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CDB

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Everything posted by CDB

  1. Modular Cemetary Pack

    That's strange. All the lots are just parks with props, no one should work as an actual cemetary. Maybe it's just some conflict with some other mod...
  2. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    Originally posted by: Benedict Probably not. Wikipedia has an explanation. Basically it is your color setting for your image. CMYK has spaces between the dots (i.e. white space) that your brain uses to make colors - saves on printing costs. Not sure why transit maps look better in CMYK, though. Care to enlighten us, Zombones?quote> Not really, it's a matter of how colours are formed. I hope I can make it clear, it's hard to explain it in English. (EDIT: I fixed a couple of parts, I hope I didn't make this even messier). First, a little bit of theory: we need to separete proper Colours from paints. it's all a matter of light. Our eyes are "just" photoreceptors, what they see is light. Colours are just light radiations at a determined frequency; I'll use the capital C when I'm referring to them (bad thing when one's vocabulary is not as rich as it should be). Colours is what is used in TV screens, Computer monitors, etc. If you put together all the Colours of the spectrum, you obtain white (it's logical: if you add more frequencies - that means more light - to the system, you get the brightest light). Full sunlight is always white. At dawn and sunrise it seems coloured because light beams hit the Earth at an angle and part of the radiations are deflected by the atmosphere. A paint (actually, the proper word is pigment), instead, is coloured because it absorbs from the white sunlight all the light radiations except the ones corrisponding to the colour that you see, which are reflected. All the phisical substances are paints. If you put together all the paints corrisponding to the spectrum Colours, you obtain somthing close to black, because most of the radiations are absorbed. Real, pure, black is nearly impossible to achieve with just the sum of different paints, but that would be a huge and largely useless digression from the point of the post. Without light, objects have no visible tint: in the countryside in the middle of the night, for example, you can't clearly see the colour of anything. To make it brief, Colours are nearly always brighter than paints because paints gain a tint as they absorb light. CMYK in graphic programs simulates the paints, RGB the Colours. That's why on RGB you can have brighter colours but it works properly only if you see it on a monitor (if you try to print a RGB image, you'll end with most of the colours screwed in tones and brightness because, obviously, inks and toners are paints), and on CMYK you get less bright colours but it works better when you are making a picture that is supposet to be printed. There's no actual difference on the edges, it's just an optical illusion: the brighter a colour is, the most it stands out.
  3. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    davidaiow: Not really. I have tons of "New City n° x". When some good name for something comes to mind I use the chat to change the name of the city. Once I chose the name for one of the rivers and then renamed all the cities along it *rivername*-ton / -borough, etc. I didn't like it, I reverted those to "New City" shortly after. Never thought about the random name generator, I'll try it. Thanks! heitomat: Many thanks. I'm working on division lines diagrams, I'll post them in a few days.
  4. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    To make comparisons, Derry is roughly four large maps with some parts of the outskirts in the neighbouring maps.
  5. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    No subway, this time. It's a map of the regional commuter rail service (heavy rail in game terms) of a big and well developed region. There is a little bit of story behind, but I don't feel to make a CJ, I don't think that there is enough things to tell. The City of Derry (the lighter area roughly in the middle of the map) is composed by four boroughs that in XIX century were indipendent cities. Each city was served by its own private rail company. When the cities were united in Derry and the regional railway authority was founded, the new lines were grouped in divisions (red, East Division; blue, South Division; green, West Division; gray, Metropolitan Division) roughly based on the old companies lines, with some exceptions: the northern and western companies (I didn't make up a name, yet) were united under the West Division and the lines closer to Derry outskirt became the Metropolitan Division, with peripherical metro-like services between the suburbs an the city. I'd really like to finish it and add names to the stations (actually, the names of the towns), but I'm really a disaster when it comes to choose names for anything. Any suggestion?
  6. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    img256.imageshack.us/i/greenhillmetro.jpg/ New map. Not finished, yet.
  7. Berlusconi immunity law overruled

    Also, some Italians get brainwashed, as you can clearly see in the previous post.
  8. Berlusconi immunity law overruled

