Building curved bridges

[Alle 1]

While making a new region which I intend on releasing on the STEX. I used  the terraformer tool and edited a tile which already had a motorway built in it, saved the tile without removing current content. And what was before an elevated motorway going on land, had became one going above water.

The motorway itself seems functional. This ought to mean, that it can be repeated as follows:

- Raise the land level where you want to create a curved bridge to just above water level.

- Build an elevated motorway (ground motorway works just as well, but looks pretty awkward floating on water) with the path you want.

- Open up the terraformer tool, lock all tiles but the one you want to edit. And lower the surface back to below water level again. It is important to leave at least a "starting piece" on land for this to work, lest you will not be able to actually connect to the new "bridge".

This might seem a bit dry, having a regular elevated motorway as a bridge. But there are modding possibilities here. If there were pre-made curved "bridge" lots, or maybe even puzzle pieces, specificly designed to fill this purpose. It could also, actually look like a bridge, and fill that purpose if following the instructions above.

As you can see on the screenshot, it can even be connected to other cities, a bridge connected directly to another city where the bridge continues, is in and of itself a new thing. At the other side which is not part of the screenshot, it continues on land.

The only question remaining, is testing whether ferries can pass through. And naturally I did this, and ferry transit worked as if there was nothing in the way.

[GlobexCo 33]

Wow!

If you want to test it, try to lower only the part between RES (island1) and Industries (island 2). If people can go to work, you're a genius. Try also to make highway with interchanges and NAM curves.

[Alle 1]

Another example follows:

The land level was a bit too high to begin with, hence the effect of it looking like it's floating above the water. But such things could be taken into consideration with pre-designed lots. I imagine quite complex automata communications being built this way, with intersections. Saving space on land and just looking good.

I did not do any simulations, but using the "question" tool (with reservation for it not being the correct name), shows stats as usual. The downside is that it might seem tiresome, and risky, to need to use the terraformer to achieve this.

It should work with rail also, I suppose the raised rail in the NAM would be most suitable for it, amongst the alternatives that exist now. Albeit it would look awkward with ferries going right through it.

Update:

The motorway and ferry transit both work well in UDI.

It is now verified to be functional in simulation

.

Rail also works

[psander5 198]

This looks useful.  After reading this I ran my own test as I thought that one of your problems could be easily fixed. 

If you start by making the bridged area harbour height in the terraformer, the resulting causeway will appear closer to the water surface, so it won't appear to be hovering in the air as much.

They show up well in the region view

Bridges can be used, but the approaches hover, so they're not that useful.  Without a slope mod it might be better though.

Ferries work

And cars can still use the highways

Neighbour connections work fine

It could easily be made prettier than in my example.

I can see this method having some applications, but there's not much difference in appearance between this and using land causways decorated with sea walls, with a bridged central span. 

I think I recall seeing something like this done before somewhere, but i'm digging that recollection out from deep within my memory, so it might be news to others too.  Well done.

I didn't test the NAM elevated puzzle pieces, but if it works like the normal elevated highways I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible to make some pieces to take advantage of this technique.  It's a bit of a fiddly technique though so such a project probably wouldn't be very "mass market" in appeal. 

[Alle 1]

Interesting experiment. Thanks for the interest. At first I was considering whether I should post something about this, and came to the conclusion "why not", it might end up useful.

I also tried the bridge combination.

The one advantage with this is that ferries can pass (anywhere). Other than that, you are correct about the alternative. I suppose someone will find it useful, and I would be surprised if someone has not already encountered this before.

It adds something at least, because I have long wanted the ability to make motorways that go by the coast such as parts in HK, and I think Tokyo (and likely other places). I suppose off- and on ramps would also work, albeit special pieces for this purpose would be needed for it not to look awkward.

Another purpose would be to make diagonal bridges, if they were made ploppable. But as you noted, it is a bit too fiddly to gain a wide appeal, requiring a third party application. Lastly it could be used deliberately, by using ground motorways, to build hovering motorways over land and water. At least it would be environmentally friendly . Essentially it does not add anything new to gameplay really, other than the visual effects it can be used for.

Off topic:

For future modding of SC4 maybe it would be more interesting to find out what values the game works with. And attach mod applications to SC4 which work actively with these same values to alter the results, without having the original sourcecode. I am not that much of a programmer so I do not know how viable it is. But as I understand it so called "trainers" work by altering known values in the memory. So if many such values could be identified and listed they could be analysed and worked with by third party mods that run independently, butt attached to SC4. For example, how does the menu work when it shows something, say parks, unless it prepares everything beforehand, which i doubt due to the loading times, it needs to filter that somehow to only show lots that have the "park" attribue. A third party mod could add a box which would add free text filtering of the lot name, which would filter everything that is loaded into the menu. For example. That is just an idea and may not be possible, and further may be quite tedious to do if it even is possible. It is something I would have expected Maxis to add to the game.

[sumwonyuno 42]

I've also discovered that trick too some time ago. It really is an excellent strategy, though I haven't used it recently in my current region.

[JayStimson 212]

I'd really like to use this trick and I follow the how-to but I'm not sure what you mean by "lock: when you say:

- Open up the terraformer tool, lock all tiles but the one you want to edit. And lower the surface back to below water level again. It is important to leave at least a "starting piece" on land for this to work, lest you will not be able to actually connect to the new "bridge".

What does that mean to lock a tile ? How do you do it ? A couple of quick how-to pics would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Kingkazma 5]

By "lock" he means making sure a tile isn't affected when terraforming a region. Because regional-scale terraforming isn't available in SimCity 4, you have to use an off-program terraformer (like SC4Terraformer). I like that program because it gives lots of freedom and can protect cities you don't want to change. By "locking" you can protect a city from being terraformed and thus destroyed.

I hope this helps!