TheCouncill0r

This style of city centre-suburbs-rural is what I've tried to do in my huge mosaic, and this is an amazing example levvoronov! Love the way fractionally angled roads spread out like arteries. Bristol Bay, population 3.2+ million, still havent finished pasting in the in-game screenshots.

Hi guys, Firstly, apologies if this is the wrong place for this - Corina & Co please feel free to move this if it's better suited elsewhere. A little while back I tried to upload my Real Railway retexture project, with 16 different railway skins to choose from. Unfortunately they clock in at ~65Mb each, and specific sets are needed depending on what sidewalks you use and any grass / terrain mods installed, so hosting them is a bit of an issue. I'm eventually going to compile them into an installer with RSC's installer, but with current time pressures that's still a few weeks away. With the release of NAM43, I've begun the process of updating my RRW textures for 100% coverage and elimination of glitches and so on, but without the ability to host suck a large range of options on any one site, I figured a publicly-accessible OneDrive folder would be the way to go! This way, users can examine screenshots and previews of the various retextures, then download the specific ones of interest in either Maxis grass, Sudden Valley grass and standard or custom sidewalks. I've attached the link below, please feel free to check any or all of them out - I'm not aware of any download limits on the free 5Gb of OneDrive storage, and they're arranged in four folders: -Maxis Grass + Maxis Pavement, -Maxis Grass + Councill0r's Pavement, -Sudden Valley Grass + Maxis Pavement, -and Sudden Valley Grass + Councill0r's Pavement. Currently most of the retextures are only available in the Sudden Valley grass option as I'm in the process of updating them all to NAM43 compliance, but they should be available in all options in the next few days. My Custom Sidewalks and custom Terrain Grass NAMs are also available in various iterations, some of which come with other changes like red asphalt crosswalks, cul-de-sacs on most roads & streets or dashed lines in TuLEPs. If you guys have any suggestions on how to host such a massive selection of textures or get the link out to the community, please let me know, and feel free to distribute these far and wide! The link: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoheF4r-pktwaqNRYyu47qAThIM?e=zvdIVR Cheer guys! TheCouncill0r / Billy.

interesting... aer you referring to the slightly mis-aligned rails in the crossover, or the 90^ rotated ballast texture in the very bottom part? If it's the ballast texture it might have been my rotating the texture during the compilation at some point, but I've also noticed the game occasionally mirrors textures where you don't expect it to - for example some of the give-way lines i've painted on the 2x2 roundabouts occasionally appear on the exit-side lane instead of the entry lane even though I haven't modified the textures that way. Not sure there's much I can do about this though. I've made a couple more railway textures for industrial areas since I tried to upload this pack, hopefully I'll be able to upload them for the masses soon - I'm sure more anomalies will pop up with more people using the different textures. Thanks for being the first to check it out and provide feedback, by the way!

That's exactly what happened. Thing is, I didn't think I had actually installed the IRM as it's not compatible with CAM, I only installed the building packs from it in the hope that the newer models / buildings would also spring up in industrial areas like happens with other CO/CS/R buildings. I guess this is not the case! I'll get bulldozing and see what happens.

So I've recently installed Colossus Addom Mod v2.1 in order to really spruce up my city centre with skysrcaper variety, and it's been absolutely brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that I figured I'd apply the same thing to farming areas and industrial areas - the maxis varieties are shocking (so many wheat silos) and even the SPAM is now a bit outdated, so I installed the CAM options for farming and a bunch of new IM/ID/IHT buildings that are CAM-patible. I also have installed a bunch of new medium-density buildings and heaps of mattb's stuff in the interim, as well as mucked around with my terrain grass textures and sidewalk stuff as some of you know, so I'm thus having some trouble chasing down the source of my current problem. As you can see (ignore the erased parts of the left shot, that's just me blending layers in photoshop) something has changed the base textures of many (but not all) industrial lots, including standard maxis buildings. If they had been switched to some random concrete or dirt texture it probably wouldn't bother me, but the new textures are quite clearly the wrong size, like they were designed for completely different lots or some such. The textures occasionally extend over the top of the adjacent road or street, overwriting them and making it look really weird with cars traversing random bits of ground. I've tried deleting some BSC texture packs I installed as dependencies for the new industrial lots, and even removing the entire IRM base pack (which it looks like some of the textures have comes from) but no effect. I'm assuming since they replaced whatever textures were there before, I shouldn't have to delete the building and let it regrow in order to change them back. Does anyone know which files are capable of overwriting existing base textures for industrial lots? Has anyone else encountered similar issues? I've also got several base textures that are now missing entirely, but since I use a bright pink background those are fairly easy to detect and overwrite with some other random concrete through photoshop, but obviously something I've done has messed with ALL the industrial base textures and I need to revert. Many cheers gang, TheCouncill0r. EDIT: Deleting any and all files related to IRM seems to have eliminated the extended textures, but something in the games still seems to want them there, as they've now been replaced by the see-through problems. Again, this is only the case with standard maxis lots, so it can't be a dependency issue, no?

