No parking lots please.

[Metalpuritan 161]

I would like to take a moment to address our modding community.

 

For more than a decade we have been putting parking lots on our RCI, landmark, and civic lots.  I feel the time has come for this practice to be laid to rest.  Once upon a time in a region far far away, we needed to make it look like our Sims needed a place to park their cars.  This true even today, our Sims still need a place to park their cars.  Going forward I shall state my argument against putting parking lots on any lot for any reason and there are just two very simple reasons I shall lay out.

 

The first reason I shall cover is the sheer number of parking lots that are available to us today.  We have hundreds of parking lots, both functional and non-function, with an extreme variety in textures ranging from asphalt to concrete and sandstone and many more.  We also have an extreme variety in sizes and shapes and even modular parking lots we can make into any shape we can imagine.  Due to the varieties in parking lots we can have uniform parking all throughout our cities or we can make it look like every parking lot in an entire city or region was paved by a separate parking lot company each.  So if our parking lots suddenly stopped appearing on our lots, we could add parking of our own with zero problems at all and the best part is that we can manipulate the parking lots in our own way since every situation for every business and every city and every region for each of us is different.  We even have street parking now and not just for streets either, we have diagonal facing side parking lots, we even have avenue overlays that have realistic downtown center lane parking, you name the kind of parking there is, we got it.  Even those 1X1 commercial lots can have parking in front the rear or the side, using the SAM1 people will be able to drive right on up to their business even and not just disappear once they cross into the lot or even if you would prefer your parking to be in the back, we have non functional lots for that too and in pretty much any texture you want or can imagine.  I mention the SAM1 because Magneto just upgraded the textures on them to look for like they were made recently.  Thanks, personally, for that Magneto.  

 

Which now brings me to my next reason why people should stop putting parking lots on any lot.  have you ever seen a skyscraper with enough space to park like 8 cars on the lot? That is ridiculous right?  For any given sky scraper there should be like three quarters the parking spaces as there are people working in the building, a building that employees two-thousand Sims should have enough parking for fifteen hundred employees.  So you say to yourself, "I am going to add some parking."  You will likely do that, but the parking on the building lot and the parking you choose to expand with will likely not have matching textures, the chances they would match is so low, I would be willing to bet they wouldn't match.  I have these huge stores,  I call them commercial service sponges, Wal*Mart, Target, Kroger and the list goes on and on, but here is the thing, their parking lots...They are not nearly big enough, not even close, not even in the same realm as close.  So you have to add parking, there is just no parking that matches them perfectly, to make it worse, you cannot just simply add parking onto those lots either, the street side is supposed to connect with the parking on the lot!  So if you want to add parking, you have to do it to either side of the lot, then you have other problems because stores like these are seldom all lone, they usually have neighbors, so what do you do about them?  Now they don't have the parking room and they just lost their road access because you just blocked them in with additional parking for another business, and their road access is by their front facing parking lot.  It is horrible.  So we could put the additional parking on the other side of the street, but to me, that just looks silly, it also looks silly to have streets snaking in and out and between parking lots just so that we can give our businesses road access.

 

So in the end, putting parking lots on any lot is insufficient parking, it is non-functional, and it matches nothing else.  Due to these few factors, I say we stop putting parking lots on RCI, landmark and civic lots, leave the parking to the parking lots only, and let the players decide where they want their parking lots and how many parking lots and the size of their parking lots and if they want parking lots at all even.  There is not a day that goes by where I do not get a strong urge to go through every lot and just shrink its footprint and subtract the parking lots right out of existence, move all buildings to the front of their lots and cut the back half off and add trees and other greenery to them in the spots that remain.  I want to so bad...

 

So this is my argument against parking lots being on lots.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Once you learn how, it's quick and easy to remove a parking lot from a lot.  Changing the style now won't alter the 12,500 lots and buildings already on the STEX.  Also you have to realize that the golden age of custom content is over...most of the stuff that will ever be made, already has

 

BATers and lot makers are just going to do what they do.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

You'd have to add on to the fact that a number of LOTers have, as I've brought up similarly in a previous topic, retired from the game as well (and the possibility that a few may have also died; I've already heard of two SC4 community members who have died), so it wouldn't be an easy task to voice your point to someone who simply isn't around (or living).

There's also the issue of the LOTer's thought process; if it's a mere engineering mistake then that's fine, but if there's a specific and legitimate reason as to why feature A is in position A and not in position B, (such as a reconstruction of a school he went to; I had thoughts of rebuilding my own high school at one point) then you'd be going against what the creator willed his creation to be in the first place.

