Three Rivers Region

[metarvo]

What is this?  A medium quad, in 3RR?   

That stream flows downhill so smoothly.  Actually, the difference in elevation is hardly noticeable, but that simply displays a high quality of work, David.  Keep it going! 

[Pat]

David I just dont know what to say here if and what I have allready said before!!!

[ldvger]

Absolutely stunning work!  I am so happy I never settled for flat rivers made from sea level game water, so happy I waited.  I am still waiting now, but feel that the huge breakthough is hours away. 

My only question is how does this new PW work with the old PW?  Jeronij has done wonderful little half-cell width plops for streamlets/rills and they seem to plop well over even moderate slopes.  They have no depth to speak of, but tiny little streams are usually shallow anyway.  I'm also very curious to combine the old PW with the new around the edges of the new deeper PW cells, so as to create pools in rivers, etc.  And how will the existing rapids/waterfalls effects work with the new PW? 

I know, I know, lotsa questions that will take time to work out.  I am patient...I have hundreds of mountains to weather before I start plopping water, so I can wait.

Great work David, and I agree with however said this will change forever the way we all play the game.  I've always thought what we needed to figure out how to do was create a realistic underground watertable and now it seems that has been accomplished, or at least is well on it's way to being accomplished. 

Now all you have to do is figure out how to plop a region sized watertable and we won't have to plop water at all anymore...just dig down until we hit the water table and there it is! 

One thought comes to mind though...how will this new tool affect other things going on underground in the game?  Subways, water pipes, etc?  You've shown us we can build at the surface without issues, but how about below the surface? 

Very exciting news, very exciting...can't wait to see how this all turns out!

Lora/LD

[calibanX]

Wow David. Your breakthroughs are coming at a rapid pace. I'm checking in almost daily and every time I log on you've got something new cooking. You're relentless!

Geoff

[jacqulina]

hiya david wow havnt you all been busy here,awesome news about the water,amazing pics,i cant wait to try this and see what results i can come up with in my cj.amazing work all of you.

[dedgren]

Okay, another doodle.



I'm doing this to learn enough to fine-tune the SCTPW panes.  Here, the river is about two miles/a little more than three kilometers from west (top, yeah, yeah, I know- I used the orientation things looked best in) to its outflow at the south (left) edge of the quad.  A little less than the bottom half is true flatwater (no drop, although there certainly would be a drop of at least several feet/maybe a meter or so in RL over that stretch, otherwise there would be no current).  The upper mile /1.2 kilometers drops... well, how far would you guess?

Here's the elevation of the bed of the true flatwater stretch: 251.9 meters/820 feet- add two meters/about six feet for the water depth and you see we are just a few meters/feet above game water level.



So, what do you think?  You saw the pic yesterday- 20 meters, maybe?  Or double that- 40 meters?  Or more?

Let's give this the morning and see who can come the closest, while I head back to that fine-tuning.  One guess per Regular^*, and no changing it, now, once it's posted.

Later.


David

^*  A 3RR Regular, as you all have been told many, many times before, is anyone who has posted here or over at 3RR-ST at least once.

292589 - We'll almost certainly hit 20K page views for this month today- the 8^th month in a row that mark has been surpassed.  Thanks to all of you!

[thundercrack83]

"Doodle." I'm sure that's what Michelangelo said of the Sistine Chapel.

You're much too modest, my friend!

Dustin

EDIT:  What, Dustin- no guess?  Who knows what good things might accrue to the lucky winner? -DE

[TheTeaCat]

Stunning David 
just what was needed in my opinion 
Superb doodling too 

I gonna guess 33 meters ( because I like that number )


TTC

grabbed my copy of the beta - gonna have to go play now

Now here's an idea for you. If only we could have a "game" water mod that matches the plopped water
and you would never have a problem blending them together

[MandelSoft]

I guess 42 meters  (the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything!) thanks for correcting me, Joe

[JoeST]

sorry maarten but 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything... not just life,universe & everything.

and I guess 1F (31)m

Joe

[Copperalis]

Well if my maths is correct then about 30m.

