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

[soulchaser]

Hey Lora,
You're doing a great job so far.
For The TOC, you might look at mine at my MD URSADOR (see my sig). It's quite easy and even easier to fit to your demands. 
You can easily look at it, if you try to quote it and copy the text.
Every comment has its own link, you can use in your TOC, so pages don't really matter. just link the headlines instead of the page-nrs.

If you have any questions, just PM me.

Good Luck

[just_a_guy]

I've been lurking here for a while now, just thought I should finally start posting. I'm impressed with the great level of detail you pu into this. Seeing it this way it doesn't even look like a hobby anymore, more like an occupation ! I envy your patience!

As for the foreshore mod, I vote for brown sand. It's not too light and not too dark.
Hopefully we've been of some help!

[ldvger]

The Beginning of Major Diversion #2

Hello everyone and welcome back after the long weekend!  I hope you all had lots of fun.  Here in Seattle it rained most of the weekend, making the Bumbershoot (supposedly French for "umbrella") Festival unusually appropriate.

Replies

ecoba/Ethan: Thanks for stopping by and one vote for yellow sand noted!

projectadam: Thank for the suggestions and for stopping by.  Too excited right now to mess around with the TOC, but I'll come back to your post when I calm down.  You forgot to vote!

kwakelaar: Thanks for commenting and one vote for brown sand noted.  Yes, this set of mods and textures is available for download on the STEX over at Simtropolis.  Do a search for Coastal Modds and it should come up.  There's no install programs, you just unzip the files to a folder outside of your game folder, then follow the directions in the readme for mixing and matching the files in your plugins folder.  There are 4 basic textures: Offshore (deep water), inshore (shallow water), Foreshore (area immediately above and below the waterline), and Beaches (above the waterline and abutting Foreshore textures).  You choose one of each and install them in your plugins folder and off you go.  The possible combinations are, while not endless, very large.  A GREAT set of textures, a real breakthough in water mods, I think. 

girlfromverona: Good to see you again and thanks for stopping by.  Glad you are enjoying my MD and viewing rivit's great set of mods.  I hope you find them as handy as I am doing and thank you also for posting a link to the download site.  I was actually leaning towards the LtYellow Inshore option myself, until rivit created the new Murky Inshore for me.  I hope you check back often as things are evolving very rapidly right now and I need the feedback!

soulchaser: Good to see you again and thanks for the advice on the TOC, I'll check out your examples for sure.  Please stop by again soon and be sure to vote or comment on the water mods!

just_a_guy: Hello and thanks for stepping out of the shadows to post, I appreciate it!  As for being an occuation, well, I am currently unemployed and have a lot of time on my hands, so this is how I have been filling the many empty hours in my days and evenings while I pray for a job.  Thank you also for voting, I have noted your preference for BrownSand.  Check back soon and take a look at the new Mudflat option and let me know what you think.

Beginning of Major Diversion #2: Solving the Problem of Creating Mud Flats, Part 1

While you have all been out having a last summer bash, I have been slaving away over a hot computer, playing with water mods and experimenting with transitioning PW to GW.  This isn't a true update, but I do have a few pics to share of my attempts.



This is one of many attempts to create a mud flat.  I think I did this Saturday night.  I'm not certain which Inshore option I am using, but I'm fairly certain I'm using Overcast Offshore.  The mud is created using jeronij's brown TPW and plopping it down in such a way so as to conceal the waves.  You can see a muddy stream bed crawling off toward the top of the pic.  This isn't too bad...it makes for pretty realistic looking mud.  But it doesn't blend at all well with the game water and if I use the brown TPW for mud, what would I use for my PW, which I also want to be brown?  I spent a number of hours playing around with different combos and ideas and nothing really satisfied me, so late Saturday night I decided to fire of a heart-felt plea to to the modder who created this wonderful pack of GW textures and beg him/her to help me.

Turns out the mods were created by rivit over on ST.  I told him what I needed, sent him a link to this MD, told him how I was showcasing his work here, then waited with fingers crossed for a reply.  It came the following day, on Sunday, and he told me he would try to mod what I needed if I could give him some ideas of what that was.  So I wrote him a long email back, full of ideas and suggestions, and this morning I opened my email to find he had created two new textures for me to try out:  Murky Inshore and Mudflat Foreshore.  I quickly (well, as quick as my very slow wifi connection would allow me) downloaded the new files and installed them in my plugins folder and fired up my game.  Here's a peek:



Now, I don't know about you, but I think this looks fairly awesome.  Installed for this look are 4 textures from rivit's pack, moving from onshore to offshore they are: BrownSand Beach, Mudflat Foreshore, Murky Inshore, and Overcast Offshore.  After re-reading the readme file for this set of mods, I determined that one is supposed to use both a Foreshore and Beach texture, not one or the other, as I had originally stated, preferably two that match with each other.  And for those of you who are big fans of Brigantine, I learned that rivit's choice of water mod had also been Brigantine until he started a new project and found, just like I did, that the texture is just a little too choppy for inland waters.  So he made Overcast to be as close to Brigantine as he could get it, but with smaller ripples/chop, which I must say reads very well at close zooms for inland waters. 

