The Diary of World-Builder - Cypress Lakes

[bubbles]

I love your discos and clubs! I tend to ignore them in Bridgeport, but I will definately use them more once Cypress Lakes is finished (I will definitely be downloading it as soon as it is linked from the Swap Shop!).

[Chuckles_82]

I love your discos and clubs! I tend to ignore them in Bridgeport, but I will definately use them more once Cypress Lakes is finished (I will definitely be downloading it as soon as it is linked from the Swap Shop!).

Thanks bubbles I do too I suppose - and they don't really fit in the other towns, so I don't play them that much either. The only one that I use regularly is the Vampire bar from Union Cove, because it is much more versatile.

Unfortunately I still wasn't quite happy with the pub. Agneza gave me some really helpful tips, and also noticed a few things that I wasn't quite happy with, so I decided to remodel the whole thing. I think my problem was that I was trying to blend too many styles together. This time, I googled some images of Aussie pubs, plus a specific pub/restaurant. I've come up with something I like much better (naiiiled it!):







I've tied in the stone from the Vault of Antiquity and Library, so I've got balance with the other parts of town. Kind of like a painting, I think, If I have a colour in one part of my painting, I need to pick up bits of it in another part of the painting. Now fingers crossed that the bikes stay where they are and don't disappear, because they are hanging off the lot just a little.

[Chuckles_82]

Ok, the vampire lounge has been a very loong project, mostly because I kept scrapping what I had and starting again, because I didn't like it. Getting down to the last few buildings only makes it that much more difficult to make them fit in. Before I could move things around if they didn't fit right. Now, I have to make sure they're right exactly where they are. I'm not entirely sure on the black, but it's the style is almost exactly the same as the Princess of Wales bar:






(the recolour for the theatre has not yet been added to the .world file, also, never mind the MF vampire bar plopped down on the Dynasty lot while I made sure I had everything I needed)






I pinched the skeleton idea from somewhere else, because it was just so awesome! This lot was also a good excuse to use some of my lace patterns.

I'll be plopping down some cypress trees at the back of the lot in that gap there - it looks a little empty.

[saltpastillen]

I love the interior but agree that the exterior looks to dark black. Could you change it to a lighter grey? Or maybe change the texture so that it's not just a relentless black that sucks all the light from vicinity?  You have a lot of light grey i that street. I think you'll have to go lighter if you want it to fit in.

[Chuckles_82]

Haha I love how you put that - sucks all the light - it does that, doesn't it! It makes it looks like there is a missing pattern. I've switched the black for white, and the wall, which was already panelled (though you couldn't see it too well), now has the top half brick, the bottom half white panelling, and a white detailed cornice.

[saltpastillen]

Haha I love how you put that - sucks all the light - it does that, doesn't it! It makes it looks like there is a missing pattern. I've switched the black for white, and the wall, which was already panelled (though you couldn't see it too well), now has the top half brick, the bottom half white panelling, and a white detailed cornice.

Glad I could help with some feedback

[bubbles]

I think the black looks quite nice, although I do think it would fit better in a dark greyish colour. Well, there's only one way to find out...

[So tempting to type FIGHT! But I won't as few people would have a clue what I am talking about.]

[Chuckles_82]

Today I mostly finished building the pool. I now have to wait for Island Paradise. It will have a pool fountain, waterslide, and pool bar. I think I may also need to make a dock and an underwater lot. The underwater lot will go under the waterfall, I think. It just seems a fitting place for a treasure chest (too much Oblivion?) Naturally it won't have all the pretty coral, but perhaps some rocks and weeds.

The other thing that I have to wait for, is a patch for CAW, and HOPE that they fix the problem. Since 1.5 patch, I can't unpause the game in EIG. This means that I can't run error trap to clean up the file. It was starting to take a reallly long time to save, and EIG is getting quite laggy. I figured a clean-up would help.

