Ennedi plays Shosaloza

[thundercrack83]

Wow!

Adam, every time I stop in here, my mind is completely blown! Those cliffs look absolutely amazing, my friend!

I will definitely be looking forward to seeing more!

Dustin

[art128]

I have to admit that it's just phenomenal ! These rocks textures are all looking excellent and the water texture is stunning too !
I can just say that ... 
Looking forward to more.

Take care,
-Arthur.

[RickD]

Oh my god! The stones in Zoom 6 ... this can't be true. I hope I'll never wake up from this dream. 

[sandokan]

Adam, your work here is simply AMAZING. And much more than that. Incredible. Far beyond any qualification. Congratulations for such a big effort.

I simply LOVE your tutorials and your "technical info". Reading this "MD - Tutorial guide on How to develop your SC4 Skills" is a must for every SC4 enthusiast like me.

I'd love to have a compendium of your tutorials in the "tutorial" section and I really agree with your idea of having a list of difficult things to achieve on SC4 with the links to their solutions. I'd put a link to each of your tutorials found in this MD on that list, with a brief description, and if possible a small thumbnail next to the item in the list. They are absolutely wonderful and simple.

And I'd upload all your mods to the LEX too, I found many of these really useful but I'm sure I'm missing some of them among the many pages of your SC4 User Manual called "Ennedi plays Shosaloza"

Greetings,

PABLO,
from Argentina

[kimcar]

  Wow another stunning result. More than that it`s real pics. Big step for the gane my friend. 

[allan_kuan1992]

This is a good project; however I'd like to point out that I run with software rendering.... so I'm kind of wondering if the textures will work in that mode.

Otherwise, the water and terrain is VERY DETAILED =)

- Allan Kuan

[Nexis4Jersey]

OMG , that makes SC4 one step closer to being a game where you can do almost anything and make realistic places 

[dedgren]

The last "talus below the cliff" pic is astounding.  This is "SC4 - Next Generation" right here, folks.


David

[Pat]

Dear god Adam wow!!!!!!!!!!!  Bravo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[calibanX]

Amazing. That gray rock texture is fantastic. I'm gonna have to play around with that one.

Geoff

[sithlrd98]

OK , I really have no excuse as to why I have not been here as much as I should...just looking at a few pages makes me sure that I need to start from page 1! I was looking back , skimming actually and am amazed at what you've done! I love the rock mods...beautiful! I am wondering , and please like I said I have yet to go through it all , but is there a tutorial on how to make the textures seamless? Also , since you have been working on these , have you ever tried to apply this technique to the sky .pngs?

I promise to start from scratch and continue coming here!

Jayson

[CarmineHilton]

Hi Ennedi, some fabulous work you've been showing here! Really like your rock/terrain mods =)
I was wondering... your recent one with the grey rocks and beach, does it also support snow?

For my MD, Savoie (dunno if you know it..) I'm starting on Nice, France. I'm currently using the mediterrain mod that supports snow but for some reason my beach mod doesn't work with it :s So I was wondering if maybe you knew what to do?


Thx in advance! x

[Ennedi]

Hello my friends,

Today we have a special day in Shosaloza: Update No 50  . Maybe numbers are not so important (after all the decimal system is something conventional), but anyway it's nice to know that I made so many updates and I didn't make my readers completely bored yet (at least I hope I didn't, because I still receive so many friendly comments  ).
I was going to prepare something special for the 50th update, especially to show some newly developed city areas. But I was too busy and preparing something really interesting would take too much time. Of course the new city update will come soon, but I didn't want to wait too long, especially seeing some questions in your last comments. So I prepared something more modest, but also special 

But first - replies:

Okay now that's just too awesome to fully comprehend. Not to ask a dumb question since I haven't been on for two weeks, but do you plan to release these? Sorry if I didn't read everything and missed something.

Thank you! Of course I'm going to release these mods, I will do it soon 

Cliffs will never be the same! Absolutely marvelous!

Thank you nerdly!  I'm glad you like these mods, it's only the beginning 

dang, its late ill be back to edit this and expand my comments in the morning.

well well well, the revised cycledogg textures looks great, but that zoom six scree shot... that blew me out the water. the new beack texture could do with a bit of variation but a s a technology demostrator works adequately. the latest rock mod is also superb but i cant help but feel it almost looks black and white, regardless, absolutely stunning.

