Abajo del Mar: Update 8

[nedalezz]

Just spent an hour catching up on what I missed, hehe.

Im going to go against the flow here and say the Italia Mod looks best I think. I know you mentioned you wanted a tropical feel, and once the snow is removed from the mountains, I still think it suits it best.

[Connor]

I read through it all (took a while  ) but i found it quite interesting. My abilities in this area is very limited, and I've always been curious about this stuff, so I am rather intrigued by this.

Looking forward to hearing your progress.

[penguin007]

I love the huge amounts of terrain mods you have tried there something maybe I should try when trying to find the perfect combination

Will

[ldvger]

Hi again!

This isn't really an update, just a quick stop-by to let you know I haven't forgotten my MD, in fact have been working fast and furious behind the scenes on terrain mods.

Rivit and I are still cracking the code, so to speak, but are beginning to assemble a brand new terrain mod that will be just for Abajo del Mar.  Right now we are working with 16 textures that are, right now, just solid colored tiles, place holders if you will.  I've been working in GIMP to create a base color palette and I'll post it here so you can take a peek and tell me what you think.  Remember what I said about the INI table and how it works.  Upper left corner is coldest/driest areas of the region and bottom right corner is warmest/wettest.



We have made a new mod using thse base colors, plugged it into the game and I have to admit, it looks pretty good.  My region is a total mess right now, with all kinds of different city tiles rendered in various tests and experiments we have run over the past week or so, so I don't have any pics of the region to share, but I'll try to get some up soon.  Things are moving along pretty quickly...it's nice that both rivit and I are out of work and have the time on our hands to spend fooling around on this stuff all day long.  Well, good for learning and creating a new terrain mod, but bad for both of us in terms of Simoleans. 

Lora/LD

[Battlecat]

Interesting indeed.  Nice pallet, looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

[mightygoose]

fantastic work experimenting with terrain mods, this is definately something i wish to look into.

[Shadow Assassin]

Interesting thoughts on terrain creation here - I'd love to see the results of that "illustration" rivit sent you regarding how the game does terrain mods.

Interesting that there are four terrain maps... Maxis probably intended for there to be a selectable terrain tileset thing like there was in SC3K, but never got around to coding it in...

I use the word "exemplar" and know it's a type of file, but I don't really understand how they work. 

An exemplar basically is a file (I guess it's a file) encapsulated within a .dat that the game reads and then it takes relevant values out from that exemplar, to use in any functions that the game needs. It's kind of like a .dll, except that functions aren't called from within it, but hex values. It's the most important thing in a SimCity .dat file, as without it, all that other data (FSH files, SC4Model files) cannot be read by SimCity and consequently that data can't be used as the game has no idea what to do with it. (so... it just ignores it)

In the case of .ini files, the game can read the files, but if the data is missing from the exemplars and the .dats... game go crashy-crashy. To see this in action, just remove the CP cliff mod's required file (while having a CP terrain mod installed), and observe the chaos that will occur...

Hopefully that clears up what an exemplar is a little bit... I may be a little off with a couple of explanations, but hopefully it should be sufficient...

[ldvger]

Abajo del Mar

Update 4: 3/5/2010

Replies:

ecoba/Ethan:  I was just teasing you about the "we", you know that I hope?  Back in the days before folks had to be careful about being politically sensitive and correct, my mom used to tell a joke about the Native American scout that led General Custer to the battlesite of Little Big Horn.  When Custer came over the hill and saw how badly he was outnumbered, he turned to his scout and said "We are in a lot of trouble".  To which the scout replied "Where do you get this "we", white man"?  I was maybe 12 years old when I heard the joke and ever since then I tease folks about using "we" when they really mean "I" or "you". 

But you are right, the last update was a little on the deep side and probably over many folks' heads, mine included.  I was just then beginning to have little light bulbs going off in my head and was overly excited about showing off my newly found lack of knowledge.  My aplogies to you and anyone else who found the update dull.  My buddy rivit critiqued the update for me and basically said the same thing: too much information.  I'll try to do better this time around and in the future.

Elevation does play a role in how the game reads where to place texture, but indirectly, I think.  The game seems to kinda assume that the terrain gets colder and drier as it gains elevation, which is RL is mostly true.  But we (rivit and I) are pretty sure other factors come into play as well, we just haven't yet figured out what those factors are.  The game does a prtty good job of softening the transitions in elevations, so going back and trying to erode of God Mode terraform things softer wouldn't, I don't think, make much difference in how textures were located.  Mostly it all has to do with warm/cold/wet/dry (or w/c/w/d, as we are calling it these days), as I tried to explain in the last update.  But more about that later.

nedalezz:  Hello and thanks for stopping by!  I like the Italia mod, too, but I don't think it's right for this region, even without the snow.  At this point, I am 99.9% certain I am going to create my own custom terrain mod, something unlike anything that has yet been done (or at least, I think so), so stay tuned!

