starrdarcy

Show Us Your Suburbs!! By Khalsa Starr I felt like creating a thread for those who have sprawling suburbs in their regions. Please give us a link or pic of your city's suburban areas and share your idea on how you design them. My burbs... These two pictures are part of a region entirely dedicated to suburban living, notice that all roads lead to the main highway, this is a small city and already the numbers of the highways have exceeded 5000 - think what it would be like on a large city! All the houses are middle class and cookie cuter - just like in real life! It seems as if sims can be coaxed into going the only way possible to work, heh heh. The more quieter suburbs have their own treed back yeards and are away from the downtown grinder. Isn't this the way to live?? I got my ideas from a city i built myself, kind of a crude comparison, however this pic shows the similarities between this and my simcity suburbs. More pics go HERE or HERE -khalsa starr

Hey Folks, it`s starrdarcy here, here is my recent trip to Taiwan in 2019. I will be moving to the island nation later this year in 2022 as I love it there. Hope everyone is doing well, and yeah I`m returning to the boards after a long while! More on what I`ve been up to here: https://peakd.com/@dcardinal1985/posts

Well Guys, all i can say from looking at this page and and other threads on this website, the community has grown and it almost makes me want to start rebuilding some of my past projects, albeit with some modifications. Keep up the good work! -Starrdarcy

Zoning for Industrial By starrdarcy 8O Zone parcels for industrial??!! Yes, it can be done – zoning for industrial. And it is actually very beneficial for you city and also adds some more realism to your industrial lands. I’m surprised more people don’t know how to zone proper industrial parcels. The default way of putting down industrials isn’t very realistic because you don’t often see the actual lots as well the development is often very clattered and unorganized. With parcel zoning for industrial you have control of how the development will build. The process is very simple: just hold down the CTRL and drag industrial near a road as if you were zoning for residential and commercial. You can also use the ALT key to alternate parcel direction when facing more than one road. I supplied a few pictures to demonstrate my point. Step One: Find some land You need land in order to lay out some industrial parcels. I suggest finding zoning and medium or large area, however you can zone small areas for community industrial and to raise local residential demand. In the following picture I kicked out some farmers for the new high-tech industrial park. Step Two: Roads and Scenery You obviously need roads to get the lots working, so start putting down some roads to service the lots. Roads and streets: You may lay out the lots in whatever pattern you like, keep in mind that it is usually not a good idea to make to many diagonal roads because the lots will look strange when they develop. I suggest lay out a simple design when building roads. Scenery and trees:In order to make a nice looking industrial area, why not add some scenery like trees and parks? Add some trees around the area for border or a noise barrier. Parks and pads can be used when your interested in create a high-tech village. You can even use a golf-course for the workers to tee of at lunch time! Step Three: Start Zoning! Ok, the most important step is to actually lay down the zones. Be sure not to make the parcels too big! Because the lots won’t develop or will take a very long time to build. I usually zone 2X2, 2X3, 3X3, 3X4 and similar. Ok. Select either medium or heavy industrial and zoom down to your new industrial area. Then hold down the CTRL, click and drag the industrial near the road. You will not actually see the parcel arrows (like for res and comm.), so just remember the concept that all zones will point to the nearest road. One you release, the new industrial parcel will appear. If you zone near two roads, you can alternate the parcel arrows by holding the ALT key. This is the result: Watch and Develop As soon as you complete the industrial area, make any last minute changes and make sure you have your lots ready. You will now start the forward button to start the simulation. The first thing you notice when you turn on the power is that the lots develop into tidy lots and look very similar to real life industrial areas. And because the parcels have been pre-defined, the game will not cut up, and randomize the development layout. Sometimes, the game will take over nearby lots to create a larger building, don’t worry about this – it's a good sign when that starts to occur. The first development! Later on in the simulation… You can now start to zone more industrial nearby for a larger area or you can start a whole new area. I chose to add to my small industrial area, I annexed some nearby farms and laid down some more parcels. I kept with the scenery theme – high-tech suburban industrial park. More industrial for businesses your Sims will never know about. No doubt it developed. In SimNation S, development tends to happen very fast with very high demands. The new parcels were snapped up and built into more soon-to-be-broke dot-com companies and AMD chip manufacturing plants. A few suggestions to keep in mind Be sure that your zones are not to big! This is a must if your lots to develop. Some larger zones will eventually develop however it will take a while before the demand is strong enough to justify the building of the lot. The common parcel sizes are displayed In the next two pictures. For large area, the most common parcel sizes. For smaller parcels. Another suggestion is to create several medium sized industrial areas so that Sims don’t have to commute far and to spread out the pollution when dealing with dirty industrial. The parcel method for zoning is best for manufacturing and high-tech, dirty is just a waste of space often. And remember, adding scenery is also a good touch to the work place, so add trees, parks, pads and alike. If you want a short animation on the process, you can find the download HERE. This file is around 8mb’s. So that’s it on zoning for industrial. I’m sure the veterans on SCC already know how to do this already, and they can probably relate to what I’m talking about. The last pic is what happened later on in the game. Comments welcome. Cheers, -starrdarcy FYI: the farmers did get a lot of money for those lots!

