Three Rivers Region

[Gaston]

By the way:

Welcome to Page 53
David,
   Sorry about the car.   I know a good laywer you can call.  LOL    I'm working alot of VERY early shifts for a few days so not much posting from me, for a bit.       I had no idea that ya'll had a Best Buy near enough to you to get the Geek Squad out there.    I'm sorta sorry to.    I had a REALLY bad experience with the local Best Buy here.   I'll just say I won't shop there ever again.
   Glad to hear all are well there and that Heather is vastly improved.         


---Gaston

[BigSlark]

David,
Sorry to see your Mother-in-law visited and left her mark on your world. I'm going to be getting one of those (a mother-in-law, not a new laptop) in about a year's time, she's pretty sane right now and I hope it stays that way. My father informs me that it will not. My Maxima also has battle scars, although not to the tune of $6000. The Altimas are pretty nice if you end up being in the market for a new car.

The rapids look pretty darn good, I'm adding them to my plugins right after I type this.

Hope the next couple weeks are more peaceful than the last.

EDIT 4/19/2007 01:46 CDT

Here in Jackson we have a really good independent radio station, Mississippi Blues, managed by a now-aged Civil Rights Activist. Its either that or NPR's News when I'm in the car.

Cheers,
Kevin

[Unkles27]

wow, that must of been a stressful (and expensive) visit. Not something that I'm looking forward to. The good thing is that you made it through alive, and its good to see you posting again!

[Livin in Sim]

Hi, David, thanks so kindly for the rapids, I've been thinking about them longingly from time to time ever since the Liv's Creek days.  And now they are mine.   

  So exactly when did Fearless Lea--I mean your mother-in-law--crash the car???        Do you think she would ever read...aww, probably not!   

I'm glad to hear things are getting back to "normal", and that Heather is doing well.

--Liv

[Tarkus]

Hi David-

Yowza . . . your mother-in-law sure "customized" that car.  I'm really sorry to hear about/see that.  Sounds like that was quite the visit.    Glad to hear Heather is doing better and I hope the thyroid issue gets sorted out.  My mom had to deal with thyroid problems a few years ago.  Sounds like they got it figured out with your wife a lot quicker than with my mom, so that's a good sign.

I've been hesitant about Vista and dual-core processors myself, even though Robert Fripp did the intro sounds .  I'm relatively happy with my old COMPAQ laptop with WinXP from 3 years ago, aside from this obscure part of the display that keeps shorting out and darkening my screen.  Happened while writing my Master's thesis last April, and again a couple months ago.  That and the lack of RAM (I can't expand beyond 768MB).  I'd be curious to see how Vista works with SC4, though.  And it looks like Geek Squad goes pretty far out.  Who could have predicted that happening a few years ago?

And thanks for posting the rapids lots.  I've gotten a little farther on the curves and have something to show for it soon. If there's anything else 3RRDOT needs engineered, I'm more than happy to help.  I've already been thinking of ways to improve 3RR's urban highways.  

-Alex

[mightygoose]

my mum installed that body kit on my dads car just the other week, looks like its quite popular nowadays....

as to vista, i got and binned it shortly after.... it just isnt the step up you would expect....

as to collaboration i have began thinking aobut plugins for the midtown as thats the kinda area of my ciy im working on, granted though my region is much bigger than yours, yeah would you believe it. give or take 320 quads.... my computer withstanding, region census cant handle it and neither can terraformer so im stuffed for a picture.... but its 16x16 with a big tail on the south east for a second city... population is around 1 million so far and its growing rapidly...