Connor:  I've always been intrigued by all the various ways the game could be added to and modified too and, like you, I started out not having a clue how it works.  For anything other than terrain mods, I still don't have a clue.  But I'm learning!  Thanks for stopping by and be sure to come by often...lots of interesting stuff in the pipeline.

penguin007:  I'm just getting started, not only with terrain mods.  Still on the list are rock mods, water mods, and tree controllers.  Be sure to visit again soon, I'll be moving fast once I get going!

Battlecat:  Thanks!  I've always thought I had a good eye for color. 

mightygoose: Well, if you are interested in learning about terrain mods, this is the place to be over the next week or so, because I'm learning a lot and will be sharing my knowledge.  In fact, I plan to write a tutorial and put together a "Terrain Mod Assemby Kit" for folks so they won't have to go through weeks of hassle to be able to create a custom terrain. 

Shadow Assassin:  I will see if I can upload the little .dat rivit made me, so you can try it out.  It's a good learning tool.  He made me a second one using 16 colors instead of the default 8 that is also revealing, but both, to be truly effective, need a rather varied terrain.  Neither have any dependencies, so they are small and easy to use. 

As for exemplars, well, I still don't know 100% how to describe them.  I've learned more about them this last week and now I think of them as "middlemen".  They talk to the files in the .exe and tell them how to deal with the data in the .dats, among other things.  They're like mini-macros or even maybe like interpretors.  Valuable little bits of code, they are.  Right now I'm not messing with them except to copy them and paste them and rename them.  If data inside an exemplar wants or needs to be changed, I need rivit to help me...that's not a task I would attempt on my own.

Interesting that there are four terrain maps... Maxis probably intended for there to be a selectable terrain tileset thing like there was in SC3K, but never got around to coding it in...

That's what we figured, too.  We discovered that all three of the "other" terrain mapping tables are identical to each other in the manner in which they distribute textures in the w/c/w/d grid of the mapping table.  The exemplars for the Temperate table exist, but the textures are missing.  I don't know if the exemplars for the other 2 tables exist or not, haven't explored that far.  Maybe I/we will get around to that later.

Update #4:

So, ok, it's been about a week since my last update, given that my last post wasn't really an update.  Lots of emails have been flying back and forth between Seattle and Australia (where rivit lives), despite the fact that he is 14 hours ahead of me in time.  It's kinda strange emailing someone who is already living in tomorrow. 

Using the table of 16 textures I posted earlier, rivit made me a quick little terrain mod.  Understand, there weren't any textures, so to speak, just colored squares acting as holding places.  We both wanted to see, also, how the mapping table and the game would react to the 16 colors.  Rivit located the colors in the Tropical mapping table using a very simple matematic layout...he divided the  table vertically and horizontally into 16 equal boxes, so there were 4 columns of color and 4 rows of color, just like my sample square.  I plugged it in and rendered a bunch of squares in my region and was fairly happy with the results.  However...

I started thinking about how the region might look with 32 colors instead of 16.  So I made a new color smaple rectangle:



I numbered each square, as you can see, then created from this sample 32 individual bitmap files which I then turned into FSH files using rivit's new "GoFSH" tool.  I made a lot of mistakes along the way, so this process took several days, but I finally got it done and now it should be much easier next time around.  And yes, there will be a next time around, probably several next time arounds. 

We have found that working with the mapping table in the INI is easiest if we cut and paste it into Excel.  We can copy it out of the INI, paste it as text into Excel, format it into a spreadsheet, change it around however we want, then copy it and reformat it back into text and paste it back into the INI.  How to do this will be in the tutorial so no one will have to mess around with copying and editing every single cell of the 512 cell mapping table (like I did the first time I tried it). 

Once the mapping table is in Excel and formatted, it's easy to pick out the individual cells and color them and see how the game distributes textures across a region.  I've taken screen shots of the two tables, the Tropical and the Temperate, with Maxis default values:



This is the default Tropical mapping table, with each of the 8 textures used colored differently and with borders drawn between sections of textures.  The darkly outlined box in the center of the table will be explained in a minute. 



This is the default Temperate mapping table.  You can see right away there is quite a difference in the way the textures are distributed across the table.  Also, this map uses 15 textures instead of 8.  As I said in my relies above, the exemplar for those 15 textures exist in the game, but the textures the exemplars refer to and control are missing.  Again, the dark center outlined box comes in later.



This is the table I created for my 16 color squares.  It's very similar to the one rivit created for his 8 color test mod...in fact, it's virtually identical except I have 8 rows og colors going from cold to warm instead of 4.  But I still only use 4 column going from dry to wet.  The highlighted center area in this spreadsheet is the same area of the table as the dark boxes in the first two and will be explained momentarily.

