Twinkle, twinkle, little BAT...

[Jasoncw 11,933]

2 hours ago, T Wrecks said:

m( indeed. Here it is - the one in the middle. You can clearly see how the shadows are cut off:

Not only that, but in the middle pic the building behind the one in the front also has the shadows cut off at the top.  

[gutterclub 2,729]

Don't get me wrong, I love your BATs and have been using them for years..I'd just love to see you bring some of these wonderful things into the Bat4Max world with some crispier renders, purely because Max is so easy to get hold of now, you wouldn't need to change the way you work..I guess I just find them more new BATs I use which all come fro Max, the less Maxis stuff which yours blends so well with I use...

[madhatter106 3,905]

20 hours ago, gutterclub said:

Don't get me wrong, I love your BATs and have been using them for years..I'd just love to see you bring some of these wonderful things into the Bat4Max world with some crispier renders, purely because Max is so easy to get hold of now, you wouldn't need to change the way you work..I guess I just find them more new BATs I use which all come fro Max, the less Maxis stuff which yours blends so well with I use...

 

[matias93 7,535]

It seems some already great building is getting five more floors by now..

[T Wrecks 10,209]

While I'm typing this, it's at 94%... now the real question is: can we overfund, bringing the counter to 120%, for example?

But seriously, I guess there's a point where the building will no longer look better with more storeys added, so I guess the floor count had better be capped at some point.

[matias93 7,535]

27 minutes ago, T Wrecks said:

While I'm typing this, it's at 94%... now the real question is: can we overfund, bringing the counter to 120%, for example?

But seriously, I guess there's a point where the building will no longer look better with more storeys added, so I guess the floor count had better be capped at some point.

Seems this guys didn't got the memo, then

[MushyMushy 3,618]

4 hours ago, matias93 said:

Seems this guys didn't got the memo, then

Oh no! I really don't like those french fry buildings!

[madhatter106 3,905]

Sidelining the art deco building for the moment; I've painted myself into a corner on it, but will no doubt return to it soon enough.  In the meantime, this one happened; still working on details and needs textures to really begin to come alive...

 

The elevation is inspired by a building I've seen in downtown Los Angeles...

EDIT:  The texturing went quicker than I expected.  That, or I'm holed up inside while it rains.  (Rain?  In LA?)

[madhatter106 3,905]

This one took a long while to get the proportions right.  It was inspired by a beautiful old building in downtown Los Angeles.  Lots of details yet to be included - roof details, roof access, all the ground floor windows and entrances and whatnot...

This one is going to be an absolute bear to texture.  So many different separate details...ugh...

[T Wrecks 10,209]

You know, this last one could almost double as a high-wealth residential building IMO. The others have an entirely commercial vibe to them, but this one seems more versatile to me. Of course, it's not finished yet (if it was, I'd advocate for naming it The Pistacchio Building ), but at least that's my impression at this point. 

[madhatter106 3,905]

A few of these can swing in a lot of different directions - with some extra details and trimmings, some of them could easily double as apartment buildings or hotels.  The glory of the Plugin Manager and/or the Lot Editor - one can take someone's stuff and craft it to their own liking.  Indeed this little one isn't finished - instead of the Pistachio Building, how about Mint Chocolate Chip Manor?  Ah gmax and its basic color scheme.

Speaking of colors, you can tell I really don't want to do the ground floor - I've tackled the texturing, which I usually wouldn't do until the majority of the modeling is done.  And though you can't see it, the rear of the building is an unfinished nightmare.   Another thing I don't want to do...I probably will tackle all the rooftop details next; the roof access is just a pistachio placeholder of a box, and I don't know if I want to do another rooftop garden or just plunk down some good old fashioned HVAC roof junk. 

[raynev1 1,886]

Looks great so far , and you know you like the challenge . 

[SimCoug 5,973]

mmmm... chocolate chip mint...  I feel like making a Culvers run.

[madhatter106 3,905]

This one is taking longer than I anticipated.  Still working it up.  Need to load in a few more details.

The real building has spherical awnings - I like spherical awnings, I just don't want to have to deal with the resulting texture for the foundation that they would require (in the architectural sense).  If that makes any sense.  Anyway, it also has awnings on the sides, too - but this building is getting rather wide for my tastes, so I am nixing them...

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I think the awnings work fine as they are now, and the overall detail level is, IMO, just a tiny bit below that invisible threshold beyond which the building looks really "lived in". Knowing your attention to detail, however, I don't have the slightest doubt that this will soon be a thing of the past.

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

It's looking really good!

[madhatter106 3,905]

15 hours ago, T Wrecks said:

I think the awnings work fine as they are now, and the overall detail level is, IMO, just a tiny bit below that invisible threshold beyond which the building looks really "lived in". Knowing your attention to detail, however, I don't have the slightest doubt that this will soon be a thing of the past.

Yeah, it's 90% there.  Just missing some little extra details that sell it.  In some ways, it's a very fun step, but the trick is not overdoing it and gilding the lily...

[Sciurus 323]

Finally, ground floor texturing went pretty easily !  I find this building nice. I'm a user of your BATs in my american themed cities, and I love them.

