Recreating San Francisco: Real Life Aside, October 1, 2009

[Tomas Neto]

Amazing project you are developing here, in your MD! Fantastic degree of professionalism!
And congratulations for the comment number 100 in your MD, taking you to the Best Sellers!

[meinhosen]

Looking good Lora.  The terraforming for the spillway is coming along nicely.

Congrats on reaching 100 replies and 6 pages.

[ldvger]

Well, you can maybe imagine my surprise and dismay when I logged in to SC4D this afternoon and couldn't find my MD in it's usual place, which had been among the top listed in the "Recent" tab.  Not having internet access at home this last 10 days has really slowed me down and I feared the worst when I couldn't find the MD even on the first page of the Recents.  With a sinking heart I paged over to the second page, fearing to find my MD there, fallen from favor due to boring posts.  When I didn't find it there, I became REALLY alarmed and wondered if maybe I'd broken some rule and the MD had been deleted.  See, this is what happens to your confidence in yourself when you are over a year out of work...it never occurred to me that I'd get "upgraded" to Best Seller tab.  I also felt immediately guilty for not having gone to the cafe last night and for not playing SC4, instead opting to spend 6 hours playing Sims2 and building my brother/sister household a new home after thier parents died and they sold off the family homestead.  She's in the armed services, training in Special Forces, while he's just been promoted to Project Manager in the Science career path. 

But then a glimmer of hope gleamed in the back of my mind and I thought hmmm, maybe I've become a Best Seller?  So I tabbed over there and there I was!  I was so happy, I decided to treat myself to a store bought lunch today (salad bar at the local market, which I can pay for with food stamps). 

Thank you all so very much for propelling my MD to this next stage along it's journey.  I am all fired up now to get back into the game and start working on a few more details.  I'm not going to plop the lake until I have the roads around the lake installed, so if there is any disturbance of terrain from road-building, it won't affect my lake.  Same with the spillway.  I am going to smoosh down the island and probably vegetate it, so look for that event coming soon, as well as Lora Build Roads.

Ok and even more good news...my neighbor is broadcasting wifi again, so no more needing to take the laptop up to the cafe.  Woohoo!  A Banner Day, by all means.  Amazing what little bit it takes to create excitement in my oterwise extremely boring life.  Home wifif AND a best seller, all in a single day!

Lora/LD, off to the market for lunch

[calibanX]

Welcome to the Best Sellers Lora, a well deserved move for sure. I'm glad your neighbor has bested the wifi problem. I'm looking forward to watching your progress now that you have easier internet access and you don't have to frequent the cafe.

Take care.

Geoff

[ecoba]

L.O.R.A,

This is absolutely Wonderful!

Your attention to detail and getting you terrain perfect flabbergasts me, as I would never have the patience to do anything close to this.

Some people at this point, 6 pages in, would probably say, 'Is she actually going to build?', but, uh-uh, for me. This detail just teaches me more and more, which I appreciate, because when I start an MD (maybe) on a computer that doesn't have Vista, I will follow your lessons on how to create a beautiful region.

I do have a question regarding the building of your San Francisco. Are you growing, or plopping? It seems it will be awfully treacherous to grow. Especially since it has to be SF.

I would be glad to try to make you some lots (after lots of reading about LE, to get me caught up, and learn to give them to you).

Can't wait for more,
                            Ethan
                           

[ldvger]

calibanX/Geoff: Thanks you and yes, it will be nice to not have to buy a pastry I don't want just so I can use the internet.  I gained 2 pounds this last week and while that's not much, it goes on much easier than it comes off the older one gets, so I keep a very close watch on my weight.

ecoba/Ethan: Hey, I like the way you "say" my name.  Welcome to my MD and I hope you stop by often.  And no, I don't think I'll be "growing" any of this region, I think it'll be almost 100% plops.  Once I get into suburban/urban areas, my plugins file is going to be a nightmare, I have no doubt.  And if you want to create some custom stuff for me, way cool!  Wander over to Battlecat's MD, also here on the Best Seller list, and see the dam and spillway he made.  His is WAY bigger than mine, but I think I am going to need help with the spillway walls.  He used jeronij's concrete wall package, which I have, but he tweaked the lots in LE, which I don't yet know how to do and I don't know if they can be used on a double slope.  As you can see from the RL pics of the spillway, the tops of the spillway walls are parallel to the bottom and that's where I think I may run into trouble.