Last night, Thursday, I finally rolled up my sleeves and created my first terrain mod using the 32 colored squares.  Yup, I did it, all by myself (well, not really...it's taken poor rivit at least 2 weeks to unscramble my poor dazed brain).  I held my bretah, put my new .dat into my plugin's folder, and booted the game.  And guess what?  It worked!  Well, kinda sorta.  As I tooled along rendering city tiles, I found some of my terrain was loading textures very definitely NOT in my .dat file.  I almost spent hours/days going back over my work to see where I messed up when it occurred to me that maybe I had a conflicting file or two in my plugins folder...I've told you all what a mess THAT is.  Turns out, that was the problem.  Seems cycledogg has some textures with the same exact name as a few I I named, so once I pulled his stuff out of my plugins folder and rebooted my game, my mod worked perfectly.  Amazing, isn't it?  And to think only a week ago I hadn't a clue in the word. 

I spent the rest of my evening rending the entire region, just so I could get a good overview of what I had done and this, my readers, is what it looks like:



As I was going tile by tile rendering it, I was quite impressed with myself.  In the medium to close zooms, it looks surprisingly good even as blank color tiles with numbers on them.  The transitions between colors looks pretty good, too.  I didn't really like to way the highlands rendered and the shorelines looked a little blah, too, but some of the central areas of the region, which are supposed to be prairies, boy they looked good close in.  Around 1 am I finally completed the region and quickly loaded it into Region Census, so I could see how it looked. 

And man oh man was I bummed.  It's very banded and the color transitions are very harsh.  Not only that but...look close and count the bands.  There are 8 of them.  Folks, there are 32 colors in this map...why are only 8 showing up?  I was of the (naive) thought that I would have 32 bands of color, each one fading ever so softly into the next.  Look at the color sample...some of those colors are so close to each other, it's hard to tell them apart! 

Discouraged, I went to bed and dreamt of textures mods all night.  No lie.

So this morning I got up and after I drank my coffee, I fired up the game and took a closer look at the region, this time taking notes as I went along.  And what did I discover?  Each of the 8 color bands is exactly 4 steps in color above or below it's nearest neighbor.  The primary color bands are represented by colors 81, 85, 89, 93, 97, 8b and 9d.  What happened to the other 24 colors?  They are the pretty little highlights that show up in close zooms within each color band.

So, this explains why I have outlined/highlighted certain areas of the Excel charts shown above.  Those are the areas the game chooses to display as "major" terrain.  I have one more pic to share, a repeat of an earlier pic:



Remember this?  That's the 8 texture default Maxis terrain, second from the left.  I have annotated the pic to number the major bands of textures.  There are 7.

So, I'm not sure what to do next.  Both rivit and I have been banging away at this pretty steadily for the past 2 weeks, so I am thinking I may take a bit of a break.  I need to think this through a bit and maybe get deeper into some of the existing mods, especially c.p.'s.  We have found differences in the exemplars controlling the textures that appear to be dependent on location in the mapping table, so maybe I need to tweak my exemplars.  There is also a "master" exemplar that seems like the big kahuna controlling all the texture exemplars, so maybe we need to look at that, too. 

But I think the key is the mapping table itself.  I am giving thought to writing a mod that assigns a number to each cell of the mapping table and seeing what the game does with that, especially over an extremely varied terrain such as mine.  It would be a long, tedious, boring job to write such a mod but it could be very useful as a part of the Terrain Mod Assembly Kit as a region analyser prior to creating textures or mapping table.  One could almost design a terrain cell by cell.  Like anyone would want to besides an OCD like me. 

That's it for this update.  Getting late and my teeth have been bothering me, so I am trying to get to bed early...the teeth seems to stay quieter (less painful) if I get plenty of rest. 

Lora/LD

[toja]

Hello Lora,

it's nice to see that your map has finally become the starting point for a new MD. The name "Abajo del Mar" is really a good choice for this region.

A while ago I played around with the terrain textures myself, but I wasn't patient enough to make my own terrain mod. Anyway, at that time I found all the information I needed here: Ennedi plays Shosaloza: Update 28. Maybe it will be helpful for you, too.

toja

[Leech10]

Looks interesting so far. The only thing I can think of right now is giving each row its own texture, though that likely would take too much time...

[penguin007]

Awesome work on the textures shame about how they are working

Will

[ecoba]

Haha, yeah I kindof figured you were joking, knowing your personality, but I decided to explain anyway in case you weren't. Anyway, I'm glad that rivit has been able to help you on this and, with a little more work it looks like you're gonna be well off.

Ethan

[Battlecat]

Hmmm, terrain mods are even more picky than they look on the surface.  Good luck figuring out the issue!  You've certainly put some good thought into it already. 

