Leaderboard

In our first Greek update, we got to take a look at one of Greece's most recognizable natural wonders. Now, we turn our attention to some of Greece's most awe-inspiring, mysterious, and magical landmarks of the past and present. --- "There is nothing permanent, except change." -Heraclitus The center of the universe - the Tholos of Delphi "Bear up, my child, bear up; Zeus who oversees and directs all things is still mighty in heaven." -Sophocles Athena's temple - The Parthenon "Experience, travel - these are as education in themselves." -Euripides Born from ashes - Santorini "I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute; but I know how to raise a small and inconsiderable city to glory and greatness." -Themistocles The capitol - Athens "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." -Aristotle In the heavens above - Meteora Don't forget to comment, like, and follow True Earth if you haven't already! -korver

As recently featured in my in my CJ, True Earth. Check out the rest here. Santorini at Sunset

As recently featured in my in my CJ, True Earth. Check out the rest here. Meteora, Greece

Proud to announce that we (finally) released an update: Pedestrian Roads: -*New* Plain Street [G] -*New* Zonable Promenade [G/E] -*New* Zonable Pedestrian Tiny Stone Road [G/E] -*New* Zonable Pedestrian Gravel [G/E] -*New* Zonable Pedestrian Tiny Gravel Road [G/E] -*New* Zonable Pedestrian Pavement [G/E] -*New* Zonable Pedestrian Tiny Pavement Road [G/E] -*New* Support for Road Color Changer Continued (Ground / Elevated / Bridge / Tunnel) Thank you so much for your patience and continued support! Believe me when I say there is much more to come.

As recently featured in my in my CJ, True Earth. Check out the rest here. Athens at Rush Hour

Zeus' Wrath The Center of the Universe

It's more or less done. Gotta do the RICO settings and decide if I'm happy with the roof. I really find large flat roofs hard to get right. Any feedback would be helpful! Is it too empty? Too much clutter? Too randomly placed? Also I think I'll have to do some more industrial props soon. The crates and barrels only get you so far.

So far it's looking good. Normal map needs a bit more work, specular and illumination still missing and then ofc the LOD. It's got the overall look I was going for though

I'm working on a small historical city centre. I'm still trying to get better commercial buildings to grow next to the train station.

Hello all. While we wait for SCD4 to come back online, I'm going to post a few pics of my latest project. If you have been following my thread there then you know about the massive oil depot project I'm developing. Here are a few pics of the main piece. The Oil Depot Rail Yard, which will be the main component of the project. The rest will be the refineries and oil depot tanks. I have many pieces on the go. It will be a modular ensemble. Please keep in mind that it is a Work In Progress.

Some districts in Goulais Bay. The Islands District. The Uptown District. The Entertainment District which has many hotels and casinos, a mall, a golf course, a beach, restaurants, nightclubs, an observation tower, and much more.

Yes, I think you have a good point. Here's an update.

Entertainment District at Night. Downtown at night. Goulais Bay at night.

Before After I know it's subtle but look from the tower/boulder then to the left

Located on the island of Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea, few beaches across the globe can compare to Greece's breathtaking Myrtos Beach. Due to it's remote and rugged location, the beach is completely inaccessible by foot - the only way to reach it is to traverse your way down a series of steep hairpin curves. Once you make it there however, you'll be rewarded greatly with pristine, warm Mediterranean waters, perfectly soft white sand, and of course, incredible views. Our journey gets started off with us making accommodations at a timeless Greek villa - our room overlooks the edge of the beach, giving us a fantastic view of the sunset. We'll be staying here tonight, and tomorrow we're off to the beach. We set off for the beach early in the morning, driving through endless fields of daisies and poppies along our way. However, just as we roll down our windows to take in the smell, the clouds darken and it starts pouring. It looks like our day at the beach could very well be in jeopardy. Fortunately for us however, it was nothing more than a quick rain shower. The sky eventually begins to clear up and the beach starts to come alive with tourists. We stake out a prime spot on the beachfront and soak up the sun - no better way to spend an afternoon! Myrtos Beach is more than just a beach - it's an experience. Activities such as hang gliding are extremely popular throughout the area, so we throw caution to the wind and decide to give it a shot. We make our way back to the beach just as the day begins to wind down. Once nightfall approaches, we get a little peace and quiet once the beach starts emptying out - being sure to take it all in one last time. A perfect end to our day. I hope you enjoyed your visit to Myrtos Beach! Don't forget to comment, like, and follow True Earth if you haven't already! -korver

