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Earthworks Tutorial Lucario Boricua's Earthworks Tutorials E-7: Hiking Trail
Lucario Boricua posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Greetings once again! Today I'm unveiling a wonderful Earthworks Tutorial for nature-lovers, we're making hiking trails!! These are a type of path located along natural areas, whose purpose is to allow for recreational walking and sometimes cycling in designated wilderness areas. These are an essential part of natural preserves open to the public, connecting visitor centers to the various amenities for outdoorsy people. A. Mods and custom content required Network Addon Mod, latest version, currently the 38. Versions 34 through 37 will still be adequate despite missing some of the latest relevant features. In particular, make sure to have the NAM hole digging lots, these are super important to do a lot of the required steps I'll be showing. There are other hole digging lots available and they work just as well. One of the features we'll be using are the pedestrian mall bridges! Slope mode of your choice: in my case, the original BRF Tunnel and Slope Mod with some slight modifications. I recommend this one in particular because it's one of the most varied slope mods available for SimCity 4. I currently use an older version which still did not include a dedicated Real Highway (RHW) slope. In fact, for this tutorial it is especially advantageous to have a slope mod which specifically excludes the Real Highway, as the network's default slope is especially steep, it'll come in handy to shape the natural terrain around the paths. Find all the published slope mods in the main topic of the Earthworks Tutorials series! God Terraforming in Mayor Mode: if not your thing, use the cheat to activate God mode terraforming tools in Mayor Mode Your favorite sand, rock or MMP path set: once the trail path is shaped, it's great to have it look just right with the right surface to match the scene. Some players might prefer a more precise and engineered walking surface, it's possible to use path lots, so long as they're slope-conforming and that the created path alignment has flatter slopes. Below there's a few trusted options: Some outdoor recreational area amenities: benches, scenic look-overs, overhanging bridges, railings and so on. Below I'm showing the ones I'll be using in this tutorial. The best one-stop area for these is the PLEX Mountain Theme Pack! One other thing players would enjoy is getting MMP trailblazers: ordinary people (pedestrians), cyclists and/or horseback riders. B. Types of terrain required: make sure to use a terrain area hosting natural features: streams, waterfalls, cliffs, mountains, lakes, coastlines, dunes--anything other than a featureless flat terrain. The more rugged, the better! Plan out your trail to include starting points (the trail heads), important stuff where amenities might be found, crossings and terminations (either another trail head, major outdoor facilities or a notable scenic destination). C. Take me to the trailblazing steps now!! Now that everything is set, we're ready to start our trail building! 1. We start by finding our scenic natural area! This time I'm in the Alba River Gorge Natural Heritage Preserve in the Town of Zacien, Kingdom of Rota. Here we have some impressive cliffs, roaring waterfalls and a refreshing pine forest, highly accessible by road, rail and even air travel (close to the Kingdom of Rota International Airport!). 2. The full trail should look like this (not exactly, depending on how we adapt to the terrain), although given the extreme level of detail involved in this tutorial, we'll end up building only the eastern half. The western half will be used for another upcoming tutorial! Location A is our visitor center to the Natural Heritage Preserve, where I'm using the Halfway Hut as the building where forest conservation activities are headquartered. Location B is a spot we'll be preparing for future outdoor uses, we will only prepare the terrain but not build anything in this tutorial. Location C will be the location of a spectacular scenic look-over for this amazing waterfall descending from the White River. 3. When starting our trail, we will find it easiest to start with a small flattish area we can use to create a switchback, a sharp turn to help trails go up and down steep terrain. We flatten the area by placing road pieces, and keep them in place to start a rising path. We also dig below to prepare our area to start building the trail downhill. 4. After digging down, we remove these pieces and start building a path segment going downhill. To keep things looking interesting, don't limit the paths to orthogonal segments, use diagonal and fractional angle alignments to better line up with the hillsides. 5. Once we reach the lowest part, we can flatten the terrain to create a larger activity area for future use. At the same time, we may notice that the landscape doesn't look quite right, we can fix that! 6. We can re-shape the natural terrain for a better look. Here I'll be using the Real Highway 2 (RHW-2) and the Street to shape the steep hillside with trees into a proper cliff face. The street can be reached with a hotkey short-cut with Alt + R. 7. To shape the cliff, we need relatively gentle slopes above and below where we want the cliff face, the cliff face will correspond to the steep transition between the gentler inclines. 8. One important benefit of the Street and RHW-2 is that they can be removed using the de-zoning tool. A quick way to select it is using Ctrl + V, saving valuable seconds of menu-loading time. 9. We now return to our original path. To ensure a consistent incline, we flatten an area uphill of our next curve or crossing, and then create an inclined portion at a higher elevation than our intended path from below. I'm using the road network (hotkey R to activate) to do this, don't use overly steep networks for the paths because our trailblazers could be discouraged by dangerously or tiresomely steep hiking! 10. We then demolish the cells for the uphill terrain raising and then build a FAR-2 road. Build 4-cell long segments which overlap 2 cells, continue until reaching the desired elevation. Once there. place the road pieces again to create the next horizontal stretch. 11. We then reach a spot where a depression would come in handy to make the landscape more interesting! Prepare the area by removing at least 3 road squares for the gorge gap. Continues to Part 2 below!!!- 3 Replies
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