cingmot

Function-over-form Wreisheim. The Wolfram river runs through it, and the campus of the Fine Art Institute is dead center. North of the Autobahnring is the Fachhochschule Wreisheim and the (in)famous Siedlung an der Nordheide. Tracts slated for development can be seen between the Autobahn and the railroad spur. Borough Spotlight: Wreisheim Many a spot in Alsechsstadt is “pretty” in the traditional sense—stepping out of the door of one’s apartment building, an aesthetically pleasing neighborhood stroll awaits, as calm and cultured as Munich’s Glockenbachviertel or the wealthy end of Maxvorstadt. But most of these places aren’t to be found in the Bezirk Wreisheim. The Bezirk Wreisheim—one of the nine boroughs of Alsechsstadt—encompasses the city’s north-east corner. Situated on both banks of the Wolfram, the borough is not without its pleasures—the forested campus of the Fine Art Institute, on the southern bank of the river; the trendy quarter to the south and east of the courthouse of the Landgericht Alsechsstadt-VII (Wreisheim), which sits in the center of the borough. But this borough is dominated—characterised, even—by the “Siedlung an der Nordheide”. The Siedlung an der Nordheide is centered aroud FH-Wreisheim, an S-Bahn spur, and the Klinikum Nordheide, obvious from the presence of the helicopter pad on the roof. Nordheide The Siedlung (“settlement” was conceived of by the city’s Sozialreferat to address one of the more urgent side-effects of the explosion of commercial activity in the city center and in Niederharburg in the last couple of decades. Land speculation and soaring real estate prices in the older quarters of Alsechsstadt had lead to a serious shortage of low-income housing, and the service and manufacturing industries throughout the region were suffering. It was thus decided to use a tract of flat land between two of the arterial roads that headed away from the borough in the direction of Aying-Mobergsbock for a mammoth public housing project, with the campus of the Fachhochschule Alsechsstadt-Wreisheim serving as a focal point. Student housing (provided free to enrolees) and public housing would surround the new development, which was fitted with an extention of the U7 beyond Walgothra (not reflected in the map in the first post) and a new overground service, the S72, which would serve a stretch between Ostbahnhof in the city center and a new S-Bahn spur into the burgeoning development. Construction began at a breakneck pace, and the population of the borough exploded. In five years, 92,000 people moved into the new buildings, and the central Baureferat expanded the settlement to some 20% beyond the size for which it was originally planned. Private developers are now being permitted to build on land between the S-Bahn spur and the Autobahnring; the Zentraler Planungsreferat Alsechsstadt (ZPAL) estimates that the Bezirk’s population could reach 150,000 by the time all the land set aside for development has been built on. The older part of the borough. The Court is in the central part of the photo, and the medium-density neighborhoods around it are a somewhat trendy, if not exactly central, part of the city. The future of Wreisheim Thalleran as a society and the Communist Party of Thalleran, which enjoys in the country a democratic hegemony akin to that of the Liberal Democrats in Japan, have long recognized that matters of such basic human need as housing must come before many others; the Baureferat and the Planungsreferat clearly prioritized the amount of provision here over the beauty of the end result. But that’s not to say that there’s not a better-looking future for this borough. Alsechsstadt is the capitol of the province of Alsechsstein, and the provincial parks and forestry office (the Alsechssteiner Staatsministerium für Land- und Forstwirtschaft) has long had plans for the rejuvenation of a long greenway stretch along the Wolfram, from Wreisheim through Aying-Mobergsbock all the way up to Dardenkirchen. For now, though, Wreisheim remains a district of transplants, an area in upheaval. It’s cause for great uncertainty, but it also means that for this once sleepy suburb of a throbbing city, a great deal of potential has been unlocked. One day a forest again? The river between Wreisheim and the airport.

D'oh, forgot about that in the last two shots. But the grid does show through on those airport tiles no matter what. I blame the Macintosh.

