Lot - Resources / Help

[PHBSD 37]

24 minutes ago, Jasoncw said:

@PHBSD So my recommendation would be to divide the building into three parts. The main part would be the long middle part of the complex, with the tall tower on it. The second part would be the extension that has the short tower on it, and the third part would be the lowrise part at the very end of the complex.

You would make custom LODs for each parts of the building, but at any given time, only one set of LODs would have the correct names (LOD5, LOD4, and LOD3), you would give the other LODs temporary names so that they don't interfere with the LODs you want to be active at that time. But then you would go through and export each section of the building, each with its respective LODs. However, you wouldn't hide the different sections of the building when you export. The parts of the complex that aren't included in the LOD will be cut off, but the way those building sections will be cutoff will make it so that there's not a seam between all the different parts once you reassemble them in the lot editor. It also ensures that, for example, the buildings will all cast shadows on each other, and things like that.

Among my BATs, some examples of this are the marquee prop from Regal Theater, the season lighting scheme props from the Penobscot Building, and the US Bank sign prop from US Bank. You can look at this in the lot editor to see the weird way that they get cut off at the edges of the LOD. The Regal Theater marquee is the best example because someone might normally only think of exporting the marquee (with the rest of the building hidden), but I kept the rest of the building unhidden so that it would remain in the background behind the marquee and be included in it so that the prop would be seamless.

Nice but after, how would I be able to load multiple buildings at a lot on LotEditor? 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

@PHBSD One of the buildings would be used as the building on the lot, and the other two would be made into props.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

1 hour ago, Jasoncw said:

@PHBSD One of the buildings would be used as the building on the lot, and the other two would be made into props.

Dear Jason, May I ask a question here about custom Lods, How to deal with the lights when I making custom Lods, I mean I want to add some props like people with Loteditor, Then I created Box a little bigger than the grond (higher 0.2m) and connect with other boxes with ProBoolean as a Lod, then I found that even I could add props on the ground, whereas the light on somewhere of the ground disappeared, Should I make complex Lod to stay away from the lights or reduce the scope of the light? and also I want to know how much bigger is Lod than model is more appropriate? I hope you could understand what I'm saying with poor english, Thank you very much Jason. 

Yours Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[Jasoncw 11,840]

@Raymond7cn Normally, I try to leave 0.1 or 0.2 meters between the edge of the LOD and the building. If it's a wall to wall building, then on the side that is supposed to be wall to wall, I make it perfectly even with the edge of the building, but then I increase the gap between the other sides.

You want to leave a small gap, because in the game the render and the LODs aren't perfectly aligned. When you're placing a building on a lot, you can place it very precisely. For example, I opened a lot in PIMX, and on of the objects was located at X:2.165, Y:1.941 (this is in meters). But the renders are locked onto the 2D pixel grid. So if you place a building on a lot, and then move it 0.005 meters, the LOD will move, but the render is still stuck in the same position in the 2D pixel grid, because it can't move in partial pixels, it can only move in full pixels. Then, if you keep on moving the building, eventually you will move it enough that the render will be jump to the next pixel. This is hard to explain, but the important part is that in the game, the LOD and the render can be misaligned by up to one pixel. One pixel is about 0.15 meters. So you want to leave a small gap between the edge of the building and the LOD.

 

But anyway, that is not what your question was about. Your question is about the lights. When you have a LOD that is very close to the ground, it goes into a special mode, which behaves differently. I don't remember the full details about this special mode. But if you make the LOD higher, the nitelites should be visible.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

2 hours ago, Jasoncw said:

But if you make the LOD higher, the nitelites should be visible.

Dear Jason, Thank you, I followed your tips and made the LOD more higher than before, and It's just fine when I rendered them, as below,

Then I got this in the game,

I thought I didn't discribe more clearly about my issue, Sorry, Can you see some black lines from the top left corner , and also there aren't black lines in somewhere of the lot, such as two blue lamps at the front of the statue, I have no idea if it's relevant to the custom LODs, whereas the other statues with Automatic LOD is fine. Thank you Jason.

