Badi_Dea's Workshop - Post Office Released

[Badi_Dea 476]

Hi all!
Like most of you folks, I have a huge back-catalog in a spreadsheet somewhere of assets I plan on making some day.
Well, here's my list.. This is just the stuff I want to make, It's alright if there is already a good asset on the workshop for it, it's just for my own pleasure.

This isn't going to replace the refinery project, I'll still keep updating that thread. I just wanted to have a place to keep my other assets organized and seek advice from everyone.

I'll have to clean up the list at some point, but for now it's just a data dump. I have some more things I would like to make, but I don't have a design picked out yet, so I left them off for now.

Oil Refinery - Oil Processing
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.0065019,-90.4071591,237a,20y,167.44h,35.05t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Oil Refinery - Cargo Train Station
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9497817,-122.3930365,129a,20y,262.12h,44.54t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0704488,-122.1403047,380a,20y,244.63h,20.43t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Oil Refinery - Cargo Ship Dock
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0521921,-122.2629243,523a,20y,11.06h,42.26t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Maintained Parking Lot Set
Park, in road menu
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3910437,-121.9274703,223a,20y,25.88h,35.16t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Steelworks - Cargo Train Station
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2377384,-104.6130184,402a,20y,104.06h,36.41t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Steelworks - Ore Processing
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6169763,-87.3499964,1970a,20y,91.87h,38.38t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Steelworks - Ore Processing
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.4605099,-81.6761571,433a,20y,24.81h,35.14t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Grain Silo
Food Processing
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7160313,-97.3329193,423a,20y,122.76h,37.08t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Concrete Plant
Road Maintenance Building
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.737851,-97.3243732,421a,20y,25.26h,37.6t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

City College
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.5618932,-104.8134453,226a,20y,323.93h,46.24t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

High School
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.6024645,-104.803733,322a,20y,114.75h,54.2t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

[Badi_Dea 476]

City College
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.5618932,-104.8134453,226a,20y,323.93h,46.24t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

During the holidays with the family I wanted to get some work done, but I didn't want to spend hours reading and researching for the refinery project...
So, I started on the last item on my list. A simple City College fits the bill, it's a beautiful structure that's not all that far away from where I live. It's pretty simple geometry, and doesn't even consume a 10th of the time that some of the refinery assets do. I've really been looking forward to making something easy and beautiful.
It's going to have to be a sub-building asset, I've been looking forward to getting used to the new in-game implementation of it.

Current WIP status, almost half way done.

It appears that the main entrance of the real building is along the right side, I wanted a more grand entrance. So I made the long edge with the large decoration the front, I thought it looked better; but it does introduce the issue of that wing overlapping into where the road would be should it be placed along a straight road.
I don't have a problem with this because I wanted it to be along a dead-end or roundabout type road, but I can just see the Steam comment section going crazy about it...

I also really like the sunken plaza in the reference. Might have to make that too if I can get around to it.

Thanks for reading.

[Avanya 2,605]

Some great ideas on there (I didn't dare click all the links in case I got more ideas ) and a very nice looking college! I always find myself using the same few schools, so more well done variation is very welcome!  If the wing is a subbuilding it will have collision like normal and force people to place it on a corner, so that should limit some of the steam comments.  Ofc if you end up adding the plaza (that totally is nice looking so I get you're tempted to make it) and add it as a subbuilding, then the corner won't really be an issue.

Looking forward to seeing your progress

[Badi_Dea 476]

Thanks @Avanya I appreciate your input, you always have such well thought out comments. I like the new avatar too

I pretty much finished up the main model, total weighs in at 5,460 tris, so I'm happy enough with it.

It looks pretty decent in game, but it does suffer from the normal mapping problem that @Ronyx69 pointed out here
I don't know if it's going to be worth it to try to fix it, it's not all that noticeable unless you're looking for it...

Gotta cut it in half for the sub-building, and make a LOD. Depending on how busy things get, I might release it next weekend.
Anyone want to suggest some stats? Same as the stock University? More? Less?

Thanks all!

 

[R3V0 909]

IMHO, it should be better than stock university, especially in terms of radius 

[Avanya 2,605]

Thank you!  Damn, that looks gorgeous <3 I agree with R3V0 - larger radius and perhaps somewhat higher capacity since it's larger than the default.

[Judazzz 1,936]

Man that looks awesome! Any chance you could publish it as university and as high school: purely by the looks of it seems suitable for both purposes (and proper uni coverage is easier to achieve than high school coverage).

[Badi_Dea 476]

Thanks folks!

@Judazzz howabout I do ya one better - I've had my eye on this guy for a while, I'll add it to the list

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.6024645,-104.803733,322a,20y,114.75h,54.2t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

I'm not sure about making all the buildings on that campus, but the longer building on the right would make for an amazing looking, realistic highschool.