[Heinz]

wooot! thats quite a handful to miss. lol. thats a massive customized look. sorry about that.   maybe you could get MTV to help.

and you mentioned

Heinz, a 3RR Collaborator from day one, observed with reference to our friend Tarkus yesterday


Quote
i see you have the rhw v13 which could be well suited for 3rr

RHWV13 is the 3RRDOT spec for non-urban freeways.

i didnt get to download it before the lex reached its max bandwidth.   is there any place else i could get to it? im sure it will look so SWOOSH in 3rr as in any other MD or project.

hope you get things back to status quo asap.   still, best wishes for you and your family

granted though my region is much bigger than yours, yeah would you believe it. give or take 320 quads.... my computer withstanding, region census cant handle it and neither can terraformer so im stuffed for a picture.... but its 16x16 with a big tail on the south east for a second city... population is around 1 million so far and its growing rapidly...

320 large city tiles???

[Tarkus]

Heinz, RHW v13 is also available here in the interim. 

And mightygoose, 320 large city tiles?  Yowza.  I believe I tried doing a 1024 quad region (32 large tiles x 32 large tiles) once with Landscape Designer as an experiment, before SC4TF was around, and I had to stop it since it would have taken like 24 hours for the map to terraform into the game.   Of course, if you could do a region with about 64 large tiles per side, you could probably easily squeeze a whole mid-size US state in, like Oregon or Washington.  We'd be talking 4096 quads, though--you'd need a supercomputer. 

-Alex

[glepet]

If i tried going with maps that large on my computer, I'd end up using the fire extinguisher to put out the fire.

[meinhosen]

granted though my region is much bigger than yours, yeah would you believe it. give or take 320 quads....

320 quads?  Good Lord, my processor had a heart attack just displaying that on my screen.  I salute you guys for having such ambitious projects, more so when you take the time to show them here.

[mightygoose]

ill post some pictures when its worht doing so lol

[dedgren]

When I start getting worried PMs, that's when I know I've gone too long without a post here.

Actually, I was around for a bit Saturday morning, but admin stuff pretty much ate up the time I had.  The 3RR things I'm working on right now are longer term stuff- I don't have anything to really show for it.  Never fear, though- there's good things in the pipeline.

I thought that tonight (I started this on Saturday evening), rather than work some more on the recent WGM, I'd share a treasure I uncovered during spring cleaning.  I found a photo album of the pics I took between 1972 and 1976, which were the first years I was really out on my own, having been drafted into the U.S. Army at the start of that time.  I had a little tiny Kodak "60" 110 film camera, and shot quite a few pics with it.  Some of them, in the light of 30 years hindsight, show a lot about where I'm coming from in authoring 3RR.

As an aside, the following pics are mostly scanned 3.5x5 inch/7.8x12.7 cm photos.  Some had held up very well over the years- sadly, the dyes in other pics had faded to the point where some were ruined.  All in all, though, they came out pretty well.  I hope you'll find them as interesting to look at as I did.



Me at 20, enjoying the sun and sand at Padre Island, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico.  I was being trained as a combat medic at the time at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, hence the nifty GI specs, of which more in a bit.



San Antonio, 1973.  The downtown section of I-37, the freeway with just a few cars on it, had just opened.  I had never lived in a big city before, and loved it.  It didn't hurt that San Antonio was then, and still is now from what I hear, a very liveable place.



While I grew up in archetypical "old" suburbia- Downers Grove and then Naperville, Illinois, on the Burlington Railroad west of Chicago, my heart was always in the countryside.  My grandparents on my mom's side owned a farm in southern Indiana, and spending the summer there was the high point of my year.  My first marriage, in 1973, was to a woman from very, very rural central Kentucky.  The time spent in that part of the country was a big part of the appeal.



I have taken pictures all my life of structures on the rural landscape.  While unspoiled wilderness has its place, the "built" environment is what makes many places special for me, and even the most dilapidated old barn sometimes is a major enhancement to the landscape.



It was around this time that I really got into 1800s railroadiana.  This is High Bridge, a steel box cantilever bridge 280 feet/80 m over the Kentucky River valley just south of Lexington, where I did my first stint in college.



Right now, I live about a half-mile/.8 km from the Alaska Railroad line between Anchorage and Fairbanks.  It actually crosses Wasilla Creek, which flows by our property, on a wooden trestle.  I'll get over there and take a pic someday.