[nedalezz]

The choice of colours for your terrain mod are perfect for what you are trying to achieve. It sucked that not all the textures are appearing; I have no idea about the mechanics of the game, so I cannot help you there. But nonetheless, I hope you get it right, because it looks awesome.

[planetechef]

Well, i'm always respectfull for the people who go so deep to the game, i'm not really sure to understand everything here  but as i can see, the result is really good so far, i like what you did with this map and very curious to see more...

[ldvger]

Abajo del Mar

Update 5: 3/18/2010

Replies:

toja:  Your link to Ennedi's MD proved to be most helpful, thank you very much!   Looking around elsewhere in his MD also was helpful, as he also touches on other points of interest to me, such as plop water to game water transitions.  But yes, I agree with you that terrain mods are more complex than most folks would initially suppose.  In concept they are fairly simple: create textures, plug them into the INI table to locate them on the map, then load 'er up and go!  But in reality, there are many factors that play to how the game uses the texture files.  The Terrain Properties exemplar plays a major role and there are dozens, maybe even a hundred, different parameter settings in it, and each setting has a wide range of possibilities.  The Weather exemplar also comes into play, as Ennedi discovered.  Rivit discovered that the orientation of the region's landscape can be a factor, as the game appears to be hard-wired in the .exe to have the prevailing weather patterns approach from the NW and travel across the region to the SE, much as it does in the San Francisco Bay Area (no big surprise there, being as how that's where Maxis is located).  Height of terrain (altitude above sea level) is another factor, as is over height relief in a particular region.  A fairly flat region will display fewer textures than a mountainous one. 

As for having the patience to figure this all out and create a new terrain mod...keep reading.

Leech10:  Ennedi did an experiment in which he did exactly this.  In one experiment, he made the texture identical across the row of the INI table, but different in each of the 32 rows.  In another, he did the same thing, but with the columns in the table, rather than the rows.  If you are interested in seeing and reading his results, I suggest to click on toja's link...it's pretty interesting (if you happen to be interested in terrain mods).  I also have been running similar experiments, but more on that later.

penguin007:  Thanks for your comment and for stopping by!  I also appreciate your sympathy over my frustration.

ecoba/Ethan:  Glad you are able to know when I am teasing, it's not always easy to convey "tone" in a written message.  And yes, rivit is my guru.  Without his patience in teaching me, I'd have weeks ago given up.

Battlecat:  It's not so much that the terrain mods are "picky" as that they are just fiendishly complex once you start peeling back thier many layers.  Thanks for your encouraging words!

nedalezz:  Thank you for complimenting me on my color choices.  I thought they were pretty decent, too.   

As for not having all the colors appear in the game, read on.

planetchef:  Don't despair about understanding the mechanics of the game...while building a terrain mode IS more complex than *I* originally thought it would be, it's really fairly simple in concept.  And really, in the end, it's all just numbers.  Understanding how they work is more a matter of patience than anything else, kinda like untangling a ball of yarn.  You just kinda start pulling on a string and see what happens.  I'm glad you stopped by and equally glad you are enjoying what you are seeing so far.

In a RL aside, many of you may know that I have been out of work for a very long time now, over 18 months.  While I have not yet been able to find full-time work again, about 10 days ago a client of mine who has not sent work my way in almost 4 years contacted me with a proposal for a fairly decent sized project.  Only problem was, it had to be completed by April 1st.  I gratefully accepted the work and so I have been working like a maniac these past 10 days, which is why I haven't been spending time with SC at all.  And, in fact, I am stealing this time now during my morning coffee and, coffee being done, it's time for me to get dressed and back to work.  I hope to have some time this evening to continue with the actual Update, so please check back soon...I have some interesting pics and news to share.

Lora/LD

Update #5:

So OK, I should be working instead of doing this, but I've spent the day frittering around, I figured I might at well slack until bedtime and then double down tomorrow.  Today I cashed the first 2 checks for this new project...my first earned income in over 18 months.  Too bad I gave up drinking before the New Year, I really feel like celebrating!  But, if I am to stay sober, I am going to have to find other ways to celebrate and it seems to me spending time here is as good a way as any.  I was able to pay my roomie rent today for the first time since October 2008 and I also gave him money for the heating bill.  Now I've got a stash of cash that will pay for some much needed dental work next month. 

This update is likely to be a little bit disconnected mostly because I am looking back over work done over 2 weeks ago and I didn't really take that many pictures to help me remember what I was doing then and what I was thinking.  So I'm going to have to kinda reconstruct things as I go along.

At the end of the last update, I was disappointed and frustrated by the lack of color/textures in my experimental region.  Because I don't want to type out "colors/textures" every time I refer to the colors I used to be place holders for eventual textures, just try to keep in mind that, for this update anyway, the two are words are interchangable with each other, OK?  I don't want to confuse anyone, but I don't want to type two words when one will do, either.  So, colors=textures, for now.

