That Unused Moisture Data View

[NCGAIO 562]

On 07/07/2016 at 6:19 PM, CorinaMarie said:

I know I haven't created anything original here. It was simply something I found and decided to play with

Just remember that it was because of people like you and this investigative spirit that the game came to be what it is today! 

I will look for the old material that may be of help to post!

 

 

 

 

[fredinno 54]

And interesting idea would be to use this to make a 'groundwater' mod- like in real life, areas with more subterrain moisture would produce more water, and pumping water would decrease the moisture in that particular area. Would make a desalination plant really useful

[rsc204 21,836]

Whilst I agree with the sentiment here, I'm not sure that's really technically possible. Maxis had originally envisioned exactly that, but as with a number of other cool features, they were cut from the final release where they presumably run out of time to implement them. As such, some code still exists that controls this, but to this day no one has been able to decipher it sufficiently to make any use of it. I'm pretty sure Xannepanne spent a lot of time looking at this at one point too, but didn't get very far.

[fredinno 54]

23 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Whilst I agree with the sentiment here, I'm not sure that's really technically possible. Maxis had originally envisioned exactly that, but as with a number of other cool features, they were cut from the final release where they presumably run out of time to implement them. As such, some code still exists that controls this, but to this day no one has been able to decipher it sufficiently to make any use of it. I'm pretty sure Xannepanne spent a lot of time looking at this at one point too, but didn't get very far.

We need a Maxis code Rosetta Stone...lol.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

On 7/4/2016 at 11:28 AM, vortext said:

If you want to dig a little deeper into the moisture / weather simulation, I'd recommend checking out Lowkee33's work as he at one point actually had a proof of concept for a seasonal terrain mod. Unfortunately pictures have gone missing since though irrc there're quite a few interesting files attached to various posts, so maybe create an SC4D account after all.

 

On 7/5/2016 at 2:08 PM, APSMS said:

It may be worth installing something like CP's Columbus Terrain mod (or similar; Missouri Breaks is probably more distinctive) because it has far more textures, and the moisture differences would be far more noticeable (or make an SC4D account and download Lowkee's Seasonal version of the CP mod to see something similar). Mostly, I suspect that this mainly influences the range of textures that you see at lower (warmer, moister) altitudes since higher altitude textures (really temp and moisture) tend to be mostly the same (less noticeable differences).

 

On 7/6/2016 at 10:08 AM, simmaster07 said:

Oh neat, the weather simulator is actually functional, I just might have to get back to investigating that in my GZCOM framework. I'm especially curious to see if the moisture data is referenced anywhere else in the game.

Here's a link to an animated GIF (1.8MB) of the monthly moisture cycle in the original post.

As evidenced in the list of functions related to weather that I've found so far, SC4 also references humidity, seasons, and (as mentioned above) wind. I haven't been able to analyze exactly what's going on with these, though. I will try to get on that over the next couple of days.

 

Sorry for thread bumping and mass quoting but I've been mostly away from SC4 for the last year.

Sometime back in like 2013 I investigated what Lowkee was working on a little bit, and I actually got seasonal terrain textures working.  You guys nailed it hypothetically.  I took the Columbus mod, messed with the values of the Weather Tuning Parameters exemplar, and was able to get enough moisture variation between the seasons to change the terrain textures visibly:

 

You can see the ground is a little more yellow in the winter and greener in the summer.  And of course with a more specialized terrain mod, this difference could be even more noticeable.

Now the problem is that I definitely don't remember what parameters I messed with and I didn't document anything.  So I'm attaching the exemplar file, and anyone who wants to can compare it with an original copy to see what's been modified.  Perhaps we can make a proper seasonal terrain mod out of this after all.  Thanks for re-opening this idea up last year@CorinaMarie

Seasons Switcher.dat

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

34 minutes ago, Indiana Joe said:

Sorry for thread bumping ...

No apology needed. Our rules say it's ok when you are adding substantially to the topic. And I feel you've done that in a big way.

