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Vanshnook posted:Just a note, I am in school for urban planning so if my city looks nicer than yours, that's why. TheIncredibleScott posted:Also I could never figure out how to make tunnels (or curved tunnels for that matter). I assume my hills have to be a certain grade in-game, but each time I try to build a highway through the hill, it just rolls right over it.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 07:28 |
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| # ? May 20, 2013 13:25 |
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Now here are the close ups. This was a suburban area that I built up right after the railroad was built. Because it was the oldest suburban area it grew the most and required high density after a while. Eventually I needed to upgrade the infrastructure (rail, station, roads, subways) to handle the growth.  This used to be a highly fashionable area (which you can still see with many of the mansions) until I put in subways and bus stations. Now it is more middle class, though upper middle class at that. This reflect real residential trends when an area fashioned by the upper classes starts to fall out of fashion and lower classes, starting with the middle classes, move in. Many of the areas in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant that are ghetto as hell were once very fashionable areas to live in.  This is another area that was originally built around a suburban rail station. As new transportation came in (highways, airport, and eventually subways), the area became more dense to handle the need for more housing. As you can see this area is very dense and very much middle to lower class. This is where the grad students live (also it is just south of the university area so it is perfect for students. In many cities there are student ghettos near colleges and universities.)  This is an area just north of downtown that is situated on a hill. Like I said, I use the landscape. The diagonal roads show where it is too steep to have straight roads and there is a large park where it is too steep to have any housing. This is usually where many parks are in modern cities for the very same reasons.  This is an area just north of the airport. In reality, areas near airports are usually low density and undesirable due to the noise and fumes. This is a great place for industry because they are both land uses that people want far away from residential areas. There is also an avenue that is supposed to be based on Wolf Rd. in Colonie, NY. Here it is much more dense. That strange green tower is an agricultural tower I got off of Simtropolis.  This is an area north-west of downtown that is loosely based on the row houses in Albany. Originally there was a railroad that ran through the center of this neighborhood which is why it is all diagonal and why it isn't as built up as other neighborhoods. I took the railroad out after a decline in ridership and installed a linear park. The diagonal roads keep the neighborhood small and walkable and keep traffic down.  The real Albany has a strangely large amount of parkways that don't go anywhere so I wanted to recreate one here.  Here is an area along the southern part of the city that I never developed until very recently. Like many cities, areas around water ways and marsh lands were not profitable so they were never developed, or were only developed and used by dirt industry. In the late 19th century many cities began buying up the land (or having it donated by the super rich robber barons of the day) and turning them into parks. I represent that here with a small stream that is surrounded by parkland and a parkway.  Also constructed in low lying lands were low income housing projects during the mid 20th century.  Across the Hudson River is the town of Rensselaer. The actual town itself is very small but I built it out here just because. Note how many of the streets are diagonal. This is because the area east of the river is very hilly. There is a suburban town east of this (that I might post soon) which takes advantage of all these hills.  This is a close up of the north-west corner of the map which was one of the last areas to be developed. Because of the highway and railroads that go to the next town over are diagonal, the land left over for development was triangle shaped and provided a challenge for development. By making the roads diagonal I created a neighborhood that was dense but not able to grow too large.  Another shot of the areas around the parkways. 
