Three Rivers Region

[dedgren]

So, remember when we 'wuz first moving 3RR off the TerraFormer towards reality...

...yet another 3RR-ST oldie but goodie...

10/29/2006 08:25 AM
dedgren Patriot Trixie Winner 2007 Posts: 1462 Joined: 06/24/2004	1 to go! ...huh? ... ...standby... ...what is that? ... ... ...what is that?  ...get closer... ... ...oh, wait a minute... ...wrong button... ... There!  That's better. Later. signature D. Edgren ________________

So it all hasn't been blood, sweat and tears, has it?  Bet you always wondered what was down there in the basement under a region.

It's almost the weekend- I'll get you the stautus of a couple of things shortly, and let you know a little bit more about my upcoming trip to Helena.

Later.


David

90893

[girlfromverona]

LOL - that's pretty funny. 

[Ennedi]

David, it's great you remind us these old discoveries 
Sometimes we hadn't an idea what to do with them at that time. Now we know much more about the game, but we often don't remember about earlier findings. It is good to see at them once again, maybe they can inspire us to something new?

Some information about snow cheat:

1. It doesn't depend on adjustable terrain parameters. I turned it on with MaxTerrainHeight set at 2500 m, then at 6000 m and there wasn't any difference. I checked also other terrain parameters, such as temperature.
It seems that this code refers directly to terrain height, not to other parameters connected with terrain.
It has a good side: We can provide where the snow will appear very precisely, week after week (it changes every week). We can - for example - make use of these semitransparent snow stripes ("jaggies" as you said). They look bad from bigger distance, but they can give interesting effects on closeups, we can create roads partially covered by snow.
You can see this effect here (please ignore green trees, I will comment it in point 6)



2. Maybe the best feature of this snow is that it covers lot textures. So we can use it instead of mods creating snow texture on particular lots. Of course trees, flowers etc. remain, so the lot can still look a bit strange  You can see this effect on the picture above.

3. The minimum snow height (in January) is about 375 m ie. 125 m about sea level. The height range in which we can see semitransparent texture is narrow - from 373 to about 385 meters (10-12 meters). At 390 meters the road is completely invisible.



The maximum height of the bottom snow border is during July - about 670 m ie. 420 m above sea level. Not very high.

4. The cheat snow covers all terrain textures including rock on most steep slopes. It can help with hiding unnatural rectangular snow/rock transitions, but in this case we will have all terrain covered by snow which is unnatural too.

5. The snow level changes every week. To see changes you don't need to save the game (if you want to see seasonal changes on terrain mod textures you must save the game, it's an important difference!)

6. I'm sure we can create very interesting effects using this cheat, but we need to use it in a complex way - together with terrain mod snow (as David showed), fog, atmospheric scattering effect ( ) and maybe some others. We should also use seasonal flora.
I suppose we can open the new stage of the SC4 development in next few months (I think about terrain/landscape possibilities, we know other SC4 aspects are quickly developed too). But it needs a complex work.

Adam

[pvarcoe]

Good research Adam.

Interesting observation about seasonal changes in terrain mods.
I had noticed that you need to save each city tile at the same time of year, for a good region shot.
But hadn't realized that to see those seasonal changes, you need to save the tile.
Interesting....

Phil

[dedgren]

I just have to note...



Our great friend and longtime 3RR Regular^* Phil (pvarcoe) rolled the odometer onto page 199 at about a quarter to five Alaska Time (GMT -9).  It took us ten months to get to page 99 [linkie]- we've done the last 100 pages in eight.

I'm going to reprint a request I made back then, which has equal force today.

I need to ask a favor...

I am headed, in about an hour, to the airport to fly to Helena, Montana, where Heather and I will be for the next few days with our boys.  Sometime tonight, probably while I'm in the air over the North Pacific between Anchorage and Seattle, 3RR will see its 2,000th comment.

Could I ask, please, that all my great friends who have, in the past, caught one of those elusive "Double-0s" would, on seeing that 1,999th comment...

...someone's gotta make it...

...stand back for just a moment or two, and allow one of our less visible 3RR Regulars^* to grab the brass ring.  That would be so gracious, and I would really, really appreciate it.  You can be assured I'll check tomorrow and see who posted within the next couple of minutes after 2K goes up.  Even though we're getting down the list of places and things to name a bit, there are still plenty of old folks' homes, water purification facilities and half-pipe skateboard parks to go around...

...Oh, c'mon- give folks a break...

...you know what I mean.

It'd be great to log on tomorrow and see an unfamiliar avatar next to the 2,000th comment.  Again, it's just a small thing in the overall grand scheme of stuff, but it would mean a lot to me.

Thanks in advance.

Now, I don't know if we'll hit 4,000 posts tonight, or tomorrow, or even over the weekend.  All I know is that it will happen pretty soon.  Oddly enough, I'm once again off to Helena, although not for another week.  But the thought remains the same- I'd love to see a brand new 3RR Regular- a first time commenter on SC4D altogether, even- ring that bell.  Note too that the person who makes the 4,000^th post is actually opening page 201.  Go figure...

Thanks again for taking this into consideration

* * *

Adam (Ennedi)- Major thoughts from one of the game's major thinkers.  It's always the greatest pleasure to see them here.

Later.


David

^*  A 3RR Regular is YOU after your first comment here or over at 3RR-ST.

91009

[thundercrack83]

4000 replies, 100,000 views--I don't really know what to say, David, my friend. To say that you've created something special here would be the world's largest understatement.

I'll be on the lookout for these milestones, as well as more from 3RR, whether it be new or old!

Take care, my friend, and have a safe trip to Helena.

