Hi everybody!
Wow, almost 1,5 years since the last post. Well-well. As usually RL always overrides the plans, and plans are overriding plans as well. But I guess, I just wanted to give a heads up here, what's going on recently with my projects. In the past 2 years I have been member of the NAM Team and helping them out with network paths and feature tests, also one year ago finally I (with the help, support and contribution of Corinamarie and CycloneBoom Simtropolis Admins) managed to launch a second account which is called
STEX Custodian.
Long story short in community wise I have a couple of longterm ongoing organization and restoration projects: Project-ZIP (at first phase it mostly covers the LEX *exe installer based contents),
SimcityPolska Restoration,
WMP Restoration, the Paeng's Stashbag and some other mostly smaller legacy upload projects.
Besides these I haven't given up on lotting and modding, I still have like more than a dozen of unreleased stuffs from the past 2 years, not to mention other started but never finished projects.
In most of the cases the big hold back is my own dependency package called
Heretic Essentials. Since with almost every kind of lotting work what I started I added something to the Heretic Essentials and I never had a fully finished set, also in the past few months I revisited the structure of it and while I kept adding new stuffs I also separated it and have taken out some other stuffs from the pack. Currently I'm working on a bunch of custom UI/query for my old and new lots, because I also started revisiting my old uploads (Seaport Project, IRM walls, GLR stations etc...).
Now, since I'm always in and out of projects it has a slow process. Once I'll finish these custom UI/Queries and will be able to start updating the lots with them, the new Heretic Essentials will be good to go. And after that I can release most of my shelved lotting projects.
Anyway here is a few example, what I was working on in the past 1-2 years.
1. In my last post I was really appreciating
Girafe's help with the blended parking cars, which was created to cover my set-up based on
kingofsimcity's overlay textures. Well a few months ago I decided, that I would give a try to BAT/GMAX after I found a bunch of nice car models on a free model warehouse. Also earlier to help me out,
Fantozzi sent me a few car models from his stashbag. Well I tried to combine these different sources and made a bunch of experiment with recoloured car models placed onto my set-up. Well while Girafe is a professional BATter and might have a slightly more powerfull machine than mine (or just managed to keep the poly count low enough for nice renders), my models appeared to have too high poly count to be able to be rendered at once, so I needed to cut them half. Which actually turned out well, because I got more variations for prop families, which was the whole reason in the first place.



2. As the above GLR station the next one is also part of the never released Urban GLR Set vol. 4. (it hasn't been releaseed, because at that time I was still waiting for someone to make those blended parking cars, now I'm waiting for myself to finish the Heretic Essentials. By the way the blended parking cars and some other car models - created by
Barroco Hispano (former Goldman Sachs and other aliases - will be part of the next Heretic Essentials)
With this station I contined to experiment the possibilities of underground network paths, which can be compatible with the current FLUP (Flexible UnderPasses) Puzzle Pieces set-ups. I love this concept and keep experimenting with this. (at the end of this post you will see a new addition which actually will be released pretty soon).

3. Last summer I revisited one of my cities (I've hardly played with the game since jan. 2019) due to a massive station and rail network rework and I found to need a new 5x5 plaza. I wanted some special stuff on it. And Simmer2 was just about to release his Scrabo tower. So I made a plaza around the building and then I spread a bunch of timed props on it just for fun and to increase the possible amount of dependencies when I release this. Also I decided to make an other plaza and then I remembered that a fellow SC4 player a year or 2 ago asked me to make a lot based on one of
RedDonQuixote Urban HD props. Now these things led to these 3 plaza lots, what I've created since last summer.
Heretic Scrabo Tower Plaza (based on SM2 Scrabo Tower)

Heretic Windmill Square (based on SM2's windmill model and prop, but also using RDQ's urban HD props)

Heretic Simlacroix Plaza

4. Also it happened on last (2019) summer, that I got involved one of Tariely's massive relotting project. This time she planned to relot SimcityFuturist's Regional Airport (modular set).
TL-SCF-Heretic Modular Regional Airport 
5. Recently the things with NAM speeded up a bit, which resulted the release of a new rail-monorail based network called
Hybrid RailWay (
HRW) -
you can read my how-to tutorial about it over here. The whole network, the platform props, catenaries and wires and textures were created by
eggman121. As there is a kind of approach now in the Team, that we would include the batteries with any kind of new networks (in this case at least a first set of stations), I made two stations for the HRW network which is included to the NAM. At a later time I'm gonna share my findings about, how to TE mod these kind of stations to get the proper result and avoid some missbehaviour.

6. And finally. An other fellow SC4 player asked help regarding and old morifari GLR tunnel OST. It gave me the idea to try to make it FLUP compatible so underground trams and FLUPs could use it. It is pathed and fully UDI enabled. Also as the original version, this provides GLR-to-Subway transition too.

The placement is a bit tricky:




Ok, so that's it for now.
- Tyberius