soldyne

yep, imbored4444 has the right idea. alot of the stuff in that pic is downloaded from the stex. I dont recognize the exact lot in the pic but I use PEGASUS' commercial alleys for parking lot development. just do a search for PEGASUS or alley or parking and you should find a ton of great stuff. to comment on the pic some more (to stay on topic) I think I see some pedestrian mall tiles being used around the fountain. either that or the texture comes with a very large lot. either way I like the texture choice, very conservative and clean, which matches the feeling that governments should have.

welcome to simtropolis Mike! ah yes, this is a standard problem among new SC4 players. with the new addition of region play, designing a city has a whole new meaning. I used to be a "grid it and forget it" type of player and my biggest city with that was about 100k before I would start over. the problem I had though was not neccessarilly in the design of the city itself but in the fact that I was not taking neighbors into account. with SC4 dont just design a city, design a region. Start large! create a region by either hand terraforming or downloading a map fromthe stex. make it interesting with rivers, valleys, hills and such. this will force you to change your designs as you go and make your cities look more organic, like real cities. Try to design the region like nature would, not like a mayor would, this will add to the realism. when the region is ready, sit back and look at it from a mayors perspective. imagine where a real city would be after 100 years, where are downtowns, the suburbs, the farmland? where are the skyscrapper forests, the highways, and the bridges. when you have your dream city in mind, then start building. Now is the time to go small. start building your city from the outside in. begin with rural areas and develop purposfully small villages of no more than 1000 people or so with farmland all around. Then move on to a neighbor, start developing low density res and com in a small town feel. then go to another neighbor and start developing your suburbs and medium density commercial (remember to stick to your regional plan as best you can). The trick is not to make every city square the same. not all cities need to have sardine like living conditions. every type of city has a purpose and will influence the develpoment of its neighbors. as for city design, if you want to break away from the waffel world approach in the small rural towns then just go random. put a road there, lay a street here. conform the networks to the terrain like a real city would and experiement with different designs. if you need to start a blank region and just experiment with random road layouts until you are comfortable with it. it will pay off in the long run. eventually you get to the downtown area and your demand will be peeked having been influenced by the rest of the region. this is where you can get a little griddy (but not too griddy) and you will have skyscrappers popping up like weeds all over the place. This is just how I play SC4 and I have been having much success with it. check out my CJ and you will see exactly what I am talking about. keep us informed about your progress and feel free to ask as many questions as you need! we like to answer them

I think I can answer a few of the questions: 1: open the lot editor and pick a building. you will see the lot size instantly in the pic on the right. you will also see the facing of the building as it will show where the road will be when the lot grows. 2: generally the first number in #x# is the number of tiles facing the road. 3: yes there are many different ways a building can grow and the general correlation is that large lot size = larger capacity, but that is not always true for all buildings. 4: yes, dilapidation is when a building becomes inhabited by lower class sims. dilapidation can also be a precursor to abandonment. 5: I actually dont have alot of experience with high density. most of my building career has been with suburbs and rural areas. But i can say that R$ are very easy to make happy. they dont need a lot of services and very little desirability to make them happy. I have a medium sized tile in my CJ with over 150k R$ sims, they have no schools or police at all but do have hospitals and fire service. If you place hospitals then you might want to consider cutting funding of the ambulance service to 0 to save money. 6: that is a good choice to stick with your initial rules, it makes for a good experiment i think. some suggestions: try to make your city full of highrise R$$$ as much as possible and then let them abandon and get refilled with R$, this may give a huge boost to overall population. not sure if it is feasable or even possible though. If you dont care about the realism of the city the layout can be such that you force all residence to take the subway with the following layout: RRRR RRRR RRRR RRRRRRRR RRRRrrrRRRR RRRRrsrRRRR RRRRrrrRRRR RRRRRRRR RRRR RRRR RRRR Each 4x4 lot can be created using the CTRL key and will face a 3x3 road which surrounds a subway. A lot does not need to have its entire side facing a road, it only needs one front tile to be on a road for it to build. I do this all the time in my industrial areas. the road goes no where and is only there to allow the building of the residential lots. this will force all sims to take the subway. this pattern can be repeated as needed. garbage will still be picked up as long as you have a road connection to the facitility. fire coverage may be a problem though, but I think you can sacrifice one or two buildings for a station here and there. If you would like a better pic of the above design let me know and I will work one out in SC and post it for you. good luck.

