Real Cities

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antidotos
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Real Cities

Postby antidotos » Tue Oct 24, 2006 1:56 pm

Hi all,
I am trying to include real population for cities in Defcon.
I have compiled a list of 430 agglomerations (more than 1 million inhabitants) in a cities.dat which seems to run OK.
However the number of cities is not the same in each country, major problem in Russia (or USSR). I do not understand why the game always begins with 12 cities (some more are available even if less than in the basic game).
I would need info about the way defcon chooses the cities and place them on the map.
Another snag is Harare, last city in my file which displays on the map without name....
I wanted to prepare a present geopolitics mod with accurate population centers (at least proportionnaly of course). It seems the game refuses to pick some cities (maybe when they are too close or when there is a problem computing the population total).
Should I include all the original cities in the file ? I wanted to avoid picking cities smaller than some not present (for instance North Africa is too much empty).
And most population data are wildly inaccurate now (maybe they wanted to portray 1985 or so....).
Any opinion or help welcome.
Antidotos.
Remember the Mahabarhata.
antidotos
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Postby antidotos » Tue Oct 24, 2006 2:49 pm

Map of problem (34 cities asked for in setting......)


http://perso.orange.fr/simulaction/Russia.jpg
Last edited by antidotos on Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby antidotos » Tue Oct 24, 2006 2:53 pm

Last edited by antidotos on Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby antidotos » Tue Oct 24, 2006 2:56 pm

Africa (note Harare without name deep south)
http://perso.orange.fr/simulaction/Africa.jpg
Last edited by antidotos on Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
antidotos
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Postby antidotos » Tue Oct 24, 2006 2:57 pm

Last edited by antidotos on Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
antidotos
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Postby antidotos » Tue Oct 24, 2006 2:59 pm

Last edited by antidotos on Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
antidotos
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Postby antidotos » Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:01 pm

Finally North America (sorry for the bandwidth, now just a link )
http://perso.orange.fr/simulaction/NA.jpg :D
Last edited by antidotos on Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Spacemonkey
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Postby Spacemonkey » Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:25 pm

I'm pretty sure the cities.dat already has the real population of all the cities, but the game adjusts them to have 100m per territory.

So even you you have all the right populations in the dat file, you will never see it in game.
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Freebo
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Postby Freebo » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:52 am

thats what i thought. also could you put all the pics into one post?
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Postby shinygerbil » Wed Oct 25, 2006 12:28 pm

*calls upon NeoThermic to truncate the posts*
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Postby Thorontur » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:33 pm

The coolest thing is that you can now see clearly Brussels 8) The capitol of my little countre :) Nice, keep up the good work :D
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Wondering if I could borrow info...

Postby Sun_Tzu » Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:27 pm

Hi there, your realistic cities mod looks great.. I was wondering if I could borrow the info that you used to create these cities to add to my own polar projection mod? If you have that info in a handy form (like a text file) could you post it?
I would like the cities in this to be realistic too, and I hate having to reduplicate effort to find all the correct data. Thanks if you can help..
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Postby Spacemonkey » Wed Oct 25, 2006 10:18 pm

omg, they game comes with a text file with all the right populations, look in the cities.dat file, duplicating this information is just a waste of time, as defcon will never show the correct populations in game.
antidotos
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Postby antidotos » Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:17 am

thanks all for your interest.
First, again sorry for the pics, I thought it was necessary to show the problems and to get reactions about blatant mistakes. I will change that for a link (I m new in this forum).
Second and VERY IMPORTANT : the game cities.dat is WRONG (from a geographic point of view).
Here is why :
-some major cities are simply absent
-the data are not coherent, they mixed cities and agglomeration data from various periods (I guess, some data are quite good other totally erroneous in 2006), I know it is not a geography exam but in this case they would not get good marks :wink:
- they have a 250000 flat population for all minor cities (some are in fact major ones....)
Note I know that the game will never display the right figures BUT it should display the right proportions !
Hence the need for accurate data (strictly about agglomerations) and my question about the algorithm defcon use to populate the territory.
I would really like to have information about this because my modded file do not yield the results I supposed it could provide.
Third, I will post a link to the updated file (I noticed bugs for some positions.....). I repeat there are only agglomerations (the real target of megaton warheads) and the result is not satisfactory in game terms !
Thanks again.
Antidotos.

Remember the Mahabarhata.
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Spacemonkey
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Postby Spacemonkey » Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:48 am

Well, even using the real populations it would still not be accurate, How many people die depends on the population density inside the blast radius, (ignoring things like fallout), not on the total population of the city.

The majority of people live away from the center of a city, in the suburbs etc, and the spread of population is different between cities, so even if Defcon had accurate populations, then it wouldn't accurately represent the number of people who would die if that city go hit.

And accurate population data for every over 0.1M people in the world doesn't exist. Data can only be taken from the last census, census are taken at different times, meaning the data could be a few years out of date, and even then it's not very accurate. Also different country's will define the area of a city differently.

I'm sure the IV staff made the list as accurate as needed for game.

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