Twin Rivers Region - a work in progress

[catty-cb 4,412]

51 minutes ago, Silur said:

...Maybe you'll be back ...Good luck and all the best.

 

Thanks ... I haven't left the community just taking a step back or possibly sideways to the SC3 boards here

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/forum/314-SimCity-3000/

And the STEX here

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/category/42-sc3k-maxis-files/

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/category/41-SimCity-3000-files/

and of course you can always find me over at my site

https://community.simtropolis.com/clubs/26-city-builders-website/

 

[Turjan 1,048]

I'm glad to see you back and in a good mood!

[dedgren 830]

So here I am with part 2 of this update.  I left off [interrupted, saving here- Windows 10 updating.  Grrrr...]

UPDATE 6/11/17:  Well, that, err... stunk.  Windows decided, for whatever reason, that I had put off a force-fed update long enough.  I tried to postpone it when the popup appeared on my screen and, nope, it wouldn't let me.  On Friday, a day later, the computer was still wrestling with the update, as all I had was a black screen with a greyed-out Windows pattern and a small spinning circle of white dots near the bottom.  That spun, and spun, and spun...

Well, you get the picture.

I don't know why Billy Mays is smiling, because I certainly wasn't.  Repeated attempts to restart the update failed, and this carried into Saturday.  I could not seem to get back to the familiar "rollback" screen to tell the computer to revert to the most recent recovery point.  By the last night, it was apparent that Windows was hopelessly corrupted.

Now, this looks like a happy story for once, Cities: Skylines-wise, right?  Our favorite usual suspect wasn't at fault.  Best I knew, C:S was working just fine.  It was a Windows issue, and all I needed to do was to get the Microsoft Miracle back up off the floor and running.  Right?  Right!

Well, wrong-o.  Shame on me, I guess, for believing what I read, but when I finally was able to boot into a recovery console- always have a recovery disk around somewhere, folks- the only option I had was to restore Windows was with a clean installation.  The nice folks from Redmond assured me that "Your user-created files will remain untouched" or words to that effect.

Uh-huh, tell me another one.

But what choice did I have?  The blow was softened somewhat by the fact that nearly every program I run these days is downloadable, and not disk-based.  This includes Cities: Skylines.  So with some trepidation but with the confidence that only a fool can muster I forged ahead and hit the button...

Several hours later everything was reinstalled and I fired up C:S for the first time since this disaster started on Thursday.  It all went great until I clicked on "LOAD" under the Map Editor tab.  No files.  I just about lost it.

A saved game is a "user-created file," right?  My reinstallation of Windows shouldn't have touched it, right?  At least that's what they told me.

Well, they lied.  Things that are saved in Cities: Skylines are somewhere at the end of this path

C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\...

I went and looked and there was absolutely nothing there.  Wiped. Blank.  All my saved maps and games, including the now working Jessamine.  All my heightmaps.  All my custom brushes and textures.  All gone.  I was devastated.

So where do we go from here?  I was about to tell you back on Thursday that my plan was to use the summer through the end of August to show you my work on the sandbox map of Arkadia Valley that I had created.  As I did that, I would gain further skill with various C:S techniques and gameplay aspects and post CJ entries here every few days.  I will then, in late August, go and ride my bicycle 2,250 miles/3,620 kilometers from the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota down the river to Venice out in Louisiana's Mississippi River Delta out in the Gulf of Mexico.

Me and my high-mileage Surly

I'll return to Alaska in late October and had planned to pick up Jessamine from there.  Obviously my non-bicycle related plans are going to have to change.

So I'll leave the screenies of work in progress...

...work that was in progress, dammit...

of Arkadia Valley that follow these words up to stand as a memorial to what might have been.  I have 20 or 30 more which I'll probably post from time to time over the summer when one or another fits in with whatever it is I'm doing.  And I'll put up a post later today with some more info.  Sound like a plan?

Railroad bridge and associated approach terraforming.  Remember how "network bridge over road and water" forever remained a SC4 Holy Grail?

