You can also find a version for ATS in the following thread: viewtopic.php?f=178&t=306951
To view and download the HD version, just right-click on the image below and 'Open it as a new tab!'
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FAQs and extra information
Why is X place not in the map?
To avoid the over cluttering of the map, I made some rules for myself:
- Features located inside a marked city are not included because there is basically not enough space for them.
- You will see that most of the identified inaccessible villages are located in revamped Germany, Austria and in DLC areas newer than the Scandinavia DLC. This is because since the release of Vive la France! (VlF) DLC, the standards for map building are much more accurate to real life, making it easier to identify even very small villages with the help of Google Maps. In the map areas released before VlF, most of the inaccessible villages visible from the roads are fictional and have a purely decorative purpose. For this reason, in the old base map areas, the Going East! DLC areas and the Scandinavia DLC areas, only the inaccessible villages that are in easily identifiable places have been included in the map.
For example, Den Oever in the Netherlands is shown in the map because it is located in the western end of the Afsluitdijk Dam. Cities such as Worcester, Cambrai or Gorzów Wielkopolski have been included because they appear to be large in the game and can be roughly identified by their position in relation to rivers or road interchanges. - The towns that are visible but inaccessible while being part of metropolitan areas have only been included if they appear specifically signed in the game. This has been made to avoid to have too many labels around city areas.
- Mountain passes are only shown when a notable change in elevation exists in the game.
- Airports are not shown as landmarks since it’s easy to recognize them and are pretty similar between each other.
- Important industries, such as nuclear power plants or hydroelectric dams are currently included as landmarks, but I am not sure about keeping them in the map.
- For spacing reasons, not every landmark in the map is labeled.
How did you make the map?
I used QGIS (https://www.qgis.org/en/site/), a free mapmaking software that lets you edit geospatial information to create and analyze maps. QGIS lets you use OpenStreetMap or Google Maps as a background basemap for reference, which helped me to add towns and landmarks as points and "draw" roads and highways as vectors. The background of the map was made combining several 'shapefiles'. Shapefiles are files that contain geographic data for any topic (they can have information about coastlines, borders, mountains, rivers...). I get my basic shapefiles from www.naturalearthdata.com, which offers public domain data.
Once I had more or less everything in place, I exported the map as a PNG, and I made the final edits and refinement with the paint.net image editing software.
How did you find information for the landmarks?
Most of the research for the landmarks on this map was made 'manually', that is, examining every in-game road with the dev cam, taking note of every interesting place, and then trying to find their IRL counterparts on Google Maps or OpenStreetMap. This was sometimes hard for the most obscure landmarks, and in some cases, especially in the older parts of the map, I found some fictional sites that didn't exist in real life, such as some castles in Germany and Hungary.
And again, feel free to comment any errors or missing places that you see in the map! Even now I am still finding new villages and landmarks that I hadn't caught before. Enjoy!