Apocrypha

[ldvger 19]

Well, I have progress of a sort to tell about.

One of the map masters from NHP over at SC4D has opened a thread here on ST inviting custom map requests.  I was able to catch the thread early on and requested a map of the region I envision.  Given the challenges this area represents for a mapper, I'm not sure he will accept the project, but if he does, it may save me a lot of time trying to figure out how to do this on my own.  However, if he does accept the request, I will still have to figute out how to marry two maps together, as one of hs rules is 35 KM square max and the region I am envisioning is closer to 65.5 KM square, so it would be two maps.  As another of his rules is only one request a week and 3 requests a year, if he accepts my request I will get one map this week and the next map next week.  I can live with that and hope anyone still following this CJ can too.  If not, oh well (shrugs). 

In case Eblem turns down my request, I am continueing to try to make this new map on my own.  Last night I downloaded a trial version of Global Mapper, a semi-costly professional mappijg software program.  Because of my ongoing chats with Troy at NHP I know they use this software quite a bit.  The original download gives me limited functions but the software company provides full functionality upon request of a "key", so I requested the key, which I recieved today.  I have full use of the program until April 23, then it all goes bye-bye.  I have no idea how to use the siftware and only 2 weeks to figure it out, so here's hoping I am a fast learner or else Eblem decides to makethe amke for me. 

Also new since my last post, I was able to find a "clearinghouse" area in the USGS site that allowed me to download all the 56 townships I needed.  The quality of the files are excellent, as they do not fade into pixels as I zoom in.  I have been working on turning these 56 individual files into a single large map, but running into some areas of, hmm, confusion (on my part...still not familiar with the software I am using). 

Still working, folks, still working. 

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

looking forward to seeing your progress  my friend

[ldvger 19]

Ok, more news.

I told you all a week or so ago about a gentleman in the Netherlands, Tony, who I had sent a copy of this region to and that he and I have begun an email correspondence about the region.  Turns out we are both wanting to terraform and develope the region in pretty much the same way, i.e. terraform first, add watersheds, then slowly begin custom content development, with the game almost always in pause mode.  He has been following my struggles with issues of scale and my decision to restart this region at accurate scale, despite that meaning I have to start over from ground zero and that I will have a huge region on my hands. 

Today I got an email from Tony telling me he had read through that section of David Edgren's Three Rivers Region CJ that covered his rationale for dumping his 2 year old and much developed region to start over with something more accurate in scale.  Despite having sent me an email just a few days ago philosophizing about intellectual creativity versus just plain old play, now Tony is bothered by the whole scale issue, too.  I don't think he's done much with his copy of the region so far (he's only had it for maybe 2 weeks and works full time), so now Tony is considering the same exact thing I am...enlarging the region and getting up to a correct scale.  In fact, he has asked me to forward a copy of the new map to him, when and if I ever get it.

So tonite, in reply, I proposed to him that we think about combining our efforts and become the nucleus of a collaborative effort, similar to what David has done with 3RR.  If/when I get this new map complete, it's going to be huge, 256 large city tiles, and that's way too much work for just one person, even if that one person is unemployed for the time being.  Tony and I share the same goals for creating and developing the new region, so it seems in many way a given that we would abandon our individual efforts and pool our time and expertise resources.  Initially it would be just us two, I think, terraforming the landscape and then adding watersheds.  If it goes too slowly or becomes overwhelming for us, I proposed to him that we could invite others to join us.  Unlike 3RR, I don;' think we'd do an open casting call like David did...I think this might be invite only, but I don't know for sure.  It's just an idea right now and given as I/we are still a ways away from achieving the map to start on, it could be pipe (or wine) dreams. 

I have to be honest and let anyone who reads this...I hate elitist "clubs".  I have a deep abhorrence for any group of people who are exclusionary for any reason.  My personal philosphy in life is to always be inclusionary and never excusionary.  I hate the "us" versus "them" mentality I see in so many folks in RL...and I think you can all bring dozens of examples to immediate mind.  So the idea of taking this project into an invite only collaborative goes against a lot of the basic foundations of my life.  That being said, and meant whole-heartedly, I have to acknowledge that I am a control freak, OCD to the max, and this is, in many ways, "my baby".  Letting go of it and letting it drift into an unknown, and therefore uncontrollable, state may not be something I can do.  Then again, maybe it's something I should do. 

I also have a very bad collaborative experience in my past with Sim City.  I headed a rather large effort many years ago, using SC2000.  We had hundreds of particpants in dozens of countries around the world.  We had a core group of volunteers that were spending 20 hours a week (in my case more) administering the project, including a person who was keeping the database of all the particpants and thier contributions.  At the beginning of the project we mutually decided to run the project for 6 months, then terminate it at whatever stage of completion we had achieved.  All particpants were polled and agreed.  Two weeks before the end date, we lost our data base of particpants.  By this time we had garnered the attention of mainstream media...Newsweek was following our website and considering doing an artcile on us.  We were planning to merchandise our final product via our website...we had taken up collections to have a booklet published that showed the growth of the city from day one through completion, we also were going to make T-shirts available for particpants.  We had orders for over 300 of the booklets and almost as many t-shirts when we lost the data base.  As leader of the project, I was not willing to let the booklet go to press without restoring the database from our combined archives.  It meant we would miss our publishing deadline and have to reschedule, but I figured that was just something that would have to be done in order to make sure that every person involved in the project got thier due credit.  We were a democracy run by commitee and I was out-voted.  I didn't respond well.  I had been the keeper of all the maps (and there were hundreds of them), and I refused to release them to the commitee for publishing unless we rebuilt the database.  The commitee threatened to publish without the maps or with whatever maps they could pull from thier own archives.  I got flamed heavily, although I also had a lot of support.  In the end, we let the particpants make the decision...it was my suggestion to let the folks who made the city what was to be done with it and that we would all abide by the decision.  The vote was very close, but I lost, so I turned over the maps.  I was given a copy of the booklet and it's not bad, but I can't thumb through it without thinking about the 150 or so folks who never got credit for having participated.  It broke my heart.  I still have all the info, all the maps, except of course the broken/lost database.  And it made me realize that if I ever enter into another collaborative online effort, it probably won't be a democracy if *I* am the one heading it up.  If I try to do this again, I will do it differently this time around. 

