The FrankU and Nexis CO-OP

[RickD]

What Mike said. I played around with the farm fields last weekend and they are excellent. 

[FrankU]

Hi Mike and Raphael,

Thanks for the reactions.

Carl/Lowkee33 advised me to put off the shadows of the props in order to make the game less slow on large farm areas. What is your experience? Do my farm fields slow down the game?
I think I will include shadowless props in an update. In this update there will be certain props without shadows and cerrtain props with shadows. But I will add shadowed and shadowless versions of all available props, so that everyone can choose their own preference. As you probably know it's very simple to put off the shadows. It's a small edit in the exemplar file. In fact I edited all available props this morning during one cup of coffe, so the shadowless props are already on my HD. What do you think?

If there is anything else, please let me know. I want to make them as good as possible.
Just don't ask for diagonal versions. I am not going to make them, at least not this year!

Frank

[RickD]

I can not comment on the performance yet. I have not yet built a large farming area with them. My rural town is still dependend on the IR jobs. I will replace the grown farms with your plopabble fields step by step.
With small fields I did not notice a slowdown while scrolling. But my farming tiles already do take ages to load. If the shadows would make this even longer, then I would also support Carl and say "turn the shadows off".

There are only two things I am trying to modify, but this is to my personal preference only: I want to get rid of the flower fields as they do not fit into my region. And I will try if I can manage to move the icons towards the end of the park menu. I do not build farms very often so it is a bit inconvinient to have them at the beginning.

[mike3775]

I have not noticed any slowdown on my system, but I also have 8 gigs of ram and usually the only time SC4 slows down much is when I make a farm field to big(like 1/4 of a large city tile). 

But the lots look great in my game

[mrbisonm]

I myself couldn't make a useful comment on the fieldprops yet simply because I haven't had the time to try them out yet, but I know this for sure, if those fieldprops have shadows, it is most likely to slow down somehow the gameplay.

I am glad to know that you're gonna change the shadows that we can't really appreciate anyways. One thing for sure, they look great for as much as I have seen.



And here is proof that I am still working on the project.....

Fred

[FrankU]

There are only two things I am trying to modify, but this is to my personal preference only: I want to get rid of the flower fields as they do not fit into my region. And I will try if I can manage to move the icons towards the end of the park menu. I do not build farms very often so it is a bit inconvinient to have them at the beginning.

Hi Raphael,
Getting rid of the flower fields is just a matter of deleting teh subfolder "Tulipa".
Changing location ogf hte fields in your menu is a matter of editing the "item order" value in the lot exemplar. You need Reader for that. It's simple.
And thanks for the quick feedback!

Hi mike3775,
Thanks for the feedback

Hi Fred,
WOW! looking good!

[Jack_wilds]

glad to see that you are still plugging away at the farms... it will be a good thing when its all done... concerning the fields, nothing bad to report or complain about as I like them well enough to use... and the crops seems to have a better 'growth' pattern as well... I like the flower fields and the cash crops as well...

[Modernman74]

Hi Frank U
Thanks for the message.
Don't know how to put the picture on here from the SC4 album.
I have sim parcels appear as the tulips grow. I know all the dependancies are installed in the plug in file.

[rooker1]

I have moved this thread here as well because it is FrankU's and mrbisonm's joint effort thread.



Congrats from The SC4D Staff!!

[mrbisonm]

Thanks Robin, it is much appreciated. This is where I will show my models etc and, FrankU will show the advancement of his Dutch farmset.

Here is where I am at the moment. I am about to finalize and pre-testing the first Pack (MFP1-Set1, which contain the major buildings) of models that will be in Frank's hand at the latest next weekend. He will test them again, in his way, and then, if everything is ok, I will continue finishing and rendering the second batch (MFP1-Set2, which contain smaller buildings and other farmdetails).
The second part will be shown here in this thread, while they are being created, rendered, tested and send to Frank, who will also show his work on them as he progresses.

Hope you'll like what you see.

Fred

[FrankU]

Now that we got the attention of all of you I want to start this month with a historic summary and an explanation.

Why do Fred and I make such an effort in making these lots and BATs?
And where do we get our ideas from?

Well in short: we are fascinated by the rural world and we derive our ideas from reality.

