Evil.Iguana

Thank you sir! Much appreciated.

I've been releasing some roads based on my favorite Roads United texture package. I am sitting on several completed networks because they are based on NEXT roads and I haven't been able to get in contact with anyone on that team to get official permission to make them public. I am 99% certain the original author would be cool with it but I want to make sure everything I do is 100% kosher and gives proper credit to everyone who contributed. If anyone here knows a good way to get in contact with anyone involved with the current NEXT 2 project that would be supremely useful.

So I have spent the last month learning, among other things, how to manipulate Blender for the purposes of vertex painting so I can have proper slope models,. I am pretty much done my first network and should be releasing it in a few days if I don't run into any snags. I had a eureka moment a few days ago when I realized that the asset importer in C:SL is case sensitive. I was finally able to understand the root cause of various issues I had been having. Creating a simple, consistent naming scheme for all the files is key. I also discovered that if you use an .fbx for the main mesh, you need to use an .fbx for the _lod mesh as well. Adjacent to that point, either the dump tools are retrieving the wrong file or the medium road's slope LOD is the same mesh as the slope itself. Either way probably gonna have to remedy that myself if I want an efficient network for that one. I'm pretty close to being able to do that in Blender I think.

Wow that's amazing. With your blessing I will absolutely put my results up on the workshop for everyone to use. I had been wondering what the best way to contact the author was but I figured I'd cross that bridge once I was sure I could get things working for my own city. One of the great things about the CSL community is how old and new creators come together to keep mods working as the game changes. I am happy to be a part of that on some small level. My next task is to learn enough Blender that I can edit the slope meshes and get the tiling to work properly on those. I will be sure to let you know how things turn out. Thanks again for the comment!

Hey so I have figured out my problem on my own. Preface: The whole reason I started this project was that Roads United is semi abandoned and buggy, and would affect roads that it wasn't supposed to in unpredictable ways, like wrapping the bridge truss from the medium avenue with a completely mismatched texture for no apparent reason making it hideous, among other things. So I discovered that by creating a custom profile with certain textures omitted I could get a lot of roads looking good and only have a few that I needed to change myself. After writing that last post it occurred to me that maybe I ought to try turning off roads united and checking my road again and sure enough when I unload the texture set my road behaves flawlessly. So basically the scope of my project just increased by a lot. Exit question: I use loading screen mod. Wondering if that could be part of the issue. Somehow interacting with roads united? Can't easily check because I don't have enough RAM to load my current game without asset sharing enabled.

The pavement map is properly named and should be getting imported with the rest of the files. My observation is that it is behaving almost as if the pavement map is being treated as an alpha map. The Roads United texture sets store the _a _p and _r textures in a single texture but as best as I can tell in this case it is exactly the same data as the greyscale textures I exported from the default medium road so using the defaults should work just fine. And I shouldn't need to do anything with the alpha as it should be defaulting to pure opaque. I'm gonna go mess with a few things to see if i can extract any more useful data from my issue.

So I really like the road skins from Roads United: North America+ but the Roads United mod is buggy. In order to correct an issue I was having I decided to endeavor to convert some of the road skins to custom network assets so I can use them without the annoying side effects of the Roads United mod. RU textures are stored as .dds files so I used a tool to convert them to a more usable format. The end result looks great in the asset editor but there is a slight issue in game. When buildings are up next to it there is a slight z-fighting issue at the outer edges of the road. Using surface painter to put pavement down at the edge reveals that the edges of the road are semi transparent, behaving differently from other roads. Roads I have created using dumped default textures do not have the issue so it has something to do with this texture specifically. I'm obviously new to texture editing so I'm hoping I'm missing something obvious here that can be easily fixed. What have I done wrong?

