(I think the first question on your survey should read 'do you currently play an instrument' not 'have you ever'. All the rest of your questions read as if you assume that if you 'ever' you 'are'.)

What with CAW being all touchy right now for most people, I'm amazed that ANY creator is getting anything done on their worlds. And while I would LOVE to see more pictures from Seacrest.... I also don't want to see Reyes pushed onto the backburner so close to it's finish. Although I totally understand the need to just take a break and do something a little different now and then to get the creative oomph going again. Also, don't risk your grades over trying to get an update out to us. We'll still be here!

I'm going to have to go back through the pictures to find the lot you're talking about before I make a agree/disagree/love click on the seasonal lot suggestion. My mind went to static noise when I tried to think of which lot that was.

Wow! You are doing Point Reyes, California? That's my BACKYARD! (I grew up in the Bay Area part of California) I was looking for your neighborhood map - where is it?

Did you make Johnson's Oyster farm on the oceanside inlet leading to the penninsula?

From the pictures I've seen so far.... Your houses are a good mix of Victorian and modern beach bungalow. They usually have fences between the street and the backyards and everything is overgrown for privacy. Lots of shrubs and pine trees in the wind protected gulleys and lee side of hills.

There should be a lot more windswept shrubs along the rocky coasts. The trees are also windswept because the regular winds come off the ocean all the time. The wind is normally strong and it's usually cold and foggy in summer so add some weather enhancements. The best windswept looking trees are Monterey Cypress


This particular picture does not want to be linked but click on it. It's a beautiful shot of a cypress shaded road The trees look like giant bonsai/ . http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdgood...82238/lightbox/

There should also be a lighthouse on the end of the penninsula on the rocky edge of the cliff.


Good job so far. Oh. No one lives right on the sand facing the Pacific because the winter storms will wash the house away. Move them up the cliff a bit or over to Tomales Bay which is protected by tall hills.

Oh! Seasons... S.F. Bay Area part of California has a dry summer and a wet winter. You can get so much rain in winter that the hills sag and fall downhill. It rarely snows and when it does, it kills all the imported plants and trees like eucalyptus. The snow may stay on the hilltops in February but melts off below 1000 feet.

Point Reyes National seashore is a prime place to birdwatch. The birds migrate through there. There are deer and elk on then penninsula and raccoons and skunks. There are no redwoods on the penninsula but on the mainland side is Samuel Taylor Redwood state park.

Please remember to place a lot of waves along your rocky coastlines. The open oceanside beaches and rocky coast is always windy and lots of waves -

I can't test this for you because I have the latest Season patch but I look forward to playing this world.

Words cannot describe the amount of eye for detail and the realistic set up of Reyes County has In this stunning Custom made world.
This will be in a class of its own based on Beta 6.

All the best with your studies, hopefully we can all be patient waiting for this stunning world by Ouerbacker.

Stunningly beautiful!

Ouerbacker, I tried to do your survey but it says it's closed - I hope that means you got enough people to fill it out for you already.

Also? I don't mind seeing a "non-update" update, because it means you're still around and you haven't abandoned Reyes. Unfortunately RL has to take priority sometimes!

Yes, that's how I should have phrased it. Unfortunately, by the time I saw your post, I had about 48 hours until I needed to turn the paper connected with it in. Somehow, I lucked out and got an A in that class.



Now that I'm thinking about things, I'm pretty sure that I never put a picture of that parking up. So, it's no mystery that you didn't know what I was talking about.



Wow, you're keeping track of the BETAs better than me.



Yes, enough people had taken my survey by then that I felt it was time to stop it.



It's good to know that you feel that way. Though this might sound quite foolish, I was a little worried that everybody would become upset and have this thread locked due to off-topic posting by the original poster, me. Fortunately, that dream didn't become a reality.



This world is more of a reinterpretation than a replica of Point Reyes. Since the area is very uninhabited and quite huge, mine is built on a 1/12-16 scale, many things are not at all right. Also, here's an overview.








No, I didn't even know that existed. If I had seen that place when I was there a few years back, I'm sure it would have made its way into Reyes, but it's a little late now.



I've tried to get the look of those trees, but Ea has not created anything that quite works and I'm to lazy to figure out how to mesh trees. The weather will be looked into last.




I kinda have that.




