Flann's Mod Thread

[Flann 1,709]

Hello everyone.

I've recently opened my eyes to the expansive world of SC4 modding so I thought I'd start a thread to document my work and questions that arise.  In particular, I've taken an interest in texture modifications via GoFSH.

Thus far I've successfully replace some dirt paths in CP's BSC_TexturePack_Cycledogg_V 01.dat :

Eventually, I would like to work out a way to replace all of the textures in this pack to be more consistent with my new preferred terrain mod, Gobias' Sudden Valley.  CP's textures are great, but I would like a more unified look.  At the same time, I'd like to keep some of the elements of CP's textures, like the flowers and tall grass elements of the lot textures.

For reference, here are all of the textures that CP used to create this massive pack:

Looking just at the grass textures, we can see there's about 13 varieties, not counting the multi-FSH textures.

By contrast, Gobias' SV Base Textures has fewer varieties.  Thus, replacing CP's work with this would greatly increase homogeneity.

One way I intend to honor the original style of CP's textures is to find a way to replicate the placement of flowers and tall grass texture onto the Sudden Valley base textures.  I'm not sure if I will stick with the original colors or try to use colors that match some of Girafe's flora.  At any rate, I'm still a photoshop novice so this may take some time.  However, once the replacement textures for CP's base set is in place, it should be relatively straight forward to recreate all of the rest of the textures because I can use the alphas from the overlay textures in the pack to create replacement combinations.  Where paving exists, I will create new definition alphas to facilitate automatic texture generation in GoFSH.  All in all, it's looking to be quite a bit of work but I am excited to work it all out.

----

Switching gears to a much more manageable project, Industrial Revolution Mod fillers.

@T Wrecks released excellent filler lots to compliment his IRM mod.

@kingofsimcity followed up with an excellent FA version:

KOSC teased in the description that grass versions to match @rsc204's TGN mods would be forthcoming, but alas, they have not  I'm trying to tackle this issue.

I've successfully made a simple GoFSH script to replace the grass texture with whatever you might want it to be.

However, the thought occurred to me that T Wrecks original filler set automatically adjusted to my SV Base textures.  I thought this might mean that the T Wrecks diagonal fillers were created with the grass as the base texture and the pavement as the overlay, but on closer inspection it is the inverse, the grass is the overlay.  KOSC's pieces are the same way, the difference being that T Wrecks' pieces are overridden by MGB's TGN and KOSC's are not.  Given all of this, likely the best solution would be to have TGN override these textures as well, rather than a myself throwing something out there.

All said, I'm curious whether or not it would be a good idea to have these types of lots created with the textures inverted, i.e, creating overlay textures for the paved portions and using grass as the base.  Would this not allow for the grass to switch with whatever terrain mod is installed, assuming it has a base texture replacement?  Are there issues with that relating to slicing up and distributing the original NCD lot textures?  Interested to hear thoughts on this.

Cheers,

Flann

[rivit 3,391]

8 hours ago, Flann said:

One way I intend to honor the original style of CP's textures is to find a way to replicate the placement of flowers and tall grass texture onto the Sudden Valley base textures.

Have you considered this problem in reverse  - what if you color match the CP grass textures to the predominant shades of the Sudden Valley textures. You can do this in Photoshop using the Image/Adjust/Match Color dialog.  Together with selective color ranges this gives you a great deal of control over how the color is changed.

This limits the number of textures to change and then you can remake the FSH textures (GoFSH batch) using these adjusted color textures. 

[Flann 1,709]

4 hours ago, rivit said:

Have you considered this problem in reverse  - what if you color match the CP grass textures to the predominant shades of the Sudden Valley textures. You can do this in Photoshop using the Image/Adjust/Match Color dialog.  Together with selective color ranges this gives you a great deal of control over how the color is changed.

This limits the number of textures to change and then you can remake the FSH textures (GoFSH batch) using these adjusted color textures. 

Hi rivit,

Thanks for the suggestion.  I gave this a go and basically brute-forced the entire texture pack through the color match process, matching everything to the $$ Sudden Valley base texture.

Some of it turned out quite nice but parts of it are kind of off.  I'm still on the fence as far as whether to use a uniform wealth texture across all the content or if it would be better to stick with the 3 wealth grasses.  I am definitely tempted to go unified texture all the way, but I'm not sure I want to lose all the variety.

Anyways, this is what the CP base textures ended up looking like when I did a more nuanced color correction and tried to save the color in the flowers:

I may give it a whirl tomorrow and try to figure out how to generate the various combos of grasses that are present in this pack using the textures above.  Because the overlay textures in this pack seem to use the same pattern as the lot base texture dual-grass pieces, I should have all of the alphas needed to stitch the textures together.