[Judazzz 1,936]

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!!! 

[Badi_Dea 476]

LOL @Judazzz you're funny. Thanks for all the advice everyone!

I got the whole thing wrapped up ahead of schedule, so I decided to throw in Rush Hour integration. I created a Graduation random event; however, it never fired in about 2 hours worth of testing :-/ I noticed that every mention of the automatic random events specify a unique building, so I wonder if there's a limitation there since it's a university building.
So, I made the event manual as well as automatic, and you can start it manually in the event that it never starts automatically. Lots of funny eastereggs in it from my days at a technical college.

Teaser is such a tease

It's ready for release, but I'm gonna keep it til next Thursday in the event that I happen to find out if the random events work or not. For now, it's open to friends if you would like to drop me a line to test it out.

I'm gonna use this time between releases to catch back up with the Oil Refinery project.

[Judazzz 1,936]

Looks fantastic, mate - I especially dig the texture work, very detailed and varied.

[Avanya 2,605]

Looks great and great idea with an event!  Dropped you a friend request as I totally can't way to try it out in game. Love the colors of it

[Badi_Dea 476]

Released :-) Hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed making it.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=843267159

More Schools after another couple industry buildings

[Badi_Dea 476]

Standard Parking Garage

Comcast started acting up on me, they managed to take down a local circuit for two days... you can imagine, it was almost a traumatic event.
I had to do something to keep my sanity, and since I'm pretty useless at modeling without a reference I decided to keep it simple.

So, here's something I happen to be intimately familiar with - a parking garage. Working in downtown Denver for years has forced me to become best friends with a couple of the local garages. This is just a no-frills version, super simple. I want to make a fancy one with a false facade but that's further down the list.

Teaser - before you scroll down, see if you can spot why this standard parking garage is special, the reason I'm so excited about it; 100 internet points if you guess right!

Yup, 256 functional parking spaces! It took a little bit of patience, but it paid off.
I used 5 sub-buildings, an outer frame for the outside, and then 4 floors of parking. Since each building is restricted to 64 props, which includes markers for parking spots, this was the best way to get 'em all working

But the hard part... I found out that overlapping sub-buildings will cull the primary buildings props. All of the lights on the inside disappeared when I dropped the sub-buildings in place!
I spent some time in mod tools and found that Sub-Building prefabs are listed in a key called BuildingsInfo+SubInfo, I altered m_collisionHeight from 16 to 0 for the sub-buildings, and the lights came back. I'm super happy I found a solution for this problem, it just wouldn't be the same without that glow from inside.

[.Del 53]

That looks great! Definitely looking forward to putting this in my city!

[Avanya 2,605]

 So lovely and great with so many parking spots! (I'm really missing a smiley jumping up and down to show my excitement!)

[.Del 53]

17 minutes ago, Avanya said:

 So lovely and great with so many parking spots! (I'm really missing a smiley jumping up and down to show my excitement!)

I have two you can use:

[Matthias King 348]

 !!!

I love parking garages!

I can't wait for all the garages you have in the pipeline.

[gfvsims 169]

Fantastic! More parking buildings are definitely needed in this game.

[Judazzz 1,936]

On 1/28/2017 at 1:20 PM, Dejected Angel said:

I have two you can use:

Lol, that second one looks like Ike (from South Park) on speed! 

That parking garage looks smashing, btw! And props for your detective work and perseverance!

[Badi_Dea 476]

Published!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=853655964

Thank you all! I know, we have a severe lack of parking garages in the game given how prominent they are in a real city.
With builtin sub-building support, and mod support that makes parking spots more desirable, it really adds realism to have to worry about parking.

23 hours ago, Judazzz said:

That parking garage looks smashing, btw! And props for your detective work and perseverance!

Thank you very much, I really enjoyed digging around in mod tools - I should really learn Unity... but I do a lot of scripting at work, and I suppose I'd rather not come home to Visual Studio as well lol.

I'm gonna be heading back to some Oil Refinery assets now, the refinery project is far from over, we got tons of work left to do!

[Judazzz 1,936]

1 hour ago, Badi_Dea said:

Thank you very much, I really enjoyed digging around in mod tools - I should really learn Unity... but I do a lot of scripting at work, and I suppose I'd rather not come home to Visual Studio as well lol.

 

I thought the same, and kept a distance for a long time, but eventually I decided to jump in anyway (encouraged by AJ3D, so my mod's existence owes a lot to him), and I've been hooked ever since. I'm a developer working with Visual Studio as well (although my primary focus is on the frond-end side of things), so in order to keep a balance I've made a conscious decision to mod strictly on my own terms, which means that I only work on my stuff when I want to. Of course I try to offer support if asked, but I don't set any targets or deadlines - it's a hobby. Sometimes I don't touch my mods for weeks or even months on end, so it's all pretty relaxed....
Added benefit is that modding introduced me with a whole new type of development and has increased my knowledge, skills and way of organizing and running projects quite substantially (and thus my net value  ), so even though it's a hobby, it makes me a better developer. so besides tons of fun it's a good investment.