OK, here we go! Read this

A brief history of Dutch Farms

1.   The reason why we do this
Because we all know that people do nothing without a purpose it may be possible that you ask yourself: what is the reason that FrankU and Nexis are making such an effort in producing this farms set?
Well, I cannot speak for Nexis/mrbisonm/Fred, but I can surely speak for myself.
About thirteen years ago I got me a new job and I moved into the town I live in now. This job and this town are closely related to the countryside. Before this things like countryside and nature were just "that green rubbish alongside the highway" and I really could not bother about them.
Since 1999 I got fascinated by the interdependency of geomorphology, climate, history, economy and personal taste that shapes the life of farming and the countryside. There is nothing nationalistic or narrow-minded about my interest in the rural areas around me. I hope  . I just know them best and I could surely be as interested in the German, Czech or Italian landscape as I am in the Dutch.
And the fascination for SimCity, should I elaborate about it again? It's the way I can create my own utopia in my own computer, without bothering about bad weather, neighbours making objections, financial restrictions (thanks to the Extra Cheats.dll) and other real life issues. So everything that goes wrong in RL can be countered in SC4.

So the aim is to reconstruct realistic looking farm lots for your game.
Is that possible? I had to work with several restrictions that we all know so well.
First: the orthogonal grid. It is almost impossible to make farm lots with disorderly arranged buildings and props. Apart from some exceptions all models made for SC4 are orthogonal. There is one luck though. In the Netherlands we have the so called "Slagenlandschap". It is a landscape made by men. By digging ditches and canals they made the wet parts dryer. And because digging straight away is the easiest, these landscapes became very orthogonal. Take a look here:



And



The second reason is: I do not BAT. I had to draw the line somewhere and it is here. So I am dependent of the models that are provided by others. This is the main reason why the final set will have such a long list of dependencies.

2.   The land
To understand farms, you need to understand something about the underground: the soil, the water systems, the fertility, etcetera. I am not going to elaborate on it. I'll give you just some small facts.

The land we are talking about is this.



This is the country today. When the first settlers built their dwellings here about 4000 years ago it looked quite different.

More like this, an image of the area around 2750 bC:

It was (and of course is) an estuary of several rivers, of which the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt are the largest. Most parts of this area were marshy, wet, half wet or downright under water. Large parts were flooded twice a day (by the tide) or on a less regular basis when wind and storm threw the waters over the higher areas of this flat marshy region.
What did they want here, these settlers? Well, nobody will be able to ask them, and as they were not able to write we have no diaries or other reports. But we guess that the attraction was the fertility of the lands. The fertile sediments of the rivers gave good opportunities for agriculture. It was the same as in the Nile, the Indus, the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Tigris and other estuaries around the world. And like in all these areas our ancestors had to deal with the water. The easiest way was: build the dwellings on higher grounds. So there the occupation began and you can still see it in our contemporary occupational patterns. People think the Netherlands are flat. They are, and exactly because of that every inch of difference in height is important.

3.   The history of the Dutch farmhouse
The first dwellings archaeologists have found date back until about 4000 years ago in the Bronze Age. They were built of tree trunks and branches. As roofing grass sods or reed were used, which was available around the corner and cheap. The people put four trunks in the ground, laid four branches over them in a square, then laid branches or thin pine trunks in a triangle over them and then closed the roof with sods, reed or thatch.
A bronze age house must have looked something like this.



And the construction looked like this.



In fact the basic principle of this technique is still in use, although since the 1960's concrete and steel took over the traditional way of wooden construction for most contemporary houses and barns.

A modern version of the traditional wood construction looks like this.



In every region of the country typical variants of the basic scheme developed, like dialects of a common language. But you can recognize the base everywhere.
You can see some typical shapes of traditional Dutch farmhouses on the next image. Later I will show images of real farmhouses. Maybe someone feels like Batting one?



So the first farm houses were tiny shelters for a family. And their cattle. Because from the beginning the people and their cattle lived together. They could keep an eye on each other and keep each other warm in cold winters. I presume there always was some kind of fence between them, though.
So the people lived in the front part and the cattle and storage rooms were in the back. The farm was always built with the materials that were available at the time and were affordable for the owner. Poor farmers used wood and reed from the surroundings. Richer farmers could afford bricks for the walls and sometimes even tiles for the roofs. Often you see that the front is built with more expensive materials than the back. In the front, where the people lived, the wealth was shown to the outer world.