What I would do different, I'm not sure.  I'll have to think on that.  And any of your thoughts on the matter are very welcomed, in fact solicited.  It's just that I don;t think anyone but Jackie is reading this these days.  No pics, ya know.

Well, let's hope that changes soon!

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

sounds like a great idea my friend,i think something like davids might work.

[ldvger 19]

Given my inability to create a new map any time soon, I am working in two directions...the new map and the old map.  If I can turn the old map into a new map before I can create a new, new map, then I will run with that.

To that end, I revisited dedegren's tutorial about how to take a Region Census file and make it flat.  This is what I came up with (finally a picture!!):

This isn't actually a "bird's eye view, straight down.  But it's close.  We are at maybe 10 degrees of view here.  Maybe less.  But not flat, that's for sure.  In making this view, I lost a lot of my high mountains to the north end of the map, and that doesn't sit well with me.  And, other than as a display tool, I don;t know what this new graphic will do in furthering my aims for a new map.  Time will tell, I guess.

Lora/LD

[Keegan V50 15]

nice region there!!

all the best

victor

[Twenty20 28]

Wow ! this region is superb !

[ldvger 19]

Victor and Twenty, thanks for stopping by and thanks, too for your encouraging comments.  They are appreciated!

Ya know, I begin to wonder if I'm not going about this entire mapping issue the hard way.  The thought occurred to me this afternoon, maybe this could be way simple.  I have Mapper and Teraformer and Photoshop and the Config.bmp tool...maybe that's all I need.  Maybe I don't even need Mapper, as a version of it is a part of Terraformer.  Here's what I thought:

What if I opened my region in Terraformer then saved the bird's eye "top down" view as a full color JPG?  The Mapper tool in TF doesn't overlay the game grid or city tiles, just gives a detailed RGB image of the entire region, which effectively is a multi-colored topographic map.  After saving the Mapper image as a JPG, I could then open it in Photoshop and resize the image from the game default region size of 1025x1025 pixels to the huge region pixel size of 4097x4097.  I could also convert the new larger image to greyscale, but maybe I don't even need to do that, not sure.

But, if I saved the new larger image in a new folder, couldn't I then now open it again in TF or Mapper?  I think I might need to open it in Mapper first, then use the Create Region button, then import the new large RGB image I made in Photoshop.  Create the new region, export it into a newly map folder in my Regions game file, then use the Config.bmp tool to make a new config.bmp for the new region, copy a region.ini file into my new region folder, export the new config.bmp file to the same folder, and voila!  I think I'd have the exact same region I have now, except it would be 4 times bigger, which would fix all the issues with scale that have been driving me nuts and leading me on this merry chase for the past two weeks.  And...I'd have a new region with (taking a deep breath here) 256 large city tiles.

I'm gonna try it!

But first, I think I'll run over to the Omnimaps forum and read up on the tutorials there for using all the tools, hahahaha.  Never hurts to stop and ask for directions BEFORE one starts into unfamiliar territory.  Guess you all now know I am a female, huh?

Lora/LD

[ldvger 19]

Well, good news and bad news.  Good news first, the bad news will become self evident.

First...unrelated to this CJ, or at least not directly, dedgren has appointed me a member of the 3RR admin team.  In working with one of his tutorials last night I found an error that caused me a small (very small) amount of confusion before I figured it out.  So I emailed him later in the evening, pointing out the error and suggesting that maybe he copy all of his many tutorials into a single thread apart of his CJ/MD, so folks wouldn't have to wade through 370 pages of Table of Contents to find what they need/want.  Then, foolish woman that I am, I volunteered to help with the task.  As he so aptly responed to me "no good deed goes unpunished", so I am now a 3RR admin person who will, I think, shortly become involved with creating a compendium of dedgren tutorials over on SC4D that will be hopefully easier to find and use than they are currently.

Second, my theory for creating a new, larger region, outline in the post above, worked.  Kinda.  I have a new region called Apocrypha Large which is the requisite size and has the correct number of large city tiles.  Here are some pics:

So now we come to the bad news.  This map doesn't come anywhere close to my old region map.  Some of the basic land forms from the old region can be seen, but there is rather obviously something very wrong with the grey scale image I used. 

I won't go into specifics here as to how I got this far, as this is not the result I wanted and I don't want to lead anyone who may try to follow my lead down the wrong path. 

This pic was taken with Region Census then resized in Photoshop before being saved as a JPG.  When I uploaded it to ImageShack, I had to resize it again. 

Opening the region in Mapper reinforces the wrongness of the region, although you can see the many large city tiles:

So, something wrong with the greyscale map that I need to work on fixing.  I am going to go back and read again (for about the tenth time) how dedgren upscaled his region and maybe I will get some clues. 

Still I am hopeful, for the first time in a week or more.  I have a 40 mile square region with 256 large city tiles.  That's a big step in the direction I want to go in...the first actual step I have been able to make so far. 

