Thanks Sandrine, will try that one out too. I made your other version (post #11) work just fine too. I think I was inputting something incorrectly!

Can some bright spark please help me Please! I am officially desperate!

I have spent an age trying to get this to work in my custom world I'm working on because I didn't plan the sea level very well and it's too low down relative to a number of large ponds in the city part of the world (I don't want to raise the entire sea because it would mess up the entire coast line which I've put a lot of work into - the landscaping is about 80% done so starting over is not an option).

I am a useless artist who finds anything more complicated than 3D meshing and Photo-shopping a struggle. After trying to follow this process from the tutorial over and over again and failing I passed it along to my husband (who is a computer genius), but sadly he can't get it to work either which is frankly a little bizarre. I was about up to attempt no.46 when I decided it was time to ask for help because clearly I am just not getting it, even after reading the whole related water level thread 8 times I just have no idea what has gone wrong.

Here's what I did altogether:
1. Used 2 objects to work out the 4 X and Z coordinates. The smallest X and Z became X1 and Z1, the larger X2 and Z2. It is a small rectangle in the middle of my city so even if I'd got the coordinates the wrong way round, or typo'd (45 times), it should still be within the central area of my city.

2. The land height is 15, the sea height is 10, but I used height 18 for my water plane so it should definitely not be hidden underneath the land. I figured at soon as it showed up I could just adjust it down to 14, but so far it's eluding me.

3. I used the values in the water plane generator link to create the binary - possibly I am getting the instance number wrong because it didn't say if the sea is instance 0 or 1 or something else. I assumed that "Edit byte 12 of the 0x90624C1B file with your hex editor to the number of water planes you want to use" means if I am adding 1 then the instance should be 1, but I have tried everything from 0 to 0F out of desperation.

I did NOT touch the advanced settings! I have attached one of the many binaries I've tried although I haven't edited it at all myself.

4. In S3PE I extracted the 0x90624C1B instance and changed byte 12 (0x0C) to 01 (first, obviously I have tried it with other numbers too as mentioned above although I don't know if it should be the same number, if the water plane instance is 0 because the sea doesn't count, should the 0x90624C1B count be 01 - I assumed so, although I've also tested having these numbers the same and that doesn't work either). I did NOT change anything else whatsoever! In each attempt I extracted a fresh copy rather than re-editing the same one to rule out carrying forward a previous mistake.

I also did NOT rename any files!

5. In S3PE I opened my world file (the one that is in C:\Users\Kate\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 Create a World Tool\UserToolData\Worlds) and imported the 2 files, I tried leaving the compressed box checked, I also tried unchecking it. That didn't seem to help.

I have tried going into EIG to see if it shows up there but not in CAW, I've also tried installing the world directly to game after editing (no re-save in CAW) to see if it shows, but nothing. Obviously I have been restoring a back-up copy of my world before edit each time so again, I'm not accidentally bringing forward a previous mistake. I did have a look at the bridgeport water levels someone posted, but it just looks like a lot of random garbage to me!

Can someone please put me out of my misery and look at the attached files and tell me what I've done wrong because this has made me extremely fed up.

I know I should have planned for this issue from the beginning (and clearly I need to be better at following tutorials because obviously I have made a consistent mistake somewhere) but I've been working on my world for 3 weeks solid but the 5 meter drop down to the community ponds looks so stupid and all the addition of little pathways down just looks really weak. If I fix that by raising the sea level it'll take me at least another week to re-do all the detail of the coast line Honestly at this juncture the prospect of that makes me want to cry! I've been trying to fix this water problem for a couple of days now (this is day 3) so I am officially at the end of my tether.

Any help would be appreciated!

Your S3_90624C1B_00000000_0000000000000001%%+UNKN.bnry is wrong, but it's not your fault you did set byte 12 to 1 but it's byte "0x12" that needs to be set to the number of water planes your adding, I'm sorry for the confusion and have edited the 12 to a 0x12 in the Tutorial.

The Sea is not a water plane so are right about not including it in the count.
Next time ask after the first few tries. I'm willing to help, I'm not going to bite any ones head off .

Your 0x90624C1B after editing 0x12 and not 12 should look like:
And once again i'm so sorry about the error.

Firstly thank you for actually replying. I have been a member here for a very long time and during that time have learned that posting requests for help should only be done as a very last resort as most experts don't like to be bothered by us flakey artistic types failing to understand modding tools.

