The Iron Coast 04/04/2010 Update XV - Censing the Journalist III

[joelyboy911]

My first comment here, and It will take you to Best Sellers. Very, very nice little PW streams there. I'm always interested to see how other people go about these things, and yours are very different to my methods.

Congratulations on the OSITM, and now on your move (once February is over) to Best Sellers.

[Haljackey]

Lookin good here Goose.

Oh, and congrats on making OSITM!

[marsh]

nice man

[bat]

Nice new update... and looking forward to the next...

[mightygoose]

&

Replies

Ethan(Ecoba) - thankyou for your kind words, there will be more on rivers by the end of the week, and as for the region shot, keep your eyes peeled for abit of a better one.

Jordan(Canyonjumper) - welcome to the Iron Coast my friend, glad you like what you see.

Sumwonyuno - thankyou for your continued support.

Tomas Neto - thankyou my friend.

CSGdesign - well when you are done with boston, perhaps the next city you decide to grow can have a few more mod's involved.

Newsimaddict - welcome to my new project, i am honoured that i inspire you, and i hope that my thoughts are useful to many.

Battlecat - to get my streams the way they are, i trapsed through all of your CJ/MD and then pootled around googleearth looking at streams and rivers and tried to create a easily repeatable process that looked good. The finishing up of that stream will be in the next update.

Joan(Jmouse) - I too am stupendously greatful to the forward thinking players before me and the custom content creators that make the game so much more than it was when you first installed it. As for your initial method of play, that has a quality of efficiency that real planners only dream of, it is amusing to think that it seems that the grass is most definitely greener on the other side of the fence for both parties. My talent for terraforming is entirely accidental but i hope that i can hone my skills and polish out some of the bumps and issues i had with the first map when creating the second. Your admiration makes me feel warm and fuzzy, it is a pleasure to share my work among an appreciating audience.

Joelyboy911 - thankyou and welcome, you are indeed correct, you have taken me into the best sellers section. This will not go unrecognised and see below for your award.

Haljackey - thankyou and glad you think so.

Bat - thankyou for your continuing support.



Censing the Journalist

The city journal census project is something me and CSGdesign have been talking about behind closed doors for many weeks now. The overall idea is to perform and record data on City Journal Regions, and on the Journals themselves, once a month. Obviously he and I are going to lead the way on this with a first post. It is sheer luck that we both end up in the OSITM on SC4D together. So as much of a trial run, I present to you the first Census Report (January 2010) from the Iron Coast. At this stage it is just data on the Journal itself, and the format is far from final. Any and All feedback is most welcome.

Now we also get to celebrate a somewhat special occasion. The Iron Coast has reached 100 replies on SC4D, to commemorate this milestone I have made the first Iron Coast Badge of Merit. Congratulations Joelyboy911 and thank you to everyone who has contributed thus far.

Now it took six weeks to get to 100 posts, lets see if we can get to 200 is the same again.

[dedgren]

This one is beyond being a keeper, John.  I sense the arrival of a new MD God on the scene.

More, please?


David

[calibanX]

I've just visited for the first time John, and I'm thrilled to see your artistry and your great ability to tell a story. You've drawn me into your MD and I'm a big fan for sure.

Take care.

Geoff

[CSGdesign]

Hahaha that's so cool MG.
You've done an excellent job of presenting your side of SC4 Journal Census.
I also particularly like your deconstructionist style merit and layout in general - nice work.
Now I'd better present my own side of the SC4JC I spose...  I might go to a little less effort naming each of the entries and stuff since I've now got 72 of them, but at least I only have one forum to census now - SC4D.   

[Haljackey]

Nice graphs!  Its always nice to see stats presented in a visual.  Nice work MG!

Congrats on hitting 100 too!  When OSITM is up, you'll be a best seller!   

[antimonycat]

Congratulations on getting OSITM!

Wow, I admire your patience in starting such a large MD and it's great that you're going for a whole immersive universe with its own unique history etc.

And while some may find it 'excessive' (if that's even the right word) to conjure up a whole world for a Sim city mayor diary, you can always turn to your imagined creation for anything creative - be it writing a novel, painting a picture, or even making a game or film.

