PMC Minnesota Lowry 8km Development

[Snake Man]

PMC Minnesota Lowry 8km aka "Millennial Farmer Map" terrain development.

PMC Minnesota Lowry 8km official homepage.

Dev Diary PMC Minnesota Lowry 8km.

Changelog PMC Minnesota Lowry 8km.

Looking for help to place buildings to farm yards. First pass of placing objects consists of simple top-down 2D building-for-building farm yard creation using satellite imagery. Second pass is vegetation trees for both farm yards and in any rural forest or tree line areas.

I can do trees pretty easily, but would love to see someone helping with the buildings.

Buildings used are going to be giants residential houses, farm bin silos and CBJ midwest buildings pack vehicle sheds. Not sure if I forgot any building 3D model type now.

Map of all building locations, not sure if I missed any but should be all buildings areas (red is buildings):


Suggestion of player farm locations where you get buildings when you buy the land, then can use and sell those buildings:



Welcome to Farming Simulator 19 Mods world.
Find me a Map Of Minnesota FS19.
Looking for good Farming Simulator 2019 Mods to play with.
I like Big American Maps for huge farming operations.
Hey got any FS19 Mods dude?
Where to find FS19 Large American Terrains?
Playing with Large Scale American Farming FS19 all day is fun.
Where can I find Farmsim 19 Mods for PC?
Good FS19 Minnesota Terrain is the best.
Where to Download Realistic FS19 Minnesota Terrain now.
Where is Millennial Farmer Map location?

[ARG_Afb]

hey snake! i would like to help you! tell me if you are interested!

[Snake Man]

Sounds good ARG_afb, any help would be much appreciated. What I'm writing below is for everyone, not specifically to you.

First I need to explain some basic information because usually if its not said it can be misunderstood the wrong way around. I really hate to say this stuff as its obvious to me and people might misunderstand why am I saying these things, its not to "boast" or "tease" anyone, its just the basics of how things work in healthy gaming community.

PMC Minnesota Lowry 8km Farming Simulator 19 terrain is created and owned by PMC. I personally created and developed that terrain as it is now seen in official homepage; heightmap, fields, configs, PDA map etc is currently done.

Only release of any PMC terrain will come from PMC Farming (farming-simulator.org) website, from me, nobody else. There will be no facebook / twitter / console / whatever releases of this or any other PMC terrain.

Just because someone helps to develop PMC terrains it doesn't mean they automatically own the terrain, it was, is and always will be a PMC terrain.

This is so dumb thing to say that my brain cells are dying, but the development version of PMC terrain can NOT be given out to ANYONE, no exceptions what so ever.

If anyone wants to help me edit these terrains they will get their name in credits on PMC Farming (farming-simulator.org) website. I will fully credit each and everyone who helps.

Development version screenshots, videos, info etc is completely fine to be shared publicly with everyone, there is no private info in PMC terrains (obviously no actual terrain files can be shared).

Farmsim community is filled with thieves who try to sneak their way into legit development teams where they "steal a mod" by taking it, labeling it under their name and releasing it. These kinds of low life scum should be shot and their bodies burned. I'm documenting everything so nobody can "steal a mod" as there is a public written record with UTC dates that who created the terrain in question. Technically such public written record documentation doesn't prevent anyone for "stealing" or "leaking" any mods, but at least we can easily see who is the legitimate owner / author and we could hope that the community would police itself by shunning these kinds of scumbags out of all forums etc (its not happening, but hey we can dream, right).

If someone helps to develop PMC terrains it wont grant them permissions to continue editing further than whats agreed during development, for example if year or two from now the helping person wants to port the terrain to a new farmsim game being released, that is not allowed. There wont be any type of "My Special Edit Of <NAME>" or "<NAME> Multifruit MTA" etc releases.

PMC terrains are free of charge, there will be no money involved and nobody can charge any money with PMC terrains. Twitch / youtube live streaming while playing using PMC terrains and accepting donations (bits, subscriptions etc) is fine because such donations are for the STREAMING content, not for the usage of the terrain. If anyone helps developing these terrains and expects to get some money reward, there will be NO such thing, we all are in this community "for free", or at least I am and everyone else should be.

I am sure some things got forgotten from the wall of text above, but I'll do edits if necessary.

ARG_afb: did that cold mean text scare you off yet? Shall we proceed planning this co-operation on millennial farmer map?

