Three Rivers Region

[dedgren 830]

So, can 3RR16² be opened in wouanagaine's SC4Terraformer?

...Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [ linkie }?

!

On another note, I've finally crossed the one post per day of ST membership threshold.

Not bad for a guy coming up on being here two-and-a-half years, eh?

Week 2 of the CJ Lists [ linkie ] up later today.

[jacqulina 162]

wonderfull work excellent mountains

[emilin 2]

That looks 100% better with the snow mod. Keep it!

[owenluby 1]

I like the snow mod, but isnt it a bit too low elevation to have snow?

[WorfoSAUR 0]

@ Owenluby, I think that the image is sort of deceiving, and the snow is at a high enough elevation.

Where can I get this region census tool that I hear so much about?

[Shadow Assassin 336]

Hell of a lot better, David. So, the main problem was in fact the lack of a snow mod... at least that's fixed it up a little

I can just imagine dense forests along there with moose, etc.

[dedgren 830]

Meanwhile, over on the assembly lines of Planet Magrathea [ linkie ]...

Click here [ linkie ] for a full-size (6,000x~3,000 pixel) view.  It's just over a megabyte in size.

Here's a close-up- part terraformed...

...part NOT.

G'night from Alaska, all.

More good stuff tomorrow.

[bat 6]

Great work!

bat

[GMT 389]

wonderful. U applied a terrain mod.

waiting for more

[jacqulina 162]

wonderfull work on your terrain its a great looking map cant wait to see more

[Kokopelli 0]

Looks good! Keep it coming.

[meldolion 1]

hi David!! I should give a try to Olimpic terrain mod... IMHO looks muck better than Columbus... I don't know if it's compatible with snow tough...

Haven't tried yet...

Keep up the good work!!!!

[owenluby 1]

Well now when I see the region from the very top, the snow looks good!

[JLT-001 0]

Great Terraforming! I love the way the snow looks on your mountains!

[Livin in Sim 83]

Hi, David,

Wow, what a lot of work--you are a machine--a friendly, funny, informative one, tho!

From my viewpoint it was worth it, that's for sure.  I can't wait to see the different tiles developed according to the diverse styles of the ones who have volunteered to help.  What an interesting idea to invite collaboration!

The mountains look realistic with the snow.

You had me from "So I assume everyone besides me can see this..."  Yep, we surely can!

--Liv

[dedgren 830]

So, this post carries out a promise made a while back to matt (threestooges) who observed, on 10-24

...what does this "upscaling" do to the rivers and streams? Will this require a change to the scale of the bodies of water? Just a quick look at your scaled up map shows that one of the smallest parts of your streams now measures 1/6 of the distance across the new large map (this translates to about 1100 feet wide: row 7, column 5 from your recent post) I know rivers are wide, but... at any rate, I wanted to ask this now to avoid the potential for future problems.quote>

I responded

That is truly an excellent consideration to point out.  I will look into the issue of RL river width and it will rate an update of its own in connection with terraforming the imported quads.  Thanks!quote>

What is the width of the rivers and streams we take for granted?  How does that width relate to the grid system of SC4?  Matt was right- are we going to wind up simply transplanting some of our old problems of scale from the 10 mile (16 kilometer) on a side version of 3RR to our new 40 mile (64 kilometer) by 40 one?  And what RL river we might be familiar with is about 1,100 feet (335 meters) wide?

We started by getting some pics from Google Map [ linkie ] using the "Hybrid" combined satellite and road view.  These were all collected with the small scale bar down in the lower left hand corner at "200 meters/500 feet" so they would be visually about the same.  You'll see these in a minute.

We then prepared an 800 pixel by 600 pixel rectangle of basic green SC4 gridsquares at the same approximate scale as the maps.  It looks like this.

For reference sake, this measures, at 102 gridsquares, about 5,100 feet (1,554 meters) wide by 78 gridsquares, or 3,900 feet (1,189 meters) high.  These dimensions, however, are not really important in the context of what we are doing.

Our first RL pic is of the mighty Mississippi River just south of the DeSoto Bridge, which carries I-40 from Tennessee over into the wilds of Arkansas.

The island on the Tennessee side is Mud Island, which was seen by millions without knowing it when Tom Cruise [ linkie ] ran across the pedestrian bridge seen in the pic just north of Jefferson Davis Park with the bad guys after him in the movie verson of John Grisham's novel The Firm [ linkie ].  I know about Memphis because my wife is from there, and she's actually visiting her mom there this evening as this is written

Anyway, the Mississippi is about 3,000 feet (914 meters) wide at this point.  Let's look at the same pic superimposed on our grid.