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[Jasoncw 11,840]

@Raymond7cn The issue with the lines is called "z fighting". When the game displays things, it has to decide what is in the front, and what is in the back. The LOD and the ground are so close to each other that the game gets confused and doesn't know which one is in the front, and which one is in the back. The black lines are actually blue lines, because it is the pavers showing, because that's what the game thinks is in front. If you put it on grass, they would be green lines. To fix this, you need to make the LOD higher. It needs to be high enough that the game doesn't get confused about which one is in the front.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

1 hour ago, Jasoncw said:

@Raymond7cn The issue with the lines is called "z fighting". When the game displays things, it has to decide what is in the front, and what is in the back. The LOD and the ground are so close to each other that the game gets confused and doesn't know which one is in the front, and which one is in the back. The black lines are actually blue lines, because it is the pavers showing, because that's what the game thinks is in front. If you put it on grass, they would be green lines. To fix this, you need to make the LOD higher. It needs to be high enough that the game doesn't get confused about which one is in the front.

Thanks a million, Dear Jason, You are completely right about that, After I made the LOD more biger, the lines was gone, Thank you very much!!

[gutterclub 2,729]

Help..I've the classic issue where everything looks alright in Lot Editor, but when I plop the building I made it screws it up and puts in another building of mine in its place, think they are all messed up.

Is it something to do with Instance ID's etc? How do I get them all back to normal?

Thanks

[Jasoncw 11,840]

@gutterclub If it's a building of your own that is causing the problem, then you should re-export it. You may not have installed the BAT ID fix, which I've linked to at the beginning of the BAT sticky.

If it's someone else's building and you can't reexport it, you would need to manually edit the IDs, but I think it's the Group ID that is unique to each BAT. I think the Instance ID for BATs mark where all the different parts go in terms of zoom and rotation etc.

So you might be able to export a new BAT from gmax to get a new random group number (idk how the group id is formatted so it would be better to get a fresh good one than to try and make one up by editing the existing one), and then change the problem BAT's Group ID to that, and see if that works.

Something else to consider though is which BAT is actually the one doing the interfering. Right now you might think that the new BAT is the problem, but it's probably more likely that both of them need to be fixed.

[gutterclub 2,729]

I think I've found the BAT in question, it was one I made a couple back 'Ritchies Electrics'. Will try re-export and see if it works. Thanks mate

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

We're confuzzled.

CB and I have made a bunch of ploppable lots and cannot figure out how to keep them from triggering a different grass texture on the adjacent diagonal street.

Here's the before pic:

 

Then the lots enclosed in pink are the ones plopped. I deliberately used the wrong field to better visually emphasize those lots:

^ And they are causing the street texture to show the R$ grass. (So, I have made our textures have the complementary grass, but we'd like to actually make them match up to a Network Dirt override texture we've made.)

 

Things we've tried setting are:

• LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes = 0x00 (None) and then 0x07 (Agriculture)
• LotConfigPropertyZoneDensityTypes = 0x00 (But this one is obsolete so prolly not helpful at all.)
• LotConfigPropertyWealthTypes = 0x00 (Tho I believe this only applies to growable RCI lots.)
• LotConfigPropertyPurposeTypes = 0x00 (None) and then 0x05 (Agriculture/Farming) But also is prolly only for growable RCI.

How can we make them not change to the street grass? I want it to stay the Ag style. Thanks for any help.

[rivit 3,391]

CB and Cori - do any of these lot textures have 1,2 or 3 in position 5 of the IID measured from the left?  When making Lot Textures its best to avoid this unless you actually want a lot to change with Wealth.

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

22 minutes ago, rivit said:

CB and Cori - do any of these lot textures have 1,2 or 3 in position 5 of the IID measured from the left?

