Recreating San Francisco: Real Life Aside, October 1, 2009

[ldvger]

Wow. 

What can I say?  I'm stunned.  I never win anything. 

Well, that's not quite true.  I won third place in a county-wide American Legion essay contest when I was in 4th grade, had my essay printed in the LA Times "Featured Students" page (does that make me a published author?).  As a senior in high school I won third place in a national archery contest and my mom bought me a bow, arrows, and a straw bale to shoot at soon afterwards. 

But I think that's about it.  Made the honor roll in high school and college.  Does that count? 

I'm a little tongue-tied at this honor.  I really, truly never expected folks to dig on what I was doing here.  I figured it was just way too OTC for anyone.  I have been surprised all along at the great response the MD has gotten and deeply grateful to all the help and comments and suggestions.  My last try at creating a Mayor Diary/City Journal was over on ST and it kinda fizzled into nothing, so I didn't have much hope for this one, either. 

So...thank you all, for your interest and support.  This could not have happened without all of you, active posters and lurkers alike. 

Once again channeling Sally Field: "You LIKE me, you really LIKE me!"

I'll have another update to post soon, so stay tuned, ok? 

Lora/LD

[joelyboy911]

Water mods.... My MD's region is also on a bay on the pacific ocean, and I use brigantine, and turbid inshore. I think on google earth however, the water is not represented accurately - I mean they just put a random blue colour over the deeper water, I imagine what you remember is accurate enough.

If you want your water to look muddier, you could get the mod that makes the water more transparent in relation to depth, and this would reveal more of the sandy texture underneath, giving the illusion of more mud.

At any rate, I suppose the water can look darker/lighter, clearer/muddier depending on the season, rainfall upstream of the waterways that feed into it, the conditions in the ocean causing waves etc. You could get away with whatever you want to do.

I actually think light yellow and overcast looked really good, I might go for that if I was you.

Oh yeah, Congratulations! OSITM is a great achievement. You deserve every bit of it.

[tooheys]

Lora, don't be surprised, you really deserve OSITM. I've been lurking for awhile and I'm impressed by what I've seen so far. It's great to see the way you plan things and how you apply that to the game  . You have a great following and keep them involved in the process.

Very nicely done indeed 

Dave

[ldvger]

Just a short post to let everyone know I have a fairly large update to post on Thursday afternoon, so don't give up on me and think fame has gone to my head.  I worked all day and evening on this next update and have 22 screenshots to upload, which is the only reason I'm not posting it tonite.  Between replies and uploads, it'd take me another 2 hours to post this new update and I'm just not up for that tonite, so sorry. 

Lora/LD

[mayorfabz]

Yipee!
Can't wait.

Fabien

[ldvger]

Update 20

Replies

First of all, thank you all very much for congradulating me for the OSITM award.  Would never have happened without your support.  Second, this is a long update today and lots of replies to get to, to I hope you have some time on your hands. 

ecoba/Ethan: Thank you very much, I'm really glad you are enjoying my MD!  Don't forget to vote on which water mods you think will work best for me!

metarvo: Your preference for the Turbid/LtYellow combo is duly noted and thanks for voting.  I'm glad my attention to detail doesn't drive you batty.

jimbo_jj/James: Welcome to my MD and thanks so much for stopping by and voting on the water mods, I appreciate your input.  I hope that now you have found us over here that you'll be stopping by often and continueing to share comments, suggestions, and advice. 

Tomas Neto: Thank you very much and don;t forget to vote on which combo of water mods you like best!

mayorfabz/Fabien: Thank you for voting, I really appreciate the input!  And yes, it's a difficult choice with so many options, which is why everyone's input is so valuable to me.

