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Three Rivers Region

Started by dedgren, December 20, 2006, 07:57:49 PM

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kelis

Happy Christmas you too  :thumbsup:
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dragonshardz

You'll probably want the 81 Tiles mod by BloodyPenguin to make maximum use of your playable area.

c.p.

Are you really hand-drawing contour lines? :o  Quantum GIS (a large, but free program) will automatically generate contour lines, if you get tired of doing them by hand.

Hope you had a merry Christmas :)

dedgren

Well, you've never seen this before.



And you can hardly see that- here it is in full size glory [linkie].

The reason you haven't seen it is that I spent the afternoon assembling it from 3RR Atlas components.  While I had done the US/Canadian lands immediately adjacent to 3RR, I'd never put them together into an integrated map.  So there you have it.

I have an ulterior motive, of course.  Starting from the discovery that a 4x4 tile Cities: Skylines map is the same size: 5 miles by 5 miles/8 kilometers by 8 kilometers, as a 3RR township, I have worked out the heightmap coverage- 16 1081x1081 pixel images- needed to recreate the region to scale so that each township could be mapped individually.  Then there is the problem of deforming an essentially flat SC4 region (I know- there are hills and small mountains, but they all rise from the same base elevation everywhere on the map) so that the Hotham Inlet is "sea level" and all the rivers and streams can flow downfill to it in C:S maps.  Hence my hand drawn contours on Pratt Island.  I don't plan to do the whole region that way (at least I hope I don't have to).  I just want to see what a hand-created contour map translated into a heightmap looks like.  The deformation upwards to the SW, NW and NE corners of the region is why I can't "reverse engineer" 3RR's SC4 quads throught the TerraFormer.  So your suggestions and tips (thanks, c.p.!!) are very welcome.  I should have some really interesting stuff to look at here over the weekend.

3RR may well have an interesting 10th anniversary come March of the new year.  We'll see.


David

1756551
D. Edgren

Please call me David...

Three Rivers Region- A collaborative development of the SC4 community
The 3RR Quick Finder [linkie]


I aten't dead.  —  R.I.P. Granny Weatherwax

Skype: davidredgren

catty

Quote from: dedgren on December 30, 2015, 05:43:39 PM
...3RR may well have an interesting 10th anniversary come March of the new year.  We'll see...

Something to look forward to, especially if you are going to be doing pictures like that   &apls
I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?" DEATH thought about it. "CATS," he said eventually, "CATS ARE NICE.

mrbisonm

Looking good. Meanwhile I wish you a Happy New Years with best health conditions for you and your family.


Fred


....Uploading the MFP 1.... (.........Finishing the MFP1)

dedgren

Pounding out the beginnings of a heightmap...



...one four meter/13 foot contour at a time.

Happy New Year from Alaska, folks.


David

1758458
D. Edgren

Please call me David...

Three Rivers Region- A collaborative development of the SC4 community
The 3RR Quick Finder [linkie]


I aten't dead.  —  R.I.P. Granny Weatherwax

Skype: davidredgren

M4346

I thought 3RR was dead! I'm happy to see that is not the case! Happy New Year to you too David! And glad to see you survived that earthquake!

Looking forward to more!
New Horizons Productions
Berethor ♦ beskhu3epnm ♦ blade2k5 ♦ dedgren ♦ dmscopio ♦ Ennedi
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Shadow Assassin ♦ Tarkus ♦ wouanagaine

dedgren

#11048
Aten't dead yet.

Well, not bad for being dormant for close (very close) to three years since the last post.  Another million views, and three million is in sight.  I was amazed.  You folks are the best.

So I'm here because a couple of folks said Beetlejuice.  I received a offsite message from an old friend asking after me these days and hinting that news from 3RR was missed and I have to say that I was quite touched.  I meant to log back on before Christmas but we had an earthquake up here in Alaska the last day of November and the less said about that, along with the many big aftershocks, the better.  Then yesterday I clicked pretty much by accident a shortcut I'd made to the site as I was moving things to some new computer equipment (earthquake, sigh) and found, almost by serendipity, that someone had inquired about where he might find my old center-pivot agriculture stuff.  I responded in that thread and, well, here I am.

