Lost Realist

Thanks a ton! Draggable slip lanes completely escaped my attention somehow and in trying to get there recently I didn't think to use that OWR/RD mix for dragging them. Man, that's some nice functionality.

Wait, what!? Where do those intersection pieces come from? What did I miss?

If you're up for some more size along the highway, using RHW-4 instead of the OWRs I think you might be able to bring the ramps into the frontage roads using FLEX-ramps. I think FARHW might work, too (Edit: Wait no, it won't, since these are inside ramps.). Then you'd transition to OWR one tile before the intersection on either side. Realism is the crucial difference between interchanges with RHW and vanilla highways, and this realism leads to RHW interchanges being much larger. In real life, the size of an interchange will have a great impact on the speeds than can be travelled through it and the probability of congestion. This is why it's really, really hard to plan interchanges in real life in situations where space is limited and/or too expensive.

Since it's summer in the northern hemisphere I'd suggest a heat ventilation issue. Many machines will do exactly that to protect themselves from overheating and actually prevent physical damage to components this way. As already suggested, cleaning the case of dust buildups can help. I've helped myself before in similar situations by pointing a fan at the exterior of the machine as well, also saving everything every few seconds and leaning to live with it on the hot days. If you're on a portable machine be sure to prop it up onto some small boxes or something so air can circulate underneath it and never ever put it down onto a soft surface when it's running. Good Lord, what is happening. There's almost no point to it anymore when it looks so much like a satellite image and I mean this as a massive compliment. Your content transcends.

Since his game appears to be running normally, it can't be the DRM, for whatever reason since that should have caused a problem here but in fact didn't. The CD version actually also comes on 4 Discs, not 2, so I suspect it's a DVD version? Doesn't matter anyway I think because what's failing seems to be the 4gb patch and that is very much needed. Someone from the team can surely confirm or refute this but I'd imagine the crash a lack of that patch being in place would cause looking exactly like this. You'll need to get that to run, but sadly I don't know what its problem is in your case.

Nah, those ain't it either but that's a cool suggestion and I wasn't aware of those yet. The one I'm thinking of might be of Japanese origin? It also may have never existed at all. Thank you guys for your effort. At this point I'm considering expanding my portfolio and trying my hand at making a texture like that myself.

That was pretty much what I figured. Afterall, it's also not at all uncommon in both freetime and professional endeavours alike to prioritise this way, as the Docs don't put the bread on the table, right? I will give it a good shot and see if the results are worth running by y'all, I'd love to be of at least a little help after all these years.

The overpass that carries the south-to-east ramp across the east-to-north one didn't override properly, the "airbourne" tile remains RHW-2; I presume it's just a tile too short to gain stability. I could have gotten that tile from somewhere but then the ramp would have lost some smoothness and I decided to stick with this for now. As far as the game mechanics are concerned this interchange will not be used by actual Sims either way just because of its position relative to the action on that city tile and with some tactical MMPs, the little snag all but vanishes... The FLEX-interchange piece that merges that ramp into the through highway by the way did something seriously amazing to the slope over there. That's L2 to L0 in fewer than 10 tiles using two FLEX-pieces and I didn't even have to hide any unseemly bumps behind Norway Maples. That was the most surprising experience building this one for me I'd have to say. And many thanks you guys for the compliments.

Thanks for the kind words, not coming from anyone when it comes to interchanges. It ended up getting a redesign already: It kind of is a "pear" now. The tunnel's obviously not very realistic and cheating a little but that is one smooth ramp I got out of it. Who would have even thought of an interchange like this in SimCity 4 15 years ago, I mean seriously? I know there's a broken tile. Went ahead and got a little creative around it already, since this is going to remain the final design of this interchange.

Getting back into it. I don't think I've ever actually finished building a Y-type before without abandoning it and turning it into a trumpet instead. They used to always be either squar-y and slow looking with the 90° turns or they turned so huge there was no arguable point in building it that way in the first place anymore when a trumpet is technically advantageous to Y-type designs in several ways, of which the most important one in reality would often be cost. Trumpets only need one bridge structure. This one... ... kiiiiinda pleases me by making some pretty hard use of the RHW's increased stability. It shares some reminiscence of a "pear", the three-way variant of a turbine, but it is indeed a "T", there being three vertical stages and two bridges. I'm not huge on the southbound-to-eastbound ramp because that's what I meant with "squar-y". It can't swing any further out in this current state as that would force the other ramp to swing further as well, making for another pretty sharp turn there. I'm considering a redesign where the S-E ramp hops over the 90° bend in the E-N ramp. This would let it swing out a little further and come in a little smoother with a longer run at fractional angle to make the turn it makes look more continuous with fewer straights.

