whiteshark365

Here are a few pics of areas arround downtown. Downtown Expressway/ Crystal Junction Overpass. Lower platue apartment development along the Sandstorm Expressway.

Thursday, August 2, 3026 Crystal Chronicles 40

My commute time setup is rather simple. I used traffic cop to modify the pathfinding engine, to find the absolute shortest route, and increased the highway speed to about 175 for cars and busses. I used the datagen program to modify the max commute time to 400. Even with this, there isnt as much highway use as one migh expect, but I find that it is more the location of jobs that gets highway use then it is the speeds or commute settings. When you place jobs at random locations across the map, sims are most likely not going to need to use the highway to get to work, then if all jobs were in a centralized location.

Here are some pics of other small towns within the Crystal Junction region. Topaz Heights: Is a small town of about 1,800 located southeast of Crystal Junction at the intersection of Freeway 11 and Highway 17. Skarran Lake Skarran Lake is a very small community of about 550 located along route 2 about 1/2 a mile east of the intersection of route 2 and 212 at the end of the dried up Skarran Lakebed south of Crystal Junction. Tucson Tucson is a small desert town of about 1,200 located off of the Tucson Highway southwest of Crystal Junction. Tucson is a off map town as it's called, meaning it's location isnt near any freeway, highway, or state route.

City Update 16: Crystal Junction is currently in the beginning phase of a rapid expansion period. The economy of the town is resulting in tens of thousands of new jobs, and even more new residents. The new airport is sparking the majority of the growth now, as opposed to the Quartz mines which brought of a lot of the eariler growth this century. Below are the population and job statistics for the Crystal Junction Metro Area. Population Stats: Crystal Junction Population: 183,245 Commercial Jobs: 70,621 Industrial Jobs: 39,223 Metro Area (includes Crystal Junction) Population: 200,359 Commercial Jobs: 74,308 Industrial Jobs: 46,894 Total Jobs for Metro Area: 121,202 Growth is also starting to occur in surronding towns. The towns of Tucson and Skarran Lake have been established, and more info about surrounding towns will be posted in a later post. Crystal Junction Metro Area Photos.

Tuesday, January 10, 3024 Crystal Chronicles40

Right now downtown is pretty much in a boom stage, but the current downtown might be once again be reconstructed, but I don't know if it will be or not. I do know a lot of the current roads are probably going to be reconstructed with new transportation networks as the city grows to accomodate the increasing traffic, espeically downtown. As far as the people whom are concerned about when high density zoning will begin. I will say this, it might be closer then you expect. The city is growing very quickly right now, current pop is about 169,644 within Crystal Junction city limits, and the metro area is 184,340, so the quarter million mark is less then 66,000 away. i am going by metro area pop, not city limit pop with the higher density zoning.

Just wanted to let you all know, still working on the region. But with the city growing, the growth is about all thats going on for the time being, that makes the newspaper difficult to keep up with. But the city is reaching arround 165,000 right now, with the metro area arround 178,000. I am going to be focusing more on the growth of surrounding towns more then the city now, since I would like the region to develop evenly. Eventually these small towns will become part of the metro area, so far the entire region has like 193,000 in it so far. Arround 10% of my aimed population. New update will be coming soon.

Thanks for all the compliments guys. For those of you looking for the mall, do a search in the St exchange and search for malls. I downloaded most that were listed there. As for the desert terrian mod, for those of you wanting it, just give me your e-mail address and I will send it to you.

For the time being most of the expansion is going to be to the north and the east. The south and west will expand as well, but not as rapidly as the north. This will continue probably until the city nears the quarter million mark.

Thursday, October 2, 3018 Crystal Chronicles 40

No there aren't any high density zones of any time in the city, with the exception of industrial. There probably will not be any high density zoning until the city reaches about 250 or 300k population.

The beltway was a proposal by simmoon, he posted a pic eariler in this fourm. So far, I havnt decided on whether to implement it since Crystal Junction is too small of a city for there to be a need for one.

Tuesday, September 24, 3016 Crystal Chronicles35

A couple of the structures have jobs and a capacity. The control tower has a 1,000,000 capacity.

Thanks for all the comments guys. Answers to questions and proposals. Simmoon04: Your proposal would be an great way to provide a superior traffic system for Crystal Junction. It would reduce traffic considerably for commuters who live and work on the outer parts of the city and even in the inner parts. However, Crystal Junction only has about 120,000 within it's metro area, which by city and traffic standards is a very small population. It already has a extensive highway system, that is larger then most cities it's size. I use this comparison based off of looking over maps and population statistics for US cities across the country. Some cities as large as 350k have only one interstate, some over 100k in california for example have none. Beltways usually are built on citys in excess of 1 million or larger. Perhaps in the future of Crystal Junction when the population swells towards the seven digit mark I'll implement your proposal. I do want to let you know I appreciate the work you put into to it. Zeddic: The airport size is more based off of sim city standards then real life standards. A 2 mile long runway wouldnt even fit on the map for where the airport is located. And the short runways were the premade runways that were in the airport pack. idirk41i: I used a combination of airport packs, but primarily joergs was the one I used. Raziaar: I can give you a copy if I knew how to upload the region as a jepg, which i don't. If you know how to do this you can instruct me on how and I can give you a copy of the region. I do have a signifficant portion of the region developed, however I did make a backup of the region before I ever began any construction, just in case something happened to the city making it corrupt, or had some sort of unfixxable development problem. But if you want it I will try my best to provide you with a copy of the region, the config file, and the desert terrian mod.