High cliffline

Small stream canyon terraforming.  Creating viable small streams is not easy in C:S.

The Gunflint Hills

All for now.  Catch you later.

David

22,000/301

[gfvsims 169]

Welcome back! I look forward to seeing many more of your beautiful screenshots!

[raynev1 1,886]

Good to see you back at it again .

[boformer 3,169]

On 7.6.2017 at 9:12 PM, dedgren said:

So after bringing Heather's mom up to Alaska to take over caregiver duties, I took a bike ride.  That is a very long story I won't take the time to tell here.  If you are interested to learn more, you can check out a blog I did to document the ride at www.b2bbiketrip.com [linkie].  Suffice it to say that, in a little less than three months I completed a solo unsupported ride from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Key West, Florida, riding about 3,600 miles/5,800 kilometers in the process.  I had a great time!

Wow, that's impressive! I'm also planning a longer ride through eastern Europe/Asia, and I would love to explore North America as well.

[dedgren 830]

Thanks to all the TRR Regulars^* who have stopped by and commented!  I can't thank everyone enough for the great reception that this CJ has gained over the coming up on two years that it has been around.

An announcement- the post I was working on last Thursday, the one that was rudely interrupted by a Windows update, has been completed and is here [linkie].  Thanks for taking a look.

David

^* A TRR Regular is anyone who has ever left a comment- even just one- here or over at 3RR on SC4 Devotion [linkie].  Welcome back!

[raynev1 1,886]

      That was one heck of a trip on a bicycle , I bet . I meant to mention it in the last post . I use to ride bicycles , those were good times . Windows can be quite a bugger sometimes . I'm still using an old XP machine and into SC4 , I don't believe it could handle CS .

      Great to see you back , and be safe on your adventures . Maybe share your route , that would be interesting . Take care and have fun .

[dedgren 830]

39 minutes ago, raynev1 said:

      That was one heck of a trip on a bicycle , I bet . I meant to mention it in the last post . I use to ride bicycles , those were good times . Windows can be quite a bugger sometimes . I'm still using an old XP machine and into SC4 , I don't believe it could handle CS .

      Great to see you back , and be safe on your adventures . Maybe share your route , that would be interesting . Take care and have fun .

Here's this year's big ride, my friend.  Thanks for asking.

.  Than

Downhill almost all the way.  Almost.

David

[gfvsims 169]

So sorry to read of your Windows woes (Windwoes... heh). I had a very similar thing happen to me when I updated from Windows 8 to 10. Fortunately my hard drive is split into two partitions, with all my documents separated from the operating system, so I didn't lose anything important. I did spend several hours worrying that I had, though. And I had another problem with the last update (which turned out to be an incompatibility with my graphics card driver). Why aren't major updates ever painless?!

[dedgren 830]

So the answer is... Jessamine!

There's just too much heartache in creating another C:S map right now from scratch, especially when you do it the way I do: building from sea level up one contour line at a time.  No, really.  Arkadia Valley took about two weeks to draw in its entirety and worked from a game water hydrological standpoint- i.e. everything flowed in the right direction- from the get-go.  When there's a world of ready-made terrain out there for the taking that just needs a bit of tweaking I decided, especially in light of the time demands I face this summer, to use some of it instead.  So I fired up Terrain Party [linkie]

and went with an 18 km square/~10 square mile patch of land southwest of Lexington, Kentucky I already have done quite a bit of work on- Jessamine.

It's actually a more clean solution to start from scratch again.  At least that's the way I rationalized.  All that work I did- locating roads and the rail line, planting trees...

...a lot of trees.  One point two million trees, thanks for asking.  All placed by individual mouse click...

was great practice and several things have come along that will make it a lot easier this time around, chief among them Samsam TS's incredible Move It mod [linkie].  There are a lot more road, tree and rock assets out there than there were 18 months ago as well.  So it's not work I'm doing all over again.  It's work I have the opportunity to do better.

