GouRou

it will be assembled in pieces, Dirk and I are formulating pieces of the infrastructure, we are brainstorming to find a solution to such a problem as you proposed. each group will be responsible for the perfection of their own piece, once those pieces are finalized, they will be inserted into a master dat file and checked again and again, the beta's probably wont be distributed as a large dat file, but stay as pieces, and only late all put together into one master file, so any one piece should be well manageable by anyone.

Flamesrock, if you smell doubt, it's emanating from yourself, not from me. We're still probing all of the ideas here, this is the introduction phase, everyone is allowed to have doubts, but that wont stop this project from pushing forewards. We will need a crew of planners, these planners will need to work amongst themselves and with me. I will look into a way to make it so teams can talk amongst themselves and with others without being disturbed. real time communication will greatly enhance the speed with which things will get done. the chat is always open, and a password protected user created room is always open to you, if needs must, we can create more rooms, and use stickies in the forums for meeting times. We will manage the managing. As I have just tried to explain, any situation can be dealt with. Given 50 modders, this project will take several months to a year, depending on depth of detail, but I believe we have many more than that hiding in the woodwork, all they need is a suitable project, a singular goal to apply themselves towards, something well defined, rather than an arbitrary thing like a 'modd' a mod is not well defined, but this will be. We will need to set a time and place for a meeting, some research has to be done at the outset to draw up lists of things that will need to be done. these things will need to be divided into manageable tasks. once the lists are done, that is what the planners are for. I need planners with some idea of modding, so we can give realistic time frames to getting the work done. it may be voluntary, but we need dedicated people that wont mess around and slow the entire project down. by the time the research and planning are near completion, we should have some project infrastructure, I dont know what it will be, or how it will work, and I wont speculate, but I imagine we'll all be able to work with it.

I think we need a few SimMars only buildings, but I see no reason why many of them, and other things, be modds for the normal simcity, we will debate this carefully. and no, no time soon, I have had to restart them, due to a HD failure, I will work on them a lot tho, they will be ready in a few months.

I have 7 arcologies in the works, I think mars would be a spectacular place for them, a lot more logical than earth, a lot more feasible to in the low grav, I have started redesigning them for mars enviroment.

the dynamic goings ons, like teraforming, and scouting, I think cant really be scripted in game, but I could be wrong! it just might be possible to do it with rewards, dont know yet. I know there is a lot to be done, and we havent even technically started, but! we've already been here a year! Most of us will be here in another year, by then, our conversion should be done. I've thought about how to compensate, and I think dedicating buildings and whatnots in the game will probably be the best way. we will keep a running credits of who makes what, we will compile this, and try somehow to get it into the game. this has to be free, there is no way around that, I did not bring this idea to light to make money, although we may, depending on size, decide to press some cd's and ship them out for a small price so people dont have to download a huge mod. that would bring in some profit, but I think simtrop would be within it's rights to apply it to itself. this is our home, we are all together, we know what we do because of this community, and in a year it's gonna need some financial support, if only to offset the cost of these downloads of the conversion, hehe. for major decisions that cant be decided by bickering and relenting, a system of voting might be in order, one a touch more reliable than currently used by polls, we dont need it cheated. I see little way to make everyone happy all at once, and I dont expect everyone to see eye to eye, we just have to get our own pieces done and make it work as a whole. there WILL be quality requirements, every piece will be put through peer review, same as in a business, they have to be, but it's not that hard to spruce up a building, and if you dont feel up to it, someone else can carry on with your project. the way I envision it is simple, the smallest of buildings will be the most crude, domes, vacuum tents, as you work up the wealth, you.. work up the wealth, hehe. commercial will work the same way, but they will be where the manufactories and storehouses sell their wares. the manufactories and whatnots should probably look nothing like on earth, creativity is the key this time around, we are dealing with 1/3 gravity, and near vacuum atmosphere, albeit one that can get ugly, keep this in mind. the pictures I saw of SimMars is far from what I envision, dont make this a 'just landed' mars, but one in which people are here, and living, and trying to survive, they got some infrastructure, and they got some money, they have the tools to build more. I would advise that anything incredibly high tech, like force fields, and antimatter planets, etc, be put on hold until the end, we need the brunt of the work done before we spend time on single shot lots and buildings. we cant hope to get the same scope that maxis did, but maybe we can have more variety. if you decide today to jump right out, keep the idea of cost in mind, what would a low r$ be capable of? not much, just a tent, so there is no need to 'hide' anything 'underground' we dont need minimalism in the lower wealths, because everything they have is above ground. what do our vehicles look like? I dont know, you tell me, I imagine huge 6 wheeled rovers that can carry 4 people, tons of water, tons of air, and lots of supplies, life is rough out there, but I also imagine open air carts, and scooters, and a lot of other stuff. if your a modeler, whip up your idea, doesnt have to be special, crude un textured will get your idea across. lets see what you guys think.

