Map Guy

Very nice! Lots of impressive things in this city! Great job! :)

Dude that last region view! :O   Amazing! Could almost be a satellite shot of the real world, great job!

I like the "block" idea! Was just putting together a nice grotty low-wealth section in my latest city and was trying to work out how to get it to look - this is a great idea that I might try and incorporate. Thanks for the inspiration! :)

I like the fillers underneath the elevated highway! Is that a special mod because I didn't think you could do that? Another great update by the way!

Brilliant update! All the old Parisian BAT buildings look great! Well done on using them so well! :)

Incredible! The MMPs are supreme and I love the use of the Symphony junctions on your RHW network too! I'd also be very interested to see how you manage to get 5.5GB of plugins to work!! That's huge!

Replies: Jedahdiah, Schulmanator, sarthakknight, sadiemydog, TheTransitMan2525 and VMIUJcadet09 - thanks for all the kind words following my first entry at the weekend! Starting South Bartholomew: Old Town I've been busy in the evenings getting started on the first large city tile, and this is the area of South Bartholomew - the southern half of the country's largest island along with some smaller islands off the coast. South Bartholomew was one of the first areas to be permanently settled when Europeans landed on the islands in the Middle Ages. As such, the majority of the earliest architecture and buildings on the islands can be found here, specifically the "Old Town" area of Kingsend, which through slow expansion and sprawl, now occupies most of the southern portion of Bartholomew. It was through the random nature of the development of a residential area as I got the place up and running that resulted in me building Old Town first. Some of the lovely timberframe buildings that make up cropped up naturally and after complimenting them with some more ploppable versions of the same lots plus a few more interesting bits and pieces, the Old Town area is almost done! So here are some pictures, and we visit Old Town on market day, which occurs every Thursday. The market is held in the open square in front of the old town hall which since the settlement's expansion and subsequent shift of the CBD to the southern tip (more on that another time!) has been converted into a small museum and information centre for the many tourists who visit. The market is surrounded by many of the restored old buildings which date back hundreds of years and now house a mixture of smart, modern apartments and offices. In the top right of one of those images, you may be able to make out the church. This was built by the Dutch settlers whilst the island was under their control and despite the British taking control of the Northward Isles, the vast majority of religious buildings and monuments across the islands were left intact and continued to be used. It is now the most popular church within Kingsend and on Sundays traffic in the area, on the cobbled streets, can be horrendous. To finish, here's a couple of overview pictures of the Old Town area, though due to its shape I couldn't quite get it all in without a load of empty space and unfinished bits cropping in so a complete shot will have to wait! With Old Town mostly done, I'm now turning my attention to two areas - the marina and seafront and also the Kingsend CBD so stay tuned for updates!

Hi folks I have an issue which cropped up a little while ago in another region that I played that is now happening in a new one I've recently started for my CJ. Whenever I load a city up, it frequently fails to load all of my plugins, so that items are missing in the menus. This has so far only affected non-Maxis lots, and I've seen both ploppable and also a few growable Industrial lots affected. The result of the plugins that fail to load is a transparent base texture - they appear normal except for the missing base - no brown boxes, no missing props, etc. The terrain texture beneath is visible. The unfortunate outcome is that the game now is largely unplayable with plugins as it's now a lottery as to which will load up! And if ones I've already used don't, then I get the transparent base texture. The problem has only come about since I started playing SC4 again recently after a couple of months away from it. In that time, I can think of two things that have changed that might have caused this. 1. I installed NAM 32 2. Windows has updated Vista in this timeframe. The fact the lots still load and the props are still there leads me to believe that it isn't a prop pox. And I don't think it's my laptop struggling to load plugins - it could be, but I have only installed NAM 32 and a handful of other new bits and pieces since I started playing again. Has anyone else had this issue, and if so, is there a solution? Is it Windows demonstrating their increasing inability to release stable software updates? As an aside I've noticed my laptop has various problems after I exit SC4 now, varying from programs not running at all, to resolution and display issues, certain applications not working, Windows Explorer not working, all at different times. This makes me think it could be the Windows updates, but if that's the case then it can't just be me having these problems. Admittedly there can't be many people running SC4 on Vista these days, I'm one of the last of a dying breed! But there must be others on Vista that might know about this perhaps? I've attached some pictures below to illustrate the problem. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Here, the market stalls have failed to load: You can see the missing texture on Matt325b's Courthouse here: And finally the base textures for the church and bus stop are missing here. It affects transit-enabled lots the same as standard lots.

