ianpaschal

Hi all, This evening in chat, a bit of discussion about the days of old on ST was started and I realised that there are many members on the site who have been members for upwards of 10 years (I myself will turn 10 in November this year). Samerton had the bright idea of a nostalgia thread, which, being the self-indulgent guy I am, created. So yeah. Nostalgia for "the good old days" and "back in my day" has a home now. Insert nostalgia below this line: Question 1: Chat reunion? Yes, lets do it. I will contact all the old members I know on FB about it. Question 2: Samerton, Krbe, and I tried to scour Google for some screen shots of the old ST versions. Anyone have any to share? I'd love to gaze upon ST v4 one last time.

INTRODUCTION Hello! After a several year hiatus from SimCity 4, I have decided to return and actually follow through with a lot of grand custom content plans I made back around 2008/2009. The reasons for this are complicated, but a big part of it is that the NAM has, in my mind, finally come of age and between fractional angles, curves, widened and arrowed networks, etc., it is possible to build the cities I want to build. Lastly, if there's any older members in the audience, this is Scipio. I'm back! GROUNDWORK One thing that I know every BATer has struggled with is scale. SimCity 4 is a bit whack but since I––essentially––intend to BAT an entire city, I have the freedom to fiddle with scale as well as a mandate to get it right, and stick to it for the next several months of BATing. So I started my research for looking for benchmarks that I could use to get an idea for what a SC meter translated to in the real world. The benchmark needs to be whatever I don't have control over. For the most part this is automa, sims, roads, etc. So step 1 was to figure out how large the streets and railways were in Simcity (things that are easily compared to real life) and figure out what the difference in scale was. The results were as follows: 1 lane of road: 5 meters 1 lane of street: 4 meters 1 set of rail tracks: 1,8 meters The road and street measurements were telling: in-game meters were 0,2 to 0,25 times wider than what would be expected in real life. I figured then that a house which was, say, 5 meters in real life, should be scaled up to 6 or 6,25 in order to look proportionate in game. The wrench in the works, then, was the railroads, which are in fact spot on with what they should be (or at least the difference is negligible). What do; what do? Since I intend to be focusing on Dutch BATs, it made sense to compare existing Dutch BATs to real world data about the buildings they imitate. Vanderaap's BATs always struck me as a little large, while Haarlemmergold's seemed a bit small. When I looked closely though, they both used a standard of about 2 buildings per tile. This would make the buildings enormous... 8 meter wide facades which very few buildings in Amsterdam have. Most range from about 5 to 6 meters. In fact, old Amsterdam zoning laws defined lot sizes in "Amsterdam feet" and started at 18 feet, or almost exactly 5 meters, up to 22 feet, or about 7 meters. So using the game's 16 meter tile sizes means that you could comfortably fit about 3 buildings onto a tile instead of 4, making them look extremely small compared to cars, roads, or the oddly tall sims (even for Dutch genetic standards). For this reason I'm leaning towards scaling 12 real meters to 16 game meters. That means creating a BAT at real-life scale, then scaling it up by a factor of 1,333 on each axis, and an additional 1,333 on the Z axis to negate vertical squash. I suspect this will keep buildings looking proportionate to their in-game surroundings such as the giant cars, sims, and roadways. Am I crazy or is this actually some pretty sound reasoning? I'd like to discuss it with other BATers before making a final decision one way or another and churning out the buildings. UPDATE 1 5 March 2014 It wouldn't be a BAT thread if I didn't show something, so here is the first thing I've started working on! 7,5 meter rail viaducts! Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to tell me what you think regarding the scale issues!

Added on the wheels. Still working on the framework and such. As discussed with T Wrecks, this is simply an aesthetic prop to hang over whatever network you care to put it on top of.

Yeah I'm leaning towards that. The small arched bridge though will need a TE lot with custom paths to arch over. That sucks, but that means there's 4 of those, instead and then the draw bridges are a simplified alternative.

