Improved Suburbs Project (ISP)

[RiverCocytus 0]

I was making a city using NAM's increased transit capacity and commute length mods, and inevitably I ended up building giant suburbs. (After all, when you can put 10000 people per day on an avenue, why not just fill large maps with suburban sprawl? Easy-peasy!)

I ran into a problem. Suburbs rarely ever are grids. Granted, a grid outlines suburban areas, and each subdivision tends to have from 1 to 4 entrances/exits leading to the avenue/rural highway/1way grid, internally they are never grids. In one of my CJ cities, Nostram, I have managed to use some of the RLM large R$$ homes (2x4 size) to create reasonable suburbs. The problem is that the 2x4 houses are way too large. Additionally, I was only able to re-create 1 type of suburb, and other types were beyond the reach of the game.

I thought about it for awhile. I looked at some of the already-created housing, and saw that there is, to some extent, already 'courts' that have been created.

My main problem with them is,

1. the BSC mega lots are too large, and thus the 8x8 arrangements get very repetitive

2. some of them do not have reasonable property value/residents/pollution etc vis a vis their maxis counterparts.

3. I don't see re-use of the maxis models, (I did see a 3 houses on 4 tiles arrangement, which I like.) or textures. This means that your new 'mega lots' always stick out like sore thumbs with the maxis lots.

I have never used the lot editor. But this is my goal:

Lot sizes (residential lots) in real life come in basically two varieties:

1. square/rectangular

2. pie/wedge shaped

My family's home happens to be on a wedge shaped lot.

Obviously, 'courts' are inimitable because of this.

Or ARE they?

I want to make a series of lots that fulfill the purpose of emulating suburbs more efficiently city-building wise, and more realistically visually.

Here's what I will do...

All low density.

Low wealth: duplex courts and townhouse courts

Med wealth: Cul-de-sacs and courts of 2-stories and single family homes

For all I want to eventually develop

1. maxis variants with no dependencies

2. simgoober based ones with the rural homes (such as the birka) as dependencies

3. American four-square homes based

4. UK cul-de-sacs (as mightygoose has wanted) with IT/Gascooker deps

The idea will be that low wealth/med wealth will be segregated by zone depth. For instance.

depth of 3,5,7 = low wealth

depth of 4,6,8 = med wealth

So if you zone a bunch of 3x5, 4x5 and 5x5 you will see low wealth popping up.

!IMPORTANT! I don't want these to interfere with maxis' high wealth mansions. being able to zone low density 4x6 with water and having mansions pop up predictably is nice. same with 3x4 zones.

I also want to make them in-game realistic. For instance,

you zone 3x6, and a court of 12 R$$ houses appears. I want the occupancy to be 11-12 * 12 for the whole court, as well the pollution values and others, etc.

The texture of the court needs to be Maxis' street texture, and the actual court itself could have the NAM court texture for street. The grass textures must be maxis as well so that low wealth courts fit in with maxis low wealth housing. This way you can fill in the gaps with maxis homes.

Obviously this is a lot of lotting... (lol) but I think the results will be worthy of the trouble.

I'm posting this because I would like some help figuring out how to lot these (I'm not making any new BATs hopefully), to get permission to use props and bats and textures, and even help from others who want to make some suburbs.

I'm thinking that once I figure out the mechanics of this it should be a snap putting them together. I don't need help with textures (though it is appreciated) as I am experienced in creatin

[T Wrecks 10,210]

One thing about the stats: If you think that if a building X has 12 R$$ occupants and needs e.g. 20 gallons of water/month, a building/lot Y with 10*12 = 120 occupants needs 10*20 = 200 gallons of water, you might be surprised to browse the actual stats Maxis gave their buildings. Of course, nobody forces you to stick to their scheme, but if you want your lots (nice idea btw!) to blend in, it's probably not a bad idea to do so. Get rid of any logical thoughts. In SC4, a 1x2 R$ house with 6 occupants may produce 4 tons of garbage whereas a 4x4 highrise with 4,000 inhabitants produces -you probably guessed it- 6 tons of garbage! Feel free to d/l my stats & values database or to use SC4Tool to browse the original buildings and get an idea.

