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CSGdesign's NATURAL GROWTH

Started by CSGdesign, November 20, 2009, 12:50:42 AM

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CSGdesign



Earth quake
That seawall was my first ever lot release.  It's not perfect (for example it doesn't have any under-bridge pieces or diagonals) but I've used it a few times for a bit of shore-reinforcement in my city.
I hope to release many more in future... different types, not all grungie - one of the ones I'd like to do is a boardwalk.




Guardburger And Sons Ltd's design for a basic aluminium ferry pontoon was selected as the best submission for pontoon designs, and went into manufacturing in late November, 1968.
The first such pontoon was Ol' Djohaal's Pontoon, built to service the pressing complaints of the Portsmouth Island community.



The results of this pontoon were almost instantaneous.
Suddenly people had a quick, cheap, reliable means to travel to and from the island using Boston's ferry service.
People not only got jobs on the mainland, but mainlanders quickly took up the opportunity to buy land in the now booming community of Portsmouth Island.
Land prices skyrocketted, and development went ahead full steam.



Felix Point's own Pontoon, slightly north west of Portsmouth, quickly became the launching point to get to and from Portsmouth Island, and as a result the community in that area also saw a significant increase in development.



So great was the development and so inexpensive was the infrastructure that District Councils all over Boston contracted Guardburger and Sons Ltd to install pontoons in their own communities, and by April 1969 Guardburger had no less than 8 pontoons built around the region, with another 16 being drafted.  All in remote regions where roads were either too expensive or not possible at all.



The benefits to Boston at large have been enormous, and has made the development of the region's numerous small islands not only possible but extremely attractive to developers.
If only Aluminium didn't need to be imported it would make the production of these pontoons much faster...

For helping with the production of this pontoon I would like to thank Djohaal for BAT help (especially with LOD suggestions) and Mr Kahki Shorts for his help with invisible texturing.

This pontoon is available to download here.

dobdriver

It's a good thing someone's building ferry landings, I suppose that's free enterprise for you.

I thought that's why they built scate parks and the like, somewhere for bored kids to hang out instead of the shopping centre. Don't they usually stone cars and break into your house?

Cheers
dobdriver

CSGdesign



dobdriver
The main reason why I wanted to build that pontoon is because the maxis ferry terminals are just too big and goofie for a lot of areas, small coastal towns, etc.




Time to take the trash out of the picture.



Boston's central west (once nice farms that were quite content to bury their tyres and solvent paints in holes on their own land so it could seep into ground water) was now a sprawling suburbia where sims had the disgusting habit of putting trash in cans out the front of their houses on the street.



So naturally the city had to cart it away and put it in land-fill, and as the population grew, so did the rate of trash.
Three large landfills later in only 17 years time, and the District Council had gotten fed up.
People were throwing out perfectly good teddie bears, televisions, even bottles of medication that wasn't even past its use-by date!  Rediculous waste.  Plenty of other sims could use this stuff, so it was time to do something about it.



The District Council slapped a Recycling Plant into the Fenton Downs Waste Disposal site, and now sims can buy back their own trash at rediculously high prices and feel all warm and fuzzy that they didn't fill a great big hole with stuff that would have broken down in time.  About 5000 - 8000 years time.  Oh big deal, it's biodegrading isn't it?!  Just SLOWLY.



Now the amount of waste that goes into landfill is greatly reduced, AND people can indulge in that bizarre trait of paying good money for things that are totally 100% useless.  Seriously who wants a rock with eyes glued onto it? Or a mirror that's got so many stickers around the edges that you can barely see yourself in it? Come ON people.

CSGdesign



Boston is expanding.
Rapidly.
Industry is booming, sims are flocking to the region in droves, and the city is fast becoming a thriving industrial sector.

But importing goods is expensive, especially if you can source them locally.
The SimNation State Government put out the call - prospectors would be given percentages of any significant mineral deposit that could be extracted profitably.



The response was enormous.  Sims from all over simnation scoared the countryside and the city suburbs alike.  Geologists were in record demand as entire businesses were founded in an attempt to cash in on the SimNation State Government's offer.
As a result many natural deposits were found and logged.  Some were small, some required further investigation with proper surveying techniques to determine their lode, and some were complete hoaxes.  But some.  Well some were enormous and very exciting.