You can also see in the picture above that I have done some underwater terraforming to create the appearance of deeper channels and underwater mudflats.  I think it looks quite good, but I would like the underwater mudflats to be morebrown and less blue.  This is a test city tile, a copy of my Black Point tile that I use for my water experiments then switch out when I want to do actual work for real on Black Point, which I have not done any of so far.  In the pic above, the Petaluma river is dredged to be GW, which is not something I am very likely to do.  I would much rather use the brown TPW for this river, as the satellite photos we have see of it so far very plainy show it as being a muddy color, not blue at all.  So, rather than dredging the river channel down, I will most likely terraform it up, as I will do with both the above water and underwater mudflats in the area. 



This is a close zoom of the same combo with some brown TPW "creeks" plopped down to see how they look against the beach and new water textures.  Not too bad, but as I emailed rivit this afternoon, I think the beach itself could be darker, just a tad, and the underwater portion of the beach needs to be browner so that the TPW fades as it enters the water.  Still, I think this is an excellent combination of textures and colors, especially as it was a frist draft. 

Some other thoughts/ideas have crossed my mind regarding transitioning PW to GW, which I shared with rivit in my email today.  First of all, I think it may be possible to mod the mod, so to speak.  When I first started this project 2 months ago, I PM'd jeronij and asked him iof he could/would modify his TPW's to transtition to GW a little better.  He said he could, but wouldn't because he didn't have time but that I was welcome to modify them however I wanted for use in my own game, just to not distribute the modded mods without his permission.  Well, we all know I don't know diddly squat about modding, so I figured that was an unfortunate dead end.  But now rivit has stepped up to the plate, so I suggested to him what I thought were a couple of possibilities:

1.  Modify a brown TPW tile to be opaque rather than transparent, lighten the color a tad, and have it plop at ground level rather than +4m as it currently does.  This shouldn't be all that difficult (should it?  what do *I* know?) and it would give me plopable "mud" to use to create mudflats of whatever shape or size I want.  Even better, match the texture/color of the modded mod to match rivit's Mudflat Foreshore and viola! I have a seamless transition from waterline to mudflat to regular terrain upon which I can then plop the regular brown TPW as streams. 

2.  Rather than trying to modify the Murky Inshore texture to be darker closer to shore, it may be easier to mod a couple of brown TPW tiles to be transition pieces that slowly change color as they descend into the water so that by the time they reach thier -4m max depth, they are nearly invisible.  As a sub-idea to this is to create new TPW files only for use underwater.  Ennedi has a technique he uses with Brigantine that I found very interesting and promising.  He knows that Brigantine becomes opaque at a given depth, I think it's -21m, so he has modified his PW tiles to plop to -21m.  That way the PW channel is still visible undetwater, just as it would be in RL, before it finally disappears in deeper water.  Why couldn't we do the same with the TPW, perhaps while also changing the colors slightly to make them bluer as they got deeper?  I think this idea has quite a bit of merit, myself, it's just finding someone to take the time to create the needed pieces.  It wouldn't work for other color combos or mods, unless rivit want;s to spend the rest of his days creating custom PW/GW transition pieces, but if he's willing to do it for me, well, who am *I* to stop him, eh? 



This is an even closer zoom of the shoreline and my only comment to rivit about what I see here is the faint banding of color both immediatly above and below the waterline, as the colors fade/blend with each other.  I told him if it was difficult to fix, that I could live with it and not to drive himself crazy trying, but that if it WAS fixable, it would be nice. 



This is a beach set I downloaded from the STEX quite some time ago and I include it because it think it represents another set of possibilities.  If we got rid of the built stuff, the props I think they are called, and just had "naked" beach, we (I use the term "we" loosely here, as I'm just standing in the peanut gallery) could use the base lot as a large mudflat plop, especially if used in conjunction with the yet-to-be-modded small mudflat tiles modded from TPW.  If the beach plops could be re-colored and re-textured to match the Mudflat Foreshore above the waterline and to fade/blend into the Murky Inshore texture below the waterline, that would be a good thing, dontcha think?  The TPW plops easily across these beach tiles (except over the props, which would be removed in any case), so creating creeks and stuff would be easy. 

And...whilst I was busily engaged writing this little mini-update, I heard the distinctive click of new mail entering my email box.  Rivit!  Look what he sent me:



Mudflats!  We still have a ways to go, especially the underwater part, and getting the TPW to disappear, but hey, one small step...

And, I think I am going to make this an official update now.

Comments requested, let me know what you think!

Lora/LD

[soulchaser]

Hey Lora,

Your efforts look good, again.

For the watermod: I'm not a modder or matter or something. And I've never been to SF, so I can't tell what to choose best. That's also the reason, Why I never would try to recreate anything existing.
The beaches are always quite hard to set. I normally keep it with plopping some props.

rivits offshore and foreshore mod looks great though.