Dustin

[CasperVg]

Oh yes, it's a great milestone. May it last for alot longer 

[superhands]

david i hope that is some photoshoping and not an actual 4km squared building.
hehe

[dedgren]

As part of my "break," I thought I'd look at a few things I was woefully behind on- Chris's (chrisadams3997) Rural Renewal Project being one of them.  I also intended to do a few things that would serve to strecth the old mind a bit, like check out game water "lakes" made with the rain tool.  As to that latter, I'm coming around more and more to the view that working with both the limitations of the rain tool water (the main one being its non-persistence) and the "see to China" no base texture bug are really worthwhile, as the use of rain water bodies and overlay texture only lots has the potential to add substantially to the game.  More on that later.

So, I took the little ploppable water lake that I created the other day to check out the RRP flora and replaced it, after suitably terraforming the area, with a lake filled by the rain tool with game water.  I then superdetailed some of the shoreline with the flora.



As you can see, the biggest issue with this sort of lake other than non-persistence is the jaggedness of its shoreline.  In short, it tends to follow the grid.  I will probably look more closely at this in the future, but the above is the best I could do after several attempts.

Now, the good news.

There is a transition between jeroni's ploppable water, which is used for the stream, and the game water lake here.  Can you find it?



Chris's flora does nothing short of an amazing job smoothing the shoreline.





There are more pics like this, and a few of my thoughts, posted here [linkie] over at the RRP thread.

As for the non-persistence issue, I was wondering what would happen after you terraformed and superdetailed a rain tool game water lake, then saved the game, then tried to "refill" it.

Here's the lake shown above after the save.

...phew, must'a been a dry summer...



Let it rain!



And here's our lake...



...terraforming and shore detailing, as well as with the surrounding seasonal tree lots, intact.

I think you'll be seeing some rain tool ponds and lakes in 3RR.

Later.


David

91198

[thundercrack83]

Wait, so all we have to do is terraform and detail the lake bed and use the rain tool each time to bring the water? That's fantastic!

Excellent find, David! I've only played with the rain tool a handful of times since it disappeared. I guess it's back to the ol' drawing board!

Dustin

[Haljackey]

Geesh, thats very cool how you made that lake!  I really like the end result!
-I've been lurking here for the past few updates too.  Some nice oldies and the new stuff is just awesome!

And congrats on reaching 199 pages!  Are you prepared for the 200's?   

Best,
-Haljackey

[girlfromverona]

I'm just wondering why you'd use the rain tool to make lakes in the first place, when you could just use ploppable water? Is there some benefit I'm not seeing? Or is it just to have another way of making bodies of water?

Either way, what you've done looks fantastic - that transition is virtually non-existent thanks to Chris's excellent flora (and of course, your marvellous "plopping" skills, David)!

[Pat]

hmmm David I do have to say that the Rain Lake is good and is made even 100x's better with your skills!!!

[stewart_garden]

Congratulations on (almost) reaching these big landmarks David.  I have learnt a lot from reading your MD (and not just about SC4!)

Stewart

[bat]

Nice work there on that lake, David! And looking forward to the 200th page!!! Congrats on 199 pages! ⁹¹⁴²¹

[dedgren]

Heh, my own reports of 3RR's imminent demise...

09/17/2006 03:20 PM

dedgren Patriot Trixie Winner 2007 Posts: 1462 Joined: 06/24/2004

<---snip---> Here's my current take on the long term future of 3RR.  Over the next month or so, I plan to complete the region map I'm working on and all the township maps at a very detailed level.  They go surprisingly quickly now with the basic work done.  Yesterday, as the Paint Shop Pro 8 file that is the region map was taking over two minutes to re-render as I made changes, I bought another gig of memory.  What an idiot I'd been not to do that some time ago- re-rendering now just takes a few seconds. A few posts back, you might have read about my correcting a basic error in laying out my map where I didn't think to scale the size of the map to the size of the region in comparable units.  I was able to fix that problem, but another has made itself apparent that I can't so easily fix.  In the future, I will lay out my townships in a grid just like U.S. topographic maps are laid out. I didn't do this with 3RR.  While it doesn't create any insoluable problems from any other standpoint, it will to some degree interfere once I get into what I will call the "regional and local planning" phase of the CJ.  I'll write more about that situation later.  Suffice it to say for now that I see this as limiting the lifespan of 3RR to the year or so it will take me to develop the various townships in implementing my land use and development plans.  More about that phase later, too. So, having walked you around the block as to your question, the answer is probably no.  3RR is probably a dead-end in the long term.  But that's not to say we won't have fun getting to the end. <---snip---> signature D. Edgren ________________

...are greatly premature.

...I see this as limiting the lifespan of 3RR to the year or so it will take me to develop the various townships...   3RR is probably a dead-end in the long term.

Heh!  That post, another 3RR-ST oldie but goodie, was written almost two years ago.  You can see the origin there of the quad approach I now use.  Collaboration too is hinted at in what I then called the "regional and local planning phase."  I know that this sort of thing might be way too much "inside baseball" for many of you, but it does serve to highlight what an amazing time those three months in the fall of 2006 were, when 3RR became the 256 quad almost real place that it is today.

But that's not to say we won't have fun getting to the end.

At least I got that right.  Thanks for hanging in there with me!

Later.


David

91463

[pvarcoe]

These glimpses back are great David.

Thanks for posting them.

[bat]

Nice new post there and good one there earlier on ST!

[Andreas]

This is pretty amazing, David - stunning work (as usual). Too bad that the rain tool wasn't fully developed by Maxis, but the ploppable water works quite nicely as well.

EDIT: And welcome to page 200. 

[threestooges]

It has certainly been a heck of a ride, with no end yet in sight. As for it being a 'dead end' in any sense, one look at what has been produced (CPI, trees and such, tutorials galore, the vast research into game capabilities, FAR/FARR, etc) will tell you what I think about that. Looking forward to the next new development.
-Matt