gothic0023

As far as I know no one has looked into this, however that does not mean someone out there is not working on this idea. As for the randomness of buildings not being so random, kind like you see with the higher density buildings. I believe that take some coding, in some folder or file I am not sure we can even get to. Though I say this also note I do not code much, so I tend to not mess with those things. As for bringing it to MaxisGuillaume's attention maybe you could write a note like an e-mail on here to them. However I am not sure that would get their attention, however since this seems to be a hot topic they might already be working or looking at ideas for this, though I can not say for sure only way to know is to get full confirmation from someone that this idea is being looked at.

honestly there is a chance for anything, but right now...I can't see it in the near future unless someone knows something I don't know. I also agree the University could use a face lift so to say. lol

yeah these post are more like me yammering to myself, and if goes to far it would be a lot for people to read. I would rather your videos explain you do really well with those. If i can fully come to some solid conclusions I will let you know so you can incorporate them into your video along with anything else. You are also correct I am still thinking trying to disprove what I had proven, which maybe more of what it is getting jumbled. Though yeah if I come to some very solid facts I will message them to you , and let you explain them to others along with also figuring out if I am correct or not. since I figure you can test out what I would be writing to you about. Plus then I can keep on working on stuff and keeping notes for you to look over, than making pit stops all over to write this stuff up on forum lol.

4/6/2014 1:04 pm still looks like how I am going about these color changes has worked, most of the buildings that I am specifically looking at have the same color tones, which can be thought of the colors I am using on the color pallet. Though after looking through a number of houses I found the following to be true at moment anyways. *color pallet only affects the mesh you are using, I had to double check this off of looking at the mesh. i was looking at all kinds of houses, where my specifically has a garage and satellite dish above it. The reason that dish is important is because it is another identification marker, since I did not change the mesh or components only coloring. Any other meshes without these two exact components are getting their color from another color pallet I am pretty sure. Mainly because some of the buildings that were small variations to this mesh, had colors I have not even inputted yet to the color pallet. (still wondering though if it affects the other houses such as if the d1w2 house takes on same colors at d1w3 this because I have seen repeating colors, but I still can not say that is not due to that meshes specific color pallete) Though I still can not fully prove this, still trying to get the normal mesh that I can see in front of me to come out nice. *looks like out of the four houses that did pop up they follow my color pallet, so I am not so worried at moment that i really was not altering anything that my eyes were messing with me. * I am at moment in the process of recoloring the original pallet with some tips from Benji about color masking, at moment I am setting down a base layer waiting to still have my color theory as far as turning houses go bad somewhere. I figure after I lay down this set of color in 72% opacity that I will build on to the colors using layering. I am still using my black out though for the part of the color pallet that I am not working with, and seems to still be working out well. I am though erasing were the black is, so that I know all the colors under it are gone. Some were in my head I keep thinking though the black was there, what if I was only just enhancing the old color pallet. *With the color of a house of same mesh, I went were is it getting yellow? I didn't put in yellow to the color pallete. Just now with the pallete zoomed out looking at thumbnail. When I looked at my green were I put one layer over it zoomed out it was yellow. -.-* I mean yay I figured it out, but if I wouldn't have looked at it from that point of view I would have went back to thinking I was wrong again. So it is deffinatly when looking at this color pallete close up what you may put and what you may see are two different things. This because for that row close up everything is a shade of green. (thought I would just put this in here that sometimes you gotta take a farther view.) so anyways back to working on this, I did want to say though going into next month I will be gone on a month long vacation. This is the reason i am pushing so hard at moment to see what is or is not working. Then who knows when I get back maybe it will all be easy and we can use simcitypak to add color and buildings. Which I see fairly possible, since I am sure the guys and gals working on the coding for simcitypak are working hard. (going for a break, I did find some more interesting stuff will post when I get back. Been editing this post most of this afternoon so far.)

