Abajo del Mar: Update 8

[planetechef]

very nice, this land look amazing & this canyon,  , beautifull 

[marsh]

Its coming along nicely. Your progressing fast and im glad to finaly start seeing terraforming. Hope to see more 

[Battlecat]

Nice to see the terraforming getting started here!  Everything I'm seeing so far says that the highland lake was a good choice!  That massive canyon is a fantastic feature, you've done a great job creating a source for it!  Looking forward to seeing more!

[RickD]

Hi Lora, good to hear that real life is going well for you at the moment. Your latest experiments have encouraged me to take another look at rivit's coastal modd and I decided to use it in my region.
Your work on the lakes looks very promising. I am sure this will be really great once it is finished.

[canyonjumper]

If you need a LOTer, my services are available

[ldvger]

Well, this isn't exactly an update, in that I don't have any pics to share or anything, really, about the region.  I take that back...I have been working sporadically on the big lake in the NW corner of the region and have actually pretty much finished one part of it.  But, I don't have any pics, boo hoo. 

What I DO have is news of another sort, more personal, I guess.  The client who sent a nice big fat project my way back in March has sent me and even nicer, bigger, fatter project this last week, or rather...several project all bundled into one.  The new project is 5 (as in "five") new homes, all of which need to be completed and submitted for permits by the end of June, 8 weeks from now.  It's a TON of work in a very short period of time and he's paying me less than half of my pre-housing-implosion fee, but hey, it's still work and enough money to solve many of my most pressing financial problems, so I accepted the work gratefully.  Four of the 5 houses were started a couple of years ago, so I will be able to pick up where the last drafter left off, saving me quite a bit of time.  Of those 4, there are only 2 distinct floor plans, the other 2 are the same basic plans, just with different elevations, so the plans for them will be very fast to complete.  Only one of the five is a completely new house that will need to be drated up from scratch, from designer sketches through to permit documents.  My client estimates the whole shebang, all 5 houses, at about 300 hours, so I am going to be a busy camper for the next 2 months. 

And it's funny but, it seems that when I'm busy, I am able to find more time to play around than I do when I am idle.  My energy level goes up when I'm working, so rather than this MD going silent while I work on this big new project, it's liable to pick up steam again.

In other RL news, my dental woes have been slowly creeping up on me since last fall and are finally at the point where I can no longer hope to put them off.  The last project paid well enough for me to get started shopping around for dentists and solutions.  I was appalled to learn what everything was going to cost and depressed to realize I was going to have to opt for the lowest cost...and temporary...fixes.  This new contract has put the gap-toothed smile back on my face though, as I will be able now to afford, if not the luxury version of dental care, at least a long term solution.  I have oral surgery scheduled for the 17th of this month...gonna lose the last 3 of my upper teeth.  It's depressing to think about, but it's been a long time coming so I've just about got myself in the mental space I need to be in.  In many ways it will be a gift to have the teeth gone...these past 10-12 years I've been losing my upper teeth at the rate of 1-2 a year and they always give me pain and problems for months before I finally resign myself to having it taken care of.  My upper denture has never fit properly, never meshed well with the smaller lower one, and never matched my remaining upper teeth very well, so besides being uncomfortable to wear, my vanity has been wounded as well, knowing the smile that used to earn me many compliments was so very compromised.  I'm getting both the upper and lower dentures remade completely from scratch, brand new, so they will fit with each other and my smille will (hopefully) return to something I will be proud to flash around. 

So...really, lots of good news this past week. 

The region is coming along slowly, but nicely.  I've filled in the entire lake with the smaller 3x4 cell "water table" tiles, so my shorelines are starting to emerge more realistically.  At the far western edge of the lake, in city tiles A1 and A2, I've also completed plopping the smaller PW tiles, so those areas of the lake itself are complete in terms of water.  I worked quite a while one evening on a small section of lake in A1, creating beaches and planting trees and other flora and am pretty happy with how it turned out.  I'm using a lot of eucalyptus in this area of the region...the soil here is thin and rocky, the elevation is pretty high, and I think of it as a fairly arid area, so the dusty greens and grey seem to work well.  I'm keeping most of the flora near the water and leaving large tracts bare or sparsely planted...I want a dry prairie look. 

My good buddy ecoba/Ethan is working on the lots I requested help with and I am thinking they will be my first built sturctures in this region.  I'd like to completely finish the lake area before I do that though, and it's a slow process.  I'm planting everything manually so far, not using any broad foresting brush tools, and getting the beaches right is also time consuming. 

So stay tuned, folks.  I should have some pics up soon.

Lora/LD

[ecoba]

I'm about done with these lots Lora, which in my terms means a couple more lotting periods on them, but they should turn out great, I hope. The grid limitations of this game tend to bug me, but I've recently found some good fences and SG does have horses, so there will be a corral. I've yet to add campfires or see if I have an appropriate smoke effect, but I'm about to go into the LE in a minute and I'll see.

Well, this whole new job sounds excellent Lora. I'm certainly glad that you have been getting some work because you sound like an excellent architect, and I think that you'll come up with something great for the fifth house; I've currently been working with my parents on their bathroom renovation and helping them with designs and such, and I hope that our final product will turn out nice, as this whole thing is so they can sell their house.

