Upcoming BATs and lots

[Adept2Rock]

I like these bats!!!




[/quote]

[FromTheAshes]

Those are some great BATs I'd love to see soime more shop which are well-known in Germany (like Saturn,... Ein paar Banken wären auch nicht schlecht (Volksbank, Citybank, Sparkasse,...) and we need some more food-shops (Subway, Starbucks, Meyerbeer, Dunkin' Donuts,...). Just an advice...

[jmyers2043]

I just spotted this thread. The 2X3 park is very well done. The wooden play set and the play set that appears to be at a slight angle – are those new props?  If they are new bats then the scale is perfect. I like the chess set. Is that an individual prop?

I like the bus stops too.  I use bus transportation extensively in my cities. These will be nice to have.

[Andreas]

I just spotted this thread. The 2X3 park is very well done. The wooden play set and the play set that appears to be at a slight angle – are those new props?  If they are new bats then the scale is perfect. I like the chess set. Is that an individual prop?

As far as I know, the play sets are all Maxis props. The chess set, however, is a custom prop, as well as the underlaying texture. BTW, watch out the LEX later this day...

[SC4BOY]

 I'd like to make an SFBT request. I genuinely appreciate the decent job SFBT does on documentation. And I know this can't be made any easier by the fact that you generously provide most in two languages.   However, as it is fairly demonstrated that docs within the plugins folder contribute to loading delays, I'd request that SFBT installers re-direct their doc's to an SFBT docs folder outside the plugins folder. Most other groups that provide good documentation already do this, so you'd simply be falling in with the crowd .

I do love the way SFBT policy makes the readme's and graphics nomenclature such that they can be blended into a master file kind of layout..

Thanks again for the good works.

[Andreas]

Well, although the readme files and images won't delay the start of the game by more than a few seconds at most, you surely have a point. However, the SFBT downloads are designed to work in conjunction with the SC4 Startup Manager 3.0, which enables you to (de-)select individual subfolders in your region profile. So just deselect the "SFTB_ReadMe" folder, and it won't have an impact on the game any longer.

[SC4BOY]

Well of course you may add or remove it as you wish, however I find that the SUM doesn't actually prevent the processing of the file, even though it ends up ignoring it.. at least that was my conclusion once when in a debug I left my full plugin in, but only enabled about 4 files via SUM profile .. the startup and city-load seemed VERY CLOSE if not identical to when I had the plugins fully installed via SUM.  I did not do a rigorous check of this, but this is my current impression. (PS: I use SUM almost every startup)

[Andreas]

Really? For me, there is a huge difference when starting up the game with a full plugins folder or one where almost everything is hidden by the SUM. Anyway, I'd say just move out the readme files manually to the desired location. It's not that it takes more than a few seconds...

[SC4BOY]

Really? For me, there is a huge difference when starting up the game with a full plugins folder or one where almost everything is hidden by the SUM.

Just a note on SUM/NO SUM and Plugin Size
show map 40 sec  open empty city 5 sec   .0016GB  Total  45sec SUM Used to set plugin use
           "     70          "          30      2.7400GB  Total 100sec SUM Used to set plugin use
           "      6          "           4 sec   .0016GB  Total  10sec SUM not used, plugins moved
           "     18          "           4        .0016GB  Total  22sec SUM used but still same plugin (small) 

SUM startup at all times was about 4 seconds.. independent of plugin size

What this shows is that whether SUM is used or not, overheads for the PLUGINS FILE size is not negligible. It still took 300% longer even with minimum file sizes. It helps for large plugin files, about half for this large folder, but clearly plugin size DOES make an impact on startup time even with SUM operating.

edit: lined up numbers..

Anyway, I'd say just move out the readme files manually to the desired location. It's not that it takes more than a few seconds...

DUH! Now why wouldn't I think of that!!??
Of course this is what I have always done.. not the point really.

