City Planner

What are those barriers on the side of sunken highways named? I'd like to put in a sunken highway and need to know what words to look up in the stex to find those barriers that are on the side of sunken highways, they're slanted and usually have either a walkway at the top or maybe a park, or a planter boxes or just plain. They're not the freeway walls that stand upright but rather they sort of conform to the landscape on the slope that is left when making a sunken highway. What are those termed in the stex so that I may search to try to find some of them? Thanks,

Hi, Could somebody tell me if there is a way to get rid of the strange colored areas that are on the side of this road (see attachment) that appear on some of my diagonal roads? Thanks,

-=|Northwest Addison|=- Northwest Addison started out life as a simple stopover, it's one of those places that you find along some highway road that stretches through the mountains for what seems like eternity, and then out of nowhere a small hamlet or town pops up insight. It usually consists of nothing more than maybe a gas station and a motel. Kind of scary at times to be sure. N.W. Addison was little different, it consisted of a Shell fueling station and a holiday inn express motel. But with the motel came it's bed turners, it's chefs, and all the other staff that one associates with a hotel / motel. Soon enough some of them grew tired of the long commute through the mountains from West Addison so they left the city behind them and built small cottages, moved their trailer homes and shacks into the area. The road gets a lot of use as it connects West Addison (see earlier CJ entry) a now bustling town with it's own casino to SimNation by way of N.W. Addison. Unfortunately, N.W. Addison couldn't stay a secret for very long, and soon enough the rich and affluent moved started to buy up parcels of land, and the workers in town had to move back to W. Addison and go back to making that long commute. Lord help them if they run out of gas as the only gas station between W. Addison and N.W. Addison is in N.W. Addison at the local Shell station. Soon enough, the area around the hotel and gas station was all taken up, and the national forestry service refused to open up anymore lands in that immediate area for the people to buy, so anybody that wanted to live in the mountains of N.W. Addison had to lease land from the forestry service to build their homes. Well, let me tell you, leasing land from the forestry service isn't a great thing to do as they can up and tell you once your lease is coming due again that they don't want to lease the land to you anymore and you're left figuring out how you are going to move your home to someplace else or you have to just leave it behind. Fortunately for now, the forestry service is not pulling any leases. And so now you know where we stand with N.W. Addison. It is a rural area at the moment with pockets of communities spread out along it's mountains. 01 And so you can see the first Shell station and the Holiday inn express that was originally the only buildings in town, but as with most stop over places soon enough the rest of the town built up around them. 02 Another one of the small bedroom communities that is further down the valley of Route 2 that runs through W. Addison, to N.W. Addison and finally on to Sim Nation. 03 One of the most recent villages that was built. The residents of N.W.A found this beautiful plauteau and thought it would be a fantastic place to live, so once the city managed to get the power poles up to the area to deliver power, the residents started to build their homes. At the moment they are suffering the urge to really expand but again the forestry service says no. 04 As you might imagine, in communities such as these there are a lot of tree huggers, they hike up the mountain canyon to the area where the shell station is every morning and hike back down every evening instead of driving their vehicles. They live in picture 02 and hike up to picture 01 above. It seems that as the mountainous roads continue to be built through N.W. Addison's mountains more and more of these bedroom communities are cropping up. 05 Another bedroom community that has grown up out of nowhere, just because the mountain road continues so do the desire to live here. When the Jones's who primarily live in W. Addison one of the most affluent cities in the region have to have a vacation home, so do the Johnsons, and so N.W. Addison continues to grow, community by community, this particular one is still without civic services and their commercial services are marginal at best, but they do have the only Doctors office in the area so people from all the other communities in the area flock here with their chickens and apple pies (as payment) to the doctor. We haven't figured out why he takes that for payment, nor why the people pay him like that since they are almost all rolling in the simoleans. 06 It wasn't long before a very wealthy hotel owner decided that this community would be the premier place for his newest and greatest hotel, and soon enough (see slide 5 above) this community grew, out with the old commercial business's and in with the new. They are now demanding that they get a school, police and fire protection. The Mayor is at his wits ends with all of their demands but I have a feeling he's going to cave in and provide them services as the taxes from this hotel should cove them all and then some. We'll have to see when the forestry service denies anymore leases on land. But at the moment the forestry service is rolling in the money while the city is struggling since it must provide service to these tiny communities which is quite expensive providing fire, sherrifs and medical services. We'll see where this goes in the future. Edit: To give you a better idea of these pocket communities, here is an overview of the three or is it four bedroom pocket communities: The budget is so bad in N.W. Addison that they will be dismantling the huge steel powerlines and selling off the steel for scrap, in place they are going to run the power lines on the more traditional wooden telephone poles that one sees everywhere as they've found they can sell off the steel and put up the wooden poles and still have a surplus in funds of close to $55,000.00 to add to their treasury which they sorely need right now.