Well well well, another thoughtful and constructive comment  I will remember what did you say about beaches! I know you are demanding, so I appreciate your nice words even more!

Good Lord, Adam!  That is just amazing!     It almost looks too good really...    Beyond that, I'm at a loss for words...

JB

Thank you Jon! Nothing is too good here at SC4D, people like you create fantastic cities and landscapes, I only want to help them a bit 

Really liking those HD rock and sand mods. Some of those shots look so real its stunning.

Thank you and welcome in Shosaloza! I hope you will find here more stuff you will like 

May I show pics you took into the wooden-flame on wall of my room ? 

Fnatastic !! 
No more words......Need no words anymore......
Yes, It's nice thing you found.
I could notice it when I tried to make HD-Texture for my Walls me too.

by the way.....
How long time should I(we) wait and only looking at scenery ?  (lol)
I always waiting for completion of these MOD !! 

Cheers.
-Mas'71

Thank you very much for your kind words Masuda san! I would be very honoured if you would like to decorate your wall with any of my poor creations 
You will not have to wait too long for releasing these mods, I'm going to do it next week together with Silvio. But there is much work especially with rock and water mods, they must look enough good in every terrain, every zoom and every direction, and this is the biggest problem. So all these mods need much testing in various regions and sometimes I must replace some FSH files to harmonize everything 

Wow!

Adam, every time I stop in here, my mind is completely blown! Those cliffs look absolutely amazing, my friend!

I will definitely be looking forward to seeing more!

Dustin

Thank you very much Dustin! I'm very glad you like my cliffs 

I have to admit that it's just phenomenal ! These rocks textures are all looking excellent and the water texture is stunning too !
I can just say that ... 
Looking forward to more.

Take care,
-Arthur.

Thank you Arthur! HD textures will really change our game, I will try to release some mods I showed as soon as possible!

Oh my god! The stones in Zoom 6 ... this can't be true. I hope I'll never wake up from this dream. 

Thank you and welcome in Shosaloza! Yes, it is true  After seeing all new HD props making new textures is simply a must, so your dream will not finish 

Adam, your work here is simply AMAZING. And much more than that. Incredible. Far beyond any qualification. Congratulations for such a big effort.

I simply LOVE your tutorials and your "technical info". Reading this "MD - Tutorial guide on How to develop your SC4 Skills" is a must for every SC4 enthusiast like me.

I'd love to have a compendium of your tutorials in the "tutorial" section and I really agree with your idea of having a list of difficult things to achieve on SC4 with the links to their solutions. I'd put a link to each of your tutorials found in this MD on that list, with a brief description, and if possible a small thumbnail next to the item in the list. They are absolutely wonderful and simple.

And I'd upload all your mods to the LEX too, I found many of these really useful but I'm sure I'm missing some of them among the many pages of your SC4 User Manual called "Ennedi plays Shosaloza"

Greetings,

PABLO,
from Argentina

Hello Pablo! Your comment is one of the most impressive I received in my MD  You are right, everything I make in Shosaloza is something like "how to develop the SC4 skills", every time I make an update I do at least one thing first time! And the greatest pleasure is to know that some of my readers can find their problems solutions here in Shosaloza and make their creations quicker and easier.
Now I haven't enough time to collect all my "tutorials" and organize them - the Wiki would be probably the best place to do it. But this time will come, for now I can only actualize the Table of Content at the first page (I just realized I didn't make it from some time  - I must do it immediately!)
Your comment is one of the greatest compliments I received and it is highly appreciated. Please visit me more often! 

Wow another stunning result. More than that it`s real pics. Big step for the gane my friend. 

Hello kimcar, nice to see you! There will be more HD textures, I know you make many closeups in Funtasia, so I guess you will make a good use of the new HD stuff!

This is a good project; however I'd like to point out that I run with software rendering.... so I'm kind of wondering if the textures will work in that mode.

