The Diary of World-Builder - Cypress Lakes

[samoht04]

It looks great Chuckles!

[Chuckles_82]

30/08/2012

Today wasn't especially productive, but taxing on my creative ability. I placed the last community lots today, so they are all now in. I may yet add a couple more residential lots, but they will probably be placed partly on mountainous terrain, so I need to place them once sculpting and painting is complete. I may have to work out who else I would like to put in my world, and start making my custom simmies and their back-stories before I know how many houses I will need. I spent a lot of time looking at the demographics of EA worlds, and trying to work out if adding a large portion of simmies with the 'family oriented' trait will help maintain my sim population beyond a couple of generations.

The taxing part of today's creating was sculpting mountains. I followed the tutorial Krrank wrote on sculpting mountains, and I think it really helped. I have posted a couple of pictures on the showboat thread, so hopefully I get some feedback on how they are looking.

I'm starting to run out of steam again - not sure if that is all the research and hard work on the sculpting - one of my least favourite parts about building a world  - or the kids today being especially demanding. My 2 month old I think had colic, so several hours of screaming tends to do that to you.

And to think, the motivation that got me back here in the first place was the fact that I was sick and tired of pets always hiding out inside while their owners are out. I was thinking about building my pet-friendly houses with most (not all) of the pets being outdoor pets, and locking the house doors to disallow pets. And, I still haven't even started building a single house!

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Several hours later, and much too late in the night...

My first house for this world - government housing which will be opposite the school:





Furnished it is worth §22, 775
Unfurnished §16,235

[Chuckles_82]

31/08/2012

Well, I had so much fun last night making my first real build since I finished Summerset Isle before Christmas. I have now made all four 'government housing' homes. For one of them I drew on the decor and colour scheme of a previous build (A Better Home and Garden - available on my downloads page), but toned it down a whole heap, because I'm trying hard to use minimal objects. I'm about to put that one in game to test just now, because I made some garden beds that I am especially proud of, and would like to see if they will actually work. It would be a shame if they don't.

Here are all four houses - opposite the school. There seems to be a trend in towns near me to put government housing near schools and other facilities. I guess to make transport easier or not necessary. All but one of these houses has very limited yard space, but modelled on my current neighbourhood, that is a normal sized block. The bigger, richer houses in the other quarter will have much more yard space.


From left to right: Simply Sweet, Itty Bitty Blues, Lavender-Fresh and The Budget Bunch (yes, it has room for 6 kids)


And here are my garden beds:



Inside one of the houses:


I've made this one a little bit more modern. Although all of the houses were 'built at the same time' and have been built from similar materials that the builder could get a good deal on in bulk, each house has little bits that personalise it. My goal with this house was to try and fit 4 bedrooms on  15x20 lot.

I might have a look at school designs in EA worlds later this afternoon/evening and get started on the school/stadium lot.

[DeLouche]

Those raised beds are really cute - I'm impressed you managed to get the edges (of the raised soil) so sharp.

Place is looking great! You've got a real knack for decorating a place simply yet imaginatively.

[Chuckles_82]

Thanks DeLouche - the trick is actually using a platform, brown flooring, and the fee fi foe fence on the edges (you have to paint the platform edges before you place the fence, or it won't paint for some reason) I used MOO to put the plants on there. And, after trialling the idea, success!!



I had to make the bed a little larger so that my sim had room to route to each plant, but the concept works! Woohoo! I probably won't put trees in garden beds later on, but I'm very happy with that little bit

Thanks for the compliment on the building too I haven't done as much with the structure of these houses, as in real life they would be rented, and you can't alter rented houses. Also this kind of government housing is usually fairly uniform, and cheaply made - so I kept most things that way. Unfurnished these houses would be nearly entirely all the same materials (except for a few trick rugs here and there).

