Advice how to build a Chinese city

[poshbakerloo 186]

Advice | How to build a Chinese city

I've been playing SC4 for a very very like time, I got it for my 13th birthday, and I'm now 26!

99% of what I may is a hybrid between US And British styles, but I've never tried anything different. I've been looking at a lot of big Chinese cities and want to have a go.

I know my custom content will all need changing, but other than just changing the building style, what else can be done? Are there any CJs which follow a chinese style city?

I want to make a modern style city etc.

[CorinaMarie 29,918]

Here's what I did. I pretended your questions were my questions. So, up in that little Search box I typed in: chinese

And here's what I got:

https://community.simtropolis.com/search/?type=forums_topic&q=chinese

In that list I found a couple which might be useful and/or interesting:

I browsed the first page of the 2k+ hits in the search results list. Do take a look thru all of it since you will know which appear useful.

 

Click me a Like if you find this helpful.

 

  Edited April 24, 2016 by CorinaMarie  
Add Depth of Search Info

[MushyMushy 3,618]

Aside from changing your custom content (I'd mostly recommend the HK BATs and use Japanese BATs to fill in any gaps if you're going for a Chinese theme), here's a great long-running City Journal by TowerDude: Okatabawashi - 蓝龙 - (AIN)

It has 87 entries and is mostly Chinese-themed, though there may be a few entries with some British stuff.

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

well you are gonna need a lot of custom content, you are gonna want to get the plugin that disables all maxis buildings so only the custom content will develop. The pencil towers are nice, you may want to widen your search from chinese to asian as you will find more content that way. If you found this helpful hit that like button 

[CorinaMarie 29,918]

3 hours ago, AprilAero said:

If you found this helpful hit that like button 

I found it to be good advice so I hit the like button.

 

@poshbakerloo

Another thing to look into might be plugin managers and possibly the dependencies checker thingers. I haven't gotten that far yet in setting up my game comp so I don't yet have any better advice for them. In another thread recently rsc204 explained a bit about tree mod conflicts. Seems you really ought to pick the one you want and stay with it. Or, really know how to change it without dire consequences if that need comes up.

[Odainsaker 2,137]

There are definitely a lot of great BATs out there to choose from, and while you said you want to make a "modern style city," it is useful to also look at how Chinese cities were historically planned, for the modern cities are built upon the old and still follow their influences.

Traditional Chinese cities are commonly gridded, orthogonal, gated, walled, and enclosure nested, and imperial capitals may additionally be axial and symmetrical around a holy square diagram.  These cities were laid out according to geomancy, numerology, and cosmology, using divination from feng shui, the I Ching, and even the imperial state cult.  The location of the palace, the major temples, the city gates, the protective mountains, and even occupancy types were all decided by principles of fitting the idealized heavenly city into the mystical qi energies of the landscape.  Beijing and Chang'an are the preeminent imperial examples, with Chang'an being the direct model for cities like Nara, Kyoto, and Seoul.  Suzhou is an awesome example of how waterways and canals were just as important as roads in moving around a city, and Suzhou's redesign into a looser grid deliberately incorporated numerous T-intersections thought to impede the progress of evil spirits, who were once believed would only move in ghostly straight lines.  I don't think I've seen a simcity built around channeling the energies of the landscape or deflecting evil spirits.  Ancient China not only has the state religion, but Taoism, Buddhism, folk religions, and even Islam and Christianity imported along the trade routes, and that means lots of temples to the folk deities, family temples to the ancestors, temples for the Buddhist relics, temples for the Taoists, etc.

Colonial cities come from the era of Western imperialism, when many of China's trading ports came under foreign control as extraterritorial concessions.  Modern, Western ideas of city planning and architecture were used within these concession zones.  This foreign zone would be segregated from the regular Chinese population, with references to "the old city," "the walled city," or "the Chinese city" distinguishing it from the foreign enclave.  The international enclave itself might be further divided by the imperial powers into their own treaty zones, creating a French Concession, a German Concession, a British Concession, a Russian Concession, and even a Japanese Concession, all with unique and contrasting architecture governed by the controlling nation.  Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, and Qingdao are classic examples.  Sometimes, the foreign treaty powers laid out new, Western-planned cities virtually from scratch at strategic locations, creating cities like Hong Kong, Macau, Changchun, Harbin, and Dalian.  The modern middle class and intelligentsia had roots in these cities, which enjoyed some stability under foreign military control while the rest of China fell into chaos.

