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ÆRDEN ~ new streets!

Started by vortext, May 31, 2013, 11:31:03 PM

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Gugu3


manga rivotra

I really love these 2 meadow.
The work with MMP and obviously yours textures is so delicate and smart.....It's a real pleasure to watch and very inspiring !  &apls &apls &apls

kelis

The work with MMP is... no words for that ! I like how you are doing those angles in your region. It does not looks like simcity 4 with those curves and diagonals lines... Goed gedaan mijn vriend. Groetjes  :thumbsup:
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                                                                                     || Benelux Team || Windows on the World || My Photos on Flickr || Kelis BNL Projects ||

art128

Damn, that really is lovely. The way you make the paths and meadows is just perfect.
I'll take a quiet life... A handshake of carbon monoxide.

Props & Texture Catalog

noahclem

Beautiful work  &apls &apls  It's so impressive how organic and natural these areas appear with your powerful brand of grid-breaking and exceptional use of textures, MMPs, lotting, and other tools. I've only recently started digging through your texture releases in earnest and can't get enough (thankfully they're exceptionally numerous :D ). Congratulations on such a well-earned OSITM--it will doubtless be a week to remember!

c.p.

Congrats on the OSITM &apls

I think you're the king of the early-settlers-meet-the-wilderness theme :thumbsup:

Kergelen

Congrats on the OSITM &apls

Calm atmosphere. The textures looks great.


                                    Links to SC4 websites

vortext

#387


Hi there and welcome to another OSITM feature. Today I'll show a variation of McDuell's terraformer trick which I hope some of you'll find useful. To highlight it's practical application a bit of back story is required, so bear with me.

When I decided I was going to redo the city tile for Traelonisk I wanted to do a couple of things differently. First of all I wanted a proper, functioning seaport and secondly I wanted to showcase the foundations of JENX's medieval models.

In short: I wanted to introduce height differences in the previously flat building area. This meant I needed to re-do the city walls, which in turn would require a lot of high precision terraforming, not to mention fitting custom lots (since these walls are difficult to align without some offset pieces). And as you may have noticed already I'm bit of a perfectionist so this would obviously take more than one evening to get right.

However, with the prop pox fresh in memory I also decided to institute an even stricter 'no mucking about in the region' policy. In other words, all mucking about must be done in a sandbox: either in a copy of the entire region, or in this case, a copy of the single city tile.


Blammo, sandbox region. Let the mucking about commence!


First order of business: prepare the terrain and lot the harbor.


Proposed location for the harbor. Obviously these sims here will have to relocate, that's the price to pay for progress.


After looking at the enablers in the Functional Seaports package I settled on custom seaport #7, though I did change the lot dimensions and increased the capacity a bit. Now you may call this cheating and I guess it kinda is. That's the tricky balancing act when making everything yourself – you could mod all utilities and stuff to have ridiculous capacities for gratis. Then again, where's the fun in that?! I tend to keep things reasonable and in this case I increased the capacity from 560 to 750. So, couple of evenings in and things start to shape up real nice.



And while at it another round of testing growables as well.


The walls were in place, except for one bit because I got tired of fitting diagonals. The port also shaped up nicely and I'd actually plans for another, eye-candy fishing harbor to the left, since that branch of the river goes into the marsh. After giving it some thought, however, I decided two harbours within the city walls was too much, so I closed it off later and made some other changes to the citywall's configuration as well.

At any rate, somewhere along the line I come to realize: there's no way I'm going to be able to replicate all this terraforming in one go for the final build, which is what I initially intended to do.  %wrd

Sh*t. What to do, what do to. .   &Thk/(

Couple of days later and out of the blue I suddenly remember Mcduell's terraformer trick&idea

For those who don't know the trick: the Terraformer allows you to alter the terrain in an already established city without destroying the developments, which McDuell used to create 'tunnels'. However, rather than manually altering the terrain in the Terraformer I wondered: what if I export the terrain of the sandbox city, which has all the necessary terraforming, as SC4M file and then import said SC4M file into an unhampered copy of the city? Would the terraforming carry over without destroying anything?

Why yes, it does!  ()stsfd()


Road tile floating on water, others buried by the changed terrain, and note the front row is actually floating in mid-air! 


So now I had a copy of the city with perfect building grounds. The really scary part was importing this Terraformer green copy back into the region . .


. . . this better work. . .