The lot used in that test has a base texture and no overlays. The mips range from F8B44220 to F8B44224. (Those are from my assigned range.)

[rivit 3,391]

Well bang goes that theory then!

[rsc204 21,808]

8 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

^ And they are causing the street texture to show the R$ grass. (So, I have made our textures have the complementary grass, but we'd like to actually make them match up to a Network Dirt override texture we've made.)

In this situation, I don't think it's actually possible to achieve uniformity.

8 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

How can we make them not change to the street grass? I want it to stay the Ag style. Thanks for any help.

You can and you can't. Ultimately, the effects of Plopped Content defaults to a specific zoning type ($ wealth), with a couple exceptions, regardless of how you set these properties. These settings in the Lots are actually intended for Growable lots allowing use of texture families.

Two Maxis lots are setup such as to force high wealth zoning, the 1x1 Open Grass Area and 1x1 Open Paved area lots. I never did track down the specific property that makes that work, but you can make copies with new IDs that will force $$$ wealth zoning (attached). Bus Stops for some reason always trigger $$ wealth zoning. If I had to guess, something in the .exe relating to Occupant Groups or something in the Parent Cohort. Perhaps, if we can track down exactly which property enables this behaviour, we can find a way to trigger it for other wealth types?

Note in each of these cases a given Network piece, with the requisite wealth textures, must be connected to actual zoning. If you block all zoning through placement of Plop Lots, the effect disappears. Also, every such scenario defaults to low density zoning too. So in short, we can sort-of control wealths 0-3 using trickery and specific design. But the med/high wealth (4-6) and A-G zoning (7), to my knowledge can NOT be triggered by this method. @Ganaram Inukshuk posted most of what's known about this somewhere, since otherwise it's a bugger to test your wealth textures when making new content (I'm sure you'll find it faster than me).

EDIT: Or am I forgetting something, the zoning type denotes Low or Med/High, we can only control the wealth, which still excludes I-AG.

Finding a solution to this would be a holy grail moment for me, I've been making mods to bypass the problem for years. In your specific example, I can think of two possible workarounds:

1. A T21 mod using an overhanging S3D prop.
   This can cover the "half square" by sitting on top of it. T21's can also be programmed only to appear for a specific zone type, ensuring it doesn't mess with all diagonal streets. The biggest drawback of this, it's an all of nothing mod, either every diagonal street with I-AG zoning has it, or none do. Controlling the texture rotation might also be a PITA.
2. A custom set of "wealth" texture overrides.
   Best done with an existing SAM mod, swap out the regular $ wealth textures with some that match I-AG zoning. You'd probably need to reserve a SAM set you are not using for I-AG. The good news is, if you want to keep regular streets, Tarkus' SAM 7 switcheroo mod has a complete set of SAM-ID'd textures using the regular streets. Once extracted, you can re-ID them in one swift operation to override any SAM set you choose. After that, GoFSH can handle everything, you just need to setup the definition alphas similar to SAM 11.

Open Grass Area.dat

Open Paved Area.dat

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

@rivit and @rsc204

Thanks so much for your help. We were mostly concerned we might be overlooking something really simple.

[11241036 5,096]

Sorry, rsc204 and Corina, but it's much more simple than that.

It's simply a feature called "wealthification": Network textures adapt to whatever you are zoning/plopping next to them. Agricultural zones and landfills are a special exception, because they (and only they) trigger a special texture. Unless you use some special trick, it's impossible to get the dirt underneath the gravel road.

To get a glimpse of it, you may want to open any file that adds network textures, such as the SAM textures, to the game and check the ID's there. Wealthification is being represented by the second digit from the right:

• 0 = unzoned
• 1 = low wealth, low density
• 2 = mid wealth, low density
• 3 = high wealth, low density
• 4 = low wealth, medium or high density
• 5 = mid wealth, medium or high density
• 6 = high wealth, medium or high density
• 7 = agricultural and landfill zones

If there's no texture assigned to one of these numbers, the game will just pick no. 0.