Battlecat: Always nice to see you and thanks for voting!  With our mutual interest in earthen dams, you should enjoy today's update!

cody426/Cody: My roomie works at a regular golf course and so we spent about 1/2 hour a few nights ago researching Disc Golf.  It looks like a lot of fun, looks like it could be down right hilarious to play.  There is a course about 5 miles away from where I live and I am thinking about giving it a try, so long as there is someplace I can rent rather than buy the necessary "equipment".  Otherwise, it'll have to wait until I get a job and have some money.  Also, thanks for voting!

calibanX/Geoff: So much affects the color of water that it's really hard to settle on any one thing, it's true, but the game doesn't allow us to have a bunch of different water mods in the game at one time and apply them in different locations across a region, so its one of the compromises that must be made.  I could switch mods out for the purposes of taking pics, I suppose, but with as much work as this is going to be, I really don't want to add more, which is why I am taking the time now to find something that will hopefully work semi-universally across all the sea level water in my region.  You also suggest:

Try lining those shorelines with trees too and see if that gives you another feeling. You'll get some contrast with those dark trees and your water mods.

Yes but, this is a recreation and all the sea level water occurs in bays, ocean, and salt marshes, where there are no trees in RL, just mud and weeds, and some evaporation ponds.  Where trees DO occur is along the banks of fresh water bodies, lakes and streams, and I'll be using PW for that, as it's not possible for me to create a GW lake at 200' above sea level.  However, I do appreciate your comments and remind you to vote on which of the mod combos you think would work best.

Albus of Garaway/Jason: Thank you so very much and don't forget to vote on the water mod you like best!

joelyboy911: Thanks for voting and stopping by to share your grats and comments.  You say:

If you want your water to look muddier, you could get the mod that makes the water more transparent in relation to depth, and this would reveal more of the sandy texture underneath, giving the illusion of more mud.

Hmmm, sounds interesting.  Any idea where I might find this mod you are speaking of?  Or, who created it?

tooheys/Dave: Welcome to my MD and I hope now that you have found it, you'll stop by often and share your thoughts with me, especially onthe subject of which of the water mod combos you like best (hint, hint).  This is WAY too big of a project for me to do all by my lonesome, the more input from other, the better. 

So, including my own choices, this is where we stand on water mod voting so far:

Overcast/Overcast: 4
Overcast/LtYellow: 2
Turbid/LtYellow: 2
Steel/Overcast: 2
Steel/LtYellow: 2
Brigantine/Overcast: 2
Brigantine/Turbid: 1
Turbid/Overcast: 1
Overcast/DkBlue: 1

So far no one has voted for any of the SeaGreen combos, so I think we can safely eliminate all of them, which makes things a little easier.  Definitely have some trends emerging and polls are still open, so if you haven't voted yet, please do!  I still have the Foreshore and Beaches option to look at, but want to cull the pack before I go there.

And now, on to the update!

Update 20: Revisting the Novato Creek Dam

While folks view the various options for water mods and vote on their favs, I thought I'd take this opportunity to revisit the Novato Creek Dam.  I'm not really happy with the downstream slope of the dam, as I think it looks too steep.  Lets review the RL dam with pics from Google Earth.

20.1


It's hard to guess the angle of slope of the face of the dam from an aerial photo, but maybe the pic can give me some clues.  There is a scale at the bottom of the pic that may come in handy.  I'm going to import this pic into CAD, then trace the scale and see if maybe I can't measure the distance from the top of the dam to the bottom. 

20.2


See the little yellow thingie to the left of the pic?  That's a copy of the scale at the bottom of the photo.  Its overall length is equal to 160'.  I put a mark at the half-way point of the scale, so each half represents a distance of 80'.  I might add another set of marks to divide the scale into quarters, each one 40', but first I have some other things to think about. 

This photograph appears to be just about vertical to the ground, but it's hard to tell.  Everything actually looks pretty flat, so it's hard to really be certain exactly where the top of the dam is and where the bottom of the dam is.  There are some color variations near what seems to be the top and down the back side towards the lake, and there are some color variations at the bottom, but I can't really tell where the slope of the dam starts/stops, so I'm going to fire up Google Earth and go take a walk along the road that leads to the filtration plant via the Street View option. 

20.3


Ok, so here I am standing on the bridge over the spillway on Novato Creek Rd.  I believe I am looking approximately south, towards the plant and I can see the dam rising to my right. 

20.4


Turning west. I can see most of the face of the dam and it appears to be fairly uniform in color from top to bottom.  I can also see, through the fence, the aforementioned graffiti covering the walls of the spillway below me. 

