Apocrypha

[ldvger 19]

I worked on city tile J15 tonite, which is the tile to the immediate north of the one I worked on last night.  I am moving up the river delta and from referencing my RL maps am beginning to encounter solid ground rather that stuff the river has deposited along it's way to the ocean.  I didn't finish the tile, so I have no pics to present, but I have been working tonite on feathering the shallow water into deeper ocean water and am quite happy with my results.  I am going to have to go back and redo J16, I can see that already.  It's just a matter of practice and I am learning as I go. 

I need to post a map that shows the alpha-numeric names I have given to each of the 256 city tiles.  It's a very basic Excel spreadsheet format, columns being alphabetical starting with "A" at the upper left (northwest) corner of the region and rows being numeric starting with "1" at the same place.  Given that the region 16 is city tiles square, that means the city tile at the far southeast edge of the region is P16.  Now that I have made the "road map" view of the region, it should be a simple matter to use Photoshop and overlay a grid with the city tile names on it, but I am not that well versed with using Photoshop (still learning!), so this remains a bit of a challenge to me.  I would really like to figure this out, because keeping readers oriented as to where I am working in the region seems to me something that should be important. 

I am reconciling edges (did I already say that?  Getting late, time for bed) with adjoining city tiles as I go.  This helps me a lot when starting a new city tile.

Ya know, everyone seems to use different words to describe areas on the map, so maybe I should take a moment to describe mine.

The REGION is +/- 40 miles to a side.  It is comprised totally of large CITY TILES, 16 city tiles square, which mean that each city tile is about 2.5 miles square.  There are 256 CITY TILES in the REGION.  Each city tile is comprised of 256 cells square...these are the little squares you see if you have your grid turned on when you are playing any city of any size.  A single cell is equal to 16 meters by 16 meters square, which is roughly equivalent to 52.5'x52.5'.  Other folks may use other terminalogy to describe thier regions, just want to set the record straight right now as to the terminolgy *I* will be using, so as to avois any confusion down the line. 

Ok, 2:15 am, time for bed.

I will post again tomorrow, with pics.

[metarvo 710]

NIce work on the micro-detailing, Lora.  The mud areas add so much character to the region. 

[ldvger 19]

Well, I just spent an hour posting pics and comments and lost it all when one pic didn't load and I hit the refresh button.  What a drag!  To lose all that work, the narrative, the telling of a story, I even had the first discussion about how landscapes form...pffft!  Gone, just like that (snaps fingers in the air). 

My back is hurting really bad tonite.  I herniated 3 disks in my lower back 25 years ago and every now and then I pretend I'm Superwoman and still 20 something years old and do something I shouldn't, like carry or lift weight I know is beyond the capability of my injured back to handle.  I cleaned the kitty boxes on Sunday afternoon and usually my roomie carries that particular bag of trash out to the dumpster for me, but he was visiting his family for Mother's Day, so I carried the trash bag out myself.  We are in a basement apartment, so I have to climb a half set of stairs to reach street level, which is another big no-no for my back.  I felt a pull, a tug, in my lower back when I lifted the trash bag up and then definitely felt pulls as I climbed the 7-8 steps to the back door of the apartment building I live in.  I have been advised to not lift any weight over 20 pounds and nothing over 10 pounds above my waist.  I don't know what the bag of used kitty litter weighed, but I know it was over 20 pounds (I have 3 cats and 2 kitty boxes...and kitty litter is heavy clean, and way heavier when dirty).  I probably would have been all right, but I had to lift the bag of used litter above my waist to get it into the dumpster, and I think that's what tweaked my back.  It takes a few days for the discs to swell enough to create pain and fortunately, having lived with this for almost half my life now (hard to believe, but true), I know how to take care of it...lots of ibuprofen.  And of course limit movement and lifting.

I have also learned to live with these occasional episodes of pain, as well as evaluate how bad they are when they occur.  The original injury was so serious that I was warned that another injury of the same magnitude could leave me paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheel chair for the rest of my life.  I was 30 years old, so you can bet that caught my attention.  I've re-injured myself 3-4 times since then, but never as badly as the first time.  This is not a serious episode I am facing now...just a reminder to be careful. 

Anyway, not feeling good tonite and bummed over losing my post.  Think I'll go into the game and maybe do some more terraforming for an hour or so, sorry to disappoint with lack of pics.

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

awwwwww thats not good hope it feels a little better soon my friend,and sorry you lost your update

[ldvger 19]

Ok, well lets try this again.  My back is still sore today after a semi-restless night trying to sleep in positions that didn't hurt, but the rest did help and the pain is less today than yesterday.

