Fractional angle W2W

[soylentgarnet 52]

 

Hi everyone

This is my first post despite being a follower of the community for quite a while.

As a brief introduction, I started playing again sc4, one of my favourite games as a child, during COVID pandemic and I ended up discovering and opening  the Pandora's box of custom content that kept this game fresh even after more than 20 years. As an architect myself I've been gradually  dragged into experimenting with models and modding, so finally I felt like I had to give my humble contribution too.

There is one thing in particular fr me that has always had great unexpressed potential: fractional angled networks.
I’m European and  I always wished to build realistic neighborhoods with w2w blocks following the different orientations of historical roads, or create urban grids with different directions.

So, also inspired by this old bat, I worked back and forth in my free time to develop a system of fractional angled w2w buildings that cover most of the possible combinations of the current FA3 road network, in both the mirrored versions.
The lots are mostly 1x3 in size, to match the FA3 grid,  and I tried to keep the same distance from the road as it is in the orthogonal network.
To identify the different types, each fitting a different canfiguration, I gave a code of numbers and letters: "S" for straights, "T" for transitions", "C" or Corners; then the orientaions: "R" for right, "L" for left.

The test models are in a classic european style, mostly using as a reference Copenhagen Vesterbro, but  I would like to add more variety in height and details.

For more realistic proportions I also divided the longer buildings in 2 parts,unfortunately I realized too late that  this way the roadside T21 trees of the FAR draggable  are exactly in front of the entrance doors, glitching with the facade especially when using a tree replacement mod (should i rethink the models or is there a simple way to move-remove those trees?)

Among the various issues that have emerged these made me questioning the most:

1.  Buildings, props and lots
   To create lots I used these blank models and turned my renders as overhanging props in PIM X. Not sure if it is the right approach.
   I noticed aslo that the nightlight seems not to always function correctly, even with all lots being powered. Is this related to the props which are partially offset,  the blank building or is it just random? However if the models are  directly set as buildings in PIM-X , instead of props, the nightlight seems to always work. I would need to reshape my carefully thought system of offsets in 3dsmax tho, not to mention the risk of immortal lots. So Which is the best strategy overall?
    
2. Functionality
   The way to go i guess is to make the buildings  as ploppable landmarks, the new submenus system can then  be used to make them easy to find (would be nice too have a specific  FA submenu,  that maybe could include diagonals too, but never mind).  I’d like them to be functional too and  the growify plopped building cheat works perfecly to solve that. With commercial is easy, but how should i do if i want them to be also residential?  In PIM-X  there is no option for residential ploppable and set them as growables is out of discussion as they could randomly appear on normal networks. Apparently i’m not the only one interested in this, is  that the way?
    
3.  Sidewalks
   Testing the growify DLL I noticed one more interesting thing: Usually a full sidewalk does not appear with ploppable lots for density reasons, leaving the grass visible along the road. But the growify DLL updates also the behaviour of the sidewalk according to the building category and density: redrawing the road was enough to show up the full sidewalks after growifying.
   This is a good way to avoid “no grass” mods, fillers, or the tedious work of making offset sidewalks embedded in the models.
   In alternative I was using also the old FA3 puzzle pieces, with the NAM facelift mod that shows full sidewalksand has no trees (but no lights either) and easier to build crossroads. Actually I  made a custom texture override for the crossroad puzzle pieces to add the zebras, (you might see it in some pictures), but they only work with the puzzle pieces, is that the corresponding draggable textures have a different IDs? Or maybe was just a rought attempt using an old repository...
    
4.  Nightlighting
   Back to lights I never liked much the fixed night renders coming with bat4max, They have  better quality, but i love to play with the sunrise-sunset transitions.
   Rivit did a great tool in GoFSH to mod lights and nightypes. I did some tests, a bit tricky but it doesn’t seem rocket science. therefore I’m thinking to go this way, render a fixed night with bat4max, then make it adaptable using Gofsh and eventually share that, instead of rendreing and uploading both MN and DN. Does this make sense?

