Simulanten

On the way from Tuxedo train station to the Trailhead on the other side of the Interstate.

Now - this is exciting. After months of not touching C:S and some time while in self-quarantine I started a new city. Well, rather a village - close to the first gated community in the US. It's sort of a recreation - but the lack of assets gives me some liberties.

I have no idea. Thing is - I was out of C:S for more than a year now. Meanwhile I have a new Notebook with 32GB RAM and it will some resetting of all the mods and assets to get back in... But in the recent weeks I was more and more keen on giving it another try.

After no time for C:S and a major blow with ploppable asphalt not loading I fired up my Rocky Beach savegame again. It has become so prop heavy and slow that I feel like it won't make it much longer on my laptop. Still there are some new screens of an area that I didn't cover much so far... This is a very Californian motel - this building alone has about 200 props and trees added. No wonder the FPS are crippled down to single digits. and more of the surrounding area - a 7eleven gas station, a storage place and some residential behind it. and another view from the bypass highway across the recycling center, a construction company lot, a tire workshop, a pool and supply store and the Rocky Beach City Hall. I really love this build and I can't imagine to abandon it because of the low FPS. Maybe I can tweak my mod setup so it gets more RAM space...

@boformer thanks for saving me: I checked the output_log.txt (could have thought about that myself :-( ) and found that the Overwatch Mod was missing... The story apparently goes like this: The updated TM::PE threw out the Overwatch mod and that was the problem - when I tried to load the savegame in different configurations I never re-enabled Overwatch because it was named as not compatible with ploppable asphalt and I considered it to be the culprit. But it was the other way round: With TM::PE updated and Overwatch re-enabled it was all back again... Thanks for the help and sorry again for hijacking the thread. Kudos to ronyx!

Needless to say that your work is one of the major game changers. And I'm so sorry to crash this thread with my problem. All of a sudden your ploppable surfaces don't show up anymore and I get even a text on some of your decals saying that "the mod doesn't work". I read all the threads on reddit, steam and so on around this awesome mod, I tried dozens of different loads with different mod set ups and still have no clue what causes the loading screen mod not to load the ploppable surfaces. I'm getting frantic because my Rocky Beach savegame with hundreds of plopped surfaces is kind of dead now... My last hope is to get help with this post.... Sorry again for crashing your showcase thread. Keep up the great work!

Now for something serious... After creating a realisticly large cemetery and the massive high school I wanted to proceed with another public element in Rocky Beach. I was going for a wastewater treatment plant and here it is: Rocky Beach Waterworks. I have no clue how wastewater treatment works but I was looking at a few sanitary plants in my reference towns like Santa Barbara, Ventura, Carpinteria and others and I found enough interesting assets, buildings and props to beef up the whole thing. There is an office building, entrance gates, wastewater clarifiers, staff parking, tubes and pipes and tanks for whatever. I studied the areas around these plants to get inspiration for the lots around the treatment plant. I love these areas - nothing fancy at all. It's where storages, trailer parks, construction businesses and stuff like this find enough cheap space between the highway and the smelling clarifiers. It's here where I placed a lot for boat storage, a small gardening company, some junk and my own cheap Pine Motel. This is pure joy... One of my few builds for C:S - the glorious Pine Motel... Cheapest rates in town. Water treatment is usually well protected as a critical part of the infrastructure. Hence the barbed wire. The clarifiers by Ronyx are working like a charm. With some additional piping and stuff they make a great treatment plant: Both entries to the facility are guarded. Every single screenshot is actually a tribute to @MrMaison 's and other's tree and plant creations. Wow. Just ... stuff. Any policy to have people use more cars? Too many pedestrians in Rocky Beach for an American town... The neighboring streets around the facility. Some simple shops, abandoned apartment blocks, industry. I love it. And yet another overview more towards Main St. There is the civic center with the town hall, a sheriff station, a small church, a recycling center and just more stuff. I'll show more close-ups of this area pretty soon. Hope you like my little town - after 4 years of C:S it's my favorite build so far.

There is coming more about a whole new area of Rocky Beach soon. Here's my favorite surf shop already...

Here we go with more High School pics. Meanwhile I built more areas in Rocky Beach (wastewater treatment, munipicial facilities, residential compounds - soon more!) - and I experience a serious framerate hit. Too much to handle... all those details 4500+ assets. OMG. Here's two overview screens of Rocky Beach High School. Someone asked about the number of parking - but after some research it's absolutely normal for a large US high school. There is all a school needs: A football field, basketball courts, an open air stage, a facility building for school buses (also serving middle and elementary school)... Road access is quite generous. The Regis High School asset is amazingly well done: Street level view of the parking (it's a Sunday, pretty calm...) I love how this nice open air stage turned out. I enhanced it with walls, props and benches... Here you can feel the Californian warmth... The sport field assets have also become better and better The backside of the new building: There is still the first high school connected to the new one with more classrooms. Lots of additional props on the roof and around it. I need a nice, simple base- or softball field for my builds. This one is one of the better existing ones - but it's almost too posh for a high school field. I like the view of Rocky Beach - the high school campus sits a bit above town. The gym wears the Rocky Beach Eagles logo. Here you can see how it sits above the highway going through Rocky Beach. Some new offices on the left... Another bird's view with the highway. Left of it there is a new trial of making a Californian residential compound That's it for now. Next will be about the other new areas and serious wastewater treatment - as long as I can still start up this heavy savegame...

Thanks and welcome to the light! The game has really evolved thanks to all the mod and asset creators.

This is in the making right now...

