That way I can see where my coastlines will be. I set the underlying layer opacity so that everything darker than about 83 gets covered up by blue. It's useful to know where sea level will be, so I create a new temporary layer, color it blue, turn down the opacity and then double click on it in the layers dialogue box to bring up the layer properties. I go into Photoshop and make a new image that's 769 pixels square. My greyscale image needs to be 769 pixels square.

Take the size of the region in kilometers, multiply it by 64, then add 1.įor my region, that's 12 * 64 + 1 = 769. Here's how to figure out how large to make the greyscale image: In this scheme, white equals high elevation, black is the bottom of the sea and sea level is at around a value of 83 (on a scale of 0-255). Once I've decided how large to make my region, I make a greyscale image representing the elevations of the terrain. The regions need to be in increments of whole kilometers, so no 13.56 kilometer sized regions are allowed. I'm going to make a sample region that's 12 kilometers square, so 9 large cities can fit in it. A small city is a kilometer on a side, a medium city is 2 kilometers on a side and a large city is 4 kilometers on a side. Regions are composed of lots of small, medium and large cities. Read on, and I'll show you how to do it.įirst, decide how large a region you want. In SimCity 4, you can create large regions, composed of multiple cities from a greyscale image. Contributor/author(s): Ocean Quigley - Art/Creative Director, D.B.

Simcity 4 region maps of africa