It is still a work in progress so suggests and critics are more than welcome 

Enough for now anyway,

cheers,

Alessandro

 

 

 

[SneakyDeaky 1,128]

I honestly can't give you much advice as I don't bat or mod, but it's a fantastic idea, something the game needs more of and the extensive collection of buildings you have batted are lovely

[Ke|is 3,337]

This will be a game changer, I mean with those models the limits of the game would be just for another planet,  I think the quality of the models is close to perfection. I really hope that you release them at some point.

[bhmantan 2,061]

Woah, these are lovely buildings!
You did such a good job with the details and textures.

54 minutes ago, soylentgarnet said:

I noticed aslo that the nightlight seems not to always function correctly, even with all lots being powered.

I'm not entirely sure since I don't have nightlight on Mac, but when you create a prop there's a "Light" property and it defaults to false on Maxis PIM (maybe the same case for PIM-X).
I think that one is related to enabling nightlight for props.

[Kel9509 1,475]

3 hours ago, soylentgarnet said:

I’d like them to be functional too and  the growify plopped building cheat works perfecly to solve that. With commercial is easy, but how should i do if i want them to be also residential?  In PIM-X  there is no option for residential ploppable and set them as growables is out of discussion as they could randomly appear on normal networks. Apparently i’m not the only one interested in this, is  that the way?

You are in luck that I was able to figure out how to make these work.  If you read that thread carefully you'll see how it was done, but in short, I've edited PIM-X so that lots can be dragged to a ploppable residential category.  I can either create the lots if you send them to me or I can provide you with the file needed to create them yourself.  

[soylentgarnet 52]

Thanks everyone for the nice feedbacks!

I will indeed be happy to realese them, hopefully soon, after solving the forementioned issues.
Actually I had been working on them for a while  now, I had even started to set up the system FA-2, 
I would like them to look realistic and nice with most of already present custom content, the fact is that sometimes I might be just too perfectionist.

On 03/08/2024 at 2:37 AM, bhmantan said:

Woah, these are lovely buildings!
You did such a good job with the details and textures.

I'm not entirely sure since I don't have nightlight on Mac, but when you create a prop there's a "Light" property and it defaults to false on Maxis PIM (maybe the same case for PIM-X).
I think that one is related to enabling nightlight for props.

thanks also for mentioning that, I did check that light property in PIM-X  when making them and seemed good, but i admit i'm not at a deep level of coding knowledge, could be easy to have made some small mistakes in the process.

On 03/08/2024 at 4:50 AM, Kel9509 said:

You are in luck that I was able to figure out how to make these work.  If you read that thread carefully you'll see how it was done, but in short, I've edited PIM-X so that lots can be dragged to a ploppable residential category.  I can either create the lots if you send them to me or I can provide you with the file needed to create them yourself.  

And thanks especially for that, I was rereading your posts, that came up exactly when i was trying to figure out the same questions. Seemed a very brilliant job, I will give it a try following your steps to create the residentials, but i would also be happy to consider your offer eventually if I realize is something too complex for me!

[11241036 5,105]

Wow, after seeing the screenshots of the building you're developing, I can only say, that this is impressive work. Not only do they look good, you've also covered all intersections, and you are taking your time to think about modding aspects. This is a real rarity. And it will greatly expand the possibilities of this game, I also like dragging out FA-2 and FA-3 routes, as well as making old town districts, and your buildings make this possible.

Forgive me to bug you about this, but do you also have plans for developing buildings for curves from FA to orthogonal/diagonal?

As for the trees, one could simply develop a new T21 mod that removes this trees. I haven't yet stumbled upon such a mod, but this should be feasible (and at least well appreciated by me, I don't like those trees, either). I'll try my hands at this, however, I can't promise that I can do it.

As for question 2: I can only say that I really don't mind if you release those as ploppable landmarks, maybe with a low amount of jobs. I can't help you with the matter of ploppable residentials, though. However, if you want to make them growable and let people use the Growify cheat: You can just set the Growth Stage property to 255, this makes a building impossible to grow, and then use a good naming convention for the building and/or lot exemplar files.

As for question 3: Yes, dealing with the sidewalk is annoying. I guess there's no easy solution to this. Please don't bake in the sidewalk, this is just annoying, especially in cases when I'm using buildings in a rather unorthodox way (such as with PedMalls). There's, however, the alternative to make separate sidewalk props, if you are willing to go to so much trouble.

