T Wrecks
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Everything posted by T Wrecks
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How to duplicate and then modify vanilla lots/buildings?
T Wrecks replied to Psiman's topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
Well, "Resource Key Type 1" points to a building model, so if you enter an ID for which the game doesn't find a model, you will see a brown box instead. You can create as many building exemplars that all point to the same model as you want, but you need a model for the game to know what to display. However, the game also contains some building models that are invisible. This is because not every lot needs a visible model on it, but the building exemplar is needed to acommodate some stats and properties that cannot be assigned to the lot - tax value being one example. The open grass lot is one such example: It has typical stats that are bound to a building exemplar (plop cost, maintenance cost, power/water/garbage, pollution, park/landmark effect, bulldoze cost, and so forth). Nonetheless you don't see a building on the lot in game. If you open the lot in the Lot Editor, however, you will see a grey building box. Therefore, you need to duplicate building exemplars that refer to the same building model. For example, you could use any random building to create a new building exemplar. You'd get an .sc4desc file that holds the usual properties, but has a new IID. Then you could delete all properties that you'd want to replace and copy the ones that you need over from the Simcity_1.dat file - explicitly including the "Resource Key Type 1"! The result would be a new, unique building exemplar with the properties you need and a reference to an existing building model. It might also be possible to hook into the aforementioned invisible buildings by making your building exemplar point to it and adding the visible building as a prop. -
Hm, that's odd. Maybe the mail ended up in a spam folder? I certainly did receive those whenever a new STEX disc was compiled, so it's not the way this was supposed to work. I doubt that they would have chosen not to mail some contributors selectively. Well, in any case I hope this gets resolved.
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How to duplicate and then modify vanilla lots/buildings?
T Wrecks replied to Psiman's topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
This should work just fine. There are other methods, such as setting minimum slope to a higher value than maximum slope, but setting the stage to FF is easier to do. Yep, this is a property that's associated with buildings and not with lots. -
TBH, it reminds me of a a close-up zoom into the compression artifacts of a heavily compressed JPEG. On a large open surface such as the Ashley and Kmart rooftops, you can make out the square blocks and what looks like pixel noise. It's obviously your call, but personally I don' think it's ideal. All of your recent BATs look absolutely fine in other terms. The problem with these big box retailers is that they basically are 90% rooftop from the player's perspective...
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How to duplicate and then modify vanilla lots/buildings?
T Wrecks replied to Psiman's topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
To make matters more confusing, you could also use a Maxis blocker (you could even create a selective one that only blocks mansions) and use any amount of custom mansions exclusively, even without explicitly overriding Maxis lots. Just mentioning it so you have this possibility on your radar, too. -
Building Education & Health Buildings: Big vs Small?
T Wrecks replied to Psiman's topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Mix of both? Yes. Organised? Ummmm.... *cough* *cough* yes, yes, sure. Absolutely. But seriously, I tend to use small clinics first, for example. I normally go by a cost/patient calculation. I don't remember the exact numbers, but at some point placing a large hospital will provide a higher patient capacity with bigger radius for lower costs than a few small clinics. It's nice to have a reserve if your city is in the process of growing, too. With police and fire departments, I ususally go for the biggest one available straight away and will only use the smaller ones to fill coverage gaps. Using large police stations has the additional advantage of making prisons superfluous because the departments themselves already hold enough cells. However, available BATs may actually cause me to change this pattern. For example, there are some really nice W2W fire departments which I can integrate seamlessly into W2W developments. I could even use them to fill those stubborn gaps where a lot seems to be cursed somehow and just won't grow a W2W building. As long as the spot is suitable, I'll be able to plop down a nice W2W fire or police department there and call it a day. => *THUD* Gap? What gap? I'm not the super analytical player, as you have probably noticed by now. I go by overall aesthetics first; "beating" the game's internal algorithms and squeezing the optimum values out of everything is not my goal. -
Splendid work, and Cycledogg's tenements look surprisingly good in this context!* _______________ *I mean to say that it's suprising to me because I had never thought of using them like this - the fact that those models are absolutely superb is hardly a surprise!
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Looking good! Is that roof texture the one you intend to use for the final version?