Off to play and take pics, maybe write a new update.  I think I may try laying down the road tonite...

Lora/LD

[ecoba]

I can try to make some CC, just say what you need. (maybe, I'll have to see if it's possible, for me at least.). But, I'll be looking for props, cause I can't BAT, cause my comp. can't handle it. ......Maybe my new one will.....

But I'm not sure if I'm getting a new one or not....

Ethan

Edit:I think I'll DL some props, and walls, and get to work, in game and in LE, to see if I can think of anything, I'll have to find some photos of the real dam as well though.

But, maybe I'll do that tomorrow, because it's 2300, and I need to start attempting to try to get ready to sleep.

Ethan

[Battlecat]

Congratulations on making it to the best seller section!  Have to say, I know how you feel; I was quite worried when I couldn't find my MD when it changed locations as well!  Glad to hear you've got internet access again as well!  Looking forward to the next update.

[JoeST]

Many many congratulations, this is an amazing MD, and it thoroughly deserves to be a best seller


Joe

[ldvger]

Update 14: Hicks Road/Novato Blvd.

ecoba/Ethan: There are pics of the RL dam and spillway a page or two back in this MD or you can study it in more detail using Google Earth (which is free to download and a WAY cool tool/toy to use/play with).  The dam is the Novato Creek Dam and the Lake behind it is Stafford Lake.  Both are slightly east of the city of Novato, which is north of San Francisco and near the top of San Pablo Bay.  I also recommend looking at Battlecat's MD, "Adara", which is also here under the Best Sellers tab.  He is working on a similar (but MUCH larger) earthen dam which he created a concrete spillway for and he posted some links to the props and lots he tweaked in LE to accomplish his work.

Battlecat: Always nice to have you drop by and I have a small mini-update to post today. 

JoeST/Joe:  Thank you so very much!  I have to admit to being more than a little bit surprsided by how many folks enjoy the sometimes mind-numbing details I go into with this MD, but hey, lots of us OCD folks out there, I guess!  Thanks for stopping by and hope you do so often.

So, I did play around with the road for a little while last night.  I didn't save any of my work because I wasn't happy with it, but I did take a couple of pics, to show you my first tries.  I am really liking writing my MD updates offline!  I can have lots of programs open and go back and forth between them (including my game) and it makes organizing my pics and thoughts so much easier.  I basically write as I play, taking pictures as I go.  So, here's the new update:

Tonite I am playing with building the road that runs along the north edge of the lake, which turns into a major arterial not too far downstream (east) of where I have been playing.  I am using plain vanilla Maxis roads so far, so am restricted to orthogonal or diagonal roads, and am using a slope mod created by un1 that has seven types of mods included:

Extra Smooth=1.5% slope
Very Smooth=2% slope
Smooth=3% slope
Average=5% slope
Mounted=6% slope
Very Mounted=8% slope
Extremely Mounted=10% slope

Again, this is a trail and error process for me, so pics may be sparse.  I started using no slope mod at all and laid down a diagonal section of road right beside the spillway.  The results were TERRIBLE, so I exited without saving (or taking any pics) and installed the "mounted" slope mod (thinking I was installing the "average" mod, but whatever). 

But before I go much further, lets looks at the road I am talking about it RL:



That heel of the hill that projects out into the lake just above the spillway is where I am having problems.  The game flattens terrain quite a bit when it builds roads and even with the slope mod installed, rounding that corner becomes very problematic.  I was not able to do it with the "mounted" option, so I tried the "very mounted" option and this is what I was able to accomplish:



It's not too bad given the limits of Maxis roads, but I'm not much digging the ditch that is created on the north side of the road OR the elevation of the road above the lake for most of it's travel along the lake.  Looking at the RL photo, I can see that the only place the road really is elevated above the lake is as it rounds that corner above the spillway, then it goes back to being fairly flat (or at least it appears flat in the satellite imagery).  I'm also not digging the way the slope mod and road closed off the mouth of my spillway, which I so carefully terraformed into existence.

So, I think I may try to switch out the slope mod as I go along, using the very mounted version for rounding the corner, then going back to a lesser slope for other areas of the road.  I also want to try to keep the 319.0m elevation of the road next to the spillway gates intact.  So I'm going to quit without save and try again.



