FrankU's Lottery - Space Center update

[Getron]

...What I have visited most in Holland is Maastricht, not far from Aachen. I used to go there everyweekend with my father, doing random shopping. Loved it there......

@mrbisonm. Funny, I'm from Hulsberg. just between Maastricht and Heerlen/Aachen. And what I'm missing are the Farms from Limburg. @FrankU, will there be Limburgse frambuildings in the near future in your lots?

But your dutch farms here look great.

Getron.

[FrankU]

Well, Getron,

I am in desperate need of good Dutch farm buildings. I could also need some sheds, hay...ehm..hooibergen.., etc. So if you know a good BATter who needs some work?
I am trying my best with what I have found yet and there are no Limburg farm houses so far. But if there is one I'll use it definitely!

[Getron]

FrankU

A haystack? Perhaps this will be in the VIP RuralPack.

About the Limburgse Farmhouse. I forgot that you mainly do lotting.
I'm thinking to start batting, but only when I have a new computer. The one I have is five years old, and not useable for this.

I have some ideas what to bat: Limburgse Farm house, dutch ditch (the one that can be found in North and South Holland), Brand Bier Brouwerij, Dutch Football (soccer)clubhouse...etc

Getron

[mrbisonm]

@mrbisonm. Funny, I'm from Hulsberg. just between Maastricht and Heerlen/Aachen.

lol...Hulsberg...you probably mean Holsberg as we used to call it in Aachen. I know where it is, but it is on the northern route to Maastricht, right?..., we used to take the southern route through Gulpen, a little more scenic and shorter from our place in Stolberg (southeast of Aachen). We used to enter Holland through Vaals.

Well, Getron,

I am in desperate need of good Dutch farm buildings. I could also need some sheds, hay...ehm..hooibergen.., etc. So if you know a good BATter who needs some work?
I am trying my best with what I have found yet and there are no Limburg farm houses so far. But if there is one I'll use it definitely!

Maybe I can help you there, it will not be before a couple of weeks, but barns, haystacks, "Heuhaufen"  etc I can easily do. I am willing to offer some holland farm props and maybe even create a *Nexis Holland Farm Proppack*,(barns, sheds, Limburger Houses, haypiles, manure piles, etc) which you can include in your farm uploads. How about it?

Fred

[FrankU]

Well, you 'd be my hero!
Maybe I could even make you happy with a postcard from Schleiden? Or some other freaked out present?

[mrbisonm]

Well, you 'd be my hero!
Maybe I could even make you happy with a postcard from Schleiden? Or some other freaked out present?

lol....fine with me. I will check out google search for some possible farmprops of Holland that could become interesting to have. If you got a picture of a typical  farmhouse (barn, shed, prop or anything else) that you would like, send them. I am open to everything that is simple and easy to do.

Fred

[mave94]

I think that you could also use some of kwakelaar's farms: [link] The farms are actually from Germany, but could also fit in a Dutch region.

[FrankU]

Hi Matthijs,

If you would have looked closely at my finished farms you would have seen that I use Kwakelaars stuff already (reply 102, image 14). And yes, I am using them on several farms already that I have not shown yet. But thanks anyway!

And Fred,
Thanks for the offer.

Look, I found some useful pictures.

First some aerials

Aerial 1

Here you see a large farm.
The round cylinders are for storing manure, because it may only be put on the grassland on certain days and in certain amounts. So it has to be stored.
The restrictions on manure disposal is also a reason for farmers to possess relatively large areas of meadows that are not used for cows to graze on. Cows usually stay in the barn.
The black chocolate bar things to the right and next to the closest barn are food storage: it is hay from last year, put under black plastic. It is common to keep the plastic in place with old tyres. These two props would be very welcome.


Aerial 2
Here you see these foodstorages in perspective: half opened.
And another set of barns. The lage one is for cows to live in. The small one: you never know... All purpose barn, I 'd say.


Aerial 3

Another farm. Just for info.


Aerial 4

Here you can see a modern farm, with an old haystack that has been altered into a shed.

I got more haystacks. Not sure if I can find the time to upload now.

Aerial 5

This one is mainly for the barns. These are for cows to live in. They are very common. Haarlemmergold batted one already, but a bit of variation would be very welcome.


Haystacks:






The barns form the ground:





This is a barn that houses bio-industry pigs.




Barns for storing vehicles, stuff, spare parts, tools, food for the animals...













The manure cylinder from nearby:


The foodstorage:
Concrete walls, about a meter high, plastic coverage, haybale-coloured food inside.


I guess some inspiration, not?

Fred, you'd be my honoured farmer of the year!
When there are BAT's coming from your hand, I'll name a farm after you.

[mrbisonm]

Inspiration you said?
Wow, I guess I will be busy soon.....lol.

Nice pictures, some detailed enough to make them like the original. I will be doing more than half of them , I hope. I just love farmthings, maybe because I have my own. Ok, more of a hobbyfarm, I know, but still, I have over 50 beefcows. (Abergeen Angus and Highland)
Since it isn't my main occupation, I have a farmhand that takes care of the farm all the time, I drop in a hand here and there, like today, we did some fence repairing, preparing the pastures for the summergrazing.