[girlfromverona]

Sweet! I hope Rivit releases these new colour options eventually - they could come in very handy. In the meantime, I've chosen the following combo for my city - Light Yellow Inshore/Brown Rock Foreshore/Overcast Offshore, and I think it looks great.

I can't wait to see how your mudflats turn out, Lora! 

[mayorfabz]

About bumbershoot:
Definitely not French. Never heard of it or anything close in my beloved mother-tongue.
Umbrella translates as "parapluie" in French ("against the rain"). The word umbrella, though, definitely originates from Latin and gave the French "ombrelle", or an umbrella-like object used to protect from the sun instead of the rain, derived from "ombre" (= shade).

Nice work on the mudflats, anyway. I have been struggling for years with an acceptable transition between ground and water and am still unsure about the results I got.

Hope to read you soon,

Fabien

[Battlecat]

Interesting to follow your efforts on the game water transition here!  There's no doubt that transition point has been a serious challenge for a long time now.  Those new lots are looking interesting, and the new beach texture looks great!  Very nice of Rivit to put those together for you.  Can't wait to see what you've got coming up next. 

[ldvger]

This is not an update, just a quick post to keep folks informed of what is going on "behind the curtain".  rivit made me a new beach mod he named BrownMuddy.  It looks awesome in game but he has made some new discoveries that I found very interesting.

First of all, the default beach plop that is in the Parks menu has a "transparent" property to it that allows underlying textures to show through.  I have not tested this with Maxis default beach textures, so I think, not certain, that any installed beach textures over-ride the Maxis default and so shows through the Maxis beach park plop. 

I have installed in my game a CC set of beach plops and they also appear to have a transparent base texture.  When I switch out Beach textures from rivit's pack, the color of the beaches in the park plops change, both the Maxis beach and the CC beach. 

Rivit sent me a new set of beach plops which is much more comprehensive than my original set.  I installed the new beach set, the new Beach texture, and look what I got:



Now if that's not a seamless transition from mud to water, I don't know what is.  I tested this against steeper shores (this shore is extensively terraformed) and it works equally well.  The mud could be less red and a little more varied in color.  I still need edge pieces the rough up the transition from mud to natural terrain.  And, I still need a way to transition PW to GW.  But hey!  I think this looks awesome so far.  Rivit has confessed to me in his last email that he is burnt out on this for the time being,and no wonder.  He has worked on this for almost 5 days straight and look what tremendous progress he has made!   

So rivit is going to take a break from his work with the mods and so am I.  The OCD part of me wants to stay with this until everything is perfect, but I know as well that pushing too hard is not a good idea.  So, I am going to go back to the dam tomorrow and start laying down the road on the south side of the dam.  Once that's done, I will kaboom the street tiles and start building the lake itself.

Stay tuned, lots of exciting (wel, at least to me) stuff coming up!

Lora/LD

[meinhosen]

The mudflats look like they're coming along nicely.  I do like the beach textures and the new shoreline, too.

Looking forward to seeing you starting on the lake. 

[mayorfabz]

Wow, looks great. You may have finally tackled it. Although I wouldn't want to bathe in there... 

Fabien

[Battlecat]

That's looking pretty good! 

[threeswept]

Wow! Firstly, I must commend you on such a grand undertaking. Several people have attempted the Bay Area with varying degrees of success. And, mostly, as this is a game, have just made some semblance of it all rather than exactness. And, living in the Bay Area, I'm super intrigued at your progress and detail. It's quite extraordinary. And, I hadn't seen this coastal mod in action...however, you've done a FANTASTIC job with it. 

[ldvger]

Well, I've been absent for a couple of days, so just checking in to let you know that rivit and I have been working away behind the scenes creating credible mud flats.  Rather I should say, rivit has been working and I've been cheerleading, with a few careful words of critique on my part.  We are very close now to having what may turn out to be an entire new set of lots and textures called Mudflats.  I don't know if he will package them up for release to the general public or not...I hope he does as I think a lot of folks would use them. 

We still have the issue of getting the TPW into the bay, but doing the groundwork, literally, is going to help make that transition much easier...or so we hope. 

I am going to be working on a new full update this evening and if I have time may post it tonite.  Otherwise, it will definitely be up tomorrow, so be sure to check back soon to see what magic rivit has created for me.  Oh and, if no one posts, I'll have to be a bad girl and bump myself, so please don't turn me into the forum police if I do so?

Lora/LD, very excited

[woodb3kmaster]

Oh and, if no one posts, I'll have to be a bad girl and bump myself, so please don't turn me into the forum police if I do so?

I wouldn't want that to happen - this MD deserves many more than zero replies!

You're very fortunate to have such a talented modder working on something that will specifically enhance the realism of your recreation - I might just have to try finding someone myself to help out with my plans for Nyhaven! I have to say, everything you've posted lately has been absolutely wonderful, and it shows just how dedicated you are to making this the best recreation of SF that anyone has ever attempted. I'm definitely a fan!