. . but much to my relief, everything was in working order - no crazy demand fluctuations or anything, and plopping down the walls and harbor was a breeze. Though I should mention a minor annoyance, namely that quite a few stretches of street were 'submerged' below the terrain, like this.




And when I went to rebuild them, this happened:


note the foundations.


I'm guessing this is because I use a really restrictive slope mod and sections like these typically take a bit of brute force. That is: dragging the ortho streets further out than necessary, thus forcing a connection with the diagonal and then bulldozing the ortho stumps, or the other way around. Either way, the end result usually is that the entire stretch ends up being 'unsuitable slope', hence the lack of a wide curve on the left bend.

That being said: if you ever want to do trail-and-error terraforming in an already developed city without (fear of) screwing it over, this seems like a nice method. I'm thinking interchanges, harbors & marina's, building on slopes obviously and what not. Just muck about in a sandbox copy, then use the Terraformer to export the SC4M file with the prepped terrain and import it into the proper build.

And that's it for now, hope you enjoyed it!






Quote from: Girafe on November 24, 2015, 05:06:54 AM
Congrats for the OSITM  &apls &apls &apls

Lovely rural scenes  ;)

Thanks! Scenes wouldn't look half as good without your work!!  :thumbsup:


Quote from: Gugu3 on November 24, 2015, 06:46:58 AM
Great rural scenes! &apls

Thanks you!


Quote from: manga rivotra on November 25, 2015, 01:35:53 AM
I really love these 2 meadow.
The work with MMP and obviously yours textures is so delicate and smart.....It's a real pleasure to watch and very inspiring !  &apls &apls &apls

Thanks you very much for the kind words!


Quote from: kelis on November 25, 2015, 03:12:28 AM
The work with MMP is... no words for that ! I like how you are doing those angles in your region. It does not looks like simcity 4 with those curves and diagonals lines... Goed gedaan mijn vriend. Groetjes  :thumbsup:

Dank je wel Jonathan!  :)


Quote from: art128 on November 25, 2015, 03:40:16 AM
Damn, that really is lovely. The way you make the paths and meadows is just perfect.

Thanks Arthur!


Quote from: noahclem on November 25, 2015, 06:21:38 AM
Beautiful work  &apls &apls  It's so impressive how organic and natural these areas appear with your powerful brand of grid-breaking and exceptional use of textures, MMPs, lotting, and other tools. I've only recently started digging through your texture releases in earnest and can't get enough (thankfully they're exceptionally numerous :D ). Congratulations on such a well-earned OSITM--it will doubtless be a week to remember!

Glad to hear you're enjoying the textures Noah! Thanks!


Quote from: c.p. on November 25, 2015, 08:07:27 AM
Congrats on the OSITM &apls

I think you're the king of the early-settlers-meet-the-wilderness theme :thumbsup:

Thank you!


Quote from: Kergelen on November 26, 2015, 01:02:28 PM
Congrats on the OSITM &apls

Calm atmosphere. The textures looks great.

Thanks!
time flies like a bird
fruit flies like a banana

Catalyst


Gugu3


noahclem

Brilliant idea using terraformer for that purpose (and for being so careful about the Pox). Those buried networks are the only problem I've run into using the terraformer trick and while they're a bit annoying (especially when they keep returning to the same places) it seems a pretty small price to pay. The tile is really looking excellent, as are the city walls. Looking forward to seeing the harbor!

art128

The way you play with the walls reminds me how I used to build cities in Age of Empire II.... Ah the good times.  ()stsfd()

No really good job.

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

Props & Texture Catalog

11241036

Very good work again, it seems like you've found a good spot for Traelonisk, and this is a good layout for city walls and a harbor.

I've read through large parts of your MD, and since I'm fond of your early medieval city building style, I might want to try to do something similar in Calidores. I'd like to ask you an admittedly large favor: I've seen the buildings depicted below in your MD, and I'd like you to give me the link to these. I've been searching those on my PC, but it seems that I haven't downloaded the necessary dependency yet. I just need a file link, I can relot them on my own. If this is not possible, or if you have no time to do this, or if there's any other reason preventing you from giving me the link(s), please notify me by writing an answer here or sending me a PM.

(Click to enlarge)


vortext

#393


Quote from: Catalyst on November 27, 2015, 12:16:41 AM
The city overview is fantastic! Bravo &apls

Thanks!


