For background, I moved to an area of the Catskill mountain region of New York, USA almost 7 years ago. In the time that has past, my friends and I have acquired an 850 acre parcel of land across the street from my house, and I have become its steward. During this time, I have taken up construction projects, land management, forestry, and agriculture. I became interested in Farming Simulator as a way to fill the gap in my knowledge in these areas. As I went down the rabbit hole, I realized the game had much to teach. I used the New Holland compact track loader and grapple in game to harvest trees in Elmcreek, and quickly realized how useful of a tool it could be. As a result, I recently bought a brand new John Deere 317G skid steer, with log splitter, grapple, stump bucket, and forks. Soon I hope to add a stump grinder or forestry mulcher. This is one of many instances of my descent into madness, as catalyzed by Farming Simulator 2022.
My friends and I plan on building out a community on our plot of land, and I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate my skills as a software engineer to aid in its design and implementation. At the beginning of January, I embarked on the journey of learning Giants Editor to build the town, our parcel, and my home, as a playable map in Farming Simulator 2022. Since then, I have made what I feel as an amateur, considerable progress.
First, I set about obtaining a DEM for the base terrain. I found a tool called Equator Studios that aggregates public datasets. It uses satellite LIDAR data to generate terrain contour data that is far more accurate than what is readily available via USGS. Using their excellent tools, I created a 4km by 4km boundary for the map (yes, this is a 4x4 map, however, the beta version will only encompass the western end, where my house and our parcel lies). I used LIDAR data to generate 3m contour vector, which I then loaded into QGIS and used TIN Interpolation to generate a DEM.
Once I loaded the DEM into Giants Editor, I exported it to OBJ file, and then simplified the model to 500k faces (for better game engine performance). I then textured the terrain mesh using satellite orthoimagery (also via EquatorStudos; higher quality than what is available via Google Maps). I exported the textured mesh and imported it into my gamefile, and have been using that as a reference to determine placeables.
Next, I exported the street curves via OpenStreetMap, and imported them into Blender using Blosm. After touching up the splines, I found a paid Blender plugin called “City Road Maker” to create textured & shrinkwrapped roads. I exported the Blender file and posted a job on Upwork for a professional game environment designer to build out road meshes. I spent $240 to have the designer contour the road to the terrain, so that they would have a feathered slope feature just above the terrain, as opposed to conforming to the jagged geometry below. The result was still imperfect, so I lowered the mesh onto the base terrain by a few meters and spent a day or two painstakingly correcting the surrounding terrain to have a bezeled approach to the roadbase. I think it’s pretty good so far, and the Rigid Body generates OK. I am having some trouble getting the textures to match up.
Next, I spent some time placing waterplanes. It would be nice if the game engine supported flowing downhill natively, as most of my terrain slopes down from north to south (ultimately terminating many streams and rivers into the great Delaware River). Alas, a stagnant “lake-like” water feature, with several steps down will have to suffice. I plan to use the waterfall shader from Elmcreek to simulate water flow as often as possible.
Right now, I am working on the slow process of placing trees. Any help with procedural placement would be greatly appreciated. As a vast majority of our parcel is within the Department of Environmental Conservation’s 480 Forestry Program, we had contracted a forester to survey it. I have detailed reports containing species composition of major tree stands within the parcel (e.g. 36% white pine, 33% red maple, 25% white oak, 6% misc). I hope to have the species composition of trees on my map match as closely to reality as possible, and for this map to be an educational tool for government agencies and schools to educate gamers and hobbyists about the science of forestry and ecology in our region.
Finally, I have started placing generic structures to their IRL locations. The local greenhouse, grocery store, gas station, post office, church, etc. are all in their proper position/elevation. Having driven these roads, it is almost uncanny how accurately they represent the IRL contours of the land.
I hope you enjoyed my synopsis of the project, and if it’s something you’d be interested in helping me with, please respond either here or via DM. There are many sub-projects I can think of. I think it is also worth mentioning that I have buy-in from local business owners, including the local mechanic that will be the buypoint, to 3D scan their premises for use in the game models. Let me know if you’re interested in collaborating on this project. Happy modding!
