Moonraker0

So earlier we got to see how some new areas in the region's largest city are developing. This update will show some more construction and how some projects have progressed. If you're sick of development-oriented updates, this should be the last one for a while. Here is an office park and commercial are that are almost complete. As you can see, the section to the right of the highway has a lot of open landscaped and paved spaces, and some of the buildings are accessible from the back only because of the road overpass. A close-up shows the office park and a parking garage under construction. Here's a picture of the cluster of skyscrapers on the other side of the highway. Hope you enjoyed these scenes.

Thanks for the comments...I guess I could have thrown a daytime picture in there, but I wanted to show the night lights on the under-construction BATs.

Thanks

You probably observed some construction projects in the last entry. Now let's follow that up with some progress on those projects. Here is an old picture of a public housing estate under construction. Eventually, phase 1 of the project was completed. Now, phase 2 is being built. However, to complete the road that's being built, it will be necessary to destroy a tunnel and rebuild it in a different position. The detour has been set up: Eventually, the tunnel was modified. Here's a mosaic of another area that was shown in the last update.

So, I will start off by showing you the region's largest city, Attabar. It is a major metropolis and is rapidly expanding. A note about highway designations in the region: There are a few different codes for roads, highways, and expressways. IC stands for Inter-City, which is a limited-access freeway that connects different cities. IC highways have a two-digit numerical designation. ME stands for Municipal Expressway. This is a type of highway that goes through or around a specific city. The "expressway" designation in El Mundo Nuevo can refer to a large main arterial road with few stoplights, or it can be a grade-separated freeway. ME highways have a three-digit numerical designation. We'll be taking a charter bus sightseeing tour along the coastline on IC01, the regional freeway, and around the city's ring highway, which is named ME001. Good day, everyone! Welcome aboard. I hope you all enjoy the ride on our Mega Bus. As your tour guide, I'll be announcing important things we see on the way. Welcome to Attabar. Attabar is the largest city in El Mundo Nuevo. We'll be seeing a lot of skyscrapers and other things you'd expect to find in a big city such as this. Right now we're on the highway called IC01, which we'll first follow along the coastline. That means "Inter-City highway". We're now approaching an interchange with the city's other highway, ME001. That stands for Municipal Expressway 1. Attabar does not have many freeways. And yes, this is the city's rush hour traffic. You might have noticed that it isn't all that severe. Public transportation takes a large portion of the city's residents to their jobs, and the highways aren't very congested. In fact, most of the vehicles on the freeway up ahead will be city buses. Now we're passing a new development. We'll be seeing a few new development areas because the city is growing quickly. This will be a public housing estate. Now you can see we're getting into the city more...although you probably can't see most of the factories to our right because of the noise wall. Noise walls are something this city has a lot of along its highways. Also, only non-polluting factories such as computer hardware and pharmaceutical manufacturers are allowed within the city limits. Now we're passing through another interchange. You can see the city's water treatment plant on the right. Some of them have the high-mast lights like you can see on our left. Also on our left are a few sky-rise condominiums, which are going to be prevalent along this highway. It's a pretty popular area to live in. We're going to be following the coastline for a while. Now we can see factories and a great view of the bay to the right. On the right is a high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear power plant. It's actually a lot safer than a normal nuclear plant. Here we'll be interchanging with the city's ring road, ME001. You might have noticed there's even more industry, still on our right side. The urban planners of Attabar decided to keep all the industry in these areas, on the outer fringes of the city. Like I said earlier, the city is really growing. Here's a whole new commercial district being built. On the left are some important buildings. One of them, the first one, is called Metro City. It's a residential estate. The second one is the Prince's Building, which is a major shopping center. The bridges you see connect with another commercial area and the city's main railway terminal. There's some unoccupied land. It'll probably be developed if you come back next year. We're just about back where we started now. I hope you enjoyed the ride and seeing the city. There's a lot more to it than just what can be seen from the freeway, so I encourage you to take a more in-depth tour of the inner city. Thank you for riding Mega Bus and have a good day.

Looks good, especially how all the roofs are the same color despite them being Maxis houses (did you selectively block them or something?). I'd say that it would look a lot better with retaining walls, especially on some of the steeper one-tile slopes. There is also a set of walls available for multi-tile grades if you want them; I believe it's called Japanese Retaining Walls (or Slope Walls). Maybe you'd want to consider adding some walls. @Morlow: Looks nice; I always have the most trouble making the transition from suburbia to wilderness or farms at the outer edges.

Welcome to my first City Journal, La República del Mundo Nuevo. This is a region of several cities, ranging from small to large and inspired by different countries and cities, including the United States and Hong Kong, specifically. This will not be me showing only completed products; I will be showcasing a lot of growth in the cities, as they have a long way to go still. To start, here is a picture of part of the region. Note: As the region is not yet complete, only certain areas are shown. So, you can probably deduce a few characteristics about the region: Rail connecting the cities, only RHW used for the highways, and a tropical setting. Other details include that I will be using a lot of construction lots (my first time using them) and seawalls along the coastline in developed areas. I hope this ends up being as realistic as possible; I will make every effort to make it that way within my own style of building. I am also something of a transportation geek; transport in my cities is probably the most realistic thing about them. I'm hoping to eventually showcase a few transportation construction or improvement projects. Oh, and although the region has a Spanish name, I've only had two years of Spanish class in school and am not fluent in it, if you were going to comment on the CJ in Spanish.

Wow, everyone's posting such high-quality stuff in here lately. Good job, all. I made this mosaic of my newest downtown, which isn't finished. It's not a very good picture because of unfortunate dilapidation and abandonment, but I figure I made it so I might as well post it. I'll be working on the city more and hopefully cleaning everything up too, and then I'll post a better picture of it.

