soldyne

if SimCity4 were real... everyone would work round the clock, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. there would be no weekends or holidays. civic buildings could function at full capacity even with no employees to run them. the only traveling allowed would be to and from work. no one would be allowed to visit freinds or family. no shopping is allowed and no one is actually allowed to go to school or the hospital.

heh lol, that is funny. In my cities people travel about 5 tiles by car and abandon due to long commute times. I wish I had your problems. as for comedy, try this thread: https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=70971

wow, these suburbs are inspirational. I can't wait to start working on mine. as for getting the same type house in one area, you could do what cnystrom1 said and if that is not having the effect you want try this: find a house style you like, set it to historical and keep demolishing the other styles that build until the style you want pops up. it may take a while but it will give you the results you are looking for.

If simcity 4 were real... no one would have any concept of weather. everyday is a sunny day. giant robots and UFOs would be considered natural disasters, and are probably covered by insurance. roads would never get potholes if the transportation budget is maintained. there would be only one religion. the mayor could summon forth bolts of lightning, giant volcanoes and create life in the wilderness, yet would not be able to put out a fire by destroying the source (bulldoze the building). time would stop when a fire started.

well, it has been nearly the entire weekend and I have recieved no replies to this thread, so, I will assume that this topic is no longer of interest. It takes a great deal of effort to take these pics, cut and paste, resize/resample them, host them off site and post them, nearly as much effort as it does to run the experiment. that being the case I will continue to run my experiment but the results will no longer be made public knowledge. see you all around later...

ha ha ha, rofl. great ones guys, how about these: garbage could be incinerated for free by reducing the garbage budget to 0 but teachers and doctors will strike every week if they dont get exactly what they want. anyone could quit their jobs and move out of the city if they have to travel more than an hour to work but pile up the garbage in their backyard and set their house on fire every other month and they will not say a word. all cities in the world would be square. firemen dont put out fires unless the mayor specifically directs them to but hospitals and police work just fine on their own. everything in the city limits is able to be destroyed with a single bulldozer...except garbage. I have lots of others, but i'll give some new people a chance.

