The FrankU and Nexis CO-OP

[FrankU]

Fred,

I will just wait until you have something that you want to show us. We will comment, if you want our opinion, and when you decide you are finished with it you will send me the props and I will put them on my lots.
It's just that I have to tell that the lotting is not useful before I have received all your props. Otherwise I have to relot everything several times and that is useless.

So we all have to wait some time until everything is finshed.
This, however, gives me time to make sure all machinery of the lots is OK and ready for the future.

I have some new ideas and maybe a new lot or two to show.

Vortex,

Thanks for the link. I found the tutorial already. it looks doable to me, so I'll go and play with the idea.
And a list of available OG's would be nice.
It also would be nice to have a central place where we can see the IID's for textures and propfamilies. Especially as teh guard, BarbyW, seems offline most of the time (or is that just my perception?).

[mrbisonm]

Well, it will not be a huge release all in one, but you will get all the files before New Years for sure, most probably in different packs at different times.

In any case, I'm looking forward to it. 

Any chance of a sneak peek?! 

Ok now, a sneak peak just for you, but......make sure not to show anyone else, ok? 

Fred

[FrankU]

Beautiful!

Could you make this shed with a dark grey roof and olive green walls, more or less like the vinyl barn M8?

Frank

[mrbisonm]

Beautiful!

Could you make this shed with a dark grey roof and olive green walls, more or less like the vinyl barn M8?

Frank

Sofar I have three (3) different versions of this machineryshed, varying in colour, size + details (and of course accessoiries). But I will make one more with a darker roof and greenish metal walls.

Fred


Edit: Had 5 minutes, how about this?

[FrankU]

Fred, you made my day. 
The green is perfect, the roof will get a nice texture like you had for the barns, I presume, so all will be perfect for me!

[gn_leugim]

I agree, but the black roof would gain if you would de-saturate it a bit. it would look more like it has worn off by time, and wont be so shocky colorfull on game

[vortext]

Looks fine. 

Nice accessories as well, the little backhoe is really cute. Though I'm wondering, are these seperate props or part of the BAT?

[mrbisonm]

I agree, but the black roof would gain if you would de-saturate it a bit. it would look more like it has worn off by time, and wont be so shocky colorfull on game

Good idea, will work on that.

Looks fine. 

Nice accessories as well, the little backhoe is really cute. Though I'm wondering, are these seperate props or part of the BAT?

I'm not sure yet if I will make separate small with all the machinery I will add to the farm props. Let's wait and see what I will come up with time. I just about started the "accessory props" not long ago. The ones you see, are the ones I made sofar, except for a small tractor and a closed silage-trailer.
Anyway, if I see that there's a demand, I will probably release a separate farm-accessory proppack with all this too.

Hey, maybe even make a mayorplop set with this........?

Fred

[FrankU]

You probably know my opinion on that: separate props and a model that allows it to place props under the roof. That's my favourite, because of the versatility.

But we'll wait what you come up with, Fred.

And the days seem to float away without me having time to do some lotting or fiddling around with rewards...
The new farms based on the Vanderaap Langeraar model should have been finished by now but are not.
And the stage 6 and 7 lots.... still waiting.

As long as there is interest in our products Fred and I will continue! Noworries.

[Runnerguy347]

Of course there's still interest. This pack will take those of us who like farming communities to a whole new level. I know I can't wait for it.

[mrbisonm]

Don't worry Frank, there will be interest in these farms as long as Simciters like growing farms in SC.

Fred

[vortext]

Actually I'm glad it's taking a while because my region is not ready yet for modern farms! 

[FrankU]

Well, I am happy to hear that there is still interest in playing this game. Although I did not really fear for the competition of SC5. 

Anyway, it has been silent, but I have not been idle.
Owing to the fact that in my other thread a certain lot has been selected as preferred version for my Farm Fair Reward I decided to use the other one as farm lot.
This meant also that I decided to use the Vanderaap Aardamseweg model as a model for my farm lots. When I started this rewards and farm lots series I thought to use this model exclusively for the Reward, but as said: I decided against.
This gave me the opportunity to add a whole new group of new farms to my set: two or three farms in each Growth Stage.

I will now present you the versions of staged 1 up to 4 as they are now.

Stage 1 - Bijvanksweide
Three farms for each pasture type I have in my farm fields.






Stage 2 - Olde Bijvank




Stage 3 - Klein Bijvank




Stage 4 - Erve Bijvank




In stage 1 and 4 you see the first appearances of Nexis' Manure props. He showed them before, but not yet on a thoroughly designed lot. Now here you are!
And as you can see I used a lot of variation for several props. That's why I show each lot three times. I did this partly with existing prop families, but more and more I decide to edit a certain prop in Reader and add other props as variation on the same spot. The technique is known as the Smoncrie alternative to prop families. There really should exist a better, shorter, name for this.