There always is a visible division between the front and the back part of the farm house. This division is important in understanding the building style of the Dutch farm house.

In the layout of the modern farm you still see this same division. The wife rules the front of the house and the yard, the back is for the husband. The wife does the housekeeping and takes care of the children and the personal food supply. She also takes care of the presentable appearance of the farm. She cleans, she keeps the fancy front yard with lawn, flowers and other beauties. She keeps a small vegetable garden, maybe some chicken and a fruit yard.
The back of the farm is a whole different story. Here you find the cattle, the haystack, the machinery shed and everything else that is needed to run the farm. The larger the farm the more sheds and barns you find here. This is the industrial part of the farm.
This division is shown in the next image.



It is not really a typical layout, but it shows the elements that can be found on the farm and their locations.

I have three examples of real farms where you can see some of this.

The original farmhouse is the lower left building. Here you can see the carefully designed and kept garden.



Here you see the horse area, the front yard and the obviously utilitarian setup in the rear parts of the compound.

09C

And here you see another setup from the back. You can see the flowers and shrubs of the front yard and to the right you can see the garden with a table: part of the front area of the compound. The contrast with the concrete and the clean area in the back is clear.



This is it for today. The next update I will show you some of the historical developments of farms and their compound, the increase of size and the way I used this for making the five growth stages in my set.
Todat there were no SC4 images. But these will come next time, I promise!

[mave94]

Very interesting to read, Frank! Keep on going.
I hope I can bat some farms sometime.

[rooker1]

Very interesting read indeed and an awesome start to your month.

Robin

[noahclem]

Great story, history, background, and explanation Frank     Well-composed and a pleasure to read. Should be a great month 

[mike3775]

Thanks for the history lesson Frank.   


A similar style house was initially built in the old west of the United States back in the 1800's as well.  They were called dug outs or even sod houses, and that is the biggest pet peeve many historians have when it comes to TV shows from the period, because 90% of the time, when homes were initially built in the midwest, there was not enough wood around to build the traditional wood homes, so they built into the ground.

[kelis]

Very interesting to read Frank !! I like the first picture with those Dutch farms...I love that landscape, when I'm in Spain I miss it, I miss to be in Assen with the bike walking through the surrounding. Assen is a beautiful part in Holland where you can see some interesting farms and the landscape is pretty 

Looking forward to more Frank and I'm waiting for that set

# Jonathan.

[mrbisonm]

Great Intro Frank, interesting, it even gave me some more inspirations, maybe an "add-on pack" for later. Next week I will have a first peak of the Staphorst homes that I have been working on three weeks ago, now finishing the first pack first. We will all see the details this weekend, ........quite a few, I may say.
Meanwhile, Frank and I will gladly answer any questions about the project.

Fred

[Jack_wilds]

thats quit the history report on dutch farms... it also speaks to the dutch sensibility in design, method of working the chores and other rural cultural events as well; like the 'dutch farm progress days fair' which I like     as it has everything, good farm eats, the latest and greatest tools and toys, the goofy giant cow, the wayward parking, examples of husbandry etc etc...    this years 'WI-farm progress' is in my county I hope to make it...

[FrankU]

Ah, I suddenly remembered!

I once already did another history. It was about Dutch dikes. Take a look at this thread!
It could be nice for anyone who likes to read a bit more on Dutch history while Fred and I are preparing the next update.

Thanks for the friendly feedback, by the way.

Frank

[mrbisonm]

I just finished the 4 models that have the LOD problems and I surely hope that THIS TIME I fixed the darn thing for good, because there will be NO follow up!......lol.... now, later tonight I will see to the other remaining 6 problems that FrankU found while testing, some offset and texturing problems, most of them easier to "fix". I might be a little late on this one, maybe Monday night. Sorry.

Meanwhile I have added another model, well more or less other texture that is. (Couldn't help it when I went through my "texture book") Hope you'll enjoy it, it's the M4-B Model. The M4-A is the original.

Fred