So this makes me wonder.  Several pages back I drew a little diagram of what I thought the cross section of the dam might be, but now that I can see it at ground level, I am no longer very certain I have it right.  In the first photo I can plainly see a band of lighter color on the face of the dam near the top.  I had taken that to be a section of newer earth that was more sloped than the rest of the dam, and so figured it to be the addition from 1971.  Now I think it's actually a shoulder of the little access road that seems to run along the top of the dam, because from street view the slope of the dam appears to be uniform and there is no band of lighter earth at the top.

20.5


Walking further south along the road gives me a wider view of the base of the dam.  The area beyond the fence appears to be pretty flat. 

20.6


So does the area where those cars are parked, slightly to the east of the road.  Unfortunately this is as far up this road I can go, so I'm going to go up on Hicks Road and see if I can get an idea of what the top of the dam looks like.

20.7


Yes, I can see that there is indeed a dirt shoulder to the left of the paved area on top of the dam.  It also looks like the back side of the dam begins it's slope down to the lake at the edge of the paving, don't you agree?  Lastly, it also looks to me like the dirt shoulder and the paving are of approximately equal width.  Hard to guess what it might be, but maybe I can make a guess using other objects nearby to scale from.  Nah, doesn't look like it.  Perspective of the photo makes it nearly impossible, along with the lack of any known objects anywhere on the top of the dam.  Would be nice if there was a maintenance vehicle up there, wouldn't it?

Ok, so I think I've learned about all I can for now about the dam, so I'm going to take what I've learned and go back to CAD and see if I can figure out some rough distances.

20.8


So this is what I now think is going on with the dam.  Now I'll use my little scale, which you can see I have rotated 90 degrees, and measure those distances.

20.9


I changed the color of the scale to make it easier to see and made a mark at the 160' distance.  Now I'm going to move the bottom of the scale to the mark and guesstimate the remaining distance to the top of the dam.

20.10


That looks close enough to half way between the scale marks for me to call it another 40', so I'm going to say the face of the dam is about 200' wide.  I know the height is 71', so if I wanted to break out my trig, I could calculate the angle, but I don't really need to do that.  I know a game cell is 52.5 feet square, so I'm going to round things off and semi-randomly decide that the face of the dam should cover 4 cells (200 /50=4).  I don't know how many it covers now, but that's coming up.  But next I'm going to measure the width of the top of the dam.

20.11


Not quite 80'.  I know my dam in game is built at a 45 degree angle and that it's one cell wide, and I determined a few pages back that the diagonal width of a cell is 73.82', so that's close enough for me!  Last I want to measure the back side of the dam, to see if I'm semi-close there, too.

20.12


That looks about ¾ of the way between marks on the scale, so I'm going to say 60'.  I think I'm steeper than that in game, but that's where we're going next, to see what I currently have and maybe fix things to try to more closely reflect reality.  However, I'm going to do that later this evening and right now it's 3:30 and I'm starving, so I'm going to run up to the store real quick (I'm out of wine, oh no!) and then reheat myself some pizza for dinner. 

Ok, now let's fire up the game and see how my first run at building the dam went, now that I have some faint idea of actual dimensions.

20.13


Looking at the back face of the dam, It looks like I'm about ½ of a diagonal cell of width from the top of the dam to the surface of the lake.  That would translate out to be about 36', which is too narrow and too steep.  I can fix that by removing the row of road tiles closest to the dam and then softening the slope out another half cell, but I want to check the front of the dam first.

20.14


I was afraid of this.  The dam front slope is only 1 tile wide across the diagonal, or about 74'.  I measured the width in CAD at about 200', so some quick math tells me I need to be about 2.71 diagonal cells in width, which I can either round up to 3 cells or round down to 2.5 cells.  I think I will round down, otherwise the slope is going to be very flat.  So now I'm going to fix the dam slopes, both front and back, starting with the back, because it's quicker and (hopefully) easier and will give me some practice using the method using roads.  First I'll prepare the back side of the dam by removing street tiles at the edge of the lake.

20.15


Now I'm going to build a diagonal road across the bottom of the dam where I want the new base to be and another across the top of the dam, which I will later kaboom.

