Ennedi plays Shosaloza

[iamgoingtoeatyou]

Stunning. That glow on the night pictures make them look, well, magical.

[mightygoose]

oh ennedi btw, those red brick plaza retaining walls featured adjacent to simfox's two creations, where can i find them, i have them, but the ground texture isn't showing up so i need to track them down to find the missing dependency

[Schulmanator]

Such a nice update! It's hard to pick a favorite picture - can I say I love them all? A delight to see your latest work! 

[Sciurus]

Ok, I see, you inspirate from La Spezia to create, your city, so very good luck!
No, very beautiful city, I like details and one question you : Where did you find barriers between RHW on the 8th pic please? Thank you in anticipation

Guillaume

[Pat]

Hey Adam I have been looking for your explanination on the moisture effect on medium tiles and I cant find it... Could you please help me and thank you a million

Patrick

[Ennedi]

Hey Adam I have been looking for your explanination on the moisture effect on medium tiles and I cant find it... Could you please help me and thank you a million

Patrick

Pat, there is a Table of Contents in the first Shosaloza page. Go there and find a link to update 28 (Weather, Seasons and New Lands). If it isn't what you want, try to explain me better what are you looking for.

To all: I'm very sorry for so long delay. I'm very busy lately, but I don't waste the time  I'm preparing some new stuff for next updates (also for terrain mod and rock mods), I'm trying to help a bit with the Prop Pox issue at BSC and I'm also engaged in a few (less or more secret  ) future projects. I will try to prepare an update at weekend and I'm going to go ahead with the terrain mod creation, together with showing Vera (the seaport city) development.

Best regards
Adam

[Pat]

Adam is that the tutorial where you deal with that issue?? Wou suggested I talk to you about this, as he said you disscused in lenght how to fix the moisuture barrier...

[Ennedi]

Ah I understand now... OK, I will try to prepare some advices as soon as possible. But tomorrow is a busy day in RL for me, so I will be able only to write something about it. But this problem can be interesting for other people too and it is closely connected with terrain mods and tree controllers, so Shosaloza will be a good place to research it. I will try to prepare more information with pictures for Saturday.

[Pat]

Adam thank you sooo much!!!    I will wait till saturday to bug you some more hehehe 

[Ennedi]

Hello everybody,
Here is a special update requested by Pat 

But first some quick replies:

Wow , your cities kept impressing me with there true Colorful and Busy , Hustle and bustle of any big Metropolis ! 

Thank you very much, I always try to make my cities alive - with better or worse result 

Wow i`m alaways impress by the quality of your MD. The amount of details are incredibile . I really like your night shot too. Thanks also for your quick reply and great news as for the release of the white rock mod. Thanks and have fun

Thank you for your visit my friend, I will PM to you with an information about the rock mod 

Another great update. I like your ports and that raising water level technic... 

But I noticed too, something wrong on your pics 6 and 7. What happen with the water level along the dock walls? Something is not right in there.

Thank you Silvio for nice words. This imperfection you noticed on pics 6 and 7 is not a texture bug. There are a few canal sets with CAL water used here, one of them is the Sunken Canal. This set is used to make a bridge (I wanted to use it, it looks very good with the monument and has very nice underbridge night lights. You can see this canal pieces along the canal too. But canal locks are from another set and this is the reason of the texture discontinuity. There is a transition piece between these two canals, but it is only for 2 tile - wide canals. If I could use the basic CAL canal set only, I wouldn't have this problem. But all my bridges would look the same 

Adam, this update is like the last one, exceptional !
All these such details are just fantastic my friend, your attention to details is enormous.
The CBD is my favorite part of this city, you've choose the good buildings to go here,and they work with harmony. 
You created a really pleasant ambiance in this city, as I would love to buy an apartment in one of these tower, even if it's just a game...
As well, the port looks excellent, and I can't wait to see more of it.

Take care,

Arthur. 

Thank you very much Arthur! The CBD will be even larger and more busy, I hope you will like it  As for appartments - yes, that's a good idea! Touristic business is very strong in Vera, I will think about a special offer for some friends 

Another awesome update. I just don't know what else to say

Thank you Ioan! No need to say too much, I'm very glad you like the city 

I really like those green and red boats by the locks.  I don't think I've seen them before.  Did they come with a canal set, or are they part of a different collection?

