logintime

Welcome to Namane, a tiny Japanese village in the mountains of Akita Prefecture! Namane has gone through many ups and downs over the last several years. For most of the 90's and early 00's its population shrank dramatically, but today the number of inhabitants is on the rebound. Over one hundred fifty people call this place home. The central fixture of the village is the Ashikagawa monastery. A traditional Buddhist retreat, it has been used for hundreds of years to teach new students. While at one point the monastery was in danger of falling into disrepair, today Buddhism is undergoing a strong revival in Namane. The Ashikagawa monastery is the heart and soul of the village, and the place where most social gatherings occur. During the 80's and the 90's, the majority of the men in Namane were employed at the cement production facility over at the town of Ugonagatoro, six kilometers down the road. Today however, the vast majority of the village works in either the security industry or in rice farming. Namane is remarkably isolated. A single generator on the southern side provides electricity to most of the village. Since the power supply is limited, villagers use their lights and utilities sparingly... ...and the road that used to lead down the valley into Ugonagatoro is no longer traversable. Over the years it has fallen into disrepair, and the asphalt at one end has been ripped up and slowly overgrown by grasses. Life in Namane is peaceful and slow. The air is clean, the summers hot and humid, and the winters cold and snowy. The locals spend most of their days tending to the surrounding rice fields. It is a calm and quiet place... But, wait- what's this?!? Why is there a guard tower at the edge of the village? And what's with the cement walls? What is going on here?

Welcome to The Pacific, grimly.... This CJ mostly takes place in the near future; as you can imagine, a lot has changed in the ensuing decade or two. It will be focusing on a number of different regions around the Pacific basin, and what's going on in their pockets of the world. My goal is to update about once a week, though that pace might slow down a bit later on. Hopefully, you'll see an overarching narrative emerge around Chapter 3. I'll be using several different terrain mods, mostly from Heblem (Yucatan and Chihuahua) and Cycledogg (Painted Desert and Columbus Terrain), and as many of the items on my plugin list as I can muster. I hope you enjoy this city journal- it's actually my first CJ. Feel free to comment if you have any thoughts or suggestions! And to leave off, here's a teaser image from the next entry: the local cemetery at the Japanese village of Namane...

thanks! the cemetery is by Foxes and Badgers over at Hide Inoki. Its description and download link are at the very bottom of this page: [url="http://hide-inoki.com/bbs/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=819"]http://hide-inoki.com/bbs/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=819[/url]

Very bright and colorful! It's quite a nice suburb

New but semi-related issue: for the last two days, whenever I try and look at all the files a user has uploaded onto the STEX, I am for whatever reason search-limited from March 23, 2011. Any of their files that were uploaded and last updated before that aren't listed- with Simgoober, for example, only his aquarium shows up on his list, even though I know he has pages of content. I know T Wrecks has a number of great apartments, but since his uploads were before March 23, 2011, they aren't coming up on his upload list. This is, needless to say, incredibly frustrating. I've tried to get rid of this search limit, but can't figure out how. Any suggestions? Is this an error on my end, or a problem with the STEX right now?

@Yan077: Oh Wow.... that shot is fantastic

C'mon guys This should do. If it's not the specific one you're looking for, one of the ones listed in its Links and Credits will be.

I don't know about timelines, but I'd definitely like to see a greater breadth of tilesets. The SC4 Maxis ones were bizarrely slated toward the US, and the Euro tileset was pretty lackluster. The community on here has been phenomenal about creating new things, and we can now feasibly build a number of different types of cities. I even remember the Medieval project which tried to relot game buildings into a Middle Ages setting. But it'd be great if the game itself shipped with a broader set of building types so we didn't have to create them for ourselves. I'm thinking a US set, English/French/German sets, a Japanese/Hong Kong set, a MiddleEast set, and a Latin American set. Basically, the main popular sets. Then the Simtropolis community can turn to expanding them and creating less common ones like an Indian set, for example.

