Spamoidutout

Hi guys. Here's the place where I'll talk about a project I'm starting, the reasons why I am doing this (or trying to do this), how I will do it... and share the results with you (if possible, because there will be complications and I'll also talk about that). ------------ First let me tell you that some of you will not agree with what I'll be saying, some of you might even truly dislike it. And also I have to tell that I appreciate the hard work of all batters here. They do a fantastic job. They have created so many beautiful buildings and helped keep the game alive. Guys, you ROCK! --------------- Who should (eventually) be interested in this: People who play Maxis Nite. People who use the Day/Night cycle. Who should not be interested in this: People who only play day. People who only use Dark nite. People with no computer. Dogs, otters, other species (but Llamas are welcome). PART 1 - Why? I recently lost my archived plugins folder and started reconstructing it from scratch. I luckily had bookmarked most of the things I liked but I had to download and decompress everything... and sort it too because I wanted to keep only the best of the best buildings. And then, when I arrived to 2011... I almost stopped. That was the time Simfox released the Day and nite mod, and also Bat4max. It marked a big increase in the quality that could be achieved by builders, but also created some problems. Some small ones... and some huge ones. --- Bat4max Maxis night renders are always a bit (or more, sometimes a lot) too dark (yes, I'm talking about the Maxis Night renders, not the Dark Night ones) They're sweet and nice looking but why put such an effort into creating them if they do NOT (when they could, they easily could) fit the rest of the game? Some are very close, but some look like dark bricks once the night version shows in the game, almost as dark as a darknite render. The fact that Bat4max gives a choice to "make things darker" by just the press of a button is a very bad idea for me. Yes your nightlights will pop out a little bit more, but again, if your building does not fit in, there's no point. One example: Jasoncw's fantastic looking Lavaughn Biotech I-HT. It's one of the best matching bat4max renders, but it still is too dark compared to what Maxis nite should be... The most obvious too dark part (like all bat4max renders) is the roof. To sum it up, Maxis buildings are lit by a full moon on a clear night, bat4max renders are done on an overcast night (I'm also not a fan of the soft shadows here). And as I said, Jasoncw's Lavaughn is not too far... there's much much darker. on001222's recreation of a building in Bangkok, the Regent House. I really love how it looks, I think he did an excellent work... but at night, here's what happens: And... there's much much worse --- Some batters now only make Dark Nite renders. Custom content creators will work mostly to create what they'd like to see, it's understandable. I'm doing the same here Rendering times can be incredibly long. Hours can turn to days, even more than a week for some of the most beautiful creations. You can't blame someone for not wanting to see his machine working at full steam for days... again. One example: Kellydale's superb Bay Adelaide Centre West. I was so sad when I saw he only made a Darknite render, but 332 hours to render... wow! Here's a video that'll remind you how different Darknite renders are from MaxisNite renders: ("action" starts at 2:06, but the beginning puts you in the mood). --- Dusk and dawn... Bat4max buildings can't work during these times. Due to the way they're rendered... they just can't. Here are two videos using the buildings I used as examples before: Most "action" happens at 0:25 and 1:24 "Action" at 0:31 and 2:14 here: PART 2 - How? At first I only tried to repair just one simple (and not too big) building, without going intot the dusk/dawn stuff. I picked TRP's Mayhem Plaza, because it's a sc3k recreation, and because it REALLY was incredibly too dark at night. (it later appeared that this building's sc4model file contained both darknite and maxisnite textures and only the darknite appeared in the game). I simply took the day render (extracted from the sc4model), darkened it by the same amount that the game does for all other buildings, and on top of that I added the night render... but in "lighten" mode... and voilà! So I wondered... "how exactly are SC4 standard buildings working? SC4bat renders? It must be quite close." I then extracted the files from a very early SC4 building: oneil_1's Western Investments. And here's the result: Sc4bat buildings (and maxis ones) use the night render only to add the lights to the day render. The night render is identical to the day render, except than the windows, different lights etc are turned on. Then an alpha layer is created and will determine which parts of that night render will be shown on top of the darkened day render. Bat4max buildings have a FULL night render, that's why they can't adapt to the luminosity change during dusk and dawn. Once the "lights" of the building turn on they completely hide the day render and as they're added OVER the day render, they're not affected by the game's day/dusk/dawn/night variations.. So... I had to find a way to create an alpha layer for bat4max night renders. I already had the basics: a day and a night render, but it was a bit more difficult than how I fixed the Mayhem Plaza. The lighten blending mode in photoshop just adds what's brighter. Here I needed an alpha, so I needed to select only the differences between the day render and the night render. Photoshop can do math... let's do that. I didn't have day renders with lights on but I could create a night render with no lights the same way SC4 does in the game. I then put a layer on top of that one with the same -day render plus night-... but this time with the lights in screen mode, like I did in the previous pic. I set that picture in "difference" blending mode. The result was a picture showing only what changed between day and night renders. But this still isn't an alpha layer. If I kept this as an alpha only the very bright lights would show. That's because the difference in luminosity of a pixel is also the luminosity of said pixel. A 50% brighter pixel would appear 50%x50% brighter, means only 25%. So I added a B/W correction layer (alphas are bw) and a levels layer to boost the luminosity. I now have all we need. A night render with lights on and an alpha layer to determine where it will show. The difficulty here is to balance the levels correction layer. If you boost the difference result too much some "not that different" parts will show if the lights turn on during dusk. I you don't boost it enough, the lights will look pale and they won't bleed onto the rest of the building, and all benefits from the bat4max render will disapper. I'll talk more about that in the next section. I've created (and I'm refining it again and again) a set of photoshop actions to make this process faster. It includes correction layers to adapt to the basic bat4max/too dark/darknite/case by case differences almost on the fly. Also... the photoshop stuff is only part of the work here. I'd like to thank rsc204, rivit, Cyclone Boom, T Wrecks, matias93 for their reactions, comments and technical info while I was thinking about doing all this. You first must extract the fsh files from the sc4model files, then split the fsh into bmps. For that I want to thank rivit, his GoFSH program is an awesome tool But it's not finished yet. You must also recompose the main textures (they're split into 256*256 tiles). This takes time. And when you're finished with the photoshopp editing you must split these textures again, rename them accordingly to what they were, remerge them into fsh files and reinject them in the sc4model files using iLives Reader. The extracting/recomposing/splitting and renaming again is for now the longest and most teduous part of the work. I wish I could script that. Or maybe someone could help me here. PART 3 - Work = Results! I will just let you look at a few videos: Part 4 - Using this method / Pros / Cons. I want to make this available for anyone. I will release all the photoshop actions I've created once they're completely tested and foolproof. I also want to make it as usable as can be for everyone. I hope batters will see this as a move forward and not as someone telling them "what you did is wrong, I have the truth". I don"'t have the truth, I'm just trying to push things in a direction I think is right and I hope others will like. I will try to convert older buildings to this standard but I will obviously have difficulties here. - Can I release modified versions of existing buildings? Well... I could if I do two things: ask for permission + set the original as a dependency But what if the author can't be contacted? What if he says no? - Can every building be converted? For now the answer seems to be yes but there are a few technical limitations to what is possible. The point (as I already said) is to balance things between the dusk/dawn/night new system and the fidelity to what the building looked like in the first place. (There are a few artefacts, a few places where the method creates "not so good looking parts". You didn't see those yet, they are details, you might even say they don't matter, I don't like things that aren't perfect. i won't release anything that's not perfect in my eyes. - Can everyone do this? Yes! When I will have released the photoshop actions everyone will be able to do the same. I hope the builders still active will use this (seeing that they will be able to render only darknite and make the maxisnite with this method I think the choice will be easy for them .

