My New York City Project

[nycyyz 0]

Hello All!

          After coming back to playing SC4 from a hiatus of a few years I decided to do a recreation of NYC. I know it's been done a lot and I have seen some awesome ones done. I used to live there and I have to try my hand at it. I'm just a couple of weeks into it now. I figured I'd make a journal of my progresses. I found a decent greyscale map of the city and cropped it a bit to fit into a 6 x 8 (1536 x 2048 tiles) large city tile set. It gives a good representation of the city. Also the scale is just about on the money. As the screenshots show (hopefully they will work as it is the first time I am posting images here) I get all of Manhattan, Queens and practically all of inhabited Brooklyn. With about a 1/3 of Staten Island, almost all of da Bronx, a few sq mi of Longiland, throwing in some of the densely populated Jersey palisades I think I should ultimately get about 8 million or so Sims in my region. Since it’s been so long that I have “laid” any tiles (so to speak!) on SC4 I’m unsure how far I want to go with this. Maybe the community can help me decide. Depending on how quickly I progress and/or the advice/help I obtain, I may decide for this to be my new long-term hobby!!

 

Using a fairly accurate map (within 10% since had to tweak a few areas because of the SC4 gridding limitations and to get what I wanted into the 6 x 8 tile set), my plan is to grid (lay all the streets/roads/avenues,etc..)the entire region first with highways/freeways,bridges, etc. roughly where they go. Then I will fine tune the interchanges and bridge placements (that in itself can take so long if you go the realistic path ,ugh!). Then I have a few choices to make.

 

1)      Go ahead and after zoning and such, run the sim via vanilla SC4 or;

2)      Place a few important structures/landmarks (maybe some commercial bat’s, in game stuff and such.) or;

3)      Go full throttle and find everything/anything related to NYC from the downloads, do tunneling, the works, what have you (definitely becomes the long-term thing!)

 

 I at least want to get the 8 million sims (would be the largest region I have ever done) so as I progress I will update this journal (hopefully weekly/biweekly). I will be using district zoning maps from some books I have for accurate placement of the zones. Also all the schools/hospitals etc.. will go exactly where they go even if it overlaps an area or doesn’t give enough coverage.

 

I will run the sim with the NAM and the Industry X4. I felt these added the most realism. Oh and I obviously use the weaknesspays cheat to build the grids before running the individual cities. Otherwise I will try to run it true as possible.

 

While working in some areas, notably Queens and Brooklyn I have come to realize that the single most annoying aspect of SC4 is the grid system. Most real cities have streets/neighborhoods at odd angles. You know,…. if it is a suburban sprawl type of thing with small streets curving in and out, that is somewhat easy to create. But when there are large neighborhoods gridded or main avenues/roads with long stretches of that odd angle, it creates problems. (Broadway, Flatbush Ave, most of damn Queens comes to mind, lol) I have decided if the area/street in question is less than 22.5 degrees to a straight line, it gets a straight orientation, otherwise it goes diagonal and just fudge, to the best of my ability, the immediate surrounding areas to get back on track. At this point I don’t know what else to do other than to alter the map, and I don’t really want to go there because I want to use the best map possible for the sim. (A beautiful Broadway looks so ugly zigging – and zagging through the SC4 grid system)

Anyway , here I go into this project, it should keep me busy for a while. 

 

Till next time.

 

I've added a few more shots of my progress at the end of this thread.. 

[nycyyz 0]

I think I got my pictures to finally work now. they are at the bottom of the thread.  Will post more a few days. Hope to have all the gridding done in a couple of weeks. 

 

[manman99 2]

sounds promising, and Im glad that we have another NYC CJ to add to our continuously growing collection!

[rossjman1 0]

Those images are awfully small. Can't even make 'em out. Also please convert to jpg so you can post them directly in the post instead of just linking them. I didn't even look at all the pics, just the first two because of these two facts. See the sticky about how to make a CJ for a detailed tutorial.

Also, from the first post, you talked about angled streets that are not supported in SimCity, there is a tutorial on Omnibus that explains a workaround to this. Sounds interesting though, and I can't wait for an update!