Love the parking garage btw, time to find it a nice home in my city!

[MisterBlueStar4 1,004]

1 hour ago, Badi_Dea said:

Published!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=853655964

Thank you all! I know, we have a severe lack of parking garages in the game given how prominent they are in a real city.
With builtin sub-building support, and mod support that makes parking spots more desirable, it really adds realism to have to worry about parking.

Thank you very much, I really enjoyed digging around in mod tools - I should really learn Unity... but I do a lot of scripting at work, and I suppose I'd rather not come home to Visual Studio as well lol.

I'm gonna be heading back to some Oil Refinery assets now, the refinery project is far from over, we got tons of work left to do!

Looks great for airports,businesses areas,and office parks maybe.

[Badi_Dea 476]

1 minute ago, MisterBlueStar4 said:

Looks great for airports,businesses areas,and office parks maybe.

Precisely Thank you all for the nice comments and motivation.

@Judazzz That's certainly something to think about. I'm on the systems architecture side of things, but I value our code monkey brethren
I extended you a friend request in Steam, if I do decide to start exploring the modding side of things I would value your advice, if you don't mind 

 

[Judazzz 1,936]

@Badi_Dea Sure thing man - click slaves unite!!!  

My first advice, if you want to get your toes wet: download the source of a couple of mods from Github and study how are structured and how they work, tinker with the code and see how that affects the mod's behavior in-game (my first few attempts were mostly burping up errors by the truck load, lol). It helps to have an idea for a new mod though, or at least a scope for it (does it affect behavior, assets, visuals, ...) - the libraries are vast and the possibilities virtually limitless (especially when you resort to detouring stuff outside the official API), so it is easy to get lost.

[Badi_Dea 476]

It's been a while folks, I moved and got the office all setup, things are starting to slow down for the winter.. and Green Cities came out (yay!)

Of course, waiting for all the mods to be updated is such a pain, I decided to try vanilla again - it's still alright... but I actually had way more fun with the upgrade system from the Concerts DLC.
It made me think about revisiting the old idea from SC5, modular buildings. I know we've talked about it here in the past, and I figured that it would be worth taking a look into. Following @Judazzz urging, I figured why not.

I noticed that I could delete sub buildings out of the prefab, place the building, reload the game(restoring the prefab), and relocate the building to bring back the sub buildings. This even worked on a building by building basis, so multiple instances of the same prefab wouldn't mess it up.
It seemed like all this could be done programmatically without too many headaches.

I developed a VERY rough proof of concept that I hope to develop further. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, I do lots of PowerShell at work and I've developed simple little things in a few other languages, but never touched C# before.

@boformer Thanks so much for the Mod development tutorials, they all were an excellent introduction to interacting with game functions. Not to mention that the old SubBuilding Enabler mod was a very good reference for my project, that and @BloodyPenguin Sub Building Tabs source were a huge insight for how the instance keeps track of it's sub buildings. Thank you both so much.

I know the video is a little grainy, but I hope it gets the point across.

I need to improve the UI definitely, and I have some ideas for the core features.

The gist of how it works is:

• the list of subbuildings is pulled in from the prefab into a temp array
• when you click the button to add a subbuilding, it copies off the subinfo to a list along with the currently present subbuildings from the instance
• then refreshes the prefab containing the subinfo only for the subbuildings that have been picked
• finally putting all the prefab subinfo from the temp array back into the prefab so it's ready for the next use.

I hope you folks found this interesting. Thanks for taking a look, I hope to hear some ideas from you all.

[boformer 3,169]

Impressive! With a proper UI and a way to modify the stats of a building depending on the deployed modules, this could really go off!

Upgrading service buildings like schools and fire stations is the first thing that comes to mind, but it would also be interesting for airports (more runways, terminals) and train stations (more platforms).

[rovapasi1 53]

Depending on the options to trigger this it could be also used to upgrade parts of a building.

If triggered by actual gametime this could trigger a change in a commercial subbuilding for holiday seasons. Thinking at the modular rico buildings from jerenable it could change the bottom commercial building with one with christmas decoration while leaving the building above as it is.

If such a trigger would be possible it would also allow a massive change within gameplay after building a city. I'm thinking f.e. about a road section that changes for a while into a road with roadworks.

But even this is not possible its - as boformer mentioned - also a massive step foreward building modular buildings.

 

[Avanya 2,605]

Very exciting!  This definately has a lot of potential for expanding service buildings.

And welcome back!

[Tomas13TO 11]

It was one of the best things in the last SimCity. It would be awesome to have it in CSL too.