Lastly, I heard back from Tony today and he is willing to work with me on this region, but not at the level he thinks I want/need from him.  Lucky man has a full time job and so has not a lot of time for playing on the computer, but he is willing to help me with what time he has.  I have yet to respond to his email, but will do so tomorrow (too many glasses of wine tonite).  My response is going to basically be, this is not a speed oriented project, so whatever time you can spend will be welcomed.  Fingers crossed, I will find work again soon and won't have a lot of time on my hands, either, so we'll both be at the same speed.  My idea for the two of us terraforming the rgion is I'll take the evens and he'll take the odds (city tile numbers 1-256).  That will give us both 128 large city tiles to work with, which should keep us busy for the next couple of years and provide tons of eye candy and perhaps tutorials along the way. 

And I do plan on writing/clarifying existing tutorials.  My first one is going to be "How to Expand your existing region into a bigger region".  Heblem over at SC4D has this in his "to do" list but hasn't gotten around to it for a couple of years, so now that I am getting into mapping, I am going to try myself.  Once I get my original region scaled up the way I want it, I'll write a tutorial as to how I did it.  If I ever gain access to the USGS DEM maps I have been looking to acquire for the past two weeks, I may write another tutorial about how to translate that data set into game regions.  Some of the tutorials I wish I had access to right now:

1.)  How to create a 16 bit greyscale map of an PNG file from an existing region

2.)  How to transform 8 bit maps to 16 bit maps, greyscale and/or RGB

3.)  How to clear up greyscale maps so they translate into game maps without problems

These may exist somewhere, but if so, I have not yet been able to find them.  Someone really needs to gather all the various tutorials together and put them all in one place...and I guess I have volunteered myself for that job. 

It doesn't mean I will ignore this CJ...this is where it all starts and ends for me.  So stay tuned, we may have some very exciting stuff coming up soon.

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

sounds great my friend,very nice region there.

[ldvger 19]

WooHoo!

Look at these!



This is the NW corner of a 4 region map that Heblem custom made for me.  Each region consists of 64 large city tiles, being 8x8 large city tiles square.  This is not EXACTLY the same area my original Katalla/Apocrypha map covered, as it is a teensy bit further north and west, which ends up eliminating some of the terrain the Katalla/Apocrypha map had down in the southeast corner of the region.  I was kinda bummed about that at first, but as I loaded up each region one city tile at a time, I just fell in love with these new maps.  I know it looks largely unbuildable, but keep in mind this region's size.  It is approximately 20 miles square and an individual game tile (or cell) is only 52.2 ft across.  So while those green valleys look very narrow at this high level of image compression, some of them are almost a full large city tile in width. 

I especially love that Eblem was able to create glaciers where there are galciers in RL.  I figured we'd have to go to valleys, but somehow he figured it out.  Don't ask me how...as far as I know he waved his magic wand and PRESTO!  Now we have glaciers!



This is the next region east, the NE quadrant.  That big green valley down the middle is the Copper River Valley.  Eblem's maps are so precise they pic up even the above sea level water courses, as can very plainly be seen here.  This will save me a LOT of time when plopping water!  Even the RL lakes show up, as will be seen.  Lets move south to the next region.



The blue is sea level water, the Copper River Delta.  This is where I am a little bit bummed, as the delta is extensive and covered with tons of small islands that were in Apocrypha but are not in this map at all.  Also, there is a string of barrier islands at the mouth of the delta which Apocrypha had and this map doesn't have...and that I requested to be included.  The maps Eblem made me are about two large city tiles off in the northwest direction.  I lost Whale's Bay and the actual site of the RL Katalla.  The mountains you see in the lower right side of the map above are the northern end of what was, in Apocrypha, Nelly's Spine. 

Eblem told me this was a very difficult set of maps for him to create and he did a fantastic job with them.  They rendered into the game very easily and quickly, with unbelievable detail.  So I am hesitant to ask him to redo the maps two large city tiles eat and south, and to lose the equivalent in the NW corner.  But I did ask him.  If he says no, I'll go with this and be deeply grateful. 

BTW, those blue "fingers" in the center of the map is where the Copper River enters the sea.  All of the river upriver from this point will be plopped water.  If you look closely at the top of the region, you can see there is a big freshwater lake up there. 

On to the last region.



Beauty, eh?  And no, I am not a Canadian.  Lots and lots of potential for this region.  The RL city of Cordova, AK, USA, is located at the east side of the third mountain chain over from the upper left hand corner, on the body of sea level water that extends almost of the upper end of the map.  If you look down (south) of the 4th range of mountains across the body of water just mentioned, you'll see a break in the mountain chain and a narrow green valley facing west across the water to a couple of small islands and a peninsula.  RL Cordova sits on the shore of that little green valley.  I think...not positive.  Still trying to match up RL features with the maps. 

I'm not sure anymore if I want to marry these 4 region to each other into one super region.  I have a lot of thoughts on this matter that I will share later.  I'm a trifle burned out on SC4 right now, given that I was up until 3 am last night rendering these regions and was back at it over my coffee this morning. 

I may take a day or two break, while I think things through a bit before continueing.  Be patient...we are making progress quite quickly now, which is why I want to slow things down a little bit.  I have basically dumped 100+ hours of work out the door in order to get scale accurate work.  Now that I have it, I want to make sure I don't make any stupid mistakes and end up having to dump work again. 

This CJ will go like gangbusters once I figure things out, I promise!

Lora/LD
 

[Follarch 326]

These regions are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. No one could ever hand-terraform this in-game, it's all so extravagant.