So tonight at 1:08 am 4/6/2014 I am starting to second guess my work little bit, as far as the re-vamping of buildings. While some things look encouraging like I was going in the right direction, I am doing. Though at same time I am still wanting to say I got things to change in game house wise. Though I was starting to notice a weirdness at using 100% occupancy on all column. Which is the following things thought I would share, if I am truly on the right track. 1. The missing colors some of them I found when I rotated the houses, or when the sun would be in a certain position in the sim sky. Though that oddness did not happen until I was way farther down the color chart.Where some houses be dark green then turned to the side it be neon green. 2. Some of the sun that reflected off those buildings at 100% occupancy were enough to burn out my eyeballs. Such as the neon green stripes. 3. I tried to test out on some of the landmarks, which was negative because I could not find a "technical color chart." 4. When I tried to pull and change color pallets to see if their were changes or if I was seeing things, I found that this seemed to only affect one certain building and I am not even 100% sure of that. So the idea that the colors I was working on was affect the other buildings pretty much could be placed at a negative at moment. Which means getting say a low density low wealth area all together done would still be a pain, because you would be going house to house on various color charts. So here Benji maybe correct that it only affects the RAW file specifically that i was working with. conclusion: This is fun still, but it is really hard getting this stuff together and still proving my theories correct or incorrect. Along with that the flipping back and forth between files and games, honestly I can say at this moment my eyes maybe playing tricks on me. I also still need to if anything learn how to control the color pallet even if it is random colors. I did not realize the shading and the sun light would make such dramatic affects. Along with that still some colors are missing which I need to read over notes again. Anyways I learned a lot this week, but at the same time it was so much to take in that my brain is now kind of on scrambled.

agreed, I am just so excited. However you are right in a down to earth way I need to take time make sure it all comes out well. Thank you for the knoweldge, and learning is always better when people learn together. If I figure out anything while tinkering I will post.

LOL yeah i finally found a project to keep me busy, this happens to me when ever I am overly intrested in something. Plus I just love sims what can I say. I found tonight that I am sure that I can release a color pack recoloring the houses in a few days. Problem is I want to make sure that some interesting house combos come up and that people have something to go OOOOOOoooo about. as for the pixel blending thing, btw ty with the occupancy thing that I know how to control, because now you really got me thinking about how to get multiple shades at least into one pixel. Before I was just seeing if I could do something crazy like cut a pixel in half and see if one half could be blue and one half could be red. Between my paint program and the color pallet it said "nope you are not going to do that." * For the wood thing, or other textures I will give your method a try. it would be nice to say these recolored houses even had a different panneling. Which btw my first attempt at this was a fail that was realized to me when I went back to the original chart. *About the land mark thing, very good and something I was kind of thinking about. Though I am realizing on my current project, that for all the color chart that is colored in, not the 8th row at moment. It looks like it can pull the colors from about any place, though I have got some interesting buildings going on because of this. Though like I said I am just moving along faster not putting up a bunch of notes, so I can see the full affect. Then I will be able to adjust my pixels if I do not like something. So at moment it my color pallet for this house/ lower density area looks more like a bar code. Just not with as many colors as when I originally saw this. * I do feel bad at moment though that the only thing I could release is something like low density color house pack. I still can not alter the props, nor can I alter the decals. which would be nice. I am still hoping Oppie get more going with simcity pack. Along with that I hope whenever i get confident enough to release this first color pack that the simcity community approves. *takes a deep breath* Though like I said I estemate at the rate I am going at that if that would happen be a few days. I still have much to learn from you about textures, walls, and any little flare I can put into this project.

Project 4:02 4/4/2014 So this may take a while. I erased what I did and re-imported the old stuff. I am going to journey on to make my own color pallet fully. After some testing, I have learned that I not only run out of color options, but I have pretty much learned what the columns themselves do for the most part. The other half that I did not learn, I am sure I will be able to figure out how to tweak it to give it the look I want to show off. I am also noting an occupancy color different shown in the color pallet in the columns. Which I may try out while re-working this out. So basically I will be monkeying with this palate on a larger scale if you do not hear from me, though I will keep checking in on the forums.