I agree with this. Unfortunately with how I've laid it out, there are no other good places to put houses. My idea with the houses was to take Stinson Beach, a place down the coast about 20 miles, and put it in place of the desolate beach located at that spot on the true reyes.



This will be taken into consideration once the map if fully done.



I need to add some of those bird spawners in. The forested area will be located far away from the playable section of Reyes, somewhere way off in the distant terrain.


After reading your post, I started trying to get the proper illusion of waves. Since simearth has no such things as vibrations, which would naturally be called waves, the illusion of waves is hard to get.

How does this look?






Actually, you could test it on that patch.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Okay, it took me a while to answer all those questions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is that parking lot I was talking about a few weeks back. If you think it'll be the perfect place for seasonal festivities, hit the agree button at the bottom. However, in the case you think it would be terrible for that purpose, hit the disagree button.


new barn stuff- unfinished





terrain's done - now it's DT time



Just earlier today I started trying to get rid of the repetitiveness of the grass texture. While I've just started in on this, it's already making a difference. So far, I've only edited the darkest and brightest grass textures. Once they are all done, the repetitive lines should be much less noticeable.

- look at the bright yellow grass

with changes


without changes


Just a small note. I have not looked over or edited this wall of text, so there are probably a few statements that don't makes much sense.

Oooh, the parking lot from the painting tutorial! Hm, I suppose it would work as well as any spot, although I don't get a real 'festival spot' vibe from it.

I found it in an overview picture on page 18 (quoted below), which is good because from the closeup example picture it did look a bit far away from everything. The overview suggests that it's close enough to the downtown. It would make a fantastic farmer's market spot, so it's not that far of a stretch to add festival stuff.

Although if you'd ever gotten that pier idea to work, that would be the preferred spot in my mind.

Out of curiosity, are you 3d modeling your own DT, or are you just repainting an existing EA one to match? I can't remember if you've said.

Liking the subtle terrain paint change, and the 'foam' around the rocky beach.

Imagine what the world would've looked like if you kept going on with this:

Yeh, I guess it doesn't quite have the most festive feel to it. For now, I'd say the pier's out of it, but I've also considered putting the lot on the beach beside the pier, thus it would be right next to the miniature tourist trap boardwalk area.




Yes, the DT will be a full new mesh and textures. My initial hopes were that I could reuse one of EA, but they just are not designed for a peninsula shaped world.

This is how I plan to create it.

1 - sculpt and paint terrain miniature version in CAW

2 - export grey-scale map and turn in into a 3d object, already tested.

3 - fine tune mesh in either blender or 3dxmax - get the poly count down to something understandable.

4 - use low-quility world textures automatically created from caw - might try to use high quality if low quality looks terrible.

5 - put it all together

6 - hope it looks okay




I'm glad you like it



Everybody would be complaining of lag. In that picture alone, there were 2500 plants.

I think another way of doing distant terrain is to set it up as a giant grid. This is what EA did with its China world. You can make a topographic/elevation map which you can load as a texture. In the texture coordinate editor of Milkshape, you can select the vertices you want to move up or down. Your texture can be loaded into the texture coordinate editor and be used as a reference as you select the vertices. After you select the vertices, go back to the Milkshape main screen and choose move, You simply want to move these vertices along the Y axis and you can select the amount you move it by -- this may take some experimentation and fine tuning. Then go back to the texture coordinate window and select more vertices, and make the appropriate changes. Just work on the Y axis and don't worry about the X and Z axis.

Also, keep in mind that you do not have to do the distant terrain as one piece. You can do it as many pieces and slide each piece into position. This has the advantage that each piece can have its own texture. So instead of cramming one texture on the distant terrain, you can actually have different textures for each part. Of course this probably means loading each section into CAW separately. (It is possible to combine the different parts into one object, with each part having its own texture. But this is a finicky process.) It just depends on how detailed you want or need your distant terrain to be. Another advantage of doing it in pieces is that it is much easier to see what you are doing.

Of course, there are different techniques for making distant terrain, and none are particularly right or wrong. I made a distant terrain simply by cutting and pasting pieces of other distant terrains, but I think if I were to do it again, I would do something along the lines of what I suggested above.

And I hope that this is not as clear as mud!

