Mushy's Random BATs

[Bombardiere 591]

31 minutes ago, T Wrecks said:

You know, you get lots of praise, and that's deserved and all... however, I see a serious problem with those pipelines that hasn't been adressed yet. The problem is this: If you use these pipelines next to any other props, the other props are going to look bad in comparison, and you'll end up having to remake it all!

 

Uh Uh I have to agree with that statement. The pipeline stuff is so good that it kind of break the game.

Seriously the HD is a bit of mixed blessing. It can take the game on a new level, but does make some older work look obsolite.

@MushyMushy These are only a preview pictures I know, but I think nailed the grime spot on.

 

[metarvo 710]

This thread's the place to be today!  All of these additional pieces add so much modularity to the set — and they look good, as usual!

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

These pipelines are... absolutely, thrilling, to, behold!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[kingofsimcity 5,739]

These look absolutely phenomenal.

[weixc812 509]

Oh my gosh! You did an unbelievable job making those pipes magically real!

[T Wrecks 10,209]

 

12 hours ago, Bombardiere said:

Seriously the HD is a bit of mixed blessing. It can take the game on a new level, but does make some older work look obsolite.

Even in SD, these pipelines are a huge step forward. The frame details, the walkways, metal gratings, ladders, and of course the textures...

It's so amazing to see how "mature" BATs have become these days. It's not even that the older stuff was bad! You downloaded it, used it, loved it... but now, when you look at new stuff, the older items often look like toys in comparison.

Of course, there's a price for this to pay...

• 2006: "Hey folks, look at my awesome CBD and the seaport, and the beach promenade, and that industrial area, and whatnot - all on a medium-sized tile!"
  Audience: Ooooh! Aaaaah!
• 2016: "So here's my large tile. It is home to a highway interchange and one half of my oil refinery. Yeah, you can also see a gas station near the edge of the map."
  Audience: The curve radii of those rail tracks leading to the refinery are too narrow. Otherwise quite decent, buddy.

[Terring 6,473]

The pipelines are so detailed and badass. Brilliant work!

On 14/6/2016 at 1:07 PM, T Wrecks said:

• 2006: "Hey folks, look at my awesome CBD and the seaport, and the beach promenade, and that industrial area, and whatnot - all on a medium-sized tile!"
  Audience: Ooooh! Aaaaah!
• 2016: "So here's my large tile. It is home to a highway interchange and one half of my oil refinery. Yeah, you can also see a gas station near the edge of the map."
  Audience: The curve radii of those rail tracks leading to the refinery are too narrow. Otherwise quite decent, buddy.

So true, man!

[RipRap 4,400]

On 6/14/2016 at 5:07 AM, T Wrecks said:

• 2006: "Hey folks, look at my awesome CBD and the seaport, and the beach promenade, and that industrial area, and whatnot - all on a medium-sized tile!"
  Audience: Ooooh! Aaaaah!
• 2016: "So here's my large tile. It is home to a highway interchange and one half of my oil refinery. Yeah, you can also see a gas station near the edge of the map."
  Audience: The curve radii of those rail tracks leading to the refinery are too narrow. Otherwise quite decent, buddy.

LOL so true, the tiniest details of those journals are heavily scrutinized upon when you use mods  

Anyway, those pipes look great!  

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Absolutely fantastic.

[MushyMushy 3,617]

 I have no problem with newer stuff making older gmax stuff look obsolete! All the more reason to remake that stuff too!

(Quick post as I'm in the middle of something) Here's a few more goodies that will find their way into Simmer2's oil lot, with the corresponding JES prop they are aiming to replace:

As a side note: yes, I'm going to also get around to releasing clean/normal variants of these vehicles.

I also made a security truck based on the Toyota Tacoma model used in both car packs I have in the works. Other than golf/club carts, I've noticed that Tacomas are one of the most frequently-used vehicles by security companies in the US. The model they favor is technically the generation after this one but I like this one a lot more so...