Now this piece seems to fit the curve around the base of the hill very nicely, but the grade is too steep to build on, so maybe I am going to have to, once again, manually terraform this curve, as well as the approaches to it in both directions.

But I think that's going to have to wait for another evening.  I am a player of Lord of the Rings Online and have been out of that game for over 10 days, so I am anxious to log in and chat with some of my buddies there, now that my home wifi connection has been restored.  I'm also about 3 glasses of wine into my evening and don't want to screw anything up in my region, so I think I'll save this challenge for another time.

Lora/LD

[TheTeaCat]

Amazing. Its really fascinating to watch how you approach the game.

I love all the little details checking this and that to make sure you are
staying as close to RL as possible

Personally I don't have the patience for that
but its great to see what can be achieved by those who have

I often switch my slope mods in and out so that I can get up and down gradients
and its amazing what can be achieved. It just may be the solution you need.

Sorry for not commenting more often but I do lurk/check in alot to see what you've been up to.

regards

Derry

[metarvo]

Wow, Lora!  How did you get that grid to appear on Google Earth?  That would be a useful planning tool for those of us who like to recreate RL cities.  I really like the way you're going about the road construction.

[ecoba]

I'll take a look at some of those pics, as well as on Google. Thanks.

I realized though, how are you going to do the region's freeways?

I like to use One-Way Roads, very modular, it seems like that's probably going to be the most realistic. Unless they're saved until RHW-4.0....

Which will probably be too far off.

Ethan

From what I've observed on the dam, the water comes up to that nice steep slope I see you've created, but, as seen in Street View, on Google Maps, there is a very gentle hill don to the operating facilities and a small treatment plant, it seems. The spillway has a very interesting design, as well as lots of grafitti in it.

Ethan

[Battlecat]

When it comes to those wide radius curves, it's pretty much 100% necessary to prepare the site in advance.  They are capable of autoleveling the local terrain to some extent, but the results can be extremely unpredictable. 

I've had some luck with laying normal maxis roads through most areas to start, and then replacing all the major curves with the wide radius curves after the fact.  There's no doubt that they're challenge to use though.  Good luck!

[djvandrake]

Seeing the image of the real terrain and what you are creating side by side makes it all the more impressive to watch this develop. 

[MrWacko]

100+ posts! Allow me to congratulate you on making it into the best sellers! I wanted to get that precious 100th post (or the 101st), but I'll settle for what I got. I'm just thankful that this is one of the few things I missed (wildfires are a pain, but they go with the earthquakes here in California). Anyways, comments!

That heel of the hill that projects out into the lake just above the spillway is where I am having problems.  The game flattens terrain quite a bit when it builds roads and even with the slope mod installed, rounding that corner becomes very problematic.  I was not able to do it with the "mounted" option, so I tried the "very mounted" option and this is what I was able to accomplish:

It's not too bad given the limits of Maxis roads, but I'm not much digging the ditch that is created on the north side of the road OR the elevation of the road above the lake for most of it's travel along the lake.  Looking at the RL photo, I can see that the only place the road really is elevated above the lake is as it rounds that corner above the spillway, then it goes back to being fairly flat (or at least it appears flat in the satellite imagery).  I'm also not digging the way the slope mod and road closed off the mouth of my spillway, which I so carefully terraformed into existence.

Ah, the endless process of terraforming a road along a grade. Well, let me put a few of your concerns at rest. The road is indeed above the lake by a semi-significant grade difference/cliff. Should you wish to get a more interesting view of the lake and road, consult google maps (not google earth). Go down to street level, and it gives you a 360 view of Novato Blvd., and the surrounding area. You can't wander off the road, but it's still very useful. The cliff face gradually flattens out into the Stafford Lake rec area, with the picnic area and some grass fields. I figure it might be useful for other shots too.

So, I think I may try to switch out the slope mod as I go along, using the very mounted version for rounding the corner, then going back to a lesser slope for other areas of the road.  I also want to try to keep the 319.0m elevation of the road next to the spillway gates intact.  So I'm going to quit without save and try again.

Now this piece seems to fit the curve around the base of the hill very nicely, but the grade is too steep to build on, so maybe I am going to have to, once again, manually terraform this curve, as well as the approaches to it in both directions.