A host of minerals were found in the local area, and the rights to the land they were on was immediately snapped up by Boston City Council.  One or two farmers disputed the claim, but the strata title clearly states that a property owner only owns the title to 2 meters below the surface of their land.  Everything below that belongs to the State.  Shotgun sales had a brief spike but fortunately there were no incidents.

Boston City Council is now auctioning off the mining rights to some of these deposits.
In particular the Bauxite and Iron Ore deposits to the south and the Silica deposits to the east... of which industry can make immediate use of without having to invest in too much new technology.

Plans for a quarry are being submitted to council, and it looks as though the healthy cheque being given to the government is guaranteeing the green-light.


Battlecat

You're really copying this over fast!  Glad you're taking the time to replicate it faithfully here.  Nice solution on the small islands, I agree completely with your assessment of the tradition ferry terminals.  Your lot will be very handy in my region in the future!  Also like the last two updates, it's going to be interesting to see what develops on those ore sources.  Looking forward to reading more as always.

CSGdesign

#25


battlecat
I'm trying to copy it across before ST completely just dies - it's becoming less stable every day.
I'm considering also publishing it privately on my own web-space along with a blog (first time I ever typed that word).
I've requested permission from the moderators and administrators to allow me to multiple-post purely for the sake of moving this diary over as quickly as possible, so I'll be updating it several entries at a time.
Once we've caught up (at about entry #39, #40, or #41 depending how long it takes) then I'll resume updating actual NEW entries at my normal rate.
By the way I like your avatar name - it's evocative.




Yesterday I received a postcard which had been posted some four months ago from Tom (gotta love the postal service).



It reads:

Dear Hector,
I wanted to show you the hospital I went to as a result of my riding accident.
The postcard is still out of date - Mett Point Hospital had only been built for about six months or so.  Everything is so white! I felt like Buck Rogers!  Except sore.
I marked the area the hospital now sits in with a red marker - sorry it smudged.
I included a photograph of the wing I stayed in - one of the nurses was kind enough to oblige.  I think she should probably stick to being a nurse.




On inspecting the postcard in more detail I could indeed see that the area the hospital now occupied used to be some smaller buildings - probably some shops or townhouses or something, as well as the old David Jones outlet that had that fire not so long ago.




Its quite a different skyline now I guess.  Feels good to know there's real quality healthcare available if something goes wrong.  There's no way those little urban GP's could have stitched Tom's legs back on and done that tripple brain bypass after his accident.

CSGdesign

#26


The Daegon Rail Link was completed in late March, 1973, linking Boston Central to the western suburbs, and terminating at the Daegon Central Industrial Complex.



The only station that was not laid from the initial proposal was the Daegon Eastbank Station.

With such a cheap and reliable method of mass transit to and from the heart of Boston, business flowed rapidly into Daegon, with sims and development following close behind.

In just one year, Deagon changed drastically from a small sleepy town into a busy developped suburban sprawl, with the growth in industry requiring not one but two new Natural Gas Power Plants operating at maximum capacity.


JUST AFTER DAEGON RAIL LINK COMPLETED, March 1973






JUST OVER ONE YEAR LATER, July 1974






The growth in this region has been rapid, but it has also been dirty and poorly planned, which is causing the local council (which is still very small and disorganised) some real headaches.

Something's gotta give.

CSGdesign



BRIEFING AT MEETING OF ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP "WILDERNESS WARRIORS".

Regarding the immediate development of the area leased to Grimey Earthscars Ltd, being open cut mined for Bauxite.



Welcome everybody.

Please find in front of you the briefing being provided on the Grimey Earthscars quarry, down in Tunnings Plains just south of Kelly Bay.

Inside you'll find details of the council application, leasing agreement of Grimey, as well as some photos that were taken last week from Sky Warrior 2, which for those of you that dont know is one of our fleet of helicopters.




Now as most of you will know this quarry has been approved and is perfectly legal and whats worse is paying the council as well as SimNation Government a LOT of money, so it's likely to go ahead no matter what we do.

The direction we need to consider is how to minimise it's impact on the local wildlife.

As you can see in the first photograph, Grimey has surrounded their entire site in a chainlink fence, complete with barbed wire rim, which effectively stops everything and everyone from getting in or out.




