Request: Water pipe crossing river or ravine

[nathkel 31]

Often when i have water lines that cross creeks or ravines, it doesn't seem very realistic that SC4 dips the water pipe down below the depression then back up again on the other side. What i'd like to have is a pipe that crosses these dips, complete with concrete footings and outlet casings, so that i can create the eye candy of the water pipe crossing the ravine. 

Perhaps there can be more than one crossing depth, say, shallow, moderate, and deep, and different sizes of pipe.

Attached are some examples of what i'm talking about, although i couldn't find any pictures of short ones. These are actually kind of extreme examples.

[matias93 7,535]

@Simmer2 made a pipes pack about a year ago, and I remember that some of them were specifically done for crossing rivers or ravines. Try them out:

 

[nathkel 31]

By golly, i think that will answer the request! I'll try it out. 

 

[Sniffeh 121]

Yeah. I tried crossing rivers with Simmer2's aqueduct pipes, and it's not exactly a solution. It was a fantastic idea, but the pipes don't really work in practice. To begin with, you must precisely smooth the ground before laying anything down, and sadly, they are not long enough to cross all rivers. The ends sometimes float above the ground. Also, I'm not sure how they're intended to be connected to water lines. It would be fantastic if Simmer2 created a tutorial so we could learn how to utilize it.

[matias93 7,535]

8 hours ago, Sniffeh said:

Yeah. I tried crossing rivers with Simmer2's aqueduct pipes, and it's not exactly a solution. It was a fantastic idea, but the pipes don't really work in practice. To begin with, you must precisely smooth the ground before laying anything down, and sadly, they are not long enough to cross all rivers. The ends sometimes float above the ground. Also, I'm not sure how they're intended to be connected to water lines. It would be fantastic if Simmer2 created a tutorial so we could learn how to utilize it.

The water pipes from the game are super limited on their capacity because they were meant to be improved on an expansion that never got made by Maxis: the game was intended to have separate sweet and salty water bodies, the possibility of terraforming water bodies over sea level, running rivers, rain, different sources of potable water and more.

For actually connecting water pipes across rivers, the only functional option is to run the pipes under the riverbed, but you can add eyecandy pipes over it to make it look as if it were running over.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,451]

8 hours ago, matias93 said:

The water pipes from the game are super limited on their capacity because they were meant to be improved on an expansion that never got made by Maxis: the game was intended to have separate sweet and salty water bodies, the possibility of terraforming water bodies over sea level, running rivers, rain, different sources of potable water and more.

For actually connecting water pipes across rivers, the only functional option is to run the pipes under the riverbed, but you can add eyecandy pipes over it to make it look as if it were running over.

 

The aquaduct set(and all other pipe sets) are eye-candy parks and don't conduct anything...

 

SM2's oil pipes are located in Power so they might conduct a little bit of electricity(but so does everything else in the game except water). Not sure who made the 3rd set pictured, but it contains the longest pipe bridge. There are several other sets(one by uki, I think) but not as versatile as these. They all can be easily edited to plop on, or under water, and expand their lengths. These 3 should be in STEX under Industry, I believe.

Simply run water pipes under the plops to simulate water.

[Sniffeh 121]

19 hours ago, matias93 said:

The water pipes from the game are super limited on their capacity because they were meant to be improved on an expansion that never got made by Maxis: the game was intended to have separate sweet and salty water bodies, the possibility of terraforming water bodies over sea level, running rivers, rain, different sources of potable water and more.

For actually connecting water pipes across rivers, the only functional option is to run the pipes under the riverbed, but you can add eyecandy pipes over it to make it look as if it were running over.

Oh. That sucks.

[LoriDee605 1]

Is there still no solution to this? It makes no sense that a bridge will conduct electricity but cannot carry a water pipe. I know we have a team experimenting with fresh and saltwater delivery. Maybe they can address this in the process? fingers crossed.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,472]

1 hour ago, LoriDee605 said:

Is there still no solution to this? It makes no sense that a bridge will conduct electricity but cannot carry a water pipe. I know we have a team experimenting with fresh and saltwater delivery. Maybe they can address this in the process? fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, this cannot be done as the bridges are hardcoded. So we have to know the code that handles the bridges and utilities well, and it will take time 

[rsc204 21,869]

16 hours ago, LoriDee605 said:

It makes no sense that a bridge will conduct electricity but cannot carry a water pipe.

Well from a programming point of view it makes complete sense, if you only code them to carry electricity, they won't carry water. The question is whether we can add or modify the code to allow such a feature, my gut feeling is that this isn't something you can alter with a .dll mod. If that's the case then there is 0% of it ever being added as a feature. But even if it could be added via a .dll, that's still a lot of work someone has to do. In the context of that, is is really so much hassle to just run a water pipe under the bridge?

Maxis addressed this with SimCity (2013), roads just carried the utilities automatically, so anywhere with a road had Water/Electric etc. But one could also argue that took away control from the player, for example to choose not to have water everywhere, which in SC4 can be a valid choice in various circumstances. Whichever side of the fence you find yourself upon, it isn't an element of the design that broken, rather a design decision and of course not every player will be happy with every element of a game.

[Lucario Boricua 7,061]

There's a much better solution to getting pipes to cross canyons, ravines and other deep depressions along the terrain! The key lies in slope mods!

 

Here's the Underground Depth Mod, courtesy of @Thalassicus back in 2004. This one comes in three flavors, which adjust the MaxDistFromTerrain parameter. This parameter allows the network to be placed at a maximum distance from the terrain surface, both above and below ground. In the case of the subway and the water pipe networks, it controls the depth placement, and the radical version has the parameter set to 10,000m, which pretty much means any and all the depths you could possibly encounter when playing SimCity 4 are accounted for!

 

 

One thing I'm debating to do, as part of my NAM Tunnel and Slope Mod development, is to incorporate the parameters of the Underground Depth Mod as part of the slope mod package. The version that's published, at the time of this post, is still the 0.20 beta. This feature is really useful to maximize flexibility and convenience in gameplay, and would allow players to build subway and water pipe anywhere in the map as they please.

  Edited January 21, 2024 by Lucario Boricua  
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