IronArcturus: In SimCity 4, is there a way to create a whole randomized region with different types terrain? I only see an All-Land or All-Water option in the game when trying to create a new region.
For now, I did use
TerraMaker to randomly generate a greyscale heightmap. TerraMaker supports heightmaps of 129x129, 257x257, 513x513, 1025x1025 and 2049x2049 pixels by standard.
Each small city has a size of 64x64, each medium city a size of 128x128 pixels and each large city a size of 256x256 pixels in the terrain heightmap. To get the needed size of the heightmap, you need to sum up all sizes of each citys in a row and to add 1 pixel.
So TerraMaker's standard sizes already fit to be used for the SC4 heightmap import.
Once you got a terrain you like, you have to save it as a 24bit greyscale bmp-file. For some reason, SC4 doesn't load the highmaps directly saved by TerraMaker, even as the colors are already in greyscale. But the file itself seems to get saved as RGB. So I did load it in GIMP, convert it from RGB to greyscale, saving and then it should work. If you think your imported terrain ist too step, you can try to use "curves" in GIMP to flatten the heightmap when you are already in GIMP.
You will also need to set the size of each cities in your region. Therefore you create a new bitmap where each small city is of 1x1 red pixels, each medium city is of 2x2 green pixels and each large city is of 4x4 blue pixels. This bitmap needs to be named config.bmp and needs to be in proportional size to the heightmap. That means you need to subtract 1 pixel from the side of the heightmap and divide it through 64 pixels (= size of a small city). Then simply place the red, green and blue pixels as you like. Here I have to correct my former posting, where I said the appropriate color values don't need to be 255. They must be 255, but the two values of the other colors can be used to have different kinds of the same color to get easier distinguishable cities of the same size next to each other. If none or more than only one color has a value of 255, this part of the map won't be shown in your region.
When you are finished, save your config.bmp as 24bit into a subfolder named as your Region inside the regions-folder of SC4 itself or your personal document path.
When you start SC4 now, you will be able to load your region named as your subfolder above is. You will see flat land with the city placements like in your config.bmp. If you now press [Alt]+[Ctrl]+[Shift]+[R] you will get a open-file-dialog, where you can select your saved heightmap, just anywhere saved on your computer.
After confirming, SC4 will import the heightmap and create your region. It needs some time, depending to the size of the region.
I used the software "
TerraMaker", but there is also other software like "[url=http://www.nikis.de/RanDEM]RanDEM[/url]" (German) or "
Hme - Height Map Editor" to create heightmaps. RanDEM seems to be optimized for SC4 and creates a simple config.bmp automatically, but for me it didn't work under Win7-64bit.
Hope this "How To" can help you getting your own randomized regions.
