madhatter106

So, it's been a month since my last post, and they're done. Rendered, plugged in, lotted, modded, queries written. And now I'm at a standstill because I'm trying to test their growability. All the cities on my laptop are way too small for them to appear; there just isn't a high enough population for stages 5 through 7 commercial offices to pop up. They're all CO$$$ with several hundred jobs, and I've only had one of eight show up in three hours of testing - bulldozing, regenerating, reloading, etc. It's been tedium. I tried loading a prior saved city from a desktop backup drive from a while back, but the population just keeps withering away - either I have a bad plugin or something going on in the region that is affecting gameplay and forcing a mass exodus, plummeting demand and stagnating everything. If there's anyone with a decent sized city with lots of commercial office space and some free time, that might be willing to test these to see how well they grow (or if they grow at all), let me know - I don't want to release them without testing this out, even though I'm fairly certain they will grow. I just want to dot all my t's and cross all my i's...or something like that...

Did you know that the only spoken word, non-music recording ever to crack the Billboard Hot 100 list was a 1973 single of the Cheech and Chong comedy sketch Sister Mary Elephant, reaching as high as No. 24 in early 1974? ("I gotta go to the can, man...")

I think it already looks beautiful, and that's just modeling without the textures. This will be a winner when it's completed. I especially like the roof details...but I'm the first to admit my fondness for water towers...

Of my own STEX contributions, I've noticed the following have off/weird formatting in their descriptions when it comes to bold, italics, etc. Surf Shacks Arthouse Theatre Pack Small Offices Midrise Offices Vol 1 Midrise Offices Vol 2 Midrise Offices Vol 3 Midrise Offices Vol 4 I've been meaning to go in and fix them because it's bugged me, but if it can be done via a batch process as mentioned above, that would work, too...

I must confess that I rarely spend time in the City Journals section of this site, but this being featured on the front page here made me click in. Glad I did; I always enjoy seeing my BATs pop up in others' cities. It makes it feel like all the effort to make them was worth it. Plus I wish my cities looked as good as this...!

Just finished the second season of Murder Maps, a series about infamous crimes in and near London from the late 19th to the mid 20th century (post Jack the Ripper). Season 2 ended with a very well done two-parter on John Reginald Christie, the notorious murderer profiled in the book and movie 10 Rillington Place.

As for my experience, the method which jasoncw described sounds a bit torturous, thought probably will give you the desired result - I've done lit signage like this in gmax, as well as neon tubing, using a custom nightmap. You can see it here in the NIMBY theaters I did ages ago... In lit lettering like the vertical Rexxx or Viceroy letters as well as the red lettering and edging on the Eros, they were regular splines with the "nitelite" prefix attached. Then I created a custom flat neon color as a set of nightmaps, and selected that in the rollout in gmax. The "bounce" of radiant light that you see in the Rexxx (the pink light that falls on top of the marquee and the walls) is just some target spots omni lights in a similar color, an effective and handy trick that jasconcw also mentioned in his posts. The only trick using this method is that since you can only assign one nightmap to a BAT, you are only able to have one "color" of neon, and you wouldn't be able to use anything else in terms of nightmaps for your windows or interiors or anything - you'd be stuck modeling interiors and lighting them. Which might not be too bad, but could be cumbersome if you're doing a large building. If you wanted multiple neon colors, that's possible to do using self-illumination, which does work (in some form or other) in gmax; the trick here is that regardless of night or day, they will be illuminated. You can't control them and have them flipped "on" only at nighttime, like you could with a (single) nightmap. If I recall correctly, I think you can see this result in the pink lettering for the Lyric, as well as the pale lighted backings on all four marquees. I also used it for the exit signs, but you can't see them on the sides shown above. My later sets of NIMBY buildings (like the naughty bookshops and video stores) had several neons going, and they were all lit at day as well as night - which actually makes perfect sense given the nature of the BATs. If you go the nightmap route, somewhere in these forums there should be info on creating custom ones - basically a .jpeg or .bmp file that is the same, but in five different sizes (one for each zoom level), placed in a folder that in turn is placed in the nightmaps folder. The customs for these BATs above were just square patches of flat bright color that I made real quick in Photoshop; I think on the STEX there are also collections of nightmaps for BATters, made way back when. (There was one nightmap from one of those sets that I've used a couple of times in early BATs called "Oatmeal.")

T Wrecks' user title should be "Titan of Industry."

