Baro

Hi everyone, been a very long time since I posted here (since sc4 days) but I've been trying to get into modeling for skylines. I can't afford 3dmax and really don't care for sketchup, so I've been spending the last week trying to learn blender. I'm having a lot of trouble though because most all the tutorials and resources out there are just general tutorials, not really focused on making things for skylines, which have a few requirements and obviously a lot of "best practices" and tricks to make things efficient and do night lighting and all that. A few of my friends make models for skylines, but they all use 3dmax and photoshop, not the poor mans blender and gimp like I'll be using so can't really help me that much. What I'm really looking for is just someone I could maybe chat with in some real-time setting and help me through the basics of the process from starter-box to in-game asset. I've watched youtubes on the subject, read articles, but they always gloss over important steps or I'm just not getting things. Just hoping to find someone or a group of someone's who could chat on irc or google or what ever format and give me some real-time help here and there.

So last night I started my first "serious" project. I'm trying to make an urban wall to wall highschool, something that won't look out of place in a dense neighbourhood. I think in terms of geometry it will be pretty ok. Maybe I need more detail, I'm not sure, but I'd prefer to keep a lot of the detail just in the texture work. Here is the prototype I'm more or less basing it off Any advise on what to do next would be greatly appreciated it

Ok so I sort of figured out materials, sort of. I actually made some sort of a cube and then played with the UV mapping too. Now my next big question is how to you snap things? For instance I made the above cube, duplicated it, then moved it eye-balling it right next to the previous cube. I of course couldn't remove any duplicate nodes since it wasn't 100% aligned. I had to delete the cube and duplicate a new one making sure to move it exactly 2 units over. But if this cube was some wierd shape, like 2.54 units wide, and I wanted to move the other cube (all part of the same edit mode object) over so that the faces or nodes or edges or what ever snapped, how would I do that?

So I'm trying to just get a texture on a plane and I can't even figure that out, even after following tutorials on doing exactly that. It ends up just black.

Thanks for the replies and PM's from people! I figure I might as well ask some random questions here too for anyone to answer. First of all, for those of you making buildings in blender,what's your general workflow? How do you go about actually modeling? I've seen in tutorials people importing reference photos and things then sort of drawing in 2d over top, then some how making that all 3d, I'm not sure how to do that all. Everything needs to be one object, but can I make parts separately then join them together later? For instance if my building needs a pillar, can I make one pillar, UV map it, get it looking good, then just duplicate that? How would that work then for joining and how would I then do the texturing for the rest of the building? I understand UV unwrapping as sort of cutting the thing so it unfolds like a paper model, and I can do that with a cube, but when things get more complex I can never seem to figure out how to cut things quite right. I watched a tutorial where someone was doing it and he was using all sorts of crazy techniques I didn't understand and doing projections and all sorts of fancy stuff. For the most part I just want to make some brutal boxy buildings with some insets here and there for windows and doors, should be simple enough. Can I just grab all quads facing me and get it projected based on the straight-on view onto my texture, then do that on all 4 sides and the roof? Obviously that would create 1 pixel stretched textures on the insides of any door/window frames, but I figure I could then just go in and unwrap those separately? I more or less always know what I want to do, but blender is very unintuitive and depends on so many extremely long hotkey combos. Like just to change the centre point of my object to be on the ground requires a quite a convoluted process.

These are amazing, can't wait to see them on the workshop.

Most people have dedicated connections these days and more and more even "single player" games require it. Sales have not suffered for it so it's something EA knows the market will tolerate. They know people will complain, people will call for boycots, but in the end it doesn't really matter because enough people will buy the game (including a majority of the people in this very thread vowing they won't). The people that won't buy the game due to a lack of an internet conection or on principle is too tiny to matter to them and is nothing compared to the control over their product they can excert with such systems. It's online only, but you can still play even with an unreliable conection as you won't get immediately booted. You just need a connection to login and to save to the cloud. Buy it or don't, but EA will not change their mind on this based on a few tiny communities of angry old fans. This is the new norm in PC gaming.