[technicallydead 1]

mm nice region, what mod did you use for the terrain?

[jacqulina 162]

excellent region my friend

[Heblem 600]

Glad to know that you liked those regions! I suggest your to keep with those you have because you already invested most of your time in rendering, if you wish I can make you a smaller map of the missing area. Doing it again by going down to squares will make you to render again the 4 maps....

[ldvger 19]

Hello and welcome to all who stopped by! 

These regions are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. No one could ever hand-terraform this in-game, it's all so extravagant.

Archean, I couldn't agree with you more and thanks for stopping by, I hope you make this a regular stop!  This is just as Mother Nature made it...and I don't think even the most imaginative person on the planet could dream up this kind of a landscape.  And as far as attempting to hand terraform something like this, sheesh!  Who's got the time?  And why do it when one can download the data files and use the great tools our wonderful fellow gamers have created? 

For the record, though, when you see any of the individual large city tiles up close, they all look a little soft, kinda like slightly melted ice cream.  So, slowly and patiently, I will be going through the region(s) and adding some weathering and roughing up the landscape a little bit, just to make it appear more realsitic in close up zooms.  I am not going to use the raise or lower terrain tools at all, or the level terrain tool, at least not initially.  I am also thinking of ways to create crevassi and seracs on my glaciers, to make them look more realistic also.  Looking ahead, I can see a tutorial coming up on this subject.  I may actually have to learn how to BAT or LOT or MOD to create glacier effects, we'll see.

"mm nice region, what mod did you use for the terrain?"

jonpaulosiglos, hello and thanks for stopping by!  I am using the Columbus Terrain mod by Cycledogg.  Make sure to stop by often and watch our progress. 

"excellent region my friend"

jacqulina, always good to see you stopping by my friend.  I really can't take much credit for this set of regions, as you know, as you have been following almost from the beginning.  This CJ has had quite a journey since it began with the "Katalla" map I downloaded from the STEX years ago.  That map was way to flat for what I know of Alaska lanscapes, so I hand terraformed it to make it more dramatic.  Then the issues of above ground water came around, then the issues of scale came around.  I really loved the original Apocrypha region, but making it accurate meant I was going to basically start over.  Them Eblem stepped up and volunteered to find the data maps for the region and now here we are.  So, while I may have started this project, at this point there are a number of folks involved and Eblem is by far most to be credited with the creation of these new regions.  I'd still be swearing at my computer until late at night, trying to figure out how to do it myself, otherwise, and I am certain I would never have been able to create anything as good as this. 

"

Glad to know that you liked those regions! I suggest your to keep with those you have because you already invested most of your time in rendering, if you wish I can make you a smaller map of the missing area. Doing it again by going down to squares will make you to render again the 4 maps....

Heblem, so pleased to see you stopped by to see your work rendered out into the game.  You did excellent work!  You and I are now chatting on two seperate threads and I don;t know if you will continue to stop by here to see what I do with the maps you made for me, but I hope so.  You have already posted over in the Custom Content area that you were unable to find the data sets for the areas east of the existing maps and couldn't get your computer to handle the data sets to the south, so OK, we are done and I will run with what I have.  I wouldn't have hesitated to re-render all the cities in game if you had been able to get the islands, but am thankful all that time didn't go 100% to waste.  I may end up re-rendering all 256 city tiles again anyway, because I am still undecided about whether or not to create one super region from these four regions or not, but right now I am tending to think yes I will.  I am not going to be able to get seamless integration between the existing 4 regions otherwise, and I really do want to have that seamlessness for the entire full region. 

And already I am having problems creating that one huge region, which I have posted about over in the Custom Content area.  I'm sure you'll see it first there, rather than here.

So, everyone.  While there are advantages to using 4 smaller large regions if this project goes collaborative (or even if it doesn't, my personal jury is still out on that concept), being able to reconcile the eventual roads, rivers, lakes, railways, etc. will be next to impossible unless this is one super region of 256 large city tiles.  So once again, we have hit a snag in the road, which will hopefully be taken care of in a day or two.  Once I have the issues dealt with, I'll show you the results, then write a nice tutorial about how to combine several regions into one large region, jusy in case anyone else is as crazy enough as I am to think about attempting such a huge project.  Maybe they are even crazier and waht to do something even bigger.  I know the upper ends of region size have not yet been discovered....

Lora/LD

 

[Shadow Assassin 336]

The region looks very impressive - I wouldn't mind seeing those four maps being released in a pack on the STEX - they'd be great to develop on.

I've been following this CJ since well, you started, so it's nice to see you're back here updating. This is quite the large project and it'll be good to see it finally finished in the next few years, I suppose.

[mightygoose 92]

Hey Lora,

reconciliation between the various maps is not difficult, especially when pre terraformer as this is, just make a note of exactly which tiles road, rivers, lakes and rail connections cross over on. it helps if you have a map of the overall region, either hand drawn or photoshopped for reference.

in general i have been perusing back and forth through this city journal and it is great to see someone take so much care and time to make decisions as well as proceeding at their own pace. often city journals falter because the author tries to do too much in too short a space of time.

I will check back here soon with an interested eye.

John

[jacqulina 162]

thankyou my friend,i know what you mean,but they are beautifull all the same.i started with a downloaded map all those years ago,but i now enjoy using blank and terraforming from scratch.im very much looking out for more progress.

[ldvger 19]

Hello again!

No news to report, at least not yet today, so I'll respond to comments:

"The region looks very impressive - I wouldn't mind seeing those four maps being released in a pack on the STEX - they'd be great to develop on.

"The region looks very impressive - I wouldn't mind seeing those four maps being released in a pack on the STEX - they'd be great to develop on.

