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*PUNCH* posted:(massive, mind-blowing amounts of info on Urban Planning)  Joking aside, the article on Lowell, MA was very interesting. There's an overhead map of their canals and river-side industrial districts that is strikingly reminiscent of so many New England towns I know of. I got the so-called "Green Book" (The Practice of Local Government Planning) from an Interlibrary Loan. It's a bit much, especially for the purposes of making purty cities in dat dem dere Simcity 4 ... but part of its History section mentions the growth of industrial towns in the Northeast as being based around a) water power, b) massive amounts of cheap labor, which leads to c) cheap housing within walking distance. It's obvious to me, now, but it explains why making those sorts of layouts in Simcity is difficult because it runs so counter to all of my assumptions. Why create these weird, organic-looking street layouts when you can separate things more clearly? After all, everyone owns a car ... That and the fact that using Fractional Angle Roads in Simcity 4 is hellaciously difficult. Do you guys have screenshots of industrial parks in Simcity 4 that you're particularly proud of? I'd love to see some. Regarding the Fused Grid layout, I would agree that it works incredibly well in SimCity 4, even if it is unrealistic. The use of parks in every grid-square, while expensive as hell to maintain, really cranks up land desirability and value. It's almost as if the Fused Grid was some sort of SimCity min-maxing tactic that bled into the real world. Almost. Anyway, great info -- thank you, very much. I'd check out some of those mega-plot industrial lots, but the dependencies are freaking me out.
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Mar 24, 2013 17:30
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Iunnrais posted:More importantly, have you tried removing duplicate files/dependencies? There are a number of programs that can help you find these and remove them easily. Did WONDERS for my startup time. Yep, no duplicates and readme's and pics are mostly removed. Even with all of those mods and add-ons I still see the occasional brown box. Most of them are due to modders using dependencies that can't be found anymore. And since the mod community is sperg central no one will upload the old files because they aren't theirs. Which makes sense since the Internet Police would totally come to their house and arrest them for uploading files that aren't theirs. GodlessCommie fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Mar 24, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 17:44
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GodlessCommie posted:Which makes sense since the Internet Police would totally come to their house and arrest them for uploading files that aren't theirs. What is passing in their minds. 
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Mar 24, 2013 17:57
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My biggest wish for the SC4 modding community: Create a mod manager with automatic download and dependency resolution. Like that's ever going to happen.
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Mar 24, 2013 18:03
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At least now we've megapacks, and they're a lot of buildings dependencieless and NAM now has a single file. The worst offenders are ancients bats with dependencies long lost.
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Mar 24, 2013 18:07
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I tried doing that thing with mixing light commercial with industrial, and some medium residential too. Dirty and mfg is taxed to hell so only high-tech industry. (Also this is in our multiplayer region where commercial demand is through the floor everywhere, so only the shittiest low-density shops ever show up.)
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Mar 24, 2013 18:48
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jadebullet posted:So I may have to remove the high def textures and run in software mode. That being said, what specifically do I have to delete from my plugin folder to do that if I am running Old Fashioned? Go into the Terrain stuff folder, then delete everything in the terrainmods folder except PNW_treecontroller.dat. Delete zzz_terrain as well. Then, go into the "everything else" section and delete another folder also called terrainmods (if memory serves - it might be something different.) I screwed up and they're duplicate. You should be fine after that, I believe. I love to build how you're describing, but I don't in practice. It's a combination of laziness and running out of money when highway planning. quote:Joking aside, the article on Lowell, MA was very interesting. There's an overhead map of their canals and river-side industrial districts that is strikingly reminiscent of so many New England towns I know of. What's crazier about Lowell is that the original workers were mostly farmer's daughters, who came of their own volition. The owners of these early mills and factories had sort of a "benevolent tyrant" thing going on: they built public education facilities and rotated lecturers in and out, even though it affected their bottom line (this came more or less out of a puritan interpretation of enlightenment thinking.) So a lot of the farmer's daughters came to work because it was their only opportunity at the time to gain an education. A lot of the groundwork for the women's suffrage and labor rights movements in the United States was paved in the early days of the 19th century at this mill towns. Here's a little more reading on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_Girls. History is cool.  Anyhow, my latest region is a little shoddy; I've mostly been focused on testing to make sure OldFashioned doesn't explode somehow. I'll post some pics when I've got something pretty going. *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Mar 25, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 18:50
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I'm enjoying my first city a lot so far with Killhour's pack, and I've had only a single problem so far. My avenues seem to be missing an asset which causes these ugly boxes to appear. Does anyone know where I can get the missing file or fix the issue?