hmm, well, perhaps I did overract. sorry for the snap. I am feeling a little stressed right now so I am a bit edgy. but to put the disscussion back on topic, I have been using raised highways in my large, dense inner cities where I put a lot of comm next the highways. I have been using ground highways in the suburbs with two tiles or so of thick trees (mostly pegs and jeronij's seasonal varieties) to act as a sound buffer and pollution reducer. I have another suburb comming under development soon so perhaps I will make a sunken highway and see how that looks. thanks for all the input everyone, and again sorry I snapped.

Demand caps are ingame limits to the number of residents, or jobs a city can hold. when you reach one of the preset caps then it does not matter how desireable the land is no more development will occur until you add something to the city to increase the cap. residential caps are relived by plazas, parks, and most reward buildings. commercial caps are relieved by neighbor connections and airports. industrial caps are raised by short frieght trips. The preset limits are pretty low, they are like 2000 for R$$ 1000 for R$$$ and similar numbers for other developer types. if you ever play the game and have 0 demand all of a sudden for a developer type, try adding a demand cap reliever and see what happens.

first of all daddy-o, your pics are mostly just a bunch of ground highways with hills next to them, not sunken highways. a true sunken highway is one where the construction crew purposfully digs a very deep hole in the ground with verticle walls and then lays the road. at best your pics are real world representation of Bones1 slope mod when building networks on uneven ground. by your apparent definition all ground highways are sunken as they all have some small pile dirt next to them at some point. and secondly, buddybud, I take a little offense to your comment, as I assume you are refering to me being the only one here who had questions about sunken highways. I have travelled far more in my time than most people. I have lived in all four corners of the united states, Washington, Florida, Connecticut, California, Hawaii, Ohio, and driven through every state in between except Alaska. granted I have never been out of the US except Canada for a short two week trip, but the US is a rather large place with very diverse areas. In all that time and travel I have seen few sunkens. My question was more focused on how popular sunken highways are and if they serve a purpose in RL and in the game since they are obviously very expensive and time consuming to build, which is the whole reason they are not very common. the answer is yes, they serve the purpose of noise reduction in real residential areas, but in the game they are just eye candy. now, lets try to refrain from making slanderous comments until we know more about the people we are refering to.

That is a wicked coaster, nicely done!

I actually play the game because it is a game and I dont like to cheat. so, yes, I always build power and water networks. I have designated areas of my region just for dump cities. not everyone cheats. and if you want to see a CJ feature utilities check out Newtopia Valley, I have a few updates which feature my dump cities. you may be very surprised, not all dump cities are the same dirty little holes everyone makes them out to be...

nicely done. good use of PEGs trees and I think I see an inkling of some of jeronij's stuff in the corner. this should be a good CJ. but I will warn you that if you post too many teasers you will start to make people frustrated around here. Just start up your CJ and see where it goes. good luck.

demand caps were mentioned earlier for your com, but I see you have at least two highway connections and you mentioned having an airport. query the airport and see how much capacity is being used. you may need to increase your commercial demand caps. if so make more connections with road, avenue, highway and subway, those are your best commercial demand cap relievers. if this does not fix the problem then start developing neighbor cities. build a suburb in a neighbor by zoning all low density 1x1s and 2x2s. try to keep the rich to a minimum with high taxes. the more res you have the more demand you will have for the commercial. with enough R$ and R$$ especially you should start to compensate for the negative demand and help stop the abandonment cycle. I think what you have here is a catastrophic domino effect of many problems which will take a lot of work to fix. my theory is that you did indeed hit a demand cap for comm but not for res. your res population then went up but your com did not and then you had unemployment which caused abandonment. The abandoment then most likely over compensated and you lost more residence than you needed to for a job balance, and so the extra res that left took commercial demand with them causing negative demand for com. and now with negative comm demand you will lose commercial jobs and thus have more unemployment and thus the cycle continues, and there we have our dieing city. This is why neighbor cities are so important for the stability of a region. no matter how bad your current city is doing your neighbors are immune to whats going on (so long as you dont play them). if your neighbors are built up to decent degree they will fuel a portion of the demand in the current city thus keeping the demand from dipping too far into the negative. neighbors wont help with demand cap relief but they help immensly with keep demand from going into the negative and fuling new demand. without actually having the city infront of me this is the best idea i can come up with. nice city layout though. if you can work through this problem you will learn a lot about the game. keep working at it.

