I had some time today so did some exp.
wont bore you with more pics that look the same but here's the info
results seemed unsure at first so I wondered if BC and 7F parts were separate... they are not
therefore the BC 7F part specifies opacity ranging from 00 00 to FF 7F
once you go to 00 80 it disappears
also its not really visible until about 20 00 and even then its very feint.
if you must see pics are on my picturepush same as others. V24 shows the final test to determine this.

SO... now its only the 01 01 really but this was fun wasn't it!

nb - note to chris... that's probably the corrections that EIG made. when you get a chance to check, see if those with number of BC 7F or less also got changed!?

As it turns out, part of the problem was that either CAW or EIG had changed the file names on me. When I went in last night with S3PE to check my instance numbers before recreating my water plane, I found that instead of 003 and 005 as they were originally, they've been renamed to 000 and 001. I'll have to look at older versions of the world to compare whether this happened before or after using EIG.

At any rate, this means that there was a gap between the (new) 001 instance and the 004 instance, so that could be why it wasn't showing up. I didn't get much further last night than checking instance numbers because something came up, so tonight's goal is to get this thing working!

Before I go into troubleshooting mode, I'm going to try renaming the original file to 002 and importing it to see if that fixes the problem.

EDIT: Okay, now I'm frustrated. The water plane shows up beautifully in a flat test world, so the plane itself is working fine, but now when I import it into my actual world, CAW refuses to open the world. Fortunately, I'm backed up, so that's not a scream-and-throw-things problem, but it's just weird that I can't get the file to open if I add it to my existing world.

I also tried adding it to an earlier, pre-EIG version of my world. I was able to add the resource and open the world just fine, but the water plane wasn't showing up.

Bottom line: The water plane works, so no bugs on your end; however something with my world just isn't playing nice, and at this stage in development (most of my community lots are built and I'm starting in on residential lots), it's not worth going back and redoing the world just so that I can have a small waterfall in the center of town!

On the plus side, now that I know the water plane itself works, my next world will have plenty of custom water planes in it!

It looks like the Game is nosey and tries to "FIX" water planes so far things I think it may be doing are:

1. Re-saving clipped planes.
2. Setting the the transparency of the points of triangles in group one based on the distance to the ground
3. Renaming the planes so there are no gaps (untested but buxcosim's post look like this is what happens)

Needed tests:

• If a world is ran in normal mode and not EIG does it edit the planes?
• Does CAW edit planes when you save?
• Is EIG really editing water planes or is it only CAW?

Note for everyone else:

• I now recommend you do NOT use force one tile.
  Transparency is saved in the tiles, and using less tiles makes the changes of transparency in the game sharper.
• I also recommend that once a world with water planes is loaded you NEVER export those planes for use in another world.
  As EIG mode (and maybe CAW and Normal mode too)edits the planes and saves Clipping and transparency to them.

We've noticed that, since around gameversion 1.17 or so, that CAW will not save extra resources correctly. So, if you import INI files it will discard them, and someone mentioned earlier in this thread that they were finding that the water planes were vanishng. I've noticed though that some resources will remain- for example, the colour ramps for the sea/sky will remain although the ini files won't, so you can get some rather odd effects. Perhaps this is just another symptom of that?

What I would recommend to try is to import the water plane resources into the world file, then open the world directly in EIG using zaide_chris' batch file.
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=453161
That would at least tell us if it is EIG or CAW doing the editing/ deletion!

Ok, I made a world in CAW then saved that world 2 times (to get 2 copies). I then imported 16 planes with varying opacity to both of them along with a 90624C1B edited for 16 planes. I then loaded one in CAW then saved. I then loaded the other in EIG using my batch script. I then used S3PE to extract all the planes from both files. I then compared the md5 of the originals, the EIG ones, and the CAW ones to look for changes, and there where none! So i'm going to edit the world in EIG and see if they change.

Also the opacity did show up in game.

For simsample:
The water planes you uploaded did you extract them from the worlds before or after you made the worlds flat?

I would not have recommended 1 tile, I presumed that was just for testing since it creates a smaller file and easier to read for quick changes.
Now we have tools that work its easier to generate new ones every time.
If I get some time today I might test some of these things but I'll have to see how things go.
So far tests on the 01 01 are fruitless. If only there were more minutes in every day

ps - in your script you wrote frist parameter instead of first parameter

pps - just saw your latest results, it is nice that opacity shows up
your exp suggests that EIG only makes adjustments if edits are made... curious

I never recommended 1 tile but I also never recommended to not use it as i didn't have a reason.
About the spelling error in my batch script if there is only one I'm lucky I didn't run it though a spell check and i'm dyslexic so spelling errors are kind of common for me.

I'm now thinking more along the lines of CAW edited it but it didn't show up until i loaded the world in EIG.

I'd rather think its once you make changes in EIG, but that's just intuition.