-=|A D D I S O N H A R B O R|=- Life in Addison Harbor has been progressing nicely. What was planned to be purely a industrial town changed and people decided that the plains area of Addison Harbor (AH) would be a lovely place to live and petitioned the city council to open up some land so that they could buy it and develop it for residential purposes. While at the moment that seems like a good idea, what the people don't realize is that there are already plans on the drawing board that have been approved that would bring the industrial sector right up to the front steps of the new residential homes. 01 Due to the mass amount of Harbor shipping traffic, the state level Government asked (actually asked would have been nice, more like told) the city of Addison Harbor that they must have a coast guard outlet in the city. The blueprints were sent to Mayor Silvermans office for his final stamp of approval and as you can see, that is exactly what he did. The area of land has been requisitioned by the city, buildings are scheduled for demo, and the new coast guard building and piers will be built shortly. 02 Even though Addison Harbor started out predominantly as an industrial harbor town, you could walk along the harbor at night without escort and not worry about getting mugged. But something changed one day and nobody was able to pin point what it was, but it was the same time that the bikers came to town so most people assume they have something to do with it. The mayor and City Planner really aren't convinced that the bikers have anything to do with it, but rather blame it on the weakening Addison Harbor economy. The traffic has been getting worse and worse with the increasing harbor industrial complexes going up what seems almost daily, and the City Planner has been given the task to improve traffic in Addison Harbor. I don't suspect it will be that difficult if I can get the train station board of directors to approve our plans to expand their network. Note: This is the first time that I've ever seen a motorcycle riding around in the game. 03 The Evergreen corporation has it's own shipping yard in Addison Harbor. It is the primary source of transporting goods in and out of the harbor. It's CEO (James Evergreen) was really displeased however when the city council approved the building plans for another large shipping and transport company (VLS) in the vacant lot right next to them. Evergreen has threatened to just shut down operations in Addison Harbor, but Mayor Oren Silverman shows no signs of concern as he knows that a new shipping and transport company will gladly take their place and or he can make more room for more industrial and have the new shipping company that is currently building their yard will take up the slack and put on more ships if need to be take up the extra shipping business. 04 And, although train transportation is on the decline, Mayor Silverman is more than confident that the old train station can handle any shipping needs should Evergreen actually leave the city. Mayor Silverman has been pestering the train station to expand it's operations into the proposed residential areas so that new traffic can be held to a minimum as the city streets are already backed up with traffic of all the people commuting into Addison Harbor from nearby areas and would like to keep the traffic impact to a minimum. The train stations board of directors are still working out the logistics of a plan to do so, but are concerned about the costs of building a new passenger terminal in the harbor area. We'll have to see where this leads to. Next Update: N.W. Addison: The mountain town(s)

 I really just love these oceans.  Could you tell me what plugin you are using for your water And for the reefs that you place?  Can hardly wait to see more.

Yeah I do have a terrain plugin and I guess it must be those electricity poles that I put up to run along the streets like I see up in the mountains around me running on the side of the road that must cause this. I guess it's live with that and have the "semi realism" of the poles running along the side of the roads or get rid of the power poles and just add another power station at each little pocket community in my moutains of this one city tile. Bummer, I really like the little power poles running along the streets but hate the odd coloring that pops in from them I guess, plus would miss the added benefit of the street lights that follow the road up the mountain which looks nice in night time screenshots. Always one or the other, one or the other.

I've got this issue in my mountain areas when roads and other things that I add are hidden by trees and the only way that I've been able to do it is to simply turn the screen in another direction until the thing I want is able to be targeted by the bulldozer tool. In some cities where I can't get to the item by rotating the screen I have to demolish the building that is blocking the demolish tool to get to the item or just leave it alone if a particularly nice building is in my way.

