ethansprang

For reference, in pre-Hausmannian Paris, standard lot sizes were about 5m. In Baltimore, the famous rowhouses are around 13' wide, or 4m. San Francisco's "Painted Ladies" victorian homes are 20 ft wide. NYC's grid system is also built around 25' lots, as Feindbold's Brooklyn themes attest. BUT... those houses are all deeper, typically 30-40ft deep. The lots are generally deeper still, and for game purposes we want the lots to be variable depth for more zoning flexibility. 8m x 8m corner buildings are less common for historical reasons. First, many of these lots in American cities were part of grided land developments where the lots were totally uniform - the corner lots were long skinny rectangles too. Given the realities of walkable retail the 1800's, more shop windows are better, so your building will fill the available frontage - which is deeper than 8m x 8m. Second, the absence of zoning codes at the time meant that corner lots were more likely to be converted to commercial uses. The corners are also noisier and less desirable for residences, so owners of them would have been more likely to sell than long-time mid-block residents. The valuable location then made them more likely to be consolidated with neighboring lots for larger structures. So the lots didn't persist. In European medieval quarters, by contrast, you can still find tiny 5mx5m square corner shops. But they are very rare. In our game, most of these historical examples are found on the workshop, but in multiples, as part of larger assets, both corner and regular. But if you want any odd-angle streets, you'll want the 1x1 corners for your hard-to-fill street corners.

Yeah. I kinda had that idea when I saw boformer's post about default assets and the texture replacer. I got all excited thinking, hey - do it all at once! But then I realized that probably wouldn't work, because each upscaled asset needs a new lot size and thus probably has to be treated separately. Although, maybe we're wrong. Maybe boformer's awesome enough he could do an entire city of growables, all zones, levels, sizes, with unique textures, all from the same single model. Kinda like this, but with colors:

When you get the larger growables done, rescaling default assets to 1:1 would combine VERY well with this.

I think the real issue with 1:1 vs 1.5 is that the default assets make that scale change between 6 and 10 floors. I disabled all my custom assets for Snowfall, and I'm struck by how odd it looks. When you get an area of mixed R3 and R4, you really notice it. There's a 10-12 story 1920's American style tower that's taller than several 17 story apartment towers. One R4 6 story is almost as tall as other R3 and R4 12-15 story bulidings. There's some slight variation, from perhaps 1.4 to 1.7 scale - and most of these down-scaled buildings are 3x4 or 4x4. CO clearly wanted to make buildings that *looked* bigger, but they were constrained by the 4x4 lot size. So, with larger lots, a good early project would be to simply use the asset editor's scaling feature to rescale all the shrinky-dinks to proper 1:1 on larger lots. 1.5 scale 4x4s should look just fine on 6x6 lots, and BOOM! Instant bundle of larger content to launch with the mod. Question: would simply resizing a default asset into a new asset like that preserve it's AD and Snowfall lighting and snow changes?

Agreed that 8x8 is a good size, and that CS'' 4x4 is clearly too small. When nearly every recognizable skyscraper unique on the Workshop is bigger than 4x4, then clearly the growables are too small. But it is not necessary that EVERY building be growable. Chicago's grid in the Loop is square, at about 120m, or about 15 cells. Clearly, any building that occupies an entire city block will be larger than an 8x8 growable limit, but how many of those are there in Chicago? Willis Tower is most of a block, but it's a smaller block cropped by the river, and there's still a large plaza on the south side of it. There are a fair number of buildings that occupy about half a block, which would make them 16x8 or so - they tend to face a street on the long side. And there are some that are just huge, like the Chicago Hilton, which does fill an entire block, including it's multistory garage. But for *growables* - the non-signature buildings that form the canvas on which your city's distinctiveness is expressed - those don't need to be much bigger than 8x8, if at all.

Over 90% of OECD adults have a high--school equivalent degree. Primary school completion rates have been close to 100% for nearly 80 years. In game terms, that means that 90% of Cims are at least Ed2. Auto workers, farmers, retail, and food service - all are typically Ed2 in the real world. In fact, most of the jobs the game treats as "Uneducated" or "Some Education" would NOT consider hiring a person without a highschool degree or equivalent, to say nothing of never having been to primary school. It wouldn't matter except it makes the education system totally unrealistic. If you try to have real-world education services, i.e. universal primary and secondary education - you get a city that is actually VERY hard to keep stable. Your specialized industry will have insufficient workers, esp farms and forests. Trying to keep a persistently high unemployment rate to force-fill the jobs exacerbated death waves.