Part of the transition to a large (8 TB) hard drive that backs everything up has involved finding in millions- well, more than 20, anyway- of different locations all of my old SC4/3RR files.  I am now organizing these carefully and, if anyone would be interested, will within the next few weeks be in a position to send anyone who would be interested anything that I've ever created.  I'll note, going back to the center-pivot and other farm stuff, that my contribution there was to come up with the idea and then create textures.  I asked Matt (threestooges) to do the BATting of the equipment and windmills and road grates, among others and so I cannot supply those directly, but I'm pretty sure my friend would be happy to make that possible.  Another interesting possibility is that, with the availability of large file transfer options not involving the LEX (Dropbox, mainly, but even email attachments these days), I can easily provide 3RR quads to anyone who might want to play with one.  Let me think that through a bit and I'll post further about doing that down the road.

So, what about me otherwise these days?  When I came to SC4D in late 2006 I was 54 years old and still in the midst of running an active law practice.  I'm now 66 and happily retired for five years.  I do keep myself busy, mainly in planning and then taking long-distance bicycle rides.  I rode my Surly Disc Trucker down the Atlantic Coast from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Key West, Florida in 2016, down the length of the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to Venice out in the Gulf of Mexico on the Mississippi delta in 2017, round-trip on the Natchez Trace Parkway from Nashville, Tennessee to Natchez, Mississippi and back in the spring of last year and then from Washington, D.C. to Kansas City, Missouri in the fall.  In the past two and a half years I have put over 12,000 miles/almost 20,000 kilometers on my bike; probably more than I've put on my car.  This summer I will ride from Seaside, Oregon across the United States almost 5,000 miles/8,000 kilometers to Seaside, New York, a neighborhood of New York City.



I've also done one and two week trips here in Alaska.

When I return from this year's trip I'm headed back to school.  I'm enrolling in the University of Alaska Anchorage's Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing and will spend three years while working towards my MFA degree writing about my experiences riding down the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers.  I've seen a lot of fascinating things and think I have enough to put together a fairly interesting story.  We'll see.

My love affair with Cities:Skylines is over.  The game is beautiful, but really not all that much fun to play over the long term and, if anything, I'm a long term sort of guy.  It's broken in ways that the developer just doesn't seem inclined to fix and there's no real sense of community that I've found anywhere on the web that matches what SC4D offers here.  I've made a couple of good friends, but I've probably, barring something unforeseen, booted C:S up for the last time.

One of the things that has kept me away has been the passing on of several SC4 players who I had become very close friends with and the disappearance of others from the community when they moved on to other pursuits.  I am very much aware of my own mortality these days and thinking about folks like John (Darmok) and Barby (BarbyW) is pretty painful.  In the end, though, their creations and contributions to this community live on, much as 3RR has appeared to.  I'm honored by that, and feel like the least I can do is wrap things up a little bit more neatly even if I no longer am playing SC4.

So, more to come.  Stay tuned, and thanks for stopping by.

David

2828313
D. Edgren

Please call me David...

Three Rivers Region- A collaborative development of the SC4 community
The 3RR Quick Finder [linkie]


I aten't dead.  —  R.I.P. Granny Weatherwax

Skype: davidredgren

Silur

It's great to see You here again!  &apls &apls &apls :thumbsup:

mrbisonm

And I thought to never see you again here in your MD, David.  Me too I've had enough from Cities:Skylines and I am back playing with SC4. Even more interesting now with all these novelties........

Fred


....Uploading the MFP 1.... (.........Finishing the MFP1)

Seaman

Thank you for the update. When you are refering to the unique community here on SC4D, I can assure you that I feel the same way and that posts like yours are the very essence of that.

I am deeply impressed to see you piling up miles like that on your bike and I do envy the multitude of impressions you doubtlessly got on these trips. It is a wonderful country you're traveling, if I can extrapolate from the glimpse I was able to see.

When resting is rusing, you definetly do not have to worry about that. Please enjoy your time back at university ;)

mattb325

Good to see you back.  :thumbsup: I see C:S was a fickle, though beautiful, temptress after all. Give me reliable old SC4 any day.  :laugh:

noahclem

Such a pleasant surprise to hear from you! Best of luck in your current endeavors and would be great to see you around again :)

dedgren

#11054
Man!  It's been a loooooong time since I've seen this.



