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Xannepans creations

Started by xannepan, October 05, 2007, 06:52:11 AM

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Should the weather plugin include a version with destructive effects (e.g. associated with tornados and lightning)?

Yes
41 (57.7%)
No
30 (42.3%)

Total Members Voted: 71

Voting closed: January 26, 2013, 06:50:01 AM

NCGAIO

#1160

I think not ... at least until  can understand what resets the sea level!

xannepan

Exploring some possibilities.
Maybe.. just maybe sparkles will be possible too... It may require some random invisible lot plopping (under water ;)

MandelSoft

Looks kind of similar to sawas, which are used for rice cultivation...
Lurk mode: ACTIVE

xannepan

Yep Maarten, that was what I intended with a quick & dirty attempt.

Quick question: does anybody know which property in which exemplar makes ploppable boats appear on the water surface?

Yild

DAMN Manager download: at LEX at STEX
DAMN Manager support thread: at SC4Dev

Girafe

Mountains lakes now feasible  :)

The Floraler

This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten, feel the earth move, and then...

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *    *   *   *   *   *    * 

sunv123

Now I don't have to make rivers at sea-level. :thumbsup: This is great!
Provo, a city apart Updated July 4.


NCGAIO

#1168

I think this should be more useful in this case ..

HOW TO FLOAT YOUR BOAT
( or... Bats on the Water )


gn_leugim

everytime I came here is to be like:  :o :o :o :o :o

whatevermind

So, I downloaded the Poseidon mod and tried it out.

Technical Check
First, and I know this is very early in the development of the mod, so some of these are probably just not gotten to yet. The lot still retains the text and properties of the "small flower garden" it was made from, including desirability and demand impacts, plop and monthly costs, etc. I'm also curious about the inclusion of a rain tool terrain brush in the mod, what part does this play? Do the effects require this to work? Would the default rain tool in SC1.dat work for this?

Empty City Check
Next, I tried it out on a blank city tile, and it mostly acted as I had expected, being familiar with the rain tool, but I'll get into some of the oddities anyways.

As expected, when the water is raised, it doesn't have any edge at the edge of the city tile, showing instead a gap between water level and the terrain below:


Likewise, when you raise or lower terrain under an area that has water from this mod on it, you get the sharp edges and "erased" water typical of the tool:


Something I hadn't expected is that not all of the land below water level gets covered up:

That image shows two areas that were below water level, but stayed dry. These also show the water cliffs at the edge of the higher water really well. (For what it's worth, all this testing was done with the Sudden Valley terrain and water).

The next shot just shows some mountain forming in a city that was previously completely covered with water from the mod:


The next two images just show the remaining bits of water left after raising the mountains and erasing most of the water the mod had placed. Note at this point I'm pretty sure the lots had been destroyed.



These show the water gap at the edge of the city and the water cliffs as well.

An interesting note about the water, is that when the slivers of remaining water are thin enough, they can be seen through. This is probably due to the transparency settings.


I tried a parting of the seas as well, raising a small strip of land out of an otherwise underwater area, and this is one shot of the results, pretty much as expected:


My next test consisted of trying out creating water at two different elevations, so I carved out a water in some high ground, and filled it with water. That went as expected, and the river filled beautifully. I then lowered a corner of the city down to sea level to get a comparison going. One interesting effect of this (other than it actually worked - multi-level water!  ;D) was that when sea level water was introduced to the city, the high level river made with this lot got edge of city water gradient as well, and the usual gap had disappeared.


The Great Flood and the Wrath of Poseidon
Next up was a check on an existing city. Well, I built a small test city and then started playing with this mod. Here's the city just before placing the lot in the river that you can see kind of winding through the city, separating the northwest corner from the rest of the city.

As you can see, I also included a corner of sea level water to watch if/how that interacted with the mod. I also specifically built some zones and a road and a powerline across the riverbed to see how they would be impacted by being in the way of the water.

Then I placed the lot in the river, and this is what happened:

So far, so good. The houses in/near the riverbed were destroyed, this was expected. There were some landslides and dezoning that occurred in the industrial area near the river bend. This mod has some terrain raising/lowering effects that I hadn't expected, and this was the result. Initially it was limited to a few localized areas and only took a few buildings out. Interestingly, the trees in the riverbed survived. In general, trees were not impacted by rising water.

One thing I had not expected was that the road across the river was not destroyed. In fact the sims kept using it. I ran the game for over a year afterwards to see if this was just network simulator lag, but they just kept on driving through the river.

The powerlines next to the road were destroyed where they crossed the river, however. I ended up just putting a windmill on the other side to keep those farms powered through the testing.