    Originally posted by: Duke87 Interesting. In the US, the president has such immunity granted by the constitution. The police can't arrest the president, nor can he stand trial like any other citizen while in office. Instead, the senate has to impeach him. The logic here being that it would be a bad idea to let local authorities have the power to compromise the presidency by arresting him for jaywalking or some other silly thing because they don't like him. And arresting his underlings won't work either since he can just pardon them from whatever crimes they may be accused of. I don't know if the concept of impeachment exists in parliamentary democracy, so I don't know that this approach would work for Italy. Although I suppose even without it parliament would have the authority to call an election (a power congress here absolutely does not have), get him voted out of office, and then you could arrest him and make him stand trial. Indeed, there is something to be said for the argument that having the leader of your country be on trial severely hinders their ability to do their job of, well, leading - so immunity makes sense in that regard. quote> There is no impeachment, but the police can arrest someone in the government only if the Parliament votes to allow the arrest, even after the sentence of a court. That should be enough, IMHO. The problem is that Berlusconi is involved in tons of trials for corruption and the such, most if not all of them not related to his activity as politician (it's common opinion among his opposers that he became a politician to hide or fix his past crimes by manipulation of the law) and he doesn't want to be judged, plain and simple. He's screwing Italian justice for the past 15 years to avoid judgement: depenalization of serious financial crimes, reducements of prescription times, attempts to make some kind of proof illegal... nevertheless, he seems involved in such a huge amount of s**** that no matter what he does, there's always something he can be put under judgement for. That's why he's aiming for total immunity. Also, the main problem with this law is that Italy's Prime Minister has no limit to his terms and can be re-elected any time he wants, which basically means a potential lifetime immunity. Not a good thing. As for the elections, it's a little bit more convoluted. I hope I'll be able to explain this correctly. There are the President of the Republic (head of State with little power), the Presidents of the Chambers and the President of the Council of Ministers, which is a fancy name for the Prime Minister (head of government). In theory (later I'll explain why), the Parliament is elected by the citizens. Every seven years the Parliament in joint session elects the President of the Republic. After every national election (every five years, if the government doesn't resign before the end of the term), each Chamber elects its President and the elected majority nominates the Prime Minister (well, officially he or she is nominated by the President of the Republic with the advise of the majority, but that's just pro forma) who chooses the other members of the government. The government needs the vote of support by the Parliament at the beginning of the legislature and the Parliament or the government can call for other support votations at any time. To make it brief, the Parliament can make the government resign by calling a support votation and voting against it; then if there is still a majority a new government is formed, otherwise new elections are called. I said "in thery" because after the "mani pulite" corruption scandal (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani_pulite) direct vote to the deputies or senators was considered too prone to the so called "voto di scambio" (exchange vote, that is "if you vote for me, I'll grant you some personal favour"), so the electoral law was changed to allow only blocked list of deputies and senators nominated by the respective party . Berlusconi kicked in this system with a colaition in 2001 and now a party born from that coalition that was ans still is an ungodly mixture of former political adversaries of the right side (liberists, right socialists, laics, catholics, nationalists, federalist, Mani Pulite leftovers, men suspected to be mafiosi, you name it) who, according to a lot of people's opinion (shared even by some Berlusconi supporters), are still together just because of Berlusconi's personal charisma (and his money, maybe ). To make it brief, the present majority has no possible candidate other than Berlusconi, most of his party's deputies are his trusted men (there are even his lawyers among them) or are kept quiet by giving them some important role in government commissions or with the promulgation of some law of their interest, so there are little possibilities that his majority falls apart and lives him and his government without the support vote.
  9. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    Final version. Since I forgot to add the keys to read the map: black is regional/national rail, gray is cityrail, coloured is rapid transit (full line is elevated, dotted is underground). I don't think I'll work on this city any more. It's time to move on a new region.
  10. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    Small update: a new elevated line added, rerouted the blue one and corrected some errors (some stations missing and, in the previous map, the violet line estern terminal was in the wrong place).
  11. Show us your city, road or transit maps!

    It's been a while since I palyed SC4. This is the map of the rapid transit of my new city: Full lines are elevated tracks, the dotted line is the only (for now) subway. EDIT: Sorry for the size, why I always find so hard to post thumbnails on SImtropolis? Every time I try i get the "broken link" pic
  12. According to latest news, the deads are over 40. http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/regioni/abruzzo/news/2009-04-06_106337465.html (sorry, the link is only in italian) EDIT: RTE updated the news too
  13. Venezia Real size

    Good work! @ vampiregirl: yes, the insular parts of Venice are almost totally flat.
  14. The first game was a Tetris clone. Then I bought the Game Gear and, few years later, the Genesis. First PC game was the glorious Monkey Island, on my old 286
  15. Fail.

