In my epic months long effort to rebuild my plugins folder, I've finally turned my attention to terrain/tree mods. After some searching and looking at what's out there these days, I settled on the Meadowshire terrain as being a good match for most of my regions, and I love the look. It seemed fitting then to use a Meadowshire tree mod to match, and again, I think the Meadowshire River trees mod gives me the look I want. Combined, they're beautiful. Even more so once all the brown boxes resolved themselves ;D
However, there is one GIANT problem that is driving me batty, and that is the huuuuuge gaps in the forest that the Meadowshire tree mod leaves with the god mode tree brush. I build at generally high densities, leaving pockets of untouched wilderness scattered around my cities, usually as forest. Meadowshire however, doesn't plant a whole lot of forest. Which leaves me with sparsely treed regions, which tells me I'll have to go back and forest my open spaces by hand. Which I know some people do, but that's way beyond my landscaping abilities or patience.
So, what I was wondering, is if anyone out there has found a solution to this. Namely, how to get the Meadowshire trees look in a dense forest, and if there's any easy way to accomplish this result, such as a different controller, or simple tweaks to the Meadowshire controllers, etc.
I've tried the Olympic and Generic tree mods from cp, and they both give the dense forest, but the trees themselves aren't at all what I'm looking for.
Any help would be appreciated.
As an aside, anyone know why the Meadowshire tree mods leave such giant gaps in the forest? The areas they're supposed to replicate (western Europe and eastern N. America) were originally covered in dense forest, it would make sense the tree mod would do the same, leaving us to prune the forest down to tidy little pieces over the years, just as it happened in real life.
Hi Whatevermind,
Short answer: To get the fullest coverage of any tree controller there are three main times to plant:
1) As soon as you enter the city for the first time (pre-mayor mode)
2) Sometime in July (while in mayor mode)
3) Sometime in Jan (while in mayor mode)
Long:
There are two variables that determine where a tree will be placed with the brush. The first is altitude (technically speaking, temperature), and the second is moisture. There are 16 levels for both altitude and moisture. These levels form a table (16x16). To make a tree controller, one assigns a tree to the various cells of the table.
Altitude is altitude, moisture is basically slope. However, moisture changes throughout the year (only after entering mayor mode, and it takes a few weeks for the simulation to kick in). It is wettest in January, and driest in July. This means that if you plant at varying times during the year you will get a wider range of cells from the table.
For Meadowshire specifically, it was designed to not plant trees on flat land. While perhaps annoying to dense forest lovers, there are reasons. First is that every tree slows the game down a little, so why have trees in places that are most likely to become cities anyway. Another is that the lack of trees can be a good way to figure out what areas are flat, so that you can build cities and networks that avoid slopes.
As a note, I was unable to get Meadowshire to plant everywhere while doing what I told you, but the forest covered about twice as much.
There have been reports that having multiple tree controllers can cause a CTD, so take this next advice with caution. You can try this: CPTNo7AssortedTreeControllers (http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/files/file/12362-cptno7assortedtreecontrollers/). The controllers found here will generally plant one type of tree, but it will plant it everywhere. So, plant the trees that you can with meadowshire, and then install one of these.
For this to work properly, the meadowshire controller must always be in plugins. I believe the generic controller can be switched out, depending upon what trees you want to place, or removed if you want to place meadowshire again.
Thanks, Lowkee!
I've already tried most of those solutions, so good to know there's not any big easy workaround I'm missing.
I completely hadn't thought of the impact of trees on memory, though in retrospect, I've been aware of that effect for years. It just seems to be such a small impact relative to what happens once the city starts growing, that it's easy to overlook the initial slowing from trees. But, of course, from a programming point of view, any impact on performance warrants attention.
Treeless flat areas for planning purposes also makes sense. I'm one of those defiantly holding on to the old Zones View for planning, so whether or not trees are blocking your view isn't really an issue.
Still, that gives me a better insight into how these controllers work and what you can do with them. Thanks!
Ok, I've been picking at this some more, and have some interesting preliminary results, and a bunch more questions.
First, Lowkee, do you recall your Moisture View tool that you posted here some months ago that shows moisture as a data view? Is there any way to get a numerical measurement out of this tool? I'm guessing the tool taps into some sort of in-game realtime database of moisture values for its display, but I have no idea how I would get to those numbers.
Second, I have proof that Meadowshire River tree controller will plant dense forest on level ground (Yay!), but I'm still figuring out what exactly those right conditions are. It seems to be that moisture controls tree placement at lower elevations, but the variance necessary to create dense forest is small enough that the west-edge-of-the-city effect will create a dense forest on the western edge of an otherwise barren city. Essentially, preliminary results indicate that at the lowest elevations, a forest will form as long as the ground is wet enough, and that the higher the elevation, the lower the minimum-moisture-to-create-a-forest threshold becomes.
Which brings about my next question, which is, does anyone know what the upper and lower bounds of elevation are for the FloraPreferences matrix? And is this dependent on the terrain mod? I'm thinking the terrain mod sets the upper bound (and maybe lower bound as well), and the program fills in the breakpoints between steps relative to these numbers, but I haven't tested this yet.
More research, and (hopefully) more results to come...
You're on the right track. If you check out the Seasonal Flora Patch, this will be another clue.
I will say that moisture levels are independent of altitude. If a tree controller plants different moisture levels on different altitudes, that means that the tree controller was set up that way.
Making the moisture data view was basically a matter of changing the data source and color ramp of the power data view. The color ramp says "This value is this color", so if you open the mod up in reader you can get a guess at the actual values. I went a little further with my terrain workings. Terrain textures have a similar altitude/moisture table, so I made textures that were just text. This way I could see the various moisture levels in-game easier.