Adara - Update 184 - March 26, 2012

[calibanX]

Looks like a great plan so far Battlecat. I'm anxious to see how you turn that GLR into a fully functioning transit system stuffed with little Sims.

Take care.

Geoff

[rhizome21]

Hi Battlecat,

Just a quick  note after a complete reading of one of the best MD's I've ever read. I'm in awe with your farms and the clever use you make of ploppable water, not as just a tool for small ponds and streams, but as the main water element in there, and your riverbanks are soooo realistic. And don't get me started on your farms, or i'll be drooling...

i've just some questions i need to ask you. In several occasions, you refer as diagonal filler lots, to smoothe edges along the roads (i mainly disguise the ugly triangles with a lot of trees, but these ones look so much better) but i was unable to find them anywhere. Could you point me to a direction please ?

Anyways, I really love Adara, which is kind of the ideal countryside we all dream of.

cheers

jf

[Battlecat]

io_bg: Yeah, I've been itching to take a stab at a bigger center, but I've got to make sure it fits the character of the region.  Good point about that bridge.  I knew something didn't look quite right, but I didn't manage to put my finger on it at the time.  I think I'll see about fixing that somehow, after I back up the region in case things go horribly wrong with the rain tool!  Thanks for stopping in! 

Vivien (Earth quake): Thanks very much for your kind words!  I'm always open for advice on this town since it's going to create a significant growth in size for my region. 

Dreamcat: BC is a fine and acceptable nickname, I'm quite used to it from various games I used to play.  I find the irony of the nickname quite amusing actually. :-)  I've got high hopes for the urban development program, but I'm already seeing some modding alterations I want to take at stab at.  Thanks for your kind words; I hope to keep the quality high!

kwakelaar: That is a pretty good way to describe the method I'm using to develop this region.  Painting a canvas is more or less the style that makes sense, particularly with the ploplable items available now.  The over the border shots are my favorite because they really give us a look at the way the world really looks! 

I really have to take a logical approach to this city because I really have to get the GLR planned out in advance.  It's taking some getting used to, and I've had a few crashes due to the issues with stations and certain puzzle pieces.  Fortunatly, I've got an autosave set for every 10 minutes so I don't loose too much work.  Thanks for stopping in, hope you enjoy the first bit of urban development for the Winfield tile!

Schulmanator: Thanks!  This tile is the most technically challenging so far in terms of infrastructure.  It is all coming along nicely though. 

clearlypowa: Thanks for your kind words, glad you found your visits here informative.  As I mentioned in the PM earlier, the dark highway colors are called the Highway Re-Styling Mod.  It was created by mrtnrln and can be found here along it his other works on the STEX.

scott1964: Welcome to Adara!  I tracked down the various power lots here and there.  The larger substation in this update is here.  The grey power lines color mod is at Pegasus' site.  For most of the rest that I've got, if you hit the STEX and do a search for the words power or transformer, you should hit most of the other power items I've got. 

Jason (Albus of Garaway): No guilt necessary, I know from experience that real life can hit hard and without warning!  Thanks for taking the time to stop in and for your kind words!

Ethan (ecoba): Indeed, Winfield is an interesting challenge.  You're absolutely right, I'm thinking more along the lines of mid rises for the most part in Winfield.  It's going to be more of a sprawling city than a tall city.  There is a pretty high demand for commercial development which I've been suppressing in most of my cities to date; this city should help fill the gap in that area.  I do have some rough ideas and conceptual outlines for a pretty huge coastal city, but that's so far in the future at this point it's not worth worrying about.   I intend to make sure it fits well with the region. 

Those street connections are fully functional, using a fascinating trick developed by metarvo. The entire tutorial can be found here and it covers street connections and visual improvements to diagonal street and road connections.  It uses various parts of the NAM, particularly the interesting effects that occur when certain puzzle pieces are bulldozed.  They're pretty handy for the work I'm doing along tile boundaries.