Man, that's a big river!  Too big for 3RR, even at its new larger size.  That's too many grid squares across to even count.

So let's try something half that wide.  Here's the same Mississippi River a couple hundred miles upstream of Memphis at St. Louis, Missouri.  Right in front of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial [ linkie ] (see the shadow to the immediate left?) the river is about 1,500 feet (457 meters) wide.

I'm familiar with St. Louis because we used to drive there from the Chicago suburbs every summer when I was fairly small (between 6 and 10 years old) to visit my parents' friends Bob and Shirley, who lived in Kirkwood, a western suburb of Saint Looie.  Crossing the Mississippi on one of the old downtown bridges (I-55 wasn't built yet) was one of the high points of the trip.  I recall thinking that the Mississippi was everything Mark Twain [ linkie ] had made it out to be and more.  Red indians, riverboats, bandits, caves, and escaped slaves were never far from mind on those trips.

Here's the same pic superimposed on our gridsquares.

About 30-35 gridsquares wide "on the bias" so to speak.  Still far bigger than any river we will see in 3RR16².

...Overnight break (to 10-6-06 at 5:15 a.m. AST GMT-9)...

Back again with our next river, this time the Ohio at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

For those who are familiar with this area, you may agree with me that this is one of the most dramatic urban riverscapes out there, and especially at night.  It is in the heart of Pittsburgh, and the openness provided by the rivers presents incredible vistas in every direction.  Pittsburgh is set in a very hilly area, and the city development around you is just an amazing sight.  I've never been there other than just to drive through to see the views I'm describing.

The large channel from the confluence leading to the left side of the pic is the Ohio River [ linkie ]starting its 981 mile journey westward to the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois.  It is, by a series of locks and dams, navigable over its entire length and as a result has been an extraordinarily important artery of US commerce throughout almost the country's entire history.  The portion of the river we see here is about 1,200 feet (366 meters) in width at the left edge of the pic.  The two rivers leading to the right side of the pic are, to the upper left, the Alleghany, and lower left, the Monongahela, important local rivers in their own right. The Alleghany's channel here is about 900 feet (274 meters) wide and the Monongahela's is about 1,000 feet in width.  These are rivers, then, of about the size referred to by Matt (threestooges) in the post that set this inquiry in motion.

Here's the pic superimposed on our SC4 gridsquares.

I see these channel sizes, 900 to 1,200 feet (274 to 366 meters) as being models for the largest waterways in 3RR.  They would be 20-25 gridsquares wide.  We'll hold that thought until we get to a later continuation of this post.

Our next stop is the Hudson River on the waterfront of Albany, New York.  I'm quite familiar with this area, as my daughter Liz graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [ linkie ], located a few miles up the river in Troy, a few years back.  The river is about 800 feet wide just south of the Dunn Memorial Bridge.

As an aside, the Dunn Bridge is interesting for several reasons.  The first is that it ends abruptly at its eastern end...quite abruptly, actually...

Credit: CapitolHighways.8m.com - all rights reserved in original

...due to a cancelled freeway project. 

...those highway engineers...what jokesters they are!

The second is that, in 2005, it broke.

Credit: Gene Kendrick / WNYT News, Albany - all rights reserved in original

That looks like a major, "Aw, sh-t" to me.  That ramp is nine stories (89 feet/27 meters) high.  I have driven on it (note use of past tense permanent).

So, back on topic, lets superimpose the Hudson onto our SC4 gridsquares.

...I'm sure that interchange at the west end of the bridge is in the next NAM...

...NOT!

800 feet (244 meters), about 16 gridsquares wide, appears to be a good width for upstream sections of major rivers.

Our next river is the James at Richmond, Virginia.  Richmond is where I went to grad and law school, getting my Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from Virginia Commonwealth University [ linkie ] and my law degree from T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond [ linkie ].  I probably drove across the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike bridge at the center of the pic about every day for three years in the late 1980s.

 

The main channel of the James River to the west of the bridge and south of Mayo's Island is about 500 feet (152 meters) wide.  The Falls of the James (Richmond is one of the fall line cities [ linkie ] for all you history and geography buffs out there) is the wooded area to the west of Mayo's Island.  The river is about 700-750 feet (213-229 meters) wide east of the bridge.  There are places downstream as the James nears Chesapeake Bay [ linkie ] where it is several miles wide.  It's a wonderful and beautiful river in a great state.