I think growable *structures* that are bigger than an acre would be rare. Maybe large "light industrial" buildings and some big-box stores. But more often you'd want to plop those as ploppable RICO. 8x8 is an acre. Larger lots are likely to be mostly parking lot or landscaping. I think a lot of use of this will come from larger setbacks for buildings, to mimic the suburban 'office park'., with medium sized buildings and lots of open space. It's wierd - real-world developers usually don't have choices about such things. The FAR limits how much building they can build, so midrise office buildings - which are efficient and less expensive - must be surrounded by huge greenspace or acres of parking. As gamers, we have total control and choice over the look of the buildings - and yet we are trying as hard as we can to mimic a built environment that exists *solely* as an attempt to circumvent the idiocy of an outdated and wasteful regulatory environment. ALSO: without some larger/more complex props, the 64 prop limit is going to feel real small. Gonna need props of larger, bland planters and tree lines - combinations of bushes, flowers, hardscapes much longer sets of parking spaces, some other parking lot markings/structures - arrow decals, curbs maybe a set of landscaped corporate logo-style billboards (randomized?) for entrances

Hmmm..... that's obnoxious. So, VERY BAD ADVICE then. DON'T DO THAT.... I suppose that's a really sad comment on how closely I look at assets and props, if i never noticed they were missing. Is the internal ID only a function of directory path? or if I move a prop, copy it, and move it back later, will it get a new ID? Is that why if I alter a workshop asset, and save the altered version in my local folder, the altered version can't find the original tooltip and thumbnail images to display in game?

This is a good way to reduce system load when modding - put all your Props into the local folder (those are rarely updated on Steam) and your essential mod tools, and you can load up with -noWorkshop and design easily. Also recommended: Mods List to disable everything you don't need; Mods List runs well out of the local folder and also covers all of the local folder assets and mods, so it can stay active in -noWorkshop mode.

Sounds interesting! For me, I like separating wealth and density more. The problem with commercial being over-represented is from the inability to add mixed-use zoning. Although strip malls and shopping centers are purely commercial in post-war cities, that's only because planners decided that mixed use was "bad". Older cities' commercial is just the first two floors of most buildings, so every office and many residences are also commercial. If you're going to touch education, at least re-purpose the levels - the idea that "Uneducated" means No Primary School is absurd.

This looks awesome. 8x8 is an acre - perfect! A 4x4 lot is only .25 acre - average for American suburban homes. Exurban and luxury lots are common in the .5-1.5 acre range, so 8x8 for luxury estates is totally reasonable. Commercial strip malls will look a lot better if they can have more parking in front, instead of trying to build ped-path parking and frontage roads. However - is possible, you should consider putting some clear default lot-sizes in your final implementation of growables, like at say 6 and 8 deep. One advantage of 4x4 is it keeps the number of possible dimensions down, especially considering corners. Only 11 sizes really get used ingame, and not that many for corners. If modders start adding both 5x7 and 7x5 etc... it's gonna get ugly, in terms of upgrade paths, memory usage, etc. What sizes would really be needed to give a feel to the city? 3x6, 4x6, 6x6, 8x6, 3x8, 4x8, 6x8, 8x8. Yes, there are LOTS of real-world buildings that are narrower, but each additional lot size will make it that much harder to make themes and allow upgrades. A necessary companion to this will be something to allow the same asset model to be used for multiple lot types/levels/orientations without needing to be loaded separately each time, to reduce memory loads.

Awesome! I like the w2w aspect as well. Low hanging fruit: - How hard would it be to add a 4x4 "L" corner version that lets you make w2w L shaped buildings, for larger corner blocks or office parks? - Alternate colors, like the pale burgundy shade that seems so popular in corporate parks?

I made local copies of a LOT of unique buildings and dropped the attractiveness to single digits. Especially a few that had attractiveness over 25 or 50.

Re: props How about randomized architectural accents? The woodwork on the balcony and eaves shapes are what really differentiate these Alpine houses in Austria and Germany. So maybe a series of props for different railings, balcony supports, eaves, wood accents, and roof-edgings? They could be randomized so you get an interesting mix from house to house.