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Mar 24, 2013 20:59
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g0lbez posted:My town keeps complaining about long commute times and I can't figure it out. Can someone give me some advice? I've included pics of the town if that helps Rocky Mountain High indeed. Awesome. Now build a giant slide all the sims can ride down. GodlessCommie posted:Is my plugin folder too big? Hey! That's the same file path I have name and all!  jadebullet posted:Edit: By the way, does anyone else build there cities the way I do? I start them as a small town linked with other small towns. Then the sectors that I designate as a city, I slowly begin growing and expanding until it is an actual city. Or do you guys just jump right into city layout design? Sort of like this. I think it dawned on me from the Grand Fromage LP that you make a highway and rail network first, and then build towns and cities in natural places. Water is the obvious one. Especially the mouths of bays or rivers. Others are places where the Rail network meets a major Highway, or where two Highways cross. I think water crossings with bridges are a natural place as well. But like Punch said, this is a lot of work, and you end up spending hours building and planning before you ever actually start a city. I have a San Francisco right now with a complete highway network, but got burnt out before building the first city. null_pointer posted:Regarding the Fused Grid layout, I would agree that it works incredibly well in SimCity 4, even if it is unrealistic. The use of parks in every grid-square, while expensive as hell to maintain, really cranks up land desirability and value. It's almost as if the Fused Grid was some sort of SimCity min-maxing tactic that bled into the real world. Almost. This is how I felt too after learning about, and implementing, it. It's loving perfect for this game, but I realized all the issues it might have in real life. In fact, I did stumble onto some of those issues in the game, particularly when it came to industrial zones while trying to keep the same pattern. I will say that the two parallel artery system of the FG is probably my favorite part. So simple, yet it really does mitigate traffic issues, while creating space for government services and rewards.
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Mar 24, 2013 21:00
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Inverness posted:I'm enjoying my first city a lot so far with Killhour's pack, and I've had only a single problem so far. My avenues seem to be missing an asset which causes these ugly boxes to appear. Does anyone know where I can get the missing file or fix the issue? It's because of the USL, try to reinstall it or either remove it. Read the readme carefully, because they're some files that need to be deleted.
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Mar 24, 2013 21:20
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I have the Steam version installed and I've been putting my mods in the plugin folder that's in the installation directory as opposed to the one in My Documents. The mods seem to be working fine, but is there any disadvantage in doing this? Other than having to click through a slightly ridiculous directory tree to get at it.
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Mar 24, 2013 22:04
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Starhawk posted:I have the Steam version installed and I've been putting my mods in the plugin folder that's in the installation directory as opposed to the one in My Documents. The mods seem to be working fine, but is there any disadvantage in doing this? Other than having to click through a slightly ridiculous directory tree to get at it. The only difference is that the game loads first the plugins in that folder and last the Mydocuments.
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Mar 24, 2013 22:13
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Darn. Software mode just makes it so that I get a CTD whenever I try and load up my city. I guess I will just keep it in hardware mode and just deal with the rare random CTD, and the CTD whenever I try and save and go back to region from my bigger city area.
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Mar 25, 2013 00:19
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Longbaugh01 posted:This is how I felt too after learning about, and implementing, it. It's loving perfect for this game, but I realized all the issues it might have in real life. I feel like I missed an up-thread discussion about the Fused Grid's real-life drawbacks, but other than some points about the park areas becoming effectively unusable as a park/destination, I can't find it. It seems pretty smart to me. I have the pattern on my graph-paper notebook in front of me and the way that the inner streets never extend across the grid square is nice; keeps the residential neighborhoods as either cul-de-sacs or (at worst) low speed traffic areas, due to all the ninety-degree turns. The "alleyways" in between the clusters of grid-squares are also nice, as they *do* create destinations of either commercial areas or, later on, high-tech jobs. This is in addition to what you mentioned earlier about reward buildings, as well. Can someone school me on critiques of the Fused Grid pattern (either elsewhere in the thread, or just in general)?
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Mar 25, 2013 00:31
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Does anyone know what would be causing my game to crash when I am saving? I am running in hardware mode on a single core. I unfortunately can't switch to software mode because the game will crash upon loading a city. It is pretty annoying because I am trying to save often to not lose progress and it will crash randomly upon trying to save. Sometimes the save goes through, sometimes it doesn't. It is very annoying, especially when I make something that is complicated and want to save so I don't lose it.