I dont think this is just my idea either. I general feeling is that modding is great and all, but little can be done with it, which isnt true. single modds are nice, but why not more? I'm not the first to think of this, but lets see if I can be the first to kick it into gear. with dirk's support, I know this could be supported in the best of ways, the ultimate SC4 modd!!!! this is goin all the way smurfer, it may take a long time, but there is no sense stopping once we start.

there is very little aside from props perhaps that we could keep, I doubt there is much at all that would work in the conversion, but when I look at the Bex, and the modds, I cant help but think the talent is here, if only there were a place to apply it. I think on a well planned project, where each sub project is defined, a person could sign for a sub project and then submit it, given well defined boundaries of things to do, more will get done. I doubt there are more than a handful of people that understand fully the scope of what this project entails, but it's not unreasonable to attempt it. given proper planning, a modeler needs to know no more than a specific task that needs done, the entire scope doesnt have to be encompassed at once. one step, one piece at a time, and it will get done

that is something that will need to be debated thoroughly. at the outset, I feel like saying no, any map should have the water turned all the way down, but we may find a happy solution to using water.

add a single shadow light pointing straight up, have it a VERY large area, but a very short falloff, just a few meters, tweaking it should give you the trick you want. I'm not entirely sure if that will work, but it's an idea

this has mostly turned into cycledogg's project for the moment, if he has any understanding of maxscript, he's farther than me. I put off this project too long apparently, but I am glad to see it working. cycledogg, glad your still plodding away on this, cant wait to see how it turns out. I am also currently doing exclusive 3dsmax stuff. I hope to astonish quite a few people out there, but we shall have to wait and see.

your right dm, if they tossed the code into a maxscript, we could just apply it in a program, or even write a plugin for 3dsmax, same as maxis did. cycledogg, your a lot farther along than I am, I've had computer troubles the past few days and havent even reinstalled gmax or 3dsmax yet, let alone any of my programming tools, so you are way beyond me. If you could email me and explain what you've found, I would love to see.

update, cam rig is done, and now I understand the lighting rig, we're getting there

I cant know if it will work perfectly mind you, but the way I see it, if I make the same lighting/cam rig in 3dsmax as in gmax, and use a maxscript to render it the same, and then export just the model to gmax, and render it, a tool can be written to take the renders from 3dsmax, dice them, and overwrite the ones in the dat that the bat produced, effectively the bat will simply do the mapping and such for us with crummy low quality, draft renders, then we'll overwrite with high quality 3dsmax renders.

they got bandwidth to burn eh? I would host a little something like that, but the key is little, if it got big, it would be a blaze, n I dont have that kind of money to throw around.

pegasus, the terrain texture is replaced by the lot base texture when a lot is plopped, there is no show through, I checked by changing an exempler to point to a texture I made which was transparent, the blue tile background shows through, like when the game hasnt built an area yet when you scroll. I checked post-rush-hour also, but no dice, I had asked for that, but I assume it would be way to much to code in.

is that to scale?

Perhaps this thread Where to get GMAX would be of use to you, you might have noticed it in the threads list

Edit?

nice textures for others information, would you say that learning a quality graphics program would also help with making these buildings? or is it possible for a person to find most of what they need?

they dont work well, they will get geometry and such in, but anything gmax doesnt support will simply crash the script, and as that's roughly half of the stuff I use, we'll have to look for alternatives. kary, I know what their bat is going to do, it's going to render 20 views and make the shells for zooms 1 and 2, then plop the other zooms down on shells you have to make, then slice and dice. I've been programming long enough to know it's not impossible to do such things outselves, could it be done in 2 months? I think it's time we broke new ground, found new vistas. now all I need is an advanced math book

No way to remove posts =/

EDIT: all fixied