I'm gonna use the example of my high school. Suppose I did recreate my high school. Because of how my high school is built, it actually has two separate and disconnected parking lots (three if you count the dirt lot next to one of them). What makes it fine in real life is that my school was built at the corner of two streets. If a person built my recreated school in their city and placed it at the side of a street and not at a corner of two streets, it'd be fine, it'd just look weird. The thing here is that I'd be against rearranging the props and textures of my recreated school because that's how it looks in real life and it's a reconstruction of a real-life object. Rearranging or deleting certain features would take away from the reconstruction.

On the topic of parking is a similar issue that I've found as well: the underground parking garage. On a few stations that I've seen before, the entrance to a garage is at an unreasonable slope. The issue with this is that there is literally no way to recreate the station without asking the original creator for a copy of the original gmax file, and if that file is gone or if the creator is gone, then you'd truly be out of luck. (I typically pay no attention to those kinds of details myself, especially the unfixable or demoniacally hard to fix ones).

As for giving people the ability the ability to manage the placement of parking lots themselves, I really doubt that it would be a benefit to the game. Here, we're at the problem of player preference. Some players just want to build big cities with no regard to what the microscopic details even look like, but many players fall in the middle of two extremes: macroscopic management of large constructs and microscopic management of fine details.

The "microscopic management of fine details" would be like placing individual 1×1 eyecandy parking lots and modular parks and using MMPs/flora to enhance the looks of things that mundane 1×1 lots can never do. Certain players simply don't have the time to stop and smell the flowers and by making players have to place their own parking lots, it'd be a heavily questioned and tedious thing to do. "Why bother placing parking lots myself if buildings already have them there already? I shouldn't have to do that." It'd take a lot of time to manage that kind of thing and it'd just conflict with those kinds of players' building style.

[APSMS 1,893]

My only real objection to parking lots is when they exist at the back (read, away from road access) of high density Commercial and Residential Spaces, where the placement makes absolutely no sense. Many of the Maxis Lots do this, but there are a number of custom content BATs that do this as well. As for the parking space, well, this is a game, and if everything were to real-life scale not only would the game be fiendishly hard to play, given the immense size of stuff, but it would also be much less fun for everyone else in general. I agree that non-standard parking lots may not look super great, but with the exception of the Maxis parking lot textures, I have noticed that many of the various texture packs are 1) realistic and 2) appropriate to be used together. Never have roads and parking looked so uniform except in the game that is Sim City. Real life parking patterns, pavements, maintenance, etc. varies substantially from store to store, lot to lot, and it only makes sense to have a wide variety of textures.

 

Again, my only complaint is the sometimes nonsensical arrangement of the parking spaces that some creators use. I'd prefer not to have to remember to plop every parking lot, especially if my city is supposed to be functional, and the parking lot in question needs to go in front of the building, which would block road access. Like Ganaram said, the situation many not always be ideal, but seeing as it is a game, and photoshop being on your side, there are ways to work around the various shortcomings.

 

Or, of course, you could follow Matt's (IJ) suggestion and simply remove all of the parking lots yourself. It might take a long time, but it could be potentially worth it if you're willing to be that dedicated to your city.

[Metalpuritan 161]

I have no intention of rebutting any of that, I still stand by the points I laid out earlier.

 

As to no new modders...I saw the next generation of modders right here: 

 

As to no new mods...I disagree, there is virtually an infinite amount of buildings to BAT and to add to that, there is an infinite amount of imagination out there, we may one day run out of buildings in the real world(not likely) but we will NEVER run out of imagination.  As to tools...yeah, most if not all the tools that are useful have already been created, no argument there, but BAT creations...there will never be a limit to those, no cap, there will always be room for improvement as well.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

As to no new modders...I saw the next generation of modders right here:

 

As to no new mods...I disagree

What is meant by the "golden age of custom content" is that nearly all of the possible niches to fill have already been occupied by at least one item that fits that niche. Power lines? Done. Highways? Done. Parks? Done. Ordinances? Even with the impossibility of adding new ordinances without having to take one away, done.