Terra was my primary journal 2.5 years ago when I was first playing the game.  It was originally posted on both Simtropolis and Simpeg, but only the version at Simpeg remains.  I'm not certain all the pictures are still there, but most of them appear to be.  Terra was a fairly standard growing region.  I'd develop the tiles and then go back and grow it as appropriate.  In a lot of ways it was a less sophisticated version of CSGDesign's natural growth project.  I was doing a similar terraforming method to here except it predated the SC4Terraformer.  The entire thing got eaten by a massive computer glitch along with the plugins folder and most of my university homework for the month, which pretty much burned out any interest I had left in the game at the time.  Hope you enjoy the look back!

djvandrake: Thanks!  I think the planning is going to be critical here; I really need to work hard to maintain the character of certain areas along the border. 

Matt (threestooges): The ridership is going to be the most interesting challenge.  From what I've read about it the GLR speed is comparable to road travel, so the key will be to ensure that the GLR network is more efficient than the roads in Winfield.  Regardless of the type, I've always found mass transit options to be underused by the simulator on the best of days.  I've had a few crashes, but I was warned by the instructions so I've taken precautions with an autosaver program. 

As for the lake crossing, what I'm envisionsing is that bridge is a major bypass that was added recently, probably through lobbying by both Winfield and Westside.  In the past, people driving up from the Denara River valley (Vavenby, Delmar Junction, Alexandria and others) would have driven north along the lake through Salmo and around the lake at the point where the highway crosses further up.  The option around the other side is a gravel road of course, so it's not a preferred option. 

The two real cities that inspired the ones I'm developing on this tile are the cities of Kelowna and Westside in BC.  They are connected across a long narrow lake called Okanagan Lake.  Kelowna was the main tourist center for a long time, but Westside is beginning to catch up in the real world now as well, particularly since a new bridge went in recently. 

Tomas Neto: Thanks for your kind words!

Stijn (BarbarossaS): The planning is critical, mostly because of the issues inherent with systems like the GLR and others.  I'm getting the hang of it though! Thanks for stopping in!

danielcote: Glad you're excited, hope you enjoy the start on Westside! 

Geoff (calibanX): It'll be interesting to see if this works or not!  It's going to be an interesting exercise. 

jf (rhizome21): Welcome to Adara!  Thanks for taking the time to read through the entire archives!  I really appreciate your enthusiasm; it's been a really fun trip since I started this in February. 

I've already sent you a pm, but to answer your question, the main set of diagonal fillers I use are by Andreas.  They can be found here on the LEX.  These ones will take care of the basic road grass texture plus some handy industrial transition styles.  I'm personally fond of the ones with fences, which work quite nicely.  They show up on the parks menu slightly before the BSC trail parks.

The farm fillers are my own creation.  They're still a work in progress and I'll have to spend some time cleaning the lots up before I consider releasing them.  Thanks for you interest, hope to see you stop by again soon!

Update 62
Winfield – Westside Town Core

Westside is going to be an interesting exercise with some connection to the pattern of development I envision for Winfield.  I imagine this dam is a good 50 – 60 years old, so the lake has been around for a while.  At the same time, the bridge is a relatively new development, to shorten the long drive around the lake.  Development has only recently begun on the growth of Westside. 

Since large box stores require significantly more open land that is usually available in urban cores, they often open in the suburbs.  In this case, there is a smaller town right across the lake, possibly accessed via a fairly new bridge.  Developers have started getting a hold of this town and it's just started to boom.  That's the style I'm looking for here, so I'll have a few bigger stores in the town a possibly pushing right out of the urban area into the urban – forest interface. 

I'm also considering some winding suburbs with tracts of forest around them, as if the town is actively expanding into the surrounding area with several undeveloped lots surrounding.  But that'll probably come later; right now my main goal is to get a balanced core urban area in place. 

62-1: Here's the future site of Westside.  There will be a major commercial service corridor along the avenue, it'll drop off to rural area and a couple small warehouse complexes further west quite quickly. 


62-2: To start things off, I just dropped a Costco shopping center into the corner here.  The average Costco takes a lot of space, and would be pretty hard pressed to fit into a well developed urban core like the one I'm planning for Winfield. 