I hope you like the product. Please comment.

[Swordmaster]

This looks great. Simple as that, great.

Except all that manure. . .  I was going to have dinner.


Cheers
Willy

[mrbisonm]

Great, just Great, FrankU.....now...these pics  even give me more stimulation and encourage me to work on the models.

Be there later this coming weekend with a update on my models.

Fred

[FrankU]

Hi all,

Two weeks ago I opened up a LEX Candidacy thread. Jim Myers talked me into that and he is certainly helping me out.
My first LEX project will be an updated version of those fields. We had some PM conversation about it.

In this thread I already discussed the Occupant Group issue. In order to be compliant with CAM and the BSC/BTE Reward Chain my farm fields and lots need certain OG's. I added these to the fields and farms already. I also designed my own set of OG's that will be useful for counting my own farms in order to have my own lot counters and rewards. So that is an upcoming project: Dutch additional Rewards, not to be confused with the Dutch Maxis Replacement Awards.

If you want to count lots, you need a place to show the results. And that brought me to the issue of Custom Queries.
Jim, again, helped me with an example lot he sent me. It contained a slightly edited query for one of his test farm fields. Yesterday evening I played around with this query and found out that is it not too hard to edit it to my own taste. All in all it took me about two hours.

So have a look at the results for now.

This was Jims test query:


He made a very nice Dutch Flag, but I think I am going to use something else.

In the first place I did this:



When you look close, you see that the name of the crop is in Latin, the line of text is in English and the "close" button has a Dutch text (because I have a Dutch game installment). Not nice, isn't it?
I considered to make all texts in Latin, but it is too long ago. I forgot too much and Google Translate gives irregular results.

So I thought a bit, decided to do all query texts in English (except the crop names) and came up with this:



The "close" button text is now in English. It will be in English for everyone, because I removed the reference to the language file.
And, of course, I added another text line giving the total numer of Dutch Lots in the city.
Of course this is just a rough first version. The image is bad. I only used it to find out how things work. Maybe I'll use Jim's flag, but probably I'll come up with something different. The spacing needs attention too.
I presume that I will stick to the standard look of the Maxis query, but nothing is certain until it is upladed to the LEX.

Ahm, yes one thing: the difference in the number of field lots and total lots is because the latter also counts the concerned farms. So you see: 9 farms with a total of 561 field lots. Why did Jim say "Estimated"? The count is exact, or isn't it?

Today's news is mainly possible due to Jim Myers' good work and advice.

Thank you Jim! 

Have fun,

Frank

[FrankU]

OK, so nobody replied.

I guess my performances last week weren't that spectacular. Especially in the light of C.P.'s return and the stunning Antigone project. Not to mention Girafe, Rambuckel and all those others.

Anyway, I wasn't too happy with the query myself, so I played around with it again.

It now looks like this.


When you hover over the close button it looks like this.
The cursor is not shown in the screenshot.


And when you click it the button goes down.


I wanted the query to be "family" of the Maxis query, but still my own. It had to show the Dutch connection and it had to show some useful stats.

So I came up with colors that are close to (red and blue) or identical to (the "white" which is actually very light blue) the original query colors. The button is on the same location, the font is identical (I even don't know if there is another choice). The name of the lot is in a similar spot, the edge has some semi transparecy like the original. It shows the amount of lots (grown and plopped) and it shows the kind of lot by the image.
I gave it a bit of depth.

You like it? Would you like to see other info or stats? Please comment.

Frank

[Simcoug]

Nice use of the dutch flag Frank.  And props for creating your own custom query - It will be fun to see how it works in-game.   

[antn]

I haven't been following this project but I looked through some pages and it's massive and it's looking really good, great job you two.
The custom query is looking good but maybe you can use round corners on the query window and button for a more uniform (with the rest of sc4 gui) appearance. There's also a minor colour mismatch between the background in the vegetable pic and the rest of the query window.

[noahclem]

Sorry I missed the last update--something I really would have liked to compliment you on had I noticed 

First, I'm really glad you've opened up a LEX candidacy thread. I feel like too many people think it's something elite and not enough people understand how much it's about sharing and helping. Anyway, I'm very glad to hear you've found help there and the kind of long-term, thorough, excellent work you're putting together certainly belongs there!

Custom queries are, in a way, just a detail but I think they add a lot of character and interest to a set. I like both versions very much and would have difficulty deciding which I prefer--perhaps the latter.

I'm always happy to read about you and Fred's progress here and you're truly on the cutting edge of farming in SC4. A K-point to both of you for persevering though this massive project