YAY! My 100th post! and its a big one! ok New Update. The experiment has indeed yielded results although they were not the results I had in mind. first a few pics to show you the state of the region: here are some closeups and information from the downtown area. the downtown area was a huge success. mass transit was going in full swing and as you will see all forms of mass transit were more popular than driving! I even had a few skyscrappers, was able to get two landmarks, lower taxes and still come out ahead in the budget. I decided to use the center grid in each block as a large parking area (courtesy of PEG alleyways). I thought it gave the look of a more commercial downtown feeling. it also increase desirability for commercial by quite a lot: Now we will start to get into the city proper. Things did not go so well here. if you look at the traffic chart you will see that mass transit was indeed being used quite extensivly. the only congestion in the city was on the monorail, subway, and rail lines. the roads and avenues and highway were barely being used at all. the problem though was that eventhough mass transit was being used so much I still had long commute times in almost every single building. I remember reading somewhere that if a commuter travels out of the city limits they get a surcharge on commute time. since I practially forced all my commuters to travel out of the city this may have accounted for the increase in commute time despite the extensive use of mass transit. In this first pic, you get an overview of the city center. I have a few skyscrappers but you can see plenty of abandoned buildings due to commute time: This is a pic of my zone layout. as you know, I had originally started with more commercial areas, but I wanted to go to the extream and force the population to commute out of the city thus promoting the use of mass transit. they used the mass transit but commute times were still long: here is a pic of the charts and graphs of the cities transit and budget views. you can see that mass transit is getting used quite a bit. I underestimated the popularity of the subway system. It was the last piece to be installed and was the most popular form. the monorail was somewhat dissapointing though having the least amount of use. I even installed parking garages near all my monorail stations. the fact is the monorails were actually overcrowed. it seems it would have been popular except that my design did not provide enough space for more. perhaps I will rethink the monorail design in my next experiment. you can also see in the budget window that my mass transit income was nearly equal to my mass transit cost. but not quite... It is hard to see the traffic graph now that I have posted hit here, the graph lines from top to bottom are: 1: pedestrian at 90k (people walking to mass transit 2: car at 70k (people driving to parking areas) 3: subway at 60k 4: bus at 40k 5: passenger rail at 35k 6: monorail at 10k here is a typical route query of a monorail station transit hub. you can see how the people in the nearby area drive or walk to the parking garage, get out and take either the bus, subway, or monorail. my transit hub Idea worked just as I thought it would, but those commute times are still counted as long. if you look closely at the residential building in the bottom right you will see how the sim gets on the one way street and goes all the way around his grid just to get to the parking garage so he can take mass transit. btw, that is a R$$$ building too, so even the rich will go out of their way to use mass transit even if it is a bit inconvienient to get there: here is a pic of the passenger rail hub: now for some anomolies. the first pick shows just how lazy sims really are. you can see the route query on the residence. the only places these people commute to are right down the street. the roads and avenues are no where near congested (100 cars max). yet, this residence regersters commute time as medium! this should be a short commute I would think, but the sims are just really lazy. there are even examples in the city(no pics) of what should be short commutes with subway and rail going out of city (meaning they are only about 10 or so tiles long) and they register as a long commute. take a look: and here is a real winner. when I started my city out I had commercial near the avenues. later on I zoned over the commercial with residential. I did not destroy the bulidings first or dezone the area, just zoned over. when new res buildings grew the people who had been working in the old commercial buildings were still being registered as working in those buildings even though those buildings were now residential and not commercial. look closely at the route query, you will see the residence in the upper left corner leave his house and ends up working in another house on the bottom right! sure we can rationalize this but we all know that the game is not supposed to let this happen. I let the simulation run for many game years and this situation never resolved. this was not an isolated incident either. I had examples of this happening all over the city and all in areas were I had zoned over commercial instead of dezoning first. eventually I fixed this glitch by dezoning the offending areas and letting the game run a few months. btw, this was also registered as a medium commute: So I was able to get a city of about 300k (which is a record for me btw). however, it was quite a struggle to get that high. when I reached 300k growth pretty much stalled. I figure that was because there just as many people leaving due to commute time as were entering due to demand. My next design will do the opposite of this one. I will try to keep all commercial and IHT jobs in the city proper while still exporting ID and IM out of the city. I may try and fix the monorail clogging issue but that will take some work. some lessons learned in this experiment: 1) sims are very lazy 2) commutes out of the city have a commute time surchage added 3) dont zone over, dezone first, wait, then rezone 4) always check funding of power buildings before unpausing 5) sims like mass transit, even the rich! 6) Subway was the most popular form of mass transit, start with it before anything else. I say this because it was heck trying to install subway stations when the streets were lined with tall buildings! 7) with good mass transit the highway was never really used. the highway had at most 1k users going to the IHT city but that was before I added subway in the IHT and then highway use droped to about 100. this makes sense if everyone is using mass transit they dont need highways! <edit> take small pictures and resize them larger, instead of resizing large pictures smaller. maybe then the graphs and numbers will be easier to see! </edit> one last note. my IHT city never really made a profit. it seems that eventhough they are I$$$ they have a very sparse population (few jobs per building). since they produce no pollution and have the same requirements for desirability as residential does it seems much more beneficial to keep IHT in the city proper instead of exporting out of the city. well, I would like lots of comments and suggestions please. I will begin working on a new design shortly. I have just recieved in the mail 3 more seasons of StarGate SG1 (seasons 5, 6 and 7) and so will be watching that while I plan my new design. I certainly hope that I was not the only one that learned somthing from this. the next update is on its way!...

the farmlands look wonderful. I hope to have a CJ someday with rural areas that look half this good! keep it up.