Everything looked good, so I saved the game. That raised the water level:

By this point, the city is in disaster stage, the power plant is flooded and powerlines all destroyed. Landslides and the resulting damage are increasingly widespread. The power plant area (bottom center of city) seems to be sinking, though it could just be a visual effect of the rising waters. The city was not flat, so it's hard to judge apparent sinking unless there is visual damage (such as dezoning).

Here's a closeup of the area around the power plant. You can see the landslides in the industrial area becoming larger. The farm at left also looks steeper than it had been. However, farms don't seem to be destroyed by rising water, they just flood and pollute. The water takes on whatever water pollution existed on tiles it covers, so agricultural areas get really nasty really fast. The residential area around the cemetery has suffered a good bit of destruction as well.

Another oddity becomes visible in this image - I think this related to the LOD issue you had mentioned earlier, in that the ploppable buildings in particular seem to stay "dry" even when they are far under water, see the coal plant as an example.

This is the riverfront neighborhood from earlier, the one built partially into the riverbed. It is now even further underwater. This would have been a good time to use some boat MMP's in retrospect.


Saving the game again raised the waters again. Call in the national guard, this city's in some real trouble now. Survivors have been ordered to evacuate the area, search and rescue teams dispatched to low-lying areas.

You can see from this image that this put the water level high enough to flood into the sea level lake in the corner, causing the water level there to rise to match. Interestingly, streets seem to flood before the zones next to them.

Sims arriving at the fire station for help are out of luck, it's under water. An emergency shelter is set up on the upper floors of the police station across the road.


At this point, the water level seemed to keep on rising:

Given enough time it did eventually cover just about the entire city.

So, finally saving and exiting this city, I reloaded it and found that the water level had reset to where the lot had initially put it, contained in the river bed. The destruction from the flood, however, remained. The power lines and water pipes were gone, as were several buildings. Ploppable civic buildings and roads and rail and farms seemed to be unaffected throughout. I ran a few more tests to see what all would cause the water level to jump, and it seemed to boil down to two causes:


  • Using the water pipe underground view, or
  • Saving the game.

One of the weird parts of all this was that some areas underwater got destroyed, and others didn't. My guess is that it was really the raising/lowering of terrain that did the damage, and the water did nothing (except the water pipes, that I can't explain with landslides). There were also some interesting graphical glitches to the whole experience, which can kind of be seen in the above pictures. Mostly it involved those buildings that stayed dry underwater having sides that allowed you to see under the water. Particularly once the runaway water level rise started this became more noticeable as each building slowly succumbed to the flood. The graphical oddities all seem to be normal from what I've seen of the rain tool though, and are probably just in the clunky functionality of that and nothing that could be solved with or attributed to the mod.

Destroying the Poseidon lot caused saving and water pipe viewing to work normally again, as expected. Saving and reloading after destroying the lot caused the water levels to all return to normal.

Conclusions
The mod is highly volatile, but useful. For creating surface water in a MD or a city you're actually playing, you might want to plop the lot, take your pictures, then destroy the lot before saving. Not sure why saving caused the water to rise, but the destruction it causes is very real. On the other hand, if you're looking for a flood disaster, this is perfect for that!  :D  I had a lot of fun playing with this one. The flood disaster is one I had always wished they had kept in SC4, and now we have a way to do it with these amazing lots!

I hope you find all that to be useful. I can send you the full set of unedited pics (70 total) and the unabridged notes to go with them if you want, just PM me an email address. Keep up the great work!  ;D

xannepan

#1171
Wow, thanks for the torough testing. Especially the differences in behavior between MMPs, plopabble, growables etc are interesting to dig in too... Also I had noticed road indeed go under water, but then again bridges are destroyed. There may be some interesting learnings. Anyway your post is going to be very useful for me!

Many of the issues are however because of the water effects (actually a terrain brush) itself. And this brush unforntunately is hardcoded. All the effect dir can do is refer to the terrain brush and tweak some of it's properties.

My biggest surprise (and worry) however is the raising water level each time you save and reload the game. I hadn't noticed that and I'll do some testing later today. If I cannot disable that (and to be honest I don't think I can) it may be a show stopper for this mod... :( 

Edit:

Well I have tested it an it's bad but then again not as bad as I initially feared. Apparently, the save behavior is different then the
save-exit-reload behavior. What happens is that each time when you reload or save the game the effect is re-activated again and when you exit the game all water is 'destroyed'. Not a problem if you exit the game and then reload. Actually in that case it is exactly the behavior that is needed to make the water reappear again, because once you exit it is destroyed. Without the exit however the water is not destroyed, but saving does cause reactivating the effect --> water level raises.

