Aran

7/10. Don't recognize the anime character and it's a rather busy icon, but the artwork is nice and crisp. tc13: My current avatar is in Japanese.

Date: 9/18/2005 3:18:04 AM Author: jmusshorn I do not fit any gay stereotypes, personally. quote> I do. Most of them, actually - and not by choice, either. It just sort of happened. Well, except that pesky one on the front page of this topic about cooking. I can't believe it took me this long to find this topic. Hehe. Cheers.

5/10. If I recognized the guy in the pic it would have earned a 8, but missing the reference drove the rating down. On the plus side, at least it's a decent pic and it's not animated (which can be very annoying).

I'd have to say that Detroit is probably the most decayed city I've ever experienced, but there are others that come to mind as blighted. Buffalo (the Armpit of America as my father calls it); Springfield, Mass.; and North Charleston, SC come to mind as other examples of poor planning and upkeep. However, in spite of the blight and the hellish areas in Detroit (such as the Cass Corridor, probably the single most decrepit stretch of property in the midwest) I gotta love that city. There's a huge amount of culture and I have very fond memories of many, many buildings and events there. As a side note, you might be interested in The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit a photographic tour of the Motor City that includes numerous shots of some of the most famous buildings and areas in Detroit suffering from age and neglect. I'd love to see some of these BATted - such as the Woolworth Building, National Theatre, or the Michigan Central Railroad Station - and would happily do them myself if I had an ounce of talent. Detroit! Woot! Cheers. Aran

I had an idea (EDIT: apparently prompted by Leech's note above. Thanks!) and decided to test it in the game. Take a look at these pics: Fact! Fact! Both of these pictures depict what we'd like to achieve; that is, a modification of the road/street textures with no where's my road?! zots. With that in mind, I shouldn't think it would be difficult to retexture these types of street layouts to look a little nicer: and Doing a 3x3 version would require more work, as a solution would have to be found to the problem of traffic moving through the center square (where the grass should be...). I'm thinking the first intersection (the loop) would work very well in a style like you outlined above, daihtnaoz. The second one would as well, though on a straight stretch of road. Thoughts? ...I'm in no way volunteering to do this, mind you. My skills with modifying SC4 are pretty much limited to downloading and installing other (far, far more talented) people's work. This would, in my opinion, be a nice addition to a future NAM though.

Puzzle pieces don't block zone development? If that's the case, I'd like to see something like this be developed. These little turnabouts are fairly common in my area and trying to recreate them in my suburbs is quite difficult.

This picture was posted in another thread by someone else entirely: Is it be possible for this type of exit interchange to be designed and implemented for ground-level highways? Or is the combination of pathing, batting, and texturing simply too much to handle? Hopefully not the latter, as I would love to subject introduce my sims to this sort of interchange. Great work on the NAM, by the way! Thanks for extending the life of this video game beyond all expectations.

Date: 8/19/2005 2:42:50 AM Author: ILL Tonkso Thanx GC, im running on limited resources here quote> Do you mean computer resources? Because if you need something rendered, I may be able to help you there and would be more than happy to do so. The desktop gaming rig I just put together is actually built more to CAD specs than anything else and it just rips along on the rendering jobs I do for work. I should have gMax and 3dS installed by Monday or thereabouts so I can get back into working on my own piddly BAT projects, so if this is the case just let me know via PM or e-mail. (If you can actually send an e-mail via these new forums. Hm.) If you mean time, though, I'm afraid you're on your own. I'm looking forward to the completion of this station. No doubt it will find a good home in my cities - just like the rest of your lots. Thanks for the beautiful work!

Just downloaded your Ann Arbor map and plan to use it in the morning. Looks terrific and rendered in less than five minutes on my desktop beast! Woohoo! I do have a question, though. Should the 500m.dat file remain in the plugins directory AFTER rendering or should it be removed? Thanks again for your hard work. Your maps look absolutely terrific.