Vanshnook fucked around with this message at Mar 1, 2008 around 08:30 |
| # ? Mar 1, 2008 07:55 |
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In many European cities the train station is a major public area. Here I need two stations to handle the regular trains and the high-speed trains. The statue is a landmark in the center of the square so people know where they are relative to the square and so that they have a visual image in their head when they think of the area. That is the purpose of a landmark. This is the public square in the center of the townhouse area. This type of scale is great for walking around in (Bostons Back Bay, New Yorks Greenwich Village, etc)  In 1898 the Chicago Exhibition brought the idea of the City Beautiful movement to the architectural forefront and is considered the beginning of urban planning. The idea was that a scientific rethinking of how cities are put together would solve all the problems of overcrowding, slums, traffic, etc. What really came out of the exhibition was the idea that cities needed to design central public areas in a grand way, and thus every major urban rebuilding program from Rockefeller Center, Government Center, and every urban renewal program was born. This is my Civic Center with City Hall on an axis with the public library, flanked by two administrative building.  This is an urban neighborhood with various different types of housing (apartments, row houses) mixed with commercial retail. This is New Urbanism.  The university area. This area has apartment housing mixed in with commercial buildings and old mansions. These areas are usually very walkable and have many funky small shops. This is based on areas around the great American universities of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard.  An old suburban area near the university. This urban design is based around the ideas of Frederick Law Olmsted who created some of the first prototypes of the American suburb. Here we have large lots with houses grouped around parks.  This is what is known as a streetcar suburb. These types of suburbs were predominate before World War 2 and were based on the new technology of streetcars to transport workers from their sleepy residential neighborhoods in new suburbs into the central business district. Many of these early suburbs are much denser than post WW2 suburbs and rely on public transportation more than newer suburban developments.  This is an older suburban area built up around a boulevard surrounding the central city.  This is the main commercial district of a streetcar suburb.  Many cities built highways in the mid 20th century. Because of the exorbitant costs of such projects, many cities built the new roads where it was cheapest. In many cases this meant through city parks (San Diego, St. Louis, etc.)  An aerial of the area around the train terminals. Areas that have concentrations of transportation uses are horrible for housing but perfect for industry and commerce.  An urban, middle class residential district. Many American cities don't have these areas as most middle class residents moved out to suburbs in the mid century.  Edit: I have twice as many shots as this but I am going to take a break so as not to flood the thread. Vanshnook fucked around with this message at Mar 1, 2008 around 19:04 |
| # ? Mar 1, 2008 08:24 |
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drat, man. It's cool to have someone here that knows so much. If you know other people who're in the City Planning field, or who are students of it, is playing SimCity common? Or is it looked upon as too flawed and ignored. What mod are you using for the giant sprawling park areas? And how on earth did you get the neighborhoods to develop in such a way where the buildings are of similar style? In the shot "Also constructed in low lying lands were low income housing projects during the mid 20th century." there's a bunch of exactly the same building. Did you just get lucky and have the game produce the effect that you wanted, or did you do some major bulldozing, or a Ploppable RCI mod for major OCD playing?
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 08:50 |
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Amazing city there man, and your explanation for everything was really interesting as well.Lakitu7 posted:drat, man. It's cool to have someone here that knows so much. If you know other people who're in the City Planning field, or who are students of it, is playing SimCity common? Or is it looked upon as too flawed and ignored. The game automatically rotates through tilesets from different eras, and you are able to manually specify an era to develop in the style of. It's one of the 6 buttons down the bottom of your screen (Budget, Data Views, etc.)
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 10:57 |
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 MIRRORS Official Rush Hour Patches Essentials Pack Giga-Pack (contains Essentials)
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 12:25 |
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Gyoru posted:
Thanks a lot for this, putting these links in the OP.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 12:31 |
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Vanshnook, do you have any tips for making realistic and effective mass transit systems? Trains and poo poo are one of the few areas if the game I've hardly touched, because they just never work I would have expected.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 16:07 |
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How did you get the highway -> avenue link? I've wanted that forever!
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:01 |
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Just run the avenue into the end of the highway. I'm pretty sure thats possible unmodded?
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:03 |
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Vanshnook...you're everything I want to be. I actually took NOTES on your city!
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:06 |
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Can't wait to try these addons. I've got the Mac version of SC4+RH so hopefully this isn't a wasted 800mb download 
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:19 |
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Oh hey Im not sure if my version is patched up, can I still patch the game after installing a couple mods?
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:35 |
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My understanding is that the "mods" are just files you place into a directory, while the patching modifies the actual game .exe (or binary, if you have a Mac), so the two should be completely separate. Then again, I still have 7 minutes left on my download so I can't say for 100% certain 
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:39 |
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I love thinking about urban planning and city design, because i just LOVE cities and downtowns. One of my main gripes with these simcity games is that it is very, very difficult to really create a "neighborhood" with character. Once I get a new computer I'm going to install all these new mod packs, etc. and hopefully that'll give me some more control. Vashnook, I find your notes really interesting. Please post more!
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:52 |
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Thanks for the gigapack, but one of the addons is constantly cutting my education budget. I now have to keep increasing it or put up with strikes at schools. Any idea which addon is doing this so I can remove it? Also, does anyone have any tips for getting commuters to use subways? How far will they walk to/from a station? Is a grid of tunnels the best system?
