Battlecat

Those 3 new pictures look great. The ruins look very realistic and that plaza with the GLR looks great! The weather report is also a nice touch! Looking forward to more.

As far as I know it's completly acceptable. As long as your journal passes the forum rules and the guidlines for making city journals, everything else is up to you! Sounds like a cool idea, I hope to see it posted sometime soon!

I've missed a bit, but I sure like how these cities and rural areas look. That camping area is great! That tutorial is really cool as well, the result is quite impressive. I'm curious to see where the story will go next!

Hey, this is a cool journal! The stories rock! Very imaginative, but some of them actually remind me of the weird stuff that sometimes happens with the elected officials here at my work (I work for a local government). The cities look great as well! Very nice mixture of rural and urban development. Keep it up!

Cool update! That's quite the insance interchange there. The highway signs are a nice touch! That's also a very nice region map you've got there.

Originally posted by: wouanagaine battlecatis this will be ok ? quote> Perfect! That will nicely hide the global tools! I have to agree with Jeronij, the interface is very professional! The little issues I've been finding are the whole purpose of testing. The software itself works great as well. I'm looking forward to version 0.5.

Another great set of tools you've added there! Another idea: I ran into serious trouble with accidently hitting some of those global effects tools. The danger is that some of them can impact the entire region without meaning to. In a region that is already developed, that can be disasterous. Solutions: Option 1: I would suggest making sure that that group of global tools is labled as such, and that none of them can be activated without a prompt window comming up, either to ask the elevation, or to warn about the impact. Option 2: They could be bundled up into a submenu of a single global effect button where they can't be clicked by accident. Option 3: This is a bit more complex, but what about the option to somehow lock "Finished" city tiles so they can't be modified futher by global or local terraforming tools. Anyhow, I'll keep up with the testing. Clicking and holding and dragging works beautifully. It's a real treat to be able to terraform on this scale.

Just to join the fray here, some low density, medium wealth suburbs from the City of Eastside in my city journal:

Well I certainly like what I see so far! That shot with the flowing water in the canyon with the seasonal trees is stunning! You've certainly put a lot of time into design of your cities! Can't wait to see more and larger scale pictures.

Very cool! Nice start and a good history. You're really starting from the smallest scale possible. I'm looking forward to watching this evolve as time goes on. Where did you get that classy looking mine site? Looks great!

This view does remind me a lot of Simcity 4 when it came out. I'm sure the lack of building variety will be fixed in time just like SC4. Does it support a region scale or is this the only city tile you get to play on? Looks cool!

Nice start! Your farmland looks great! I like how you've used large tree filled gaps between farms. It's a nice effect. I like how you've laid out your cities as well. Looks like you're having a bit of trouble with high wealth resident overpopulation. Keep up the great work!

Nice work! This really helps clarify some methods for encouraging transit use.

A copy and paste of either sort would work although I was originally thinking a straight copy. It would be handy for creating a series of highland areas without affecting the terrain in between. For example, creating terraces on either side of an existing river. Also, it would allow us to grab an elevation without destroying the surrounding terraforming in a finished area.

I did run into the very problem you are mentioning several times. I personally have never gotten a city past 100,000 people but I have some things I keep in mind when building a region which may help you out. These are just guidlines, not rules by any stretch of the imagination. 1. Know what kind of region you want to build: Do you want realism or massive cities? Do you want to build you city through natural evolution (gradually build to large cities, or do you want an instant metropolis (You could try the radical demand mods for that effect). 2. Terraforming is very important. A city build in terrain is always more interesting than one built on a flat empty map. Even a single river can give more character. Download, or build your own! 3. Playing on a regional scale never hurts and can be quite rewarding. In fact, the game is really designed to be played on a regional scale. Neighbouring cities can help growth immensely. 4. Don't be afraid to demolish and redevelop sections of you city if you don't like them. Real cities do this all the time, granted not on the scale we can get away with in game, but still, it's worth the trouble. 5. It's the small details that really make a city nice. Farms look much better with trees, country roads, ponds and drainage ditches even if they have no impact on the game. Downtown areas look much nicer with parks, and a wide variety of urban buildings. 6. Mass transit can help immensely. Particularly roadtop bus and subway station so you don't have to loose to much land (Try uroncha, they look very realistic and work on intersections). 7. If you're shooting for realism, build railways early on. The vast majority of cities have railways impacting them in some way, and they have a significant impact on how developement proceeds. For example, railways are bottlenecks that very few roads cross. They are industrial corridors. Often cities will evolve around a railway station. 8. Going along with the realism, try not to be trapped into a grid. It is true that square grids are the most efficient way to build in Simcity, but they are very difficult to make asethetically pleasing. Build diagonal roads (ands streets if you have the NAM), cul de sacs, winding highways and twisting roads. Fill in leftover gaps with greenspace! 9. Read city journals! They are full of good ideas, just don't let them intimidate you. Everyone here has gone through the same difficulties as you're having. Many of these people have been playing for months and months. 10. Mods make the game much nicer! Some of the new mods are truely amazing and make the game much nicer. The NAM, terrain mods, and Cycledogg tree mods come to mind first, but there are many to choose from (BSC, CSX, Pegasus, jeronij, NDEX and many others). Personally I'm playing my region with dozens of small cities which are slowly growing. Keeping the pace of growth under control allows me to grow aethetically pleasing cities by repeatedly demolishing and rebuilding sections of the city that I don't like while expanding through a fairly large region. Anyhow, I hope this helps, these are some of the things I keep in mind when I'm building my region. Above all things, remember to be patient, and keep trying. Don't be afraid to post your pictures in a city journal of your own, even if you're not entirely happy with it. The people in this community are very helpful and quite willing to provide constructive criticism and encouragement. For inspiration, I recommends looking at the following city journals (These people are artists): Anduin Valley Revisited - Great technical tutorials here Green Depra - Gradual evolution of larger cities Urland - Rural journal Digby - Doesn't update much but lots of good information on realistic farmland Astoria - More of a constructed style Simtropia - Beautiful detailed work here.