Ploppable buildings, no matter what they do, will never trigger no. 7, only 1-3 (unless there's some exception I'm not aware of).

Please note that your sidewalk mod (or Maxis default one) also affects which texture appears there. You may see that some textures have transparent parts. These parts will be filled with the sidewalk mod. There are 5 types of sidewalk:

• unzoned/no ploppable building
• low-wealth
• mid-wealth
• high-wealth
• and railroads, agriculture, and landfill zones.

I highly recommend not to use T21's, as I can't imagine of a way to limit them to only appear if a specific lot is being plopped next to a network. T21 can adapt to the zoning - but ploppable buildings mostly always count as their own zone type (Type F, you will see what this means when reading the tutorials linked below). This will have the disadvantage that every diagonal SAM 4 street (if you edit this network) will show dirt triangles as soon as you plop something next to them, no matter which building.

These tutorials/topics covers the basics of T21, if you still want to make a T21 mod:

https://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:How_to_Create_T21_Exemplars_(Swamper77s_way)

How To Create and Modify T21s (Xyloxadoria's Way)

IMO, the simplest way of achieving this goal would be creating a flat overhanging prop on the lot itself. This will give you a bit more stuff in your menus, but you can control it best. Magneto has created some overhanging fillers this way, maybe he can help you. Link:

 

[rsc204 21,808]

45 minutes ago, 11241036 said:

It's simply a feature called "wealthification": Network textures adapt to whatever you are zoning/plopping next to them. Agricultural zones and landfills are a special exception, because they (and only they) trigger a special texture. Unless you use some special trick, it's impossible to get the dirt underneath the gravel road.

Preaching to the choir here.

52 minutes ago, 11241036 said:

Ploppable buildings, no matter what they do, will never trigger no. 7, only 1-3 (unless there's some exception I'm not aware of).

As per the edit to my last post, I checked in-game and indeed, by using Med/High wealth zoning, you can invoke the wealth 4 through 6 textures using this methodology.

I-AG and I-D are technically $ Wealth Ind, with $$ and $$$ being I-M and -HT respectively. But despite a special I-AG zone type and "sidewalk", Industrial zoning still invokes the normal 0-6 textures in most cases. It's not even possible to trigger a "7" texture, unless 0 through 6 also exist, most NAM textures end at 3.

1 hour ago, 11241036 said:

IMO, the simplest way of achieving this goal would be creating a flat overhanging prop on the lot itself.

Actually, that may not (exactly) work out:

You have to keep every other gap empty (top), otherwise you loose the very zoning you need so your fillers will match (bottom). Not a huge issue, but it requires a different kind of filler piece, which is slightly more complex to work with and may require at least 5 lots per style to cover all eventualities.

Note for the screenshot I used the invisible zoning technique, but it would be identical to grown farms below them. If you plop your farms, then you won't ever see the I-AG zoning around those anyway.

[11241036 5,096]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

Actually, that may not (exactly) work out:

You have to keep every other gap empty (top), otherwise you loose the very zoning you need so your fillers will match (bottom). Not a huge issue, but it requires a different kind of filler piece, which is slightly more complex to work with and may require at least 5 lots per style to cover all eventualities.

Note for the screenshot I used the invisible zoning technique, but it would be identical to grown farms below them. If you plop your farms, then you won't ever see the I-AG zoning around those anyway.

??? I don't understand what you are talking about. I'm talking about creating a simple ploppable lot with a flat, triangular prop overhanging the lot. I've been using Magneto's overhanging fillers frequently. Aside from the fact that you need to raise the overhanging props a little to avoid z-fighting, all of that doesn't matter because the overhanging diagonal prop will just cover the texture on the diagonal street/road. This works just fine, no need to keep every other space free. It's true, you can do it like this, but that means that Corina can only place lots that she wants to place at every other tile.

[rsc204 21,808]

I think there must be some misunderstanding here.