I'll echo the reply of granto93 below: two airports isn't extreme at all, given the scale of the city. New York has three (arguably several more if you include its exurbs); Los Angeles has at least that many, including Orange County, etc.; Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Boston--all served by multiple airports, and that's just in the lower 48. How many does London have? Six? Berlin has three, Paris at least two... the point is, in very large cities, it's the rule rather than the exception. The particular reason for it here was that I built Guthrie, became unsatisfied with the level of realism (i.e. it's not very), and decided to start afresh with an airport that's very closely modelled on MUC and MEM and other real-world airports whose layout is very straight, and therefore feasibly imitable on the grid-line constraints of SC4. Basically, the built-in airport provision in SC4 was wholly inadequate and unrealistic, and in terms of time, the airports probably represent a solid third of the effort I've poured into this thing. Here's two views of the Guthrie airport--man, in hindsight, it sucks more than I remembered: Is that Area 51 adjacent the cargo area? What was I thinking? Nevertheless, this airport mainly turned into a playground for the RMIP tiles I was just learning how to use. Here's the terminal: The U3 comes aboveground at this its southern terminus and does a DFW-style skylink-thingy between the HSRP Fernbahnhof and each of the three dropoff sites: one for T1, one for T2, and one for the parking area in the middle. Ultimately I just wasn't OK with this airport, and built its replacement at Arlanda. The airfield itself is modelled on Munich's, and all the runway markings/designators are done correctly this time, with the aid of RMIP diagonal taxiways (invented since Guthrie's construction), and some other sexy terminal pieces from the STEX -- the runway at the top is where the party's at. Here's a closeup of the terminals. Mad props to the folks who came up with those tunnel diggers--they're the lifeblood of my transit networks, because the default level crossings envisioned by the game become totally unrealistic in any settlement with a population above 500. Also, those orange Braniff planes... wow. Just wow. But anyway, all the other airfield markings are also correct -- the RMIP comes with some great instructions, and when you fly as much as I do, you start to notice the way these things are done at airports out there in "reality" (sooo overrated if you ask me). Here's the new and improved terminal area: That's my airport story. It's one of the more fleshed-out features of the city, probably because of all the time I spend in airports in my own life.

