1km Terrain Map Brushes
This is what I could call an "advanced" mod – it is not something that will work out of the box (unless you really like Glossop and Hadfield), and that is by design.
It exists solely as a utility to bring map data into the game at 1:1 scale and paint it onto the terrain.
For the sake of ease of experimenting with it and seeing what it does, I’m including some Ordnance Survey data of a small area of the UK.
You can use the provided map tiles with this height map of the same area: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2593538290
Maybe someone will make a nice recreation of that area 🙂
To make proper use of this mod for different locations, you are required to provide it with 16 different 4096×4096 DDS files, called A1.dds, A2.dds, A3.dds, A4.dds, B1.dds.. etc all the way to D4.dds.
What it will do is provide paint brushes for these images to paint them to scale on the terrain – it’s tailored for a "tiny" 4km map size. Each brush is called A1, A2, etc, and can be found in the badgerhax category on the paint tools.
I haven’t tested it on other map sizes because I am not crazy enough to want to detail anything bigger to this level of accuracy.
As long as the other map sizes are some multiple of 1000m then it will probably work, but you’ll still only get 1km tiles to paint, so you’ll have to detail your map in segments and replace the tile images as necessary.
If you already know where to get height and image data and how to use a GIS tool such as QuantumGIS to process it, then what you need to do to prepare these tiles is
1. export your imagery layer as a VRT using your height map extents
2. set its resolution columns and rows to 16384
3. set the tile max columns and rows to 4096
4. after creation, take each file into GIMP or some other image editor and flip each file vertically – DDS files are loaded upside down ingame
4a. (optionally) draw a border around the edge of each tile to help you see the edges in game
5. save each tile as DDS using the naming convention noted above
If you don’t know how to perform these steps but want to learn how to do this, watch the the video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxhXsaQyY-s
It covers both generating a height map, and the steps above to generate image tiles to draw onto it.
Once you’ve placed roads etc over the maps, naturally you want to get rid of the overlay.
In all my usage and testing so far it seems to be safe to simply remove the mod from the save, even if you had still left the maps painted on the terrain.
When you load the save without the mod enabled, the places where you painted these textures simply default to the original grass texture.