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 17:57 |
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Kire posted:One of my main gripes with these simcity games is that it is very, very difficult to really create a "neighborhood" with character. My favorite way to do this to deprive certain neighborhoods of essential services and any for of recreation. Instant slums. Oh you probably wanted to make nice neighborhoods
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 18:11 |
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Vanshnook posted:This sounds like some solid advice, and I like what I hear about treating neighborhoods like their own city. That little bit is probably going to help me the most with balancing demand and making things more aesthetically pleasing. The biggest hurdle I just got over was planning cities to flow well into the next city, in a capacity that's not just highways. Time to take this advice and bring it down a scale and make it so neighborhoods flow well into each other instead of huge blobs of residential areas with commercial zones placed randomly throughout. I may also have to check out some of those books, if only to add them to my collection of random knowledge and so I can be an internet know-it-all about urban planning in the future. Not really, but I can get interested in just about anything as long as the information is presented to me by someone who is the least bit enthused about what they do. Looking forward to some more screens, good poo poo in the last set. I especially liked the part about building highways through parks. 
Renounced fucked around with this message at Mar 1, 2008 around 18:46 |
| # ? Mar 1, 2008 18:43 |
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Lakitu7 posted:drat, man. It's cool to have someone here that knows so much. If you know other people who're in the City Planning field, or who are students of it, is playing SimCity common? Or is it looked upon as too flawed and ignored. I have honestly never talked to anyone about SimCity. I think it is assume that you play it or have played it at one time though. I remember a while back when I was looking at colleges I found this one college guide that gave run downs of various majors and when it came to Urban Planning it started out, "Did you play a lot of SimCity as a kid?" quote:What mod are you using for the giant sprawling park areas? It isn't a mod. When they first released the lot editor I fooled around with it and made some different sized parks (1x2, 1x3, 2x3, 3x3) because building big parks one lot at a time is crazy. quote:And how on earth did you get the neighborhoods to develop in such a way where the buildings are of similar style? In the shot "Also constructed in low lying lands were low income housing projects during the mid 20th century." there's a bunch of exactly the same building. Did you just get lucky and have the game produce the effect that you wanted, or did you do some major bulldozing, or a Ploppable RCI mod for major OCD playing? Those projects you mention are plopped in there but this is an easy thing to do via various means. One way is to limit the lot size, usually small like 1x1 or 1x2, and alternate medium and high density lots so it looks like a checker board. This will stop the game from combining lots and you will always have a small neighborhood. Another way is to create an area that is undesirable, like a dirty industrial zone next to a residential zone. In another city I made I put some high density residential next to a large dirty industrial zone and 5 identical projects shot right up. I was so pleased that I made each one historic so they wouldn't go away. Opals25 posted:Vanshnook, do you have any tips for making realistic and effective mass transit systems? Trains and poo poo are one of the few areas if the game I've hardly touched, because they just never work I would have expected. This is hard, even for me. The trick is not to connect areas you think need to be connected but areas where there is a lot of traffic. This city has a very extensive network (I'll post that at some point) and there are a few lines that just never had any traffic because I added them mostly for looks. Another tip is to zone at a higher density around transit points. Start with bus stops and then when there is a demand go with subways/elevated rail. I like the trains because they also serve industrial areas so even if there are no passengers you can still have a great train network that works. thesurlyspringKAA posted:Vanshnook...you're everything I want to be. I actually took NOTES on your city! I'm glad people are getting something out of this. I'll post more later. vagary posted:This sounds like some solid advice, and I like what I hear about treating neighborhoods like their own city. That little bit is probably going to help me the most with balancing demand and making things more aesthetically pleasing. Also every time I make a suburban development I treat every residential area like a subdivision. It creates a totally different feel. quote:The biggest hurdle I just got over was planning cities to flow well into the next city, in a capacity that's not just highways. Time to take this advice and bring it down a scale and make it so neighborhoods flow well into each other instead of huge blobs of residential areas with commercial zones placed randomly throughout. I still have this problem, though I seemed to handle it well in this city. The problem is with how many connections you make to a city. It is good to start off with as many possible but at some point the traffic will chose a direction and you will need to rebuild your infrastructure to accommodate it. At some point you just have to accept the traffic and not worry too much if there is red in one corner of the map. Vanshnook fucked around with this message at Mar 1, 2008 around 18:49 |
| # ? Mar 1, 2008 18:44 |