Hand terraforming is often the only way to get it perfect. Sometimes you just have to do it the hard way. But it'll look good, at least. I'm for the NAM curve, too. That way it'll look best. FAR pieces might be useful here as well, although I'm not staring at the city screen, and they tend to be a bit more curve intolerant. Up to you, obviously

Now, to a completely random suggestion about terrain! I was thinking how nothing quite matches CA terrain for 2/3rds of the year (the golden hills). So, why not go for next best thing, going for the other 1/3rd? To be exact, the winter and spring months, when California gets almost all of its rainfall. Due to the shear amount of rain dumped between November and March, The hills turn a vibrant shade of green (as seen in one of the initial pictures of Stafford Lake, posted by our wonderful MD maker Lora). It's quite common, due to the 35"+/880mm+ rain, all concentrated almost entirely in those 5 months. Think it might be worth it?

[ldvger]

Update 15: Hicks Road/Novato Blvd., Part 2

Well, believe it or not I spent a good hour last night (Sunday) posting an update and replying to comments/suggestions and when done and I hit the "Post" button I got the "507 User Identification Failed" error message.  I was so mad, I logged out immediately, completely forgetting to copy the update/post to I could paste it back in when I relogged.  So I lost the hour thing.  Good news is, at least all my pics are already uploaded, so it shouldn't take long to recreate at least a semblence of the post.  Replies first:

TheTeaCat/Derry:  Thanks for stopping by and good to know switching out the slope mods works, I'll keep it in mind.  Come by again soon, lots of stuff coming up.

metarvo: that is the default latitude/longitude grid that shows up in my Google Earth window, but I don;t think it would be very useful for using in game, as it has no relationship whatsoever to the game grid.  Thanks for stopping by and I'm glad you are enjoying my play!

ecoba/Ethan: I am not yet certain how I will create the freeways, but am thinking they may be custom made.  I am trying to learn how to make custom content, so maybe by the time I get to the freeways, I'll know how.  Also, thanks very much for the tip on using Street View in Google Earth, wow!  I had not used that option yet and now will use it a lot.  And yes, there is a LOT of grafitti on the spillway walls:



Does this mean when you LE spillway walls for me, you will make them covered with grafitti?  Just kidding pf course, and thanks for stopping by!

Battlecat: Yes, as you will see by tonite's update, I am learning how to use the non-standard road pieces.  Always good to see you and I hope you come by again soon, lots of good stuff coming up.

djvandrake:  yeah, I'm having fun with it, too!  I am finding I am keeping Google Earth open while I play in game and flipping back and forth a lot to compare to see if I am coming close to what I want to achieve.  Hope to see you stopping by often!

MrWacko:  Good to see you again and thanks for your comments.  I just discovered the Street View option and wow, you can be sure I am going to use it a lot.  Amazing software, hard to believe it's free, very powerful stuff.  As for the terrain, well, I've pretty much decided to use the Maxis "Plain Vanilla" and maybe try to gussy it up a bit as I go along.  It's still pretty green for California and probably matches what the area looks like in late spring as it starts to brown up after the winter rains.  The next big question is actually going to be tree controllers, and I guess I'll use more than one.  I need lots of deciduous trees, mostly oaks, for the lowere elevations and then pines for higher elevations.  I know there aren't many native species that color up in the fall, so I don't think I'll be using many seasonal trees.  Being as how I will rarely actually be running the game out of Pause mode, that won't be too much of an issue, just takes away from the eye-candy of seasonal color.  Stop by again soon, always appreciate your comments!

So now for the update:

So tonite I'm going back to the road to try again.  The first thing I want to do is plop the FAR curve I showed you in the last update, but I need to flatten the ground first, so I'm going to use the fine terraforming technique.  I may end up doing each square of the curve individually, as I'm afraid that if I use street tiles I will over excavate the face of the hill to the north of the road.  Once I have a flat tile, I'll try it and see.  I'm going to start my flattening of the curve in the middle, then work to each end.  This FAR curve, by the way is a 90 degree, 5x5 cell curve, and for those of you unfamiliar with them, the FAR stands for Fractional Angle Roads, or roads that run at other than 90 or 45 degrees.  This is where I'll start:



I've found that the street tiles laid on the road bed below may affect my terraforming (and vice versa), so I am going to bulldoze those lake tiles adjacent to where I plan to put my road.  I know everyone loves to blow things up and see things being blown up, but I won't take a pic of that this time a round.