Otherwise, the water and terrain is VERY DETAILED =)

- Allan Kuan

Unfortunately HD textures don't look good in the software rendering mode. This mode also causes some problems with shadows, automata etc., so I'm afraid playing in the hardware mode will be more and more important, we can't stop this process. But I'm glad you like these textures!
If we will have many requests, it is possible we (me and Silvio) will make non-HD versions of some mods, but we probably will not be able to do everything this way 

OMG , that makes SC4 one step closer to being a game where you can do almost anything and make realistic places 

You are right, this is our goal!

The last "talus below the cliff" pic is astounding.  This is "SC4 - Next Generation" right here, folks.


David

SC4.1 ? SC4 Turbo?  Or maybe somebody has even better idea?
Thank you my friend! I had a lot of work with these stones 

Dear god Adam wow!!!!!!!!!!!  Bravo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you Pat, nice to see you again!

Amazing. That gray rock texture is fantastic. I'm gonna have to play around with that one.

Geoff

Thank you very much! I will try to release it as soon as possible 

OK , I really have no excuse as to why I have not been here as much as I should...just looking at a few pages makes me sure that I need to start from page 1! I was looking back , skimming actually and am amazed at what you've done! I love the rock mods...beautiful! I am wondering , and please like I said I have yet to go through it all , but is there a tutorial on how to make the textures seamless? Also , since you have been working on these , have you ever tried to apply this technique to the sky .pngs?

I promise to start from scratch and continue coming here!

Jayson

Hello Jayson! I will be very glad if you will make a tour through Shosaloza, I hope you will find more interesting things here!
As for seamless textures:
1. We can make it manually in Photoshop or another graphic program, basically you must have a rectangular texture (usually a square), offset it by 50% right and down and wrap around. Thare are many tutorials how to make it, you can find one of them here.
2. you can use one of special programs - look for Texture Creator, Texture Generator or (the most complicated but with many possibilities) Texture Creator. But using these programs is not so easy and it not always give good results (the method from point 1 too). If you have a simple texture, even with many small, similar details (such as sand, grass or grass with small plants), everything is easy. But if you have something like this



Things become complicated. If you will simply "offset and wrap around", the final texture will look completely different from the source one. So I often use another method - a simple Photoshop plugin called "Tiler" from the Richard Rosenman's site. It has very good tiling algorithm, I don't move the texture 50% to the right and down, but only about 10-12%. But earlier I look at texture edges and tweak them a bit. I try to have similar brightness of texture details and similar forms at the opposite texture sides. This way the tiling operation will not be so brutal and there will not be any unnatural connections.
Specialized programs can show you your seamless texture surrounded by another tiles, so you can check the final effect easily. But if you are working in Photoshop, you must do it yourself. You must open the new empty image 2x larger than your texture (for example 512x512 pixels, if your texture is 256x256) and paste your texture into this image four times, then move tiles to cover all area. It is really easy when you use "Move" tool, the texture is snapped to the big image edges. If you see any imperfections or too big, repetitive details, you must go back and improve your texture.
Do you ask about sky .pngs? I din't think about it earlier, but this is a great idea!  Look at this update, you will see the effect 
Thanks so much for an inspiration!

Hi Ennedi, some fabulous work you've been showing here! Really like your rock/terrain mods =)
I was wondering... your recent one with the grey rocks and beach, does it also support snow?

For my MD, Savoie (dunno if you know it..) I'm starting on Nice, France. I'm currently using the mediterrain mod that supports snow but for some reason my beach mod doesn't work with it :s So I was wondering if maybe you knew what to do?


Thx in advance! x

Hi Carmine, welcome in Shosaloza! Rock and beach mods are independent from the terrain mod, and snow is supported by the terrain mod. So there isn't any problem with having those rocks and snow together 
I answered for your question yet, I'm glad your beach is working now!

As I said earlier, I prepared something special today. We usually try to don't show city edges on our pictures, but sometimes we have a nice city skyline or mountain ridge - and we need a good sky background in these cases. Looking for good night sky textures I found only a few, and they showed blurry white patches instead of stars, so I wasn't satisfied of them at all 
After reading Jayson's comment I was electricized: It is so easy!  So I started to play with sky backgrounds.