So I had 32 colors which I plugged into the INI table but only 8 of them showed up in my region.  Further explorations into the region display and the INI table revealed that really only two columns were displaying: H and I.  I think I previously talked about how 4 columns, G-J were displaying in my experiments, so by fooling around some more, I was able to get 16 to display by condensing the 32 colors into 2 columns, H and I.  I did this by making each row a different color, but the two columns the same color.  I ended up with a very stripped region which looked ridiculous.

Then I read Ennedi's post, as recommended by toja.  I learned that if I went into the terrain Properties exemplar, I could modify the Max Terrain Height value and so either increase or decrease the width of the color bands across my region.  Using this information and looking at my miserable region, I came up with a new color order.  I had been using the colors in numeric order with color 80 in row 00 of the INI table and color 9f in row 33.  So I re-arranged my 32 colors thusly:



These are arranged according to elevation above sea level, with the top most colors being highest elevation and the lowest colors being close to sea level.  I then used Excel to re-write just those two columns (H and I) that I knew where the primary displays:



The green highlighting in columns J and K represent textures than showed up in my region as "detail" within the greater bands of color, which is also nice to know.  This table above is the maxis default Tropical table, so when I plugged my experiemntal mod into my game, I got a mixture of my color squares and Maxis default textures.  I'll show you the result in a second, but first I want to talk about the terrain height.

The Maxis default for max terrain height is 2500 meters above sea level.  This value is set in the Terrain Properties exemplar and is adjustable.  So...I started adjusting it.  And, instead of having bare rock from the tops of my cliffs to the NW corner of my region (the highest parts of my map), I started getting bands of color slowly creeping across those pesky uplands.  I kept pushing the height value upwards and relaoding my region until I finally had color bands across 100% of my above sea level terrain.  This is VERY handy to know, folks because it's a really simple modification to make and it can really make a big difference if, like me, you are trying to play a region with a lot of extreme differences in terrain heights.  I finally settled on 8000 meters as the ideal max height for my region...that's how high I had to go to get it covered with terrain. 

Some things I learned and am passing on to anyone who is interested:  The game will display colors/textures according to primarily terrain elevation.  Think of a contour map.  Flat terrain has few contours, therefore flat regions will have few textures and the bands of texture will be wide, each one filling roughly the distance between contour lines.  Mountains and cliffs and hills have contour lines closer together, so bands of color in the game are closer together.  If you want to get rid of the bands being so close together across steep terrain, you need to then use the same colors across a wider range of rows in the INI table.  You can use as many colors as you want, up to 512 will fit in the INI table (if anyone is nuts enough to design that many textures for a region), but the primary textures are most likely going to fall within the H and I columns. 

I know this is probably more information than most folks want, but some folks (mightygoose, you listening?) have expressed interest in learning how to mod terrain, so I include it. 

I didn't want ons of bands across my cliffs, so I spread some of the colors I did want over several rows and eliminated those that I didn't think fit very well with what I had envisioned.  This took several days of experimenting and many re-do's of both my color order AND the INI table, but this is what I finally ended up with:



I was semi-happy with these results and thinging about moving on to actually starting to develope textures for this mod when the email blipped into my inbox offering me 3 weeks of paying work.  I have not revisited the mod since then but I have been stealing a few minutes with my region off and on since then and have a couple of announcements to make.

I am reneging (for now) on my idea/promise to create a terrain mod tutorial AND a custom terrain for this region.  With any luck at all, this first piece of paying work will be just that...the first.  If I get more work or get a real job, then I am not going to have the time to spend with SC that I have had over the past 18 months and so will want to really PLAY instead of create time consuming "make work" projects for myself.  So, I've made a couple of other executive decisions.

I have chosen to use c.p.'s Missouri Breaks terrain mod for my region.  However, I have modded the mod, so it's a semi-custom mod.  I have removed most of the snow containing textures and replaced them with other textures in his Essentials Pack that I thought were appropriate for those areas where they display in my game.  I raised the max terrain height to 8000 meters so all my region would have textures on it.  I made my beaches wider and shallower.  I'm not using his water mod or beach mod that are optional parts of the MB mod.  The region is greener and drier than what I envisioned it should look like, but it's easier at this point for me to re-write the region's climate than it is to continue to try to develope a new terrain mod for it.  I still have more tweaking to do, but this is what the region looks like and where the next phase is going to begin:



If I don't get more work or a job by the time this current project completes, well then, I can always go back to designing my own terrain mod.  But Missouri Breaks really is a very beautiful mod, deeply detailed, nearly seamlessly integrated, and I can be happy with this for my region.  It looks best in close zooms, where all the gorgeous detail comes through and really, most of us see the detail in our cities and regions way more than the regional views. 

