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I am interested in returning to building custom regions after being away from the game for a long time, and while I have extensive notes on region creation from long ago, I am unable to locate any game files on my computer. I purchased and downloaded the game from Steam today, but apparently I can only enter the game if online. I am running the game on my desktop PC, running Windows 10. I have old copies of regions I created many years ago, likely while running the game under Windows 98. Is it possible for me to load those old regions into the game? And, if so, how? When I use the load region button, my only choices are the default Maxis regions and I seem to have no way to change either the drive(s) or folders where my other old regions are stored. I can accept and understand if my old regions cannot be played anymore, and am not intimidated about relearning custom region creation, but without being able to access the Regions folder in the game files, I'm at a loss as to how to even begin. Please help! I also recently downloaded and began to play Cities:Skylines and just am not enjoying the UI as much as I remember using the SC4 UI, which is why I am trying to return to SC4. I used to be a very active member of this community, years ago, and created a couple of City Journals, even had one featured as CJOTM once, I believe it was called "Recreating San Fransisco". I'm also an architect IRL, and make extensive use of AutoCAD when creating my cities and regions. I remember learning how to create custom regions was a steep learning curve, and very time consuming, but also very rewarding once the region was created and finally loaded into the game. I'd really like to relearn how to do that again, also how to use some of the GREAT 3rd party created content, especially NAM and many of Pegasus's creations, but I have no idea, currently, where to save them on my computer in such a way that my game can access them. Any/all help will be appreciated!

I made myself a little "cheat sheet" of game dimensions, so I wouldn't have to go scrounging around for them all the time: 1 cell= 16mx16m = 52.5ftx52.5ft 1 acre= approx. 4x4 cells Small city tile=64 cells x 64 cells=256 acres=1.024 km x 1.024km=.63 miles x .63 miles Medium city tile=128 cells x 128 cells= 1024 acres=2.048 km x 2.048 km=1.27 miles x 1.27 miles Large city tile=256 cells x 256 cells=4096 acres=4.096 kmx 4.096 km= 2.54 miles x 2.54 miles 1 mile= approx. 100.5 cells 1 km= approx. 62.5 cells Also helpful: 1 m= 3.28 ft 1 ft= .305 m

Well, I have been having the exact same problem, all the download buttons take me to the same error 10850.2 page you were getting. I am also finding many of the links within the description pages are either broken, taking me to an error 404: page not found page OR taking me to some (seemingly, to me) random page on the STEX that does not include the information I was trying to link to. I use AOL for my browser and am not aware of any settings I can or need to change to allow downloads...I have no trouble downloading from other sites, so I'm wondering how your fix might be applied to my similar problem. Lora/LD

Alex opines: "I doubt Maxis would even care about someone modifying the exe." Um, I think they would care very much, Alex. Computer code is proprietary and protected under copyright law. Maxis/EA controls the copyrights for the code inside the .exe and if anyone messes with it without explicit written permission of Maxis/EA, well first offense for copyright infringement is $10,000 US dollars (not Simoleans). Maxis/EA was kind enough to provide us players with all kinds of tools that allow us to customize the game in ways few, if any, other game developers or manufacturers do, so rather than spending time and effort dwelling on illegally busting into thier toybox, I think it's wiser to be grateful for the toys we currently have. If you, personally, are disappointed with the existing disasters menu, I suggest you address your complaints to Maxis/EA directly rather than using a third party fan site to encourage players into criminal activity. In RL, such actions are considered "abetting" and could get you into a whole heap of trouble. Lucky for you, persistance in such postings here on St may only get you banned. Lora/LD

How does one go about creating a terrain mod? Lora/LD

I hesitate to jump into this fray, but as a woman who has chosen to terminate a pregnancy, fell I have some valid points for folks to consider. There is a common opinion that "life begins at conception". Please notice my use of the word "opinion". Among scientists and doctors alike, "life", in and of itself, is not 100% defined or agreed upon. Among various religions, opinions vary as well. This slippery slope gets even slipperier as strides in medicine have allowed the prematurely born to survive at increasingly earlier stages of development. The use, storage, and possible disposal of fertilized eggs is also problematic. Keep in mind that when you take a side in the abortion debate, you have to think about ALL the ramifications of making the act illegal. Are we to force women who become pregnant against thier will to have children they don't want? Are we to deny women who could not have children at all without medical intervention thier opportunity to become parents? Are we to force women who have little or no access to birth control to celibacy or having children they cannot care for? Abortion is not about sex and taking repsonsibility for the possible outcomes of having sex. Having a child should not be a form of punishment for having had irresponsible sex. Human beings are hard-wired to want to have sex and for us to deny that primal need is impossible and, more importantly, dangerous to our continuance as a viable species. Remember that human beings, for all we do have big brains and opposable thumbs, are still animals. There is not a single animal on this planet that voluntarily foregoes sex. If life begins at conception, then how do we address the fact (and it is a fact) that not all fertilized ova implant in the uterus? Many pass directly out of the woman's body during her monthly menstrual flow. Shall we begin to police every woman from ovulation to onset of her menses every month to ensure she does not inadvertently cast out from her uterus a fertilized egg? And what about those forms of birth control, such as IUD's, that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting? Shall we make those illegal, too? And what about those fertilized eggs that do implant, but don't stay attached to the uterine wall for the full 9 months? How many women reading this have ever been late to get thier period and then got it, late and heavy? I don't know what the statistical figures are, but the human female spontaneoulsy aborts fertilized eggs rather regularely. I"m pretty sure it's happened to me a couple of times, even though I never knew for certain I had become pregnant. If we are to accept the idea that life begins at conception, then how do we address the rights of fertilized eggs when they come into conflict with the rights of the woman whose body the fertilized egg requires? Do we relegate the woman's rights as secondary to those of the fertilized egg's? Do we denigrate all women to being then solely a host body for the fertilized egg to use as it needs for it's own development and survival? And what of the instances wherein the pregnancy presents a threat to the woman's life? Every pregnancy does, you know. Death by childbirth is the #1 cause of death among women of childbearing age, worldwide. In so-called first world countries where most women (but not all) have access to adequate pre-natal care and hospital delivery, death by childbirth is less common, but it still happens. I gave birth to a child in 1975 and, had I been born even 20 years earlier, I would have died and most likely my child would have died with me. But what of women who, even in this day and in this country, have to make that horrible choice between saving themselves or thier child? I had to make that choice and I chose to live. Lucky for both me and my son, the doctors were able to save my child, as well. Not all women are that lucky. Are we to take that choice away from all women? The Catholic Church to this day holds that point of view, one reason I am (voluntarily) no longer a Catholic. And what of the women whose much wanted child is diagnosed in utero with some horrible life-crippling condition? Are we to force that woman, and her child, to a lifetime of pain and misery? This is another slippery slope, as who determines ahead of time how much pain and suffering any human being can endure and still find value in life? If life, human life, is sacred beyond all, do we not then abrogate that very free will that every religion I am aware of says is God's greatest gift? It's not a simple question, abortion, with a simple yes or no answer. There are extenuating circumstances that must be taken into account. And in the end, I think the Supreme Court of this nation did the right thing with Roe vs Wade. The decision to end a pregnancy is a privacy issue between a woman and her doctor. Speaking from personal experience, it's a heart-breaking decision to face, let alone make and then carry through. But, as a woman, it's my body, my life, that the fertilized egg requires to sustain it and grow to sufficiency. It's my decision to make as to whether I allow that or not. Lora/LD