Ok, the first pic is from Region Census, to orient you all to the areas I am currently working on:

Those two little squares outlined in red at the bottom of the map at J16, the one furthest south, and J15, the next one to the immediate north.  We all know by know that this region is all large city tiles, but boy they sure look punt when placed against the background of the entire region, don't they? 

Truth is, most of the green flat land you see above at the southern edge of the region is almost all mudflats, shoals, and sandbars in RL, grading slowly up in elevation to saltwater marshes, fresh water marshes, and best of all, inter-tidal marshes which are both salt and fresh water.  I am not planning to plant much of anything on the mud flat areas, maybe a few scattered weeds, as in RL nothing would really be able to grow there.  However, I have a bunch of aquatic plants I can use in the various marshes and am going to try to segregate them into types so that I only use say types a,b, and c for slatwater marshes and types d,e, and f for freshwater marshes, and then using I guess both for inter-tidal marshes and, if I can find some more aquatic plants, those as well.  In RL, the plants that grow in the three types are marshes are quite different from each other, as plants that tolerate salt water don;t usually tolerate fresh water very well and vice versa.  However, plants that tolerate both at differing times are rather unique in and of themselves, so having a seperate set for the tidal zones would certainly be nice. 

Ok, forging on:

This is the SW corner of J15, which abuts the NW cormer of J16.  You can see that the island towards the top of the picture is NOT a mudflat or river-created feature, but has underlying rock structure of some sort.  In my RL maps of this island, there are areas to the north end of the island that get as high as 100' above sea level and there are np mud flats or marshes shown, except for a small area at the very top NW corner of the island (which doesn't show up on this city tile...it will occur in tile J14).  I have created some rasied terrain on the island for now, mostly to remind myself when I come back and work on it again that it is not a river construct, but I have not yet checked if I have built the elevations up high enough. 

What I am doing now, with this terraforming, is not what I would consider to be "fine" or "micro" terraforming.  I am really just getting the basic shapes into place right now.  I will probably do this for the entire region before I go back and start the "fine" work of adding streams, plants, trees, etc.  We have a long way to go...

This is a close up of the SW corner and I hope you can see that I am getting better at feathering the shallow water into the deeper water of the main channels.  This is actually harder than it may look like!

An enlargement of the SE corner of the tile.  I thought I did a particularely good job with the water line along this coast, which is the mainland.  You will all be able to see it much better when we revisit it a couple of months from now when I start plopping plants and water. 

This is the NE corner of J15.

And the NW corner of the tile.  Notice again the higher elevations on the actual island.  I know they look square and unrealistic now, but I'll fix that later.  of all the "moldy pancake" islands seen so far, this is probably the only one so far that will actually have substantial plant growth on it.  My RL maps also show a couple of small creeks running across it, mostly at sea level, so they are really more like mini-channels and part of the overall delta system rather than drainages of the island itself.  In RL, these would occur in areas where the underlying rock stata that allows this island to even exist would have been either weaker rock of the same type OR a softer type of rock intwined with the harder rock.  So the creeks/channels that will eventually run across the island will have embankments that represents the harder and more ersion resistant rock of the creek bed. 

I have not yet done any research or study into what the geologic processes were that built this landscape over time, but if it is anything like the Pacific Northwest, which I suspect it is, this will going to be all metamorphic rock, mostly granite and shist and feldspar...volcanic/igneous in origin but morphed over eons of pressure.  This area is on the edge of the Pacific Plate, which is moving east and under the North American Plate, which is moving west and over the top of the Pacific Plate.  I think this is called a "subduction zone".  Lots of volcanoes occur in these areas and Alaska certainly has her share. 

I think I have some zoom-ins next.

Ok, this is actually a snap of the center of the tile.  I am trying to make the main channels slowly shallower as I move north towards the mouth of the river, but I may come back and "dredge" some narrow but deeper channels later, so as to allow whales.  I have whales frolicking in the deep water of J16, but none so far in J15.  Also, given the massive extent of the mud flats and marshes in this delta, it seems pretty obvious to me that by the time this river hits the ocean, it's not moving very fast anymore, which means the water should be pretty shallow.  The fact that all these mudflats and shoals and marshes show up an semi-permanent features on a RL map also shows that neither the ocean nor the river are working on them very much, otherwise they would be transitory features, changing not only with each incoming or outgoing tide, but also with every flood season's passing.  Again, looking at my RL maps, the Copper River doesn't seem to be a long river or even drain a very large area...it apprears to be almost exclusively glacial melt and run only in the flats, which means it wouldn't have a lot of whitewater or flow very rapidly in terms of cubic feet of water per second.  It's definitely not a rainwater river...or so it seems to me.  I will have to look further into the river and what it's characteristics are before I start terraforming the area where it meets the sea.