<edit> ap8806: I got your PM and have not had a chance to send the files to you. I will try to remember to do it tonight. as you can see by the post below, i was kind of tied up with things yesterday. sorry </edit> Quick update: (sorry no pics ) I had some trouble in my city yesterday...first some background on the way I mayor. Whenever I place an incinerator I reduce the funding for it to 0. this basically gives me a garbage burner for free with some pollution as incinerators will burn garbage even with no funding, they just wont produce any power. however, when this is done all subsequent power buildings will be plopped at a default funding level equal to the average of all other power buildings including all incinerators... so, my city was doing well and I was given the solar plant reward, so I decided to replace my coal plants with them. well I pause the game, destroy the coal plants, replace them with solar power. everything looks great...I unpause the game... ... see where this is going? well I forgot about the default funding and all my solar plants were funded at 0. when I unpaused the entire city (at this point around 100k pop) had a city wide blackout! and because there was no power, there was also no water. by the time I was able to pause the game, fix the funding issue and get water and power up and running again my pop had dropped to 7k........ it was a nightmare. I had done so much development before hand I did not want to reset so I kept going. so many abandoned buildings, so much horror. my income dropped from 60k to 5k in the blink of an eye. but my expenses stayed at 50k. good thing I has some money saved up. I let it run for a while and eventually people started to move back in. but there are still areas of town with eniter blocks of abandoned buildings, remnants of the Great Black Out of 102 (that was the year it happened). ever since then my city has not been quite right. some areas will develop well, and other areas still have undeveloped zones even with high desirability, land value, and civic services. what makes this disaster even worse is that I made a post on gamefaqs.com to someone about the very issue of underfunding incinerators and making sure to check power funding on all new power buildings...shame on me, shame on me... well the good news is that the city right now is at the tail end of recovery and I have a few mayoral tricks left up my sleeve to entice growth. the city is once again profitable (barely) and the connecting cities are all doing well (except my IHT city which is still not making a profit but is close). when I feel my center city is well enough to take pics of I will post em, probably before the end of the holiday weekend.

mysterious globes, metallic earth, sneek peaks! you must give us more!!! THIS SOLDYNE DEMANDS! or at least asks for nicely...

I recently tried this and the results were fantasitc! heres a small pic, I may have more later: everything is nice, neat and orderly. before I parcelized I had a bunch of little 1x1 buildings poping up everywhere. it looked really chaotic and ugly. thanks for the great tip. if it was not for this thread I may never have found this out!

NEW UPDATE! here is the state of region. I have one main res city, the north is High Tech industry, the south is Manufacturing and Dirty industry and the east is the beginnings of a Central Business District. I have only zoned low density res and com for the moment. yep that is a large map with nothing but low density res. they have all the services they could ever want and I am making a profit of about 10k a month. the residents have everything they could ever want, art museum, main library, resort hotel, advanced research center, minor league stadium, radio station, a few cemetaries and an airport tram (which goes to the airport that does not exist). The only cheats used thus far is the god mode trees cheat (and the city renaming cheat). all the money and rewards were earned the old fashioned way. I dont have any pics of the city proper since it is pretty boring right now, but once things pick up Ill take more pics: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/7720/sateoftheregion19fc.jpg align=baseline> here are the current data views describing the transit network and the zoning pattern I used for the main city. as you can see commute time for this large city is only about 30 minuets (not bad so far). the second most common form of transport is walking! thats a new one on me! of course with only 60k peeps in the city the transit network is still a little bit overkill: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/2502/dataviewsnov221en.jpg align=baseline> here is a close up of the parcelized IHT area. I originally just threw down some random, non parcelized zones and things looked like carp. I rezoned with 3x3 parcels and now everything is moving along swimmingly and it looks good too! http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/3100/parcelizedindustry0ak.jpg align=baseline>

the only words that I can think to say when I see your region compared to actual maps is, Oh my g0d, oh my g0d, oh my g0d!. your airport recreation is nearly exact. your city journal is like a living breathing map! I can see it now, New Interactive World Atlas, by JerseyDevil! keep it up man!