And some oil barrels:

---

Unrelated to that, I've been messing around with another side project:

I was mostly interesting in the industrial buildings this place had to offer (it's basically butted up against Tokyo's container port), but I figured "why not just make the yard too?"

Because of that, I've been playing around with some textures. Right now I'm just laying out rails, with maybe a third of them done. I'm going to add the switches and other visual effects last before making the ground textures. Due to the various packs of vehicles I've made I already have almost everything I need model-wise except for the buildings (and because they are industrial offices or warehouses none of them are very complex). Obviously this is a long term background project.

Fair warning: seeing as this is Tokyo's rail hub, one can assume that this is a very massive lot (you can't completely see all of it in the Google Earth shot I provided). From my rough estimates the total length may actually be longer than a Medium City Tile (>2km / >128 tiles total length) and very wide as well (30-40 tiles). With this in mind I'll have to divide the modular lot sections up in a way that it will fit for those of us who play on Medium City Tiles. What this means for you guys: this will not be a very flexible lot placement-wise. And to clarify "modular," I'm splitting it up because I have to (lot size limits), not because this is going to be modular in a customizabile sense - but just looking the small preview of some of the rail curves in the texture image should be a good enough explanation for this.

You can also see on the top right in the piece of the texture WIP I provided that there is a Shinkansen service yard partially integrated with the JR Freight yard. It will be included.

[matias93 7,535]

And this is the reason why so much people believes we are living on a computer simulation: it is simply too much plausible, because our own simulations are too much realistic. Your work is a huge leap forward blurring that line.

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Ford F350, Chevrolet Express, Ford F250, Toyota Hilux. The fact that you can even see what vehicles they are is just a testament to how amazing your modelling skills are.

[TakemeThere 5,833]

That rail yard is a ridiculously huge project but would truly be something to behold, wish you the best of luck completing it.
On another note just the other day I was mulling over the idea of making some steel pipes but now that I've seen your work I think I'll just wisely put that idea aside

[metarvo 710]

This is a new level of what I can only call gritty crispness.  Even the dirt can be seen more clearly on these than it could on some older props, if that makes any sense.  The addition of little things like oil barrels adds much to the appearance of a lot.  The bulk of the the industrial buildings in my area are energy related, and there are barrels everywhere.

Keep up the good work, Mushy! 

[tankmank 853]

You had me at Tokyo, i generally never really make space for large railway infrastructure, in my current region i didn;t even plan properly and to overcome that i have it going underground in many places, but i think i will look at making some space for this. 

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Thanks for the nice comments!

I'm currently working on finishing up the needed models for Simmer2's massive oil refinery. I focused on vehicles today so that department is almost complete. Now to just finish the pipe set and related models!

Employees' cars

Some more equipment

Company-branded oil tanker (WIP)

[raynev1 1,886]

WOW ! They look great . 

[Bombardiere 591]

Thank you for making slightly older cars. I think those could paas from 70's till 10's, so these would fit into larger city style variation. Only if you could make historic cars or may be even wagons.

[MushyMushy 3,617]

1 hour ago, Bombardiere said:

Thank you for making slightly older cars. I think those could paas from 70's till 10's, so these would fit into larger city style variation. Only if you could make historic cars or may be even wagons.

Yeah, most of those cars shown aren't very recent. The newest one in that little selection is the pickup truck model (09-14), but the rest are pre-2000. The oldest one is the Suburban model, which was made from 73-91. So the years go from 73-14... you got the range right! The models were taken from the US car pack I'm working on, which I included a wide variety of model years in. Plenty of cars from the 80s and 90s (I'm part of that crowd) still on the roads here and I tried to represent that.

[Simmer2 23,786]

MushyMushy for president!

[SimCoug 5,973]

I haven't been around much lately, but I just stopped by to see what was cookn' and your newest autos look phenomenal!  The improvement from your early work is night and day.  Keep it up Mushy! 