39 minutes ago, 11241036 said:

This works just fine, no need to keep every other space free.

Well it depends how picky you are I suppose. Because the sidewalk will still be visible between the street and filler, unless the filler overhangs to the very edge of the street. A standard filler won't reach far enough, hence in my mind keeping the zoning in place works out better.

[11241036 5,096]

Well, that's true, you make a good point there. I guess no solution is perfect.

You did release this mod over at the LEX. Is there a version that does the same, just with Maxis grass (I can't find it)? This would, however, mean that the dirt is entirely removed and replaced by grass, but if Corina doesn't bother with that... However, your second suggestion a few posts above sounds like a viable solution, too.

Also, @CorinaMarie, I can recall you attaching a file to one of your posts overriding the sidewalk textures below railway lines. As far as I know, this also affects agricultural zones. Again, this will remove the dirt altogether, and it's probably not a perfect solution, either, but at least all roads/streets will look the same.

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

2 hours ago, 11241036 said:

Also, @CorinaMarie, I can recall you attaching a file to one of your posts overriding the sidewalk textures below railway lines. As far as I know, this also affects agricultural zones. Again, this will remove the dirt altogether, and it's probably not a perfect solution, either, but at least all roads/streets will look the same.

Yes, indeed. It's a simple texture override I attached to this post. And it is my intention that this replaces the network dirt underlay texture throughout the entire city tile where the brown dirt would otherwise show up.

It's nothing fancy.  I started with the Maxis R$ Grass 7AB50E44-0986135E-251C1004-C0, edited it to make the pattern much less noticeable, and then assigned it the TGI needed to be an override. It looks like this zoomed to 300%:

 

For the diagonal filler lots @Cyclone Boom and I have made, my use will be along only SAM-3 and SAM-4 (Peg Dirt and Gravel). I believe (tho I'm not certain) as installed from NAM these will not be affected by any sidewalk mod along the diagonals since it appears the various shades of green are baked into the SAM textures.

With my Network Dirt to Grass override texture installed that gives me this when the dirt road runs between farms:

 

It also allows my rail to look like this:

^ Hidden agricultural zoning used to create this.

 

The main reason for my original question is that @thingfishs asked if our filler lots would be compatible with the SFBT Street Tree mod in the agricultural areas. My research and post here shows that out of the box the answer is no. In that post, I did poke around in the SFBT mod and found I could tweak it to then work with our fillers. The drawback to my brute force method is it might affect other aspects of where their trees appear elsewhere in their city. (And, unless I'm missing something, that mod does not work with SAMs, but only for regular asphalt diagonal streets.)

Anyhow, CB and I then began wondering if we'd overlooked something simple that could make our fillers work with said mod. (Hence my question here.)

To be useful, our fillers cannot be every other cell as they need to look like this:

^ What I did for our textures is simply transition from the crop fields to the R$ grass which SAM 3 & 4 have baked in.

We really appreciate the explanations about T21s and overhangs and such, but those options are more than we feel are needed for the purpose of our mod. The fillers also get plopped around the field where they are not adjacent to a network. As created, these fillers work well enough for my rural scenes. (I'm already aware that growing $$+ adjacent will then trigger a different SAM grass and I simply plan my layout accordingly.)

[rsc204 21,808]

20 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

For the diagonal filler lots @Cyclone Boom and I have made, my use will be along only SAM-3 and SAM-4 (Peg Dirt and Gravel). I believe (tho I'm not certain) as installed from NAM these will not be affected by any sidewalk mod along the diagonals since it appears the various shades of green are baked into the SAM textures.

Basically only the sidewalk is not fixed in most network textures, grass must be baked-in, whatever is left transparent determines where the sidewalk is "inserted".

It sounds like what you want is to get the grass on the SAM networks, to match the one for your filler? If you give me your edited texture, I can generate a custom override for specific networks, i.e. Just SAM2 + 3 that will use this grass texture.