It never occurred to me that the problem may have been with the tutorial. Obviously there is a small but significant difference between byte 12 and byte 18, but I was so busy trying to ensure I accurately followed the tutorial that it never occurred to me to take a random stab-in-the-dark at the other bytes around 12 (not actually true, I did try byte 11 by accident once!)

Needless to say it works fine now, although it has taken quite some time since then to sift through various 'opacity' options to find any that work. I do feel it might be worth mentioning in the tutorial that it is not a range of values, there are only some within that range which work. The default is completely opaque and looks rather plasticy. Personally I found that 512 looks good for a more realistic clear water effect, and 768 is a good match for the CAW default sea water. I ran out of patience after that so those are the only ones I've found.

I think I'm going to crawl back under my rock now. Thanks again for your help.

Thank you for this tutorial.

I thought it was ridiculously hard, by looking at the tut, but it was actually really really easy

Here is my quick draft:


There is one huge plane on the corner of the map, on height 100, and another narrower coming under it towards another edge of the map on height 50.


Now this has nothing to do with the tutorial, at least I hope so, but I did run into an interesting problem. After I had made what you see in the picture, I flattened the terrain so I could show people where my planes are and how big they are. That I could do, and I also saw that my planes were not square anymore, but round where the edges of my terrain had been. So I saved the map under another name, so I could continue to work with the terrain I already had.

I closed CAW and loaded the new save I had, and boom, my screen started blinking and I got a message saying something like "Nvidia graphics drived has crashed and recovered (kernel)." That kept blinking on the screen until I forced CAW to shut down in task manager. I started to panic slightly, but thought, Imma load CAW up again to see if it was a one time error, and this time I could not even get to open a world. Same blinking again, and I had to close it. I tried normal sims game next, and again the same blinking occurred.

So, I rebooted my PC, and have not had the blinking after that. I did open CAW and managed to load the first save of the map, no problems, but I'm terrified to edit it :P

The reason I'm posting this, not to scare people, is that I'm curious if this has happened to anyone else, or was it just my graphics cards time to start dying?

armiel: As far as i have known no one has had CAW crash the graphics drivers do to water planes but it is possible. Could you upload both the the working version and the flat crashing one so i can look at them? The planes becoming not square has been called "clipping" and is normal, simsample figured it out here: http://www.modthesims.info/showpost...91&postcount=26.

Thank you for the quick reply, and yeah, I saw simsamples post earlier

Just to make clear what you want me to upload, all the CAW files for the world so you can open it in your CAW, or just the waterplanes and the file that handles them? I'm at school at the moment, but I can upload any files you want as soon as I get home.


ETA
ok, so I'm attaching all the files for the world, sorry if there is too much :P

armiel:
I was able to open your flat version of the world on both the PC's I have with CAW so not sure whats wrong. I also looked at the water planes you uploaded by them self and the ones in your worlds and they all look correct. So that leads me to believe it's your PC or just a random crash.
If your up for it could you try loading the flat world again?

Thank you for your time and for testing, it's good to know that I had not done stuff wrong.

I uninstalled my graphics drivers completely yesterday, then installed them back, and I am able to modify the sculpted version now. I took the water planes out of it in s3pe, then flattened it and put the planes back, and now I have worked on the water area very tiny bit at a time - it seems to be working. *knocks wood*

I also added one more plane of water, and noticed that the x and z are actually not the same in my world objects and the water planes. I had 4 objects, I took the x and z out of them and made a water plane - it went to a wrong side of the world. So I put x values to z's and z values to x's, and got the plane going exactly where I wanted.

like this (left are x values of the object, right are z)
845 1231
803 1231
845 1105
803 1105

So the plane I first made went wrong place, so what I had to do was:
X1=1105,Z1=803,X2=1231,Z2=845

Then the plane went exactly where the objects were.

Oh, and I would rather not poke the flattened version now that I got at least one of them working All though I hope it really was just a glitch and that reinstalling the drivers helped.

I've been busy on non-S3 stuff so only just came back.
Is this all worked out or should I also take a look at this?
It really sounds more like a hardware thing.

I think it's been worked out. At least I have been able to CAW, and have had no crashes since reinstalling the graphics driver.

Is there a way to change the direction of the current? If not I'll just flip my entire world over... water flowing away from the sea kind of bothers me

Simsimillian: Sorry there's no way to change the direction of water that I have been able to figure out.
Also I know it look like the water is moving only one way but after going to a lake I see it more like the waves that wind going over a body of water makes, so water that looks like it's going away from shore could easily be explained from a constant onshore flow. And adding rapids and other water effects where the water would be moving at a fast rate also helps to enforce this idea.