Day 5 more tinkering 12:43 am 4/4/2014 column 9 Test city 1 Project idea working on column 9 vertically, here I am going to add in a couple more colors and see what I get going on. Here I am going to designate the “R” spot with finally one solid shade which will be grey, “G” with what I think is a magenta color. Then for “B” I will designate that with baby blue. With this testing I will make a new region and start my test city at 1 again. Results at 1:14 am 4/4/2014 I did find a baby blue house with red windows and yellow trim. So maybe this hints to me part of column 9 is designated to walls. At moment I am going to restart origin and reload this zip file , just to make sure that it is true that I am not seeing my grey or purple anywhere in variations. Then I am going to kindly go pass out for the night. At 1:32 am 4/4/2014 I have now witnessed a baby blue house, and only had one sign of a grey house which is that of upper wealth. As for the grape purple color, I have yet to see this in action. Which simply could be my sims are picky and do not want to show me tonight. Tomarow is another day though and more work on this color palate. I am still seeing though that in the long run, even if I can identify were all these things are and show people the possible combinations as of lately. I am still not sure we can truly manipulate these files in this form to say yes all houses will be blue and white for every wealth upgrade. Though in this process I am still learning a lot, I figure one step at a time. So today at 1:18 pm 4/4/2014 Project & results test city 2: I started to ponder what happen if you blend the boxes of colors if you would get blended color houses. At 1:25pm I can confirm the pixels cannot be blended. So the idea of a blended house in that way cannot happen or at least now with the tools that I have been given at moment. Since well 1pt on my tools is equal to a pixel and you cannot take the paint tools below that as far as I know. Project 1:28 messing with the texture material. Where I can make out brick walls I want to see what happens if I implement new colors or ideas into the wall. So here I painted a wooden floor type piece over top of what was the brick in the texture materials page. While at moment in the shading page I am going to leave that as what was the brick. Project Now looking over Benjis show again, 1:54 putting my wall color onto the shading material area. So now in theory sim city should pick up this wooden wall in the game. The only way to know though is basically test it out and see what happens Results test city 3 2:04 : some how the brick walls stay, So I started to get bright idea that might possibly fail, but what happens if I color the little brick wall underneath it. Project 2:05 test city 4 So I went ahead and colored the little brick wall in both the texture material file and the shading material file. I covered it with what is like an orange marble look. So now that I have done this time to go and test this out. If the brick wall stays, I will be amazed. Though there is a very strong possibility that it will. During this testing I am going to start a new region and fully exit out of even Origin. Results: So coursity has gotten me, I ended up finding a house that was neither really brick nor was it really a wooden boards. Though I cannot define exactly at this moment If I have gave the game an alternative option. This is because though I covered up would have been “Brick walls” Brick walls are still relevant in the game. Though that could be simply from another materials set coming through. Project 2:24PM In my excitement I am going to darken both areas on the maps that I had shown above even more to see, if I can really identify change. If this goes through and my first thoughts are correct, then we will be on to one way to change wall types on houses. Results: The results I came up with was again another building with this texture type , but in pink. So far all I know for textures that was in the original game was really brick or really wooden planks. I need peoples help, is this a normal texture for a wall that I am looking at or is this new? Basically though the image is a little shotty it looks like say wall paper or really faint bricks. The reason I am asking for help on this, is because through all this coloring I can't remember what the old low density, low to medium wealth houses look like.If this is actually new great, though saddly I still can't get the brick off every part of the house, if I did succeed with the wall of course, If not back to drawing board.