The curved one in the bottom-right corner has already been done by agwitt. It's in the STEX here . I'd love to see most of the rest of those done, however. Any takers?

The good news: the error message I was getting was due to a mistake on my part, not to the incompatibility of 3d Studio MAX 7 with the BATforMax scripts. I'm now able to export models without almost no problems. The bad news: I still cannot get night lighting to work properly - in either gmax/BAT or 3dS. Anyone else able to set up lights but not export them? Incidentally, whomever's in charge may add 3dSM 7.0 to the list of supported versions. Except for the night lights, this baby works fine.

If Walt Disney were alive, he'd be clawing at the inside of his coffin. Seriously, though, the castle at Disneyland in Anaheim was modeled after the Schloss Neuschwanstein which is in Germany I believe. The dimensions are different, but the Disney castle borrowed a lot of the style from SN - and that one's already in your landmark menu, so with a little bit of tweaking it could be turned into a CS$$ building.

Date: 7/10/2005 11:28:17 AM Author: eddiem quote> Sweet buildings, but what I'd really like are those street nubs. Anyone know where to find those things that replace the dead-end streets with a little circle?

Hi. Been a while since I posted a message. Probably been even longer since I played the game. HUGE, HUGE thanks to SimGoober, ill tonkso, Vlakhaas, and far, far too many other talented folks for getting me interested again with their fantastic lots. My Plugins folder runneth over with beautiful buildings and my only regret is that I haven't enough money to plop them all! Anyway. Speaking of lots, here's a couple that I've posted in the last couple days. These are historical markers, sort of like the ones to which your parents used to drag you when you were small. You know, back when they thought that a little bit of history couldn't hurt. They're designed to blend into heavily urban (read: downtown) settings. The markers act as wee museums and as such they show up on the education menu. Unfortunately, they also spawn school busses. Until I figure out how to make a park with educational benefits like a museum...ugh. Guess I'll have to just suck it up and deal with it. The marker is actually a little BAT building. I'm happy with the look of it, though I suppose it could do with a little more variety. Should I make a few more and package them all together into a single 'random' lot so as not to clutter up the menu or would you prefer to have them in separate files in order to pick and choose which ones you want in the game? I'm rather pleased with these sculptures. Learned quite a bit in the last couple days while working on them: how to package props into family, using invisible buildings, etc. The sculptures are parks, no other benefits, but I think they look pretty good. The designs are actually letters from a bunch of unusual fonts - got that idea from someone on this board, though I can't remember who it was. (Thanks, someone!) These really look sweet outside a museum. I'm considering working on a 2x2 variant of this with different sculptures if there's enough demand. These will be updated eventually with such things as custom queries and night lighting...as soon as I figure out how the @^%$ to do those. The tutorials on ST are great, but I'm still scratching my head over gmax and lights. Grr. So. What do you guys think? Good? Bad? What can I improve on these? Leave them alone? Stick to my day job?

Hehe. Thanks! I'm already having troubles with 3dS, though, which means I might have to try getting it into gmax and suffering through the long render. Might be a while on this building.

Hey, Malty: how did you switch from Mental Ray to normal rendering? I'm getting the same error message you did, but when I go to Customize/Preferences/mental ray the Enable mental ray Extensions box is already unchecked. Ack!

Here's the next little project I'm working on. It's actually taking me a lot longer than I expected. The windows are giving me fits. When it's complete, I'll probably turn it into some sort of industrial building if I can successfully export it from 3d Studio MAX.

Date: 7/12/2005 5:47:57 PM Author: kefka I think they are good. I think the lots could have more props on them though. Maybe a little gardeny thing with some benches next to the signs would be good. Putting the sculptures into a prop family was a good idea. quote> Thanks for the encouragement. So both of them need more props? Hm. I might be able to come up with some concrete or wooden benches for the historical markers that would fit in with the urban theme. I'm not sure I can squeeze much more onto the modern art lots, though. scififan: Glad you like the art.