[matias93 7,535]

Did the same with NHP Santa Haven. I'm on a cell phone now, so I cannot check the dat, but IIRC, the change is on the script itself: there is a line (annotated indeed, I believe) that controls the seasonal simulation, maybe over or between the moisture/altitude matrixes. It is just a boolean so is really simple to change. 

Later I could add some images of the terrain changing; it is very noticeable how it goes from a lush green to a red-yellow bare land in a few months.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

9 minutes ago, matias93 said:

there is a line (annotated indeed, I believe) ... It is just a boolean so is really simple to change. 

Do you suppose they toggled it off to conserve CPU usage back in those days? The game had to be able to run on a 500mhz comp back then. I'm curious how much extra oomph a seasonal terrain mod would require.

[rsc204 21,836]

44 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Do you suppose they toggled it off to conserve CPU usage back in those days? The game had to be able to run on a 500mhz comp back then. I'm curious how much extra oomph a seasonal terrain mod would require.

I'm not sure it would have been a problem really. Assuming the textures for the seasons are the same size, they wouldn't take any more power to show at different times of year. The only thing that utilises the CPU is the moisture part which seemingly is running behind the scenes anyhow. I think in truth they had much bigger plans for this feature but simply were not able to finish it in time. Since it wasn't a priority, it got cut. I'm imaging something like water contributing to "fertile" areas, more suited to farming.

[vortext 573]

4 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I think in truth they had much bigger plans for this feature but simply were not able to finish it in time. Since it wasn't a priority, it got cut. I'm imaging something like water contributing to "fertile" areas, more suited to farming.

As far as I know there's nothing directly hinting at a tie in with agriculture, however,  it's safe to say a lot of terrain & climate features got axed. Only 1 of the 4 terrain textures tables in the ini file is enabled, which also happen to have settings related to wind erosion, hydrology and even a rain fall - all of which have no to little effect ingame. My best guess is the devs planned to include a seasonal watercycle, with actual rain (as evidenced by the rain tool) which would have an effect on actual, flowing rivers. One comment in the ini file especially alludes to this: 

Quote

When a river joins the sea, because of the force of incoming water, the flow of water continues a little distance beyond the point where the river mouth. This aspect needs to be considered for the desired erosion to happen at river mouths. To get this effect, we use the following hack: for the purpose of hydrology simulation, we take the sea level to be a little below the actual sea level. So, the water at river mouths continues to flow a little distance as if the sea hasn't been reached.
 

  Such a shame to think what could have been if only they'd been given more time. Ah well, best not to think of that too long I guess. 

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Just read whole thread. My thoughts:

IRL climate...

In the tropics, weather generally moves East->West, bringing rain to eastern plains and slopes (magnified by slopes causing convection). Western slopes and plains beyond them are often drier in the "rain shadow".

Mid-latitudes are the reverse. In both northern and southern hemispheres, prevailing winds carry weather generally West -> East. Hence the west side of the Cascade mountains get wet, and the plains east of the mountains are the best wine-growing region in the world.

I thought it weird that Maxis saw wind as dryness rather than as a source of rain. Maybe they lived in California?

Throughout the thread, I thought the best use of moisture data would be in a farming mod (causing certain farm lots to change activity, even freight, in an annual cycle). It could be cool to have industrial farm lots that would turn green in the rain but spontaneously irrigate if arid and connected to water (jobs etc depending on having either rain or city-water).

Indeed, Maxis devs could have done so much more dynamic modeling if they'd been allowed to continue SC4 -> SC5 rather than being diverted into eye-candy like SC2013. Still, I'm pleased by what fans have made of this game.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

2 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

Maybe they lived in California?

Yep.  Maxis studios were always around the 'Frisco/bay area.  Places like Walnut Creek and eventually Emeryville, before closing down for good out there.  Many aspects of the game were modeled after Silicon Valley circa 90's-00's.

 

Also, on the idea that "it's a shame they didn't develop this and that feature:" we should take a second and appreciate that there are so many stub features hidden in this game.  Without them, all of this modding wouldn't be possible.  They could have completely removed all of the half-finished projects, but they left them instead for us to find and utilize a decade in the future.  If Maxis hadn't been so damn ambitious with this game, it would have died a long time ago.  But they really packed it full of stuff; it was ahead of its time.