Hello, Does anybody have advise, tutorial or information on how to create good looking switch backs that go up a mountain side? I've created a map that has two tier layers that I would like to get a road that goes from the bottom layer up to the mid layer on the side of the mountain where there is a plateau, however the rock face that the road will need to go up is quite steep so just running a road or street straight up the mountain to the second layer will not work and I imagine that I need to create a switch back of roads or streets to get up there. But all that I've tried so far is either a mess and looks absolutely horrid, or I get stuck about 1/4 to 1/2 the way up the side of the mountain and then the roads and or streets won't go any further. So any advise, plugins necessary, or tutorials etc that would help me to create good looking switch backs sure would be appreciated.

Is the country club (golf course) supposed to be a crime infested location? Or maybe I have installed some plugin or mod at some point in time that has caused it to be one of the worst places in my city with regards to crime. It's very strange to me that I go near to the country club and hear gunshots every 30sec or so when usually country clubs are where the rich and influential dwell and where one would not expect to find a lot of crime, at least at the country clubs that my parents belong to there is no crime to speak of.

This is starting to become really annoying to me. There are times that my cities (even the medium sized ones) save in less than 30 seconds or so, and more and more however, there are cities that may not even have any buildings on them, just the landscape that are hanging when trying to save. I'm just wondering how long I should actually wait before giving up and killing the process in task manager and lose any work that I've done since the last save, which may actually be a while since I don't remember often to save every 10 to 30 minutes. What is the longest you've waited while the game is supposedly saving, and actually had the game save and come up with the save confirmation? 10 minutes, 20 minutes? Updated with the following: Just so that people understand, here are my computer specs so that they can tell me that my computer is too slow if they like... AMD Quadcore 2.2GHz 8GB System RAM Windows 7 64BIT Profesional Nvidia 275 GTX video card (with something like 800MB of video RAM)

 The rocks along the shoreline and the reefs in the crystal clear water add a lot to your pictures.  Keep em' coming.  Thanks for sharing.

Thanks but the other way of doing it... And it's not as big of a pain as it might sound, but correct me if I think i'm doing it but not really doing it... I created zip files of all my individual folders in my plugins and marked them all as installed with DIC. Now when I add new files, I choose either the lot file or the model and do a search on it. If the search shows a result then I know that file has already been installed and I take proper actions, if it doesn't show a search result in DIC then I go ahead and install it. Sounds like a bother to do, but since I've already got close to 4GB of plugins, and new additions to the STEX are slow coming, it means I don't install all that much new stuff anymore but it seems handy to me to do it this way so that I know if I've already installed it by doing the search, and have all the files in the DIC now so that I can do a search when I'm trying to find a particular file. So, I think it seems to work this way, but if I'm only imagining it is (and I could be) then please correct me. Thanks, P.S. My DVD is full of raw plugins (just like they are in my plugins folder, so theres no zip files to use as I didn't save them, I simply made a dvd from my plugins folder when I realized I was getting a new computer and didn't want to have to redownload them all over again, so it seems it's either do it this way that I described or start over, or only use it for new installs which would be useless after having 4GB of plugins already installed since I don't like using default folder installations, but rather choose my own folders in the plugins like Restaurants, Trains and Railroads, Retail Shops etc, which makes more sence to me than having things listed in folders by somebodys name that I don't know, or some other obscure folder listing..

Okay I think I understand you, and if so, then the DIC would rely on my still having the files in their original zip files which I don't for the most part. In general I've downloaded them and at some point in time just burned the raw plugins to my DVD disk and stored them that way. Before I take the time to try this, maybe you can tell me if it would work. What if I zipped up my entire plugins folder to one zip file and then browsed to that zip file as if it were a regular manual install zip file? Would I then be able to import all the files that are in that zip file? I'm guessing yes, but don't want to kill a couple hours trying to zip up the entire plugins folder if that is not going to work. Never mind, it's not going to take as long to zip up my plugins as I thought, so I'll just try it myself and see if it can work this way. Thanks for the help.

