My military bases are plagued by some (possibly) terrain issue.

[ryandinho14]

I am trying to build a sprawling joint military base to keep my sims safe, sound, and sleeping at night. All is well in Joint Base Kickass, except my SNM wharves. They're driving me insane. When I place anything but a 1x4 piece, it plops directly at the elevation the terrain was at. But when I place a 1x4 piece (necessary for variety), they sink to sea level. The end result is this.



I tried individually raising the elevation of the 1x4 slot, but the wharf piece still sinks to sea level. What is causing this problem and how can I fix it? Thanks guys.

[twalsh102]

You my want to consider using the PEG_CDK Leveler set and actually lowering the level of the rest of your wharves.  Scale-wise, the tops of your wharves are about 30 feet out of the water.  In the real world, that is fairly extreme except for extreme low tide in locations that have a massive difference between low and high tide. 

An indicator that your wharves are sitting too high actually shows up in your screen capture, i.e. the submarines.  If you look at any pictures of subs available on the web, you will almost never see the screws sitting high and dry out of the water except when in dry dock.  The average sub only has about 10-15 feet of the hull (not including the sail) sticking out of the water when docked or running on the surface in the open ocean.  Your screen capture shows most of the sub high and dry.

So the likely answer to your conundrum is that the 1x4 wharf is actually placing itself correctly in relation to water level, and the other pieces are working as they were designed and placing themselves at the level of the surrounding terrain.  Why the differing behavior between the different size pieces... http://sc4devotion.com/forums/Smileys/JasonSmilies/confused-smiley-001.gif

There used to be a good tutorial of how to use the CDK Leveler available on the PEG website before the website went away.  Although you can get the lot over at Simtropolis now, it may be a while (if ever) before any of the other content from the PEG website gets uploaded there.

[ryandinho14]

You my want to consider using the PEG_CDK Leveler set and actually lowering the level of the rest of your wharves.  Scale-wise, the tops of your wharves are about 30 feet out of the water.  In the real world, that is fairly extreme except for extreme low tide in locations that have a massive difference between low and high tide. 

An indicator that your wharves are sitting too high actually shows up in your screen capture, i.e. the submarines.  If you look at any pictures of subs available on the web, you will almost never see the screws sitting high and dry out of the water except when in dry dock.  The average sub only has about 10-15 feet of the hull (not including the sail) sticking out of the water when docked or running on the surface in the open ocean.  Your screen capture shows most of the sub high and dry.

So the likely answer to your conundrum is that the 1x4 wharf is actually placing itself correctly in relation to water level, and the other pieces are working as they were designed and placing themselves at the level of the surrounding terrain.  Why the differing behavior between the different size pieces... http://sc4devotion.com/forums/Smileys/JasonSmilies/confused-smiley-001.gif

There used to be a good tutorial of how to use the CDK Leveler available on the PEG website before the website went away.  Although you can get the lot over at Simtropolis now, it may be a while (if ever) before any of the other content from the PEG website gets uploaded there.

Thank you very much for the detailed reply. I knew the subs were too high, but thought it was just how the BATs were designed. I tried lowering all the ground to where the 1x4's are, but I receive the "inappropriate terrain" query when I try placing any wharves at that level. I will try the PEG_CDK Leveler set and see if that helps.

[twalsh102]

After doing a little more digging (using iReader) to try and determine what the difference is between the 1x4 lot and the other lots you show in your screen capture, I think I found it.  At first I thought it my be a difference between how different content creators created their lots, and in a way it is. 

I first found the lot you are having problems with, looked at its configuration settings, and compared it to the other lots you are using from the same download (SNM Navy Base Set by SNM).  I found one glaring difference: 

In the lot exemplar, the setting "LotConfigPropertyMaxSlopeBeforeLotFoundation" for the 2 1x4 lots in this download is set to 0.  In all the other lots that I checked by this same author, the setting is set to 90.  As a comparison, in all the PEG naval lots, this setting is set to 0 as well.  And after further checking, it appears the setting is the same for the PEG CDK lots I checked.

So for consistencies sake, if you feel comfortable modifying settings for individual lots, you can either change the two 1x4 lots to a setting of 90 (although you will be left with unrealistically high wharves, but at least all will be consistently high).  Or change all the others to 0 so the others automatically plop themselves properly in relation to sea-level.  You might have to do this anyway for the PEG_CDK Leveler to work properly (which might make the use of the Leveler unnecessary). 

NOTE:  I have not had a chance to try the lots (as corrected above) in-game to see if the problem is solved, but the differences in settings are too much of a coincidence otherwise.

[ryandinho14]

After doing a little more digging (using iReader) to try and determine what the difference is between the 1x4 lot and the other lots you show in your screen capture, I think I found it.  At first I thought it my be a difference between how different content creators created their lots, and in a way it is. 

I first found the lot you are having problems with, looked at its configuration settings, and compared it to the other lots you are using from the same download (SNM Navy Base Set by SNM).  I found one glaring difference: 

In the lot exemplar, the setting "LotConfigPropertyMaxSlopeBeforeLotFoundation" for the 2 1x4 lots in this download is set to 0.  In all the other lots that I checked by this same author, the setting is set to 90.  As a comparison, in all the PEG naval lots, this setting is set to 0 as well.  And after further checking, it appears the setting is the same for the PEG CDK lots I checked.

So for consistencies sake, if you feel comfortable modifying settings for individual lots, you can either change the two 1x4 lots to a setting of 90 (although you will be left with unrealistically high wharves, but at least all will be consistently high).  Or change all the others to 0 so the others automatically plop themselves properly in relation to sea-level.  You might have to do this anyway for the PEG_CDK Leveler to work properly (which might make the use of the Leveler unnecessary). 

NOTE:  I have not had a chance to try the lots (as corrected above) in-game to see if the problem is solved, but the differences in settings are too much of a coincidence otherwise.

Since the 1x4's were actually correctly configured, I went ahead and changed the values of everything at 90 to zero. Here's the finished product.



Those last 3 pieces on the left are 1x4's fitting in seamlessly. And my subs propellers aren't getting exposed to that nasty sea air either. Thank you very much.

[twalsh102]

Looking good!  Joint Base Kickass is on its way.

[mgb204]

Nice work sorting this out, can someone make sure twalsh102 gets a Karma point for their efforts please?

I think this was released as SNM so I don't know if there is a chance to get these lots corrected for others, however if this is within the control of the former SimPeg team I'll see what we can do.

[APSMS]

K-point has been sorted.

Thanks twalsh102 for the quick response and assistance.