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Mar 25, 2013 00:41
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The problem I generally see with patterned cities is that they are patterned. I'm not an urban planner and I'm sure patterns are more efficient, but all of the strongly patterned cities i know of are cities i wouldn't like living in (Almere comes to mind, but also the grid of Kyoto makes the city less charming to me than Tokyo is) while the cities I enjoy the most are the chaotic, messy ones (Tokyo, Granada) while those cities never struck me as particularly inefficient, at least not in a way that I experience as negative. In Simcity 4 I always deliberately create a mess for this reason.
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Mar 25, 2013 00:45
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benzine posted:It's because of the USL, try to reinstall it or either remove it. Read the readme carefully, because they're some files that need to be deleted. 
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Mar 25, 2013 00:45
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jadebullet posted:Does anyone know what would be causing my game to crash when I am saving? I am running in hardware mode on a single core. I unfortunately can't switch to software mode because the game will crash upon loading a city. It is pretty annoying because I am trying to save often to not lose progress and it will crash randomly upon trying to save. Sometimes the save goes through, sometimes it doesn't. It is very annoying, especially when I make something that is complicated and want to save so I don't lose it. What mods are you using? Start removing the terrain mods, at least to me they bring me a lot of problems, if not it could be some buildings.
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Mar 25, 2013 00:46
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Shibawanko posted:The problem I generally see with patterned cities is that they are patterned. I'm not an urban planner and I'm sure patterns are more efficient, but all of the strongly patterned cities i know of are cities i wouldn't like living in (Almere comes to mind, but also the grid of Kyoto makes the city less charming to me than Tokyo is) while the cities I enjoy the most are the chaotic, messy ones (Tokyo, Granada) while those cities never struck me as particularly inefficient, at least not in a way that I experience as negative. In Simcity 4 I always deliberately create a mess for this reason. My traditional pattern has been circles. I build a hub of school and safety facilities, and then make a circle of roads surrounding it at the max distance of the structures. Then I fill in the empty space with houses. I put space between circles to make room for commercial or industrial buildings or whatever else I want to put in like trains or highways.. it makes it nice and messy and hides some of the pattern.
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Mar 25, 2013 00:49
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null_pointer posted:I feel like I missed an up-thread discussion about the Fused Grid's real-life drawbacks, but other than some points about the park areas becoming effectively unusable as a park/destination, I can't find it. It seems pretty smart to me. I have the pattern on my graph-paper notebook in front of me and the way that the inner streets never extend across the grid square is nice; keeps the residential neighborhoods as either cul-de-sacs or (at worst) low speed traffic areas, due to all the ninety-degree turns. Punch had some critiques in recent posts.
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Mar 25, 2013 01:07
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I am running NAM, as well as whatever is in the old fashioned and first DEP pack from the OP. I also grabbed some add on buildings and the real highway mod, though I haven't placed anything from the highway mod. I also grabbed the modular railyard asset. Also, I deleted anything referring to the terrain mods from the old fashioned pack and the game still crashes when I try and load a city in software mode. Edit: Well gently caress. Now the game won't even load my city in hardware mode. I tried reinstalling NAM since I hosed around with the settings earlier to make cars more persistent but it looks like that didn't help. jadebullet fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Mar 25, 2013 |
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Mar 25, 2013 01:15
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Try only the old fashioned pack and NAM only or the other way.
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Mar 25, 2013 01:23
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I hosed around with things a little bit and it looks like I had 2 NAMs running at once. I think that was the problem. BTW, is there any way to make it so that your zones that you place at the same time don't keep spawning the same building? jadebullet fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Mar 25, 2013 |
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Mar 25, 2013 01:41
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Longbaugh01 posted:Punch had some critiques [about Fused / Fixed grid layouts] in recent posts. In other news, LeCorbusier's ideas sound kind of hellish, like the comment of "deadening suburbia" spread out over every aspect of a city. A picture I found of his sixty-story cruciform towers struck me as some sort of horrific cross between Orwell, the RiverBay housing projects in the Bronx, and some sort of oppressive Mirror's Edge type city. EDIT: As I obsessively-compulsively search for interesting examples of industrial park layouts, I find some occasionally weird poo poo which, after much pondering, starts to make sense.  Here's an example of something which seemed initally stupid, but then started to make more sense as I looked at it. I suppose having this big loop that doesn't connect to the main road (the East-West toll road) is way of keeping the traffic on that road at high speed. Anyone heading for the industrial park bleeds off into that North-South secondary road and then enters, further south.Unless I'm reading too much into it, it seems like the layout makes good use of stop lights and loops to keep traffic flowing both inside the industrial park and outside of it. The park has its own smaller traffic pattern inside a larger network of roads, without interrupting it. The chances of this being modeled within SC4 seems sort of slim, though. null_pointer fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Mar 25, 2013 |
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Mar 25, 2013 02:35
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 I like the random, lone trailer house that is convinced that it has no road connection.