[ARG_Afb]

I personally agree with all the terms and conditions, and promise my complete loyalty to you and the PMC organization with no personal editing nor converting or releasing the content shared with me. This being said I personally want to participate in the map development respecting all the indications and orders listed by the PMC members, Snake Man and the PMC org,
Yours faithfully,
AFB

[Snake Man]

Okay great, so now that we have that nasty obvious stuff out of the way lets talk about technical editing

As everyone should know by now PMC addon / mod releases are error free, we have zero tolerance policy for errors.

When I'm editing it begins by learning how to do a simple editing task so that there will be no errors and then I'm repeating the task over and over again to all our terrains.

So whatever we edit, it will be error free. If there are some error that sneak in, all editing will be halted until the error is fixed. We live in the FS19 GE and game log files.

Quick tip: Notepad++ has "tail -F" function, you open GE / game .log in notepad++ and use the tail -f function and it will constantly update log file when its being written, all errors are fairly easy to see during editing.

Building models: we use giants residential buildings. Long time ago I grabbed them from mapUS and imported into PMC_Helpers transformgroup where they are easy to copy-paste aka CTRL-D duplicate from. For vehicle sheds we use CBJ midwest buildings pack. For farm bin silos, umm err cant recall what auger pipe bin's I used in iowa garden city (need to look them up).

Buildings are simply placed in top-down 2D over the satellite texture / imagery. Building by building, trying to match the size of the buildings as best as possible. This is a constant struggle because often times there are no exact matching size building 3D models available of what you can see in satellite imagery, but we do the best we can.

Editing "passes". First pass is buildings, second pass is vegetation, third pass is decorations. Umm actually now I cant remember in which pass I did utility poles

Its important to note that yes people, these little kidz in the community, love what I call "pixel porno", meaning very fine small details like fences and decorations etc, that is pure eye candy and doesn't make terrain any more playable, decorations actually make terrain less playable because they add useless junk like fences etc crap in there (see all BRITISH mapz haha), in the third pass yes we add decorations but it definitely is on the back burner.

Anyone helping me to place buildings has to understand that if you try to to dazzle me with your uber decoration placing skillz, you're wasting your time, just stick with first pass of object placement, simple building-for-building on top of 2D satellite imagery and you'll do fine.

Here are some dev diaries for reference, you don't have to read all through as they are very long, but here they are anyways, at least skim through the pretty pictures heh: dev diary PMC Iowa Garden City 8km is a very good read to see what kind of level of detail I keep when doing real world data terrains (building-for-building, tree-for-tree on farm yards).

Further dev diaries for FS19:
dev diary PMC Grande Gardens 16km
dev diary PMC Montana Shelby 8km

And for FS22 just for reference, even though some things wont work the same for FS19:
dev diary PMC Cereal Region 32km
dev diary PMC King Corn 45km
dev diary PMC Korkscrew 40km
dev diary PMC RedWhiteBlue 10km
dev diary PMC Super Six 6km
dev diary PMC Undefined Farms 20km

How editing cooperation would work: well I 7-zip the current terrain project for the people helping, link will be sent privately (obviously, community full of thieves, remember heh), objects are placed in transformgroups under "Buildings", usually one farm yard in "Location-01", "Location-02" etc, dunno if my method had specific one for player farms (forgot already).

Once editing is done for which ever number of farm yards got done, being it one or several in one days editing session, these transformgroups are moved into lets say "UsersName_DATE" transformgroup, and this whole transformgroup is exported to I3D, the I3D + shapes file is then 7-zip packed (please, no ZIP, no RAR, since over decade ago we use 7-zip) and privately uploaded to proper file host like google/drive and link sent to me again privately.

I'll then proceed to import the transformgroup / objects into the "master source" of the terrain project in my HDD.

All this is subject to change, its first time for me to cooperate with anyone in this export / import manner so we'll surely fine tune the tool pipeline so it works the best for our use.

I probably forgot many small things about editing techniques etc in this post, but the general starter info is there now.

I'm not trying to force anyone to edit just the way I do, but at the end of the day these are PMC terrains and some wild editing techniques wont fly there.

Just trying to talk about these editing issues before hand so there is as less changes needed to be made when exchanging transformgroup export / import 7-zip's. But we must prepare that there definitely will be those changes like "ok looks good except XYZ and ZYX needs to be made like this / that" type of things. Such changes are not to be taken "uh oh I messed up, this sux" but as just a simple refining our tool pipeline.

Overall I don't want to repeat the horror mistakes of 2019 where dude was sending me whole terrain project as "mod zip" with all kinds of useless shit private mods added and there was exponentially increasing number of errors in each upload even after I specifically mentioned that hey dude there is dozens of errors here, fix them, we don't do errors.

