The Noro Cooperative

[Themistokles]

Narrowing lanes seems a really good incentive for SimCity sustainability , and I also like how an off-topic article makes its mark in the Simuverse. But seriously, it looks absolutely wonderful the way all of it seemlessly merges together. Though do I notice that the tram gauge has been - how do you say? - somewhat narrowed? Is it in order to keep on scale with the narrower RRW rails?

Thanks! I wonder if the guy who wrote the article would be happy he's been listened to here, even if he's had less luck persuading people in the real world so far   Glad you like the textures and please let me know if you have any ideas on how to align things better. And nice observation on the tram guage, it's indeed equal to RRW and the distance between the two sets of tracks is lessened by a pixel per side (@128px/tile).

-Noah

[noahclem]

Proposed new Tram-on-road textures:



Features:

-RRW-guage rails with distance between sets of tracks 25cm less than RRW has, conserving precious space and removing any reason to redo paths. Design is based off of RRW but textures are HD (256px)
-Concrete paving between tram rails
-Slightly widened paved area (75cm/37.5cm per side/~19cm per lane). Lane width is ~30px/3.75m.
-Sidewalks are no longer "baked in" but can vary in the same manner as el-rail-over-avenue (all credit to memo, though Vortext did help explain it to me)

If combined with a narrowing of the widest networks (avenue and the triple-tilers) these textures should not look out of place at all next to the other networks.

Texture:



And the newest TIA texture with variable sidewalks and updated rails:

[Dantes]

No words, only this:

[c.p.]

The textures look great.   Looks like it would be a bit uncomfortable for pedestrians to walk along the edges of the first texture.  Luckily, the sims are good at walking very straight lines.

[Earwhyckque]

Great work! Although I would suggest to add concrete paving in between the two spurs, too.

For reference, have a look at the Rozengracht in Amsterdam:



Good luck with the Cooperative!

[compdude787]

Oh, that Tram-in-road texture looks really nice! The new tram textures you're coming up with looks pretty neat.

[vester]

That looks great Noah.

Like your choice of trains/light rails trains.


Can see I have devolved in my texture making.




Maybe the tram textures (the area around the rails) can be overlay textures ?

so people can pick if they want concrete textures as Earwhyckque or
asphalt as you did, grass as you see in some place in Paris or.......

[romualdillo]

I like the new texture a lot!! Great work! 

[noahclem]

Thanks for the opinions everyone

I probably wouldn't do "overlays" though from my understanding another layer of S3Ds with transparency wouldn't be a problem but I'm not sure if it'd be worth the effort. I'd definitely make the original files with separate layers publicly available for others to make variations from and consider doing variations myself.

I tried Earwhyckque's suggestion with the pavement, extending it like the picture to both sides of the tracks. The concrete is something I found from opengameart.org a while back, then darkened and added cracks to. I couldn't be much happier with how the tram-on-road turned out but something's not quite right with the tram-in-avenue. I tried adding raised medians between where the trams run and where cars run, as it tends to be in Helsinki where trams and cars don't share space. That kind of implementation for TIAs would mean smoother/easier transitions to stations and that paths wouldn't need to be altered but TIA wouldn't line up with RHW and avenue like the earlier design would. I might try grass or baked-in pavement for the medians as how nice this style looks will vary a lot depending on the sidewalk mod installed.

Feedback is very much welcomed, particularly:
-Yes or No to the medians for TIA
-If Yes, custom sidewalks, baked in pavement, or grass for the medians?
-Yes or No to different pavement for the tram paths











Oh, and a belated:

[kbieniu7]

Oh, what can I see? Rails in concrete slabs! I'm not sure what do you mean with "medians" right there - the small strip between rails and asphalt, or whole space between carriageways (including rails)?
Anyway, for me, I would choose the concrete slabs - the ones, which you have shown. It's very common in Poland, we call them "Hungarian plate". Last years we had many funny situation with them...



It's better to keep them well-maintained. Especialy during hot days...

[Shadow Assassin]

Not bad, Noah, though I would suggest you use the standard width for the double yellow lines (as on other networks) - they seem too close together.

Why not try a RD6-style implementation for TIA as well? That would look good too.

Though I do agree - something's a bit off with the TIA, perhaps tone down the drop shadow effect to about half and see how that looks. The best option would be just to continue the concrete treatment across the median. I actually would like that concrete texture as a sidewalk mod as well, to be honest...

[noahclem]

Welcome to NORO 2015    I'm quite busy with work around the Holidays but will be having a lot more time until the second half of February. I have high hopes for the new year, as one is wont to, and in particular I'm hoping for a return to more collaboration here. Planning, custom content modification & creation, plugins maintenance, and real-time discussion are all things I hope to see the better side of this year. For now though I just want to share a few files, including a significantly altered region plan, the sidewalk mod Daniel requested, and easily editable gimp files of my most recent texture attempts. Please feel free to edit in your suggestions to the region map and tweak the various textures.

Noro concrete sidewalks
Noro concrete sidewalks model

Noah's current region plan

TOR4
TIA_no_median
TIA_median
TOR6

[Shadow Assassin]

Much appreciate your work on that, Noah, so K-point you get! Might add that the new TIA looks much better, none of that median funkiness going on

[Gugu3]

Like the new textures Noah!unfortunately cannot open the images in your old posts...seems like the link is broken

[noahclem]

A belated but sincere thanks Daniel!!

Thanks to you as well Guglielmo. I was aware of the majhost outage, but expected it to be relatively short-lived as it's been in the past. Unfortunately it's still out and I'm not really sure what to do about it. Almost all NORO images were hosted there and while I have local copies of all of my stuff, re-uploading and re-linking would be a huge task    I'd been putting off updating until majhost returned but I don't think it makes sense to wait on it any longer.

So, teaser time 

[juliok102013]

Wow, this intersection is fantastic! It seems that the airport will be very good too!

[art128]

The interchange is impressive. But I'm more looking forward to that massive airport....

[Gugu3]

Outstanding interchange!can't wait to see more

[romualdillo]

Great interchange!!! But that airport...  I really want to see it finished!!

[noahclem]

Thanks everyone! I'm glad there's a bit of excitement for the airport. I think it's a biggest single project I've ever tried in SC4, even though only a small part of it has been done. The vast majority of the time I've spent has been researching though, not actually building in SC4. Every time I planned an area I looked up how it functions in real life and how examples in RL have been done, from runways (length, width, markings, number, layout) to terminals (number of gates, overall size, width, intermodal transport access) and everything in between. Airports are fascinatingly complicated and the possibilities for them in SC4 are enormous. It reminds me more of the NAM then any other aspect of SC4 and in a way shows what the NAM might be like without controller files necessitating centralized distribution and planning: a rich patchwork that doesn't necessarily integrate well and offers users a pretty steep learning curve--figuring out what's available to download and fits the user's needs is no small task itself.

Anyway, I can ramble on all the details later. For now I wanted to show an overview of the airport so far.










Obviously there's a lot yet to be done and I expect many of the things that are done will be changed. I'm hoping though, that this will be the foundation for an outstanding airport. What do you guys think? Is there anyone with an interest in airports that might be interested in collaborating?


Bonus pic--the next tile east (right):