Help with my terrain mod

[Golhbul 134]

Hello

I installed my mods and other plugins, and I cannot adjust my terrainMOD. I tried to follow the tutorials here and on other sites but nothing to do. I show you what I would like to get.

Thank you for your help

Spoiler

Before

Spoiler

After

PS> If you need this is my .DAT

LK_AppalachianTerrain_Snow_Jagged_Coast.dat

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Hi Golhbul, Nice to meet you!

@Golhbul I show you what I would like to get.

All I know about how to tweak the parameters of Terrain Mod is come from this tutorial Know Your Terrain: A simple guide to making the most of your terrain mod, Frankly, I'm lack of experience of this, I just only used iReader to tweak the waterline and snowline, I guessed you want to modify your beach, So do you have the iliveReader? iLive - Reader 0.9.3 if so, you could tweak the MaxBeachWidth and MaxBeachAltitude to see what happen in game. I'm sorry I couldn't help you with .DAT due to outside right now, But I'm sure the experts here will probably come along with much better advice, Thank you.

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

BTW, you could use the Reader to create a new dat file which just has one exemplar file inside with the same TGI as your Terrain Mod, you could put it into a folder which loaded by the game after your Mod,(E.g. z___test) then It will be convenient for you to tweak the parameters. and also the MaxBeachWidth is a HEX value, it decides how far from the water does the beach extend, You can use your OS's calculator to transform decimal and the Hex value. Best Regards! 

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

I don't know if it helps, however you could use the Reader to open this Mod as a reference. Beach Extend Mod.

Best Regards,

-- Raymond

[Golhbul 134]

Unfortunately I have already tried this following this guide but I can't get the desired result ...
I will fight but I will definitely get there

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, Golhbul said:

Unfortunately I have already tried this following this guide but I can't get the desired result ...

I'm a wee bit uncertain what the desired result is.

Is it that in your after picture the beach textures are mostly eliminated?

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

9 hours ago, Golhbul said:

Unfortunately I have already tried this following this guide but I can't get the desired result ...
I will fight but I will definitely get there

Hi Golhbul, I Installed the LK's Terrain mod from Cori's shop, there were only this mod with vanilla SimCity, and also I noticed that you had changed the parameters from 0x03,5 to oxo1,30. Then I got this below:

You can tell from the shots above, there are changes on the beachline, some of them maybe not very obvious only if you look through with the same window. So if that is what you want, Maybe there are some conflicts with your plugins, You could test it with plugins folder just have this Terrain mod. I hope it helps.

Best,

-- Raymond

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

I'm not very good at animate pictures, I hope it could help you with the difference.

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[Golhbul 134]

I tested well that with the Terrain MOD and my beach is still too wide towards the land ... I am still trying different settings, I will achieve something but for the moment, I am not getting any satisfactory results

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

4 minutes ago, Golhbul said:

I tested well that with the Terrain MOD and my beach is still too wide towards the land ... I am still trying different settings, I will achieve something but for the moment, I am not getting any satisfactory results

Ah, i kind of understand your demand, I will show you that soon. Please wait me for a moment.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

This time I changed your parameter 'MaxBeachAltitude' to -30, then I got the picture above, Is that what you want?

[Golhbul 134]

I see that you get the same results as me. I believe my request is impossible in this case, unless someone knows, I don't see how to get the requested result

MaxBeachAltitude < 0x00 : no sand at all

 

MaxBeachAltitude >0x01  : The sand is still too wide ...

I'm looking for a more precise way to settle

 

I will show you with a sharper image retouched via photoshop if necessary

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

8 minutes ago, Golhbul said:

I will show you with a sharper image retouched via photoshop if necessary

That would really help to clarify.

In the meantime, have you tried setting MaxBeachWidth to 0x01?

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

15 minutes ago, Golhbul said:

I see that you get the same results as me. I believe my request is impossible in this case, unless someone knows, I don't see how to get the requested result

MaxBeachAltitude < 0x00 : no sand at all

 

MaxBeachAltitude >0x01  : The sand is still too wide ...

I'm looking for a more precise way to settle

 

I will show you with a sharper image retouched via photoshop if necessary

Hi Golhbul, Maybe I'm wrong here, But I thought the MaxBeachAltitude is a float value which between -10,000,000 and 10,000,000. have you ever tried more precise value for testing.

[Golhbul 134]

 

I unfortunately tried ... And no correct results

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@Golhbul

I'm confuzzled because the 0x01 looks like what I believe you want for the result. Obviously, I'm misunderstanding so a Photoshopped pic would prolly help a lot.

[Golhbul 134]

the photoshoped image is "???"

The more in advance, the more I have the impression that we will arrive at the expected result.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Ah, so you want the beaches to be wider? Then up the value in the MaxBeachWidth to 0x0A or higher.

[Golhbul 134]

OK... 0x0a is lower 0x01? I will try

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, Golhbul said:

OK... 0x0a is lower 0x01? I will try

No, no. 0x0A is larger. It is 10 in decimal. The large number is to allow the beaches to extend further inland from the water.

[Golhbul 134]

So my request is impossible.

