Background map update - discussion

[Nathan_A_RF]

This update should make it so that everything aligns with one map - the SCS background map. There is no need for separate SCS and ProMods background mods now. It will take time for other mods to be compatible but it's better in the long run.

[ExtremorGP]

I think these problems are here because of lack of communication. I know it's offtopic now, but if you wish move my post.

Promods created their own background map. Middle East also has it's own background. It's not SCS background. SCS background, both in main menu and in map editor, doesn't include Middle East. So there's need to create a custom one. Mandelsoft created a background with Middle-East, with this background everything is okay. But other mappers? How to create a background what matches this one? We don't know. If there would be some tutorial, some documentation how to do it. But no, there's nothing like that.
Bengan created several background map using SCS' projection but as he says, it's not 100% accurate. If he asked about some issues with Promods and his background, because he wanted to fix them, nobody responded.

SCS doesn't provide very useful documentation. Modders have to guess a lot of things from what is already done. Promods has no documentation, in most cases don't care about other map mods. After having some issues with Promods, modders (and users) are getting annoyed. Southern Region was rescaled to match Bengan's background, The Great Steppe and Rusmap were moved. A lot of people put a lot of work into this.

We (modders) want to cooperate, to provide the best playing experience for our USERS. I'm sure Bengan would have modified his background and improved it to fix issues with Promods if he had known how.

I'm not asking you to fix every issue with every map, I'm asking you just for some cooperation with map background. You already fixed issues with FLD prefabs, so why won't fix issues with map background?

[bmwGTR]

Hi,

to end the discussion:
We are currently discussing inside the team, we are planning to update this topic here:
https://www.promods.net/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=30197

Best regards,
bmwGTR

[bengt.jensie]

For all of you! This is a comparison between the ORIGINAL SCS BG map and the new PM BG map!
The plain blue color is coming from the PM BG map, which is clearly overshooting in many areas!
Both are matched in the central Europe region where PM can't change much! ENJOY!


Click on image to get full size!

[bricksathome]

The area around Turkey/Cyprus/ The middle east (the area that sparked the discussion) looks to be lined up the same on ProMods' background map and SCS's. when you look in the top left of Perryd's image:

Cyprus is very far off of the background map, which shouldn't be the case if his background map is based on SCS's map projection.
We'll keep looking into it but from what I can see in bengt.jensie's picture, our map lines up with SCS's in the middle east perfectly - yes, the rest of the map gets a bit mis-scaled to the north and south but around the area of this discussion, both maps align

[Vøytek]

Almost everything matches nicely from the comparison picture.
You can see that the area around Barcelona is a bit different, so people won't complain "Barcelona is on water". (there are also some other little tweaks here and there, but it doesn't really break anything)

The UK is the only noticeable difference and it has to do with hard-coded 1:15 scale.

As mentioned above, Cyprus and Middle East are correct in our map.

[ScuL]

The reason why there is distortion in the North of Scandinavia and also around the Adriatic/Greek coast is because of the additional areas added by ProMods. Because the SCS standard projection is somewhat curved, we need to stretch those parts of the background to match the realistic locations.

The UK/ireland has always been distorted because SCS have hardcoded a 1:15 "zone" with a number of fixed sectors. If we enable it, it will completely stuff western Norway, Faroer and Iceland.

The most important and critical part here is the (Middle) East of the map. With this new projection we are pretty much "bang on" the SCS map with very little distortion which should greatly simplify further modding in countries such as Ukraine and Turkey. As for the Middle East, all of our add-on should align much better with other mods now that it's using the correct SCS dimensions.

We always knew that updating the background map would break other mods and we announced that we were going to do this almost one year ago.

=edit=

NOTABLE INFO FOR MODDERS

I almost forgot, please check the values in the map_data.sii file of ProMods 2.46 (def). The UI map centre values have changed. If you adjust those (and if your map is based on the new SCS projection) it should match almost perfectly.

[MandelSoft]

We have changed the background so it mostly lines up with SCS's background again, save for some added countries, a scaled UK (due to hard-coded limitations), and some minor borders we had to re-adjust. The geometry along the Adriatic coast and in the far north of the map was a bit problematic, but we decided that it was easier to "cheat" on the background map (you may not have noticed it, but SCS cheats like this as well), rather than to break up entire map areas and stitch them back together again, which would be very time-consuming. We have the whole thing in vector format now, so changes can be applied easily in the future, and we don't have to be afraid of image quality loss.

The reason why we did is that we keep in mind that SCS may want to add expansions in let's say Russia or Turkey (there are no confirmations that they are going to do that, though), and we want this to line up properly so that will save us some trouble in the long run.

Also, in our background map, the border stations are now actually at the borders, and the roads are now located in the correct country (i.e., the Croatian A3 was located half in Bosnia...). Also, we don't have cities floating in the sea anymore.

Any third party background map mod is incompatible at the moment. That's quite a bummer for now, maybe, But sooner or later, we'd have to fix these problems anyhow...

[vulchor]

Just curious, since you guys said that you've had to cheat with the Adriatic coast, does that mean that if/when SCS gets down to doing Greece/Crete the maps will no longer match up? I know that's at least a year and a half away (probably much longer), just wanting to have advanced knowledge on what your expectations are there.

[bricksathome]

Cheating just means that we edited the borders of the background map slightly so that roads don't look like they are in the sea. If SCS makes the area we'll have to merge it in the same way as any other DLC merge, at which point we can just use SCS's background map in that area so there shouldn't be any extra effort involved