St members... More pics from the suburbs, they are really starting to turn out the way i want them, though i am still working on the desired dirt texture for them. I will probably end up releasing these lots as plopable lots for those who dont mind pruning their cities and creating realism in there city journalism I have been getting several requests to release some of my work to the public, idealy i would however right now i have to give people a warning that these lots are non functional in nature and only serve as eye candy lots. Also, the remains lots of modding to be done in order to make the usage of the lots less cumbersome than they are now... Anyways, here are some more pictures Thats if for now folks... -Darcy

Hey ST members, im back... of course the suburban project has been chugging along, thought i would show my suburbs... this time, im doing some construction... These lots are still in beta mode of coure, as im trying to figure out the right dirt color and adding additional detail to the lots themselves. As for new houses, there are few new ones, however, they are not shown in the following pictures, as well there is a powecenter and commercial lots im working on, but far from completed, anyways... on to the goods Ive gotten this idead while doing a fly over of some cities in Google Earth originally, since suburbs are new areas... why not show the progress from start to finish? this area is in a heavily wooded map, locatin uknowk, but i was trying to go for an Albertan feel... The general idea of these lots is to show what the suburbs look like BEFORE they actually are occupied... here there are unpaved road sections, and empty landscaped land... A close up of a suburb, with freshly place ashphalt and unpaved sections waiting to be completed, with signs of new houses being constucted. The home construction have since been updated and shown in a later update. A developing suburb... there are some new road pieces which are not easily visable in these pictures, but they are the ones with the concrete strip in the middle, show in the upper right section of this picture. Last but not least... i have been experimenting on different ground textures for the exposed dirt lots, however, i have been unable to come to a clear decision on which one, however i have been leaning more towards the first on shown here, with more lighter, bolder look. These pictures are of earlier attempts at this lot type... One final word... there still is alot of work that needs to be completed here, including storm water ponds, commercial lots, lights and power boxes as well as working on the construction scenese. As one would imagine with all these custom content... the parks menu, where all the custom material shows up for me has become cumbersome to use, and pruning these suburbs are long proccesses, however, the end product looks good in my opinion... -Darcy

The Most recent picture of myself, or at least the one i have at the moment. Its a bigger version of a my avatar of course. -Darcy Cardinal

Originally posted by: Joetropian1 Starrdarcy, does it have any blogs or forums?If so, I may add it. JT1quote> Yes, its a blog. If there is anyone else who has a website, they should also post it up.

all add mine in, however there isn't any downloadable content right now: www.sklion.com

Hey Jason, good work there buddy, I was thinking about this a long time ago, what you said about the textureing over modeling is good advice, i try to do that as much as possible, as it can dramatically lower the poly count in your model. -Darcy Cardinal

Hey Jason, good work buddy, One thing that i notice is that most people will model something, when they could really make it a texture, thanks for pointing that out, since many newbies to BAT dont realize that. -Darcy Cardinal

Hey, cubsfan0624 I see you are looking for an answer to a popular question, i think the initial planning that you do while starting out your city generally dictates how your city will look in the future. Though the one thing i see many members doing here is planning out everything, right down to highways and districts. IT is okay, however it should be known that placing highways and avenues when no sim has set foot in your city is well... kind of unrealistic, unless you are in Dubai or some other instant city. Grids will also be your guidelines to work with, however if you take a look at some of the city journals out there, you will see some of the amazing work done to make cities less gridded. Check out the ol' edmonton city journal, it has been around for a while, and the author has done some sweet work doing this. -Darcy Cardinal

It's probably been mentioned before, but there could be other shades of light going on in that building, to simulate different lighting conditions. Once that gets done, this building would be almost perfect, keep up the good work friend!