Fantastic! As said, those windows look amazing, wonder what they look like at night! I think gravel roofing would look great on this building, like so, or tar, like so. Nice and weathered And I dig the King's sentiment that these buildings are perfect buildings to gentrify, so our resident hipsters and yuppies have a place to scold their barista: "Oh dear, is that cinnamon on that foam?"

Oh boy, that's awesome! This is one of the best recreations (if not the best) of Greece in Simcity 4 I've ever seen. Well done!! Ω φίλε, είναι τέλειο! Είναι απ' τις καλύτερες απεικονίσεις (αν όχι η καλύτερη) της Ελλάδας στην Εξομοιούπολη 4 που έχω δει ποτέ. Εύγε!! I was actually wondering if I would ever see you here once I first saw you were from Greece - nice to see it has your stamp of approval -korver

Some overviews of the city of Goulais Bay. Population of the city is. 346,033.

That's an interesting beginning for sure! What I'm not so sure about is the combination of that castle and the bridge. IMO, the bridge is better suited for a large capital city - I'd expect palaces and monuments where I see such a bridge, just like in Paris, London, or Vienna. The castle and the buildings we can see so far, however, remind me of a much smaller and more rural medieval town. Of course I don't know what else you're planning, just thought I'd leave this feedback here. Anyway, that castle hill will be quite the landmark, even if it's not that tall!

These are the original values - NAM mods them heavily. It also changes max commute time radically. Many versions of the "Traffic Simulator" have been released, with a swarm of self-proclaimed "experts" exhilarated about "making a Traffic Simulator" - they actually set the Traffic Simulator parameters. The goals of this kind of modding varied a lot among modders; some wanted making any commute trip possible (eg setting max commute time to extreme levels), others wanted networks capable of bearing any traffic volume, some others claimed that they could affect commercial growth (at some expense of R desirability), while there were even attempts to achieve purely cosmetic effects, as some players wanted, for example, to see cars queuing on the highways, or "realism" (in the way each one means it). I general, NAM traffic simulators make the game a lot easier to play, resulting in a nearly "sandbox" playing mode: network layout seems to have little effect, if at all, all commute trips are possible (then they complain about the eternal loops) etc etc, posing very little challenge to the player. Even the "Low" simulator is a lot easier than vanilla's. Some other important things weren't fixed tough (they actually could not), for example the simulator will almost always select commute to the neighbor city (if the connection is fairly close) to getting the CBD (let alone that power plant at the city's corner), although the former commute will always be "Long" and the latter most probably "Medium" or even "Short". As for your question, use the reader's Navigator Tool to find the Traffic Simulator exemplar in simcity_1.dat. All related parameters are there. You can copy it in a new datfile (put it in under your Plugins folders) - you can examine it more easily, without having to search all the time, or... who knows, maybe... "make your own Traffic Simulator"! Most likely you will need to do so, as the vanilla simulator (well, "Simulator Settings") won't get you far, it's totally insufficient. For example, speeds are low, while max commute times is too low (it's 3.. "units"). IIRC, if you have residences at the one edge of your city (big tile), and jobs at the opposite edge, connected with a (plain) road, sims can't get to their jobs with the default settings - you can experiment, of course. Also, the times you see in the Graph are scaled - there is some "factor" defined somewhere, so don't try to make any direct calculations or assumptions about of what this really is. I think... there's another factor which affects the Graph only. If you are interested in the mechanics of Traffic Simulator, you need to experiment, eg a city with one R lot, located at pos say CellX=2, and a small power plant at CellX=252 (the distance is 250 tiles, for easier calculations), sims will need to travel this distance to get to their jobs, and having only one house and only one workplace makes calculations easy; then you can check the commute times and find what they actually mean, or try to reduce speed on the road, to check where the cutoff really is...