Thanks David for the comments on my pictures.

I'm not sure if my stream beds were too regular but when I used the 9x12 lot of ploppable water it gave very straight edges (see the curves partially disguised by rocks at the bottom of the second picture). The your latest 'doodles' with the SCTPW retain the original more ragged and natural edges of the original PTW. I wonder whether this a difference between your two versions or do I need to soften my stream bed up...?

EDIT:  My friend, the next part of the tutorial will deal with that precise question.  Don't fret in the meantime, though- it's all technique. -DE

[metarvo]

I'm going with 15m, because it's the magic number used for NAM overpasses.  I should know, because I've been playing around with the overpasses a lot lately. 

[ldvger]

I'm gonna guess 54, feet or meters, hahahaha.  Is that cheating?  

And, just to be persnickety, a stretch of perfectly flat space covered with water could very easily have current to it, because so long as there is water flowing into it, the water will continue to move over the flat space.  And, sooner or later the flat area will stop being flat and the water that is slowly moving across the flat area due to continued flow from above the flat area will find that low spot and spill over and down, thus creating ongoing current across the flat area.  This is kinda the physics behind how rain gutters on the eaves of buildings work.  Gutters are not installed with any slope (usually) because they have this magic device attached to them called a downspout.  The downspout is the low spot the water collected in the gutter eventually finds and falls down into, thus creating current in the gutter.  That's the rule with water everywhere on this planet...it always seeks, and finds, the fastest way downhill (some may call it the path of least resistance).  

You can prove this to yourself at home very easily.  Fill a glass with water then pour it onto something perfectly flat that has an edge to it, like maybe your countertop.  If you keep pouring water onto your countertop, sooner or later it will spread to the edge of the countertop then spill over the edge and onto the floor.  And, even if your floor is perfectly level, sooner or later, if you keep pouring water on your countertop, the water will spread all over the floor and eventually find the door, then it will fall down over the door sill and onto the porch or ground or whatever is just outside of your door.  However, unless you want to clean up a really big mess, I suggest you just take my word for it that water does indeed have current over perfectly flat areas so long as there is an ongoing source of water coming in from a higher area.  

You'd never guess I love physics, would you?  

Lora/LD, being a smarty pants

EDIT:  Yeesh!  Hydraulics.  That's it, Lora- you get the call the next time my sink clogs. -DE

[dedgren]

Since nobody has yet come within a reasonable degree of what I would call close, let me show you another pic.



That's the stretch from the end of flatwater to the west (left this time) edge of the quad over which our ploppable stream descends across five sloped PW panes.  The very top of the gap is also a flatwater pane.

So let's see if that helps.

Derry (TheTeaCat) raises the excellent point of matching game and ploppable water.  One of the things I had hoped was that the slanted surface of the pane would make a transition less noticeable.



For larger rivers, I don't think so.

For smaller ones, though- well, you be the judge.





Not perfect by any means, but remember that this is only going on the second day that this stuff has existed.  There's definitely some settings that can be tweaked and other things that can be adjusted game water-wise.  Our friend Adam (Ennedi) is a master at that sort of thing, and I'd suspect we'll be hearing from him before too long.

A few more hours of guessing, then we'll see what we have.

Later.


David

292822

[Nardo69]

David, a good slope for a slow flowing river without rapids etc would be 1-5 0/00 (in hydrologics per mill are used and not per cent). However this is reallife - slope from hydraulic calculation and not SC4-Scale. Depending on the hydraulic roughness of the river bed water will stream or shoot (with turbulences etc) but this would go to far (and it wasn't the best part of my diploma either).

About the transitions ... well, best things would be artificial overfalls and/or small hydroelectric plants (not Hooverdam - style! but run-of-river powerplant - right translation for the German term "Laufkraftwerk"?) ).