[vortext 573]

30 minutes ago, Indiana Joe said:

Also, on the idea that "it's a shame they didn't develop this and that feature:" we should take a second and appreciate that there are so many stub features hidden in this game.  Without them, all of this modding wouldn't be possible.  They could have completely removed all of the half-finished projects, but they left them instead for us to find and utilize a decade in the future.  If Maxis hadn't been so damn ambitious with this game, it would have died a long time ago.  But they really packed it full of stuff; it was ahead of its time.

 

Oh for sure, I didn't intend for to come across as bemoaning it. Indeed it was way ahead of its time as they clearly set out to make thoroughly comprehensive simulation, not only in terms of climate and terrain. There're also all sorts of LOT related properties, like 'allow for mixed use' and  'fence definition' of which we can only imagine their intended purpose. And who knows some day some one will come along and prod at them long enough to make some use of it, in similar fashion seasonal flora came into existence. 

[matias93 7,535]

Going back to the terrain simulation, I'm on the pc now, but not on the right OS (ills of the triple boot), so I get to check the file on the reader, but not to take the promised images. Our desired lines are on the only INI file on the DAT, are 193 to 196, and say:

[MiscTerrainTunables]
;
; Enable/Disable terrain simulation
EnableSimulation=1

The '1' stands for enabled, of course, and is the only thing I did to activate it.

Don't know about you, but I was unable to open @Indiana Joe's file, so I cannot check if the same line was the modified one. Intuitively assume that it is.

Now, seeing how the script is built, I'm thinking that maybe uncommenting one of the matrixes for a different climate could change the terrain simulation behaviour. If uncommenting isn't enough, it wouldn't require much effort to simply replace the values on the known active tropical climate which one of the inactive climates. In fact, considering how clear the syntaxis is, one could go further and experiment with more of the adjustements, to see how many of them have in fact an effect in the game.

***

And about the general idea of unfinished features, one can always hope that SC4 will face the same fate than Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I see Paul Pedriana lobbying for open-sourcing parts of the Maxis' games cores, and even more, the fantastical work with the DLLs of people like Simmaster07, as a huge leap through an OpenSC4. In any case, I'm not clearly informed about the TTD copyright holders' opinion on OpenTTD or the reverse engeening process that was key to develop it; the fact that Ludwig Strigeus is working on Spotify AG and not behind bars is promising, though.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

Do y'all suppose I should move this thread to the SC4 Modding - Open Discussion forum? When I first created it I wasn't really even aware that place existed. (I pretty much only frequented General Discussion and the Techy Bugs ones here in the players forum.)

[matias93 7,535]

Definitely it would be more adequate.

Oh, and by the way, I'm still waiting to see if you release a version of the mod that uses another data view instead of the relatively useful 'air pollution'. May I recommend the 'land value'? It is somehow duplicitous with 'desirability', so the lost functionality is lesser, and has the same wide colour range (as opposed as radiation, which seems to fill the map with boolean markings only)

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

Move completed.

5 minutes ago, matias93 said:

Oh, and by the way, I'm still waiting to see if you release a version of the mod that uses another data view instead of the relatively useful 'air pollution'. May I recommend the 'land value'? It is somehow duplicitous with 'desirability', so the lost functionality is lesser, and has the same wide colour range (as opposed as radiation, which seems to fill the map with boolean markings only)

I've barely gotten my feet wet with regard to modding exemplars. I used the pollution one cause that was the reference I found originally. Would it be as simple as tweaking a cohort value in mine to move it to a different data view? And if so, I could just create several variations for a few views? Then peeps could install the one they feel is the best place for it. For me, radiation would be the best home since I never need that. I do use land value.

With regard to the color range, I'm pretty sure that's a moot point cause I re-did all of them to get a better spread of the color variations.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Good move. As a moderator, your forum selections will guide others. To make less work for your future self, you want to lead us to post in appropriate places  .

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

16 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

Good move. As a moderator, your forum selections will guide others. To make less work for your future self, you want to lead us to post in appropriate places  .

If y'all post everything where it ought to be whatever would we mods have to do?