Wedge lots are impossible, period. you can use some tricks to imitate them with ploppable buildings, but forget the plan of making wedge-shaped lots with growables.

I like the approach you are taking, and your plans really sound good, but my capacities are bound by the MAPP project, the HK BAT Team, Jasoncw's BATs, and my own little stuff, so all I can do to help you is by explaining one or two things if and when I can. Good luck!

[diablo_del_bano 3]

what you could do, is make a 2xwhatever lot that has two houses kinda in the wedge angle. Like this:

..........................lot outline

..........____________________________

.........|..._____.......................______...|

.........|...\.......\...................../........./...|

.........|....\.......\...houses....../......../.....|

.........|.....\____\................./____/.......|

.........|____________________________|

....................___/.street........\___

................../................................\

.................|.........________...........|

.................|.........|.............|..........|

.................|.........|.............|..........|

.................|.........|________|.........|

..................\.................................|

....................................\................|

.....................................|...............|

[RiverCocytus 0]

Excellent replies. Ok, so maxis is basing garbage roughly on lot size? Hmm. I'll look into it and draw out some plans.

Diablo: You have the idea, but here's more of what I mean.

<pre>

Here is how you make a 'court' probably, with maxis' rect-only zone shapes.

..||...

..vv...

->/\<--

->\/<--

-->|<--

-->|<--

I would turn it into a single lot, but make it realistic zone-wise

.......

.hhhhh.

.h/-\h.

.h\-/h.

..h|h..

..h|h..

As a basic layout. Though the houses themselves would not be so strictly aligned to grid. So you would zone

|||||||

|||||||

|||||||

|||||||

|||||||

vvvvvvv

a 7x6.

</pre>

[Andreas Roth 629]

This is definitely a nice project, and I'm looking forward to see the results. As T Wrecks pointed out, you should consult his reference table and the building database that is included in SC4Tool to get some reasonable stats. It needs some time and knowledge to get things balanced, esp. when you also want to try preventing the lots growing like weed and such. SimGoober has done some nice "court" lots, this might help you creating "wedge" or "L" shaped developments. Plus, SimGoober's textures match the grey street textures quite well, so you can use them to visually "extend" the streets into your lots. You might even transit enable them, but please keep in mind such a lot won't upgrade anymore (basically, it has the same effect as "Make historical").

[RiverCocytus 0]

Excellent, thank you for telling me that, Andreas. Obviously I will need to create a ploppable 'entrance' lot to be put at the front of every court. Question will be if that lot will allow a proper transit of commuters? Anyway, it would be called 'court entrance' or something- just something that changes the road to make it look like the lot is transit enabled.

Here is what I thought might work very well

This is a map i have marked up showing lot boundaries (in teal) and the area that is most problematic for SC4 in green.

I'm certain of these lot sizes, as my mother had a zoning map of this neighborhood.

Here is how you normally would do a 'court' in SC4 (area total, 5x6 tiles.

The dark green area represents the space; also it represents what I want to replace with a single lot. the 'x's are wasted space (which might be used for other courts touching or parks, but when you mass lay suburbs there is little time to figure these things out.)

So here is the stage 1 replacement, I'm sort of assuming that the houses will take up 4 tiles each (though they often take 6)

H's are positions where Maxis 2-stories will be.The gray represents the fake street.

Stage 2:

now the other lots have been bought, but we're not done yet...

Stage 3 (?) (Will figure this out later.)

Notice they are pretty squeezed in there; much like the satelite photo.

I would also do a second 5x6 lot; with a different house arrangement;

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Zero lot line for the last lot.

Based on number of houses against the maxis 'standard' for this kind of low density housing, you would get

Residents Stage1 Stage2 Stage3

Type1     60     120    144

Type2     60     108    156

Anyone like the idea? If the game works as I have experienced it doing, if these lots are not transit enabled, there should be a result of them upgrading from stage1 to stage2 to stage3 or some such. Perhaps I would do only one 'type per lot size.