A rotated and zoomed view of the upper end of the island, and sorry for having forgotten to turn the UI off first, my bad.  Keep in mind it's usually like 1 am when I start snapping pics of my evening's work/play, I've got more than a couple of glasses of wine in me, and so I sometimes am on a bit of personal internal cruise control. 

I like the shallow little bay that kinda look like an extremely mini-San Francisco on the lower part of the screen.  Jusr above it and on the opposite side of the island you can see a little inlet.  In RL I seem to recall there is a creek that runs from a point  north of the SF-like little bay across the island to that little inlet.  I have some high ground across that little isthmus now, but may shave it down later to put a creek there.

Rotated from north the same as the above pic, showing the south end of the island and the channel that runs between the island and the mudflat feature to it's immediate south.  The upper right corner again shows my feathering of the coastline of the mainland from mudflats through deeping degrees of shallow water into the main channel.  I have to admit I am quite proud of this feathering...it's not easy to achieve and this tile took me two evenings to create because of it. 

Last shot, again showing off my feathering techniques. 

I'mnot totally certain which direction I will move in from here, but I think I will probably continue to work north towards the mouth of the river.  Getting polopped water to blend seamlessly with game water is still a challenge, one I am not looking forward to trying to resolve, but it's a issue that must be dealt with sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner. 

Anyway, Hope you enjoyed the pics amd will come back to see more in a day or so, as I complete whichever next tile I decide to work on.

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

very nice region there my ffriend,great feathering techniques.

[ldvger 19]

Jacquilina, I sometimes think only you and mightygoose are the only folks who stop by here to see what I am doing.  But then I see this CJ has over 3500 views and only about 250 replies, so I wonder who all the folks are who stop by and take a peek and never leave a comment. 

And as much as I hate to say this, I need cheerleaders.  This is a huge region, a very daunting task, and I lose steam pretty quick without encouragement to continue.  I play for myself, it's true, but a CJ becomes a little bit of a community project and when the community fades to the background, well, I kinda wonder why I sweat trying to keep updating as often as I do, why i spend the time sharing my work/play with others.  Come on you lurkers, step forward and help me out, let me know what you think about what I am doing!

Just as last week I was thinking about abandoning this CJ because in RL it has so little buildable area, so I am this week going through another spasm of, if not doubts, then re-thinking.  I keep going back to my RL maps and wondering if I could recreate this landscape more closely if I hand traced the RL topos I have and then merged them all together into a grey scale.  I have been posting lots of questions in the mapping section both here on ST and over at SC4D and think I now have all the knowledge/tools I need to do exactly that.  It will take me MONTHS of hand terraforming this lanscape to get it even semi-close to where I want it to be..and then I will have to go back and redo the entire 256 tiles to plant plants and plop watercourses.

The truth is, what I probably need to do is throw away all my RL maps of this area, because so long as I have them around for reference, I will use them...and be frustrated by my inability to exactly recreate them in the game.  And, even if I was able to do that, it would render me a 90% unbuildable region, so why even bother? 

I did work in the region tonite, on tile K15.  It is the tile to the immediate east of J15.  It's a shoreline tile in that it abuts the river delta and has some "moldy pancake" islands off shore from the mainland.  It's also the first tile so far where there is land above the mudflat elevation, rising to salt marsh.  There is actually a small (discontinuous) line of very low level hills in this tile that divide the mudflats from the marshes.  Obviously some harder underlying rock strata in this area.  I didn't take any pics tonite because I only worked the western side of the tile, that which is closest to the river delta, and so very easy to terraform into mudflats.  The raised terrain that divides the mudflats from the salt marshes is visible in my game region, no need to refer to RL maps to see the area of transition, so I used my God Mode level brush to make mudflats to the edge of the dividing line.  The difference in elevation between the mudflats and the dividing hills is still rather extreme (cliffs about 100' tall), so I need to go back and do some inland feathering to soften this entire transition area down a bit and still raise the overall elevation to the east of the barrier hills just a tiny bit.

I'll work on this tomorrow, maybe a bit yet tonite, heck it's only 1:15 am, I am good for another hour . 

And, maybe I'll have more pics tomorrow.

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

i know what you mean my friend,there are a lot of lurkers,im enjoying what your doing so far.