 

Ok, I'm looking at the original for DataView: Air Pollution in SimCity_1.dat and it seems my first step would've been to change the value in Data source from 0x00000008 to 0x0000001D.  (I need to find my hand written notes from back then.) I'm noticing that Air Pollution has a different name for one of the variables showing in Reader 1.5.4 than it did in 0.93 that I used. 1.5.4 simply crashes when I try to open my tweaked one. But, it does seem that I'd have to make the same changes directly in Land Value or Radiation or such as I did originally in the Air Pollution one rather than just change one cohort value. This might best be left to the experts.

I still fall back on the idea that one prolly would not want this installed all the time and it can just be pulled in and out of Plugins when needed. (Less work for me.)

[matias93 7,535]

20 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I still fall back on the idea that one prolly would not want this installed all the time and it can just be pulled in and out of Plugins when needed. (Less work for me.)

I understand that. In any case, for a flora control freak like me (and I doubt there are many), having moisture data at hand is always useful for MMPing realistically, even more so when developing a semi-arid region that would look totally absurd with border-to-border forests.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

19 minutes ago, matias93 said:

... having moisture data at hand is always useful for MMPing realistically, ...

Ah. Now it makes more sense to me. I just assumed peeps creating terrain mods or tree controllers would use it.

Ok. I'll see what I can do about getting it to another view. Do you agree Radiation would be the least intrusive for everyone? I believe the boolean aspect of Radiation is simply because the Color ramp only has 4 entries. I'm guessing I could up that to 22 like in the Air Pollution modification I made and toss in the color values I determined were the prettiest for it.

[matias93 7,535]

Considering that almost no one wants to have radiation on their cities, and that the last iteration of the SC4fix allows for getting rid of it easily with a cheat code (instead of having to look for the offending lot), that is the less useable view.

And definitely your colour selection was really appropiate, as they convey the meaning clearly but aren't easy to miss with the terrain colours (which would have been the case with a green to orange colour range)

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

On 1/21/2017 at 7:11 PM, matias93 said:

I'm still waiting to see if you release a version of the mod that uses another data view ...

The wait is over! Take this one for a test drive and let me know how you feel about it.

Edit: If you grabbed the attachment earlier it's now the old version. It'll work the same, but I figured out how to get some slightly better text on the popup overview:

I can't just write whatever I want. It seems I can only use existing text from the LTEXT Group 6A231AEE so as pictured is what I selected. It's still the radiation view, just has different verbiage.

 

Radiation View as Moisture.dat

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

9 hours ago, matias93 said:

Going back to the terrain simulation, I'm on the pc now, but not on the right OS (ills of the triple boot), so I get to check the file on the reader, but not to take the promised images. Our desired lines are on the only INI file on the DAT, are 193 to 196, and say:

[MiscTerrainTunables]
;
; Enable/Disable terrain simulation
EnableSimulation=1

The '1' stands for enabled, of course, and is the only thing I did to activate it.

Don't know about you, but I was unable to open @Indiana Joe's file, so I cannot check if the same line was the modified one. Intuitively assume that it is.

Now, seeing how the script is built, I'm thinking that maybe uncommenting one of the matrixes for a different climate could change the terrain simulation behaviour. If uncommenting isn't enough, it wouldn't require much effort to simply replace the values on the known active tropical climate which one of the inactive climates. In fact, considering how clear the syntaxis is, one could go further and experiment with more of the adjustements, to see how many of them have in fact an effect in the game.

 

You're in the terrain parameters DAT, but I didn't modify that at all and can confirm that value is still set to 0.  I altered a file called Weather Turning Parameters, and it looks like this:

 

 

Basically, you see some values about temperature and moisture variation.  Lowkee33's pictures are unfortunately gone, but he had some stepped-height maps where he would display terrain mods and how different textures appeared at different altitudes.  Texture placement is affected by either moisture or temperature, or both.  Don't remember.  But throughout the game year these values vary as pictured on the first page of this thread.  And since the terrain textures are mapped to these values, the textures shift up and down in height slightly throughout the year.  I increased something here or there and widened the variance.  With the Columbus mod it worked really well, as it is greener at low altitudes and yellow at high altitudes.

