[Gobias]

PNG 0917660E is quite an interesting one, it seems. does changes in the other axis have any effect on things?

Good point Joe - Haven't tried changing the vertical axis yet but I'll add it to my to-do list.  There's also another PNG out there 0917660F that is almost identical to the -E PNG but a little darker and must have something to do with day-night color but I've tried manipulating it and it's had no effect.  If anyone knows what the deal is with that PNG let me know.  My first guess was that it might be connected to the region-view snapshot that gets taken whenever you save a city but that apparently isn't the case.

In the meantime I also have been playing w/shadows and sun-pitch.  The Berner Oberland has a general sun pitch of around 20 degrees up from the z-axis at it's lowest in January and gets as high as around 67 degrees on the longest days of June.  Maxis defaults at around 45 which is suitable for the mod however I still wanted to tinker with these settings to see the effect of anything from around 35-40 degrees which would be spring-time and snow-melt around March-April.

Reducing the sun-pitch in the game can create a really nice hill-shadow effect that really brings out the depth in a mountain terrain.

At 45 degrees you get some hill shadowing:


But drop it down in the upper 20's to low 30's and you get those long winter-shadows that look real atmospheric:


But as Lowkee warned this has a negative consequence as it affects model shadows and can "tear" the shadow on the ground.  Even at 42 degrees just a slight change in sun-pitch rips model shadows.  Notice my trees below look like a collection of "Terrence and Philip" dolls!:


So... not sure if I'll bother to utilize the pitch property and that's too bad because it'd be even more relevant when I work on the Highlands or Icelandic landscapes.  Thoughts?  Pros of depth greater than the cons of modelling shadows or just leave it alone?  Any opinions are welcome. 

[vortext]

Notice my trees below look like a collection of "Terrence and Philip" dolls!

Pull my finger   

Anyhow some time ago I've tinkered with the shadow angle as well and it seemed to depend on the BATs themselved wether or not tearing occured, though it happened more often than not so probably best to leave that be.

As for the glacier texture imho the tiling is more of an issue than the actual placement 

The night texture seems pretty straightforward, should be fun to play around with. To the lab indeed! 

[Girafe]

job is going on 

Some tests I did long time ago about glacier texture in addition to PTM:

[mrbisonm]

Love that last picture!!!! Great!

[DAB_City]

And this is SimCity 4? *Jaw drops straight off*

[Gobias]

Working on a few detail textures, scaling properly at each zoom and testing changes to the zoom strength so that the textures drop off a bit more sharply at zoom 4.  Too much blending on detail textures at high zoom causes things like rocks (esp limestone and light colored rocks) to have a "ghosted" affect as they blend against darker grass textures.

I'm still re-revising several of my textures I'm not 100% satisfied with so... more to come.  Over the next week or so I'll spend more time tinkering with the INI table and I'll start testing out a seasonal mod.  I played with it a little bit last week to learn more about moisture changes but it's almost time to dive all the way in.  No promises if the weather mod ends up in the final product.  Until then... a few examples of what I'm working on:





Ignore the brush as it's not very "Alp"-y... I just threw that in for scale...


The rocky texture is still a bit "temporary" as I find it a little too grainy.  That's something I still need to clean up.


And the meadow could use a sharper resolution... I'll try and shoot some better samples next weekend and photoshop them up a little better.


That's it for this weekend.  Gotta get back to real-life for a while.  Next update will probably be weather-mod testing.

[Buzzit]

omg thats unbelievablely pretty 

[noahclem]

 

Fantastic and unique-looking textures    It's a shame you're running into those troubles with the elongated shadows. I live around the Arctic Circle and would enjoy the option of longer shadows. Nice you're exploring these parameters anyway 

[Gobias]

As usual I didn't get a lot done during the week but hope to have a decent update before the weekend is out...

noahclem:  yeah, shame about the shadow-tearing.  Although I even notice some tearing occuring even at 45 degrees.  Me personally I don't mind it that much and I feel like in certain cases the "atmospheric" benefits of stronger hill shadows outweight the cons of a few model shadow tears but I understand that not everyone would agree.  Perhaps I could always include an optional installable dat to lengthen the hill shadows when I tackle the Highlands/Icelandic mod (still haven't decided specifically which region I'm going to model it on though they both share similar terrain characteristics) and include a disclaimer that it's known to tear model shadows.  User's choice?

girafe: thanks for the screenshots.  Glad you've taken note of my little project.  Your BAT work and especially the flora are, in my opinion, some of the best work ever to be done on SC4. 

And thanks to the rest for the interest in my project here...

