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Three Rivers Region

Started by dedgren, December 20, 2006, 07:57:49 PM

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Ryan B.

#5000
I just thought I'd pop my head in and let everyone know that 3RRDOT may have something to show off very soon.

Stay tuned, because this stuff will really get you turning in the right direction!  ;)

EDIT:  I suppose a teaser is in order . . .

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the new standard of design for traffic signals in 3RR.

Masochist

Quote from: burgsabre87 on October 01, 2008, 10:11:38 PM
I just thought I'd pop my head in and let everyone know that 3RRDOT may have something to show off very soon.

Stay tuned, because this stuff will really get you turning in the right direction!  ;)

EDIT:  I suppose a teaser is in order . . .

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the new standard of design for traffic signals in 3RR.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the 5000th reply (5001st comment) made here in 3RR! &apls  &apls  &apls  And a good one: Those are the type of streetlights I see in Texas.  They look great, especially with the turn sign!

(Testing the FARR tonight, will have pics soon)
(Under Construction)

Heblem

#5002
Congrats for 5k posts!  :thumbsup:
... also 140k views...

threestooges

Milestones indeed. Nice work on the signals Ryan. I was wondering when those'd pop up here. Also, good going on the 5,000th post.

Joan, nice work testing the proximity parameters. I hadn't thought to try the large 90 curve overlap, but it is really neat that it works that way. I'll have to go back and try the same with the rail curve. I wasn't able to get it to do that, but it may have just been the positioning.

David, congratulations on all the work you've done: in 3RR, at SC4D, just in general. 5,000 posts down, and here's to another 5,000 more to come.
-Matt

bat

#5004
Fantastic new pictures there of your tests, @ all!

&apls And congrats on more than 5000 replies and 140267 (+) views!! &apls
&apls Also congrats on 251 pages!!! &apls

Looking forward to more...

In my MD Capporth City are 3 pictures with stuff from FAR/FARR!

Simpson

Great tutorial David  :thumbsup:
And also some very nice pic  &apls

BTW this is my 901th posts  :)
My new city is now here
The région of Kaikoura

Teaser of Lopsas[+ How did I do it?]:Lopsas

art128

I'll take a quiet life... A handshake of carbon monoxide.

Props & Texture Catalog

metarvo

This is a very realistic traffic light, burgsabre87.  :thumbsup:  It's just one of the things that can be done for David to commemorate this grand milestone.  Although, if I know David, he'll celebrate by doing something totally mind-blowing for us.

Congratulations on 5,000 posts, David.

&apls
Find my power line BAT thread here.
Check out the Noro Cooperative.  What are you waiting for?  It even has electricity.
Want more? Try here.  For even more electrical goodies, look here.
Here are some rural power lines.

thundercrack83

I could not think of a better way to ring in 5000 than with Ryan's fantastic traffic lights! Excellent work there, Ryan!

And congratulations to you David--5000+ posts? That's just mind-blowing, my friend. 3RR is a world all its own!

Dustin

Grneyes

WOW! 5000 posts!!  &apls &apls &apls

MaryBeth

emilin


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j-dub

#5011
Quote from: ben_meissner
Zones grow on the FAR! (not sure why the middle set of three residential zones worked while the outside one did not.)

It is because how they are pathed. The houses on the ends with the no car zot are two tiles away from the pathing on the road, so since the road has a tile with no pathing between the edge of it, no access. Maybe a sidewalk straight away FAR piece with pathes for those empty end tiles should be considered?

nerdly_dood

Yes my testing indicated early on that zones DO grow on FAR pieces. That was one of my first tests in fact - to see if (1) zones would grow along a FAR and (2) to see if the residents could use that FAR to get to work (the indstrial zone was along a standard orthagonal road)

Now all I have left to wait for is FAR with Euro textures. (Maybe with a solid white line instead of dashed just to make it interesting...)
My days here are numbered. It's been great and I've had a lot of fun, but I've moved on to bigger and better things.
—   EGO  VOBIS  VADELICO   —
Glory be unto the modder and unto the fun and unto the city game!

savagemuppet

#5013
Hi David

I have been following this progress as a guest but have finally signed up.  This work you are doing is absolutely brilliant I dont know how else to put it.

I have been playing SC4 for years and have been so annoyed at roads etc conforming to a grid.  Recently I tried to start making a scale model of where I live using Google maps a a guide but became stuck when I couldn't get roading right due to the dam grid. Hence when I stumbled across this forum.

I would love to test the roads and start posting pics of the Google map and what I have done.  If you have enough volunteers for testing I'll wait for the release.

Again some brilliant work - ever considered taking on the challenge of writing your own SC version and selling it?  You'd be a millionaire in no time!

Cheers
Richard

EDITRichard, thanks for the great first 3RR/SC4D post.  It's always a real honor when I see one of those.  I'm headed for bed, but will shoot you by email a beta test set of the WC/FAR/FARR in the (US) morning.  Thanks again! -DE

dedgren

#5014
Over the past 48 hours or so I've been engaging, as it were, in a labor of love...