interesting design, Gnargenox. I see you are using tunnels in some of the larger blocks. what do plan to use that space for in the future if you don't mind me asking? to keep on topic though, I use a combination of roads and avenues in a new octagonal grid layout which I designed for my CJ. I have not released the CJ pics yet so you will just have to wonder about it right now. I, like Gnargenox, only place commercial near the highway and only facing avenues. the residential is kept to small cels of roads within quadrants in the city surrounded by the highway and commercial. 200k people so far and only a few bottle necks at neighbor connections (because the neighbors aren't developed enough yet to handle the influx of commuters).

I use a combo of road top and tile mass transit stations as well as the bus/subway combo. I also use a modified 6x6 grid pattern and put a station at about 12 tiles from each other. that way no matter where a sim is there is a station with in a max of 6 tiles in any direction. (it is like the water pipes, they spread water in a 6 tile radius so you put the pipes 12 tiles from each other for optimal coverage). as for the NRZs, if you use a grid pattern just force the facing of the lots to the north and the south using a combination of Shift, Ctrl, and/or Alt (what ever combination you need to make it work right) and you will have the roads on the east and west clear for road top transit stations.

hmm, well it seems sunken highways have a purpose then, the main one being to reduce noise pollution through residential areas. that, and it seems to be eye pleasing. well, I guess I will have to start experimenting with it now.

ah ha! facinating facts. thanks everyone, now I know. those pics of the flooded highway are kind of funny, although I am sure it must have cost a ton of tax money to dry it out.

this is a facinating idea you have here. I use suburbs all the time and I would like to think I am a decent suburban planner myslef, but these lots should really help others in making eye pleasing and realistic suburbs. great job so far, keep it up.

ah ha, I was having such a problem figureing out the dependancies. I will play around with SC4Tool this weekend and see what I come up with. so far though, the lots are looking and working very well and I may release them on the STEX as an Urban Beautification Project! thanks for the replies everyone! <edit> I am having trouble finding a texture that will match the maxis sidewalk texture. the one that appears on the roads when you put parks or medium density zoneing next to them. there are textures that have the same pattern but not the right shade. I am surprised that maxis did not include this texture as it seems like such a logical extension for different lots. anyone have any advice on this matter? </edit> <edit, part two> I was lurking through the modds and downloads section for the SC4Tool and found a program by Darkmatter called the Lot Information Generator. this looks like a very simple tool for creating decent looking readme's. does this tool actually create the dependacy list or do I have to supply the list myself, and this tool just makes things look pretty? any information about the program would be most helpful </edit, part two>

actually, I just started messing with the lot editor and I am having good results. the only problem is that if I ever decide to upload them to the STEX, figuring out the dependancy list will be a heck of chore, it is difficult to know exactly which prop pack or texture file a particular prop or texture is from just by the name... thanks for the response though, I may even post some pics of what I come up with.