[nycyyz 0]

Ya, I'm sure there are a ton of stuff here in the forum,I just can't seem to get the search function to work properly. Doesn't get specific enough. I type in a specific term in advance search and I still get all responses. Oh well

[rossjman1 0]

Yea, the search is messed up. Currently it's impossible to search in any specific forum which blows. But here are the links to those tutorials:

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=84296&enterthread=y

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=146&threadid=78009&enterthread=y

[patriots_1228 51]

pics too blurry. also, this idea has been done way too many times.

[nycyyz 0]

Ya, I stated that it's been done a bit in my original post. Well, what can you expect from the greatest city in the world, lol. Gonna try to fix those fuzzies next time.

[Sim_Air 2]

Maybe i should have converted them to jpg before hosting?

You got it!

I can't see any images at all mate. Perhaps editing?

Don't worry; your CJ will turn out fine. You only have to repair some problems and naturally you will get the hang of it.

Good luck!

[nycyyz 0]

Here is the map I'm working with.  I've done about 90-95% of the basic gridding so far. I was going to do the tunnels and highway interchanges, but I've had enough of roads for now, I think I will start placing the sub/el/commuter stations next, ferries. Also, I will have to redo most of Jersey, Staten Island and Lond Island, because I used all roads and no streets, thinking I couldn't do diagonals with them, but DOH! the NAM does it... Oh well..


I think I got the hang of posting images.....

OK, here's what we got so far after 3 weeks...

 

rockaway,far rockaway






working on Queens and Long Island....  Little Neck, and Island burbs..






Staten Island is nearly gridded....


practically finished gridding Da Bronx....



You from Joisey?.... I'm from Joisey......  Done, except for the  upper Palisades near Fort Lee




manhattan of course.....


upper manhattan,cloisters etc...





where to put Nathan's..... mmmm yummy, Coney Island, Bensonhurst,some of Borough Park...


broadway junction in brooklyn. where 2 el's, subway and commuter rails meet.



atlantic/flatbush aves. in brooklyn



george washington bridge


verazzano/narrows bridge




 broadway/myrtle ave el's in brooklyn




long island city in queens, where manhattan-queens tunnel comes out along with 2 commuter stations, an el, and a variety of sub stations

[manman99 2]

excellent pics!! a lil blurry, to let u know, the maximum image size is 800 by 600 pixels. I suggest using irfanview to resize ur images and maybe touch them up a lil bit. Ur road systems look excellent and very precise ! I would love to see the city in a lil bit! oh and yea....im from joisey too!!! only i dont pronoumce it as "joisey" no one understands our legendary accent

[Abc987 3]

It looks very nice, very nice road layouts.

[rossjman1 0]

Ambitious much? That is a huge map, and you already have a lot done! Very nice start!

[Hanson784 165]

That's some great work, very accurate streets and map. Which map are you using?

You have more streets laid in the outer boroughs than I do. Laying them and getting it to look just right takes a lot of patience and time. You want to lay the rest of my streets out for me? lol

[patriots_1228 51]

would be greatest...if it weren't for those yankees

great job with the roads did you do all that by eye? thats pretty impressive then. I tried Boston and couldnt even build one neighborhood!

edit: sucks that they are tearing down MSG

[jerzeslugga 0]

WOW keep it up...I'VE BEEN looking for a recreation of NEW YORK CITY for the longest....

[patriots_1228 51]

the longest equals one day? there are tons of new york cities on ST. watch the caps too

[homeandaway 1]

cool road layouts my friend!, cant wait to see the city shots!

[octaves 4]

Awesome.  I'd suggest using Imageshack instead of whatever is making that big ugly stamp on the side. 

[crazyyaya 4]

If your recreation is as good as your maps, this is going to be amazing. It looks promising.

[Tommy_Vercetti3 3]

Looks good so far. Good Luck.

[jacqulina 162]

looking good great maps there good start my friend

[Sim_Air 2]

great map of NY and nice pics also; waiting for more...keep it up my friend!