Sorry for the long post again, I'm just trying to explain things before getting started so there is as little surprises or "well I didn't know / expect that!" issues on both sides.

ARG_afb: how about now, are you scared off yet?

If not, do you have any editing questions so far about anything related to such cooperation?

[ARG_Afb]

I’m not scared, I can do zero error maps if I have zero error objects, I also made spring creek in “passes” so I know very well what you mean with that method, also I’m ok with no “excessive” detail map it’s not a really relevant thing to the game after all, just visually pleasing but if you want me to respect that policy I’m ok with that

[ARG_Afb]

I will do everything you order me like you order me, even sending the files via 7zip and making another TG for all the buildings you order me to place

[Snake Man]

Just created backup 7-zip bat file for the project which backups this terrain project and copies the 7-zip packet to three different HDDs and one Linux computer on network, never forget backups

Starting to take a look at what stage this project is at, I don't have any dev diary documentation about it, last edit was so long time ago that I didn't write such texts yet. Plan is to put it in-game and see how it runs, does it have any errors in the log and what has actually been done, for example I simply cant remember if roads and farm yards have painted into _weight images yet.

Was thinking about millennial farmer farm yard, do we create it first or last. If we create it first there might be a too tempting lure to just start playing before objects have been placed as that is the "star attraction" of this terrain so to speak. If we leave it last, then it would keep us motivated placing all the buildings as in the end we get to the main event which is that specific farm yard

What do you guys think?

Also doesn't giants modhub have some "millennial farmer map objects pack" or something? If there is, does anyone know if its any good, realistic or some conzole peasant miniature size object set?

ARG_afb: when you look at the homepage satellite imagery, is there any specific region of the terrain you would like to start with?

First we of course start with a single small and simple farm yard, to make sure our tool pipeline is synced, for example I'm pretty sure when you send me the first I3D/shapes 7-zip there will be some texture path errors, so we need to make sure the PMC_Helpers transformgroup has all the "source" building models set properly. It should work fine from CTRL-D copy-pasting from there, but we'll see how it goes.

Oh btw was thinking about it some more and reading my own local notes, seems like the object editing work phases are: 1 buildings, 2 utility poles, 3 trees, 4 decorations.

[ARG_Afb]

Glad to hear your answer snake! I personally would start with the town and the power poles, as they are the easiest thing to make

[ARG_Afb]

Also I think we could use the mappers paradise sheds, house and dealership, since they are mods and I think have no errors, (obviously if you want to do that)

[ARG_Afb]

And I could make some roads as “detail” for the map (if you want)

[Snake Man]

I personally would start with the town and the power poles, as they are the easiest thing to make

Hmm you want to make the town as your first "export I3D"?

I use Utility Poles with Wires Tutorial when creating those, works good for me, its not the fastest task but gets the job done.

Do you have any fancier blender method to create utility poles with wires?

we could use the mappers paradise sheds, house and dealership, since they are mods

That's what I meant by the millennial farmer objects pack, I faintly remember seeing them years ago.

I could make some roads as “detail” for the map

3D mesh object asphalt roads, hell yeah

But that is more or less in the decoration phase, 3d roads wont make corn yield any better, our focus should be first pass buildings, if you cant see any buildings in the horizon when farming its going to be pretty boring to drive around in an empty landscape.

But yes of course, 3d asphalt roads are cool and should be added, when the time comes.

BTW: if you want to add some info to your forum post, like you make one post and another two minutes later, please edit the first post instead of making a new post. "Edit post" is the pencil icon, left most of the icons on top of your message. In our forums you can edit posts for first 60 minutes, after that no editing. Its not a big deal but just easier to read one post instead two back to back

I'm currently going through the 2019 era terrain project, its now in-game error free, just adding proper heightmap with heightScale now while checking forums. Plan is to get you the source files today, should not take too long.

Edit: I have now sent you a private message with link to the current terrain project 7-zip backup file.

[ARG_Afb]

Thank you so much snake for trusting me! Really like working together! Will start doing the town right now, try to finish it as fast and do the best I can, the “fancy” method in blender for Wires can be done really easily and it’s almost the same as the roads, will make a file with the method done and send it to you as EXAMPLE.i3d, so you can check if you like the method or prefer to apply your method

[ARG_Afb]

ok, town houses placement finished, images link:
https://i.postimg.cc/QM6nJxjH/Captura-d ... lla-99.png
https://i.postimg.cc/VLR9CZfN/Captura-d ... la-100.png
places that dont have buildings are for the final detail phase, or i just doubted if there was a house or something else
what should i proceed with now?
I3D file link with town buildings sent via PM

[Snake Man]

the “fancy” method in blender for Wires can be done really easily and it’s almost the same as the roads

Can you give us quick overview how its done, or if you want to write step by step guide we could add it to farming-simulator.org as tutorial?

