Psiman
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Everything posted by Psiman
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I've discussed the problem of mansions popping up all over the place in this thread. I feel that a key part of this issue is that it seems to be too easy to get most of the city up to maximum Land Value. In this screenshot of my previous city, one can see that most of the city is at the highest level of green Land Value. Using the SHIFT + CTL + ALT + Query Tool, I was able to confirm that most of the city was at the maximum allowed Land Value of 255. This means high-wealth mansions can appear pretty much anywhere in the city - the default Medium/High wealth boundary is 120. I've been going through the list of known Exemplar properties trying to find something that might have an effect on this, and have then been creating some modified .DATs to test out in the game. I've been through a few and haven't noticed any effect, but I've now found one that looks very interesting, even though I don't know exactly what it's doing. There an Exemplar property called: 0x47e2c331 Float32 Land Value Desirability Factors Size of effects (see IDs) It's default value is 2.5. I changed it to 1. I then loaded up my city and the effect is instantly obvious on the Land Value data map. Instead of most of the city being maximum 255 Land Value, everything is reduced significantly. The highest I could see was 172, and then all kinds of numbers below that. Lots of land had gone below the High-wealth default threshold of 120. So I don't know exactly what's happening here or how it will affect other aspects of the game, but it looks promising.
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- land value
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What proportion of the residents in SimWorld work in, or are looking for, jobs? In the real world, there are lots of people not looking for jobs, like children, pensioners etc. Is it the same in SimCity 4? If so, is it affected by things, such as population age demographics?
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How to create realistic farms/agricultural land in SimCity 4?
Psiman posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
My next city will start off as an agricultural village/town and develop into a manufacturing city. I am wondering how to best structure the surrounding agricultural landscape in both a realistic and game-effective way. If we start with the basic building block - the farm. What does a farm look like in SimCity4? Some questions to begin: - What does the residential part of a farm look like in SimCity 4 - a 1x2 light residential zone? - How much agricultural zoning is a single (1x2) farm able to utilize effectively? - How far will an agricultural worker go to work the fields he/she works at? I presume that, not counting the cost of roads or providing amenities, it would be most efficient in the game for a single house to be directly adjacent to the fields the residents work in? So, basically, dividing the land into a system of individual farms/houses. Or perhaps groups of farms with the farmhouses clustered together to form hamlets, with the fields that each house worked on radiating out from the centre. -
Open Grass Area and Small Park Green are both 1x1 tiles that have the same Plop Cost and Monthly Cost. According to the SimCity 4 Encyclopedia - entries for Open Grass Area and Small Park Green - they have the same stats except for in three categories, in all of which Small Park Green outperforms Open Grass Area - Park Effect, Landmark Effect and Air Pollution reduction. (Note that I don't know how reliable these stats are in the links, since it says that Open Grass Area is 2x2 lot size). The only advantage I can think of that Open Grass Area has over Small Park Green is that one can plant trees on it. Is this correct? If so, is it a good balance? How many trees must one plant on an Open Grass area tile to make it as good or better than a Small Park Green tile?
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I came across this random map generator for SimCity 4: https://cesiumcomics.com/sc4terrain/ Anyone used it? It looks like it could be useful. One could raise/lower sea level on game setup to create sea and islands. Any similar map generators out there?
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Building Education & Health Buildings: Big vs Small?
Psiman posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
When building a city, I more often build the larger versions of education and health buildings, mainly so I don't have to have an elementary school or small health clinic at the end of each street or so. My city isn't full of skyscrapers, and so the usage/local funding slider for these buildings is low, especially for education buildings which use only a small fraction of their capacity. I suppose if the city had ever got to high-density then it would been good to have had things all ready prepared, so it would be just a matter of adjusting the sliders. How do you go about building education and health buildings in your growing city? Do you go for the big buildings with their large radius, but little-used capacity, or small buildings, which would be more efficient in capacity used, but have small coverage area and thus require greater numbers? Or maybe a mix of both, in some organised way? -
Here's a better configuration of tiles, with some good locations for cities using the big tiles.