Rivit with the texture save again! I'm going to have to give this a shot myself - I'm making a house wallpaper-size image in photoshop from zoom level 4 and the glare is an issue for me too, particularly in the corners: The filesize is over 32gb and I've been working on it on and off for over 10 years, but I only recently figured out changing the background to bright pink and using the colour select tool in photoshop to remove the background, and have never found a good solution for the water. I've also used different water textures as you follow the rivers inland to get a glassy reflective ocean look for the beaches, and a slow-moving river rapid look in the rivers, but I still need to fill that huge bay with just water, and it's almost impossible to match up the pixels when there's no buildings or land! EDIT: Bingo Rivit! That works on all the different water textures i've tried so far.

I had a feeling it was something like that. An easy fix, in any case. I've now used the scripts to customise the railways, footpaths, RHW grasses, curve the edges of SAM-7 intersections, dashed give-way/yield lines and Melbourne-style coloured asphalt pedestrian crossings at intersections! Although Melbourne intersections generally use yellow or green, with the red reserved mostly for bus lanes. boom Again this modification seems to apply only to puzzle-piece TuLEPs, but that works for me because just like my part of the world, not all crosswalks utilise this coloured asphalt. I think I've just about run out of stuff to do with this amazing piece of software!

huh... maybe i've changed something in GoFSH or something to do with the latest beta version - the builder comes up with 511 errors detected when I load up the main script (purely as extracted from your onedrive to a clean folder), but they're just missing folders, including the _tmp directory. The "Start Build" button is greyed out until the folders are present. The TGN had both the install and _tmp directories, the SWN only had it for the install directory (see pics #1 & #2 of the zip file and errors - no _tmp directory and subsequent subdirectories). Given it's just folers, I figured GoFSH might just automatically create them as it writes the files, but again maybe that's something to do with how I've set it up. So I've had a crack at this, extracted all the L0 texture files and had a quick look at the texture bitmaps, and it looks like it'll cover pretty much anything I could want it for... but it cannot *possibly* be that easy?? I mean, GoFSH even wrote its own scripts to output *.dat files?!? Look at this (pic #3)!! Incredible... I think I ran about 6 of the auto-generated scripts for various parts of the network and made a makeshift filesystem for the plugins folder and voila. Are these installers you mention just your own in-development work, or are they scheduled to be part of the NAM at some point? I feel like if you had an installer going around for this stuff it'd be one of the single most downloaded mods in the community! Or are these installer releases more of an aspiration at this point, something for the Lot & Mod Shack down the track? Next project: Finding the GLR textures, ripping out that horrible concrete and making my own light-rail and trams! When you're up-to-date with NAM42 for the scripts I'll release a few of these pre-packaged for the wider community - I forsee your installer methods being useful for the community on that front.

Ahhh well that may explain it, I was only using the US-RHD scripts for SWN (or I was when using the Sidewalk-NAM scripts). I'll try building them with the newer script. I did also check out the individual roundabout skins, both 2x2 and 3x3 and the 2x2 ones are clean of zebras, so I simple got rid of the ones on the 3x3 myself! It also sent me on a little side project, which was creating give-way lines for uncontrolled road intersections and the tiny 1x1 roundabouts! Haven't tested them out in game yet though. Sorry I tried to insert the first picture here but it came out at the end - it's the avenue-over-MHO pic I was referring to. I actually thought it was overhanging flat grass textures as opposed to a missing model - you can see it on the uphill section on the north side of the road, where it obscures part of the street cul-de-sac, which is beyond the MHO model. The MHO models passing under it are definitely there before applying these custom textures, too (or does each customized texture need its own underlying model?) - I'll append a side-by-side screenshot when I get a chance. That's a bummer, but I do understand the phenomenal number of textures, puzzle pieces and widths, although I believe it's only ground-level networks that these textures appear on. It's not so much the zoning as it is the use of signs and other props near the road, like you see below. I feel the overhead signs and toll gantries really bring the look of the roadnetwork to new heights. Is there possibly a way to remove the RHW underlying textures altogether, as has been done with RRW and the dirt textures? That would certainly do the job. I'll have to start digging into the RHW files with the filleter and see if I can update even just a few of the main ones I have issues with. Indeed, I always preferred mods that were simply folders to extract to plugins over *.exe installers as you have more control over the filesystem (and installing 100s of exes is a bit of a pain with a mod folder the size of mine) but now that I'm getting down into this level of granular detail I'm certainly seeing the benefits in terms of avoiding conflicts. I had deleted the maxis and PEG railway files but kept the RRW ones, so it's good to know I can do away with them entirely. I don't know how you play without that yellow line on American roads - personally I think that should be a thing everywhere in the world, you always know whether you're on a dual carriageway or not. And those puzzle/flex pieces... I can only imagine the nightmare using them in-game without the yellow line as a guide! Plus I always assumed US RHD was the game's default and that this would be better for compatibility, but I think there's more available for Euro textures these days. I'm still a little unclear on the Patches in SWN too - I can't even decode the acronyms haha... TGN=Terrain grass Network, NGN=No Grass Network? What's TSR - Tram-in-Street+Road (based on the textures)? For example, if I've already made the TGN from your dedicated script, do I still need to run through all 4 options in SWN? BTW, the SWN doesn't include the 7z folder creator for temporary files - I copied in the ones I created for the last edition based on script errors. Just fyi. Thanks again for all your support on this!