So now before I go to sleep I wanted to wrap up my night with the last of my testing results. Thanks to everyone that is reading along and putting up with these what seem to be diary entries. Though just in one night I believe we have learned so much about colors and even what they may stand for or how to start getting pallets or our own in. Along with what happens when colors go wrong in a color pallet. 8:16 4/3/2014 Project: Modifying to new color idea I decided to change my colors of columns 5 & 6, where I am going to designate the “G” spot with the color Red. This will help me to identify the when the “g” pixel is used. Since I believe Benji had the point that the colors are too common with the variation of pink. So what would happen here is that I would not know when the game was using the “R” pixel or the “G” pixeled area. Along with this I brightened up the pink to a hot pink so it would possibly come out clearer in the houses. Results test city 1 Success my following results showed me exactly what I wanted to see at 8:49pm. Now with this I did create a new region for this testing and with that a new test city. I am not sure if I needed to go that far, but I tend to want to create these new places when I make changes to the palate or if I add on to the palate. In the first picture I can now identify that red is for the windows, many of the houses now ended up with red windows, in which tells me that I added a new window color option. The next two houses one is an all lavender house with all lavender trim and doors, and then there is an all pink house with pink trim and doors. So with this I can say this house mesh added another design it could have. Which again may have been manipulated by the artist when they cropped the color control map on to the mesh. That would be the only way I would know how to explain why I got an all Lavender house and an all pink house. Project idea: Column 7& 8 vertically 11:10pm 4/3/2014 For this part of the project I am going to switch up colors again and see what happens in a second tester city. So far what I see happening is one column seems to define the house out of a two column combo, and the second column seems to define what features a house has such as window color, shutters, and doors. So now for this next part in the “R” spot put a turquoise blue, and in the “G” I am going to put a mint green with an occupancy of 70 just to see what happens. Since on my paint program the option for me is either 100 occupancy or 1 occupancy. So what happened is that my mint green with the occupancy change even on the color pallet is more like a dark grassy green. Now in the “B” section of this I am going to do a strip of a peach type color. I am going to keep with the same region that I just recently created. Though I am going to start a new tester city. So that will be tester city 2, with column 7 filled. Result from column 7 filled in 11:35pm test city2 With column 7 filled in with the aqua blue, green and peach. I saw another change happen. I have gave the buildings another option in which they will transform in. Which is houses that are green with peach shutters, doors, and possibly windows as shown with the blue house. As for the aqua blue well I could not find that exactly at this moment. Though through rendering it may just look like another blue house. So here I am pretty sure the green color is designated to building, blue to building and peach is for the outside features such as windows and doors and so forth. Oddball house Once again I find a house that does not fill the requirements of the double story houses, however it seems to taken on traits of my color pallet. As we can see this house has a fire engine red door way and windows. So I think it is safe to say that the palate can affect other buildings with in the same wealth type to a degree. Project: Filling in column 8 11:57pm 4/3/2014 test city3 In filling in column 8 I am going to stay with the same colors as column 7. This will allow me to see what else may happen. This again helps me to stay in control of what I am seeing as pointed out if there are a ton of colors everywhere it is just too do what I am doing in identifying parts. Results of column 8 12:23 am The results that I came up with again are showing me that for one group of wealth this color palate means one thing, while when you raise that wealth the color palate means something totally different. Though within the same level of wealth residences in the same density, the colors seem to stay pretty true to form. Though as you add on to the palate it seems you keep giving the game engine more and more options of combos. Though they still have within a certain house the same identity spots. I found as well at this moment I maybe starting to alter roof colors, I ended up with a house with a peach roof. Not that I know much about roofs, but if their color comes from some other spot than the roof materials page that gives it a certain look. Then I maybe adventuring into new grounds in colors. Though with the added peach into column 8, I found I am now getting more peach color houses. Though their window traits and variations are coming off of 5 and 6. I have yet to see a peach variation of a double story house that has used the blue and green colors that I have introduced other than the blue and green houses I found with the peach windows and shutters. The first picture I could say is pink in some forms which would make sense to the red window tints. Though at the same time to me this really looks like a peach house lined in red windows and shutters. The second picture is what I meant about the roofs changing colors. Though honestly at this point I can’t remember what the real colors were for the roofs. Now for my oddball pictures, the first one has a yellow house with a fire engine red door. The second picture is a house that is half yellow half red, with blue shutters. Both of these lower pictures was when I raised the wealth of the land in low density by a little bit. Along with this I found a building that at the richer end of this density that had taken on the baby blue colors and peach patio and trims.

np and yeah I am not sure why it would or would not make a difference, just something I do. It could be that it completes the collection have no clue. NP have to keep me posted on how it goes, I am glad I was able to give instructions you could follow, without getting it all muttled together.

