Three Rivers Region

[homefryes]

Hi, David -- my question is similar to RickD's: my creeks and rivers have a slight slope to be realistic. How will this new 2m-deep ploppable water look/work in those situations? Will it work? It looks fantastic, and I hope I can utilize it in my region and MD. As always, on the edge of my seat here at 3RR!

-- Don

EDIT:  We'll be figuring that out over the next couple of weeks, Don.  Welcome to the Double-0 Club, by the way. -DE

Reply to EDIT: Wow, I didn't even notice my post was a Double-0! Yay, me! Thanks for the response ... can't wait!

[just_a_guy]

  WOW, I must pay my respects to all of you great modders here. So many new ways to do things come out from here almost every day! I'm amazed. Keep up the amazing work everyone!

[dedgren]

Out here on the bleeding edge sometimes things just come together.

Today.



Ploppable.



Water.



Flows.



Downhill.



I don't know what else to say.  I had the "Eureka" moment about 9:00 p.m. last night, and have been up since about 4:00 figuring out the details.  These pics are concept development, so they're not pretty.  But it works, and it will be fairly easy to use once the stuff is integrated.

Me- I'm for taking the rest of the day off.


David

291734

[deathtopumpkins]

 

Quite the breakthrough David! 

[Rayden]

SCPW?  Very well thought

[JoeST]

WUT   THU    FRACK !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


!!!!!!!!!

* JoeST jumps of of the nearest window.

[Korot]

SCPW?  Very well thought

What does 'SCPW' mean? Oh, David, you forgot to mention that the water is also transparent, making the sentence:
"Today. Transparent. Ploppable. Water. Flows. Downhill."
Mentioning the transparent is very important, as that wasn't around a very short time ago. It looks good though and I can't wait 'till you mention us in part x of the terraforming tutorial how we do this.

[Rayden]

What does 'SCPW' mean? Oh, David, you forgot to mention that the water is also transparent, making the sentence:
"Today. Transparent. Ploppable. Water. Flows. Downhill."
Mentioning the transparent is very important, as that wasn't around a very short time ago. It looks good though and I can't wait 'till you mention us in part x of the terraforming tutorial how we do this.

Slope Conforming Ploppable Water

[evanator]

Wow, seems as though the Holy Grail of ploppable water has been achieved!

Congratulations, and I can't wait for it's release!

[Jonathan]

Slope Conforming Ploppable Water

oooo I think i understand it...

David that's amazing , can't wait for more, (even though I don't post that often I check here every morning and evening at least )

Jonathan

EDIT:  Well, Jonathan- you can take a bow here, too.  I never would have known about the trick of using an Excel spreadsheet to mass-convert S3D "Vert" (which I now have figured out are "vertices," as in the corners of a triangle) values had it not been for your tip.  I had been doing them individually by hand, and by T&E as well, and that took hours for one small thing.  Just proves once more that 3RR is all collaboration, no matter what is going on. -DE

[metarvo]

I go away for a few hours, and another groundbreaking discovery appears in 3RR.  I can't believe Maxis didn't include water above sea level in SC4, especially since it had been in the previous two SimCity games.  However, David has done it again, and now ploppable water is closer than ever to outdating game water.  Game water will still be useful for seaports, but those are normally built at sea level anyway.  Good job!

[Copperalis]

Following on from my earlier post, no. 7677, and David's kind comments, I thought I would show an experiment with ploppable water, slightly raised bridges and chrisadam3997's culverts. My initial version is below. Having had a few issues with the fine tuning of the raised road as used by David I tried a different method. The stream was lowered using the 12m Hole Digger lot. The 14m Hole Raiser Lot was then plopped at right angles to the stream bed and raised for 5 tiles. The end tiles were lowered using roads. These were deleted and replaced using the NAM filler lots.