Yikes, I guess I'll retract that statement then, I was under the impression that at worst it could be 1000-2000 pieces you'd have to deal with. I guess it's not a feasible option then, the good news being that the community still holds a workaround in ploppable lots with offset light masts. Being no stranger to customer support myself I guess it's hard to refute you here. I think the first NAM I ever downloaded was around v13 so it's safe to say I am at this point very, very far removed from the impressions of someone who uses it for the first time. And it's always better to be safe than to have people super red-hot mad at you. Getting into the text files myself is a good idea. If time permits me I'd actually like to try and reformat and possibly rephrase quite a bunch of the information that's shown in game to make it a little more uniform and consistent, as I feel this is (understandably, obviously) one of the areas the NAM could need some more love. With different creators working on their projects mostly independently it's easy to see how the compiled product can wind up lacking a common style of presentation, especially since this is such a minor concern and I'm sure everyone will agree that judging by the mod we have, we're glad you're investing your time in it the way you currently are. I don't think the details of its presentation are of much, if any, concern to the average user of the NAM and thus not much would be gained from "cleaning" it up either, but I have a little background in advertisement and all I see is an opportunity to make the package appear more "professional" and even more impressive. This also extends to in-game instructions being phrased or worded differently for different parts of the NAM, giving it some practical implications as well. I'll try my hand at resolving some of that and giving my NAM a more consistent UI-appearance while I'm at it to make the curve warnings less intrusive. If I wind up feeling real good about the outcome for some reason I can keep you posted if you're interested.

Despite its undeniable overall chevronyness, I think that isn't the one. I'm so sure there was one that had tight chevrons in the center lane. Thank you anyway for taking the time to look for that one, I really appreciate it. It's a really beautiful blast from the past as well, that TRM.

Hey guys, long time no see. So I believe I recall there was a texture replacement of the TLA-3 network out there that had chevrons in the center lane like that WRHW-2 filler piece that connects to the intersection CPs, making it not a lane at all but essentially an AVE-2 without a solid median. Over where I live, center turning lanes like the TLA-3 are nonexistant while these so called "chevroned surfaces" are extremely commonplace, so I'd like to utilize those more as well. There's a good chance this texture was part of a complete network textures package that I can't seem to find anymore. If anyone has any leads I'd be much obliged. Or if anyone happens to feel a desire to make a texure like that... I'm sure I wouldn't be the only taker.

Just for some perspective let me also mention that I, personally, would hate a T21 mod like that as about 80%-90% of my typical highway systems will left unlit on purpose to emulate the real-life areas I'm drawing inspiration from. I mean, cars got headlights and you're basically just moving straight for miles and miles. So I certainly appreciate that the RHW comes fairly "naked" and can be tuned to the individuals liking if their motivation is high enough to put in the effort or coerce someone to do it for them, which is where our beautiful community as a whole would come into play as there's surely someone out there who can (or maybe has? This doesn't seem too far out there) put a T21 together that adds lights to RHW or at least update the one you already found to work again. Got a little request of my own, too: Is there any chance we could get rid of or at least reformat the very, very long tooltip texts for the RHW flexcurves? The one that mentions how they're slope tolerant but not flexfly? Because that huge slab of tooltip always finds a way to hang precisely at the other end of the piece when I'm trying to place it and then I have to guess where it'll land. I've ruined more than one onramp's slope that way, does this actually affect anyone else? If I just happen to have the worst possible screen resolution and it doesn't bother anyone else I'll retract my request.

Many thanks! I thought I had tried that already but I guess not, works fine. And even though I guess I can consider this kind of a "preview" release of that feature, just got to say that it slaps. Quite a game changer for some intersection and interchange designs already. Slip lanes to everywhere!

Hey guys, thanks for and congrats on another great release. I must be looking in the wrong places, but I can't seem to find out how to access the new REW-feature. Are there any docs for it I'm not seeing? Alternatively, anyone giving me a quick point to how it generally works ingame will probably work just fine as well.