21 hours ago, 11241036 said:

You did release this mod over at the LEX. Is there a version that does the same, just with Maxis grass (I can't find it)? This would, however, mean that the dirt is entirely removed and replaced by grass, but if Corina doesn't bother with that... However, your second suggestion a few posts above sounds like a viable solution, too.

There is no TGN version with Maxis Grass, because that should be what you are seeing if you don't use TGN. But due to how I've built the repository for TGN, I can run an automated script to make any variant of TGN I like, it just requires one to three grass textures to be supplied.

It may be worth checking out the Overhanging fillers in my Diagonal Filler Set, those are designed to match installed textures, the Dirt variants would automatically show your grass override.

20 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

The main reason for my original question is that @thingfishs asked if our filler lots would be compatible with the SFBT Street Tree mod in the agricultural areas.

Isn't that a T21 Mod? In which case, unless you're making a T21 Mod, it would work just as it always does. Which because it doesn't support SAM, is not at all. Updating it to support SAM just requires duplicating all the T21s (the pieces are identical, although SAM contains less of them), to the SAM IDs. Placement might be off in some places due to different widths/standards, but you'd probably not need to edit too many pieces.

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

6 hours ago, rsc204 said:

It sounds like what you want is to get the grass on the SAM networks, to match the one for your filler? If you give me your edited texture, I can generate a custom override for specific networks, i.e. Just SAM2 + 3 that will use this grass texture.

Thank you ever so much for the offer!

As it happens, someone also sent us full overrides via PM for SAM-3 using my texture. I'm not mentioning their name atm in case they want to keep this a secret, but ofc I'd like to give them credit. (And I know you can guess who.)

Now, to clarify what CB and I are doing: We have made a bunch of ploppable filler lots which we plan to release on the STEX. Currently the full package weighs about 1 MB and it is intended for the beginning player who's not yet ready for full packages like SPAM or such, but who also would like to eliminate the jaggies.

My original question was with the idea that there might be something simple we were overlooking and could tweak in our lots to prevent the T21 texture change of the adjacent networks. We really appreciate the detailed help you, Ron, and the Numbers Bear have offered. As it turns out, it would vastly increase the size of our mod to include a bunch of SAM overrides so at this point we believe using the matching R$ grass in our fillers will correspond well to how the adjacent SAMs change to the R$ grass.

 

6 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Isn't that a T21 Mod? In which case, unless you're making a T21 Mod, it would work just as it always does.

Yes, theirs is a T21 mod.  They have it set up so it adds certain props based on the adjacent zoning or plop. So, when theirs sees 0x07 nearby it'll add a tree (sometimes), but when it detects other zoning it adds something else. Because our lots cause their T21 override to no longer see the Network Dirt, that causes their trees to disappear. In the test I linked above, I simply tweaked their mod to add the tree props for all wealths. That was only to prove to myself it could be tweaked to work when our fillers are plopped adjacent. Ofc, that would then cause trees to appear in other places their mod did not intend.

Again, we really appreciate all the offers to fix things up with the T21 texture switcheroo, but we realize it would increase the size of our mod way, way more than we are comfy with.

New question: I know that the 5 sizes of textures are called mips. Is there a specific way to refer to the 4 variation sets of textures? Ergo, the C0, C1, C2, and C3 varieties.

[thingfishs 416]

On 5/13/2020 at 6:37 AM, CorinaMarie said:

The main reason for my original question is that @thingfishs asked if our filler lots would be compatible with the SFBT Street Tree mod in the agricultural areas...(And, unless I'm missing something, that mod does not work with SAMs, but only for regular asphalt diagonal streets.)

Sorry about this, I should have clarified this earlier (I guess I was a bit embarrassed ). But when I made that post I, in my quick look at your image, failed to factor in that they were SAM streets (which, as you found out, the SFBT has no effect on). As it's come up - is there anyway that a SAM T21 setup could be enabled? Even if it would be arduous, that is a project that, down the track, I would have a lot of motivation for... (it's disappointing not to have tree lined dirt streets, and I do a lot of agricultural stuff).

