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Hello Houston my old friend.... We're here to kill you off, again
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Nov 5, 2015 22:25
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People should stop using anything in Texas as any kind of example, unless you're trying to demonstrate how to do it wrong.
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Nov 5, 2015 22:32
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Supraluminal posted:As lovely as that is, there's too much limited-access highway. Needs more six-lane roads lined with commercial development and at-grade intersections. YEsssssss
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Nov 5, 2015 23:00
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Filled parking lots are the sign of progress and the American dream. Better than the rust belt, where downtown is filled with parking lots because of building demolitions. Texas cities are a great example of hammering urban living into a car shaped hole, which is pretty cool from ooh look at the pretty road stuff, but obviously kind of horrifying from sustainability points of view.
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Nov 5, 2015 23:05
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Baronjutter posted:You don't have little pedestrian paths at the end of each dead end, grid is not fused Some of those shots are from relatively early in the city's development. I started with ped paths connecting around the blocks' central parks, but yeah, later on I started adding them more liberally to the dead-ends to make even more short-cuts. You can see that a little bit in the second album. It was also built way before After Dark, so no biking! However, it did seem like the design succeeded in getting people to walk fairly often.
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Nov 5, 2015 23:17
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How come everyone has that monkey avatar?
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Nov 5, 2015 23:32
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I'm guessing the GARBAGE DICK avatar got replaced.
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Nov 5, 2015 23:36
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Everybody who downloaded Bonzi Buddy back in the day has had the subliminal programming activated, and now Bonzi Buddy is waging war across the internet in order to affect the singularity.
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Nov 5, 2015 23:36
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Supraluminal posted:Some of those shots are from relatively early in the city's development. I started with ped paths connecting around the blocks' central parks, but yeah, later on I started adding them more liberally to the dead-ends to make even more short-cuts. You can see that a little bit in the second album. My brother must have seen these on imgur because immediately after I told him I was building a new city he told me to build a modular fused grid. Weirdly specific!
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Nov 5, 2015 23:54
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Baronjutter posted:Which one?? The one where I'm a big dumb idiot and I confused it with a different building.
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Nov 6, 2015 01:18
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A city in the golden ratio, still growing...
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Nov 6, 2015 05:46
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah, if only parking was required for cars to path to destinations things would be a LOT different. Thankfully the cost of building multi-story parking garages has come way, way down in the last 60 years. Downtown Dallas has double that parking capacity, but it's all in a half dozen blocks due to every other building having 6-12 stories of parking garage on the first few levels + basement.
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Nov 6, 2015 06:09
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah, if only parking was required for cars to path to destinations things would be a LOT different. This image is pretty confusing to me. was loads of the city centre demolished to build these car parks?
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Nov 6, 2015 14:26
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Also, are land values in the basement there or something, since nobody has thought to buy up some lots, build a parking tower and then sell the rest for development?
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Nov 6, 2015 14:30
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Slashrat posted:Also, are land values in the basement there or something, since nobody has thought to buy up some lots, build a parking tower and then sell the rest for development?
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Nov 6, 2015 14:35
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Metrication posted:This image is pretty confusing to me. was loads of the city centre demolished to build these car parks? Yes. That pic is from around the 80s, when a whole bunch of older buildings were torn down to make room for the skyscrapers that (mostly) stand there today. It was part of a massive urban renewal project that took off incredibly slowly because of the unbelievable amount of traffic congestion. So, a lot of the proposed buildings never actually became buildings because of their lots held so much importance to the integrity of the traffic system, and now Houston is full of parking lots that nobody is allowed to build on. Not as many as in that crazy-rear end picture these days, but it's still really bad.  The pic on the right is what it looks like today from the same angle. CJacobs fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 16:10
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CJacobs posted:So, a lot of the proposed buildings never actually became buildings because of their lots held so much importance to the integrity of the traffic system, and now Houston is full of parking lots that nobody is allowed to build on. Couldn't people negotiate, say, getting three blocks of parking lots, building skyscrapers on two, and building a five-story-park on the third? It looks like there's lots of plain ground-level parking lots.
