Rural Renewal Project

[catty]

This is great stuff, and I love the new flowers, my cities are getting more colourful by the minute.

Thank You 

[Pat]

Chris fantastic job here!!!    David cant forget Bruce has an alter ego here with monkeys lol 

[klaascornelis]

Jeey update finally

[girlfromverona]

How now, brown cow?
These new breeds of cattle will be SO welcome in my game! Well done, Jestarr and Chris. 

[bat]

Great work there on that stuff!!

[klaascornelis]

Is the water view bug solved actually?

[Pat Riot]

If you can model animals, chances are you have become to good for this community 

everything looks great chris.

[Unassigned]

Is this thread the proper place to post bugs with RRP?

Anyway I just installed "RRP Fences and Paths Beta(6-12-08)" and attempted to plop one of each item on flat land. I found some issues with the fences, namely:

• "1x Diagonal--SF 42 Deg" is a brown box thingy.
• Immediate CTD on plopping a "Filler-Trans--1x Diagonal" (btw what does "Trans" mean here?)
• Typo in menu for all 7 "1x Straight" pieces: "Striaght".

FYI I also installed the flora, draggable paths and culverts and have no problems plopping/using any of those so far.

Your works here has me really excited, I can hardly wait to start using them. Yay!

[Chrisadams3997]

Thanks Unassigned, I'll take a look at those this afternoon, see what I find.


EDIT:  Thanks again unassigned, I've fixed the bugs you found and added the updated files in the sticky.  Good spot on the 'straights' by the way, I really should have my very own spell checker looking over my shoulder at all times, wonder how much that would cost .

[Chrisadams3997]

Hope everyone noticed the updated beta, at any rate, I've just got a teaser for yall, still more work to do

[jacqulina]

thanks chris,beautifull pic btw

[Pat]

Chris me hats off to you!!! 

[bat]

A really beautiful shot there! Beautiful work!

[bakerton]

That looks really cool dude. I am enjoying everything and all of your work here. JKB

[Chrisadams3997]

Thanks Jacky, Pat, Bat, and Bakerton.

For those who haven't guessed yet, I've entered the transparent ploppable water business as of late, with a couple new ideas to add to what we have.  The first thing you'll notice from the preview I already gave above is new textures and transparency.  While I love hearing how much yall like the pictures, etc. in addition in this case I'd like more of an objective discussion on the colors and textures and how to potentially improve them, or if you think they are good as done so far.  I can't emphasize enough how much I'd like to hear your opinions on what you'd like to see here, though I do ask that you come with a reasonable logic for any suggestions, as I'm shooting for as much realism as possible within the constraints we have.

Now, moving beyond the textures(while not forgetting them), The second thing I'm playing with is the height of the TPW models.  The original set by Jeronij has all tiles set to a height of 4 meters, which works well for many situations.  But, not for all.  In particular, the distortion of bank lines at different viewing angles makes developing a convincing bank(using other ploppables) often a trade off between those different angles.  Furthermore, it works well for deep water, but what about shallow stream beds?

So, what I've begun to do is create two new 'height' types of ploppable water (shallow or STPW, and shallow-bottomed (STPWB) are the temporary names I'm using now, suggestions are welcome ).  The first, shallow, is set to 2.2 meters and will have probbably the same texture as the deeper pieces(which will still be used).  This height is much better for banks and small streams as it reduces the angle distortion by nearly half.  Here are two early pics from the development process.



Here I've visually lined the bank of the original TPW(on the bottom), and the STPW(on the top) with grass, then rotating the view 180 degrees...



Notice the difference in how much the bank line 'jumps'.  correcting this is a primary goal of the STPW.  The second goal is to change the impression of depth by allowing some objects to break the water's plane that couldn't before.  You should recognize this photo from the picture competition if you've been in there lately.  Notice the c.p. rocks that break the surface, all(or most) of these would be below the water in 4 meter TPW:



Also looking at the preview pic I posted before, you'll notice two different 'textures'(other than the original JRJ green one), the one on the left is the 'bottomed' TPW, set still at 2.2m in that pic, but I've now got it moved down.  Notice I've tried to give the impression of seeing the rocky bottom, which in my experience you'd see at this depth quite well, even from above.  Of course, I'm interesting in your opinions here as well .  To show this again(without as many plop rocks in the stream), here's the blue water comparison pic:



But as I've said, I've not moved it down, in this case to .6m, not quite all the way, but enough that most things poke through, which means we can  add small rocks and vegetation that actually breaks the surface.  Here is my first experiment with it:



Really looking forward to you comments here, and if you've got an opinion--say it 

Chris

[Heblem]

thats great!!!!  this will be great for define edges to a lake, we will not use rocks anymore as usual...

[bat]

Looks wonderful as always!

[threestooges]

Now that I know a bit more about what I was looking at, let me see if I can create a somewhat coherent response. As far as your texture selection goes, I like the rippled effect. It provides a fairly realistic sense of movement. I am curious to know how it looks as a larger body instead of as a stream (tiling effects and all) as well as its slope tolerance (I'm guessing that would be the same as the other versions, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask, just in case). I also thought something was different about those rocks in the water for your photo comp pic (didn't realize it was the water, I just thought they were the larger rocks of the plop sequence). Are there any visual issues transferring between regular and shallow versions?

Also, I recently downloaded the RRP beta and the cows are great (as are the other features of course) but I'm curious if/when you plan to include the sheep and other such models, unless they are already there and I just missed them, which wouldn't surprise me too much, but anyway, good work. I hope the above stuff makes sense and I should have an update of those trees sometime today hopefully.
-Matt

[Chrisadams3997]

Thanks Heblem and Bat

Now Matt, I'm curious to see how it looks on larger bodies of water too, but haven't gotten that far yet.  I halfway anticipate that on the larger tiles, I'll want to relax the texture a little bit to make the ripples larger, while still working in with the ripples on the smaller pieces, but that remains to be seen.

The basic placement parameters, like the 'size' of the plop, slope conforming, etc. aren't changing any as I Jeroni did a great job setting those up the first time, so they'll place exactly the same.

Moving between different height variations so far seems pretty seamless.  There will be some difference in vertical 'jump' seen from different views, but much less between them than original TPW and the ground, as the most height difference seen between the pieces is just 1.8m.  As long as you have a little overlap, they fit together just fine in my experience so far.  But further testing will help confirm that.

And finally, those ploppable animals are Jestarr's, so he'll be releasing them, I just did the modding.  He's working on a few more things with them  for some lots, so I don't know when he'll get them released.

[Pat]

OMG Chris that is what you where doing!!! WOW talk about making something great to ummm crap what can you do make something even more great oooooh yea that is it have Chris get ahold of it so it now goes beyond great to wicked!!! 

my question would be are they still going to be the same avaible sizes to choose from or are you going to expand on that as well?