Well except that after building a road at the top of the dam, the top is now too wide, so I quit without save and skip the idea of building a road up there for now.  I'll figure something else out.

20.16


Now I'll drag diagonal roads from top to bottom to create a uniform slope.  Ok, this method is not working at all.  When I try to build roads, they flatten the top of the dam to lake level.  Maybe I should remove my slope mod from my plugins folder, hmm?  Well, that helped, but not by much, and I don't want to fool around with 7 slope mods trying to find the one that works, so I'll do this the old fashioned way...I'll use the fine terraforming technique.  The top of the dam is 319.0 in elevation and the surface of the lake is 310.6.  Subtract the lake surface from the top of the lake and the answer is 8.4 meters.  Divided by two is 4.2 meters, so I add that to the base elevation and get 314.8.  So now I'll go cell by cell across the back of the dam and raise terrain just a teensy bit at location of the current base of the dam.  That should widen the slope out another half cell, giving me a slope one full diagonal cell in width. 

20.17


Much better.  I do this with every cell across the back of the dam and now this is what the slope looks like:

20.18


Well, it's not perfect, but then what in life is?  I am happy with it, that's what matters.  So now I have to address the front of the dam.  The first thing I am going to do is kaboom the street tiles that are in my way.

20.19


And again, rather than trying to mess around with roads to create a uniform slope, I'm going to terraform this slope.  So that means more math, to figure out what my cell intersection elevations want to be.  Top of the dam is 319.0, bottom is 297.3, so the difference is 21.7m.  I know I said above that I would make the slope 2.5 cells wide, rather than 3, but I'm exercising my female options and changing my mind, simply because it makes the math easier to make the dam 3 diagonal tiles wide rather than 2.5.  So I'm going to divide 21.7 by 3, to get about 7.2.  This time I'm going to work from the top down, so I'm going to subtract 7.2 from 319, which gives me 311.8.  That's the elevation I'll terraform to across the first set of diagonal cell intersections.

20.20


And so on across the face of the dam.  This is a little trickier because I am 180 degrees out from the back of the dam and my terraforming tools act always on the NW corner of the cell, so I have to remember that when chosing which cell to use the tools on.  When my game north arrow is pointing north, that means the upper left corner of a cell is what is changed.  Now that my north arrow is pointing south, that means the lower right corner of the cell is affected.  Tricksy, my precious. 

20.21


The first pass is complete and while it's subtle, if you look close, you can see the shallower slope at the top of the dam and the steeper slope at the bottom.  Now I need to subtract 7.2 from 311.8 to tell me what the next pass elevation wants to be, which is 304.6.  I'll go ahead and complete the next pass before taking another screen shot. 

Ok, I discovered an error in my math AND my technique.  For the first pass, I used the first cell intersection below the top of the dam, which is only HALF of a diagonal cell, not a full diagonal cell.  So, what I really needed to do is not 2 passes, but 4, and hence divide the 21.7m by 5, not 3.  Or, if I go back to a diagonal distance of 2.5 cells of dam width, by 4.  Hmmm.  Which one divides out better?  21.7/5=4.34 whereas 21.7/4=5.43.  Six of one, half dozen of the other.  I think I'll go back to 2.5 tiles as it's closer to actual dam width.  START OVER with the face of the dam.  Patience my precious, patience.  I won't screen shot my fixes, just the final result. 

20.22


And here we go.  The dam front face is now approximately 200 feet wide and 71 feet tall, as per RL, as my best guess at such given my resources.  I still have some work to do on the south side of the dam (to the left in the shot above, melding the dam into the hillside(, but I have a road running up that slope of the dam, too, so I think I'll leave that area undeveloped for now.  My spillway channel is still there, but may be problematic in the future when I go to actually build the darn thing, so I'm going to leave that alone for now as well.

