Show us your Before/After Shots!

[pcwhiz24 1,187]

Before industrial fire:

During industrial fire:

After shots are coming up soon

[Dgmc2013 873]

Before:

300k inhabitants after:

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

After eons of diligent modding and testing, @Cyclone Boom pronounced our farm filler lots completely ready for use. And as I see in my game, they are everything I could hope for. I've used the EPIC Technique for these pics so you can click one and then use the right and left arrow keys to compare them.

Before:

 

After:

[thingfishs 416]

Wow, what a difference! I, (like everyone, I can only assume), hate those jagged edges, and I look forward to seeing how these work in-game.

My first thought though, is whether these will be able to fit in with the SFBT street tree mod option for tree lined agricultural roads? (these trees appear to be more densely packed). But I guess it would just be a matter of (personally) using the LE/LE-X to space the tree props to the right distance...?

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

Thanks, @thingfishs.

Having never used the SFBT street tree mod option for tree lined agricultural roads, I've no idea how this would work with it. (If you could post a zoomed in pic of how it looks on it's own, that'll help.)

Our lots don't add anything to the SAM part at all. They are adjacent to it so it might blend in well enough. Basically, what we've created is a set of fillers for my personal play style which is a whole lot of vanilla with a few downloaded items and a bunch of things CB and I have made for me personally.

[Silur 3,306]

@CorinaMarie It is so easy to do, but it's so difficult to do! How do You keep up with it? You are this site along with CB, and something else huge do... I'm at Your feet...

 

[Silur 3,306]

Corina and Cyclone ...

You do huge business for many people here. 

Reaction of 100 % to new questions are it is unique!!!

[bladeberkman 720]

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

After eons of diligent modding and testing, @Cyclone Boom pronounced our farm filler lots completely ready for use. And as I see in my game, they are everything I could hope for. I've used the EPIC Technique for these pics so you can click one and then use the right and left arrow keys to compare them.

Before:

 

After:

Wow, what a transformation. The fillers look great and compliment your play-style so well. But I have to know: Where did all that dirt go?  Your streets, rails, and farmland look amazing. Would love to know what you did so I can attempt to re-create this look with my terrain mod. 

-Blade

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

Thanks, @bladeberkman.

 

1 minute ago, bladeberkman said:

Would love to know what you did so I can attempt to re-create this look with my terrain mod.

That's the easiest part of the whole mod.

There is one single Maxis Texture for the dirt which appears adjacent to streets, roads, and rail. I replaced that with a modified version of the R$ Grass. I reduced the patterns to make it more random (especially for how it appears under the rail lines when they are parallel and the texture appears cause of the zoning it's next to).

Here's an advanced copy of that file: Network Dirt to Grass - Texture by Cori v0.07.dat

[Raymond7cn 6,773]

2 hours ago, Silur said:

I'm at Your feet

me too. I couldn't agree with you more dear Silur, How lucky we are! I will tell you a funny story, when I first came into simtropolis as a dumb newbie, I almost made a big mistake, They are specialist with many knowledge, Especially, They are also patient and thoughtfuI and kind, I mean both of them, I never seen people like them before, So I misunderstood them as … Lovers.Then I said something which I have forgotten now, They must didn't notice it, After a while, I began to enjoy everyday in simtropolis. Then someday I suddenly rememberd that post, I made frantic dash for that post and modified it. So I confess it today, Please forgive mistake of a dumbo.

3 hours ago, thingfishs said:

is whether these will be able to fit in with the SFBT street tree mod option for tree lined agricultural roads

Hi Ryan, I also used SFBT's seasonal sam t21 mod, I thought those trees are made by CoriBoom™ as diagonal and straight filler lots with trees. So you could choose when to plop them or reLot it with LE, But I'm not sure whether CoriBoom™ release this mod in STEX, Furthermore, as you said, I thought we could personally tweak SFBT's t21 trees with reader and LE if it's too much there.

Yours Sincerely,

-- Raymond

I didn't notice that Cori had replied it while writing, You could try it with SFBT to see if they could fit well, I may couldn't help since you are also specialist and knew much than me. 

Yours,

-- Raymond

[bladeberkman 720]

16 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Thanks, @bladeberkman.

 

That's the easiest part of the whole mod.

There is one single Maxis Texture for the dirt which appears adjacent to streets, roads, and rail. I replaced that with a modified version of the R$ Grass. I reduced the patterns to make it more random (especially for how it appears under the rail lines when they are parallel and the texture appears cause of the zoning it's next to).

