asteconn

Apologies to bump an old topic, but I am planning on creating some new tutorials once I'm happy with my level of competency with the new NAM and RHW stuff. =]

I still call it Rural Highway in my mind's voice whenever I read the acronym.

Dia daoibh a chairde, agus fáilte go an cathair Bhaile Straith iris. Or, hello everyone, and welcome to the Ballystray city journal. I'm starting and journalling this city from stratch - to give you all an idea of how I throw towns and cities together, and because it seems like jolly good fun! The terrain used is the rather marvellous NHP Londonderry Northern Ireland map, which has Derry and a lot of the surrounding area ready for development. My reason for this city is to have a crack at producing a Belfast style transport network, although no doubt I'll have far more train lines abouts. To start with, I am going to lay out the transport networks from what will be the most important settlement in the area - Ballystray. Geography comes first in such matters - I'm certainly not going to drive the roads about willy nilly. Generally, roads will follow the contours and avoid the really hilly parts. River crossings make excellent points to start a settlement. To make this one extra awesome, here's one based on London's tower bridge. After drawing some roads - we have this: Next - Rail lines. Often this for me involves a hop out into the regional view so that I can plan the destinations that these lines will serve. Now - Rail is quite a disruptive network in my opinion - if it wants to look good it takes quite a bit of planning and a lot of space at times. The same is true for RHW. As I plan to have a mostly-bypass in this city, mirroring the M1, M2, M3 and A12 in Belfast, I decided that I should place down the most potentially disruptive part of the network (the interchange between them all) down first. I can see this interchange handling a lot of traffic, and deliberately so as I wish to tie in local roads here as well as free flowing between all of the main roads. I had to rebuild some of my rail lines, as they were in the way of my planned southwards RHW. Although I did bash this rather cool looking flying junction together because of it: And here's the junction so far: And lastly - after much faffing about - here's the progress so far

Dezone the area, then Zone something underneath it. Then demolish the lot.

Commute Time Abandonment. Commuter Loops.

I do have some videos that show how to make nice and easy interchanges with the RHW =3

The steep gradients are very unrealistic, but that is a very clever way to make a 5 way interchange.

I think that Freshballin has just schooled us all in how to apply eye candy to the RHW! For the benefit of those at home, what mods are you using for all of that eyecandy?

Here's an ancient, RHW version 2 6 way interchange I made for the craic a few years ago. It looks awful.

As it so happens! I have created a page that lists all of the absolute essential addons for SC4: http://www.latech.co.uk/sc4/essentials.php

very nice BlueLightning. If that's going to be a rural area, it need not be quite so tight, but very clever use of clover ramps.

As luck would have it - I have compiled a list of the absolute essentials already: http://www.latech.co.uk/sc4/essentials.php

I have a question: Will you be redoing the roads with FARR at a later date?

Pertinent point: You can use the RHW2 to some degree to allow faster travel outside of an urban area. Lots won't grow next to RHW2, so be mindful of that.

That is a pretty awesome map just there! I had a go at tracing some roads on the region I'm working on presently. I got fed up and wasn't happy with the result. I shall make an interchange map of somesort mind you. Eventually. Perhaps.

I'm a web developer by trade. I use IE, Chrome and Firefox. Although FF is my default for browsing (yay noscript and adblock and web developer toolbar)

You can use the Marrast MTEL and a regular avenue tunnel in the mean time

I'm going to get shot for asking this no doubt - but are there any tutorials on making decent maps about?

It is exceptionally tight! That interchange used to be a roundabout junction: Here's the satellite picture of it under construction: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Dublin&aq=&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=16.973616,46.538086&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Dublin,+County+Fingal,+Ireland&ll=53.318063,-6.367704&spn=0.004179,0.011362&t=k&z=17

Moonraker0: Those interchanges are superb - especially the trumpet. Just shows how brilliant the RHW can look when curves are used.

SimCity 4 Deluxe runs fine on a low spec Dell Inspiron 1520 running XP - Cheapy celeron processor, 1gig of ram. Any modern laptop should be absolutely fine.

I'd be more than willing to help on road and transport matters - I'm a supreme road geek and have a good few tutorials on youtube for the RHW - although roads in general are my area of interest. I shall of course be lurking to see what I can do to improve my cities' aesthetics. [screenshots of mental RHW use to follow]

I'm very surprised that the M50 in the Republic of Ireland hasn't cropped up. When the M50 was first built in the early nineties, it was adorned with roundabout interchanges for its whole length. These did great, until the traffic levels started to shoot up. Now, anyone who encounters roundabouts regularly should know that they are great for high levels of traffic, but once they snarl up they become an atrocious flashpoint for traffic. The best example is the intersection with the N7 - dubbed the 'Mad Cow Roundabout'. However! The Irish don't drag their feet much when it comes to their motorways! All of the important junctions along the M50 are being upgraded to be completely free flowing. This has resulted in some extremely tight interchanges, albeit they are very cleverly designed. The N7/M50 interchange now looks like this: How mental is that interchange?

Incomplete junctions are often built with the plan to carry them on through the junction, but haven't been completed because of: cost, traffic levels not warranting it, or political reasons. Incomplete junctions happen a lot in the UK as our road traffic planning is so fractious and oftentimes disjointed. A very good example is the glasgow ski ramps: http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=55.852047,-4.266804&spn=0.002957,0.011362&t=k&z=17 976: I can't articulate enough how much I appreciate the realism that's portrayed by that junction of yours.

A huge selection of brilliant interchanges But a woeful lack of terrain mods =[