Other than that, I'm down to my 'final checklist' before importing the population. My final checklist includes:

- check each individual lot for:
* ceilings
* set front door
* lock doors I don't want accessible
* set front of lot
* adequate lighting, and set intensity
* terrain under all foundations is dirt
* name, description and address
* make sure all names use the same punctuation. All residential lots will have the suffix " x BR, X BA" to show how many bedrooms and bathrooms.

- get a good shot of the front of every lot if I don't already have one
- write a list of all EPs and SPs used for each lot
- rebuild routing data
- check routing paint

So, VERY SOON, my friends, Cypress Lakes, will. be. finished!!

[saltpastillen]

I'm so excited! I hope they get that CAW patch done soon, so you can clean it up and be able to tweak those last few things without massive lagging.

An underwater lot under the waterfall sounds like a great idea!

[Chuckles_82]

I've decided to do some more play-testing the mean-time, to cut down on what I have to do once it's complete. The world exported fine, so I can go around and test all my new lots. So far I haven't had too many issues - I forgot to align the lift in the dance club on the basement level after I redid the fire escape stairs, but that's no biggie. It only needed moving back a space, and there was nothing stopping it. A little bit of paint here and there, a few object fixes where MOO has made them inaccessible.

I ran error trap in the exported file, and it actually didn't pick up too many things. There were only a few Core Forwarder objects, but quite a lot of deleted bookshelves. I don't know entirely what to make of it, since I'm not especially familiar with the mods, but from what I can gather it's not a biggie. All in all there were 72 instances.

[saltpastillen]

72 seems pretty low to me, I have read of worlds that had over 500. But they were large worlds, so maybe that'll make a difference.

[bubbles]

I'm so excited now! As Salt said, EA really need to hurry up with that Create-A-World update. It must be really tedious for you just waiting, and waiting, and waiting for that patch. Good luck with the final touches.

[ladybug53]

Good luck with your final touches Chuckles ! This must be so exciting for you . What an accomplishment ! Your world is so beautiful . I love all the work you've done on those buildings . Brilliant !

[Chuckles_82]

Thanks guys! It's so exciting to be this close. Waiting is hard, but I'm making sure I make good use of that time. I have a small notebook - about half an A4 page size, and I filled two pages of fixes yesterday while play-testing. Today I went around implementing most of those fixes. There's one I'm still looking into - problems with the stage on my private venue, and some that I can't change until right before export. I got those ready though. I did the test-export very quickly, and I grabbed an outdated version of 3 recolour files, so I tracked down where my finished copies were, and have those ready to go.

I added addresses to all of the lots today, and Beautiful Vista to some lots. After looking around at what EA have, the highest I saw was 50, so the Dynasty lot will have a +50 BV bonus!

I am altering the pet pool for Cypress Lakes to only have one wild horse - I'm not sure if it's normal, but the wild horses seem to be having all sorts of routing issues, and that can cause lag. I don't want the horses gone altogether - someone might want one for some reason. There'll still be one Unicorn, too. Additionally, there'll only be one deer. Hopefully those changes should reduce the load on the game.

I am running error-trap and overwatch for initial testing. I joined NRAAS wiki this morning, and am just waiting for membership confirmation so that I can upload my logs for analysis - make sure that there's nothing sinister in there. That will at least show me if there is anything I can change before I do the proper clean-up when CAW is fixed.

One especially good thing - when I loaded the game for the first time, I did it with a factory reset, and only the free plant I used, and my patterns. It didn't tell me certain objects were replaced, which means (I think) I was successful in excluding store content.

After I have run through 5 or so generations (gee it's hard to not use the birthday cake!), I'll start over without the mods, and see how I go. I'm not sure if overwatch fixes the rabbithole opportunity issue, but I've completed all of the logic opportunities without any issues (I looked them up in the code to make sure I got them all. I'll do the same for the other skill ones, too).

Anyhows, back to the play-testing!

[ladybug53]

Good luck Chuckles ! It sounds like you know what your doing . That's a very big project you've tackled and it's almost finished . You're amazing !