Framling

I have returned to playing SC4K after quite some time off and I started toying with the old idea of mine of making largely pedestrianized cities with bus rapid transit serving as the major/only means for longer journeys. This was inspired by some exploration of how such systems work in some cities with intelligent urban planning that I've enjoyed during my recent travels (see, I even make my travel plans according to how can I develop my SimCities!) Using pedmalls, HOV lane markings and bus blocking tiles, I have reached really great results here, seems like the Maxis simulators really do reflect the reality quite well. People walk to wherever they can, take the buses etc. They even walk far longer than they should, but then given that pedmalls are the size of the house I guess they also bike around. I have two small issues tho, which are more visual in nature than anything else: Pedestrian crossings - unless I am mistaken, my pedestrians won't cross streets. They will go to a street through a pedmall. They will follow the street. But they won't cross the street perpendicularly to the traffic to continue on a pedmall on the other side of the street. More specifically, they also seem unable to cross a road tile with a road-top bus stop on tip. This makes me use the pedbridge tiles that come default in the pedmall tile menu, but those are, with all due respect, quite unsightly for the low-rise, low-density residential environments I am developing. If pathing works for those, I was wondering if there was a pedestrian crossing tile that works the same, but is essentially flat? Residential tiles requiring road access - to most of you this is "d'oh", but I have only now "discovered" that while for commercial tiles a pedmall in front of it is enough for it to be "connected", for a residential tile it isn't so, they do need at least a street adjoining from any direction. This does work well with rowhousing with parking in the rear, where the entrance faces the pedmall and the back with parking adjoins the street (even if the fences that pop out make little sense), but I could certainly up the density (and balance out the gigantic pedmall tiles) if I could get rid of the extra tile of network per residential tile. Any way around it? I guess I might not be the first person to raise those issues, so there either is a nice mod or set of plugins to alleviate those, or they were discovered to be impossible to overcome, but I am too daft to find any trace of those. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

All my pedmalls connect to roadtop bus stations at some point, most of them are running perpendicularly to a road on which the roadtop bus stops are placed. The PedMall tiles are ostensibly insufficiently "road" for the simulator, as when the residential tile is only connected to the network with pedmalls and no roads/streets, it gets a "no car" zot.

Fatherted, you're my hero! Please tell me you will make them work with Euro street skins and sandstone textures **** How about waiving the "street connection requirement" for houses tho, y'all?

Lieve Dames en Heen, It seems that I have so little time on my hands that trying to find some to bring you an elaborate, Photoshopped (GIMPed actually) posting would delay it further to infinity. As it remains a "technical" CJ, for me to gather some experience and your feedback and advice on, well, going Dutch , I'll keep it short and simple posting pics of the various parts of my all-new project. So, here we go with Het Middeneiland, or The Middle Isle, sourrounded by canals (some of which might have been the channel of a local river or stream). Here we have an imposing gothic cathedral, and, facing it, the much small historic town hall. The clou, however, is the attempt to create a pedestrian-only brownstone-paved square around both of the historic buildings. As residential buildings cannot be connected to the transit system by pedmalls (is it only me, or does the name sound a bit like a double-entendree?) only, the "inner ring" of buildings are commercial only, with the "outer ring" being residental. Here's where I faced an unexpected problem, as given the rich variety of lots provided by Haarlemmergold, there still were NOT ENOUGH of them. Go figure! Anyhow, I've reached out to another great Dutch Batter (anagram to which is Butch Dater, btw), Vanderaap, to broaden the selection... All in all, I am not sure if I succeeded, given that Vanderaap uses a rather oversized scale compared to regular "Maxis" and Haarlemmergold, and I gave up on fighting for variety at some point... You be the judge:

Wow, it's such a great public administration district. I am so envious that it isn't mine :( Reminds me a bit of Bundesstadt Bonn, I think it would also be quite reminiscent of Washington., but I've never been there so can't tell...

A new city, a new story.... Details will follow...

Ummm.... Is the asterisk referall at the bottom intended as irony? :D

Nice port! As concerns the flying cars, I guess I need to see the optometrist too. I thought you are using the obscure "jumping ramp" mod, or that it simply was a glitch in the game, while it indeed was a byproduct of the "transparent" UDI mode.... Should've known the car is green for a reason... Anyhoo, how do you take snapshots in UDI? My SC4K does not allow me to, do you simply use PrtSc?

You were friggin talking about a visit to optometrist while there was a car flying over the city and a host of others glued to vertical slabs of concrete! The passenger indeed has been treated with something strong...

I spy with my little eye a Vanderaap building in the midst of there!

This CJ is far too good for you not to offer many more updates. Just keep shooting whatever part of the city and posting it, this is so nice even random pics would brings us some much-needed delight!