Show us your attempts to break this barrier, please! This remains the single largest challenge to creating naturalistic game environments. I have been working on this for years, literally, and feel like I may be coming close, but I would like to see how others have addressed this issue...and know how they did it. Given the built-in parameters of the game engine, it may be impossible to seamlessly integrate plop water with game water...but I am not yet willing to give up. I know there are LOT and BAT and MOD and DAT folks out there who can figure this out. We have many options for above sea level water now, most of which are excellent. Nw we need to figure out a way to tie plop water into game water. Lora/LD

Ok, I have been playing around and this is what I've come up with so far. Comments/suggestions would be appreciated. First a pic, and then and explanation of what I did to achieve this: This was a "down and dirty" experiment, so it leaves much to be desired in the manner of detailing, not to mention lots of wiggle room for improvements in other ways. The king pin of this is PEG's Hydro Dam_Small. I had to find a way to finesse the dirrernce in elevation between the river/lake and the sea/game water. This is a big compromise over what I REALLY want to be able to accomplish, but it may be a step in the right direction...time will tell. Anyway, I used 3 of the Hydro Dams side by side to each other to span the width of the river mouth (this is actually a river, not a lake, and it's a fairly good sozed river, about 12 tiles wide). I had to do some terraforming using both God Mode and Major Mode tools, as well as streets in single tiles and end-to-end tiles. I am using, also, the combinations of water mods/textures I listed in the previous post. First thing I did was raise terrain 2 clicks in God Mode, then use the Level Terrain tool at it's smallest setting of 1 to create a level channel from deep sea water area (which doesn't show in this photo) to the mouth of the river. This created the cliff-like shore line you can see in the lower right hand side of the pic. This wasn't acceptable for what I had in mind, so I used the God Mode Soften tool, again at it's smallest level and softened the slopes around the river mouth down so all the rockiness was gone and every thing was grassy. Then I had to create a uniform slope across the river mouth to install the Hydro Dams, so I used single tile street plops across the bottom of the seaside and then again across the top of the river bed on the other side. Then I dragged street tiles from the top to the bottom, one right next to the other, all the way across the 12 tiles I wanted to install the Hydro Dams across. Not all of the dragged street tiles met with the bottom single tiles, as you can see if you look at the right side of the dam. A little "cove" got created there which in the future, if I use this technique again, I would soften down and blend into the sea side of the shoreline. Once I was satisfied with my uniform slope, I used the God Mode Lower Terrain tool 2 clicks to restore sea level to normal. Then I plopped the dams into place, aligning them end to end with each other. I probably should have gone one more dam section, but this was an experiement, so the right side of the dam isn't really as well connected to the dry land as it could be. I put a bunch of large boulders over there (PEG's) to cover this up, but they don't show very well here. To build the river itself, I started by laying down Edmonton PW tiles all the way across the back of the dam and then tapeing them off slowly to the center of the dam as I went upstream. When I actually build this river for real, I'll continue to use the Edmonton tiles in the center of the river, as they give a great illusion of depth. Next I laid down a border of PEG's Tahoe PW tiles. They are lighter than the Edmonton and I think using them in conjuction with each other gives an illusion of gradually shallowing water as the river nears the riverside. Past experimenting shows that using some of jeronij's "grass" along the transition lines between the Edmonton and the Tahoe PWs helps to blur the differences in color between them. I also like using the grass at the edge of the Tahoe PW, too, to again blur the transition from Tahoe to jeronij's TPW (dark blue). I did not use the grass in this experiment, though (I forgot that step). Next is filling in the entire river bed with the TPW, going over the top of both the Tahoe and the Edmonton. After that it's just detailing the riversides, so I played with a bunch of new rocks and plants I've recently downloaded and noticed that for some reason a bunch of stuff I used to have has for some reason disappeared. So now I get to go back into my plugins file and see if I can find the stuff I want and re-install it. The biggest drawback is that I am not able to install the water turbulence effects at the base of the dam the way I had been hoping to, as those tiles (PEG's from the PPond pack) won't install over water. However, I think the color match between the water on the sea side of the dam and the water behind the dam is very good, and that was one of the big things I was trying to achieve. I may be able to create a "shelf" of sea level land on the sea side of the dam that will allow these effects to be plopped...something to try for next time around. I'm also not really happy with the way my game water looks using both Edmonton v2 and dogfight's Green Water Mod. The water is flat, without any texture at all, and it's jaggedy/pixelated as it changes in color going from shallow to deep water, which I really don't like at all. So, I am going to try some other combos and see if I can come up with anything better. What do you think? I'm very interested in any/all feedback. Lora/LD