After downloading the Jessamine quad [linkie to one you can actually read - warning huge file: 23 mB]

the first thing I did was to terraform the bed of the Kentucky River to reflect a 10 meter/33 foot drop in elevation from the southeast corner to the northwest corner of the quad.  That's about 40 river miles/65 kilometers along a very windy course, and a drop of less than one foot/300 centimeters per mile.  So a smooth and regular descending riverbed is essential if the game water is all to flow in the right direction.  I also terraformed the bed of the Dix River below Dix Dam, which impounds Lake Herrington.

A more detailed account of all this will be the subject of my next update later this week.

Moving on once that task was done, I started work on something I should have done the first time around, but never worked on seriously.  I needed, in order to efficiently and accurately place roads, streets, lanes, the rail line and high tension power lines, to develop a to-scale map of the C:S quad with these things overlaid that would guide me in doing this.  I started by creating a very large- 9000 pixel square- terrain map in Paint Shop Pro X9 [linkie] and overlaying a 7200 pixel square image of the 81 tiles of Jessamine accurately on it.

I then started with the rail line and a couple of roads and started laying them as vector lines on the topo background.

This is what it looks like when I turn the game terrain layer on.

When this work is completed, I'll have an accurate map on Jessamine's terrain of where these major infrastructure items are located.  I will then place them first before I start once again...

...groan...

planting trees.  I'll keep you, err... posted on my progress.

David

22148/309

 

[Tarkus 6,933]

It's always fascinating to see the way you work with city-building games, David.  The amount of detail you put into your efforts has always been inspiring to me (and I suspect many others), and the work here is no exception. 

The Windows woes are aggravating, however--having had systems crash hard because of wonky Microsoft updates before (completely lost a laptop to one), I feel your pain.

That looks like quite the amazing bike adventure, too!

-Alex

[westy177 203]

My god thats amazing!

[Horus_Kol 118]

@dedgren I've been trying to use terrain.party to get my home city of Adelaide into the game - but the area seems to be too flat - I don't seem to get well defined river systems from the height map date. How'd you go about doing your maps by hand?

[dedgren 830]

20 hours ago, Horus_Kol said:

@dedgren I've been trying to use terrain.party to get my home city of Adelaide into the game - but the area seems to be too flat - I don't seem to get well defined river systems from the height map date. How'd you go about doing your maps by hand?

Out and about, H_K.  I'll get back to you in this comment later this evening.

UPDATE 6/14:  Okay, so here's the short answer.  I'm happy to do a tutorial with screenies if you think it would be more clear.

1. Start a new map in the map editor using the theme of your choice.  It will be dead flat when it appears.  My game has this terrain at an elevation of 60.00 meters in the "Moderate" theme.  I'm not sure if this is the case across the board, but 40.00 meters is plenty high enough unless you want your lake or sea to have an abyss.

2. Lower the "sea level" to 0.00.

3.  Using the "flatten" terraforming tool and the max size- 2000- shaded edge round brush, set the terrain height to 5.00 and level out the lowest depths of your lake/sea area.  Not all lakes- just the one you want your river system to drain into.  If you are not terraforming a lake or sea into your map, then reduce the size of the brush accordingly and flatten the lowest point of your main river on the edge where it leaves the map.  I will presume you are creating a lake or sea from this point, but what to do if you are just doing a river should be pretty easy to figure out from that.

4.  Decide on what elevation you want the surface of your lake or sea to be.  I generally use 39 meters so that it is just below the 40 meter contour line.  The game does not treat hydrological systems as an exact science, so you ultimately may need to adjust up or down- probably down.  DO NOT reset your sea level at this point, though.

5.  Using the flatten tool sized as required, create your sea or lake area in five meter increments (15.00, 20.00, 25.00 and so on) until you reach the contour elevation just above the level you chose for the water body in question.  You should now have the lake or sea placed on the map.  Don't forget about islands.  As long as you are not putting rivers or streams on them, you can make these quickly with the raise/lower terrain tool with the strength of the tool set to 0.005, which gives you a very gentle raising or lowering of the land.  DO NOT forget to press the return key after setting the force.  Remember that you can use the undo button if you goof up and forget- and you will.

