Hutts

In sim city, the only main traffic in the transportation system was to and from work. This is leaving out a majority of real traffic in a major city. Residential Commutes The job commute is a given but there are two others that should be considered. 1. Commerce - Everybody shops. Sims should also travel to commercial lots to do their shopping. 2. Recreational - Sims choose a recreation spot to relax whether it be a park, stadium, etc. Commercial Commutes Commercial lots should also have 2 additional types of commutes depending on the type of commercial business. Services/Retail 1. Customers - sims should travel to a store to do thier shopping 2. Freight - service and retail business should receive freight from industry to get their product to sell to customers Office 1. Customers & Sales - office's should accept and create 'commerce' commuters, people or other offices travel as customers. Industrial Commutes Industrial commutes should also have an incomming freight as well as outgoing. How it all comes together Residentail lots would have 3 commute types - Work, Commerce, Recreation. Commercial Servce lots would also - Work, Customers, Freight Commercial Office - Work, Customers, Commerce Industrial - Work, Incomming Freight, Outgoing freight. Residents will try to find the closest available job, but also the closest commerce that's not to "busy" (based on its customer capacity) as well as the closest recreation that's again not "busy" (based on its recreational capacity). Residential development would then be hindered if they would have to travel too far to shop or play. Factory A would receive materials from Mine B and then ship them to Shop C. Shop C also receives freight from Warehouse D because Factory A has less outgoing capacity than Shop C's incomming capacity. Shop C has 1000 daily customer capacity that travels from the local area. These methods could then provide more realistic city to city transport. You have more recreational capacity than residents your tourism would thrive from people traveling to your city to fill the demand. Commercial office has more salesmen than customers so they must travel to other cities, or vice versa, not enough customers, they must travel from other cities. Airports and other intercity transit would to recive and generate traffic. Tourists would generate recreational traffic to parks, etc. if they have open capacity. Or vise versa, if there were not enough recreation in your city your sims would travel to the airport and leave the city for recreation. Would work the same way for commercial office commuters as well.

What could be feasable is to organize all the lot files on disk as they would appear in the games menus much similar to the way the windows start menu works. If you had a folder say c:\program files\cities unlimited\content as your base folder and each individual ploppable building file would reside in subfolders that would create the menu. C:\program files\cities unlimited\content\Civic would create a Civic main menu option with \Civic\Schools, \Civic\Police, etc. would create the schools, police, etc. submenus with the actual building files being located in these folders on disk. The games GUI could represent this in a 'Start Menu' style interaction which would allow you to rename and create your own menus and move buildings into any folder (menu) you wish.

What wookieerebel said about bus routes would be a great addition too. In SC4, the busses can take any path they want to get to their destination, being able to define bus routes would be far more realistic. In SC4, how realistic is it when you have dozens of busses traveling down residential streets (i sure wouldn't want to live on one of them).

I'd love to see some sort of road building tool like KeanoManu mentioned above where you could select which type of median the road would have (none-residential, double yellow line, grass divided, concrete divided, concrete wall, or center turning lane), select the number of lanes in each direction, and which type of curb (dirt, grass, sidewalk, parking, etc). Highways could be built the same way selecting the type of median with rural and urban styles, any hov lanes, and the number of lanes in each direction.

Have an idea for an airport mod. Basically was looking at creating an ATC for the Modular Airport packs, that would function like an airport (seeing the modular airport is not actually an airport), the thing would be, however, to use lot tracking (like the BRT) of the airport gates, and assign a value to the type of gate for capacity, and then create a custom query that would calculate the airport 'capacity' (which would not be the real capacity of the airport per the game thinks, but a given value for the mayor). This way you could size your airport based on real data. Any thoughts? ADDED: In doing a little digging (never done any modding yet) here's what i got so far: to do this, creating a custom query you'd have to track each gates instance id (if that's the right term) #sc4game.automata.get_source_building_count(hex2dec("XXXXXXXX"))# where XXXXXXXX would be the value of the gate lot And in the query LTEXT entry for the 'capacity' would look something like #(sc4game.automata.get_source_bulding_count(hex2dec("XXXXXXXX)) * 5000) + (sc4game.automata.get_source_bulding_count(hex2dec("YYYYYYY)) * 10000)# Noticeing that like BSC and SimGoober have their own instance id's to track their lots, how would you add a properties to track gates by size like GateSM, GateMD, GateLG, to individual gate lots so your final LTEXT entry in the ATC custom query would end up something like this: #(sc4game.automata.get_source_bulding_count(hex2dec("GATESM")) * 5000) + (sc4game.automata.get_source_bulding_count(hex2dec("GATEMD)) * 10000) + (sc4game.automata.get_source_bulding_count(hex2dec("GATELG)) * 15000)# Going in the right direction here?

Originally posted by: Andreas Roth I must admit that the space-consuming RHW ramps are a bit too space-consuming for my taste, but that close-up of the ramp splitter is beyond cool. And now excuse me while I collect my socks at the other side of the room...quote> I'd have to agree. The MIS and the RHW are what i believe were the biggest things that sim city had left out. Can't count how many times i'd like to do what this will but were not able to. But like Andreas say about space-consuming it would be nice if it could be scaled down a bit. Especially when the RHW-8+ come out, it would be great to have more lanes and more capacity through heavily developed areas, but to make the parclos and trumpets,etc. that people are always asking for, it doesn't look like it will be very practical in heavily populated or traveled areas. By the looks of the parclo example by estimate it is 17x8 tiles (not counting 1 tile on either side of the rhw). That is a lot of real estate. Agian though, great work to the greatest addon yet to come to Sim City, can't wait to use it.

@ Tarkus: is it going to be possible to have a sunken RHW with MIS ramps that would extend 2 tiles to the side of the RHW and conform to the slope of the sunken highway wall, something similar to the ramps that the NAM has for sunken highways?

Are the wider RHW-6,8,etc. going to be able to transition into the wider TLAs and OWRs in the works?

One thing i would like to see (if possible) is to have individual gates with their own capacity based on the size of the plane (ie. bus. jet, regional, large jet). You could then query your gates to see their usage and be able to adjust your airport funding to increase, decrease capacity and add aditional gates to increase the airport usage capacity.