First of all, let me say that I know next to nothing about GISs.
I'm trying to find / make / aquire a topographical map of britain. I want to use it as a height map in Dwarf Fortress so it needs to be gradient grayscale, without labels and bmp format.
I've done some googling and so far haven't found any maps I could use, free or otherwise. Which seems absurd, so I must be looking for the wrong thing?
It seems possible to retrieve the height from Google Maps API. My first thought is to make a program that requests the height for every coordinate from Google. Leave the program running for a week and then construct an image from the data.
Though I thought I should ask here to see if people look at me like I'm crazy!?
Best Answer
You need to download the Land-Form Panorama OpenData (OpenData=free) dataset from Ordnance Survey
Download is for Great Britain only (England, Scotland & Wales only) 530MB
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html
Pros:
FREE This product is supplied both as a set of contours and spot heights (x,z,y) and as a gridded digital terrain model (DTM).
Cons:
Lots of processing of the data (some manual work)
Panorama data was collected between 1970 and 1980. This product has not been updated since this date. DXF format not the easiest to convert
Broken Contours - they do not link back to start so polygons cannot be created.