Good job also on posting some background information on steampunk as I'm sure it'll help some readers understanding the characteristics of the genre.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing more!

[bat]

Looking forward to more from the city journal census project...
That are nice graphs and congrats on over 100 comments...

[Jmouse]

Doggoneit! If I'd realized you were just a single post shy of 100, I'd have held out and tried to be the one who put you into the next category. Unfortunately, I don't notice things like that, though.

Nevertheless, congratulations on reaching your first milestone. Considering the quality of your work, I've no doubt there will be many more to come.

Later...
Joan

[Tomas Neto]

Wow!!! Great graphs!!! Very nice stats!!! 

[ldvger]

MightyGoose-

I came across your new MD, which is very good and which I am enjoying, while researching mapping problems and solutions, specifically the all important 16 bit grey scale.  I've read your tutorial and while it answers some questions, it leaves or creates a lot more, at least for me. 

For all intents and purposes, I have a "hand-drawn" map I want to create a game map from.  In reality, my map is a scale accurate bathymetric map of a portion of the Atlantic Ocean seafloor off the coast of New York.  I have contours drawn at 200 meter intervals as well as smaller seafloor landscape features shown.  I actually have 2 maps, one a greyscale (no idea what bit) and the other a color gradient.  However, there is a lot of graphic "noise" on both maps due to the fact that all information was generated via sonar.  The maps I downloaded were in PDF format but, using Adobe Acrobat, I have been able to save them as JPG's and open them in Photoshop. 

I pretty much assume that the usual method for creating scale accurate game maps from USGS maps is not going to work in this instance and that I am going to have to trace my maps in Photoshop and then create a grey scale.  I'm willing to give that a shot, but I need to better understand THAT process. 

You seem to have a good grip on that, could you help me? 

Lora/LD

[mightygoose]

Replies

David(Dedgren) - how is a humble soul like me supposed to respond to that level of praise eh. The key difference between me and the true gods, is that they know what they are doing, their tutorials are explicit. As Lora rightly says mine have a very large amount of wiggle room, largely because i am making them up as i go along. If it works i stick to it, if not i find another way. This is a ramshackle stumbling shoggoth compared to the deft elven cavalry of yourself and other Hall of Fame inductee's. This is City Journalling the russian way, if it's broke; bash it till it works.

Geoff(CalibanX) - welcome to the Iron Coast. I hope there are many things that make you go: "ooh, i wonder if i could apply that to my own game experience" as that is my intention, this is a collection of ideas, badly ordered, but then i think that reflects the personality of the thing, jumbled. XD

CSGDesign - well thankyou for your words as i said, just dump an updated file in the dropbox and i can annotate my graphing process with your data.

Haljackey - thankyou, its surprising how well this is rolling along, i wasn't expecting half as much attention as this.

Antimonycat - firstly, welcome back, secondly, your timing is superb, i have many questions, as your PM box has surely discovered.

Bat - thankyou for your continued support.

Joan(Jmouse) - well as of this update this is further than any previous attempt by me at a city journal has ever got in terms of update number and even chronological period of sustained interest. I think it is telling that i am actually more excited by the scope and grandeur of the project as each day passes and i add ever more details to the behind the scenes world that the Iron Coast resided in, as food for thought i just wrote a revised list of Gallacean(Spanish) Kings from 1326-1581 last night, including assassinations major protests and coronations, why you ask, because it is all in the details....

Tomas Neto - thanks.

Lora(ldvger) - i am well aware that my tutorialling technique is miles below par and is incredibly vague at many points. Unfortunately that is the way i am with most things, its more of a general guide for someone already relatively profficient with the tools. The Bathymetric data may have been false coloured so you will need to ensure that the colours are in the correct order. I have virtually no experience importing USGS data so i cannot really ascribe my tracing technique to your problem, i wish i could help more but it is simply something i have never needed to do. i hope you find an adequate solution in your thread in the map request section. When i return to the subject in the not too distant future maybe i can shed a little bit more light on the matter.