Good to see some responses, I hope this continues! ArchangelMichael, I followed your links and viewed Ennedi's work and found it comendable. I did not read the entire MD through it's 46 pages and maybe I should because what I saw was pre-TPWand I am committed to using the TPW plop water. Ennedi made some very pretty streams and rivers, without a doubt, and all kudos to him, but this is not exactly what I am looking for/hoping for. CaptCity, I also went and looked at abcvs's stuff and he is a lot closer to what I am hoping for, but at about the same point I am at...which is not quite there yet (at least as far as I'm concerned). I love all the PPEG pond tools but am not overly fonf of the PW because it is not transparent. Also, the transitions abcvs manages to achieve only work with "waves" turned off for the period of time one needs to take a snapshot and if one leaves waves turned off then one loses what is to me an important point of realism with seashores...waves. I love and am wanting to use jeronij's blue TPW as my default PW. I have found that by laying down some Edmonton PW tiles in the center of a watercourse, then using a tile of PEG's Tahoe PW on either side of the Edmonton, then using jeronij's "grass" to blur the edges between the Thaoe and the blue TPW works very well to create a river or stream. I also love PEG's "Brignatine" water mod when combined with the Edmonton v2. I think this gives the game water the most realistic look and feel of any of the water mods I have tried. However, it doesn't work at all well with the PW I am using, so I have been experimenting with other combinations and recently found that this combo works really well for matching PW with game water: For game water: Edmonton v2 Dogfight's Green Water mod For Plop water: jeronij's blue TPW The color of the deep game water and the TPW are almost a 100% match. The problem is (one of many, actually) that natural shorelines become shallower as they approach land and so the water becomes more transparent and lighter and shows more of the underlying terrain under the seashore. With waves turned on, this means the game water close to shore is almost white on shallow beachs. And in RL most watercourses meet the sea in very shallow water. However, it is also true that most watercourses continue to dig a channel in the shore bed once they join the sea. So, water in the channel will be deeper than the water around it. I am ignoring, for now, the case of extensively braided river deltas...don't know as this game will ever be able to render such, given the limitations. So I have been playing with a couple of ideas. My first idea was to use the god mode tools and use the level terrain tool from a deep water part of the sea to the mouth of a river. I did this by raising terrain to lower sea level, then using a place I knew was deep enough sea level to create the dark water I need to match my PW. I set the tool at lowest levels and dragged/painted an channel from deep sea to river mouth, then lowere tarrain to restore seas level to normal. I looks pretty good and very realsitic...up to a point. I won;t go into details here, but I fudged around for several game sessions and was still not able to get the PW to blend with the game water. So I thought, maybe I am going about this the wrong way. Maybe I need to find a way to extend the land into the sea. So I tried that too and have to admit had somewhat decent results. Right now my biggest problem is waves and transparency of game water in shallow water. Second problem is that despite the nearly perfect color match between game water and PW I've found, I don't like the way the water mod looks. There is no surface texture. I know nothing about batting or lotting or datting, so I don;t know how challenging this issue is to folks who are trying to make this easier for the rest of us. I am unemployed and have a lot of time of my hands, so I would be willing to learn and try to solve this issue myself, and sahe with others, if someone would point me in the right direction. I have two mega regions, both gorgeous, that need extensive work in installing above ground water and until I resolve this issue to my own satisfaction, I doubt I will ever build on either of them (which is a shame, I know). I have long felt that I'm probably the only one that obsesses about this (OCD, anyone?), but maybe others out there are want this resolved, somehow, as much as I do. Lora/LD

thought you might like to see the finished product: This far zoom does not give credit to the detail this map presesnts, The snow is not realistic, but I have the Columbia low snow mod installed, which I plan to uninstall. Regardless,this is an unbelievable map and I hope you share it with anyone who wants to try it! Lora/LD

I just downloaded a beautiful custom region Heblem made for me of the greater San Francisco metropolitan area and am anxious to get started on it but, after playing with the out-of-scale game default SF region for almost a month now I have come to realize a big lack in the game...urban alleys. I have a post (made today) over on SC4D in the 3RR project that covers my thoughts in full, so I won't repeat myself here, but I am wondering if anyone has given thought to creating urban alleys? I have been through the STEX here and found some lots that will work, kinda sorta, so it's not like I am totally without the tools I'd like to use. But as good as the various download/plop alley lots are, none of them really work as RL alleys. I think the best I found were disc_error's "Commercial Access" lots, but they leave something to be desired as well. Some of the items on my Urban Alleys wish list: 1.) transit enabled, but at extremely low volume, with preferance to garbage and delivery trucks. 2.) single one-way lane 3.) stops signs at intersections with roads/streets/avenues 4.) transtion apron between the alley and the street/road/avenue it intersects. In RL these are like driveway cuts, with radiused edges meeting the greater right-of-way. 5.) puzzle pieces of 1x1 cell each, so the alleyway landscape (such as it is) could be varied. Dumpsters are an obvious feature in alleys, but often there is limited parallel and pull in parking, as well, not to mention access to parking stuctures both above and below ground. 6.) able to be matched up end to end (something I have read is not easily accomplished using transit enabled lots) I know all the BATers and LOTers and MODers and coders have tons of other, more important projects to work on, but really, the urban alley is a huge part of any/all major metropolitan areas and to not have an honestly workable alley to use makes it difficult to create realistic cities. Just a thought. Lora/LD