Here's a pics with the James appearing against our SC4 gridsquare background.

This width (about 10 gridsquares) appears to be a good intermediate width for 3RR's major rivers.  It is at this point where they would reach the limit of navigability.

Back a little closer to my boyhood home, we next look at a really nice small river, the Kankakee, that rises in Indiana and flows westward about 50 miles south of Chicago into the Illinois River south of Joliet.  We see it here in the city of Kankakee, where it is about 400 feet (122 meters) wide.

Here is the same pic superimposed over our gridsquares.

The eight gridsquare or so wide Kankakee, along with with the Fox River shown in the next several pics, is broadly representative of the hundreds of small rivers you cross on a drive across any US state.  It's not navigable in any commercial sense, but on any given summer weekend you're likely to find all manner of local folks in small boats and canoes out on the water having a great time. 

The Fox River is also close to where I grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago.  It rises in southern Wisconsin and flows to the south and then south-west about 50 miles west of the city.  Here we see it flowing through the center of the city of Aurora, which you will recall if you ever saw the movie Wayne's World [ linkie ].

 

South of Stolp Island (toward the lower left corner of the pic), the Fox flows free through a 300 foot (91 meter) wide channel.  There is a dam in the channel on each side of the Island between New York Street and East Galena Boulevard, with the impounded river upstream being about 500 or so feet (~152 meters) in width.  The Fox River is a very scenic stream, and is a wonderful amenity in the many suburban communities through which it flows.

Here it is flowing across our gridsquares, at about 6 squares wide downstream of the island.

We're now clearly down to the stream level.  The next pic shows the Grasse River as it flows through Canton, New York, where I worked as a county planner in the early 1990s before moving on to Alaska.

The Grasse rises in the northern Adirondacks [ linkie ] south of this gem of a small upstate New York town.  It is about 200 feet (61 meters) wide just south of the US 11 bridge in the main channel east of the island.  Note the falls downstream of the bridge.

Here's the pic superimposed on our SC4 gridsquares.

As you can see, that channel is about four gridsquares wide.  This is a good width for the major tributary streams of 3RR's rivers.

At the 100 foot (30 meter) width, we return to northern Illinois just a few miles south of Naperville, the town in which I lived during my high school years.  The following pic is of a local stream we derisively called the "Roaring DuPage.   Here, the DuPage River flows north and west of the town of Plainfield.

 

I once spent a long summer day pulling a canoe across gravel beds and mud bars for most of the way between Naperville and Plainfield.  I'd seen deeper bathtubs...

Here's our two gridsquare wide DuPage against the SC4 background.

Further upstream, in my town- Naperville, we again see the Dupage, this time about 1/4 mile (4/10 kilometer) from my old house.  I lived on Oxford Lane, which you see at the  center-right of the pic.  My old house, which was pretty nice (my folks bought it for US$39,500 in 1965 and sold it for a quarter mil in the late 1980s) was torn down in the 90s so a McMansion [ linkie ] could be built in its place.

The blue rectangle is the area of the following pic, which shows the 75th Street bridge over the DuPage.

The bare light colored areas next to the river north and south of 75th are gas stations (a Phillips 66 to the north and an Amoco to the south) that were there when I was a kid and the intersection was just two two-lane roads crossing each other on the edge of the farmlands to the south.

...ahhh, progress...

Anyway, here's the Roaring DuPage in all of its one gridsquare wide glory.

So here's a table based on the foregoing to conclude this portion of the post.

Classification	Width	Gridsquares
Large River	1,000-1,200 feet/300-350 meters	20-24 gridsquares
Medium River	600-800 feet/175-250 meters	12-16 gridsquares
Small River	300-400 feet/90-125 meters	6-8 gridsquares
Large Stream	200 feet/60 meters	4 gridsquares
Small Stream	50-100 feet/16-30 meters	1-2 gridsquares

I'll be terraforming 3RR16² in accordance with this.  More info on specifics in Part 2 of this update over the next few days.

[Nik-nik 3]

Nighty-night David. Sleep tight (as in have your ropes around your matrass tighted fast, sorry reffering to the CJ of John (Darmok)).

I guess your point is that 3RR does now not have any rivers anymore just streams or wadi's?

Nik-NIk

[raul39 0]

Your region looks great! Are you going to change the naem of your cj? I'm just wondering because that region has more than three rivers (or streams I guess).

