Potsdam
Greetings from Potsdam!
Potsdam is a city in Brandenburg that sits at the south-west corner of Berlin, famous for its grandiose palaces and manicured gardens. The Havel river flows through the center, and the region is dotted by many lakes both big and small. Potsdam was a residence of the Prussian kings.
I enjoy biking along the canals and through the forests in Potsdam, particularly along the Mauerweg, a bike path that traces the path of The Wall between former East and West Berlin. You can either go the short way by taking the ferry from Kladow to Wannsee, or you can go the long way, around the Krampnitzsee and Jungfernsee, and over the Glienicker Brücke, or "Bridge of Spies." Be sure to visit the 1000-jährige Eiche (Thousand-Year-Old Oak), along the way.
The terrain was created by merging data from two excellent sources: Geoportal Brandenburg and Geoportal Berlin. Both sources are 1m-raster, which means there is elevation information every meter. Both sources are maintained by state organizations that manage, categorize and clean them, so that there is minimal noise or influence by man-made structures and trees. The Berlin terrain information (within the Berlin city borders, found in the top-right corner of this map) is astonishingly clean and detailed. I have downscaled the sources in QGIS, using the Lanczos downscaling algorithm, for import in Cities Skylines, which has a 16m-raster grid. Even at the lower in-game resolution, the terrain from high-quality sources is impressively accurate.
Terrain under the rivers and waterbodies was created in a two-step process. First I burned the water areas into the terrain heightmap using water shape overlays from Geoportal Brandenburg. Then I cleaned them all by hand and sculpted their depths with the in-game terrain tools.
Many trees within the Berlin city limits (again, top-right corner of the map), have been sourced from the Berlin trees database. 21,777 strassen (street) and anlagen (field) trees have been imported at their precise locations, using my own legend algorithm to pick the most appropriate workshop trees to match their real-world counterparts — based on Genus, Species, Height and Age. For this Potsdam map, the legend used trees from 66 different workshop assets, many of which are packs of multiple trees. These trees-from-data have been parsed by our custom website code and can be viewed in more detail at allbuilds[www.allbuilds.org].
The rest of the ~700,000 trees have been plopped by me, by hand. I’ve used my own knowledge of biking in the area through parks and forests, combined with my experience using the Berlin trees database for my previous Berlin and Marzahn maps, combined with info from the Google Earth orthophoto overlay, to attempt to recreate the foliage of the region as faithfully as possible. Shoutout to my fellow tree creators — MrMaison, pdelmo, and GreyFlame, among others — whose work is on grand display in this map! Even if you don’t plan to play on it, I invite you load it up just to have a look around and immerse yourself in Potsdam’s beautiful nature.
data credits:
Geoportal Brandenburg / Digitales Geländemodell – DGM
Geoportal Berlin / ATKIS® DGM – Digitales Geländemodell
Geoportal Berlin / Baumbestand Berlin
I have used QGIS to convert two overlay sources to perfectly match the map layout in the common projection system used by the Berlin and Brandenburg databases (CRS EPSG-25833). Each overlay is a highly-detailed 16384×16384 pixel .png:
- Potsdam-OSM-16384-tweaked (Open Street Map with the colors darkened)
- Potsdam-googlesat-16384-ps (Google Earth satellite orthophoto)
Download the two overlays from my googledrive here[drive.google.com]
Be sure to sub to Ami’s Berlin Trees Collection and set Tree Control to allow at least 1 million trees (map starts with 728,076 trees). Use Visibility Control to toggle LOD modes to retain high FPS. Unlock all tiles with 81 Tiles 2 to see high-quality terrain on the whole map. Put the two overlays in the correct folder, for example:
C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonCities_SkylinesFiles
Use Image Overlay Renewal to toggle them on and off (hotkey: Shift-Enter) and switch between the OSM diagram and the GE orthophoto view.
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If you would like to see more stuff like this, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Have fun!