Replies: eufl: Thanks, I'm really glad your enjoying the CJ. Yer the water pump is a little on the large side lol but oh well. As for the farms they do take a while which is probably why the road layouts for them are beginning to outpace the actual farm detailing but I'm sure I'll catch it up. As for the power poles I'm not using any mods in this CJ sorry. Plus it makes sense to have the pylons as there coming from the actual power plant which is further down the single lane highway. Entry 11: Recovery begins So, were back in Antario and as the title suggests, were glad to say that the city has begun its recovery plan in regards to the failing industry that supported our city and has benefited from several knock on effects from this recovery which we'll show you in this entry. Jumping straight in, you'll remember that the former oil sights were left like this as nature retook the areas they used to operate in. 1. Well we've used some set aside money to offer grants for forestry companies to take up management of the area and bring some industry and jobs back into the city and am happy to say that the response has been promising indeed. True not all the land has been bought but at least its a sizeable start and ones that we have a number of plans for in the future. 2. Moving back toward the city you'll remember the intersection for the village of Froska was getting a bit clogged up and frankly, dangerous. Well we've gone ahead and turned it into a simple but much more effective diamond interchange. 3. Which has a,lso allowed us to expand the growing network of villages that are popping up around Antario. In this case were In the new village of Londhei where farming and forestry are the main way's of life. There is also a cider brewery here as well that uses its own and other local orchards to produce several varieties of refreshing cider for the local area. In the background you can see just how close it is to the city, sitting just across the highway from the suburbs. 4. Meanwhile we also have expansion in the aforementioned suburbs as the sprawl continues to spread outwards. 5. Also more expansion in Skjar, which is fast becoming a little town in its own right, what with the new neighbourhood and the preparation to use the land around it for farming and forestry. We do however probably need to do something about the pollution that might be beginning to threaten the fishing industry that it was founded around. 6. Finally for this small entry we have the obligatory overview, marking the moment that our city and its surrounds have hit the 50k mark, now showing no signs of stopping with the focus on new industries and, as usual the list of things on the councils minds. 7. -Improve the lacking public transport network? -Take a look at streamlining the harbour area? -Expand on the forestry industry. -Financial district substantial expansion? -Get the city beautification projects finished instead of half done? -Agricultural expansions -Housing expansions

Here are two roundabouts from the same town

Old brick tenement and a converted glass works are up. No pics as they look alot like their industrial counterpartners. Instead I'll give you an early WIP of my next project. I think I'll make both a brick and concrete version of this one.

In the latest round of changes to the API reconstruction, the framework is now able to subscribe to and receive messages from the game, and to send messages for other DLLs and parts of the game listening for them. The most relevant code added can be found here in the DLL director. The proof-of-concept DLL can be found here, and here's a relatively boring screenshot of it in action: More technical details follow. --- From what I understand, each DLL director gets a reference to the GZCOM framework, which acts as a sort of coordinator for different types of components of the game. Namely, the framework controls the application, services, and hooks. Hooks are what we've been dealing with primarily up to this point. The extra cheats DLL is a hook that waits until just before the app initializes, where it then proceeds to enable debug functionality and extra cheats. Hooks mostly relate to major events in the framework, which are all named in the cIGZFrameWorkHooks interface. Services are classes which process logic on each tick (what appears to be each frame) of the game or on each idle interval when the game is not doing work. The application (here, cISC4App) seems to be a special type of service that coordinates the game logic. One of the most important services in the game is the message server, which is responsible for allowing different components to communicate with each other by sending and receiving messages. SimCity 4 actually has two different types of messages: cGZMessage, which behaves like a plain structure with a message type ID and three fields; and cIGZMessage2, which behaves more like an object and is extended by cIGZMessage2Standard, cIGZMouseMessage, cIGZKeyMessage, and cIGZCanvasMessage. Non-UI code exclusively sends GZMessage and Message2Standard-type messages. As there are two different types of messages, there are two different message servers: cIGZMessageServer and cIGZMessageServer2, which act almost identically. Game classes can send a message, which will immediately inform anyone who subscribes to that message's type, or post a message. Posting a message places the message in a queue for delivery and may be deferred for delivery until the game has free CPU time to process it. However, specifying it as a high priority message sends it straight to the front of the queue. The message server also allows you to add a notification class, which must implement a DoMessage method for receiving messages. Unless a specific target is given for a message, it gets sent to all classes subscribed to it, which is what I've done with the latest proof of concept. In our case, we subscribe to a message with ID 0xea8ae29a (or 3,934,970,522 in decimal), which is sent when the game has finished loading a city, whether new or existing. It's currently unknown what the data fields for this message contain. It's also unknown what other messages exist that can be subscribed to, though this is what I plan to explore next.