Yeah, no reason not to. What I haven't decided yet though is 3x1 lot with centre tile TE'd, or 1x1 lot on one side, that hangs over the other 2 (one of which is the road). The 3x1 version seems more "proper" but that means I'd have to make a separate version of the lot for every transit network, so I'm leaning towards the overhang method whereby this one bridge lot can work for any 1 tile wide transit network.

Nice work! As always, fantastic attention to the little details that bring it to life.

Just a small update to everyone's new favorite water/drainage management infrastructure.

Yup. The purple one though is one giant prop-as-building for a weirdly shaped block. It also will have 2 fake pedestrian streets.

Yeah, right now I am struggling with trying to figure out the exact scope of the tile set. As you see from the picture, almost everything is done simply with 2 pieces. To expand the 1 tile wide canal set to every possible piece would be about 22 pieces, and that's JUST for 1 tile wide canals, not even the single wall/open water set. I'm thinking though that I will maybe just make a nice bundle of every possible piece and users can install as much as they want. If you only need the, say, 5 basic pieces for most straight canals and bridges, then thats all you have to install. If you want to go nuts and make all kinds of crazy waterway intersections, install the 50 piece kit. In other news, what are these shenanigans?

Yeah. I wish I knew how to get rid of it. It's not really like a clever prank fooling me into thinking it's business as usual. It just looks broken and unusable. I guess I'll just see you tomorrow, ST forums.

Whooo! I think it's just about done (apart from some small tweaks)! To Do: Create transit puzzle pieces for the bridges. Adjust the railing size on bridge pieces. The vertical scale makes it look too tall. Honestly, it looked pretty good at 1m––1,33 is too high. Some tweaks with respect to positioning. I HAVE to learn a way to place the pieces on to the file precisely. Reflections by bridge are too big. Should be reduced. Reflections at vertical angle are weird when tiling. No idea how to fix this though... Especially since it looks great (IMO) at the more horizontal angle.

True, although that doesn't explain why it tiled for most of the pieces but not the last one, but I found out it's because it was facing the other direction. The problem is that the maps are very difficult to tile. One is a smoke map and one is noise map, both of which don't tile very well. I had tried making a version but what you ended up seeing was a mirrored seam between the tiles. I decided since the seam wasn't very noticeable (see left 3 seams) to just let it be, but didn't anticipate the issue if the tile was flipped (see right seam). Grrrrrr. I'll look into it. I'm pretty certain that's the cause, although it is behaving backwards. In theory the lower angle closer to the street should give you more darkness in the reflection as it catches things like shadows and buildings which don't emit light. As you raise up and zoom out though, the reflection should catch more sky and turn brighter and bluer, not darker and blacker... No idea how to get it to behave less realistically to compensate. GRRRRRRR.

Good idea, but no, because the LOD crops that image to only the middle 50% of the canal, the edges don't show up. But I was just about to drag the scene to the recycling bin, when I decided to another export and... it worked. There are some issues though. On close up zooms, some of the pieces tile better than others. Can't figure out how that's possible: The bigger issue though is that as you zoom out, it gets darker and darker when in reality it should get lighter. No idea what to do about this other than separate renders for each zoom level which is very very very very very messy. Oh and they vanish at Z1. WHUT? So I think brighter, bluer water is in order. Also per you guys' suggestion, I had reduced the brick saturation to 90% but I might try reducing it all the way to 75%.

Damn. I don't really know what to do other than shelf the project. There is nothing I can think of that might fix it.

Masked and unmasked. I tried removing the mask since it's typically not used on canal sets (no above ground shadow issues), but the output is identical.

Thanks, but already ahead of you. Those are 16,5. It's still happening for some reason.

Well the depth is looking better now that I changed it to 3 meters. But what I'm really stuck on is these lines occurring between the pieces. They're there with and without the M/S/R mask. I'm pretty dejected and close to giving up. I can't think what else to try.