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Here's something for the OP for Mac users: To run in a custom resolution (eg. 1680x1050 or whatever), you'll need either Apple Developer Tools installed, or you will need to have some other way to edit binary plists. A cusory google search shows this: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/plisteditpro/ may be a good candidate (but I have no idea since I use the Developer Tools). - Go to your "Home" directory - Go to "Library/Preferences" - Find the plist entitled "com.aspyr.simcity4.plist" - Back up the plist in case you mess it up I guess. - Open the plist (with either Property List Editor, or whatever tool you downloaded) - Twirl down the "Root" node and find "custom-height", "custom-width", and "custom-resolution". - Change custom-height and custom-width to whatever values you want to run at, and change custom-resolution to 1 - Save your plist, open up SC4, enjoy your new native resolution CPU-sucking game. I have no idea what happens if you put in h/w values that are beyond the physical limit, so obviously play carefully.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 19:08 |
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/\ How do I do that for PC? I hate having a box when I have this nice widescreen monitor.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 19:18 |
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"C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CustomResolution:enabled -r1680x1050 Mind sharing some of your park lots, perhaps? I poke around Simtropolis and I find either 1-tile-at-a-time things or busy non-tileable ones.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 19:28 |
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Irish Bandit posted:Thanks for the gigapack, but one of the addons is constantly cutting my education budget. I now have to keep increasing it or put up with strikes at schools. Any idea which addon is doing this so I can remove it? Are you talking about the education slider in your budget window, or the per-building budget? Because the education slider in the budget window is just a total of all of the building budget of education buildings in your city. Generally you only need to micromanage your funding for the buildings themselves.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 19:37 |
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Ok I made a little pack but I don't have any good place to host it. More images. This is my Edge City area. Edge cities are areas that gow up around highway interchanges. They are the suburban equivalent of a downtown.  I'm a big fan of the townhouse neighborhood.  Had to do something with this no-mans land inside this interchange.  A close up of the airport area with a train yard. The airport used to be much bigger but then I built a huge regional airport in another city. I kept this as a sort of corporate jetport. I wish the runway wasn't screwed up.  A quiet residential neighborhood in a streetcar suburb. The diagonal grid allows for many different lot sizes and a variety of housing styles and is esthetically pleasing.  Small park squares like these here add a lot to a neighborhood. These were popular in London in the 19th century.  Patches of land that are hard to develop because of land shape and are great to use for all zones. Here I have residential next to commercial next to industrial. The purpose of zoning was to separate these uses and Modernist planning theory aimed to separate them further. This is ok for residential areas but it then creates heavy traffic. Putting houses close to jobs here means the workers only have to walk. This cuts down on car traffic and allows for more traffic to travel to the next city over without clogging the roads.  Originally I had every train line connected through a network of rail but changing ridership levels resulted in only needed a few major train terminals. Many cities in Europe (as well as New York and Boston) don't have a connected system but rely on a few major terminals. The avenue you see leading to the train terminal was cut through the city to create a more direct route to the station but also as a way to create a sight line to the station. Baron Haussmann was famous for doing this to Paris.  This is based on Washington Park in Albany NY but looks nothing like it. I plopped the diagonal building like this so the slope at the top would work with the diagonal of the park.  An aerial of my downtown. Much of the built up area in the bottom part of the picture was once dirty industrial and low income housing. After many urban renewal attempts that all were fruitless, I built the bridge across the river and immediately the area began to grow. However the area is still mainly lower to middle class.  Connections to my other cities are so critical that I need to build major infrastructure to support them. Here my only two connections to the city to the north are by avenues (to cut down on local traffic) and I have them feeding into the highway system to take pressure off the local roads. I also have a number of major subway stations here that are almost always well above their ridership limit.  A medium density residential neighborhood centered around a medium sized park. There is a nice mix of row houses, apartment buildings, and office buildings.  This is a major park I built along a ridge line north of downtown. Many times parks (as well as highways) create walls that separate neighborhoods. I didn't try to intentionally do that here but that was the outcome. 
Vanshnook fucked around with this message at Mar 1, 2008 around 20:49 |
| # ? Mar 1, 2008 20:04 |
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Has the Gigapack changed since the OP link? I installed it on my fully patched Rush Hour and now it crashes every 20 minutes or so. It's pretty sporadic. Sometimes opening a city crashes it, sometimes just clicking a tree to build. I was so excited about playing  Maybe it's Vista related.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 20:45 |
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No, mine just started crashing again.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 20:50 |
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Slap Happy posted:Has the Gigapack changed since the OP link? I installed it on my fully patched Rush Hour and now it crashes every 20 minutes or so. It's pretty sporadic. Sometimes opening a city crashes it, sometimes just clicking a tree to build. I wouldn't even know where to begin troubleshooting, sorry. I'm on Vista and it works fine, the odd crash sometimes but I'm a compulsive CTRL-ALT-S -er ever since I lost 3 hours of work on a city expansion in a crash once.