I've been following this CJ since well, you started, so it's nice to see you're back here updating. This is quite the large project and it'll be good to see it finally finished in the next few years, I suppose"

Shadow_Assassin, hello and welcome!  I can't bundle and post these maps to the STEX...it's a pre-condition Heblem puts on anyone he creates a custom map for and I respect that.  He will allow me to share the map pack with selected others, with his permission.  So my suggestion to anyone who may want copies of these maps is to PM Heblem and ask him.  Being as how I am giveing a lot of consideration to creating a collabortive effort with this monster region, I'm kinda into the idea that *I* am the only person with this exact and unique set of regions.  If I decide to create a collaborative, I will be sharing individuals city tiles (there are 256 of them, after all, plenty to go around), but as the "leader" of this effort, I think I really would like to control the map myself.  However, if Heblem gets enough requests for these maps, he may relent.  Can't hurt to ask him! 

And yeah, this is going to be a long-term project.  That's part of the decision I had to make when I was mulling over whether or not to go scale accurate...the time commitment a much enlarged region would require.  So, pull up a chair...this will be a long haul.

"reconciliation between the various maps is not difficult, especially when pre terraformer as this is, just make a note of exactly which tiles road, rivers, lakes and rail connections cross over on. it helps if you have a map of the overall region, either hand drawn or photoshopped for reference.

in general i have been perusing back and forth through this city journal and it is great to see someone take so much care and time to make decisions as well as proceeding at their own pace. often city journals falter because the author tries to do too much in too short a space of time.

I will check back here soon with an interested eye. "

mightygoose, hello and thanks for stopping by!  I wish it were as simple to reconcile the 4 regions with each other as you suggest.  First of all, there are no built features in any of the regions yet...and won't be any for a while.  There is a lot of work that needs to be done before anything will be built.  First the fine terraforming of the mountains and land forms needs to happen.  That'll probably take months.  Then all the above sea level water will need to be plopped.  There's a lot of water in these maps, so that will take more months.  Then all the species specific trees have to be plopped in thier correct places and that will take months.  Finally, the general forests of the God Tools will be brushed across the entire landscape, except in the water (game and plopped) and on the glaciers.  That will probably only take a week, maybe two.  When all that's done, THEN the building will start.  And, as this is supposed to be (and actually is) a wilderness area, I plan to start development with dirt paths.  My plan is to start in one or two areas, maybe more, but two for sure: the southeast corner of the region and the NW corner of the region.  This is how Alaska pretty much developed and I intend to be an "explorer" in the early days of the development process, walking all over the monster region and leaving trails wherever I go.  I'll still be making trails when the first dirt roads start to appear and they'll probably go on top of the trails, the same way real roads come into being through wilderness areas. 

So, you can see I need to marry these regions to each other now, not later.  Trying to reconcile these regions to each other after painstaking months of work could turn out to be a total disaster.  I've already dumped one region out the door, I don't want to have to do that again. 

And yeah, this CJ faltered badly for quite some time because I just jumped in with both feet and just a very vague plan.  That's why the original region got dumped...I didn't think things through enough first.  So now I'm going slower and trying to make sure I don't make the same mistakes this time around.  I also have some really great and inspiring folks to emulate, most especially degren and his "Three Rivers Region".  He's several years into his work and it's a masterpiece.  And...he's just starting his development, too.  He and I had a converstaion several years ago about development philosophy and he has credited that chat with being influential in his own decision to throw his first region out the door and start over.  It was seeing his own thought processes while he pondered that decision that gave me the courage to consider doing the same thing. 

Check back often!  I think things will move along quite nicely once I get the monster region created.

"thankyou my friend,i know what you mean,but they are beautifull all the same.i started with a downloaded map all those years ago,but i now enjoy using blank and terraforming from scratch.im very much looking out for more progress."

jacqulina, welcome again!  I understand, I had tons of fun hand terraforming the original Apocrypha map, but the idea of tryng to create 40 square miles of glaciated wilderness was just beyond my capability to consider.  Maybe some day, years from now, I'll be totally burned out on this project and start a new, regular sized region and do as you do. 

That's all for now folks.  I'm supposed to be making turkey pot pies today and have not even started carving up the turkey yet. 

Lora/LD

[tvisker 0]

Hello Lora

These regions look beautiful and Heblem proved to be a marvellous terraformer. It looks like the visualization of a landscaping dream. At least it should become one.

By the way, did the turkey pot pies taste well today?

Tony

[ldvger 19]

Well.

Finally. 

Here is the new super region in all it's greyscale beauty, thanks in a very large part to Heblem, who finally broke down and married the 4 smaller regions together for me, then created the 16 bit greyscale PNG file I needed:

That's 40 miles x 40 miles of untamed northern wilderness, folks, as yet unrendered into city tiles.  Rendering the city tiles will take a while...there are 256 of them!  I am going to give each one a seperate alpha-numeric designator type of name, following Excel protocols.  Rows (west to east) will be numeric, columns (north to south) with be alphabetic, starting in the NW corner of the region.  Each city tile will be given $10,000,000,000 (that's ten BILLION dollars) of "seed" money with which to play with. 

Unlike dedgren, I'm not going to try to do this all by myself past the point of rendering the city tiles.  So I'm making it official, this is CJ is now to be renamed the Copper River Project, although it will still appear, for a time anyway, under it's current Apocrypha thread heading. 

To keep the CJ moving along, I am putting out my first call for volunteers.  The first thing we will be doing is weathering the mountains and other landforms, so they don;t look quite so smooth in city view.  I would prefer to have folks already experienced with fine terraforming, but folks who want to learn the ropes are invited, too. 