Alright, I exported the most basic piece and stuck it in game to see how it looks. The short answer is: not great. I'd like some feedback on the following issues: Pieces do not tile correctly. Shadows are too blue/purple. Water level may or may not match sea level. 1. Tiling Issues: I don't really understand what's going on here. The separation between props increases as you zoom out, but also appears inconsistent at closer zooms. Does anyone know how other canal sets and embankment sets combat this issue? Also, is there a way in Lot Editor to assure that the prop is placed EXACTLY centred on the lot? 2. The shadows are too blue. JasonCW and I discussed it a bit, and he thought shadows would look good, but I honestly think they look weirdly fake on the water surface. I will probably opt to avoid them. 3. Water depth. I already knew that creating my ground with a greyscale value of 84 would put the actual land at 252 meters elevation, with sea level at 250. For this reason, the canal was made 2 meters deep. Below, you can see how it compared to the actual water line. It looks to me like the waterline is actually a bit lower, but I can't really tell... that may be caused by the fact that the stone cliff is slightly angled. Performing the 1,33 scale factor may compensate for that, however I am curious: does the squishing only show up in game, or do you tend to see it in BAT preview renders as well? Because I feel as though my walls look shorter in game than they did in BAT preview renders but that maybe my eyes playing tricks on me.

So, I made some really, really crude bike models. The proportions are whack and as a cycling enthusiast, it hurt my soul to model so unrealistically. There's 9 different versions, including a totally necessary bakfiets (basket bike) because they're quite typical here for schlepping around children and groceries. I will go back later and add some textures to make the boxes brown wood and the saddle bags dull green and blue (most common colors), as well as some very simple color variations. So, why are the models so inaccurate? So they look good in SC! Here's a jumbled up view of them, in SD and HD:

Show me these pictures. Not only did I fail to find nudes, I also have never seen a photo (or a scene with the naked eye) in which anything below the waterline was visible. Yeah, I've been toying with that. The texture file is actually spot on and I'm not sure if I should be adjusting gamma or denaturing the texture. De-saturating the texture feels like a crude fix to another problem, but maybe I'm wrong. I do really want them, but I'm afraid that unless I make 30 of them in different slightly different style and colour, it's just going to look like a big black smear. So right now I'm leaning towards leaving them out, or just having 1 or 2 chained to the railing (as compared to literal wall that forms in reality).

Oh my God... guys... guys... I think it's done. There's only 2 disappointments: 1. My bicycles aren't really visible. They're also needlessly high poly. Actually they're not mine, they're a free downloaded model, and I COULD make one that is lower poly and has proportions that make it visible (10 cm thick tires and frame), but I'm not sure if it really will add to the lot that much. 2. The water at the BAT angle looks a bit flat in the shadow. Anyone know how to fix that? On a default material I'd darken the shadow colour from the ambient colour, but the MR Arch materials only have a base colour. The thing is, in some ways I have to make it LESS realistic because this is how the water actually appears at a normal perspective angle: There's also 2 other very small issues: I have to move the fence posts back about 0,3 meters, and also I have too much gradient on my default wall texture compared to my bridge texture. Both easy enough to fix though. So the big questions for my friendly viewers are: 1. What to do about the flat reflection colour? 2. Bikes: Yay or nay?

The issue is long and complicated but I got it sorted. The water is one and the same, although the colour is shifted slightly. Look at the further up post, you can't see below the waterline on the canal section there either, only on the grass. I'm leaning towards blueish because it will match a water mod better.

You can find the answer of how to plop any building here, but keep in mind, the R buildings will not function and are essentially eye candy.

A small update. I think I am pretty happy with this water colour, but it needs to be slightly bluer. Just slightly. The special thing though, is using something I discussed with Jason, which a fake facade that is invisible to render above/behind the canal. This will increase the amount of reflection there is on the canal, and should allow me to put in tree props and still have the feeling that they are being reflected in the water.