Zygar fucked around with this message at Mar 1, 2008 around 21:26 |
| # ? Mar 1, 2008 21:24 |
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Vanshnook posted:Ok I made a little pack but I don't have any good place to host it. Someone earlier in the thread suggested mihd.net, which is apparently now http://ifile.it/. Maybe try that? If not, rapidshare, putfile, megaupload et. al. would work okay enough. We already chewed through all of Zygar's generous bandwidth already  . Thanks though.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 21:56 |
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http://ifile.it/15m7nzc This contains parks sized 1x2, 2x2, 1x3, 2x3, and 3x3.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 21:58 |
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Vanshnook posted:http://ifile.it/15m7nzc Thanks for this. Great job with your posts and detail you put into them.
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| # ? Mar 1, 2008 22:17 |
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Zygar posted:That's really weird, none of the addons should even be touching your budget. Are you running just the gigapack, or anything else? I had an old pack of plugins that was posted on the forums last year, but I emptied the plugins folder before installing the gigapack. Other cities in my region aren't having this problem with their educational buildings, so I've no idea what's causing it. Edit: Messed about with it a bit more. It also cuts the school bus budgets, but it leaves private schools alone. Bleepblorp3587 fucked around with this message at Mar 2, 2008 around 00:35 |
| # ? Mar 2, 2008 00:30 |
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Irish Bandit posted:The budget of every educational building is cutting itself at the end of the month. It keeps going until it reaches zero. Did you by any chance have the plugin that enabled the sliders for private schools installed at one point? I had it with the old pack that was posted earlier (in the old thread), and when I switched to the new pack, my schools started doing the same thing until I put it back - if you have the old pack, the file's called "RJ - Private Schools with Sliders (version 1.0).dat"
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| # ? Mar 2, 2008 01:35 |
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Cheers, that fixed it. Edit: One more question. Is it possible to rename cities? Bleepblorp3587 fucked around with this message at Mar 2, 2008 around 03:10 |
| # ? Mar 2, 2008 01:56 |
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Has anyone else seen this lovely bug that I have? It seems to gently caress up the bottom of large regions on my map, and it also fucks with any connections that are on that border. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like: EDIT: I started out with Rush Hour, unpatched, with NAM. I deleted NAM, patched the game and added the essentials mod but it still hosed up that bottom-most region when I tested saving it. 2nd EDIT: I emptied my plugins folder and it still does it with every region I save. I guess I'll be re-installing. theodop fucked around with this message at Mar 2, 2008 around 04:41 |
| # ? Mar 2, 2008 03:15 |
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My city disaster seems to be improving. Some of my RCI demand is occasionally positive again, and I'm making money again too! I'm adding a big section of diagonal roads that seems to look really nice. I'm going to make use of this in my suburban residential cities. What do you guys do to alleviate traffic in areas that are already hosed up and gridded? I've been trying to strategically add bus stops and cut out useless streets. I've had some success so far. When my map is full I am thinking of adding a subway system but I might hold off on that for my biggest map. I think transportation is one of the most difficult things to plan out in this game. I'd like to have really nice trains and stuff like that but unless I set up my whole transportation network before I start my city I find that it never works out the way I want it to.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2008 03:47 |
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So I guess residential doesn't like being next to low income commercial. I am tring to make a down town area and the suburb type area next to it started rioting non-stop.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2008 04:07 |
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theodop posted:Has anyone else seen this lovely bug that I have? It seems to gently caress up the bottom of large regions on my map, and it also fucks with any connections that are on that border. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like: Are you running the game in 1600x1200 by any chance?
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| # ? Mar 2, 2008 04:59 |
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This is my latest city. Its entirely commuter into the industrial city east (top in this orientation) and the soon to be CBD to the South (right in the image) Its coming along great I think, and the train system is packed to the brim. 
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| # ? Mar 2, 2008 05:02 |
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Dootman posted:Are you running the game in 1600x1200 by any chance? Yessir.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2008 05:06 |
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| # ? May 20, 2013 13:25 |
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theodop posted:Yessir. This is a known problem running at that resolution. It's just a minor graphical glitch that only occurs on super huge city lots in region view and doesn't affect game play at all. The only way to get rid of it would be to run the game in a lower resolution.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2008 05:10 |
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