I am at the lowest (0x01) and the beach are too wide ... I will do with

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Did you try 0x00?

[Golhbul 134]

7 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Did you try 0x00?

Yes... I haven't sand... just grass

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

At least I believe I understand now what you want. That is to have only the one tile closest to the water show the beach texture? If so, then as @Raymond7cn mentioned, the Altitude one can accept decimal numbers. So for that, what happens with 0.1? (No 0x in front of it which means hexadecimal.)

[Golhbul 134]

Nothing to do, I get only grass ... I give up, I will settle for grass and I will play MMP

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

One more thing which might be worth tweaking: WaterProximityRangeFactor. Maybe (hopefully) lowering that would change how far inland the beach color goes.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Hi Golhbul,

24 minutes ago, Golhbul said:

Nothing to do, I get only grass ... I give up, I will settle for grass and I will play MMP

 

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

That is to have only the one tile closest to the water show the beach texture

Thanks for Cori, Now I understand what you desire to do, I'm basing my guess on this part, I can see from reader there is a statement which said that the MaxBeachWidth decides how far from the water does the beach extend (cells), So I just guessed cells means tiles here, then from our test results, we couldn't get a one tile beach even had set the BeachWidth to 1, so are there other parameters decide this? I'm not an expert on Terrain mod, I just thought maybe we could change other parameters as MaxNormalYForCliff or INI file which may decide how STEEPER to see what happened, Anyways, if you still couldn't get a satisfied result, I believe others who are good at the Terrain will help you with it. 

Best Regards,

-- Raymond

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Hi Golhbul, I hope you haven't given up this issue, I did some tests about this, It's just my conjecture, I thought maybe your issue had no relation to MaxBeachAltitude and MaxBeachWidth, and what you want is just the MaxBeachWidth = 0x01, same to MaxBeachAltitude which just decide when the maxbeachwidth appear according the altitude. (with my test, the value below 4.25 means no beach, higher means there is)

That's all my guessed parts basing the tests, Maybe wrong, so I carefully observed the effect of MaxBeachWidth = 0x01, I found that the beach probable has been 1 tile there. Since the other parts looked like some Blend textures, or say gradual change, Then I opened the LK's textures, I found that there was a parameter of every exemplar which was TextureBlendStrength = 1, it's a float value, and the desc was : Higher this value, the more weightage this Texture gets while blending with others. 

After that I found out some description of the Terrain Texture from web, There are 3 beach textures 0x13, 0x14, and 0x39.

0x39 is the beach above ground

 0x14 is right below sea-level

 0x13 is deep sea

Then I also noticed that there were Z*_TextureSpreadCurve (one for each zoom level). I guessed those numbers each two of them is as a group, the first number maybe the distance, another maybe represent the Strength. But I still have no clue where is 0x39 and the start point of the distance feature.

That's all, It's too late and I have to go to sleep now, I will do some tests tomorrow, Before that, I still hope others could advance this issue for you.

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

 

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Hi everyone, I think i got some progress with this issue, I didn't noticed that the LK's Terrain mod also has starter dependence, that's the beach Texture itself, so I think it just replace the Maxis's TGI, Anyway, I relpaced the beach's textures with a balck one followed the tips which Cori taught me before, then I got the first picture above, From the screen-shot you could easily tell, there are at least 4 textures blend with each other. So I thought the distance value here means form the center of the first texture, then I guessed:

0,1 means from the center 0 meters, blend strength = 1

8,0.8 means from the center 8 meters, blend strength = 0.8

16,0.6 means from the center 16 meters, blend strength = 0.6

24,0.4 means from the center 24 meters, blend strength = 0.4

32,0.3 means from the center 32 meters, blend strength = 0.3

40,0.2 means from the center 40 meters, blend strength = 0.2

48,0.1 means from the center 48 meters, blend strength = 0.1

Since each tile in SimCity is 16 meters, So the values above might means from the center of first texture to the center of the fourth one(48 m and it makes sense with my test)

Then I got a random thought, If we replaced the 0x39 textures with shoreside's textures, Or if we tweak the shoreside or 0x39's exemplar's blend value, We may got  the result which Golhbul want. But I haven't found out the 0x39's exemplar or the shoreside's textures. So I still need some time to do those tests. That's all my friends, I will try to figure out these as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

 

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Dear All, I thought it kind of looks like @Golhbul's demand this time, I found out 0x39's exemplar from Maxis's dat1, It seems like Mr LK prefer to Maxis curve behave pretty well on their own. so I change all of LK's exemplar's TextureSpreadCurve strength to 1, and then set the Maxis's beach exemplar's TextureSpreadCurve distance from to 0 to 16, then I got the shot above, I know it still looks kind of unnatural, but I guessed you could get a satisfied result through tweaking those parameters. Anyway, that's all I can help with this issue, I have to go to model my Castle which just began. I believe that Dear @CorinaMarie and @Cyclone Boom could help me to confirm these with more professional research. Thank you! 

Yours Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[Golhbul 134]

That's exactly it .... It's just great.

I will try to understand how you got these results.