[Skyfire2275 23]

Wow. If this works out as planned then, well, suburbia here we come! I like this project and I wish you good luck on it, it looks promising already. I'll check back later as progress is made. I agree that transit enabling the lots (so that they won't be overgrown) would be a good idea, especially because "Make Historical" does not work all the time... I have seen it with my own eyes!

-Skyfire

[RiverCocytus 0]

hmm, I think that only the stage 3 will be transit enabled; this way, 1 and 2 can auto-upgrade to 3...

I'm going to make some base textures which will be generated from the maxis ones...however, seems that documentation on how to do this is fuzzy... in addition, both datgen and ireader do not work properly... ireader will not load the English locale dat (although it will load the thai one.. 0.o) and datgen will only do sims 2 stuff... not sure why, and when I try to browse SC4 exemplars I get repeated errors.

What I need to do is pretty simple, though-- 1. make new base textures and put them in a dat or texture file (seems that Fishman is involved?)

2. mod my lot so that it has the correct number of occupants, garbage, water use, etc.

3. mod my lot so that the desirability is correct, to make sure it grows

4. generate the dependencies (dang textures. Who knows which belong to which!)

I will be reading any kind of help I can find on this stuff. But, if in the meantime anyone has any especially helpful advice that may be hard to divine from the help threads, please share.

[Andreas Roth 629]

I'm not sure if that "entrance lot" is a good idea. You would have to plop them in front of every lot that develops, and it would require to make all lots with the same layout, so the fake street/court texture would have to be placed on the same tiles on every lot - which looks a bit repetitive and thus quite boring. Anyway, that "wasted space" you marked with the "X" isn't really wasted, since you can easily use it for small playgrounds, parking lots and such.

[RiverCocytus 0]

indeed. however, given other factors, playgrounds and parks are entirely un-necessary. I'm with you on not doing the entrance lots, though, looking over the whole deal.

Here's what I'll do:

Stage 1 and 2 will not be transit enabled

Stage 3 will be.

Hopefully, game mechanics holding, you should see the stage 1 be 'rebuilt' when stage 2 hits, and 'rebuilt' again for stage 3; at which point you will have to force it to change to get a different court (after all, in reality, nothing short of abandonment of fully developed suburbs followed by rezoning really ever causes a change.)

This is a test, I copied the lot from one of simgoober's sets (the townhouse lot) and altered all of its properties... It is transit enabled for now, (this is a stage 1 lot)

It grows a lot, but I need to make unique 'buildings' for these lots so they have the right occupant stats, and make the textures look more like real courts.

Here are some images I have collected of the growable moving in like thunder on 5x6 zones.

Right now they look like cul-de-sacs, since I have not gotten the textures in yet (nor figured out how to properly import them.

Also, It seems that I really can't create new exemplars with SC4tool? I'm kind of confused. Oh well. Input is welcome.

[Andreas Roth 629]

Making textures should be quite easy with the Texture Maker included in SC4Tool. I don't have any experience in making textures, though, so if you have specific questions, you should contact GeoffHaw from the BSC, for instance. In any case, you should request a unique ID range for your textures, there's a request thread in the BSC forums. You cannot create new exemplar files in SC4Tool, but you can copy existing ones and edit them as needed.

Anyway, nice work so far, this project should open a whole new possibility to develop suburban areas. Actually, ArkenbergeJoe from the BSC is doing something similar with some European buildings that are placed on lots with the size of 4x5, 5x4, 5x5 and similar. There are lots for low, medium and high density (all in the European tileset, of course), so they also upgrade when the city develops.

Oh, and please include a line break between your screenshots, they are disrupting the forum layout.

[pickled_pig 7]

This is a great idea and one I would support. I'd imagine you're going to do this with all of the Maxis tilesets (Chicago does not look terribly suburban; I remove it when doing suburbs) - if you do so and have some variation in each tileset (I see the houses are in the same place in each lot) this will, as previously said, open up new possibilities to suburbia.