[madhatter106 3,905]

So, it's been a month since my last post, and they're done. 

Rendered, plugged in, lotted, modded, queries written.  And now I'm at a standstill because I'm trying to test their growability.

All the cities on my laptop are way too small for them to appear; there just isn't a high enough population for stages 5 through 7 commercial offices to pop up.  They're all CO$$$ with several hundred jobs, and I've only had one of eight show up in three hours of testing - bulldozing, regenerating, reloading, etc.  It's been tedium.  I tried loading a prior saved city from a desktop backup drive from a while back, but the population just keeps withering away - either I have a bad plugin or something going on in the region that is affecting gameplay and forcing a mass exodus, plummeting demand and stagnating everything.

If there's anyone with a decent sized city with lots of commercial office space and some free time, that might be willing to test these to see how well they grow (or if they grow at all), let me know - I don't want to release them without testing this out, even though I'm fairly certain they will grow.  I just want to dot all my t's and cross all my i's...or something like that...

[Fantozzi 4,067]

Sadly I'm in the middle of a lotting project and my current plugin folder don't match my older cities - would have been an honor to test them. Seems everybody is busy with modding these days and no one is playing .

But I totally agree, someone should test their growing.

[rsc204 21,836]

I could give it a go for you, I should have cities capable of meeting the demand requirements. Assuming that is you still need a tester?

[madhatter106 3,905]

Special thanks to @rsc204 and @Fantozzi for running this latest batch of midrises through their cities to test their growability.  I am hoping to have the query done soon; just need to snap some glamour shots of them and bundle it all together.  In the meantime, here's the naming conventions for this recent pack...

• Pazder & Smith, LLC - Canadian psychologist Lawrence Pazder published the 1980 bestseller Michelle Remembers, one of the earliest books describing satanic ritual abuse and repressed memory syndrome.  Pazder would later marry his patient and the subject of the book, Michelle Smith, who claimed to have taken part in numerous satanic rituals since the age of five, including one that lasted a full eighty-one days in which the devil himself was summoned.  Multiple investigations have revealed glaring inconsistencies throughout the book, as well as no corroborating evidence for many of her allegations.  Pazder would later be forced to withdraw his assertion that the Church of Satan was directly involved in the story, after having been threatened with a libel suit from its founder Anton LaVey.
• Stratford and Davis, Inc. - publishing under the alias Lauren Stratford, Laurel Rose Willson authored three books including Satan’s Underground, alleging that she had been the victim of satanic ritual abuse, as well as serving as a “baby breeder” to supply infants for sacrifice.  Her story would later be debunked, though she would surface again in 1999, falsely claiming her real name was Lauren Grabowski and that she had been a Jewish holocaust survivor of Auschwitz.  Anne Johnson Davis’ book Hell Minus One purports to a similar tale of satanic abuse at the hands of her mother and stepfather, who allegedly confessed to the diabolical deeds before being excommunicated by the LDS Church.
• Baran, Buckey and Amirault - schoolteacher Bernard Baran was tried and convicted in 1985 on eight counts of molestation, many arising from disapproving parents who had removed their child from his classroom after learning of the educator’s homosexuality.  Baran was granted a new trial in 2006, and was eventually freed in 2009, after the Massachusetts Appeals Court cited prosecutorial misconduct, including the presentation of false testimony before the grand jury.  Along with his grandmother, mother, sister, and several teachers, Raymond Buckey was accused of numerous insidious crimes as part of the McMartin Preschool scandal in the southern California, which would become the cornerstone case of satanic ritual abuse accusations centering around daycare centers in the early 1980’s.  Despite over five years of time in jail and two criminal trials, no convictions were obtained against him in the case, and all charges were eventually dropped in 1990.  Based primarily on the testimony of his young accusers, Gerald Amirault was convicted of assault and abuse in the 1986 Fells Acres Day Care Center trial.  Later examination of the videotaped police interviews would reveal that most of the sensational claims (including sexual penetration with knives and assaults by a clown in a “secret room”) were coerced; Amirault would be granted parole nearly two decades after his imprisonment.
• MacFarlane and Finkelhour, Esq. - Kee MacFarlane pioneered the use of anatomically-correct dolls for interviewing the children who were involved in the McMartin Preschool sex abuse case in southern California.  She later would testify before Congress about a nationwide satanic conspiracy, despite providing no evidence or proof of such claims.  Sociologist David Finkelhour’s 1988 investigation of satanic ritual abuse in United States day care centers identified what he claimed to be over 30 substantiated cases (including the McMartin hysteria), though the report would later be discredited due to insubstantial corroborations.
• Raschke, Rivera and Pace - Theologian Carl Raschke became an expert witness testifying in court cases involving the occult; his book on the subject, Painted Black, has been dismissed by many, including one reviewer who maintained it added “additional fuel to the flames of hysteria surrounding Satanism in America.”  Journalist and television host Geraldo Rivera hosted the 1988 primetime special “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground” which included interviews with prominent Satanists (and a befuddled Ozzy Osbourne) as well as investigators and law enforcement officials who were convinced of a nationwide conspiracy of satanic activity; years later, Rivera would apologize for the sensationalism the Halloween-time special caused, despite it generating the highest ratings ever for a two-hour documentary special on NBC.  Written in 1990 by an authority of the LDS Church, the Pace memorandum detailed over sixty allegations of satanic ritual abuse within Mormon congregations throughout the western United States; a three-year investigation by the Utah attorney general’s office found that none of the allegations could be substantiated beyond the victims’ testimonies.
• Pulling, Jaffe & Egbert - After the 1982 suicide of her son, Patricia Pulling founded the advocacy group BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) in an attempt to force government regulation of roleplaying games, which she was convinced had contributed to his death due to their focus on devils, demonology, magic, and fantasy.  Her lawsuits against her son’s high school principal as well as game publishers TSR were later dismissed, and a number of agencies including the US Centers for Disease Control would conclude that there was no causal link between roleplaying games and suicide.  Writer Rona Jaffe published the novel Mazes and Monsters in 1981, based partly on the apocryphal urban myth of students playing live action roleplaying games in the steam tunnels beneath their college campus and inspired by a similar incident involving the suicide of Michigan State University student James Dallas Egbert III; Jaffe’s book would later be made into a 1982 television movie of the same name starring a young Tom Hanks.
• Warnke and Todd Design - Author of the 1972 book The Satan Seller, evangelist Michael Warnke’s claimed he was a satanic high priest before his eventual salvation and religious conversion; his story would be debunked in 1991 by the Christian magazine Cornerstone.   Conspiracy theorist John Wayne Todd would also be known for his sensational (and later discredited) claims of having been born into a family of devil worshipers, as well as maintaining he was a green beret in the Army during Vietnam.  Ironically, Todd would accuse Warnke of plagiarizing material of his concerning the Illuminati.
• Hollander, Holmberg & Chick - Erik Hollander and Eric Holmberg produced and directed the 1989 Christian documentary Hell’s Bells about the perils of heavy metal rock and roll music, including the belief that hidden satanic messages were encoded backwards in some song lyrics.  Fundamentalist Christian cartoonist Jack Chick would become famous for publishing Chick Tracts, small illustrated books used by religious conservatives to preach and proselytize, a number of which featured sensational claims of devil worship and diabolism encroaching on the modern world.  Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and Freemasons were also frequent targets, leading organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center to categorize the publisher as a hate group.

