matthewscott6615

The island population began in 5 small settlements. Since I've been mainlining the tragically awful show Vampire Diaries on netflix for the past few weeks, I've named these settlements after the founding families of the town in the show: Salvatore Village, Forbes Village, Fell Village, Gilbert Town, and Lockwood Town. An agricultural area and ore mining area have also been set up, as well as a general industrial area and many cargo and passenger harbors. Overview of the island and 5 founding settlements Fell Village settlement Gilbert Town Settlement Forbes Village settlement and industrial area Salvatore Village settlement Lockwood Town settlement Agricultural area with Lockwood Town in the background Downtown area of Forbes Village

It's been days of wading through the steam workshop, but I finally compiled enough collections to feel ready to start up again. I also made a custom map of Staten Island, the least interesting place in New York City! Platten Island is a go. Get ready for Moscow in the West. Transportation collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=608135494 Terraced houses and shops collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=608116941 Rowhouses collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=608116689 Blockhouses collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=608116506 Plattenbauten collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=549043148 Schools and service buildings collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=608115400 Parks collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=549078056 Parking lots collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=549125546 Mods collection https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=549077111

so deceivingly small. overtime you show a more zoomed out view i'm like "that's it?! how'd all that fit in there?!"

This isn't an actual post, because I've been having TONS of issues with a pesky mod, and I've only ~mostly gotten the game back the way I want it. Was previously using Traffic Manager with Improved AI mod, with no problem for quite a while, when suddenly yesterday opened my save to an infinite series of object reference errors, and cars jumping around like mayflies on wheels. Still haven't figured out what caused it to freak out out of nowhere, especially since i am now using the Traffic Manager Plus mod combined with the standalone Improved AI mod (which is essentially the same thing in two parts.........why should it work differently???) with no issue. Only caveat is that, as separate mods now, the AI doesn't follow the Traffic Manager custom lane flags, so I'll have to tweak a few intersections if I want them to work closer to the same way. Much better than what I expected, which was that my save was corrupted. Thanking the gods that at least that didn't happen. So anyway, in honor of my traffic managing modding woes and the despair they cause me, along with my focus being drawn away too much by this to care about much else in the city for the time being, here's a comparison of traffic between what the base game does and what Improved AI does. I only did a tiny bit of stuff other than letting the simulation run for a bit (added a bit of residential zone because a perfectly timed death wave started during all this mess! ugh!) while I let the traffic work itself out. I disabled despawning so I could get a very real sense of how well the Improved AI actually cleared out jams, and the results were incredible. Hopefully this is all over for now, so I can get down into the neighborhoods and work on stuff. I'm loving my new theme with a mix of Feindbild's and others' NY styled buildings, mixed in with European style blockhouses. I honestly didn't think it'd work very well, but so far it's looking great! Stay tuned!

Another Jamestown from the dead post! Was looking through old screenshots and found a series showing the small but immensely effective service road network below downtown Royals. The service roads are somewhat inspired by Chicago's stacked streets, such as Wacker Dr, Michigan Ave, Columbus Dr, Randolph St, etc. In Chicago the street level as you typically walk on it isn't actually at the level of the natural ground. Chicago, as some of you might know, is a lovely swamp. Americans for some reason LOVE to build cities on swamps. I don't get it. I will never get it. But alas, something at one point needed to be done about the water levels in the Loop, and the street level was artificially raised in many areas. The original streets were left down below and are now used as service roads that enter directly into the basements of buildings and garages. Some of the lower levels are simply grade separated arterial roads; shortcuts through and around the Loop. Now, since we can't really change the level at which a building enters off the street, a true replica of Chicago's system is not possible. So I went for the next best alternative, which is to keep the spirit of the idea of these streets, and build them to the best of CS's abilities. As you can see, it doesn't work nearly as well as in real life. Because of how the ramps had to work to be able to come back to ground level, as well as the horrible difficulty created by having editable things neatly vertically stacked, the lower level streets are actually parallel and next to their upper levels instead of being directly beneath them. Other than looking physically different, and the buildings not actually having service levels, they operate much the same. There is still a ton of traffic on busy streets, but a lot of people get to benefit from the shortcuts created to the busiest areas. Stay tuned for another Jamestown from the dead post! I'm working more with cimtographer and now using an app called maperitive to display and style the OSM data. It may be a while though due to attempting to use a very ornery windows app using the mono framework on mac OS...tons of fun.