Quote from: Gugu3 on November 27, 2015, 01:55:17 AM
Very nice work!

Thank you!


Quote from: noahclem on November 27, 2015, 04:46:27 AM
Brilliant idea using terraformer for that purpose (and for being so careful about the Pox). Those buried networks are the only problem I've run into using the terraformer trick and while they're a bit annoying (especially when they keep returning to the same places) it seems a pretty small price to pay. The tile is really looking excellent, as are the city walls. Looking forward to seeing the harbor!

Yeah it's a really nice way to do trail-and-error stuff, which I actually like to do outside of the region for more reasons than the lurking danger of prop pox (more on that below).


Quote from: art128 on November 27, 2015, 05:36:39 AM
The way you play with the walls reminds me how I used to build cities in Age of Empire II.... Ah the good times.  ()stsfd()

No really good job.

:thumbsup:

Thanks!


Quote from: 11241036 on November 27, 2015, 03:07:48 PM
Very good work again, it seems like you've found a good spot for Traelonisk, and this is a good layout for city walls and a harbor.

I've read through large parts of your MD, and since I'm fond of your early medieval city building style, I might want to try to do something similar in Calidores. I'd like to ask you an admittedly large favor: I've seen the buildings depicted below in your MD, and I'd like you to give me the link to these. I've been searching those on my PC, but it seems that I haven't downloaded the necessary dependency yet. I just need a file link, I can relot them on my own. If this is not possible, or if you have no time to do this, or if there's any other reason preventing you from giving me the link(s), please notify me by writing an answer here or sending me a PM.

(Click to enlarge)
. . .snip. . .

Well that's quite the list but I'm pleased to hear you like it so much!  :) So here goes:

1 - can be found in Swi vol1

2 & 5 – excellent HD models by Manchou

3  - interesting one as the lot contains work from 3 authors. Smallest houses here. The other, slightly taller house can be found in one of the CSX prop packs, iirc vol4. However, CSX has other models is similar style which might interest you as well so it's worth while to check all the volumes. And finally the largest model is from TSC

4 – also TSC

6,7,9,11,12 – BATs from DaveN, also in HD, for which I actually made a lot set.

8,10,13,14,15 – unreleased JENX materials. I'm still awaiting answer with regard to a prop pack.

16 – actually the hardest to track down. :D  It can be found in D66 vol 2.

I'm looking forward to see what you come up with!  :thumbsup:




As said, Noah's remark reminded me of another reason, besides the lurking danger of prop pox, why I in general want to avoid mucking about in the region too much, namely extrapolated regional demand. So today a few words on the subject and how it affects individual cities. Recall from Thursday I made a sandbox which consisted of just one city, Traelonisk, isolated from the region. 

Now, if you ever wondered how much of a difference regional capacity and demand makes, here's a neat comparison. First the demand graph of Traelonisk as it was when embedded in the region.




And here it is for the exact same city in exactly the same situation when it is run isolated in the sandbox. And important to note: the city does not have any neighbour connections!




So what, doesn't seem to be a big difference, right? Wrong.

See, I wanted to give my stage 4 lots another go in the isolated, sandbox city but they just refused to grow, even though the city population actually met the stage threshold (albeit barely). However, they grew just fine under the exact same circumstances, but with the city embedded in the region. Only when I added ~750 more population to the sandbox city did stage 4 wanted to grow. So the difference in demand and subsequent refusal of stage 4 lots to grow is purely down to the regional oomph, or lack thereof.

And more recently I encounter another, more extreme example of extrapolated regional demand. I took a break from Traelonisk and turned my attention to a newly envisioned town. I'd already done some eye-candy work in the tile itself so I'd expected the demand to be somewhat typical of a new tile, like so:


Demand for a brand new city tile, in a completely empty region, with the CAM and X-Turbo mod, the latter to help get my rather large stage 1 lots off the ground.


However, the region has experienced quite bit of growth recently and thus I was met with the following demand graph:


Agricultural demand is literally through the roof!

Seeing the crazy high demand I decided to take a gamble with the very first lot.


ahhw yes!

I can ensure you this lot would have never, ever grown if the demand hadn't been there and I would have had to rely on my smaller 'starter' lots to get the tile going. And again I'd like to stress that none of my cities are connected in any way. In fact, this particular tile is fairly isolated, with only 2 sparsely populated neighbours. So the increased demand here is nothing but the extrapolated, regional demand. Now if I were to safe-and-exit this tile without running the simulator, as you would when mucking about, all this extrapolated demand would be lost!

