SC4Terraformer, a tool for regional handterraforming

[prince_of_sims 0]

i've got a question: what happens when you terraform in SC4TF, but a mod setting tells your game that the max height is quite below what your newly terraformed region is?

[bourneid 13]

@prince: find out what the mod sets the hight at and impout that into the dialog that pops up when you first open the region in teraformer.

I wanted to comment on greatness of this program....

A) being able to terraform the whole region in one shot rather then opening up each city.

B) in the newest version....when you first open the region you get a hight image that you can then take into photoshop and make a grayscale...this is a boon for those that make maps....and those that are increidably talented at hand terraforming...that wernt able to share their work...can now....that image works on already built on regions.

that map can also be used to create realistic maps for journals...

so that is totally cool...

thank you for the hard work and dedication that you showed to the community in creating this great tool. You are definetly on my short list for Trixie nominations...and are ranked right there with the NAM.

Great job

[prince_of_sims 0]

just to point out, SC4TF has Exporting capabilites, that include Grayscale PNG and a new format, SC4M that is much more precise in regaining height data than previously used formats. the SC4M format is a creation of the creator of this wonderful tool. so, you don't have to use the Overlay as a base for your grayscale maps, SC4TF can export a terraformed map as a grayscale, or a prett-close-to-lossless SC4M file, ready for sharing =D

EDIT:

what I meant by my original question was what happens if you don't set it in SC4TF? for example, say I have a terrain mod that sets the max height to 1500, but i terraform and save a region where the max height is 3000. what happens in SC4? does it crash?

[wouanagaine 86]

pos

I think that nothing happens, the game do not check for the max elevation until you modify the terran, so if you built a 3000m mountains, it will display correctly with a 1500m max mod. Then if you try to modifiy the mountain in SC4 it will be flatten to 1500m where you modify it.

bourneid

Thanks for your great words

I'm still wondering how you have set you network layout in a 2D top view

According to Dirk, the STEX will be soon open to allow sharing of SC4M files

Take care

[Lord Kronos 0]

wouanagaine,

Got a problem I tried to load my region (created with SC4T) and it froze. Had to do the three fingered salute to close SC4T. here's what the console says

IOError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument

It also says on the line following "Uncompressed file" "This was the city info False"

This is the first city it tried to load.

I had loaded the region into SC4 and edited that city tile once, but since then I have done a number of saves and reloads. If you need anymore information or would like the file PM me

LK

[SC4BOY 21]

Originally posted by: wouanagaine[/bMoganite

Deeper ocean, you will need to mod the waterlevel so that you can have more than 250m deep.

Personnaly I don't see the need of deeper ocean, but that is my personnal taste.

Anyway there is nothing in the game that prevent a huge ocean and huge mountains, ( still I have not test a negative value for elevation ), the minmial and maximal height can be modded to suits your needs. but now SC4TF can't terraform that.

quote>

 

Just out of curiousity (and I may be in over my head..   but can't you move the water level, terraform it, then move the water level again? 

[wouanagaine 86]

LK

I have pm you, hope I can fix it

SC4Boy

yes you can, but you SC4TF is still limited to 6000m range, whatever water level is. and changing the waterlevel in SC4TF requires that you also change it in SC4

[moganite 4]

You can change it though you need a mod to do so. It has a property that sets the water to be the lowest 250 m so that you can change it to be say 1000 m or 10 m. i am considering a mod for that but i want to make one or two other mods first.

[Romaq 18]

That map looks great, bornid! I wanted to note that if one uses World Machine for building their region, the erosion tool allows you to export a 'flow' map, which can then be used to mark down where your rivers should be. I've not yet built a city to see how that impacts the 'radar' image on SC4TF, but I must say SC4TF is quite the stroke of genius.

[MadTV_Freak 0]

This is a great program, I'll have to try this soon, I love those shots!

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Speaking of Photoshop, i didn't like the default icon, and made another one, thought someone might want it. It is attached but i dont know how to make it be the icon. How do yo do it?

