RedImperator

I'm genuinely surprised even R$ sims will move in next to a garbage dump.

Originally posted by: mayor_brando Originally posted by: RedImperator Third, you seem to know how to take pictures without leaving the "..." menu showing (Ctrl-Alt-S on PC), but you still have part of the menu bar showing.quote> Hmmm... isn't it Ctrl-Shift-S to take screenies? In my experience, Ctrl-Alt-S saves the game, or at least that's how it is on my PC. Regardless, those tips are still good, and if you do all of the things mentioned in the above post, you should be able to take some pretty decent pictures.quote> Yes, you're right. I have no idea why I wrote Ctrl-Alt-S. I edited my earlier post for accuracy.

Okay, a few tips here for better pictures: First and foremost, get rid of the brown boxes, either by bulldozing the lots or locating the missing dependancies you need. It's just impossible to take a good looking shot of any city with brown boxes in it. Second, get rid of the U-Drive-It icons by clicking the "My Sims" button, then the UDI button, and then the Icons toggle at the bottom of the UDI menu. Third, you seem to know how to take pictures without leaving the "..." menu showing (Ctrl-Shift-S on PC), but you still have part of the menu bar showing. The tiny square with the "_" in it is the minimize button; click that, and your screen will be free of menus entirely. Fourth, get rid of the pause box, either with photo-manipulation tools (the GIMP is free and works on Mac, PC, or Linux), or the Yellow Pause Thingy Remover (https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=18680) by TheQuiltedLlama.

Originally posted by: bigthing Thanks for the answers everyone!!! Do you think it was modded to work like that or did it just work??quote> I discovered it by accident. When I started working on my current region, I was still breaking GLR out of roads and avenues to cross city borders as draggable GLR. That looks ugly and stupid, so I decided to only have one or two "real" GLR connections and then a bunch of eye candy where I plopped non-functional GLR-in-x all the way to the city line. To my delight, the GLR trams started using the connection. I'm not sure exactly what's happening here or if the NAM team intended it, mostly because I don't understand how puzzle pieces or neighbor connections work. I suspect it was deliberate because it works with GLR-in-avenue and GLR-in-road both, and those were developed separately. On the other hand, I don't remember seeing anything about it in the NAM documentation (though I confess I didn't read it super-thoroughly).

The only potential problem is if you have a lot of industry developed already, you could end up overshooting your demand and get some industrial abandonment. But it sounds like your problem is unemployment, and to me, commercial and industrial vacancy is a much better problem to have than unemployment.

Near as I can tell, the Phillies just picked up a Cy Young winner for a bucket of balls and a bag of magic beans.

Well, if chris can repost, then so can I: Central Arcadia, the main city in my region, Rose Valley County. Judging by the lack of traffic in the streets, it looks to be after midnight.

vershner: That's probably my favorite image on this page. Looks like winter somewhere in the North Pacific. Hawkeye9: Convincing 'burbs you have there. I like how you've selected houses which are alike enough to appear as though they were all built by the same developer, while at the same time avodiding looking like someone just ran the plans for one house through the photocopier. buildsolid: I don't know if that....erm, what is that? All of Frank Gheary's buildings look like the aftermath of a fire in a sheet metal warehouse to me. Anyway, whatever it is, I don't think it really works as well as it could in the middle of a featureless open lawn. Stomtroopa: Too much blur. JayStimson: There doesn't appear to be any subject in your photo. There's nothing really wrong with the scene, but there's no place the eye naturally falls. If you have Photoshop or the GIMP, perhaps add some motion blur to the trains? Amryai200: I like what you're trying to do, but I don't really know if it works. Besides the gas station, you have cars in driveways and a paved road with a double yellow line. If you hadn't told us it was supposed to be pre-automobile, I would have just taken it for a small rural town. A decent one, but definitely 20th century. Anyway, here's mine:

Heh. Sadistic AND clever.

I'd like to see a city simulator that generates buildings procedurally, which would put an end, once and for all, to the endless building repetition we've had in Sim City since the beginning. Combine that with something like the Spore creature creator (the one thing that game got right), to allow anyone to edit any building without needing to know how to model in 3d. In my fantasy-land, you could actually pick and chose allowable styles or building types for different parts of the city, (say, by clicking-and-dragging around an area, so you could, for example, select a 10 block neighborhood and set it to rowhomes, no more than three stories, Queen Anne style). That's probably asking for quite a bit more than programmers today can deliver, however. And yeah, then add the standard SC5 wishlist--rail viaducts and GLR supported natively, free camera, optional grid only, park zones, a return to airport and seaport zones, mixed-use zoning, a bleeping undo button, four calling birds, three french hens, two turtledoves, and if it could actually run on Mac without crashing, that would be super too.

