Janbiya

Kei--Looks good, nice and complex. Big city interchanges are really works of art. However it'd look just a little bit more real to life I think if you used some fractional angle ramps and curves. Samness7--I think that the folded diamond with the Ave-4 90 degree turns turned out really well, and you've definitely got that spaghetti junction feeling going with your larger project. --- I built two new interchanges today for a collaborative Dropbox region that I'm working on along with a bunch of other people from the SimCity 4 subreddit. I thought they both turned out pretty nice, so here they are: This asymmetric trumpet was the first interchange I ever built using the C-type RHW networks. Hopefully the first of many. I think this parclo is the best of its variety that I've built so far. The development in the picture is the first area that I've actually built up so far in the region.

I recently updated the central interchange in one of my older cities in order to widen the mainlines and include all sorts of niceties like fractional angle ramps, cosmetic pieces, and merge lanes--or at least as much as I could without dramatically changing the interchange's footprint. Check out the original version from October for comparison! It was my first ever four way RHW interchange!

I updated some of the pictures when I saw that I hadn't fully closed the UI and it screwed up the links. Should be fixed now.

It's been a good six months since I last played my region of Prospect Bay intensively. When I started this MD, I had already started another, much larger region called Yakutat Bay which more and more came to consume all of my SC4 efforts as I worked on it. I'll be making an MD for that region eventually too, but first I want to round this one out a little because Prospect Bay is close to being finished. Last time, I said that my next entry would focus on the city of Port Deliverance. I've decided against that. The city was the first that I built in the Prospect Bay region, and does not come close to living up to the standards that I build today. Plus, it's really small so there's not too much interesting to see. In general my play style has changed a lot since I started Prospect Bay more than a year ago. It was the first region I played based on real world terrain, and also the first where I had realism and organic development at the top of my priorities list. Consequently, there are a lot of things I would do differently if I were to go about building this region again. Foremost among those are the designs for the region's freeway interchanges. I literally built out my learning process with RHW from scratch in them, and as a result they do not conform to contemporary highway standards. That's why I decided to go into the region's largest city, Lagos, and update its most important central interchange. Here's a map of the highways in the Lagos metro area. Wide lines represent freeways while narrower lines represent at-grade alignments. As you can see, the city is still very much a work in progress with new neighborhoods in development for quite a ways along the southern urban fringe. The highway interchange I updated is the big one between Highway 1 and 24. This is what the interchange used to look like when I built it in October, facing east. I don't think I did so badly considering that it was the first full four way interchange I built with RHW, but the positioning of the exits and entrances and the unnecessary narrowing of the roadways at certain exits certainly left something to be desired. At first I tried to rebuild the interchange from scratch a couple times, but in doing so I realized that making some simple upgrades would be a more elegant solution. Here's how the interchange looks now. The retrofit was a pretty wide ranging project, involving rebuilding many ramp connections, widening the mainline roadways, new overpasses, acceleration lanes, merge in/merge out auxiliary lanes, fractional angle curves, and a couple minor surface street upgrades. The eastern side of the interchange leads into a bridge approach and a partial interchange with Lagos' Market Street facing toward the bridge. As part of the upgrade I rebuilt the Market Street overpass and its bridge ramps, reconfiguring them to eliminate the need for entering and exiting traffic to make U-turns at the congested street's nearby intersections, which also saw upgades. I also improved the merge for eastbound traffic entering the Highway 1 mainline by getting rid of an extra lane that terminated at the merge point. The southern side of the interchange was one of the trickiest to work with. I had given up on being able to use a fractional angle ramp leading into an RHW-4 split for northbound traffic trying to turn east or west when I practically built the thing by accident with not a tile to spare--the highway goes into a smooth curve just beyond the lower right edge of the screenshot. I was even able to improve the sound walls between the ramp and the neighborhood to its east. At the western edge of the interchange is the Pine Valley Mall, the largest concentration of jobs in the city outside of the industrial port. The main improvements I made in this area consisted to building more articulated curves for the right turn ramps, building a short merge lane for traffic entering the westbound mainline on Highway 1 before it heads into a viaduct and placing cosmetic pieces. You won't believe how much of a pain it was to rebuild the central overpasses of the interchange in the same spot while widening both the surface and the overpassing lanes from one tile RHW to two tile RHW! It felt like I spent half an hour frantically clicking around. There were more subprojects in this update, but that about covers the main and most interesting ones. I chronicled everything else related to the update in a short series of gameplay/commentary videos, if you're interested check them out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WslD4pd14Wk. I hope you guys enjoyed the entry, if so I plan to bring you more of this style from Lagos and Prospect Bay soon. As an added bonus, here's a dusty old screenshot of Lagos' industrial port from October, again facing east: I have a heck of a lot of work ahead of me with bringing this sector of the city up to my current standards, including an already commenced dredging project for the channel in front of the container cranes and a widening project for Highway 24, so don't judge!