Shouldn't be a big issue. I'm not going for absolute realism, just for something better than the pathetically short runways that are included in the game. At any rate, it will be quite a while before my city needs something that can handle max take off weight 747s. I'm really aiming for something more modest at the moment. I want something that looks like it can handle private jets and moderate sized airliners. I think part of why I'm running into problems is that I'm building something for a growing city rather than trying to improve a basically "finished" city that has enormous surplus income. Au contraire! The modding community is SO strong, they still find new possibilities today. Needless to say that almost everything found yet still works and is still practiced regularily. I suggest you take a deep breath and plunge into the 9 years of modding and experimenting practiced... I agree that the modding community is definitely strong. My concern is mostly with the fact that a lot of resources for self help that used used to exist may have gone offline in the ensuing years. Just for an example, the original Maxis SC4 website with modding tools and info is long gone and it took me a little while to find all the resources from it hosted elsewhere. The wiki that Chimeran linked also makes references to images that no longer show up. There are other instances too, but I think you get the idea. That doesn't mean the information isn't out there, it just means it's a bit harder to find for a person like myself who doesn't want to annoy too many people asking questions that could be answered through a little research. In the real world every piece of equipment and infrastructure has a purpose. Very few of the airport pieces we're discussing do anything but look nice. Furthermore, there is no conversion rate for going from simoleans to dollars to compare prices and the game does not closely mimic the real world in how infrastructure spending affects the economy. The bottom line is that realism is immaterial in this case. The realism I'm interested in is visual, in that I am trying to replace an ugly asset (default style single lot airports) with a nice looking one that has the same function (custom multi-lot airport) but am being hampered by the fact that the latter is hugely more costly than the former. Ultimately I think that the decision of the creators to build the content in such a way is illogical, but I will ultimately correct the problem.

The vibe I'm getting is that, basically, what I want to do isn't possible. The sets were apparently not designed to be used with limited money or by anyone whose city isn't already "done." Why the builders decided to make them cost anything, given that there would really be no downside to making them free, is what confuses me. The last sandbox-y sort of game I played was Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. That game also had a vibrant mod community. Standard operating procedure for visual items that had no gameplay effect was to make them free or really really cheap. Not doing it that way just seems illogical to me. I guess what I will have to do is start learning how to edit these things myself so I can adjust the values in a way that suits how I play. The downside for that is that, with a nearly 9 year old game, a lot of the useful information on modding has probably gotten lost.

I've decided to take the plunge into creating a reasonably nice looking custom airport. Obviously getting it right is going to be a long process. There are so many options that it's a bit intimidating just figuring out how each piece fits together with every other piece. My plan is to start relatively simple and add details over time, the main first step being to get a runway that is properly scaled for the game and the aircraft that are using it. The problem I'm running into, though, is cost. My city is around 190,000 sims. My previous airport, the AC functional airport (stage 4 I believe) was quite affordable. The terminals and tower I'm using to replace it are also reasonably balanced cost wise. But runways, taxiways and ramps are both prohibitively expensive to build and hugely costly to maintain. I'm really confused as to why this should be the case. The pavement systems are, as far as I can tell, purely visual flare to satisfy people such as myself who want a realistic looking city. I don't understand why they have any cost whatsoever. As far as I can tell, my airport with just a few terminals and a tower is performing it's intended function perfectly well. Why is making it look good so expensive? Is anyone aware of the rationale of the content creators in making these lots perform this way? Is there something happening behind the scenes that justifies these costs? Furthermore, how do you folks with these huge airports in your cities afford them? Is it just assumed that everyone will use cheats?

Thanks for the replies folks. I'm gonna give blazerzr2003's mod a try and see if that does the trick, otherwise I think I'll just end up building the bridges sans mod then loading it up to build my nice gradual inclines. I tried to make it work just by terraforming but I was never able to get the opposing ramps to exactly the correct height and still have them be shaped adequately. Magneto is correct that I am using the medium version of the mod. I am curious about that data on the chart from the readme that he reproduced. The first value is obvious enough, but what does "Max Slope Along Network" determine?

So I picked up SC4 during the Steam Summer sale and I've added a few mods to make the game more to my liking. I got NAM/RHW almost immediately because it came highly recommended. Today I picked up Ennedi's slope mod so that my road and rail networks have more realistic inclines. I've run into a problem, however, in that I cannot place bridges with the slope mod enabled. Here's an example of me attempting to build an avenue across a river: https://dl.dropbox.c...08-24_00003.jpg No dice. It's not just the avenue. Attempting the same thing with a road yielded the same result. Undeterred, I tried using the ground lifter mod to create some pre-built embankments: https://dl.dropbox.c...08-24_00004.jpg Looks promising. Will it work? https://dl.dropbox.c...08-24_00005.jpg Nope. Can anyone offer any suggestions for how to proceed? I'm sure there is some technique I'm unfamiliar with or perhaps I need to pick up another mod to help. Right? *note: The existing bridges were built before I installed the slope mod. I suppose I could uninstall to build each bridge then reinstall to fix each slope but I figure there has to be a better way.