Thursday edit:  Well, as it turns out, my math for the front of the dam was wrong.  When I used 4 even divisions, I ended up with my dam face only being 2 diagonal cells wide, instead of the 2.5 I wanted.  So lesson learned: when doing this kind of thing, it's the number of diagonal tiles in widthx2 to get the number of divisions to divide the height by.  After completing 4 passes, I figured this out, so I went back and did 5 passes to arrive at what is seen above.  There is also a flaw in my trig as applied to the game.  What I measured in CAD was the long leg of the triangle comprised of width, height, and slope of the dam.  What I built in the game was that same measurement as measured across the slope, not the long leg.  However, I'm getting bored with this dratted dam and all the time it's taking to get it right, so I'm going to leave the slope the way it is.  The spillway is going to present me with a lot of challenges, and the road up the front of the dam as well, and this is just a game. 

I was going to try to post this tonite (Wednesday), but it's already past 11 pm, I have 22 pics to upload to Imagaeshack, and a buddy waiting for me over on LOTRO, so I'll post this Thursday afternoon instead.  Gives you all more time to vote on the water mods, anyway.  I also have to allow time to respond to replies and I know from lurking on my own MD that there have been quite a few posts, so that will take some time, too. 

But this is it for update 20.  Hope you enjoy and don't get sidetracked from voting on water mods!

Lora/LD

[joelyboy911]

Hmm... Well I thought the mod was on Gizmo's site SimCity4Mods, but actually it isn't. Hopefully someone else can help out here. I don't actually use it myself, so I don't really have anymore info on it...

Sorry 

[mayorfabz]

Lora,

I did some research on your dam. Some site about lakes in the US (findlakes.com) provides a height of 71' (very close to your estimate if I got everything right). Here is the URL:
http://findlakes.com/stafford_lake_california~ca00321.htm

Hope this helps

Fabien

[ecoba]

Ugh, terraforming, I hate it.

But what can you do?

Looks great, Lora, at first I looked in the Best sellers, and RSF wan't there, and I thought, ohmigod, (as one word, yes), is it a Classic? But then I remembered it was OSITM, you should get put in the Classics by the time September is over.

Ethan

[ldvger]

Woohoo!  Look at my pretty new sig, with a link that actually works!  Oh, she's a happy camper this evening, that's for sure!

Tonite I am working on the MD itself rather than on the game aspect.  You may notice I have started to name my updates as well as number them...just another layer of organization and something that will help in creating a Table of Contents.  Kind of a drag (hey wasn't that a song?) to need to go back and add this stuff into old posts but like I said before, better now than later.  Most folks who have been keeping an eye on this MD from the beginning and those who join in at this very early stage of it's development will never probably page back to see that changes I've already made, but newcomers (if and when they arrive) will probably appeciate being able to find thier way easier, or so I hope. 

So, now that my new sig is up and running, it's back to work!  I'll start work on another update tomorrow.  I'm antsy to plop the lake, but I have another road to build on the south side of the lake first, the same one that starts at the face of the dam, so maybe that's where I'll go next.  Then again, I'm not happy with Hicks Road below the dam and want to redo that.  I still have to fix the neighborhood connection for Hicks Road at the edge of the city tile and I still have to smash the lake's island down a bit, too.  And, we still have a bunch of water mod options to make decisions on (notice my use of the inclusive plural "we"), so who knows what whim will grab me for the next update?  Guess you'll have to stay tuned to see...

Lora/LD

[ldvger]

Ok, so doing a bad an bumping my own post, but I have a question that needs to be answered and I am hoping someone will have an answer.  I have now created a TOC for this MD and gone back and given names to all the updates I have postes thus far.  I would like to add this TOC to my MD but the only way I know how is to cut and paster it into Page 1.  And, I'm afriad if I do that, that all the pages from that point foward will renumber themselves, making my TOC somewhat meaningless in terms of being a guide ofr folks new to the MD for finding thier way around.  I have not created links from updates in the TOC to the pages of the MD, but I would like to do that eventually.  I just worry about discombobulating the entire page set of the MD if I cut/paste the TOC into the first page. 

This is going to be a very long running MD (I think...my commitment is there, time will tell if folks will continue to enjoy it), so I am wondering if it's possible to create a second sub-thread that will contain the TOC without bumping all the posts in the main thread. 

Anyone have any ideas/suggestions?

