A Guide To Creating A City Journal

[dedgren 830]

Hey, Uumke-

Are you talking about the "Reply ; Quote ; Top : Bottom : Edit" links that appear at the bottom of your own posts (the posts of others, of course, are minus the "Edit")?  There is no link for "Update" if that is what you are asking.  If you have a CJ and want to post an update, or other content, you simply select "Reply" from one of your previous posts (usually I group mine by subject, so I click on the "Reply" link at the bottom of the last update I posted) and create the update in the subwindow that appears.

You cant, of course, post an update, per se, in someone else's CJ.  I guess you could call adding new information to a previous post of your own there an "update," but some might view that as bad form.  I dunno- I'm for guidelines, not rules.

By the way, disregard what I said above about turning the computer at right angles to rotate something.  Actually, I just moved to a different side of the table.  Learn something on ST every day- yep!

[MrCinatit 30]

(dedgren answered the question quite nicely...I am just giving this a slight bumb so the post can be seen)

oh, and dedgren, re: turning your computer monitor around...that can be tough on your arms if you have an older, larger monitor.

I suggest simply taking a picture of what is on your monitor, then flipping the camera around - less wear and tear on the ol' muscles.

[Shadow Assassin 336]

A note to people (not directed at anybody in particular) when posting updates:

For the love of God, please use Save for Web @ ~70% quality JPG when saving images! I am (and others) sick and tired of wasting time waiting for ~700kb images to load in CJs. If the majority of image file sizes are above 300kb, I am not going to bother visiting.

Not everybody has superly fast connections and has the time to waste around 10 minutes waiting for images to appear... no matter how nice the city is, there is no point in wasting time waiting for the images to load, time that could be better spent doing other things. I am normally quite patient, but there is a recent proliferation of CJs with image file sizes that are well, huge.... and it annoys me when people have 30, 40, 50 images on the same page, all with 500kb.

The rules are there for a reason.

--Cheers, SA

PS: sorry if I sound a little PO'ed, but that's just how annoying the issue is

[Micah 16]

Yeah, I know what you mean, SA. Some of these CJs have so much stuff to load, that when I try to actually look at it, they freeze and then I have to close the page and try to open it again. And yes, 50 images is a little out-there.

[collgab 10]

yup that is annoying......but what can we do only inforce the rules

[dedgren 830]

Shadow (Shadow_Assassin), Marc (Micah) and collgab (and anyone else concerned about the pic size issue)-

Hey, you're hittin' pretty close to home with that "50 pic" stuff...

That said, there is no frickin' reason whatsoever for any 800x600 pixel .jpg file to be over about 120kb.  I went back through the 300 or so pics I've put in 3RR and they average about 80kb.  I use Paint Shop Pro 8's default .jpg settings (I never thought about tweaking them until I saw your posts) and the quality of my pics is just fine (at least as far as I'm concerned).  I bet I could keep that same quality and shed another 10-15kb per pic on the average.  That may not seem like much, but some of my CJ's pages have 70+ pics on them- that's close to a megtabyte of saved DL time.

You guys are exactly right- CJ's that have great pics but you have to wait 10 minutes to see them don't get looked at.  I've wondered, quite frankly, how many of 3RR's page views are folks who click the link in, then wait a minute or two and move on because there's nothing to look at yet.  The pics are an essential part of my style there, but I'll definitely pay a lot more attention to how much they weigh in the future.

Thanks for bringing this important issue out into the sunshine for everyone to see.

Cheers!

David

 

[CDI_spy 5]

Hi guys: how do you guys manage to save JPEGs at 70% quality without making the picture all grainy

[Yoman3 5]

is with CDI_spy ^^^^^^^

[bourneid 13]

Well, being one of those that clocks in with the higher pictures sizes....I would like to point out that it is defenetly common politness to at least warn those with the slower connections that the journal they are going to look at may load slow.

I do so right in the title of my journal, others may do something diffrent. As for lowering the sizes, its a matter of personal taste and sometimes necesity. For the most part I choose to keep the higher detail setting because with the graphics and such that I use, detail would be lost compressing the picture. And that would defeat the hours spent creating them. The necesity comes in when dealing with the animated gifs, these tyes of pictures can get rather big, but it is an element of a journal that adds something that just couldnt be captured any other way.

