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Three Rivers Region

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

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threestooges

Well now, that's something new. Thanks to everyone for the compliments on the poles, but the credit should go to David for the idea, the modelling was easy enough. I'm looking forward to the next development, and I should have some things to send your way sometime soon.
-Matt

dedgren

Taking a brief break since yesterday's post- here's some mental elevator music for your eyes in the meantime.


Mountains, Glacier Nat'l Park 080709


Cascade, Glacier Nat'l Park 080709


Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier Nat'l Park 080709


Waterfall, Glacier Nat'l Park 080709

Back tonight.


David

112383
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

allan_kuan1992

nice... never thought of that before (using signs as trees).

now maybe i can grow some of these signs later :D

- Allan Kuan

Simpson

Oh David great pics I love the nature  :thumbsup:
My new city is now here
The région of Kaikoura

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

Silur

#4384
Hi, David - this is Terrible serial for me means Excellent Nature pictures - really GREAT !!!
Great Pictures - wonderful and unique  &apls &apls &apls &apls &apls :thumbsup:

j-dub

Hey David, you said Stop signs? I batted some bigger, visible ones, that are used in Heblem's small American town- http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=5061.0 You can see for yourself three posts down.

bakerton

David, What A Sight with those signs and power poles. I do not know about any one, but I would die to get my hands on them. (I do have the sign pack). You are doing an excellent job and I have been lurking for a while enjoying everything. Gotta go and play SC4. JKB Also, keep the work up dude.
beam me up.... please!
I am the lurker that hides in all the corners and you can't get me out. You may try, but you can't.Please call me Jon or Jonathan.

emilin

#4387
Well, I've been lurking a lot lately, but I thought it was time to leave a note of appriciation for everything you are doing around here.

I don't have all that much to add... you are developing so many nice features that I wouldn't know where to start. I have had so much fun playing around with the rural stuff you released so far, and I'm hoping for much more later on (epsecially the fencelines ;)

Anyway, take care and enjoy the game. :thumbsup:

EDIT: Emil, it is so great to see you here.  I was away down south when Blackwater passed 1,000 comments earlier this summer [linkie].  Congrats, my friend, on being the first MD to reach that amazing milestone.  That is a gorgeous map [linkie], I can't imagine how long it took you to make.  Don't be a stranger here, and we'll see you over there soon. -DE

BlackwaterEmil's inn
Berethor ♦ beskhu3epnm ♦ blade2k5 ♦ dmscopio ♦ dedgren
♦ Emilin ♦ Ennedi ♦ Heblem ♦ jplumbley ♦ moganite ♦ M4346 ♦
papab2000 ♦ Shadow Assassin ♦ Tarkus ♦ wouanagaine

metarvo

I knew that no important details would be omitted, especially when David and Matt are involved.  The diagonal rural poles are superb. :thumbsup:
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.

The REAL Tolsome




I never saw this textures. It is really amazing!!!  :) :) :) :)
Is this a private mod? Or at work?



vester

That is not functional sc4. It's in sc4, but not functional. If I got it right it's part of Eblem's private project:     
Planning "The Mock City"

j-dub

Wait- Rechi, Videosean made a road replacement texture, with dashed lines, it doesn't look exactly like this, but it looks like the same concept. I don't think it made it to the LEX, not that I know of.

deathtopumpkins

#4392
Expanding on j-dub's post, videosean's mod is available on his LEX candidacy thread.

Really impressive shots, David, but what ever happened to "Back tonight."?

EDIT: Heh!  Time is such a relative concept... -DE
NAM Team Member | 3RR Collaborater | Virgin Shores

ben_meissner

#4393
The more of those pictures you post, the more I'm tempted to hop in the car and drive west toward the Rockies.

Ben

EDIT: Ben, my friend, Montana is very easy on the eyes.  So is Wyoming.


Lamar River Valley, YNP  080629

-DE

dragonshardz

Well as David viewing the thread right now I suppose he is busy working on his next post....right David?

dedgren

#4395
Here's an interesting problem for all you BATters and MODders out there...

I've actually been in a sort of a holding pattern this last little bit in connection with my detour into the world of ploppable signs because of an issue that has surfaced.  It's along the line of the old IT professional's response- "That's not a bug, that's a feature."

As has been figured out by now, when I went looking for an "off-the-shelf" nicely-scaled road sign set I found one recently posted on the STEX by Simtropolis member ja/att.



These signs are available here [linkie].

Now, I want to preface what I say in a moment with this.  I have recently noted the inescapable limits associated with BATting small things for SC4 [linkie].  I said


QuoteAt game scales on normal monitors, a notional telephone/power line wire a quarter inch/.625 centimeters in diameter is, bluntly put, invisible.  Look at it this way- at the highest zoom level (press the [ 6 ] key in the game), a 50x50 foot/16x16 meter grid square is about two inches/5 centimeters square on your monitor.  Most monitors in general use running Windows run at 96 dpi, so let's say at that view level each side of that gridsquare on your monitor, for discussion purposes, is 200 pixels long.  The smallest object, then, at the closest in view level that can be accurately displayed is three inches/15 centimeters across- more than 10 times larger than our wire.

And that is the largest scale- two zoom levels down (press the [ 4 ] key in the game), a gridsquare is about one-quarter inch/.625 centimeters square.  The smallest object that can be seen at that level is two feet/.6 meters across- almost 100 times the size of our poor wire.  I know we make compromises in our beloved simulation at all levels of viewing it.