Lora/LD

[RickD]

Hi Lora, it is amazing how many thoughts you put into your recreation. I would never have the patience for that. And I probably do not have the skills. I am wondering for example why you use the scale and CAD program to measure the dam instead of using the measurement tool in google earth.

Oh, and thanks for the many pictures with the different water mods. I found those textures a few days ago but didn't have the time to try all of them myself. I still can't decide which one I like best, though.

[woodb3kmaster]

Lora, first let me say that you've definitely earned your place in OSITM. Your attention to detail is terrific!

As to your most recent question: If you edit your first post in this topic, the page numbers won't change, since you wouldn't be adding any new posts. So go right ahead and add your ToC - you've got nothing to worry about there.

I also want to comment on your measurements of the dam from the most recent update. Although the Google Earth scale bar has a length label over its center, the length it reads (in your case, 160') refers to the length of the entire bar, not half of it. So all your measurements above are actually twice what they should be. Don't feel too bad, it's an understandable mistake to make, given how scale bars are normally labeled. I just wanted to make sure you had all the right measurements - I'm just as much a perfectionist in things like these as you are!

Keep up the outstanding work! I'll definitely be back for more.
Zack

[Battlecat]

Nice job smoothing the surface of the dam!  I hadn't quite realized how small that dam really is!  Looking forward to seeing what's up next. 

[ldvger]

Zack says-

Although the Google Earth scale bar has a length label over its center, the length it reads (in your case, 160') refers to the length of the entire bar, not half of it. So all your measurements above are actually twice what they should be. Don't feel too bad, it's an understandable mistake to make, given how scale bars are normally labeled. I just wanted to make sure you had all the right measurements - I'm just as much a perfectionist in things like these as you are!

Well, that's a huge drag to learn, make no mistake about it.  So, my dam is actually twice as wide as it wants to be.  Ya know, I kinda wondered about that when looking at the top of the dam from Hicks Valley Road...sure didn't look like 80 feet to this drafter's very practiced eye.  But who am I to argue with scaled photos taken by satellites?  To my eye it doesn't even look like 40' or even 30'.  Maybe 20-25', max.  

I realized another error in my placement of the dam itself this evening.  The topo maps show the location of the dam with a single heavy line.  In translating this to the game, I used that line as the top of the dam, but now I realize that I probably should have made that the edge of the back of the dam, then built the dam downstream from there.  So, my game dam is also at least one diagonal game cell upstream from where it wants to be.  It's in the wrong place and it's too wide.  

So now the question becomes, do I fix it or just chalk it up to, hey it's a game?  Well, if I rescale the dam correctly, the top of the dam will only be 1/2 a diagonal cell in width and I won't be able to build the paved surface up there, as nothing builds on a half cell, especially half a diagonal cell.  Also, the dam is such a small structure already, in game, that making it smaller makes it almost insignificant.  Running a one cell wide game road up it's side would make the road look like a freeway by comparison.  

Executive decison time.  The dam stays as it is.  I'm tired of messing around with it and want to move on to other things and it's representational, after all.  I'll be more careful next time around, especially now that I know how Google Earth scales thier images.  Sheesh!  It's not enough that I have to convert meters to feet?

Zack, not sure I should thank you for this info or not, but of course I do.  No telling the grief this discovery would have caused me had I learned say 6 large city tiles down the road from now.  I might have found a bridge (in game, of course) to jump off of.  

Lora/LD

[ldvger]

Update 21

Here I go bumping my own post again, but it's allowable if I'm posting an update, right? 

You'd never guess it's Labor Day weekend, the last big hurrah of the summer.  I've gotten spoiled by finding a couple of new posts here every day over the pasy couple of weeks, but for the first time in a while, zip, nada, nothing in the last 24 hours.  I guess everyone is out playing, taking advantage of the long holiday weekend.  I envy you.  Seattle has Bumbershoot this weekend, a 3 day music fest at the Seattle Center, just one block from me (in fact I can hear it right now), but it costs $15 for an all-day pass, so I'll just stay home and play on the computer.  So, on with the update.