I have mangaed to create a shortcut like you said but i cant change the icon of the exe itself. I just figured out you have to press attach inside the attach ,odule so now it is attached

Here is a picture of it:

Post edited because of attachment problems noted above

icon.zip

[wouanagaine 86]

moganite

You tell it better than me

Romaq

As always, thanks for your support

MadTV_Freak

Thanks for your support, and yes, try it, you won't be disapointed

Xyloxadoria

I don't see any attached icon in your post

If you want to change the icon, the only way I know for you ( ie without the source code ), is to create a shortcut on the desktop, then rightclick -> properties -> change icon

Thanks for your support

Take care

[bourneid 13]

the transit layout was done in photoshop.....I first tool the transportation view from region census and used the method mentioned in my journal  ( https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=56514&STARTPAGE=29&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear  look near the bottom of the page.

I used this as an overlay and drew out the networks using the pen tool, laying out each type on its own layer...and stroking them using a hard brush using the color of the network.

[wouanagaine 86]

Bourneid

I think dedgren has found a quicker ( or easier ) way to do that, check out 3RR ( last image on page 15 ) and the how-to on page 16

[SC4BOY 21]

wou.. just a suggestion.. perhaps you might put a link to this thread on the page where you provide the description for the download of SC4TF... This may help people who are curious about it... as I recall you have a link in the readme, and maybe that is enough, but this might help people who just want to find out about it before they dl it.

I have a question too.. after I load the file into sc4 and save all of the city squares, may I delete all the *_alpha.PNG files?

[ldyhwkann 0]

I am having a problem with uploading my region from your mod into simtropolis. Any suggestions?

[wouanagaine 86]

SC4BOY

I can't edit the info for now, Dirk have not tell me how to do that . But yes the readme contains the link

And yes you can delete all png in the region folder. There are here for updating the region view but they will be recreated as needed

ldyhwkann

lol, I don't want to pronounce your nickname

Well it seems the STEX is not yet ready for SC4M, Dirk told me that he'll work on it, so we need to be patient , there are certainly others stuff to do

[wouanagaine 86]

I will be offline for the next 3 days. So just leaves any questions, and I'll try to reply on next monday

Take care

[tbird 2]

Wouanagaine: I have a question/problem. I noticed that after I create a region in the Terrain Generator, and then open it in SC4, the terrain looks fine until you zoom in- then the entire terrain surface is covered with the "grid" that normally appears just around the cursor. I also noticed that the usual highlighted square that appears when, say, laying a road or street, doesn't show up. Is this just a glitch- or a result of a mod ( I do have the Missouri Breaks terrain mod) interfering? Any thoughts?

[prince_of_sims 0]

this is a glitch on your end. the grid can be gotten rid of by pressing G. the other one is an issue i've heard of before, but i cant remember how it was solved. doing a search on the forums will help.

incidentally, does this happen only on cities created in SC4TF or does it happen in other cities as well?

[Chico008 0]

Hi, I wanted to create my own region, but before teraforming, i want to know how to make big city zone, because when a create a new region, it creates it whith very small city size. How can i make it bigger ?<br />Thx<br />en FR si ca peut aider :<br />quand je crée une region, j'ai que des petites zone pour les villes, j'aimerais en faire des tres grandes, comment on fait ?<br />Merci.

[wouanagaine 86]

Chico008

Welcome to ST

Bienvenue à ST

va faire un tour ici ca explique comment faire :

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=120&threadid=72642&enterthread=y

ou en français:

http://www.toutsimcity.com/forums/afficher-reponses.php?forum=sc4&page_sujet=1&sujet=16030

[Chico008 0]

C'etait juste le config.bmp a faire, bah super, ca marche impecable.<br />Merci beaucoup.<br />Bon courage pour le developpement de cet outil

[prince_of_sims 0]

please post in the Support thread for SC4TF, link in my signature. this way we can consolidate all troubleshooting issues in one thread for other people who have the same problem.

[bourneid 13]

Originally posted by: wouanagaine Bourneid

I think dedgren has found a quicker ( or easier ) way to do that, check out 3RR ( last image on page 15 ) and the how-to on page 16quote>

 

Accually....I used a simalure methoud for my map as well as for all my prevous region views in my journal. One of the layers used to create my map is the regionshot provided by region census, that I then used the trace contor and lowered the visibility......it is accually what is seen as the city road layout...

here was what I posted in my journal....the almost completed map...