For my first car, I would settle for no less than the best car in its class...



...the fact that it was the only car in its class never crossed my mind.  I paid (U.S.) $1,699 for that '73 Gremlin, which had a AM radio, as I recall, as its only piece of optional equipment.



It dutifully took us to Padre Island, the first coastal beach I'd ever been to, four out of the nine weekends I was stationed at Fort Sam.  Those weekends were the start of a lifelong love-affair with sand castles-



This was an early effort- I've constructed some pretty elaborate ones over the years, and in some pretty far-flung places.  Someday I'll find some pics.

The end of 1973 found me at Fort Lewis, just west of Tacoma, Washington.  I continued spending as much time outdoors as possible.



Here's a pic of young Elton John feeding a hungry deer...  No, no, that's actually me, just kidding!



About that time I ditched the Gremlin and bought the most beautiful car, save perhaps one, that I have ever owned- a 1971 Plymouth Road Runner.



It was a "muscle car" in looks only- it had a V-8 318 cubic inch/5.2 liter displacement with a two-barrel carburetor, but oh, man, was it a pleasure to drive.

I know I was in that car when we stopped here.



Do other countries do the "center" thing, or is that some uniquely U.S. hang up?  Most states have markers like this as well.



By late 1974, fickle me decided I wanted the real thing, so I traded for the other "most beautiful car" contender- a real Road Runner.



400 cubic inches of four-barrel power- the only thing that could stop this '73 beauty was a gas station.  But hey, gas was only (U.S.) 60 cents or so a gallon.

So by this time, I'm in Colorado, stationed at the now closed Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora and being trained as an optician.  I guess the goofy glasses, which military jokesters referred to as "birth-control frames" (as in, if you're wearing them, you won't need any), must have had a larger effect than I anticipated.  After I finished the six month school, I worked at the Army's Optical "Fab Lab" at Fitzsimons until I was rotated to Germany in 1976.



This was a dream job, for the military.  If we completed the work in the inventory at the start of the week, we were almost always released early on Fridays.  Fairly frequently, Friday was just off, so I had a multitude of three-day weekends to go driving in the mountains.  I continued my interest in railroading at this time, and actually built and detailed a 2'x4'/60cm x 120cm "N" gauge layout that I sold to a local hobby shop when I left for a display.  This last pic is the eastern portal of the Denver, Rio Grande & Western's Moffat Tunnel, at the base of the road, now closed, I believe, over Rollins Pass.



The road used the old railroad grade, and the old railroad trestles.  It was a white-knuckler to drive, but the scenery could not be surpassed.



But, not so fast.  The other area of the state I discovered at about this time was the route of the old Denver, South Park & Pacific narrow gauge railroad up to Alpine Tunnel.  That led to another lifelong fascination- with ghost towns and old mining districts.  St. Elmo, pictured above, is one of my favorite places in the whole world.



I don't know what this area looks like today (I actually flew over it on a clear day on my last trip to Texas, so that's not exactly correct- it's a little hard to pick out detail from 33,000 feet/10,000 meters up), it's probably, like so many other things, been picked apart and wrecked by unthinking idiots.



In the '70s, though, many of the buildings were still in gorgeous condition.



The old Hancock Mine buildings were dilapidated, but mostly intact.  I have long thought that if ever an area should have been designated a historic national park, it was this one.



And the aspen...



Anyone who's hung around 3RR for more than a few minutes knows that I have a thing about massive stands of aspen and fall foliage trees generally.



Any possible doubt left as to why?



Outdoor scenery just doesn't get any better than this...



...and I spent as much time outdoors in it as I could find...



...weather be darned!

A few final pics today, in this very self-indulgent post.  Thanks for bearing with me...



By late '75, I knew I would be headed for Germany the following year, and that the Road Runner was not the vehicle to be taking (although, in retrospect, it would have been really, really cool to have been able to have driven it on the autobahnen- ...pass me at 100 mph/160 kph, will you?  we'll just see about that...)  So I, ever the trendsetter, anticipated Wayne's World [linkie] by some 15 years.



