The Prestine Landscape (Terrain Works)

[dedgren]

Carl, I missed seeing until today your December 22, 2011, post here.

Blending snow with cliffs has been a real challenge.

Looking at the pics, I might be inclined to agree with you, except that you didn't finish the sentence.  It would have been far more correct to say, "Blending snow with cliffs has been a real challenge, but I've been able to overcome that."  Those snow cover patterns are almost RL.  Snow doesn't stick to close to vertical rock there and shouldn't in the game, either.

Your amazing work here as elsewhere (I know that there is another snow surprise from you for me to catch up with elsewhere) is always K-point worthy- and so it once again is.


David

[JoeST]

Holy-moly. People like Yan and Badsim have spent their time painstakingly creating utterly stunning visuals that boggle the mind into believing they are real photographs, and then there's David and the NAM team breaking the grid with their fractional angles, but HECK, you just blew me out of the water with a BLANK MAP!!!

[Lowkee33]

Thanks for the compliments

JoeST, if you were as bad as I am at making cities, you would make terrain too 

After a little testing, I think I am going to drop the altitude for when High Altitude snow appears.  Rather than 2500m, it will be 1500m.  A big drop, but there are only a few maps that go above this height.  I figure anyone playing in high mountains can adjust the height as desired.

[JoeST]

JoeST, if you were as bad as I am at making cities, you would make terrain too 

Hahah, yeah I've resigned myself to making support software lol

[FrankU]

JoeST, if you were as bad as I am at making cities, you would make terrain too 

Hahah, yeah I've resigned myself to making support software lol

And I started lotting and modding (a bit)! 

[noahclem]

Really impressive job blending the snow Carl! 

Your textures continue to look outstanding--I think the terrain mod is really coming together. Out of curiosity, what are you thinking for the water transparency settings?

...And if you're as bad (and slow) at lotting and modding as I am it's best to spend most of your time building cities and leaving the technical work to the pros 

[JoeST]

...And if you're as bad (and slow) at lotting and modding as I am it's best to spend most of your time building cities and leaving the technical work to the pros 

yay for the circular argument

[Lowkee33]

Your textures continue to look outstanding--I think the terrain mod is really coming together. Out of curiosity, what are you thinking for the water transparency settings?

Right now there are two options, low and high 

Water depth for max alpha
  -Low = 8
  -High = 35

I just noticed that Water Min Alpha is higher for the high transparency option.  I will check on that.

Water depth color gradient didn't seem to do anything?  Perhaps I need other settings, as I didn't try higher than 1

What do you think? 

[noahclem]

...And if you're as bad (and slow) at lotting and modding as I am it's best to spend most of your time building cities and leaving the technical work to the pros 

yay for the circular argument

Yay indeed 

Right now there are two options, low and high 

Water depth for max alpha
  -Low = 8
  -High = 35

I just noticed that Water Min Alpha is higher for the high transparency option.  I will check on that.

Water depth color gradient didn't seem to do anything?  Perhaps I need other settings, as I didn't try higher than 1

What do you think? 

I actually keep my Water depth for max alpha set to "9" almost all the time. I haven't extensively tested all the different water properties but the experimenting I've done makes it seem like the other properties aren't as important as that one. For me the 9m seems about perfect, changes within a few meters of it don't make a very noticeable difference, and unless I discovered settings I liked more I'd only change it if I was making a tropical area.

I suppose it could be helpful for me to note that the water mod I use these settings with primarily is drunk_apple's dark blue, though it's also been effective with Brigantine and a couple others. However, right now I'm using Rivit's icy water with a transparency of 3m (attempting, unsuccessfully to make it look like ice).

I am quite curious to hear more of your thoughts on these settings as I'd love to get the most out of my water.

