Yellowish Altitude lines

[SC4BOY]

My best guess is that Maxis simply used them

Yea, I'm guessing it was made to benefit the developers, and only released as an afterthought because it was already there

noticed is called refresh, cntrl alt shift f. Any clue as to what the refresh command does?

There are reasons to refresh the screen after you've made some changes just to see how things have changed since you took some action on your own. I've never had to use it... well I do recall I wanted to use it once or twice but of course when I want to use it I can never remember the command... LOL

Let's put it this way.. when you need the command it will dawn on you that that is what you want to do.. hehe

[wouanagaine]

Thanks wouanagaine, but it wasn't Maxis's idea to create polpable water, so must have been something else they used it for or intended to do something with it, right? 

Remember that initially the game would have allowed downhill rivers and game water at different altitude ( like in the rain water tool ). It could have been used for debugging such stuff to see if the water flows the correct direction

[j-dub]

I think the reason they originally blocked the rain tool, where you can still access it during mayor mode with the three finger salute, was that sometimes issues this fill the hole with water thing it does, while good for making land bridges in mountainous areas, and filling these areas higher up with water is nice, it was ridiculous going back down to find a rail tunnel under the highway filled with water, because the land slopes down for the tunnel, not to mention where all that beach/dock property flooded by the bay. The rain tool may be visually appealing, but the aftermath is something else, I could not save with all that flooding.

Realistically though, that sort of thing does happen. In reality, there used to be this bicycle route tunnel under a highway, just like the Maxis tunnel design. It was easier to ride through, but because of flooding, a giant overpass was built instead, great, except unless a human is built with speeds like a car, it takes a lot longer to get up all that way, not to mention the hard to brake speeds when coming down, and a curve.

I also wanted to add, in SC2000, it was Maxis ideas to have water you had to pay for to put down. Why this was so hard for SC4, I don't know, if they would of done the classic Maxis waterfall, there could have been hydro electric dams in SC4. There may have been waterfalls, but judging at the initial awkward default water texture, I doubt water flow animations. It may have just looked like the same landscape they used for Sims, the water is kind of still, and flat, also since those seem to use SC4 map files, some of the bridge models in that game give it away. If only they would of originally allowed us to drag roads, and go from birds eye view to street level, first person like they do in Sims 3.