Heres an attempt at powerpoles

[gizmo28 2]

I took a stab at trying to mod powerpoles, after 2 hours of trying to draw freehanded i got this so far( my drawing skills suck).

[Teirusu 38]

Good work there Gizmo! Few questions and suggestions though.

First, 4 wires is kinda messy and in truth you only need 2. All around where I live is power poles with only two wires on them, then a few sets of high tension power lines that have much more then 4 wires.

Also, with only two wires you can make the power poles an upside down 'L' shape instead of a 'T' shape, which I think would be a little more pleasing to the eye when lines cross each other. Or you could just make them lowercase 'l' poles and not have to worry about the mess of wires crossing each other.

And third, I don't know how the power poles work myself, but do you think it's possible to add a small transformer to the last pole on a line? Just a thought.

As for my question, just how did you get that in-game? When I try editing FSHes for S3D files I get this:

[Trolca 15]

I think it's a very good start.

[gizmo28 2]

I think the number or wires is hard coded into the game becuase you can have no model for the resource key for the poles and the wires will draw no mater what,u just get the base tile thats at the bottom, and the 4 wires in the air.

 

I just do weird thing with properties, theres like 20+ s3ds for the power poles, and i can just cut it down to only needed six for the drawing of them in game, its kinda of like a lame shortcut but it works and does the the job, the game only has 6 types of poles, and they are for the directions they can face, so the transformer idea is out of the question, unless u want one on everypole, hehe.

 

Can you send me the dat with a good fsh that i can import and ill take a look at it, kinda hard to tell what you might of done there.

[El Effe 5]

I agree with Teirusu, 4 lines as shown in your photo is a bit much and to me looks weird. A T pole (with two lines) , a upside down L pole, a l (small L) with one line, and/or a "Greek Cross) for four lines (but not crossing in all directions like in your photo), should fill all needs for power lines.

 

We know that the Power Line lot that came from Maxis can be edited and made into a separate ploppable lot because there is a working modification of it on the LEX that came out soon after the Lot Editor was first made available.

[gizmo28 2]

I dont have a choice on the lines, theres no known exempler for it, just the poles, im pretty sure the lines and base tile are hardcoded into the exe, if u dont have the poles the lines will just form a continous loop in the air, i tested this by replacing a pole with a tree, lol, looked funny cuase the tree was short with these wires in thin air. Ive looked in all the .fsh files and i dont even see a graphic for the lines.

[Teirusu 38]

Well that sucks about the wires, but I guess you just can't have it all!

Anyway, heres a dat with fsh. It's basically the pine.dat from my G-Mode tree modd and forces pine trees. At the bottom of the file is that fsh I poorly edited. That FSH is referenced by S3D 0x5AD0E817,0xBADB57F1,0x6E460400

To see the problem just zoom in and start plopping G-Mode trees. You should see it.

[ALTX 40]

Yo can you post the S3D of that power pole in a zip file? Im curious to examine it myself...

[Teirusu 38]

Okay, here's the S3D file: 0x5AD0E817,0xBADB57F1,0x6E460400

[Equinox 1,209]

I'd like to see those MASSIVE power poles you see spanning entire desert areas of CA.
They are behemoths of power lines, and go up mountains and the like.

I can get screenshots if you like.

[oppie 487]

Teirusu, you forgot to import an alpha channel into your FSH file. Just make a new bmp where the black area remains black and the rest becomes white (this is necessary for the game to tell what areas to make transparent).

Then in Fishman (I assume you use that program), when importing a new bitmap, choose an alpha file, and don't forget to set the box that says 'DXT1 Compressed, no alpha' to 'DXT3 Compressed with alpha'. That should fix your problem.

[gizmo28 2]

Here's a update on that pole, after 25 hours worth of work drawing and redrawing i got this, now the question is, would any one even use this if i modded the other 5 poles that i have to do,  otherwise ill just drop this project.