Right, that's what I meant...would make it easier to build the systems if they could be on any road.

Are the tramways limited to only dedicated right-of-way in avenues? I hope there will be an option to have tracks that share the right of way with other vehicles. It would be limiting to their usefulness to only be able to have tram tracks in the widest roads. If there aren't any shared-lane tramways, I hope that at least it will be possible for them to be modded in properly, instead of like in SC4 where the trams in such roads go through cars because modders didn't have a way to make them stop and slow down for other traffic.

A lone tram crossing the avenue late at night http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/560958683126828550/52BA678B1B4CE0257C931E51D302B211EBE019D4/ (I'm "not allowed to use [this] image extension on our community") Too bad there aren't any cars on the road because it's paused...

Thank you.

Here's a picture of a raised park near a highway interchange at night in my newest city. Here's one of some downtown skyscrapers and one developing building.

What happens nowadays in my game is it builds up a lot of commercial office demand, then builds office skyscrapers like it should, but then (apparently because of those skyscrapers) demand falls below zero and they become "abandoned due to low demand". Immediately after they are/it is abandoned, the game builds new skyscrapers, sometimes multiple duplicates of the one that just got abandoned, in nearby areas and almost never repopulates the wrongfully abandoned building. In fact, this is happening right now, when I had a nice-looking cluster of skyscrapers and made them all historical, and then one of them abandons and three more duplicates of it are immediately built. I am really tired of this; it's ruining every city I build. I recently installed the "Less abandonment" mod by Bones1 at the recommendation of Cogeo in another thread. That was in my plugins before I started this latest city, which is experiencing the issue. However, the abandonment issue preceded the installation of that mod. I don't use the CAM now. I have parks all over the place in this new city, way more and bigger ones than I've ever built before. Traffic and air pollution from traffic are both relatively tolerable. Water pollution is non-existent in the area. In other words, desirability is as high as possible. Why does this happen? A response would be appreciated. P.S.: I also have a certain high-wealth residential skyscraper that abandoned several game-decades ago and basically the same thing is happening with it. Edit: Now the office building I mentioned is repopulated at medium-wealth (when it should ideally be high-wealth). I noticed it has low customers and high pollution in the query...maybe that is actually the problem. I'll try to get more traffic near it by placing residential zones nearby. I never actually saw the demand graph show negative demand after they were built, but I assumed that is what happened if they were abandoned due to demand. :/

Alright, thanks for the replies, everyone. I was happy to see that the CO$$$ building that had abandoned and dilapidated had been restored, so the city looks nicer now. Hopefully building more slowly will prevent the problem from returning in the future.

Looks like my largest age group is 21-30, with 11-20 second and the rest of them after that progressively smaller. The data view is pretty much all green areas. I will try to control my zoning and not zone much at a time. I already kind of had that going in this city; I've been building street grid segments and leaving them unzoned for a while, and the zoned area is relatively compact. Maybe that's why the problem is less severe than in another earlier city where I had more zones. I removed the Less Abandonment mod at z's recommendation. I do have the NAM installed.

Yeah, R$ buildings in the game go up to high-rise tenements and such, although not as tall as the other wealth level buildings can be. I checked and found that I had way more R$ in my city than R$$, and just a relatively small fraction of R$$$. I would say the R$ is higher than 60%, but I have to check the exact numbers first.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I will have to look at how much of my city is high-wealth residential. However, I read in the other thread that one should make a significant number of R$ high-rises historical to keep that workforce present, which I have been doing, at least somewhat. Maybe I should make more R$ high-rises historical.

I don't really understand the whole "our simulator can't handle one-way roads" thing, to be honest. I mean, surely Maxis could figure it out if they tried.

Also what happens if something happens to the server that your city is on? Well, you get up, and go outside and relax and take a break from playing. Really don't think it will be all doom & gloom as all your posts make it out to be. You don't seem to understand how important people's cities are to them... Cities XL is worthless to me, as it won't even run on my PC at all, and the devs have announced that they won't fix the problem that affects me. I also like the way in which SimCity zones fill up the space along curved roads completely by changing their shape and size, as opposed to Cities XL's square ones that have gaps between and behind them a lot of the time (which need to be filled by park areas/trees). One thing I do like about Cities XL is the way in which bus routes are created by the player, while in SimCity they're auto-generated. The auto-generating always bothered me in SC4, since I was trying to visualize how the routes should be when I placed bus stops and wondering if they'd be set up like I wanted them to.

Nice coastline, santosh82. All the pics posted in this thread as of late are very good, I must say.

Hey Need4Camaro, I've been absent from BH for a while now. Sadly. I was just wondering how the project is coming along now that Microsoft wants to force users who update to Windows Essentials 2012 to replace Mesh with SkyDrive. I thought about it for a while once, and I couldn't think of any way in which Blue Hope could work using SkyDrive, since it's a different format for sharing files. I'm using SkyDrive now, and that's why I've stopped playing Blue Hope.

Awesome. I've never seen anything quite like it. I wish I had the dedication to work on a region that much.

Just had a suggestion about that interchange...it's great-looking overall, but on the lower left ramp, where it exits as two lanes and narrows to one just before the intersection, you could transition the RHW-4 to one-way road instead of MIS so that it would have a right and a left turn lane there. I also have one to show that I've been holding off on showing until the area is developed (or at least I think I have...can't exactly remember). Unfortunately, the development of residential suburbia has stagnated as of late, so there is just empty zoning on one side. Curved basketweave combined with 3/4 diamond interchange (added later): And a close-up:

Wow, dogma555, the stuff you've posted is pretty awesome. I made a YouTube video about my suburbs; I figure I'll post it here. It shows all my pre-planning in a city tile and how it all comes together.