What happens when a WoW server goes down? This is a simcity mmo and will be run more or less as such. Can't compare it to previous simcity's. People are very willing to buy online-only, multiplayer-only games these days. I'd like a totally offline mode too, but the amount of people who won't buy the game out of some protest for online connections isn't worth EA's concern. And besides, half the people here saying the online aspect has ruined the game for them will buy it anyways. It's an online game, deal with it, move on.

Billboards and such are fine. I justhope they don't do what they did in societies and let the game become a political mouthpiece for certain high-paying corporations (ie BP getting their branding on all 'green' items in society to help sell the lie that BP is a green company)

I hope we can actually define routes for our transit system, plus I hope rail-based transport is more flexible. Subways, ground rail, elevated rail, should all be the same track more or less than the same line can run on. Many metro systems have all 3 styles. You'll be underground downtown, then elevated in the core, then ground-level in the burbs. Just give us a simple "track" tool that we set the elevation on rather than defining them as separate items.

They just recently corrected their press statements. You will need to be online to start the game, and to save, but if your connection goes down while you're playing you won't be booted out. If it goes down, it will just upload your city the next chance it has. No offline mode, but you won't need a perfect reliable connection. You could connect, disconect and play, then connect again when you want to save.

You create a new region and can invite friends or pubbies to come in and build cities in that region, or you can just set it to private and build every city tile your self as if you were playing single player. Yet even with you being the only player in the region, the regions will still be online unfortunately.

Will there be roundabouts like in the NAM? Yes but they will have really bad public art in the centre, this might be fixed in a mod. Is the highway in SC5 modular like the RHW, or is it like SC4 without the RHW? The highway system will not be modular, but will be based on a new "quantum" highway placement system. What is the minimum intersection angle? 45 deg like CXL, or less? exactly 23.56 degrees, 24.3429 on hard mode. Hope that clears things up! If you have any more very specific questions to ask feel free!

I can already tell you what Cities Xl 2012 will be. It will be exactly cities xl 2011. The same interface, the same buildings, the same terrain, everything will be exactly the same. There will be a few new landmarks, a few new buildings, a few new maps, and maybe a new feature or two that are of course initially badly implemented and barely functioning. It will be buggy and slow and the game balance will feel untested. It will be little more than a minor update sold as a new game.

I can't even play anymore, ever since I traded a few resources between cities I now get constant message spam about not enough resources reducing by 100% or something along those lines. The messages make no sense and refer to trades and resouces that don't exist. Something is very wrong with the trade system!

So I'm playing solo and tried to build a landmark, I found out MC "forgot" to finish these landmarks so I can't finish them. I now know better and to only build landmarks that list all 3 stages. But how do I delete this landmark stuck at stage 2 constantly spamming me that it's progress is complete?

how is this game STILL so buggy??? IT still feels like a half finished beta... no wonder the PO failed. So I have the same problem as above except I can't delete my half-finished projects. How do I delete or cancel them???

No chance in its current form. I don't like how MC operates and I generally don't trust them to operate the MMO aspect competently. The gameplay is lacking, there's no real growth or activity IN your city. The only challenge in the game is pre-planning your city from the start to unlock the features you need for what you actually want to build. I'd pay a tiny monthly fee for a really great online experience but there is nothing offered online that warrants a monthly fee. Instead of offering something for the fee, they decided to take out core and basic features as a punishment for not paying it. The zoning system is horrible and static, the interface and feedback is confusing and cluttered, and there's just a real lack of features in the game. Plop down houses, check your employment, plop down businesses, check your employment, plop down houses, check your employment, build the next required service, plop down businesses, check your employment, plop down houses... for ever and ever until your map is full.

I wonder are they going to be in posts in this thread, or other threads? Will they be posted randomly into people's messages or will they show up other places? Title bar? Legal notice? Where are we looking...

Oh man I feel so sad, I signed up for the beta the moment it was announced on citiesXL and didn't use a key. I signed up my self and my whole family and some friends, and NONE of us got picked. I totally don't understand this give-away... where are we supposed to look for these code words?

It's scary how EMPTY all the pics are. The streets, trains, sidewalks, everything always looks so so empty outside of staged events. Like a giant ghost town.. ghost country.