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.

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!

Prospect Bay Click on any of the images to see them in the original glorious HD! I won't bore you with too many details in this introductory post, but to give you guys some background on what's going on, Prospect Bay is a region of over a quarter million people spread across a few dozen discrete settlements in a scenic coastal area based on Dobdriver's map of Nelson, New Zealand. Most live within a couple miles of the shore in towns of less than 10,000 population. Watertown, a prosperous hamlet centrally located on the coastal highway The economy of the region is dominated by agriculture, resource extraction and manufacturing. In particular, timber and lumber processing are areas that have been cornerstones of the regional economy since the inception of its settlement due to the density of the old growth temperate rainforest covering most of the hills, and they have only become more intensive over time with the arrival of new, more efficient modes of transportation and a steady supply of people to work in the mills. The lumber mill and its associated rail spur have been the main drivers of economic development in Napoleon, just a couple miles southwest of Watertown in the rolling hills Of course, more recently, with a constant increasing factor of economic activity and population growth, the boom times have expanded to include the services and public sectors. While it's quite far from an accomplished fact at this point, there are those who foresee all the scrap yards, warehouses and farmers' co-ops on the region's Main Streets being squeezed out by banks, department stores and government office buildings. For many years in the region's early history, High Street in Trapezus was the biggest hub of commercial activity to be found as well as far and away the premier entertainment destination Urbanization has already fundamentally changed the character of the region. Gone are the days when every property owner could count on having a virtual forest on his land or in the vicinity of his house, and children could wander and play anywhere with minimal supervision. You're definitely never really alone when you're in Lagos, the economic and cultural capital of Prospect Bay But for the masses moving in, the expanding urban amenities make all the hassles worth it, and the sweeping Bay and mountain views along with the many remaining swathes of unspoiled nature offer a kind of beauty and majesty that's a world away from anything they knew in the congested city centers of the East Coast and other countries. The historic small towns that take the best advantage of this resource are often some of the most prestigious real estate areas, owing to short overall commute times. They are also hotbeds for getaway tourism from the cities nearby, with thriving strips of boutique shops. With its historic charm and breathtaking coastline dotted with cliffs, islands and sandbars, visiting Happy Valley is always an idyllic experience--at least until you get stuck behind an RV on the narrow highways leading through the hills out of town In my next entry, I'll be talking about some of the region's earliest history, with a particular focus on its first city, Port Deliverance, a very unique place in its own right. Due to the difficult local geography, the town has not physically expanded since before the railroad's arrival and has become a living artifact of a previous century, protected in contemporary times by the region's strictest redevelopment laws. Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of Port Deliverance's historical preservation is the town's location along a major transportation corridor--everybody taking the coastal highway from east of the region to Prospect Bay's major cities passes right through the middle of the preservation district --- Check out my YouTube channel! One of the unique things about this MD is that it focuses on a region that I built almost from scratch on YouTube. While the video series is already long enough at more than 100 installments that I don't seriously expect too many people to watch it from start to finish, I release SC4 gameplay/commentary videos in the style of Haljackey, Mandelsoft and Casper based in the region frequently, or at least whenever I have the time to play. In the future as I create entries for this MD that focus more on specific areas and things, I'll include links to all the relevant videos as supplementary material. In the meantime, you should check out my two latest videos. In them, I take viewers on a thorough tour of the region's largest city, recently lost to a corrupted save file and rebuilt better than ever from a 3 month old backup. It should be an entertaining watch, and a great way to get more familiar with Prospect Bay's character.

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.

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.

Doesn't everybody agree it's about time that this topic was revived? Today I have for you not one but three mosaics. They all come from my Yakutat Bay region, a 37.5 by 47.5 mile endeavor to take my SimCity 4 play to the next level of realism and organicism. The region is still very rural but has begun to develop some interesting towns and great overall character. I've been at it for seven months now, but most of the progress including these three mosaics has been in the last month. Click each image for its full sized version (each around 5000x3000 pixels) This is Lakewood, Yakutat Bay. It was the first "big" city in the region, and despite growth concentrating elsewhere more recently the city remains the region's most populous today as well as its most walkable. Downtown hosts a CBD more than twice the size of the nearest competitors, but its presence has never yet threatened the city's overall working class character and old fashioned charm. This is Emonds Field, Yakutat Bay. It's a rural center less than half a mile northeast of the ocean shore and some of the region's more expansive sandy beaches. The completion of a new high speed coastal highway in the area brought considerable growth to the small city, even though local business owners fought it because the access road was to be built parallel to instead of running into Main Street. This is Annapolis, Yakutat Bay. Located on the same large lake as Lakewood about three or four miles upshore, this is one of the most scenic places to live in the region to date. With very little open land suitable for building left in the city's vicinity, the city government is staking its hopes for economic growth on attracting more wealthy residents from across the lakeside metro area and tourism. Hope you enjoyed!