[Twenty20 28]

It's sometimes hard to get comments, but the most important thing is that you enjoy build cities. Personnaly I try to go in many CJ and write comments, but I've few time to come here, (and for my updates too lol). Don't give up, and keep up the good work !

[ldvger 19]

Lookie what I found this evening:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009228777_websalmon16m.html?syndication=rss

Copper River in the RL news!

Lora/LD, be back later tonite

[jacqulina 162]

oh wow

[ldvger 19]

This really burns me.  I don't know if it's the site (ST) or my connection, which I know is not stable.  But I posted an update earlier this evening with pics and it is not here now.  Between pics and explanatory text, it was a full hour of update on my part.  I had to quit about 1/4 of the way thru the update because all my screens came back white.  I assumed imageshack was down for the moment and promised to come back later to finish the update (and here I am, fulfilling my promise), but to find my earlier post non-exsistent is just too much to bear this late at night. 

I will post (or try to to post) again tomorrow.  So sorry folks...

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

awwwww nooo i wonder what happened then,thats weird isnt it my friend.looking forward to your update.

[ldvger 19]

:::taking a deep breath::::

Ok, let's try this again. 

Although I have not posted much and no pics recently, that doesn't mean I haven't been working/playing.  I have been working on 3-4 new city tiles, almost simultaneously.  Becasue the tiles are large and the terrain is fairly boring, these pics were generated using Region Census, then the zooms were done in Photoshop.  I think looking ar areas of the region is going to be easier than going one city tile at a time. 

So, let's take a peek:

Ok, here we can see the mouth of the Copper River Delta and the two tiles I previously illustrated, J16 and15.  I have not yet started on J14, but instead have been working my way east across the K &L 16-15 tiles.  I know there is a small range of mountians over to the east and I want to be sure to gradually raise the terrain while I approach those mountains so I'll have buildable land in the future.  In RL, these mountains rise almost straight up out of the marshes, which we'll see and I'll explain in the next pic. 

FYI, even though I've had Region Census for a while now (like a couple of years), I just discovered some handy new features when preparing this set of pics.  After loading the region and selecting Show Image, I found that if I unchecked the little box "Fit To Screen" to the upper left of the image, I was able to get a zoomed in view.  Using the Region Census's File/Save Image command didn't give me a shot of the zoomed image though, just a shot of the entire region.  So, to take a pic of the zoomed area of the region I used a freeware program dedgren turned me on to called Gadwin Print Screen.  Before doing a screen capture, I clicked the Region Census boxes above the enlarged image to Show Borders and Show City Names, then I maximized the window to fill my entire monitor screen.  Using the "Print Screen" button on my keyboard, I was thus able to capture the pic above as well as the next two pics.  From there, I used Photoshop to crop the screen captures to eliminate the non-image stuff.

This is another view, again slightly to the east of the one above, showing the mountains I need to take into consideration as I leave my marshes behind and build up to useable land.  I have pretty much competed the work on K14, 15, and 16 and have zooms of those areas coming up.  You can see I have started on L 15 &16, but have'nt yet finished those. 

If you look closely you can see lots of little irregular spots of darker green in the unterraformed areas.  In the RL maps, these are little lakes and ponds in the marshes and you can see they run almost up to the base of the mountains.  I hate losing these as I terraform, as they would provide handy little built in guidelines for where to plop my water and streamlets/creeks through the marshes, but this is the price I pay for my own impatience.

When Eblem first created these maps for me, we realized they were way too high in overall elevation, so I had to lower the whole map down using Terraformer.  Problem is, I didn't lower it down quite far enough, so I was left with low cliffs all along my coastlines.  I kinda liked the way they looked and figured at the time it would be easier to lower some areas than raise others, so I went ahead and rendered the region.  Big mistake.  Almost all of the coastline in this region is mudflats, sand bars, shoals, and marshes, so know I will probably be flattening down a huge amount of coastal areas.  In hindsight, it would have been faster and way easier to lower the entire region two more clicks in Terraformer.  Had I done that, I would also have to do a lot less ocean/river dredging.  And, just as a warning, given how little work I have already got into the region thus far, I may yet go back and restart.  I was wise enough to make a back-up of my unrendered region, so I could theoreticaly (I know that's spelled wrong) be right back to this almost exact same place but with better coastlines in about 3-4 days.  Something I continue to think about.

Ok this last medium zoom shows another thing I am having to keep in mind as I terraform along and that is the approach of the river's mouth.  I am starting to make my waterways shallower as I move north so that by the time I reach the area that looks like a bunch of badly arthritic fingers in the upper portion of the pic above, the underwater areas will be barely submerged mud flats and very definitely un-navigable by anthing other than very shallow draft boats.  This is also where I will have to begin to transition from game water to plop water, so I want to be careful to try to match colors/textures if I can.  I know this game/plop water transition is still the biggest challenge for above sea level water.  I am hoping someone solves this before I confront it!