Zack

[Battlecat]

It would certainly be nice to see these released, mud flats are a missing link in the creation of a diverse coastal area.  Those would be great for simulating those tidal marshes that are only under a few feet of water a high tide.  Muddy bottom, with tufts of grass poking out of the water here and there.  Looking forward to seeing how it all comes together. 

[ldvger]

 

Ongoing Major Diversion #2

Replies

soulchaser:  Thanks for stopping by and for sharing your comments, they're always appreciated!

girlfromverona:  Yes, I am very impressed with rivit's mods, too and think they look great in the game.  Thanks for posting and I hope rivit decides to release the mud flats, too, seems a lot of folks would like to have them.

mayorfabz/Fabien: Well, I only repeat what I've been told in regards to the origin of the word "bumbershoot", so if it's not French, then someone told me wrong.  Maybe it's a made up word?  And yeah, the PW/GW transition is still the last major frontier to bust through, but lots of folks are working on it, so maybe it'll happen soon.  I have anxiety over getting a technique to work for my MD, too, and can only hope I can devise something acceptable.  But it's why I am likely to avoid my shorelines for a while.  All the stuff we're working out for mud flats now is really in the nature of homework for future use, as until I figure out a good PW/GW transition, I'm going to stay inland.  Thanks for your comments and for stopping by!

Battlecat: Always good to see you and yes, the PW/GW transition is a real bugaboo.  Glad you are liking rivit's work on the water mods and mud flats.

meinhosen: yes, I am really pleased with how the mud flats are developing als and I will be returning to Stafford Lake and the Novato Creek Dam over this coming weekend, so stay tuned!

mayorfabz/Fabien: No, I don't think I'd want to swim there, either, and the mud is probably squishy enough to suck the shoes right off your feet, so I wouldn't want to walk there, either.   

Battlecat: Yes, I am imprssed with how the mud flats are progressing as well. 

threeswept:  Welcome to MD and excellent to have another Bay Area resident stopping by!  I hope you come by often, your first person experience of the area will be invaluable.  I'm glad you are liking what I have done so far and I'll try hard not to disappoint.

woodb3kmaster/Zack:  Thank you for sparing me the necessity of bumping my own post, appeciate it!  And yes, I feel very fortunate that rivit has consented to put so much of his time into helping me with my project, I have no idea how I would have ever been able to create realsitic water and mud flats without his input.  Stop by often, we are a long ways from being done yet!

Battlecat: I agree, I think we should all encourage rivit to bundle his work up into a new Mud Flats package, there seems to be a lot of interest from other people who would also like to use it.  Take a peek at this new update and tell me what you think of my use of the grasses to fade the edges of the mud into the greener terrain and also fade the TPW into the mud.  This was a first try, down and dirty, so I'll be experimenting around with these types of fades more in the future. 

Ongoing Major Diversion #2: Solving the Problem of Creating Mud Flats, Part 2

Well, first of all, as you can see, I have changed the title (and, to some degree, the focus) of this Major Diversion from water mods to mud flats.  While it's true rivet and I started out working on the Inshore texture, we very quickly moved on to the Foreshore and Beach textures and from there to creating some custom plops and textures that will go a long ways towards my alibilty to realistically create the miles and miles of mudflats that line the shores of the San Francisco Bay, most especially in the far northern and southern reaches of the bay.

In some ways this task requires a bit of sensitivity to Bay Area residents, because they are justifiably proud of their beautiful Bay.  And mud flats are not really very pretty and in RL they small quite a bit, too, especially at low tide.  And of course the bay is tidal.  So I don't want to make the bay and the mud flats too gross, but there is reality to deal with as well.  My buddy rivet doesn't really know very much about the SF bay area and has been spending time with Google Earth, reviewing the satellite pictures, and I wrote him a little explanation of the mechanisms of the bay, to help him understand what the bay is about as a large inland tidal water body, and as many folks here are also unfamiliar with SF Bay, I'll copy from my email to him here:

Well, I have to admit I have never been down to the mudflats or beaches surrounding SF bay.  I have seen them fairly close up while landing at SFO and the water is brown and murky.  The water is very shallow along the shorelines and there is not a lot of wave action other than wind chop coming ashore.  It is of course a tidal basin, so it's salt water and you can smell it regardless of high or low tide.  You may have read in my MD that this is a very large inland water body with only a single very small outlet to the sea (the Golden Gate), so the further one goes from the outlet, the worse the water quality becomes and the shallower the bay becomes.  There really is only one major fresh water inlet and it is major.  The entire Great Central Valley of the interior of California drains into SF bay.  The San Juaquin (wa-KEEN) River runs south to north through the central valley, while the Sacramento River runs north to south.  They join together east of SF and then flow into the San Pablo Bay, north and east of the city of SF and almost due east of the city tile Black Point.  Both of these rivers are watershed for the east side of the Coastal Range and the west slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The central valley is almost exclusively dedicated to agriculture, which is the primary  source of California's economy.  The big rivers are obviously polluted with agricultural run off and it all comes into SF bay eventually.  As enclosed as the bay is, it's terribly vulnerable to extreme pollution and while much has been done to protect the bay since the 60's, it's still not water I would fish in or go swimming in. 