A couple more pictures...

An eight way roundabout... turns into the centre of downtown Goulais Bay.

WORK IN PROGRESS --- The Jade Bight -- Wilhelmshaven -- (1) The South Mole has been filled in and detailed -- (2) Adding a few new units to the Fleet -- Still have 3/4 of a large map to work on -- QUESTION: Has anyone experienced a problem getting Somy's tugboats to work?? I keep plopping them -- but nothing ever shows up on the map.

Working on an Arinsian Venice of the north!

It's highly dependent on how easy it is to override prewritten game functions. On the SC4Devotion discussion on Buggi's source code, someone listed (years ago) a handful of functions that would need to be modified to, say, add a new menu button. It's not clear that I can do this by simply calling into SimCity's API, but I don't have enough info to conclusively rule that out. If there are existing game functions for features that were disabled before shopping, obviously we could start by reactivating them, similar to the extra cheats DLL. The Cutting Room Floor notes that upgradeable city halls were modeled but not programmed, and I'm curious to see if that's possible.

Just a simple texture replacement in this one before: after:

Well, since I had some free time, I figured I might as well take some screenshots straight away (I was dying to see them in-game anyway ) I put all pictures in one album, and I think I captured them all: if I forgot some, let me know.

Im not really concerned about the plugins as much as I wantbthe basic stuff. Im going to restart the project on my end.

@Huston The simplicity of this building is really what got me started and of course the lighting experiments I could do to it @Toothless Stitch Haha, yes indeed @JP Schriefer Did a bit more tweaking to the white concrete that you liked @Jasoncw Yaas, although ages later, I'm excited to be back. @KonstantinII Mhmmm, yes plaster those holographic signs The building itself is slightly less than 2x2 tiles but now with the lot enlarged there should be more room to play with @City_Master You're looking good in that picture of yours @Hotwheeler The window frames rendered a bit strangely and it should have been much darker (fixed) and yes transparent squares definitely don't look realistic. Those blueprints and floor plans helped immensely with some measurements that were missing in the beginning. Much appreciated Thanks for all the encouraging words everyone! 432 PARK AVENUE A Z5 RENDER FROM THE WAKE - DAY, NORTH There is much work ahead of this project but rest assured it'll get done slowly but surely I took the liberty to further simulate ambient lighting on the front facing windows with some subtle glaring and varying dips in light levels to accommodate clouds and an exponential falloff to the first four rows of windows on the side. The next step would be to complement that with residential and public area lighting (think of night renders but for the daytime tailored to sims/tenants that would switch on the light for much needed lighting in their rooms/spaces barely or not adequately lit by the sun). The glass is still in the tinkering stage with an experimental, continuous shot of its corresponding environment using 50-100+ stitched-together google maps images that would be reflected back per side. Indeed, it is an extremely cumbersome process yet so liberating when done right. However, it may require more tweaking and the horizon needs some adjustments for better sky transitioning but what do you guys think? On the other hand, keeping it in line with the W2W spirit as seen in real life, additional buildings were added to the project only because they overlapped on some game tiles and couldn't be separated at 16m increments. Also, I could continue to have them included to keep the buildings' proportions in check but could this potentially break RCI demands due to this lot housing an entire block? If that is the case, maybe there is a way to get around this with some mod wizardry or stat adjustments or something simple yet unknown and I would appreciate any suggestions. It's good to be back and I hope you enjoy this update as much as I have been with exploring and tinkering.