While I was loading this pic I was thinking about what I said in the paragraph about maybe lowering the rgion in Terraformer and realized doing that really wouldn't save me all that much work because all my land/water transitions would be too deep, given the 2 tile drop off I am currently flattening down to.  If I lowere the terrain all across the region, I would have to raise the ocean floor to create the very shallow waters I am currently terraforming along the shores, so it's kinda like six of one half a doxen of the other. 

If you look at the upper left corner of this pic above you will see steep mountains plunging straight down into the west fork of the river.  The islands currently near that shorline I am likely to leave rocky and cliff like rather than smashing them down into mudflats, as the proximity of the solid rock mountains suggests there will be many other areas of isolated solid rock nearby.  I'll have to check my RL maps to see if that is indeed the case, but I'm betting it is.  Having taken many classes in the Earth Sciences in my college days, I have a pretty good understanding of how RL landscapes form and, if you notice, that west fork of the river is both smaller and narrower than the east/main fork, another indicator that the river has to work harder to get anywhere in that area of it's path to the sea.  I would also hazard a guess that the water is deeper in the west fork and runs faster.  While navigable in terms of depth, I bet it would be tough to get even a powerful commercial fishing vessel up that waterway.  Which reminds me, I am going to have to download myself some commercial fishing vessels to plop into the water around this river delta!  Salmon season is upon us!  Yum!

Ok well, I thought I had some closer zooms to show you, but it seems I don't.  I am still learning how to use the various tools and software, including software like Photoshop.  I thought if I zoomed into a pic in Photoshop and did a "Save As" I would get a saved file of the zoom, but evidently that is not the case because all I get is a copy of the original I zoomed in from, even if I give the Save As file a completely different name.  I guess I am going to have to make a new file in PS, the copy/paste/crop/zoom/resize.  I will try that later this evening and see if that works, because I had wanted to show in zooms the little outcroppings of land that seperate the mudflats from the marshes, like very low barrier islands, that exist in the RL maps and which I have carefully constructed in tiles K 14, 15, and 16 and which if you scroll back to the first pick you can see.  They are very roughly shaped right now, created using the God Mode leveling tool set to 1 at close zoom, so they "read" right now more like a contour map than an actual landscape feature, but I will be fixing that before I leave this area of the region. 

So, I guess that's all for now.  I'll continue to fool around and have more stuff to post in a day or so.

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

wow excellent region,very nice work so far my friend

[metarvo 710]

Wow, this is some true dedication, Lora.  You certainly have a way with terraforming.  I have a lot to learn about the subject myself, but I'm sure I'll be able to learn a lot about it right here.  Keep up the good work, Lora. 

[ldvger 19]

Metarvo-

I am a natural born teacher, being an eldest child with two younger sisters, so if you would like me to write a tutorial of how I am flattening this area of my region down into mudflats, marshes, shallow seas, and deeper river channels, I would be happy to do so!  I actually enjoy teaching a lot and jump at the opportinutiy, when presented, so just let me know. 

Because of this natural tendency to want to teach others, this CJ will often have long passages of text as I expound on how landscapes this dramatic are formed.  My younger sisters got tired of my "lecturing" them, but they became remarkably informed about things they never studied, and not just in the Earth Sciences area, either! 

I'm one of those people who, if I won a huge lottery, I would give up working for a living and become a professional student.  My life has taught me that the purpose of life is two-fold: 1.) to learn as much as you can about as much as you can and 2.) to expose yourself to and drink in the unbelievable beauty of this blue marble spinning through space we all live on. 

Lora/LD

[ldvger 19]

Ok, so I have a bunch of new pics to share, so lets get right down to it:

This image was taken from Region Census via a screen capture and shows how the areas east of the river bed ar starting to move up in elevation to match the ambient terrian at the base of the mountains.  You can see I've terraformed city tile L14 to include the landforms my original maps protrayed, just at much lower elevations.  I know this all looks very choppy and map like right now, not at all like any RL landscape, but I did play around with various modifying tools this afternoon and think that when I'm done with this area, in terms of basic landforms, it will be much smoother.  

The large flat area in tiles K16/15 and L16/15 will be the marshes.  The lower land west of the marshes will be mud flats.  The higher land east of the marshes is buildable.  For some reason the mud flats in tile K14 are a different color, not sure why that is...game anomaly, I guess. 