Fascinating stuff, though a little bit over my head! Interesting to see that the 3GB option when installing the NAM is designed for 32bit systems like mine. I gave it a whirl without it, as I wrote above, and the game CTD'd as soon as I tried drawing out a normal street. Whether that was related to the removal of the 3GB patch or not I don't know, but suffice to say it didn't solve my problem! Instead I removed everything from NAM 32 and reinstalled my last copy of the NAM which was 31.1. Immediately the game is running better, the menus load faster and I'm able to run the simulation and move around the map far easier. Whether the issue with the missing textures is solved or not by this remains to be seen. What is clear is when I quit the game now my laptop is stable and functions properly whereas before I would have to restart it before I could go and do anything else. So unfortunately for me it appears that my laptop doesn't like NAM 32! It's not too big a big deal, my current region is mostly islands so in terms of large transport infrastructure there isn't too much, and what is in NAM 31 is plenty enough to do what I need. If we see a NAM 32.1 down the line later this year then I'll see if that is a bit more stable for me. Thanks all for the help and advice with this. Time to crack on with the CJ now!

I understand what you mean now. I'm pretty sure I installed it with the 3GB option included so have just run the "Unpatch32" in the Tools folder and will see if that fixes it.

I see, that's interesting. I've just re-installed the game now and backed up my plugins folder which is approximately 2.5GB. It's definitely not over 3GB but perhaps that is the issue here. Is it possible that could be related to computer performance as well, or is that just an in-game thing? About NAM 32, I just used the standard download link on the STEX, I don't know whether that includes the 3GB memory option. EDIT: Scratch that, just checked the size of my plugins folder and it's 1.78GB.

Yeah definitely have them all because I've been playing for years and had no trouble up until recently. It doesn't affect specific plugins it is an entirely random thing. The game will load up and a random selection of my plugins won't be there - schools, parks, landmarks, etc. Those that aren't there but have already been plopped in the game display the transparent base texture as in the images above.

Should be very interesting to see how you develop that delta area, will that have development on it or do you intend to leave it and do most of the building on the mainland?

Superb! Can't fault anything with this!

100% agree with you. I like to grow the city from scratch, let areas develop and then go back and make them how I want. Often this will mean the entire city changing eventually as I demolish and change different parts, but I find it's much more interesting to try and make things fit and work in sub-optimal environments rather than just planning everything out perfectly from the start.

The arterial suggestion is a good one. I tend to create low-density suburbs on the edge of cities with just one or two accesses to main roads or avenues which then delivers the traffic to more commercial areas. Ensure that your junctions on highways/motorways deal with just these important roads rather than have exits for every road that comes near the motorway. When it comes to the CBD itself, I think the most important thing is to ensure that you have plenty of different transport options to access it. Whether that's road, heavy rail, trams, buses, or subways, make sure there's plenty of stations and intersections between these different types of transport in and around your CBD. If you make it easy enough for your sims to commute to the CBD, then they will do just that.

I wouldn't be won over by BRT. I don't know how prevalent it is over in the States, but it's been trialled in a few places here in the UK, notably Cambridge where it's been a disaster, Gosport/Fareham fairly recently where the jury is still out, and there is a planned project in Bristol which has been watered down so much due to objections that it's likely to be little more than a glorified bus lane. Certainly for Bristol there's been some strong campaigning for a far more wide-ranging solution involving trams or the reinstatement of a lot of dismantled railway lines. I'm of the opinion these are a much better choice long-term because in Britain we've had years now of bus lanes and other priority schemes that have quite often been little more than a political exercise and a waste of money. In the States I'm assuming planning regulations are more relaxed and there is more space for these sorts of schemes to go ahead but when space is tight, as it so often is in Britain, cutting a swathe through suburbs, across fields and over roads and rail lines is hard to justify when it's just being used by buses. The scheme needs to offer as much as possible and unfortunately in Bristol, the BRT scheme will be about as useful as a chocolate teapot to the vast majority of the city's 400,000 residents. The fact that the overall transport situation of the city is so dire just compounds the impact such a shoddy scheme has on me and I'm sure many other disgruntled commuters!