No tonyr here , still campaigning perhaps . korver ?

In the picture below you can see an industrial district in my city. The district has several cargo terminals and highways. However, lately I've been coping with quite some abandonment in this area. I've demolished the abandoned buildings and dezoned them. Which makes this kind of a concrete emptiness at some places.

Replies: Turjan: Thanks and glad you liked Sinatoa, lets hope this one turns out better! Yep I've got the new expansion. I won't be creating a snow city just yet though. Horus_Kol: Thanks glad you like the old feel of the buildings. I agree that the in game Coal power plant isn't the nicest but I'm not using and Custom Content (apart from stuff I create in the asset editor) so for now it'll have to stay. I guess you could argue that although the town looks old its just being built that way and as such, the higher safety of the newer plants overruled the older style ones. Entry 2: A bit of everything So yes, as the title suggests this entry is about looking at various issues and items that have sprung up around the growing town as the investors have continued to do what they do best, invest. Unfortunately as your about to see what they don't do best is plan ahead and we've had several traffic issues throughout the growing town, the worst being these back ups in the centre. So yes, this caused a slight issue as they didn't want to have to redesign and destroy large swathes of buildings to widen the road. The solution, however came with making the majority of side street splits into one ways heading away from the road and creating this rather elongated round about thing. Right problem 1 solved (for now anyway), what's next? Turns out it was power outages. You see while the city had been steadily growing the coal power plant had been steadily struggling. However no one actually bothered to keep track of this until we started getting some black out complaints. Now we also apparently needed some sort of rail facilities now that the city had bought itself a rail fleet, so why not use the smallest amount of space possible to build a new Oil (because who likes dirty old coal?) power plant and a railyard. (OOC: Please note I have no idea what a oil power plant is meant to look like and google was useless so there you go, I winged it). So, moving onto the next issue that were having is a bit of a case of expanding to fast, you see up until now, this Primary and Secondary schooling facility and another Primary school are the only educational facilities in the entire town. Which was fine when the town was small and no one paid it any attention, However, when you have people investing in expensive offices all over the place, the limited pool of educated people quickly cause a slight issue and lead to investors pulling out and situations like this dilapidated building popping up over town. Now space in the town at the moment is at a bit of a premium so we'll have to look at building a university outside of the current city limits. Now, however for this rather random entry of mish mashed problems and solutions, we'll take a look at some random images showing various things like the newish local hospital (health is more important than education). A look at the growing financial district (or at least our attempt at one). Some new housing, trying to use up all the space in front one of the many mountains in the area. A panorama of the wall to wall architecture that makes up the majority of the city with the Hospital and some fire breaking the skyline (don't worry I'm sure they were fine). Finally for today we have an up to date overview showing the city as it currently stands, population 21,404. As you can see there's still a lot of growth going on with roads leading nowhere at the moment. Hopefully you can also begin to see the slight attempt at a mainstreet sort of thing emerging. We definitely need to start spreading out a bit more though as things are beginning to get a bit cramped (OOC: I need to buy more than 1 2x2 square basically) Anyway that's all for today's entry, join us next time when hopefully we'll have some sort of approved educational facility to show you all! (OOC: As you lot have probably noticed, I've started messing around with the theme editor in the new DLC, hence why the roads, ruined ground, mountains and water have all changed a bit from what were used to. I'm not sure they're going to stay this way in the long run but for now they'll do (though the mountains do look rather weird in the rain though I'm not sure if this is due to the rain or the colour adjustments I've made). Cheers James)