These kind of hydro power plant are designed for small level difference of lets say 1 to not more than 12m (which is really a lot IRL). They would also provide a realistic transition from ploppable water to ingame water. By incident I found out that  longtime BATter and modder whose name I don't want to use at the moment is working on such a hydro plant. A nice draft can be found in wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Hydroelectric_dam.png

As an alternativ overfalls are installed if the height difference multiplicated with the flow rate isn't enough for a hydro power plant. Overfalls are installed to avoid sole erosion in the river and to control flow rate and speed of the water.

Of course they are no option for rivers untouched by human mankind.


Oh, btw ... you know, that's all your fault:

I always envied (not only but especially) you for your great skills with ploppable water. It nagged and nagged on me untill I finally tried it out, too:



Sometimes even stubborn oldfashioned donkeys like me learn new tricks ... but don't complain that I slow down even more because of that!

and don't you stop to seducing stubborn oldfashioned donkeys to learn new tricks!

[meinhosen]

I always envied (not only but especially) you for your great skills with ploppable water. It nagged and nagged on me untill I finally tried it out, too:

and don't you stop to seducing stubborn oldfashioned donkeys to learn new tricks!

I'll echo Nardo's sentiment about the new tricks.  Seeing your tutorials finally convinced me to test out and use PW.  Now I too count myself among the stubborn, old-fashioned donkey's who are learning new tricks.      

[evanator]

The river looks pretty steep for a free flowing river so I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the total elevation change to be somewhere between 50 and 60 meters, perhaps 55?

Who would have thought we'd be having a contest at guessing the change in elevation of a ploppable water river a week ago? -well maybe you and the others working your magic.

Truly remarkable innovations here! 

[Ennedi]

David, I need a PNG (or FSH) texture with an identical color as your TPW. Maybe I will be able to help with the TPW/ingame water transition.
In fact I'm working on such transitions between various canals and the sea from some time, but I haven't time to finish it till now. Today you gave me an additional motivation 

Adam

[dedgren]

Speaking of numbers...



1,000 per day over the last 24- the old odometer is smokin'!

* * *

So how far did our mountain stream drop?



It flows off the quad at 251.1 meters/about 825 feet...



...after dropping from...

...drum roll, please...

...330.6 meters/1,080 feet!



Our friends Evan (evanator) and Lora (ldvger), with their guesses in the mid-50s, were closest but still way too timid.  The overall drop is just under 80 meters/250 feet.  A pretty respectable drop, but after finding out that Bernhard (Nardo69) is a hydrology expert, I'm not even going to try to tell you what it means, flow-wise, except to say that there'd almost certainly be some pretty healthy rapids there in RL.

So, we can use our slanted PW panes to represent water flowing downhill.  I think its fair to say that it's all just details from here.

* * *

Quickly revisiting a topic we touched on in the last post- here's a road bridge used to mask the transition on a wider river between game water and the new TPW, with a slanted pane used at the transition point.



The dark artifacting you see on the TPW is from conversion into a JPEG- it wasn't present in the game.

Closer in.



The bridge hides the line across the "water" we saw earlier, but it allows the eye to take in the big difference in color and texture between the game water river and its PW continuation.  I have used Timotheus4's Edmonton Water color and John's (Pegasus) Brigantine surface texture over Brian's (c.p./cycledogg) default Columbus terrain river and seabed terrain textures for years- note that jeronij's ploppable water matches up very well with this combination where the game water is "deep," but not so where the game water is shallow.

Another view.



One thing you can see is that the new TPW behaves pretty much exactly like game water in terms of conforming to the terrain.  I'll be getting those files off to Adam (Ennedi), and will be looking forward to seeing what he thinks about addressing our matching problem.

We'll be resuming our ongoing tutorial shortly, where we'll look at how to terraform flatwater stream banks, and other interesting things.

Later.


David

293060

[frdrcklim]

I've been gone a few pages now. im just surprised to see this pic. Now that is truly bending the game .