The pictures of the farms above look more or less like ours here in Quebec, except that we have an exercise pen beside the barns where they keep the cows inside barns most of the time, called feeders. But most of the farms own the land for the pasture, quite normal when you see the immensity of land space we have here.
The only difference I see are these haystorage huts, never seen them before, and I cannot remember from my youthood neither. Also we in Canada, living in the cereal Country, have taller and more silos for either grain or green silage.

On the second picture the smaller barn is probably used for calves or heifers (year old cows) and younger steers (sterile bull yearlings). We have a lot of farms that look like this, just add a square menure pit and big silos and you're in Canada.

In fact, I like all the pictures, most of them would make a nice Farmprop pack.
So, here is what I do: whenever I have time to create a prop, I will send you the file once finished, you may use it and upload your lot including my modelfile, just mentioning that it is a Nexis prop and soon will be replaced with a proppack. I will make more and we repeat.
Once I have made a whole bunch of them, I will make a dat file of all of them, call it a *Nexis Holland Farmprop Pack* or something and I will upload it to the LEX and STEX under my name. When you then continue to make more, you just mention the proppack as a dependency. When my proppack is uploaded I will include a cleanitol file to delete all the individual farmmodel files that you included in your first lots.


I will show my creations in my MD :  http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=7189.1180  ,mentioning that they will be for a farmproppack for FrankU to make lots, including a link to here, Ok?

Monday I have time and I will do a first one. During the creation I will show it here (in your thread if you give me the permission), mostly to get your affirmation, whether or not textures and details are good enough. (never hurts to get a second opinion). If yes, I will send the file to you.
I like sc4 farms and I couldn't find a better LOTter for using my BATs. I just love the details and originality that you put into your farmlots. If you have seen my MD, you probably have seen some of my farms already.

Let's make some nice Dutchfarms now....

Sounds good?

Fred

PS: if you find more pictures or ideas, show or explain them please.

[FrankU]

Hi Fred,

Sounds very good!
Sorry, this is a short reply. Within 5 minutes we are off to my fathers birthday. He became 75 today.
Maybe I'll have time tomorrow, if not, we'll talk next week. I have some days with my family out of town.

Frank

PS; yes please, post your progress in this thread.

[Getron]

lol...Hulsberg...you probably mean Holsberg as we used to call it in Aachen. I know where it is, but it is on the northern route to Maastricht, right?..., we used to take the southern route through Gulpen, a little more scenic and shorter from our place in Stolberg (southeast of Aachen). We used to enter Holland through Vaals.

Fred

Hölsberg (http://li.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6lsberg)(like in Limburgse), Yes  .  They route you toke was the route Aachen-Vaals-Gulpen-Cadier en Keer-Maastricht, right? That is a scenic and lover route than 120 Km/u in the Highway. How long that you life in Aachen?

Getron

[mrbisonm]

Hi Fred,

Sounds very good!
Sorry, this is a short reply. Within 5 minutes we are off to my fathers birthday. He became 75 today.
Maybe I'll have time tomorrow, if not, we'll talk next week. I have some days with my family out of town.

Frank

PS; yes please, post your progress in this thread.

Funny, I'm off tomorrow for my father-in-law's birthday, he turns 90. Have a nice day with your father, I lost mine when I was 18, that's 40 years now that I miss him. Be back with some props later this week...

Hölsberg (http://li.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6lsberg)(like in Limburgse), Yes  .  They route you toke was the route Aachen-Vaals-Gulpen-Cadier en Keer-Maastricht, right? That is a scenic and lover route than 120 Km/u in the Highway. How long that you life in Aachen?

Getron

Exactly. I used to live in Aachen/Stolberg from 1957 to 1971, I passed my childhood from 5 to 14 years old there....lol.....I know that sounds like history (maybe it is  ). The route between Stolberg and Maastricht through Vaals and Gulpen was really beautiful then, scenic, and I haven't taken that route since '71. I was back in Maastricht  last year (september) though (I go every year to Aachen and surroundings, going over the highway beside Holsberg (sorry cannot create those 2 little dots on top of the "o" with my computer), but didn't really pay attention to it. I have a cousin in Maastricht that lives there since a year and last fall I visited all the rest of my family in the "Dreiecken Laender", Holland, Belgien and Germany. Maybe I'll take the route this summer, just for the fun of it and wake up some beautiful memories.


Fred

[Getron]

@mrbisonm, 1957 to 1971, that was even before I was born. And the Highway I mentioned was completed until 1975, so now I understand why you toke the Gulpen route. BUt still now it is a nice route to take. Every made the trip by bike? South Limburg is a nice place to bike.

Hope you can help FrankU with those Limburgse Farms. I would like to see them in a lot  .