[soylentgarnet 52]

14 minutes ago, 11241036 said:

Wow, after seeing the screenshots of the building you're developing, I can only say, that this is impressive work. Not only do they look good, you've also covered all intersections, and you are taking your time to think about modding aspects. This is a real rarity. And it will greatly expand the possibilities of this game, I also like dragging out FA-2 and FA-3 routes, as well as making old town districts, and your buildings make this possible.

Forgive me to bug you about this, but do you also have plans for developing buildings for curves from FA to orthogonal/diagonal?

As for the trees, one could simply develop a new T21 mod that removes this trees. I haven't yet stumbled upon such a mod, but this should be feasible (and at least well appreciated by me, I don't like those trees, either). I'll try my hands at this, however, I can't promise that I can do it.

As for question 2: I can only say that I really don't mind if you release those as ploppable landmarks, maybe with a low amount of jobs. I can't help you with the matter of ploppable residentials, though. However, if you want to make them growable and let people use the Growify cheat: You can just set the Growth Stage property to 255, this makes a building impossible to grow, and then use a good naming convention for the building and/or lot exemplar files.

As for question 3: Yes, dealing with the sidewalk is annoying. I guess there's no easy solution to this. Please don't bake in the sidewalk, this is just annoying, especially in cases when I'm using buildings in a rather unorthodox way (such as with PedMalls). There's, however, the alternative to make separate sidewalk props, if you are willing to go to so much trouble.

Thanks, i do appreciate the support. 
For the curves is a totally legitimate question, I realized i had skipped that too. I was thinking to add the ones for FA to diagonal (it means 4 new lots,  one internal and one external for each side, but I still have to model that),  i'm not so sure for FA to orthogonal, I guess you were referring to something like this, but i think is a quite rare situation even in real cities. the internal one might be interesting to do tho.

For  removing trees a T21 override mode can be actually a great ideaotherwise i should remodel everything to solve the glitch.  For those who want to keep the trees in rural situations would be also great if there is a way  to remove them only on medium and high density. but i would leave this answer to experts. I only  tried some T21 basic modding too for some realistic streetside parking in straight pieces, and i remember to be already a bit tricky.

About the functional lots   I would like to realease them both as landmarks with jobs (that can be growified to commercials) and residential ploppale (made with above linked forum method by Kel9509, that can be growified too), up to the users then to keep those they prefer whether or not they have the growify chet DLL. But thanks a lot for the tips about growables and stage property, i didnt know about that.

For sidewalks, after having found out that the growify DLL solves the density grass problem i think i will just go leaving them like that, without any baked in sidewalks or props. I'm totally up for using them in all unhortodox ways myself too! especially to build pedestrian areas with FA oriented neightborhoods  just like in many european centres.

Further wish would be  that those FA3 one way road and avenue puzzle pieces would get  draggable function or at least crossorads too,  but i know is not NAM prority at the moment.

 

[Jasoncw 11,933]

Great job! Making BATs is already hard enough, but the logistics of doing diagonal BATs has discouraged most people from doing them.

[3136271573 187]

建筑精美至极

[rsc204 21,836]

On 03/08/2024 at 1:37 AM, soylentgarnet said:

 Buildings, props and lots
To create lots I used these blank models and turned my renders as overhanging props in PIM X. Not sure if it is the right approach.
I noticed aslo that the nightlight seems not to always function correctly, even with all lots being powered. Is this related to the props which are partially offset,  the blank building or is it just random? However if the models are  directly set as buildings in PIM-X , instead of props, the nightlight seems to always work. I would need to reshape my carefully thought system of offsets in 3dsmax tho, not to mention the risk of immortal lots. So Which is the best strategy overall?

Using specific blank models is generally not necessary unless you are stuck with the Maxis LE, even then it is just adding another dependency when the game already includes blank models you can re-use. If using PIM-X (which you should be), it includes a Blank you can use under Other Models / Blank. However, I wouldn't worry about this right now because...

Nitelighting requires that the object in question is fully upon the lot, otherwise you may find they fail to light up at night. As such the only practical solution is to use the Model itself as the Building, but in practise that will require that you reduce it's Occupant Size, since the bounding box must be within the confines of the lot. In addition that might require using different Offsets from what you originally intended. The good news is that using SC4 Model Tweaker, you can easily adjust the position of your models without having to re-export them.