Communism dropped in all the fun ideas of socialist dystopian planning and internal population control.  After the old superstitious traditionalists were purged and the foreign capitalist imperialists expelled, the civilian population was reorganized into either agrarian labor communes or urban industrial workers.  Revolutionary leaders wanted to leapfrog into an international communist superpower, and they needed quick mass housing and even quicker mass industries.  Also needed were new heroic monuments showcasing the power of the State and the Party, and these were modeled after Stalinist examples.  Lots of productive factories, lots of utilitarian apartments blocks, and lots of joyous labor camps.  With the severing of old economic ties, buildings in the old city and the colonial city lost their economic underpinnings and were either repurposed, frozen in time and maintenance, or left to deteriorate.

Capitalism, mega-densities, and moneyed expatriates fleeing the War and the Revolution created glitzy skyscraper forests in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and that has finally spread back to the industrial mainland with China's reopening in 1970s.  Though they are now running a kind of state-controlled capitalism run-amok, where the politics are still authoritarian while the state-subsidized economics are spectacularly laissez-faire, the scale still has all the features of state mega-planning as the tremendous rural population is relocated and urbanized and the traditional cities are overrun with instant skyscrapers and superhighways.  The state-directed system of categorizing citizens into quotas of rural and urban workers has been loosened, unleashing what some call the largest human mass migration in history as the rural masses move into cities.

Your Chinese city may look like any of these, or all of these, and it is really cool if you can suggest hints of all these that have somehow built up over each other over time.  Not that I expect anyone here to study actual feng shui or numerology, but we can pretend in our own storylines that these things are happening, such as "our 'Temple of the Black Tortoise of the North,' built during the later Song Dynasty at the north gate of the city, guarded against the unlucky qi coldly blowing down from the northernwestern mountains during the Winter Solstice."  Of course, if we really wanted to push it:  "... severely damaged in the war and shuttered during the Cultural Revolution, it is today being redeveloped into an upscale urban shopping mall."

 

[tariely 4,499]

Very interesting !  I was hoping to find something on how to register on Simcity China 2016 (the link I was given previously refers to SC-China 2012, and the look of the website has changed since then...) Any help available ?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Good luck with this.  I hope you have the advice of a good local geomancer, to say nothing of a numerologist.  Placement is everything.

[Odainsaker 2,137]

Underneath the ancient superstitious and metaphysical aspects are actually bundles of rational planning ideas not unlike folk wisdom:  cold fronts, desert dust storms, and hordes of barbarians typically blew down from the northwest against which you had to physically shield and protect, while building orientations open to the south embraced the sun's warm and allowed important façades to be impressively highlighted by sunlight.  What industries you put upstream or upwind might not be just cosmologically unlucky, but were also not-merely-coincidentally unlucky for the cleanliness and health of the those downstream or downwind.

I have been re-watching the Taiwanese drama "Silence" starring Vic Chou, and it is largely set in the mainland Chinese coastal city of Qingdao.  Formerly an Imperial German concession port and previously known as Tsingtao (or Tsingtau), the Western-planned city boasts a picturesque collection of pre-WWI German colonial architecture, and these charming buildings alongside the long coastal beach makes Qingdao a romantic, escapist setting for the television drama and Taiwanese audiences.  I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the popular Tsingtao Beer brand comes from here as a result of the colonial German breweries, and the characters in this show are going to mistakenly drink their fill for the melodramatic scenes of romantic misunderstandings.  Interestingly, in the drama, a Taiwanese-based megacorporation wants to redevelop an old, colonial courtyard residence into an urban shopping mall, and the Romeo and Juliet storyline plays out between the tycoon family of the megacorporation and the impoverished holdout family of the decaying courtyard doomed for demolition.  Of course, the drama is going to root for the courtyard family, but architecturally, the old courtyard residence really is the more interesting building in comparison to the shiny corporate skyscrapers and bleak apartment complexes, and the extended families and generations of residents better represent the traditional pattern of Chinese living.  The show came out in 2006 and makes Qingdao look like an idyllically modern, somewhat slower paced Chinese city without the overbuilt crowds and pollution, but ten years later we can see from photographs that Qingdao too must have mushroomed into a skyscraper jungle and that the megacorporation developer truly won in the end.