SFO's runways are built on jettys that extend into the bay.  Every time I land at SFO, I swear the plane is going to go into the drink before it hits the runway...you can see gum wrappers floating on the water from the windows of the plane.  Just when you expect to see water flashing over the windows, there's the runway beneath you, finally.  Because the terrain under the water is shallow and muddy, it's really hard to say how clear the water is.  There is not a lot of differentation in color between the above water mud and the color of the water immediately offshore.  Not a lot of difference in texture, either, as the mud is rippled from tidal action and the water is rippled from wind chop.  There is little or no wave action...it's more like a lake than the sea (which brings to mind an entirely new thought...any way to mod the Maxis waves?). 

I don't know if this information helps you or not, I hope it does.  Folks who live in SF are fiercely proud of the beauty of their bay and the area, and rightly so.  The deeper water away from the shorelines is a dark/bright grey blue, which is why photos that are wide pans with distance show a brilliant blue bay.  Close up it's not quite so pretty.  I don't want to offend any SF folks by depicting their bay as a cesspool (which in some ways it really is) but at the same time I want to depict a realistic view of the area. 

I guess that's all just a long winded way of saying I think the clearer inshore water textures are probably just fine the way they are and that the Homer beach set, if we can come up with a texture/color combo that works, is probably just fine also.  It may not be very pretty, but the shorelines of RL SF are not pretty either.  It's sad but true.  This bay was a cesspool long before humans ever found it and made it worse.  Forty years of working to clean it up has helped return it to it's original state, but the original state was not good to begin with.  All large inland bodies of water are so.  I live on Puget Sound, which is much larger than the SF bay area but also a confined inland sea.  We have an advantage in that Puget Sound has a much better "flushing" mechanism than SF bay does.  We also have much more fresh water flow into the Sound, both in number/locations of sources and in the actual amount of water in terms of cubic feet per minute due to the majestic amount of rainfall we get.  Still, Puget Sound was one of the world's most contaminated bodies of water, along with SF bay and The Great Lakes, before the environmentalists of the 60's started forcing folks to look at the mess they were making and demanding it be cleaned up.

I think perhaps my use of the word "cesspool" is overly strong and if it offends anyone, my sincere apologies.  I know the bay is way cleaner now than it was 40 years ago, but it's also true that it has only one small outlet and is subject to a lot of human abuse.  I have not done any research into how long it takes the bay to make a complete water change, but I imagine there are tons of studies done on the subject and available to the curious online. 

But again, I diverge.  I posted the picture rivet sent of the beach set with a brown sand texture.  He has since then been tweaking the beach and foreshore textures, trying to get them darker and looking more like mud and less like sand.  He's on I think his third iteration and I'll show you here how we have evolved to where we are now.

21f


Now this may not look like much, but there are actually 2 different beach plops here.  The top on is the Maxis default beach found in the Parks menu and the second one is a plop from a set I downloaded a couple years ago.  Why is there no sand?  Because in this shot I have installed rivit's Transparent Beach testure mod into my plugins folder.  It allows the underlying texture of the terrain to show through where otherwise the plop's sand would be.  This was part of an experiment on our part to discover how the plop textures were affected, if at all, by rivit's mod textures.  It was also a learning tutorial for me, as I am trying to grasp how rivet is able to make these texture mods so that maybe someday I can make some for myself.  He is kinda teaching me SC101 as we go along and while I still don't understand more than I do understand, I think (not sure) that I am beginning to catch the fainest glimmers of understanding. 

21g


This is the same two plops with rivit's BrownMuddy Beach texture mod installed now instead of the Transparent.  Now I have a brown beach.  I did some fairly extensive terraforming of this area in preparation for these experiments, as I wanted a very shallow/flat beach and a very shallow/lightly sloping underwater area.  You can see the brown beach does not fade well into the surrounding water at all, but we were not too worried about that at the time.  One problem at a time.

21h


Same two plops, this time with the BrownMuddy Beach removed, allowing the Maxis default beach texture to display.  Notice the non-plopped areas of the beach retain their darker muddier color.  I think this is because those areas are controlled by rivit's Foreshore texture mod and which, as shown here, is still installed in the game.  Again, remember this was all in the nature of an experiment to figure out how that various CC stuff and Maxis default stuff worked together.

21i


This is the same pic I posted in my last non-update, showing once again the same two plops, but this time with some special underwater plops that help fade the beach colors into the surround water.  It's a decent fad, but I can still see where the underwater plops end, which does not make me very happy.  Still, if this was the best we could do, I'd go with it and just chalk it up to limitations of the game.