Here's an advanced copy of that file: Network Dirt to Grass - Texture by Cori v0.07.dat

Thanks for sharing! So this file overrides the default Maxis dirt texture and replaces it with the R$ grass for applicable transportation networks? Can I somehow modify this file to use a texture that better matches my terrain mod (in this case, Sudden Valley)? Another question: Is this file also responsible for swapping out the farm field textures? In your after picture, your farm fields dispense with the dirt and grungy green (... is it green? lol) textures and swap them with other shades of green. This looks reeeeeeeally good. 

-Blade

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

37 minutes ago, bladeberkman said:

So this file overrides the default Maxis dirt texture and replaces it with the R$ grass for applicable transportation networks?

Yes, it overrides the default Maxis dirt when adjacent to networks. And it's mostly the R$ grass texture in that file, but also with my tweaks so it doesn't produce as much of a moire pattern.

 

37 minutes ago, bladeberkman said:

Can I somehow modify this file to use a texture that better matches my terrain mod (in this case, Sudden Valley)?

Yes indeed. Or rather, yes for the concept. Find the texture you want to have as your dirt replacement, copy its FSH to their own .dat file, and then change the Group and Instance IDs to match the one in my mod. Then toss my mod out.

 

37 minutes ago, bladeberkman said:

Another question: Is this file also responsible for swapping out the farm field textures?

No. Those are separate .dat files atm. During development we've keep each and every thing in their own separate files to avoid confuzzling ourselves. This way either of us can work on something at the same time that the other is working on something else and when we share our tweaks, we don't overwrite what the other did.

As part of the Maxis Farm Upgrade and Rural Diagonal Fillers (or whatever we decide to call it) mod, there will be the option to convert the plain bare dirt fields to green cow pasture and the plowed dirt fields to green row crops. This will happen instantly in existing cities because they are texture overrides. Additionally, I've revamped the small and large Maxis lettuce fields and added an additional one so they are all greener than before, but still with 3 distinct flavors.

[bladeberkman 720]

4 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Yes, it overrides the default Maxis dirt when adjacent to networks. And it's mostly the R$ grass texture in that file, but also with my tweaks so it doesn't produce as much of a moire pattern.

 

Yes indeed. Or rather, yes for the concept. Find the texture you want to have as your dirt replacement, copy its FSH to their own .dat file, and then change the Group and Instance IDs to match the one in my mod. Then toss my mod out.

 

No. Those are separate .dat files atm. During development we've keep each and every thing in their own separate files to avoid confuzzling ourselves. This way either of us can work on something at the same time that the other is working on something else and when we share our tweaks, we don't overwrite what the other did.

As part of the Maxis Farm Upgrade and Rural Diagonal Fillers (or whatever we decide to call it) mod, there will be the option to convert the plain bare dirt fields to green cow pasture and the plowed dirt fields to green row crops. This will happen instantly in existing cities because they are texture overrides. Additionally, I've revamped the small and large Maxis lettuce fields and added an additional one so the are all greener than before, but still with 3 distinct flavors.

Thank you for the reply and instructions! I'll give it a shot. Excited to hear you've got something in the works for farms. I'll stay tuned; that would be an instant download for me. 

[Cyclone Boom 17,016]

8 hours ago, thingfishs said:

My first thought though, is whether these will be able to fit in with the SFBT street tree mod option for tree lined agricultural roads? (these trees appear to be more densely packed). But I guess it would just be a matter of (personally) using the LE/LE-X to space the tree props to the right distance...?

Just adding to what Cori explained above earlier...

There are distinct sets per filler type, and one of these will be able to transform diagonal fields from this:

 

To this, which features one sub-set style of our fillers:

(This being the before/after pics thread after all. And notice how the field on the left changes.)

All the lots are 1x1 fillers and have incorporated specially blended textures with each field type, including for the extra greener field as well.

Now while street tree mods aren't something we've tested yet, perhaps this particular set with no bordering trees might be an option. Then those like the SFBT mod might still appear on the diagonals if they're T21 props on the network sidewalks. A big thing as a focus is to give choice of what components might be preferable, since there's over 50 fillers and not all might be useful for everyone. The core package will be designed to be everything Cori personally likes for her farming scenes. Then some components will be completely optional, such as the odd bonus item involved with this (which are still to be fully finalised).

Also as @Raymond7cn said, it might be doable for editing those T21 props for compatibility with certain other items.

 

4 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

But I'm not sure whether CoriBoom™ release this mod in STEX

Currently it all still officially has work in progress status, and we're making significant strides towards completion.

A big idea revolving our project is everything to be self-contained, and importantly there'll be no required dependencies. All that we've made (so far) amounts to over 100 core components and only 1 MB total. This means it overall will have a very small footprint for the total size, and it's something which Cori has gotten used to with building up from a minimal (mostly vanilla) Plugins folder. We've tried to make the most of the Maxis agricultural offering, and consider it to be an enhancement.