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Wow, that is an epic update! Making a tileset, are we? That industrial building looks spot on now, in all variations. A certain addition to the IRM W2W in due course, hehe. Although I'm not too familiar with the looks of US cities and towns in the mid-to-late 1800s, everything looks pretty realistic to me. That sidwalk texture sure looks good in combination with the dirt street texture and your buildings, and your plans for building families and lot configurations also sound great. These gorgeous pics really made my morning, thank you for that.
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Phil! Such a pleasure to see a SimCity picture from you again. Looks like you haven't forgotten how it's done, either! Btw, @Haljackey: You keep using this rather bright, modern two-track rail station... Do you remember what it's called and where you got it from? I seem to remember it was a Japanese BAT, but I might be mistaken. The reason I'm asking is that it might benefit from a little toning down, and since this is basically what I've been doing the past weeks, I felt like this building would be a candidate for my long-term "might be worth a shot" list.
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Set up new notebook using my old Windows 7 key to activate Win 10 - much to my surprise, that worked.
- Installed the essential tools.
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Installed my brand spanking new SC4 Deluxe Edition from GoG.
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Gave SC4 a quick test run and found out it seems to run perfectly right out of the box.
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Installed all the modding tools, which all seem to work as well.
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Just need to move over all my current modding stuff from the old PC, then I might be all set up and ready to go.
=> Everything went better than expected.
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Set up new notebook using my old Windows 7 key to activate Win 10 - much to my surprise, that worked.
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*Me looking at your WIP shot* *Me looking at the RL photo with those neon lights* *Me realising that we can trust your BAt will have a fabulous recreation of those night lights*
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Sounds perfectly understandable. In this case, all that's left to say is that I wish you fun and good times making stuff, that I'm grateful for you sharing it so generously with us, and that I'm glad we have you around here. Keep 'em coming!
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Wow, that is some superb modeling job! Easily your best so far. It would be even better if those light grey plates were oriented in the same direction as the overall structure. I also wonder if the roof texture for the two round storage buildings could be made to look a little less repetitive. These models are absolutely fantastic and impressive, plus they are really something you don't see every day. Sometimes I feel that only some of the textures would need a tiny bit more work to make the step from "really impressive" to "absolutely awesome". I'm pretty sure that you have the skills, but of course it's your choice... creating all this must take a lot of time and effort, and what worth is it if it's no longer fun for you? So it's entirely your call, I just thought I'd mention it. Either way, this is looking really mouthwatering!
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This is all shaping up very nicely! As for setbacks, it's complicated. They are based on pavement tiles, and the use of setbacks is not as consistent as you'd wish it to be. For most authors, the following division is true: European stuff: 2 tiles (Xannepan, all SFBT, Glenni, debussyman and other BSC members, simcitypolska members, etc.) American stuff: 1 tile (All NYBT authors, BSP / mipro, Jasoncw's / nofunk's solo work, etc.) JBSimio's Smalltown USA collection is an exception from this pattern, as is spa's work IIRC. I'm not sure about Cycledogg. In any case, since JBSimio's work is closest to your stuff and corner buildings made for the 2-tile setback cannot be moved further towards the front without causing gaps, it's probably wise to do as you did and stick to the 2 tiles as well. On a side note, while piecing together my next plugins folder, I found out that JBSimio (A) seemed to use a monitor calibration that caused him to shift the overall colour balance of his BATs towards a bit towards green when compared to the Maxis palette, and (B) often scaled his BATs pretty big - I ended up rescaling some of his apartment blocks (particularly older ones, though) to anything between 75% and 85%. The latter will probably not be an option for W2W because you'll want to keep the W2W character of the BATs. However, it looks like scale is pretty fine on the Smalltown USA buildings anyway, so this shouldn't be a problem. By the way, it's good to see screenshots of these buildings from up close. The old STEX preview images often don't do them justice, and some of them actually look really good even today. I might end up using more of them than I had anticipated. Some are a bit off colour IMO, but armed with the knowledge that I have acquired recently, this shouldn't be a problem, either. In any case, you are cooking up some really interesting stuff here, and it's fun to follow this thread!
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A sad chapter in the history of mankind, awesome creativity and work in SimCity. Kinda leaves you with mixed feelings even if the work involved is impressive and flawless as usual. So two thumbs up for you, korver, and all fingers crossed for all of us that we'll never experience anything that inspires this kind of scenes again! It's sure better to unleash earthquakes and other kinds of havoc on our Sims than to jump at each other's throats.