Rivit1


Ok, this is where things start getting exciting.  Rivit sent me a new set of beach plops made by someone named Homer.  They are neither better or worse than the other beach plops I had been using, just a little busier (lots of props and people animations) and they have a much more extensive set of underwater plops.  And unlike the other set I was using, the Homer set has a 1x1 sand only beach plop tile.  Ah-ha!

So the pick above shows the new Homer beach plops with rivit's BrownMuddy Beach.  Rivit also created his first mayor mode plop tile, an irregular 1x1 plop that (accidently, by the way) matches his Beach texture mod.  I had requested this, as I need a way to sften and blur the edges of the beach plops, as mud flats do not have straight edges and the change in terrain between mud and non-mud is not a razor's edge.  The same is true for use underwater.  You can see I have plopped some brown TPW across the beach, always keeping in mind getting the PW to GW transition to work, too.  We still have a ways to go for that one and have been brainstorming how to accomplish it, but right now we're concentrating on making mud.  In this pic, you can see the use of grasses, specifically the brown and green Johnson grass (I forget who made these, but they are excellent, as is the entire pack of flora it comes with) are very effective at hiding the edges of both the TPW and the transition from mud to natural terrain.  The mud is still a little light and a little red/pink to my eyes, so rivet mad a new one that I like better and which we will see next.  His new little 1x1 beach plop also has a bit of a problem in that I am not able to plop TPW over it and my hope was to use it the make muddy stream banks for my TPW to flow along.  Rivit believes there may be an in-game defined limit as to how many "layers" of objects can plop over each other and I think he may be right.  His 1x1 plop is set at +1m above ground level and TPW is at +4, so theoretically the TPW should plop and display over the top of the 1x1 tile, but it doesn't.  Do, back to the drawing board with that one.  I think we are going to need 2 of these tiles, one to plop at ground level above the water line and another to plop below the waterline, but rivet is opposed to making tons of specialized tiles and I can't blame him, as he's really doing all the work, so he is working on a solution that will allow me to plop TPW over mud.  One of the things he is doing (shhhh, don't tell anyone) is creating his own TPW.

Rivit2


This is the same shot, this time with rivit's new BrownMuddy Beach texture.  I like the darker color much better, but now the 1x1 plop doesn't work at all.  We're working on that.  I also like much better the was the TPW looks against the darker mud

Rivit3


And this is showing off future eye candy possibilities, if you think mud flats can be eye candy.  Rivit took one of the large Homer plops and stripped it of all it's props, giving me a "naked" mud flat to plop.  This is a pic at furthest zoom, with the underwater Homer plops carried all the way out to the deep water channel.  If you think this looks pretty good, it gets better.

Rivit4


Next zoom in and now the TPW stream I laid down shows up.  We are having some trouble with color banding underwater, especially close in to the waterline, but are working on that.  The mud is still a bit too red, I would like to see it greener/greyer.  Rivit thinks this may be due to underlying terrain coming through.  Still, the fade from mud to blue water is so good, so seamless, I am so happy.

Rivit5


Next zoom in and the banding shows up a little more here, but you know, if it's too hard to get rid of, I could live with it and explain it away as tidal ripples in the mud. 

Rivit6


Now if that ain't a pretty picture, I don't know what is.  Never thought I could get this excited about mud flats, but hey...you gotta admit this is a pretty good look.  I've tried it on steeper beaches and it works just as well on them as well, the fade to deeper water happens quicker (less underwater tiles to plop). 

So that's it for this update.  Your comments and feedback encouraged.  Rivit is reading here to see how folks react to his work, so if you think he should assemble a Mud Flat Pack, be sure to let him know!  We aren't done yet, still have work to do, but we are closing in rapidly and I think the work he has done is just stunning. 

Lora/LD

[Battlecat]

Very impressive indeed!  You're putting those new items to good use.  I'm looking forward to seeing more as always!

@Rivit: I'll be keeping an eye out for this set of lots and plops to be released, keep up the great work! 

[Glowbal]

Well none replied, so I think I will give my opinion on this for a chance;
First of all, I am amazed by the work you put into your updates. Your goal to make your SF as close as possible to real life, makes me respect you.
I wouldn't be able to do such a thing.  

But, I've to say that after countless of updates like this.. the updates become slightly boring. Not that they are not good, but I find it less enjoying to even watch it.

Cheers!  
- Glowbal

[threeswept]

I'd have to agree with you - that the beaches around here aren't that great - but, since it's almost always between 55°F-65°F (12°-18°C) all year, it doesn't really matter too most. There are a few that are mostly inaccessible or rarely accessed because one has to climb down a steep cliff or something. But, you're pretty spot on with the muddiness of it all. The Bay is VERY 'dirty'...but, not necessarily due to pollution. The tidal flows are quite impressive and they stir up a lot of silt. And, it doesn't help that the average depth is around 14', I think. There are many places where one can actually walk pretty far out into the Bay before it goes over 6', though. Even the ocean outside the Gate isn't very 'clean' - I can't see my feet in the water below my surfboard.