Immortal Lots are potentially a problem, but can be easily avoided if you know what not to do. BEFORE you create a Lot using PIM-X, you can adjust the Occupant Size without trouble, but you need the actual size to correctly calculate the other Properties. Once you've done that, change it to something like .5,.5,.5, which will be small but should give you the most flexibility. Note that whilst you can alter the Occupant Size property having created the Lot, it doesn't actually update the value in the LotConfig. At this point you can manually edit the Hex data, but there is no other way I know of changing this once a Lot has been created.

 

On 03/08/2024 at 1:37 AM, soylentgarnet said:

Sidewalks

Testing the growify DLL I noticed one more interesting thing: Usually a full sidewalk does not appear with ploppable lots for density reasons, leaving the grass visible along the road. But the growify DLL updates also the behaviour of the sidewalk according to the building category and density: redrawing the road was enough to show up the full sidewalks after growifying.
This is a good way to avoid “no grass” mods, fillers, or the tedious work of making offset sidewalks embedded in the models.
In alternative I was using also the old FA3 puzzle pieces, with the NAM facelift mod that shows full sidewalksand has no trees (but no lights either) and easier to build crossroads. Actually I  made a custom texture override for the crossroad puzzle pieces to add the zebras, (you might see it in some pictures), but they only work with the puzzle pieces, is that the corresponding draggable textures have a different IDs? Or maybe was just a rought attempt using an old repository...

This happens because Plop Lots don't invoke wealth upon the surrounding sidewalks (well typically at least), but when they are switched to act like growables, this function is enabled. A nice bonus of Growify actually.

The old Puzzle Pieces use different textures to the new Draggable ones, in fact due to the lack of wealthing, Puzzle Pieces had to bake-in sidewalks or they would never appear.

Whilst you could remove the trees, in fact, I did this years ago as a request for someone, so the files already exist. However, I think it's generally a bad idea to make content that requires users change default setting in order to use them. Trees exist on Ortho/Diagonal networks too, so when making Lots you have to be aware of their existence.

But in this case it's tricky, looking at your screenshots the buildings seem to be positioned really well to align with FA Roads. It could be that because until now there hasn't been a lot of FA content, that the tree positions are just not ideal, in which case maybe they can be adjusted instead.

On 03/08/2024 at 1:37 AM, soylentgarnet said:

Nightlighting
Back to lights I never liked much the fixed night renders coming with bat4max, They have  better quality, but i love to play with the sunrise-sunset transitions.
Does this make sense?
Rivit did a great tool in GoFSH to mod lights and nightypes. I did some tests, a bit tricky but it doesn’t seem rocket science. therefore I’m thinking to go this way, render a fixed night with bat4max, then make it adaptable using Gofsh and eventually share that, instead of rendreing and uploading both MN and DN.

I agree with you, that's how I intend to handle any models from here on out myself, I think most MN users would prefer this, since it's closer to how the game works.

However, do be aware that the DarkNite mod is pretty popular, so whilst there is no obligation to support it, you may be surprised at how easy it is to do so. If you are rendering with BAT4Max, it's actually super easy to create both options following this work-flow:

• Render the Day View as normal to an SC4Model file
• Create a copy of the SC4Model file and rename it with DN in the filename
• Using the original SC4Model file, now render the regular Night View
• Switch to the DN SC4Model and render the DN Night View

If you do it this way, there isn't a huge amount of additional rendering time, plus DN renders fastest because there is much 'dark'. Plus the two models would be interchangeable, users can swap out MN/DN models at their whim and the lots using them will show the installed models (because the IDs will be the same for both options).

Otherwise can I add that you've done an excellent job on this set, it's always nice when someone takes care of things that tend to get overlooked. Many of us would like to make better use of Diag, FA and WRCs to do more than just break the transport grid and sets like this help towards that goal.

[11241036 5,105]

@soylentgarnet I've uploaded a small plugin which removes the trees on straight FA-2 and FA-3 roads. I hope it works out well.

 

[justforfun 7,878]

Lovely project! We do need more w2ws for fractional angle networks, and yours blend in seamlessly with other SimCityPolska content. 

Do you think you could also model some shorter buildings, suitable for small towns?