Island Planning Tools?

Does anyone have any resources for planning islands? Besides some graph paper and an Excel Spreadsheet...are there any software packages for land laying out a SIM? What do you use?

Also, what are the standard prices that one would charge per sq meter to rent land and how much do you charge for prims when making shops to rent?

Thanks for any advice.

Graph paper? Bah! I used regular everyday paper. And a pen that leaked.
Then I made the raw file manually in photoshop.

You might want to take the easy way out and get Terragen though, it's a 3d landscape making thingy.

If I owned an island, I'd use a combination of Terragen and an in-world sim planning grid.

The latter is just a prim with a grid texture with little prim markers of various sizes to match common parcel sizes. Virtual 3d graph paper, really. You can build miniatures of your sim buildings on that.

I tried Terragen - did not work for me in terms of terraforming the land. I downloaded the RAW file using the Estate tools, then imported that into Terragen. I did not see much that was useful - just a bunch of dots. I started to pan..zoom, etc and realized that the dots were sticks of land, so to speak - just lots of bits of land sticking up out of the design surface.

I got a terrain file (I downloaded it from a popular Terragen-related site) , exported the RAW file and uploaded. What a disaster! My land maxed out at +100m and I lost everything that was on the island (everything was copyable so it was ok).

I ended up using PhotoShop to edit the RAW file but could not take advantage of the different channels. I could not, for example, see the property lines when I selected the channel that contains that information.

I terraformed using PhotoShop but I would have liked to do more using PhotoShop rather than using SL for planning and layout (note: I am still learning how to use PhotoShop CS; however, I know it well enough to make some clothes, textures, etc so I am thinking that maybe PhotoShop CS is not displaying the channel information correctly - but then I did not know anything about channels until I edited the RAW file ).

If you have any advice on working with the RAW file using PhotoShop, I'd appreciate that since I think I want to redo parts of my sim (raise most land and lower one part for a beach).

Thanks...

-2fast

Tropico

and if you want pirate themes:

Tropico 2: Pirate Cove