Three Rivers Region

[Pat]

David its hard to believe that its been almost what 3 yrs of 3RR wow!!! Talk about amazing feets and Rails and Roads and Tracks lol OK bad puns I know what can I say lol.... You sir are a true master of the game and give us all so many more reason to play this game still today and for that I thank you!!! I also thank you for the friendship that you have given too!!!!

Patrick


New Edit: LoL Ryan thanks I didnt even notice that ringing of the bell there!!!

[Ryan B.]

Ding!  Nice ring of the 'Double-O' bell, Pat!

All these rail improvements make me wish Sims would use the rail a bit more than they do.

[Battlecat]

Three years is an amazing accomplishment for this project!  I'll guess February 25th for the day you hit 250,000 page views.

As for the recent beta rail textures I've noticed on oddity in the shading department, and I'd like to find out if anyone else can see it. 

When you're at zoom 1 and 2 with the latest version the orthogonal rail sections seem just a touch darker in color than everything else.  It's hard to tell for sure, but I think it's the gray color between the rail ties that is the culprit.  This issue doesn't extend to the diagonal sections. 


I wouldn't have noticed it except that on zoom 3 or larger, the same sections of track seem much lighter in color than every other section of track out there.  I'm really not sure what's causing it.  This issue also doesn't extend to the diagonal sections. 


Anyhow, I hope this helps!  Other than this issue, all the testing I've done with the new textures looks excellent. Can't wait to see everything else that will be coming out with the STR!

[CaptCity]

Battlecat...

You might try the SFBT Rail Texture Mod to match things up a bit better on those far away zooms.

[girlfromverona]

Ok, my guess for when we'll hit 250k page views is:

24th February at 3pm (Alaska time)

[jpj_starfleet]

Dedgren... I found something interesting while playing around with the rails, when you cross two diagonal rail lines the system wants to automatically put in connecting tracks but not when you cross two straight rail lines however what's most interesting is the connecting tracks only show up on zoom levels 3 and above, has this always been a Maxis thing or a problem with the new 3RR upload? other then that every else is perfect!





EDIT:  Noop- that's another bug to squish.  I'm keeping track. Oh, and David, please, my friend. -DE

[Jonathan]

BattleCat, you need to download the files from David's posts a couple of posts above you, and The SFBT Rail Texture mod Is probably incompatible with David's

Jonathan

[BarbarossaS]

I've been following this MD for a while now, but always was more of a lurker. The chance of being a part of 3RR was to good to resist tough! 

So: my guess is that you'll hit 250k views on the 27th of February at 4 pm

[Korot]

As victor of the last contest, I have to take part in this contest as well, right? So my guess is 23 February 15.39h GMT+1, which relates to 23 February 5.39h Alaskan time (GMT-9), asuming that the page view is around 1000 a day (and, this being a contest making people wonder how far we are at page views, is quite possible)

Current pageviews: 227767

[Andreas]

BattleCat, you need to download the files from David's posts a couple of posts above you, and The SFBT Rail Texture mod Is probably incompatible with David's

Not exactly "incompatible", but as David changed the look of this particular texture, it still looks like the Maxis equivalent if the SFBT mod is installed. I prepared a fix for this already, but at the moment, I'm not sure how to release it, since David is revamping the entire rail textures. I guess I could attach a small DAT with the updated textures here in the forums, and remove that later if another version of the SFBT Rail Texture Mod is going to be released.

[metarvo]

Since we've got another contest here...

I predict 3RR will hit 250,000 page views at 15th February at 5 am (Alaska Time).

[CaptCity]

BattleCat, you need to download the files from David's posts a couple of posts above you, and The SFBT Rail Texture mod Is probably incompatible with David's

Not exactly "incompatible", but as David changed the look of this particular texture, it still looks like the Maxis equivalent if the SFBT mod is installed...

Hmmmm... I'm confused, now. I've been using the Darker Texture.dat file of the SFBT mod with no problem. Without it I do get the different shades. I guess I may have missed a file somewhere. Off to check...

[Jonathan]

I'm confused as well, seeing as they both are replacing the same thing, it will depend on which loads last, so they should be incompatible, I don't have the SFBT Rail Mod installed and my textures are the same darkness everywhere.