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Thanks for the nice comments!

---

I've been quiet for a bit, but I do have something going on in between my RL obligations. I'm sure we all remember PEG's geothermal power station - it looked pretty decent, but it's scaled to fit in with Maxis's minuscule power plants. Well, I'm not really a big fan of unrealistic scale, so I decided to make a new plant. It's still going to be small by real life standards (they're generally very spread out), but it'll be closer to a realistic look. It's going to sit on a 10x13 lot. Note that the textures on the Main Building are not final - it looks like a messy patchwork because what I've done on it so far is made of components copied from the other buildings. I also plan to make an HD sign at the entrance that has some form of identification on it. The vehicles are actually completely finished (HD, special for this lot), but I didn't feel like loading up that model file to make a preview render because it's a hefty file and it takes a bit to render out due to the cars having a fair bit of detail.

The real life images shown are placeholders to give you a general idea of what will eventually occupy those spots.

And here's a scaled-down look at the custom base texture (with the general location of the building footprints - obviously those aren't in the real texture). It's already split up and in-game... all of the 130 textures work. Many, many thanks to rsc for giving me instructions on how to do that easily. The location of the well heads that I need to make aren't shown because I'm not entirely sure where I'll put them all yet. It doesn't really matter since in real life they're scattered about, likely wherever gives easiest access to the desired hot substance (I'm guessing steam?).

As a closing, judging by the size of the building, what do you guys think the plop cost, upkeep cost, and power output should be? I personally don't have any ideas so far, but keep in mind that in real life geothermal plants do not produce a lot of power if you make a suggestion.

[nos.17 5,120]

Plop cost: Significant, maybe $350 000

Upkeep/Power Output: From my (very) limited research, I was thinking a low(ish) monthly cost of maybe $250-300/month. Add a relatively low output (50-1000 MW seems to be the most common IRL), divide by like 400 resulting at about 1.25MW (translating to about 2740 MWh/month in-game. Basically, between 2-3k MWh/month would be a pretty balanced number in my opinion. See my post below for an explanation.

 

----------
What I am still wondering about, however, is the state of that vehicle pack that seemed promising so long ago. I have even been writing a few scripts to use with Reader to facilitate adding dozens and dozens of props to families. It turned out to work so well, I impressed even myself. So ya, I'm excited to hear any updates.

  Edited August 11, 2016 by nos.17  
I'm an engineer and I can't math

[raynev1 1,886]

Cool new project you are working on . The models look great so far .

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Those well heads... will they need a visible piping (or other) connection to the main building? I'm asking because if the lack of such a visible connection could be justified, this would open up the possibility to expand the geothermal power plant by placing additional well heads outside the main lot. In game, these could provide additional power, thus boosting the overall power output of the plant. With careful adjustment of the values, a price/performance curve could be achieved where the power plant becomes gradually more efficient the more well heads are placed around it... just some food for thought.

[APSMS 1,892]

I'd suggest between 4 000 and 7 000 SimMWh

IIRC, the PEG plant has around 6 000 for a 4x5 lot? Or are we referring to the rural, MTP version? I think that version is by Paeng.

While you could argue that the PEG lot is slightly cheaty, it is designed to be used, and I would argue that any powerplant in game that produces less than 6 000 for an 11x13 footprint is going to be borderline useless, and require modding upon download (an undesirable situation).

I am willing to sacrifice power output per grid square for realism and no pollution, but there are limits, and I don't want to have to plop a bunch of powerplants in my city just to get it up to basic level. Keep in mind that the Oil Powerplant produces what, 17 000 (<that's the plop cost) 7 000 power for a significantly smaller lot? You want to strike a balance between realism and usability, because ultimate realism will always require a custom, end-user produced facility layout anyways, and the goal (IMO) should be to make a highly accessible, as closely realistic, LOT as possible without going overboard. I like PEGs lot for my cities, but it has the problem of approaching capacity quickly. I only have a city of about 200 000, and need about 3 of PEG's powerplants to power the city (I actually end up using the Black Hole PP more often, cause it's so simple).