Yeah mine was rough, I just played around with the brush in photoshop til it looked acceptable in-game, if you've got the source textures (particularly the alphas, they are hard to line up!) that's the way to go. I have played around with a few other textures though, like the blend between slip lanes and maxis streets, but a few other artefacts have come back that I must've had custom mods get rid of, like the roundabout zebra crossings and road / avenue zebra crossings. I'm guessing having these texture mods load last now overrides this, but I reckon I'll be able to edit the texture files to sort them out like the cul-de-sacs, much easier to flatten a road texture than smudge it into a bubble. I play with the american settings so I'm thinking I've accidentally used some of the euro textures too, or possibly the alt-zebra files that didn't appear in any of my other examples... maybe I'm not deleting the correct files from the final result and they're just loading last. I think what's been happening is I get confused as to which textures are controlled by the TGN and which ones by the SWN, considering I just use the one GoFSH texture folder that contains the textures for both concrete and grass. Do you have a recommended loading order in the plugins folder? As mentioned I had RRW Reskin, SWN and then TGN, (all z___) but then the railway crossings were stock RRW instead of retexture, so I changed RRW Retexture to z___ZRRW Retexture but that itself might cause other issues. I also noticed some OWR curves have the standard maxis textures, few and far between but possibly due to the addition of REW and new curves as you may have noted. There's also the matter of zoning that buts up against normal stretches of RHW and/or MIS, which also seems to have standard maxis grass under-textures that really stick out, even though I'm sure this was part of your script... but perhaps the strangest thing I noticed: I even tried removing the TGN Ave - US.dat file and this oddity remained, which leads me to believe something about these old puzzle-piece overpasses don't use a variable texture for the grassy bit, kind of like how the sliplanes switch between grass and concrete depending on zoning. As you can see on the RHW pic, the draggable AVE overpasses have the updated concrete textures but no grass overhang. Not sure if it's an issue you're aware of or if again it's to do with my loading sequence but I thought it worth mentioning! Just for kicks I also made weird diagonal cul-de-sac textures you can see in the MHO pic, but they certainly looked better in a 128x128 image file than in-game. Hit-and-miss, but if you don't experiment I guess you don't find out what's possible. Do you happen to have a link for this? I'm up on rivit's onedrive and your "Sidewalk NAM" google drive but neither seem to have been updated, I'm sure I got the original from you... nevermind, just found it! Looking forward to trying this out - I don't suppose those new RRW retexture files you mentioned are buried in there somewhere? P.S. thanks for moving the thread, it definitely grew beyond the uploading of files.

So I didn't end up testing the filleter because I got a much simpler option to work re. the cul-de-sacs, I simply copied the bitmaps from the cul-de-sac options that weren't working and overwrote the standard the bitmaps in the TGN and SWN folders. In this way I even used them and photoshop to make a pretty good SAM7 cul-de-sac, something I've long wanted since pretty much all streets in my part of the world are asphalt. I've attached them and the edited alpha file just in case they're of any use to your repositories. With the Turn lanes, I tried a similar thing, modifying the alphas so they would all just have a static grass texture instead of switching to conrete based on zoning density, but I just couldn't get it happening with the newer draggable turn lanes. I have a lot of legacy plopped ones in my cities and they worked fine but I've copied the file from your SV TGN mod as as that one seems to work with your SV grass textures, which are actually very close to mine, I actually extracted some SV textures with GoFSH in order to make mine. Long story short, now my plopped TuLEPs have all my textures, and the draggable ones have my footpath textures with your SV grass! I've just joined the discord server too, so I'll see you all there! EDIT: Thoughts on the very-slightly-darker footpaths, rivit? I think you were right, it takes a bit of the harsh edge off, with slightly lower contrast too. 7AB50E44-1ABE787D-5B04000E-D0.bmp 7AB50E44-1ABE787D-5E500704-D0.bmp 7AB50E44-1ABE787D-5E500704-C0.bmp