Ok, so I've got some of the organizers functions to work and it seems other than a few things the DIC seems to work for installing plugins etc. I do have a question however... 1. I installed DIC after I've already got a substantial plugin folder, my plugins is about 3.8GB (unpacked) and I'm wondering if there is a way to import all those plugins into the DIC so that it knows what I've got installed in my plugins folder? As I'd rather not reinstall everything all over again to get them into the dic listing of my plugins. Is this possible somehow? Thanks,

 Wow, look at all those people walking on the streets.  The only thing that would make an island resort better is to have golf carts instead of cars but as of yet I've not heard of anybody putting out a golf cart plugin to do so.  Thanks for sharing, such nice photos.

 The water look so crystal clear, it's inviting me to try to drink it. LOL.  Great photos of a great layout.  Thanks for sharing.

Hi Dave, Yes I've tried them multiple times, with this morning being the latest attempt in hopes that maybe they'd work better on my new(er) computer, however the while the catalogue works just fine, the organizer has issues when I attempt to enter the configuration of it to feed it all the paths of where the program is, and plugin director etc. When I click on the browse button so that I can choose where the Simcity 4 application is I always get an error that says: "Unhandled exception has occured in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately. Conversion from string "C:\Users\CB\Desktop" to type "integer" is not valid" Edit Oh, and it's not limited to just this particular browse for folders button, it's scattered throughout the Organizers different functions that this "type" of error will popup and cause the organizer not to function the way that it was designed, like trying to analyze my plugins after pressing the start button will also produce a similar error. Then gives these details See the end of this message for details on invoking just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box. ************** Exception Text ************** System.InvalidCastException: Conversion from string "C:\Users\CB\Desktop" to type 'Integer' is not valid. ---> System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format. at Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.Conversions.ParseDouble(String Value, NumberFormatInfo NumberFormat) at Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.Conversions.ToInteger(String Value) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.Conversions.ToInteger(String Value) at DEPSeek.frmSetup.defButt02_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mevent) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam) ************** Loaded Assemblies ************** mscorlib Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.50727/mscorlib.dll ---------------------------------------- DEPSeek Assembly Version: 2.0.2.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.2.0 CodeBase: file:///C:/Program%20Files%20(x86)/SIMCITY%204%20TOOLS/SC4%20ORGANIZER/DEPSeek.exe ---------------------------------------- Microsoft.VisualBasic Assembly Version: 8.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 8.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/Microsoft.VisualBasic/8.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll ---------------------------------------- System Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Windows.Forms Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Windows.Forms/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Windows.Forms.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Drawing Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Drawing/2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Drawing.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Runtime.Remoting Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Runtime.Remoting/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Runtime.Remoting.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Configuration Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Configuration/2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Configuration.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Xml Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900) CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Xml/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Xml.dll ---------------------------------------- dao Assembly Version: 10.0.4504.0 Win32 Version: 10.0.4504 CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC/dao/10.0.4504.0__31bf3856ad364e35/dao.dll ---------------------------------------- ************** JIT Debugging ************** To enable just-in-time (JIT) debugging, the .config file for this application or computer (machine.config) must have the jitDebugging value set in the system.windows.forms section. The application must also be compiled with debugging enabled. For example: When JIT debugging is enabled, any unhandled exception will be sent to the JIT debugger registered on the computer rather than be handled by this dialog box.