I'm getting the same problem as the original poster. Freshly installed NAM 32 today, and I removed my slope mod before I even tried to use the Diagonal Bridge Enabler. Can't get it to play friendly with slopes of any kind, using any network. Just burned more than an hour wrestling with it. Here's proof I wasn't doing anything wrong. I never had an issue with the Diagonal Bridge Enabler under previous versions of the NAM, so this is definitely an issue worth looking into.

Go for it. Don't expect huge numbers of views, but SimCity 4 videos still definitely have a niche on YouTube. At least I still watch and enjoy them, and a fair number of people watch all the videos I upload. If you're an experienced player who's skilled with custom content, chances are you could do better than most of the people currently putting out videos.

This is Watertown, a prosperous hamlet centrally located on my region's coastal highway. Its built form is indicative of organic development and is fairly typical of the small communities that house the majority of the region's residents. Click the screenshot to see it in its original 1080p! I've shared this pic before, but I'm posting it again for this thread at the suggestion of a comment in my new CJ. Hope nobody minds!

I've got a high design speed three leaf cloverstack type deal to show off. It's the junction of my (mostly rural) region's two longest and most traveled highways, well inside the urban area of its biggest city. The idea was to create a two-level interchange in order to maximize the number of spots where I could use smooth curves and RHW-4 grade connection ramps. The area around the highway is one of the largest wide-open green spaces in the urban area, something a bit ironic when you consider that it's also the most dangerous for people and wildlife to enjoy. At least the plants and trees thrive there, in the eye of the commuter storm. (Click for full size) This was actually my first full 4-way RHW interchange. I don't think it turned out too badly all things considered, although it is a fair bit larger than I had perhaps hoped. Any suggestions on things I could have done better would be appreciated.

I recommend CAM for anybody looking to even out growth across a region and increase the variety of growables at their disposal. Even the CAM farms alone are cool enough to make it worth it if you enjoy developing your regions' countryside. Just because you use CAM doesn't mean you have to build endless fields of skyscrapers a la Manhattan or Hong Kong--In fact I don't think I've zoned more than a handful of high density plots since first installing CAM 10 or so months ago. I can see how people might want to pass on the CAM if they are trying to keep their plugins folders small, but for someone who loves mods and variety and has the computer to handle it I don't see a compelling reason not to go for it, at least to try out.

Very nice! I don't know if this is the best place to ask, but how did you get those smooth curves for the elevated segments? --- Here's an interchange I just built today. It's on top of the location of the first complete RHW interchange I built, which was between the RHW-2 that comes in from the top of the picture and exits at the lower left and another RHW-2, which now enters the picture as one of the RHW-4 roadways on the right and originally terminated at the other RHW-2. The impetus for the construction of the new interchange was the completion of a new RHW-6S in the regional capital, which enters the picture on the left. The original connection to the capital, where the RHW-2 transitions into an important thoroughfare, was preserved and incorporated into the interchange. The RHW-4 in this picture connects at the top of the picture to the right side of the first picture. It was built out until just beyond the far edge of the pleasant historical suburban community of Watertown since the trunk road here serves as the primary connector between all of the towns of the western quarter of the region on one side, and the main cities and everything else on the other. However funding was not forthcoming to build anymore interchanges, so the new divided highway was designed after the bypass routes around many major Canadian and Latin American cities, with several intersections but the possibility for grade separation in the future. Click on either of the pictures to load up the full size versions!

Greetings. Recently I've been running into a problem in my cities where, in some places and in some directions, when I pan the camera it tiles the image at the edge of the screen instead of revealing the terrain in that direction. Check the video to see what I mean. Generally it only happens when I pan the camera up or down, as opposed to right or left, and only in built up areas. At first I thought the problem might be caused by one of my custom lots, but I've been unable to solve the problem by getting rid of any particular lot. Has anybody else encountered this issue, and if so, did you have any success finding etiologies or solutions?