EDIT: I just realised I had a previous version of David's mod which included some textures that aren't in the latest download, like the straight tile. So there are still some missing textures,

Jonathan

[CaptCity]

I'm confused as well, seeing as they both are replacing the same thing, it will depend on which loads last, so they should be incompatible, I don't have the SFBT Rail Mod installed and my textures are the same darkness everywhere.

EDIT: I just realised I had a previous version of David's mod which included some textures that aren't in the latest download, like the straight tile. So there are still some missing textures,

Jonathan

So, the latest link for the new rail textures doesn't have orthogonal track textures? That makes sense then. I've just checked and rechecked, and, still, if I take out the SFBT mod, I get the exact situation that Battlecat mentioned. With the mod, I don't. However, after looking a bit closer at some of my images, I do notice a slight difference on orthogonal tracks even with the SFBT mod.

As for loading the SFBT mod... I've got it so David's new textures were loading after the SFBT mod. So David's were replacing those except for those orthogonal tracks.

CaptCity

[Andreas]

Oh well, I guess I should clear that up a little. The SFBT Rail Texture Mod is basically two mods in one. There's one file that makes the zoom 1 to 4 Maxis rail textures darker, this was done because all custom rail textures look darker than the Maxis textures in zoom 1 to 4. I didn't include darker zoom 5 textures, though, since they are the base for the smaller zoom levels anyway. The rest of the files add wealth-dependent rail textures to the game - i. e. the rails will have a grass or concrete base texture, depending on the adjacent zones.

The new NAM includes modified textures for the diagonal rail textures, as well as the rail crossings, created by David. Obviously, the zoom 1 to 4 textures are darker as the Maxis textures, this is why a NAM installation without the darker textures from the SFBT mod looks odd in zoom 1 to 4. Installing the darker textures from the SFBT mod will fix this, with one exception: The diagonal/diagonal rail crossing texture was modified to remove those superfluous rail curves - obviously, those will still show up if the SFBT mod is installed (and loaded after then NAM, as it is mentioned in the readme file).

Now what David is doing right now is modifying the complete set of Maxis textures - this set will do the same as the darker rail textures from the SFBT mod, so those two are basically incompatible with each other, as they contain the same texture IDs. The only difference is that David's mod also contains new zoom 5 textures. So far, no wealth-dependent textures have been made for those, but it is under consideration. It's a relatively simple task, actually, but rather time-consuming, since each texture has to be processed six times in order to cover all possibilities (low/medium/high wealth grass and concrete).

So if you want to use David's updated rail texture set, please remove the SFBT mod for the time being. If you just use the NAM (with the updated rail crossings), you can wait for an update of my SFBT Rail Texture Mod, which should repair the oddities in zoom 1 to 4. I guess we shouldn't have included David's updated textures into the NAM, but back then, nobody envisioned that a complete makeover of the Maxis rail textures would be done very soon.

[niktest]

Hello!
   I found some other missing textures. Most of them are related to parallel tracks, both orthogonal and diagonal. Were these tracks already re-textured? Have a look!

Anyway, wonderful work!
   Nicola

P.S.
In order to perform the test, I only use the NAM and the beta textures coming within the package.

[CaptCity]

Thanks for the clarification, Andreas. I think I misunderstood what textures were included in David's texture beta, and I'm sorry if I've caused any headaches here...

CaptCity

[Battlecat]

The images above do use the latest release by Dedgren (090131-02.dat).  I can also confirm that I did not have the SFBT rail texture mod installed.  So I downloaded the SFBT rail texture mod this morning, installed it so that it would be loaded before the new textures from Dedgren.  The brightness issue is now gone, resulting in:


As explained in the readme for the SFBT mod, Maxis has some weird brightness enhancing effect that is applied to the default rail segments only and wouldn't change any modded textures.  While it looks better on the further zoom, the orthogonal segments still looks slightly different on the closer zoom, but it's pretty hard to see.  Of course if the orthogonal segments are being changed by the SFBT mod, that's not entirely surprising. 

Based on the statement by Andreas above, I'll be removed the SFBT mod while testing out this mod.  Thanks for the clarification Andreas! 

[Jonathan]

I found the missing Orth Texture(That's all the dat contains, only the orth texture), it's from an earlier upload and is attached below:

Jonathan

[mayorfabz]

A Contest !
My guess is February the 25th, 2:20 pm Alaska time

Kudos on the big texture hassle-ridding

Frozen and snowy greetings from Montreal (-15°C)
Fabien