EDIT: the pbvious stuff I forgot originally * SC4K Deluxe, the pack with Rush Hour built in, I presume with patch too (I think I looked into that when I installed for the first time and I figured out I have already been "patched" by EA) *Survey says: WinXP Professional 2002, Service Pack 2 Intel Core2 Duo P8400 @ 2.26 GHz 1,93 GB RAM for virtual memory, see below Hard Drive is 40GB C: + 120GB D: (physically one drive, wrongly configured by my IT guys) SimCity is on Drive D:, but savegames and such are obviously on C:, which is horribly crowded due to all preinstalled software sitting there in Program Files **** OK, so here's the deal: I have been building this lovely city which I really wanted to be my next CJ. I am using: * NAM * Most, if not all, of Haarlemergold's buildings * Some NDEX buildings and other BATs/lots, but I really don't think any is the culprit (some are diagonals) * Simgoober's canals (regular, narrow, bridges) * Mikeseith's essential Euro Car Replacement mod + some extra models (Volvos, Chrysler 300, Merc C-Klasse) * BSC Maxis Landmark MML Mod (only this MML installed) * Block All Maxis Buildings Mod (all files, everything Maxis blocked) * Palpatine's Money Park and Money Gnomes * RTMTV3, with only one model (all other DATs deleted) * No Palms Mod + SMP Sidewalk Replacement + ShadowAssassin's Porkissimo Street Flora Mod After yesterday's save, I opened the city in the morning and suddenly I started crashing on 27/28.10, a month after the start of the game. Subsequent experiments have shown that the speed at which game runs does not affect it, I still crash on that day. Building something affecting the development of the city will cause the crash to change timing, even as to crashing as soon as I emerge from pause. Going to another city before I go to the crashing city can extend the length of the non-crash period, but only by a few months. ALL IN ALL It seems some kind of "event" triggers the crash, most probably concerned with the development of the city (new buildings appearing) Some background: * I think all my growables have already grown at least once, so I don't think it was a hidden corrupted one, and I don't think those crash your game, but one never knows. As I am writing this, it occured to me the Haarlem Wilhelminastraat II 6x1 R$$$ version (neither the 6x3 version) might have not grown for me in this game, but I did have it grow in another city * I've played in windowed mode, went back to fullscreen mode (standard, just changed resolution to 1280 in Simcity's internal settings, leaving at 1024 caused the game to still be in windowed mode despite removing "-w" from path), no change * Moved virtual memory to a disk partition with much more free space than C and increased to 8192MB - no change, though the exception reports show "System memory: 1980 Megabytes total" (oh, with 944 MB free, I don't think that's bad) * Rendering changed from hardware to software - no change * I also have SimCity installed on a much older, dirtier (physically and software-wise - it probably has a ton of malware installed, and the disks are full to the brim with *****ty software, games, plugins etc.) -> it NEVER crashed; this laptop is all-new and it's the first time in years (or perhaps ever) I saw SC4K crash [it might be it never crashed for me before, because I don't remember seeing it crash before] DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT'S UP? I am exhausted. I am having a totally tiresome period in my life, can't sleep, woke up to continue this game that's been keeping me alive for the past few days. And it won't work. I know it's a complicated and capricious game, I know I might even not be able to recover this very city. Perhaps I might not even be able to recover the city. But I feel like I can't bear the thought... Please tell me there is a very very very easy solution, like clicking a hidden switch to "don't crash to desktop". I know it probably will end up with you being very helpful and politely pointing me to a myriad possible stuff I could try, boiling down to trying 179 combos of plugin folder contents, installing/deinstalling useful mods and apps and adding some 20 combos of system settings on top of that. And probably after using just 5% of the combos available, which is still an unbearably excruciating amount for a casual player who just wants to play the game, I will concede it's no use. But still, I need a reply. Only just not to feel that alone during this, suddenly, cold and cloudy Sunday summer morning. Which is why I posted. Thank you.

EDIT: First of all, obviously thanks for replying - and everybody else, for taking the time to read it. The day moves when I do some common "remedy" tricks, such as changing game res by modifying the command line etc. So it's not the 27th/28th date. Is your experience the same, or did you SC4K just CtD on a certain date regardless of what you did/played? I'll see if reinstall is the option if there's no other. BTW, is there any way for SC4K to KEEP ITS DIRTY HANDS OFF my MyDocuments folder? Due to an error on my IT guy's side, I have a very small Drive C: (yes I know, sounds embarassing in so many ways), and thus keep the SC4K on drive D: - I want it to write my Savegames, regions, MiniDumps (oh dirty humour) etc. THERE, not in MyDocuments. Any idea?