Hmmmm. I'll have to check that again. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention when I tried clicking and holding. I'll try that tonight and let you know. I'll also do some more testing on multiple city tile terraforming. I just had an idea for two modified leveling tools you could build later: 1. Instead of grabbing the elevation from the center of the tool, it could grab the elevation from an edge. This way we could extent an existing mountain range out from the edge of a terraformed area without damaging it. 2. A leveling tool that can grab an elevation from a location without applying it, and then place that same elevation at a completly different location. You could think of it like loading a paint brush and then putting the paint on a completly different piece of the map. Just a couple ideas. Fantastic work!

Nice start! Looks like a very pretty city you've got to start. Terraforming look great, as does you fledgeling city. A word of warning about farms, you might want to buffer them a bit away from you major routes. I made that mistake in my city journal and wound up with pretty severe dilapidation from the road pollution. Of couse if you're planning on re-development, that shouldn't be an issue. Keep up the great work!

Very nice! It is quite green. I like those beaches, they look very inviting. I'm looking forward to seeing more!

I've spent some time playing with the tool, and I'll certainly spend some more, but here are some observations and feedback about the software to date: First impressions: Amazing work in such a short period of time. Wounagaine you are truely a gifted programmer! Interface is good, I like the navigation methods. Good choice of tools to start, very basic but very effective. It works very nicely with existing regions, even when they have cities in them. (Tested on a copy of my CJ region). Some issues: I noticed these things while testing. You've probably seen them too, but it never hurt to mention them: 1. Each increment of a tool takes a single click of a mouse. To build a mountain takes a large number of clicks (Over 50 for the hill in the screenshot below). I tried the strength slider, it didn't seem to have enough magnitude. Idea: Clicking and holding a tool on a spot could repeatedly apply that tool over time. 2. I couldn't terraform a city that didn't exist as a save file of one sort of another already. A blank region wouldn't function in here. So at this time each city tile you want to terraform has to be loaded and saved before you can actually build it. 3. Aesthetically the shadows in the newest version are a bit too dark They make the terrain on one side of the mountains impossible to see. Those are the big things that come to mind. Some may be pure limitations of the game (such as 2) or a missing feature (such as 1). What I see so far I like. Very enjoyable program to work with. The pictures: This took about 50 clicks to build with the largest tool available. Given more time than I have this could be repeatedly refined quite nicely. All the terraforming. The stuff closest to the edge of the map is on a non-existant tile, and so it didn't get saved. A long scale view showing the new region in the foreground, and the existing region in the background. An in game view showing existing city tiles plus the new material from the SC4 Terraformer. All my existing cities work fine as well. An in game shot of the terraformed area. The Mountain in the lower left was built with more refinement, giving a much more rugged result. The tools available here are different from what we currently have in the game, but they aren't that hard to use, and in some ways they are easier to use since we can work from any angle we choose. I'm looking forward to the next iteration!

Nice! Those roadside fences and trees look fantastic! Reminds me of the area around my grandfathers former farm. The region looks very cool as well. Can't wait to see more.

Nice! The tech shots are one of the many reasons I keep following your city journal. Nice tricks for making good looking bridges. Can't wait to see more!

Looking good! I'll be sure to give the latest version a good round of testing once you release it.

Excellent! Just wanted to show a couple of the shots I took of my region using this program: As you can see there are some edge problems in my region, but those are entirely a result of reconciliation problems that I just can't face trying to fix. In the places where I don't have any of those problems, the resulting terrain looks fantastic! I'm looking forward to trying out the terraforming tools when you manage to get them working. Keep up the fantastic work!