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rob_mtl

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Everything posted by rob_mtl

  1. Continued work on regional rail and expansion in the central city:
  2. A new power plant and speedway in the central city plus development around rail stations.
  3. Honestville gets a new central train station.
  4. Hey Simtropolis! Some of you will know my YouTube channel, Rob's Red Hot Spot, and my SC4 tutorial and Let's Play series. I'd like to do an episode (possibly a recurring series) with one of the more experienced players from Simtropolis. The idea would be that you participate in a voice chat and screen-share session for the recording of the episode. We'll work through city design and mechanics live over the course of the episode and sort of collaborate to work on my current Lets Play region, Honestville. All you would need is a headset and microphone. We'll work out the details of the screenshare/recording after. While I've made a series of tutorials and am an experienced player, everyone has their own approach and focusses on specific aspects of the game. I think it could be really fun and beneficial for viewers to see a video dialogue of this sort. Please let me know if you're interested or have ideas for content. Cheers, Rob
  5. Hey @chfzdn ! I haven't checked this thread and missed your message. I'm especially interested in other YouTubers with different SC4 playstyles! Get in touch via PM here and we can talk!
  6. Honestville gets a regional plan for future expressways and passenger rail.
  7. The passenger rail network expands along with the regional garbage complex in North Ward.

  8. Making (Real Life) Money off SimCity 4

    rob_mtl replied to Propfam's topic in General Off-Topic

    Hey so just to weigh in. My channel is up to nearly 800 subscribers, largely as a result of SimCity 4 gameplay and especially tutorials. I've taken a little break from making content for the past few weeks because of real life stuff, but I expect once I get a regular upload schedule going again, I'll hit 1000 subs by Christmas or so. (Not trying to be boastful or anything, just a fairly realistic outlook given the trajectory of the channel). At that point I can "monetize" my channel on YT--ie. put ads on videos--which I might do for the most popular tutorial videos. Other options include mail-order merch, Patreon and similar donation services (things I will keep in mind in the future if things go well) as well as sponsored videos--these options look like better revenue than the built-in YouTube ad system which tends to pay out in pennies unless you are basically an internet celebrity. Twitch also has some decent monetization options for live streaming and I would (and will) be looking into those as well. In terms of what type of content--even just to build subscribers if not make money-- "evergreen" content like tutorials, modding guides, etc has been the key, for me, to building a subscriber base, while my regular weekly Let's Play content is where long-term subscribers hang out. The weekly episodes are less labour-intensive than the tutorials to produce but generate less views. From a "business" standpoint, they fill the channel with content to complement the more "lucrative" evergreen stuff. They're also fun and easy to make! Feel free to reach out to me here to get more into details or ideas--I'm also open to collaboration ideas. SIDE NOTE for any of my viewers who might be here: My YouTube channel, for the time being, is purely a hobby and I don't make any money from it as I'm writing this. I am certainly open to monetization possibilities if things go well. If I do go down that rabbit-hole I will try to be as transparent about it as possible and make judicious choices about how/in what way I ask viewers to contribute. I think asking for money for making online video content is perfectly fair and reasonable--but I would never want to spam or pressure viewers to contribute or lessen the quality of content for the sole purpose of making a buck.
  9. Honestville gets a passenger rail line and road widening as the regional population hits 100k.
  10. North Ward gets the Industrial Revolution Mod PLUS check out Honestville Extra on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/rob_spot
  11. Hey @Tyberius06! It's really cool that you're taking the time to update and reorganize files. It's simply amazing the commitment and passion people have for modding this 15 year-old+ game! I can remember about 6 years ago playing SimCity 4 on the Macbook Pro 2010 I used in college (a faithful beast of burden that I finally gave away earlier this year--the thing still runs fine) and being essentially limited to mods that didn't use .exe files, which meant tiptoeing around anything TE to avoid CTDs! Now I'm on a PC, and have learned many tricks for organizing my mods and the like. Anyway, keep up the good work!
  12. @Cyclone Boom thanks for the shoutout!

