Three Rivers Region

[Darmok 34]

Sorry about the lack of posting these last updatees David, I was on a business trip in Ontario. So missed a lot of updates in a lot of CJ's. I'm trying to catch up tonight!

That tutorial is really well done, in fact if you don't mind I think I'll copy a link to this page and give it to everyone who ask me for such an explanation.

You covered the subject quite extensively, AND expicitly.

Greay work, and I can't wait to see those other tutorials.

Thanks man!

[S70 0]

I can't see how updates of this quality and thoroughness could not be of use to many that frequent Simtropolis, myself included. I always gain insight into different aspects of SimCity when I read your update, and I have to thank you for the effort and concise manner in which you present your material.

My concern is that you are going to burn yourself out maintaining such a high level of perfection!

That said: Can't wait to see the topics you have in mind for the future!

[sloppet 3]

good work there! Keep it up!

[jacqulina 162]

thanks .excellent updates i love the step by step on the highway very nice pics too looking forward to more

[dedgren 830]

So, here we are again- this time after a 10 day absence.  No answering the mail, no shameless eye candy, and (for at least a few days) no images when you viewed the CJ...

...so what the heck is going on?

Well, a combo of real life (RL) stuff.  I had a trial and other substantial brief writing to attend to in my day job as an attorney.  I had an echocardiogram and a sleep study (somehow I always thought sleep was what happened any time I had to study- oh well) in my spare time and we put a new floor in one of the kids' rooms.  In short, the nearest I've been to the computer this month is to walk by it on the way to the bathroom...

That's not quite true, actually.  I have, working a little bit here and a little bit there, gotten the first substantial part of my next tutorial done, which will involve creating a surface water stream, called Little Cold Lake Creek, between a canyon starting on the south side of Cold Lake (the body of water, not the city) and Little Cold Lake, which was featured in some shameless eye candy pictures back on page 3.

Here's a general location map that showcases my Photoshop skills...heh!

And here's another that shows the canyon area that we will be starting with over the next few days.

Later sections of the tutorial will address creating the upper section of the creek, its outlet from Little Cold Lake, and laying out the farms in the area of the upper creek along the lines of those created by cjah starting on page 6 of his great CJ Callisto.  I see this as a project spanning the next couple of weeks...but who knows?

A few other notes...

Your Comments  As far as answering the mail goes, I've been working on that offline.  As some have probably noted, I like to try to use some comments as points of departure for extended responses, and I intend to continue that.  What I may do is start responding to the "quickie" comments in purposeful "acknowledgement" mode (i.e.- Hey! Howya doin'?  Thanks for stopping by.) and say up front in doing so that I have no intention of slighting anyone who who is kind enough to stop by 3RR with anything less than my full attention.  Brief responses to "nice CJ" comments will simply be my way of maximizing the time I have to work on 3RR in areas I would hope would be of the most benefit to the community.  Extended responses to comments that raise substantive or otherwise interesting or unique points will continue along that line.

Bottom line- I plan to catch up on all mail by the end of this week.

No Access to Images  I host 3RR's images on my own server, which got turned off by accident last week (apparently by a power interruption) while I was not paying attention.  If you find that you don't see images "across the board" at any time, please pm me- I'll get right on it.

Editing Posts  This last item is sort of a plea.  I write my posts offline in MS Notepad, having taken the time to memorize ST's faux HTML codes as of a few weeks ago when the CJ started.  Hey...it works for me.  I understand now that there is a new system for writing code and doing other things in posts (or so it would appear).  Can anyone tell me whether this is worth taking any time to learn?  What I'm doing now seems to still work, but I don't want to fall behind the power curve if the new stuff is worthwhile to use.  Comment or pm if you might have any insight, and my thanks in advance.

First part of the update up later today.

David

[PhilsCafe 8]

Sorry for my lack of comments recently. I'm quite busy with college work at the moment.