[ldvger]

Update 22

Well, it was a quiet weekend here on the MD, guess everyone was outside grabbing the nice weather.  For those of us north of the equator, it's the tail end of summer and the beginning of fall.  Here in Seattle was had a marvelous weekend, warm, sunny, and soft breezes coming into the city from of the bay.  For those south of the equator, it's spring and the weather is warming and tress and flowers are blooming, waking up after thier winter sleep.  Rivit and I have run into a bit of a road block with the development of the mudflats, so we decided to step away from the project for a time and let our brains rest (his more than mine...he's been working almost exclusively on mudflats for almost two weeks).  And I've been so caught up with mudflats that I have kinda ignored the rest of my region, so over the weekend I took the opportunity to get back to the Stafford Lake area and do some research, plotting, and exploring in preparation for building the next phase of the city tile.  But before I post the update, time to pay attention to those folks who stopped by to visit and comment.

Replies

Battlecat:  Thanks for you comments and glad you are liking what rivit and I are trying to concoct between us.  In the ongoing correspendence between he and I, I have pretty much gathered that he is planning to release this new set of mods and lots, but we are testing it back and forth between us to make sure it works as intended.

Glowbal:  Hello and welcome to my MD!  Always great to "see" a new face and "hear" a new voice chiming in, I hope you stop by often!  And yeah, I know some folks get bored with all the tremendous detail I go into and how many of the screenshots can appear to be very repetitive, but like I said in my introductory statement for this MD, this may not be everyone's ball of wax.  You seem to understand that I am attempting as nearly accurate a recreation of the SF Bay Area as the game will allow me, so you must also understand that it takes a lot of attention to small details pulled from many sources to be able to pull such a feat off well.  Combined with that, I have to take a very close look at all of the tools the game and custom content developers have created over the years, to find that "just right" look to make the recreation as credible as possible.  I am hoping you have read the MD from beginning to end and realize that this is not a project that will move quickly at any point in time.  The region is huge, consisting of 130 large city tiles and so far I have only done a little building and terraforming in one city tile, Stafford Lake.  Also, this MD is still actually very young, so I'm still doing a lot of behind the scenes research as I work on the first city tile.  I've only been up and running with this project for about 2 months and plan to spend several YEARS developing it, so things will always move along a bit slowly here.  I appreciate your input though and in truth try to stay sensitive to my readers wants, which is why rivit and I are taking a break from the mud flats and I am returning to building for a while.  I just thought that while the background work for the bay coastlines may be boring for some, it could very well be fascinating for others.  I am 2 city tiles away from any coastal tiles, so all this work on mudflats is in the nature of "homework", preparation for work to come months down the road. 

threeswept:  Thanks for your input and for stopping by and I'm so glad my comments about the water quality of the SF Bay Area did not offend you.  One really need only look at the basic geography of the bay to understand that it couldn't possibly be very clean water.  The two big rivers, the Sacramento and San Juaquin, that enter the bay carry a phenomal silt load...I think they are draining the second largest watershed on the entire west coast (the Columbia River being #1, I think).  All that silt has been pouring into SF bay since the end of the last ice age and continues daily, so yeah...I can't imagine the water would be swimming pool clear and blue at any point.  And given the overall massive size of the bay and the relatively small outlet/inlet at the Golden Gate, the bay really has no way of flushing itself very well, even with a twice a day tide change.  I amagine the tidal flow through the Golden Gate is extremely fierce, more like a river than anything else during tide changes.  I can't imagine trying to take a boat of ANY size through that small gap if the tide was running against me.  I'll bet the Pacific Ocean is muddy/silty many dozens of miles, if not further, out to sea west of the Golden Gate.  Makes one think about the forces the engineers who built the GG bridge had to consider when designing the footing that hold the bridge in place.  I never paid attention before, but now I wonder if there are any footings in the Golden Gate itself or if it is totally suspended from footing on either shore.  Any footing built in the water of the GG would be subject to tremendous water forces, not to mention erosion from all the silt-laden water rushing by 2 times a day during tide changes.  And...that's kind of a drag for me, as I have a city tile border that occurs in the middle of the GG, meaning I am going to have to build an island in the middle of the GG gap in order to build the bridge.  In RL, such an island could never exist...the water forces would destroy it. 

Update 22: Novato Creek Road, Part 1

Ok, so now I want to build the road that veers off from Hicks Valley Road and goes down to the base of the Novato Creek Dam, then up the face of the dam and around the south side of Stafford Lake before heading up into the hills south of the lake.  This is going to present me with some challenges, as once the road leaves the dam administration building, it becomes first a street and then later a gravel road.  I have never used the SAM puzzle pieces, so I don't know how accurately I can follow the actual route of the road, but I'll do the best I can.