As we know from Grimey's development plan, the dozers move in next month and clear that entire area within the chainlink fence, and burn the lot.  There is nothing we can do to prevent this, and the trees in that area are completely unable to be saved - Grimey has blind-sided us by placing a detailed and very elaborate reforestation plan which has been approved for the last 3 months and is out of our reach.

What we can and should focus on is the animal life trapped within this fence.  Presently this fauna is completely unaware of its danger, and has been totally surrounded, but once those trees are clear felled their shelter will disappear fast and they'll have nowhere to go.  This is going to result in the unecessary death and injury of many animals, and could actually lead to injury to Grimey's workers too.




Grimey Earthscar's development plan shows they'll be working from the site office which will be located just within the gate.  That's the third picture in your folders, which shows the main gate at the north end of the site. We need to take urgent action to lobby the government to require Grimey to open up the southern end of the barrier at four key points which will allow the startled animal life to escape away from the machinery and into the neighbouring forest.



This should be a relatively inexpensive exercise for us, but just for good measure I want you four to organise the local schools and college to chain themselves to the trees and chant holding banners that people won't really understand anyway.

Any questions?
Good.  Thanks for coming people, and good luck with the stink-bombing of that Japanese whaling vessel tomorrow.  My wife has kept all our used nappies from the last month, so that should be a nice addition to our ammunition.


CSGdesign



The time has come for Grimey Earthscars Ltd to set up shop and clear the way for their mining operations.
Two large trucks have rolled in and set up the site office, located just within the main gate, as per Grimey's development plan.

It is patrolled by dogs at night and manned during the day.  Please wipe your feet.



Enough trucks and vehicles have passed this way now to wear a visible muddy track that meanders through the forest from Kelly Bay.



The gravelly sealed road that leads from Kelly Bay terminates in a cul-de-sac, and another huge gate stops unwanted tresspassers and casual on-lookers.  It is also remarkably good at reducing the number of people trying to get in and chain themselves to trees.  Willful damage of property is a good deterrent.



The bulldozers and heavy machinery rumble ever closer.
The earth trembles, birds scatter screaming and fluttering their distress.

Somewhere in one of Grimey's water-front offices a corporate fat-cat with a cigar grins on his leather chair, drooling over profit forecasts.

CSGdesign



The machinery has arrived.
Grimey Earthscar Ltd's clearing operations have begun.



The forests within the fenced off quarry region are being cleared at a rate of two football fields per day, with the lumber being piled into huge stacks and left to dry out and become more combustable.





When the piles are dry enough to be flamable, they're burnt, leaving nothing but ash which will be scraped and relocated along with the top rubble, to expose the valuable ore only meters below the surface.



This is where Grimey Earthscar Ltd lives up to its name.



Credit to Pegasus for the mayor-mode ploppable construction equipment shown in this entry.
The download for these can be found here.

CSGdesign



The machinery at Tunnings Quarry have begun mining operations!
The layer of un-useable dirt and debris on the surface (known as the Top Rubble) has been scraped off into piles, exposing the valuable Bauxite Ore underneath.




Then the huge Earth Moving equipment rolls in and digs huge pits into the ore, with a bee-line of rumbling dirt-covered trucks rolling back and forth carting the ore away to the nearby Electrolysis plant.



Of course the trucks are temporary, until the rail-line is put in.
Council is still dithering about regarding who is footing the bill for this, because they know it will cost Grimey a great deal of money to be forced to use large trucks on a dirt road.  Grimey's legal team are stirred wasps.

Meanwhile the mine is becoming quite the eye-sore.



CSGdesign

#31


The remote northern community of Cradle Bay is nestled around a beautiful white-sanded sparkling salt-water inlet, and is one of Boston's most rapidly developing areas, despite it's distance from civilisation.



But as buildings go up and people move in, the fire hazard grows and grows.

In addition, Cradle Bay is completely surrounded by Bettledown Forest, and so wild fire poses are very real risk, especially during the drier summer months.



With the only access to the closest Fire Station (located in Gravatt, on the northern shores of Boston Central) being Old Cradle Bay Road - some 5 kilometers of winding woodland road - it is no wonder that Cradle Bay residents were nervous whenever someone sparked up a cigarette.  In fact there have been recorded cases of Cradle Bay residents taking hoses to their neighbour's barbeques.