Amazing job David. This tutorial is outstanding. It's huge and very illustrative. I can't say that this was all news for me, but your RL explanations truy are a big plus and very interesting to read. Although I am using a slope mod (yes, after some difficulties), I've never put that much thought into the slope issue. But your tutorial opened my eyes. Awesome updates.

Take care.

- Phil

[sloppet 3]

I'm lookin' forward for some more great updates!

[tchaos713 5]

I am waiting with baited breath for the stream tutorial... I have a few ideas for the region I'm working on, but I'm interested to see what you do.

I've already started applying what I learned about the slope mod.

As for RL, I can sympathize... but I think that we all understand...

[dedgren 830]

For the first part of this tutorial, we'll head back to Cold Lake Township, which we last saw in Update 9 when we used bigredfish's Tunnel and Slope Mod to place more realistic highway and rail lines across low hills we created north of Cold Lake.

[ n.b.:  This part of the tutorial has 23 pics, which I have tried to squeeze down just as much as possible in .jpg format.  If your computer is slow or your bandwidth is low, I'm sorry, but I will do my best to make the level of detail worth the wait. ]

We select the township, which remains undeveloped other than the few transportation, terrain and flora details we have added over the past few weeks...

...and it begins to load.

On arrival, we find our vantage point at view level 2 looking north over Cold Lake.

This general area, as noted in the post that started the tutorial, is where we will create Little Cold Lake Creek, a stream that drains Little Cold Lake, the east end of which you can see at the left side of the pic, into Cold Lake itself just west of where the highway that passes south of the lake transitions from elevated to ground.

We'll zoom to this area by centering on it with a right mouse click and then pressing the [ 3 ] key, which takes us to view level 3.

And then back away and flip the view by pressing the [ 2 ] key followed by the [ Page Down ] key twice.

This places our vantage point back at view level 2, but this time looking south at the southern shore of Cold Lake.  Now we'll superimpose the general course of Little Cold Lake Creek on this view.

The rest of this part of the tutorial along with Parts 2, 3 and 4 will deal with terraforming the canyon area of the stream, as shown here.

As a first step, we'll remove a section of that nice, new, never-driven-on ground highway that is in the general vicinity of where the canyon will cross it by selecting the bulldoze tool by pressing the [ B ] key.

I got tired of shouting "KA-BOOM" in the last tutorial, so you are free to add whatever sound effect you would choose anytime there's blasting...

With the highway now gone, we'll zoom in close by pressing the [ 4 ] key to view level 4 (okay, I'll stop doing that, but only if you promise to remember that the view level corresponds with the number key [ 1 ]-[ 5 ] pressed, with 5 being close enough to see your Sims sweat...

We'll also press the [ G ] key, which turns on the grid square lines...

...leaving us with a system of perfect little squares all over the area.  These, as you probably know already, will come in handy.

We now choose the road tool by pressing the [ R ] key and then look for a grid square with a corner as close the water level of the lake as possible.  The green diamond on the next pic shows you the corner I used.

We'll plop the road in the square, which has the effect of leveling that area of the cliffside just above the water line.

Proceeding on to the next square over, we plop another road tile.  It is important not to drag outside the square or otherwise connect to the first square.

We do this for a few squares, then move diagonally out toward the shoreline as a new row of full "above-water" squares becomes available.

When the road tile is plopped here, the terrain levels to the elevation of the previous row.  This "diagonal" shortcut is used later in this tutorial to speed things along.

Now we move our plopping inland from the lakeshore, as shown here...

...ultimately winding up with a second row back that looks like this.

We then go to plop further back and...uh-oh- a problem.  The SC4 Plop Police say no-can-do. 

We are, so to speak, left up against that proverbial wall.

Here's where our friend and STEX God pegasus comes to the rescue.  If you haven't downloaded it already, click on the following link

https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?id=4527

and save and then install PEG's CDK Leveler V205.  As always, a review of PEG's "readme" file first is helpful.  You'll wind up with two special "leveler" lots right near the top of your "Parks" submenu of the "Mayor" menu.  One is four grid squares by four (4x4).  The other is one by four (1x4).  Select that one after reading the info that pops up when you "mouse-over" the lot on the menu.