So... the weather mod... not so sure this one's going to be do-able.  The biggest problems I'm running into are:
a) It seems the Lowkee-approach is the best way to go - manipulating moisture change.  But the way the game thinks of moisture isn't exactly well-suited to simulating things like snow fall.  The game is always looking for wet/dry slopes and moisture in valleys instead of on cliffs.  And so when I attempt to simulate change w/snowfall from winter to spring I get really messy looking terrain:



The snow melts on one side of the valley but not the other.  And in some areas, steeper valleys, it's hard to get rid of it altogether and it lingers in depressions in the terrain.  Because the game doesn't know it's snow - it's just moisture. 

b) other problem has to do with the use of a wide range of textures.  If I consider the INI table a standalone snapshot of a terrain in a non-seasonal mod I can put in little detail textures.  Rocky terrain, flowery meadows, glacier textures up in the mountains... and that works.  But once you activate variations in moisture that whole table starts to shift as moisture shifts with the seasons and all of a sudden a texture previously displayed as detail suddenly takes over your landscape.  This is especially problematic w/the blended-rocky textures I'd use between the snow-cap and the grass... when the seasons change it descends down the mountains and takes over the tops of my hills.  Just looks like a complete mess:



With the right amount of tinkering w/the INI I might be able to clean some of that up but I think it would cause me to opt to limit the # of textures I'd use in order to keep the season changes civil and cooperative.  The testing I've done in these pics utilized 3 textures only:  1 each of snow, rock and grass.  And even that was hard to wrangle.

A third issue would of course be water-related.  No way to change the water texture that I can see... so if I bring the snowline down to the shore in winter then the obvious problem occurs w/the look of summer-lake texture next to snow:



... Anyway, not sure that's going to be workable but I'll keep playing with it for a little while.

As for the state of the mod let me sum up where I'm at:  It's about 98% done.  What I've got left:

* Just 3 textures I'm going to take another stab at improving.  Mine are suitable but I think I can improve them.  I think I've got 26 or 28 in the mod right now and the total file-size is very similar to the Appalachian.  FYI the range I'm using is C0-D9 to avoid conflicts with the Appalachian and the Pyrenean.

* Still tinkering with the INI table to match everything up to the region as best I can.  This is mostly done and should be finished within the week.

* I need to make an installer I suppose - never tried that one before.  Can anyone recommend a tutorial?  I think there's a thread for that stickied around here somewhere...

* Today I'm going to work on making some MAXIS base texture replacements for the residential grass textures and a few farm fields... since the Oberland textures are quite a bit brighter than normal the game lots look oddly dark in contrast.  So to complete the look I thought it'd be a good idea to blend the lots w/the grass textures.  A few shots of the grass textures BEFORE I get underway with this.





In the second shot there you can see what I mean about the base textures along the road.  The sidewalks (all 3 wealth levels) I probably can't do anything about without re-doing the NAM completely!  But as long as I knock out the RES and FARM grass textures I think most of the look will be improved.

(Also if you look closely at those pics you might notice a few other mods I've made in the past... the very base of the Manchou house in 1st pic shows a little retaining wall I made.  I replaced the MAXIS default retaining walls w/a set of european stones/cobbled-stone walls... the sidewalk textures, a maxis-tree replacement mod where I subbed Girafe's flora for the maxis default oaks, palms, etc.  And also a street texture replacement mod that uses the SAM asphalt textures to replace the MAXIS grey-streets automatically.) 

Ok - so I'm off to make some base textures and finish the INI.  Getting pretty close to complete now.  If there's enough interest out there for release I'll go for LEX candidacy? 

Cheers,
Daniel

[Gobias]

Almost finished.  Base texture replacements are complete and turned out pretty decent.  INI is done.  Textures re-graded a bit and only a few last bits to take care of.  I've still got to make an installer, fix up a low-altitude plugin and test it and make one more pass at a texture I want to clean up.  Likely I'll tackle that next weekend.

In the mean time... some PNGs of the nearly-finished product.  Should be the last time I show the mod before it's done.  Enough interest for a release?  Any final critique?:

[RickD]

The terrain mod looks great in the pictures. Especially the glacier effect.  But I would have to try it in my game for more detailed feedback.
It does not fit in my current region, but I would love to use it in another one. I'll definitely give it a try when you release it.

[Kergelen]

The textures looks really nice.
The glacier, the rocks with grass and the high attitude textures all seems very appropriate.

[noahclem]

Just spectacular 

I was a bit unsure about the Oberland texture brightness--not because it doesn't look great but because I was worried about it fitting in. The steps you're taking to resolve that issue make this mod even more attractive.

An option on the longer shadows sounds like a great way to go.

As for the LEX candidacy, please go for it!

Finally, would you consider sharing your street mod? I think there's a lot of interest 

[vester]

Looks great.


You can easy save on the file size on the pictures. By saving them as jpg with 80 % quality/compression ratio the file size can cut to 10%.
I use the free program IrfanView for fast view and file conversion. It even do batch conversion.

[mrbisonm]

If there's enough interest out there for release I'll go for LEX candidacy? 

I am waiting for just that!!! Great job!

