Region 1

[LivingInThePast 364]

This is the story of Region 1, a journey to make a semi-realistic small town without cheating.

Unfortunately, it's hard to go for realism and make a functioning city at the same time. I had rebuild my power plant twice, for instance.

It starts with a single-track railroad and RHW-2. The street is where the town will grow.

 A closer view. As you can see, it does have obvious errors. The streets don't have stop lines for the railroad, and the streets appear to "tear" at the edges. Plug-in conflict? Nope...just a bad porting job. The stop lines I would prefer, but it's been so long since I played SimCity 4 that I don't remember. Do they, and if they don't, is there a mod to let it have stop lines?

Unfortunately, there are two things wrong. The first is a texture conflict, dunno what it is (it appears only on that zoom level), and the second is the heavy traffic in the residential area. Just imagine a problem of "cul-de-sacs within cul-de-sacs"....(shudder)

Here's where I put the power plant. The railroad is simply eye candy: it's supposed to be a spur that goes out to the plant. It's inspired by the local power plant and the adjacent railroad spur and lake. Unfortunately, in SimCity, that lake is going to turn black soon enough, and unfortunately, in real life, the spur is actually abandoned. Go figure, huh? 

A texture glitch ruined an otherwise good shot of the railroad spur splitting off.

Wanting to figure out what the street and railroad stopline was, I tried to use a regular street road and regular railroad at a perpendicular angle, only to find this.

Anyway, that's the first part of my CJ. Unfortunately, I'd like to continue it, but not with the texture problems like this! By the way, the texture problem is posted here, in the Bugs & Technical Issues forum. Please leave comments (about the CJ and texture issues). In the meantime, I'll try to make another update so we can all keep a tab on the growing city of Region 1.

[joshriddle 29]

Well, I have several rural communities with abandoned railroads. It really doesn't hurt any in my opinion. As for the texture problems, I couldn't tell ya.  But anyway, really nice journal, can't wait to see more.

[cheeseman 3]

i have NEVER seen that texture issue before. these problems are very severe and I understand you being frustrated, but ive never seen problems this bad before and I use a LOT of custom content i wonder, are you missing texture packs or something?

[Schulmanator 5,787]

I am glad to see your work and look forward to more.

[LivingInThePast 364]

Whoops, it should be a regular ROAD, not a street (textures).

Despite the texture problem, I'll run some tests, install a few more plug-ins TBA (and I know which ones), and add more to Region 1.

[Sepen77 157]

Something is definately wrong as there shouldn't be any glitches in a regular road/rail cross. I suggest you make sure your "Simcity 4.exe", located in Apps folder, is version 1.1.640.0 If it's not, go to the EA site to get the update. And if this dosen't work, try re-installing the game as it looks like something is wrong with your simcity1.dat.

[LivingInThePast 364]

OK, official update time!

Unfortunately, when I did the second update, several things went wrong.

First I checked each and every one of my plug-ins, putting one in each at a time, repeating the same thing, and nothing happened. "Great!" I thought. "It must have been nothing."

So I installed a few new mods and went to work.

But it turns out that for things like SAM (the Street Addon Mod), it doesn't play very well with other streets. I had a difficult time trying to dictate what streets were what and what were others. The readme doesn't account for it, and given that it's still technically a beta, it's forgivable. Still, I was able to take this screenshot of my farms.

Then I played around with other things, such as the Rural Renewal Pack's bluebonnets. That was cool. It even had Indian paintbrushes mixed in, as bluebonnets would be in my Texas hometown (it's no coincidence: the creator of RRP is FROM my hometown). I added a small Baptist-type-looking church.

But my population wasn't growing too much, so I had to add a second layer of homes. But in adding said home layer, I found an entirely different problem....

It's an intersection as a cursor. And that was the ZONE TOOL AT THE TIME.

And now for official comment responses...

Joshriddle: Actually, the railroad shown isn't really abandoned in the game. It's more like just eye candy (though admittedly, to save on maintenance and such, I probably should've used non-functional eye candy lots...)

cheeseman: No, I'm not missing texture packs (typically they appear on lots)...see the response to sepen20.

Schulmanator: Thanks....

sepen20: Well, this was only after a few days. No lots were modified, but it was on a Mac. The Mac version has a poor port job. See those "lines" it between the streets, even when the tile view is disabled? That's just there. Even when the resolution is down to the crummiest option available, and no plug-ins are in play, that's always there. (Also, on the picture, notice the commercial zones)

A possible suspect is "Money does grow on tree", a 2005 lot that gives you money. A comment posted on the same day mentioned "As you said will spoil the game. It modifies the City Beautification as a Landmark that doesn't seem to be corrected by deleting the lot from game or Plugins. I would remove the file from the STEX if I were you."

The fact is, even if the texture problem is removed, I still don't know if I could continue Region 1. I had forgotten to take pictures of the things like the church and the bluebonnets. There's a chance that I'll change some stuff around on Region 1, such as widening the rails as to allow the No-Dirt Railroad Mod, scattering the homes through the entire map, and so forth and so on. But even adding a second RHW and scattering homes and businesses through the map won't work because the RHW won't respond to having homes directly against it. So right now, the fate of Region 1 (as a CJ) is definitely in the air. The texture problem either is from that renegade cheat lot or a bad port. Bad port would be a bit more likely...I used the same lot on a PC and it didn't seem to have any problems.

Right now, I'd really like to focus on BATting (as it seems finally right for me to do so).

If I do come back to CJing, it probably won't be Region 1...trying to do nice aesthetics while not cheating is a dangerous act: rebuilding power plants several times isn't a great way to go. But the possibility isn't eliminated...