The hard part will be matching up all the pieces.  TBH, I don't know if it's going to work out or not.  It seems like a hell of a lot of work and I can't seem to wrap my head around how to do it efficiently.  There are too many combinations. The more I think about it the more tempted I am to just convert all the grass to SV $$, be done with that and focus more on the dirt and pavement, which was my original goal and seems a lot easier to handle in GoFSH.

[rivit 3,391]

An interesting experiment and I think it proves the old adage that variety is the spice of life. Matching everything to the same color takes out a whole dimension of variety. I think if one went this way one would have to keep $,$$,$$$ distinctions in color.

Another way would be to adjust the CP grass colors towards the dominant tones of the Sudden Valley. In your first post you can see how the bright greens ($$$) of the CP are quite a long way from the Sudden Valley greens. Dropping the saturation of the CP textures might be a way to get them to be less stark against the SV terrain, but retain the variety.  These can be done using Photoshop batch, but once again its hard to automate as personal judgement is needed to avoid strange results. You would also need to keep some sense of $,$$,$$$ for best results.

There is also a way with GoFSH by script to XEDIT the textures from one color to another - akin to how the RRW reskin was done.  This takes the average color of a tile and replaces it with another color, then adds back variations to maintain special detail. Its not infallible because it depends on certain color assumptions about the textures themselves (for example bright magenta flowers on green grass might not turn out well) but can do quite well.  It can deal with $,$$,$$$ variations. You need to make D0s to actually do the edit too - they're mostly plain cyan for grass only changes.

[Flann 1,709]

4 minutes ago, rivit said:

An interesting experiment and I think it proves the old adage that variety is the spice of life. Matching everything to the same color takes out a whole dimension of variety. I think if one went this way one would have to keep $,$$,$$$ distinctions in color.

After testing it out, I tend to agree.

5 minutes ago, rivit said:

Another way would be to adjust the CP grass colors towards the dominant tones of the Sudden Valley. In your first post you can see how the bright greens ($$$) of the CP are quite a long way from the Sudden Valley greens. Dropping the saturation of the CP textures might be a way to get them to be less stark against the SV terrain, but retain the variety.  These can be done using Photoshop batch, but once again its hard to automate as personal judgement is needed to avoid strange results. You would also need to keep some sense of $,$$,$$$ for best results.

This is more or less what I did with the textures in the second to last picture in my last post.  For each of the base textures I picked one of the SV wealths to color correct towards, but I also cut out the flowers from the correction.

A good chunk of the textures in this pack are combinations of different grasses and dirts.  What I'm trying to do now is sort them into folders via common base grass, so that I can use the default bmp function of GoFSH.  Then, I'll modify the existing A0s to insert new grass.  If I can get it all sorted properly, I think it will work.  I might even be able to do several replacement grasses at once.  Does that make sense?

[rivit 3,391]

Yes I think that will work out OK. You probably will have to make up several folders to be able to automate each base texture, then a script to recombine everything at the end. But the good thing is you will be able to make reuse of a lot of D0s (only need to renumber them) because the various combos will have been made in the same way.

[Flann 1,709]

I've shifted my attention towards T21 mods.  Specifically, I'm attempting to fill a gap in the game right now: a seasonal street tree mod.  I'm basing my mod on the techniques and props used in the SFBT street tree mod.

In exploring the T21 exemplars, and by some examples shown by @Raymond7cn in his thread, I've learned that if multiple T21 exemplars exist for the same network tile and on the same pattern, the game will choose one at random.  For example, the Maxis street T21s have some overlap like this to show different props:

This led me to posit that I could create a seasonal street tree mod using the same methods.  Essentially, there needs to be a separate T21 for each tree model.  Doing it this way, as opposed to tree prop families, will ensure that the trees change to the fall/summer/winter version without changing the type of tree.  Unfortunately it also means a great deal of work creating the T21s.

When I started to consider the math of it all, I was a bit put off by the sheer scale of the work.  For example, considering only residential streets -

3 densities x 3 wealths  x  ~ 20 prop configurations  x  3(sometimes 6) props/tree  x   n trees =  540n edits !  If I were to use 8 trees, that would be 4,320 prop keys to change.  Obviously this is a huge effort, and it doesn't even consider the commercial, industrial, or plopped area T21s.

Recognizing that there would need to be some simplification in order to make the project feasible, I started considering ways I could condense the configurations.  One easy change would be to group medium density with high density, which would reduce the number of edits by 33%.  Further, I thought that it was silly to have seperate exemplars for 'Persons', 'Post Box', 'T Can', and 'Bench'.  Turns out there is a prop family for these items, so these can be condensed and that eliminates a chunk of the prop configurations.

Ultimate I landed on 9 total basic prop configurations, which reduces the number of edits by about half.

