matthiasbasler

Tonight I did a series of tests and would like to share my findings with you: Pedestrian connections do indeed work, if placed correctly. When you do changes to the asset and then click "continue" in the main game in order to load the last saved game, the visual changes to the building will apply instantly. However, in order for the changed pedestrian paths to be used, the building has to be removed and to be re-built. Otherwise the cims will behave as they did with the previous version. This is irritating and the reason why I thought those paths were not working at all ... my changes simply didn't apply automatically. There's obviously no point in creating two distinct connections to platform 1 (the one close to the station building). I created one right of the station (when facing the city facade of the station building, in the back of the screenshot below) and it was used. Then created another one left of the building, and from that point on only the left one would be used. The first one now gets ignored even if this means cims have to walk a "U" around the station building when coming from the right hand side. Stupid cims ... A combination of "underground" and "surface" paths worked for my pedestrian underpass. The short surface part just connects the tunnel entrance to the street. Tunnel connections are, by default, unrealistically deep. They can be moved up (with the "Move it!" mod) to be more shallow but need a certain (still relatively great) depth, otherwise they are moved to the surface when saving and re-loading the asset.

Hi Clus, I very much appreciate you comprehensive answer and will have another go at this once I have the time for it. Will try to use the automatic snapping and see if it works better. Matthias.

Hi all, I just released my first train station and it was quite a struggle. In its current state I still dont manage to make the Cims take the preferred paths I to in order to get onto the platforms and back. Basically the walk from the street to left of the building, then disappear and re-appear on either platform a second or so later. I even built an underpath for them (see screenshot below with pedestrian path connection removed). I have used the "Advanced Network Stuff" and "Move it" mods in order to place "pedestrian connections" (as existing in the vanilla train station) and I also have the "Advanced Building Editor" mod. I do not currenly use the "Mod tools". My search for information on "pedestrian connections" on the web did not yield any guides for "do"s and "don't"s. So here are my questions: There are four types of pink "pedestrian connections": Unspecified, "surface", "underground" and "inside". I can imagine what each of the three last is good for, but don't know the details. Do they only differ in the way they are placed or do they really function differently in game? When should I use the unspecified "pedestrian connection"? Can (or must) I combine them for an underpass? What prerequisites exist for pedestrian connections to be used by Cims? Am I allowed to move them in place with "Move it" (and maybe even "Road Anarchy Mod" on)? Or will Cims ignore them if they contain things like too short segments? (The second screenshot below shows what I tried to achieve with surface/inside connections.) Can the behaviour of Cims always approaching the train station around the left side of the building be altered to make them walk around either side of the building in order to get to the first platform (as in reality)? Concerning the underpass: It consists of two sunken exit sub-meshes with slopes and roofing. There is a wall at the bottom of the stairs so there's no real tunnel connecting the two. Can this still made to work with Cims? (That is, will they move through underground walls if the connection tells them to do?) What type of pedestrian connections do I have to use? I tried "pedestrian connections underground" for the complete stretch and moved it into place with "Move it". Should I use another type for the stairs? When I later load my saved assed, the underground pedestrian connection has moved upward onto the surface. Huh? Why could this be? Hope someone can help me.

Thanks for this helpful information. Matthias.

I have creates a few commercial buildings for C:S and did the extra work to create three different assets - one for each building level. So far I have released them separately. (See my "Weißenburg" collection.) However, I wonder if this is best practice. Following questions arose: Is it better to include all three assets into one workshop item? It seems possible, as it is possible with props to publish a collection of them. But I think I haven't seen it for buildings yet. So maybe there's a downside to it? Is it possible to determine that a certain L1 building will be replaced by the corresponding L2 and later L3 building? Is a certain naming sheme necessary for this to work out of the box, for example? I am aware I can use the "Building themes per district" mod to configure this for a building theme but it would be good if I could set this on the model already so it works even for users who download all three model variants and do not use this mod. Matthias

Thanks Clus, I tried it yesterday and you are absolutely right. Thanks for pointing me to the obivous.