[SkyTearer 10]

Nice, it may be in the infant stages now, but this really could go somewhere! I do think thought that it should be on grass or dirt bottom.

[joeherb15 1]

do it, id use it. just one question: what does it look like on fire? it be cool if it burned

[gizmo28 2]

I cant find anything that tells it what to use  for the base tile, i can change the fsh for it but im not sure what else that fsh is used for.

[yoseph 0]

You all know the familiar telephone pole that is around everyone's neiborhood, don't you? They cross the streets and provide electricity and telecommunication to everyone who pays for it. That's what I want. They wouldn't even need their own tiles to set them. Actually, they would automatically pop up once a building is plopped or finished growing. They would even touch the actual building and get grown with the lot. Now that would be cool!

[Equinox 1,209]

Hey, sorry to burst your bubble, lol, but they don't do that anymore.  If we got that in the game, the flammability of everything should be cranked up a notch and once you started a fire, it should be able to spread along power lines.  In the neighborhood where I live, the lines are all underground, and we practically never get power outages while a lot of surrounding, older neighborhoods do.

[stp243 8]

Keep on going! id use this modd if it ever came around, it adds a great deal of realism to the game, most cities have above ground power lines running along the roads. Id use these more than the current power lines, which resemble high tension wires that I almost never see in a neighborhood. It looks ok for now, but i hope that you could streamline the poles a little.

[jbbry232 87]

gizmo28: good idea you have their, here's a way to fix the visual aspect of it:

 

model it in gmax and take pics of it at the right angles

 

[droletpeople1 0]

Keep going, I need this modd for my region

[jbbry232 87]

here's something i whipped up in gmax, just to show you an example

 

 

and after giving it some thought, i've come to the conclusion (if you can call this one) that maybe the powerlines have their own fsh file, and you could just take out the bottom 2 power lines

[DvdGStwrt 5]

4 Wire limit? Shucks.

Well I would use it, in my rural areas as long as it isn't too tall.

Though it looks like this is an intersection of 2 poles, what would a line of poles look like?

cheers

David

[El Effe 5]

I would certainly use your modded power poles. Do you have any pics of the other 5?

 

[gizmo28 2]

Im working on so many projects at once, i do a lil bit of each them everyday, im still working on that one pole unfornately, i dont really like the way it looks, but that ss above looks very nice, wish i could do that. I keep searching the fsh files but cant find them, it probably some little graphic in a file that has many images in it, and theres no way else to find it cause the lines dont have an exemplar.

[DuskTrooper 314]

Good start.  How did you get the wires to connect from pole to pole?  Is it ingame?

[maxismike 0]

the lines are drawn programatically, you can't easily (or possibly at all) remove or edit them..

[DuskTrooper 314]

Ah, I see.  Do they automatically snap to the top of the tower?

[iMacWin95 0]

4 lines... Near my area (Northern Virginia, if you didn't know), we have two types of 6-line high-tension lines. (I live near them, I'd be able to tell that obviously). Even better, not too far from me is a 4-way pole!

 

Sorry, I keep forgetting we have two 'extra' lines over here...

[maxismike 0]

They have registration nodes in the S3D file. I suppose you could edit those and superimpose them if you just want 2 wires, but that may not draw correctly.

[El Effe 5]

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On 12/2/2003 7:24:55 PM gizmo28 wrote:

Im working on so many projects at once, i do a lil bit of each them everyday, im still working on that one pole unfornately, i dont really like the way it looks, but that ss above looks very nice, wish i could do that. I keep searching the fsh files but cant find them, it probably some little graphic in a file that has many images in it, and theres no way else to find it cause the lines dont have an exemplar.

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Well, we all know that a simple grass lot will conduct power. I would settle for a simple park-like lot that has a single pole on it without worrying about wires for now. I just want someting that looks like a normal power pole and conducts electricity. I don't mind having to place one every two or three tiles. Just keep the plop cost, monthly cost and bulldozing cost low.