Looks great!!

Thank you CabraBuitre! Yes, those boats are a part of the canal set (one of addons to the basic set, it would be the best to download them all)

Adam wonderful last few updates here wow!!! I cant believe it that I missed some... I am sorry my friend about that...  I liked how you did the harbor there!!!

Thanks a lot Pat!

That are some wonderful pictures of your harbor! And the city next to it!! Fantastic work, Ennedi!
And thanks for the link...

Thank you bat, always nice to see you here!

Adam, I has just been thinking about what MD shall I visit next. I've chosen yours version of Shosaloza, and I have to say that I'm proud that I've done so. The newest update was truly awesome.

The area along the river is a real treat! I love every single part of it: From the roundabout with GLR sorrounded by billboards in the first picture, through the Japanese/Chinese/Korean area, to 'one of the biggest landmarks' of the city that's called Gateshead Millenium Bridge (that BAT is amazing, isn't it?). Oh, and I love how you got that sea ship on the river. I'm going to try that method some time.

Oh, and one another little thing. Your lots are amazing, but it goes without saying

So, all in all, it was a good update! Keep up the great work, Adam

Piotr

Thank you very much Piotr, so much nice words 

Wow Your city is actually beautiful. Very colorful too. You did a fabulous job. I really like the night shots .

Thank you and welcome in Shosaloza!

the apotheosis of city journalling, well met.

Wow, what a compliment, thank you mightygoose for your visit!

Hi there, I've just been looking through some of the start of this diary. It's fantastic work. Really inspirational.

I haven't worked my way through the whole topic yet, so apologies if this has been asked before, but how do you make those sloped bridges, as in the pic below:
(...)

Thank you, I'm glad you like Shosaloza  Mightygoose's answer about sloped bridges is very accurate. I can only add that to create them you should rather use one of older slope mods (BRF JRJ, bones1 or CSX slope mod). Creating my own slope mods I tried to adjust them rather to create land bridges, and because of it making sloped bridges is more difficult if you use my mods.

Amazing work here!  Love the waterfront in your latest update!

Thank you very much!

those road viaducts are created by maxis, you just need an appropriate slope mod, carefully location choice and abit of luck to make them...

Thank you very much for help! 

Thats what I call an update 

Excellent work as always Adam.
I am just blown away by some of the pics 

I'm going back for another look

Derry

Hello Derry, always nice to see you! I'm really glad you like these pics 

Stunning. That glow on the night pictures make them look, well, magical.

Thank you, nice to see you here! You use much magic in your pics too 

oh ennedi btw, those red brick plaza retaining walls featured adjacent to simfox's two creations, where can i find them, i have them, but the ground texture isn't showing up so i need to track them down to find the missing dependency

The answer was send to you yet, but in the case somebody would be interested in it too, this is a Red Brick Plaza set from Kazuki's site. You can find a link to it in the Japanese BAT Gallery II.

Such a nice update! It's hard to pick a favorite picture - can I say I love them all? A delight to see your latest work! 

Thank you Bruce, it's a pleasure to hear you like those pics 

Ok, I see, you inspirate from La Spezia to create, your city, so very good luck!
No, very beautiful city, I like details and one question you : Where did you find barriers between RHW on the 8th pic please? Thank you in anticipation

Guillaume

Thank you Sciurus! If you want to find RHW barriers, go to the RHW thread and read the stickied message. There are links to all RHW basic and additional stuff there.

Hey Adam I have been looking for your explanination on the moisture effect on medium tiles and I cant find it... Could you please help me and thank you a million

Patrick

OK Pat, its a theme of today's update 

Looking at Pat's picture in his message we can see the texture discontinuity along the West border of every city. Our goal is to improve it. I see that some people playing GRV II have similar problem, I hope my information will help them too.

An introduction: Terrain textures change with an altitude and with moisture (valleys, other cavities and North slopes have higher humidity, hilltops and south slopes are more dry). I showed it in my MD in Update 28 (see Table of Contents in my first message). My first step was to check the terrain shape along city borders.