I have to lay some ground rules:

1.  This project is not a democracy, it's a benevolent dictatorship.  I'm the dictator, but I am reasonable and not a tyrant.  But my rules are my rules and if you don't want to play by my rules, that's fine with me.  Start your own CJ and play the way you want. 

2.  The natural and existing landscape of this region is to be respected and preserved at all times and under all circumstances, to the best of everyone's ability to do so.  Pursuant to this are two sub-rules:

 

     a.  The actual surfaces of the glaciers will never, ever, for any reason, be developed at all.  Many reason for this, mostly being that RL glaciers are extremely unstable and very slow moving rivers of ice, so you can't really build on them and expect your structure to last for more than a year, at best.  The second is that an extremely wealthy and somewhat eccentric anonymouse woman in Seattle, WA has endowed a "Glacier Protection Fund" (hereafter known as the GPF) with unknown bizillions of dollars to make sure the glaciers have enough money to fight off any developers who might want to encroach into the glaciated terrain.  This woman has appointed ME as sole trustee in administering this fund and I am going to take my job very seriously.  And so, because many of the city tiles are completely covered with glaciers, we have no reduced the number of city tiles available for eventual development by quite a bit.  Once I have all the city tiles rendered, I intend to do a thorough survey and identify the unbuildable city tiles, but that's a ways down the line. 

Please notice I said above "the surface of the glaciers".  Areas around the glaciers will be terraformed, water plopped, treed, and most likely have trails, maybe even some dirt roads.  Eventually, there may even be some scattered folks living around the edges of the glaciers.  We'll see.  But the surfaces of the glaciers are sacred.

     b.  Existing terrain elevations are not to be raised or lowered except as an absolute last resort.  Heblem went to a lot of work to make this an accurate map in all three dimensions, so lets try to honor his work and work within the existing general contours of the land.  That's why we will be doing FINE terraforming, using small areas of influence and small fields of force.  If detail work isn't your thing, best sit back and watch. 

3.  I'll have to talk more with dedgren about this, but I'm pretty sure that if we are going to work as a collaborative, we are all going to have the same plugins and similar computer capabilties.  No one can introduce new plugins of any kind into thier city tile without clearing it through me first, and then you'll have to make sure all other members of the team recieve a copy of whatever it is you want to use.  Sending it to me and asking me to send it around is not going to work.  If you want a new tool introduced, YOU will be responsbile for making sure every one gets is and knows how to use it (including me).  To that end, using a different water mod won't be cool, using a different terrain mod won't be cool, etc.  My plugins file is getting fairly extensive, so my current thought is to copy it and send it to anyone who wants to play along.  Before you open your city tile, swap out your plugins file, so you have the correct tools in place.  At least, I think that's how it works, not sure, but will find out. 

4.  Do not move ahead of the rest of team on your own.  Do not start plopping water while the rest of us are still weathering mountains.  Do not start planting trees while everyone else is plopping water.  If you get bored waiting for us to catch up, request a new city tile...there are plenty to go around.  The reason for this is simple.  Keeping all the city tiles reconciled with each other is going to be a big job, something that is going to have to be done often to keep the entire region seamless.  If anyone gets too far ahead, the work they do is going to negatively affect the work of folks working on adjacent tiles.  So we basically need to learn to work apace of each other. 

5.  Heblem has restricted me, as is his right as the creator of this region and I intend to respect it, to NOT share this region with anyone else or to post it to any of the various ST file exchange sites available on the web.  I expect everyone who participates in this project to honor this restriction as well.  Anyone found violating this rule will forfeit thier city tile(s), will be banned from any further participation, the work they had done will be purged and the  newly naked city tile(s) they had worked on will be given to someone else to start over on.  Pursuant to this:

     a.  Do not post to the CJ any images of your work UNLESS you need to post a pic to ask a question about what you are working on and want help/advice/suggestions.  Again, this in MY CJ and so completed work will be displayed in updates I write.  I will of course credit the author of each work and display thier work independent of other's work.  You will be free to take as many photos as you want of your completed works and package them up and send them to me for inclusion in the next update.  I may edit and if I do, I don't expect or want to hear any feedback, OK?  If I REALLY piss you off, PM me and we'll talk about it.  

I think that's all for now.  I know more issues will come up over time and we'll deal with them as they do.  But I think what I've laid out above will get us off the ground.  

I'm really not the heavy the rules may make me sound like.  I know this is a very friendly and respectful sandbox to play in.  I've been here for a while and have never had any problems with anyone...and don't anticipate any with Copper River Project (shall we acronym it to CRP???).   But if you've read anything before this, you know I got badly burned in a collaborative project years ago and have hopefully learned from my mistakes.  Best to be open and honest and up front right from the get go, right?  This is my baby and while I'm willing and delighted to let others play with it, I am the one who will be putting it to bed every night.

Ok, so now that that's said, the next step is to render the entire region.  Makes me tired just thinking about it.  It's actually kinda boring.  Open city, hit pause, turn off grid, hit CTRL+X, select "MOOLAH", type a space, then a one, then 10 zeros, click enter.  Exit city to region, while saving city.  Once region reloads, start over at open city.  Do this 256 times.  This time around I will also be naming the cities, so I think I'll skip over to Excel and creat a little spreadsheet so I can tick them off as I go along, to make sure my wine doesn't interfere with my ability to do a mindless task over and over and over and over....

Next post will probably be the completely rendered region, along with a map of the city tiles with thier names, and maybe an Excel sheet, if the city names don't show up well.  I'll probably check back a couple times a day between now and the next update, just to see how folks react to the new region and (ahem) the Rules.