Playing earlier with terrain textures I found that I can enlarge the texture tile. I can even make it enough large to cover the whole big city tile in zoom 1 by only one terrain texture tile. I decided to check if I can do the same with the sky background.
Unfortunately I can't. The sky texture works different than terrain texture.
1. It has always the same size on the screen. In zoom 1 a large city tile = 4x4 sky textures, in zoom 2 - 8x8 and so on.
2. It always has the bottom at the South and the top at the North. Terrain texture rotates when we rotate the city tile, so we always see it in the same way - the texture bottom at the screen bottom, the texture top at the screen top. If we would make the sky texture with horizontally stretched clouds, they would be stretched vertically if we would look at them from East or West 
Really bad news - I had so many ideas! 



But I had accept this situation, at least I can improve the texture quality 
All textures you will see were made in Filter Forge - that's a really good piece of software! Unfortunately it is not free, the free version has very limited possibilities. But this is a great tool 
I hadn't enough time to use these backgrounds in developed cities - my Plugins folders are big and they are loaded too long. I show the sky over empty terrains - but empty SC4 terains can be nice too!

So let's look at the sky gallery











I like the next one. Please look how does it change during the (ingame) sunset. The first image shows how does it look during the day



Now clouds become more visible and change their color...









...And finally night comes and clouds are almost invisible now



Not every day is sunny, rainy days and storms happen too in SC4 





And finally the night sky in a few versions







It is good to see at the sky from time to time. It is a window outside. Let these sky textures will be a window for you too - outside of the game, and maybe outside of another game called the real life 



























(...)
Im Wahrheit singen ist an andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um Nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

You will not need to wait for these backgrounds too long. I will upload them in the LEX scrutineering thread today, so you will be able to test them yourselves. If the scrutineering will be successful, they will be released in the LEX.
I made also the clear sky texture, but there was no need to show it here.

This will be the first release of the new unofficial but actual team - we even haven't a name for it yet 
- my proposition: Rayden & Ennedi Landscaping Studio
- Silvio's proposition: Ennedi & Rayden Landscape Studio
Or maybe somebody has better idea? 

Adam

[thundercrack83]

If you'll excuse me, I must pick my jaw up from the floor. Those sky backgrounds are simply insane, Adam! They give such a realistic dimension that it's almost impossible to tell it's a game! Magnificent work, my friend! Magnificent work!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Dustin

[allan_kuan1992]

Wow... the cloudy background blends in so well

Well... having bought my computer with the graphics card installed (stupid me for not buying custom ) things are quirky. For example, if I use hardware rendering then the game will not save any graphical setting that I try applying to it, and that is annoying. Even more strange, these settings are not controlled by the game itself, but rather the graphics card control program (Catalyst for ATI Radeon).

At the moment texture quality appears to be fine, but of course I haven't really used any HD textures yet... if the result does turn out bad (as others are reporting) then I'll make the switch, but it won't be a smooth sailing either way.

- Allan Kuan

[io_bg]

I'm speechless... these textures are amazing!!!

[JoeST]

Oh... My.... GAWD!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe you should just call your team "The Landscape(ing) Studio", thus allowing for the possibility of some expansion without discrimination.

Joe

[sithlrd98]

Wspaniały! that is exactly what I was talking about! The background that blends with the time of day is beautiful! I guess I should have dropped by sooner!
And thank for the links...gotta check them out!

Jayson

[iamgoingtoeatyou]

"http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/6126/night2.jpg"

This is epic!

[sandokan]

Is this still a "game" ??

When your full set of new textures come to the LEX, I think I won't dare to put a single building in any new city to avoid ruining the pic!

Great work as usual, Adam. And good astronomical pics too! I was just looking some similar pics in the net today before coming to SC4d, so I got pleasantly surprised!

Greetings

Pablo,
from Argentina

PS: your excellent road slope mods are giving me a lot of work in my "non-flat" region, but when I get the final results, they're amazing! Still, I can't get anything like your winding ascending roads... I'll keep practicing!
How do you terraform the land to make the road placement a little bit easier? Every time I drag a road segment, I get bumps to the sides, sometimes the road digs the ground, other times the roads elevate the terrain... are there any trick to solve it? Reading the manual (THANKS FOR IT! it's awesome) it states that the road are the only pieces that make those effects due to some parameters you had to keep in order to achieve some features with the elevation transitions (I'm really short of knowledge there, sorry for my bad explanation). How can I get around that? Thanks!!!