Just as some lots on the STEX may not be everyones cup of tea, some folks may have to understand that some journals may not thiers.

One Idea though....if you know that a particular journal may intrest you, but you cant load it verry good.....you might be able to ask the journalist who made it, though PM, if they would be interested in providing a low bandwith version though PM.  

what I mean is, taking the pictures and lowering the quality and pm'ing them to a non broadband member.

[dedgren 830]

john (bourneid)-  Well, you are certainly correct that your CJ's pics are of the highest quality.  And I must note that I didn't have animated .gifs and such in mind when I said 120kb a pic should be about the upward limit.  So, your situation may very well set Broome County apart along with a few others that take the same approach (I note that BC is a "must stop" on my CJ rounds- it's set apart from that standpoint in any event).

That said, I raised the compression of pics in 3RR starting with today's post from 15% (in Paint Shop Pro 8) to 25%.  I literally begged people to tell me things looked worse.  Nobody who posted could tell any difference.

And the change saved 173kb of DL "weight," according to my not-so-scientific calculations.  I assume this means 3RR will load a few seconds faster- a good thing, if I'm not losing quality.

I'll make here the same offer I've made by PM to folks I've talked with who have extreme bandwidth limitations- if you truly have problems enjoying Three Rivers Region in all its glory because you are really, really on a really slow connection, or your ISP cuts you off at the knees above some ridiculously low upload/download byte limit, I'll send you my CJ on a CD, pics and all, for the cost of a PM asking for it in a "single file" HTML format.  It won't have all the ST chrome, but it's otherwise all there.  Happy to do it.

CDI_spy:  If you've got the grainies at 30%, you're doing something else that's causing it.  Let me make a suggestion- then PM me if this doesn't work.  I resize all my pics, from whatever native source to 800X600 at 150dpi resolution.  I always use [ PrtSc ] as opposed to the SC4 album because getting pics that way starts them out in .bmp format, which is lossless.  If I am dealing with photos, I set my digital camera to the highest pixel count and granularity setting it can stand (I'm no digital photo whiz, but I think that's 6M at "fine" resolution).  After resizing, I then save the pic in .jpg format.  Don't use .png- they're good, but too big.  Don't use .gif unless you absolutley have to, such as for pics with transparent areas (most of the road signs on 3RR are saved as .gifs).

If you still have grainy pics at 30% after doing that, PM me- we'll 'figger it out.

David

[KT3 5]

Bourneid

That proposal certainly sounds like a good compromise.

I agree that after spending hours creating a beautiful picture, it would be such a shame to lose it by overcompressing the jpg, but those of us fortunate to have superfast computers and 2+Mbps DSL connections, must give due consideration to those members still on dial up

[Rayden 7]

I've been using until now Photoshop and compressing 7 or 8 for jpgs. A 800x600 jpg compressed with factor 8 gives an image weight of 165 Kbs. Factor 7 goes down 150 Kbs. Didn't notice any difference in quality.

[Yoman3 5]

Thanks that sounds good!

[moganite 4]

All of mine are with the gimg and set to 85 on the quality and the results are fine go have alook if you want they weigh in at about 50 KB for an 800x600 city shot, and about 426 KB each for the full sized version of the satelite images I used in a previous update. There were 5 of them and will be only one or two more of those. Satelite images are very complext so they dont compress well.

[seemurray2 21]

This may be a dumb question, but how do you change the topic summary located below the title?

[mayormommy 8]

Not a dumb question at all - it stumps a lot of people. Just click the edit button on the first post of the thread. The title and subtitle boxes will both appear and can be edited.

[seemurray2 21]

Thanks mom!

[ilikehotdogsalot 311]

[AspieGamer13 11]

1: your quadruple posting

2: your image is in .png format (change and re-upload as .jpg)

Edit: friendly advice for the quadruple posting... the edit button is to the right and bottom of your post(s).

