Super Island by d2f, v2.0

[d2f 4]

They come back. They always come back...

Some of you might remember my Super Island thread many, many months ago. Here's a refresher if you forgot it:

Something bad happened between the last update and this thread: My computer's WINXP crashed and I didn't have the then-latest backup of the SimCity 4 folder in My Documents. The big 120GB external drive only had the original cities as shown above, with none of the newer ones in the old thread.

In real-life, I was kept busy by being in the final year of university. Online, I played more Everquest I, fell in love with OpenTTD 0.4.x a.k.a. Transport Tycoon Deluxe in C++, and committing manslaughter in the Battlefield 2 demo. I figure that I haven't touched SC4.exe for at least half a year.

Now? All of my U courses are finished and dealt with; I have three well-off characters in EQ1. But since my iBook G4 isn't powerful enough to run the Mac version of SC4, I'll have to make do with playing the game on the PC now and posting screenshots later.

As you will see in the following screenshots, there is a bunch of weird citynames. Their names come from Ayumi Hamasaki's songs. (I bought a iPod Shuffle when it came out, and filled it with nothing but ayu goodness. )

I've brought the Kansai Airport-styled city back to the current Super Island, with a few changes of course

Now I need to return to SC4 and take the screenshots of the cities. Check this thread later around midnight EST; hopefully the newest screenshots will be up..

~d2f

[MissTonya 2]

hey boy i think you need lots of help you have too many highways you are overusing them we dont want them getting out of style ya hear!

Yo it's Tonya

[sirgeoj2 1]

Looks like its going to be a giant amusment park!            

[djrules5454 5]

I think this looks promising, but there are too many highways.

[scififan68 23]

Good start on this!

[d2f 4]

Current city: Everywhere Nowhere

The primary difference between the first Super Island thread and this one is that the island looked like a crafting tool with a right-angled edge for cutting. The first thread's looked like a boomerang . All of the new expansions have to be done on the mainland because there is no room left here.

The secondary difference is, the right-angled side of the island is a fifty-mile-long continuous beach.

Here is the area where all the new buildings are taking place. We apologize for the smallness of the pics; we're currently having a civil lawsuit with the contract photog(rapher) in question.

Anyway...

The station above serves as the Grand Central Station for the city. Below are pictures of the station in peak activity...

...and boring times.

[d2f 4]

I hardly remember you guys, sorry.

We would like to take those highways down, too. Thing is, residents in some cities are very unforgiving to any mayor or councillor that makes such an idea. Secretly, we want to drive bulldozers through their neighborhoods, trashing a few houses, to make our point

[d2f 4]

Development of Wonderland

Nobody knows why there is a big doughnut at the fringes of the Super Island region. Deputy Mayor Hobo Weaver suggested it's possibly the work of Homer Simpson, with the help of a giant cattle prod from Principal Skinner.

 

A terrain like this one posed many engineering challenges for Mr. Weaver. He must find a way to get his prospective residents out of the doughnut while maintaining a slightly livable city with great tourism opportunities. Ferries are too handicapped and shipyards are too big, he once protested on the phone. Hence the above design. But there is something wrong here: the bridges and tunnels do NOT line up properly, as in...

 

------>

        -

        -

        -                 /

        -                /

        -------------/

Where the left side of the above illustration is the end of the island bridge, and the right side being a steep incline. Hold on a minute... is this supposed to be a Waterfalls Racer Flying Game, where contestants submit their last wills before attempting to go over..... THAT?

 

Now that the Game has been called off, Mr. Weaver needed to figure out just how to get from A to B without going to the Hospital... before he loses commercial interest in the city. The results are horrifying; he turned a giant doughnut into a giant doorstopper with a gaping hole in the middle. When the AASL (Architects Association of Super Island) tried to remove some of the still-settling mud from the island to preserve its original image, Mr. Weaver herded the lobby group in a sinking ship on autopilot. AASL lost many of the brightest heads, and its influence is reduced to something closer to begging for cash to buy dope.

 

Some of the AASL on the ship survived.... more on that in a moment.

 

As it stands, these ARE the only ways any resident can get out of Wonderland:

 

 

 

It looked absolutely UGLY, and as Buckley's said, it worked.

 

Oh, er, the Architects? Right. A few of them managed to swim to shore, only to find Deputy Mayor Weaver and a few hundred cops lining the cliffs nearby. The Mayor gave them a deal: Build the world's most damage-proof prison complex and they will be fre... No no no... they're not free. They will be serving life sentences in the very same complex they helped built.

 

Realizing just how vulnerable they were, the AASL survivors gave police total control of the prison:

 

Just how serious are they?

 

#1: Like every other prison in the region, there is only one entrance. The difference is, the entrance is on the OTHER SIDE of the complex, which sits south of the doughnut. The bridge connecting between this entrance and the main prison perimeter is painted black and completely sealed off, so a slight *FART* can quickly strangle any prisoner enroute to the complex;

 

#2: Privacy advocates be damned. They may look like highway light poles, but they are equipped with anti-personnel turrets mounted directly below the security cameras;

Also #3: Any possible security breach, such as highways and railroads, are mitigated by a low-security fence at the perimeter. It might not kill a runaway inmate outright, but it is powerful enough to make him/her unconsciously walk BACK to his/her jail cell;

 

#4: Forget what I just said in #3. The walking dead inmates get to walk into the Matrix power plants...