It would be interesting of we could create a complete transit-enabled modular suburbia pack. Not just cul-de-sacs, but as well, small gated communities, cluster developments, etc... But I'm not the Lot Editor expert here; who knows if that can be done.

[newyorkrunaway1 110]

This is an intereseting little project, can't wait to see it more developed!!!

[DonD13 0]

Great idea. I was thinking of doing something like this awhile back, but my relative inexperience with lot building, combined with my work schedule has kept me from doing much myself. I for one, would like to see several houses rendered diagonally, maybe we could convince some of the people who released some of the great house BATs to turn the models 45 degrees and render them as props. While diagonal lots are not possible right now, with several houses along a diagonal court, it would add a lot of variety to the layouts. You could use the diagonal house models at the end of the courts as well, to keep them facing the street. Here's an example of what I mean:

H=orthagonal house

D=diagonal house

S=street texture

O=cul-de-sac texture

R=actual road or street

DHD

HOH

DSD

HSH

HSH

HSH

RRR

Or on the diagonal, it could be like this

HDH

.DOD

..HSH

...DSD

....DSD

.....DSD

RRRRRRRRRR

Sorry for the cheesy ascii art. If you think the idea has any merit, PM me and I'll sketch something out in paint and show you what I mean.

Keep up the good work,

Don

[RiverCocytus 0]

For your ascii art, select it and use the format 'formatted' -- it will make it a fixed width font.

The textures so far haven't been a problem (though dealing with alpha channels is annoying)

Yes, I think doing a modular suburb pack would be possible. Although, in all likelihood, due to the tile-based nature of textures some parts will be extremely tedious.

Anyway, I'll show later what I've done RE:Texturing the lot. Then I'll try to make it have the right number of occupants...

Andreas: I had trouble copying the exemplars, but maybe this has something to do with them being placed in a lot file instead of a dat?

[SC4Noobie 5]

This looks good... Seems like you are making a lot of progess on this. I can't wait for furthur development. Sorry, I can't help, as I have ZERO experence with this stuff

[RiverCocytus 0]

As did I before yesterday. Here is the pictures of what I've achieved (you can see whose examplar I copied! =P)

There you have it for now. I will create

1. another court that matches an even width of tiles (tilts to left or right)

2. walkups and driveways for straight roads and courts

3. sidewalk overlays for the stage 3 lots

Other things to set up..

1. Random props

2. Random houses

A few things...

Looking at the lot editor, it would be helpful to be able to flip (mirror) textures, instead of just rotating them. Is there a key to do this?

Also..

Are there conventions I should follow for the road texture being a base/overlay and sidealks being base/overlay? or does it matter?

Diagonal houses.... would be nice, but are they available anywhere? Maxis houses certainly can't be made to be diagonal (at least not to my knowledge!)

I'll keep going.

[Andreas Roth 629]

What exactly is your problem with copying exemplar files? Just right-click them, select "copy", then go to your target file, right-click again and select "paste". It doesn't matter where they are located, either in a lot file, a DAT or whatever - the game sees every file (with the common extensions) as DAT file, and the only really important thing is a unique ID.

In the Lot Editor, you can mirror textures by selecting them and pressing "M" (for "mirror") - duh, that was too easy, I guess. And as I mentioned above, please edit your posting and add a line break between those large screenshots. Horizontal scrolling is just too annoying...

[RiverCocytus 0]

ah, thank you.. lol.

Well, copying them did not seem to always work. I would select the exemplar I wanted, copy it, and then load the file I wanted to paste it into... when I would paste it, nothing would happen...

So I loaded the other file into it, and deleted the exemplars I didn't want.

getting that Ltext exemplar to appear might be a challenge, it disappeared when I deleted the lot exemplar. Hmm.

I'll do something about those images; they never seem to horizontally scroll for me.

[subedei 3]

What about larger Lots say using the mega-growable knowledge say like 24 by 24 tiles? Also can you make curved roads since this functions just like 1 lot? also try to incorperate JaWoods condos/apartments using the larger lots.