Replies

joelyboy911: Don't worry about it, I think I have enough water mods to figure out something decent.  I may run across what you suggested in my travels later on.  As always, thanks for stopping by.

mayorfabz/Fabien: Yes, I found that site, too, back when I was researching the dam.  A better site for info on the dam, I thought, was found at the Marin Country Department of Public Works (I think that was the site, anyway).  I gave a detailed history of the lake and dam, along with providing me with the stats I used in regards to height and length of the dam, so the 71' height I used wasn't an estimate but rather a fact I garnered from research.  Sure wish I could find an elevation for the height at the top of the dam, though.  Maybe I'll email the folks that work at the dam and ask them.  Thanks for the confirmation though and for stopping by.

ecoba/Ethan: Thanks for your vote of confidence, but I really doubt 2 months in existence would qualify anything as a "classic".  I am very content to remain on the Bestsellers page for a long time, it's an honor to have gotten there in the first place.  You also have to remember the tremendous scope of this project...I have 130 city tiles to complete before I'm done and all I've really built so far is part of a road and a very small earthen dam on the very first tile, and that has taken me 2 months.  I'm still picking out custom terrains and textures, so it'll be a while before I settle down to some serious building.  Good to know I have your enthusiast support, though!

RickD: Hello and welcome to my MD!  Always great to see a new face and hear a new voice, thank you for stopping by and sharing your comments.  As for why I didn't use the measurment tool in Google Earth, I didn't know there was one.  Now that I do, maybe I'll figure out how to use it and save myself the time of importing images into CAD for measuring.  Thanks for the tip!  And yes, with so many choices (for water mods), it's hard to make a decision.  I'm glas my decision to view all the possibilities is paying off for someone other than just myself.  Stop by again soon!

woodb3kmaster/Zack: Thanks for stopping by and thanks so much for allaying my worries about adding my Table of Contents to my first page, I really appreciate it.  I'll add it in this evening, after I finish with this update. 

Battlecat:  Good to see you again and yes, the dam is very small, makes it difficult to render in game with any degree of realism, given my basic "building block" is a cell 52.5 feet square.  Next up is the hopefully last slop through the water mod options, hope you ejoy and comment.

Update 21: Water Mods, Part 4

Ok, no one seems to be voting on water mods anymore, so the consensus appears to be to go for Overcast/Overcast for Offshore and Inshore.  So now I want to look at the various Foreshore and Beach options.  There are 9 options for Foreshore and 6 options for Beaches, so 15 options total, of which only ONE (or none) can be chosen.  It's not possible to chose BOTH a Foreshore AND and a Beach, OK?  Keep that in mind while you view the way the various options look with the OC/OC (Overcast/Overcast) mod we have chosen so far.  Also keep in mind that I am not 100% married to the OC/OC and if I don't like the way it works with any of the Foreshore/Beach options, I'll look at some of the other Offshore/Inshore combos that folks liked.  We ain't out of the woods yet, folks.  We'll start with a look at the OC/OC as combined with the Maxis Plain Vanilla look, then start switching out options.  Keep paper and pencil handy to jot down thoughts (just a suggestion...there won't be a test later).

21.1


I really do like this OC/OC combo and am glad so many folks agreed with my own thoughts about it.  It has lots of depth and color to it yet fades out nicely to yellows and golds and greens as it comes closer to shore.  I went ahead and saved my game when I exited, as I'd like to get a screen capture of the entire region with the new mod installed, so we can all see the difference in color between the Maxis water (which is installed in all my other city tiles) and this one.  What's an extra screen capture?

21.2


Ok, this is the region shot and that's OC/OC installed in the Black Point city tile.  Looks good, I think. 

Ok, for viewing the Foreshore and Beach options, I'm going to divide them up into their two separate categorys, all the Foreshore first, then the Beach options.  Those of you following along at home may want to do the same thing. 

Foreshores:

21.3


This is BrownSand.  I think I am going to need some close zooms for these options, else no one will be able to see any differences between them.

21.4


Close zoom of BrownSand

21.5


This is GreenRock at far zoom

21.6



And GreenRock at close zoom

21.7


This is GreyRock at far zoom.  Black sand beaches in SF bay anyone?