I do like T Wrecks' idea of potentially making it [pseudo] modular, so that additional capabilities would be able to be added without having to plop another of the main lot.

@nos.17 I'm confused by your math. I know SC4 kWH are not RL figures, but where exactly did you come up with those calculations? (I'd like to know for future reference).

EDIT: Scratch that, while my job numbers are a little wonky (for some reason, about 1:1 even with a CAM 2.1 Datpacked installation), I'm running about 25 000 MWh of power consumption in the main city alone, and I seem to have bulldozed all the PEG Geothermal plants in the process for being too inefficient.

[Gn_leugim 853]

I like those ind props a lot! definitely useful

[nos.17 5,120]

@APSMS ... After taking a second look at things and reasoning it out myself, it turns out that my calculations were wrong. That's what I get for blindly trusting the first link on google...  

 

SC4's units of kWh/month are actually RL units, albeit expressed in a different way. If you don't know, first read up on the differences between power and energy. The unit MWh/month is just disguised as a unit of power: energy (MWh), divided by time. Energy per time = power.

The math:

Cancel those units and you'll find it's relatively easy to convert. So, given that the largest plant produces 3450 MW,

2.5E6 MWh/month is a vastly outrageous number for SC4, so we have to experiment around a little to find a number that works well (about 10 MW, which is not too vastly out of the picture when considering the plants in 2nd or 3rd world countries).

Hope this helps and if anyone sees anything wrong, don't hesitate to say so.

 

@MushyMushy ... it seems to me that the power output is very much a user-preference sort of thing, so maybe it would be a wise idea to just include a little blurb in the readme with a screenshot showing users how to change it themselves. AFIK, there is only one property that controls power output. Easy to change and you wouldn't have to bother modding a few different versions.

 

 

  Edited August 11, 2016 by nos.17  

[APSMS 1,892]

@nos.17 Thanks for the summary (sort of). I know the difference between Energy and Power, but I had been wondering how you arrived at the number in question. What I meant in my statement isn't that kWh aren't real units, but rather than SC4 doesn't properly represent their usage, so, like Simoleans, their meaning is abstracted and must be determined separate from RL capacities. I was hoping you had a sort of conversion factor between the game kWh and RL kWh usage.

I find that, generally, unit conversions work best when you keep it simple. Not that your math is wrong, per se, but there are some shortcomings in your assumptions, first being that utility grade stations section of Wikipedia only refers to a nation's total Geothermal capacity, not the size of the largest Plant, which would appear to be the Geysers in California, with 1650MW nameplate capacity (1517 MW nominal installed capacity, and 955 MW average reliable capacity).

Secondly, that 955 MW is a[n hourly] Power rating, and therefore the plant (the largest one, mind) produces 955 MW x 24h/day x 30d/month = 687.6 GWh (687 000 MWh) per month. It's the exact same thing as dividing 955 by .001388 (well, almost) but there's no rounding and you can do the math on a sheet of paper.

Clearly there is a misconception here about how much power IRL a Powerstation produces vs what SC4 considers adequate.

The in-game Solar PP produces 5 000 MWh, and the Nuclear PP produces 16 000 MWh (both monthly). The largest US nuclear PP is rated at ~4 000 MW, and the largest Solar Concentrator plant--the type of solar power in-game--(Ivanpah, in CA) is rated at ~400 MW nameplate. In-game nuclear is only 3x more powerful (potentially) than Solar, but IRL it's almost 10x more powerful (at the extremes) and this doesn't account for the fact that Solar plant is currently operating at 40% rated capacity, while the Nuclear operates at ~90% all the time, reliably.