I feel like @rivit's point of view on this and mine are not the same... and I hope he didn't take it badly when I said I didn't believe his method would give the same results as mine. What I do requests actions that can only be performed in photoshop (for now). @xxdita, once a building is adapted using my method, it will work with darknite, maxisnite, every imaginable light plugin. It's now reacting like maxis created buildings do. I've made tests and I can see no noticable difference between a darknite render and a building I modified when people use the DN mod. It also allows DN users to use the night day cycle and have nice looking dusk and dawn time. It could also allow builders to only render DN (because you can get better results when using a DN render to work, it allows better contrasts over the day render). I will always release as additional .dat files requiring the original sc4model files. And of course always credit the authors. I made my files as zzzzzz "insert name of the building" and placed them alongside the sc4model files, it works flawlessly. SC4 loads the original and then overrides the night renders using my files. I will ask permission to active and non active builders. Yes will mean yes (duh) No will mean I will keep my files private and that's sad... No reply will mean I will release the files but if the original author finally says no I might someday have to remove them. I will ask said permission HERE, meaning the authors will have to come here and see what it's about instead of just seeing a message and maybe not paying attention and (maybe) just dismiss it not really knowing what it's about. Does it seem ok to everyone?

Mayhem Plaza and Neihu Plaza, now 100% operational. Just a reminder about these buildings, the Maxis versions of both were broken (they contained both MN and DN renders, and DN renders were showing at night... so no actual MN version for them.). These two and a dozen more are almost ready to be released... but still I'm not sure how I should release stuff. It's not really building, but in some cases it's a fix (like the example above). In other cases it's added functionality. What is it???