Once again, driving the best car in its class.

That's it for today.  I do note that there's lots of 3RR coming up.  I'm currently writing 20 quad backstories and am putzing around with an airport project some might find interesting.  The ongoing WGM will resume with the next post.

Later.


David

[BigSlark]

David,

Love the pictures, especially of the railroad civil engineering works.

To build a detailed N scale layout in the 70's must've been a real challenge with few good running locomotives and virtually no detail parts available. I simply cannot imagine doing such a thing.

I was a D&RGW modeler myself, in HO scale, focusing on the 1950's. I love the Craig Branch and D&SL in general, I had a 4x8 that I started when I was 12 but by the time I was 18 had turned into a reasonable facsimile of Hayden, CO, provided that you ignored the rear half of the oval! However, the combined issues of space and money once I got to college have successfully put that hobby on hold.

As a result of living in Jackson, Mississippi I found that the Gulf, Mobile, & Northern (which became the Gulf, Mobile, & Ohio in 1938, Illinois Central Gulf in 1972, and today the road's remnants are owned by the Kansas City Souther, among others) had a collection of timber lines that it linked together from Meridian, Mississippi to New Orleans via Jackson! Unfortunately, almost all of the 200 mile route is abandoned, but it was known for its short and steep grades, and many curves. That's my current interest, I just need to figure out how to build steam engines that look good and run well.

Also, a couple of years ago my Dad and I were on our way to a Dual-Sport Motorcycle Rally in Wyoming (we lived in Alabama at the time) and we tried to cross Rollins Pass. It turns out that tunnels 31 and 33 are caved in but there is a shoo-fly that motorcycles and hikers can use, however, Tunnel 32, also known as "Needle's Eye," is closed due to falling rock and there is no way to detour it. Nonetheless, it still amazed me that David Moffat built a line over that pass.

Anyway, hope all is well in RL and 3RR Development world. Keep up the neat pictures from your past!

As always, I faithfully await collaboration instructions,

Cheers,
Kevin

[thundercrack83]

David,

That was a truly magnificent update you presented there. I loved looking at all the pictures of the places you've been and the cars that took you there! I think my favorite one was the "Elton John" one, that made me laugh pretty hard. I also saw where you lived in Downers Grove, IL, and if I'm not mistaken, I think "Macho Man" Randy Savage graduated from Downers Grove High School, which (as someone who grew up watching the WWF in the 1980s) is what I always think of when I see Downers Grove, IL. Anyway, fantastic trip back in time!

Dustin

[dedgren]

Says it all...



SC4 changed forever today.


David

[threestooges]

Picturesque beauty. If those are the seasonal tree lots, then this is truly a turning point for the wilderness areas of the game (and other parts of it too). The road curves as well are a sight. This pic shows what the game can truly be, and where is has come from as a result of the owrk put in by many, many people. It will be great when the backstories are finished and the development begins. Until then, I shall wait and enjoy the sights along the way. (Incidentally, though I still have yet to hear from some schools, I have gotten into Whittier Law school (in Costa Mesa, CA)). Hope things are better in your neck of the woods with family and such (minus the car as it seems).

[emilin]

First of all: you have GREAT taste in cars. Awesome!

Second: I love those curved roads! If you do plan to release them as puzzle pieces I hope that you consider making a version with euro-road textures too. I'll probably use them even if you don't, but that would be GREAT.

[meldolion]

Great post David!!

I really liked the outdoors pictues I'm a big fan of  wilderness landscapes too..

[thundercrack83]

The first official 3RR shot with the new curves! Beautiful! Great job and many thanks to all that handled that project!

[mightygoose]

dang nabbit david, that is some mighty fine work there, i am most impressed, i also agree thats some good car selections... i cannot wait to see more of 3RR with curves....