[dedgren 830]

I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but I'll post here a tutorial of sorts on how to link directly to specific posts on pages in your CJ (or for that matter any particular post in any forum topic).  I've never seen such a system in anyone's CJ yet (I've now got a fledgling one going in 3RR, click on this linkie

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=74819&STARTPAGE=1#727938

to take a look), so I'll presume at least that the technique is not widely known.  It would seem to me that it would be great for creating "post-specific" CJ tables of contents (as I am doing in mine) and to point someone who's post asks a question that has already been answered in a previous post to the specific information instead of doing something like "click on the link following to go to page 17 [ url ], then scroll down to post 23 about 3/4 of the way down the page."  I've used the latter in posts on my CJ like this one

www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=74819&STARTPAGE=18#848167

Now, it's a little bit of work, but the end result, IMHO, is well worth it.

First, set your browser to display the address of the page you are currently viewing.  In IE6, this is done by checking the "Address Bar" choice under "Toolbars" in the "View" menu, as shown here.

 This will give you a line up in the toolbars area that looks like this, and which may be cut and pasted.

Now, navigate to the page on which the post appears that you want to link directly to, and copy [ Ctrl ][ C ] the link.

For our example, we'll use the page you are currently viewing, and link directly to my second post, which is the sixth post down on the page.

Position the mouse cursor anywhere in the tan "chrome" area of the page below the avatar, as shown here inside the green diamond...

...and right-click the mouse.

This will bring up the following menu (at least in IE6- I'm sure Firefox has a corresponding capability), from which you left-click on "View Source."

This will bring up a Notepad window displaying the Hypertext Markup Language, more commonly known as HTML, code for the page.

Teaching anyone HTML is beyond the scope of this tutorial, and it isn't necessary in any event.  All that you need to know is that a particular component of the code, known as an anchor tag, exists for each post on the page followed by a name unique to the post.

These tags look like this, as highlighted this time by the yellow rectangle. 

Now, hang in there, you're almost there.

At first, it would look like finding a needle in a haystack.  There are hundreds of lines of code on each ST forum topic page- scanning through them by eye would take forever...

...but you don't have to.  Instead, type the following in a Notepad "Find" box, which comes up when you select "Find..." under the "Edit" menu.

That's right- "<a name="

Left-click on the box's "Find Next" button once.  It will find and highhlight the following

 

This will always be the first anchor tag on a ST forum page.  We ignore it.

Next, we'll right-click six times on the "Find Next" button.  Why (other than because I told you to)?

Because the post we want to link directly to is the sixth post on the page.  If we were linking to the twenty-third post, we'd have clicked 23 times.

Makes sense, eh?

This is what we see.

From this, we learn that the anchor name of the sixth post is "828908."

From here, it's easy to create the link.  First, paste using [ Ctrl ][ V ] the address of the page we previously cut from the "address" toolbar.

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=63427&STARTPAGE=3&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

Find "STARTPAGE" in the address.  It will be followed by an "=" sign and then the number of the page- in this case "3."  Delete everything after that, which leaves you with this.

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=63427&STARTPAGE=3

Position the cursor at the end of that line, then type a "hash" (#) symbol, followed by the anchor name, "828908," that we identified a bit ago.

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=63427&STARTPAGE=3#828908

Now for the last tricky bit.  Highlight the entire line (I'm assuming you are doing this in ST's "Replying to a Message" box) and, after pressing [ Ctrl ][ C ] to copy it, right-click the mouse cursor on it.  The following selection box appears

After clicking on "Edit Link," you'll see a "Link" box, where you will paste the address line with  [ Ctrl ][ V ] you just copied into the "URL" field.

Click "OK," and you are done.  Don't believe me-

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=63427&STARTPAGE=3#828908

Here's your link...check it out.

If any of this isn't clear, feel free to PM me.  Happy linking!

[AspieGamer13 11]

Thank You. I will now update my CJ ToC.

Edit - done

PS - you can also go to "View" "View Sorce" OR press Alt then V the C.

also, if when you update, you type in you update Update and whatever update it is (Update 7, for example), then you just have to find that (might not be first one if you update your topic summer to have the same thing, and if that's not the first post to contain Update 7... or whatever), then change the search for <a name= and change the search direction to Up, and that should take you right to where you need to go without counting posts

[patriots_1228 51]

do you know any other ways to appropriately advertise your cj beside in a signature

[swesim 1]

How do I minimize the panel at the bottom of the screen before taking pictures of the city/region?