I'm glad to hear that your work is giving you new inspiration, in some words, I suppose. The process of getting some good work done has given me that feeling that you are describing as well. As long as I finish everything I know I need to before I get on SC4D or open up the game I feel like I can get a lot more done in the game.

I've been using a lot of Eucalyptus trees in my region recently, and if you look on the 6th and 7th pages of my MD you see them a lot. I have however, started to not use them as much as they weren't giving me quite the look that they wanted, and they seem like they can be very overdone very quickly, however you may be using different eucalyptus trees than I had been,  so yours may look great. I bet that they will look great whatever way you use them though, you always seem like you have a thing for great natural settings. Are you using any ground flora in this area as well? Yan has been able to make some great dry looking areas in Corsica, and he really uses the brown rye grasses well, I think that they're an excellent asset to any drier areas.

Ethan 

Also, Happy Birthday, my friend.

[ldvger]

Well, it's been almost a month since I stopped by or opened my game, so I figured an update (of sorts) is in order.  No pics and little MD news, tho, so sorry, not yet.

I have been incredibly busy, usually working until 11-12 at night, and when I finally turn to an hour or so of play, I'm just too tired for SC.  Many nights I just zone out behind solitaire until I finally win a game, then I go to bed.

Ethan, meanwhile, has been crafting up some custom lots for me and forwarded his finished product to me earlier this week.  I finally got around to unzipping and installing them this evening and bad news, they are not working for me for some reason.  I have an email off to him so figure out what is going wrong, so hopefully we'll get that figured out. 

I feel badly about being away for so long, but really, I have been slammed.  It's wonderful to have work waiting for me every day after almost 2 years with no work at all, and I have really dived into the projects rather completely.  Besides working, I've also been spending a LOT of time in various dentists' chairs, finally able to address the many and serious issues I had regarding my oral health.  I have almost a month of denatl "time off" before the next round starts, which is good because the work projects are beginning to fall rather badly behind schedule and the next month could be very crazy catching up.  My client's client is very slow at giving my client the approval needed, which means we can't proceed with work or have to jump to another part of the project.  Also, my client is personally slammed, juggling his own work load plus that of his equally slammed staff.  I am often working ahead without authorization, praying I won't have to make too many changes later if I guess wrong, just to keep my end of the process moving forward.  So far that's worked well enough that no one is hollering at me for not getting the work done on time and as promised...and I want to make sure it stays that way.  If we fail to make our June 24th deadline, I want to make sure nobody points a finger at me. 

This new set of work projects has really been a godsend to me.  For the first time in over 2 years I'm not stressing 24/7 about money...I'm maybe down to 16/6.  I'm actually able to afford to go out once in a while, so instead of filling my empty hours in front of the computer, as few as they are, I meet my roommate for a late night drink or rent myself a movie.  I've been able to accept a few social invitations as well, so I'm feeling a lot less isolated and out-of-touch, which is very nice.  But it also goes towards explaining my long absence for both the game and this MD.

Tonite, wanting to finally try out Ethan's new lots, and going back into the game and taking a quick peek at Abajo and reminding myself where I was with it, fired up my want to play again.  I just have one small corner of the most northwest corner of the region planted and ready for humans to move into, but it really looks pretty good to me.  I really do want to try to find some to take some pics and post them here, so hopefully that will happen soon.  No dates or promises, but I will try.

Lora/LD

[RickD]

Hi Lora, it is nice to hear from you again and to know that you are still around. I wish you all the best with your projects.

[ldvger]

Again, not much of an update and no pics, but thought I'd let you know I AM playing and gathering ideas for the next "real" update.

Ethan (ecoba) and I are still working out why the lots he made for me are not displaying correctly in my game.  He had some dependencies I didn't know about and needed to download, but some things are still not showing up, so we'll keep working on it.  What I am able to see so far looks good though, so hopefully when we get all the bugs worked out, you'll all be happy with the results.

I spent about an hour or so the other night working on a new area of the upper lake, adding beaches and trees.  It had been so long since I worked on the first section that I had forgotten which things I had used and how, so this new area of beach looks a little different from the original, but they are close enough to blend together pretty well. 

One of the things I had been missing was scrub and grasses to fill in the areas between the ends of the beach and the start of the trees.  I knew I had downloaded the files I wanted for that, just could not find them in my plug-ins folder.  I have a second, discreet, folder I call "SC4Mods" in the "My Documents" folder that is kinda my default location for all game downloads, so I was finally able to locate some of the files I had been missing and copy them into my plig-ins folder.  I did this last night and ran out of steam before I could test things out and see if I had indeed acquired the files I had been looking for.  I am running out of steam again this evening, but think I have enough left to load the game and see if what I want and need are there, but not much else.

Blending the beaches into the surround landscape is really the last thing I have left to do before taking and posting pics, so please be patient and check back. 

Lora/LD

[marsh]

Good luck. Hope to see some pics soon.

,marsh 

[ecoba]

Hope to see some pictures up soon, Lora. Sorry for the troubles that the dependencies are causing, hopefully the last eMail will solve everything up.

Ethan

[chasespncr]

this seems like one hell of a project.....if i may make a suggestion i think that a delta at the end of the rivers would look great