Eblem- Looks excellent, my friend, just excellent! I have downloaded the file but have not yet installed it into the game or tried to render it, need to make sure of a couple or things first. Unlike the Copper River (which you made in 4 maps and took a while for us to marry into one), this appears to be one single region that I can just pop right into a new region folder, is that correct? I'm going to try that now and if it doesn't work for any reason, I'll come back and ask for further instructions. As for the Oakland Bay Bridge...I'll cheat. I was able to create it in the game SF region by extending Treasure Island (the island in the middle of the bay between SF and Oakland), so if I have to do the same here, that's OK. There is another big long bridge to the south, the San Mateo Bridge and it is also angled, so I'll cheat when I get there, too. I'm glad you had fun making this map and also glad you feel it is your best so far. You told me that about my Copper River map and it is gorgeous, so I can't wait to get this new map up and running. You seem to really try hard to make great maps and I'm sure everyone who you make a map for appreciates your efforts. I know I do! Thanks again, amigo, great work! Lora/LD

Eblem- Knowing you were busy and unlikely to get to my request anytime soon, I did my own experiment last night and tried to enlarge the existing Maxis San Francisco region map...not with good results! I used TF to save a region RGB map, then used Photoshop to enlarge the map from the number of pixels it was to 4096, then created a new config map for the large region, then loaded it into the game. Disaster! I dumped the region immediately. I really need to learn more about mapping. Then I went to the USGS site with the idea that I would try to create my own scale accurate region from scratch. I was able to instruct the website to get the maps I wanted, but my wifi connection is so slow I could see it was going to take me more than the 1 hour timeout time, so I canceled the downloads, thinking I'd try again later when maybe my download speed might be better. Anyway, take your time, good buddy, I'm in no rush. I am ignoring the gorgeous maps you made for me a few months ago in favor of this new project and all 2 fans of my CJ are probably unhappy with me because of it. I will get back to Copper RIver, have no worries, just feel a want/need to actually build right now and not spend hundreds of hours terraforming. Copper River is a huge project and while take years to complete, so I feel OK with letting it sit idle from time to time while I veer off into other projects. And thanks for your help, I really appreciate it. Some day you map folks are going to have to take me under your wing and teach me the ropes because as much as I love building and terraforming, I would love map making too, if I could even figure out how to do it! Lora/LD

Hey Eblem! It's me again, with a new request. While in Santa Barbara at the end of last month for my nephew's wedding, I started playing the San Francisco region that came with the game but the issue of accurate scale once again started getting to me. The game provided region seems smaller than SF really is. This has got to be a popular area for city builders worldwide, so I am imagining someone has probably already created scale accurate maps, I just haven't yet been able to find them, even though I have looked both here and over at SC4D. By now you know I'm hung up on the mega region concept, so even existing SF maps may not work for me. I know you're busy and have closed requests for the time being, just putting myself into the line up for when you have time again. When you're ready, I would like a 40 mile x 40 mile map, 256 large city tiles, 16 large tiles x 16 large tiles. I'd like the City of San Francisco centered in the region in the North/South axis, and then as much of the Bay Area to the east as you can manage to fit in while still including enough of the Pacific Ocean as to allow ocean going vessels (and whales!) to travel along the west coast of the region. I'll see if I can grab a Google Earth picture at near scale. The red line is the scale, represents approximately 20 miles. And, now that I can see the scale of the RL area, yes the game map I am currently using is badly out of scale. Lora/LD

Hello! And welcome fellow SC4 fans and CJ'ers. This is my first CJ and so, because I have never done this before, I am going to be counting on the help of everyone who knows how to do this better than I do. The region I have chosen to develop into Apocrypha is a map created by Flamesrock which is named Katalla and which I downloaded from the STEX. I think this is one of the best maps ever created because of its extremely varied, and challenging, terrain. It is modeled after an actual river delta in Alaska, according to the description in the STEX. This CJ will be my second use of this region. Ok (taking a deep breath), now I am going to attempt to post my first image to ST from an off site host (ImageShack). Ive read the tutorials and the Image Shack web site, so hopefully this will work without too much hair-pulling involved on my part! Apocrypha 1.00.00: Well, it doesn't seem to be working. I guess I need someone to walk me through this. How embarrassing. Well, just incase anyone actually reads this and wants to know what this CJ is going to be about, I'll continue anyway. Forge ahead! Don't let adversity get you down! So, my plan is this. I am going to spend some time doing some manual God Mode terraforming of the map because I am liking CycleDogg and Jeronij's new snow mod a lot...and the terrain in this map isn't quite high enough. This is rugged country (Alaska), and so a lot of the map wants to be unbuildable mountain wilderness. I plan to use CycleDogg's Columbus Mods throughout the CJ, and his trees. Once the God Mode terraforming is complete to my satisfaction, I'll be going city to city making heavy use of plopable water and PEG's stream kit tools, to create natural above sea level water features like waterfalls, rivers, and lakes. If you could see the map (sigh, so sorry), you would be able to see that it presents excellent opportunities for extensive watersheds. Once all the God and Mayor mode terraforming is complete, I'll start to build small communities. It will be sometime along this point in the evolution of the CJ that an actual story line will begin. Besides being a RL architect with a strong interest in city development, I am also an amateur writer, and being of Irish descent, I've been told I'm a very good storyteller. My story will center around a young girl living in Apocrypha. After the region's communities are built and the story phase has begun, I will begin to destroy Apocrypha slowly, through a series of natural disasters related to global warming and general degradation of the ecosphere. This will all be told in our heroine's voice. Eventually, the Earth will again stabilize herself and what is left of the world's population will begin the process of rebuilding. By this time in the CJ, the original map will be much changed. It is at this point that the true building phase of Apocrypha will begin. I am going to try to create an Ecotopia. This is going to be, as you can imagine, a fairly long-term project. Along the way I hope to learn how to create textures, BATs, LOTs, and MODs, because the region I envision as my Ecotopia is currently unable to be built, even with the massive resources available on this site. I hope you will all join me on this adventure....and help me along the way. Now, can anyone tell me how to post a pic of my region? I followed the tutorials to the letter (I printed them all out!), and still no luck. I think my biggest problem is, when I click on the insert image button at the top of this post, the Insert Image dialog box that pops up displays a message in the upper left corner saying gallery has been disabled. Well, it said that last I I checked, now it tells me the area I am trying to access has been forbidden. Help? Lora/LD