[Romaq 18]

For those using World Machine with SC4TF, I have carefully edited the WM color file to match SC4TF default colors as closely as possible. There are two files: http://www.mik-maq.com/dump/colors.txt and http://www.mik-maq.com/dump/colors.tga

When you start World Machine, SC4TF is one of the selections, and as I said the image you see in World Machine will match as close as I can get it to SC4TF's default colors. I did tuck in a surprise, however. At heights over the 4000 m mark (including the ocean floor) it will be the color blue. At heights over the 6000 m mark World Machine uses the Red color. So if you hit solid blue, those patches can not be edited within SC4 without a mod to allow it. And if a patch is red, that area will be flattened to 6000 m within SC4TF.

World Machine Tutorial

Purpose: Use World Machine to create a landscape, and then go through the steps to bring as close as possible a match into SC4TF.

1) Start World Machine with the correct world size and detail

    From the menu, 'World Commands', 'World Size' and set Width and Height to 512 (you may go larger IF you purchased the standard version, but 4096 is a HUGE map for SC4). Set Largest World Size at 7.68 km. 15m/pixel is the closest match with SC4's scale. Close down the dialog box.

2) Set the Z-axis scale

    You'll see a 'Terraine Height Scale with a slider bar underneith. Set it at 7800m. This suggests that our highest elevation will be 3900m above sea level (asl). The largest elevation you may edit in SC4 is 3750m asl. The largest elevation allowed in SC4TF is 5750m asl. Yes, I know you may edit sea level, but the default is 250, and here's the math for you to edit to suit. For reference, http://www.peakbagger.com/list.aspx?lid=12004 is a list of peak elevations. The local volcano where I live, Mt. Baker is at 3286m.

3) Start with a blank slate with a nice land & sea Terrain Color

    Yeah, that's it. Delete all devices on the screen. I'll tell you what to put in, and you can change it to suit after this tutorial. Use 'Set Terrain Color' for 'Land & Sea'.

4) Add Perlin Noises and build your 'basic world outline'

    Add a Perlin Noise device and use the 'WM Default' preset. Change the 'feature size' all the way up to contenents. Add a second Perlin Noise Generator, use the default 'as is' and set the feature size for 21.72km. The net result is to have areas of ocean, areas of mountains, areas of stuff in between to explore later when we wander around this world we built. Add a Combiner and plug both of those into it 'as is'.

 

5) Flatten costal areas for exageration

    You won't likely want QUITE this much exageration, but it'll be useful for this demo. Change it later to suit. Add a Simple Transform device, have your 'combine' output go into it, and slide your Midland Plateau all the way right, and close the dialog box. That orange area in your preview is all beach.

6) Natural Erosion

    Drop the Erosion next in the pipe, use the 'Good with Terraces' presetting. This will carve the natural flow of water. It is an additional exercise for the reader to save the 'flow map' heightfield output to a file for a reference on where to put rivers, lakes and such.

7) Chop out the extra ocean info

    We only get to use 250m of ocean level by default, so we'll chop out the extra. Make a 'constant' device, and set it at half the max anticipated altitude (less the 250 meters we can see) and divide the entire range (3900-250)/7800 = 46% rounded down. Feed the erosion output into the TOP of a combiner device, feed the constant into the bottom, then set the combine method to subtract with a strength of 1. Now change the Terrain Color to SC4TF.

Find your spot in the world

    At this point, you may not see anything particularly interesting in the preview window. Now is the 'fun' part. Press 'ctrl-4' and you'll see an entire world you can walk, drive or fly within. The white-shaded cube will match your preview window. Bring up the World Size window again (under World Commands) and you may change the Global Terrain Location Control to move that white box (and the area you'll end up saving) to some spot on the landscape you like. Don't see anything that does it for you? You can click the 'dice' button and randomize the entire globe with a click. Another way to quickly pick a spot you like... Click the 'set' button and point at the spot with your mouse.

