Politician Archive

Yes, the rings represent the city sizes. They are 100% accurate with respect to their size. Unfortunately, I noticed last week the center is one square (8 meters) too far to the right. The first two rings are centered accurately around the center of the map (The darkened box) while the outer 3 rings are centered accurately according to the whole picture. Work off the center for now. By the time you reach the third rank I should have things straightened out.

Be sure to place the city hall so the dark box is not visible towards it's front

Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friendsSWG Entertainer.com Fashions by TK

Do this because then it puts the center of the building part of your city hall(Which happens to be the city center) in the center of the circles. If you center the footprint (IE leaving a dark line on both sides) you put the city hall 8 meters off center.

Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friendsSWG Entertainer.com Fashions by TK

/bow

Saevok Iveim - Mayor of Mos Strahteks City
Tatooine, Wanderhome

In a "Duh!" moment today, it occurred to me that it would be so easy to add a display of the coordinates as you move the mouse around. So as soon as I get home and can test the change on "other browsers" I'll post an update here. The basics of it is you enter the coordinates of your city (from the city management terminal) and then you will get an accurate representations of the coordinates under your mouse. This will prove invaluble for figuring out placement of houses without having to do any sort of messy math.

Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friendsSWG Entertainer.com Fashions by TK

Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friendsSWG Entertainer.com Fashions by TK

Saevok Iveim - Mayor of Mos Strahteks City
Tatooine, Wanderhome

The back-end server that handles creating the graphics was down for about an hour yesterday. Well, more accurately my server rebooted and it never came back up. I fixed it as soon as I noticed the problem. Unfortunately looking at the logs it appears a few people were affected.

Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friendsSWG Entertainer.com Fashions by TK

Can you put in an option for it to save with the grid background and border circles?

Saevok Iveim - Mayor of Mos Strahteks City
Tatooine, Wanderhome

I don't currently have a plan to, no. There are a lot of possible things that could be done... However the effort to implement it vs the effort it saves is nowhere near the levels of the rest of the functionality. Whereas figuring out city layout or making a map used to be at least a day's worth of work, creating a grid is only a few minutes work. The circles are a little more work, perhaps I will add how I did it to the tutorial as well. However, it is only a few minutes work to save the background graphic and add it yourself instead of creating a grid by hand.

If you follow the little tutorial at the end of the help page, it covers using a very powerful and free graphics program to easily compose something that looks nice. One of the topics is creating a grid for the background. And really, there is nothing I could do that couldn't be done just as easily in the program I recommend people using, The Gimp. The reason I say that, is it is the same program I use for the back-end to create the graphical maps, the program I've used to create all the graphics you see in the city planner tool, the program I used to create my maps in the past. Some things are even easier to do by hand. For example, the checkerboard grid. Or even a regular grid grid. There are filters to render a checkerboard or a grid in The Gimp which take only a few clicks. To do it in the back-end, I would have to take the script for that filter and translate it to the language I use for the CGI script.

I highly recommend following through the tutorial. It will show you how to set things up in such a way as you only have to do it once, and future updates of the map are just a few quick and easy steps. I also highly recommend getting The Gimp. It is nearly equal to PhotoShop, possibly even equal or superior in some ways. It is also free to download and free to use. Not to mention a variant of it is used by the division of Lucas known as ILM for working on movie special effects. If you do, let me know how it goes, good or bad. I have yet to recieve any feedback on the tutorial.

Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friendsSWG Entertainer.com Fashions by TK

Saevok Iveim - Mayor of Mos Strahteks City
Tatooine, Wanderhome

I'm a web designer, so I got the whole Macromedia Studio MX. It has Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, and Freehand. Fireworks is a lot like Photoshop. I don't do much advanced graphic design, so Fireworks does everything for me that I would ever need Photoshop for. It's actually designed more for doing web layouts and exporting them directly into sliced images in an HTML page. Photoshop can do that, too, but the HTML isn't anywhere near as clean since Fireworks is integrated with Dreamweaver and uses it to actually generate the HTML. Fireworks uses .png as it's native file format,too.

I have my city set up in 4 Layers now:

1) The Grid (blank copy of your grid)

2) The City Layout (the direct export from your program with thebackground deleted)

3) Buildings (I made a cutout of each building. If I add a new building, I just copy it, move it to the City layer, and flatten the layer again)

4) Labels (Names of each building)

For coloring, I just use the handy Magic Wand tool (same as Photoshop's). Select all the buildings I want to color, and poof! I'm actually modifying the color in the layer, not keeping the color on it's own. When I need to export to a .gif, I just hide the Buildings layer and get what you see in my link above.

You can download a free 30-day trial of it from Macromedia.com if your curious and just want to see what it's like.

Saevok Iveim - Mayor of Mos Strahteks City
Tatooine, Wanderhome

I may, but probably not. Got enough other things to do, and it sounds like just another similar tool to do the same things, if you don't use the web development aspects. I actually used some macromedia HTML as reference for how to drag things around, but I rewrote it because the MM one I had didn't work in any web browser I use.

My city layout is10 layers, from bottom to top:

Blank background

Line grid

Water/land outline (Lighten only)

Water nonbuildable locations (Lighten only)

City rings (Multiply, to get the darkening rings going outward)

Building footprints (Exported image of footprints in black and background in white, darken only)

Buildings (Exported image of doors/background only, background color set to the color I want the buildings)

- Mask (Exported layer of buildings in white, background in black, applied as a layer mask to get the shapes into the buildings layer)

Coloration (Just rectangles over the buildings I want colored, set to "hue" mode)

- Mask (Same as buildings mask layer)

Key/labels (Key covers what the colors mean)

Since I don't change any of the images I exported from the city planner, updates are just a matter of replacing a layer. When I do an update, I just export the map 3 times. One with black footprints, white background, one with green background and blue doors, and one with white houses and black background. I then just do a straight coopy and paste, the first into the footprints layer, the second into the buildings layer, and the third into both the two layer masks. Takes about 30 seconds to import a new layout from the city planner, 45 if I want to change building colorations. It is the process of setting that up whichI cover in the tutorial.

The end result of all that is this - that one with the line grid active instead of the check grid. Two clicks and I have the check grid instead.

Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friendsSWG Entertainer.com Fashions by TK