I am surprised that this thread is not larger, like the BAT request thread, oh well, here is my request. I have no experience with the lot editor so I am placing the request here. I have done an exhaustive search of the STEX and found nothing quite like what I am looking for so I hope my request is heard and someone has the time and knowhow to fullfill it. I would like to have a single 1x1 park lot (low park effect, low maintence cost) with a single seasonal tree on it from either PEGs tree sets or Jeronij's sets. I use their seasonal tree lots everywhere but those lots are too thick for inner city landscaping. I would like to use them as a boulevard filler between two one way roads. Yes there are boulevard fillers out there already but none of them are seasonal. There is a set of lots which claims to be seasonal but they only change once during the year and have some kind of foot path on one side of the lot which makes them more useful for the side of a road and not the middle of a boulevard. I would like to have many different kinds of trees to choose from but only one tree per lot, fully grown, and centered. (perhpas 4 different lots, 2 PEG style, 2 Jeronij style) I would like the base texture to be something that can match the maxis sidewalk texture so it can blend in to an urban environment and a set of these lots with a grassy texture to match jeronij's trail parks and diagonal fencing. It would be nice if there could be some kind of landscaping base to go with it (low squared hedges, small flowers, or even a circular cement base like those on porkies tree props.) It might also be nice if this filler set came with a non-treed lot which had some concrete flower beds (that's where a new simple BAT might come in to play) using simgoobers flora packs. This way I can alternate -tree-flowers-tree-flowers-etc... I will post this request now and post my second request later. let me know if any of you read this and if anyone wants to try it. thanks.

<edit> THE ORIGINAL REQUEST FOR BOULEVARD TREE LOTS HAS BEEN MOVED TO THE LOT REQUEST THREAD AT THE AUTHOR'S DECISION</edit> But that is ok as I have another request which I believe really is a BAT request. I would really like some simple park areas which are 1x1, 1x2 or 2x2 which are pure eye candy. I would like to have decorative entry ways to be placed at the entrances of my suburban neighborhoods. I dont have pics right now of real entry ways (I dont have a digital camera right at the moment) so I hope that my description will be enough. The entry ways to medium and high wealth neighborhoods in my city are usually decorated with a small stone wall and lots of expensive landscaping which basically highlights the name of the neighborhood, like Bradenton Meadows, Raven's Bluff, Worthington by the Lakes, Bedford Commons, and other areas where I live. there is usually a lot of shrubbery, flowers, one or two trees, night lighting (to see the sign) and the sign is usually mounted on a nice stone or wodden wall which is only about 10 feet long or so. the more ritzy areas have waterfalls and fountains at the entrance. I am not looking for any real words on the signs just something nice to put at the transition point between the main roadway and the neighborhood street entrance. it would be nice if there were two lots per set (one for each side of the street) and it would be nice if there were many different sets of entryway lots so it does not get repetetive in a large suburb. let me know what you all think and if this is more of a lot editor request or BAT request. I would like it to look professional for use in my CJ. thanks ahead of time.

good start. I would like to say that I have been experimenting with ploppable trees myself and find that mixing Jeronij's seasonal lots with PEG's seasonal lots makes for very nice pics. I like to use an even, random spread of the acer, ulm, and peg lots where every I can. the only problem being that the peg lots are near the bottom of the parks list and jeronij's lots are at the top...oh well, it is a labor of love! keep posting though and let us see how you progress! btw, I dont see any pics on the second update...

awsome waterfalls, very well done. nice stroll through the woods too.

Thank you sloppet! and yes, compromise, that highway might be noisy, however, the trees help dissipate some of the sound. although, now that you mention it I may look up those sound barriers on the stex and see what I can do with em...

well I would like to put in my 2 cents if I may: when I started with SC (any of them) I was a grid happy, sardine city building freak! but after seeing all the beautiful and fantastic city designs in the CJ forum and the City Building Concepts forum I decided I had to break out of my symetrical shell. I Think the best way to do that is to start a fresh region and start experiementing. I started making streets and roads that went in random directions. I used more angles, more low density areas, and started playing regionally little by little. I also started experimenting with farms a lot. farms are one of the lots that you don't "need" but can make a very eye pleasing city. the same goes for suburbs. nothing but low density and random, non-grid streets. it may not be effcient or dense but it is realistic and pleasing to the eye. also, parks, parks, parks. trees make everything look better. In my CJ, Newtopia Valley, I use PEGASUS and JeroiJ Ploppable Seasonal Tree lots everywhere, even in industrial areas, and I have gotten a lot of comments on it. The trees I use are slowly becoming a "National Symbol" for my region. just keep experiementing and you find what pleases you.