[WIP] ATS Company/Facility Directory — C/FD

[truckermudgeon]

From your screenshot it seems the road network matches ATS exactly, even for inaccessible roads. So are you reading the geospatial data directly from the game files somehow? You mention the telemetry SDK, but IIRC about the only spatial data you can get from it is the player's current position. So I assume the idea is to use it to display the current GPS position on your slippy map eventually? That's pretty neat.

Correct: I'm using a hacked-up version of https://github.com/dariowouters/ts-map to read the game files, do a bit of pre-processing, and output json files. Then I use a custom tool to convert those json files into a GeoJSON file that I can feed into a slippy map library (currently OpenLayers, but soon to be MapLibre). And yes: the idea is to use the telemetry SDK to "drive" the slippy map.

In the screenshot, I see drivable roads have sections of different types, colored yellow/white/gray. Sometimes the color changes briefly at an intersection or interchange—for example, at the spot where I-19 ends, or at Congress and 7th. How come? (And what's the meaning of the magenta rectangles?)

The road colorings come from my very naive method of classification. It's on my TODO list to improve . I use the traffic rules that roads are tagged with to classify them as freeway, arterial, or local. And for the roads that appear in prefabs/intersections: I guess based on the the classification of nearby roads. It works most of the time... until it doesn't. Thanks for those pointers to JOSM and QGIS; I'll explore using them to help tweak the generated data

The magenta rectangles come from bounding box information in the game files. I think they're what the game uses to trigger the "SomeCity discovered!" messages while driving. I wanted to visualize them as part of figuring out, "how can I detect when a user is in a city, so I can properly re-scale time / distances to 1:3 during route planning?". Maybe ATS uses those bounding boxes... or maybe they use some other info, like a "is city road" flag. Yet another thing to research

About reading data: you mentioned earlier you have scripts to read the games files to help parse what cities have what companies/facilities... are those scripts available anywhere for the community to read?

Also, fun fact: the rectangles are normally axis aligned when viewed in the game's LCC projection (like within the game's map editor), but they look warped in my screenshot because I've reprojected the data into Web Mercator, for use in slippy maps.

My Tucson map was 100% manual work. Yes, the result speaks for itself I suppose, but drawing it was time-consuming.

Oh wow, that explains the quality! Your artisanal, hand-crafted map has much more personality than my auto-generated one . Cartography is hard; I like the choices you made in how to display the different bits of key data. I hope future versions of the C/FD include those annotated city maps! If there's any data you need for your project that I can try querying/gathering for you, or sharing (maybe a viewable slippy map can be used as the starting point for future hand-drawn maps), let me know! I'm more than happy to contribute to community mapping projects

[nautofon]

This is very exciting!

If I had had access to your slippy map back when I worked on those city maps, that would have been very helpful. Thanks for offering data and access, that's incredibly gracious of you! The fact is, I have been thinking about drawing new maps for the C/FD. But there seem to be a lot of practical problems I would need to figure out for that to happen.

Having easy access to a proper background map would indeed solve one of these problems. Another one would be how to handle the scale distortions SCS builds into their cities. And I would need to come up with cartography that fits the style of the C/FD, which is subject to change. Therefore, the notion to add new maps essentially is a "stretch goal", something I won't be able to really work on until much later in the project. But I am thinking about it, and will get back to you when the time comes.

Now the old maps, the three I drew for Arizona years ago—sure, I can add them to the directory in one of the next previews. Don't be too impressed with their cartography by the way; I basically just copied Rand McNally style. But still, I'm glad you like it.

The magenta rectangles come from bounding box information in the game files. I think they're what the game uses to trigger the "SomeCity discovered!" messages while driving.

Ah, that could well be it. They cover entrances to all company depots in Tucson. Knowing where these areas are would be useful for new DLC. I have had difficulties to trigger discovery for some cities in the past.

About the road classification: Yes, depending on what data you can get from ATS, I can easily see this being one of the more difficult parts. Seems to me the heuristics you have are a good start though.

About reading data: you mentioned earlier you have scripts to read the games files to help parse what cities have what companies/facilities... are those scripts available anywhere for the community to read?

Not at the moment, no. They're just a bunch of hacks, nothing particularly fancy about them. But hey they work. I only need to read the def files, which are all text, so it's simple compared to something like the ts-map project you linked to above. Didn't know about that one, and I think it's really impressive. I'll have to try some time and see if I can get it running here on macOS.

