Is there a new Diagonal Jagged Edges Modd?

[FrankU]

Well, I did some experiments and though I thought it would be quite straightforward I found some weird things. Maybe I am doing something wrong....
To begin with: I wanted to use the DJEM in order to make raised and sunken roads and rail. For this I use the Ground Lifter and Hole Digger by Smoncrie. Without the DJEM they look ugly, at least when you want to use Jeronij's Diagonal Walls, which I do.
So, for me it's not an option to use the DJEM only in flat areas.

For my experiment I used the values MaxNormalYforCliff = 0,50 (Maxis Default) and 0,73, because I thought that this value is right to do the trick.

The influence of the value on the overall view. You can clearly see the difference.

MaxY = 0,5


MaxY = 0,73

Then I made some raised roads.
I set the value MaxY to 0,5 and built the road and covered it with the walls.

You can see the jagged edges one one side. But on the other side everything look OK. Why that it? Beats me...


Then I changed MaxY to 0,73. You can see, everything is allright now. Also watch the difference in saturation and the amount of cliff-textures.
Without showing all the pictures, I found out that it seems to matter what the MaxY setting is on the moment you do the landscaping. Because first I made the raised roads when MaxY was 0,73 and when I then set it to MaxY = 0,50 everything still looked allright, almost..... Don't know why....

As a last small detail I found out that with MaxY = 0,73 the walls look OK, but the shrubs are floating in the air....


Well, if anybody can help me further....

[M4346]

Have you inspected the original Olympic and Maxis versions of the mod to see if it has the same effect? I'll have a look at it too though, but I can't and won't guarantee anything. 

[FrankU]

No, sorry, I haven't. But I can assure you: the only thing I edited was the MaxNormalYforCliff value.
I was quite surprised and it only stresses the meaning of the saying: each answer raises new questions.

[Chrisadams3997]

Well, as for the change in saturation, I think your eyes are playing a trick on you here.  What you're seeing is the bleed over from the cliff textures where they blend with the next tile, but if you look at an area without any cliffs in it in either version of the mod, you'll find that the saturation is all the same.

The reason that without the DJEM, only one side messes up has to do with the way slopes are handled.  Any tile that is not flat is composed of two planes which are split from one corner to the other diagonally across the tile, which leaves two possible ways it can be split, bottom left to top right, or vice versa.  In order for the diagonal walls to appear correctly, this line splitting the two planes has to run in the same direction as the wall, where the bottom of the wall texture rides right along that split.

For any non-cliff slope, they all split in the same direction.  In the case of your pics below that's bottom left to top right.  That causes the line to split textures on one side, while the other is drawn appropriately.  Cliff tiles always split perpendicular to the slope on the other hand, allowing them to display walls properly.

Unfortunately forcing the cliffs is the only way known at present to fix the wall textures, which means there isn't much of a way around your predicement.  The only thing I can see is to perhaps change the cliff texture to something less disruptive for your terrain, perhaps to a green grassy texture of some kind, so that it doesn't actually look like a cliff.  Of course this means that you can't have a cliff if you actually wanted it, and the areas covered by the cliff texture will still lack much of the variation that would exist without the cliffs there.

Naturally, as you know since you've been playing with the values, the lower the MaxY value you can get away with and still fix the walls, the better off the rest of the landscape will fare.  Perhaps you could use a greater hight change for your raised and lowered networks to allow for a lower MaxY to still fix it, though I realize that has it's own problems with the appearance of the network and connectivity since most props for such networks are built for a 15 meter hight .

[FrankU]

Chris, thanks.

I have seen the bleeding off effect. Sure this is part of the changes. But what I found while experimenting is that also the colours changed on terrain further off the location I showed. Even on completely flat ground. But I have some ideas about the reasons. One I gave already in an earlier post: the mixture between grey clifftextures and green meadowtextures. Afterwards I realised that the elevation of the terrain must also be a factor in the mixture: I am guessing, but are almost sure that higher terrain will have more cliff or rock texture, and thus less saturation. In my overviews you see that the higher the MaxNormalYforCliff is, the higher is the amount of rock and cliff textures.

In my experiment I first tried to find the lowest MaxNormalYforCliff that can do the trick of DJEM. This first experiment I did on completely flat terrain almost on sealevel. And here I found 0,73 as useful value. PJOT had 0,85 as value, maybe because he found that in some situations lower values simpy don't work. In other words: the higher values will force the squares to split in the desired way. So apparently 0,73 just isn't enough.

And the saturation question: maybe I just have to live with it. It is not really an option for me to edit the cliff textures. Maybe I just stop using elevated and sunken roads and rail?

And your last point: I did also some experiment with 7 meters high walls: first raised road (15m) and then sunken rail (8m). The cliff texture didn't show, so it looked much greener, but the splitting of the squares did not look any different. Although I did not experiment too intensively...

So conlusion:
1. To solve all the jagged edges I suppose 0,73 is not enough.
2. If I want to fix the edges I have to live with a much more cliffy and rocky landscape.
3. Someone could feel challenged and make a terrain mod that has much less cliffs and rocks....

Well, you know, these discussions are very educative for me and I thank everyone for her and his answers and support. Also: I would like to experiment with this stuff, but have to take in account that I have not much time. Effectively I have maybe about 6 to 8 hours a week to play the game. The forum I can visit on quiet hours at the office... So you will understand that in these limited hours I sometimes just want to work on my region.

[jeronij]

So conlusion:
1. To solve all the jagged edges I suppose 0,73 is not enough.
2. If I want to fix the edges I have to live with a much more cliffy and rocky landscape.
3. Someone could feel challenged and make a terrain mod that has much less cliffs and rocks....