[Gaston 0]

       Welcome to page 42 !!!!

I just love getting to do that.   LOL

Okay David my friend,

    Once again I have found another topic in your CJ that fascinates me.    I have always felt there was something "not quite right" about the scale of my rivers in SC4.    If they looked navagatable, they looked too big for everything else.   And if I made them so they looked right to my eye for things like, the road sizes etc, they didn't look like a ship could possibly travel along them without hanging on a sand bar somewhere.      The other issue about rivers I have is about the height of the banks and the bridges crossing the rivers.    Maxis must have some VERY tall ferries.   It seems to me that they should be able to pass under lower bridges than they do.   (Oh well maybe someone will make a mod for lessening the height requirement to something more realistic.   I have the zero height bridge mod installed but that doesn't fix the fact that the ferries can't go under a bridge with 60 meters of clearence.) 

   Maybe you should look at some other areas along the Mississippi.   Like maybe Dubuque, IA.   J/K     Actually just south of here is an interesting stretch of the river.   It is Savanah, IL.   The river gets very narrow there.[Linkie] & [Linkie]   Just a thought.

     Hey, maybe SC5 will have rivers that actually flow down hill.   Then you could build dams and locks along them like a real river.    Just another random thought.

   Can't wait to see more on this topic.

---Gaston

[ElBarto92 7]

David - I love seeing SC4 scale related to real life, and you're a master at it. Seeing the SC grid superimposed onto RL pics of rivers was real interesting, and will definately help me with my scale in Sim City. I'd give you a link to some Miami River information, but I can't find anything any good. Great work recently, should be fun watching as 256 tiles fill up..

-Andr

[Rayden 7]

I never thought too much about scaling, even less about river wideness. As long I can have the bridge crossing and have enough height for a ferry, then it's ok. There is one or two bridges that require less terrain height to allow ferries under. Anyway, most of my CJs have been built on the mountains, so, my rivers or streams have been done with ploppable water, no ferries or ships in the mountains

[jacqulina 162]

hi my friend thats an awesome region you are making and terraforming you have done well,awesome work

[dedgren 830]

Here's Sunday's region view (from Region Census with a few extra proprietary processing steps) of 3RR.  I'm trying to do 10 quads or so a day..

I posted the following along with the above pic over on the "Show Us Your Region View" thread [ linkie ]:

I am in the process of doing basic through superdetail terraforming of the entire region prior to building anything.  I've done the basic stuff in rows one and two at the top of the pic, about half of row three and two on the left end of row four.  I'm planning that city development would be a collaborative process- if you are interested in participating, check by my CJ from time to time.  That phase is still down the road a bit.quote>

I am making a little list...

UPDATE:  (11-7-06 4:15 a.m. AST GMT-9)  Here's this morning's Region Census view.

Click here [ linkie ] for a much larger version (132kb).  As you can see, we're coming up on a quarter of the way done with the basic stuff.  I'm hoping for at least half by the weekend.

Here's a few closer-in pics.

#1

#2

#3

The detailed banks of the rivers and the islands look even better in the game itself.

Later.

n.b.:  I'll do anything to call your attention to my previous post on river and stream width- if you haven't seen it yet, please check it out here [ linkie ].  DE

[owenluby 1]

Very interesting thoughts here David, keep it up!

[jacqulina 162]

thats an excellent region my friend i am looking forward to seeing more,awesome pic

[hamsterTK 93]

its coming along...

[mightygoose 92]

this CJ is an intereting one, at first you region was too small and wishy washy with rocks for my liking, nothing personal great work, just not my thing, then you expanded the region and put in some higher density, i gainedan amount of interest, being mathematical ans seeing 16 squared i decided to drop by again, and shall it be known i shall lurk no more, your project is amazing and i cannot wait to see how this monster region develops.

[crazychickensc12 84]

whoa awesome advancements, the terraforming is looking really nice!! keep up the great work, its a big job terraforming 256 squares lol!!

[cityhawk 12]

Hey, David!

Nice presentation on the river width part. I enjoyed the pics of the different places, especially the one with the CRAZY intersection right beside the river for which you sarcastically said would be in the next NAM. I could never have the patience to figure out the math to do what you have accomplished here, but I'm glad you're working hard on making the very best stuff that you can, and your terraforming is definitely coming along greatly! I look forward to more!

[patfirefghtr 160]

David that is wow amazing work on the rivers great job and defintly a attention grabber i just love that pix lol looking forward to more - pat