Well, turns out I've been taking a bit of a break from SC these past few weeks. Got involved in some large spring cleaning chores, for one, and while in California last month I started a plain vanilla version of the game provided San Francisco region, which is what I've been playing with when the SC bug bit. Not certain when I'll get back to this CJ, but probably soon, as the plain vanilaa game is already starting to annoy me. Anyway, it's summer and summer in Seattle is a time to be outdoors soaking up a year's worth of Vitamin D to keep us sane throught the winter, so not sure how much time I'll be spending on SC even when I do get back to it. Check back from time to time, you have probably already determined I run in spurts. Lora/LD

I am so sorry for having abandoned my few fans. My home internet was down for 3-4 days and I could not visit this site to keep folks appraised of the situation. I am back online now and hope to be able to post updates soon Again, so sorry. Lora/LD

Well, it's been a couple of days since my last post, but between getting ready to travel, traveling, visiting, traveling home, and recovering from all the hoopla, I think I am ready to get back to playing in my region again. I had copied my region files to my laptop with thoughts of playing in it during the late nights I would be left alone while my mom and sister slept, but when I thought about it a little more, I decided to distract myself by trying to recreate San Francisco, instead. I haven't done any actual building in game for quite some time as I have been playing almost 100% in Copper River Project....and it's still a long way's away from being ready to be built in. My sister used to watch/help me play "City" (as she called it) way back in 1993 when I was playing SC Classic, so I wanted to show her how much the game has changed since then. I always think I come from the most dysfunctional family on the planet and visits with them always feel like confirmation of that belief. But a part of me thinks that dysfunctional is the norm for all families, we just don;t really see that or understand it until we live apart from them and then revisit them. All I can say is, 3 days among my family is enough to exhaust me, overwhelm me...and I can't wait to get home. Someday I'll write a book about my family...just before I die, so none of them can call me nasty names for revealing our dysfunction to the world in general. I'll instruct my editor to hold it and publish it post-humously, tee hee. My parting shot. So, check back soon, as I will be picking up where I left off, most likely this evening. Oh, almost forgot! It's official now...I am a grandma. My grandson Hunter Keith Haws was born last Thursday afternoon, May 28, at 2:46 pm, 8 lbs 10 oz, 21 1/2" long. Mother and baby are fine, her labor, for a first child, was blessedly short, only 7 hours, lucky girl. Lora/LD

Busy day today! I am going to be out of town Thursday through Monday to attend my nephew's wedding In Santa Barbara, CA. Was feeling more than a little frumpy in terms of my appearance, so I managed to find a stylist who would cut my hair and give me a fresh new look in exchange for a stack of restaurant discount coupons I've managed to collect over the past year, about $90 worth to be exact. Back when I was working and living fat, I ate out almost every meal and joined a number of restaurant's discount clubs, getting points for every dollar I spent. My largest account was with McCormick's and Schmick's, a global semi-upscale steak and seafood house. I cashed in my points with them in December of last year and got 2 $50 dinner certificates as well as 2 $10 dessert certificates. And because I'm on the list of frequenters of a number of restaurants, I get discount cards sent to me by other restaurants who would like to gain my business (or what USED to be my business...I cook at home now), so I also had a $20 gift card for a local seafood restaurant called Cutter's Bay Bistro. So I got a very nice, very upscale haircut in exchange for the Cutter's Card, one of the McCormick's dinner certificates, and both of the McCormick's dessert certificates. This gal usually charges $60 for a haircut, so I gave her what amounted to a 50% tip for accepting my barter items in place of cash, which means we both made out very well on the deal. I love win-win situations! And I absolutely LOVE my new haircut, which just makes it all the better. But anyway, I worked tonite on a composite map I started weeks ago that gives a good overview of the RL region my game region is derived from. I had found this USGS site that allowed me to take screen shots of the area, so once I had about 50 screen shots, making sure they overlapped each other a bit to make it easier to marry them all together, I started creating a compite map in Photoshop. I got about 1/2 way through before I stopped, for whatever reason, so tonite I went back and completed the map. Then I opened Region Census and loaded my region, clicked on Show Image and,with Photoshop still open, began to match my region with the USGS maps, trimming out excess areas of the composite map as I went, until I have now what I think is a fairly accurate RL map of my region. The one tweaky thing I don't understand is that it is wider in the east/west direction than it is in the north/south direction. I had expected it to be square. So, I can only assume there has been some compression/stretching of the map by Eblem, when he made it, to make it square. Doesn't really matter to me at this point...I am not going to start over because of this discovery, don't worry! So here is a pic of the composite map I made of the RL area, with the approximate areas I have been working in recently outlined in red: The areas you see that are here shown as faintly stippled are labeled on the maps as "mud", hahaha. When Eblem made my maps for me, these areas came across as solid ground, with little to distinguish them from the actual low by permanent solid ground around them. These RL maps contradict, so some degree, other RL maps I have, which are much more highly detailed, so I am kinda extrapolating between the two sets while I terraform. Anyway, I thought you might find this interesting! Lora/LD