Hello frankU,

1 and 2 are ok, unfortunately.... 
3 it is not possible, because only one texture is used for all the cliffs in the game....unfortunately again 

But I hope you can find a workaroud to make the walls work always 

Btw, dont forget that when the seasons change in game, the terrain textures ( not the cliff ones) do change. In summer you should have more dry terrain textures, and in winter more moistured ones.... .depends on how the mod is designed...  the terrain textures are organized depending the height first, and the form dry to wet....if you terraform your terrain, you make a hill or a mountain, usually the parts in the shadow will have more moistured textures that the part exposed to the sun. I hope this helps to understand how the terrain textures work 

[Chrisadams3997]

Higher terrain will use different textures with or without cliffs, as the game assigns textures(other than cliffs and beaches) by the elevation range and moisture/proximity to water of a given tile, although how they change is dependant on what terrain mod your using.

What did suprise me is that there is a saturation change associated with the MaxY property, even away from cliffs.  Without going into too many details of my sampling procedure, I took various selections of areas of terrain in your two pictures that were far enough away from cliffs to avoid any bleed over and compared their histograms, finding typically anywhere from 5 to 7% drops in saturation in such areas.  I also used the sea in the pics as a control and found no saturation difference, which initially indicates that the difference is not a result overall saturation differences between the pictures through editing(resizing, etc.) of the pictures, and that only the land was affected.

However, given the fact that I had to check it in an image editing program to see if the difference really existed, I doubt most people will notice much , the over abundance of cliffs really is the larger problem visually, but there's no way around that either.

Also, in order to reduce the necessary MaxY value, you'd have to increase the hight change in your elevated and sunken networks(to 20m for instance) rather than lower it, as the point is to make it easier to get cliffs on the edges of those networks.

Finally, you can replace the cliff texture without changing the rest of the terrain mod.  Just look around at the available cliff mods(Peg's for instance) and make sure that which one you want to use loads last.

[FrankU]

Thanks, Chris and Jeroni, both of you.

I really had the impression that I could see clear differences in colour and saturation. Maybe it's good to experiment further on this.
Another thing: all pictures are taken on the same SC4 day: the game was paused somewhere in january.

Anyway, I think I will just take it as it comes and try to live with it.
Pity though, because especially the "cliffs" at the raised roads and rails would also be beautiful as green areas in my cities. But now they are rock and I think I need to cover them with walls or parks.

And Jeroni, what about your floating shrubs?

[jeronij]

And Jeroni, what about your floating shrubs?

... oh my bad memory.... what are we talking about ?¿ 

[FrankU]

Take a look at my last picture: the detailed one. You see the wall textures are flattened against the cliffs up to the road. But if you take a closer look at the nearest corner you can see that the round shrubs are floating in the air. If my eyes don't deceive me they follow the shape that the cliffs would have if the MaxNormalYforCliff had been the lower Maxis-standard value (= 0,50).
So somehow it appears that the landscape and the attached textures are affected by this famous MaxNormalYforCliff, but that the shrubs are not!

[jeronij]

Well, those are Maxis shrubs, so there is not much that I can do about it atm  . It seems the props "sit" on the real terrain, regardless of what we think we see  ¡¡¡

[FrankU]

Yes indeed, so that raises the question: what is the real terrain?

[Pat]

I hate to bump an old topic from the depths but I think there is renewed intrest in this and well Im trying to piece together in how to fix this myself so FrankU have you come to any conclusion on the effects of Diagonal Jagged Edges at all and why the maxis props float?

[FrankU]

Pat, thanks for the interest.
But no.... time, time, time.....
RL has its demands...

So, in short: no I did not experiment further.
I decided to edit the MaxNormalYforCliff in my terrain mod and go on play the game.
The shrubs still float in my cities... My sims don't complain, so I leave it that way.

[Pat]

Ahh OK thank you FrankU, I do thank you for your hard work that you did put into the information at least I have a starting ground.... bad pun I know....

[HandsOn]

Pardon my butting in but when I opened the CP Terrain Meadow DAT I found that the MaxNormalYForCliff had a value of .65 and not .85. Does this mean I have a later version? I am about to change it to .73 as suggested but I am now wondering if that will take care of ALL jagged edges? Or did I misunderstand something (again?).

[Pat]

Nope Handson I think you are understanding it just right as thats what I belive as well from reading here...

[HandsOn]

Nope Handson I think you are understanding it just right as thats what I belive as well from reading here...

Unfortunately, it seems I must have misunderstood something because I did the dirty deed but the "jaggies" annoy me as ever..so the quest for the ultimate no-jag mod remains..

[Pat]

so it didnt work for the Terrian Meadow???  Hmm I wonder if something else is missing then? I have the Meadow as well and I will try it out myself later when I get off work...

[FrankU]

All right then.
As far as I know this is it:

Original Maxis is 0,5
Pjot's DJEM is 0,85
While I was experimenting I tried to find a value that is as low as possible to do the trick. I did this, because I found out that the value also affects the saturation of the terrain.
I my case 0,73 seemed to do the trick. But afterwards I found out it does not.

Now I use Pjot's value: 0,85.

HandsOn: think of other files that edit the same exemplar. I advise you to put the Meadowshire modd into a directory that wil be loaded as one of the last. A directory with a name like ZZZ_Meadowshire.
E.g. Gizmo's waterflora mod also edits these values. If this modd is loaded after Medaowshire, your edits will be of no use.

Hope all is clear now?