Creating smooth slopes

[Fire Lancer 0]

Personally I like to keep all my roads/railways/etc as flat as possible. Often I'll have mayby say 10 empty tiles for a railway to drop mayby around 20m (guessing, going by the height of surrounding objects...) , but SC4 decides that it only needs two tiles for the slope. Similar problems occur with the other transport types.

Is there some way to make a smooth slope between two tiles (ie so the gradient is constant for every tile between, rather than the first two or so tiles make up the entire change in height)?

[DCMetro34 576]

First, welcome to Simtropolis! Well, there is the slope mod, it makes slopes smoother. It looks way more realistic, too. Hope I helped.

www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm

[bigthing 35]

I'm pretty sure that there are a few tutorials on this kind of thing on the omnibus. Check it out!

[Jezus53 18]

I personally use the mod DCMetro34 and it is a very good mod. It will create very realistic slopes for transportation systems. My only complaint is that it is very difficult to make rail go up a mountain. He added a very low grade to it. If you don't want to deal with that, you can press + + to get into God mode and use the smooth option. Or if you get tired of switching you can download the God Terraforming in Mayor Mode Mod. This just adds the God mode tools to the mayor mod menu.

As a side note, I'm wondering if anyone knows of any slope mods like Frankie_Grove's that doesn't have the rail part of it. I'm trying to create a logging community and I need a rail connection but it's nearly impossible to run rail up a mountain without looping it around the mountain 346 times.

[Fire Lancer 0]

Originally posted by: bigthing

I'm pretty sure that there are a few tutorials on this kind of thing on the omnibus. Check it out!quote>

Ive been over it a few times and can't find anything to do with creating smooth slopes...did you have any one in particular in mind which I may have missed for some reason?

@Jezus53 & DCMetro34

Id rather not use a mod that changed the maxiumn gradient for the various transportation systems since that causes problems in places where a steeper gradient is required (I saw people suggested enableing and disableing the mod, which requires a restart. Appaerntly those people are very pateient or have a super computer because the time it takes to save, exit, restart the game and load my city is far to long for me personally...), while still not solving cases where I want a shallower gradient than normal (eg when I want to make a ramp or somthing for say an avenue, which is often less steeo than going up some of the hills etc).

However, I was thinking that if there was some mod that added some way to create the desired slope in the first place without spending ages with the terraforming tools and still not getting it perfect/smooth, that I could then just build which ever transport method I wanted afterwards.

Also some way to stop the terraforming tools from being able to destroy/move things like existing tracks would most likly help somewhat.

[Spinmaster 75]

"A" slope mod vs. terraforming, those are your only real options I'm afraid. Note I put "A" in quotes though - there are several of them, on here and at SC4Devotion, not to mention a dozen other sites. They all have different assortments of gradients applied to the networks (and one slope mod by Ennedi on SC4D comes with three varieties for mountainous terrain, smooth terrain, and "medium", i.e. in between). But they're all used the same way, altering the max gradient for each of the networks. And the only way to switch them (or any mod) off is to exit, remove the mod, and restart the game. Yes, it does suck sometimes. All I can say is, I feel for ya.

Note that you don't have to use the same network you make the slope for though. I often use rails to build smooth ramps, particularly for bridges, but not "for" rail. Use the rail to draw the slope, then bulldoze the rail and lay the avenue. It works wonders. I presume you also have joerg's Bridge Height Mod (prevents the game building its own bridge approach ramps, which it usually does very poorly)?

As for terraforming causing destruction... nope, there's no way to prevent it except being very very careful. Think about it - you're "god" in that mode. Destroyed roads and buildings aren't your problem.