Another little exp just to see if it would work.
oddly it didn't work the sensible way when I set up a file to not draw 2 of the 9 tiles
it only worked when i create them all but set the opacity of those tiles to a number that doesn't render

Interesting,

SandrineD:
Could you please look over my tutorial for Adding Water Planes?
I want to make sure I didn't miss anything.

The ones in the first post? I'm afraid I can't really remember, but I would think it would have been from the intact worlds (before I flattened anything).

ETA: I moved your tutorial to the tutorials section, here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=453392
Thanks for that!

chris, it seems pretty straightforward, I think you can be pleased with it... except the same 'frist' typo

simsample, also ul that file over there. have a go and see if its easy to follow

Fixed the typo and I tried to keep it simple.

I guess this is not a simple subject and don't think you could have made it any easier.
Mine is a bit harder to use but anyone who mods shouldn't have a problem really.
Now I should go do some experiments on world size

SandrineD- perhaps you could write a tutorial on changing world size, I really want that one too!

Don't even know if its possible yet
I have upsized a smaller world by changing files
plus I believe the appropriate files for an even larger world could be generated in a manner similar to what we did with the 707's providing the content can be sufficiently extrapolated.
My real concern is that even if we make a workable larger world it will just refuse to load into CAW as the larger heightmaps already do if you select one at the 'new world' dialogue.

See? You did it!

Re: your 707 Generator- I've hit some snags, I must be doing something wrong!

With zaide_chris' program, I can generate planes to replace the rivers I made using the river objects from China.
With River object:

With water plane (it's a bit rough, I need to sculpt the river bank and move the rocks, but it already looks better!):


If I try to copy paste the code generated with your generator into HxD, I get this:

If I paste instead over the text, I get this when I try to open the world:

I think that means I asked it to do something stupid! What can I do to correctly paste the code in? I did notice that the HTML had a load of decimals in it- .1, D., like that.

Did I put the wrong parameters in, maybe?

thats weird can you tell me what values you put in?
what browser?
I've never had that.

never mind, I figured out what you did.
put in a catch for that.
I guess I'm just too regimented [dead reckoner] :p
probably have to add more of these so please test to destruction!

I think I'll do one with a form and data checking so you don't have to edit the page itself.
Do you think its better to use script to autocorrect or suggest changes?
If anyone is looking for something in particular let me know.

SandrineD:
Just a note so if it comes up later I use floor when I have a float that needs to be an int not round

I would have done the new one by now but my poor darling laptop overheated again and crashed.
Its not its fault its a design flaw I think.
floor/round I don't know in this case, I suppose I could be really 'clever' and use floor for values over 32 and ceiling for under, since that appears to be a favoured value

My hunch would have been that the renaming/editing took place after I made edits to the world in CAW. The reason I thought CAW was doing it even before EIG is that when you first import the water plane, it's square or rectangular, but when you do terrain sculpting, it recalculates the clipping and transparency of the plane after you save, so my guess was that it probably "fixed" the resources at the same time. Unfortunately, my hunch seems to be off as nothing changed when you tested it. Weird.

Like I said, I put the new water plane into a world that already had water planes (I used a version from before I went into EIG after the post-EIG version didn't work) and while the old water planes worked fine, the new one wouldn't render - which makes me suspect that CAW might have modified the 906 resource to reflect the "correct" number of water planes as well. I'll have to try reimporting the original 906 from Bridgeport (which I forgot to do yesterday) at the same time I add the new plane; if CAW modified the 906, that could very well be preventing the newer planes from rendering in my world.

EDIT: Okay, that's the problem! I reimported the 906 from Bridgeport and now the water plane renders! So CAW or EIG modified the 906 when it renamed the 707's. Gah! At least that part of the mystery has been solved! (See attachment for details.)

Great tutorial, btw! Once I finish this world, I can start a fresh world with water exactly where I want it! Unfortunately, I can't actually use the new water plane in my existing world, because the plane is only a few units above the sea level, so the waterfall I'd planned in the center of town won't work. I can't change the sea level or raise the surrounding land without completely redoing the world, and I'm too far along for that! Oh, well. Like I said, it'll be great to have for my next world!

Wow, you guys have really made amazing progress!
Do you think using this could fix the problem I've been having with CAW only keeping the Bridgeport water layers after saving but discarding the Twinbrook one? I've been working around this by just re-importing the Twinbrook one after each save and before export, but it would be nice if I didn't have to do that each time

you did update the # water planes part in your 906 right?

I just imported the '702's I needed from Twinbrook and Bridgeport and used the Bridgeport '906'. Since that one expects 5 or 6 planes, I figured that would do for the 3 + 1 I am using, but somehow it still 'rejects' the Twinbrook one. I haven't changed or edited any resource, as I've just stumbled on this thread after +3 months of abstaining from world building, so I haven't looked into any of these new developments properly yet