After the lot is selected, we place the end of it that contains a red outline and arrow on the grid square where a moment ago we were informed no future "plop" leveling would be possible.  The other three squares of the lot are oriented in the direction we want leveling- in this case further inland up the path of the canyon.

Plopping the lot gives us a level floor chasm into the hillside, complete with nifty construction equipment, some piles of stuff on a tarp, some other completely unidentifiable stuff, and some totally useless sidewalks outside of the leveled area that, knowing PEG's perfectionist bent, I'm sure he would have eliminated if it would have been possible (the ridiculous stuff that is hard-coded into SC4- don't get me started....).

Here's another view of the chasm rotated 90 degrees by pressing the [ Page Down ] key.

That's where we'll stop for a while.  Part 2 is fairly far along, so should be posted in the next few days.  As always, thanks for visiting 3RR.

EDIT:  (9/6/06)  Moved pics to ImageShack

[SC4Noobie 5]

This tutorial will be rather intresting to me, as i was planning a small stream, in a similar way to you, but i didnt know how... But, soon I will! This will be very useful. This will be a cj i will defintatly remember. Thanks for all the work... Cant wait for part 2!

[Rayden 7]

Great stuff, and of course all this info is worth well. Keep this good job and congrats.

[Darmok 34]

Hey David, continue like this and you'll be the reference in tutorials on Simtrpolis!

Really interested in the last one, I'm doing something similar in Anôrien right now, and wonder what technique you used!Perhaps I'll revised what I've already done.

As for the lack of time, I guess I'm in the same predicament, didn't play a lot those last days and even weeks, mostly worked with the LE when I had some free time, trying some stuff for my last rural city.

The only down side of usig PEG leveler tool, is that you can't make a sloped canyon, but it sure is a great tool to get "trhough the wall".

Can't wait to see more of this, I'm really intrigued!

Take care

-John

[Cjah 15]

I love tutorials and your doing one excellent job!

I can't wait for the next update!

[magpieshooter 1]

Nice tutorial, I did a similar thing when creating real water canals...

[dussin23 1]

I can't wait for the rest of it, either. Terraforming is the weakest part of my game.

[dedgren 830]

I just wanted to note that today 3RR passed its 2000th page view in just under a month.  We're running a good bit ahead of the 5% comment rate that I think is about the average for CJs that last beyond the Dread Second Page 'O Death- about 6.5%.

It's you, dear reader, who has made reaching those accomplishments possible.  Thank you for the time you spend here.  You have my commitment to always working my hardest to make that time worthwhile.

[van1357 15]

Thanks for the amazingly detailed tutorials. I am certain that they will help many people. 

I also like the look of your region and would love to see some more of the developed areas. Don't let this discourage you from making more awesome tutorials though!

Hoping to see more soon...

Isaac.

[bat 6]

Very good new update!

bat

[GMT 389]

interesting tutorial...

can't wait to see it going on

[rw0381c 2]

David, I must say ... you outdo yourself everytime! Simply amazing tutorials.

I wish I had the patience to do what you're doing. Not only patience, but time. With two kids under 4, it makes it slightly difficult to do any gaming at all. But, I do enjoy reading your CJ, and most of the time, it inspires me to put in an hour or two! Perhaps one day, I'll be able to share my region with the community!

Cheers!

[sloppet 3]

woah! the last update is really great! keep it up1

[Bobbo662 23]

Hey David - I really enjoy your 3RR - fantastic job!

[bluemax 0]

Exit lurking mode.

David, I have been watching and reading with great interest your 3RR CJ. I find your detailed explaination and point by point pictures to be most beneficial. While many of our SC4 community members are quite adept at working the mechanics of the game, there are those who are new, or relatively so (me) to SC4 that appreciate your time and effort and attention to detail. I find an attorney with a sense of humor and who enjoys creating fantastic looking mini-worlds to be quite refreshing. I would hope you will consider using the pieces of your informative CJ to prepare and post  an 'official' tutorial on this great SC4 site. Keep up the excellent work. It is appreciated.

