Georeferencing Chernarus: How I Put a Fictional Country on a Real Map
Georeferencing Chernarus and visiting in real life (2021)
I stitched tiles from a tileserver to build a high-res Chernarus map, then used QGIS to georeference it to the real region near Ústí nad Labem in Czechia. After converting it to a Garmin-compatible KMZ with GDAL and Python, I loaded it onto my handheld GPS and hiked the actual terrain. The process works for any fictional or historical map that resembles a real place.
Some people in the community would occasionally post pictures comparing the game with the real location either by Google Street View or from actual visits and note how familiar the place felt even though it was their first time there.
- dancing
Speaking of DayZ, if anyone is wondering what it looks like on PC these days, I'm watching this VoD right now:
https://youtu.be/5v8M5LD7gkU?t=11152
Obviously the PvP in DayZ is different from other games like CS, given it is open world.
- laidoffamazon
This brings me back. Some of my best memories were playing DayZ in 2012 and getting absolutely torn apart by bandits.
Don't think I've had a gaming experience like that since, including with the standalone version
- stackghost
Chernarus was such a better map than Altis or Stratis. It was large enough that you could run some serious games, but small enough that you could comfortably learn the entire terrain pretty well.
Some of the best gaming moments were duelling snipers on the hill north of Electrozavodsk in DayZ, sneaking from town to town between the two airfields, or on the Arma 2 Warfare mod running convoys through the woods to try to flank the other team.
The Arma 3 maps were definitely technically impressive, but bigger is not always better.