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Nov 6, 2015 16:28
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MikeJF posted:Couldn't people negotiate, say, getting three blocks of parking lots, building skyscrapers on two, and building a five-story-park on the third? It looks like there's lots of plain ground-level parking lots. Open air parking lots require almost zero maintenance compared to parking garages. A surprise maintenance day on a parking garage can put an office building in serious (time as money) trouble, since usually those 'days' are more like 'months', sometimes with little to no warning due to a crack being spotted. Then finding a place to park can become a hellish real life minigame.
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Nov 6, 2015 16:33
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On the other hand parking lots are fundamentally incapable of holding as many cars as any nearby building can fit workers.
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Nov 6, 2015 16:35
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xzzy posted:On the other hand parking lots are fundamentally incapable of holding as many cars as any nearby building can fit workers. Yep, this is why density doesn't work in auto-centric cities. if you're designing a city based on car culture you need vast areas of cheap land for parking and can never go very dense because you'd then need some sort of "parking structure" vs surface parking which is enormously more expensive, enough to make the bump in density unprofitable. It's only when land values and demand push way up past a critical threshold do you see an increase from the density that surface parking supports. This is why in auto-centric cities you generally only have extremes of low density and high density but a "missing middle". You'll have miles of single family housing built up around a core of skyscrapers rather than a more natural gradient of densities. It's also extremely hard to change because once most of your city is car-dependant everything needs parking. You can try making some low-car neighbourhood but the people living in it still all need cars to go anywhere else in the city and any businesses inside the new area still need full parking in order to get parking. And on top of all that the parking and car-centric design will be mandated by the city, so even if a business doesn't want to build way too much parking (bylaws are generally set to make sure a strip mall has parking enough for the busiest possible day) they can't. It's a vicious cycle. Parking and parking policy is one of the most powerful policies that shapes how cities grow and function.
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Nov 6, 2015 18:27
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So I played a lot of SimCity 4 back in the day and I've been meaning to scratch that particular city management itch again for a while now. After looking into this game it seems to me as if the main differences are that it doesn't have regions but has curved roads and some weird progression system. Assuming I don't care about spaghetti roads and leveling up my mayor skills, is there anything this game offers to justify no regions + $45 to purchase it and the expansion + the hassle of having to use
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Nov 6, 2015 19:38
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SovietPotatoe posted:So I played a lot of SimCity 4 back in the day and I've been meaning to scratch that particular city management itch again for a while now. After looking into this game it seems to me as if the main differences are that it doesn't have regions but has curved roads and some weird progression system. Assuming I don't care about spaghetti roads and leveling up my mayor skills, is there anything this game offers to justify no regions + $45 to purchase it and the expansion + the hassle of having to use It's cheaper than you think. The expansion is not necessary and actually adds almost nothing interesting - the day/night cycle is from the accompanying free patch. The base game is only $30 and seems to go on sale fairly often at this point, I think there was a 50% off weekend recently.
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Nov 6, 2015 19:47
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The major feature to compare to SC4 if you're on the fence is agent based traffic opposed to SC4's statistical model, which encourages doing cool traffic things. The rest of the civic management is just kind of there in service of doing cool traffic things. e. but yeah, we are do a sale for Thanksgiving and Xmas sales so it'd be hard to recommend the impulse purchase this second.
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Nov 6, 2015 19:48
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Baronjutter posted:Yep, this is why density doesn't work in auto-centric cities. if you're designing a city based on car culture you need vast areas of cheap land for parking and can never go very dense because you'd then need some sort of "parking structure" vs surface parking which is enormously more expensive, enough to make the bump in density unprofitable. It's only when land values and demand push way up past a critical threshold do you see an increase from the density that surface parking supports. This is why in auto-centric cities you generally only have extremes of low density and high density but a "missing middle". You'll have miles of single family housing built up around a core of skyscrapers rather than a more natural gradient of densities. A bit off topic, but I've seen you posting about dense cities and mentioning Jane Jacobs. I like her work, I was wondering if you have any :further reading: suggestions on the same topic?