Looking at the history of PC gaming, I'm not confident we'll see SimCiy 5 anywhere in the near future, if ever. SC4 was a disappointment for EA at the same time the Sims 2 was raking in the money. I'm not sure of the sales totals yet, but I imagine Spore was a letdown as well while Sims 3 is going like gangbusters. And the less said about SCS, the better. The lesson a lot of people are going to take from that is that large-scale simulations that don't have "Tycoon" in the title are a niche genre that don't warrant the investment of resources a new Sim City would require. My guess is, if there's ever going to be another Sim City that actually sticks to the core city-building mechanic, it's some time off in the future and will be marketed as a "reboot" of the franchise (that is, no "5" in the title), and there will be at least one drastic departure in gameplay which will undoubtedly upset some portion of the hardcore fanbase.

Originally posted by: bigthing Is it possible to connect 2 cities with GLR in avenue/road? If so how?? I ask because they arnt draggable so...?quote> Indeed it is. Note the arrow going out of town. What you do is drag a regular avenue to the edge of the map to make an avenue neighbor connection. Then, select the tram-in-avenue piece you want and plop it directly on top of the connecting piece. Then do the same in the neighboring city and you have a streetcar connection between two cities. This works for tram-in-road and viaduct rail, as well (I assume it works for tram-on-road, but I haven't tested it, and it won't work for tram-in-street because you can't make a neighbor connection with streets).

I don't have a good image of my overall downtown, so I decided on a close-up of City Hall Park, at the intersection of Broadway and Federal Avenue, the very center of the largest city in my region, Arcadia. I fiddled with the curves tool in Photoshop until I got the light I wanted, distorted the perspective, and then flipped it all horizontally for fun. Included in the picture, clockwise from the left: City Hall (Buffalo City Hall, sergeantcm), the Key Tower (Equinox), the Arcadia Inquirer Building (Detroit Free Press Building, jasoncw), ArcTrans headquarters, formerly Iverson Tower (Smith Tower, Maxis), Arcadia Stock Exchange (Odeon Theatre, Porkissimo), Rose Valley County Municipal Building (Eliel Saarinen Chicago Tribune Competition Entry, prepo), First National Tower (oneil), Wren Insurance (Maxis), Tower Life Building (Odainsaker). The park itself is sergeantcm's Niagra Square, and the stoplights are by Heblem. More fun with the perspective tool: Breaking suspenstion of disbelief for a moment, the city is still a work in progress. I have a few homebrew mods at work to fill the patchy green area to the lower left with marcszar's Brooklyn rowhouses (available on the LEX), and the open green area along the right and right-bottom edge is slated to be filled with BCS modular parks. Also, I hate the Bell Towers, for reasons which should be obvious. Back in tour guide mode, this is a wide-angle shot of the entire Central Arcadia area and its surrounding neighborhoods. Above it, alongside the river, is University City. To the lower left is Federal West, bottom center is the exclusive Cathedral Square neighborhood (you can just make out the cathedral between the Ryan Apartments and the bottommost instance of Bell Towers). Right of Cathedral Square, including the major league stadium, is Parkside. The far right is Rose Park, a huge urban park about the side of a single medium city tile. Included in Rose Park, along the river, is the Sheffield Recreation complex. The boulevard through the park is Monument Avenue, the stone arch bridge is the Monument Bridge, and the square is Republic Square, named in honor of the Union victory in the Civil War. And now, a night shot: Not much photomanipulation here--just a horizontal flip, a sharpen, and a darken with the curves tool. This part of the city is substantially complete, barring another skyscraper or two to meet additional CO demand. I'm not much of a fan of skyscraper forests, so further growth will be outward into satellite cities and suburbs. I think I might add some spotlights to the obelisk in the park in the Lot Editor as well.

Originally posted by: Deathcat001 Swat-medic is right CitiesXL is still in beta so you still need another 4 years to compare them. quote> OK, now that's swinging too far the other way. If Cities XL's core mechanic is a substantial improvement over SC4's, we should know out of the box. And likewise, if it's irredeemably terrible, we'll know that, too. To make a comparison, SC4 vanilla was a decent game, even if it was limited without Rush Hour and the modds that came later, whereas we knew Sim City Societies was a wreck practically the day it was released. I think we'll know early on if CXL has potential.

For major cities, I try to have as few interruptions in the grid as possible, which means dozens of road connections for big city tiles, with at least ten GLR-in-road or GLR-in-avenue connections among them. I like to have at least two highway and heavy rail connections per city as well, though I can live without the highway (since my region is supposed to be a built-up urban area on the East Coast, the rails are non-optional; every town and city around here has a rail connection, because the ones that got skipped by the railroads in the 19th century faded into tiny hamlets or outright ghost towns).

Originally posted by: mayor_brandoThe second problem is the only kind of bridge this will make is a causeway. quote> That's very true and one of the major quirks about that idea. That's also a reason why I do it the old-fashioned way: with islands. Like I said, if you make the islands small, you hardly notice them. It's also a good system to make curved causeways with, although when you curve the highway, the option of other bridges is thrown out the door. By the way, you can make curved and diagonal bridges using the same system of making the highway, going into SC4 Terraformer, and lowering the ground. However, the same problems mentioned above will arise.quote> I'm with you on the islands. I try to make lemonade out of that lemon by either making the island perfectly rectangular and giving it a concrete wall texture, or by actually terraforming the island and making it look like an existing island in the body of water that the bridge designers used to save money. Both of these ideas, oddly enough, I got from the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Done right, a pair of twin suspension bridges can be a pretty spectactuar feature (though obviously you can only fully appreciate it from the region view).

