angelo

My mindframe until now was to have something completely ready before I make a city journal topic showcasing it. But, being a perfectionist, I never was 100% happy and always postponed the journals, "Ah I'll post it when I make it a little bit better..." or "Ah I'll post it after I complete that little neighborhood over here" and "Ah I'll post it now... but wait, what if I make some changes here first...". So I rarely got around to actually posting any pics. So with my new city on the works, I decided to take a leap and start posting as soon as I layed the first street down. I hope it turns out to be interesting for both me and you. So here we go! Welcome to the newly founded Piesi City! The region I'm playing is Cape Newenham AK by flamesrock . I always have trouble as to how or where to begin building in an empty region... I don't like laying flat grids, they look so robotic and uninteresting. Lately I've been following a more naturalistic approach, by which I don't make my life easier by flattening the ground, but building around it instead. What I accomplish is that when viewed from the data views panel with all filters off, the terrain is as grainy and random as possible as it would be without a city on it. After some thought, I decided to start laying a street by the river line, as you can see. I hope that opens some doors for me as to how to proceed...

Update 4! Hello friends! This is an update to show the progress of Piesi City development! As you can see in this region photo, a big percentage of the land is now developed. Here is the transportation map: A more detailed road map is shown in these traffic congestion and volume data views. I'm working on adding details and stuff on certain areas to make them ready for showcasing. I only have one that I'm happy with, but more will follow! So stay tuned! Here's a small area I decided to use as a Industrial-Manufacturing center. It's a tick north west of the center of the map. Can you find where it is? ...oh and happy birthday to me

More of Arete! Here's the overhead of Arete City, a zone map and a shot with no filters on, to demonstrate the "naturality" of the terrain. You fancy?

How can I fix it?

Arete City Sneak Peak! As promised, here's a sneak peak of the neighbor city, Arete. It follows almost the same style. A regional view of Arete on the south west, and Piesi City on north east. A couple of noon shots of peaceful neighborhoods. A wider and nicer shot of the second pic after some coastal development. Arete's commercial center... a first of this CJ

jayo: Thanks Do you mean this? KingTitan: Well I see the mosaics normally, with one pic on top of the other... Am I missing something? Thanks by the way Update 3 I decided to do some beautification. The difference is mentionable. I filled the areas surrounded by buildings with grass and put some trees on it. The R$$ residents immediately started flocking in with their lovely european homes I'm not sure I'm gonna keep it that way though... it might change in the future. What do you think?

Thank you all! Time for update 2... Update 2 For this project I had to backup the city in the state shown in update 1.3, because the abuse it was about to suffer would be substantial... I started out by finding some "choke" points through which the highway would pass, so that it wouldn't have to slice open areas in two. Here's what I found and where I started: Immediately after building that I went on to decide how the highway that was already coming from Arete (the neighbor city, sneak peak coming soon!) would extend into this city. After many loads, here's what I decided to stick with: Now my job was to connect those two highway "nodes". After many hours and loads I finally managed to do it, and that's because I wanted to build a "ferry-height" bridge without having to mess up the terrain much. Finding the right bridge spot was the first hard thing... The next one was to actually connect the town to the highway. This came around to be much easier, although I had to rape the town . I had to make the connection with an avenue, and then I had to actually run the avenue through the town or else it wouldn't make any sense. Thankfully it worked out fast, and although it's a little snakey, I like it. I noticed that it looks silly to have an avenue without having any roads first, but I decided from the start that the only roads I'm gonna make will be by upgrading the streets that have the most traffic volume. And my population still isn't high enough to have an impact on the volume. Here's the end result! You will notice that some things have changed It still needs some touching up but I'll be posting mini-updates.

Update 1.3 Last update before update 2! This is the current shape of the town before I begin working on the next project, a highway connecting Piesi City with its neighbors. And to everyone who appreciate this town as a peaceful riverside town, who knows, maybe in some updates this location will be replaced by skyscrapers Who knows how it's gonna turn out...

Bus stops.

Thanks everybody Here's another mini-update. Update 1.2 Expanding the idea.

everybody: Thanks about the border effects, but it's not that I make them myself, I just chose them, they're paintshop pro presets cleaner475: I can't find low density R$ homes anywhere. Apparently everybody is interested in super huge villas and skyscrapers. Update 1.1 Following the same motif I came to this.