small world!!! i grew up in bolingbrook about 1000 feet south of naperville! wacker before the huge reconstruction was a terrifying mess. there used to be ramps at almost every intersection on the west side, now there is only one entrance and one exit, aside from the tangle at the end at congress. i remember the first time i drove it alone, i came flying up one of the old exit ramps because it was so hard to see anything, blasted through the red light that was barely visible to the roadway, and went straight across back down an entrance ramp. That photo is of one of the old scary ramps, the new ones are so much less sloped and properly signed and signaled.

the shots look great! i too love watching and taking lots of photos of my trains and metros. i watch traffic in some places the same way. something cathartic about just watching my city operate and cims go about their digital little lives

and to think...i once felt silly for placing and curating individual houses in a medium sized neighborhood. the different ways people use this game never cease to amaze me, sandbox games are great like that

i figured if i was keeping anything from the real montreal, it should be that bizarre bridge design with only a single lane in each direction straddling a railroad. although mine is not nearly in the same place.

Here's a little preview of the beginning of the new city. Lenox began as a small mill town on Mercer and Remington islands in the Hawke river. Its location along existing shipping routes allowed the small mill to develop into a larger industrial operation along the river, and a town called Mercer was soon officially established. Mercer grew quickly, and soon many more new towns started popping up along a nearby ridge above the riverbanks. Officials from Lawrence County, which presides over the area, began to see the need to establish a central government and infrastructure plan for the rapidly growing Mercer area. Funds were bolstered, officials were appointed, a charter was drafted, and the Commonwealth City of Lenox was established. The residents of the mostly lawless unincorporated towns that littered the upper banks weren't very happy about the county stepping in and establishing a city to charge them taxes and tell them what to do. Many residents saw the change as reason to move across the river to Perry County, where they could again establish their own unincorporated towns. Thankfully this sentiment was far outweighed by the number of people who flocked to the new city with all its protections and services. Currently, Lenox is still operating on a provisional charter and has no elected officials. Lawrence County appointed an interim City Council, whose job it is to assess the current infrastructure, take a provisional census survey, and develop draft legislation that will be worked on further by the full-time council that is to be elected in the coming weeks. The city charter provides for basic ordinances and taxation. Once the council is elected and take their offices, a mayoral campaign and election process will take place; for now the Lawrence County Board President is acting mayor, although her only true duty as such is to preside over council meetings. The city is growing quickly! Things are happening!

I typically use illustrator but I wiped my computer for the latest mac OS update and did a fresh install so now I'm slowly working on getting everything back. This was just a fun tool someone on reddit suggested so I went ahead and tried it out. SO MUCH EASIER than illustrator for just sketching a quick map since it's designed to only do the specific things i'm trying to do. in illustrator it's way more work even to make a sketch map. I've tried different styles on different maps, but since I'm from here I tend to use Chicago's style of just widening the station bubble to extend over all the lines at transfer points. This is a map I made for a fantasy boat transit system on Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and the southwest side ship canal. All the station bubbles are separated because there are no free transfers between routes. And this is a way cooler fantasy map I made of the TARP dropshafts and tunnels styled to look like a transit map. Here, transfers are shown with bubbles and regular stations with black dots! I don't have much of a preference visually but now that I've got a sketch map I can try some different things out for my official JMetro transit maps