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No no, I didn't mean game-wise. It shouldn't affect performance in any way that you'd even realise while loading and playing the game. I meant the work it is for you to figure out all this stuff, make equations, think about viable concepts, isolate the required files, make the changes, design the lots, and so forth. I've spent quite a lot of time tearing apart in-game buildings as well, and when I saw how erratic some of the values assigned by Maxis seemed to be, I would sometimes wonder whether I was overthinking it all and caring more about small number changes than I should, that's all.
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KOSC's mod was mostly visual, the Maxis Mansion Overhaul. He created new lots to replace all existing Maxis mansion lots, and this required splitting up building families in some cases. It was no under-the-hood modding in the way you are doing here. I'm not sure, but I see large potential for overengineering here. If you tear apart the data for Maxis buildings, you will see many sudden jumps and inconsistencies. I'm not so sure that all of these are actually based on careful calculation and weighting of many different factors. Some seem to be mere mistakes and mix-ups. And yet, the game behaves OK, so it might not be such a big deal. Or maybe I'm just too thick to grasp the logic behind it all.
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Yup, that sounds like the route to go. IIRC, @kingofsimcity had to choose the same approach, but in his case it was for aesthetic reasons - the buildings that belong to one and the same family are sometimes so different in size and shape that one and the same lot design doesn't work with all of them. (Unless you call three planters scattered around the edges of the lot "lot design".)
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Oh, now here's a name I remember from back then! Although I don't think we had much (if any) personal interaction, I remember @Joesocwork as one of the handles that belonged to higher-profile ST users. Cool that you came back after all this time!
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Californian Desert - More Ghost Town!
T Wrecks replied to Simulanten's topic in Cities: Skylines City Journals
That looks like a scene from an open world game - it's so atmospheric! (On a totally unrelated note, I wonder if it would be possible to pull off that S.T.A.L.K.E.R look with C:S... ) -
This looks pretty impressive so far, and I don't think it's something that has been done for SC4, either! The prospect of getting a truck dealership - and at this quality to boot! - is sure nice.
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Oh wow, this is drop dead gorgeous! A really interesting RL building, and an impressive BAT rendition for our cities! A day when you release something on the STEX is a good day for the STEX, this much is granted. Thank you for your dedicated work despite the loss of your texture library and for sharing it with us. Excuse me, I need to re-hydrate now.
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If the house has a decent heating, there's enough food to cook something nice once in a while, it has (satellite?) Internet and I can bring my notebook and a few boxes of wine... count me in for a few months!
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OK, I thought I'd share another little progress update. This time it's about a BAT that's obviously top quality, and yet I somehow felt I wasn't quite happy with it. Sure, the colour hue might benefit from an ever so slight adjustment, but what else? Here it is - Pheasant Run Apartments in its original state (not sure about the lot, but the BAT is straight out of the box): I slowly came to realise that it was the scale that bothered me. While those Maxis mansions you see here are pretty overscaled and you could argue that other buildings are somewhat underscaled, upon closer examination the building looked too big in most surroundings. Since we have not only GoFSH to change textures, but also cogeo's Model Tweaker to change size, I used both tools and ended up with this (plus a new 3x2 lot): if you look closely, some of the lines have become a bit 'squiggly', as is typical for a resize. However, since this mostly affects the roof shingles, it ain't so bad. That slightly greenish hue is also gone now, and the building doesn't stand out at all from further away now. Here is a comparison of the new size (which enabled me to put the building on a 2x2 lot) with other 3-storey apartments (back) and some 4-storey apartments (front). The building is now roughly as tall as others with the same storey count, and slightly lower than buildings with an additional storey: I think this is acceptable. As a bonus, I could even squeeze the building onto a 2x1 lot, which - coupled with its built-in slope-friendliness - makes it very versatile. Here is the small lot: ...and in yellow: This is not the most impressive modding in the world (neither by nature nor by quality of execution), and it is certainly not the Holy Grail of Simtropolis. I merely wanted to show how much can be achieved using the tools that circulate freely in this community even if you're not the ace big shot elite BAT artist. Don't be afraid to use those tools, guys! They can go a long way in helping you get the most out of the huge but chaotic treasure trove that the STEX is. Thanks for reading, and keep posting your awesome stuff here - this thread is always a joy to visit thanks to you guys and gals.