[Chuckles_82]

31/08/2012

I just had the best idea for the name and theme for my Cat Jungle: CYAN CAT!! I was actually trying to think of names for the Government housing I just built. I've named 3 so far. Naming things is not one of my strong suits. So, as you might guess, this particular house has some cyan coloured features, and by playing with words in my head that just popped out! Because naming things and writing descriptions is such a chore, I'm doing it as I go this time. And keeping a copy of it all if for some reason it doesn't export properly. That way it will all be ready to go if I need to upload lots separately.

Ok. Moving on to fixing those mountains a little. I think I'm happy with the shape of them now. And I figured the only way to tell properly now will be with paint. So, following Krranks mountain tutorial, I painted my mountains. Instead of adding sand though, I added some Hidden Springs textures, and I also filled in the valleys a little with the dark blue-green grass on about 5 opacity. It was looking really good. And then I decided to move onto the river. Did I save? No. Did I screw it up? Yes. Do I have to do it all again? Yes. Now to try and work out what is going wrong with painting the river. It's getting too late, again, though. Off to bed, and maybe more tomorrow if the kiddiewinkles and hubby let me. Hubby tends to get rather annoyed if I spend waaay too long on sims too many days in a row. I've been ok so long as I balance it with doing things around the house that save him doing them.

[Chuckles_82]

01/09/2012


Today I re-sculpted the mountains I had fixed yesterday (but didn't save) and re-painted the mountains. This time I also dug out the 'white' texture and added a very small amount of that on just the tops of the tall mountains. I set the opacity to 2. I painted the river successfully, so it seems the trouble I had with the brush dropping out was just CAW being buggy. I also painted a bit of brownish grass on the edges of the roads, and added a very faint layer of dark blue green grass to the whole lot, which helped to blend the brown grass in better. To do all this I removed all my lots, and when I was done, I put them all back in again, in more or less the same order.




Somewhere in there I experienced my first texture being replaced by brown yuck. I'd seen mention of it before in all my research, so I looked it up, found the fix, and added that to the resource list.

Other than that I haven't got a whole lot done. I spent nearly the whole middle of the day catching up on forum stuff. My next step will be to start work on buildings. I new patch came out, which modifies the spawners, so I'm going to have to wait until I know what's changed before I start adding spawners.

We had a fuse go today - hubby was boiling the kettle. I don't know what else we had on that's not normally on all together to overload it, but the computer shut down. Luckily I was at a point where I had saved everything, so the only think I lost was all the tabs that I had open, so no biggie.

[saltpastillen]

I just wanted to say I'm following your progress and it looks great so far. I understand how tiering it can become when you don't see much progress despite a lot of hard workl (shaping mountains) but the result is truely impressive.

Also, everyone looking forward to downloading the world will be super happy you preservered and named and described each and every lot.

I like the small yards and cheap looking housing. It's nice to be able to afford a roomy house if you want to move in a CAS family that has a couple members at the start of the game. I for one sometimes enjoy playing poor sims.

[Chuckles_82]

02/09/2012

Today was surprisingly productive. I ended up adding some more paint to my mountains. A few bits of the paler colour on the top (white) was looking sloppy, and I realised that I really had been a bit too liberal with the green (thanks *someone* for the pointer in the showboat thread). The mountains have more definition now.

I also added a walkway along the edge of the lake, which passes through the main park and the beach lots. Making the path curve through the park was a little tricky, but I think I've made it look very sweet, and managed to disguise most of the hard corners. Here are some shots:




Here I have used the 'exit' sign recoloured to make it look a bit like male/female signs for the loos. I didn't use the discriminatory male/female doors, because I hate those. I hate not being able to recolour the horrid orange on it, and I hate the route failure tantrums my sims have when I forget which one is which, because you can't tell with walls down. For the BBQs I made the lot a residential lot in Edit In Game (EIG), used  MOO to place them between the outdoor counters from Pets, and made them all nicely stainless steel, as I've seen in parks with newer facilities. Back in CAW I changed the lot back to community, then once again in EIG placed the community picnic tables and bins.



