Arden Tree Controller Help Desk

[rooker1]

Love the road side as well.  A little more variation would be nice, but not absolutely needed.

Robin

[FrankU]

The roadside is beautiful! This thread is called Street Geekery after all, isn't it?
Anyway: I vote against streetside rocks, simply because I would not use it if it had.... I don't use rocks in my Dutch landscapes. You know why.
But shrubberies, a flower here and there, some weeds. That would be great and help us to save time in making nice regions.

[RickD]

I have to agree with Frank here. The shrubs and flowers looks great but the stones are too special to fit in most scenarios.
Anyway, I know I am late, but I love the finished tree controllers. I just started using it yesterday. Once I had a strange bug where all the wrong trees were planted but a reboot of the game solved it. Empire Bay now looks better than ever before. 

[vortext]

Thanks everyone for your comments! Rather than addressing each personally, allow me to ponder the possibilities for the rural street side mod (as that's it name now, apparently ).

While I do share the sentiment for foliage only there simply aren't enough shrubs yet, even though Girafe's latest berries are excellent, so I was looking for more variety / ground cover. Sure, I could add some flora from CP but that would introduce SD items, which I guess also was the reason for being hesitant about Murimk's rocks.

Given the above, I remembered Neko's HD rapeseed props, which are quite excellent for my purposes. Of course Girafe's lupines come to mind as well, but I feel they would clash with the other flowers. Though maybe I could make spring bloom white/yellow and summer red/purple, or the other way around. Anyhow, here's how it looks at the moment.


Fall


Winter


Spring


Summer

Since I've added Neko's flora it has become a little messy so I'll need to do some reshuffling in the LE. However, I actually do quite like the little rocks so they'll most likely stay. Though maybe it could be made optional somehow. 

Moving on to textures then. As indicated a while ago I'm planning a LE set and while overlays and such are ready to be exported, colors still prove difficult because I want them to blend into a number of terrain mods as good as possible.


Maxis


Appalachian


Berner-Oberland


Sudden Valley

As far as I'm concerned it's a pretty decent match to both standard Maxis' and Lowkee's terrain. Gobias' Sudden Valley still looks a bit awkward, not to mention his Berner-Oberland mod. The latter is quite the outlier when it comes to color anyway so maybe I shouldn't focus on it too much. Any thoughts?

And finally the new, new NAM has me excited because of Willy's wonderful work on the streets. It's truly amazing and I wish to take full advantage of it. But of course the standard Maxis' textures are a big no no in my playbook. Therefor;



Color is not final yet. Width is the same as the standard streets but that may change in the future, too. More important is I've finally figured out how to make proper wide curves textures.



 

That's it. Suggestions and ideas are welcome!

[Swordmaster]

Once again you're far too productive for me to keep up with. I love it all, though I have no suggestions to make.

Love the horse tram. In fact I suggested this to Arne but it looks like that's not necessary anymore.


Let me know if you have any other ideas for street RULs.


Cheers
Willy

[Gugu3]

Great job here Vortext!outstanding work with the flora props...nice street texture as well

[Kergelen]

Nice street textures, ideal for old-towns.

I like the street side mod, although there are too many rocks for my taste. IMO darker rocks fits better because seems random, and the group of rocks in round shape seems less natural.

[noahclem]

Excellent work with the "Rural Street Side Mod"! The texture set is also looking very nice. Too bad the SV fit is a little weird but can't please everybody    Beautiful street textures and perfect curve as well!

[FrankU]

Hi Vortex,

Don't you have anything else to do? Each time I take a look at your thread there is something completely new.
The Rural street side mod is great. Maybe you could make the mod in such a way that rock-haters could install some invisible props that overwrite the rockprops? And another: is it possible to make this mod in such a way that it only works on certain SAM streets? Not all? It would be great for rural streets, but not for urbans streets. Right?

The street texture is great! It's perfect for historical streets.

[whatevermind]

This all looks quite amazing, as usual. The rural street side mod is pretty neat. I happen to like the rocks, particularly when you get a string of them together, like it's the ruins of an old low stone wall, slowly succumbed to the overgrowth and the effects of time. Your cobblestone street is looking great as well!

[epicblunder]

...like it's the ruins of an old low stone wall, slowly succumbed to the overgrowth and the effects of time.

There you go: Aubrac stone wall pieces.   

[vortext]

@ Willy, thanks! I'll pass the praise on to Krashspeed! Keep in mind the horsetram is just a prop though. If you can convince Arne to make a horsetram automata, please by all means do so! 

And since you asked for RUL ideas. . 