For your original plan, you might look at this tutorial showing how to make a 3d image from a Grayscale in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended. I'd sort of be interested in knowing how this works for making Sims 3 distant terrain. If it does work, it would seem that using 3d real world data could be converted relatively easily into distant terrain, taken from something like Google maps. Ideally, you would want elevation data but also the satellite data which could be used on the texture. Perhaps a better link: http://photoshop-tutorials.wonderho...hop-cs4-258637/

That's helpful High Plains Gamer. Before I get into the dt, everything else, aside from the ini, should probably be done, so that's what's being worked on right now.


Returning to an idea I had about a year ago, I though it would be interesting to see how the grass terrain paint would look if it was smaller. In some ways I think it looks better, but in others I believe it looks worse. Since I'm unsure about which is better, I'm going to leave the decision up to all of you. Since shrunk down pictures can at times be deceiving, you'll have to download the file to look at it. For something as central as the grass, it's best to see how it look ingame from a playing viewpoint.

Not being a true beta, this file is about a week old version of Reyes with different grass textures.

bizarre installation method

for installation - put in mydocuments/electronic arts/sims/installedworlds

because this is all about the grass textures, there's no need to have any of the special reyes cc


If you like the smaller grass hit disagree, but if not, hit funny.

disagree=newgrass funny=oldgrass - buttons below


download link

http://www.mediafire.com/?conk0usjjbsjzed

other random stuff

Looks incredible!

I hope though that the distant terrain that you create has the tips of San Francisco landmarks (Golden Gate, Transamerican Pyramid, misc skyscrapers ) peeking across the bay and behind the hills- I know this isn't realistic, but it would really help orient people not familiar with the area. And of course, you've said that this is an interpretation, not a recreation

This is actually quite doable. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge and TransAmerica tower already exist as deco items. There also are many deco skyscrapers. It's really just a matter of downloading and installing them -- then sliding them onto the distant terrain where you want them. Incredibly easy -- actually.

I tend to view a world with its distant terrain as one great big canvas. Which means that the distant terrain is not something added as an after thought, but is an integral part of the world.

There is so much one can do with distant terrain to give a world a unique character. You can stick mountains on it which are much higher than anything you could build in the world itself. I mean, these mountains can be truly mamoth. For example, if you wanted to make a Nepalise town (eg, something like Lukla) with Mt. Everest looming in the background, you could do it. Similarly, you can have distant cities, farms, airports and other items. In fact, it seems that some things, like airports, which are not functional in game, are better placed on the distant terrain, especially when one realizes how big airports really are.

Then one uses optical tricks and non-routable terrain paint to blur the boundaries where the world ends and the distant terrain begins.

It just seems the vast majority of world builders simply ignore this aspect of world building, or content themselves with plopping down an EA terrain.

That's because most world builders aren't 3d modelers at the same time. If there was a Distant Terrain Creator tool, sure, we'd all make one. But I don't think that many people want to learn a new set of skills for one final detail on a world that otherwise doesn't need those skills. And I'm sure it's like any odd hobby, where someone looks over your shoulder and says "I could never do that" when it's really not that hard. However, any new skill is an investment in time and tools and we aren't all equally prepared for that.

And in other news, I can't get the world to show up on my list of installed worlds. It's in the right spot, I have to do this with the one I'm working on too. It just... isn't on the list? I'll try again with a fresh download tonight after work.

Ouer hits himself on the head a few times for accidentally giving faulty instructions.

It seems that Reyes doesn't want to install into that installedworlds file the way it should, but it does install into the EP world file location. I don't quite know why it works one way and not the other, but , eh, I guess that's how it wants to work.

the new spot to put the file - remember to unzip or extract it

sims install directory/any sims 3 game/gamedata/shared/nonpackaged/Worlds

Right now, I'm uploading another , with changed grass, beta of Reyes, which will install the normal way.

link http://www.mediafire.com/?r8v9l64o4z8c30q

We're going to move the voting down to this post for the grass, since I kind of messed up on the last one.

these are different than on the previous post.

agree - new grass / helpful - old grass


edit

Also, there are a lot of new lot descriptions for those who download the file above. Since a number of them were written when I wasn't exactly in an awake state, could you all over them and point out any errors, bad grammar or confusing description.

I've downloaded the beta and tried it out. I wasn't playing for long but I sadly got lots of laggs and freezes

The fly-over is awesome, BTW!

That's not good. What patch level are you on, and which EPs do you have?

In other words, you are calling them lazy.

