Blackwater (with Islas Gemas)

[petercintn]

One week and look at it all!  Man Emil, I love the beach.  I gave up trying to build them because of the texture dif.  Now you taught me how to do it.  So I will do it.  Remember Waterboy?  I will be beachboy!  I can do it!  I'm following closely, so far I like the no maxis look, your doing a fantastic job.

[greenbelt]

 
This region has really inspired me.  I used the links to get more med style buildings from Capital SimCity.  Thanks to HabLeUrG.  Great pictures.

[urban]

Probably one of the best journals I've ever seen. this wundeful scenery with the mountains and the perfect choosen buildings...wow great

[emilin]

Dedication: jeronij – for this site, and countless BAT:s that I use almost daily, and being a limitless source of inspiration.

[Note on dedications: I thought it would be nice to dedicate each update to some member of the SC4 community that has had an influence on the creation of this MD in big or small ways. It's just my way of saying thanks!]


Personal replies

Marius: Thank you! And feel free to call me Emil anytime. I have a tendency to copy-paste the usernames, so don't misinterpret it if I sometimes use your nick instead.

HabLeUrG: That's great news! I already have most of DebussyMan's stuff, but the rest of the links was all new, and awesome, BAT:s that I hadn't seen before. And don't worry, I'm building this really slowly, so there will be plenty of space left to use your houses too. It's a good thing to make more latin BAT:s I think. And not only residentials, but more commercial latin and Hispanic buildings would be a real treat (the only ones I have found so far is some Mercadonas and some brazilian cell phone shops).

thundercrack83: Thanks! Unfortunatly it will take a while untill I get there, since it's located in the capital city that I haven't started on yet. But I have downloaded a stadium that I like.

bat: Thank you! And thank HabLeUrg for the mountains.

Petercintn: Thanks a lot, beachboy. *surfingtheusa*

greenbelt: Thank you! I'm really glad you liked it.

urban: And now you made me blush. Thanks so much!


The rest of Puerto Rico

Not much to say this update. I'm still trying out the different NoMaxis mods, downloading more stuff, and slowly building Juaníta. Today it's just pictures from the rest of the town of Puerto Rico. First out is the "downtown" area, that is a combination of older buildings (some really old - like the cathedral and some governmental buildings) and more modern stuff. It's supposed to look like organic city development, you can judge for yourself if I failed or succeded:

















And now we go to take a look at the harbour and industrial area connected to it. Mind you, this is all plopped. I have yet to test if I can block the growth of Maxis industrial buildings or not.

[Grneyes]

Great update! I especially like the cathedral. Where did you find it? And the shore/marina looks great.

MaryBeth

[M4346]

Why thank you Emil! 

GREAT update, I especially love the Cathedral and the harbour, even more so because you also use the SMP Sandstone Sidewalk mod! 

Definitely looking forward to more!

Regards,

M

[kwakelaar]

Looking very nice, making a good industrial area I think is the most difficult part. The way Maxis planned their industrials never comes out very nice in my cities, thus I am also plopping quite a lot.

[thundercrack83]

Wow, great job! The downtown area looks fantastic. I love the park with the monument in the middle of the roundabout. Very beautiful. And the harbor looks great, too! Keep up the good work!

[bat]

Wonderful city and great harbor!

[Fred_Ginger]

Wow, great job! The downtown area looks fantastic. I love the park with the monument in the middle of the roundabout. Very beautiful. And the harbor looks great, too! Keep up the good work!

Thundercrack took the words right out of my mouth!  really like that park, it just 'fits' so well!

[urban]

It is wonderful, really...especially the roundabout!

can you tel me, where you finde all the things for the marina please?

[goin2chicago]

awesome update. i like the terrain and the trees. the way you make the buildings flow is perfect. that little harbor is pretty awesome too.

[Air6]

Great update. I like the harbor. Definitely I like your MD.

[Yoman]

Great work again, even if it is totally ploped (yes I can tell ). That port amazes me yet again.

Just one question, in photo 5 in the lower left corner there are some cool w2w houses. Where did those come from?

[Antoine]

wow I like very much your update 
good job !

[emilin]

Great work again, even if it is totally ploped (yes I can tell ). That port amazes me yet again.

Just one question, in photo 5 in the lower left corner there are some cool w2w houses. Where did those come from?

I wish I knew myself. I went through pretty much all the available BAT:s I could find before starting this up, so I really can't remember what everything is.

Those w2w:s are grown by the way.

Actually, as far as plopping goes - I plop pretty much everything that can be plopped, and then I spend half of the rest of the time trying to follow Alek King's tips and tricks on making the stuff I want grow at the right place, the other half wishing that someone had made ploppable examplers of the lots (I'm too lazy to edit all the lots myself). More of those pics than you might think contain grown buildings, but it would have been a real time saver if I could have just plopped them.

[GMT]

now this work of yours approves the rule:
less is more.
you're doing a beautiful work with all those small communities, often linked to a small fishing harbor like those from around where you come from (at least I've seen such in areas around smaller towns in skandinavia)
really worth a visit. 

waiting for more

[meinhosen]

I really can't begin to tell you how much I enjoy looking at this MD.  I think that "finely detailed" would be a good way of describing it.