I hope you agree that this will be a good fit for Abajo del Mar.

So next up is water features.  I'm going to need to settle on a water mod, both for game water and plop water.  This will inevitably bring me back to my biggest challeng: transitioning PW to GW.  However, before I get that far, there is some important prep/planning work to do.  I have to map out the above sea level water features before I plop them, so to do that, I need to make a region map.  Way back when I rendered this region for the very first time, I named each city tile and took a data view screen shot of each city tile, so now I have a folder on my desktop with all 140 dtat view maps in it that need to be married to each other and made into a region map.  This is jmore of a tedious chore than a difficult one...time consuming and a bit boring.  However, once the base map is made, it will serve many purposes over the life of the region because some day I'm actually going to have roads and towns, ha!

That's what coming up: the region map, choosing water mods, planning the water features, plopping the water features. 

I'm going to be slammed between now and April 1st, so I most likely won't get time for another update until then.  I probably will have little bits of time, though, in which to start piecing together the region map and play around with water mods, so next update when it comes, will be a good one.

Lora/LD, so very happy to be working again!

[ecoba]

Don't worry, Lora. RL always comes first, and considering your case I'm sure everyone completely understands the lack of updates for the time being. Hope that I'll be able to go to the building... I'm sure you're do great.

I hope that in ten years, when I could need a building, (probably not, though, as I would liike to go into architecture myself, I'll get some advice from you though...) you'll still be willing to design it for me... 

Ethan

[Battlecat]

Looks like you're getting pretty close with that terrain mod.  By the time you drop some trees in there, the faint edges will fade out very quickly! 

Glad to hear you've got some work on the go! 

[RickD]

Hi Lora, I can't believe the effort you put in this. I mean, you even develop your own terrain mod! I admire your dedication.

[ldvger]

Abajo del Mar

Update 6: March 25, 2010

I don't have a lot of time this evening, so I'm going to skip replies for the time being...I hope no one minds.  I won't get this entire update finished tonite, either, as I have quite a bit to share and, like I said, I'm short of time tonite, so I'll probably work on this update some more tomorrow.  I'll edit in replies then.

Update 6:

A matter of what I consider to be of some importance has come to my attention recently while reading another Mayor's Diary.  I have been, until a few days ago, completely oblivious of a phenomenon that can affect our regions and cities that folks have come to call Prop Pox.  RickD, whose MD "Santa Barbara" I have been following, has unfortunately been hit with this problem.  He very wisely posted a link in his MD to the forum thread here at SC4D where the topic has been under discussion and investigation for a couple of years now and I read all 19 pages of posts to see if any of my cities may be at risk.  And I learned they might be.

Prop Pox is avoidable if you follow the suggestions given in the thread, which you can find here:

http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=7066.0

However, a city, once poxed, evidently can't be cured.  *IF* you have a backup of the city made before the Pox struck and *IF* you clean up your plug-ins file to remove the KNOWN files that cause the Pox (there are also unknown files that cause it), you can regain your city from the point of the back up, but will lose any work done after.

None of us want to lose the time and effort we put into developing our cities, so I very strongly recommend that ALL players read the thread and take steps to protect thier cities.  And please...spread the word.  The more folks that know about this problem, the more likely it will occur less often.  I went through my own (very messy) plug-ins file and I am about 95% certain I do not have any of the known causes, but no one knows of course about the unknown causes. 

So, I finally completed the creation of my regional composite map, made from screen captures of the in-game data maps.  On a large region like mine, this is a very tedious process...extremely boring.  However, these base maps of each city tile and the entire region as a whole, can be invaluable both for planning out your cities and region, as well as for use with future "road maps" to include in an MD, so the heavy time commitment is worth it, in my opinion.  This is what my region map looks like:



There are many ways to manipulate this map, as you all will see as time goes on (and assuming you continue to read this MD).  David Edgren (dedgren), who authors the Three Rivers Region project (and if you haven't checked out THAT beauty, you should) has a bunch of map making tutorials in his 3RR MD, which is where I learned how to do this.  I'm going to have to go back and review some of his other mapping tutorials as I go along, because I've never really gotten much further with my mapping than this initial stage.

So, the first step in developing a region is, for me anyway, creating the natural environment.  I don't build anything until the landscape is 100% complete through out the entire region.  That means I do all my terraforming first, but I decided that with this region, I am not going to God Mode terraform anything at all.  It's just too different of a landscape and I think it will make for an interesting project to leave the basic landforms exactly the way they are.  I'll have to push stuff around once I start building, but for now, I'm leaving it just the way it is. 

