanted me to, write a tutorial on how to do it, if anyone out there is as mental as I am and has access to AutoCAD software.  Just let me know, I have lots of time on my hands these days. 

Anyway, this is what the final area map looked like:



Time to stop again, gotta run to the store and make myself some lunch.  I'll stop by again this evening.  Coming up next: scaling the topo maps to the region...or more accurately, scaling the region to the topo maps.

Hope your not bored to tears yet!

Lora/LD

[dedgren]

I've been watching for this, Lora.  Us detail-oriented folks need to stick together.

Here's to a long, long run for RSFBA.


David

[Albus of Garaway]

Wow, what a fascinating read, Lora! You put in a lot of hard work, but the results clearly paid off with that wonderful map you stitched together. Amazing work, and I'm eagerly looking forward to more.

[ldvger]

Boy oh boy if I don't feel like a complete and total idiot.  I completely forgot that I started this thread just what, 2 weeks ago?, and I started a NEW one called "Recreating San Francisco Bay Area" last night.  I am going to see what I can do to combine this one into that one, so there will be only one and it will be the one I started last night.  For those of you who visited here, thank you for you kind comments and if you have been checking back waiting for updates, thank you too for your patience.  Please, transfer your interest to the new thread and we will let this one die a quiet, painless death.

Lora/LD, red-faced with embarrassment

[joelyboy911]

This all sounds very, very interesting, but I'm afraid I can't see any of the pictures from your second post. I, myself have had the pleasure of visiting San Francisco when some relatives of mine were living in Sunnyvale. I look forward to seeing the future of the Bay Area.

[ldvger]

Update 2: Scaling RL Maps to Game Maps, Part 2

OK, this may or may not work.  Seems system admin folks have turned on to the fact that I started two MD's on the same topic and they have combined the two for me, sparing me a lot of frustration in trying to meld them together myself.  However, this occurred while I was in the middle of a 4 hour update and I just discovered this when I tried to post the update to the "Recreating San Francisco Bay Area" thread I created last night and was told that the thread no longer existed.  So now I have four hours of work on a reply to a thread that no longer exists, so I am going to try to copy and paste it here.  Fingers crossed, this will work, as I have tones of pics. 

Taking a deep breath and crossing my fingers, legs, and toes, here goes:

Ok, back again for entry #3, but first some biz to attend to.

It is with great embarrassment that I this afternoon discovered, while double checking my last post to see if the maps displayed properly, that I actually started an MD on July 17 titled "Recreating San Francisco".  I only made the first beginning entry and it was probably laste at night after a couple of glasses of wine, which is probably why I completely forgot I did it.  There have been 10 replies and 350 views of that similar thread since then, not including my new post there asking folks to please disregard the false start and please head over here instead.  I am going to see if there is a way I can lift the posts out of that MD and include them here, but if not, I may just do an update of quotes, so the folks that responded "over there" can be included with the folks who respond "over here".  How embarassing. 

And...drum roll please...everyone please give a warm welcome to my good friend dedgren, the SC4 master of the universe and proud creator of the inspiring and totally awesome 3RR or Three Rivers Region.  It was he who inspired me to start my Copper River Project and to not be afraid to tackle immense regions.  We've kinda been leap-frogging each other for a number of years now.  Back when CRP was a CJ called Apocrypha and was standard game default region size, I ran into two obstacles that caused me to lose my enthusiasm for the game.  One was scale and the other was the lack of credible PW.  When I found myself out of work recently (um, this time last year), I returned to SC4 and fired up my old CJ again and then began to renew my acquantaince with David (dedgren).  I was stunned with what he had done with 3RR during my absence, especially his solution to the scale problem, which has led me to where I am now, with not one but two, count them, two mega regions to keep me busy for most likely the rest of my life.   

joeylyboy911 writes:

This all sounds very, very interesting, but I'm afraid I can't see any of the pictures from your second post.

Neither can I.  However, Albus of Garaway seems to be able to, so I don't know if it's some lack in yours and mine computers or what.  If the problem persists, please folks let me know and I will see if I can figure out a way to fix it.  I am using Imageshack as my picture host and an careful to size all my images to the 800x600 max, so perhaps it's a problem with Imageshack.  When checking the last post this afternoon I used my refresh button and that didn't help.  I sometimes run into this on other MD's and found that if I page ahead and then page back, the images sometimes come up, but not always. 