The only thing will be optionally to download the Pegasus SPOT set as a dependency which greatly helps for the plop placement with orientation.

We've a bit more to do, but will keep at it where time permits and we appreciate the support and kind words from all.

And we're not intending to transform this thread into a project development diary of ours!   (As much as we're encouraged by everyone's enthusiasm here.)

Whoever wishes to post their own before/after comparison pics next is most welcome to...

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

@thingfishs

Continuing on with before and after (and after and after) pics and adding to what @Cyclone Boom showed, I did a wee bit of research into your question.  Out of the box installing the SFBT Street Tree mod (and selecting to have Maxis Deciduous Trees so I didn't have to grab the other tree dependencies), the answer is no. However, their mod can be tweaked to become compatible with ours. The test changes I made would likely affect the street trees and props in other areas or your city tho. That would require extensive testing to see which items get changed. This latter part is way beyond the scope of our mod.

It also appears their mod only works with the Maxis Streets. Or maybe there are other versions for SAM that I didn't see.

Anyhow, here's the before pic with SAM-3 Peg Dirt Road and using my Network Dirt underlay replacement texture with the Street Trees mod installed. I did click and re-click with the street tool and no trees appeared:

 

Next, I converted those back to plain asphalt streets and the trees show as expected:

^ Yes, the timestamp shows this as before cause I did the tests more than once, but goofed up on the zoom.
 

Then plopping our diagonal fillers as CB showed in his post and the trees disappear:

 

But, after I tweaked their mod to recognize the plopped lots they are back:

 

I'm not personally fond of sidewalks out in the hinterland so the Street Trees mod won't interest me personally. Ofc, from what I learned peeking inside their .dats, I now understand how SAMs could also be updated to show the same trees. (Not that I'll do that either as I like the thicker tree row we have on the Sets 2 and 4 fillers which are also a wee bit further from the street.)

[Seppi93 17]

I love this Thread, so interesting

I also want to share pictures of one of my newest city, called Rochester in the Region Inwood.

 

Before:

It used to be a city with bad demand, so on one side of the Crystal River there were the residential areas which had to commute to the neighbor city Bsson or to the dirty industries in Rochester.

And on the other side of the river there were agricultural zones to get more jobs and a bit tax income...

 

As you can see, Mayor Quentin was so desperate that the whole other side was used for agriculture so Rochester got the State Fair of the Inwood Region... To reach this goal the single fields of the farmers weren't that big...

 

After:

After a hard time and lots of patience more and more big companies appreciated the cheap price of land and cheap office spaces and the city grew and grew...

Now it looks like this, no agriculture anymore and also almost no dirty industry. But Mayor Quentin decided to keep the state fair in the City and build the Rochester Convention Center right next to it. Farmers love to visit this city, it's more interesting then the little cities they live. And Rochester is proud of that little piece of country side in the middle of a now 430.000 count residents city..

 

[mmprog 104]

The town of Ranney Center, before and after a highway construction project. South of Ranney Center is the growing city of Port Blake, which just reached 100,000 residents, and just north is East Kiwassa, a large commuter town. So there is a lot of through traffic here — passenger and freight rail, regional roads, and now the highway. The old rail depot which primarily served the local farm/industrial population was replaced with a passenger stop and a smaller freight bypass, and an overpass was built over the railroad near the station for smoother traffic flow. The highway swings east of the village and a new trumpet interchange was built to serve the local population.

The screen shots are aligned so you can use the arrow keys for a direct comparison.

Also, when stitching together screen shots in a graphics program, I temporarily set the top layer to use the "difference" blending mode. It makes it much easier to align overlapping images — just nudge one of the layers until all the pixels turn black, and then switch from "difference" back to normal blending mode. Anyway, I noticed that it also produces an interesting visualization of a city's change over time, if you overlay two images of the same area taken at different times. The third image in this post shows the result of the difference blending mode between the first two screen shots: the highway, train station, new housing, and couple of new commercial lots are clearly visible (in addition to some train car automata).

Before:

After:

 

Difference:

 

On 5/11/2020 at 8:05 AM, Cyclone Boom said:

Currently it all still officially has work in progress status

That is looking really nice and clean! The screen shots above show some diagonal roads + farm fields with some help from the SFBT diagonal filler lots. It would be great to have some more options available.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

Region Transportation View:

Before:

 

After:

 

And @Cyclone Boom is going to make a custom Legend UI for it.

  Edited July 17, 2020 by Cyclone Boom  
Re-updated pic to include Cori's new annotation. :-)

[Raymond7cn 6,773]

Woww! Great work CoriBoom™, now we could have more specialized region analysis, it turns out so many details have lost. Thank you!

