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I got myself a new PC about a month ago. Initially I planned to just grab my Plugins folder off my old PCs harddrive and slam it in, but the whole "Fresh PC" feeling made me change my mind about that. The folder I had been using most recently had survived a major number of system switches and drive wipes, its earliest additions go way back to 2008. I was using my 2008 plugins folder. It's above 4GB in size at this point and contains such an unholy amount of sheer junk that it never seemed feasible to me to actually go in and sort it out. Resolving conflicts and other issues could end up taking me days. So a fresh start was needed and already being presented to me. I decided to start all over again. Pick and choose my downloads more deliberately, do more of my own lotting and keep everything nice and tidy in that folder for easy access right from the start. I'm pretty handy with PIM-X and ilive's reader at this point so that shold help tremendously. I can't believe how long I went without ever using the reader, especially considering how easy it is to get into and how much it can help out. Obviously there's some of the indisputable basics that go in the folder right away: The NAM, SC4Fix.dll, T-Wrecks' improved bldngprps, Extra Cheats. From there I wanna take it step by step. The first step being the world itself, so terrain and water mods are the next item on the agenda. Thanks to Cori being an angel, finding a good combination took all of five minutes by going through her Shoppe-threads. They're awesome. I landed on: Sudden Valley terrain, Cape Cod water and Vancouver Island beaches for a nice temperate, somewhere on the northern hemisphere sort of feel. They're all by Lowkee if I'm not a complete idiot. I also already went ahead and threw in some slope mods, the LRM (of which I'm intentionally using an outdated version, don't mention it), and some props by girafe and PGB so I could do some lotting to combat some boredom. Here's what my Plugins folder currently looks like: So liberating. We're ready to get started. I'm not much of a gambling man but the Landscape Designer, which essentially creates random grayscales has served me well over the years. I also just now see how ancient it is - that's a link to an upload in 2005 and even that was already a re-up, dang! It gives out pretty little 16x16 regions which is a size I'm comfortable with, it lets you set some parameters and then roll the dice. The ratio between Unusable, Ugly and Sweet is about 50/40/10 so it's a little frustrating at times... but the sweetness is worth it. And that is ours today. An interesting, realistic shoreline, no immediately obvious major inclines and some realistically shaped and sized lakes. This will be the Whitehaven Metropolitan Area, surrounding a large harbour city of Whitehaven with multiple counties, townships and small towns. It'll be swell, y'all. Landscape Designer regions have a tendency to be a little bumpy and use of the term "smooth" is really subjective. Also, the Designer can't generate rivers, and I like rivers. So thankfully, there's the SC4 Terraformer for us to sprinkle some fairy dust on this. There's an apparent issue right away, the map is rendered at completely wrong altitudes. Its elevation is way too high. This has been happening with LD grayscales recently, if anyone knows why this is I'd be delighted... So lowering, lowering, lowering that "terran"... After some general smoothing I wanna add some rivers. The smart thing to do this is by finding the lower spots in the original terrain and carving them out. ... yeah, that'll do. The region lies a little higher than it seemed, so a little more elaborate terraforming is becoming necessary to smoothen it all out. I'm not too big on doing that with the terraformer though, I'm really just giving myself a rough outline to perfect with ingame tools later on. The water erosion tools are really useful here though. Also had to switch image hosts right here because tinypic sucks 'em by the bag and wouldn't let me upload that specific image. So after ingame rendering it all, here's what the region looks like on day zero. This is going to be our canvas: I'm pleasantly surprised to be honest, Sudden Valley eats up a lot of the more obvious brushstrokes and the rivers look pretty okay. Yeah, it's pretty flat but that's fine by me, some interesting features might be added ingame at some point. The little river split is making me cringe right now, it looks so bland, but overall, I like this so far and it's gonna do it for today. I hope some of you will be interested in joining me not only starting a region but also a Plugins folder from scratch as I'm really looking forward to your ideas and suggestions while I move this thing along. If there's any mods, lots, anything you think is worth my trying out then please never hesitate to let me know. Let's make this fresh SimCity a community effort! Feel free to express anything you wish to and swing by next time when we'll sketch up a quick map, finish up on the terraforming and probably start laying down some of the regions backbone infrastructure already. See y'all!
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