No green spaces in diagonal squares

[ohdude 2,353]

Hi everybody!

I have a problem making diagonal lots for the community.

The fact is that when a ploppable lot is put in the city, the diagonal streets or avenues round on it make green squares on it.

Look at the example:

 

I tried to solve it zoning the squares around with medium or high density commercial areas. And it showed like this:

 

On the other hand i made and rendered a very flat BAT emulating street sidewalk (a ploppable one) with the same texture but i don't like the final look too much for many reasons ( ground texture is flexible with terrain irregularities but no a prop emulating ground texture):

 

The problem appears when i don't want to zone anything around it.

My question is: How can i make ploppable lots to look like growables ones in regard to street, avenues ,etc. effect? @Tarkus @Haljackey @rsc204 @Lucario Boricua @CorinaMarie@Cyclone Boom @rivit

I mean, i want the streets round my ploppable lot look like if they were growable high or medium density  ( with no green spaces between the lot and the street)

 

Thanks lovely people, it will help to improve lots that I'm working on!

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

@ohdude

Since you beeped me, I've followed the topic to see what answers are posted.

This is an area in which I had a similar trouble when CB and I were creating diagonal filler lots and, as I recall, the solution is to redo all the sidewalk/grass textures that the streets use so they are the same and unchanging. (It was more than we wanted to learn at the time as it would then need explained to anyone downloading our lots for how to customize for their setup.)

I believe it was @rivit and @rsc204 who replied then.

[ohdude 2,353]

@CorinaMarie

I've found a "no grass mod" which in its description says that: "  will remove the grass edges on the Avenue , Road , One Way Roads and Streets that are part of the NAM and SFBT Euro TexturesMod that are not covered by any other mods".
 

 

But i don't want this effect. I just want the growable medium or high density effect on the sidewalk of the streets, avenues, etc when you plop a building in the city.

(for example: using buildingplop cheat, you can plop any growable building but the effect on the sidewalk street will be the ploppable effect and no the growable):

 

And this is what i want to get but for ploppable lots (the picture correspond to the sidewalk effect when you are zoning the terrain with medium or high density commercial area (growable):

 

In summary, I just want to change the behaviour on the avenues, roads, streets sidewalks produced by the ploppable lots ( maybe using reader we could make that happen).

[11241036 5,115]

@ohdude Yes, that's an annoying problem, and you already mentioned two at least partly viable solutions to this problem - by making a building medium-density, or adding a prop looking like a sidewalk.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a way to tell the game to not to use grass at a specific location, but I'd like to make two additional suggestions of how to deal with that problem:

Magneto has released a set of filler lots with overhanging props that cover these nasty grass parts. They work in a very similar way and are sitting on a 1x1 lot, so, if you make a lot with a very small footprint and an overhanging building, one could, on theory, combine your lots with Magneto's lots.

There is a mod on the LEX by rsc204 that removes all grass from road networks, including avenues: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3316

Edit: Sorry, I forgot you already mentioned a quite similar mod. But I'm afraid there's no way to change the behavior of ploppable lots. As far as I know, plopped buildings always count as low-density buildings.

[rsc204 21,866]

There isn't really an easy one-stop fix for this problem, in large part because it depends a lot on the specific location and networks surrounding that as to which solution is best. You've already shown in your examples a few solutions such as using Med/High wealth zoning and using overhanging sidewalk props. Another example is altering your game (network) textures, it is possible to force the Med/High zoning to always be in use with a mod like this one. The problem with that is that it's an either or choice, although you can make that on a per-network basis.

As part of this set, I've included pre-made models that adapt to the installed sidewalk, which may be useful if you want to go the Overhanging Prop route. That said, whilst the pieces included are intended to cover the most common (shapes) situations, they don't cover every eventuality, for example there is nothing to cover the slip lanes. Colour-matching is not 100% perfect, but it's as good as you can get without making dedicated models for every sidewalk, a much more complicated and less flexible approach. Note too, either approach is not slope tolerant and this can lead to odd effects, again in your final screenshot you can see the sidewalk of the lot doesn't line up with the avenue, this is probably because it's actually above it (only slightly), which distorts things. Likewise, the size needed to fill the grass for Avenue might be different to say a Road, so again this may lead to less than ideal gaps or covering a bit of a network. By and large I've made mine to work best with Streets, Roads and OWR, since Avenue is easier to control the wealthing effect, since it uniquely determines the zoning of a given stretch based on the dominant zoning type along it.