That was said using telephone wires as the example, but applies equally well to road signs.  In rural areas, signs are are often mounted on metal standards.  This one is on my street.



These standards are a little less than three inches/about seven centimeters wide- just at one pixel in the largest scale.  The sign itself, of course, is of de minimus thickness- about 1/8 inch/30 millimeters.  That's invisible in SC4.  The face of the sign is about 30 inches/75 centimeters in width by about 42 inches/105 centimeters in height- about 10 by 13 pixels, again in the largest scale.  At that scale, the words "SPEED" and "LIMIT" are about two pixels high and the number "25" is about 7.  The sign is just over seven feet/2.1 meters high.  On more heavily traveled rural roads, signs may be up to half again as large dimensionally and up to nine or ten feet/around three meters in height.  Any way you look at it, this is an incredibly small object for the BATter to work with.  This is especially troublesome with diamond-shaped signs.



So, when I say that ja/att's sign set is fairly rough looking, and especially at the highest view levels, that's not a criticism in and of itself.  I don't know, not being a BATter, if things can be made more smooth or not.  His poles are also far too "thick," but again, that may be nothing that can be materially improved.  I do note that they are a marked improvement over the "game" road signs, a point we'll return to in a moment.

Another issue I have with ja/att's signs is that the set, which is remarkably complete in other respects, lacks the following two signs:

   

...yeah, yeah- I'm showing my age.  I always hated those "new" red "YIELD" signs...

So, a couple of days ago I started looking for a way to quickly get these two signs into my ploppable sign arsenal.  I note that my longer-term plan is to see if I can persuade one of 3RR's good friends: someone like Matt (threestooges) or Ryan (burgsabre87) to work on a set of sign BATs to see if we can improve on ja-att's work.  In the meantime, I'd hoped to find existing alternatives that I could build the plop .dat files around, so that when something better was available it would just be a matter of some quick TGI swaps.  After some looking I found the "game" stop sign.



As you can see, our friends at EA/Maxis didn't spend a whole lot of time on this particular prop.  It looks more like a lollipop than a stop sign.  But it gives us our placeholder, and so I created the plop file based on it.  And that brings us to our "feature, not a bug" situation.

The above pic shows, in the yellow circle, that the sign plops right where you click the cursor.  On one hand, this seems like a good thing- it's predictable- sort of "where you click is what you get."  The problem is that you want the sign closer to the road than the game grid will allow.  That pic gets...

...trust me on this...

...the stop sign as close to the road as you can get it.

But, you protest, the ja/att crossroad sign a few pics back was way closer to the road than that.  Let's check that out again.



Yep, that's right about where you want the sign to be.  But if the game grid doesn't allow you to plop it in the same gridsquare as the road, how did we get it there?

Well, here's a series of pics that show four plops of a ja/att road sign.



This first one shows you where we clicked the cursor to plop the sign and where the sign actually wound up- the inset gives you a better look at the offset.

Now, this first pic in the series shows the basic drawback of ploppable road signs- they can go in one of four orientations.  Only one of them is the one you want.  You have no control over which orientation you get, and so you just have to be patient until you get what you want.  So let's try again...



Nope.  And again...



Uh-uh.  Once more...



All right!  Fourth time was a charm.

So why do ja/att's road signs plop at an offset to the tip of the cursor?  It's clearly what we want, but how do our friendly BATters duplicate this, er... feature.

If you know, we'd love to hear from you.  You will be appropriately honored.

Later.


David

113112
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

dragonshardz

#4396
Wait, so ja/att's sign's are already ploppable; or are they simply offset props that you've turned into ploppable signs?

~~Dragonshardz~~

EDITNeither, my friend- the first for sure and the second as best I know.  ja/att advertises them as props- I run them through the 3RR Plopperizer to make them ploppable.  So they are props, but are they "offset" props?  Not that I know of- so the correct answer, again as best I know, is that they are props that I have made into ploppable props. -DE

EDIT #2dtp's post above appears to indicate that I'm all wet, and that these are, in fact, BATted as offset props. -DE

deathtopumpkins

#4397
Well the props are offset by being that far away from the origin in the BAT. If you place an object, say, at the X coordinate of -4 with the y and z coordinates at 0, then when you go to place that object in the LE, it will appear 4m to the left of where you click. I assume these props were created like that, and thus when you made them ploppable, they were still offset, and thus plopped in a different spot then you clicked.

Hope that explains it.

Nice lecture on game sign plopping.

EDIT: And a great explanation of the answer to my question, my friend.  So it sounds like the signs that Matt and Ryan would work on should be offset to the left of center four or five meters (that's a guess, but based on what you've said, an educated one).  I appear to owe 'shardz an apology as well, because what you've described sounds like the definition of an "offset" prop to me. -DE
NAM Team Member | 3RR Collaborater | Virgin Shores

girlfromverona

#4398
Ploppable props - try saying that 10 times fast.  $%Grinno$%

EDIT: Marisa, try saying "Double-0" Club three times fast.  Congrats, my friend, on ringing the bell this time around. -DE

Ryan B.

I think I'll take a crack at this.  Look for something from me very shortly, David.

EDIT:  Let me be the first to congratulate girlfromverona on joining the "00-Club"!