I have already laid down the road route using sub alpine pines, and using the method of counting grids square intersections I have shown you before, so I didn't take any pics of that process.  However, I am now ready to try to plop my first section of road, the intersection of Novato Creek Rd. with Hicks Valley Rd.  In RL, Novato Creek Rd kinda dives down a bit of slope as it leaves the main road, then it travels west and parallel with Hicks Valley Rd for a bit before turning south and crossing over the dam's spillway.  Now, I had removed all my slope mods from my plugins folder when I was working on the dam last week, but now I am going to need to use one again, problem is, I don't know which one.  Using my best guess, which isn't very good, as I don't have a lot of experience with the slope mods, I'm going to start first with Mounted.  Lets see how that works out.

22.1


So this is what we have to begin with.  Lets see if I have a pic on file that shows the RL intersection.  If not, I'll go get one from Google Earth.

22.2


Lets check it out from street level.

22.3


Well, when seen from street level, the road doesn't seem to drop off much at all, does it?  In fact, there appears to be a small hill to the south of the road (we are looking roughly west here).  Hmmm.  Thinking.  Do I need to terraform my game to match?  Maybe, we'll see.  Notice how polite the Google Earth folks were in pixelating any ID info on the truck passing by when the photo was taken.  I'd like to walk down the road a bit and look at some things I am curious about.  The "natural" stream crosses under this road at some point and I'd like to see if I can find that.  Also, there is a creek coming in from the north that goes under Hicks Valley Rd and joins the natural stream at some point, so maybe I can see that, too.  Let's take a walk.  Looks like a nice day for a walk along a dusty, shady road.

22.4


Signage and a bike path. Nice details, I hope I can incorporate them.

22.5


A gate, a fence, and not a hill at all to the left side of the road, but a ravine.  Do I hear water running down there?

22.6


Looking back the way we came, there is an hill there and the ravine that runs next to the road appears to skirt around it.  Interesting the way the scrub oak grows out over the road, making a bit of a canopy.  Nothing like plants/nature to teach us all about engineering.  That's a pretty sizable cantilever!

22.7


Well, we are looking back again, east (dead ahead) and south (to the right) of the road and rather obviously there is no ravine here.  That makes me think there is likely a culvert back towards the entrance of the road that leads either the natural stream and/or the creek from the north side of Hicks Valley Rd into that ravine.  Using the pan feature, the ground all around where I am standing is fairly flat.  Let's continue up the road and see if there's more to learn.

22.8


Looking north of the road here and hey, is that water I see at about the center of the picture?  Had to tell, but I think it is.

22.9


Turning just a tad east and south, I think I can see a very shallow ravine and a tiny streamlet running parallel to the road here. 

22.10


To the left of the pic you can see what I think may be a streamlet and to the right you can see a marker of some sort.  I'm willing to bet the marker shows the location of the culvert that goes under the road and feeds this little streamlet (only about 18"-24" wide) into the ravine on the other side.  I'm just guessing, but I think this may be the creek from the north side of Hicks Valley Rd.  It's hard to keep my bearings in street view, so I'm not certain where I am in relation to where that creek is, but it seems about right, intuitively, and I think the shallow ravine to the south side of the road is the natural stream that bypasses the dam and spillway. 

22.11


This is the opposite side of the road (south) and while the ravine is still there, it's quit shallow.  I think this is the natural stream and the reason the ravine gets steeper further back towards the entrance to the road is both because of topography and the result of two small combined waterflows.  I'm kinda running out of time to follow this up, but would like to walk just a little further up the road to see if I can discover where the natural stream goes under.

22.12


Well this confirms it for me, that is indeed a small stream running next to the road, between Novato Creek Rd and Hicks Valley Rd. 

22.13


And while I'm not yet sure, now looking at the other side of the road, I am thinking this may be where the natural stream exits a culvert.  But looking up stream a bit I see something that makes me wonder about this.

22.14


At the left side of the picture we can see an obvious depression.  Looks like a waterway to me.  We are approaching the bridge over the spillway now and I think we may also be seeing some kind of human made barrier between the natural stream and the water of the spillway.  Lets walk up a little further and see if that helps clarify anything.

22.15


Look between the two rocks at the bottom of the photo and then up to about the center of the pic.  I think this is the natural stream culvert inlet.  I almost took a pic from my last position that showed a strangely flat area in about the same place.  Now lets look back down the road a little bit.

22.16


See that small copse of trees and the depression they are growing around?  I think this is where the natural stream "daylights" for a small stretch, exiting a culvert and then entering another that takes it below the service road we can see in the back ground. 

And that's all the time I have for this evening.  If I can I will try to post this later tonite, but most likely it will happen tomorrow, Sunday.  Having walked the road and learned what I have learned, I may want to think again about building my roads, as it seems I have several culverts I need to think about and I may want to build them first.

I also (heaving a deep sigh) have to think about the spillway.  Novato Creek Rd bridges the spillway at a diagonal and this presents challenges I'm not sure I am prepared to confront quite yet.  Then there is the spillway itself.  Game-wise, it's tiny, about half a cell wide or even less, and it runs across a diagonal path.  Given the tools available, I don't think I can render it accurately in game, so I am not sure how to deal with it.  Stay tuned.

Lora/LD