[Lowkee33]

    One issue I have is that the older textures aren't going to look good anymore (because they are smaller they will be stretched out).  Ennedi has some 1024x1024 cliff mods on the LEX, but from what I know, there are no water/beach mods anywhere.  In order for the mod to not look like crap, I am also going to have a little "starter set".  As time goes by, hopefully the community will help make as many water/cliff/beach options are there are for 256x256 textures.

    Anyway, it does seem that the MaxDepth has the largest effect.  MinAlpha is interesting too though, if this is high, you can clearly see where your water starts.  The downside is that it can look glitchy.

    Something you might want to play with are the underwater textures, 0x13 and 0x14.  13 is the deep sea texture, and 14 is right below sea level.  There is a property Min Water Depth For Deep Sea Bed Texture, I think you can guess what it means.  I will have to play with water settings as well, but perhaps a value of half the MaxDepth is sufficient.   For my mod, the deep sea texture's main purpose is to blend cliffs in with the beach.  It's not the strongest part of the mod, but like I say, let's at least get a primer on, choose colors later.

[Lowkee33]

Concerning water, I checked out DobDriver's mods on the STEX.  Something very interesting he had was the textures that make the edge of the water a better color.  There are two of them, and I'm trying to figure out exactly what they do.  So far, the color of the edge appears to be the difference of color between the two.  One has an effect on the surface of the water, though I am not sure exactly what.  Making the edge of the the tile match the water has changed the color of the water as well.

I happened to find another texture that deals with water, and this one is the one that makes the sun appear to shine on water.  Well, that effect has always annoyed me, so the first thing I did is make it go away.  I've attached it as a little mod here.  Any thoughts about this one?  I'm making a water mod for my terrain, should I include it?  (obligatory plugin load order speech here).

[vortext]

  You killed it, you killed it!! 

Too much? Perhaps so but it annoyed me as well for a long, long time.

As for including it, imo you should keep the terrain mod as simple as can be, otherwise installation might get unnecesarily complicated. Maybe you could point future users to all these nifty mods in the read-me.

[NCGAIO]

This Japanese creator made ​​several interesting changes on the subject ..



link - http://www.fukajun.net/simcity4/modules/d3downloads/index.php?page=singlefile&cid=3&lid=18

[Lowkee33]

@NCGAIO:  There is no doubt many interesting things to do with the water texture.  A snow mod perhaps?


The attempt now is to make the edges of the city match.  I never thought making a good water mod would be so complex though

@Noahclem:  Looks like I got something for you, about the Alpha to Gradient:

Here it is with a value of .01:


And here is a value of 100:


Maybe tough to see in the images, different depths get different pixels in the gradient.  So that means that property actually matters...  The gradient itself too, 0x69EFB6F8.   

The other side texture is 0xC9EFB727, they are in SimCity_2.dat with the terrain Group ID.  This one appears to be a gradient from the surface of the water down (I think unaffected by depth).

And you were interested in the Ice too.  For that, not only is the water the ice texture, but the sea-bed and beach textures are as well, 0x13, 0x14, 0x39.

Of course, that is a lazy man's snow mod...

[NCGAIO]

... but from what I know, there are no water/beach mods anywhere.     

Sorry friend had just read above and thought to help ..

I went back to the start of the topic and see who has everything under control. Mods snow? There is no doubt the best are on the PLEX ... Direct PEG MODS

http://www.simpeg.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=ad4ece3a98379305d1ee92fd4997ca5e&action=downloads;cat=8

[Lowkee33]

The textures I am making are 1024x1024 pixels large.  SC4 can only display 8 pixels per meter, so this mod spreads them out over a greater area.  This spreading is done with the property TerrainTexTilingFactor in the Terrain Exemplar (THIS LINK shows a little work I did to figure out how terrain is displayed).  The property effects every terrain texture, so a 256x256 pixel texture is going to look very blurred (each pixel of the texture will take up 8 in-game).  PEG's snow mod might not be too hindered, my blind guess is that the snow is just a white FSH.  Ennedi was making some terrific snow textures before he left, THIS IMAGE from THIS POST shows that we can do way better.  It's a shame you are left with just me .  Water is my least favorite texture to make, followed shortly by snow.