Well, I hadn't gotten round to putting in any objects apart from my distant terrain so I flipped everything over
I'll just have to get used to the idea of the sun rising over the ocean, which is a bit disturbing to me
I guess it's clear the sims live on the East Coast

oh and thank you all so much for the tool + help! this is great stuff to work with

I seem to have the same problem as Pistachio. I did the steps exactly as adviced, and made sure many times that the coordinates were the same, so that I hadn't taken wrong coordinates, and changed the height to higher so that it wouldn't be underground for sure. I also changed the right byte. Something must be jamming this, but what could it be... : / I'll keep trying to redo the steps again.

My world is the biggest size, but the maximum height is 200. Could this have affect in any way to this? Also the area where I'm trying to get the water is completely flat, so the middle section is certainly not under ground.

Here's my coordinates, could there be something odd with them...?

y 92,34009

x1 1470,618
z1 246,678131
x2 1647,29944
z2 249,402969

Arisuka:

Could you please upload your 90624C1B file?
Your cords look okay other then you using a ',' and not a '.' as the Decimal Separator, but I think my tool catches that based on where your sending the request from.

Just to make sure, I tried using the '.' too, that didn't make any difference. :/

Here's the file from my world:

This worked perfectly for me! Granted, I did have to give myself a crash course in hex editing, and it took me all night to figure out some pretty basic things (like that 0x12 =18), but I successfully imported a water plane in my world, exactly the size/location I wanted, and have saved it successfully, etc.

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have been following the other water plane thread but thought "I could never do all that stuff, it's way too technical". The tutorial and the WP generator are great for non-computer-savvy people like me. Thanks to you, sandrine, and zaide_chris for putting so much work into figuring this stuff out.

I was wondering if it would be possible to add some special/simplified instructions for changing water opacity? I've noticed that you did this in one of your screenshots, and I've read you guys discussing it in several places in this and the other threat, but it's not quite clear enough for me to figure it out on my own.

Again, thank you for putting in so much work to enhance the CAW experience for everyone! I am amazed at how perseverant and creative you guys are!

I'm glad you've made it work, jedi_waffle- and that you've found this useful!

I got the water to look transparent by changing the opacity level in the plane generator program.
For Sandrine's program, you can type in the transparency as a percentage, and experiment until you get the desired effect.


For Zaide_Chris' program, there is a figure for opacity which you access by clicking 'Show Advanced' on the web page:




If it won't work in your browser, try using Google Chrome.

You can experiment to find a suitable opacity for your world, but I found that a figure above around 2500 was totally opaque, whereas figures below that give some transparency. I used a figure of 1750 for opacity in the screenshots in post #22 above.

Also, I found that when the waterplanes were initially imported into CAW, they look totally opaque, as in this image:

If you then save the world and then reload it, CAW will edit the water planes to fit the terrain, so you'll be able to see the transparency correctly.

If your water plane disappears completely when you do this then it usually means that the centre of the water plane is covered by terrain (as the game will crop the planes from the centre outwards), so in that case you'll have to edit your lake/ river shape to make it work.

I found that once I had the water planes in CAW, I could save as many times as I wanted, and the planes would remain intact and retain their transparency. They also looked nicely transparent when imported into the game, too.

I hope this helps!

ETA: Arisuka, I just noticed your post! It seems that your 906 resource is incorrect. If you look at Bridgeport's, you'll see that there is a figure 06 to indicate the six water planes:

Yours is set to zero though:

You need to set that to 01 if you have one water plane (or 02 if you have two, etc).

Simsample: The file I linked was the un-edited, original resource from my world. I did edit that resource exactly as said, then saved the world. But when I opened it in CAW, the water plane was nowhere to be seen. :/

Ahh! *smacks forehead* I was using zaide_chris' program but didn't think to try the advanced settings! I will give that a try. Thanks for the help.

I still haven't got this to work, mysterious... I could record a video where I'd do the steps, so that you could see if there's something I do weirdly? Because I can't get these to show up in any world, old or new.

Arisuka, perhaps you could post your files exactly as they are when imported into your world? Then I could put them in a test world and see if they are showing up for me.

OH, I might've realized the one thing I repeatedly did wrong! I exported the 0x90624C1B file, but did NOT open it separately in s3pe, I just edited the file in the world files and saved the world. : P Man, just... OOPS? lol

Hmm, it shouldn't matter really whether you edit the 906 in the world file or before importing, as long as it is correct.

Have you got it to work yet?