  16. Plan a good fire coverage and you'll have no more fires.
  17. Happy New Year

    Happy new year everyone! (My greetings are nearly 11 hours late, here in good old Milan, but I had no computer, tonight ).
  18. Single Rail Railroads

    As far as I know, there's only a non functional eye-candy set with single traks.
  19. what to do when bus stops are congested

    First of all, a transit enabled lot is a kind of lot introduced by the Rush Hour expansion pack that allows traffic to pass through it. the default SC4 toll boths, el rail and monorail stations are transit enabled lots. There's a couple of issues with all the transit enabled lots, even the original made by Maxis: if used on road they don't provide road access to the adjacent buildings and there's no distinction between passengers in transit and passengers who actually use the stop/station to get on the mass transit, si there is only one statistic about the capacity, and it depends on the station. Nam doesn't affect the capacity of any stations because of it's non-lots policy. So if you build, for example, a standard road top station on any of the roads with the x2 or X5 NAM setting, you make a bottleneck. That's why you should install the RTMT set that matches the NAM settings that you chose or a higher one. The RTMT allows you to choose to install one of three different sets of stations (every set hase the same look of the others, but different capacities), each ones designed to work with one of the three capacity options of the NAM. So we have a standard capacity (same as Maxis default settings), a X2 capacity and a X5 capacity to match the Nam standard, X2 and X5 traffic plug-ins. Also, besides the on-road stops, you have a set of three one-tile stations (one for the bus, one for the subway, and one with both bus and subway) that are normal ploppable buildings like the default SC4 mass transit stops, whith the eye-candy advantage that they have the same props of the on-road ones. If you don't like to use the on-road stops, you can still use the last three I mentioned, they work as the default stops only with incrased capacity. The answer is a bit convoluted , but I hope that is clear.
  20. what to do when bus stops are congested

    You can Download the Road Top Mass Transit by Cogeo ( https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?id=13510 ): this mod has multiple capacity options you can choose when you install it (and standard road-side stops too, if you don't want to build stops on the roads), to meet with the raised networks capacity of the NAM. EDIT: just seen that you already considered this solution. As for your questions: 1- Yes, the RTMT has incrased capacity stops, designed around the NAM capacity options. So, IMHO is the best solution if you use the NAM. 2- No, NAM increases the capacity of the network, not the capacity of the stations. This beacuse of the non-lots policy of the mod. You have to download custom stations for that. 3- The subway-bus thing is tricky. If you delete the bus stops, there are chances that Sims won't use the new subway that much, because it is'nt integrated with the network. Leave the bus stops or replace tham with higher capacity ones (think about them as capillary distribution of passengers) and build the subway near the stops that already exist to link the most conjested of them. That's for your problem, after that you can extend your subways wherever you like, of course. 4- That's an issue of all the transit enabled lots, not only of the RTMT: they cut the road access in front of them. However, if the building is larger than one tile, or it grows at the corner between two roads, there's no problem. So, you can place the RTMT stop near a crossing and you'll be OK.
  21. Monorail vs subway

    Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember that the transit team said that the bug can't be fixed
  22. Monorail vs subway

    Originally posted by: sobol vershner: Me2. That's what I am trying to figure out.. what's up with the El/GLR as well.quote>Did you have any transit enabled lot? If you move the cursor with a puzzle piece over one of them, the game crashes. The only workaround is to build all the tracks, leave the space for the stops, and then build the stations. As for the subject of the topic, I prefer the Subway. I'm not really a planner, so subways are easier to build when the city is already developed.
  23. I just downloaded a 4.5mb bat, and everythig was right
  24. Originally posted by: Gridlock You want a pathfinding engine make it yourself , what happens if no body makes one , what happens if nobody makes nothing for SCS , why should we/they . You cant rely on the fans to finish the game . Anything that is added comes as little bonuses and shouldnt be an essential feature . imho .quote> Oblivion anyone? Still, I tink that is too early to make copnjectures. Well, i HOPE that's too early to make conjectures.
  25. Originally posted by: Gridlock You want a pathfinding engine make it yourself , what happens if no body makes one , what happens if nobody makes nothing for SCS , why should we/they . You cant rely on the fans to finish the game . Anything that is added comes as little bonuses and shouldnt be an essential feature . imho .quote> Oblivion anyone? Still, I tink that is too early to make copnjectures. Well, i HOPE that's too early to make conjectures.
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