A snowy terrain mod that also has grass is like an F-35, good at everything, perfect at nothing.  I imagine as time goes by I will make a snowy cliff and an icy water.  A dedicated snow mod shouldn't be too hard to make from there.

For those unhappy with the snow I've made, my first thought is that there is probably enough snow slots in the INI to override the textures themselves.  Otherwise, making a new INI wouldn't be too hard.

I had to stop my mod for a minute, load SC4 for a second marathon for RL.  Hope to pick it back up tomorrow, I think there is just one more thing to figure out (the same thing that got my looking at changing the water in the first place). 

[Lowkee33]

You may notice my CML, thought I would make this post display my tinkering process.

Texture 0x69EFB6F8 is a 1x128 pixel image.  It effects the water on the edge of the tile, as well as the surface of water.  On the edge, it is the color of where water meets the cliff edge (the ocean floor).  This effect is controlled in the Terrain Properties Exemplar with the property WaterDepthToColorGradientFactor.    The Reader description is "Number of pixels in the gradient corresponding to water depth".  If the value of the property was "1", at a water depth of 128m the color at the ocean floor would be the bottom pixel in the image.  If it were ".5", at 128m we would see pixel 64.  Simple enough I think.

As for the way it effects the surface of the water, this took some tinkering.  Here are my notes:

Experiments with 0xC9EFB727 and 0x69efb6f8:

Vanilla:

Water as: 0x7f7f7f = 0x525563 in-game.

Can these textures be alphas:  No, appear black.  Grey water is 0x393c39 in-game.

0xC9EFB727: set to 0xFFFFFF (white): No effect on water surface, ignore for now.

0x69efb6f8:

Top half white makes water very close to 7f7f7f.

Bottom half white has no effect...  Testing changing terrain exemplar properties... No effect.

Pixels 32-64 white, no effect... black for no effect confirmation...  Confirmed.

Pixels 16-32, no effect.

Pixel 1 white, the rest black...  Brighter water... Making black for confirmation... 0x393c39 !!!

Hue ajustement...  Water texture to 0xFFFFFF, pixel 1 to 0xFF0000, red water!

This means that all a water texture has to be is a bump map, the hue/brightness can be controlled with this texture (that one top pixel).  This implies that if I make a good 1024x1024 bump map, then I can make 100's of different water mods with just variations of that 1x128 texture.  The bandwidth gods smile.

As for 0xC9EFB727:  The only purpose of this, for now, would be to act as a gradient from the water surface to the water floor.  It is also 1x128.  It seems very complicated for something that only acts as a gradient, so perhaps there is more to it.  Here is an image of it tiled:  Note, those sharp changes in the gradient are not jpeg compression.

[rooker1]

Lowkee, when you post pictures that you need to show fine details in color differences, you are aloud to post the pictures as png, especially if it shows the difference better.  Just be sure you keep it to a minimum please.
I don't say much in here but I am following your work very closely.
Keep up the great work, please.

Robin

[noahclem]

Congratulations again on the CML Carl     If this is the amount of work, knowledge, and contribution required to receive one there may not be many more coming soon.

Nice tinkering here, speaking of which. I'll be curious to see what comes of these discoveries. Some snowy cliffs could be quite useful and Ennedi's snow work is quite beautiful. As far as existing, released snow mods go, I share your suspicion that Peg's is a simple white FSH. QuantumEagle's Antarctic Terrain Mod on the STEX is something else altogether though and I've been able to capture some nice scenes with it.

Keep up the great work!

[buddybud]

Wow! The quality of these textures and your ability to integrate them into to the game is astounding. Just when i thought that i've seen it all, i come across this. Congrats on the amazing work and thanks for showing how much further this game can be pushed, nudged and exploited...... in a good way

Bud