There is no 'P' square for the proprietor to be found in buymode, but upon testing, the proprietor shows up anyway. There are 4 squares there for crowds, but for some reason they don't show in EIG.


A night time shot

[Audren]

I like the mountains, Chuckles! It gives the town an isolated, yet cozy feel. Is the park a Showtime-park? (as in, where performers can perform)

[Frey]

I love that "gate" (I have no idea what that's called in english LOL) in the park! I mean, the white thingie with white columns and plants above.

[Gogowars329]

I like the mountains, Chuckles! It gives the town an isolated, yet cozy feel. Is the park a Showtime-park? (as in, where performers can perform)

As pretty sure it is as Chuckles mentioned a P for Proprietor and the crowd spots.

You usually can't see the crown spots anyway and even without the P, the proprietor still spawns. I think the P just shows where they are meant to stand or something.

I really love the park. I'm really enjoying watching the town build up little by little.

[Chuckles_82]

Aww  thanks guys

Gogo is right, it is indeed a park where performers can well, perform.

Frey, I guess you might call it an arch.

Audren, I hadn't actually explicitly thought about how the atmosphere should be, but you are absolutely right. That was where I was unconciously aiming. Perhaps I should add that at the start to the planning stage, so readers doing their own worlds can think about it too.

My last addition for the day - Capitol Plaza. I may yet change it a bit - as it is it underwent 3 different designs already! One was too modern (sigh... I like modern), the other was too Asian.  This is almost just right.





It might look like there are 5 car spaces, but like EA have done in a couple of towns, I've only actually put in 2 car spaces from buy mode. That way, the game won't spawn too many extra cars, hopefully.

[Chuckles_82]

Ok, maybe one more. I've had an idea I wanted to try, and to make it work properly, I think I need an opacity map that makes a sidewalk completely invisible. On one side, my driveway entry looks great!



On the other side, however, I have this problem:



I'm hoping it won't cause routing issues, but if I make the sidewalk for that road type invisible, then I can place another sidewalk underneath, that is the right texture. It won't place over the top for some reason.

[Chuckles_82]

03/09/2012

Well, so much for that idea. I think something I just read squelched it totally. It still might be useful on streets where you have houses and their driveways in exactly the same place on either side of the road, but it's hardly realistic. Apparently the double strip of sidewalk drives the routing nuts. I had a feeling it might, but wanted to at least get to the testing stage and try it for myself. At some point I realised that AP must have used terrain paint to make their sidewalks seem wider.

Unfortunately I can't do that with mine without creating my own texture, because when used as terrain paint, the sidewalk tiles are much larger. I would actually like to get into editing some textures (and rabbitholes!) but I need to install photshop on my computer and get the dds plugin for it. There is a plugin for GIMP, but I haven't updated it yet, and it looks complicated to install.

There are so many things I would like to use it for! Well maybe not that many all up, but I've already thought of some things. For starters, it's possible to edit the paintings that your sims make. How cool would it be to put your own kids' drawings in? Or even your own paintings. Also, I'd like to extract some of the photos that my sims take for use in stories. Hmm... does CAP open dds files? I'm going to have to check that! I might even be able to use some of the CAW textures and convert them to patterns. Then I could use the same pattern that makes the sidewalk tiles on my lots!

I'm off to play around with CAP and then back to world building! yay!

Laugh out loud! While I was researching invisible sidewalks, I read about someone's problem with road clipping, and found out about the 'smoothen road' tool. I either forgot about it, or didn't notice/know about it until now. And to think I spent forever trying to shape the terrain to fit my road throught the mountains! All I needed was that tool. I have smoothed the road 'leaving' town now (It leaves via a train tunnel placed so that the tracks are hidden just under the terrain, and the road goes into the tunnel). Hmm... come to think of it, that could cause routing issue too... drats.

Ah well, here it is all fixed up.