I installed the same Terrain Mod as Pat (Meadowshire), opened the Bordertown region and checked the terrain in every city. The large flat area is very flat  . It has an altitude 256 m (only 6 m above the sea level - you will not be able to build sunken networks here!). There are only a few very little cavities here and there. So the altitude doesn't decide about textures in this case.

The only reason of changing textures on so flat terrain is the moisture variation from place to place. But the moisture also depends on the terrain shape - so?
- There are two possible reasons of moisture variation.
a) the game generates some "moisture blur" during map creation process, to make the terrain more diversified. These moisture changes are random, textures vary in a small range.
b) The game decides about assigning a texture to the place using an information about this place and its surrounding. So we can see different textures in two places of the same altitude and shape, but different surrounding (for example if one place is near the hilltop and the second one is surrounded by flat terrain). To choose textures for tiles near to the city border the game must make an extrapolation for the border side. We don't know which formula is used here, maybe we will discover it in future. We also know that many things in SC4 terrain depends on the direction (it's a consequence of the game graphics features).

Anyway, it seems that West city border is always more moist  and we must do something with it.

1. First method: We change the moisture.
We can't (and we don't want) to change the moisture map ie. moisture proportions between various altitudes and terrain formations. The effect could be very bad. But we can do two things:
a) Increase (or decrease) the basic moisture level on the whole map. What will it give us?
Every terrain texture appears at a specific range of altitude and a specific range of moisture. If the given level of moisture is a "border" between two textures, we can move this border away. If the moisture on the whole flat area will be inside the range assgned to one texture, we will have only this texture on this area. There are more details, but they are not needed now.
b) Disable seasonal moisture changes. It is important, because if we will develop only one city at a time, run it a few months and save, neighboring cities will be saved in various days of the year. Textures change (slightly with the default settings, but noticeable) with moisture changes and cities saved in various seasons will look different. If we disable seasonal moisture changes, we don't need to worry about it.

Here is Pat's problem. We will want to remove this darker texture.



First let's disable yearly moisture variations. To do it I use my WeatherT0MV0 mod (it was described and attached to Update 28), I will attach it to this message too.



As we see, darker texture was partially removed. Why?
It's a new region. I saved all cities in January. The WeatherT0MV0 mod sets the moisture at the yearly average level ie. at the level we have about 21th March. Winter months are more cold and wet, Summer months are warmer and dryer.
Conclusion: I changed moisture from January level to March level ie. I decreased it. The unwanted texture was partially removed, so we should decrease the moisture more to remove this texture at all 

We can also check it in another way. Let's look at textures closer.
Here is a closeup of the West city border.



Let's identify these two textures. I made a "visual guide" of Cycledogg's textures for myself, I extracted textures for Zoom 4 from CPT No3, 4 and 5 files and saved them as PNGs. Their colors are a bit more vivid than on the terrain, but it is easy to identify them.
Here is the "main" texture of our flat area": ad (Cycledogg's textures for closer zooms have two versions appearing randomly)



And here is our unwanted texture - c4:



Now we should look at the Terrain Texture Map Table in the INI file of the Meadowshire Terrain Mod. This table contains 16 columns for various moisture levels (from dryest to wettest) and 32 rows for various altitudes.
The Meadowshire Terrain Mod has Maximum Terrain Height at 1950 m, The upper layer spreads from about 820 m to the top. This layer contains rocky textures (not rock mod, but textures from CPT No5 file). The rest ie. from 0 to 820 m above sea level (250 - 1070 m in Terrain Query - the sea level is at 250 m) are divided into 31 layers according to Terrain Texture Map table rows.
Each layer has 820/31 = 26,5 m, so the first bottom layer spreads from sea level (250 m) to 276,5 m. Our flat area has 256 m - we are inside this layer.
Here are texture numbers in this layer (the dryest at the left, the wettest at the right):

a3, a3, a3, a3, af, af, ad, ad, c4, c4, ab, ab, 40, 40, 40, 40 - red font shows where we are.