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

very nice map there my friend.i hope the pies turned out ok.

[ldvger 19]

Ok, I have now rendered 64 of the 256 city tiles and something Heblem cautioned me about is now obvious.  He told me the region would render out "high", meanining there are no oceans.  He recommended I use photoshop to adjust the greyscale parameters, but as I have no idea how to do this, I just forged ahead. 

The lack of oceans is not necessarily a bad thing, given this point of the region's development.  I know where the shore lines are supposed to be and everything is contour driven, so I can lower the terrain of the region, city by city.  It's a lot of work, but at the same time it makes dredging the ocean shipping lanes easier and makes creating softly sloping beaches easier, too. 

And ,as I began to render the region at the NW corner and the lowest land, and ocean fronts, are much to the south of where I am woking now, I have no ide yet how much to lower the terrain.  So I'll jusy continue to forge ahead and render the city tiles until they are all complete.  Once I get to a city tile I know is supposed to include ocean frontage, I will learn how many clicks to lower the terrain. 

This is a learning process for me and hope it is for those that choose tyo stop by and read, as well. 

Long day...and my brain is numb after rendering  64 city tiles in a row.  No new pics, maybe tomorrow.

Lora/LD

[mightygoose 92]

This is how Alaska pretty much developed and I intend to be an "explorer" in the early days of the development process, walking all over the monster region and leaving trails wherever I go.  I'll still be making trails when the first dirt roads start to appear and they'll probably go on top of the trails, the same way real roads come into being through wilderness areas. 

This is a brilliant way of doing things and a method i whole heartedly would consider myself undertaking a similar project.

Unlike

dedgren

, I'm not going to try to do this all by myself past the point of rendering the city tiles.  So I'm making it official, this is

CJ

is now to be renamed the Copper River Project, although it will still appear, for a time anyway, under it's current Apocrypha thread heading. 

I would love to participate and assist you but i have too many things on my plate right now, i am very sorry. i look forward to watching this project grow and cannot wait for you to start teasing us with tit bits of back story.

John

[ldvger 19]

Ok another day another update.

Heblem tells me trying to lower the terrain in God Mode is going to mess things up, so he suggests using Terraformer instead...BEFORE I start rendering the city tiles.  :::sigh::::

There goes another 2 hours or so out the door, as I will now have to trash the current region and it's 64 rendered cities and start over once I have lowered the terrain enough to have oceans again.  What a drag, but that's the way it goes.

Philosophically, it's a good thing I don't get too "married" to my work, I guess.  As a drafter and designer of custom homes (when I'm working), I have to draw and redraw projects sometimes many times, because the client changes thier mind or they discover they don't have enough money for 4500 sf.  Not all the projects I complete get built either, and that's always a drag.  I'm also a knitter, fairly advanced, and am always choosing knitting projects that challenge me to learn new techniques or are just plain hard.  I make mistakes, of course, and if I'm lucky I find them quickly and then backtrack and fix them.  If I'm not so lucky, sometimes I leave the mistake in place and just live with it, but being a perfectionist, I usually end up ripping out the completed work and going back to the mistake and fixing it, then re-knitting back to where I was.  In knitting lingo this is termed "frogging" because we have to rip-it, rip-it, rip-it.  Frogging is just a part of knitting, just like erasing and redrawing is just a part of crafting and designing.  My brain balks when I know I have to do over and sometimes I'll set a project aside for a while, to gather the steam I need to go back and then start over. 

But, I am itching to get this puppy started, so guess what I'll be doing this evening?  Yup, the SC4 version of frogging. 

The pot pies turned out pretty good, ate one and froze the other four.  Don't think I'll eat another one for a while, I'm kinda burned out on eating turkey (it was on sale so I bought 2, breasts only, but it's still a lot of turkey) and I still have at least one meal left.  I'm going to try to pawn it off on my roommate, tee hee. 

And, we have our first collaborator, none other than Heblem himself!

I'll post again later this evening after I get the region's ocean's restored and the region re-installed into my game.  Not sure I'll get as far as rendering any city tiles tonite.  I am an avid player of Lord of the Rings Online and weekends are busy in game, great times for questing and catching up with game buddies.  I've kinda been ignoring them this last week, so I think I'll take a partial "night off" from SC4 and go explore MIddle Earth instead.

Lora/LD

[technicallydead 1]

I'm back! Sorry if I took so long in visiting back. Anyways, great progress! good luck and God bLess!

[ldvger 19]

Hello again!

Well, finally, finally, finally!  We have the Copper River region exactly the way I always wanted it, huge and gorgeous.  Stick yer peepers on these:

There it is, bird's eye view as taken using Mapper.  Here's another:

This was taken using Region Census.  The images here are before any of the city tiles have been rendered (in case that wasn't obvious).