Worryingly, much of today's newer planning in diagram looks familiarly like Western suburban sprawl planning, but with apartment blocks instead of pods of ranch houses.  Big swaths of apartment blocks separated from big bubbles of office parks and big zones of megamalls, with highways to connect them together.  It was once suggested that perhaps sheer population density will overcome the dehumanizing pitfalls and grossly unsustainable inefficiencies of this type of disconnected urban sprawl, but that may not necessarily hold true.  In another thread SteveMSim linked to the "Story of Cities" by The Guardian...check out "The great leap upward:  China's Pearl River Delta, then and now."  Then there is the way the authoritarian, one-party state likes to plan things...

Ah well, back to my drama...no, Vic, you can't die!  You can't die until to go back to Qingdao and tell Zhao Shen Shen that you love her, that you are really her long lost childhood love Qi Wei Yi, that you have read the secret hidden love letter, that you are actually the heir of Yi Yang Corporation, that you have stopped Xu Li's vengeful machinations, that you have saved the orphans from Si Xi Courtyard, that you have slapped some sense back into your psycho ex-fiancé, that you have saved your battered housewife mom from your mentally abusive dad, and that you have the Untreatable Cancer!  Waaah, Vic, you can't go until the mute Zhao Shen Shen recovers her lost voice and finally tells you that she knows who you really are and that she has always loved you!  Waaah, Vic...

 

[alicenychto 41]

It's nice to search some CJs and use search engines such as Google to do some researches before constructing a very first city and find some plugins such as HKABT or add some Japanese buildings.

But you don't need to disable all Maxis buildings to build a Chinese style city (though it's true that lots of vanilla buildings don't match the image of a Chinese style city), assuming that you won't build a 100% ancient or medieval Chinese scenario.

Although I have never build anything like a real Chinese town, but I think it'd be better if you have an idea of what you'd like to build, its style and approach (continental metropolis, or Taiwanese towns, or HK high-rises, or something else?), if there's a reference existent in real world or someone else's CJ, or some images, other games, or something totally imaginary. 

You don't need to have a lot of East Asian buildings, a great palace complex and huge zones of Siheyuans to make a Chinese city, there's something more interesting behind these buildings, although a Maxis vanilla city is usually boring.

The Simcity China is still available: www.simcity.cn, and you don't need to sign in for CJ or most of articles in plugins categories (at least for SC4). A good translator might be helpful. There're not many new articles since 2013, but you could find some old post that might be inspiring.

http://www.simcity.cn/thread-103496-1-1.html

Here's some of the best works from Chinese CJs.

http://www.simcity.cn/thread-114331-1-1.html

http://www.simcity.cn/thread-25228-1-1.html

http://www.simcity.cn/thread-145416-1-1.html

Some CJs that I think are typically of Chinese architectural and aesthetic flavors.

http://www.simcity.cn/thread-85631-1-1.html

This is my favorite CJ. Although it's more likely of Japanese taste, but I think it's interesting in its nuancee and selection of props. Those CPT Season Trees, transparent water, BSC Parks and Meadowshire texture are all very common things.

And if you could bear infinity ads and dig into numerous posts to find something really interesting you can also have a look at tieba. But I think the following 2 posts will just be enough (with Google translation):

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/3928818231

This post introduces some of the best works and analyzes how they homogenized the architectural style and created the respective atmosphere. Some of these CJs tried to make an approach to modern or ancient Chinese style.

However making some ancient scenario will be a bit difficult because you would need to use lots of Japanese props, and westernized trees (CP Trees, for example), as few Chinese players have invested in making plugins and even the plugins that you could get are somehow not in high quality.

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/3524337029?pn=2

Some general suggestions about transition between urban zone and agricultural areas using satellite maps.

And don't forget to use SC4Mapper to resize your map to a perfect scale and start your network with NAM ;-)

------

There's a Chinese SC4er active in Simtropolis (who specialized in ancient Chinese gardens and palaces), you may want to ask him for some advices @weixc812

Good luck >_<

[kenny chan 0]

Traditional chinese version of SimCity

[Odainsaker 2,137]

While making some extreme SimCity region maps using scale accurate DEMs of several Chinese cities, I have noticed a regional feature that might be of interest here.  I mentioned in a previous post the canals and waterways of Suzhou, but I admit even I did not appreciate just how extensive the water systems around Chinese cities were until I made my maps.