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I've been working on creating a new region from the random map generator. I created a large random map of 50x50 km, applied Gaussian blur using GIMP and then opened the grayscale image in SC4 Mapper. I saw an island that looked like it would be interesting to create a region out of, and used SC4 Mapper to extract the selection as a new region. Loading it on the game, it looks good, but the littoral zone is not ideal - it's too shallow for ports etc, and the ocean itself is also really shallow. It needs a continental margin of continental shelf/slope/rise leading to deeper ocean. So I opened up the original grayscale image in GIMP and also took a screenshot of the region from the SC4 Mapper. Then I precisely cropped the region view from SC4 Mapper, resized it to the exact size of the grayscale image, created a new layer in GIMP, and pasted the SC4 Mapper region view on it. I then reduced its opacity so I could see the both the edges of the island and the grayscale image beneath. Then I drew an outline in black around the island on a new transparent layer. Then I filled in the rest of the ocean with black, to give me a layer filled with black, except for a hole where the island is, plus a few squares around it. I then applied a Gaussian blur to this layer. Following this, I changed its opacity to 64% and exported a new grayscale image combining the original image with the layer of transparent blackness plus hole. Then I created a new region in SC4 Mapper using this new grayscale image and loaded it up in the game. There's now a better defined coast and a deeper ocean. Here's how the region looks. So, the basic map look okay, but it could do with some optimization of the map tiles. So I open up the large grayscale image again in SC4 Mapper and use the Config options to place large city tiles at more interesting places on the coast which would be good places for harbour settlements.
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A useful feature of SC4 Mapper is that one can extract a part of a map and create a new region from it. So one could generate a larger map than one needs with the random map generator, and then look for good areas to create a region out of.
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Seems like it could take a while... --------------------- Here's another couple of examples of regions created with the map generator, 40x40km, Randomness 0.7>1, Mean Height 0.5>0.25
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One can use SC4 Mapper to load a grayscale image and it will show where the sea level will be, or close enough. Here's the view in SC4 Mapper of the grayscale image that produced the region in the first SimCity region screenshot of the thread (above). Here's how it was rendered in the game, as created by SC4 Mapper. It appears one has to open every map tile to get it to render the graphics from a SC4 Mapper file properly, so it's probably better to use the standard method of generating a new region.
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GIMP users: how to show sea level when creating new region?
Psiman posted a topic in Mapping Community Room
The instructions for creating a new region include a part about how to show where the sea-level would be using Photoshop. Here's what it says: I've been trying to work out whether I can do the same using GIMP, but have not, thus far, found a way. Any GIMP users here know? -
GIMP users: how to show sea level when creating new region?
Psiman replied to Psiman's topic in Mapping Community Room
I've downloaded SC4 Mapper, and it's easy to use it to load up a grayscale image, whereupon it will show the region with sea level added. -
Nice terraced effect on the hills!
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What's more exciting in the world of map-making now then? I need to work out how to do the blending thing in GIMP, as discussed in the map-making tutorial, in order to see what the sea-level is before generating the map.
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Here's the first one. It didn't come out right as I flipped to another window while it was generating, but you get the idea. I agree that it could do with some blurring. Uneven ground like this can be a real pain to build on. Here's the second one. I probably set the randomness too high, or should have avoided using a map with areas of undefined white, as that just creates unrealistic flat mountains.
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Thanks. I'll make them as is first, and then try a blur for comparison.
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Here are the map tile sizes in SimCity 4: Small city tile = 64 cells Medium city tile = 128 cells Large city tile = 256 cells The "size of region in city tiles" parameter in the generator refers to the number of small tiles. So the default of 2 would be a medium city tile. A region of 5 large maps x 5 large maps would therefore be "Size of region in city tiles" of 20. Here are a couple of maps I've generated to test out. This first one is default settings, just size of region changed to 20. For this second one, I've increase the level of randomness from 0.75 to 1.75.
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My thread on the random map generator has disappeared and is in some sort of time travel limbo. It says it's in the Mapping Community Room sub-forum, but it's not there. It also says I posted it on 1 January 1970.. but I wasn't even born then!
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- missing thread
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Yeah, I'm on Screenshot (2067). Doesn't everyone have this?
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You can see the negative effect on Land Value alongside the avenues in the screenshot. I'd guess that maybe you haven't reached the Stage Limit thresholds, perhaps because you don't have enough parks and civic buildings, or just because the town isn't big enough yet. You could test by saving the game, placing a bunch of parks near the medium-density zoning, and seeing what happens and reloading.
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- apartments
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Hmm... if I press Windows key + Print Screen it creates a PNG image in my Pictures folder.
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Parks, and other civic buildings, also provide a transient aura effect, which is a massive boost to desirability in surrounding squares, which lasts for a few months, and helps promote growth.
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Post a screenshot of your city!
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Yeah, traffic air pollution is a big negative for residential. Commercial, on the other hand, likes the high traffic volume of avenues (although also doesn't like air pollution). I wouldn't zone residential along avenues, generally.