Fred

[Gobias]

Sorry haven't had a chance to get much done during the work week.  Still have to make an installer (and I've never made an NSIS before, usually just use the old clickteam wizard.  But since this will have optional components I'll have to write a script), the readme, and a few small administrative details to clean up and test before it's up for scrutiny.  Should happen this weekend if all goes well and then I'm at the mercy of the LEX.

Thanks all for the responses and:

vester:  thanks for the tip on compression - I was wondering about that.  I read somewhere around here that PNG was preferred to JPEG for keeping bandwidth down but since I tried your tip w/Irfanview I can see the filesize is much smaller... I'll do that from now on.  thanks!

noah:  thanks and I will probably add the shadow option to the installer w/disclaimer about slight tearing.  As for the street mod I suppose I would consider releasing it but a lot would have to go into that.  First off the textures are the same as the asphalt SAM textures - I merely reappropriated them w/MAXIS instances to override the street textures since I prefer to plop street w/the MAXIS tool instead of the SAM tool... just my preference.  I replaced all of the wide radius and diagonal puzzle pieces and created a few extra pieces myself to fill out the set.  But I'd have to get permission to release it since most of the fsh's aren't mine.  Also there are probably a few rare puzzle pieces that I didn't make so to make sure the set was complete there'd be some work there to clean it up to release-standards.  I'd consider doing that but might be a little ways down the to-do list.  And if I were to do it I might rather just make a new street mod from scratch as those textures are starting to look a little low-res and dated.  But as anyone knows who has tried making a street mod there are a LOT of puzzle pieces that need to be made... it's a big job.  Perhaps it'll be a project when I'm ready for a terrain break.

On brightness I agree at first I was a little unsure how the brighter grass textures would play in game since most lots are set up w/darker bases.  Changing the base textures made a big difference.  See below and sorry the tileset isn't very "swiss" but you'll get the idea.  I changed the grass textures that appear on residential lots, parks, cemetaries and the like and also a few of the farmfields that default on the MAXIS farms:

[epicblunder]

Your terrain mod is looking quite impressive, Gobias.   

I just have one concern with fiddling with the shadows: are you doing so within the lighting exemplar or is that something in the terrain exemplar or somewhere else?  I ask because simfox's day'n'night mod uses the lighting exemplar.  I don't know the nuts and bolts of how his mod actually works, i just worry that including the same exemplar in your terrain mod might conflict with Dark Night.  Just thought I'd throw that out there as something you might want to do a quick test of before release.

I also really look forward to seeing what you can do with the other two environments you mentioned in your opening post, especially the pacific northwest. (if you plan to continue along that line)   

Again, excellent work so far and best of luck.

[Girafe]

Work is really nice.

The only thing I am not sure about, is the green color. For me it's a little bit too blue.

Keep going in this way 

[Gobias]

I just have one concern with fiddling with the shadows: are you doing so within the lighting exemplar or is that something in the terrain exemplar or somewhere else?  I ask because simfox's day'n'night mod uses the lighting exemplar.  I don't know the nuts and bolts of how his mod actually works, i just worry that including the same exemplar in your terrain mod might conflict with Dark Night.  Just thought I'd throw that out there as something you might want to do a quick test of before release.

Fear not on the lighting issue:  the mod will be compatible with both Simfox's Dark Night and the standard Maxis night.  Here's how it works:

Simfox's Dark Night has several components (light cones and such) but the core elements that produce the dark night effect are the PNG I discussed on page 1 of this thread and the lighting properties exemplar.  For the purposes of the mod I will provide an OPTIONAL installable replacement to both of these files for Dark Night and Maxis Night using mostly the same settings that Simfox/Maxis use in those pairs of files but manipulating just a few key properties. 

For those who want to use it I'll provide 2 optional PNGs that slightly reduce the redness of sunset but retain the Simfoxines and Maxis-y qualities of the rest of day/night coloring.  So the only change the user will see is a subtle change relaxing the intensity of sunset.

As for the lighting exemplar this file is required for the mod but I'll provide several options in the installer for Dark/Maxis users:
- Dark Night Option:  will retain all of Simfoxes settings with only a few variations:  eg. changes only the water night color RGB which is custom'd to the Berner Oberland water texture.   
- Maxis Night Option:  pretty much the same concept. 
-Dark Night w/Shadows:  same as above but also lowers the sun angle slightly to produce longer shadows - no effect to day/night quality.
-Maxis Night w/Shadows:  same concept.

The options should keep all users happy and maintain the look of dark or Maxis night.  Me, personally I'm a dark-night user so I was careful to retain that look w/the mod.  Also, I didn't want to mess too much with lighting since BAT'ers tailor their models to fit these light schemes.

[epicblunder]

Heh looks like you've got it all thought out and covered   

I'm going to have to whip up a couple alpine maps to have something 'proper' to test this on...