We can clearly see that texture c4 is assigned to higher moisture than ad, exactly as we said earlier after installing WeatherT0MV0 mod.

Conclusion: We should decrease the moisture level.
But how much? The basic (average) moisture level is 0,2. Let's make 0,1. (Attention - we keep WeatherT0MV0 mod in Plugins, in fact we change the moisture level in this mod!)



Too much  Now we see another texture - this is the dryer one, af (look again at texture numbers above). OK, we make 0,13



Still too much. Now 0,14



Almost perfect. Only small residues of the texture c4 are visible. Here is a closeup



And the region view



This way we removed the unwanted texture from the city border without modifying textures. Our terrain will look the same all the year. Our change will also have an influence on placing God Mode trees, they depend on moisture level too. I suppose it will be apositive change, but I can't guarantee it. We should look at the Tree Controller parameters and eventually modify some of them to have the same trees on both sides of the city border. We will do it in one of the next updates.
We can say it's done - but not at all. Do you see a discontinuity along North borders? We will speak about it later.

2. Second method: We modify the Terrain Mod.
It is simple: Let's look again at textures from the bottom Texture Map Table line

a3, a3, a3, a3, af, af, ad, ad, c4, c4, ab, ab, 40, 40, 40, 40

Instead of changing the moisture level we can replace the texture c4 (only in 9th column or in both 9th and 10th columns) by texture ad. This change will affect only the altitude range from 250 to 276,5 m, all other textures are on their old places.
Here I replaced c4 by ad in 9th column only



Not enough. Now I replace c4 by ad in 10th column too



Perfect! And here is the region view.



The Meadowshire Terrain Mod modification is attached to this message (zzENN_CPT_No6_MeadowShireTerrainController_ad31_9and10)

3. North city borders.
Look again at the picture above. You can see that North side of every city is slightly brighter than South area of neighboring city. We saw it earlier after moisture change too.
This effect has nothing common with texture, weather and such things. It's something completely different. It is an atmospheric scattering effect managed by the Lighting exemplar.
This effect is very subtle, I increased it (for the case if you don't believe me  ) to let you see it better. The default value is 0,15, I increased it to 0,5

The city


And the region


What to do with it? It's very simple, all we need is to make a mod changing the atmospheric scattering effect value to 0  . It is attached to this post (zzENN_LightingScat0)

Here is your region, Pat. Do you like it now? 


Note: Playing with atmospheric scattering I discovered something interesting:
- This effect is visible in the city view only in Zoom 1, and
- It is visible in the region view only if you save the city in Zoom 1.
So you can avoid this effect even without my mod, if you will never save your cities in Zoom 1.
It also leads to a very interesting conclusion:
- The game can use various zoom views to create region views, at least Zoom 1 and Zoom 2.. It shows (maybe) a way to another interesting findings.

4. How to use my mods?
a) I explained many times that it is wise to move your terrain mod folder to the end of game loading order ie. to change its name adding zz at the beginning. I have zzzCPT_TerrainMod.
b) You should use: zzENN_WeatherT0MV0MY014 and zzENN_LightingScat0 (if you want to use the first method), or zzENN_CPT_No6_MeadowShireTerrainController_ad31_9and10 and zzENN_LightingScat0 (if you want to use the second method).

- If you will use the first method you can expect changes in trees placement (probably positive), your terrain will look as in summer all the year;
- If you will use the second method your trees will be placed exactly as earlier, your terrain will look as in March all the year. If you will want to make any other terrain mod modifications, you will need to modify my mod (it will be loaded after the CPT No6 file).

c) Simply unzip my mods and place them into you Terrain Mod folder.

Adam

[mightygoose]

that has solved so many issues for me as well as many other players... great work and and a stellar contribution to the community as always.

[Pat]

Adam your cml is soo fitting to you!!! I honestly just dont know how to thank you soo much!!! I wish I could give you a K-point now for your discovery here in the Medium Tile Moisture Bug!!  You have saved my day and along with a numerouse others sir!!!  aaaaaaaaaaargh I just cant express my gratitude enough Adam and how helpful you are, again thank you a million...