Moving slightly east, we see how the land is slowly rising to the defualt level at the base of the mountains.  While this higher land will be buildable, it will still be veined with little watercourses coming down from the mountains, so I have tried to make allowances for creating extremely shallow and wide valleys in the flat lands.  Notice how I have begun to circle the default terrain level as well as the next lower terrain level around the base of the mountains in tile M14.  In Rl, this is a river valley that is formed downstream of a sizeable glacier, which I don;t think occurs in this region.   The base of the glacier may show up in tile N or P 13...I don't remember off hand, but I want to make sure my base terrain levels match with the base of the glacier. 

At this zoom, it may appear that the land at the base of the mountains is lower than that to the west, but trust me, it's higher. 

Odd.  I sized this image in PS to 800X600 same as all the rest, but it comes out so much smaller and a much further zoom out. 

Well, sorry for that.  I took this shot to show how close I am coming to the river's mouth and how much I am modifying the terrain to eventually blend into existing terrain levels at the same area.  I am likely to leave this area alone for a while while I think about how to accomplish this.  Please note the presence of the base of yet another set of mountains in the upper right hand corner.  The existence of this large rock mass so near to the river's mouth is going to give me some challenges...one of the reasons I may avoid it for a while yet.  It's been over 3 years since I did any terraforming and I am still regaining the "hang" of it. 

You can also see, kinda, the extent of my work so far.  The last obviously terraformed tile at the center left is L14.  I have reconciled edges with tiles L13, M13, and M14.  The difference is elevations is growing as I move north, which makes my eventual work at the river mouth ever more problematic. 

Again using Region Census and Screen Capture, I have full city tiles to share of all the tiles I have worked so far.  The game doesn't allow me to photo full large city tiles, only corners and center, so I hope this overview will give a sense of the work so far completed.

This is J16, where I started, the southern most part of the region at the river's delta.  I have been working north and east fro here, uphill in both directions.  These city tile pics will run west to east, north to south.  Refer to maps above if you get a little lost. 

This is K16, the next tile immediately east.  The raised landforms you see mark th boundary between marshes (to the east) and mud flats (to the west).  At the center of this tile is a high point of triangular land called "Cottonwood Point".  This is a RL navigational marker and I will be eventually be planting a single very large cottonwood tree here, perhaps surrounded by smaller trees and shrubs. 

Continueing east this is L16 and marks the end of the marshes andthe beginning of the gradual rise to the default etrrainat the base of the mountains in the next tile east.  Not much to look at, I know, and most of it will be un buildable, as the marshes will be protected.  However, you can see the change in color from the deep green of the marshes to the lighter green of the buildable land.  Not sure I would want to build anything that close to such extensive marshes and mudflats, but who knows what sims will do? 

This is M16 and the base of the mountains.  The first layer of terrain you see at the base of the mountains is the map default that I was working my way slowly up towards.  This is a riverine landscape at this part of the map, something shaped by the river/rivers.  There are a number of sizeable glaciers that melt into this delta, each with it's own drainage system, so while I have been grading terrain down towards the river, I also have to keep in mind grading up to the base of the glaciers.  At some point in time, I will also be creating steams coming don from the galciers and joining the marshes/mudflats/Copper River Delta, soI have to keep that in mind, too.

Ok, like a typewriter working backwards, we are back to J15, the furtherst west I have worked and one tile north of all the other tiles so far shown.  I like this tile because the island at the upper left is not a mud flat bau has some underlying rock to it. Not much, but enough to make it an honest to goodness island.  Keep track, if you will, of the ocean depths.  I have been trying hard to make them shallower as we head north towards the river's mouth and would like to know if you think I have done well so far.

K15, one tile east.  Mud flats to the west and marshes to the east, barrier "islands" between them.

L15, the end of the marshes and the beginning of "real" land.  Marshes to the west, buildable land to the east. 

It's 1:30 am, can you tell I am running out of steam?

M15, the base of the mountains. 

And I have to quit for the evening.  I have 10 more pics to post, but just do not have the energy to do so tonite. 

Hope you enjoyed the pics!

Lora/LD

Ok, Happy Memorial Day!  It's now Monday afternoon and I have some time to post more pics while my artichoke cooks.

Ok, back to the river delta again (using the rurn bar on the typewriter...any of you folks old enough to remember typewriters?), this is tile K14.  I have not yet worked the next tile west, J14, except to reconcile it with the neighboring tiles.  It contains the top part of the real island and some tricky narrow waterways that I want to wait before attempting, spending time practicing my techniques on easier tiles. 