 

#5: any attempt of jailbreaking results in an instant death. Props to the AASL for making the impossible happen;

 

#6: If any inmate gets tired of getting whipped day and night, they have something better to do: process our filthy, smelly trash FOR FREE! With nothing but their bare hands and feet!

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/wonderland12.jpg align=baseline>

 

oh, we're at #7 already?

 

#7: Rounding out the package deal is a frozen piece of molten rock collar with integrated RFID and GPS sensors. Each inmate gets to share a collar with the same passcodes as three others in a jail cell. These collars are designed to explode when they are more than five yards apart from each other OR if one of them manages to break free (and there is a 100% guarantee that the signals from these sensors get picked up right away by the lights above). This complex is nicknamed Battle Royale because of its inspiration to the Japanese movie, also named Battle Royale.

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/wonderland13.jpg>

 

We will see how the main doughnut evolved later.

[yuhhaur 0]

quote>

sounds good...

Wait... I notice that the station actually convert elevated rail to monorail. can I know where you get the station?

[d2f 4]

Date: 7/26/2005 11:01:59 PM Author: yuhhaur

quote> sounds good... Wait... I notice that the station actually convert elevated rail to monorail. can I know where you get the station?

quote>

It comes from the Japanese B.A.T. thread: https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=51212

[d2f 4]

A few more things before I go:

 

The bad news. I can't run the city of Love Destiny without crashing to desktop so this is as far as I could go with this city. Looks nice to myself IMO otherwise...

 

My 120GB external hard drive died. I tried to resurrect it by taking it apart, no luck. I bought this about 18 months ago, when there is still no such thing as Backed by a 3-year warranty.

 

Back to the program: For this city I've settled on a figure of three, plus a few sub-highways. There are to be only two major highways in the city (I'll fix the others as I move along), and one intercity highway dubbed the IntePan 01, which passes through many of the cities here and bears a signature roadside design. The sub-highways are to separate the truck traffic from everything else. I do this because my RL city, Toronto, has the Highway 401 with the massive collector/express system. A single truck accident can snarl normal traffic for HOURS, and a lot of trucks do use the same highway as the rest of us. Don't even mention last year's Canada Day snafus: a truck overturned on the 401 under the Highway 400 bridge; three Express lanes got narrowed to just one while cops try to get it cleaned up, and the collector lanes were CRAWLING.

 

 

As always, the screenshots are taken before any changes to it are made. The actual version of the city has no freight station, and the Target store gets shafted. The main Dense Commercial strip gets a treatment. Some things just won't change, though, like the Ferry Terminal here:

 

 

 

Yup, went through the STEX and found the marrast's double-rail station to replace the rather odd-looking one on the first screenie. This is the city's commercial airport, and it has its own highway going to the shoreside. Signs to the Airport are posted where they are logically correct (as in, the signs point to the RIGHT, but the other side has to turn LEFT!!!????).

 

 

It's different with the T-junctions, fortunately.

 

[d2f 4]

While zoning and doing the mass transit infrastructure (no monorails here), I noticed a visual bug for the Target department store's ploppable lot.

 

Here is the lot at zoom level 1 (1 as on your keyboard):http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny14.jpg align=baseline>

 

At zoom level 2:http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny13.jpg align=baseline>

 

And finally, level 3:http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny15.jpg align=baseline>

 

I have this issue no matter which angle of view (N E S W) I'm looking with. Weird.

 

This is the community squeezed between the Dense Commercial strip to the north and the LARGE industrial district to the south. The empty spaces in this section and the twin elementary schools are reserved for the Large Elementary School and Large Highschool when the city pop. blows past 6K.

 

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny12.jpg align=baseline>

 

The Dense Commercial strip. Previous zoning and one-way roads give way to large 4x4 blocks, each zoned next to the one-way roads, separated by the EL-trains. I'll be back, have to drop some stuff at a friend's house.

 

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny17.jpg align=baseline>

[d2f 4]

The L.D.I.A.: welcoming industries of all colors. A pair of parallel highways to take the trucks out of the city as soon as possible.

 

As I mentioned before, I couldn't play this city without a crash, so here is a quick snap. I don't want these trucks to clog my roads dangit.

 

The only way to get the city growing is to focus my screen at the edge of the map, CTRL+S, and then set the speed to Mach 3. To take any screenshots, I have to pause.

 

Here's the main residential area closer to the Ferries.

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny01.jpg>

 

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny02.jpg>

 

And here's the first residential zone I mentioned earlier. The Airport Expressway is at the background.

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny03.jpg>

 

The L.D.I.A.:

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny04.jpg>

 

Finally, the IntePan 01.

 

Very basically, it's a BAR LAWN GH GH LAWN BAR type unless the layout nearby makes it impossible to maintain this design.

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny20.jpg>http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny21.jpg>

 

And here are the IntePan 01's connections to Love Destiny:

 

http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny22.jpg>http://www.printerboyweb.net/simtropolis/lovedestiny23.jpg>

[Simworld 056132 1]

How about makeing it less crowded and griddy, over all I cant wait to see whats next!