Building Styles

[utora 0]

Hi everyone. Considering the extreme amount of lots and BATs on this site, and the great quality of most custom content, I was wondering if there would be any interest among gamers for creating different building styles, to gain more control over the actual look of your cities.

Let me explain the problem. Currently I'm kind of testing how much BATs, lots and mods I can stuff into my plugin folder, and It won't be much of a susprise to tell that the game finally slows down so much that it takes away the gamepleasure. With only 1/3 of the STEX in my plugins (about 1,5 Gb), I find that the game takes up to 10 minutes to start up, sound and music don't function anymore, but hey... I do have a large amount of custom content.

As most of you know, most problems arise with the parks menu as well as the landmarks and commercial section.

 

What to do about this??

Creating different building styles sounds like a good solution to me. I'm currently experimenting with creating an English style and a Dutch style, and I have ideas for a modernist style, futuristic, mediterranean, German, French and Classic. An American style would be a problem since the amount of American architecture on this site is simply huge.

 

The English style would make use of Gascookers BATs, as well as RP2005 and Ill Tonkso for example. French would obviously consist of Porkissimo's stuff, as well as Xannepan's.

 

So far a short explanation of what I'm currently doing. Further challenges arise, such as: how to grow the kinds of buildings I want? I found a very useful mod on Simcity Central: Dhamp's No Maxis Buildings Mod. When this mod is installed, it allows you to create a completely custom looking city without a single Maxis building. In combination with one of the created building styles mentioned above, this gives a rather satisfying result.

 

The only issue I'm dealing with right now, is the huge amount of time to sort out all the particular buildings, parks, landmarks, utilities etc for a particular building style; but once done the effect would be absolutely great I think.

The reason that I also want to split the parks, landmarks and utilities sections (as well as the farming section) is simply that if I don't do this, the game would still considerably slow down to the point of not-being-able to play anymore. So for example an industrial looking English city would not only make use of Gascooker, RP2005 and Ill Tonkso content, but it would consist of a special selection of English looking parks, utilities and landmarks (found on the stex) as well. It would make use of Simgoober's Canals instead of Oppies, and of PEG's CDK IND instead of others. At the same time it would make use of one or two of Jeronij's diagonal walls instead of the complete amount of his work. All of this is to ensure the game to be played with ease.

 

Oh, btw, my computer specificities are: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ processor at 2.08 Ghz; 1 Gb of RAM, 80 Gb Harddrive and a crappy 64Mb Graphics card.

 

Tell me what you think of this project!

[storms991 0]

I could email you my plugins folder, It has all of gascookers stuff, a lot of rp2005 and all the stations and high-rises are ills tonkso.

[CDI_spy 5]

You're quite right Utora. 

My word on this is that it's up to the BATters to tap into more original buildings styles and functions so they can attract more downloaders.

[bdniner 0]

How far did y'all get with this project. I think it would be nice to have more building packs. especially more variations in the smaller building types.

[storms991 0]

bnider, I would send you my plugins to try out simcity4 UK if you like, I will have to it on the weekend though cause my laptop is not with me rite now.... I'm obsessed so I cant play on weekdays....

[storms991 0]

hehheheh double post, If anyone else is inteested then tell me

oh and is anyone else having the same problem as me,

go here http://www.imgcity.net/server/primary/simtropolis1.bmp

notice there are no avatars, it just says author icon

[winonanick 0]

This sounds like a cool project. What is the status?

storms991 tell us more about your scUK. I might be interested in what you have. I currently have a bunch of gascooker's stuff, what elese do you have?

[SuperBeber 0]

Utora,
I'm very interested by your project.
I've tried to make only french style cities, but with only the stuff of Porkie and Xannepan the cities looks more like Paris (and not all of french cities looks like Paris...).
It's clearly true that a very big amount of lots would be needed. But, if the building styles (UK, French, and so on...) are done separatly, they doesn't need so much plugins, am I right ? Its the whole thing that is hard to do...
So the best thing would be make this project parts by parts, style by style...
And if you need help to carry on this projet, you can count me on the list of helpers
I'll look at this topic frequently, to see if it progress...

Ber