Norwegian Neko

The street which you decide to carry the lightrail traffic should be conbined with the Ground Light-Rail mod (which is a modified El-train that travels on the surface) to provide us with real trams. Considering that hardly any actual cars travel down either of the max streets due to the narrowness of it & the stop signs, this makes a lot of sense to just completely convert it to a max-only street. However, the Pioneer Place Mall is 2 blocks East of Pioneer Courthouse Square (which is adjacent to Nordstrom's, Meier & Frank, the Old Pioneer Courthouse, and kitty corner from Fox Tower. So these should be two different projects. Here is an aerial view of Pioneer Courthouse Square: As you can see, there are no skybridges that connect to Pioneer Courthouse square. Further to the East (right in the pic) is the Pioneer Place Mall, which has them, but its not part of the Square.

How far do most of your sims commute? To the downtown area? I'd be curious to see how many people drive on the freeways from the burbs all the way downtown.

Date: 3/25/2005 1:17:28 PM Author: ReapOR hi there! i think 'new urbanization' is the future of urban management, at least in europe. cities have always been places where cultural and social interchange took place, where poor and rich, young and old , intellectuals and common workers lived door by door (or, at least close together). imagine how many social changes happened to start in cities, just because people could meet (and now dont't say you have a car, this is clearly not the same ). citizens also were more free and independent from authorities, which is another indication for the historical importance of densly populated cities. in contrast to urban sprawl which is neither healthy for people nor for a complete region, as zilfondel stated. but to be honest, i think it is utopic to REALLY plan things like that. in free states people live where they want to, you just can set basic conditions and the rest has to be some kind of movement or so. i, for my part, love to live in a city.quote> You know, there really isn't any freedom to live where you want. You see, the federal, state, local, and city governments long ago created a system of regulations that tell where you can and can't build. If you build here, in the countryside, you must spend X dollars to install water, sewage, and electricity. What is very interesting, is that with the massive freeway system we have in the United States, it actually encourages people to abandon the city and move far, far away. Then the government traffic engineers try to keep the freeway as efficient as possible, so they keep widening it, encouraging more people to move away. Also, many areas in the US - MOST of them - encourage new housing developments outside of cities by paying for all the new roads, electricity, water hookups, schools, etc. What is ridiculous, is that most cities stopped improving these things in the cities, so it costs MORE money for a developer to build a house or building inside a city than 100 miles away. The kicker is that our tax money pays for these improvements - and it usually costs a LOT more for the government to build this new infrastructure far away in the 'burbs, than it would be to use the existing infrastructure in the city. Bottom line, development and urban planning isn't just oh screw it, do whatever you want. Maybe Houston, Texas does that...but wait till their pollution gets so bad that you only live 5 years before getting a lung disease, like Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Here's an interesting test to create walkable communities in simcity: first, you will need the NAM add-on mods that increase the speed of traffic. Create a medium-density, mixed-zoned city - mix residential zones in with commercial ones, and let it all develop - get those 'small condos' and other stage 6 apartments to develop along with a bunch of offices and shops. If you place lots of bus stops (maybe every 2-3 blocks or so) across the city, and DO NOT use roads, but streets, you will find something interesting happen...since the streets will quickly become saturated with car traffic, many sims will switch to taking the bus or walking, because its faster: while cars are affected by traffic volumes, pedestrians aren't - and busses don't contribute to it. So you can have a million pedestrians or busses going down a street, but as long as there isn't much car traffic, then it will be quite efficient. Hmm, anyone up for making a car-blocker lot?

Comment on the roof here - Large towers are less likely to actually have duct work on top of the building than smaller commercial services buildings would. If they have the HVAC equipment on the top at all (some don't), they tend either to be a collection of fans that plug directly down into the vertical circulation shafts, or they can be monstrous units that tower 15 feet or more on top of the building. But they usually don't have much in the way of visible duct work, the higher the FAR of teh building. In other words, the taller the building - the less duct work, since the fans are proportionally larger.