Originally posted by: ROFLyoshi Thats pretty much what I do. Except I use rail with it. I find GLR better than buses.quote> I do use heavy rail for intra-city commuting. My region is developing satellite cities strung out along the rail lines radiating from my central city. I build a high capacity rail station in the center of each satellite city, and that station acts as the central hub of the satellite city's streetcar network. So the streetcars service local traffic and funnel long distance commuters to the heavy rail, and the heavy rail connects the cities (and since each city has a streetcar network, sims can rapidly move around the local network). I DO use buses sometimes. They supplement the streetcar lines in very congested neighborhoods (since all my streetcar stations are dual bus/GLR, sims generally take the bus to the nearest streetcar stop and then transfer there, rather than take the bus all the way from point to point). I also use them in outlying neighborhoods beyond the end of the line, and in newly established neighborhoods. The main advantage of buses is that they're quick and cheap to place, so I can get a new neighborhood running quickly. Once a traffic pattern develops there, I can decide where to lay the streetcar tracks.

I think at this point it's impossible for most of us to judge without having played the game, and even if you have played the beta, it's difficult to make a fair comparison between the two. SC4 is a mature game with a mod community that's been at work on it for six years. Granted, a lot of that effort has gone into fixing things EA should have taken care of, but the end result is still a game with very diverse transport options, modular parks, airports, and seaports, dozens of civic buildings in every category, a variety of ground and water textures, a stable of world landmarks, and thousands of buildings available representing nearly every major Western architectural style since the middle ages, and more than a few Eastern buildings as well. Cities XL is in beta, with no existing mod community, from a small company. You just can't expect it to duplicate all those options out of the box. What I'll be watching for from Cities XL is this: 1. Good core gameplay mechanic. Even if it's buggy or broken, I want to see some potential. You can patch a broken game into a good game, but all the patches in the world can't save a bad game. 2. Moddability. Obvious. 3. A commitment from the company to continue supporting it. I already play one city simulator that was abandoned by its creators; I don't need a second. I'll wait and see how others react before spending money on CXL. Seeing as I don't own a computer that could efficiently run it, that's a somewhat academic position to hold, but I will pay attention to what the early adopters think.

Originally posted by: mayor_brando Yeah, just make the island pretty small and you won't even know it's there. However, I do wish there was an easy way to connect cities by bridges without using any islands. I think I read somewhere in another thread that there actually is a way to do it. I think it said just connect two cities by elevated highway, then go into SC4 Terraformer, and lower the ground underneth the highway to reveal water, then go back into SC4, and voila! A bridge connecting two cities. However, I don't have SC4 Terraformer so I don't know for sure if this actually works.quote> It does work (and Terraformer is worth getting anyway), but there are two problems: first, the highway's supports will float in the air above the water. It's not noticeable at low zoom levels, but up close, it's very jarring. This problem, so far as I know, is unsolvable. The second problem is the only kind of bridge this will make is a causeway. This is less problematic, especially if you're crossing a body of water without a ship channel. Even with one, you could create ramps for a high level bridge with the terraforming tools; a number of real-world bridges are like that, with long causeways interrupted by high level bridges (or tunnels, another option available to you).

Le Corbusier beat you to this idea 87 years ago: Ville Contemporaine. The city fathers of Paris told him where to go and how to get there. Later, American public housing agencies adopted the idea of the tower-in-the-park, and we got places like this. The tower in the park just doesn't seem to work in the real world. That said, with enough care, it could LOOK good and work well in SimCity 4. Sims aren't people, after all.

I use GLR-in-avenue, road, and street almost exclusively, so I never have to demolish anything to extend my streetcar network. This allows maximum flexibility (the lines go where the demand is), at the cost of dealing with thousands of fiddly little puzzle pieces. Still, it looks good and it works great, so I'm not likely to go to anything else.

There are two mods to correct the problem with too few industrial jobs (industry doubler and industry quadrupler), which, unsurprisingly, double and quadruple the number of jobs provided by each Maxis industrial lot. There is also the Residential Halver (https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=12383) which does exactly what it says on the tin: halves the population of Maxis residential buildings. Note that it doesn't affect downloaded lots, so if you have some downloaded houses, they'll just crowd out all the Maxis houses and you'll be right back where you started with your population density.

The NAM team is one of the groups on SC4 Devotion. Presumably, since SC4D has strict quality control standards, they'd endorse any GLR station posted there.

The thing about a sandbox game like SimCity 4 is that cheating shouldn't carry the same stigma it does in other games because the point isn't to "win", it's to build the city you want within the limits of the software. That said, there's a significant number of players who want to preserve the challenge of the game, or they feel that realism includes realistic difficulty in construction (I count myself in both camps). To an extent I think it matters who your intended audience is. If you're doing it for yourself, it might be important that you overcame the limits imposed by the game designers to increase the challenge, whereas if what you want is a dynamite CJ, challenge takes a backseat to design.