Hi everyone. I've got one question about SC4 bats. What do you do when some custom bats grow too much? (I'm certain you know how infuriating it is when you find a nice looking bat and once in your plugin folder it grows absolutely everywhere and ruins your city) What's the easier way to fix that? (Apart from bulldozing, of course). Secondary question, it probably involves modifying lots... if we do so, is there a need to bulldoze every instance of the building already in a city or is it ok to leave them? Thanks for your future replies.

Yep, kellydale does fantastic buildings. It's that particular one:

Right... the Go away Wren mod must just modify the capacity of all the Wren Insurance lots... BTW is there a good way to determine said capacity? I guess it must take into account the capacity of the buildings of the same category. Edit: I wonder why nobody ever made a "Go away Reflect Systems"? It grows a bit too easily too.

News! Well just short news. I've now worked on almost 50 buildings. I've reworked some buildings from the Trunite period and they work as fine as the others. Oh, and btw, about DarkNite... I think I've been asked if what I do makes it possible to use Trunite or MaxisNite only buildings with the Darknite mod. The answer is yes, they look great when used with DN. Here's @Jasoncw's Ouellettte Electronics, a Trunite Building, now usable with the DarkNite mod: Here's how it looked before

The red circled one is @mattb325's very cool Ivy Nightclub : ... and I think it'll be great news for you that I just worked on a Night4Max version Edit: Damn I just realized I was replying to an old message... Sorry, guys.

Hi, folks. Been completely off for a few months, new job, new appartment, this stopped me right in my tracks for a while. And then had to reinstall my whole machine and backup all my files in an emergency. Some landed in different harddrives and it was a complete mess. I've started having time to look at this a couple of weeks ago and finally managed to regroup my wip files just a few days ago. Now... where am I? As I didn't have the time to take note of everything, I have to rediscover parts of my own process, but I think I went the wrong way to streamline it and make it less time consuming. I think the part where I regroup all the tiles that form the complete textures is unneccessary. I saw @rivit made a lot of additions to his GoFSH tool. The proofsheet function he added will be extra useful I see two ways it could be done much faster. 1 - Having a tool like the GoFSH proofsheet addition but for all zoom levels, and also (and I don't think this exists at all) a tool that would recut the whole textures back to tiles and rename them correctly and automatically (it's still the worst part of the process, it's hard and long to do manually). 2 - Using the proofsheet to find the correct settings for the photoshop actions, and then batch-treat all the tiles separately, without having to recompose or rename anything. Problem is I don't know how to do this with photoshop. Batch treating simple files is ok, but you have to work with separate layers to obtain the alpha and I don't know how to script this. Edit: the only viable solution is the first one. Why? Because while doing some of the buildings I already did I noticed some of them had the night render slightly offset (the result would be sligthly blurry in some parts if left uncorrected) this need fixing as a whole in photoshop and would be extremely difficult to do if processing all the tiles separately. So... I need some help to make the renaming of the tiles easier. @rivit , is there a way this could be done using GoFISH? Or maybe @violins77 (if you're still around and your help proposal still holds), because that part does not need to be visual.

A very interesting article (and some video) about a version of the first SimCity that was almost released on the first Nintendo console. https://gamehistory.org/SimCity/ Good read!

Hehe, that's not wrong in a sense. But I wasn't saying I was converting to maxisnite, I was saying I was reworking maxisnite renders. Anyway... I've been quite busy. I said I would do one or two more but I did a bit more... like twenty more. And I'm glad I did because I saw a few more obstacles to overcome or errors to avoid. I'll take some time to make vids for the new ones (and I will need to rework some of the first I did in the beginning so they're "perfect").

But... I'm reworking standard maxisnite renders (except for a few exceptions). Yes, I have seen these early "non standard sc4bat" renders that came out before the maxisnite/darknite separation and bat4max. ALL bat4max (or these too) renders do not adapt to the day/night cycle and use a full night render, maxisnite and darknite.

Shouldn't the limit theorically be FF? Meaning 256 in decimal? The view number jumps to 4 to continue the 1, to 5 to continue 2 etc... so the max value could be FF. Edit: LOL Ok I forgot to divide by 4 afterwards because of the four views; so yep, the limit is 64.

Absolute coolness:

It was a pleasure. Nice to see people still playing SC4 (and still using Win 7 ...)

Are you trying to play from a physical copy of SC4? If so you're a victim of microsoft's removal of the securom drivers. Many old cd games won't run anymore because some drm drivers are now not recognized by windows. On Windows 7 you can get rid of the windows updates that prevent the game from running. https://community.simtropolis.com/omnibus/SimCity-4/reference/info-windows-update-kb3086255-prevents-SimCity-4-from-starting-r275/

Ok... this time I did a big building... nofunk's excellent Carew Tower. Before : NOW :