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Nov 6, 2015 19:52
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SovietPotatoe posted:So I played a lot of SimCity 4 back in the day and I've been meaning to scratch that particular city management itch again for a while now. After looking into this game it seems to me as if the main differences are that it doesn't have regions but has curved roads and some weird progression system. Assuming I don't care about spaghetti roads and leveling up my mayor skills, is there anything this game offers to justify no regions + $45 to purchase it and the expansion + the hassle of having to use Each map tile in the game is about as big as a sc4 medium map and you've got a 5x5 tile grid to work with, so that's a poo poo ton of land, basically you're making a whole region at once. Your region also has a variety of outside connections and even through traffic. The curved roads look great when there's no buildings along them, but the game uses Cities XL style rigid square plots which can look horrible in many cases along curved roads, specially if your buildings look urban or "wall to wall", but nothing forces you to use curved roads, I only use them where I know the buildings growing along will be detached or suburban style buildings. The progression system is dumb. Density and wealth have been combined, but building models have nothing to do with density. So you can have a level 1 residential building grow that is a huge tower block apartment and have 10 households, then later that tower block goes through a series of upgrade and ends up a modest 5 story villa-apartment with 20 households. You also have to unlock roads and service buildings as you play, and some of the progression is a bit odd (like you get subways very early on but surface rail is end-game). Transit is also fairly badly implemented as you set up detailed lines (and line building can be very finicky) but you can't control how many vehicles run on the line other than your global transit funding. Your subway system has too many trains and your bus system is over loaded? Your only option is to increase global transit funding which will result in some more buses but even more empty metros. Oh also transit vehicles all clump together, there's no system to space them out. The good news is that most of the the dumb design choices can be fixed with mods! There's a mod that makes the actual graphics/model of a building relate to the buildings stats, so a 4x4 20 story building will have twice as many people as a 4x4 10 story building. There's a mod that not only lets you exactly specify the number of vehicles on a transit line, not only auto-spaces your vehicles so they don't clump up, but it allows you to select the exact type of vehicle you have running on your line. Want a little community shuttle bus serving your suburbs and a huge articulated bus downtown? Go for it. Want to use the lackluster vanilla railway system to make a tram, LRT, elevated, or commuter railway? Go nuts, enjoy the wide selection of trains and rail vehicles and stations on the workshop! There's basically a mod for everything. Of course depending on so many mods to fix and improve the game can be frustrating, and the developers have shown to be a bit stubborn when it comes to sticking with bad design choices, but it can be a really really fun game. Some people even manage to enjoy it without any major mods at all!
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Nov 6, 2015 19:55
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Baronjutter posted:There's a mod that not only lets you exactly specify the number of vehicles on a transit line, not only auto-spaces your vehicles so they don't clump up, but it allows you to select the exact type of vehicle you have running on your line. Want a little community shuttle bus serving your suburbs and a huge articulated bus downtown? Go for it. Want to use the lackluster vanilla railway system to make a tram, LRT, elevated, or commuter railway? Go nuts, enjoy the wide selection of trains and rail vehicles and stations on the workshop! What's this mod specifically? Already have Extended Public Transit UI, if it's in there I didn't see it.
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Nov 6, 2015 19:59
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Baronjutter posted:There's a mod that not only lets you exactly specify the number of vehicles on a transit line, not only auto-spaces your vehicles so they don't clump up, but it allows you to select the exact type of vehicle you have running on your line.  Which one is this.I need it!
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Nov 6, 2015 20:01
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SovietPotatoe posted:So I played a lot of SimCity 4 back in the day and I've been meaning to scratch that particular city management itch again for a while now. After looking into this game it seems to me as if the main differences are that it doesn't have regions but has curved roads and some weird progression system. Assuming I don't care about spaghetti roads and leveling up my mayor skills, is there anything this game offers to justify no regions + $45 to purchase it and the expansion + the hassle of having to use Especially if you use the mod that unlocks all the edge tiles so you can eventually cover the whole map, your city can become bloody enormous. It's not as big as an SC4 Region, but it's still huge, and you can play with the transit systems that connect all your different suburbs and such in the contiguous simulation, rather than just having them contribute to commuter statistics in the simulation model. The progression system is mostly just there to be your tutorial the first time through. You can turn off the thing that locks zone densities and road types behind population walls by using mods. There's also a mod that lets you still get achievements while mods are enabled. Speaking of mods, Steam Workshop is 100% a good thing for the citybuilding genre, and this game especially. All the mods and custom assets you could possibly want are right there in one place, and install with one click. If they have dependencies, a little popup appears to tell what they all are, and gives you the option to install those, too. You don't have to deal with the little whims and pissing contests associated with the turbospergs who run the various Simcity websites. Steam Workshop is the way to go, and is actually the opposite of a hassle.