Wow, it looks as if this game will be taking over where SimCity left off of, some of these shots look as if they where taken from real life. -Darcy Cardinal

Wow, this game looks to take over where SimCity left off of, some of these shots look like there from real life lol. I am looking forward to this. -Darcy Cardinal

Vista huh... thats odd, works fine with mine, whats you video cardÉ -Darcy Cardinal

This question has dogged me for a long time, i turned on some of the better ordinances but to no quick avail. From what i have seen and experience, it takes quite a while to build up a good manufacturing and high-tech industry in your city. Anyone else care to reveal the silver bullet here? -Darcy Cardinal

Somehow links don't work will today: www.sklion.com -Darcy Cardinal

Hey, cmdp123789 i just noticed this thread... i'm happy to see another person using Sketchup here, seems to be a rarity these days, they all went elsewhere! Anyways if you are looking for exporting to SimCity, unless you have the Pro Version you will have to it the long route... but that is just to much work in my opinion, i have a export 3DS service on my site if you want to take that path instead, its free. Anyways, you can create models in Sketchup and export them to Gmax/3DSmax and all textures will be preserved. However, you will still have ot add in the lods and lighting in Gmax and save it to work in Simcity 4. I prefer sketchup since i have been using the program since version 1, which was quite some time ago. Regardless cmdp123789, take a look at my website to see what can be done in SKetchup for SimCity, i'll pm you on it too. -Darcy Cardinal

Interesting, that's all i have to say for now.

If this game was released as SC3000 back in the day, then it would be awesome. However i am under the impression that some games aren't meant to go true 3D, i like the isometric view of the current SC4 game. One more thing... curing roads are okay as long as the buildings can conform to the curves as well. Nonetheless, no one can really say how it feels and plays until one tries it. -Darcy Cardinal

Some other mods the think about are water and ground mods, as this will make a dramatic change to your game by replacing the maxis standard textures with more realistic textures. -Darcy Cardinal

Impressive indeed, this will make an awesome addition to the community, -Darcy Cardinal

Originally posted by: autoVino Thanks. The file format is a *.sc4model file, which is a composite of a few different file types (it is synonymous to a *.dat file, which packs data, the only difference is that it can be directly accessed by sc4plugin manager because of the xml file inside it). It contains the following: 1. a directory file to direct where in memory the different files should be stored when the file is unpacked and being used. 2. s3d model files for each zoom and rotation (a total of 20) which represent the shape of the faces on the LOD that face the camera. This is the file that is directly displayed in the game. 3. FSH files which are composite files of a bitmaps and an alpha channel, these are 256px by 256px in size and are mapped on the s3d file. The number that exist for each s3d file varies depending on the size of the s3d. The larger the s3d the more fsh files are linked to it 4. an xml file to allow for linking into sc4 plugin manager. It contains basic file properties such as size, name, etc. The s3ds, xml, and dir file are to be created with the gmax sc4bat tool (I guess it is possible to create it however you want if you have the time or have a script that will do it for you). The FSH files, although they already exist in the sc4model file from gmax (but should be blank) are to be rendered via manual rendering or script from your renderer of choice (currently gmax is supported by the sc4bat tool and 3ds max is 90% supported with the bat4max tool. It works most of the time but big problems still exist). I don't think there is a current possible way to directly export from sketchup or other modelling programs the way there is from 3ds max or gmax, but if the program in question supports scripting it should be possible (with a lot of work of course). I would recommend (if you have 3ds max) exporting as a 3ds or similar format to 3ds max and rendering via bat4max from there.quote> Thanks, autoVino for the information i can sort of see what needs to get done. As for an export straight out Sketchup to SimCity, it is highly unlikely. However i dont think its impossible too do either - since there has been a recent exporter made for the source engine. However the one thing i would like to see get done is the ability to export sketchup files to another format like 3DS or similar which can export lod shells, lighting rigs, cameras and preserve texture transparencies. Right now, one has to have the pro version in order to export 3DS and even then, once you export from 3DS you still have to touch it up in Gmax, including applying lods, lights, transparences and editing the meshes is hard since during the conversion from SKP to 3DS the model is spliced up into triangles resulting in a scary mess to deal with. As for scripting in SKP, there is ruby scripting and i know there is several plugins for sketchup where you can export your files with lightings rigs and cameras, for example SKP to Kerkythea and a few other render programs, and you can even render in Sketchup with SUPodium, since Sketchup doesnt render models like 3DSMax By itself. So if there is already a source exporter being worked on, you can export lighting rigs to other programs and even render in Sketchup - then one could at least make an export from SKP to Gmax/3DSMax more easier. I will be personally be experimenting and asking around to pull this off. Again, thanks autoVino -Darcy Cardinal

Originally posted by: masochist Well, each small city tile is exactly 1 km x 1 km, medium tiles are 2 km x 2 km, and large tiles are 4 km x km. Some simple conversions (1 kilometer = approx. 0.6214 miles), and you have: Small Tile = 0.6214 x 0.6214 mi., or 0.3861 sq. mi. Medium Tile = 1.2428 x 1.2428 mi., or 1.5446 sq. mi. Large Tile = 2.4855 x 2.4855 mi., or 6.1777 sq. mi.quote> Yes those are correct however, if you take a look at close look at all the props, buildings, people and cars, you will notice that the scale is quite off. When you crete buildings which are to real world scale, it looks kind of small when compared to maxis standard game material. -Darcy Cardinal