There is always the problem that any plopped items won't trigger higher density zoning types, although they can trigger higher wealths, but in essence a Plop Lot always triggers Low Density zoning. In some cases this can make it hard, if not impossible to have any network tiles touching such ploppables whilst keeping Med/High wealth zoning. However, it's worth considering that this is really only a problem for diagonal tiles, as such I generally stick to the following:

For Avenues, you just need to make sure that the largest proportion of the section in question has Med-High wealth zoning, this may require avoiding too many Plop Lots, including fillers. A handy trick is to use Pedmalls since they are a road network and don't contribute to the dominant zone calculation. To give an example if a section of Avenue contained 20 tiles overall, with 9 Low Density and 10 Med/High density zones, placing 2 1x1 sidewalk filler (plop) lots would cause that section to all switch to Low Density zoning, since it's now the dominant type (11 vs 10). Whereas, if you used two Pedmall, which not only look the same, but also are functional, the count would remain 9 vs 10, i.e. Mid/High wealthing would remain as the dominant zone type. It's a bit complex to explain, but if you experiment with using fillers & pedmalls, you can regain a lot of control over this area. Another possibility is converting sections to Tram in Avenue, it is possible to force sidewalks for diagonal TiA outer tiles.

For Streets, Roads and OWR, here I tend to use a lot more overhanging fillers, which has the drawback of keeping things level. But you can work patterns into where grass/sidewalks transition, so even though you may not always get a perfect filled-in section, sometimes you don't have to to get pleasing results. Since these network's zoning is controlled by only what's touching a given tile, you need to be careful to ensure they remain med-high wealth. Likewise using either SAM-6 or SAM-10 options for a street, will give sidewalks instead of grass by default, so just use one of these overrides in the relevant areas.

[Barroco Hispano 26,933]

Prop base textures without zfighting problem
 

1. The lod of the "Base texture prop" must have exactly this height and that elevation above the ground.

2. You should also disable "Is a ground model" when you create the .desc file

 

 

[Barroco Hispano 26,933]

I forgot to say that you must activate "Orient to slope" parameter so that the BAT base texture can be deformed according to the shape of the terrain.

[ohdude 2,353]

Thanks @Barroco Hispano and @rsc204, you are helping me a lot with your points of view and valuable info.

Let's see what can we get from this point.

[ohdude 2,353]

13 hours ago, Barroco Hispano said:

Prop base textures without zfighting problem
 

1. The lod of the "Base texture prop" must have exactly this height and that elevation above the ground.

2. You should also disable "Is a ground model" when you create the .desc file

 

 

1. Doesn't matter the size of the model??? in the example you showed me, the relation of the LOD compared to the model is 0,14 - 0,1? Does it matter? I ask it beacuse i'm having rendering glitch when I check the BAT in the SC4 PIMX.

[Barroco Hispano 26,933]

The shape of the LOD does not matter, all that matters is the height and elevation from the ground. Yes, it has to be exactly the one I showed you (0,14m & 0,02m).

 

[rsc204 21,866]

14 hours ago, Barroco Hispano said:

Prop base textures without zfighting problem

I'm not sure how you are creating these, but most people would just use a simple 2D plane with height, this seems to be a much more complex model, are you using a detailed mesh for this?

The models I use (and recommend) are not BAT models, instead they are RKT0 or True 3D models, they work very differently to BATs. Do you have a simple 16x16m version of this LOD you can attach as 3DS file?, I'd be interested in checking it out. Theoretically if the LOD can adapt to the terrain, the same data as an RKT 0 model should also be capable of the same thing.

[Barroco Hispano 26,933]

@rsc204 I used a displacement map for the texture and the lod is a simple box with 5 polys. 

AGC_Paths_LC_Tex7_V01_S1_90.gmax