9) Save my spot, please!

    You found the spot in the world. You can get a detailed look at it with ctrl-3 and pressing the green button. That causes it to render in detail, and it will fairly closely match what you'll see in SC4TF. Add a 'file output' device to the combiner, and save it as a Terragen file.  Note that the file is NORMALLY named output.ter and saved to the last directory you've been saving stuff to. Be sure to save the project, because you have to close World Machine to use SC4TF. You'll likely want to make futher changes.

10) Lost in translation

    I'm using Pauli's TerraConv (http://koti.mbnet.fi/pkl/tg/TerraConv.htm) for 16 bit-per-channel (bpc) conversion, but it also causes the result to add one more bit to the height and width (512 x 512 becomes 513 x 513) so you don't have to enlarge the image by that amount. You may not see anything but a black or grey box when your file loads. Everything is ok. If everything is relatively flat, 16 bpc 'deep grey' information is still there, but it is too subtle to display on your 8 bpc video. Even if it could display, your eye isn't likely to make out the difference in shades. But it is still there. Load the output.ter, export output.tif. That .TIF file needs to become .PNG. I'm using CinePaint from http://www.cinepaint.org/press/cinepaint.windows.2003.3.12.html though it is buggy and doesn't work well. The command-line tools I have found seem to convert the .TIF to 8 bpc before saving the 8-bpc .PNG file. If someone has a better tool for this, I would be greatful. Anyway, load the image with CinePaint then save it as output.png.

11) SC4TF editing considerations

    Create a blue 8-bit config.bmp and put it into a test directory within your regions. I suggest you START with all big cities. Since SC4TF will let you a color image, you may FIRST do your editing, and then use that color overhead map to work out the best spot to plunk down cities, and what size they should be. I use a black-white checkerboard in GIMP set with a 64 x 64 grid. I then use bucket fill to fill in the squares with the correct color. This is on a layer that is half transparent so I can see the SC4TF color PNG underneith. You can THEN save the PNG image as an export, fire up your new config.bmp and load in the saved .PNG image that you've touched up in SC4TF.

Other considerations for World Machine:

    Play around with combining input devices before your final erosion stage.

    Do all erosion BEFORE you chop out the ocean (The constant and combiner) devices just before File Output. Once you chop out the ocean, the new ocean floor becomes filled with erosion debris.

    The Simple Transform device is your friend. Why? Because it becomes extreemly easy to make sharply peaked mountains, steep ocean trenches just offshore, wide and relatively flat coastal areas and beaches. Beautiful and great for building.

     World Explore is very useful for finding great areas to save and build in.

    The Erosion device has outputs for flow, wear and deposition. You may have more than one file output, so you COULD save image maps showing where your rivers and lakes ought to be. Save the images and use them for reference when placing river and lake tiles in SC4. I happen to be using two monitors so I can use SC4 on one while viewing the image in another. You can also use GIMP to layer the rivers over the SC4TF color PNG image, then print it out.

Considerations for SC4TF:

    Use the 'flatten' zone tool, square your brush, then drag the slider bars below to a minimum height of 252, max height of 253. Try to leave your deep channels alone, that is where your natural rivers and streams will flow into. But if you pull AWAY from shore into the water with a square brush, you'll mimic developer's tendency to square off shoreline with concrete and wooden piers AND you'll have deep water for your ships to sail into without affecting naturally created landscape or blocking off natural stream and river outlets.

    Because of how we did the Simple Transform device, you'll still have craggy bumps and sharp reefs just under water. Those are excelent spots to develop natural and man-made islands, reefs, and sea walls. Again, use your 'flatten' tool at that 252-253 level for the shorewalls and follow the flow of natural terrain for seawalls. Be sure min-height is 0 if you use 'Make Hills' for creating your islands on those ridges just under water, and your islands will 'flow' naturally from the landscape as well.

    You CAN go full circle back into World Machine with your SC4TF and existing cities. Save to PNG, convert to TIF, load using TerraConv, and use the Load File device on World Machine. I don't recommend doing so, because your new sea floor at 250 meters will interfere with proper erosion development. But it may be useful to save only the erosion flow map so you can see where rivers would naturally develop on regions you have built by hand.