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Nov 6, 2015 20:03
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Count Roland posted:A bit off topic, but I've seen you posting about dense cities and mentioning Jane Jacobs. I like her work, I was wondering if you have any :further reading: suggestions on the same topic? Death and Life of Great American cities is a good starting point. It's not really a technical manual nor does it make any specific prescriptions for how to build a city, it's just someone's very keen observations on how a city and it's people actually function and was written at a time when everyone involved in planning and any sort of science related to cities and transport were all beep-boop math proves cars are best, optimize the world for traffic flow. The Geography of Nowhere is also a great read, it's not dry, very entertaining. The High Cost of Free Parking is a good and surprisingly interesting book on parking policy. The Economy of Cities lays out how urban economies function, also very good.
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Nov 6, 2015 20:06
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Baronjutter posted:Death and Life of Great American cities is a good starting point. It's not really a technical manual nor does it make any specific prescriptions for how to build a city, it's just someone's very keen observations on how a city and it's people actually function and was written at a time when everyone involved in planning and any sort of science related to cities and transport were all beep-boop math proves cars are best, optimize the world for traffic flow. I've read The Economy of Cities, and it influenced me quite a lot. I'll check out those others, thanks.
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Nov 6, 2015 20:07
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Houston is a motherfucking nightmare town in a state full of nightmare towns. I've never been to Houston and not seen traffic exponentially worse than my first attempts to make large cities in this game.
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Nov 6, 2015 20:26
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Ok I've been having friends and posters here asking about mods and methods. I'm a huge sperg and ridiculously nit-picky when it comes to city builders, I want the game to make sense and at least seem "realistic" but also play well and be fun, which is a tall order. Here is my list of "essential" mods I can't imagine playing without. Building Themes http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=466158459 This mod lets you create themes and set them per district. Want a historic area here and a modern area there? Go for it. Want to mix styles? Go for it. Want to create your own styles or download entire themes ready to go on the workshop? Go for it!! Advanced Vehicle Options http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=442167376 This mod lets you tweak and control vehicles. For the most part you probably don't need to fiddle with it, other vehicle related mods need it work better when it's there. It also lets you turn off custom vehicles from spawning "in the wild" so you won't see that cool custom Chicago EL train running down your railway tracks. It also lets you turn off all the bugspray/doughnut/hotdog delivery vehicles and replace them with a variety of delivery vans from the workshop. It also lets you change the colours of vehicles to a more realistic pallet. Traffic ++ http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=409184143 Slightly improves the pathfinding AI but it's mostly about the additional control it gives you. Set speed limits, set vehicle restrictions, adjust turning lanes and traffic lights and most critically: remove traffic lights from intersections that don't need them (which in 99% of cases traffic lights do nothing good). Traffic ++ is a pretty standard mod, it seems most people use it as its often a dependency for other mods these days (as it included multi-track station enabler) Realistic Population and Consumption Mod http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=426163185 This mod totally changes how building stats are generated. The title is a bit of a misnomer, don't write this mod off as just another mod that jacks up building population levels to "realistic" numbers. The actual numbers are fully under your control and the mod ships with stats that will be fairly close to vanilla. The revolutionary thing this mod does is assign stats to buildings based on the VOLUME of the building model rather than the size of the lot. In vanilla CS all building stats are assigned simply by the size of a lot. So a 4x4 plot with a tiny building in the middle surrounded by grass will have the same stats as a massive skyscaper on the same size and level of lot, very dumb design. This mod calculates the volume of the building, chops it up by estimated number of floors based on the height, then assigns stats. Better yet, each zone type has its own (user configurable) formula for this, so a factory with tall smoke stacks doesn't end up having 5x as many jobs. At the end of the day the mod means you can simply look at a building and guess its stats, skyscrapers actually mean something, and single family houses generally have a single family. But if you don't like any of the stats or formulas you can change them very easily! This is probably my favourite mod to date and has made me fall back in love with the game! Improved Public Transit http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=424106600 Another absolutely essential mod that's functionality should be in the base game. It lets you actually control your transit lines by selecting how many and which type of vehicles are on the route, it also automatically spaces your vehicles out so they don't look stupid all clumped up. It also lets you use custom vehicles on your routes, which lets you do some very cool stuff with choo-choos and custom buses. Control Buildings Level Up http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=410535198 Basically lets you make buildings "historical" like in simcity4. Works per building or per-district by limiting the level a building can grow to. I use other mods too course, fine road heights, infinite oil and ore, lots of others. But the above are the absolutely essential game-changing mods that I think correct really bad choices or oversights made in CO's design.