[S70 0]

Excellent update, as always!

Have you thought about separating your 3RR cj from your tutorials, and posting your tutorials in the "City-Building Concepts" section or such? That way both CJ and Tutorial audiences get their fix based on their particular interest without sifting or risking losing one segment of the audience, and those of us who like both can just follow both threads... you could put the link to both CJ and Tutorials in your sig for easy reference...

And if you're building 3RR from what you're doing in the tutorials, so much the better, as in the tutorial you can say "check out how it turns out here" and in the CJ say "if you like this and want to see how it's done take a look here"... that sort of thing.

Just a thought. I like your work as it is, of course.

[latazyo 0]

dedgren, this is one of the only journals I have gotten the opportunity to read through the entire thing....your city is phenomenal

the landscape and trees and farms are perfect and the transportation system will handle a large city quite well

keep up the good work and keep up the tutorial style CJ, it is very helpful to noobs

[capitol1 1]

Dedgren, im learning alot on how to make realistic looking region since the best thing i can do is terraform...But in making the canyon cant we just use one strip of road peices then use the leveler??

Capitol-1....Whats in your backyard stealing your dog....ME!!!HEHEH(jk)

[dedgren 830]

In the second part of this tutorial, we start back in Cold Lake Township on the south shore of Cold Lake, where a few days ago we did the basic terraforming to create the mouth of Little Cold Lake Creek Canyon.  We last placed one of PEG's CDK Leveler V205 lots to begin extending the canyon into the river bank.

This part, which is lengthy, will show our efforts to extend and broaden the lower canyon, again just sticking with the basic terraforming, with the goodies (terrain superdetailing, bridges, flora, and all that other stuff) to come toward the end of the overall tutorial.

As I've noted, I plan to respond to all the comments that have accumulated over the past two weeks in an omnibus "We've Got Mail" session in the next few days, but I want to take a minute and address a few comments that seemed particularly timely before we get going into Part 2 itself.

On March 30th (and shame on me for getting that far behind), Kwakelaar observed, in commenting on Update 9, which contained a lengthy tutorial about the use of the bigredfish Tunnel and Slope Mod:

I would say that not all images are essential in the explaining and understanding of how to make the transport networks as you have shown.quote>

A day later, dussin23 quoted this portion of Kwakelaar's comment and responded:

Yes, it could've been much shorter, but it seems like Dedgren enjoys doing it this way.  The good part about it is that people new to the game will not be confused and sidetracked by minor details.quote>

So, the situation appears to present the old Saturday Night Live dispute...

Gilda: New Shimmer is a floor wax!

Dan: No, new Shimmer is a dessert topping!

Gilda: It's a floor wax!

Dan: It's a dessert topping!

Gilda: It's a floor wax, I'm telling you!quote>

...and things go downhill from there.

So, what is 3RR going to be- floor wax or dessert topping?  Back to SNL, now in progress, for the answer...

Chevy: Hey, hey, hey, calm down, you two. New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping! Here, I'll spray some on your mop..  ..and some on your butterscotch pudding.

[ Husband eats while Wife mops ]

Dan: Mmmmm, tastes terrific!

Gilda: And just look at that shine! But will it last?

Chevy: Hey, outlasts every other leading floor wax, 2 to 1. It's durable, and it's scuff-resistant.

Dan: And it's delicious!quote>

What I want to do, in 3RR, is "play" (don't get me started- my wife and I have discussed my "playing" SC4 on a number of occasions...) SC4 my way out in front of you and everyone else...in public performance, as it were.  So what you see in the tutorials that make up the first part of the series will provide a basic framework for what I do in the course of just a screen or two later on.  A side benefit for me is that, to the extent I've learned something over the course of well into two decades of playing Sim City, and as further informed by being a city planner, a road map collector (more about that later, too), a model train enthusiast and a person who has had the fortune to have lived in both the U.S. and Europe, and traveled to other parts of the world to boot, I think I can pass some things along.