And this is just in a simple agricultural, low wealth region without any neighbor connections. The interaction effects when the cities are connected, and different education & wealth levels come into play, are rather intricate I imagine. So if your focus is on regional play, the take home message here is you want to minimize the number of times you save-and-exit your cities without running the simulator. Or in other words: ideally you always want to run the simulator and grow the city a bit.

That's it for now!
time flies like a bird
fruit flies like a banana

Vizoria

You always create the most artful farm and rural areas. This Mcduell's terraformer trick looks pretty amazing to, especially for bridges! Anyway you somehow manage to find the right balance between too many MMPs and too few. Great work.

11241036

Thank you very much for the links, I appreciate it :) Unfortunately, due to lack of time, it will take a while until I can work further on Calidores. Please keep your eyes open for an extra surprise. Also, great to see how much the isolation of a city (seen while it has been a sandbox) affects demand; I've already thought it, but it's actually good to see screenshots.

vortext

#396




All right, so back to rebuilding Traelonisk. With perfectly terraformed building grounds, plopping down the walls was a breeze.




However, the walls are actually plopped on the outside so I have these empty, sloped strips to deal with inside the city. And since the wall props sit in top of the slope, there's this little gap between the slope and the walls. Obviously, both need to be addressed. To begin with I cloned the BAT in the Reader (nice function with which to make a copy & change the IID in one go). Next I fired up the ModelTweaker to lower this copy and, perhaps most important, squeeze the depth slightly, so the copy is a bit thinner than the original. This way the lowered model will fit inside the original, thus preventing horrible z-fighting textures that will occur otherwise.


argh. . overlooked this one diagonal piece that obviously needs to be textured as well. . sigh. .  lets fire up the LE – again.


Looks a lot better with the gap neatly filled out. The ModelTweaker has been quite essential for the city walls in general, as I made a number of offset copies for the diagonals. In addition I used the same technique as described to make faux foundations for the bastions, like so:


red arrows indicate end of proper model, start of lowered 'foundation' model.


While it's far from perfect, it's better than having the models end in mid-air, as they would otherwise. The lowered walls also appear a bit warped but a little photoshopping will probably go a long way here. Anyway, I still needed something to go along the harbour side, however, at this point I'd gotten a little tired with the whole thing so I quickly whipped up another mockup.




Hm yeah, admittedly not my best work. I don't like the weird extra bit of wall and it's kinda silly there's no stairs or anything to access the harbour from that side. Worse still I'm really, really annoyed with the area circled in red. Even though the seaport lot, outlined in blue, has textures on those tiles the bare terrain still pokes through. The reason is a zero slope threshold for the lot foundation in combination with a large slope tolerance in general, which makes the terrain actually protrude through the lot. Changing the foundation slope threshold isn't an option since than the props would sink. And no, I can't cover the area up with MMPs, nor can I learn to live with it, which was my next best option.  &sly

At the moment I'm still figuring out the best solution. I don't want to change the street layout because I really like how the diagonal warehouse extends over the wide radius curve, so I'll probably end up shorting the seaport with one tile. Much depends on how the rest of the area turns out as I'm currently relotting the vanilla farmers market and state fair, both of which I plan to have in the vicinity. The filler lots along the walls will be turned into something functional at one point because why waste space on eye-candy when it could also provide some much needed jobs, right?! 

At any rate, I hope you enjoyed it! Hope to bring you a mosaic tomorrow!  ;)




Quote from: Vizoria on November 28, 2015, 04:33:46 PM
You always create the most artful farm and rural areas. This Mcduell's terraformer trick looks pretty amazing to, especially for bridges! Anyway you somehow manage to find the right balance between too many MMPs and too few. Great work.

Yeah trick will be great to make perfect bridge approaches too, totally forgot about that! Thanks for the kind words!


Quote from: 11241036 on November 29, 2015, 12:05:04 PM
Thank you very much for the links, I appreciate it :) Unfortunately, due to lack of time, it will take a while until I can work further on Calidores. Please keep your eyes open for an extra surprise. Also, great to see how much the isolation of a city (seen while it has been a sandbox) affects demand; I've already thought it, but it's actually good to see screenshots.