[emilin]

Dedication: Andreas Roth - for the SC4Tool (get it now - you might not know you need it, but you will when you have it!)

[Note on dedications: I thought it would be nice to dedicate each update to some member of the SC4 community that has had an influence on the creation of this MD in big or small ways. It's just my way of saying thanks!]


Personal replies:

Grneyes: Thanks! The cathedral is one of DebussyMan's BAT:s. I believe I found it somewhere on STEX, but I don't have a link available right now.

Marius: Thank you! I tried all sorts of sidewalk mods before settling for the sandstone one. Now I don't understand how I could ever live without it.

kwakelaar: Thanks! I like to plop a lot of other things too. I really wish I could say that I grow most of it, but even when I grow stuff I bulldoze most of it untill I get it the way I want it anyway, so I guess that's not really growing either.

thundercrack83: Thanks! Gotta love what the NAM team have done to this game. Autobuild-roundabouts are soooooooo good!

bat: Thanks! It's nice to be appriciated.

Fred_Ginger: Hehe... thanks alot! The park was actually an attempt to disguise the jagged edges of the sidewalks at first. Then it kind of grew from there.

urban: Thanks! The marina is mostly my own custom lots. I would be happy to upload them somewhere but I would have to get permission from the original BATters first, and my japanese is a bit rusty these days.

goin2chicago: Thank you! I'm really flattered that you like the "building flow". That is the hardest part to achive in my opinion. I'm glad it was appriciated.

Air6: Thanks! More harbours are yet to come later on, by the way. It is after all an island journal.

Yoman: Already answered that. But forgot the "thank you"!

Antoine: Thank you!

GMT: Thanks! I guess my origins show a bit, yes. Being from the west coast of Sweden I've been to my fair share of fishing towns, hehe...

meinhosen: Thanks! That would be a very nice compliment.


Random development, and a small tutorial

I won't make any excuses for thw slow development of Islas Gemas this time. I have discovered that I really appriciate to build this region really slow, and to return to places that I thought I was finished with and fix some small details.

One of my weak spots has always been airports, and I realized after building some off the charts crappy airports for Province of Lazarus (over at ST) that I had no choice but to download the newer airport stuff. Now I'm just waiting for someone who actually knows what an airport is supposed to look like (and what all the gizmos actually do!) to write a proper tutorial.

Meanwhile I have spent some time in the LotEditor making a custom airport terminal. Not that there is anything wrong with the ones available, but I needed a more tarnished and rundown look for this airport. praiodan gave me the inspiration to use NOB:s Hiroshima station as a terminal (over in the Show us... section) but I developed the concept a bit further. It's not badsim quality, I know, but it's pretty good editing for little ol' me.



As you can see from this closeup the textures change at different zooms (this is how they are supposed to look), something I will have to resolve later:



Ohh... and it's fully transit enabled, which was much easier than I thought to achive. I made a small tutorial on that further down this post.



Now, for a slight return to Puerto Rico. I was not happy with the open spaces in this area. They looked to empty:



So, I added some of Pegs food court plazas, and it looks much more alive now:



I was supposed to have started building the "twin city" of Puerto Rico by now, but after reading dedgren's tutorial on ploppabe water over at 3RR I just hade to make a stream going down the mountain side. It was much, MUCH, harder than I thought, and I'm only semihappy with the result this far, but I think the general direction of the development looks right:










And now we move on to the... 

Minitutorial on making transit enabled lots

I know that most of this stuff is so easy, that it's self explanatory, but it took me a really long time to find the proper tools to do it, and I wasn't able to find any comprehensive tutorials on the subject, so I decided to make a small step-by-step just for people like myself who might think that this is really advanced stuff, when infact it's dead easy. I may post it over in the tutorial section too, if you guys think it would be usefull.

Anyway, here goes...

Most lots can easily be made transit enabled with the brilliant SC4Tool by Andreas Roth (link supplied in the dedication). It's as simple as pushing a button, but I'll go through it step-by-step just for clarity.

For this tutorial we will make transit enabled beaches (very useful for... eh... GTA style beach races or... eh... I don't know, I just thought it would be funny really).

1. Open a park or plaza lot in the Lot Editor.



2. Change the base texture to "beach" (0x21f0000).



3. Increase the depth of the lot to wanted size.



4. Duplicate the base texture to cover the lot.



5. Save as "new name".



6. Now fire up the SC4Tool and chose the transit enable option.



7. Chose the "road" option called "c" and use the directional indicator to chose the possible ways that the traffic can travel.



8. Right click and "add transit".



9. This is what you should have now:



10. And add transit points for the rest of the lot.



11. Now, let's try it out. Here we have a rudimentary beach site:



12. And we add some of the new transit enabled beach lots.



13. This certainly looks transit enabled to me...



14. And it IS transit enabled. What a kick!

[kwakelaar]

I think this is the first TE-beach that I have seen, so top marks for originality, and a good tutorial at that.
To Yoman, I am pretty sure those w2w bats are from SimGoober, can't remember the name, but it should be possible to find those on the STEX.

Changing textures with different zoomlevels, how did that happen?
Like the idea for your terminal and how you are making this in the LE, very nice.