Update 1 I toyed with the streets a bit more. A mountain blocked my riverline street so I continued inland, following the edge of the mountain slope. What have we got here? A narrowness formed between the streets. That gave me my next step. I drew a street to connect the two narrow points, circling up an area for development. After a bit of residential zoning and some commercial and industry to get rid of the no-job zots, the end result is this. (spruced up with a lot of trees to cover up any imperfections and rough edges)

I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this, but since it's mostly addressed at the simtropolis community, I preferred it over the off-topic gaming forum. Have you heard of Introversion? It's the company behind Uplink, Darwinia, and Defcon. Their new title, Subversion, is in production for quite sometime now. The main aspect of the game as it seems, is city-building in a procedural way. I cannot possibly describe it here, but you can check out the details at their blog. There is ample information, pics, and a couple of videos in there. If you check it out, I think you'll agree that it's extremely interesting. The city layouts that can be created by the game's engine are truly interesting, and very realistic, at least from my point of view. As you can see though, the graphics are minimal, as they have been in all of Introversion's games. Now, I don't exactly follow their community and forums closely, but in several instances I have felt the company express their -not exactly desire- but curiosity on how would things evolve if they had an artist team. I'm probably the most inappropriate person to make this post cause of my minimal activity here on the Simtropolis forums (as you can see from my number of posts ) and also at Introversion's community. Despite my minimal forum activity however, I'm a very active sc4 player and I closely follow the modding scene. You could say I'm a lurker Anyway, I'm following the events succeeding the announcement of Simcity Societies, and I'm witnessing the disappointment of the fans. A disappointment to the point that a lot of modders/artists/modelers are seriously thinking of creating their own "opinion" of a simcity sequel. So, while snuffing around at Introversion's forums today, it kind of struck me... Subversion's lack of graphics, and Introversion's "desire" for an artist team on one hand, and on the other, Simcity's experienced modders and artists who desire to fill the empty space created by the failure of the hopes they had on sc5. You see where I'm getting at? I know something like that is a long shot... But it was eating me all day! The least I could do is make this post. I think that there's a serious chance that something very good might come from all this. If you find it interesting enough, and after discussion, we could make a post on their forums too. I don't know if I made the right decision by posting this first on our forums instead of theirs, but I felt more comfortable doing it here.

Check out my post https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=32&threadid=89637&enterthread=y . A lot of you might find it interesting

While seeing photos of mostly north European and American apartment/loft residential buildings, I felt something was strange. Lately, I realized that this feeling was caused by the lack of balconies in those buildings. Why the hell don't they have balconies? Is it because of the climate? At north Europe for example, is it too cold at any time of the year for someone to have a balcony to hang out at? Or do they have them at their back side? Balconies are common in Greece where I live. Of course, it gets quite hot in the summer so we have a reason to use them. But we also use them to dry out our clothes for example. I just got a couple of photos (from my balcony ). It's probably a stupid question... but I'll DIE if I don't know WHY THEY DON'T HAVE BALCONIES!

Psirri, Athens? I think I have sit on those steps of the left building's entrance

Sorry for the big picture. I replaced it with a non-topdown, 800x600 version.

edit: I replaced the pic with a smaller, non-topdown version. I want to start a cj about this city of mine, so I'd like to hear your opinion on the color setting I'm planning to use for my images. What do you think? Cjah: I was going to give you a 11/10 until I noticed that the railings of the stairs are actually taller than the cars So I'm only gonna give you a 10/10. Where did you get those stairs btw? (and those white fences) Deever: I'm giving you 8/10 for all except the last part of the mosaic. Those retaining walls and unnecessary filler lots just above the water are disastrous You just had to clutter up as much as you could there next to the shore, hadn't you?

I NEED the diagonal brown brick paths with the bushes and the lamps at the sides. AND 1) The fences along the sides of the avenue, and 2) those stairs with the railings. Thanks to anyone who can help

I'm not a big fan of grid systems, but your pics are very nice I like how you don't clutter up the houses. I think that some more trees between them would make it even better (more pleasing to the eye) The regional shot also looks magnificent!

This is driving me crazy. It was working fine till some days ago. Any lot i try to place next to a road, cannot be rotated so that it faces another direction instead of the road. I press pgup and pgdown like crazy, but the alignment arrow automatically resets to pointing the road. I can no longer place cool little paths and stuff next to roads the way I want. I have patched sc4 deluxe. Anyone has any idea?

Bah yeah, I made a typo, home and end is what I'm actually pressing. I'm loosing my credibility Anyway, it's not that nothing happens when I press home and end, I can actually see the building rotated for 0.0001 second, before snapping back pointing at the road (without me moving the mouse).

I've been playing sc4 for years, I know every hotkey and every little workaround like the palm of my hand I shouldn't have to do that (bulldozing the road) everytime I want to place something though. It's sad. Look, the point is that this only started happening some days ago. Before that, I could freely rotate ploppable buildings before I placed them near roads, like I always could. Could it be that some recent addon I installed, caused this weird behavior? Or perhaps I accidentally pressed a super secret hotkey combo that toggles "auto-snapping" of buildings? This problem is very annoying and It's ruining my playing mood