Wow, that much be a much bigger city than Oly in real life. Transit advocates there are still fighting to have their city included in the expansion plans for the Sounder commuter railway and for express buses outside of traditional commute hours, much less an actual grade separated metro system. And likely the only reason it has a chance of getting those things is because it's the state capital.

Very nice, ROFLYoshi! I like how the tracks split off at different angles over on the left. Too bad there's no way to create a pedestrian overpass to reach the center platform between the two adjacent pairs of tracks.

This may be an unpopular opinion but I think that using the word "illegal" here is something of a wild hyperbole. I'm pretty sure that a modder's so-called intellectual property rights would never hold up in court, especially when it comes to a game like SimCity 4. EA has exclusive rights to the game after all, and I'd be surprised if there isn't text addressing this issue in the lot editor's EULA. Of course distributing custom content without the creator's permission is a serious violation of site rules and SC4 community norms and doing so will quickly lead to backlash, but that's a different issue entirely.

Here's a shot of the central area of the west end residential district of my city of Jamaica, Yakutat Bay. Building a grid of streets was impossible here due to the steepness of the area's terrain and the presence of a protected five acre wooded recreational area near the center. Unfortunately there's no traffic on the roads because the city was infected by prop pox and I messed up the paths while temporarily restoring the props. Fortunately enough though, the prop pox struck just as I was literally putting the finishing touches on the tile.

Here's part of my city of Jamaica, Yakutat Bay. It's rapidly taking shape as the new metropolitan center of the still rural region. Since I took this shot, both of the farm fields in the upper-left part of the picture have been redeveloped as part of a new residential subdivision and downtown has undergone a number of restreetscaping projects.

This September, I spent many, many hours building up the largest city in my Prospect Bay region, saving it many times and reloading it without issue until one day a save apparently went bad and the entire city was lost: Every time I tried to reload the tile, and I tried dozens of times doing everything I could think of, the game would crash almost immediately. There was one way to prevent the crash, by immediately zooming in and panning the camera as soon as the loading screen disappeared, but as soon as I stopped panning advisor dialog boxes would appear and as soon as I had clicked through all of them, the postponed CTD would hit. At first I thought this had to do with some recently installed plugin, or one of the lots I had just plopped. But through experimentation, I found that my plugins made no difference and I've successfully used every lot I plopped before that bad save in other cities without any kind of issue. In the end I could never figure out why my city would no longer load properly, so I restored a three month old backup and resolved to rebuild nearly from scratch. Cut to today: I was working on a new city tile in another region for a few hours, and saving intermittently until suddenly about 20 minutes after a save I ran into a seemingly inexplicable crash while panning the camera. All I'd been doing was zoning (without running the simulator), building infrastructure and plopping landmarks that I've all used in many cities beforehand without issue. My game has been particularly unstable ever since a graphics driver update about a month ago, so I figured I'd chalk the crash up to that. But then when I tried to reload the tile, I ran into the same crashing problem I had with my city back in September! All the characteristics are the same, right down to being able to delay the crash by zooming and panning the camera. I was about ready to tear my hair out after the first couple times, especially when the fourth crash triggered a black screen of death. I'm not ready to just accept that there's nothing I can do about this problem, at least not with some confirmation from some of the long time players here. So does this situation sound familiar? What could I be doing be doing wrong to cause this? How do I recover my save?

Change your hotkey in fraps. SC4 has hardcoded hotkey functions for most (all?) of the F-keys already. I use the period (.) key for fraps screenshots and have never run into issues with it. Don't know if that will fix your issue with the repeated screen capture not working, but it will stop the audio options dialog box from opening.