There is a mod called the BRF tunnel & slope mod - search for it - which limitst your rails, highways and avenues to a very low % grade when they climb hills and so on. If you want to grade your hills at a certain low %, then this is the mod to use - just drag parallel rail lines over a section of hillside you want smoothed out. As far as increasing occupancy - there is a mod to quadrouple the # of industrial workers in each industrial building. It's under the mod section, search for industry.

Where the heck did you guys download this mod? I've been looking for it all day long!

I love your city. Just wondering, could you give us a list of the lots you have installed? Like print out your plugins folder for all the parks and european-styled buildings you have? I want to create my own truly European building!

Date: 2/11/2005 5:34:53 PM Author: ardecila Erm.. wagons, carts, etc? They had those in 1000 AD. Not to mention horses.quote> Hey, he didn't say it was on Earth, did he? I don't recall seeing any stop signs in Star Wars... A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Next he'll want speeders!

Crime mod Does anyone know of a way in which you could increase crime by approximately three times higher in the low-wealth residential areas? I want to create a slummy area and get riots, but its ridiculously hard to get any actual crime problems!

Date: 12/27/2004 1:28:08 PM Author: gil_mnogueira I think that the people who go by car to work aren’t racist.quote> I hate to pick on you, because clearly English isn't your first language. I just would like to point out to you and others that this is a gross oversimplification of the original poster's point. See, I don't think a lot of you native Europeans truly know what it is to live in some of the VERY urban-sprawly cities in the US. Picture this average day of an American who is 30 years old and works at an office: You wake up in the morning, get ready for work. Walk into the garage that's inside your house (you live in a residential-only area, no sidewalks, 1/8 of a hectare for your house). You get in your car and drive down the road onto the freeway. From there you drive for anywhere from 5 km to 200 km, then exit the freeway. You are now in a central business area - in a downtown or another suburban sprawl place, and park your car in a parking lot. You then walk 20 meters into the building where your job is at. Note: you just spent anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours driving...just to work. Then you sit in a cubicle, pound on a keyboard all day long, check simtropolis's website, read some CJ about how to build freeways in a city, then go home. The drive home takes longer, because there are more accidents after work then in the morning. The only people you saw that day were also commuting to work, as well as your office mates. So you saw maybe 10-50 people that day...and probably said hi to fewer. Then you go to sleep, and repeat the next day. On the weekend you get really drunk, because your life sucks. Go watch the movie Office Space - it's a great lesson on the true life Americans lead. So...eh, you guys accepting immigrants from the United States now? hehe...

Date: 12/26/2004 4:49:55 PM Author: kansashindles I think the real issue most suburbanites have with public transportation is that it is a public resource. You have to rub shoulders with the underclasses. I remember reading Edge City quite a while back discussing how and why private spaces (malls) were replacing public ones (CBDs).quote> The real cool thing about those shopping malls is that if you're too rowdy, don't dress appropriately, or try to do something public - like protest - the local rent-a-cop will kick you out and not let you back in (that's bad?) It's really sad that shopping malls are so prevalent in suburbs...and that there is a complete lack of any REAL public space in suburban areas (like town squares). I mean, when's the last time you've seen somebody take pictures of a mall?!

sweet...someone understands me. =\ Course, I have about 4 years left of school...hehe.

balance game? heck, I just want to win! I hope we won't have to kiddy-cuddle our creatures a la Black & White... But it's an awesome idea for a game! Totally different than Simcity. If I had time, I'd love to buy it...

Update! I spent about three hours last night, finally getting around to mapping textures to the model. Special thanks to Gascooker for his photoshop tutorial for tweaking textures, I think it's helped a lot so far... although the textures still need some work on them. The next step will be the interior: I think I'm going to whip something up in FormZ and import it - 5 floors of cubicles, plus a front desk, benches and plants near the windows in the lobby. Let's see if I can get some people in there...perhaps? Then lighting! So, without further ado, here's the recently texturized update:

Yea, I just read the fake ray-tracing tutorial. Learned a lot about photoshop, too... Pretty amazing stuff. I take it it's not too difficult to apply a texture to just a face? Do you have to apply a UVW coordinate system to the geometry first? Lighting is going to be fun also. The renders at the top of the post were done in another app, FormZ. It has one of the best ray-tracing lighting systems for architectural use...too bad! I get to do it by hand...