Now for Rocky Beach Cemetery. It's something I wanted to do for a while: A decent burial place for Rocky Beach residents. The usual Deathcare buildings are far too small and walled in - and I wanted to get it real in terms of size and atmosphere. Fortunately there are a lot of great assets on the workshop - only thing missing are good SoCal service buildings (red tile roofed and mission style) and funeral homes. Now I have a massive cemetery with dozens of hearses driving around town - I wonder how to tweak their service radius (I remember that the respective mod doesn't work anymore?). Is there a way to assign services to districts or so? Anyway, here we go: The cemetery sits on the hils behind the coastal highway - there are nice views... I like the driveways with the patched cracks - The whole area is heavily inspired by Santa Barbara Cemetery - it looks quite similar with the grassy lawns, kind of trees and a few larger mausoleums. One of them has a nice vista point with benches and sits on the highes hill. My Rocky Beach is some kind of ideal California - that shows in the much greener grass because it rains more frequently on my map than IRL... In the distance you can see the hills south of Rocky Beach. The map comes from the real north end of Big Sur - if my RAM and prop limit allows it I will develop into that hilly coastal area and make a National Park... Here you can see the funeral chapel of the Rocky Beach Cemetery Association. It has two different assembly halls. I adapted one of the workshop churches (red roof...) There's a funeral right now... The chapel is surrounded by these great tall pine trees. The cemetery is close to the highway. I reduced traffic on the highway by having only one entry to the map. I hate those busy roads going from nowhere to nowhere... On the chapel I covered the window with the cross to keep it religion neutral... I like the Californian late afternoon atmosphere in this pic. Another view of the upper entry that doesn't go past the chapel. It's actually another part inspired by Santa Barbara, amazing how C:S can look on eye level... That's how proper deathcare looks like! These great assets by BTB are perfect. The Rocky Beach Cemetery Association has the gardening facilities here (also growing flowers for the services) and the crematory serves a few funeral entreprises of the greater RB area. It's a bit set back in a discreet corner of the cemetery. Close to the chapel there is a sculptor an his monument workshop. This intersection with the entry gate, the big palm tree road island and the surrounding buildings is also inspired by SB. In the Rocky Beach version there is a nice restaurant next to the monument shop. I love how this intersection turned out. Here's the area south of the highway that links the area covered so far with the cemetery. I added a few smaller service builidings close to the sound barrier to get coverage in the large suburban residential area. And finally a complete view. At the bottom there's the hillside - a future development area for larger properties with a view. It was an extremely satisfying thing to work on this cemetery. Hope you like it too.

Thans boformer for the hint! I stayed away from ModTools and Resource Replacer (being on the consumer end atm) but this might be a good moment to dive in. Here's a preview of Rocky Beach cemetery. It's quite a big thing and was inspired by Santa Barbara and a few L.A. spots. More pics to come very soon.

Drool... Thanks for your nice comment!

Now I had the time to make some screenshots of the large new area on the edge of town and especially close to the beach. It's a lot of pictures and I try to comment a bit on the assets that I used. First I finished the suburban area close to the elementary school and sports fields. I found a nice version of row houses that have a bit of a Californian look. The baseball field in the background was managed with the Paintermod to control the far too vibrant textures. Now it blends in nicely: The fields are popular - parking in the background is always full. Another asset that needed heavy modding to cover ugly ground textures and hedges. Now it's a decent Californian home. Although there are quite a few American suburban assets now in the workshop I feel there is still a lack of generic houses... Props galore in an older part of the build. The odd shaped lot is being used for an open air garden / plants store. I just tried to use every available plant/pot/garden prop there is. Here's where Rocky Beach residents get ther pruned date palm seedlings: And now for the glorious coastal area. Heavily modified vanilla and workshop assets, new rock and coastal decal textures, abundant vegetation create a nice lush neighborhood with expensive lots and real estate. The Amtrak Surf Liner goes right through this area. One of the bigger mansions of Rocky Beach. Has its own tennis court, a large pool with a wind protecting glass wall and a comfy guest house. And access to a private beach. View from the water. I got some ideas for detailing the cliffs from Pres' Calavera Beach. The vanilla "High Vegetation" from Park Life make good bushes on the rocks. BTW Paintermod is great for adapting the luminosity of many vanilla and workshop buildings. But I always dream of a crp unpacker to directly adress the textures.... Another one of my newly discovered vanilla assets. Just a little tweaking with Prop it up Mod and completing it with additional props and gardening they make fantastic modern villas like this beach house on the cliff. It sits on a small looped street that has just about a dozen of houses on it. There's a small public beach between these houses. Maybe it's a good surf spot? No idea. The actually French Aquitana houses make good Californian single story residences - especially when combined to larger houses. These two sit on a little hilltop in the middle of the street loop. Even the ugly chunk of vanilla building looks like nice real estate after some prop and Paintermod treatment. Exiting the railway underpass - the two apartment blocks needed some new roof textures (ploppable asphalt positioned on the flat roof) but with the surrounding palm trees and their position on the beach they look more luxurious... A more general view from the Amtrak station area with the Holiday Inn Express down to the beaches. The terrain didn't allow any grid down there - looks nice. A Japanese family feeling homesick owns this property. A great excuse for using all those splendid Japanese assets... But there is a great sushi restaurant in town. It has a nice garden patio with a small temple gate. Up front there's my very own Pine Motel in all its glory (and with a decent pine tree to justifiy its name... Again a more general overview of this part of Rocky Beach. It has a few commercial buidlings and a police stationalong the tracks. The larger residential buildings behind the tracks are waiting to be accompagnied by the dingbats that are lurking somewhere in Leijo's toolshed. And finally a Bird's view of the whole area between the train tracks and the water. It was fun but also tedious with all that residential detailing - now I'm moving on to some other parts of town I guess.