Ok, so I have a bunch of new pics to share, so lets get right down to it: This image was taken from Region Census via a screen capture and shows how the areas east of the river bed ar starting to move up in elevation to match the ambient terrian at the base of the mountains. You can see I've terraformed city tile L14 to include the landforms my original maps protrayed, just at much lower elevations. I know this all looks very choppy and map like right now, not at all like any RL landscape, but I did play around with various modifying tools this afternoon and think that when I'm done with this area, in terms of basic landforms, it will be much smoother. The large flat area in tiles K16/15 and L16/15 will be the marshes. The lower land west of the marshes will be mud flats. The higher land east of the marshes is buildable. For some reason the mud flats in tile K14 are a different color, not sure why that is...game anomaly, I guess. Moving slightly east, we see how the land is slowly rising to the defualt level at the base of the mountains. While this higher land will be buildable, it will still be veined with little watercourses coming down from the mountains, so I have tried to make allowances for creating extremely shallow and wide valleys in the flat lands. Notice how I have begun to circle the default terrain level as well as the next lower terrain level around the base of the mountains in tile M14. In Rl, this is a river valley that is formed downstream of a sizeable glacier, which I don;t think occurs in this region. The base of the glacier may show up in tile N or P 13...I don't remember off hand, but I want to make sure my base terrain levels match with the base of the glacier. At this zoom, it may appear that the land at the base of the mountains is lower than that to the west, but trust me, it's higher. Odd. I sized this image in PS to 800X600 same as all the rest, but it comes out so much smaller and a much further zoom out. Well, sorry for that. I took this shot to show how close I am coming to the river's mouth and how much I am modifying the terrain to eventually blend into existing terrain levels at the same area. I am likely to leave this area alone for a while while I think about how to accomplish this. Please note the presence of the base of yet another set of mountains in the upper right hand corner. The existence of this large rock mass so near to the river's mouth is going to give me some challenges...one of the reasons I may avoid it for a while yet. It's been over 3 years since I did any terraforming and I am still regaining the "hang" of it. You can also see, kinda, the extent of my work so far. The last obviously terraformed tile at the center left is L14. I have reconciled edges with tiles L13, M13, and M14. The difference is elevations is growing as I move north, which makes my eventual work at the river mouth ever more problematic. Again using Region Census and Screen Capture, I have full city tiles to share of all the tiles I have worked so far. The game doesn't allow me to photo full large city tiles, only corners and center, so I hope this overview will give a sense of the work so far completed. This is J16, where I started, the southern most part of the region at the river's delta. I have been working north and east fro here, uphill in both directions. These city tile pics will run west to east, north to south. Refer to maps above if you get a little lost. This is K16, the next tile immediately east. The raised landforms you see mark th boundary between marshes (to the east) and mud flats (to the west). At the center of this tile is a high point of triangular land called "Cottonwood Point". This is a RL navigational marker and I will be eventually be planting a single very large cottonwood tree here, perhaps surrounded by smaller trees and shrubs. Continueing east this is L16 and marks the end of the marshes andthe beginning of the gradual rise to the default etrrainat the base of the mountains in the next tile east. Not much to look at, I know, and most of it will be un buildable, as the marshes will be protected. However, you can see the change in color from the deep green of the marshes to the lighter green of the buildable land. Not sure I would want to build anything that close to such extensive marshes and mudflats, but who knows what sims will do? This is M16 and the base of the mountains. The first layer of terrain you see at the base of the mountains is the map default that I was working my way slowly up towards. This is a riverine landscape at this part of the map, something shaped by the river/rivers. There are a number of sizeable glaciers that melt into this delta, each with it's own drainage system, so while I have been grading terrain down towards the river, I also have to keep in mind grading up to the base of the glaciers. At some point in time, I will also be creating steams coming don from the galciers and joining the marshes/mudflats/Copper River Delta, soI have to keep that in mind, too. Ok, like a typewriter working backwards, we are back to J15, the furtherst west I have worked and one tile north of all the other tiles so far shown. I like this tile because the island at the upper left is not a mud flat bau has some underlying rock to it. Not much, but enough to make it an honest to goodness island. Keep track, if you will, of the ocean depths. I have been trying hard to make them shallower as we head north towards the river's mouth and would like