 

The only new thing you'll ever see is the reiteration of something that, in a way, has already existed. With fiction writing, for example, there's a quote out there: Everything you ever come up with has been written before. In college, I learned that there are only ever two types of stories: The main character goes on an adventure, and a stranger comes into town. This doesn't mean there are other types of stories, it means that everything tends to fall under those two main types. In other words, it doesn't mean that no new mods will ever come into play, it's just that different ways to come up and create something will crop up, as opposed to being absolutely genuinely new. What's new is how it's made and how it looks, not what category or niche it falls under. (This doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, either; there has been a weather mod for SC4 that's been made last year; even though it's based on a singular "park" you have to place, it introduces in-game behaviour that has simply never existed before. These instances are just super-hard to come by.)

 

Also, there's a mismatching between what modding is and what BATing is. What you see is a new generation of BATers, not modders. These guys don't generally mod in the sense that they take some mechanic of the game and change it through a change of exemplars, they merely create addons, things you can add to the game without having to change some fundamental aspect of the game and independent of what in-game mechanic exists naturally (or unnaturally). The NAM, on the other hand (or SPAM or CAM; these also work for this example), is an actual mod because it changes certain aspects of the game to behave differently; these kinds of plugins rewrite the exemplars (for NAM, more than just mere exemplars) to be completely different than the original. However, the NAM (as with the SPAM and CAM) is a bit weird in that it's both an addon and a mod; it changes behavioural aspects of the game and adds to its existing features.

 

Remember how I said there are two types of fiction stories? The same can be said for BATing and modding; in fact, the folder where we install our mods isn't called "mods", it's called "plugins". Here, we have two categories of plugins: addons and mods, even though both are often used to mean each other. Your addons are typically BATs (custom buildings, custom parks, etc), but your mods are the game-changers (though oftentimes they will include BATs and lots of some sort because something is needed to work with the changes). There are few caveats to this: A BAT (a station, for example) can be remade with different settings (and they have to be exemplars); this can be seen as a mod, but is commonly referred to as a re-lot. If a re-lot has different lot textures, it can also be seen as a mod, or rather, a modification of an addon.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

If I got you correctly, you'd like all lot creators to stop adding (open) parking to most lots.

 

I could ramble on and on about the pros and cons now, but I'll simply state a few things that - I suppose - are true, whether we like them or not:

 

- You make the music, you decide what to play.

- You pay the band, you decide what they play.

- You listen to someone, you like it or you don't.

 

I think it's unrealistic to expect that such an appeal to "the community" (= the tiny fraction of ONE community that may read this thread) will have any noticeable effect - not least because the problem you identified is relevant to your taste, your preferences, your playing style, your pet peeves, your priorities. Other people may say "A WalMart with an included parking lot is fine - less hassle with the surroundings, and if the parking lot would be too small in terms of RL conditions... eh, who cares? It's a game, and much of it isn't true to scale to begin with, so why bother?".

 

As much as I like Magneto's mods, they also have the disadvantage that they use very modern European cars. I, for example, like to make old-style American cities, where such cars would look terribly out of place. I much prefer different parking lots (a detail that's not that unrealistic at all) with generic-looking cars (or even cars that get replaced by the 60's car mod I use) over totally uniform parking lots filled with cars that neither match the cars on the streets, on Maxis lots and on other custom lots nor the general theme of the city that surrounds them.

[Metalpuritan 161]

As much as I like Magneto's mods, they also have the disadvantage that they use very modern European cars. I, for example, like to make old-style American cities, where such cars would look terribly out of place. I much prefer different parking lots (a detail that's not that unrealistic at all) with generic-looking cars (or even cars that get replaced by the 60's car mod I use) over totally uniform parking lots filled with cars that neither match the cars on the streets, on Maxis lots and on other custom lots nor the general theme of the city that surrounds them.

You missed it.  I might have used Magneto as an example but he is far from the only one who ever made any parking lots, there are hundreds of parking lots out there, if his parking lots don't suit, then there are some that do.

 

You think I want realism?  No, if so, you are way off base, I just want things to make sense.  Even at that, this is really not about ME at all.  pardon me for trying to introduce a new way of thinking, so much for innovation, someone comes up with a decent idea(no matter what you think) and it gets shot down left and right, maybe you are right, maybe the golden age is over with, lack of open mindedness will surely lead to the death of the golden age, there is zero doubt about that.

[Wiimeiser 452]

should help with the parking out front issue. Actually, that's what the SAM1 should have been from the start.

[patfirefghtr 160]

OK I understand that LOT's shouldnt have parking lots anymore but then again there are some that really need to have them to make sense... IE ones that I see making sense in not having a parking lot - Office buildings, IND Lot's, and Transportaion Lot's... But there are the expections that need them to make sense is Resturaunts, Fire, Police, Hospitals, and Commercial services to make sense