[GT182]

It would be extremely great if these companies has a sleeping spot.

I've not seen any company with a place to sleep so far. It would be a great mod if someone would make it. We could do it in real life. So what's the problem that SCS won't or doesn't want to?

Interstate service areas need more sleeping spots too. There used to be ones that were to the left of where you drove in, but they've disappeared. The Special Heavy Loads really need them. It's a pain to park in the motel parking with them. You block cars and trucks already parked there.

They need to be brought back. If I knew how I'd do it. Unfortunately I've no idea how or what to use to do it. If anyone lives near me in New Castle. Delaware, please get a hold of me and maybe you could give me a few lessons how and what I need to do them. I'd like to do a couple myself that I've been asking for and no one wants to.

[nautofon]

Well, like I said earlier, those company locations are clearly marked in the C/FD—for example in Sandpoint, to name but one city where they exist.

@GT182 Please take a look at page 27 of the March preview and tell me what you think of it!

Knowing that rest areas at companies exist is (I think) probably only useful when you're already located in that city and want to sleep, or if you're currently heading there. I'm not sure that adding a separate list of all such places to a future version of this directory would be useful to drivers. If you disagree with this, I'd love to be convinced though!

Since you mention mods: In principle, the C/FD is only about vanilla ATS. No map mod content. However, in cases where mods only add content outside the vanilla world, I might make an exception at some point in the future (likely far in the future). In particular, I'm eyeing ProMods Canada here.

[nautofon]

The C/FD preview has been updated to include all cities in the state of Colorado.

Additionally, a number of small changes and corrections were made to existing content for Washington and other states. Such minor updates will generally not be reported in this thread in future. I'll look into making a full list of changes available elsewhere instead.

Completing Colorado at this particular point in time would have been difficult for me if it hadn't been for the immense research effort that @Bedavd put into the ATS IRL Map. I'll continue to use that map for cities I haven't visited in ATS myself yet. I've also started to use @truckermudgeon's ATS Slippy Map, which simplifies my workflow and helps with quality control. Many thanks to both of you for your work and your support!

[nautofon]

The C/FD preview has been updated to include all cities in the state of Wyoming.

Additionally, simple maps showing the street network of Kingman, Tucson, and Yuma have been added. These are maps I made back in 2019. Adding more maps in this particular style to the C/FD is not currently planned.

[nautofon]

The C/FD preview has been updated to include all cities in the state of Utah.

For the next few months, the idea is to prioritize the newest content. I'll get started on northern California as soon as the next phase becomes available, and the same goes for the Oklahoma DLC. Until then, I'll try to spend some more time on Texas and Montana.

[nautofon]

I've decided to share the next preview version of the C/FD under the terms of the Creative Commons By-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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This means that you may copy and upload this work or its contents in any form, whole or in part, changed or unchanged, on condition that you follow the terms of the license; in short:

• Attribution ("by") — You must always identify "nautofon" as the original author (with a link back to this forum thread if possible).
• Non-Commercial — No one may make money off my work—not you, nor anyone else.
• Share Alike — If you make changes, you must always mention this and in turn allow others to use your changes under CC By-NC-SA 4.0 terms, too.

Please note that these terms are not compatible with the truck sim wikis on Fandom or wiki.gg, because both of them have license terms which allow commercial use.

If you share or adapt the C/FD, I'd love to hear about it. Not only am I as curious as anyone but perhaps I might even be able to help you in some way. Please feel free to @mention me or tell me in this thread (or send a PM if you prefer). Thank you in advance!

[nautofon]

The C/FD preview has been updated to allow reuse under the terms of CC By-NC-SA 4.0.

The C/FD GitHub repository is now publicly available. Among other things, it offers detailed changelogs.

I've made a little bit of progress on Texas and Montana. I'll switch my efforts over to Oklahoma once it releases next week. But overall things seem to be going slowly this summer. So, have patience and all that...

[nautofon]

The August 2023 preview release of the C/FD is unchanged from July, but the supplement contains a new section for Oklahoma.

This map shows all cities for which location descriptions are complete as of today with a green dot. Cities with a yellow diamond are complete, too, but have not been field-checked in the game, so their descriptions might not be entirely accurate yet.

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