Patrick

[wouanagaine]

Brillant

[JoeST]

Brillant

[Rayden]

Nice work Adam, very instructive. I usually don't suffer much from that problem, first maybe because I use most of the times the Italia Terrain Mod, and second, for quite sometime now, I created a routine of saving my cities always on the same day of the year, or at least around that same week. That helps a lot to decrease that little difference. If you look at my region the diferences are most up north, and just because all the tiles were saved at zoom1, showing that atmospheric scattering.

[Splime]

These mods are excellent, the texture bug was bothering me a lot. As far as the effect on trees, I got some interesting results. The zzENN_WeatherT0MV0MY014 file seems to have flipped where the trees grow, though the darker trees grow in a larger space than the lighter ones did before the mod. Not surprisingly, zzENN_CPT_No6_MeadowShireTerrainController_ad31_9and10 had no effect on the trees.

[pvarcoe]

Excellent update Adam!

The information and mod files are very useful.
I have also noticed patterns with tree controllers and moisture levels.
You are elevating (no pun intended) this area of the game to new levels.
Thank you for sharing this with us.

Phil

[Ennedi]

Mightygoose, Pat, wouanagaine, JoeST, Rayden , Splime, pvarcoe - thanks a lot guys for your nice words!  I really hope my findings and mods will help you and other people who love playing with landscapes and panoramic views. If anybody knows about other issues or problems connected with large/regional views, please inform me, we wil try to solve them.

Today I'm going to show an experimental stuff. Please look at it, eventually download files, test and tell me what should I change or improve. I will be very grateful. An idea is interesting and can be useful for many people.

An idea was given by FrankU. Some time ago he started a thread "Terrain Mod without rocks?". FrankU described a problem which is very common for people who build large cities on flat areas. They are not interested in rocky landscapes, and slopes in their cities are mostly artificial: embankments, riversides, walls along sunken networks and similar structures.
The rock texture looks unnatural on such slopes, so it is very common to cover this unwanted texture by various walls. Sometimes we just want to have an embankment covered by stone, concrete etc. But we often have problems with placing wall lots, especially under bridges. Even underbridge lots don't solve all problems. Sometimes we want to see a natural, ground embankment - for example for a railway in rural area. Rail embankments running across the rural landscape are very common in many places around the world, especially on flat areas at low elevations, on swampy terrain etc.

An idea is to replace the "classical" rock texture by something looking better in such situations. Of course it will probably look strange in mountainous terrain, but our goal is to improve urban landscapes  . If you build your city in mountains, you will need to use old methods to create your engineering structures.

We can do two things:

a) Use one of grassy textures from the terrain mod; but it can lead to some visual problems. In some viewing directions we will see the texture on our embankment brighter or darker than around it, but in some cases the same texture on flat terrain and on slope will flatten the slope visually. Sometimes it can be good and sometimes bad.

b) use another texture similar to real ones which can be visible on embankments and other artificial slopes.
I made some experiments with this second method. I will present you my first results and attach my "urban rock mods" to this message for your own testing. My intention is to make something universal (it will be difficult), or to make a set of mods dedicated to embankments, sunken networks or waterfront. But we must remember that we can use only one texture in a city.

I would be very glad if you would tell me about your opinions, needs and suggestions. I will take them into account preparing the final version.

Here are some of my "Urban/Rural rock mods":

1. Rock Mod No6









2. Rock Mod No7









3. Rock Mod No8









4. Rock Mod No9









As you can see textures change their look according to viewing direction. It is more visible than on rock texture because grassy textures are more uniform.
Looking at larger views you can see these textures in some other places too. They seem to correspond with the terrain quite well, so if you use the Diagonal Jagged Edges Mod and some unwanted rocks appear on your hills, you can remove them using these mods - and nothing bad happen 

Please tell me what do you think? Or maybe I should use gravel or concrete texture too?

Adam

[JoeST]

That is an awesome idea Adam, fantastic looking too

Joe

[Ennedi]

Sorry for double post, I hope I will not be banned for it  
Edit: Wow, you saved my life Joe! 

An attachment was too large, so I had to divide it. First two mods are in the previous message, second two mods are attached to the current one.