A small farming and fishing village in the Amazon Basin:

I'm not really sure of where to post this, so I thought I'd place it here since it does technically fall under the definition of "small town". Recently I've been curious if it is possible to create an Antarctic research installation based on what's out there, so I decided to give it a try earlier today. Here are the preliminary results. The three central buildings of the base, where all of the staffers conduct their research: And an overview shot of the station during the long Antarctic night: And a far-off shot of the frozen landscape: There's more that could be done, including detailing the terrain to feel somewhat less uniform (although the landscape there is quite uniform) and relotting more buildings to create a bigger base, but I think it's definitely possible to create a decent looking research station.

@ Mithrik: If I had to guess, I'd say they are probably onlyplace4's City Walls set. For my own inquiry, does anyone know if there's a tundra terrain mod? You know, rocky green and red grasses at the coast, transitioning to grey-brown rocks at mid-levels, and expansive snowfields and glaciers higher up? I'm working on a greenland-style region which could definitely use it

Something along those lines had better be in the works!

I like it. The lot is not flashy but does convey the religious nature of the building well. My one suggestion is, if possible, to not have a tree directly in front of the entrance/exit to the shrine. Unless it has religious significance, most religious buildings keep foliage away from the front of the building so it can be more easily viewed (and inspire awe) by pedestrians.

I don't think it's shoving Al Gore down peoples' throats to show environmental ramifications. As a number of other people on here have said, it's a real and major aspect of urban planning. Example: I lived in Jakarta, Indonesia for a year. The pollution laws are both very relaxed there and lightly enforced due to corruption. The air outside smelled... like you would not believe. You could feel the pollution in the air. It was like breathing in an ashtray. And what I noticed a lot was how many of my coworkers had respiratory problems and an assortment of other illnesses, which meant you almost never had the full staff in the office because someone would always be out sick. When I left Jakarta at the end of that year and flew to Singapore, I had a nosebleed when I got off the plane and what came out of my nose was black. I'm not kidding, it was honestly that bad. And beyond that, Jakarta had other issues. No trash collection meant people burned their garbage or dumped it into the river, both of which increased pollution. Land clearing and deforestation outside of the city meant that more water became runoff whenever the rainy season would come, which now causes the city to regularly flood every year. My hour commute to work once became a seven hour car ride from hell because the streets were flooding. The point of this is, these weren't just environmentalist gripings. Jakarta has pollution problems and suffers for it. The surrounding countryside has misused a lot of its land, and Jakarta suffers for that too. Decisions have ramifications, both bad and good, and that's always going to be a part of city planning. I don't really mind that they are including this in the game then, because it's just introducing a facet of the urban landscape that already objectively exists in real life. On your second concern, I understand. If this is the main focus of the game, that would be bad. However, it does seem from the interviews like the designers really are putting the city building aspect first and foremost, and additional features like this secondary. It's a bit early to tell of course, and I've been burned by games that seemed good during production but turned out badly (Civ5, this means you!), but right now I'm cautiously optimistic.

That's actually what I thought about too when I saw the size limit. For the most part I'm okay with the medium tile size- it means we'd have to use more city tiles to develop a big city, but it also means each tile would run faster than the corresponding 'large' tile would. (And since we're getting full 3D and adjustable zoom, the tile will feel larger than it currently does anyway.) The only thing that this size would constrain are large constructions that need more land than 2x2km, like big airports. Single runways alone can be nearly that long, and I've seen some fantastic user-made airports that have taken up almost the entirety of the large tiles in SC4. That'll be a big limitation for airports in this game. Then again... have they even said anything about airports yet? I haven't seen a single screenshot. Are they going to still be these tiny single ploppable versions we currently have?

Fantastic as always!

I had a new idea I wanted to test out, so I made a try at creating some terrace farming! This is still a work in progress- it hasn't turned out quite how I wanted it to- but I thought the results so far might be interesting enough to share.

I'm sorry to ask what has to be a basic question, but I've searched high and low and haven't yet found an explanation on how to do this... I've wanted to BAT some things for a while. I've built a few models and want to add textures to them (most specifically, a few from PegProd's MTP pack), but I have no idea how to add textures in. I can get the colors from the bitmap, but whenever I try to find MTP textures or even basic Maxis textures, I can't find anything. Please help??

Oh wow, thanks for responding to my request! They are already looking fantastic. Do let me know when you think you're ready to release them!

Rury, that region is gorgeous! And are those diagonal bridges I see? Looking forward to seeing more of this region as you develop it.