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[Terring 6,476]

It shows the zones too? That comes very handy

I wonder if it will show the RHW highways as well. Just curious

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

15 hours ago, Terring said:

It shows the zones too? That comes very handy

Yep. It does.

Keep in mind with the region view being a tiny thumbnail of the whole city tile said zoning will be a wee bit difficult to see. I made an extra large area of them so they'd show better.

Here's what that zoning block looks like in the city tile:

 

15 hours ago, Terring said:

I wonder if it will show the RHW highways as well. Just curious

Does it show in the default Maxis region transportation view? If not, no. If yes, yes.

[Lucario Boricua 7,031]

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Does it show in the default Maxis region transportation view? If not, no. If yes, yes.

No, the NAM Team had to develop a different transportation legend view to show the Real Highway, and the color selection for the legend is bizarre because it lumps together all the non-freeway road networks but excludes streets, while the different rail systems (heavy, light/elevated, monorail/bullet/high speed) have distinct colors.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

10 minutes ago, Lucario Boricua said:

No, the NAM Team had to develop a different transportation legend view to show the Real Highway, ...

Ah. I've not seen it. Prolly cause I only installed SAM and a few other basic things.

Would you mind to show a pic of what it looks like? It now sounds like there'll be no point to releasing ours as it wouldn't be as useful to RHW users (and that's prolly most peeps).

[Lucario Boricua 7,031]

It's definitely possible to mod the RealHighway to be visible in the transportation legend view, but there were two visual glitches associated to it:

• RHW must be shown black or else the network gets a blurry black border when using another color
• Some different re-distribution of the other network colors could be in order to ensure more things show up

I do believe development of a version compatible with RHW is possible, just not straightforward. Don't give up, as I'm sure Cyclone and you have figured out trickier modding endeavors and turned them into very useful and popular mods.

Here's a sample from my most recent region with widespread freeway use, Sinnoh. The RealHighway are the black lines, monorail/high speed rail are the violet lines, heavy rail is in red, light rail is in blue, all the other roads (regular, one-way, avenue) are in light gray/white. Other transportation view legends omit the streets, leaving them as gaps only discernible when they separate areas of zoned land.

Another thing I never understood is the annoying change from soft color to extremely intense color (the bright yellow) of the zoned areas).

[matias93 7,535]

21 hours ago, Lucario Boricua said:

Another thing I never understood is the annoying change from soft color to extremely intense color (the bright yellow) of the zoned areas).

That's because of the UI transparency adjustement on the time you last saved that city tile.

[Haljackey 17,355]

Before:

After:

[Captain Adam 422]

One of the things I love about SC3000 is the notable progress over the years, you can see how low $ residents and dirty industries disappeared and were replaced by better and cleaner buildings! 

[mattb325 28,880]

 

[SIM-ple Jack 17,445]

I didn't start saving regions till about 4 years ago, and taking pics till about a year or so ago. So I decided to revamp a few old regions. This one was loaded mostly with Maxis, so there was no remorse in deleting stuff. The transportation network was about all I kept. Apparently I was big on limestone and "sunken" back then.

[Naomi57 2,985]

On 11/05/2020 at 5:05 PM, bladeberkman said:

Wow, what a transformation. The fillers look great and compliment your play-style so well. But I have to know: Where did all that dirt go?  Your streets, rails, and farmland look amazing. Would love to know what you did so I can attempt to re-create this look with my terrain mod.

On 11/05/2020 at 5:13 PM, CorinaMarie said:

There is one single Maxis Texture for the dirt which appears adjacent to streets, roads, and rail. I replaced that with a modified version of the R$ Grass. I reduced the patterns to make it more random (especially for how it appears under the rail lines when they are parallel and the texture appears cause of the zoning it's next to).

Here's an advanced copy of that file: Network Dirt to Grass - Texture by Cori v0.07.dat

@bladeberkman, aside from her sheer artistry, Cori's also been cooking up a few other mods that make a huge difference if you don't use the SPAM mod:

• https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/31827-coris-friendly-pedrianas-plants-killer/
• No Maxis Dirt Farms.zip

Here's a few posts with a little more info about these mods:

• https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/758654-acocfpalbn-its-farm-stuff/?tab=comments#post-17
• https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/74369-maxis-farmlands-seems-to-be-missing/?tab=comments#comment-1681748
• https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/759969-how-do-you-define-a-developed-agriculture/?do=findComment&comment=1741606

So Network Dirt to Grass - Texture by Cori v0.07.dat is just one of four mods that contribute to making her farm scenes look so delightful.