Still haven't opened my save file, but I have been working on drafting a transit map of Jamestown based on screenshots and map views I already have. This is a quick version made with the metro map creator web tool ( http://beno.org.uk/metromapcreator/# ). It's not very pretty but the tool is super quick and very free. Public transit in Jamestown is operated by Jamestown Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or JMetro. The JMetro rapid transit network includes 6 subway lines that serve the city and some nearer suburbs, as well as all the way out to Bedford on the western shore. The Red, Orange, and Green metro subway lines run north/south through downtown Royals in a single tunnel, while the Gold, Blue, and Purple lines run east/west through downtown in 3 parallel tunnels.

eh, i'm not that upset since i start new cities pretty often anyway. i was liking getting more detailed with it though, and i'm going to use that a lot in my next big city. it's going to be on a map of montreal! the save game for jamestown is still good, just won't be playable without some very large annoyances like having to regrow a fair amount of buildings. i'm going to keep it around and make some road maps and transit maps while i'm planning my new city. maybe i'll keep playing it if it turns out to not be too bad. i think i got ~most of the stuff back that i need for it

As all of us CS players are aware, both the game's content manager and steam's workshop are both almost entirely devoid of actual features that allow you to.....manage the game's content.......which is their entire purpose......whatever..... But alas, my workshop assets have been botched again and another save game all but ruined!!! I'm so glad I dropped 50 bucks on this game!!! I haven't actually opened the savegame yet, but I'm certain that when I do I'm going to be immediately hit with half my buildings being demolished because the assets are missing. The city barely survived that happening last time and I really just don't have the patience to bring it back from the dead AGAIN, so for now I am saying goodbye. I may work some on it and resurrect this city journal after a while, but for now I think I'm going to start a new city on a new map and I'm going to try to do it with as little custom content as humanly possible (this time sorted into collections so I can easily get it all back in case of the THIRD apocalypse)

For close up screenshots you can turn off or change the "depth of field" option in graphics settings. That's what setting tells the game's "camera" to focus differently based on how far apart you want the closest and farthest object in focus to be from each other. When you are far away building stuff, most objects are a more similar distance from one another; when you are down at street level, the closest objet is very close and the farthest is very far, so you want to have a different depth of field setting. http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/fototech/htmls/depth.html Turning down the film grain effect will make it a bit clearer as well. You can also take a 4x size screenshot if you aren't doing that already. That will momentarily pause the simulation, render a frame at 4x and save it, then go back to whatever the game was doing. Helps the edges and corners look better. The sunken highway looks great! I've never tried one with walls, only with natural slopes on the sides so far.

Now that Jamestown is growing into such a tourist and business destination, the city council has dedicated a committee to rework and redesign the city's informational databases and access thereto. This includes mapping neighborhoods and business. Using the cimtographer mod on steam, I exported OpenStreetMap data and viewed it with JOSM, a java based OSM data viewer and editor. These are the raw data, many pretty road and transit maps to come soon! Unfortunately only the standard network types are programmed into the mod, so any road/path types from mods will not show up. Most of my freeways are not visible due to being made from 6 lane and 2 lane highways from the network extensions mod. cimtographer mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416064574 JOSM downloads: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Download

A lot has been happening in Jamestown the past few years. Out of control expansion in the central business district lead to a regional housing boom, but still developers could not keep up. Businesses that had contracted with the city to move their offices here were left with few and in some cases, no employees to work for them. Some companies began transferring people in from other locations, and recruiters brought new people to the city every day to apply. Finally, the city stepped in and laid out plans for a massive housing expansion. Two estates were planned, both on the southwestern outskirts of Jamestown city. Deering, which originated as a private development interest that was purchased by the city's Housing Authority, was to include two areas of attached single family residential, and two areas of mixed mid-rise and high-rise apartment flats. The Wellington area was designed as mid-rise and high-rise apartments only. Now that all these new workers have a place to live, next on the city's agenda appears to be an expansion and reworking of the JMetro transportation system. All these people have to get around somehow, and the freeway can only carry so many.