[gndrew]

Can I request some modern Euro glassy skyscrapers for commercial and residential, for both CO$$$ and CO$$ as well as R$$$ and R$$.  I love super glassy modern towers with a postmodern twist, featuring maybe some Asian architectural hints with some wacky shapes and spires.  Thanks!

[Andreas]

Well, you "can" request, but please don't expect them to be made - usually, the SFBT members don't take requests, but merely starting to do projects they do like. However, if they get excited about a suggestion, there's a good chance that it will be made eventually.

[Adept2Rock]

Andreas, you prepare a pack for Christmas? With your fantastic Spar and your flora shop!

[Andreas]

Well, I'll see what I can do about a Christmas pack, but unfortunately, I don't know the status of the Spar and the flora shop at the moment, since the BATter who has started those is MIA at the moment. 

[Andreas]

Well, I promised that I will start working on the SFBT Rail Catenary Mod some day, and so I did yesterday (and today):



No lots involved (as they are released), but this was done by creating type 21 exemplar files (aka "network lots") that put the catenary props on the tracks automatically, similar to the street tree mods. Unfortunately, it's a lot of work, and since there are about 75 different rail textures, maintaining all those IDs is a tedious work, and it will definitely take a while...

[freedo50]

This is it! This is just what I've been waiting for! I have used the catenaries at every possible opportunity since their release and now it will be even easier, I can't wait for this, electrified rail is one of those things that should have been in the game ages ago.
Thanks for bringing a dream to life!

Fred

[Yoder7652]

ditto....a very worthy project. I can't wait Andreas.

[SC4BOY]

Sweet looking project there.. good luck on it.. I know it will be a lot of work..

[Shadow Assassin]

Yay!

Now I can finally electrify my railroads. Wonder if the curved rail puzzle pieces will get a similar treatment?

[KampfHase]

They are looking very good so far. Do you know whether it will be possible to electrify 2 side-by-side layed tracks as well? || || <-- you know

Oli

[Andreas]

Thanks, guys!

@Shadow Assassin: Yes, I do have catenary props for the gentle rail curve as well, so if I manage to add them, it'll be equipped with those as well. I don't know if it works (or looks) properly with the rail viaducts, though. We'll see.

@Kampfhase: Well, at the moment, two railway lines that are drawn next to each other will show both the same props that are shown in the pic. I don't know if it's possible to tell the game to use those larger ones that span two tiles in this case.

Anyway, as a "side project" I saw a good opportunity to create a mod that I wanted to do since a long time. smoncrie once posted an alpha mod at ST that put grass or concrete textures below the rail texture in developed areas, so you were able to get rid of those ugly brown textures. Of course there's a mod that eliminates the texture, but it eliminates it altogether, which looks bad in rural areas. PEG's Alternate Railway Mod is also mainly intended for rural cities.

The downside of smoncrie's mod was that it only covered two textures - straight and diagonal - compared to the about 75 different railway textures that are in the game. Since I needed some rail texture overlay for my mod in order to create the type 21 exemplar files, I extracted all rail textures as PNGs (along with their alpha maps), which I used as templates for the wealth-dependent textures.

It was a lot of clicking and copy & paste work, but now I'm basically done: Each rail texture now has six different textures (grass and concrete, three wealth levels each) that shows up, depending on the surrounding zone density and wealth:



Some people at SimForum said that the rail tracks would look rather odd on the concrete, so I made a patch that simply re-uses the grass textures for those zones as well:



Another advantage of the mod is that it corrects the odd color shift from zoom 5 to the other zoom levels. For some reason, Maxis brightened the textures for zoom 1 to 4, which always looked odd because any custom made rail textures (if not color-corrected) and rail puzzle pieces looked darker in those zoom levels. Now every zoom level has the same, slightly darker texture. I put the darker in-game textures in a separate DAT file, so if you don't want to use the zone-dependent textures, you can still have the darker rail textures without the grass and concrete underneath.