For Cities:Skylines it seems to be good practice to create prop assets or prop asset packs containing assets to be re-used, for instance on multiple buildings. I have seen them for antennas, lamps, chimneys, flower pots and so on. Now I got the case that some of my buildings have the same type of street lamp attached to the side (or corner) of several buildings. Of course I could release them as asset but I wonder if it is possible to attach such prop to the side of a building in the asset editor. I am not aware how to set a vertical placement. Or maybe it needs another mod to achieve this? Does anyone here have experience with such situation?

Thanks for your answer. I tried the approach with the seamless roof texture and tiling during the last days. It works, but is only just practical for several reasons: Since you have to pack all the images in one single texture, you can only fill a part of this texture with the roof image. So you have to decide whether to tile horizontally or vertically, but you can't have both. Moreover if tiling horizontally (for instance) you have to fill the whole width of the texture with this one image which wastes a lot of space. What I did as a compromise is to use a 1024x2048px rectangular texture and basically fill the complete upper one third with two rows x two colums of the roof texture image. This way I could utilize the unlimited horizontal tiling and minimize the number of vertical breaks in my roof faces to one. However, using one third of the texture just for one image surely feels like a waste of space. Looking at the "LOD Mesh" section of the guide you linked I can see a sample models which clearly shows that other modelers choose the other approach, which is to split their faces into rather small sections in order to get a maximum texture re-use and small textures on the expense of many more triangles. The sample buildings in the guide show triangle counts between 4000 and 9000 - my models usually have 500-1000 tris. (One additional reason being that I don't model the windows in 3D.) Long story short, it seems there's no perfect approach, but I can live with that.

Back in the time when Google was keen to have modelers create real building with Google SketchUp, I would create large uniform faces (typically sloped tiled roofs, chimnes or brick walls) by using small generic textures which would tile (repeat) automatically when applied to a face. Often such textures are available are free from texture libraries the web. This worked well, because I could use as many textures as I wanted and Google would later care about generating a single master texture from the (aka texture baking). To my knowledge Cities Skylines requieres your model to have just one texture ... otherwise the FBX file won't load in the asset editor. There is this SCSH mod for Blender mentiond in another thread which is supposed to take care of texture baking, but unfortunately I have found this Blender extension to not work for me. Thus, so far I do the texture baking manually. My question to more experienced C:S modellers is: If you need to have all your images in one texture file, how to cope with large faces you would normally use a tiled texture for? So far I have only come up with two suboptimal workarounds: Make the single texture larger and place an image of the complete roof into it by manually copying and "tiling" the original image as often as needed to cover the whole face Only add a single instance of the tiling image into the master texture, then split the face (e.g. the roof) into smaller rectangles and triangles and UV map every one with the same small roof image section. This results in a lot of tedious work, a lot more triangles and a hard-to-maintain 3D geometry, but a smaller master texture. What's your recommendation?

This forum thread is gone since today. I assume this is a technical error. Here is what I get: Mayor, we have a problem... We could not locate the item you are trying to view. Error code: 2F173/O

Hi Elektrix, just stumbled about your thread and your Blender extension after getting a headache baking my texture manually and re-texturing my SU model with it (which stems from the Google Earth modeling times). This seems like a huge time saver for me. Anyway, it is a relatively simple model - a hundred faces before export (360 triangulated). I tried to follow your tutorial closely, exploded components and triangulated during export. I used the older SketchUp Pro 8 and tried both .dae and .obj export. I can do all the "manual" steps in your list up to "Batch Mark Correct UVs ..." where I get the attached error: Seems somewhat similar to the one posted by "RaeFromStateFarm". I use version 0.5.0 of your Blender extension in Blender 2.79. Can someone please give me a hint what could be wrong? Could it be there's some solid colored face left in the model? Matthias.