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Mar 25, 2013 04:21
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Giggily posted:
By the way, this looks wonderful. Very nice.
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Mar 25, 2013 06:18
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Giggily posted:
This is lovely looking, but the bit where the road and the street are running parallel would drive me bonkers. Is there an SC4 profile/mod manager? Just fake out /Documents/Simcity4 with folder redirection, I'd imagine.
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Mar 25, 2013 06:24
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The town I live in has a bit where in Sim City terms there's a road and streets running parallel on either side. I don't see anything odd here. 
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Mar 25, 2013 10:16
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Elukka posted:The town I live in has a bit where in Sim City terms there's a road and streets running parallel on either side. I don't see anything odd here. Are you talking about Service Lanes? (slash Frontage road depending where you live, I guess)
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Mar 25, 2013 10:33
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Going by googling the term, basically, but for some reason they run parallel to a not at all busy 2-lane road with a 50 kph speed limit.
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Mar 25, 2013 12:48
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Elukka posted:Going by googling the term, basically, but for some reason they run parallel to a not at all busy 2-lane road with a 50 kph speed limit. I also have roads like that around where I live. I didn't even know it was terribly unusual. It's hilariously frustrating/retarded, so I enjoy subjecting my Sims to it.
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Mar 25, 2013 13:08
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I think I've made the anti-Magnasanti. This region is perfectly stable. Advance the timer 30 years at Cheetah speed, and you'll not see the population change a single bit. Safety services cover all areas, and crime doesn't show up at all - either on the graph, or on the region view. It has a High School, Elementary School, College, Library, and Museum, all of which have funding twice in excess of the demand. Traffic congestion is nonexistent - it's green as far as the eye can see. Everywhere has water and power, and the power is all windmills. No industry exists, no air pollution, no water pollution. Health care is omnipresent, and all educational and health-related citywide ordinances are in place. It's drawing a profit. Save for the occasional restructuring of the commercial zones, where some buildings get smaller and some get bigger, the city is utterly stagnant. Everyone is completely happy about everything, all the time, and nothing ever changes. ... ... gently caress 'em.  It's laundry day, and Truckasaurus is bringing the Maytag.
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Mar 25, 2013 13:54
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So my sims are now refusing to cross the railroad I built leaving all the residential on the far side without car access. I've tried with the regular rail crossing and the bridge over rail from GrandFromage's pack, but no luck and the vehicle sprites just disappear at the barrier/bridge 
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Mar 25, 2013 16:45
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Strategic Tea posted:So my sims are now refusing to cross the railroad I built leaving all the residential on the far side without car access. I've tried with the regular rail crossing and the bridge over rail from GrandFromage's pack, but no luck and the vehicle sprites just disappear at the barrier/bridge I had something like this once and eventually worked out it was because I had the wrong version of NAM installed -- I needed the right-hand drive version but was using the left-hand one. Maybe try reinstalling NAM?
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Mar 25, 2013 17:14
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Regarding that industrial anchoring trick where it's the only one with road access: Aren't you boned if a fire breaks out and you don't have the landing strip?
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Mar 25, 2013 17:41
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Does anyone know why the game will pick the same model to grow on a zone as the neighboring zones? I have bulldozed them several times but it will just come back with the same model. I mean, there is still variety, but in some places there will just be a cluster of the same coffee shop, or the same exact house, or 9 copy centers all in a row.
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Mar 25, 2013 19:17
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I assume because that thing is the "best fit" for the current demand and the location's desirability. I've noticed this mostly happens for the poorer, smaller buildings, and that placing a park or plaza next to one of the plots is often enough to make them change. Then I can erase the park/plaza (or leave it be if it makes things look neat).
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Mar 25, 2013 19:34
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That is probably the problem. I will give that a try. Also, does anyone know of a mod that gets rid of the stupid Cul de sacs at the end of streets?
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Mar 25, 2013 21:44
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jadebullet posted:Also, does anyone know of a mod that gets rid of the stupid Cul de sacs at the end of streets? That's NAM, just uninstall and reinstall without the Cul de sacs, option. Or I don't know if it will even work in the NAM folder search for the cul de sac.dat or something like that and delete it.
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Mar 25, 2013 21:48
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As someone new to SC4, what size cities (by population) should I aim for when starting a new region? I wish I hadn't started with New York, since its all flat. 
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Mar 26, 2013 00:55
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