to know if you think I have done well so far. K15, one tile east. Mud flats to the west and marshes to the east, barrier "islands" between them. L15, the end of the marshes and the beginning of "real" land. Marshes to the west, buildable land to the east. It's 1:30 am, can you tell I am running out of steam? M15, the base of the mountains. And I have to quit for the evening. I have 10 more pics to post, but just do not have the energy to do so tonite. Hope you enjoyed the pics! Lora/LD Ok, Happy Memorial Day! It's now Monday afternoon and I have some time to post more pics while my artichoke cooks. Ok, back to the river delta again (using the rurn bar on the typewriter...any of you folks old enough to remember typewriters?), this is tile K14. I have not yet worked the next tile west, J14, except to reconcile it with the neighboring tiles. It contains the top part of the real island and some tricky narrow waterways that I want to wait before attempting, spending time practicing my techniques on easier tiles. Not much to say about this tile that wouldn't be essentially a repeat of the other tiles along the river's edge, so on to the next pic. Moving east, this is L14. The darker/lower areas will be marshes and mud flats. If you look closely you can see a faint brown line running roughly east to west across the upper part of the tile that markes the boundary between mud flats and marshes. The higher ground is, again like all the rest of the tiles, buildable. The mountains in the next tile east are quite a bit closer to that tile's western edge, that's why we have so much more buildable area here in this tile. This is M14 and you can see at the very top of the pic how I have curved my layer of lower (but still buildable) land around the base of the mountains. The next tile north of this is a wide glacier carved river valley, so I have to start dropping my elevations down a little bit again as I think about working M13. I also need to go back and take a quick peek at my RL maps of that area, to get an idea of how low the land around this new river valley (I seem to recall it's the Miles River, but could be wrong) is. Ok, gotta take another break to eat my artichoke. I'll post the rest of the pics, which are a couple of zooms showing my technique for connecting terraformed tiles to each other, later. Lora/LD Ok, back again. One of the things I am finding is that the Reconcile Edges tool in Mayor Mode God toolbar doesn't always pick up the very slight changes in elevations between my terraformed tiles. Most of the time it works most excellently, but for some reason the tile M15 always read as being fully reconciled with it's neighbors, depite my having lowered terrain in both tiles to the north and south of it. When I opened the tile to the south of M15, M16, and checked the Reconcile Edges tool, the game wanted to reconcile the edge with M15 to the north. As M15 had not been terraformed yet, this would have raised terrain in M16, which I did not want to do. The same thing happened when I opened and checked M14, to the north of M15 which I had already terraformed. The game wanted to raise terrain in M15. So, in order to make M15 match up with it's neighbors, I had to figure out a way to co-relate elevations between tiles. So, what I did was built roads that I connected to the misbehaving tile, measured the elevation of the already terraformed tile using the Crtl+X terrain query tool, then saved/close the terraformed tile and opened the un-terraformed tile. I went first from north to south, from M14 to M15. Here's a pic: Ok, here is the south boundary of the default terrain of M14. You can see I turned my grid on so I could count how many tiles to the west I need to go before getting to the next level DOWN, which in this case is 3 from the road location. And here is the north boundary of M15, showing how the road connects and, after carefully digging a svery small hole, I leveled the terrain 3 spaces west from the road to match the level of the same area in the next tile north. The higher terrain, BTW, is at 298.9 m and the lower is at 289.9. Because M14, the next tile north is only lowered one level past the default value, I only had to make this single reference point to match M15 with it. Reference overview pics of the M tiles at the beginning of this post to see what I mean. This was not the case with matching M16 with M15. While there is only one drop of evelation between the two, they occur in three different locations. Again, reference the overviews to see what I mean. So anyway, this meant I had to build 3 roads, starting with the reference tile M16: Ok, granted, this is a further out zoom and makes it hard to see the roads, but they are there, at the north, little lines of black which are again 3 tiles away from the next level down. Because I am using the level brush in God Mode (not Mayor Mode God tools) in all tiles I am working on right now, I didn't have to use Terrain Query (although I did just to make sure and yes, I have the same elevations to work with, 298.9 and 289.9). Save and close M16, open M15. Again, a wide out zoom to show all three roads and how I lowered the terrain to match as close as possible with the conditions of the roads in the M16. And if you look at the overviews, you can decide for yourself if I did well or not. And that, folks, wraps up this update for now. Sorry it was fragmented, but at least it all got up within a reasonable period of time. Hope you enjoy! Lora/LD

