Creating .PCX graphics for use with Railroad Tycoon II

Originally from the H&P RT2 Web forum http://www.exdx.net/cgi/Yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Maps&action=display&num=1025263088

Here is my way of map making, which I promised to describe to Steve.

The methods I want to descibe here are no secret, and to be honest it makes me wonder why this method is still not described. At many websites you are supposed to download some of those large tiles, which is not acceptable for dialup users. Lan users like me also aren't eager to do this because of paying for traffic. So, I describe the way to avoid downloading many megs.

First you need to decide on the area you want to select. Take an atlas and look at the map of the required territory. No accuracy is needed at this stage. Just measure the degrees with a finger using the sidebar.

After you found out the coordinates of the area, go to the NGDC site. Most of the map making "howto" authors suggest downloading some of the sixteen tiles, which are several megabytes size. At the same time there is a very useful service of selecting a custom area. Click the link entitled "Select your own area" (highlighted with a red frame).

You see a page looking like this:

Type your coordinates into the text boxes. Remember, all degrees are measured in East longtitude and Nort latitude. It means you need to add minus sign to the degrees of South latitude and West longtitude.

Then select "GeoVu" in Export type list and "Compressed tar file" in compression option list. Type the fileame you wish to see and unique title (optionally). Press "Update".

In the blue box you see the size of your selection (in case of my one it is 1.2 megabytes). Compressed data will have less size. Click "Get data" (actually you can click this button at the previous step instead of clicking "Update").

The server is processing your selection. This page reloads every minute until the selection processing is complete.

The compressed data size is only 305 kilobytes, which is acceptable even for dialup users.

Donload the data file and unpack it. Then launch GeoVu programme. Open menu "File\Set data...". You see this dialogue:

Click "Ok".

Select file "<your selection filename>.bin".

Open menu "Search\Create...". In the following dialogue

...just click "Ok" (or set the seach parameters to the values shown on the picture). You see something like this:

Looks like Britain isle in the map. Click "Save" button.

Select "PCX encoded file" and click "Ok".

You've got image looking like this:

Then open graphics editor (I use Adobe Photoshop). Cut the image to leave only the required territories in it.

I've got and image of 758x584 pixels size. As you see, it is not the real Scotland map, it is distorted a little. The distortion reasons is that one degree of longtitude at equator (measured in kilometers or miles) is not equal to one degree of longtitude at the Scotland's latitude. For example, look at the world map at first picture. Alaska seems to be as large as half of the USA, while in fact it is not.