Many of us have already seen examples of USGS topo maps, so that image isn't really terribly important, but I would really like the big composite map I made to display.  First of all because it was so time consuming to make and secondly because it is the basis for a lot of the work I have done since and want to share here.  So, when I am done writing tonite, I will try to go back and edit my earlier post and re-post the composit map.  My apologies for the snafus.

Onward.

Ok, so no one has begged me to write a tutorial of how I made the composite map and I explained it fairly coherently, so instead I'll just post some of the screen shots I took of the process because well, I have them and because, well, if you are going to enjoy this MD at all you are all going to have to crawl into my head a little bit and this series of pics will help you begin to do that.  You may find being inside my head a strange and maybe uncomfortable place to be, but if you are the detail-oriented, anal, OCD type I am, you may find yourself comforted to know you are not alone and indeed feel quite a home.  We'll see.

So ok, one of the keys to successful creation of composite images is keeping things very organized.  I had already created a folder on my desktop called SFmaps to which I had downloaded all the USGS topo PDF's.  Now, after my first map was unskewd and isntalled in my CAD drawing, I had some idea of the other levels of organization I was going to need to keep things from becoming hopelessly tangled up in each other.  So in my SFmaps folder I now created 3 new folders: USGStopos, topoJPGs, and rotated.  First order of biz was to put all the PDF's into the USGStopos folder.  Then I collected off my desktop the other miscellaneous SF maps I had, including the Mapper file and a pristine version of the rendered region (a copy/backup of the one in my game file...just in case) and stuck them into the SFmaps folder, too. 

I've already told you about the Excel spreadsheet I made, but let me go into just a little more detail about it.  In each cell of the spreadsheet was the USGS name of each map I downloaded, each placed in correct relationship to each other, so I would know what maps abutted which.  Lets see if I can post a pic of the completed spreadsheet:



This spreadsheet is basically the "map" I used to track my progress in creating the composite map.  I started by collecting the names of all the maps I needed from the USGS download site and entering thier names into the spreadsheet as I went from map to map.  Then, I put a check mark in the upper left corner of each cell of the spreadsheet when the map had been downloaded.  Then, after I had saved the PDF as a JPG, I put a check mark in the upper right corner of the cell.  When I found the angle of rotation in CAD, I wrote that across the top of the cell, above the cell/map name.  After I had cropped and rotated the jpg to plumb and level in PS, I put a check mark in the lower right corner of the cell.  And finally, after I had matched the map up with others in CAD and saved my work, I put a check marl in the bottom left corner.  Very helpful for keeping track of where I was and not skipping or duplicating work. 

And here are some pics of the process of creating the composite map.  I used the Redwood Point map for these pics:



A screen shot of the PDF loaded into PS.  Only step here was to got to File>Save As then select JPG.  I didn't rename the files, they kept thier original map name file name, in this case Redwood Point, just the file type changed from .pdf to .jpg.  I saved these new jpgs to the topojpgs folder in my SFmaps folder on my desktop.  Then minimized PS and opened CAD.  In CAD, I went to Insert>Raster Image and grabbed the jpg from it's folder and installed it in my drawing.  This is what it looked like as it comes into the drawing:



The red square represents the size of the object being imported.  In CAD, I can make the object any size I want it to be, either by using the crosshairs to click/drag to the right to make it larger or to the left to make it smaller.  There is also a dialog boz that pops up that allows me to choose from a bunch of options including scale and rotation, but I didn't use those in this process.  Also, at this stage of the process, the size of the imported map is immaterial, as all I am doing now if finding the angle the map is skewed at.  I am NOT going to save my work and I am going to delete the map from the drawing once I have found the angle of rotation.  So, to get as accurate a measuremnt of that angle as possible, I want the imported map to be as large as I can get it and still fit comfortably in the workspace I have near the rest of the already married maps:



You can see the image will be larger given the red square showing it's size.  The white line inside the red box represents my cursor.  Once I like the size if the image, I release my mouse button and hit enter.  Now my map is in my drawing:



Now I need to zoom in to the corner of the map to begin to draw my reference line:



I start my line, zoom out so I can see the upper corner, zoom back in, complete the line at the next corner, click enter to end the Line command, then zoom back out.  This screenshot really isn't very good, but maybe you can see the red line I just drew along the edge of the map:



