hi all,
i use the meadowshire terrain mod and the meadowshire coast tree controller. ive read this thread: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=546.0 but rayden (i think) was right by saying how these tutorials wont work on the newer terrain modes, i did try it out. i was wondering if there was a way to still use these trees and terrain but maybe edit or replace one of the cycledogg files to allow me to plant trees anywhere at any elevation. i just find it takes such a long time planting trees in mayor mode. thanks for any help.
If you don't mind a little cheating, hold down the ctrl+shift+alt and press Sun icon. Then you will have access to all the god mode tools including trees.
hi vester,
yes thats what i usually do, but with the meadowshire terrain mod and/or the meadowshire tree mod, i believe the trees actually follow a certain planting rule which follows the terrain elevation and slopes and such. therefore if your terrain is relatively flat, there will not be very many trees. now this does look nice and has been seen in many MDs, but i would prefer more trees on my flat land and im finding that the only way to do that is in mayor mode which is very time consuming.
1. If you want t have more trees on flat surfaces, change the tree controller. As I remember, you have 6 CPT No 7a tree controllers: Meadowshire River (this one doesn't give much trees on flat surfaces, but it gives them even on the smallest hill), Meadowshire Coast, ItaliaRiver, Missouri Breaks, Olympic Coast (this one gives you dense forest on flat surfaces), Maxis Generic.
2. Every tree mod gives you an interesting mix of trees from 250 m (the sea level) to about 550 m, then it gives a stripe of Maxis pines, from 600 to about 750 m you have some more another trees and then you have only Maxis pines on every elevation.
This pattern is not very useful for me, so I use one of 34 kinds of forests I have in the Mayor mode when I have the terrain controller installed and single trees from CPT (they come with CPT No 8 and No 9) to put trees as I want on higher elevation. This way I set the upper border of the forest as I want (I can put Mayor mode trees on every elevation). then I go down to about 550 m (if I don't want to see Maxis pines at all), and then go to God mode and put trees everywhere else. If I don't like any specific place, then bulldoze trees and use Mayor Mode in this place.
3. I'm sure it is possible to change parameters of tree controllers but it need many experiments to make it in a wise way. The elevation is not the only parameter responsible for apperaring specific trees.
4. Nothing wchich is fully automatized gives good effects. Manual work is often the best solution ;)
The tree placement pattern of the tree controllers is defined by the "kSC4FloraPreferencesProperty" in every single exemplar file that is contained in those tree controllers. This means you have to edit every single one in order to change the placement pattern, and the bad news is that every property has 256 REPs (values). Cycledogg's newer tree controllers contain about 700 exemplar files, so you can imagine the amount of work that has to be done for editing those files.
I don't know how the placement pattern property actually works, but Cycledogg once told me that groups of eight values or so represent the pattern for a certain elevation, this means if you want truly random trees, all of those groups should have a mix of 0 and 1 that is different. I once created a tree controller that contains the conifers from the original Columbus Tree Mod, which has about 150 Exemplar files. I ended up creating a huge Excel table with 256 colums and lines, putting in 1's and 0's in a more or less random way, and exporting those as a text file for pasting the numbers into the exemplar files of the trees that I wanted to include.
After Andreas' in-depth explanation :thumbsup: I would like to add than in my opinion it is much better to customize forests using existing mods than modify tree controllers.
Cycledogg made a gigantic work adjusting all parameters of his mods and they work very good on various terrains. It is completely impossible to make a tree controller wchich would be in accordance with every player's expectations. But as I said earlier, we have two additional possibilities in Mayor Mode: 34 specific kinds of forest and about 15 (I don't remember exactly) various trees (and of course many kinds of flora made by other creators, wchich can be used together with CP trees).
It happen to me very often I want to have a paricular group of trees (for example Yellowstone forest with red bushes) in a specific place, and a random mixed forest around it. If I would use only God mode trees, it would be impossible.
So I think it is much better to have some tools and use them all, than to have one universal tree controller (or make many controllers useful only for a small group of people). Of course using more tools needs more work, but it is worth of it.
I also think there are some details in tree controllers wchich could be modified (for example placement of Maxis pines), but I'm sure Cycledogg is the only person who could do it succesfully and without an excessive amount of unnecessary work (he simply knows his controllers perfectly).
About customizing forests - maybe any tutorial could be useful? ;)
well i think andreas hit the nail on the head....it would be a very long and tedious task to change all the files. as you mentioned before ennedi, i may try the olympic coast tree controller to see if that helps (i didnt even know this was available, hehe), i supposed i could load the game with 1 controller, plant trees, save/exit, then load a different tree controller, plants trees and save again and see how that turns out. ive seen md's with trees planted everywhere so maybe i will post a msg there to see how the creator acheived this.
That could be an interesting experiment. Are you sure there won't be any conflicts or brown boxed trees?
We will hear from you.
Another thing that I found out, playing with the 34 forests contained in the pack:
You can plant a single tree by a click, after the second click the second tree appears. There always is some randomization which tree occurs, but always (as I found untill now) the last click is the same tree or group of trees. So, if you are not too careful, your forest ends up as a bunch of identical treegroups.... Is it a question of a very spoiled mind to ask if there is anything to do about it?
I would like to stress, especially after having read the above, that I feel very humble and are greatly thankful for the fantastic quality and the enormous amount of trees in the Meadowshire terrain modd.
I pity that I am not yet allowed to give karma points, because I know someone who deserves one.... But my time will come.
Quote from: FrankU on October 24, 2007, 07:26:37 AM
You can plant a single tree by a click, after the second click the second tree appears. There always is some randomization which tree occurs, but always (as I found untill now) the last click is the same tree or group of trees. So, if you are not too careful, your forest ends up as a bunch of identical treegroups.... Is it a question of a very spoiled mind to ask if there is anything to do about it?
No, the sequence is defined in the way the exemplar files are set up. Each tree has one exemplar file, and a set is defined as continuous IDs, that means each exemplar file has a pointer to the ID of the next one.
just an update for me. i did try the olympic terrain/tree mod to get more trees but i still had a similar amount as compared to the meadowshire/tree terrain mod. i think the only thing that really change was my sea level, which im not even sure the terrain mods caused this, i just noticed it after i was trying things out with these mods. also, i really do appreciate these mods as well (as franku mentioned above) and by using jeronij's street mod and some other maxis tree replacement mods there is more realistic urban tree use.
so as it stands now, i pre-plant trees in god mod on the mountains and hills (although it is still hit and miss as to how many trees i get and where) and since the trees wont plant on flat ground, i still have to plant trees click by click, trying to avoid groups of similar trees.