StreetDblTree : 2 staggered trees (appears every other tile)

StreetEven : Tree + Light

StreetOdd : Tree + Light

StreetEven-Hydrant: Tree + Hydrant (Maybe Light too)

StreetOdd-Hydrant: Tree + Hydrant (Maybe Light too)

StreetEven-Prop: Tree + Light + Random Prop ( trash, post box, people, bench, etc )

StreetOdd-Prop: Tree + Light + Random Prop (  trash, post box, people, bench, etc  )

StreetEven-NiceFlora: Light + 4 bushes or planters

StreetOdd-NiceFlora: Light + 4 bushes or planters

I've also considered not creating separate versions for different wealths, but I'm not sure the reduction in detail would be worth it.  It would mean that the street lights would all stay the same across the city, and no variation in parking patterns or props between wealths.  Assuming I do all three wealths, the math changes to :

2 densities  x  3 wealths  x  7 prop configs w/ trees  x  3 props/tree  x  n tree varieties =  126n edits.  This might be manageable.

Updating Props

In doing this work, I wanted to make use of some different props for the T21s.  Notably, I've changed to CP's street planters, which come in a family of 2 (circle and square).  I've also tested out using the SHK Parking Pack car families, which look great, but in my opinion are just a bit too large.  I'm experimenting with creating new timed prop families out of the massive PC Mega Props car props, which I find are a bit closer to the original scale.  I also might include some of CP's vehicles in this family.

Compatibility with USL

I recently discovered the Uniform Street Lighting mod and immediately fell in love.  My T21 mod will use the maxis street lights that will be compatible with the USL prop overrides.

 

Finally, here's a picture showing the first test of a second variety of tree added to one of the exemplars:

[bladeberkman 714]

Hey Flann, 

Just stumbled on your mod thread. I realize the last post was a long time ago, but just curious if you made any additional progress on your CP texture replacement. The results so far look great. I imagine this involves a lot of tedious work. 
 

Your T21 mod looks beautiful as well. Always wanted to liven-up the streets and roads in my cities to make them feel more human, but I find that a lot of the existing T21 mods have issues with prop scale, color, and redundancy (oversized florescent trees, undersized cars, and a phone booth every other tile come to mind, haha). They often have compatibility issues with other mods, too (like street light replacement mods for example). I think you’ve found an aesthetically pleasing balance. 

Thanks,

-Blade

 

[Flann 1,709]

On 5/27/2022 at 12:10 AM, bladeberkman said:

Hey Flann, 

Just stumbled on your mod thread. I realize the last post was a long time ago, but just curious if you made any additional progress on your CP texture replacement. The results so far look great. I imagine this involves a lot of tedious work. 
 

Your T21 mod looks beautiful as well. Always wanted to liven-up the streets and roads in my cities to make them feel more human, but I find that a lot of the existing T21 mods have issues with prop scale, color, and redundancy (oversized florescent trees, undersized cars, and a phone booth every other tile come to mind, haha). They often have compatibility issues with other mods, too (like street light replacement mods for example). I think you’ve found an aesthetically pleasing balance. 

Thanks,

-Blade

 

In short, no I haven't really made any progress on either of these things.  I'm glad you think they look good, that might just be the inspiration I need to get them more complete.  Most of the time I spend on SimCity 4 these days has to do with NAM related stuff but I think it'd be worthwhile to revisit some of these projects which I started before that.

Thanks for stopping by.

[rsc204 21,805]

Should have popped in here sooner, but CPs grass textures are also on my todo list and I’ve been plugging away at it for a few years.

Rivit is quite correct when he mentions the problem of mods like TGN, unifying textures sure looks better, but often comes at the expense of variety. This is something I’d been working to address and if it eventually comes to fruition it will mark the v3 release of TGN.

A long while ago I was talking with Rivit about this and it lead to a custom version of TGN I use that takes advantage of GoFSHs ability to alter the overall colour/shade of a texture whilst keeping the details within it. But it’s an imperfect solution and works for some textures well, for example the BSC grass textures with patterns like strips of lighter/darker grass. Some of CPs textures also come out ok, but many of them need a lot of manual work and even then are a bit ‘fudged’. In an ideal world, if we had access to CPs development textures, assuming they even exist or were suitable, that would make this task both automatable and with hugely improved results. Assuming the base grass was a separate layer from other detailing, you could simply replace the grass with a more terrain friendly one and keep the general style.

Without such, I think it would actually be quicker to remake everything and simply keeping the overall style, rather than matching it pixel for pixel. But this is personally beyond my texturing skills and probably very time-consuming.

If you are picking this up again Flann, I’ve a bunch of resources that may be useful. I was playing with the CP stuff earlier this year again and starting to get somewhere with the less-complex textures.