Now I do the same thing again, starting at exactly the same point where I started the first line.  CAD has a function called OSNAP which, when turned on, allows me to pick from a selection of options for starting/ending lines, including endpoint.  I can also constrain any line I draw to any given angle I want, so I turn ORTHO and OSNAP on to make sure the next line I draw is perfectly vertical and starts in the same place as the first one, then I draw my new line:



Now I have an angle I can measure, so I do exactly that:



After noting the angle down, I delete all thw ork I just did and un-import the raster file of the map.  A number of reasons for this but the primary one is that at this point the raster image in CAD is at some unknown scale and won;t match up with the others and I really have no way of knowing what to scale it down to.  Also, the map is uncropped and still skewed and while I can rotate the image in CAD, I can't crop it.  So I minimize CAD, maximize PS and go back to my JPG image I left about 3 minutes ago (in RL) and first rotate the jpg by the angle I just discovered:





Then I crop it:



Now I'm done with PS for a while, so I save the work, this time in the "rotated" folder and close PS (actually minimize it, because I usually did a number of maps at a time and wanted to have the saved jpg's open if I screwed up in CAD and had to delete my work there.  It happens, especially late at night after a couple glasses of wine...), and go back into CAD.  Once again I import the raster image, this time from the "rotated" file and this time, instead of enlarging it, I am very careful to not hold down my mouse button or move my cursor after the image comes into the drawing, so as to make sure the new image is at the exact same scale as all the other maps I've already married to each other.  Once the image is imported, I move it up close to where it's supposed to marry up with the others, then zoom in to begin the process of matching it to the other maps:





You can see the elements I can align to each other, so from here it's just a matter of nudging the new map into place, slowly and carefully, with zooms in and out to check alignments.  I go along the entire border of each map where it meets with others and make tiny adjustments as I go along.  None of the maps match 100% and perfectly with each other, but they are close enough, even for me.  For one thing, the original USGS maps vary in age...some are over 50 years old and a lot has happened with mapping technology over that period of time.  For another thing, because the original PDFs are quite large ( 21"x42" if I wanted to print them out and had a printer big enough to do so), when I view them for cropping in PS, they are pretty small and it's difficult to crop exactly on the map borders.  So sometimes the maps overlap a pixel of two, sometimes they don't meet at all but have a gap between them.  Also, the majority of these maps were hand drawn, traced from aerial or satellite imagery, so 100% accuracy is impossible.  I am almost 100% positive these maps were scanned into the computer rather than computer generated in the first place and having myself made the transition from manual drafting to CAD, I can forgive a great many of the inconsistencies I found in the process of creating my big composite map.  Even with CAD, which stands for Computer Assisted Drafting, and it's phenomenal power for accuracy (I could theoretically draw the know universe to scale), it's still humans behind the screen and punching the keyboard and humans err.  Besides being an avid SC4 fan and gamer of other games, I am also a knitter, a fiber artist of sorts, and despite my experience in the fiber arts (which is extensive) I still make mistakes and like my fellow knitter friend Fran says "That's how you know it was made with human hands." 

Besides this is a GAME and even as OCD as I am, I do recognize that I have to let go at some point.  In this regard CAD has been both a blessing and a curse for me.  It satisfies my need to be as accurate as possible and at the same time feeds my mania for unreasonable and unneccessary accuracy.  A saw cut across a piece of lumber is 1/8" wide (in rought framing), so trying to deliver accuracy of anything greater than that is a total waste of time and effort, when it comes to RL buildings.  In SC4, our smallest landscape element is the single cell, which is 16 meters or 52.5 feet square, so accuracy to within a couple of cells, or 100'-150', is about as good as is gonna get.  If I was truley mentally ill, I would become so obsessed with this game that I would move to SF and spend the rest of my life mapping the area out with a transit and computer, down to the inch, noting the locations of gum wads on the sidewalks, not to mention bird splats. 

It all comes down to finding a way to balance the need for extreme accuracy and detail with understanding the limitations of the game and the tools and to not become lost or overwhelmed by either.  I do become both lost and overwhelmed by both from time to time and have to break away and do something else for a while.  I have to remind myself no one is paying me for this, I will never be judged by anyone for the manner in which I play my game, and most of all I have to remember that it is JUST A GAME.  I can fudge things here and there and no one is going to take me to task for it.  In fact, if I am to have fun and become absorbed in the game, I have to do exactly that...fudge a little now and then. 