Thanks for the encouragement, and all of what Benji said is true. Though I can see from tinkering with this how it is fun for me, though I think of it as painting models. It does at moment take a long time, and yes different looks can happen but I am no were wanting to touch the texture material files yet. As for solid colors, yeah you got solid colors but there is texture, just because i put on flat pink does not mean the building will come out in that flat pink. This is because of the "different materials" that make up the building. SC4 was fun for me for the time I had it on my comps, I just tend to move up with the games though true not everyone can do this the economy is not fun sometimes.

Some reason now its cutting down how big of images I can add with my post, so instead of attachments I am going to try and photobucket this so you can see. Hopefully it will work as a URL attachment so I can continue explaining. Glad this works, okay so now that I can get imagines I will continue. 5.So now I go to my folder and go to send to , and hit the file that says compressed(zipped)folder. As shown below, in the second picture is the result of hitting that button. So now I get that little package box thing which is part of Openit which is my winzip program. 5. I take that folder or icon and put it in the following area shown below. As shown about five “package below” is my house package that I have now over written the game file with. Though I still retain my old files, so if something is not right or I want to change something. I simply pull the file out and put it in the trashcan. Everytime I go through this to modify I take the old file out of this area and trash it. So basically each time I go and alter my color palate I am saving and creating a new compressed (zip)file. I hope this works for you Benji, this is about the best I can explain what it is I am doing to have my images and coloring come up. With out using Oppies SimCityPak the whole time.

As to my knowledge I am not doing anything special as far it as I know it is standard compression and zip. I will provide pictures this time to help show what I am doing. Your welcome on the explanations, I am having fun with this and I feel that others should have as much fun. Plus how can you make our awesome videos if you cannot explore farther, after all you are one of the reasons I took up this task, among the others who were calling out for what can be done with buildings. (I’ll show all my steps, though I’ll show by were I got my files as well.) Please bare with me this explanation is fairly long about what I am doing. Side note: I am not sure why but with the color palate because I tried that with both black and pink, the game does not pick on it, so that the houses will change to all of that solid color. I do not know why because I do not know the SimCity program format that well. So to see varation if after troubleshooting this, I would recommend doing the rows as we have been talking about to create the varation in the buildings. Step 1 · So first I gather up all my materials, though what I may have done different than you though it may not make a difference. Is that I pulled my particular file from the graphics data area for the simcity game. However exporting the materials should all be same in theory through simcitypak. Which I am pretty sure you know how to do, since you found your color pallet and know what the control map is and so forth. Though for sake of example I am going to point out through a picture. So first you find what rw4 building that you want. 1. Were the orange square is that is how I exported the .ObJ file for this building that will be one file sheet that is named whatever you put on export. 2. Where the kind of pink square is, that is where I come up to the page we are looking at in this picture. Through the export 3ds max materials files. I export that into my specific file that I made. So now in that file we should have in there both our .obj and our materials. 3.Where the green line is that code is how I found my color pallet. Which is simply plugging in that number under the green line into the idenfitcation box. Though at moment I have to say not ever building is as nice as to have a color pallet connected to it. Which could tell us something or could simply be simcitypack is still under development. So now we have found our color pallete I export this into my created folder. (BTw this is not exactly the file I used, just demonstration) 1. Simcityfive is what I named my mod creation folder btw, and my smaller folder inside of that is called house. So these file names are my doing, not part of simcity game folders. That light blue strip by the obj file as well came along when I had exported my materials page. So what I have done is created a double of the main files that are found in simcity graphics rw4 files.From here I can alter the files, but until transported back into simcity were we put our usual mods. Nothing with the “game” will change. So here we should have very little fear of tinkering around for the most part.

Edit to notes : 1. export materials from simcityPak to designated file in your case Paletteadjust 2. Everything including modified pallete should be in that folder 3. left or right click on the folder and hit compress, a second folder should apear 4. take the second folder and drop it in your sim city folder were you would put the usual mods so to answer your top question yes I have the obj file along with the other files ziped up into that one folder, all I am doing is creating a second folder to move to were I put the mods usually. I hope this is a little clearer, I looked over my last directions and it was still a little muttled. If this does not work for you let me know and I'll try to show through pictures how I am doing what I am doing.