Subedei

[RiverCocytus 0]

Yes, that sounds like a great idea, sub! I don't know how it will be making them growable but I will definitely give it a shot later. It will also as you said allow them to have curved roads, which will be cool. And the condos; yeah, sounds like a plan. We have some condo/apartment complexes around here that would look good on mega-mega lots. Maybe I could do whole communities =P

Ok, but right now I'm just doing some smaller growables. Here is a picture of the two variants, plus random houses and props, working out ok:

and a closer-up

If you like what you see, give me a holler. I unintentionally made those two houses in the same places mirrored-like, and SC4 strangely put them on opposite sides when I grew them. Oh well; I'll re-arrange the houses a bit for the next version. Still, growing both variations works like a charm!

Uh, I'm going to go request a custom texture number set, so my textures won't conflict. I'll just keep going!

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Really nice job so far! I only suggest using a mix of medium-sized (50) and large tree prop familes (51). Other interesting tree prop families are around 78. Other than that, I don't see any flaw in this promising project!

As for the mega-mega lots, I wouldn't do that. You might hit the maximum prop count earlier than you think, and it will be so much work to fill such a huge space, especially given the poxy little interface provided by the LE, which only lets you see a tiny bit at the same time and is locked to 800x600 pixels. Besides, such immense lot sizes require flat land to really work, and they will be highly unflexible. If I were you I'd stick to smaller lot sizes.

[Skyfire2275 23]

Wow, this is coming along very nicely. It seems to me that these lots need more props...  Around here anyway (a typical suburb I believe) almost every house has something... a pool, swingset... or a large deck/patio with a BBQ. And most have flower gardens in the front or something like that. Ususally the yards are very uncluttered and organized. The trees in your lots look a little to wild (ie: randomly placed and unorganized) to be suburban and possibly to many trees in each yard too. Like T Wrecks said, use different sized trees or bushes. Also something to try, put a little garden at the base of the trees. Keep up the GREAT work.

-Skyfire

[T Wrecks 10,210]

There are also prop families for these "garden thingies": Swings, sandboxes, trampolines and other play structures, patios / decks and terraces, outdoor tables, pools... you get the idea. These will help to both fill the lot and randomize the appearance so that the shared lot design is less obvious. Some flower and bush prop families in the front yard (4a - 4e, I think), and you got it.

[GMT 389]

this looks sooo awesome.

but the textures really need a hand.

but not mine, this would make it worse....

anyway, very great idea and a very impressive way to deal with!

oh please keep it up!

[Kippis05 2]

Wow, very impressive work, there! I haven't developed out to suburbia just yet, but this gives me some great ideas

[soldyne 111]

this is a facinating idea you have here. I use suburbs all the time and I would like to think I am a decent suburban planner myslef, but these lots should really help others in making eye pleasing and realistic suburbs. great job so far, keep it up.

[RiverCocytus 0]

hmm. I don't see any problem with the court texture itself; though I do need to do a little work with the overlays.

How it will work will be:

Stage 1 (as shown) with no fences - trees like that - random and wild, as they are empty lots.

Stage 2 - sidewalks, no fences - trees more organized, more shrubs and landscaping

Stage 3 - sidewalks and fences - all trees organized, some ornamental; more landscaping.

I think the problem you had with the court texture is that there are no sidewalks, driveways or front walks. I will resolve that next week, as I need to hold on this for a little bit. Anyone who would volunteer to help with this, please PM me; I first need to standardize the house positions and get a texture set, so I can create only a reasonable number of textures. If you want to help with that, cool. Just, like I said, make with the Private Message.

Ok, well, see you next week, folks.

[DonD13 0]

Looking good so far.

I was thinking, once you have these lots perfected, perhaps you could do some suburban duplex and small apartment complex courts like these which would grow on medium density lots of the same size. This would allow you to re-zone these lots and have them upgrade without changing the layout of the courts and the associated streets/roads that feed them.

Just a random thought that popped into my head

Don

[brancra 1,206]

You're doing an excellent job rivercocytus, and I'm sure a lot of people will be extremely pleased when you begin to release the fruits of your labour.