I'd suggest a second 1x1 corner because that one building is going to appear on every corner, regular and recognizable. The rest of the streets will have a nice random look to them, but as a result the corners an intersections will stick out like sore thumbs, four identical fronts facing each other, every time.

Re: backyards vs. front yards, in a lot of US suburbs from 1965 onwards, the lots are actually more than four cells deep. Pre-1920 suburbs may have 5-15 foot setbacks (up to 4m, half a cell). Modern suburbs have setbacks of 50' (16m)or more. If measured from the centerline of a 2-cell road, that puts the house one cell deep on the lot. If measured from the street edge, a 30' setback might be farther. A typical post-war 0.25 acre lot would be about 80' wide and 130' deep, or 3 cells by 5 cells. If players want realistic suburbs, they'll need to make 10-cell deep blocks and just landscape the unzoned terrain themselves.

Couldn't you have a style with just 1x buildings? I know that works in the Themes mod. Also - the 1x corner is lovely! Low or Hi Res?

In the asset editor, your props can overhang the edges of lots. Great! You can also place props outside of the lots- but ONLY to the sides. NOT to the front or back. Example lot I made: the triangular shape of cobblestones in the middle of the block. The ground is a 1x1 cell cobblestone texture from the workshop. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=594253860

@TurjanThe plazas on the Flatiron Building are another great example. (I added the pic in the post.) @boformer Not sure about your difference between "placed" and "visible". In the editor, I expand the lot size, place the props in the newly expanded area, and then shrink the lot size back down. You can place props this way to sides or front/back - they appear in editor and in thumbnail snapshots, they count against the prop limit, etc. The difference with external props on sides vs. front/back is that the side props are visible in game, but the front/back props are not.

Judazzz, The mod for placing props is capped at 64,000. That's still more props than buildings. Placing trees has a MUCH higher cap, so.... but then I'm not really worried about the building limit yet since they raised it. Maybe in a few months.... As for placing trees into empty spaces, that's one reason I like the newer 'grass' and bush clumps from Gula, Breeze, and others. There are also a few flowerbed' or 'wildflower' props that cover nearly half a cell. These can be placed alongside the asset and overhang it. And, of course, you can place almost any tree between any two zoned lots - there is a magic pixel or two where the tree will plop. If the building is demolished and respawns, the vegetation will still be visible. Works for backyards and for street trees out front. For larger spaces, you need to make some custom parks... Did you know props CAN be placed outside an asset's lot, and they will overhang whatever is nearby? Here's an example I made: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=584419684 where the asset lot is just the concrete surface. The shipping containers to the back left are outside the footprint and will sit on top of or clip into anything in the way: trees, roads, other buildings. Works just like oversized trees that stick thru overpasses. To do this, you set the asset size large enough to place your props, then reduce the size to the foot print you want. This is actually what I wanted to do with the overhanging surface props.

I like the substation... but I gave up on the cables when I added the "Remove Need for Power Lines" mod that just increases the power radius of power plants to the whole map. Now it's just pure eye candy.

Turjan, you can edit the Themes xml file in a text editor, which means if you make the theme you can just cut-n-paste it. Someone else would need to have all the same buildings, etc... but that will get the clones to load too. Editing the file directly is also a good way to duplicate an existing theme if you want to tweak or trim it.

@hitzu That's much closer to a realistic use of a Right of Way - most CSL roads are way too wide. The big question is, "what do you want to do at intersections?" You will never make effective intersections with three road types because that will need 3 intersections for every crossing street, and those will be too close together. Without road anarchy, the game wouldn't even let you build them close enough together. If those parking lanes ALWAYS join back to the main lanes at every intersection, then you want a single road type. But if you want this to be more of a frontage road, with smaller streets or 1-cell alleys intersecting the side parking lanes but NOT intersecting the main road, then it would have to be three separate roads - and until we can re-write the vehicle AI to handle complex multiple-intersections, that's not going to work well.

When I try to edit existing workshop assets, I frequently get the "no buttons in the asset editor" bug. I found some discussion of this from the summer, regarding assets with changed categories. Is the only solution to unsub/disable those assets? How do you tell which ones are bad? More generally, how do you modmakers keep your assets organized? Finding anything in the "Load Asset" list is a total chore. Every time I think about trying to mod things, it seems like a PITA. So I just sub more workshop content, which only makes the whole mess worse.

By rename, you mean I can change the name in the lower left file name box in the Save Asset dialog. But leave the "asset title" box at the upper right the same?