Metarvo- I am a natural born teacher, being an eldest child with two younger sisters, so if you would like me to write a tutorial of how I am flattening this area of my region down into mudflats, marshes, shallow seas, and deeper river channels, I would be happy to do so! I actually enjoy teaching a lot and jump at the opportinutiy, when presented, so just let me know. Because of this natural tendency to want to teach others, this CJ will often have long passages of text as I expound on how landscapes this dramatic are formed. My younger sisters got tired of my "lecturing" them, but they became remarkably informed about things they never studied, and not just in the Earth Sciences area, either! I'm one of those people who, if I won a huge lottery, I would give up working for a living and become a professional student. My life has taught me that the purpose of life is two-fold: 1.) to learn as much as you can about as much as you can and 2.) to expose yourself to and drink in the unbelievable beauty of this blue marble spinning through space we all live on. Lora/LD

:::taking a deep breath:::: Ok, let's try this again. Although I have not posted much and no pics recently, that doesn't mean I haven't been working/playing. I have been working on 3-4 new city tiles, almost simultaneously. Becasue the tiles are large and the terrain is fairly boring, these pics were generated using Region Census, then the zooms were done in Photoshop. I think looking ar areas of the region is going to be easier than going one city tile at a time. So, let's take a peek: Ok, here we can see the mouth of the Copper River Delta and the two tiles I previously illustrated, J16 and15. I have not yet started on J14, but instead have been working my way east across the K &L 16-15 tiles. I know there is a small range of mountians over to the east and I want to be sure to gradually raise the terrain while I approach those mountains so I'll have buildable land in the future. In RL, these mountains rise almost straight up out of the marshes, which we'll see and I'll explain in the next pic. FYI, even though I've had Region Census for a while now (like a couple of years), I just discovered some handy new features when preparing this set of pics. After loading the region and selecting Show Image, I found that if I unchecked the little box "Fit To Screen" to the upper left of the image, I was able to get a zoomed in view. Using the Region Census's File/Save Image command didn't give me a shot of the zoomed image though, just a shot of the entire region. So, to take a pic of the zoomed area of the region I used a freeware program dedgren turned me on to called Gadwin Print Screen. Before doing a screen capture, I clicked the Region Census boxes above the enlarged image to Show Borders and Show City Names, then I maximized the window to fill my entire monitor screen. Using the "Print Screen" button on my keyboard, I was thus able to capture the pic above as well as the next two pics. From there, I used Photoshop to crop the screen captures to eliminate the non-image stuff. This is another view, again slightly to the east of the one above, showing the mountains I need to take into consideration as I leave my marshes behind and build up to useable land. I have pretty much competed the work on K14, 15, and 16 and have zooms of those areas coming up. You can see I have started on L 15 &16, but have'nt yet finished those. If you look closely you can see lots of little irregular spots of darker green in the unterraformed areas. In the RL maps, these are little lakes and ponds in the marshes and you can see they run almost up to the base of the mountains. I hate losing these as I terraform, as they would provide handy little built in guidelines for where to plop my water and streamlets/creeks through the marshes, but this is the price I pay for my own impatience. When Eblem first created these maps for me, we realized they were way too high in overall elevation, so I had to lower the whole map down using Terraformer. Problem is, I didn't lower it down quite far enough, so I was left with low cliffs all along my coastlines. I kinda liked the way they looked and figured at the time it would be easier to lower some areas than raise others, so I went ahead and rendered the region. Big mistake. Almost all of the coastline in this region is mudflats, sand bars, shoals, and marshes, so know I will probably be flattening down a huge amount of coastal areas. In hindsight, it would have been faster and way easier to lower the entire region two more clicks in Terraformer. Had I done that, I would also have to do a lot less ocean/river dredging. And, just as a warning, given how little work I have already got into the region thus far, I may yet go back and restart. I was wise enough to make a back-up of my unrendered region, so I could theoreticaly (I know that's spelled wrong) be right back to this almost exact same place but with better coastlines in about 3-4 days. Something I continue to think about. Ok this last medium zoom shows another thing I am having to keep in mind as I terraform along and that is the approach of the river's mouth. I am starting to make my waterways shallower as I move north so that by the time I reach the area that looks like a bunch of badly arthritic fingers in the upper portion of the pic above, the underwater areas will be barely submerged mud flats and very definitely un-navigable by anthing other than very shallow draft boats. This is also where I will have to begin to transition from game water to plop water, so I want to be careful to try to match colors/textures if I can. I know this game/plop water transition is still the biggest challenge for above sea level water. I am hoping someone solves this before I confront it! While I was loading this pic I was thinking about what I said in the paragraph about maybe lowering the rgion in Terraformer and realized doing that really wouldn't save me all that much work because all my land/water transitions would be too deep, given the 2 tile drop off I am currently flattening down to. If I lowere the terrain all across the region, I would have to raise the ocean floor to create the very shallow waters I am currently terraforming along the shores, so it's kinda like six of one half a doxen of the other. If you look at the upper left corner of this pic above you will see steep mountains plunging straight down into the west fork of the river. The islands currently near that shorline I am likely to leave rocky and cliff like rather than smashing them down into mudflats, as the proximity of the solid rock mountains suggests there will be many other areas of isolated solid rock nearby. I'll have to check my RL maps to see if that is indeed the case, but I'm betting it is. Having taken many classes in the Earth Sciences in my college days, I have a pretty good understanding of how RL landscapes form and, if you notice, that west fork of the river is both smaller and narrower than the east/main fork, another indicator that the river has to work harder to get anywhere in that area of it's path to the sea. I would also hazard a guess that the water is deeper in the west fork and runs faster. While navigable in terms of depth, I bet it would be tough to get even a powerful commercial fishing vessel up that waterway. Which reminds me, I am going to have to download myself some commercial fishing vessels to plop into the water around this river delta! Salmon season is upon us! Yum! Ok well, I thought I had some closer zooms to show you, but it seems I don't. I am still learning how to use the various tools and software, including software like Photoshop. I thought if I zoomed into a pic in Photoshop and did a "Save As" I would get a saved file of the zoom, but evidently that is not the case because all I get is a copy of the original I zoomed in from, even if I give the Save As file a completely different name. I guess I am going to have to make a new file in PS, the copy/paste/crop/zoom/resize. I will try that later this evening and see if that works, because I had wanted to show in zooms the little outcroppings of land that seperate the mudflats from the marshes, like very low barrier islands, that exist in the RL maps and which I have carefully constructed in tiles K 14, 15, and 16 and which if you scroll back to the first pick you can see. They are very roughly shaped right now, created using the God Mode leveling tool set to 1 at close zoom, so they "read" right now more like a contour map than an actual landscape feature, but I will be fixing that before I leave this area of the region. So, I guess that's all for now. I'll continue to fool around and have more stuff to post in a day or so. Lora/LD

This really burns me. I don't know if it's the site (ST) or my connection, which I know is not stable. But I posted an update earlier this evening with pics and it is not here now. Between pics and explanatory text, it was a full hour of update on my part. I had to quit about 1/4 of the way thru the update because all my screens came back white. I assumed imageshack was down for the moment and promised to come back later to finish the update (and here I am, fulfilling my promise), but to find my earlier post non-exsistent is just too much to bear this late at night. I will post (or try to to post) again tomorrow. So sorry folks... Lora/LD

Lookie what I found this evening: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009228777_websalmon16m.html?syndication=rss Copper River in the RL news! Lora/LD, be back later tonite