I then tried, unsuccessfully, to replace the NAM lots with the standard road. Every time I dragged the road it lowered the bridge to the ground level. I twigged that this may have been caused by a slope mod so spent a few hours installing and uninstalling various slopemods, and came up with the following conclusions:

No slopemod – a slightly raised bridge can be made
JRJ_SlopeMod – a slightly raised bridge can be made
ENN_SlopeMod_Mount620 – a slightly raised bridge can be made
ENN_SlopeMod_Medium315 – a slightly raised bridge can be made but it will lower the bridge slightly so this needs to be compensated for by initially raising the ground slightly higher
ENN_SlopeMod_Smooth212 – a slightly raised bridge cannot be made

I then revisited the area successfully using a standard street. In the meantime David had brought out his ploppable water so I removed the earlier stream and replaced with the new version. I also created a small hollow in the adjacent field and with a pit of flora - voila - a small clay pit appeared.



I hope these conclusions are of use.

The new ploppable water looks like a breakthrough (literally...). Given how the last version was created, I am assuming that this new version uses a large (e.g. 9x12) lot. My only comment is that the width of the stream narrows as it goes downhill (following the natural sides of the stream bed), whereas it should actually widen. Although I don't have technological background to back this up I wonder whether a small - say 2-tile lot - with a gentle slope would resolve this. Having said that and taken another look at your pictures, which were clearly made to show the slope, I suppose in reality the natural slope would also drop downhill reduce this narrowing effect.

Keep up the good (or should I say groundbreaking) work.

EDIT:  Heh!  I was so excited when I saw that it was finally (I originally had the S3D files out of synch, and every time that I rotated the view it would all come apart) going to work that I didn't take the time to fiddle with the banks.

Here's what a few minutes of tinkering gets you.



I'm still really constrained by the width of the sloped sections- that'll be fixed in a bit, and then we'll take another look.

Thanks for the kind words, my friend.  I think your pics are really great, too! -DE

[mightygoose]

woah, i assume its a large overhanging prop that is sloped, that you then have to orientate, and that curving round corners still must be done on the flat.. but either way wow....

[BarbarossaS]

You've certainly deserved to take the rest of the day of David, what you've done the last couple of weeks is just amazing!
I've been lurking here again for a while, but I just wanted you to know I really appreciate the things you're doing for the SC4 community.  
Love the tutorials by the way, couldn't have done it myself otherwise  

-Stijn-

[dedgren]

Here's a few more minutes of tinkering.





The rise isn't much- terrainquery tells me it's about 20 meters/65 feet.



That's a medium quad, though, so our river drops that distance in somethin less than 8/10 of a kilometer/half a mile.  I don't know how much time anyone else here has spent in a canoe, but a three foot/one meter drop per 100 linear feet/30 meters of flow is at the edge of flatwater, that's for sure.  I've paddled some big rivers in the Arctic (the Kobuk [linkie] below Shungnak in particular) where the drop is only about three feet/one meter per mile/1.6 kilometers, and the current is still 3-5 miles/5-8 kilometers per hour.



The big thing was to prove up the concept.  Now I can get busy on the details.


David

291908

[Ryan B.]

This is great, David.  The things I've seen in this thread will change the way we play SC4 forever.

[Ennedi]

Too much to comment  I must take a break for half a day and study a few last updates including the terrafoming tutorial

Excellent work David! 

Adam

[Tarkus]

I'll concur with Adam to a certain extent here.   This is absolutely groundbreaking work here, David.  Business as usual, I suppose.   I'm just absolutely stunned.  This would come in handy in so many places in Tarkusian Cities. 

-Alex

[Darmok]

David that new ploppable water is simply a stroke of genius! What else is comming... sliced bread?? (Oh we already have that...) well then, a better sliced bread!

Simply to say that I'm positively flabbergasted....   

P.S. About the culvert, could it be possible to modify the rocky texture so it could be narrower at the top as to give a narrow top, broader base kinda look, I know we can have overhanging props, but can it be done with textures???
crazy idea...

[homefryes]

Amazing! That's all I can say right now!

-- Don