SC4 is apparently, after a few burps and hiccups, back up and running on the most recent iteration of my computer.  I have some questions, which I will get to in a minute.  But my C:/Documents folder readily accepted both of 3RR's Regions and Plugins subfolders and it appears to be up and running.  I'm not certain that the plugins folder is anything more than a bare bones one, but I'll figure that out shortly.  The 3RR Region subfolder is currently 301 megabytes, which is larger than my first PC's hard drive.  Each of the 256 quads (large city tiles to the uninitiated) ranges between 500,000 KB and 3.6 MB.  You might remember that four quads equals one township and there are 64 townships in the region.  The quads are pretty much bare ground with a few trees, and of course the lakes, ponds, rivers and streams.

As noted- ***and this is not, at least for the foreseeable future, a resumption of collaboration***- I am happy to make available to anyone who might want one via email or dropbox a quad to play with.  I make no promises at this point that I will continue to be around at any particular time to offer advice or support, and in fact know that I will be completely off the air between the third week of June and the first week of October while I ride my bicycle



across the country.  There's a lot of information, though, in the 3RR Atlas [linkie] and Gazetteer [linkie] that will let you develop it consistent with the way the region is laid out.  Who knows...?

OK, some questions.


  • I remember "God Mode" mayor's tools, but am not finding them.  I believe they are a mod, but I'm not immediately coming across them in my files.  Help?
  • I downloaded the game from Steam after looking at Alex's [Tarkus] various posts around the web concerning the inability to properly patch the game if obtained from Origin.  Is the Steam variant properly patched or do I still need to apply them?  Inquiring minds want to know.
  • I stopped doing any major work on 3RR at a time when Cycledogg's trees were the latest and greatest thing.  Is that still the case?  Those trees are amazing, but I'm seeing indications that new trees by other content creators have come along since that I probably should look at.

That's enough for the moment.  I know that I've forgotten more stuff about SC4 than I ever learned in the first place, so in some ways I'm pretty much a newbie 15 years down the road.  Any comments, suggestions or even complaints are welcome.  Just don't throw anything.

Later.

David

2830181
D. Edgren

Please call me David...

Three Rivers Region- A collaborative development of the SC4 community
The 3RR Quick Finder [linkie]


I aten't dead.  —  R.I.P. Granny Weatherwax

Skype: davidredgren

Haljackey

Welcome back David!

I can answer question #1. You can find that file here: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/20092-god-terraforming-in-mayor-mode/
-If you have any in your plugins folder, simply replace anything there when prompted. That way you will have all the files and no duplicates.

There is a thread on Simtrop about the file not working. It may help you out: https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/74708-god-terraforming-in-mayor-mode-mod-doesnt-work-why/

art128

The steam version of the game is indeed properly patched. I have been playing that one for years and never encountered any issues.
As for the trees, Cycledogg's trees are still excellent but in the recent years Girafe has been releasing a lot of HD trees that are absolutely beautiful. Take a look at what he has to offer on the LEX.
I'll take a quiet life... A handshake of carbon monoxide.

Props & Texture Catalog

Seaman

I do not know, wether some of your cities were plagued by the prop pox or not, but it might be of interest for you that simmaster07 over at simtropolis has solved the problem (for real!). The best is, that you can cure old infected cities and bring them back to their former brilliance.
Look at this:
SC4Fix: Third-party patches for SC4 1.0.7

Maybe this is of help when you are going through your old savegames...

dedgren

#11058
I just about cried when I saw this tonight.



Ploppable seasonal trees were, along with underbridge roads and more realistic game water, the Holy Grails of SC4 for me.  I came close, but it took friends like Carl (Lowkee33) to make the trees happen.  How did I miss this?

Been gone too long.

David

2830994
D. Edgren

Please call me David...

Three Rivers Region- A collaborative development of the SC4 community
The 3RR Quick Finder [linkie]


I aten't dead.  —  R.I.P. Granny Weatherwax

Skype: davidredgren

art128

Ah yes, Lowkee33's seasonal flora patch is really indeed awesome.
I'll take a quiet life... A handshake of carbon monoxide.

Props & Texture Catalog