@ebla71
Shameless promotion of regional NewGRFcontent? I like it.
It never crossed my mind to try Oceania. However, we may have found a better solution outside of OpenTTD. I have a collection of digital elevation files from Russia that we used a long time ago to create landclass and scenery files for older versions of Flight Simulator. They produced superb scenery files at the time. I haven't done cartographic work in two decades, but converting whatever projection was used into a 4k x 4k map is not rocket science. OK, at worst, maybe some spherical trigonometry. But for example...
The great circle distance between Long Beach and Singapore is something like 14,000 km, so one square in OpenTTD world will be...4 km, as we need some room around the edges for continental land masses. We might have to scale to 5km, depending on how those continental land masses fit. Viti Levu - the larger of the islands that make up Fiji - is about 150km x 100km. So...37 x 25 squares @ 4km resolution or 30 x 20 @ 5km resolution, with an area flat enough on the southeast quadrant to put a decent-sized airport, which is where the airport actually exists. But not the big intercontinental airport - takes too much space in relation to the island itself. And at 5k, we might have to reclaim, which means we have to earn those reclaimed squares in 5-year increments. Start small and grow...just like the real world.
(This is where 8k or even 16k would benefit. Did Bilbo's map mod go that large back in the day? I don't even remember anymore...)
@odisseus
Best way I could address your thoughts are to say 1) this is an attempt to
realistically portray a large geographical area within the limits of the game, and 2) Co-op is not an intended target, as I am a lone-wolf gamer.
v14 will be the first chance we have to try this region the way it works in the real world: sea lift with some air cargo thrown in for good measure. Land on the fringes will represent major Far East and Oceanic ports (Singapore and Tokyo, for example) along with Long Beach, with all three feeding what can be fed into the Pacific Ocean ports and airports. Why, I might even add a South American port, too. Obviously, the oceanic cities cannot grow very large due to geographical restrictions, but that's the point: what is possible with such limited land and limited destinations?
And it's not going to be easy, either. The game rules will not allow for any meaningful terraforming. Reclamation is limited to one square per island every 5 years - a realistic balance between what is actually possible and what can be considered meaningful within the limits of a 4k x 4k map.
Which is why we've decided to create a map from scratch. We have to find the right scale to allow for airports that would actually fit in the real world, which for some islands is not possible because OpenTTD does not have a 1x or 2x airport option for modern jets. I may have to finally break down and learn how to code - or pay someone here to do it for me.
As for RAM? This machine has 96GB. The machine next to it has ten times that amount. I am going to say with some confidence the words 'RAM' and 'waste' share no commonality here. I agree that network synchronization might be problematic - at least initially.
