G'day Folks!
Time for an another update, admittedly long overdue. In part because RL has been rather busy lately as I've been promoted at work. Well, sort of that is. The paycheck doesn't reflect the additional responsibilites nor the longer hours but at least I'm of the hook for half the time (pun intented, I'm sure you'll figure it out

). Anyhow, I've also found another area of interest when it comes to modding which I'll get to in a moment but first the street tree mod.
Test reports came back a while ago and in general it was deemed pretty decent. There were (and still are) some restrictions however, which make it a beta release for now.
* trees are applied to SAM 3/4/5. Moreover only one type at a time!
* trees are applied to unzoned and rural streets only. Mostly to avoid compability issues with the original SAM T21s and other mods.
* a shoddy read-me. I'm no good at html. It does link to dependencies though.
Sure this could all be fixed but honestly, I don't feel like it. You see, I didn't think things through beforehand and ended up with no less than 144 T21 examplers just for the trees! I'll spare you the why and how but needless to say it would be pretty tedious to change all exemplar IDs by hand. And given this mod wasn't intended for release in the first place, I rather start out anew and develop a more user friendly mod, along the lines of the SFBT street tree mod which has a rather clever design (= much simpeler

).
Long story short; those who want to give it a try are welcome to do so. It's available for download
over here. Please note I'm not responsible for any unforseen conflicts that may occur but I'll gladly help out if it does. Others will simply have to wait untill a proper version is ready. This may take take a while though because last couple of weeks I've been captivated by something different alltogether.
On second thought, it's not
that different. As you may have noticed I'm a big fan of all things seasonal. After I'd spent a week and half finishing up a medium tile however, I figured something had to give. Either I had to lower the bar and give up on seasonal flora. Or I had to up the ante and figure out a way to get it done faster, i.e. make a seasonal tree controller. Guess what?!
All flora in the pics to follow are done with the god mode brush.

It all started innocent enough; I just wanted to get the shoreline in faster, which was pretty easy.


And while at it, why not throw in some trees.

And what about some shrubs as well.
Actually it was quite a pain to get all the models to show. Which led me to explore the flora placement & spread.


It was at this moment I realized an entire seasonal tree controller would be feasible. Having learned from former mistakes (i.e. losing track of files and settings) I took a step back and prepared for a more systematic approach. First I made an inventory of all seasonal flora available, including their respective RKT4s. Next it was a matter of mix & match and try to create different forest types and find suitable placement. Here're some examples.







This sums things up for now. Keep in mind it's far from finalized. So if you have suggestions which flora to combine, or any comments otherwise, please know feedback is highly appreciated. Thanks for stopping by!
ps: I'm still having ferry troubles, as explained here. Would be nice if someone has a solution.