And it wasn't that hard to do once I figured it out.  I dumped my Ice Age region from my game folder and started over in Mapper with the 16 bit greyscale PNG Heblem made me.    Created a new region, saved it, then opened Terraformer and loaded the region.  As big as the region is, it takes a while to load, as you may imagine.  I had no idea how much I had to lower the terrain, so I worked in trial and error mode for about an hour, lowering, saving, opening my game, loading the region, nope, still and Ice Age, start over.  Then a little light bulb went off in my head and I started thinking about what I had learned from reading dedgren's "Three River's Region".  Using Ctrl+Shift+C while in game and with a city open will bring up the contours of the city map.  Using this handy tool, he discovered that sea level in the game is at 250m.  So, to get oceans back into my game (and melt my Ice Age with some extremely rapid global warming), all I really had to do was make sure any area I knew was supposed to be ocean was at 250m.  Starting over once again, I hovered my Terraformer cursor over a strecth of what was supposed to be open ocean and found that the elevation was 1380.6m.  Just a tad high (cough, cough).  Subtracting 250 from 1380.6 gave me 1130.6, so I set the Lower Terrain value in the Global Tools menu of Terraformer to 1130.6, clicked the button, waited a few seconds (well, maybe a full minute) and Voila!  Instant global warming!  All my glaciers had retreated back up into thier mountains and my oceans were back.  However, the water was a little ways out from the line of low cliffs that currently mark the shoreline and being as I know thier are no tides on Planet SC4, I could see some more terrain lowering was going to be needed.  When I had checked ocean elevation before, I had found some areas at 1380.8 and some at 1380.6, so I lowered the tterrain 1m, clicked and in a minute could see that while the tide was coming in, it still wasn't up to the base of the shoreline cliffs.  There was a little strip of flat beach at the base of all the cliffs and I gave thought to leaving it that way, but then discarded the idea.  I would rather terraform beaches into the landscape by softening cliffs and besides, northern beaches are rarely flat.  So I lowered the terrain another 1m and that brough the tide all the way into the base of the cliffs.  Perfect.  Save and load into game.  Once I saw it in the game, I knew I had it exactly the way I wanted it, so I took my pics, showed them to Heblem (he asked me to let him check my work before I started rendering any city tiles, to make sure I didn't spend time rendering if the map still wasn't correct), then spent the rest of the evening, yep you guessed it, rendering city tiles.  I got 80 done before I had to quit for the night.

As I rendered the tiles, I took a good look at each one to start deciding which ones were going to be protected by the GPF (the Glacier Protection Fund, remember?).  Of the 80 tiles so far rendered, 39, almost half, have already been designated "Protected Areas".  They will be lightly terraformed to get the mountains looking less like melted ice cream, and some creeks, and streams, and maybe apline lakes will be added, maybe even a few scattered trees here and there.  And it's likely there will be some paths/trails wandering around along the edges of the glaciers, and maybe even a single lane dirt road here and there.  Maybe a ranger station, or a fire-spotter's tower.  But that's it.  No industry, no people living there.  Just mountains and ice and snow.  Wilderness.  Maybe it'll become a park. 

For the time being, I am naming the cities by thier alpha-numeric codes and the mayor's name is "?" for all of them.  Using the Ctrl+X cheat, I can rename cities later, and rename the mayor, too. 

Once the entire region has been rendered, I will create a new flat map that shows all the city names and those cities protected by the GPF.  Pretty soon after that, I am going to begin the task of naming some of the landscape features as I identify thier RL counterparts from the highly detailed maps I've acquired over the past few weeks.

So, stay tuned, we are on our way!

Lora/LD

[ldvger 19]

Ok, here is the completely rendered region, as seen from Region Census:

Having rendered the region, I know know I could have lowered the terrain just a meter or two more in Terraformer, as my shoreline cliffs are now just a little bit higher than they were in the four seperate regions I rendered a week ago.  As anal as I am, I am not anal enough to redo the entire region for the sake of  a meter of overall elevation...this is one of those kinds of mistakes that stays in my knitting and proves it was knit with human hands.

Also, northern beaches being what they are, most do not slope gently down the the waterline.  I haven't yet checked the difference in elevation between sea level and the default top of cliff, but truth is, it will be easier to  have cliffs and soften them down in areas than it will be to have beaches and create cliffs in areas.  This is the way it works in RL...nature erodes the landscape down and very rarely raises it up.  I'd rather do the same. 

Not sure when I'll have another pic to post, maybe tomorrow.  I want to creat a city name map so everyone can gander at the various cities and think about which ones they might be interested in terraforming.  Right now there is a total of 54 tiles protected under the GPF, so that leaves 202 tiles available for development.  EXCEPT, the anonymous wealthy woman in Seattle called me tonite and said she is endowing an additional $60 billion for the protection of pristine ocean waters of the coast of the region, so I have identified another 6 tiles for protection under the newly established POWF (Pristine Oceanic Waters Fund), all contigous to each other in the far SW corner of the region.  So, of the original 256 tiles, we are down to 196 tiles available for development. 

But development is a long ways away and ALL tiles are available for terraforming.  The oceans need to be dredged deeper, the mountains need to be weathered.  

I am coming down with some kind of bug, not feeling very well.  Started three days ago when everything started smelling slightly odd and chemically.  Hard to explain.  Yesterday I had a small and uncomfortable knot in my upper chest (well above my heart, don't worry).  Today the knot in my chest has been worse and I have begun a cough, which has gradually loosened up over the course of the day, so I am assuming I am coming down with a chest cold of some sort.  Hardly seems fair.  I have this immense immune system which kept me free of any colds or illness of any kind for over 5 years, then I came down with a cold the day after Xmas last year.  I'm a smoker, so colds are semi-serious biz for me and it was the end of January before I finally shook off the last of it.  And now here it is mid-April and I am coming down sick again.  Kinda pisses me off.  Part of me blames my roommate.  He works with the public and so is exposed to all kinds of contagions on a daily basis...and bring it home with him.  And while we are not lovers, we share a lot, as most roommates do.  He's been hacking and coughing a lot these past few days...and he is a smoker, also.

But after a couple of glasses of wine, the pain in my chest is less and I am breathing easier and coughing less, so who knows, I may esacpe this bug yet.  Knocking on wood...

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

beautifull region my friend