62-3: It occurred to me, I've never actually show you the demand levels for my region.  At this point, it would appear that every single possible business is clamoring to find space in my region.  It's annoying the game advisors to no end because I'm not providing nearly enough zoning for their tastes. 


62-4: Continuing up the main corridor, everything here grew once zoned.  There's a school right up on the top of the hill, residential areas all around it. 


62-5: Thanks to the return of demand for medium wealth homes, we get the first mattb325 homes from that class popping up.  Even more diversity than before!


62-6: This dense forest covers a shallow slope between the upper and lower terraces.  It just seemed like a nice idea to fill that with trees rather than urban development.  What can I say, I like green cities. 


62-7: The school up here is mostly done, just one small touch left to add in . . . 


62-8: And that detail is more trees of course! 


62-9: Hey look, more medium wealth mattb325 homes!  This just look so awesome, I'm never going to get tired of these.  And he's still releasing more stuff!


62-10: Here's a fairly typical subdivision, moving along to the other side of the highway.  I tend to make the homes historical when they're only partly touching the street to ensure they don't split later.  With mattb325's low wealth homes that's not such a big worry, they look great, unlike a lot of the maxis low wealth stuff.  This layout helps produce a more realistic cul-de-sac. 


62-11: Here's how it looks with homes in place. But at this stage, there is one thing that's annoying me.  I'm not happy with the appearance of the sidewalks.  Both the appearance and inconsistency from wealth level to wealth level is terribly annoying, I'm going to change the mod I'm using out now.


62-12: I finally settled on SimTropiaProductions (SMP) sandstone brick sidewalks along with Jayson's (sithlrd98) mod for avenue curves.  I had considered Jayson's grey concrete mod, but I like the texture from the brick.  It looks quite nice, and kind of fits the feel I'm looking for in Adara.


62-13: Here's another look at the sandstone brick in a different area.  Hmm, the cul-de-sac mod I'm using hasn't been converted over for the brick.  This will need some attention, I've got something in the works already. 


62-14: Even with the few things that don't perfectly match, this style looks pretty nice!  As you can see I've popped a Sears into place here and a few other smaller stores.  The suburban development only goes a short distance off this shot.  Looks like I need to check the NAM roundabouts as well. 


62-15: This area is pretty much at the edge of town.  I don't think I'm going to take development too much further in this direction. 


62-16: Finally, here's an overview shot of the town of Westside as it stands now.  Except for a few isolate warehouses and a few suburbs to rough up the edges, this is the majority of Westside.  Hope you like it!


That's a wrap.  Next time, I'm going to take care of the details along the Vavenby – Winfield border.  Sadly, the update is going to be postponed a bit due to life eating my gaming time this week.  Maybe Saturday but most likely Monday for the next update.  See you then! 

[Dreamcat]

Hi, BC.  Did you know that elsewhere on the web I'm known as DC?  I thought your name was so similar to mine.  I was going to ask you how your Thanksgiving went when I blankly remembered Thanksgiving for Canada is long past.  Silly me!  So Americanized.  Enjoy your short hiatus away from Simcity.  Meanwhile, Winfield is looking splendid.  I love the new sidewalks, and wow at those demand levels...it doesn't look as if they'll be satisfied soon!  The Mattb325 houses look amazing, I can't wait to see the new R$$$ houses from Matt appear here as well.

I love your neighborhood layout, it just always seems so real to me.  The paths in 62-15 look oh so good; I particularly like the stairs.  I've seen that before, and it always looks fantastic wherever I've seen it.

I love the Sears and the Costco BATs, but there is something that has always bothered me about them, and that's the lack of parking lot space.  They're so small compared to real life, and ploppable parking lots just don't match up very well.  Just something that has always irked me -- not anything that can be practically fixed.  But you should probably enlarge the parking spaces for the elementary school.  Seems a bit small in my opinion.  Also, you do have JBSimbo's schools, right...?  It's just that's there's not a lot of diversity in the schools here in my opinion.

