Malloy Flats - Pop. 154
It's year 23. I'm accepting no nomads with this one.
I am having way too much fun with geometry and mods.
i think the best picture i like the most.... are the cows :) look so cool !
Quote from: RedKetchup on October 08, 2014, 12:25:35 AM
i think the best picture i like the most.... are the cows :) look so cool !
I know! I love
@slink 's Holsteins! On my most recent attempt at a big town (which was spiraling out of control last time I checked) I had so many cows just because I love the way they look. :)
Nice design work! It's too bad that the road colors mod is a bit garish. Those designs would look even better if the colors were toned down just a bit. I don't know how many people notice, but granite actually comes in several colors: gray (of course), black, dark brown, yellowish, pinkish and greenish are the ones I'm familiar with. When I was a kid we had a cabin in the high desert and at least three of these colors were present in the little valley. Plus some bright white rocks in the creek bed. Those colors for stone roads would look great and be completely natural.
Quote from: rkelly17 on October 08, 2014, 08:58:03 AM
Nice design work! It's too bad that the road colors mod is a bit garish. Those designs would look even better if the colors were toned down just a bit.
Thanks, and I agree. As it is, I'm using the least garish of the colors. I really like the whitish stone but the others are soooo bright. I'm happy it exists, though. One of my first thoughts when it was said that modding was coming was that I wanted new stone road textures.
I really want to install the mod kit and take apart that mod to see how it's done so that I can make my own. I've already downloaded everything, and I've even got the source files for that mod. I've just been fighting off a head cold for days so I don't have the energy or brain power to dive into it.
Those colours look too 'off' for me too, but I love the hedges. If only the author would release them in an individual mod... I'm not a fan of these huge packs where usually at least 50% of the content isn't interesting to me.
The packs really are getting a bit out of control, IMO. But more people in various places are screaming for more! more! packs when some of us want small, specialized mods so that we can pick and choose what we want to clutter up our menus with, and the risk of conflicts increases with each element.
I give RedKetchup a pass because I like most of what's in the Decorative Items pack, and the stuff goes together pretty well. And obviously those that contain entire production chains are best as a package of the items so that it all works. But I don't really see how the items in Fountain Mod need to go together, and I'm hoping some of these "pack" makers will start to break them down a bit.
But it's very early days yet so who knows what the mod scene will look like even a month or so from now. I'm just glad we have them. :)
I caved and installed the mod kit, checked out the source on the Color Tiles mod and made some changes but something isn't working. All I changed was the a few of the graphic colors (desat and brightness adjustments) and it seems to build correctly but when I fired up the dev version and activated it for a new town, the items don't show up in the roads menu. Bah. Too much for me right now.
I might try to contact the mod maker and offer to send him the pngs for a less-bright version and see if he'll offer it as an alternate version.
The Fountain mod is the main one in my mind as well. It's obviously great work, the castle looks fantastic for example, but firstly it's odd to call it the Fountain Mod when there are about 37 other new buildings/resources (perhaps a slight exaggeration), and it's frustrating that we can't just use some of it. The same applies to other mods as well, though as you say new production chains have to be in one mod, otherwise they won't work correctly.
I've tried a few games with many mods, and sooner or later it crashes, so I'm highly skeptical to try a "serious" game with 20 new buildings/resources and expect it to go well. The crash wasn't the infamous trading post crash either, the save simply CTD at some point, for no seemingly good reason. The last attempt "died" when I clicked on a wooden house...
I've started using The Fountain Lite, which has the decorative items, a stone bridge, three "medium" stone houses and an inn (Smaller boarding house) which I have used in game. The castle and castle parts are also there, but I don't use those. The stone bridge is double wide but the modder said the game won't let him line it up so a double wide road looks right. It does not include the various production chains in The Fountain.
I agree with
@Mahnogard about packages. I'm not sure I want structures I have no intention of using and I certainly don't want mods with stuff I want filled with new production chains I don't want. If you want a production chain, yes, you absolutely need the whole chain. Give me that chain by itself: don't package it with other, completely unrelated mods. This is one reason I really like
@RedKetchup's work.
Yeah, I can't figure out why he wants to keep the stuff all together. Castle should be one mod, houses and Inn another, decorative stuff with fountains, hedges and bridge maybe, and production chains in another. But I do love all his stuff, he's a really good modder. Almost as good as our
@RedKetchup ;D
I agree he's a great modder, his models look incredible, but when I just want to use a few things here and there, it doesn't really make sense to use the mod. I don't want all those new buildings or houses, but mostly just the hedges.