I have AMB, LN, SHT, Pets, Seasons & WA installed, patched to 1.42.

I have the impression you like to know. I have installed your last file the launcher way. Prepared to see if it's lagging a lot. Robbing some of your lots to build on and playtest. We'll see how it goes. How did you manage to make a working export to be installed like before Season's?

I'm patched 1.42 and have World Adventures, Ambitions, Late Night, Generations, Pets, Showtime, Supernatural, Seasons, High-End Loft, Outdoor Living, Town Life.

You should definitely find some lag. After about three hours of testing I found one building that couldn't even be entered. Past the initial getting into the building stage, I also found the bathrooms were unroutable.

you might want to consider updating to this beta.

http://www.mediafire.com/?7g8lzle44c2tfdd



It would be nice to see what you build. Since I know my buildings do not suite everybody's playing style or architectural preference, when somebody builds in one my worlds, I always like to see how it looks.


On my world building computer, I'm still on the first supernatural patch.

I really love the theme and the scenery is just breathtaking. I also played the latest beta and I must admit I expected lag because my laptop's not the best, but it was actually quite smooth. The only problem I have is the slow rendering of the objects and buildings but I guess it's not related. I also played with one of the lots and redecorated it to look a little more like a country club.

Once again you're doing an amazing job! I can't wait to see it finished.

EDIT: I noticed there was bookcase outside of the library I guess you misplaced it while furnishing.

I'm downloading that last beta. I found the right file in DCBackup. Not that many of 89 mb.

Yesterday I started a new hood, placed Tora in there. Found her a house and a new career, then I had to save to make some food. That was the first time I saved, so needless to say I had no lag what so ever. I have an 8 ram with Radeon HD7870, so I usually don't have much lag.

This is just a few small things, it's the first day in testing. I'm using Mastercontroller and Storyprogression in this game.

Tora changed houses a couple of times. She moved because she wanted to live closer to where she worked. I placed her in the Stylist career, that house is quite far from the center. On the road there all the times before she moved, she had to change taxi at the same spot each time. It was quite close to the stylist house, a bit before the little house a bit further up the road.


Testing Seasons export file Reyes by Volvenom, on Flickr

I haven't really been paying attention in this thread for a long time. Excuse me if I missed something.

Did you use the Bridgeport ini's? I had two gamedays of these colors. Not my favourite I must admit.


Testing Seasons export file Reyes by Volvenom, on Flickr

Are you gonna add a ghost or something on this metal dump or what it's called? Would fit nicely


Testing Seasons export file Reyes by Volvenom, on Flickr

I just wanna remind you of this Fusion Lounge down by the sea. It was quite cozy there this time with the mods. Piano was playing and lots of people. Don't forget to put a toilet in this house.


Testing Seasons export file Reyes by Volvenom, on Flickr

I had some troubles with the Campsite, not sure what it was. I have to investigate it further. Perhaps something with the fridge.

Tora's workplace was nice, but she needed a drawing table or something for her studies? Perhaps an Idea to add?


Testing Seasons export file Reyes by Volvenom, on Flickr



I didn't think you wanted my houses in your thread, but then I can add some shots when it's finished. It's probably gonna take some time to finish this world I have plans for a whiteish simple lines/minimalist lot. It can fit nicely in here if I can find a suitable 50x50 lot.

Ok, I started a list of odd things. Loaded the town with random sims so the gameplay would be true to a usual play through.

Library has no skilling bookshelf. It's like the first place I send any newly made sim, so they can get some skilling in before they get a job. I don't know why EA made it so that only certain specific bookshelves have the right books for a library.

Schoolhouse has floating carpet syndrome. Easily taken care of by hammering away and then hitting the undo button.

Firehouse doesn't have anything to build athletic besides a baseball? I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but I thought I'd bring it up.

There seems to be some sort of routing fail on the curve of the road just beside the Float-yer-Boat Cafe. Sims get out of their cars/bikes/whatever, and go to the sidewalk before resuming.

And on typos, wow. I can tell you were tired! I made my list from the beta just before this one and haven't checked to see if anything's been fixed yet - but there were a lot. You might just want to go through the house descriptions one at a time to see.

We're going to keep this organized.

All issues that have been found and fixed are listed below.

All issues that are in the process of being fixed are listed below this line.

Issues that can't be fixed are listed here.

pictures