// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Georeferencing Chernarus and visiting in real life (2021)
I will apply it to the fictional map of Chernarus which is based on a real area near Ústí nad Labem in Czechia. The end product is a georeferenced Garmin compatible KMZ file which you can put on your GPS handheld if you ever visit the area.
The map below shows Chernarus (left) overlayed with the real region (right) - you can move the map and drag the slider to compare:
Chernarus is a fictional country introduced in the game Arma II, and the name of a large piece of terrain featured in the game spanning roughly 15x15 km. It was also the main location used in the DayZ mod which modified the game from a “military simulator” to a zombie survival game, which was later expanded1 into a standalone game where new details and towns were added to the original terrain (known as Chernarus+).
The map of Chernarus is closely based on an area in nothern Bohemia in Czechia, between Ústí nad Labem and Děčín and appears very similar to the real location, as many of the real buildings are also appearing in the game. 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.
The map can be even be georeferenced and overlayed on the real location quite accurately:
A few years ago I was in the area and decided to put the map on my GPS handheld and try to use it as reference while hiking around the area for fun.
It took a bit of effort and learning for me to get it working, and in this post I will walk through how I did it. The same process can be used for any map sufficiently similar to a real location, be it other fictional, historical or rare maps that you might have a copy of.
To obtain a high-resolution map of Chernarus, we are going to download tiles from a tileserver and stitch them together into one large map. A tileserver is a common way to serve maps for the web, where a large map is rendered as many small tiles, so we don’t have to load the full map. For this project I used the iZurvive Chernarus map as a source.
https://maps.izurvive.com/maps/CH-Mod/1.7.9/tiles/${z}/${x}/${y}.png
In this format ${z} is the zoom level, and ${x} and ${y} is the x and y integer tile coordinates, or simply the tile number.
Thus at zoom level z=6 (the highest of the server) the tile with x=4 and y=3 is found at https://maps.izurvive.com/maps/CH-Mod/1.7.9/tiles/6/4/3.png and looks like this