It's early in the modding life of this game, so hopefully these big packs will be more split up as we move forward. I also look forward to more models get implemented, especially new crops. There is the big seed mod, but it makes little sense when they look like the current crops with a new name. Hopefully there is an end product to the Blackwood and Desert projects too.
if we gonna split them, then we will get some conflict 'red' since we will do the same toolbars over and over in each modules (splited part). when i ll retouch it before the end, i ll do a seperate package. 1 for fences, 1 for trees, 1 for flowers, 1 for statues, and 1 for walls, 1 for random items. and you ll choose what you want to add. and you ll just have to ignore the warnings, and cross your fingers that it doesnt crash the game :)
Quote from: RedKetchup on October 08, 2014, 05:21:17 PM
if we gonna split them, then we will get some conflict 'red' since we will do the same toolbars over and over in each modules (splited part). when i ll retouch it before the end, i ll do a seperate package. 1 for fences, 1 for trees, 1 for flowers, 1 for statues, and 1 for walls, 1 for random items. and you ll choose what you want to add. and you ll just have to ignore the warnings, and cross your fingers that it doesnt crash the game :)
I think most of us agreed that yours is fine as a package, because the items feel like they go together. We were talking more about mods that have a bunch of things that
feel like they should be separate. As it is, the risk of conflicts are high anyway with some of these packs, because it can be difficult for the average user to suss out exactly what is affected by each little thing in the mod.
I think a good rule of thumb would be, "Would these items normally all be found in the same menu set?" If the answer is no, and there's no production chain to be kept intact, then they should probably be separate mods. Your Decorative Item Pack works well from one menu set.
If you
are going to split yours up, though, I'd do it in categories:
-fences and walls
-plants (flowers and trees)
-statues, fountains, and random items
k
Wow, I really should give mods another go. Although I find a couple of the roads a bit "glare-y"
Haven't had much luck with mods so far outside of
@RedKetchup 's ones, the rest eventually lead to a CTD. :(
Quote from: RedKetchup on October 08, 2014, 05:21:17 PM
if we gonna split them, then we will get some conflict 'red' since we will do the same toolbars over and over in each modules (splited part). when i ll retouch it before the end, i ll do a seperate package. 1 for fences, 1 for trees, 1 for flowers, 1 for statues, and 1 for walls, 1 for random items. and you ll choose what you want to add. and you ll just have to ignore the warnings, and cross your fingers that it doesnt crash the game :)
@RedKetchup, your mod packages work well together, so don't get too worried about splitting them up. One can hope that the menus situation can be worked out, but I'm not horribly optimistic. I look at my SimCity 4 menus and they are a mess of stuff that takes a long, long time to scroll through. I could cut them down by using less custom content, but I really, really need all that stuff. ;)
Anyway, the point is,
@RedKetchup, you are doing great. Don't change your approach yet. Logical groupings are good; putting a bunch of stuff together that goes off in all directions at once, not so good.
Quote from: ivorymalinov on October 09, 2014, 01:13:09 AM
Wow, I really should give mods another go. Although I find a couple of the roads a bit "glare-y"
Haven't had much luck with mods so far outside of @RedKetchup 's ones, the rest eventually lead to a CTD. :(
It really is fun to have new possibilities to play with in design. I have since torn up some of those roads and replaced them with other colors so it's more like a "splash" of color instead of "omg my eyes are bleeding". I also added some of RedKetchup's trees to soften up the geometry. I'll post some updated screenshots later.
I am running several mods and everything seems stable - not a single crash on this game, and I'm at about year 40 I think. But a lot of that is luck, and also careful choosing, and who knows what will happen as the town keeps growing. The only problem I ran into was with Shock Puppet's textiles mod - the cotton crop slows everything down because it needs improved models, but he's aware of it for his next update. So I just plant flax for right now.
Okay, here are the updated screenshots.
That's beautiful,
@Mahnogard. Coming from a background of Caesar, Pharaoh, and Children of the Nile, I really like those roads. :)
Thanks
@slink ! :) Now that I'm using your markets & Elfecutioner's small vendor buildings, I plan to have a go at this map again to see where the new design options lead me. My last couple of maps (including the one I'm playing now) have been a bit of a mess. Lack of reliance on the placement of large markets caused me to go in the complete opposite direction - total decentralization. Hopefully I can find a happy medium.
I played a lot of CotN back in the day. Even own the Steam version now.
I bought CoTN late, on clearance. The funny part was that a dear friend of mine in the UK also bought it on clearance at the same time. I ended up with the UK version and she ended up with the US version.