I still need to learn the 3d mesh object road making in blender, have the info written down but only did it once, hopefully can replicate the steps again heh.

will make a file with the method done and send it to you as EXAMPLE.i3d, so you can check if you like the method or prefer to apply your method

If utility poles look OK in-game it doesnt make much difference to me which method we use heh, easier method should be used

Octanen in chat showed one way to make utility poles with wires in blender, but that was a weird method as wires were hardcoded 90 degree angle to the utility pole, so in up or down hill elevations the poles were tilted unnaturally.

ok, town houses placement finished, images link:

Looks like you got the city/town area done, nice, good job.

places that dont have buildings are for the final detail phase, or i just doubted if there was a house or something else

google/maps has street view photos for two streets on that town, looks pretty plain to me, its just house with bunch of trees surrounding it.

what should i proceed with now?

Well I havent edited anything yet, so you are free to do what ever areas you want. I'm actually busy with one more arma3 terrain and fixes for several of the news ones, this might take me a couple of days, but once I get my hands free I'll try to get into lowry building placing mode.

BTW about decorations: if you want just use anything you can find from giants mapDE/mapUS directories so that textures are $data/ referenced (no textures in PMC terrain dir). I have nothing against about decorations if someone wants to add them, as long as its moderate amounts and dont take away from the main task which is building placement.

What about farm yards, besides the obvious millennial farmer youtube guy's farm yard, which ones do you think would make a good players farm on defaultItems.xml config?

Also for FS22 I used TrailerParkFarm's (TPF) huge vehicle sheds, year(s) ago when I checked them in FS19 they were way too high poly, do you know if he has fixed them, are the FS19 TPF vehicle sheds usable today?

Otherwise CBJ midwest buildings pack is the go-to farm yard vehicle shed setup to use.

If you do many farm yards, don't worry about players farm defaultItems.xml stuff, that can be fairly easily done with GE to XML switch.

Was just browsing my own local notes from years ago and there was guideline for good terrain basics, it said to have sixteen (16)! players farms (defaultItems.xml) which objects can be sold. It sounds a lot but for 8.1km terrain is pretty decent amount, in multiplayer games it would allow maxing out farm for every player.

[ARG_Afb]

houses of town N2 placed

[Snake Man]

Imported both I3D files to the terrain project, no errors. Buildings are looking good. We are in the right track, good job

Can you please use UTC ISO 8601 format for the file names, meaning "YEAR-MONTH-DAY" so they can be alphabetically sorted correctly. You dont have to actually adjust the date/time to UTC if you dont know what it is, but please use YEAR-MONTH-DAY format at least.

Once I got my current arma3 projects sorted out and finished I'll start making players farms map image with 1-16 numbers. Millennial farmer's yard of course will be players farm numer 1. Hopefully after that I'd get to place some buildings myself.

[ARG_Afb]

Glad the buildings had no errors! I will use the correct format, thanks for telling me that! Good luck with the arma projects, can I proceed to make the 3d mesh roads?

[Snake Man]

In general terms sure, but the map for asphalt and dirt roads is not done yet, did you plan on checking google/maps yourself for asphalt roads?

Also I cant say if my dirt road _weight image painting is complete, most of these 2019 made terrains I had to finish the painting as it was not 100% complete. So I cant vouch for the weight image dirt roads painting, I would say its probably NOT complete.

Edit: updated first post with image of all building areas and suggestion for player farm locations.

[ARG_Afb]

hey snake, imma do the roads but there is a problem, i need to download and use 2 textures because giants ones are shit and bullshit organized, wanted to warn you about that, tell me if you want me to proceed or not

[Snake Man]

Any textures need to be with permissions or open source / free to use.

[ARG_Afb]

the textures are free to use but we have a small problem, in order to fit the roads correctly the heightmap will need to be modified to fit the roads correctly, also blender 2.79 refuses to work... the roads are giving me a lot of problems, i will try to make them but i think it will take me more than it usually takes me, if you want me to continue with something else like trees or anything more tell me! i prefer you to make the farms as its your map and im only collaborating, wish you the best man!

[Snake Man]

Check out my previous posts I had several questions there.