After terraforming, the overlying terrain needs to be decided, which is why I spent so much time and effort on terrain mods.  In fact, over the past few days I am revisiting terrain mods and have new stuff to share, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.  I haven't changed my mind about using the Missouri Breaks mod, but I still have some tweaking to do before I am 100% happy, so I have been working on that a bit. 

Once the terrain is in place, next comes water features.  It's really very unfortunate that this version of the game does not have tools that allow us to create above sea level bodies of water, but we've managed to fill the gap with plop waters of many, many different kinds.  Someday some bright fan will figure out how to create a realistic water table for this game and then we will be able to kiss our plop waters good bye, but until then, PW is all we have. 

Abajo del Mar is a very interesting region to create water features on as it is, in RL, underwater.  It was exposed to sky and rain at one time eons ago and it did have running water flowing across it during that time, evidence of which is still very obvious.  The major water feature is the huge Hudson River Canyon...a no-brainer for a mayor to figure out where the major river in this region is.  There are in fact several watercourses visible in this landscape.  But most of the watercourses are faint, having been under the sea for many millenia, and subject to being filled up with sediment (and human garbage).  That's one of the reasons making the map above is handy.  It gives a perspective of the region that would otherwise not be available.  It's like a satellite view that allows me to see features I can't otherwise see in game or in the other various thrid party developer tools. 

So once the map was complete, I began to draw in the beginnings of my water features, starting with rivers/steams/creeks:



A couple of things I am thinking about.  In the upper left side of the map there is what appears to be the remains of a fairly large alluvial fan at the base of the cliffs.  There are a couple of deep canyons there that seem to be old watercourses.  However, there are no scars in the lower plains of old rivers other than the alluvial fan.  There is also an escarpment that runs along the base of the cliffs in an east/west direction which currently blocks water running down the cliffs from reaching the plains.  So I am thinking about a couple of things.

First, I am thinking about turning that space between the base of the cliffs and the escarpment into a long narrow lake that parallels the cliffs.  The escarpment has a couple of sizeable breaks in it, so I could exit water there.

I am thinking about turning the area of the alluvial fan into a big marsh.  There is another area at the center left of the map that looks like it may want to become a marsh, too.  I can see watercourse scars in this area leaving the base of the cliffs but then they peter out in the middle of the plains before appearing again a little to the south.  I might make a lake there, instead. 

The big question for me now it how to explain the huge Husdon River Canyon that bisects the map diagonally.  I need water on that upper plateau, but there are no scars up there at all to indicate how water funnelled to that spot for it's descent.  A lake could work, especially if it ran off the NW corner of the map...it's size could be implied rather than actually created within the map boundaries.  A wide, shallow river might work, too, again running off the map. 

It also seems that the head of the canyon would be a perfect place for a large dam...dontcha think?

Time for bed.  I'll try to edit more into this update tomorrow, but the deadline on my work project is rapidly approaching and I need to stay focused on work, so no promises made, no promises broken.

Update 6(b):

Ok, I'm being very bad today because I am still playing when I should be working.  However, I think I can "cheat" a little bit and squeeze in time to complete what I started last night.

So, this next section of this update returns to the subject of terrain mods.  Once I finished rendering the entire region in my modified Missouri Breaks terrain, I sent a photo of the entire region (the same one I posted here) to my good buddy rivit, asking for his comments.  He wrote me back and told me he thought it all looked pretty good, BUT that he had kinda envisioned the upper plateau as drier and rockier.  I agreed with him.  After all, I really had not put very much time or effort into modding the mod...I just quickly picked out a couple of c.p.'s textures that I thought just maybe might sorta work with the top band of dark green at the top of the cliffs.

All I really wanted to do, immediately, was get rid of the snow.  Since then, both since rivit's email and since I rendered the region, I've been peeking in at it off and on and still thinking about how to get the terrain of the upper plateau to display better.  So, with the little bit of spare time I've had over the past few days, I've delved back into both my own terrain mod and the Missouri Breaks mod.  One of the first things I did was create a graphic ini table of the MB mod, using GIMP and the MB ini Excel table.  What I did was create in GIMP a new file that was 4096 x 8192 pixels in size.  I know that the BMP files for each texture used in any terrain mod are all 256 x 256 pixels each.  The ini table is 16 columns wide and 32 rows tall.  So if I want to replace each entry in the ini table with an actual picture of it's representative texture, I need a graphic file that is 16 x 256 wide and 32 x 256 tall, hence 4096 x 8192.