You're welcome!
time flies like a bird
fruit flies like a banana

art128

Quite a lot of thinking is going into this city.. I like the way it's going.
I'll take a quiet life... A handshake of carbon monoxide.

Props & Texture Catalog

Kergelen

This walled town is going to be awesome. I like it and you pay attention to all the details &apls

I really like the smooth transition between river and shoreline, with the flora you use (Grfe Feather grass resized? &Thk/()


                                    Links to SC4 websites

vortext

#399



Hi there and welcome to the final instalment of this 4-in-1 OSITM from me. 

First of all I'd like to thank you for all your kind words over the past week. Honestly I was bit stuck in a rut with the region in general, and Traelonisk in particular. Besides the pox my disinterest was compounded by the fact things take sooo long to build. For instance during my previous OSITM 2(!) years ago, I had a fun little contest to name the very first cathedral in Ærden, and only now – two years after the fact – can I finally show it! Sometimes it feels like I'm still setting the scene for the 'proper' regional developments, which is a kinda backwards way of looking at things, I know. Besides, I released my texture packs this year, so there's that.

At any rate, all this to say your comments are greatly appreciated! Lets get this show rolling.


first mosaic of the year! Also, the most wip-ish mosaic I ever made!

So, where's the cathedral you might ask? Well, it's the large shed structure in the middle of course! See, the masons just finished the first phase and will start constructing the bell towers and buttresses shortly, so stay tuned to see how it develops.  ;)

As for the name, the winner of my little contest was Willy. However, he's been largely absent since, so on a whim I decided to google St Willy and see if anything would come up. After clicking around for a while I stumbled on St. Willibrord, who lived from 658 to 739 and was the first bishop of Utrecht! What are the odds, it could not be a more perfect fit! So it's officially the Saint Willibrord Cathedral from now on.

And fun fact: there's actually a slight mishap in this mosaic as well! I could've easily shopped it out, however, I figured why not make it an OSITM tradition of sorts. So, the first person to correctly identify the mishap in the above mosaic gets to name the bridges & gates. (you may have to look at the mosaic in fullsize to find it. And hint, the mishap is a result of using the Terraformer Trick)

Anyway, at the middle-left you can see the old ferry landing, shown here. I still need to replop the building, and possibly expand it into a small settlement. And at the bottom you can see the eye-candy fisher harbor, which also needs some attention, obviously.

Next up another mosaic which spans almost the entire tile. It's not quite as polished because I kinda forgot how much work it's to make a proper mosaic.





At the top Aenwic hollow which passes through a marshy area, which in turn is the border between the commons and the demesne. At the edge of the demesne we find a rich forest patch, to be used as private hunting estate – though it needs some fences and hunting cabins still.

Funny aside: over the course of many evenings I totally Bob Rossed the area, already rich in Oaks, and planted happy little trees everywhere! One night, however, I realized this kind of forest is completely absent in the rest of the region. So, by way of explanation lets just imagine this is ancient woodland which used to cover the entire valley floor, okay?

Anyway, at the bottom we find Fellendorf. Another thing which I wanted to different this time around is to have more development along the waterside. I'm pretty happy how it turned out, though it still needs a church and manor house somewhere.

Anyway, as may be apparent by now there're still a lot of ideas to materialize. And that's the list for just one tile! Who could've predicated that as the region grew, so would the number of projects in need of attention.  ::) 

In that regard I'd like to mention that I've not forgotten, nor given up on, the cobble stone roads! I just had a greater need for LE textures first of all, so I focussed on them. However, with the region expanding, and my growing dislike for the street textures in a city setting I actually have quite a high need for them – which greatly increases the chances I'll see it through.  ;D

Finally for today an appropriate winter picture. Enjoy!  :)








Quote from: art128 on November 29, 2015, 04:22:50 PM
Quite a lot of thinking is going into this city.. I like the way it's going.

Thanks! I really enjoy this kind of puzzling.  :)


Quote from: Kergelen on November 30, 2015, 09:14:51 AM
This walled town is going to be awesome. I like it and you pay attention to all the details &apls

I really like the smooth transition between river and shoreline, with the flora you use (Grfe Feather grass resized? &Thk/()

Thanks, I hope so to! I used the Feather grass indeed, along with seasonal ALN reeds and CP cattails, both found in my Seasonal Oldies MMP pack.
time flies like a bird
fruit flies like a banana