That description of the A44 in Germany is much like the A1(M) in the UK - it's never going to be fully connected, though there have been a lot of works to complete the motorway from the M62 east of Leeds, up to Newcastle. The last of these stretches is under construction at the moment. The best part is probably the 8-lane (4 lanes each way) section south of Peterborough which is all on its own and really overblown! With Pathetic Motorways having covered all of the UK's examples I won't go into too much detail, but my favourites were/are: The A41(M) at Tring The M45 (who doesn't love it? It's an antique!) The A40(M) Westway in London

I like this - very similar to what I'm trying to do with my latest project! I particularly like that curving avenue through the urban area - it's always nice to see roads in SimCity built according to the geographic nature of the area rather than just in straight lines on flat terrain all the time! Great job! :)

The Northward Isles are a group of islands located in the North Atlantic Ocean. Their origin can be traced to the mid-Atlantic Ridge - a constructive tectonic plate boundary that has been responsible for creating many of the Ocean's islands, including Iceland. The islands' history is one of conquest and colonialism. Having been used by numerous expeditionary forces as a stop-over point during the European colonial expansions, they soon became a vital and valuable military station and the French, British and Dutch all at one point or another claimed overall control of the Islands. In the 18th Century the Bartholomew Campaign, a British military invasion of the islands under General Samson Bartholomew, resulted in the attackers forcing the Dutch occupants out of the islands for good, and ever since, the islands have remained under British rule as a protectorate. Firstly under the British Empire and now as a member of the Commonwealth. Prior to the arrival of European explorers, there was no indigenous population on the islands, they were occupied only by the local wildlife, which was dominated by sea birds and seals. As soon as the Europeans arrived, settlers began to move in and small towns and villages cropped up around the many natural harbours. With the settlers came new wildlife - both intentional such as sheep and cattle, and unintentional - small mammals such as mice, rabbits and rats were soon a common sight across the islands. General Bartholomew's victory led to the main island, previously known as Vasteland (Mainland in English) being renamed in his honour and now Bartholomew is the location of the main settlement Staunton. Well that sets the scene for this City Journal! I'm a fairly fresh face on Simtropolis but I've been a member of the site for a number of years now, just been content to read and enjoy everyone else's CJs without ever putting one together myself. Well, I've made a commitment to myself to change that, and after a couple of false starts, here we are! The Northward Isles Protectorate is your typical island colony, though I'm attempting to make this one slightly more populous and urban than say the Falklands! I'd like to make it clear though before I get any further into this CJ that it is a platform that neither defends nor attacks colonialism, it is merely just an interesting backstory to a bunch of ocean islands, so no political debates please! I'll be updating this as often as I can, and as I'm starting from scratch it may be a little while before we see any skyscrapers, but I'm looking forward to the adventure of finally giving an SC4 region a proper shot. Without further ado, let's get to some images. First of all, what introductory post would be complete without a region view? Here are the islands in all their glory: This is a region I've terraformed myself and comprises four large city tiles along with numerous medium and small tiles around them. As you can see, I really am starting from scratch on this! Also, you'll have to excuse the mis-matched colours on different parts - I couldn't get them all to save on the same colour! The names of the islands' five Districts are visible on the map. Bartholomew has already been introduced but the others are included for reference. I'll be aiming to get some level of development (whether that's rural agricultural areas or urban towns and cities) across all of the islands so chances are the CJ will flit between different places depending on what I've been working on. And to finish off, the Northward Isles' flag, for those interested: The Union Jack is a reminder of the islands' status as a protectorate within the Commonwealth, whilst the coat of arms signifies a number of aspects. Firstly, the five-pointed yellow star represents the five Districts that make up the islands' government. The green and blue represent the harmony between land and sea that has characterised life on the islands since they were settled, and the white stripe is a symbol of strength, referencing an old island tale that has been passed down the generations. Maybe I'll tell it one day! Anyway, that's it for the introduction, keep a look out for new updates which I'll endeavour to make as frequent as possible, and most importantly thanks for reading! I look forward to your comments and questions - ask away!

I like the terraforming and landscaping, especially Old Man's Teeth - brilliant! :D

Really, really good! I like the effects you've put on the images - really gives it that feel of a fairly quiet town. It's great to have the variety and distinction between big cities and settlements like this and the mods you're using really help in that respect. Great work!

The stories about the packed markets and fistfights is similar to what Covent Garden used to be like in London up until the 1970s! Great work as always Paeng!

Fantastic! Absolutely love this CJ, very realistic and really detailed as well. Simsinnati has to be the best name I've ever seen as well!