You see, I had some time on my hands.  As you know, I take 3RR with me on the road when I travel, which is fairly frequently.  Right now, in fact, I'm in Montana, and will be here through the end of next week.  My 3RR and SC4D stuff (data files) winds up, then, in three different places- on the home desktop, on my trusty laptop (a year old, I think, today!), and on a terabyte capacity Western Digital portable hard drive.  Now, as you can guess, moving all these files back and forth, creating working folders, saving copies of things on one computer but not the other, that sort of thing, created what we used to call back in my army days a "goat rope."  I had this sense that I had about four copies of everything, and trying to fix that situation by trying to guess which files to move around wasn't getting me anywhere.

So, before I left for Montana, I copied every single 3RR and SC4D-related file I could find into a single huge folder on the WD drive.  I wasn't surprised to find out that it was almost 80 gigabytes in size.  There were not just thousands of folders in it, but tens of thousands- I kid you not.  To be precise, I had created 185,344 files in 41,562 folders.  Things were clearly out of hand, and far beyond any ability of mine to simply "move things around."

So, I went back and found my good old "Doublekiller" program.  You've heard about it in 3RR before- about the third or fourth post I made over at 3RR-ST I talked about using it to clean up my plugins folder.  The program basically sorts through your files and identifies "doubles" (or, in my case, triples, quadruples, and worse).  It then gives you a list along with the ability, with the push (click, actually) of a cyberbutton, to make them all go away.

So, I ran Doublekiller on a copy of my mammoth all-in-one file.  It took hours to sort the files, hours more to compare sizes and CRC-32 checksums (whatever they are- reading about them has this technique sounding like a good way to make sure a data file is an exact duplicate byte-for-byte copy of another file... or not!) and more hours for the program to delete all the duplicates, because that's precisely what I did late in the day and into the night yesterday.  When Doublekiller was finally finished this morning, I had about 43,000 files left, but still 41,562 folders, most of which I figured were empty.

So, I found a second utility, the appropriately named "EmptyFolderNuker."  It does pretty much what its name says- run it and all those empty folders go away to the recycle bin with just a little bit of user assistance.  It took hours this morning... well, you've heard the story before.

So here's a comparison between my original "SC4 Master File" in all its bloated glory and the copy of it after two days on the 3RR Diet Plan.



Ha!  A nice slim and trim 30 gig of files in about (gulp!  I still have to sort that out) 9,000 folders.  Much better!

Before I forget, if you would like to DL Doublekiller, which is freeware, for yourself, it's here [linkie].  I've used it for years- it's invaluable.  EmptyFolderNuker can be found here [linkie].  It is also freeware, and the developer has done a very nice job with the interface.

So what's the labor of love, you ask?  All that just sounded like labor, period.

Well, you all are aware by this time that I am a huge fan of the seasonal trees created by our resident SC4 Naturalist Brian (c.p./cycledogg).  These trees were released several years ago, and I can't think of anything (except perhaps Brian's Columbus Terrain Mod) that's had a greater impact on the way that I "see" the SC4 outdoors when I am thinking about it.  You've seen many pictures of little more than Brian's seasonal trees and a road or creek here at 3RR.  They amaze me every time I work with them.

Coming up on two years ago, though, Brian improved the trees, mostly by muting the fall colors, which were very bright in a few cases.  Overall, the effect is astounding- the color of a SC4 fall forest is about as close to the real thing as the game can possibly get.  I found myself, though, missing the ability to have trees here or there that were the original bright color, because those are on fall's palette as well.  Because Brian recycled his BATted object TGI numbers, though, it was either one or the other.

Enter me, yesterday.  Quite a while ago, I contacted Brian and asked if I could take the old fall trees and see if I could make them into a stand-alone set that could be used alongside the new ones.  He graciously said yes- and even through in some suggestions as to how that could be done.  At the time, they were Greek to me.

While I was sitting with my computer yesterday as it chugged its way through Doublekiller working on my files, I took out the Brian's first (old set) tree files and started up the Reader.  It took hours of trial and error, but sometime around midnight I arrived at where I wanted to be- we now have two sets of seasonal trees, and I have even aligned and customized each with the types of deciduous flora that is found in 3RR.

Want a look?

This morning I LOTted a mixture of the two sets' trees onto 1x1 transparent base lots.  Then I plopped them in the middle of a game tree forest.



Even from a ways back, you can see the subtle color difference in several of the stands of trees.  In about half, Brian left things be, so here's a closer view of each type of tree.

We'll start with one of my favorites, the cottonwood.



The tree on the left is from the new set.  I would use about nine of them to every one of the way more yellow old set cottonwood, but every once in a while, just like you see outside, a row or group of trees will all just go brilliant yellow at the same time.  I can't wait to do that.

Brian's large and small aspens weren't changed, as best I can tell.