[Cleaner475 150]

awesome work so far - your doing really good - great effort

keep it up,

Richard

[nycyyz 0]

Hi! Back with the update, an unfortunate realization and responses to some of your comments:

 

First, the unfortunate realization…… Right after I posted those pictures last week it occurred to me that one can make diagonals with the streets with the NAM. While it doesn’t really affect the more dense part of the city, I would think the majority of the network I made in Long Island, Staten Island, and the less dense parts of the other boroughs would have a substantial amount of streets (no traffic light, just a stop sign) in them, not all roads (traffic lights,with lane divider) like I have been doing. Of course I do not know the location of every street light in the city I still would strive for realism. This means having to go back and redo a decent chunk of the region (Looks like a weeks worth of work).  So it seems I still have at least couple of more weeks of basic gridding before I get into tweaking (doing the sunken/ground/elevated hwys,bridges,tunnels,ferries subway,commuter trains,etc)

 

So I have gridded so far:

Staten Island, Long Island, Manhattan,Bronx, and Jersey

Brooklyn is about half done, and Queens (which is a *****) is about a quarter done.

 

To the community:

 

Manman99 – Ya, I was born in Brooklyn, but moved to Joisey(near jersey City) when I was very young. Left there before high school to Florida where I live now. I never really developed the accent but I still say yous’,yous’ guys, cawfee, brefest and a few other Joisey/nYC isms, LOL

 

Hanson - Thank you for reminding me, I should give credit to the original map maker/owner , before I cropped it a bit. I believe I got it from a website owned by a  “Rebel 13” although, now I am realizing that a much better one probably could have been found. There are some serious errors in this one..

 

Patriots - Screw the Yankees….. go Mets!!

 

Brad-Macd – I do use Imageshack, the problem is I need to find a free PNG to JPG converter. The game only takes PNG shapshots, and when I posted those up, not every one could see them or they said they were very blurry. Anyway, I’d like to find a way around this, any ideas? .  

 

Which brings me to thinking.. how do people get that nice clean picture of their entire region?

 

Homeandaway – Thanks, it will be quite awhile before I actually run the sim, since  I have decided to make this a long term project for now and will be adding anything and everything I can get my hands on and will strive for as much realism as possible with this software and my humble talent….

 

 

And to everyone else, thank you for your kind words, as you have noticed I am trying to get the map looking as good as possible, trying to keep the block error to a minimum (trying for 10%). Meaning if there is an area of 20 blocks by 10 blocks, I will try to include, as accurate as possible at least 180 of them on the map. And of course , whole neighborhoods aligned at odd angles, will affect the adjacent neighborhoods greatly, and that……. IS the challenge.. The more rural stuff of twisting roads is easy, in my opinion.. Anyway will have more screenies in a few days to show my progress,replacing/updating the pictures that I have shown. Till next time…

[robby2161 0]

Impressive!

[Voulpiotis 4]

Amazing road work..... How many days did ti take you to build that?

[nycyyz 0]

It took me about 2-3 weeks to do what the screenshots show, I've added since then (about 1 and 1/2 weeks worth). But now I am contemplating changing the majority of the roads to streets for added realism. I just recently found out that the NAM has the capability of making diagonal streets. Duh....  

Anyway I am just about done doing the basic gridding of the entire region (about a week left). At that time I will decide whether or not to do the change right now. I've noticed in a lot of my cities. mass transit probably doesn't get used because the roads never get too crowded (I never use streets), but realistcally networks don't have a traffic signal (even in the densest of cities and especially in the more suburban areas) at every crossing.. So I will have to see. Even though the NAM lets you grid diagonal streets they still are a real pain to do.

And to an earlier poster, I am doing this by eye off an old street map I have, although I did look at Google maps to make sure they didn't add a bunch of roads/streets in Long Island/Staten Island., lol.. There is still a little bit a vacant land out there..  Very cool thing that Google Maps.. And I just heard about Google Earth, even better.. Woohoo!

Anyway, I've been lax about the new screenies, hope to have them up tonight.  Also, does anyone know how to take a picture of the entire region, it doesn't fit on my monitor at the highest resolution,  do I need to take a few screenshots and merge them, or is there an easier way?

Till next time..

[edmonton_stinks 5]

Great map. You seem really dedicated.

[nycyyz 0]

I just put up a region shot with region census. INobody responded but I figured out how people were doing it anyway. Gives you an idea of the map I'm using. I think I can take better screenies with that program.

Getting a little burnt on the roads, going to move on to the railroads, placing all the lines,tubes,and stations,instead of the tunnels,interchanges I had planned. Maybe do the the ferries. Next I was thinking of doing the Airports. JFK is gonna take awhile!!,LOL. Gotta get a rest from the asphalt. Till next time.