So last time I said I was going to sketch a map of the region. I did that and it was pretty swell, too, but then I accidentally the whole thing, so now we're left without it. As in, I derped up and only saved the background: I'll redraw it soon, just couldn't be bothered right now. Meanwhile I still had my sketch to draw some highways into the region. Because I plan the entire region ahead anyway I like to build those in advance just to kinda get things going. Two highways are going to meet in the southern suburbs of Whitehaven, one of them heads northeast around the city while the other one runs from the southern border of the region to a future ferry terminal in downtown Whitehaven. The process of building these itself probably isn't the most interesting to most of you, so here's the finished product. First, the current region view, Day 1 so to speak: Yeah, they look chunky when you look at them like that, but we all know it's not really practical to have a highway smoothly waving through the countryside if you want some interchanges here and there, so... here's some of those from a little closer: A lot of parclo action and a roomy Y where the highways meet. Parclos are everything around where I live, almost all highway onramps are some variation of a parclo. I like that and I love how the NAM has evolved to be able to build them this smooth and neatly. I'm thinking I might add another interchange somewhere in the urban area and build it as a diamond of some sort though. This is the currently very barren looking end of the south-north highway: Had to get rid of that lane somehow... also, pardon the grid. And I see that bump right there... at least now I do. *facepalm* We'll see all of these again at some point when they look much nicer. So far I've decided to already dress them up with some lights and signage because god knows I don't wanna spend ages scrolling down to that stuff in my parks menu at some point in the future, so why not do it while that menu is still nice and empty... As for the terraforming, I'm going to take that step by step on a smaller scale, mediating between using the existing terrain and adjusting it for better use or aesthetics. And then of course, there's... The aforementioned signs in form of the GLR Signage Sets have gone in alongside with the outdated version of the LRM I like to use. The T21s you also may have noticed already. Along with that there's a sidewalk mod I made a while back using GoFSH and the wonderful compository by rsc. Still very nice and tidy, but now that the main traffic anchors are done road-wise, it's time to get dirty with some rail - and that means I have a couple of hours on the popular file exchanges ahead of me looking for some stations. Feel free to shoot any suggestions my way, what I've been looking for pretty desperately has been a really large central station that is not a terminus. I know Warsaw Central sort of fits that description but I'd like regular ground rail for regular ground raility purposes. If anyone has anything nice, I'm game. So next time hopefully I'll have the map back and some clunky old rail lines to show you guys. See you then!

That's true. I like the flatlands aesthetic a lot actually, because it resembles my home - but I do want to get a good balance of everything, including more interesting features. Because I also do like using ingame water, vast parts of the map have to remain at reasonably low elevations so I don't have unrealistic transitions. That's another limitation but in the interest of a balance between realism and excitement I've already picked some spots that will make for some good landscaping.