F A R M I N G D I S T R I C T 2D Thus far, Addison Mountains has 2 farming districts This is Farming District 2D, As you might have noticed when the Mayor approved this district he told his City Planner (me) to be as efficient as possible with the zones that we are allowing for farms and don't go squandering any land for flora or fauna. I took the Mayors words to heart and placed the farms as close to each other as possible. However, there was an outcry for more farming districts in our region and so the Mayor alloted Farming District (FD) 3A and in that FD, the people of Addison Mountains spoke up and said that they wanted a more natural aproach to leaving the landscape in it's more natural state while still filling up the FD with farms, so we switched plans there and here and started to plant more trees in any place that we could that had not yet been built on and resolved that we would from now forth, leave space between farms and not cut down, or if the area was barren, would plant trees between the farms to produce fresh oxygen for the inhabitants of our region. F A R M I N G D I S T R I C T 3A And so in FD 3A you can see that we've been planting a lot of trees where there was nothing, or leaving the trees that were there between the farms. I'm sure you've all heard of the bridge to nowhere right? Well this bridge actually goes somewhere. If it hadn't been for the city council dolling out millions and millions of dollars to have this bridge built, the farm transports would have had to take suburban streets all the way around the region to get to the harbor to ship out their produce. That was extremely inefficient and since the Mayor had already crumbled to the people and lost some efficiency in the planning of the Farming Districts, he kept pushing until he got close to 83% of the funding for this bridge paid for by the National governement. This meant that Addison Mountains only had to come up with a measly 3,000,000 itself towards building the bridge and the rest was paid for by the National Governement. After the bridge was completed the transportation of produce from 3A to the Harbor cut nearly 3 days off the trip for the truck drivers, and thus it boosted the Mayors ratings by at least 20%, not to mention, good old City Planner here got a raise and was able to move into one of the new skyrise condominiums in West Addison. Teaser of what's to come: East Addison gets a new casino, and the Rupert Cerdock Hotel moves into the resort areas high above the city of East Addison. The costs to build the road up the mountain in switchback style cost tens of millions of simoleans however the Casino and Hotel had struck a deal with East Addison to pay for the road with extra taxes. Mr Cerdock himself moved into one of the Hotels pentouse suites and can often be seen driving around town in his plush motorcar. I think, yes, yes, you can see him here in this photo driving around the resort area. You can usually spot Mr Cerdock by the big flashy zot that he flys on the roof of his car to let everybody know that he's coming. West Addison was so jealous when the deal was struck as they were looking to make the same deal themselves however their tax rate offered to Mr Cerdock and the Casion board couldn't match that of East Addison. However, East Addison did accept the plan from W. Addison to extend a road from W. Addison over the mountain ranges to hook up with the casino, hotel and the new ski resort that is in the building stages right now. We'll also have an introduction into Addison Harbor soon. See ya next time, City Planner

Lot Description: The Colossus Addon Mod (CAM) extends the number of growth stages for growable (RCI) lots to 15 for residential and commercial, to 10 for industrial and to 7 for agricultural lots. This download contains an installer for Windows. You can find the CAM files on the LEX on sc4devotion, just use the power search and choose the CAM Main file category to find the installer for windows and mac.

Are there any plans to update the catalogue and Organizer to work properly under Windows 7 64 bit?

Hi, It seems I'm loaded with passenger rail stations but when it comes to freight rail stations I've only got the Maxis original game freight station so I'm looking for some really nice "city" (not rural) freight stations to add to my cities. I've searched the stex and found plenty of rural stations but not finding any really nice (smaller, like 2x2 or 3x5) freight stations. Could anybody recommend some freight stations that they are using in their own cities that look like they belong in a typical medium sized city please? Thanks Edit Also, if anybody knows of a "build your own" freight rail station for a city that would be great. to know where to download it from. What I mean by build your own, is like the airports where we can add the indiividual lots to the overall freight station so that multiple lots put together makes the whole station yard would be great if there is such a plugin(s).

Originally posted by: Nuclear550 I don't think it has to do with how fast your comp is. It is possible , since i am assuming that your plugins is un-organized, that your sim city is having a hard time saving it on to the hardrive because some mods weren't compatible and it takes a while for it to figure it out. quote> This would make sense if it did this every time, since the plugins organization wouldn't change between the times that I play with SC4. But since it doesn't happen everytime I would have to assume that SC4 is otherwise choking on something, but I'm pretty sure it's not my plugins since it doesn't do it every time like one would assume it would do if it were something like the plugins that we use. But I'm really not sure what you mean by un-organized plugins, if you mean that maybe I've got plugins that are not compatible with other plugins, then I'd have to say not in my plugins. Unless of course I've downloaded plugins where the author has not stated that his plugins are incompatible with somebody elses, otherwise the only ones that I know of that are incompatible to use two or more versions are terrain, water and rock plugins which I've only got one of each. The only time that I've noticed that SC4 takes longer to load is the first time that I run SC4 after repacking my plugins with datpacker. After that initial first time, it usually loads in less than 1 minute or 2 minutes. Update: Oh and I can now tell when the city is not going to save... You see when I click the save button, normally the mouse cursor turns into the hourglass cursor. When the city is going to go into one of it's long binges and not actually save, the mouse cursor simply stays as the pointer cursor. I just noticed that this happens every single time, so I guess I need not wait for 10 or 20 minutes to see if it's going to come out of it and actually save my city.