These maps are based on the 1 arc-second, or roughly 30-meter, tiled Copernicus DEMs, which include as auxiliary files water body maps.  The combined tiles of my focus areas have all been scaled down to 33% and saved in lossy jpeg format to be a size uploadable to Imgur within their image dimension limits.  When images below are fully expanded, the Copernicus product tiles are to scale relative to each other, however, the actual areas they represent are not shown here precisely to scale relative to each other as they come from different latitudes.  These are actually from an intermediate step in my own process, and final sizing to make all cities to scale to each other and SimCity comes later, though the differences here are not that large.  These maps have had their dimension ratios adjusted for longitude versus latitude.

Keeping to the DEM setup, land is generally black, with lighter shades indicating higher elevation.  Water bodies are all depicted in white.  Copernicus DEM actually has separate black value indicators for oceans, lakes, and rivers, but I have made all water bodies here white for display.  Not every narrow channel is going to be picked up by the Copernicus DEM's threshold, but plenty enough are to make patterns that almost look like fractal art.

 

Beijing, with Tianjin and Langfang:

 

Shanghai, with Suzhou, Wuxi, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Changzhou, Taizhou, Zhenjiang, Huzhou, Jiaxing, and Nantong:

 

Hangzhou, with Ningbo, Shaoxing, Jiaxing, and Jinhua:

 

Nanjing, with Wuhu, Zhenjiang, Yangzhou, Chuzhou, and Xuancheng:

 

Nanchang and Jiujiang:

 

Wuhan:

 

Guangzhou, with Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Huizhou, Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhaoqing, Macao, and Zhuhai:

Those are a lot of white dots!

Admittedly, my attraction was to megacity regions with strong coastal, river, or lake features, and these particular cities are on broad river deltas or river lowlands.  These areas also readily lend themselves to rice agriculture, which commonly employs inundated fields or paddies, which are picked up in the DEM as water bodies.  I'm not sure if SimCity has yet a good rice MMP brush to fill these water bodies, as otherwise they can read like thousands of tiny lakes or vast flooding.  There are already existing fan-made rice paddy lots, which would have to be plopped in the thousands.

In the era before railroads or highways, river and canal transport was the primary mode of bulk transportation, and if you look carefully, you can trace here the Grand Canal from Beijing to Hangzhou.

 

For comparison, here are some other regions from China's neighbors:

 

Seoul, with Incheon, Daejeon, Sejong, and Kaesong:

 

Tokyo, with Yokohama, Chiba, Kawasaki, Saitama, Nagano, Utsunomiya, Maebashi, Kofu, Shizuoka, Hamamatsu, and Toyama:

 

Nagoya, with Gifu, Hamamatsu, Toyohashi, Fukui, Toyama, and Kanazawa:

 

Osaka, with Kobe, Kyoto, Nara, Sakai, Wakayama, Himeji, Okayama, Tottori, Takamatsu, Tokushima, and Nagoya:

 

Manila, with Quezon City, Batangas, Angeles, and San Fernando:

 

Obviously, these are mountainous countries or islands, with the delta of the Pampanga River north of Manila coming closest to the type of China's vast and complex river deltas.  I would suspect that other Asian delta or lowland river cities with rice agriculture like Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Haiphong, Phnom Penh, or Bangkok will be similar.

Interestingly, for Japan it is the area around Osaka Bay whose white dot density approaches even the smallest smattering of those of the Chinese cities.  This is historically the older traditional core area of Japan, with cities originally planned following models of ancient China.  The Kanto and Nobi plains of Tokyo and Nagoya are more vast and probably have a greater agricultural impact, but they also developed in a later, different era.  Modernization and disaster reconstruction have also seen Osaka and Tokyo lose much of their former core city canals.

 

Lastly is a comparison from Europe's Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta.

Amsterdam, with Rotterdam, The Hague, Antwerp, Utrecht, Ghent, and Eindhoven:

I'm tempted now to see what New Orleans must look like.

 

Hope this was interesting!

 

 

  Edited February 17, 2023 by Odainsaker  
Adjusted canvases sizes uniformly so images display to scale on forum. Added more examples.

[Odainsaker 2,137]

Having shown the DEMs and water body maps, I might as well show the actual scale-accurate SimCity region maps made from them.  These are 31x52 large city monster regions created using Copernicus DEM data, MicroDEM, GIMP, and SC4Mapper 2013.  Their region view images exported with SimCity4 Startup Manager 3.0 have been reduced to 25% of their original size and saved as lossy jpegs in order to be uploadable to Imgur.