Haha that's a good point, those grass patches between slabs are probably a metre wide in reality. Fortunately it's one of those areas where I can overlook the realism side in favour of aesthetics - I have a picture of a whole region made from screenshots one zoom back from the above image, and the smooth transition between wealth level footpaths looks too good! Interesting note on the lightness of the concrete though - my initial efforts were actually quite a bit darker, including the grass. They probably looked a bit more realistic, but when stood back and looked at a larger area of the city, the lack of contrast between the grass, roads and pavement sort of... well, not ruined it by any means, but made the whole city have a "low wealth" look to it, so I brightened it up a bit. I might try toning it back down just a smidge now that I've got the file and folder setups right. I had a similar thing with some of the above RRW Retextures, they look excellent in the texture files, but in game zoome out a bit, lost juuuust enough detail to bring down the overall feel of it, I'm also having issues getting the retextured cul-de-sacs appearing for SAM streets (the standard-grassed ones work ok), but I think that might be something else because the "zoption_TGN_CulDeSac" patch dats are definitely present in my TGN folder. In any case having some residential areas without courts/culdesacs is not a dealbreaker. Thanks for the tip on the alpha stuff rivit, that'll be my next endeavour. it's certainly been a bit of a learning curve getting the hang of textures in a 128x128 file vs how they look on surfaces in the game but imho the results have certainly been worth it. Honestly I feel a bit bad using GoFSH to modify my whole game without having made some sort of purchase, especially considering the level of support you've offered after-the-fact.

So I'm still unable to get the wrappers working - I'm struggling to understand how simply copying new files into the Apps directory would make the *.exe utilise them without some sort of alteration to one of the game's *.ini or *.dll files, but I've still been working on the SWN and TGN and have completed my custom grass and sidewalk textures, except for the turn lanes! It looks amazing in-game, the degradation in the concrete from high wealth to low wealth, and has effectively replaced every bit of grass and concrete under pretty much every lot I can see! Except for the turn lanes. Considering I've used my own GoFSH textures folder which includes *both* the custom grass and paving texture files, I'm at a loss to understand how these texture squares manage to use the custom pavement texture but not the custom grass texture? Is it possibly something to do with the underlying alpha files not accounting for new grass textures in this part of the script, or maybe something to do with the way I've ordered the texture folders in \plugins? I've currently got z___RRW Retexture, z___SWN Retexture and z___TGN Retexture, and if I understand the use of underscores correctly, the game should load these folders last (or close to), and in this order. This GoFSH scripting has revolutionised my game, just a bit of fine-tuning left and it'll be as close to perfect as it's possible to be!! Cheers guys.

You bloody legend. Niiiiice! And indeed I am using GOG Galazy 2.0.41, The game itself is installed on my HD and I can run it without it, the launcher just made it easier to insert the "arguments" or whatever those lines of code are called instead of creating a shortcut. I wasn't aware the galaxy version and the offline backup version would actually operate any differently?? When I first installed the GOG version, it actually opened up with all the plugins from my old disc version and vice versa, so that caused a few issues I thought I'd rectified. Downloading the offline version now, will get rid of this galaxy version because SC4 is the only game I have in there anyway, and I only bought it because I figured it'd be handy to not have to run a made-for-modern-times version downloadable at any time in the future. My original was actually SC4 and the separate Rush Hour and it was painful to make happen, it's actually why I stopped playing some years ago in windows 10. And, it was a measly AU$6, no more haslles or no-cd cracks and the like which most mods now don't support. cheers m.

In the mean time, I've installed your SuddenValley terrain grass mod and have been playing around with the various scripts available on your online drives, I've managed to get a custom sidewalk texture happening on every NAM/NWM/etc piece, and even the draggable elevated standard networks like road and ave, but can't seem to get the basic road networks to display the new texture. I've scraped every script and repository i can find onto my hard drive, and have managed to get the TGN, SWN and even the rural GLR scripts from the OneDrive working, replacing everything from the centre island of the turbo roundabouts to the concrete textures under standard Maxis buildings, but not the standard sidewalks... I feel like I must be close, because there are other sidewalk texture mods out there that are just a single DAT file and cover pretty much all the sidewalks, so perhaps I'm using the wrong GoFSH repositories here? Also can't get any of these wrappers working on my GOG version either, which is bugging me. It just opens to the pre-intro black screen, then immediately closes. but this a distant secondary consideration to my texture toybox right now.