I

[sanantonio 0]

Good question...I was wondering that myself. Must be a hotkey, I'd guess.

While on the topic, does anyone have a complete list of SC4's hotkeys? They came with the manual, but I seem to have misplaced it long ago.

[AspieGamer13 11]

simply click on the box while the panel is open that easy

edit: another post made just before I first posted this...

i'm sure there's a post about this somewhere, but I'll list 'em now...

General Hotkeys

1	Zoom to 1
2	Zoom to 2
3	Zoom to 3
4	Zoom to 4
5	Zoom to 5
6	Zoom to 6
- OR NumPad -	Zoom Out
+ OR NumPad +	Zoom In
Ctrl ` OR Ctrl Pause	Pause Simulation
Ctrl 1	Turtle Speed
Ctrl 2	Rhino Speed
Ctrl 3	Cheetah Speed
Q	Zone Low Density Residential
W	Zone Medium Density Residential
E	Zone High Density Residential
A	Zone Low Density Commercial
S	Zone Medium Density Commercial
D	Zone High Density Commercial
Z	Zone Agriculture
X	Zone Medium Density Industrial
C	Zone High Density Industrial
R	Road Tool
Shift R	Elevated Highway Tool
Ctrl R	Avenue Tool
Alt R	Street Tool
Ctrl Shift R	Build Bus Stop
T	Rail Tool
Shift T	Subway Tool
Ctrl T	Elevated Rail Tool
Alt T	Build Elevated Rail Station
Ctrl Shift T	Build Passenger Train Station
Shift Alt T	Build Subway Station
Ctrl Alt T	Build Freight Depot
I	Pipe Tool
L	Power Line Tool
P	Build Small Police Station
Y	Build Landfill Zone
Shift P	Build Jail
Ctrl P	Dispatch Police
Alt P	Build Large Police Station
F	Build Small Fire Station
Ctrl F	Dispatch Fire
Alt F	Build Large Fire Station
H	Build Clinic
Alt H	Build Hospital
K	Build Elementry School
Shift K	Build City College
Alt K	Build High School
V	Dezone
B	Demolish
M	Build Passenger & Vehicle Ferry Terminal
Ctrl M	Build Passenger Ferry Terminal
/	Query Tool
Alt /	Route Query Tool
Ctrl Shift O	Obliterate City
ESC	Close/Release Tool
G	Grid Toggle
Ctrl Shift C	Terrain Contour Toggle
Ctrl Alt Shift F	Refresh
Page Up	Rotate Camera CounterClockwise
Page Down	Rotate Camera Clockwise
Home	Rotate Building/Lable Clockwise
End	Rotate Building/Lable CounterClockwise
Down Arrow	Scroll Down
Right Arrow	Scroll Right
Up Arrow	Scroll Up
Left Arrow	Scroll Left
Spacebar	Center On Cursor
F1	God Mode
F2	Mayor Mode
F3	My Sim Mode
F4	Options Panel
F5	Day Only
F6	Night Only
F7	Cycle Day/Night
F8	Exit to Region
F9	Graphics Options
F10	Audio Options
F11	Game Options
F12	Quit Game
Ctrl S	Save
Ctrl Alt S	Fast Save (No Region Thumbnail Update)
Ctrl Shift S	Snapshot Mode
Ctrl Shift A	Photo Album
Ctrl X	Cheat Input

[SC4Noobie 5]

I think it's online. Also, I think Dedgren posted it in 3RR. Try there. BTW, just minimise it, then hit ctrl+shift+s and you got the snapshot mode.

[sanantonio 0]

Got it....here...Thanks!

[swesim 1]

Thanks for the help guys! I should have figured it was that easy...

[RushHourFreak 1]

<p>Thanks for the information, So answer me two questions, FIRST I wanna know if that signature, hypervincle with city's name how can you do that? And SECOND i wana post my first CJ, i can only take the pictures in a short sieze instead of downloading that programs? tHANKS</p>

[MadMax410 1]

There is a program that allows you to convert the pictures you take in SimCity directly into a photo you can put on the Internet. I know it is here at Simtropolis. Can someone give me a link to its location?