Also I vaguely remember changing one of those values to be negative, because the original setting brought Australian seasons (yellow/winter textures in July), and that offset the variation by 6 months, flipping the perceived seasons.

There's also some other interesting parameters in there, like how much the wind direction varies (last value).

[matias93 7,535]

3 hours ago, Indiana Joe said:

You're in the terrain parameters DAT, but I didn't modify that at all and can confirm that value is still set to 0.  I altered a file called Weather Turning Parameters,

Could that mean there are two ways of activating the simulation? Or I'm just confused? I checked if some relict Lowkee file was on my plugins, but no...

3 hours ago, Indiana Joe said:

Also I vaguely remember changing one of those values to be negative, because the original setting brought Australian seasons (yellow/winter textures in July), and that offset the variation by 6 months, flipping the perceived seasons.

That sounds really interesting! Currently both the terrain mod and the tree controller on my configuration act as on the northern hemisphere (i.e. more humid at the beggining-end of the year, drier on the southern slopes). If this could be used to inverse those configurations, I'm in!

[vortext 573]

39 minutes ago, matias93 said:

Could that mean there are two ways of activating the simulation? Or I'm just confused? I checked if some relict Lowkee file was on my plugins, but no...

No I dont think so. Rather it's that the settings in the ini file seems to pertain to (regional) rendering, rather than the running simulation ingame. For instance Lowkee's Apalachian terrain mod offers an erosion setting, which makes for smooth region rendering (i.e. without any visible seams along the city tile borders).  However it's mostly unknown what effect the other ini settings have, let alone how the simulation would make use of them. 

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

On 1/21/2017 at 6:51 PM, matias93 said:

Don't know about you, but I was unable to open @Indiana Joe's file, ...

Which program are you using to try to open it? In Reader 0.93 I see this just fine:

 

In 1.5.4 I get to here just fine:

 

If I double click on the Exemplar this happens:

 

But from that previous pic if I click the Exemplar magnifying glass button in the Analyzer box it goes here ok:

 

Edit: Comparing @Indiana Joe's and the original shows two changes:

Original:

• mfYearlyAmbientTemperatureVariationFactor: 0.5
• mfYearlyAmbientMoistureVariationFactor: 1

Seasons Switcher.dat

• mfYearlyAmbientTemperatureVariationFactor: -0.5
• mfYearlyAmbientMoistureVariationFactor: -1

[matias93 7,535]

Well, now back on the right OS (I have to use that really good guide for installing the game on Debian), I toyed with the moisture data view on a blank city tile. There are images with and without the data layer, to also show the changing terrain textures. 

This one is in February and the view is to the south. As you can see, the moisture pattern matches the northern hemisphere (is a bit of a problem for me but guess is solvable)

And this one is August. Look how the scene is much drier (again, the pattern matches the northern hemisphere), but some slopes stay humid: there should be the permanent forests, while the most changing parts are grasslands.

And now seeing the terrain: the lowest part is at 30 m.a.s.l. and is lush green on winter. I used the moisture layer for February to paint some god mode trees on the bluest parts.

And this is the terrain on August: everything is more dry, particularly the praire on the bottom. As you can see, now some of the trees are misplaced. This would happen in real life, and those trees would eventually die on a wild fire, reinforcing the pattern.

  Edited January 23, 2017 by matias93  
Now it is a real post

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

Very nice with the contrasts between seasons and showing the terrain mod can be seasonal.

On 1/23/2017 at 10:24 AM, matias93 said:

February ... the moisture pattern matches the northern hemisphere ... is lush green on winter ... August: everything is more dry ...

^ This part confuzzles me. I live in the northern hemisphere and the grass is green in the spring and summer then dies off and turns brownish in late fall and all thru winter. Using February and August like your pics, here's the real world data for the US:

February rain. (Linky)

August rain. (Linky)

 

So it seems to me the game is backwards for where I live.

[Abrams 1,744]

On 1/23/2017 at 0:29 PM, CorinaMarie said:

 

I knew it,the government keeps data of where you live