First of all, the ability to draw intersections from the 90 degree and S curves is rather genius. The resulting street plan flows so organically, gorgeous really and I've vowed to never-ever use an ordinary t-intersection again. 

That said, if it's possible I'd like to have the same ability for the 45 degree wide curve (1). In addition it would be even more awesome if intersections could be drawn from inside of the curve as well (2, this goes for all wide curves). And of course FAR streets would be far out . .   



Anyhow, probably nothing you didn't think of yourself already and I'm more than happy with the current possibilities anyway! 

@ Gugu3, thanks! I'm glad you like it!

@ Kergelen, yep, the new street textures are meant to add some historic character.  As for the rocks, you certainly have a point round clusters aren't all that natural. That said, I do like to have the occasional rock laying around so . . maybe I can find better alternatives. 

@ Noah, yeah, I guess a compromise is inevitable. Thing is, I actually use the SV mod myself . .    Thanks for your kind words!

@ Frank, hehe, keep in mind most of what I've shown thus far is 'proof of concept', so to speak. Whipping up a texture or making a few T21s isn't too hard, not anymore at least. Getting it consistent across the board and ready to ship out. .  Anyhow, I was planning to apply the rural street mod to PEGs dirt and gravel streets, in addition to Trolca's dirt streets, which seems most appropriate to me. As for the rocks, yes, blind props could work too. . 

@ whatevermind, thanks!! I like the overgrown look as well, in fact that's kinda what I was going for. 

@ epicblunder, those have crossed my mind as well. .   

[vortext]

*click for full size*


Widened the texture and cleaned it up a bit. Also played around with different scaling factors. Zone dependency was used as a gimmick in order to see all three variations at once. Although I did wonder if it would be worth the trouble to actually implement it, given it boils down to creating at least more than one texture set.   

[APSMS]

Sorry to bump this thread, but does anyone know, regarding switching tree controllers, when I use the "flora off" cheat, do I need to use it before I switch controllers or can I use it after the fact before I place any trees in a previously occupied tile? (Erasing all of the trees in the cities in my currently active regions is going to take a lot more time than I previously thought,)

Nice textures, by the way.

[vortext]

Sorry to bump this thread

No problem.

does anyone know, regarding switching tree controllers, when I use the "flora off" cheat, do I need to use it before I switch controllers or can I use it after the fact before I place any trees in a previously occupied tile?

My advice would be to err on the side of caution. That is, use 'flora off' while the old tree controller is still in the plugins. Depending on tile size and flora density it may take a while to clear the entire region indeed. Also note the 'flora off' cheat will remove any and all MMPs you may have plopped.

Of course, you could try and see what happens when 'flora off' is used without the tree controller present. My suspicion is the tile will start to experience CTDs somewhere along the line, so please make a back-up before experimenting.

Nice textures, by the way.

Thanks! 

[noahclem]

I'm really (continuing to) like the streets Erik    Perfect detail and goes beautifully with that sidewalk as well. I think I could find a nice place for both in a variety of time periods.

[Swordmaster]

Thanks for the ideas Erik. I already have a 45° curve with intersection all drawn and ready, but I need to get into RUL2 first to complete it. Now the code has been split up I might just be able to do that.

Intersections on the inside of curves are a bit of a specialty, couldn't personally see their use when I thought of them. I'll take a look at the INRULs and see if it's feasible to do.

And we'll keep silent about that last idea, shall we? Although. . . 


Cheers
Willy


PS: Great cobbles!

[vortext]

Thanks Noah! As you correctly noticed I'm aiming for a generic cobblestone texture to fit a variety of players' styles so I'm pretty pleased that comes across. The sidewalk is taken from Gobias' Sidewalk mod btw.

Good to hear the 45 curve has already been taken care of Willy! 

As for intersections at the inside, it serve little purpose for the small 90 degree curve indeed. However, for other two curves I do see advantages to it. Especially at the outermost part of the large 90 degree curve. And I was also wondering if diagonal (outer & inner) intersections would be possible, like so.


Hm yeah, hope it's clear enough .

Glad you like the cobblestone texture! Unfortunately I've had little time lately, though I did improve upon the widecurve texture procedure recently so. . . that's something. 

[Simcoug]

That cobblestone street texture is beautiful - I'd use that in a heartbeat

[Smeel]

I've been using your tree controller for some time, and i't absolutely amazing, it's so well made! As I've written before, I'm using the coast controller to fill spaces where I've want forest that the Inland controller doesn't fill. This made me thinking about the possibility to have more controllers for specific purposes. I have no idea if this is possible, but would it for example be possible to create a controller that is more conifer heavy, be compatible with your other controllers and would fill the map the same way the coast controller do?

And fantastic work on those streets, they look fantastic!