Jamestown has grown from a tiny settlement near the water to a respectably sized, although by no means world class, commercial center. With a population of around 40,000 in the city, and another 25,000 in its extended suburbs, Jamestown has a host of amenities for residents, tourists, and businesses alike. JMetro operates a number of transit options for the region, including 9 Metro bus routes serving the city and another 4 connecting the outlying suburbs to the city. 4 Metro subway lines are in operation, and JMetro is currently constructing extensions on the B line. There is even work on the design of an airport to serve the city to allow easier access for business travelers and tourists. This is a collection of photos throughout a typical summer night. Some parts of the city are quieter than others. To end our nighttime tour, let's take a trip to the rooftop observatory at the Scott Building, currently the tallest building in the city (although rumors speculate that may not be true for too much longer).

i really like the bridge stub! so many people fail at this game due to improper future planning, it's nice to see people looking ahead

Now that I've been playing long enough to have learned the idiosyncrasies of the game, I've been getting more and more detailed with each city I build. This time I am even going so far as to place individual 1x2 terraced townhouses with the building cop/paste mod into large neighborhoods and then using the building level locker mod to keep them all in place. It's been a bit tedious, but I really enjoy how real everything looks, and it's better than having enough custom assets saved to keep things populated at every building level :/ Here is a look at some of my terraced townhouse neighborhoods so far! I'm really liking how they are turning out, and they work as great medium density areas. Having trouble getting the matching commercial terraces to spawn so I can copy them. They are all 2x2 2x3 and a couple 2x4 buildings, but commercial zones typically want to build larger buildings so they keep pulling from the standard building set (which i used to not mind but now looks abysmal next to my finely curated townhouses!) Probably going to take a break from these for a bit, as I've got several different districts partially built out with them now. Going to work on some bigger suburban housing and also on some stuff in the city with my NY themed buildings. Stay tuned!

Well I went a little overboard compared to what I wanted. I started by trying to use the district styles, but all the terraced houses are spread across all the house levels, and after running the simulation for a bit, there were only two designs left in the whole neighborhood :| So then I got the copy/paste building mod and the building level control mod and started customizing it more. Now that I'm doing that, there's no need to sale the ENTIRE district this way, so I'm going to start mixing in bigger houses and keep townhouses in certain places in other neighborhoods. This is my first foray into actual neighborhood design. Up to this point with my cities I've mainly focused on transportation and roads and such.

This neighborhood showcase begins right where the city began. Old Jamestown (also known as Old Town) is a small peninsula that wraps around a dead volcano on the east side of the Portage County isthmus. Old Jamestown currently has a population of around 4,100 and is home to all levels of schooling with an elementary school, high school, and a community college. City Hall is on the edge of Old Town, between Dome Park and the newly completed Shoreline Trail bike and foot path. The trail circles almost the entire neighborhood along the shoreline of the Inner Bay, connecting neighborhoods, parks, and beaches. While mostly developed with mid rise apartments, there is still available land in Old Town, and with many older buildings preparing for upgrades the face of the neighborhood may be changing soon. New park and beach facilities and the new Shoreline Trail continue to attract tourists and residents from across the county. Public transit access to Old Town is by the number 2 bus, which makes stops on Myrtle Ave, Commonwealth Ave, and Kerry St.

Just started a new city before discovering this site, so I thought I'd jump right in and start my first city journal! Here's a few quick shots to give you an idea of what I've got so far. I have most of the central area districts started, and a suburbs, but not a whole bunch very far out. Started plotting out and naming some of the outer districts and suburbs, and set up a few special industrial areas. A few bus lines are open as well, and I have plans for several metro lines when the need arises. I don't usually do very well with placing unique buildings or laying out special or interesting areas. Usually my cities are just a jumble of neighborhoods and tend to focus on how people get between them, but I want to try to use the unique buildings and tourism more to draw people certain places and to give the city a more realistic look and feel. I'm thinking of things like stadium clusters, venues, and things akin to Chicago's museum campus.