Not much to say about this tile that wouldn't be essentially a repeat of the other tiles along the river's edge, so on to the next pic.

Moving east, this is L14.  The darker/lower areas will be marshes and mud flats.  If you look closely you can see a faint brown line running roughly east to west across the upper part of the tile that markes the boundary between mud flats and marshes.  The higher ground is, again like all the rest of the tiles, buildable.  The mountains in the next tile east are quite a bit closer to that tile's western edge, that's why we have so much more buildable area here in this tile. 

This is M14 and you can see at the very top of the pic how I have curved my layer of lower (but still buildable) land around the base of the mountains.  The next tile north of this is a wide glacier carved river valley, so I have to start dropping my elevations down a little bit again as I think about working M13.  I also need to go back and take a quick peek at my RL maps of that area, to get an idea of how low the land around this new river valley (I seem to recall it's the Miles River, but could be wrong) is.

Ok, gotta take another break to eat my artichoke.  I'll post the rest of the pics, which are a couple of zooms showing my technique for connecting terraformed tiles to each other, later.

Lora/LD

Ok, back again. 

One of the things I am finding is that the Reconcile Edges tool in Mayor Mode God toolbar doesn't always pick up the very slight changes in elevations between my terraformed tiles.  Most of the time it works most excellently, but for some reason the tile M15 always read as being fully reconciled with it's neighbors, depite my having lowered terrain in both tiles to the north and south of it.  When I opened the tile to the south of M15, M16, and checked the Reconcile Edges tool, the game wanted to reconcile the edge with M15 to the north.  As M15 had not been terraformed yet, this would have raised terrain in M16, which I did not want to do.  The same thing happened when I opened and checked M14, to the north of M15 which I had already terraformed.  The game wanted to raise terrain in M15.  So, in order to make M15 match up with it's neighbors, I had to figure out a way to co-relate elevations between tiles. 

So, what I did was built roads that I connected to the misbehaving tile, measured the elevation of the already terraformed tile using the Crtl+X terrain query tool, then saved/close the terraformed tile and opened the un-terraformed tile.  I went first from north to south, from M14 to M15.  Here's a pic:

Ok, here is the south boundary of the default terrain of M14.  You can see I turned my grid on so I could count how many tiles to the west I need to go before getting to the next level DOWN, which in this case is 3 from the road location. 

And here is the north boundary of M15, showing how the road connects and, after carefully digging a svery small hole, I leveled the terrain 3 spaces west from the road to match the level of the same area in the next tile north.  The higher terrain, BTW, is at 298.9 m and the lower is at 289.9.  Because M14, the next tile north is only lowered one level past the default value, I only had to make this single reference point to match M15 with it.  Reference overview pics of the M tiles at the beginning of this post to see what I mean.

This was not the case with matching M16 with M15.  While there is only one drop of evelation between the two, they occur in three different locations.  Again, reference the overviews to see what I mean.  So anyway, this meant I had to build 3 roads, starting with the reference tile M16:

Ok, granted, this is a further out zoom and makes it hard to see the roads, but they are there, at the north, little lines of black which are again 3 tiles away from the next level down.  Because I am using the level brush in God Mode (not Mayor Mode God tools) in all tiles I am working on right now, I didn't have to use Terrain Query (although I did just to make sure and yes, I have the same elevations to work with, 298.9 and 289.9).  Save and close M16, open M15.

Again, a wide out zoom to show all three roads and how I lowered the terrain to match as close as possible with the conditions of the roads in the M16.  And if you look at the overviews, you can decide for yourself if I did well or not.

And that, folks, wraps up this update for now.  Sorry it was fragmented, but at least it all got up within a reasonable period of time.

Hope you enjoy!

Lora/LD

[ldvger 19]

Busy day today!

I am going to be out of town Thursday through Monday to attend my nephew's wedding In Santa Barbara, CA.  Was feeling more than a little frumpy in terms of my appearance, so I managed to find a stylist who would cut my hair and give me a fresh new look in exchange for a stack of restaurant discount coupons I've managed to collect over the past year, about $90 worth to be exact.  Back when I was working and living fat, I ate out almost every meal and joined a number of restaurant's discount clubs, getting points for every dollar I spent.  My largest account was with McCormick's and Schmick's, a global semi-upscale steak and seafood house.  I cashed in my points with them in December of last year and got 2 $50 dinner certificates as well as 2 $10 dessert certificates.  And because I'm on the list of frequenters of a number of restaurants, I get discount cards sent to me by other restaurants who would like to gain my business (or what USED to be my business...I cook at home now), so I also had a $20 gift card for a local seafood restaurant called Cutter's Bay Bistro.  So I got a very nice, very upscale haircut in exchange for the Cutter's Card, one of the McCormick's dinner certificates, and both of the McCormick's dessert certificates.  This gal usually charges $60 for a haircut, so I gave her what amounted to a 50% tip for accepting my barter items in place of cash, which means we both made out very well on the deal.  I love win-win situations!  And I absolutely LOVE my new haircut, which just makes it all the better.