So, all that being said (whew!), this is the final pic of how the new map marries in with the rest:



Repeat 43 times and viola!  An accurate scale topo map with all the detail any OCD person could ever want. 

Ok, that's it for this update.  I know I said I was going to explain/illustrate how I scaled my region to the composite map in this update, but I wanted to share the pics I had and besides, I didn't take any pics of that process, so I am going to have to go back and do it over, this time taking pics.  At the time that I did it I had no idea what I was doing, it was a total experiment, which is part of why I didn't take pics.  But as things turned out, I got it right the first time around and I think I actually remember how I did it, so recreating the process shouldn't be too onerous and I am sure those who are following along here will find it interesting and perhaps give them ideas they can use in thier own regions and cities.  It will take me a good portion of tomorrow afternoon to snap the pics I need for the next update, so I probably won;t post again until tomorrow evening.

I hope no one fell asleep at thier keyboards reading this.

Lora/LD

No choice but to post this and then check back to see if it worked.  I am keeping my post in the other thread open until I know for sure, but I think I will take the precaution of pasting it into my clipboard, just in case this attempt fails.  Stay tuned.

Lora/LD

Well, my copy/paste seems to have worked for the most part, thank goodness!  All the images I posted except one came through for me execpt for the first one and to me that's no big deal it was just an image of the PDF map file as originally downloaded from the USGS site.  I am still not seeing the images from my second post and they include the image of the ccompleted composite map, so I remained a bit worried about that. 

This is also, I think, an excellent time to warn you all about typos.  I am a two finger typist (index finger of each hand), so be prepared at all times to translate my typos into language.  Reading back over what I have already posted I find tons of typos that I am itchy to go back and correct (OCD again), but at some point I have to trust the readers to understand and not get to anal about being perfect all the time.  I hate typos but being as how I am so often guilty of them myself, I have learned to live with them.  I hope you will, too. 

I said I was going to try to go back and fix the post of the composite map when I finished tonite's post, but that was over 4 hours and 4 glasses of wine ago and now I just don't have the energy for it.   I hope you will forgive me and stay tuned, as I will definitely find a way to get the composite map posted...to much of what I have done since then depends on it.

:::yawning:::

It's finally cooling off here in Seattle after an all-time record breaking day of 103 degrees yesterday.  That's not on that date, but regional and streteches back over 100 years.  It was damn hot and I felt for my poor roomie who works as a short order cook, sweating at his grill all day.  Today was cool by comparison as it only reached 96 degrees.  Today was also a record breaker, but only for this date.  We only have to break 87 degrees tomorrow to break the record for the hotest week ever and being as how predicted temp is supposed to be 89 and we have exceeded predicted temps all wekk, I imagine we'll do so again tomorrow.  But cool. moist air is finally beginning to move inland from the Pacific and the temps have dropped 20 degrees over the past 5 hours.  It's supposed to stay cool and cloudy into the afternoon tomorrow, then the clouds will burn off and the heat will return. 

Ah, summer in Seattle.  Summer means Seafair and Seafair means The Blue Angels come to town:



I was awakend this morning by the sound of the air above my apartment being ripped to shreds, to be closely followed by the sound of powerful jet engines roaring.  The sound terrifies my little boy cat and he bounded off the bed and dived for cover.  For some reason neither of my girl cats are perturbed by te jets.  Myself, I love the Blue Angels and look forward to thier anual visit.  I love thier speed, thier noise, thier power, thier grace, the sheer beuaty of seeing them up close and personal against a bright blue summer sky and feeling the air being torn, in your eardrums and chest, as they fly by or pass overhead. 

They come to Seattle every year and fly a show the last weekend in July/first weekend in August.  The show is Sunday and they arrive Thursday to practice and get thier bearings, so they fly twice a day for 4 days before the show.  The sounds and sights of them is indelibly ingrained in my brain as summer.  I feel sorry for my little boy cat, who hides under the bed during these 4 days, but me, I go outside and watch them fly by, grinning as they set off car alarms across the city. 

Seafair also means...Hydroplanes!



Awesome place to be in summer, Seattle.

Lora/LD