I am playing SimCity 4 recently. After getting tired of Boston and San Francisco maps I found the game less interesting. So Sinya uses great Teochew's map to make a super large Simcity 4 game map.

Firstly I will give you the download link. An then a screanshot of the gaming screen, This is the Swatow city center:

Firstly I downloaded NASA's ASTER GDEM data. I downloaded from a mirror site in Chinese acadamy of science. The mirror site is down now. You can download it US Geological Survey's mirror site. Besides img format DEM data, we got a preview graph like this:

It's obvious that this is the Teochew region. (Do not ask me why it is obvious). We can already see mountains like Noihue Mountain and the Grand South Mountain. ...=v=...

Then we can download FWTools, transform the DEM data from img format to more friendly GeoTiff format:

Then if we use free software MicroDEM to open the transformed data, it becomes:

Now the shoerline is still vague. So for you guys, it is still not obvious that this is the DEM data of Teochew region. So we can use MicroDEM's shoreline recognization functionality. At the same time we can transform the graph to the grayscale accetable by SimCity 4:

Notice that in SimCity, we use the darkness to represet elevation. The darker, the lower. The darkest 1/3 is seabed, the whitest 2/3 is above the sea level. We need to know about this during transformation.

Then we can transform DEM data to large graphics. And we can use Micro DEM's Mercator projection grid to cut out an 64 km x 64 km portion, which is similar to the following region. We can see that the core of the Teochew region is covered. Counties of Teochew, Swatow, Tenghai, Teoyeo is mostly covered. Counties of Zyaupeng, Nam O, Kityeo is partially covered:

After we got the graph, we found that we can only get the data of shoreline. But we cannot get the data of rivers. Moreover, Han River bed is above the land. So it is even harder to distinguish the river from land. But SimCity cannot handle this situation. SimCity require all river bed to be below the sea level. So to make the game more fun, we need to find out the rivers.

We can download data from Google, find the blue part or water surface part, adjust the size and position, and then use GIMP to cover the original graph, then we can find out the rivers.

Even though the method above is practical, Sinya is not good at playing with images. So I use more simple and more stupid method: drawing by hand. Besides the Google Map, we can find out some evidence from the DEM data to find the river. For example, in the DEM graph, we can find something curly between two mountains:

And we can find the same river in Google Maps.

So we can simply draw the river on that curly thing.

In the end, we make the shore line of swamp areas like Guchangyeo and Haimun. And then adjust the sea bed, make the size of the graph to (2561px)^2, export as grayscale image. Then we get a geo-graph acceptable by SimCity 4:

Since Teochew region is mostly plain, which make the game less charlenging. In order to increase the gaming difficulty and joy, I adjust the grayscale line to make the mountains higher than actual:

Because SimCity 4 need me to make divisions of regions for a big map, I need a config.bmp file to specify the divisions. Now we can use the mini software "SimCity 4 Region and Config Creator" to divide the map. Notice that we need to make real world cities like Swatow, Teochew, Tenghai, and Teoyeo into independent divisions:

Then we put config file to the folder, and import the data using the game SimCity 4 itself. This is the outcome:

This is Kityeo, north part of Teoyeo and Sangpou Mountain. Notice we can see the distributary of Han River we mentioned before:

This is Teochew city. The mountain in the east is Kim Mountain. The river delta is Hongwang delta. =v= But it seems that SimCity 4 doesn't have mod for Hongwang Tower and Guangji Bridge. You can make one if you are interested.

This is Teoyeo, I made the swamp in Haimun Bay back into water as in 1960s. To emphasize the shipping importance of Swatow city, I remade the canal connecting Haimun Bay and Guchangyeo.

Dakhau Island (Kakchio Island) and surrounding area.

Swatow city center, Ampou, Guaswa, Tenghai city. Bue River, Guaswa river, Sincim River, and Lengou River are all included. Black Bridge Island and Sun Yat-sen Park Island are also included.

Tenghai County. We can see the tower mountain in the center of the alluvial plain.

This is Nam-o, Tenghai's Laibu, and Zyaopeng's Haiswa:

This is Teochew Kim Mountain and Tenghai Noihue Mountain. They look so real because they are made from real DEM data:

Download address is here:http://sdrv.ms/SY24lA

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