But anyway, I worked tonite on a composite map I started weeks ago that gives a good overview of the RL region my game region is derived from.  I had found this USGS site that allowed me to take screen shots of the area, so once I had about 50 screen shots, making sure they overlapped each other a bit to make it easier to marry them all together, I started creating a compite map in Photoshop.  I got about 1/2 way through before I stopped, for whatever reason, so tonite I went back and completed the map.  Then I opened Region Census and loaded my region, clicked on Show Image and,with Photoshop still open, began to match my region with the USGS maps, trimming out excess areas of the composite map as I went, until I have now what I think is a fairly accurate RL map of my region. 

The one tweaky thing I don't understand is that it is wider in the east/west direction than it is in the north/south direction.  I had expected it to be square.  So, I can only assume there has been some compression/stretching of the map by Eblem, when he made it, to make it square.  Doesn't really matter to me at this point...I am not going to start over because of this discovery, don't worry!

So here is a pic of the composite map I made of the RL area, with the approximate areas I have been working in recently outlined in red:

The areas you see that are here shown as faintly stippled are labeled on the maps as "mud", hahaha.  When Eblem made my maps for me, these areas came across as solid ground, with little to distinguish them from the actual low by permanent solid ground around them.  

These RL maps contradict, so some degree, other RL maps I have, which are much more highly detailed, so I am kinda extrapolating between the two sets while I terraform. 

Anyway, I thought you might find this interesting!

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

wonderfull work my friend,your region is fantastic so far,hope all goes great at the wedding

[ldvger 19]

Well, it's been a couple of days since my last post, but between getting ready to travel, traveling, visiting, traveling home, and recovering from all the hoopla, I think I am ready to get back to playing in my region again.  I had copied my region files to my laptop with thoughts of playing in it during the late nights I would be left alone while my mom and sister slept, but when I thought about it a little more, I decided to distract myself by trying to recreate San Francisco, instead.  I haven't done any actual building in game for quite some time as I have been playing almost 100% in Copper River Project....and it's still a long way's away from being ready to be built in.  My sister used to watch/help me play "City" (as she called it) way back in 1993 when I was playing SC Classic, so I wanted to show her how much the game has changed since then. 

I always think I come from the most dysfunctional family on the planet and visits with them always feel like confirmation of that belief.  But a part of me thinks that dysfunctional is the norm for all families, we just don;t really see that or understand it until we live apart from them and then revisit them.  All I can say is, 3 days among my family is enough to exhaust me, overwhelm me...and I can't wait to get home.  Someday I'll write a book about my family...just before I die, so none of them can call me nasty names for revealing our dysfunction to the world in general.  I'll instruct my editor to hold it and publish it post-humously, tee hee.  My parting shot. 

So, check back soon, as I will be picking up where I left off, most likely this evening.

Oh, almost forgot!  It's official now...I am a grandma.  My grandson Hunter Keith Haws was born last Thursday afternoon, May 28, at 2:46 pm, 8 lbs 10 oz, 21 1/2" long.  Mother and baby are fine, her labor, for a first child, was blessedly short, only 7 hours, lucky girl. 

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

awwww congratulations im sure you will enjoy being a granma,looking forward too more of your work.

[ldvger 19]

I am so sorry for having abandoned my few fans.  My home internet was down for 3-4 days and I could not visit this site to keep folks appraised of the situation.  I am back online now and hope to be able to post updates soon

Again, so sorry.

Lora/LD

[jacqulina 162]

looking forward to more my friend

[ldvger 19]

Well, turns out I've been taking a bit of a break from SC these past  few weeks.  Got involved in some large spring cleaning chores, for one, and while in California last month I started a plain vanilla version of the game provided San Francisco region, which is what I've been playing with when the SC bug bit.   Not certain when I'll get back to this CJ, but probably soon, as the plain vanilaa game is already starting to annoy me.

Anyway, it's summer and summer in Seattle is a time to be outdoors soaking up a year's worth of Vitamin D to keep us sane throught the winter, so not sure how much time I'll be spending on SC even when I do get back to it.  Check back from time to time, you have probably already determined I run in spurts.

Lora/LD