Then, and this was just about as tedious as making the region composite data map, I went cell by cell through the MB ini table as it's represented in excel and created a composite texture map that matched it.  This is what it looks like:



And this is the corresponding excel table:



I have highlighted those cells which contain the snow textures.  Those entries with red text are the bare rock textures.  Now lets look at MY excel table as it currently exists, so illustrate how and where I modded the mod:



I have highlighted those areas different from c.p.'s ini table, areas that I changed.  Once I looked at this again a few days ago, I realized why I still had snow in my region.  If we look at the first excel table and it's graphic representative, we can see there are 3 snow textures: 0x8f which is totally white (all snow), 0xdf which is mostly snow with a little bit of rock showing through, and 0xde which is about evenly divided between snow and rock.  We can also see that there is a band of bare rock without any snow or plant growth: texture 0xef.  I am looking almost exclusively at the upper right hand corners of both the graphic MB and the MB excel. 

Now look at MY excel table and we see that I only subbed out the least snowy texture, 0xde.  I chose to use texture 0xb7 in that area.  We'll get to that in a second.  I also subbed out the 0xef bare rock texture with 0xc2.  Lastly, and I don't know why I did this, I subbed out the 0xd1 texture with 0x97.  Maybe I just liked the 0x97 better, who knows?  Here's a little graphic I made showing my substitutions:



Now, this may get a little bit tricky to follow, but I'll try hard to be clear.  After I made the MB graphic table, I gridded it and gave each cell/texture alpha numeric assignations:



I did this so I could reference the graphic table with the excel table quickly and easily, back and forth.  Problem is, I didn't actually refer to the excel table when I assigned letters and numbers to the rows and columns of the graphic, so of course they don't match each other.  Sometimes I can be such an idiot.  Still...this gridded graphic IS helpful, so long as *I* (and hopefully you) can mentally re-jigger the graphic to correspond to the excel table.  In other words, cell B7 in the excel table is not cell B7 in the graphic.  Given that I only want to revise the upper left corner of any of these maps, I'm not going to bother to go back and rename/renumber the graphic to match the excel.  I know this adds a level of confusion to what is already a kinda deep subject for many and I apologize.  Thankfully, so long as I stay concentrated, I am able to make the adjustments between the tables and figure out what is what.

So.  Today I opened my game to look at those areas of my region where the changes I made to the mod actually display.  Just the top left corner is affected, the far NW corner of the region:



There are 2 bands of textures crossing the far NW corner of the region.  Taking a closer look at where the two textures come together in city tile A3, I see this:



These are textures 0xc2 (upper left) and 0x97 (lower right), both of which are my own subs for 0xef (bare rock) and 0xd1 (grass with small rocks here and there).  My subs for the snow texture 0xde doesn't show up at all, at least not in this area of the region.  I didn't take a thorough look around the region to try to find it, all I care about is that most of the snow is gone.

But an interesting and important clue is still visible.  In scattered places across the area where texture 0x97 is displayed, I found these little patches of another texture:



Looking at both my graphic and the MB excel file, I was able to determine that this scattered detail of texture is 0xd4.  I did not sub that into my mod...that's from the original MB ini table.  So look at the MB excel file and see where 0xd4 occurs.  It only occurs next to areas of bare roock...it's a "transition" texture that breaks up, visually, the change from bare rock to areas where growing stuff is.  You can see it on the graphic, too, if you look.

But try to remember back when I was playing with just plain old solid colors.  Remember I was able to determine that the majority of textures used by the game fall into either the "H" or "I" column of the excel file (when it's set up like the ones above)?  So, let look at my modded ini excel file and see where 0xc2, 0x97, and 0xd4 occur in proximity to each other:



And lookie there (I boxed in the occurance so you wouldn't have to hunt it down).

Another interesting thing to note:  In my region as it is now, that area displaying 0xc2 displays ONLY 0xc2.  There are no other textures in that particlur band.  I think, am pretty sure now, that's because the game (for this region anyway) displays primarily the textures in column "I" and then details that "band" with textures from columns "H" and "J", depending on how the game reads the base terrain conditions (dry or wet). 

I am REALLY tempted to make a little experiment mod that has textures only in those 3 columns and a single solid color in all the rest, just to see what would happen.  I'm betting dimes to dollars that the majority of the test region would be nearly fully textured with just a few areas of solid colors here and there.  I am slo once again tempted to create a 512 item ini table, all just blank white tiles with alpha-numeric indications on them.  It would be really interesting to see what textures are actually used and where. 

But, those kinds of experiments will have to wait for the next time I have too little else to do, which hopefully will be a long time from now 

But I do want to make my mod of the mod better, so I am going to be looking into remodding my mod of c.p.'s mod.  Now that I have a better understanding of how the game assignes textures to places, and having a good overview of all the many c.p. textures available to choose from, it shouldn't take long or be difficult.  And, because the subs I am making only affect a few city tiles in the region, I won't have to rerender all 140 tiles in the game, yay!

Anyway, for those of you interested in terrain mods, I hope this information is useful.  If it bores everyone else, of well, sorry. 

And now I really do have to get back to work!



Lora/LD