Thursday, June 22, 3010 Crystal Chronicles 35

City Update 15: Well here it is the update I have kept promising, and unable to deliver until now. I havnt really done much at all in terms of developing the city in the past week, been busy with all the maps i've bene making of the city. Well basically I'll give you the growth since the last update. Crystal Junction is a thriving small cith with roughly 116,000 residents living within Crystal Junction, and 121,850 residents living within the Crystal Junction metro area, which only includes the towns of Madrid and Maplewood Village. Indusitrial and commercial growth is steady, Crystal Junction Interregional Airport has been completed as well as Freeway 511 leading to the airport, and the city is expected to continute to grow at a rate of nearly an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 a year. Crystal Junction Overview Map. Downtown Crystal Junction. Crystal Junction Interregional Airport. City Maps Crystal Junction Overview Map (Updated) Downtown Crystal Junction. (Note to monitors this pic is hosted off site) Crystal Junction Metro Area Map. Sandy Ridge Map. Quartz City Map. Topaz Heights Map. Granite City Map. Freeway 511 South Right Before Freeway 348 Exit. Freeway Sign. Feel free to provide any comments. I'll be posting the next edition of the Crystal Chronicles in a short while.

Questions Update: There is an error on the map with the freeways. Freeway 11 is what goes north and 48 goes west, I got the two numbers mixxed when I was rushing thru trying to get the map posted.

Airport pics will be posted in the next crystal chronicles post. Probably later on today after finishing the overview map.

Creating this map took a number of long tedious steps, and a couple of programs to complete. Here is how I made the map. First I created a blank white jpeg file about 1500x1500 pixels I then opened each and every city tile and took a screen shot of the traffic map view and then pasted them into the jepg, placing them pixel by pixel together. Medium and small cities i scaled the map by either 50 or 25% the origional size to get all of the map grids to be the same size. After I pasted each map in, I kept sim ciyt opened and manually taced over each highway, avenue, and major road. I then cropped the file so that onle the filled map for the region showed. Next I saved the file uncompressed, and imported it into an autocad file. Since I work as a computer aided drafter, I decided to use my skills at it to create this map. I manually digitized the map on top of the jepg file. I scaled the jepg file so that a large map was 4 x 4 miles in size. I would do kilometers, but miles seemed to be a more realistic size, based off of how many people live in each building. I created a master template of the file after tracing over everything, and then had to add freeway and highway names and so forth on the file. I then created 4 screen shots of the file, and pasted them into a new jepg file and matched each shot up. I then saved the file with as low compression as I could make it. Because I digitized on top of the map, if you were to compare it to the actual simcity files, every water edge, cliffside, and road would match up to that of the actual file. I will be refining the map some more as posting it exclusively on a web site. When I am complete with it I'll be posting the link in the next update. This way there won't be an extremely large file on this post, which will make reading future posts easier. The link will probably be posted sometime later on today, since the refining work is only going to be minor, but the final map will be uncompressed and uncropped. My goal here is to make the map look as if you were panning thru the city on a map program such as rand mcnalley, streets, or on yahoo.

Thanks for the compliments guys. I used the microsoft streets defintion for towns and there sizes.

Well I've been working the past two days on creating this map, and finally I have finished the overall map of Crystal Junction. Was going to post it with all the other updates I promised but figured I've give you guys something instead of letting you all wait. Note to Room monitors this image is hosted off-site thats why it is larger then your size restrictions. I tried to make it as small as possible, but wasnt able to get all the details I wanted to show. Overall Map of Crystal Junction Region. I know this is a large image guys. I will make sure that the other images are smaller, most likely fitting within the hosted images on st server restrictions.

Do a fourm search for the desieraiblity mod and you should find it. As far as the other one I'll be posting it as an attachment in the next update.

Following is a list of updates that I'll be posting soon. This is going to be a major update. Overall regional map of Crystal Junction - includes location of all rivers - includes location of craters - includes location of canyons and cliffsides - includes locations of mountians - includes locations of towns, cities, highways, freeways, state routes, and major roads - includes locations of airports Closeup Map of Downtown Crystal Junction - includes freeways, all roads - includes location of major buildings and transportion structures Overall Map of Sandy Ridge Overall Map of Quartz City Overall Map of Crystal Junction Metro Area Overall Map of Granite City Overall Map of Topaz Heights Crystal Chronicles Special Edition - covers city growth, surronding areas, the new airport, and freeway 511 Pics of Crystal Junction Metro Area including the airport. Freeway signs along freeways 348 and 511