Have fun in real life.  We'll be waiting for you.

Cheers,
Eric

[Tomas Neto]

The development of your cities is staggering!!! It is pure beauty and realism, with the touch of your fantastic talent!!! 

[turtle]

Hi Battlecat

I meant to reply after your 60th update, but somehow forgot. Thanks for letting us in on your plans. This is really a massive project, so I wish you good luck in your venture. It's impressive that you can plan out every tile so well, without knowing the excact context of the whole region - I don't think I would be able to do that.

As for your latest update, everything looks excellent. I like the look of your new sidewalks, making the look more uniform. As a personal preference, I think Adara has missed some more urban development for a little while, and so far you are right on track (not that I didn't love the previous 61 updates as well ). It also looks like it still will fit in nicely with how you've developed everything up until now. I for one am really looking forward to see how you continue this.  
The textures on those parking lots look a lot like PEGs scenic drive kit, and they would fit together seamlesly, if you want to enlarge the parking spaces.

Enjoy your week off  
/Thomas

[ecoba]

A good update, and a nice bout of starting growth.

It's okay that you're taking a break, I'll be glad to see it when you're back.

Ethan

[calibanX]

Enjoy your week off Battlecat. Great start here, we'll be waiting patiently.

Geoff

[djvandrake]

Looks great!    I think you're doing a fine job of maintaining the character of your cities.

[Albus of Garaway]

Wonderful update, Battlecat! Not that that's anything I should be surprised about. Westside reminds me of so many places I've been to before. I'd list them, but I doubt you'd recognize the names. I was surprised at your choice of the SMP sidewalk mod, but now that I see it in use, I think it looks quite nice. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how it looks in the more rural areas.

-Jason

[clearlypowa]

Nice update. From today; i am going to follow your update in time 

Good luck in your great project.   

Edit : Thanks for your PM

[Schulmanator]

Looks great! A very nice neighborhood... great place to live and work.

[scott1964]

Looks good.     Which trees are you using?

[sumwonyuno]

Nice to hear that you've taken a liking to the NAM goodies.  As for the advisors, just turn them into llamas, but be careful: they'll spit at you instead of complain!

[danielcote]

I like all the little parks, paths and sections of trees that you put in you're neighbourhoods.

[amapper]

This town is very pleasant to view and even better to live in. I noticed several stairways which remind me of what my hometown had when I was growing up. Unfortunately they have been allowed to fall into disrepair or are completely gone. Nice touch indeed.

[Nanami]

Nice town

[kwakelaar]

I have never really been working much with GLR either, and for Andau it is not needed for quite some time still. But I have read about some of the issues with the puzzel pieces, so good luck with those
Well, demand does not seem to be a problem in Adara, you could build quite some more larger cities if that is what you would like.
Your planning and history for Westside is well put together, did Costco by any chance lobby for the bridge at city hall
Like some have mentioned already the small walkways and stairs are a great touch to this neighbourhood. And the way you lay out your schools are very good. I like that you are using more lots to create a unified whole.
And indeed the sidewalk textures are a troublesome lot, never quite doing what one would want to.
As always this has been a very enjoyable visit to Adara.

[danielcote]

oh more beautiful natures neighbourhoods and winding paths! By the way where do you get those stairs and those paths they're really neat!

[Battlecat]

Eric (Dreamcat): Funny how both our screen names get abbreviated in the same way!  It's easy to forget that while both Canada and the USA celebrate Thanksgiving, they're over a month apart.  You'd think we'd get used to that, but I usually have to be reminded in October that the USA hasn't had Thanksgiving yet! 

This wasn't so much a hiatus by choice.  It's more like the realization Monday night that my wife and I had commited to various social gatherings Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights!  Doesn't leave me a lot of time for SC4, but such is life!  As for Simcity 4 itself, I've actually had a few of Mattb's new high wealth homes pop up in inconvenient locations.  I'm conserving R$$$ demand for a part of Winfield so I've had to be rather brutal about beating back the mansions in Westside. 