6.  Zoom in on the map as far as you can and use the smooth terrain terraforming tool set at 51.00-200.00 all over your lake or sea bottom.  You should see light one meter contour lines appear between the five meter contour lines.  When these are roughly evenly spaced between the five meter lines you have a smooth instead of a stepped slope and you can stop. 

7.  This is still gross terraforming at this point, so you shouldn't sweat making things look perfect and detailed.  That will happen later.

8.  Starting from the shoreline you've created for your lake or sea and begin working your way up in 5.00 meter increments with the flatten tool, pretty much the same way as for the water body.  Have an idea of where you want your rivers and streams to be- a stubby pencil diagram on a sheet of scratch paper will work fine for this- and add elevation around them, bringing the newly lowered, and at some point raised terrain to a "V" where the waterways will cross the newly formed contour lines.  When you start adding new terrain above the default level- in my case 60 meters- you started with carry it out to all the edges of the map with as large as possible a brush.

9.  Once you are above the level at which your highest river will leave the edge of the map by about 10 meters or so you should have some fairly well defined valleys.  At this point you can then use the smooth terrain tool the same way described in step 5 above to smooth out the five meter steps.  Be very careful along rivers and streams to not lose the well defined "V" shape of streambed contours.  At worst, they can become more "U" shaped on larger waterways, but care must be taken or the game water will not behave once it is placed and started.  A proper streambed will have neither "holes" or "bumps" between the contour lines.  This takes some practice, but skill will come with time.

10.  Elevations above this point can be created with the raise/lower terrain tool, again set at a very low- two leading zero- strength.  This is done in pretty much the same way as islands are terraformed in step 5 above.  Your imagination is pretty much the only limit here.  Don't be afraid to experiment.

This process will take a while.  It took me about two weeks to create the Arkadia Valley terrain using this method, but it worked from a hydrological standpoint from day one.

I plan to do a tutorial about placement of water generators in the CJ here in the next couple of posts.  That should help you as well.

Let me know if there might be anything else I could help with.

David

[Horus_Kol 118]

57 minutes ago, dedgren said:

Out and about, H_K.  I'll get back to you in this comment later this evening.

David

No worries - I've got a day of work ahead of me anyway

[dedgren 830]

So I'm moving right along.  A couple of hours at this every day and I'll have this latest mapping effort knocked out by the weekend. 

On the topo layer things don't really jump out at you.

But when you pull up the C:S layer, the roads really pop.

I'll note that Paint Shop Pro (the poor man's Photoshop), which I have over a decade of experience working with isn't really intended to be a mapping program.  I've just figured out how to stack the vector lines so that they pretty much look like what you could generate with dedicated cartographic software.  I just drop a line on the topo map roughly where the road is located then add nodes and pull them so that they overlay the road.

Each read segment consists of a vector line with anything from a handful to several hundred nodes, all hand positioned.  Short straight roads take a few minutes apiece.  A long windy one can take an hour.

Here's another before and after.

This is the area around the village of Wilmore.  Ultimately all the local streets and lanes will be added.  There are, as you can see, a lot of them.

Here's what this looks like right now, though, on a C:S map.

It is interesting.  I have the map and the topo registered pretty well.  US Route 68, which is the solid red road that goes from the top right center of the map to the lower right, is pretty much exactly where it should be as it descends into the Kentucky River gorge, crosses the river on Brooklyn Bridge, then climbs back out in a wide arc up the palisade on the south side of the river.  On the other hand, the Southern Railroad line, which is right where it should be on the topo map, is not perfectly aligned with the cuts and fills that are visible on the C:S map northeast of Wilmore.  That's okay, though.  I'm not trying for perfection.  I just want things close enough so that I can place the actual infrastructure in the game map where it is supposed to go in relation to the terrain and everything else.  I'm sure I will be adjusting, but for game software that you can buy for quite a bit less than $100 I'd say that Cities: Skylines is pretty amazing in its ability to accurately model real terrain from a heightmap.