And I'll say it [ gritting teeth a little ], with no intent to refer to any particular CJ, I have far too often seen a series of pics that can be described along the lines of...

Now, here's the area where we'll [ do something nifty ].

...pic...

And, after we do it, it looks like this!quote>

...and my jaw drops in amazement to see something done that is so great...and my hand slaps my forehead in frustration over the fact that I have no idea whatsoever from the information provided as to how it was done.  I'm not going to cite any particular examples, as I know the time and effort that many CJers put into the many wonderful journals that are available, for nothing more in return than a few minutes of time and clicks of the mouse, to us here on ST.  In other words, whatever level of 'behind the scenes' detail a CJ is presented in is completely appropriate, to include none at all.

I will note, though, an example of a CJ where its author, John (darmok), has always made the extra effort to provide a helpful degree of detail as to how he obtains his amazing results, and that is the acclaimed Anduin Valley Revisited.  There's a reason AVR has received over 85,000 page views and almost 2,500 comments in the little over a year that it has run, and it's not because he is giving away free popcorn with each visit.  I never had any idea how clumsy my terraforming efforts really were until I started reading John's great CJ, and I suspect Anduin Valley Revisited has been, like a well thumbed Chilton's, almost a "user's manual" for some of the more difficult or arcane aspects of SC4.

A comment yesterday (April 11th) by Scott (shizu00) really helped focus my thinking about how to handle my "floor wax and dessert topping" approach to 3RR:

Have you thought about separating your 3RR cj from your tutorials, and posting your tutorials in the "City-Building Concepts" section or such? That way both CJ and Tutorial audiences get their fix based on their particular interest without sifting or risking losing one segment of the audience, and those of us who like both can just follow both threads... you could put the link to both CJ and Tutorials in your sig for easy reference...

And if you're building 3RR from what you're doing in the tutorials, so much the better, as in the tutorial you can say "check out how it turns out here" and in the CJ say "if you like this and want to see how it's done take a look here"... that sort of thing. quote>

What I am going to do, hopefully with the helpful assistance of our dear topic moderators, is continue to post all the parts of a particular tutorial in the CJ as it comes out over its various parts.  Once the tutorial is complete, though, I'll leave it up for a while, then move the entire tutorial to the SimCity4 Tutorials area of the Omnibus.  I may add to it some of the helpful or otherwise pertinent comments that follow, and in general try to think of other ways to make the tutorial the "go-to" place for the information involved.

I won't just leave a smoking hole here at 3RR where the tutorial was, though.  I'll make sure that I edit the area where the tutorial is removed from in order to maintain continuity (Jeez, I love it when you can rewrite history the way you want it) and will include a hyperlink so that the information is easily accessible.  I'll experiment over the coming week or so with those ideas- if you have further suggestions along this line, let me know.  As always, I welcome your input, to include constructive criticism when you think I'm headed off in the wrong direction.

Anyway, one last matter...

On the 10th, my friend John (Darmok) noted:

The only down side of using PEG leveler tool is that you can't make a sloped canyon, but it sure is a great tool to get "through the wall".quote>

Sloped canyon floors...coming up!

[ n.b.:  This part of the tutorial has 15 pics.  Thanks for your patience.  This Update and tutorial, in which we terraform an area and then create a surface water stream, starts the fifth post down above on this page (5) of the CJ. ]

We start today by placing another one of PEG's CDK Leveler V205 lots (if you don't have this tool, there's further info in Part 1 of the Update) with the red outline/arrow end located as shown...

...and plop it.

Here's the view now rotated back 90 degrees by pressing the [ Page Up ] key.

Now, we press the [ B ] key to select the bulldoze tool and drag the tooltip over the road plops and PEG leveler lots...

...and push the plunger.

Our canyon mouth is taking shape.

Next, we'll begin broadening the canyon by placing another PEG leveler lot in the position shown.

After the lot is plopped, we see this.

Now, we'll extend the canyon back into the hillside from the area where we just widened it.  We make sure that the red outline and arrow of a new PEG leveler lot is located adjacent to the last square of the one we just plopped...