You've got a good point about the Costco and Sears, not to mention many of the other big box stores that have been custom built.  I should be able to expand the parking lot for the Costco, but the Sears isn't going to work so well!  Ironically, that's the reason I developed Westside in the first place, guess I forgot what I was doing in my enthusiasm the other day. 

Good point about the schools, I guess I have used the maxis school a fair bit.  I do have other school models, including JBSimbo's stuff, for some reason I'm not using them much.  At least one of JBSimbo's schools will be showing up in Winfield I think.  In the meantime, I think I'll review my choice of schools for Westside and see if I can find something else.  Thanks for the suggestions! 

Tomas Neto: Thanks very much for your enthusiasm!

Thomas (turtle): It really is a massive project, but it's boiled nicely down to small, bite sized pieces which helps a lot.  The approach I'm taking makes this a lot less overwhelming!  I've got vague ideas, but the majority of the context is developing as I go along here. 

Glad you like the new sidewalks.  They do present some interesting challenges, but I think the results are well worth it!  After Jackson Pass, this tile is a welcome change of pace.  Although ironically, today's update is going to be mostly a fall back to the rural styles!  Good thought on using Peg's scenic drive, I've also got another set of parking lots that are of a similar style that should help as well.

Ethan (ecoba): Thanks, glad you enjoyed the start.  It wasn't really a major break, but it is nice to catch my breath for a moment.  It's nice to be back up and running!   

Geoff (calibanX): Thanks!  Back in action right now.  Thanks for the link to that Spanish site! 

djvandrake: Thanks very much, it's always a relief to get a second opinion about city character!

Jason (Albus of Garaway): You could always run the names by me, I'll probably have a look at them on Google Maps if I haven't heard of them!  The SMP sidewalk mod was a tough choice, I almost went with the grey asphalt for realism.  But for some things, I'm shooting for aesthetics, it's going to be nice even in my other smaller cities.  And more importantly, it's consistent!  I dislike the pink sidewalks; they're way to much California style for the region I'm developing. 

I've taken the agricultural texture out of the mod; I'll be using the standard rural textures for the other street types.  It helps that gravel and dirt streets don't have alpha maps for sidewalks.  I'll have a peek and make sure it works though; there might be some small oddities to clean up.  Thanks for the thought!

clearlypowa: Thanks for stopping by again!  Glad I could help with finding that stuff.

Schulmanator: Glad you like it, it's going to be a bit bigger when all is done, but it's come together quite nicely! 

scott1964: Thanks!  I think you're looking at Dedgren's tree lots in the Three Rivers Region Exchange.  I'm using the 1x1 lots from his collection, but there is a wide diversity of forest lots.  The Three Rivers Region Exchange is here.

sumwonyuno: Yeah, I've taken quite the interest in the NAM components, particularly recently!  I'll show you a bit of what I've been messing with on Wednesday.  Yeah, mostly I just ignore the advisors.  They lack vision!  I can do without the spitting so I think they're safe from being polymorphed! 

danielcote: Thanks!

amapper: Welcome to Adara!  Glad you like how this is turning out!  It's a shame how some cities let infrastructure like this fall into disrepair.  I'm just really glad I found these stairs, there are very few options for stairways, particularly ones that are compatible with the width of basic trail parks.  Thanks for stopping in!

976: Thanks very much!

Kwakelaar: I can imagine it's going to be a at least a couple millennia before you have much call for GLR in Andau!  ;-)  Despite the glitches, it's a pleasure to use.  I've got a project in the works relating to it I'll reveal on Wednesday.  It's funny just how much demand has been built up by the four existing tiles.  The highways and their associated bridges would be the responsibility of the National government.  I expect Costco would have partnered up with Westside to lobby the government for that development.  After all, the city gets a great deal of benefit in the form of development and increased tax revenue. 