So the city council plopped a small fire station in, which happened to land of the Wicked Witch of the West as an added mayor ratings bonus.  Hot.



The downside of course is that smoking has proliferated in the area now people feel safer to light up.
So now council is forced to consider health facilities for the area.
Damn the Butterfly Effect!

CSGdesign



Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was founded in 1926 in the eastern suburbs of a fresh young Boston by Garibald Hampton, an Italian immigrant.  Originally intended as a property to conduct experiments on creating the first electric horse, Garibald quickly discovered it was a lot more sensible to simply breed and sell horses.  And so the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was founded, and has done relatively well up until the last 10 years or so.



In 1921, the area that the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was located on was nothing more than wild land, sliced here and there by the odd road and powerline.



In 1926 Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was founded, and was one of the leading studs in the entire region for almost a full three weeks, until Girder and Girder set up their automated horse factory, which could produce horses at almost five times the rate Garibald could bred them on his stud.



None-the-less the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud continued to prosper somewhat, and saw the conversion of the old coal power plant into a modern Natural Gas power plant, the proliferation of industry in the area, as well as the buy-out and development of old Jerry Hatcher's apple orchard by Grimey Industries Pty Ltd, just to the stud's north.



Little by little development enveloped the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud, until last year when it was so completely enveloped by modern industry and noisy train lines, that the Stud was seriously under threat.  Combined with the area's almost total conversion to automobiles, and the recent shocking birth of a foal with a head at the back, a tail at the front, and all four legs facing backwards, Hampton's last shred of income potential was stripped and the Stud was utterly bankrupt.




Fortunately an enterprising counciller was at the time searching for a convincing means of slowing dirty industries growth and encouraging a much cleaner direction for the city's booming population.



Counciller Koffystane realised that while the stud's land was utterly useless to agriculture, and close to useless to every other zoning type except perhaps industry (which would have only increased the growing problems of traffic and pollution plaguing the area), it was a truly excellent location for a green project designed to boost the area's culture and wealth.

Koffystane proposed Boston's first Botonical Gardens, inspired by recent visits to some large SimNation cities that had some very fine examples of how botonical gardens could promote a region.

The City Council was enthrawled by the idea, and begun preparing the site and importing huge fully grown live trees from other parts of SimNation (and locally) at massive expense.



After almost a full year of construction, the new Hampton Botanical Gardens were complete!


Earth quake

Wow, a lot of update CG design ( 9 th update in one day, i's a record  :D)
It's there a very interesting update, I really like to see the same picture in periode of time. :thumbsup:
The differents cities developpements are really original.
My favourite update is the 14th.

RippleJet

This must be one of the absolutely best presented MD's ever made!
A perfect storyline and wonderful images!
And the animation is stunning, hard to stop watching... ::)
It's all so natural, it could almost be for real...
And those bats of yours would deserve a place on the LEX as well! :)

Battlecat

The rapid ongoing transfer continues to look great!  I'm really enjoying the diversity of the projects you're presenting. 

Nice, simple job on that mine!  It's really doing a great job of reflecting the real appearance of one of those facilities.  Where did you track down the model/lot for the slash pile? 

Tomas Neto

I like very much the way that you present your updates, really fantastic!!! And nice cities too!!!  :thumbsup:

CSGdesign



Earth Quake
I'm copying them across rapidly until we're up to date with Entry #40 (or possibly 41 or 42 depending how long it takes).
Glad you're enjoying it!  Stick around - there's a LOT more and it doesn't get tedious because I always focus on something new.

RippleJet
Well that's great feedback, thankyou!
The animation will be improved once I find time - it's very naked at the moment.
Robin (Rooker1) who has been so supportive and helpful since I posted in the picture competition a little while back has suggested that I start a LEX application thread or whatever it's called.  I certainly will once I've got a moment... I've got lots of stuff to release, and plenty of ideas for other stuff, and it'd without doubt help me improve dealing with the pros that hang around this site.

Battlecat

You certainly haven't seen the last of that mine.  And it's only the first of many.  The next mine to develop will either be the nearby Iron-Ore mine or most likely the north-eastern Silica (sand) mine.  Depending on which way my sims decide to randomly flick their efforts.