Working for Gaea

So welcome back to frantic February. This, the third update of the month, follows on directly from Update VIII, Playing God. As I continue to battle with custom content with the aim to creating an aesthetically pleasing stream. If you remember I said I was looking for an iterative process that would be relatively straightforward to duplicate, as there could well be many of streams in the region. I happened to stumble blindly into the method I'm showing you today. It was all because I was fawning over Cycledogg's terrain textures.

Well I was thinking that there is a veritable treasure trove of detail and even flora represented in the terrain textures that make up the Meadowshire terrain mod that I am using. I thought why not use that as my guide for the ploppable flora. So I parked the spring of the river right on top of a natural rocky outcrop. Cleared the surrounding tree-controller trees and set about making my barebones water trail a bona fide stream.

In this first image you can see I have used a combination of Pegasus' plop rocks from his plop stream kit, and some of the maxis rocks re-modded by Chrisadams3997. Around the edges is a smattering of Aubrac rocks from Orange O that are available on the LEX. Notice the various elements of the Meadowshire terrain mod in just this small expanse of land. You have yellow, white, orange & pink flowers, strewn rocks & detritus, scrub bushes and mossy rocks. All of these things we have a corresponding ploppable available.

Using the various ploppables available to me you can see how I have begun to fill in the landscape, matching ploppable to texture as closely as possible for now. I did however notice that Jeronij's transparent ploppable water sits very high off the ground and that Pegasus' plop rocks and shoreline pieces don't sit on top of it. I decided that I should sacrifice the transparency for the sake of river shape and switched over to Pegasus' water also. It turns out that this water matches my water mod better anyway.

I found that if you are using Ennedi's HD sandstone brown rock mod like I am, Pegasus' sand brush helps with cliff blending quite well. This is especially useful considering most of the rocks from the set are very mossy and need some form of interface for them to sit comfortably adjacent to a different rock tone.

As you can see I am just steadily adding bits a small amount at a time. Unfortunately you have to do this and also save often; as when working at this level of detail the fact that the bulldoze tool has to demolish whole tiles can come and bite you hard in the rear. Patiently filling in gaps one by one I begin filling up the open areas, at this altitude you would not have open forest but clumps of trees, with a much larger percentage of bush.

After all the major elements are complete I begin a final pass with the two weed brushes in the rural renewal kit flora, and then the green rye grass. Now obviously you have eyes, if anything looks out of place, you can go back and edit it, but I was pretty happy with the result.

This small area is largely complete now.  The following images show the same technique used with varying degrees of human override. This next pair shows the immediately downstream segment of water that is on a far steeper gradient between two cliffs. Obviously I wanted a rockier stream bordering on rapids; however I thought that excessive for such a small body of H2O. I used the mayor mode sub-arctic tree controller for the major flora in this area.

The next section downstream is a wider gentler slope and I wanted to attempt some form of weaving in the river. I laid out the basic weave first before beginning my flora plopping. It is a tough process getting the balance between too much interest and too little interest in any particular scene. I like to think I am getting better at it but I am by no means the best.

Just to round off this update I have a couple of shots of the area as it currently stands. Now I may have done these three little sections of this one stream but the surrounding hills remain untouched at the time of writing. But there you have it, that is how I am making my streams.

See you soon.

[ecoba]

Interesting update, John. I think that adjusting your ploppable flora to match the terrain textures is a very good idea, and I think that it is also a new one, comparitively, I'm pretty sure David did something pretty similar over in 3RR. Or that might have been something else, well I don't know what he hasn't done.

Anyway, The end product really was outstanding and definitely rewarding. The final pictures of the streams in their photoshopped forms are quite awe striking. Keep up the good work!

Ethan

[deathtopumpkins]

Whoa, Goose! Amazing update. That stream is just gorgeous. How DO you do it, man!?

Eagerly awaiting more.

[Connor]

Fantastic work on the stream, very impressive update once again. 

[CSGdesign]

Awesome!
I had no idea that the tools existed to make such unreal natural scenes.
Very inspirational - must be very time-consuming.

[canyonjumper]

Wow! Very realistic stream, Goose! Great stuff!

             -Jordan