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Nov 6, 2015 20:36
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Baronjutter posted:Realistic Population and Consumption Mod How much will the city ecosystem be thrown off if you activate this on an existing large:ish city? I'm guessing that it's really something you want to build with (and in accordance with) from day one to make sure you have the right amount of workers and jobs and the like? quote:Improved Public Transit 
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Nov 6, 2015 20:55
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Tippis posted:How much will the city ecosystem be thrown off if you activate this on an existing large:ish city? I'm guessing that it's really something you want to build with (and in accordance with) from day one to make sure you have the right amount of workers and jobs and the like? I did it to an existing city when I found the mod and got excited. I was already running a mod to give offices a more realistic balance of jobs so I wasn't hit too hard at all. The first thing that happens is almost all office and high density commercial will abandon due to not enough workers. Not because there aren't enough workers, but that the slightly changed numbers and education levels reset everything and the game is actually very slow to assign workers to buildings in good times, let alone the entire city at once. Good news is that citizens are not upset in the least by being unemployed so you won't lose any people. The bad news about residential is that the new stats only take effect on newly built or upgraded areas, so if you already have large areas that are fully upgraded you won't see any effect. Eventually, like always, your city will pop back into existence and be happy. The only big thing you'll notice after the dust settles is that you probably have way too much office. So just deal with it, de-zone a bunch of office and replace it with dense residential. Hell de-zone your entire city and just use it's bones. That's always a good mindset to have when playing. It's fine to gently caress everything, it will re-grow. \/ I also forget not everyone plays with infinite money turned on! Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 21:11
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Tippis posted:How much will the city ecosystem be thrown off if you activate this on an existing large:ish city? I'm guessing that it's really something you want to build with (and in accordance with) from day one to make sure you have the right amount of workers and jobs and the like? I recently did precisely this with my 100k+ city and it's a pretty dramatic (but doable/survivable) transition. (in particular, you'll almost certainly need less office zoning than you currently have, so it may help to de-zone (or re-zone as something else)some in advance rather than letting mass abandonment handle it. Having a lot of money saved up helps because your tax base will get hammered for a while but eventually the city will reach a new equilibrium state and float on with shinier numbers.
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Nov 6, 2015 21:13
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Is there a mod to let you go bigger than that mod that lets you go 5x5? If so, 1) how does it impact performance and 2) does it work with existing saves?
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Nov 6, 2015 21:14
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Bold Robot posted:Is there a mod to let you go bigger than that mod that lets you go 5x5? If so, 1) how does it impact performance and 2) does it work with existing saves? I heard the bigger than 5x5 mod does some fucky things and breaks a lot of other mods. The 25 tiles mod is a simple mod, just removes the limit to buying more than 9 tiles. The mod that goes bigger than that actually has to carve up more map tiles in what would otherwise just be the buffer/border space of the map. Basically it has to do a lot more stuff so there's a lot more stuff that can go wrong. Map size its self doesn't impact performance at all, what impacts performance is how much stuff is in the map. A city of 100k spread over 25 tiles worth of small towns isn't going to be much different from a 9 tile map with one big city. CO just implemented the 9 tile limit so people didn't buy 25 tiles then fill it wall to wall with skyscrapers and complain about performance.
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Nov 6, 2015 21:49
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Bold Robot posted:Is there a mod to let you go bigger than that mod that lets you go 5x5? If so, 1) how does it impact performance and 2) does it work with existing saves? There is but it's incompatible with quite a few other mods IIRC.
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Nov 6, 2015 23:10
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I got this a few days ago out of an urge for city building and my first city burned because the fire trucks were constantly stuck in traffic. How does traffic flow work?
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Nov 6, 2015 23:54
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njsykora posted:I got this a few days ago out of an urge for city building and my first city burned because the fire trucks were constantly stuck in traffic. How does traffic flow work? Have you seen the various pictures in this thread of crazy-looking chtulhic highway ramp spaghetti? It's not just for show.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:02
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