Tomas Neto
That's very nice of you to notice - I created a couple of templates so updates are really pretty easy to alter and submit.




Since the installation of Ol' Djohaal's Pontoon, Portsmouth Island has grown rapidly, spreading almost across the entire island in only a few short years.

Such rapid growth in a community is great, but with any growth comes requirements.  In this case, elementary education.



The nearby mainland elementary school on Felix Point had served for the lucky few that could afford two daily ferry trips and the long walks to and from the pontoons, but it meant that only 8% of the kids on Portsmouth Island were getting any kind of eduction at all.



In addition, the daily traffic on the ferry was ensuring the ferry was nearly sinking from the weight of all the chewing gum stuck under the seats.  Seriously, it was at a point where people were having to roll large balls of it down the isle and over the side of the ferry just so they could claim a seat.

However with such a small population it was a problem for the council to fork out the huge maintenance costs of a full-scale school, so the council had the brilliant idea of relocating an abandoned house from the mainland and turning it into a small one-teacher school house.



The bus range was smaller, the education the school impressed on the local community was less, and the size was physically smaller than a standard elementary school, however the costs were enormously less, both to build and maintain.  And that's enough to make any councillor smile.



This school house is available to download here.

CSGdesign




Foggy Inlet, a well established township that surrounded the crystal gently lapping salt waters of a natural bay, with a nearby freshwater lake (one of only a few in the region).  As this township developped, the locals were quite happy to drive around the shores of the inlet, however as the sprawl moved up and down the coast, the trip around the inlet got longer and longer.



Combined with the traffic commuting from south and north of Foggy Inlet (for example between Crystal Bay and Felix Point), and Foggy Bay was beginning to get positively in the way.
A crossing was proposed where the north and south shores of Foggy Inlet were closest, to drastically reduce the trip from one side to the other.  Since there was no major traffic, it only needed to be a small crossing.



Three crossings were proposed, and weighed on their merits.
In the end, Charlie's Crossing (named after the engineer that proposed the design) was selected as the best option, both because of cost and the minimal disruption to the local population.  It only involved the purchase of Quiggley Manor, seven small residences, and a downtrodden half-abandoned old shopping centre that had been struggling to lease to video rentals and mower shops for years.



The trip up and down the north coast of Boston had now been greatly reduced, and Foggy Inlet and all of the northern reaches of the coast had grown enormously in attractiveness to sims.  Hoorah, now let's have a beer.

CSGdesign



Sound Way, south of Boston Central.  A waking rural landscape that has been selected by the newly formed Department Of Forestry to undertake a trial plantation of Renewable Lumber.



As SimCity spread rapidly (Boston being only one of millions), farms and roads cleared the surrounding forest both for space and for lumber required to build the blossoming number of developments underway.  Soon the local environment was under a very real threat, and SimNation Government formed what came to be known as the Department Of Forestry.  The Dept of Forestry's purpose was to manage the green resources throughout SimNation, which included not only protecting and managing developmental impacts, but also providing renewable building resources to industry for the greater good of SimNational cities' development.



A farm in Sound Way was selected as a viable location for the trial, and Cedar was selected as the lumber to initially trial.



After only a couple of short years the saplings had grown to a healthy 3 meters (some even better where they'd tapped into water pipes) and were looking very healthy and productive.



After another three years the cedars were young mature harvest-ready plants, and Forestry's trial was now ready for the final report before lumber harvest began.



One of the first observations was that some of the trees often did not grow very well when too near developments such as roads and structures.  This was put down to likely compression of roots and redirection of runoff water (into gutters and drains instead of an even spread and seepage into the ground where the trees' roots were).



Another observation that was never made public was that the trees posed a very serious fire threat to neighbourhoods that were immediately adjacent to the plantation.  In addition roots tended to upset foundations and asphalt, requiring expensive repairs.  Forestry did not release these results for fear of litigation, and the reports were shredded shortly after the trial plantation was harvested.

However the end deduction was clear: renewable pine plantations were cost-effective, improved the local environment, drastically helped prevent the clear felling of native forests, and in general were an extremely viable means of producing lumber.

With a few key adjustments like locating the plantations away from development and increasing the size and variety of species, the Department of Forestry was confident that a new industry was being born.

Plantation sites for cedars were selected all across the region, as well as trials for a variety of other tree species.