The sidewalks are troublesome indeed.  It's a lot easier now with the pure brick style for all wealth levels.  Keeps a single pink section from showing up without warning.  As for the leftover bits, I've got plans there!  Thanks for your thoughts and kind words!

danielcote (2): Thanks very much for your kind words!  The stairs are part of Marrast's Footways set.  I've found it quite odd how few choices there are for stairs.  The trails are from the BSC Trail Park Set , using the grey rock option from the BSC Trail Park alternate Textures.  There's a large number of parks compatible with the trail park set; links to most of them can be found on this list here.  I've found the trail parks very handy for filling in gaps, particularly since they come with a number of trail free filler pieces. 

Update 63
Winfield - Vavenby Border

So before I start today's update, I thought you might all be interested to know that during my break this week I burned a rather special DVD.  It contains the entirety of my plugins folder and a copy of the Adara region as it stands now.  If I suffer a major computer crash, the first 4 and a bit tiles of the region are safe and sound. 

Rather than working through all the urban details immediately, I'm going to do some work on the rural edges of town.  Among other things, I've got a pretty significant modding plan on the books that I want to get at least part way through before I do too much work in the urban area.  So, first on the list, I'm going to take care of the Vavenby border, including the first bits of lake and shoreline.   Naturally that means I've got a few cross border composites to put together today!

63-1: First, a bit of exurb development right on the border.  You might recall that Vavenby actually has the first set of exurbs I developed in the region although I didn't have a name for the concept at the time.  We'll have a look at how the two match together in a little while with a couple cross border composite shots. 


63-2: I'm going to get a fair bit done on this side before I go over to cross border shots.  Here's the fully developed exurb.  It's got the freedom to update the home styles going forward though. 


63-3: A bit further east, I've got an old clearcut and a farm built into a second old clearcut.  I imagine the first one is just waiting for someone willing to spend the time and money to clear the stumps out of the land.


63-4: Yeah, there's a fair bit of work that needs to happen here before a farmer takes over.  Looks nice though!


63-5: Further east still, a slightly denser set of exurbs.  I'm still pondering the rural – urban interface for this area.  That will probably come in an update later this week. 


63-6: Here's the status so far.  I'm going to hold off the gap between the city and forest for a separate update.  I've got to ponder the exact shape of this boundary a bit first.  Next I'm going to get to work on the Vavenby border on the left side of this shot.


63-7: I made good use of the coordinates tool for matching the shoreline here.  In this shot, I've just drafted out the rough shoreline carrying on from Vavenby.  This shot is on the railway (south) side of the lake.


63-8: I decided on a proper retaining wall for the railway here.  The rocks are there just for fun, they're barely visible anyhow.


63-9: On the North side of the lake near the highway, the shoreline has just about come together properly.


63-10: So, here's Vavenby.  The railway, powerlines and the gravel street disappear into oblivion as they cross the border. 


63-11: Or, more likely they continue onwards just as the were before the border!  If it wasn't for those power poles and the big black spot I missed during photo prep, the border would be pretty hard to spot here.


63-12: Over on the highway side of the lake, the boat launch area has a limited amount of water available.


63-13: But not nearly as limited as it was before.  I'm particularly happy with this shot.


63-14: Despite my best efforts, some small issues occur at zoom 5.  It appears the trees plopped differently on each side; I'll touch that up shortly.  The only real glitch is the flowers only showing up on the Vavenby side.  That's pretty much unavoidable in this game. 


63-15: Over near the railway, the edges is also fairly evident due to the rock slope appearing on the Winfield side.  Still, I'm quite happy with the result.


63-16: To wrap things up today, here's a small two picture mosaic.  This mosaic has the border of Vavenby and Winfield running diagonally from the top right to the bottom left of the image.  I think I'm satisfied with the quality of this blend.  I know I'm not quite done the bottom left corner of this mosaic, my wrist decided it was done with SC4 around this point.  I'll polish it off later when I finish up this side of the lake. 



That's all for today!  Next time I've got a few tweaks to Westside to do.  More importantly, I've also got a few surprises to show you all.  Thanks for stopping by!

Edit: Replaced a bunch of .png files I forgot to convert with .jpg versions.  Sorry about that!