  13. Hey kids! I'm going to be streaming some mod testing in my Let's Play region Honestville momentarily!

    https://www.twitch.tv/rob_spot

    welcome final.jpg

  14. The first terminal of the Honestville Port Authority is constructed in North Ward.
  15. Yeah I'm going to work on a design like that soon! I do like the kind of harrowing, crazy look early inner city expressways have with crooked narrow lanes and uneven surfaces but it would probably look better in game with straight collectors.
  16. Seeing as I've veered this thread off-topic (in terms of diagonals) I made a new thread.
  17. I'm using the draggable transitions to switch from one RHW to another. It's the transition to 3-lane OWR that has been temperamental and takes a few extra tiles. I totally get keeping the collector lanes one tile away. The purpose of this experiment was to see just how compact you can get with an express/collector configuration. I'll post a new photo soon with updated configuration.
  18. I'll have to try that! EDIT: It works, but the transition takes up a few extra tiles.
  19. Ok. So for my Montreal Metropolitan Expressway inspired express/service road system I've come up with this: It's a high capacity inner city expressway that uses the fewest possible on-ramps and off-ramps to save space while allowing for multiple perpendicular roadways to access a single ramp system via the collector boulevard. The only limiting factor here was that RHW-6S can't make intersections with avenues, so I had to transition to RHW-4 to make it work. The ramps are two lane and the express segment between the two sets of ramps is RHW-6C, while the main portion of the highway on either side of the ramp system is RHW-8C. It's basically as compact as MHW and even more compact than MHW in some segments!
  20. Honestville's North Ward develops along the waterfront:
  21. This is the best I could do with RHW: I couldn't get the three-lane OWRs from the NWM to connect to the MIS lanes. Even the vanilla, two-lane OWRs don't seem to connect quite "properly". Also the whole thing takes a huge amount of space. The ramps are super long and I'd like to be able to not have any tile gap between the service road and the expressway. Let me know if you think I'm doing something wrong (quite likely). For the time being, though, I find this more realistic:
  22. Hey folks! Sorry to revive this aging thread, but I am also experimenting with very compact urban expressways. Here is what I am trying to replicate: The below image is the Metropolitan Expressway in Montreal. The central, elevated portion is a six-lane expressway. The exterior, ground-level roadways are one-way collector boulevards. The purpose of these collectors is that they make a single exit ramp serve to connect with many cross-streets. Cars can easily join and exit the expressway from these collectors. And there's no need for gigantic diamond interchanges for the exits. Here, we have another Montreal highway, the Décarie Expressway. In this variation on the same design, the central, expressway road is in a trench, while the collector boulevard is at surface level.

  23. Region Bitmap size incorrect

    rob_mtl replied to kita's topic in Mapping Community Room

    Ok I thought as much. Never tested it, but I had wondered whether neighbour connections were affected. I didn't know the region maps were thumbnails but that makes sense! Thanks for putting all those links together! I've read many of these in the past but this saves me the hassle of tracking them down again. Your CORIMAPS method is really cool! At some point I'd like to figure out how to make to scale maps from GIS raster images too and make a video on that.
  24. In this episode, I build some of the key infrastructure for the region's first city tile.

  25. Region Bitmap size incorrect

    rob_mtl replied to kita's topic in Mapping Community Room

    Hey guys! Thrilled to see talk of my Plantation Bay and Altana (Honestville) videos here :). I've been thinking of doing a video on rendering maps. I even started one but realized I wasn't totally clear on some details and am doing experiments to make sure I give the best advice possible. For Plantation Bay, for example, I used the CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+R method and rendered the map ingame. For Altana, I used SC4Mapper to redo the config.bmp (I really prefer working with SC4Mapper rather than MS Paint), copied the new config.bmp into the region folder with the greyscale jpg, but rendered the .jpg ingame using CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+R. I had previously rendered Altana in SC4Mapper but found that when opening it in the game each tile had to be "re-rendered" when first opening it, a very time consuming process for such a big map. @CorinaMarie that's really interesting regarding the precision in elevation using SC4M. I'll make a note of it for my eventual video. One question: If you play on maps in regions rendered in SC4Mapper, is it necessary to load and render every tile in the game before starting play, or can you just render them as you use them? @CorinaMarie, @Cyclone Boom and others with extensive map knowledge: I'd love to here your suggestions for a video about handling downloaded maps from the STEX. I'd like to give the viewer a few different methods, ranging from the simplest to execute to more precise and complex methods. I'm getting lots of questions on YouTube on this topic so I think a tutorial video is in order soon!
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