However in my new version I could tweak some properties so that it never raises the water level beyond the "enclosing edge" of a valley (their is a mathematical term for this, but I forgot  &Thk/() For example, the water in my rice fields picture posted above will never flood the city no matter how many times I save.
Would I have created a deep valley that initially was only filled half way, then repeated saving will raise the water level up to the point where the valley is completely filled.

How to deal with it then. Well today I will see what is still possible by tweaking properties of the lot, the brush and the effect dir. I still do not understand however what the meaning is off all the unknown parameters :(

The worst case "solution" is to initially plop not one lot, but as many lots that are needed to fill a valley completely up to the edge. Once the maximum is reached saving will not cause it to fill any further.

Well guys, it is a setback.. but as I have mentioned in a post at simtropolis: I choose to think in terms of possibilities rather then in limitations and accept the fact that this mod will not make everyone happy ;)






gn_leugim

that is very nice, nice testing Whatevermind  :thumbsup:

mave94

Wow, that looks so great! Like a wish come true: would this mean we can build "below sea level"?  :) :)

noahclem

Nice work on the testing there whatevermind  :thumbsup:  Hopefully a number of these shortcomings can be mitigated. And there's a bit of great news here too: If the roads aren't destroyed by water then 0-slope or viaduct-based bridges should work in these new waters....

xannepan

#1175
Quote from: noahclem on January 27, 2013, 04:22:16 AM
: If the roads aren't destroyed by water then 0-slope or viaduct-based bridges should work in these new waters....

Well unfortunately they don't. I think it has to do something with the pylons(support pieces) of any bridge that is destroyed. Perhaps there is a property in those support pieces that can be tuned, I haven't looked into it yet.

I have been tweaking the effect from early this morning until now... Without much success :(
Yes, sometimes the water level is limited to the enclosed valley edge... But sometimes it isn't. I think it has to do with how deep the valley is, but also with how steep the valley is and its width. Not sure if I can ever tune this in such way it will behave in a predictable way, and that is really the least that has to be achieved before this can ever be released officially.

I just wished we could have a peak at the game's source code... Not to modify it (I know that that is not allowed) but at least to learn from what the effect properties mean and how these effect properties are processed....

Well anyway I am not giving up yet... But very close to that point nevertheless.

xannepan

Here is a new version of the poseidon mod. I am affraid it still has many of the same issues. There are some differences though

1) There are three lots now, refering to three different brushes. The brush exemplar are easy to edit in Ilive's Reader. Esp the comp1strength and comp1width properties control much of the behavior of the brush (the last of the 5 values for those props is relevant).
2) The lots now have their own custom icons (very crude, yet easy to recognize) in the park menu now
3) I removed the base texture of the lots, which prevents the lot from "demolishing" the water above the tile once the game is saved and/or reopened.
4) I added a pulsating marker that shows up on top of the water surface, so the lot is a bit easier to find back in case you'd want to demolish it. ( &idea: perhaps I could use this texture based effect as the bases for more lively water... well.. first things first)

I created a simple video of the mod in action.

http://youtu.be/RY4hhJRGARU

Note:

I found out the best way to use the poseidon lots is by plopping them several times in the same valley, until the water level reaches a max. As a rule of thumb it seems to hold that the deeper the valley, the more lots you'd need to plop.
Once water level doesn't rise anymore saving the game won't cause the water level to rise any further either. That will "solve &mmm" the issue whatevermind mentioned in his ellaborate test report.

Plop the lots only in valleys/holes/canyons which don't leak. In most cases  (%wrd) I have seen this should prevent the entire map from flooding.

For testing you may want to use CTRL+ALT+SHFT to get back to the god mode menu, then use the raise or lower terrain option to "clear" the map from water. This way you can start over again without having to save and reopen. Obviously you shouldn't do this in a city you want to preserve as it will destroy it.

I appreciate your feedback off course, even better any finding from tweaking the brushes in the reader. :thumbsup:

Indiana Joe

Sounds like some awesome progress.  But on a side note, I really like that idea of "more lively water."  I've always wondered if that sparkling effect that appears on the waters surface can be turned into a moving wave texture effect.  Do me a favor and write this down on a sticky note; you should come back to it once you're done with Poseidon.

rambuckel

All these mods you created in such a short time are really brilliant. I'm much too birdbrained in all those technical issues to understand what you're talking about but I'll nevertheless try to use your wonderful creations ...

Keep up your great works!
Angels can fly because they don't take themselves too serious!


HurricaneMod10

Wow! Areas flooded where the depth was less than 0.01m are not shown up to approximately the water depth of 0.01 m (1cm) by the "MinWaterDepthForDeepSeaBedTexture". Similarly in areas where flood plain depths may be less than 0.8 m (1 ft.) are likely to get the deep with surface river flooding up to this water depth we use deep seabed texture for terrain (No texturing beyond that depth).