    You'll notice I've maintained 16 bpc conversions end to end. If you set the Z-axis scale at 7800m and chop out 46% from the final image, then what you see in World Machine's explorer view is pretty much what you'll see in SC4TF with NO SCALING issues. This lends itself to going 'full circle' with SC4TF <--> World Machine. This also lets you use a 16 bpc editor like Photo Shop for laying down those constructed shorelines, or gouging picture-perfect streams, rivers & canals from the flow maps rather than by hand in SC4TF.

I hope this tutorial helps. If there is a strong demand, I'll develop it further into a .PDF tutorial with image photos and sample files.

[wouanagaine 86]

Bourneid

Only one word : Impressive

Romaq

Small tip : you can change the color of SC4TF

You can either edit the datas\basiccolors.ini or create another one and use the 'Change color' button to load it

Take care!

[Romaq 18]

wouanagaine:

Yup, I know I can edit SC4TF, and I even borrowed from your colors to get World Machine right. Two problems:

1) I like your default colors too much, and when I used the 'snow' patch, the snow in SC4TF hit where snow was in my terrain. I decided World Machine's colors needed to match YOURS. This also gives people ideas on how to modify their World Machine colors to match any SC4TF colors they may decide upon.

2) I need to know where the shoreline was, presuming it was at .5 on a 0 to 1 scale, so I had to do a color set that gave me this line anyway within World Machine.

I'm still working on the tutorial above. As it happens, I accidently deleted a chunk when I went to look at helptext by web page. But that's ok, because the tutorial will show people how to walk, drive or fly within their World Machine world to find the terrain most suitable for their purpose.

Edit:

The tutorial is finished, the prior message I made, by the by.

I've been working on docks and such, particularly Peg's Coastal Development Kit (CDK) - Industrial. From the PEG CDK Tutorial (http://www.jphayden.com/pegprod/forums/cms_view_article.php?aid=13&sid=be4ba6e3d7855d686373a1a0fcf3e0f4) you can see it is VERY useful to place squared shoreline tiles at a precise and consistant height. PEG has released a ploppable 4x4 and 1x4 leveler tool that flattens an area at precisely 0.5m above whatever sea-level if you plop the tool with the last row of tiles in the water.

It would be quite useful if the Max Height and Min Height slider bars could allow precision values. I can slide the bars to get as close as 251 minimum and 252 maximum. (edit: I figured out using the arrow keys to get integer precision. Yay!) If I could specify 250.5m for the flatten tool, I could more easily make happy industrial coastlines. I would also recommend having minimum to the left, maximum to the right. Perhaps the sliders would be on the same bar? This would leave more room for a box to input precision slider values, and it is logical that if I push the minimum pointer into the maximum pointer, I could push both sliders up at the same time.

Also, I would note for American English 'terran' should be 'terrain'. I didn't see an i18n (internationalization) translation file. Given the varied languages I see pop up in the forums (Including SC4TF's author wouanagaine from France!) a 'translation file' might prove useful. I18n is painful to impliment, but it has big rewards. Contributers could provide their own translations for the buttons and menus in Unicode, and the file would display the proper language accordingly. But I understand if i18n is a VERY low priority. Implimenting a translation table would be a major investment in the code, I would think.

I'm very happy with my World Machine/ SC4TF combination. Starting with the info from my tutorial above, it is trivial for me to create far more realistic terrain than I could hope to do by hand. SC4TF lets me hand-level my coastlines to PEG CDK specifications within a few meters. World Machine provides me maps of where rivers and lakes would likely go based upon how it eroded the terrain.

Cheers!

[Shadow Assassin 336]

Hey, now that I'm back, checking this out... I now have a GeForce 6600GT, and it runs SC4T excellent.

[Pixelrage 34]

I just tried the terraformer last night for the first time since a very early beta version, and WOW has it improved!!

My only question -- is there any chance that an undo (Ctrl+Z or Edit->Undo) feature can ever be added in? It helps when you've made a really bad mistake, and don't want to shut the program down and re-open the region all over again.