I got myself a new PC about a month ago. Initially I planned to just grab my Plugins folder off my old PCs harddrive and slam it in, but the whole "Fresh PC" feeling made me change my mind about that. The folder I had been using most recently had survived a major number of system switches and drive wipes, its earliest additions go way back to 2008. I was using my 2008 plugins folder. It's above 4GB in size at this point and contains such an unholy amount of sheer junk that it never seemed feasible to me to actually go in and sort it out. Resolving conflicts and other issues could end up taking me days. So a fresh start was needed and already being presented to me. I decided to start all over again. Pick and choose my downloads more deliberately, do more of my own lotting and keep everything nice and tidy in that folder for easy access right from the start. I'm pretty handy with PIM-X and ilive's reader at this point so that shold help tremendously. I can't believe how long I went without ever using the reader, especially considering how easy it is to get into and how much it can help out. Obviously there's some of the indisputable basics that go in the folder right away: The NAM, SC4Fix.dll, T-Wrecks' improved bldngprps, Extra Cheats. From there I wanna take it step by step. The first step being the world itself, so terrain and water mods are the next item on the agenda. Thanks to Cori being an angel, finding a good combination took all of five minutes by going through her Shoppe-threads. They're awesome. I landed on: Sudden Valley terrain, Cape Cod water and Vancouver Island beaches for a nice temperate, somewhere on the northern hemisphere sort of feel. They're all by Lowkee if I'm not a complete idiot. I also already went ahead and threw in some slope mods, the LRM (of which I'm intentionally using an outdated version, don't mention it), and some props by girafe and PGB so I could do some lotting to combat some boredom. Here's what my Plugins folder currently looks like: So liberating. We're ready to get started. I'm not much of a gambling man but the Landscape Designer, which essentially creates random grayscales has served me well over the years. I also just now see how ancient it is - that's a link to an upload in 2005 and even that was already a re-up, dang! It gives out pretty little 16x16 regions which is a size I'm comfortable with, it lets you set some parameters and then roll the dice. The ratio between Unusable, Ugly and Sweet is about 50/40/10 so it's a little frustrating at times... but the sweetness is worth it. And that is ours today. An interesting, realistic shoreline, no immediately obvious major inclines and some realistically shaped and sized lakes. This will be the Whitehaven Metropolitan Area, surrounding a large harbour city of Whitehaven with multiple counties, townships and small towns. It'll be swell, y'all. Landscape Designer regions have a tendency to be a little bumpy and use of the term "smooth" is really subjective. Also, the Designer can't generate rivers, and I like rivers. So thankfully, there's the SC4 Terraformer for us to sprinkle some fairy dust on this. There's an apparent issue right away, the map is rendered at completely wrong altitudes. Its elevation is way too high. This has been happening with LD grayscales recently, if anyone knows why this is I'd be delighted... So lowering, lowering, lowering that "terran"... After some general smoothing I wanna add some rivers. The smart thing to do this is by finding the lower spots in the original terrain and carving them out. ... yeah, that'll do. The region lies a little higher than it seemed, so a little more elaborate terraforming is becoming necessary to smoothen it all out. I'm not too big on doing that with the terraformer though, I'm really just giving myself a rough outline to perfect with ingame tools later on. The water erosion tools are really useful here though. Also had to switch image hosts right here because tinypic sucks 'em by the bag and wouldn't let me upload that specific image. So after ingame rendering it all, here's what the region looks like on day zero. This is going to be our canvas: I'm pleasantly surprised to be honest, Sudden Valley eats up a lot of the more obvious brushstrokes and the rivers look pretty okay. Yeah, it's pretty flat but that's fine by me, some interesting features might be added ingame at some point. The little river split is making me cringe right now, it looks so bland, but overall, I like this so far and it's gonna do it for today. I hope some of you will be interested in joining me not only starting a region but also a Plugins folder from scratch as I'm really looking forward to your ideas and suggestions while I move this thing along. If there's any mods, lots, anything you think is worth my trying out then please never hesitate to let me know. Let's make this fresh SimCity a community effort! Feel free to express anything you wish to and swing by next time when we'll sketch up a quick map, finish up on the terraforming and probably start laying down some of the regions backbone infrastructure already. See y'all!

I guess it depends on what you need to achieve to feel fullfillment from this. If you're looking for a million subs, that's probably a long shot and honestly pretty unlikely. If what you're looking for is a smaller, engaged and interested community to produce some occasional content for then by all means, why not? As it happens I'm currently trying to compile some material and come up with some content to start a channel of my own. SimCity isn't going to be a feature on it, that's for sure, because it really is a fringe topic with no mass appeal. No brands are going to be interested in sponsoring that and the youtube algorithm will almost certainly have little to no idea who to suggest it to. This isn't high-intensity let's playable content, informational pieces about the game are only going to appeal to those who already play it and furthering your reach beyond that demographic would require some major strikes of luck. Maybe you'll tap into some model train communities or whatever but you're always going to be far off of mainstream appeal which I consider anything aiming for 200k subs needing to have. Then again, what do I know? Maybe you're a really funny guy whose commentary can make anything entertaining. Those people exist. If you can overcome the odds of commenting on such a... unthrilling thing let's say, you can always find some reason to dream. But as it stands I think you'd wind up with a youtube-based community pretty much like this one right here if your content is good and stays fresh, which is certainly possible with the right amount of dedication. I don't think you should hope to wind up in people's suggestions I'm afraid though.

You're using the outdated 4.something version of the mod, there's a model in the Imaginian set that has an Umlaut in the description and apparently the game doesn't like that. I use that set as well because I think it's convenient, so if you don't wanna upgrade to the latest version of the LRM for whatever reason, you can do as I did and grad ilive's reader to change the descriptions of the offending exemplars (they're called Näde-Andaluh) or I guess you could toss the entire Imaginian set from the folder if you don't intend to use it anyway.

This I am totally cool with. I would have probably ridden the medevial theme a little harder but the village being a former citadel really makes sense.

That's a really cool idea. I just think the area looks extremely separated from its surroundings; the bright white texture is hard to blend in as it is and then there's only one access street that gives it this "fenced community" kinda feel. I don't think that's ideal because the Old Town would have been a center of commerce way back when and it would make sense if it were connected directly to the docks for example, then it wouldn't look so much like a complex someone just dropped into the landscape on a slab of white pavement ;).