...and plop...

...and bulldoze.

FIRE IN THE HOLE!

...oh, sorry...I just love watching stuff blow up...

Next, we press the [ T ] key and drag two sections of rail line as follows.  This illustrates the point that using rail plops and drags has pretty much the same effect in terraforming as using road plops and drags.  There are a few important differences, though (especially if you are using a slope mod), but more about them later.

Let's now place the rail tooltip over the grid square on the side of the canyon wall as shown...

...and plop a rail section to...OOPS!

Well, that's not what we wanted, is it?  The floor of our canyon was raised by the plop about halfway up the level of the cliffside.  This is just not the result we had intended...but sometimes it is the result you get.  The way the game handles leveling things on uneven terrain when a road or rail plop adjacent to another grid square on which any transportation network mode (street, road, rail, highway and so on) is located is only absolutely predictable in one sure way - the elevation of newly plopped square will be level with the elevation of the adjacent existing transportation mode square.  Beyond that, though, all bets are off.  A number of factors, which I won't address at this time, can cause the square on which the existing network mode is located to be raised or lowered, and sometimes with disastrous results.  There is nothing more frustrating than plopping that last terraforming road piece after a half hour's work getting everything else just perfect and then seeing this huge unintended hill or depression in the midst of what you are doing.  It's my belief that this sort of frustrating result is what stops a lot of people from ever doing more than the most basic terraforming.

So, what to do?

Well, Maxis/EA could give us an undo button.  This seems like a pretty basic and straightforward solution, and one that would also address what should be able to be done after you accidentally plop the 34x26 'MegaSim International Airport' one square over too far right in the path of the long-planned 'MegaSim Industrial Freeway.'  You should be able to just hit [ Undo ], right?  The old [ Ctrl ][ Z ] combination?  Like in just about every other computer program developed (at least on Windows, sadly, I left the Mac world behind about 15 years ago) in the last decade?

But not SC4, which is apparently now a red-haired stepchild in the wonderful world that rotates around the hind end of The Sims2.

So, again, what to do?

First, I recommend that you learn (here, wherever) what works and stick with it.  Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds but that doesn't mean dooky when you can avoid screwing up that perfect area you just created- "Oh, just this last little touch...@$^$*@!"  Recognize that if you venture into the unknown, there may be consequences.  This leads me to...

SAVE YOUR GAME OFTEN.  This is good advice generally, given that a "crash to desktop" error can totally ruin your day.  You know it is going to happen.  You know you won't get any warning.  SAVE YOUR GAME OFTEN.  The keyboard shortcut is [ Ctrl ][ S ].

Now, I'll add to that advice, save your game before you make that terraform plop that you've never tried before.  Heck, save your game if there's any question in your mind at all about that plop.  Save your game before you do anything that might screw something up that you want to keep.  Other than a couple of seconds of 'down-time,' it doesn't cost anything (if you are counting Simoleans) and can save you a bundle (if you are counting Simoleans- what does it cost again to plop the 34x26 'MegaSim International Airport,' then demolish it, then plop it again one grid square over?).  Even if you aren't counting Simoleans, it will save you time and frustration.

Back to Part 3 of the Update after a short break... NOT!  Actually, it doesn't continue until page 9, and after a several week break.  But, hey, that's another story.

Anyway, enjoy! 

EDIT:  (9/7/07)  Moved pics to ImageShack

[latazyo 0]

dedgren, your format of CJing is unique as is most other people's

if someone does not like your style of CJing, then who cares, you are allowed to CJ as you please

I think your work is excellent, when I made a canyon similar to yours I just lowered it to the proper depth and then used the "level terrain" tool

is there a reason you don't do this? perhaps I'll have to wait and find out.......

[Tommy_Vercetti3 3]

Very nice. I like that layout of the land And the mini tutural is quite helpful.

[lardonbur 5]

Thanks for the amazingly detailed tutorials. I am certain that they will help many people. I also like the look of your region and would love to see some more of the developed areas.