 

Beijing and Langfang:

 

Shanghai, with Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, Huzhou, Nantong, and Yixing:

 

Hangzhou, with Ningbo, Shaoxing, and Haining:

 

Nanjing, with Zhenjiang, Wuhu, Yangzhou, Ma'anshan, Xuancheng, and Chuzhou:

 

Nanchang, with Jiujiang and Wuxue:

 

Wuhan, with Huangshi, Xianning, Xiantao, Xiaogan, and Wuxue:

 

Guangzhou, with Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Macao, Zhuhai, Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, and Qingyuan:

 

Zhengzhou, with Luoyang, Kaifeng, Xinxiang, and Jiaozuo:

 

Xi'an, with Xianyang, Weinan, Tongchuan, and Pucheng, 

 

The last two maps are far inland from the coast and lead into western China.  Being at significantly higher elevations, they have been lowered overall in elevation and then their lowest elevations have been further compressed to allow SimCity water to appear.  Aside from Kaifeng at the lowest and flattest elevation, the galaxy of water bodies so apparent on the previous maps does not occur here with the higher and drier elevations.  With the exception of only the Shanghai map, I have not yet removed water bodies using SimCity water at elevations high enough to produce undesirable cliffs and chasms, nor have I yet edited by hand any missing or poorly defined water channels.  When all that is done, these will be redone using FABDEM, which are Copernicus DEMs reprocessed to remove buildings and forests from the elevations.

 

I hope these are inspiring!

 

[thecitiescenter 3,059]

WOW!  These all look great!  The retention of all the water and small canals on the Suzhou map is especially impressive but also the waterways around Beijing too.  When I tried to make a map of Beijing in the past maintaining the waterways was the most difficult part as theyre really narrow and not pronounced.

Do u have any plans to chop these up and release to the STEX?  Theyd make a great addition to the map catalogue.

[Odainsaker 2,137]

On 2/23/2023 at 12:40 PM, thecitiescenter said:

WOW!  These all look great!  The retention of all the water and small canals on the Suzhou map is especially impressive but also the waterways around Beijing too.  When I tried to make a map of Beijing in the past maintaining the waterways was the most difficult part as theyre really narrow and not pronounced.

Do u have any plans to chop these up and release to the STEX?  Theyd make a great addition to the map catalogue.

Thanks.  A full size region map's SC4M compresses to a zip archive of about 80-85mb, while the 16-bit PNG base image compresses to a zip archive about 60-65mb, both of which are over the STEX limit.  They'll probably be uploaded to a hosting service like Mega.  Though I hadn't thought of chopping these up myself and have been using them at full size, it is actually very easy for any user to do once they have the either the SC4M or PNG file.  I suppose it may be possible to make a STEX entry with a smaller, STEX-friendly cropped map to download, and include additional links in the description to a full size version uploaded elsewhere for those who want the monster region.

If and when I finish crafting a guide to making these, it will be easy to see how easy many of the water features are to make initially from the Copernicus DEM auxiliary mask files.  The more tedious work is finessing their water edges after rescaling, as these maps are too large for SC4Terrafomer with its landscaping tools and so must be tinkered with in GIMP in a non-WYSIWYG approach or by subdividing the maps up into Terraformer-friendly chunks.

__________

Amazingly, the waterways of Beijing largely connect down into those of Tianjin, creating a huge drainage plain.  The map below, whipped up last evening, doesn't have so much a galaxy of thousands of water bodies but rather huge swafts of land reclamation sites.  The data is generally from 2014, so many section have gotten further along in land filling, and it's cool from a SimCity perspective to see via Google Earth the filled sections getting road and rail infrastructure installed and later replica Manhattans rising up.  The scale is mind-boggling:

Tianjin, with Cangzhou, and Tangshan:

 

[Nero55 313]

Great idea and job！I need your those wonderful maps，right now！

[rsc204 21,868]

12 hours ago, Odainsaker said:

A full size region map's SC4M compresses to a zip archive of about 80-85mb, while the 16-bit PNG base image compresses to a zip archive about 60-65mb, both of which are over the STEX limit.  They'll probably be uploaded to a hosting service like Mega.

That’s one option although using 7zip and a better compression algorithm it should be very possible to reduce the size of PNG files much more than with the in-built Windows tool.

Otherwise, convert them to an SC4M file using SC4 Terraformer, it’s whole purpose was to export maps in a much more compact file format.

Whilst a 60mb upload isn’t unthinkable today like it once was, not too long ago it was pretty much mandatory to utilise the SC4M format for such maps.