A man was housesitting for a friend who had gone on a two-week vacation abroad. A few days into the task, he returns to the house to find that his friend's cat has died. That evening the phone rings, and the man answers it; it's the homeowner on the line. After a few minutes of chit-chat about the vacation, the man inquires about his cat. "Oh, I'm so sorry, but when I came home a little bit ago, I found your cat dead," the housesitter replies. "What? That's terrible!" exclaims his friend. "I know, I know, I'm so sorry," the other says. "I wish I hadn't told you." "Exactly!" his distraught friend says. "Now I'll be on the rest of this vacation, and all I can think about is how I'll never see my beloved cat again. I won't be able to enjoy all the sights or sample the exotic cuisine, or rest or relax without thinking about my poor cat. My vacation is ruined!" "I'm so sorry," the housesitter says. "Why couldn't you have lied to me? Why couldn't you have just said something like, oh, I don't know, 'I don't know where the cat is right now' or 'the cat is on the roof,' or something like that? And then when I came back to the house, then you could have told me?" "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," the housesitter says. "I suppose you're right. I'm sorry that this has put a damper on your vacation." "Ah well," the homeowner says, with a heavy, melancholy sigh. "I guess I'll manage. By the way, how is my grandmother doing?" After a long pause, the housesitter says, "well, you're grandmother is on the roof..."

Well, I wanted to pick up a copy of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, because America 2017, but they were sold out on Amazon. And since it's 2017, and I can't function in any way, shape, or form without purchasing things like books on the interwebs, I went with Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, about the American ambassador sent to Berlin in 1933.

"Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television." - Gore Vidal

Did you know that despite a review in the Washington Post stating that it would "never be designated a film treasure by the Library of Congress," the 1993 comedy movie Groundhog Day was indeed selected by the National Film Preservation Board for such an honor in 2006?

This makes me incredibly sad. While I never played Asheron or its sequel, I experienced a similar sadness at the end of City of Heroes/City of Villains. I think it's a testament to how much gaming affects our lives. Somewhere I have a pic of one of my alts on that game waving goodbye to that world in the hours before they unplugged the servers...

I wish more people would do just that with large windows - modeling the interior. Yes it does eat up a bunch of time, but it really is worth it when it comes to nightlights. One can cheat smaller windows, but when it comes to large swaths of glass like that, it's really best to do what you've discovered. I really like the Garfield Block; I'm looking forward to that one even more so than the bank building, which is further along. You're a BATting inspiration!

This is partly why I rarely ever do accurate or full recreations. BATting time is finite and limited enough as it is; an unfinished and unshared BAT doesn't do much good compared to one that is done and shared and downloaded by many, though not as accurate as one might like... On one of the film projects I worked on, which was based on a very well-known and highly regarded graphic novel/series, there was an almost slavish dedication to the source material in some aspects. When asking what the designer wanted, usually the first answer we would get was, "well what does it look like in the graphic novel?"

Yeah, it's 90% there. Just missing some little extra details that sell it. In some ways, it's a very fun step, but the trick is not overdoing it and gilding the lily...

Of the numerous Disney films that have been nominated for Best Animated Short Film, Donald Duck has starred in only one that has taken home the Academy Award , the1942 WWII propaganda film Der Fuehrer's Face.

This one is taking longer than I anticipated. Still working it up. Need to load in a few more details. The real building has spherical awnings - I like spherical awnings, I just don't want to have to deal with the resulting texture for the foundation that they would require (in the architectural sense). If that makes any sense. Anyway, it also has awnings on the sides, too - but this building is getting rather wide for my tastes, so I am nixing them...

Not sure if this is a bug, or "working as intended," but merely replying to a thread automatically makes you following it. In and of itself that's fine, but it also sets it so that you get an email notification for every single reply; thus requiring you to go to the thread and either change your notification settings or outright unfollow the thread. Is there a way of shutting this off on the user end for everything of this sort, somewhere in the profile settings? I'm pretty sure that if I want emails when a thread gets a reply, I would proactively enable it, rather than having to actively disable it on everything I don't want notifications on...

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Indeed, generic, standard, run-of-the-mill buildings like this are always a great addition to the pool of commercial BATs available. And it looks like a 1x2 footprint, so anything to crowd out the regular Maxis stuff (like the overused Rivello Building, et. al.) is a worthwhile endeavor.

A few of these can swing in a lot of different directions - with some extra details and trimmings, some of them could easily double as apartment buildings or hotels. The glory of the Plugin Manager and/or the Lot Editor - one can take someone's stuff and craft it to their own liking. Indeed this little one isn't finished - instead of the Pistachio Building, how about Mint Chocolate Chip Manor? Ah gmax and its basic color scheme. Speaking of colors, you can tell I really don't want to do the ground floor - I've tackled the texturing, which I usually wouldn't do until the majority of the modeling is done. And though you can't see it, the rear of the building is an unfinished nightmare. Another thing I don't want to do...I probably will tackle all the rooftop details next; the roof access is just a pistachio placeholder of a box, and I don't know if I want to do another rooftop garden or just plunk down some good old fashioned HVAC roof junk.

The oldest surviving set specifically built for a movie was that of the Paris Opera House, which was constructed for the 1925 Lon Chaney silent horror film The Phantom of the Opera. It was the first set of its kind to be constructed with steel girders and concrete, due to the fact that it was required to accommodate such a great number of actors, extras, technicians and crew. It existed on soundstage 28 on the Universal Studios lot until 2014, at which point it was removed for preservation and the soundstage was demolished.