Making a proportional city?

[LivingInThePast 364]

I was kind of proud of my medium-sized tile city: it had suburbs, a downtown, a large airport, a railroad, and a highway circling it. But I heard that the medium sized city was only 2 km x 2 km! I did a quick look at a real map, and realized that it was actually the size of a large neighborhood, with a few big box stores, schools, and parks, but by and large just lots and lots of streets with single family homes.

By contrast, a large city tile would (in actuality) be 4 km x 4 km, which would be taken for a real international airport (Houston's G.B. Intercontinental) entirely.

But the roads are grotesquely overscaled: the same measurements I took of real life things measured a four lane road (sidewalks, no bike path, median) as 23 m, well under the 32 m standard.

Is there any way around these bizarre scalings? What do I do?

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Big thing to note about many of the road systems in SC4, and especially with the NWM and RHW, is that they'll always take up as much space as needed.

What I mean is that with the RD-4 for example, it will take up the same space as RD-6, even though RD-4 has fewer lanes than RD-6. Why? Partly because the sidewalks go from the tile edge to tile edge, not curb to curb like they're supposed to.

If you disregard sidewalks altogether and only measured how much is asphalt, the width of RD-4 is still less than that of RD-6, but they still take up the same footprint: Two tiles.

It's like loading 127 people onto three buses that each hold 50 people each. You can't have 27/50ths of a bus; You MUST use three buses, even if they won't be fully-loaded.

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To be more specific,...

  Edited September 23, 2012 by Ganaram Inukshuk  

[robloxkiller 25]

ok so this is weird when i was making my my city i had some r$ and then some r$$ i was able to put in 2 stage 5 buildings but then when i tried it again small houses showed up

[Afronaut 1]

ok so this is weird when i was making my my city i had some r$ and then some r$$ i was able to put in 2 stage 5 buildings but then when i tried it again small houses showed up

The demand that got you the stage 5 buildings is satisfied.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I was kind of proud of my medium-sized tile city: it had suburbs, a downtown, a large airport, a railroad, and a highway circling it. But I heard that the medium sized city was only 2 km x 2 km! I did a quick look at a real map, and realized that it was actually the size of a large neighborhood, with a few big box stores, schools, and parks, but by and large just lots and lots of streets with single family homes.

By contrast, a large city tile would (in actuality) be 4 km x 4 km, which would be taken for a real international airport (Houston's G.B. Intercontinental) entirely.

But the roads are grotesquely overscaled: the same measurements I took of real life things measured a four lane road (sidewalks, no bike path, median) as 23 m, well under the 32 m standard.

Is there any way around these bizarre scalings? What do I do?

Alas, no. It is a game, not a scale model. Liberties are taken to match the theme which is getting to and from work. Ever notice that the sprites that represent Sims are about nine feet tall?

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

For the record, width scaling for transit networks is pretty much close to real-life, but the footprints in which things take up are still subject to the "127 people onto three buses that holds 50 people each" conundrum.

Keep in mind that each tile is about 52 feet wide, and that the average lane is about 14 feet wide. That means you can cram about three lanes into one tile quite comfortably, with enough room for 5-foot sidewalks per side. Once again, the reason why Road (RD-2) takes up all 52 feet is subject to the "127 people onto three buses that holds 50 people each" conundrum, and to make up for that, wealth grass is added. By default, the extra 24 feet left over by the already-occupied 28 feet is all paved over, but the NAM Retexture and Cosmetic Mod adds wealth grass to that.

The thing is, wealth grass is put in between the sidewalks and the asphalt, displacing the sidewalks to the very edge of the tile, so in that respect, all road networks take up more space than they really should. What I had above pushes the grass to the very edge of the road and the sidewalks back alongside the asphalt, where they should belong. This also makes orthogonal widths and diagonal widths more uniform, if you keep the sidewalk width uniform throughout both ortho and diag.

Why's the wealth grass that way? Because AVE and Street do it, and for uniformity's sake, Road and all NWM networks should do it, too.

Height scaling is explainable: SC4's 2.5D projection makes actual-height objects look shorter than they should be, hence the increased height scaling by about 30%. That should be the only major inconsistency you should ever have to deal with, especially with BATing.

[LivingInThePast 364]

I don't know, that turning lane looks awfully large, wherein most places (around here at least), they're usually very narrow compared to the road that they're on. Compare these two roads here. The smaller one has two lanes, bike paths, and a normal-sized bike path. The larger road has a four lanes and a very narrow turn lane. While this is a bit of anomaly, I have never seen a turn lane wider than the normal ones. Ever.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

I don't know, that turning lane looks awfully large, wherein most places (around here at least), they're usually very narrow compared to the road that they're on.

Geometric limitations with trying to get every lane of uniform width on my part; What's actually happening with the TLA-5 and consequently the TLA-7 with the default textures is that the lanes nearest to the central turn lane are wider than every other lane, so that the CTL itself will look like its proper width.

Try placing a TLA-5 starter, then placing an OWR-5 starter right after it. If all the lanes on the OWR-5 are uniform width and all the lanes on the TLA-5 supposed to be of uniform width, why is the TLA-5 still wider than OWR-5? Only explanation: The median is either wider than the other lanes, or the median is the same width as all the other lanes but the innermost travel lanes are slightly wider, or somewhere in between.

It isn't that the OWR lanes are narrower, because they aren't. This effect is even more apparent with the Type-A TuLEPs for both AVE-4 and AVE-6 in that the double yellow lines on the TuLEPs are spaced farther apart, so if the CTL and travel lanes are supposed to be of uniform width as you described, that giant gap between the double yellow lines shouldn't even be there.

Because Imageshack isn't online at the moment, you'll need to try them for yourself.

And several contradictory examples in which the CTL is slightly wider than the travel lanes:

https://maps.google....California&z=20

https://maps.google....California&z=20

The only TLA network whose CTL is the same width as its travel lanes is TLA-3. With the TLA-5 and with the TLA-7, the CTL is actually wider than the travel lanes, and in making every lane uniform in width, I end up magnifying that effect.

In other words, nothing's exact.

  Edited September 24, 2012 by Ganaram Inukshuk  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Sounds like a typical engineering compromise to me. Nothing ever really works out exactly, especially in software graphics.