I could only wish for a blazing yellow variety of the large ones.

I use Brian's "Scarlet Oak" for 3RR's Red Maples.



Here, the two trees to the forefront are from the new set.  The much more red old set tree peeks out from behind.  Again, these would show up few and far between, but I am sure will be stunning when they do.

If Brian changed his "Wide Oak" trees, I can't tell.  We call these northern red oaks in 3RR.



When he went on to v.2 of the seasonal trees, Brian added the very worthy (and stunningly modeled) trees.



These are just the sort of big "turns brown in the fall" sorts of trees my midwest woods in Illinois were full of when I was a kid.

We had two big trees in from of my house in Downers Grove.  One was a sugar maple, for which I've adapted Brian's smaller cottonwood.



Once again, the older set is a far brighter yellow.

The other was an elm.  The trunk on the tree in our yard was gigantic- six eight year olds could not circle it with their arms outstretched and hands touching.  Brian's elm tree is just perfect.



The old set tree on the right has that yellow-orange color that I recall very well.  Our elm was one of the holdouts in Northern Illinois against Dutch Elm Disease [linkie], which decimated the ranks of American elms all across the North American continent in the latter half of the 20th Century.

We had burr oaks in the Chicago area, too.  For these, I used Brian's generic "Oak."



Burr oak acorns are remarkable- they are really large and have almost a "furry" cap.  I haven't seen one is about 20 years, but they are unmistakable.

If Brian changed the color of these, it was pretty subtle.

Finally, there's the monarch of the oak kingdom- the white oak.  I've used Brian's "Valley Oak" for these.



The new version is on the left.  This is another one of those where I think having the color variation will really add a lot to the fall scene.

I didn't stop there, though.  Having run out of Brian's seasonal trees, I took a minute to MOD two other trees that I think are essential in any northern latitude SC4 region.  These are ArkenbergeJoe's masterful SFBT birch trees.

Here are the large variety...



...and the medium ones.



I've named them "paper birch" for 3RR's purposes.  They are flat out beautiful in large stands along a game lakeshore.

So, there you have what I've been doing when I haven't been visiting with the boys yesterday and today.  I'll be putting my MOD of these trees up as a set on the 3RREX later this evening.  They will require, of course, that Brian's prop set that includes them [linkie] and the SFBT birch tree set [linkie] be downloaded from the LEX as dependencies.  Brian's old seasonal tree set is incorporated into my MOD.

More great stuff on the way.  Have an excellent weekend!

David

141095
D. Edgren

Please call me David...

Three Rivers Region- A collaborative development of the SC4 community
The 3RR Quick Finder [linkie]


I aten't dead.  —  R.I.P. Granny Weatherwax

Skype: davidredgren

wouanagaine

Lol , I thought my 15 gb of Simcity 4 files where a huge stuff

Can't wait to see all the trees, now that autumn is here again I can wait to get some in SC4



And you're right, sometimes somes are bright yellow

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JoeST

Hey David

@ your multiple file controll problem: you may have heard of things like CVS and subversion (SVN), they are commonly used for big software projects and the like. I recently got into a similar one called Git (now I personaly "dig" it cause its OSS and by Linus Torvalds but) I thought I better suggest it because it tracks changes in folder structures and file changes, and you can simply make a complete copy (for your laptop on the move) and it tracks any changes you make, and then you can simply merge it into the "master branch" (the PC's version) when you get home. You can also simply branch it off at points when you want to incrementally back it up or merge a stable development branch into the current stable backup.

I know, its a bit geeky and/or ott, but it could save the need for pottentialy wasting time (though obviously not today) re-merging after traveling and stuff, (it could also help at "giving out time"  ::) )

Joe
Copperminds and Cuddleswarms

nerdly_dood

O_O 28 gb! my whole hard drive is 40gb, with 20gb taken up by my WORTHLESS! Windows Vista. (Custom-built computer, huge-corporation-built OS) If I could fit 28gb of plugins in my hard drive it would still take about 20-30 minutes to start the game (plus it would set my single gigabyte of RAM on fire and it wold have no room for a hard drive paging file for over-filled RAM)

And those are some AWESOME trees - I'd love to see a time-lapse animated GIF of them changing with the seasons (IF you have the winter and spring versions in addition to summer and fall)


My days here are numbered. It's been great and I've had a lot of fun, but I've moved on to bigger and better things.
—   EGO  VOBIS  VADELICO   —
Glory be unto the modder and unto the fun and unto the city game!

JoeST

Nerdly: you need to upgrade to XP $%Grinno$% and get a bigger HDD ;)

Joe
Copperminds and Cuddleswarms

wes.janson

Being a prarie boy who was transplanted to a rainforest of evergreens I tend to miss how autumn should actually look. Thank you David for such a pleasant reminder.


Henrik Sedin: 82gp 29g 83a 112p - 2009/2010 Art Ross/Hart Trophy winner!