Getron

[FrankU]

@mrbisonm/Fred,

The set of lots is in no way finished. Don't panic if it's going to take another six months! So I guess that the cleanitol file will not be necessary.
In the past I have been thinking about releasing the first two stage lots, but I am not going to.
During lotting I sometimes find out that things need to be changed. I then have to go through all lots that I have made already. E.G: I found out that not all of my prop families are useful the way I uploaded them. I changed some. In order to stop confusion I deleted the file from the STEX. There will be a version 2 of the prop families together with the finished set of farm lots.

So the conclusion is: send me a prop when it's ready. I'll see where I can use it in my lots. A new prop can make me change some of the previously made lots. In the end I want a set of lots for the first 5 stages of CAM, that are somehow a kind of family. A Dutch family, of course. So editing already finished lots will be necessary. And maybe, jsut maybe, the SPAM props will become a dependency also, because maybe I'll use some props
Also one of my team mates, MrMAvE94, is planning to do some farm houses. If he succeeds, they will be incorporated in my farms too, of course.

[mrbisonm]

@mrbisonm, 1957 to 1971, that was even before I was born. And the Highway I mentioned was completed until 1975, so now I understand why you toke the Gulpen route. BUt still now it is a nice route to take. Every made the trip by bike? South Limburg is a nice place to bike.

Because I lived in Stolberg, it was a little too far for me to go by bike to Vulpen, but I did quite often go to Holland to a small village called Moschenbach or Moschenberg, if I remember right. It was only like 6 or 7 km from my place. At the time kids were free to cross the border, no one ever bothered me to ask me where I was going when I crossed the borders. It was the chocolate who made me go to Moschenbach, it was a lot cheaper there than in Germany and money I did not have much as a kid. lol.
I don't remember all the details of the exact location and area, but I do remember that it was beautiful, the whole area, and since I am a great naturelover, memories of it are still fresh and well impregnated.
You know, you really gave me the taste to go there again, awaking my memories, maybe I'll go twice this year......lol. I hope, Greton,  you know and appreciate it that you live in a great area on this earth.

FrankU, No problem and it sounds great. I will get on modeling as soon as I have time, maybe as early as this week, probably starting with a small pack of manure tanks and open sky silos. Can't wait to get onto it. And if MrMAvE94
can do some nice dutch homes, your farmset will be a "must have" for sure.
Question: Do you want me to send you the modelfiles only, or make a propfile and send you both model and desc file?

Remember, if you have more pics of possible props, show them, the more pics the more ideas....

Fred

[Lowkee33]

Great to see some collaboration here 

If I could throw a perspective out there.  When people thin out Maxis lots, they make models that are the same size and put them in the building family.  A similar approach can be done with your lots.  If you grow a bunch of your farms and say "this building appears too much" you could relay this info to the BATers, hopefully getting back a model that is the same size.

Perhaps you can also get into lotting via Reader.  This can be a quick way to slightly alter lots, and I do it for fences.  A lot is made with brown fences in LE.  Opening this lot in reader and you will see a bunch of LotConfigObject properties.  The last rep of these properties is the Instance of the prop.  So, say the brown fences are 0x01, and the white fences are 0x02.  Making a completly new lot is a matter of cloning the lot exemplar, giving it a new instances, and changing all of the 0x01 reps to 0x02.  You could do this for all of the different fences, and you quickly have many variance of lots.  Similarly, you could clone lot exemplars and take out a tree, new lot.  In that case, just remember to reindex the lot config.

As for knowing what Instance to use:  The first digit of the Instance is a random odd (or is it even?) digit.  The last 7 digits are generated by the time, down to the second.  So, if you were to clone a lot exemplar, increase the last digit by 1 and the first digit by 2, this is just as unique as an Instance made in PIMX.  It gets a little iffy if you make 100s of clones (thus using 100s of seconds that someone else might make a new desc.), but you still have that 1/8 chance from that first digit.     

[FrankU]

Last reply thisa week (off to my vacation!):

@mrbisonm: you can send me the model. I can make desc files and props as much as I want with Pim-X.

@Lowkee33: thanks for the tip. As you know I use prop families for variation. I don't want to have hundreds of lots in my plugins. Also I know of another way to change lots. There is a technique that is used by Maxis to make variation in lots. I read about it and am planning to find out how it works exactly. There is a tutorial somewhere. My next modding lesson.

Talk to you next week.

[mave94]

Good to see Fred will help you with making props for your lots!
I have to postpone batting farms to the future. I'm moving to a new village now and that keeps me busy. I'll be back with BAT when I have the time

-Matthijs

[mrbisonm]

@FrankU....Have a nice vacation. I'll make some props later this week (wednesday I'll have the whole day offf....and if it rains, oh boy....there's gonna be a lot of props here... )

@MrMAvE94, good luck moving !


Fred

[strucka]

May I present to you the Slovenian hayrack? It's a distinct architectural feature that is said not to be found anywhere else in the world. Maybe you could BAT/LOT one. I could probably found a 3D model somewhere on my computer and can send it to you if you wish. These are really nice nad useful. Nearly every slovene farm has one. It's used for storage of hay on the top, where drafts dry it, mostly anything goes underneath, to keep it from bad weather.