Map: Height Maps

[RecruitMonty]

Originally Posted by lukerduker123

Sorry for the delay -- one fine fellow is working on forking it (Github speak). Once it's forked the other'll mess with the php, but otherwise I think it'll be working.

Any news on progress with this?

[lukerduker123]

Originally Posted by RecruitMonty

Any news on progress with this?

I lost contact with them, but thanks for reminding me! I'll see if I can find them again and ask for an update. Maybe get real, real on them just to make sure this gets done.

[RecruitMonty]

Dear Lukerduker123,

Sounds like a good plan. It would be good to have the contour mapping up and running again. Keep us posted on your success.

Best Regards,

Monty

[RecruitMonty]

Dear Lukerduker123,

Good morning.

Any news?

If not, then anyone else reading this know someone who could potentially be of some use in fixing the height map tool? Anyone have the expertise to craft a new one?

Best Regards,

RecruitMonty

[MarkSheppard]

I used Claude AI to remaster the stuff on the GitHub into something that might work.



It's very crude right now but I think we have possibilities; since you can now scroll around the map and use RIGHT CLICK to set a notepoint which will be used in generation of the SPMAP999.txt file:

WinSPMBT Map 999: Autogenerated map
Generated: 2026-03-01T23:31:56.087Z
Center: 39.830897, -77.231012
Rotation: 0°
Level height: 8m
Elevation range: 100.0m – 225.0m

Corner coordinates (hex: lat,lng):
(0,0): 39.908304,-77.300760
(159,0): 39.907915,-77.161264
(0,199): 39.753490,-77.300760
(159,199): 39.753101,-77.161264

Description:
(none)

Hex Notes:
(66,150) Devil's Den
(70,156) BIG ROUND TOP
(74,123) Copse of Trees
(74,151) Little Round Top
(76,124) CEMETERY RIDGE
(79,99) GETTYSBURG CENTER
To use: copy .dat to WinSPMBT\Maps\ directory.
In Map Editor: Fill range 255, clear terrain keeping contour.

[Mobhack]

The image is a big blue square with "Content not viewable in your region"

Any idea why that is, have seen that on some other forums as well recently as well - some sort of restriction for viewers outside of the USA perhaps? (me in the UK here)

[Mobhack]

OK - I tried using a VPN and a Norwegian point of access - picture is now visible.

So my bet is your image hosting site has decided to simply not serve .uk visitors in order not to have to deal with the new .uk age verification laws and the need for some sort of end user age verifier as required by the new UK government laws they introduced octoberish "to protect the ickle kiddies". Like prawnhub has apparently done as well. Because if they do serve .uk visitors and the UK GOV decides something is bad - big fines.

The "innocent little kiddies" can of course do just what I did and use a free VPN service to simply bypass Parliament's demands while normal web usage gets annoyances like blue squares in normal usage by regular users - and does very little to "regulate" prawn site access by the ickle ones who are far more web-savvy than any politician at 13 ..

[MarkSheppard]

OK, I think it's gotten to a point where I can release it for limited public testing.

https://generalstaff.org/maps/spmbt-map-tool_V3.html

Search bar, lets you type in a name like Gettysburg and go there.

Lat/long are obvious.

N = make the map zone point NORTH again.

ROT slider, rotate the map zone around.

M/LEVEL adjusts the scaling per level of height.

CTR = Recenters the map zone. You will have to move the map or zoom in and out to see the new zone area if you hit this button. Current known bug.

GRID = toggles the hex grid on and off

NOTES drop down, lets you delete notes, etc.

SAT - Toggles satellite map.

90M Copernicius / 90M SRTM = switch between sources = 90M SRTM is what Venhola used. I got it set up for my website to use php to cache Copernicus maps on my own server; so the more people use it, the more stuff is cached and the faster it will be.

90M SRTM is slower to download, but you can run it without webhosting as a fallback; but it doesn't cover extreme north latitudes.

D/L ELEV downloads the height

You can then adjust the M/LEVEL scaling, add hex note points by right clicking on areas and ADD NOTE.

Then D/L MAP and it'll be downloaded to your download directory.

It was designed to work on a 1920x1080 monitor; so may not work well on smaller screens.

[MarkSheppard]

Current test version:

https://generalstaff.org/maps/spmbt-map-tool_V20.html

Improvements:

1.) Center Button draws new bounding box zone right away, no need to move/zoom in or out the map -- major bug fixed here.

2.) Right Click Menu brings up CENTER HERE option to make centering map easier.

3. Special NOTE Functionality added.

Hold LEFT SHIFT + LEFT CLICK on the map; if it's inside the yellow bounding box, a note named A1 will be added there. Another click with this combo will add A2, and so on.

Hold LEFT CTRL + LEFT CLICK to add NOTEs with the name(s) B1, B2, etc.

Hold LEFT ALT + LEFT CLICK to add NOTEs with the name(s) C1, C2, etc.

The use case for this is to let a user generate a quick list of coastlines/rail/road network nodes in the accompanying SPMAP999.txt file that they can then use in the built in game editor to lay out those features; instead of "eyeballing it".

4.) New 30M Copernicius DEM Map Source added; as well as an improved DEM sampling algorithm that is used with it to take full advantage of the increased resolution -- we go from 90M to 30M resolution this way; enabling much finer grained maps right from the start (useful for coastlines + mountains).

=======================

SPECIAL NOTES REGARDING MAP ELEVATION DATA:

90M Copernicius
30M Copernicius

Both of these require a PHP server component at GeneralStaff.org to be running in order to grab the map data from S3 AWS.

90M SRTM

This one doesn't require a php server component. You can literally save the spmbt-map-tool_V20.html file to your hard drive and run the program from there and still access 90M SRTM data as a ultimate hard fallback if generalstaff goes offline.