Nothin' like a little moral "satanic" panic to spice things up...

[Ceafus 88 1,828]

Beautifully written post @madhatter106 I have always liked when people took the time to explain things, it makes each BAT have an even more unique story.

[SimCoug 5,973]

The devil is in the details... Now, time to crank some Ozzy 

[madhatter106 3,905]

They're uploaded - if you want them, you can find them on the STEX.

I've accidentally put them in the 3ds models category - is there an STEX moderator who can fix that and put them in the SC4 BATs Buildings category?  I'm afraid I don't know how (or cannot) do it myself...

[rsc204 21,836]

36 minutes ago, madhatter106 said:

is there an STEX moderator who can fix that and put them in the SC4 BATs Buildings category?

Done

[madhatter106 3,905]

On ‎3‎/‎9‎/‎2017 at 9:54 AM, SimCoug said:

The devil is in the details... Now, time to crank some Ozzy 

If you need a great laugh at all this moral panic stuff, you really should watch the Geraldo Rivera primetime special about Satanism.  They have poor old Ozzy via satellite answering a number of Geraldo's questions, mostly with a bewildered "what the hell am I doing this for?" look on his face.  Plus some of the other interviewed subjects are downright hilarious in their belief that Satanists are lurking on every corner to maim, mutilate, and murder.  Sprinkled in are jailhouse interviews with misguided teens who blamed the occult on their convictions, overzealous law enforcement officials, a trip to a voodoo bodega in New York, and even footage of loony Charles Manson.

The ironic thing about the whole special is that the two real spokespeople for Satanism, Zeena LaVey (Anton's daughter) and Michael Aquino (founder of the offshoot sect the Temple of Set) are the most down-to-earth, rational, reasonable people on the whole panel.

You can find it online - I think I had it playing in the background while I was working on an early BAT in this set and I thought, "oh, why not use this as a theme for the naming conventions on this bunch of offices?"

[raynev1 1,886]

      I have done DL'ed and entered to game , but sadly my region doesn't or at least most tiles don't support the demand for this last set .

      Lookout West Virginia , installing another set of Commercial Offices of the MadHatter kind . We have encountered technical difficulties in the past , while installing these irresistible gems . Off to simcity to see if the lights will stay on or not . 

[madhatter106 3,905]

As much as I love doing the office buildings (and I confess, I don't think I'll ever have plumbed the depths of those completely), I have been wanting to do some medium wealth commercial service buildings to add some variety to that realm.  From left to right, here are their tentative names...

• Beards & Shears Fine Barbers
• Rita's Fashion
• House of Fabric
• H-2-Oh! Water Filters
• Kitchen & Restaurant Supply
• The Vitamin Depot
• Carpet World
• iFixit Phone Repair
• Sir Lamps-a-Lot Lighting Fixtures

 

[matias93 7,535]

This is so sorely needed!!