21.8


And GreyRock at close zoom

21.9


This is GreySand at far zoom

21.10


And GreySand at close zoom

21.11


This is PinkSand at far zoom

21.12


And PinkSand at close zoom

21.13


This is WhiteSand at far zoom

21.14


And WhiteSand at close zoom

21.15


This is YellowRock at far zoom

21.16


And this is YellowRock at close zoom.  Keep in mind that as odd as this may look, especially in combo with the OC/OC mods, that I have massive mudflats to build all the across the entire inland areas of the SF bay.  Salt flat mud is brown, brownish yellow, or brownish green.  These are not the sandy beaches of an ocean, OK?  This is shallow mucky muck, which probably smells at low tide and sucks the shoes off your feet if you try to walk on it.  Also keep in mind that I am likely going to have to do extensive terraforming of the shorelines to make them flat, so pay special attention to the areas immediate adjacent to the water itself.  It may be that as much as both I and so many others like the OC/OC combo, another combo may be more appropriate for this particular situation.  Also keep in mind that I am likely to be transitioning brown TPW into GW at the shorelines as creeks and rivers finally meet the sea, so I need any help I can get with water mods to help make this work.  We're not just talking about what looks pretty here...we're talking about what we can find in game to reflect RL conditions and how to make it easier for me (ahem) to recreate same.  So, as odd as the yellow and brown combos may look, it may be that OC/OC is not the combo of mods I need. 

Just something to keep in mind, folks, as well go along, OK? 

21.17


This is BrownRock at far zoom

21.18


And this is BrownRock at close zoom

21.19


This is YellowSand at far zoom

21.20


And this is YellowSand at close zoom

I'm going to quit here for now and leave the Beach options for later.  Could be a separate update, could be a continuation of this one, time will tell.  It gets to be a bit mind-numbing to be presented with so many choices all at once, so maybe it would be better to divide this part of the water mods into two updates. 

Well, now it's Saturday afternoon and I've decided to go ahead and include the Beach textures in this update, so let's get to it

Beaches:

Well, I took lots of pics and in the end decided not to include them.  I looked at 4 of the 6 Beach mods and each one was so close to identical to the other, that it really seemed pointless to continue looking at them.  I really could not see much difference, if any, between any of the Beach mods and the Maxis default beaches, either, so I'm not sure just exactly what's up with the Beach mods.  Regardless, with the 9 Foreshore options, I'm certain that's enough choices, hm?

That's enough for this update and is, maybe, the end of the water mods.  I'm probably going to play around with some other combos of Offshore and Inshore, because nothing shown above, when combined with the OC/OC is really grabbing me.  I'm also going to try to plop a creek down and see how the PW/GW transition looks with these new mods.  If I come up with something really spectacular, I'll be sure to take some pics and post them here.  Until then, review the choices above and please tell me what you think of them.

Edit Saturday evening:  Can anyone give me some tips for formatting my TOC?  I wrote it out and formatted it in MSWord and cut/paste it into my first post tonite and it looks like poo-poo.  All my text aligned beautifully in Word but is now a total hash here.  I tried a couple of different fixes and just made things worse, so any tips/help would be appreciated.

Lora/LD

[ecoba]

I personally like Yellow Sand the best.

Ethan

[projectadam]

Lora,

The way that you have your TOC set up I would recommend using tables but I am not for sure. It looks like messages on SC4D are set up to html and learning tables are easy. As I said, I believe that the messages are set up to html but this is something I am not 100% for sure.

You can also link all the updates to the specific messages, which seems to be the popular choice for TOCs. I do not know if you were going to do this and just have not gotten around to doing it or if you knew about this option.

[kwakelaar]

Very enjoyable what you are doing here. Nice to see someone going into such details in recreating a real area. 
I like the brown sand option myself.
Is this a mod that is ready to put into the game or is it a bit more complicated than that?

[girlfromverona]

Belated congrats on the award, Lora! You truly deserve it. 

Thanks also for all the wonderful comparison pics. I just downloaded that mod myself and was a bit overwhelmed about having to decide which options to use, so your screencaps are coming in handy! From that Google Earth shot you showed us, I'd say you should go with the LtYellow inshore option, but that's just my opinion... 

kwakelaar: You can download the mod here: http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=22358#