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

1 hour ago, thingfishs said:

As it's come up - is there anyway that a SAM T21 setup could be enabled?

Yep, I believe so.

It might be as easy as copying the prop data from the existing mod to the corresponding pieces of each SAM you'd want to have those appear on. Seems to me the biggest challenge would be understanding which ones need to match up with which others. My first impression was it might only be a bit tedious. I've looked into it some and realize it's more than I understand atm.

[rivit 3,391]

11 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

New question: I know that the 5 sizes of textures are called mips. Is there a specific way to refer to the 4 variation sets of textures? Ergo, the C0, C1, C2, and C3 varieties.

I'm not aware of a term for them - for me they're the variants of or in a multifsh which is a fsh texture with more than one source bitmap.

[rsc204 21,808]

11 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

My original question was with the idea that there might be something simple we were overlooking and could tweak in our lots to prevent the T21 texture change of the adjacent networks.

Just for clarity, the texture changes are nothing to do with T21s. Simply that T21s can be set for which zone types are present. Of course, that's what fillers mess with, since any zoning such fillers replace, is now a different zoning type.

You can see more clearly the 16 zoning types. You can just add Plopped (0x0F I think) to the list of existing zones. Otherwise, you can create a new set of T21s especially for Plopped zones.

5 hours ago, thingfishs said:

As it's come up - is there anyway that a SAM T21 setup could be enabled?

Yes, copy all the T21s from the mod. Replace the Network Tile IDs from the current Street ones to their SAM equivalents. Likewise adjust the IIDs too. For the most part, that's all you'd need, but note that not all SAM mods share the same geometry. It could be, you'd need to move some Props and that's where things get tough, especially if you're not familiar with T21 modding.

11 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

As it turns out, it would vastly increase the size of our mod to include a bunch of SAM overrides so at this point we believe using the matching R$ grass in our fillers will correspond well to how the adjacent SAMs change to the R$ grass.

Yes, I can totally see why it's preferable to just use the defaults, rather than a cascading change-everything solution. But a matching SAM mod wouldn't be that huge and if DATPacked into the original SAM files in NAM, doesn't have to take up any extra space.

In which case, what are you going to do with the I-AG "sidewalk", because if a farm zone is one side and Plopped lots on the other, that will bring with it jaggies because each side of the diagonal textures would be differently zoned? The simple solution is just to keep a 1-tile gap and always use the fillers, then you can control both sides of the zoning.

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

7 hours ago, rsc204 said:

In which case, what are you going to do with the I-AG "sidewalk", because if a farm zone is one side and Plopped lots on the other, that will bring with it jaggies because each side of the diagonal textures would be differently zoned?

We'll simply explain how our filler lot's textures are based on R$ grass such that R$ homes grown adjacent will maintain the continuity of the textures:

^ There is that slight difference by the farm building lot because of the Network to modified Grass underlay. This particular .dat will also also have an unmodified R$ grass version which would make the above scene blend even better, but also adds way more of a moire pattern under parallel rail lines. I personally feel the trade off in the above pic is worth it.

I believe it'll be up to the city designer to control (via tax rates) what grows adjacent just like it already is now for anyone plopping and zoning adjacent to diagonal SAMs (or any other diagonal networks) in a farm area. It's beginning to seem like we should not release our mod since there will be these issues which would take a significant amount of additional work and a whole lot more lots with overhangs to avoid these disparities.

[11241036 5,096]

7 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Just for clarity, the texture changes are nothing to do with T21s. Simply that T21s can be set for which zone types are present. Of course, that's what fillers mess with, since any zoning such fillers replace, is now a different zoning type.

etc.

What's with this T21 editor, if I'm right about this? Never seen it before. Is this available for download somewhere? I'd really like to have it, I'm occasionally dealing with T21's as well.