So how will I use this map once it is finished, you ask?  What I am hoping I can do is create a PNG overlay with just the roads, rail line, powerlines and the few other features I will add on an otherwise transparent background and then use a mod to put it in the Map Editor.  The choices in the Steam Workshop for doing this appear to be:

1.  Image Overlay by Play Nicely [linkie]

2.  EvenBetterImageOverlay by Lanceris [linkie]

3.  OverLayer V2 by princekolt [linkie]

Does anyone have any experience using any of these?  I'm ready to just dive in, but any suggestions based on first-hand experience would really be appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

Oh, and if posts about mapping, even C:S mapping, just make your eyes glaze over, here's a random screenie from the gone but not forgotten Arkadia Valley.

Enjoy!

David

22371/315

 

[Roadman20 601]

Welcome back! Good to see TRR making a comeback. Interesting to see how you approach making map terrain as usual, mainly since I'm back ending those modifications on my build.

[dedgren 830]

Seems to be a slow day, so how about a teaser? 

All major and most minor roads are done.  Locks and dams are mapped.  Power lines are in.  I'm left with a lot of city/village streets and rural lanes and drives.  Tomorrow, maybe?

David

[dedgren 830]

Another teaser. IS THIS GREAT OR WHAT!?!

Woo hoo!!  I'll post about this tomorrow.

David

[dedgren 830]

So not tonight.  It's too late to do a proper post justice.  But here's a last teaser- a threefer.

#1

More than just roads and rail can be precisely located by an overlay.  This is Lock and Dam No. 7.

#2

It takes a bit of fiddling, but the registration, once dialed in, is pretty precise.  A high tension power line crosses the screenie from top to bottom in the center.

#3

And transparency is just icing on the cake.  Jessamine's infrastructure will start going in tomorrow.

David

 

[gfvsims 169]

That is awesome, David! I wish I had your patience for this kind of thing!

[dedgren 830]

I'm just having too much fun exploring this.  Even more teasers, then.

US 27 graded down the hill approaching the Loyd Murphy Bridge.  The dashed road is the old US 27 across the Camp Nelson bridge, which is now closed.  The old highway runs under the huge fill through a tunnel.

The overlay positioning is not exact.  But it gets me close enough to figure everything out.

Still hoping I can stop having so much fun and do a post today.

Cheers.

David

[dedgren 830]

So here we finally are.  By now you've certainly figured out that somehow I wound up getting an overlay to work in my game.  I originally had these grandiose plans to do a post about my search for the right mod and all the work I had to do to get things going right.  But that was then, this is now.  The first mod I tried worked great.  And everything went very smoothly after that.  More about that in a minute.

I've told you that I registered- in other words lined up- an image of my game map- Jessamine quad- on a USGS topo map of the area.  I then drew vector lines in essence tracing all the roads, rail line, high tension power lines, the airport, and locks and dams just a ways past the edge of the quad.  That looked like this.

This was several days of work.  The map is huge- 8,000 pixels square- with the game map part of the image being 7,200 pixels square.  Each pixel, then, represented five meters on the ground.  My Paint Shop Pro program was groaning by the time I had created with several days of work over 100 individual vector layers, each consisting of several vector lines.  When I was done laying out all the named roads and highways in the quad along with the other things I mentioned, I had this after I "hid" the map and topo background.

I then reduced this to a single 4,096 pixel square PNG file, which allowed a transparent background.  I was ready to choose a mod.

I mentioned that there are several on the Steam Workshop.  I'll cut to the chase and tell you my first choice was princekolt's Overlayer V2 [linkie].  The description seemed straightforward and it appeared to be the most current and full-featured.  It said to name the overlay image to be used "overlay.png" and place it in the "Files" folder at the end of the following path.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Cities_Skylines\Files\

Because my Steam program is installed, along with my other programs, on an SSD drive set up as the A: drive, I changed the path to

A:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Cities_Skylines\Files\

and I was in business.  Depending on your individual computer setup you probably won't have to make this change.  I'll note that I gleaned the 4,096 pixel square size from reading the 13 pages of comments on the mod.  princekolt's description does not state this explicitly and in fact he says "the higher the size the higher the resolution" in the game.  I will tell you that, if you are just looking for assistance in placing things, 4,096 pixels² is plenty big.  princekolt also says an "alpha layer [is] allowed and encouraged."   I don't know why, because the overlay worked fine for me without one.  The thing I did do was increase the transparency of the entire PNG image down to 20%.  This is based on firing it up for the first time during a test run and discovering that a 100% opaque overlay is just that- opaque.  You can't see what you are positioning under it.  I made a SWAG and increased the transparency and it worked great.