The metropolitan area as seen from above. Positions of the rivers, airports, city center, etc. all fairly obvious. Torsten is to the south, Mittelborough and Balkenerde to the north. This handy view shows the metro area, but with the names of all the boroughs and the near suburbs. The second name refers to the Landkreis (County) within the region, not the mayor. ALSECHSSTADT Introduction Alsechsstadt was a project I conceived of after several years of Sim City 4. Over the course of hundreds of hours of playing time, I had continually played with the myriad possibilities for interaction between individual city tiles within a region that the game offers. Before this project began, however, I had never attempted anything with Alsechsstadt’s structure—that is, an enormous city splayed across multiple city tiles, whose function was to become much like that of London boroughs or German Bezirke—units subordinate to (and not in any way independent of) the greater metropolitan area itself. Alsechsstadt was begun in the autumn of 2004 and had reached a regionwide population of close to 1.5 million in the winter of 2006 when it vanished, lost (like everything else on my computer) to laptop theft. Always back your junk up, people. I took a break from Sim City for some nine months after that, but in the fall of 2006, with time on my hands again, I took to rebuilding that which I had already spent so much time on. And so this, the chronicle of the second incarnation of Alsechsstadt. (Oklahomans and employees of the U.S. Geological Survey might recognize this terrain as Tulsa, but with an additional river, of course—Rebel13’s Tulsa terrain was used as a starting point for the second incarnation, as it closely resembled my own custom terrain upon which the first was built.) The oldest part of the city is the leafy low-rise Altstadt, on the western bank of the Milo. Not much of it is left, but you can see it peeking out from between the Hauptbahnhof and the riverbank in the right-middle of the photo. The two-part Hauptbahnhof is almost dead center, with the University just north. Also, the northbound rail stretch, which is grade-separated from the area around it, is visible up top. Man that took a while to engineer. General Observations The fictional city is the largest (but not the capital) of the Nation of Thalleran, a quasi-republic in the Bolivarian vein (for more on what that could possibly mean, see Miguel Centellas’ very detailed explanation at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/7609/eng/repbol.html) that serves as a sort of umbrella nation-state for all my Sim City projects. It’s sort of Thalleran’s Munich or New York—the center of the country in a chiefly cultural or emotional sense, and less burdened by the whirling dervishes of national politics. The intersection of the Milo and the Wolfram. The financial district is beyond the upper edge of the photo. Some of these apartment buildings have seen better days, evidently. Alsechsstadt is situated at the intersection of the rivers Milo (the larger) and Wolfram (the smaller), some 60 kilometers north of the mouth of the Milo. The suburban town of Torsten is the Ostia to Alsechsstadt’s Rome, as the river is not really navigable north of the suburb of Ebershahn. While it is mostly already complete—the reconstruction has a regional population of some 950,000 at present—it is far from done and dusted (are our cities every really finished?), and so I hope to provide at least weekly updates on the late-stage growth and development of a very large city with a lot of history behind it. The Bezirk Harburg is just north of the central Bezirk, Alsechsstadt, and spans rich high-rise apartments in the south through to the industrial surroundings of the City Airport and the Nordbahnhof, in the upper right of this photo. The City Itself Alsechsstadt proper is divided into nine Bezirke—Alsechsstadt, Harburg, Niederharburg, Szondars, Marsedus, Otaminn-Birgisfeld, Alexandrum, Darmstadt, and Wreisheim—Alsechsstadt being the most populous and the center of commercial and transport activity. Major suburbs include Mittelborough, north of Niederharburg; Balkenerde, further north of Mittelborough; and Torsten, the aforementioned seaport south-east of the city. The relative locations of Arlanda (above) the City, and Guthrie (below) are obvious in this photo, as are transit connections between them. Alsechsstadt is served by two airports: Guthrie, south-east of Alexandrum, the older of the two airfields and a principally domestic airport nowadays, and the replacement international airport at Arlanda (I’m in ur airportz stealing ur namez, Stockholm), which is to the north-east on the Wolfram River across from Dardenkirchen. Both are served by HSRP and conventional rail links direct to the city’s two central train stations, Hauptbahnhof Stochniol (on the western bank of the Milo in the city center) and the Ostbahnhof, on the east side. (A third airport, used primarily for business and commuter jets, is located at the northern end of the borough of Harburg, and there is a general aviation field in Darmstadt.) These stations are in turn connected to a vast network of U-Bahn (subway, see map) and S-Bahn lines which snake throughout the nine boroughs. The S-Bahn serves the suburbs as well, though the U-Bahn, save one connection to Guthrie airport in the south-east, stays within the city limits. (Torsten and Mittelborough have Tram/El systems of their own, while Balkenerde has a small U-Bahn network.) Click here for the map of the U-Bahn (subway). I’m particularly proud of this subway map—I spent nine hours laying it out and drawing it one night last fall. If you’re keen to do the same thing in your city, I recommend a program called ConceptDraw (www.conceptdraw.com). The transit view makes clear the scope of the S-Bahn (in black), the Autobahnring (orange) and the traffic flow of the region in general. Torsten's El rail is also visible at the bottom of the frame. With the city itself expanded out to the Autobahn ring encircling it, the emphasis these days is on the development of the suburbs, which I’ll speak about more specifically in the next installment. Balkenerde has a pretty strange and unique history, and something tells me there are also stories to be told in the watery lives of the towns of Mittleborough and Torsten. Stay tuned. As a final note, I'm pleased to entertain comments and questions in English oder auf Deutsch; the city bears more than a passing resemblance to München (albeit with a thyroid problem), and I have built it with the assumption that German is the local language (as will probably be evident from the place names and Subway map). Ich freue mich auf euren Kommentar und natürlich auch auf irgendwelches Feedback. The exurban village of Amhafen is served by Torsten's El/Tram network. Special thanks to the creators of the following mods: Radical Ordinances, the NAM in all its glory, HSRP, Marrast's brilliant diagonal rail stations, JasonCW's and the BSC's equally glorious rail station projects (especially London King's Cross), the incredibly detailed and absorbing RMIP airport packs, and to the legions of STEX contributors whose work peppers this city--most recently the creator of the Penn Plaza building from New York; don't it look sehksy? Sho do.

Nice. I downloaded the SWAP pack yesterday, so I'll have a poke around and see if that works. Thanks, dude.

How very unsatisfactory. So 707s don't land on ANY of Voltaire's RMIP runways? Not even the concrete ones from way back when?

Animation Problems? Voltaire/Anyone Else -- I've got a huge city with a handful of airports, two of them built out of the (amaaazing) RMIP pieces, and one, the smallest, one of the Maxis prefab jobs. All are powered, because they all blink like crazy, and my graphics settings are turned all the way up. Yet the lovely orange Braniff 707s take off in an animated fashion from the Maxis prefab airport, and not from my RMIP runways! I haven't put down either of the small-plane animation (Rockwell business jet or DC-whatever) runway pieces... is there one for the 707 prop that I've overlooked or forgot to install? Guidance much appreciated in advance!