Now that I see where I want to plop the FAR curve, I've changed my mind and decided I'm going to start at the western edge of the curve (on the left hand side above) and work my way around.  I have a nearly flat tile there already and that's where I'll need to connect my next piece of road, so it seems a good place to start.  First I have to check the existing elevation of the cell:



Going clockwise around the cell from the tree, I get: 320.5, 324.0, 322.2, and 319.5.  Now, another thing I have to think about is the elevation of the ending cell on the other end of the curve, so now I'll go check that:



Again going clockwise around the cell I get: 311.4, 329.2, 338.1, and 326.6.  Ok mathaphobes, break out your valium, here comes some math.  I'm going to find the average of the heights of the first cell, then do the same for the second cell, then find the average between the two cells and, I think, I'll use that as my base elevation for the curve.  Ready?  Here we go!

First cell average: 320.5+324.0+322.2+319.5=1290.7/4=322.7
Second cell average: 311.4+329.2+338.1+326.6=1305.3/4=326.3
Average between both cells: 322.7+326.3=649/2=324.5

So now I'll try that and see what happens.  Hopefully I won't create any cliffs or escarpments, because none exist around this curve in RL.



This end looks good.  I saved my game so if plopping street tiles messes things up, I can start over with my level tile.

Ok, so problem solved.  The next cells for the curve are too steep to plop a street tile on, so I guess each tile will have to be hand terraformed.  Maybe a road tile will work, instead.  I'll try that and see.



Road tiles do indeed work!  More slope tolerant, it seems, than street tiles.  I had to play around with several road tile layouts to affect the least amount of lake and hillside, and I lost 3 lake tiles (I think, not sure, I didn't count), but I am pretty happy with the look of the hillside and I have checked the curve and it now will plop, so (after I saved my game again), I'm going to bulldoze those road tiles and plop my curve:



Uh-oh.  I don't like the east end of the curve and the way it cuts into the hillside, so I'll try again, using more road tiles to soften that end of the curve.



That looks much better, don't you agree?  Judicious use of the depress terrain tool to lower the elevations of the cells around that area of the curve did the trick.  Now I'll plop the curve again:



Oh yes, now we're cooking with gas!  Now I get to see if I can hook up roads to either end of the curve.  I'm going to use the "average" slope mod to start with and see how that works.  Bummer, the Very Mounted mod is installed in my plugins folder and my game is running, so I can't switch it out unless I save and exit, so I guess that's what I'll do.  Forgot about that part of switching out mods during a play session, dang!

Well, I didn't like the Average slope, so now I'm going to try the Smooth slope. And now Very Smooth slope.  And now Extremely Smooth.

Eureka!  Well, I got one end of the curve, using another FAR curve piece, this one a 3x4.  I need to soften the face of the hill behind it some, so I'm going to do that now:





(Monday evening edit: the two pics above may be duplicates of each other and if so, I'm sorry.  The offline update I wrote Sunday night didn't have a space for screenshot9 and I had it in my folder, so I posted both 9 and 10 next to each other)

Much bettah!  Now sneaking past the spillway is going to be a challenge.  With the road so close to the lake here and the angle of the road, things are a little dicey.  Every time I try to get the road through, I loose the mouth of the spillway.  So, I'm going to try to VERY CAREFULLY manually terraform the road bed around the spillway so that I can lay some Maxis diagonal road tiles here without loosing my spillway.



Well, it looks a little rough and jaggedy, but I think I'll save it.  There is actually a pullout area just below the spillway gates, so if I bulldoze the road after it jags south, I can run the road straight and use the bulldozed area as the pullout:



Oh, I'm liking it.  I need to soften the hill behind the road cut to get rid of the exposed stone, so I'll do that now:



Now we're talking. 



And with that, I think I'll stop for tonite.  Time to go check on my buddies over on LOTRO and I'd still like to save time to play Sims2, also, and it's going to take me a while to upload this newest update and photos, so check back tomorrow night to see how I resolve the other end of the curve.  I'm quite happy with what I did tonite...hope you enjoy!

Lora/LD

[JoeST]

if you wish to get your diagonal road SUPER straight on slopes, first use rails

[Battlecat]

Nice job.  Thats a pretty challenging location to place wide radius curves.

[calibanX]

You have a quality in abundance that I lack, patience. I admire that. You are also methodical and detail oriented to a fault. All great qualities to have. I'm still quite hooked on your project Lora.

Take care.

Geoff