Here's what I first saw when I booted the game up in the Map Editor.

The arrow points to yet more screen bling- an button appearing as an exclamation point in a dot.  This is the on-off switch for the overlay.  The game loads with the overlay set to off.

Mouse-clicking the button gave me this a second or two later.

The overlay creates, as best I can tell, absolutely no lag in the game's performance.  Scrolling around the map I was seeing areas like this right where they were supposed to be.

Note the powerline path running from the bottom of the image diagonally off to the left.  You can also see the airport runway I included at the upper left.  This is a fantastic tool for those who are seeking to reproduce a real-life area with everything located where it is supposed to go.

Here's the Camp Nelson area of the map where US Route 27 crosses the Kentucky River on the Loyd Murphy bridge.  The old Route 27 is the dashed map line.  The locations of the lines aren't on there with surveyor's precision, but they are just about perfect for the for the C:S player who can refer to the real world map if any questions arise.

Here's what just a few minutes work just laying the roads on the lines got me.

Because the game "terrain" doesn't deform under a road with the same exact effect you can achieve with heavy equipment, you may have to work at things a bit to get them the way you want them.  Again, this is a computer game costing a small fraction of a $100 bill.  I say it is just about incredible what you can do.

And there is plenty to reward the player who likes roads and highways realistically graded.  Turning on the game's topo lines is a great help as they show you in conjunction with the use of the overlay right where cuts and fills need to go and grading needs to be done.  In the screenie below, I have graded US 27 towards a planned cut through the hilltop immediately to the right of center of the image.  Doing this in advance of laying "pavement" just makes your roads look incredible.

I'll address some planned tweaks and an idea for using the overlay for something you can't currently do in the game in a future update.

Enjoy!

David

22716/322

[sstyrnol 21]

Amazing work!

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Wow! Thanks for the detailed tutorial. In SC4 I usually made my own maps from scratch. There are some good maps on the workshop but this really inspired me to get back to map making, especially with that overlay mod I didn't know existed. Great work. Looking forward to the next update.

 

 

[dedgren 830]

So another teaser.  Actually, a three-ser.

The light dashed overlay line is one of the several paths of high tension transmission towers and lines that originate from the E. W. Brown Power Station adjacent to Dix Dam.  I am using the overlay to position the towers tonight.

The towers are the smaller version of the Electricity Pylon by Zuben [linkie].  These are the only US style transmission towers in the workshop- the vanilla game doesn't give you any.  Even though the selection is limited I would say these are pretty good.  I wish that they didn't have the concrete base but other than that they are just like the ones (sans wires, of course) that I remember running out in the countryside that lay between the western Chicagoland 'burbs.

The overlay makes them a snap to place in a perfect line and then SamSamTS's amazing and essential Move It mod [linkie] allows them to be oriented perfectly.

Summer, for us Northern Hemisphere types, arrives in an hour.  Catch you later.

David

[gfvsims 169]

Nice work! Btw, is it just me or are the images in your latest post not loading?

[sstyrnol 21]

Images are gone for me as well...  

[dedgren 830]

Hi again, folks.  Just returned from a 650 km/400 mile bicycle ride from my home near Wasilla, Alaska to Chena Hot Springs northeast of Fairbanks.  Went with a friend, carried everything we needed, camped all the way.  Cities: Skylines can't be played on my iPhone so it got a week's rest along with this CJ.

Back home tonight.  Back to work on Jessamine tomorrow.  I'll fix those screenies in the last post, too.

David