SO clearly some concessions were made for gameplay regarding renewable energy. AND game figures do not properly correlate to RL PP capabilities. A 16 000 MWh/month station would be, IRL, 10 wind turbines, but in-game it's the second most productive PP (base, obviously).

If we assume a nominal Power capacity of 350 MW for Mushy's powerplant (moderate size, SC4 scale ontwithstanding), that works out to 252 000 MWh/month. Compared to the solar collector at 400MW, we could suggest 4 000 SMWh/month (SimCity MWh/month). If we take a modular approach, then each additional vent could produce between 250 and 600 SMWh/month (the Geysers PP field in CA is spread over 22 PPs and 350 wells, giving nominally 4.3 MW per well; apply the scaling that Maxis did to the Wind PP, or SimCity Kurier's Wind PP--750 SMWh/month--and that seems like a sort of balanced number, depending on the cost/SkWh and pollution produced).

I would still like it to err on the higher side (if with appropriately higher total cost), to make it easier to use in the large cities possible today with NAM and CAM and the myriad assortment of plugins, but I would be willing to change it depending on the vision. I do like that modular idea, though. Maybe, if it's not too much, have the base lot, and then large and small well-heads to accommodate the user (and let the willing modify it personally to their heart's content).

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Thanks for the input! I'll use it to figure out what I'll set the stats for. I intend to add some basic modularity with wellheads to increase the output so that while the initial ratio of production versus space isn't very good, you can make it more efficient by maximizing the modular function . My guess is that digging the wellheads and setting up the main generators isn't overly cheap, but the general upkeep isn't too bad (I mean, it's just a bunch of pipes full of steam and hot water right? They also don't need to buy any combustibles.) so I'm leaning towards making the upfront cost on the pricier side (but not terrible) and the upkeep relatively cheap. The other trade off, of course, is the space. So in the end, I'm aiming for a moderately expensive facility with relatively cheap upkeep that will take up a lot of space for the power it produces.

In all honesty, I like power plants a lot and wouldn't be averse to making (over time) a more realistic set of them that covers all the bases. That way if you were playing the game "for realz" you could pick between any of mine based on their strengths and weaknesses. Since I'd be bringing SC4 power generation into the modern era of modding, I could theoretically make them all modular, similar to how they added on to in real life. This is just an idea I had in passing, and of course it wouldn't be some quick thing to throw together since most power plants are far more complex than the one I'm making now.

---

I actually updated this thread today primarily to explain what I want to accomplish right now. I've been super busy these days (senior year, starting a job, art competitions, college apps, and managing a club) and don't have much time for modding. At the points where I actually have free time, I'm usually so burnt out I'm just ready to play a game or something... and proceed to fall asleep on my keyboard.

Here's some important things at the top of my list that are reasonably feasible based on my current schedule:

•  American School Buses - If I dropped the additional bus I was working on from the pack, I could easily render the models and package it up for release. It would only be 5 bus models multiplied by the 4 rotations. 20 models is no big deal. I might be able to push this one through soon so I can say I've released something this year! I'm also hoping to build a Japanese-themed region (and make BATs for it), so I need to get through these things that aren't related to that!
• 3DS Max basic texturing guide - I told someone I'd make this, and in all honesty I've wanted to make some basic tutorials for a variety of things about using the software. I feel like some people are tuned off by the steep learning curve (if you haven't used 3D programs before) and how most of the helpful guides are scattered about all over the place and many of them are very old (for gmax).
• Finishing active requests - I really want to finish the props I've been working on for @Simmer2's amazing oil depot - I want to get my hands on that lot! I also have another (small) request by someone else that I've been needing to finish for a long time.

Once things settle down some I'd say the next thing I'd add to that list is FH 21. I'd really love to get it released, and I'm probably not the only one waiting (im)patiently for it. The huge car packs and truck packs are something I'll work on here and there, they are just generally daunting projects so we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

/end wall of text

-Mushy