I love the night pics like everyone else. your night pics make the day pics look boring. I especially love your ideas for rich suburb design. it gives me so many ideas for when I build my suburbs. keep it up man!

thanks everyone. Yes I may indeed have problems later on but as it has been said an experiment is not a failure if it does not yeild expected results, it is a failure if it yields no results at all. as far as grids and symmetry are concerned this is how I like to live my life; efficient and orderly. and so it is the style I fall back on when designing a large city. When I begin my actually CJ in the City Journal forums I will have a hand terraformed region with mountains, hills and rivers and most of my rural and suburb areas will be more freeform. this current experiment is for the main downtown area. I want something different from the basic grid style but still efficient enough to get large buildings and high populations. as far as the industry areas go, I have already used this parceliaztion design in a limited fashion and was please with the results. of course it was just a small experiment at the time so things may not work out as planned. but that is the fun of an experiment, to see what happens! If anyone wants a copy of the city layouts just send me a pm with your email address and Ill send you a .zip. I can't attach them (even as a .zip) because the city files are just too darn big. the way I made my region was to do the first city by hand and then I copied the city file itself (out of game) multiple times and then imported the copied versions. I then used the ingame cheat: whererufrom City_name to change the name of the city. changing the file name will not change the city name in game. if I did all the cities by hand I would still be on the second one!

A NEW UPDATE! I have finished laying out both a large city mass transit network and an industrial city mass transit network. I centered both layouts and created a block of 9 city squares as shown below. I have not put in highways or monorail yet as I will wait until those forms are needed. but you can figure out where they will be going by looking at the previous update. also, I have not placed any bus stops in yet so you wont see them in these pics, but again, look at the previous pics to see where they will be going: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/3380/freshregionwhole2ll.jpg align=baseline> the layout of the city portion changed hardly at all. the industrial portion is slightly different. I opted to go with a slightly larger grid of avenues: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5756/regionindustry5ha.jpg align=baseline> here is a pic of one of the industrial neighborhoods with zones placed: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/7567/industryzoned3ev.jpg align=baseline> this next pic is close up of the industrial zoned block. you can see that there is a frieght station next to each passenger station. you can also see that the center line within the avenues is different when surrounded by industrial as compared to being surrounded by residential or commercial (ie less landscaping): http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/6364/industryblock8ic.jpg align=baseline> here is a close up of the parceled industrial zones. yep they are parceled to be 3x3 industrial zones. I got the idea from a thread in the game experiments section. it is supposed to make the industrial zones look a bit more organized. we shall see: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/4884/industryparcel6fz.jpg align=baseline> this next pic is an aerial view of the residential city fully finished: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/7033/cityfull8uo.jpg align=baseline> when I started to redo the city layout I wanted to make sure that the neighborhoods were centered and evenly spaced. unfortunately, my neighborhood design has an odd number of tiles because of the monorail in the middle. this caused a slight anomoly when I did the center neighborhood. it is not a big deal, I will just fill the extra tile space with parks or something. what I am talking about is the extra tile space between the one way roads. this is where the monorail is supposed to go and two tiles wide is one tile too big: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5249/roundabouttrouble7mn.jpg align=baseline> this next pic is showing what I did with the space between the neighborhoods and the map edge. when I centered everything I had this buffer zone of empty space. I am not sure what kind of purpose this space will serve yet; low rent housing projects, strip malls, we shall see: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5075/bufferzones2fg.jpg align=baseline> That is all for this update. Next on my list is to actually start building a city in this mess! I dont plan to have any trouble until the maps start getting full, that is when we shall see if this mass transit system I designed really holds up.

thanks for the encouraging words everyone. I am currently planning a way to integrate an industrial city and CBD city with the residentail connections. I dont want the same grid pattern to extend into those cities mainly because I don't want the entire region to be monotonous and Industrial and Commercial zones work a little differently from res. Ill post more stuff when I get it. thanks again for the encouragement.