You are free to place buildings on any farm yards, forget the roads for now they are cosmetic eye candy for later.

[ARG_Afb]

Checked the questions again, I won’t be able to use the “fancy” wires method if the road making method doesn’t work, so I will use your method instead, i checked also the roads and paths so the final road amount will be five, there are some errors with the CBJ buildings, they are lacking the textures, and that’s a huge problem, if you let me solve it downloading the textures I will start then doing farm yards, also I came up with an idea that I’m gonna send you tomorrow as an i3d

[Snake Man]

Hmm CBJ midwest buildings pack has no errors, did you forget to unpack FS19_PlaceableCBJbuildings.zip into the same root directory as PMC_Minnesota_Lowry_8km/ dir is?

Also PMC_Helpers includes wind turbine "Windkraftanlage" so if you don't have that in the root dir you get errors obviously. Sorry my bad, forgot to mention that in previous posts. I don't think the terrain project or PMC_Helpers use any other texture referencing models. BTW the wind turbine is not used in lowry, its just for grande gardens, iowa garden city and some texas terrain, I always have it unpacked in my FS19 editing dir as its used in multiple terrains.

As I said above: we live and die in FS19 game and Giants Editor LOG files. Always open log, always check log, no errors, not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow

[ARG_Afb]

Thanks for telling me that snake! Will start making the farms today!

[Snake Man]

Had to spend a week to watch some TV as I couldn't get any editing started due long time burnout, but now its back to editing.

Still got two arma3 terrains to re-process before they are ready to play, after that its minnesota lowry object placing phase 1 time.

ARG_afb: please update me on what areas you have placed objects so far, I want to create coordination map image which areas you and I will work on so there wont be any overlap.

[ARG_Afb]

Hey snake! It’s ok, everyone can get burnout of mapping, specially if you are working on a lot of projects, I started doing the trees, once I get them finished I will send them to you in a file!

[Snake Man]

Trees? Umm we have barely got started with buildings phase 1, why did you jump to trees now?

[ARG_Afb]

Doing trees first is a way of seeing where you will be able to place buildings correctly and also a way of making the map look more like a map and not just like a clean plain, it makes map making easier I think and also removes a heavy task if you don’t want me to continue just tell me and I will stop

[Snake Man]

Well, send me the tree export files when done.

[ARG_Afb]

Hey snake! Sorry if I havent posted any updates on the map development, I have been trough some complicated weeks and also my new computer arrived 3 days ago and I’m still testing it, will continue with the map tomorrow or maybe next week, but I honestly don’t know

[ARG_Afb]

hey snake! im really sorry if i "took my time" to place the trees but i can finally say that i completed that task, 15715 trees in total, tell me how i should proceed

[Snake Man]

Good job placing all the trees. What do you want to do next?

[ARG_Afb]

Next thing imma do is placing the houses of the farms, and after that start placing the sheds, also i was gonna ask you if I can (with the base DEM and the fields only) make a map for 22, i give you credits if you want, (obviously if you don’t want me to do the map I won’t do it)

[Snake Man]

Next thing imma do is placing the houses of the farms, and after that start placing the sheds

Okay buildings next, sounds good. However sounds cumbersome to me to do a farm yard without vehicle sheds, then have to coming back and try to find the yards with sheds missing.

Why do you specify houses first and only then vehicle sheds?

i was gonna ask you if I can (with the base DEM and the fields only) make a map for 22, i give you credits if you want, (obviously if you don’t want me to do the map I won’t do it)

This post explains porting to FS22.

[Snake Man]

ARG_Afb can you please send me the trees export file and any possible buildings you placed so far, I'd like to take a look at them.

Also regarding the new data request in other forum topic, if you cant continue placing objects to lowry that is completely fine no problemos, just let me know what you want to do.

[ARG_Afb]

Hey snake yea of course, will send them to you when I arrive at home

[Snake Man]

Received the export file and checked it out. There was only couple of new buildings since the existing ones you did previously, did you forget to send me the buildings or are all the buildings you placed in this latest export file?

Scanned through the trees randomly to see different individual examples, meaning I didn't check them all but it was fairly good scan to see a good overview. All trees have scale X, Y and Z set to default 1.

To keep moving forward from here; if you placed any buildings which were not in the export file please send them to me and then don't add any more objects, I want to place some objects and we need to avoid duplicate work.

[ARG_Afb]

Thats all i had placed, tell me if you want any more help With the map or this is all!, also tell me if you need any more help with other projects, i would be glad to help!