Realistic Cities For Dummies

[APSMS]

Wow. That was one crazy update/lesson!

The perpetrator of your K-point, btw, was Arthur (Art128). He said thanks for four years of educating Dummies in the way of SC4.

What an eventful four years! I have no idea how you found the time to learn all this stuff.

[Catalyst]

You truly deserve that 2nd karma point   
As always, great lesson! The tuturials are easy to follow and with the pictures everybody should be able to start modding themselves.

The fenced railroads look really good, too bad the first couple of glr tiles before the sunken station have a base texture (caused by the ped mall bridge ?)

[catty]

You truly deserve that 2nd karma point   ....

And I think we will make it a third karma point as the amount work you are putting into these "lessons" for people is outstanding, especially as you have made them very easy to follow and understand.



-catty

[mgb204]

Good to see SmileyMK getting some recognition for this CJ, it's really unique insomuch as the level of detail that's given and commitment that has gone into this project as a whole. I'm sure many player can recognise how much extra work goes into explaining everything you are truly a credit to the community  .

[compdude787]

Hey, I was looking through your first few posts and noticed the pictures were not showing up. They say "look who's popular...upgrade to Plus for more bandwidth." Although the photos aren't gone and you can still see them when you click on them, I would post those pics on a different website; Photobucket really sucks these days IMO.

EDIT: seems like all your pictures are displaying that message, even the ones in the most recent update. Upgrading to Plus is actually free if you just want 2 GB of storage space, but for more storage space, they want your money.

[thebagleboy]

Seems to me that simcity 4 is too popular for the photobucket servers to handle.  Good work man!

[yochananmichael]

Congrats in getting all the Karma and only 74 more replies to go before you "level up" to the Classics section. I don't know about anyone else but I can't wait to see that happen. Look forward to the next lesson.

[smileymk]

Hello everyone.

Before we begin, a huge thank you is due to art128 and catty for the recently awarded Karma points. It's a nice surprise to get that sort of recognition, and it's very much appreciated.

ASPMS: Thanks for the kind words. I admit that Lesson 22 was a little mad - it was certainly extensive, involved and detailed. I think the airports lesson was madder, though, and this upcoming lesson is pretty crazy too! It won't be the last crazy lesson I do either...
It's hard to believe that RCFD has been going for 4 years. I've definitely improved massively in that time, and I'll put that down to having had those 4 years of practice and experience with the game, as well as time spent learning new techniques, watching others and researching the real world.

Catalyst: Thanks. I hope people start modding as a result of this, as it is the main aim of the modding lessons. I hope I'm showing that modding is pretty easy if you know what to do.
Regarding the base texture, that was indeed necessitated by the pedestrian bridge, as there aren't any puzzle pieces for rural GLR points. I don't mind it too much - it's next to a station so I think we can get away with a little bit of extra concrete.

catty: Thank you, you're very kind. You don't have to give me karma points for these updates, the kind words are more than enough.

mgb204: Thank you! It's good to know the community is finding this MD useful.

compdude787: Thanks for alerting me to the image problem. It turns out I found out about Photobucket's 10GB/month bandwidth limit the hard way. Because of this, the pictures for Lesson 22 have been moved to Flickr, which gives me 1TB storage and unlimited bandwidth (I think). The pictures for this lesson and all future lessons will also be put on Flickr. The 'look who's popular' thumbnail should not happen again.

thebagleboy: Thank you. I blame you guys for liking this MD too much ;)

yochananmichael: Thanks. I hope it happens soon, although 74 replies is still a lot, so there's a long way to go yet. Just keep those lovely comments coming in and we'll get there soon enough, I'm sure.

And now, let us build roads. Lots of roads. And then some more roads for good measure.

Lesson 23 - Central Roads

In this lesson we're going to build the roads in and around Mapleford's CBD. There's a lot to do, so let's get started.

We'll start by extending the road leading to our suburban rail station north to the city tile border:


On the other side, we're going to extend this road over the GLR line to the south, running past the sunken station we built a couple of lessons ago:


The street connecting to the sunken station must first be rerouted, and the terrain for the flyover must also be prepared:


The tiles at the bottom were placed to flatten the terrain in between the GLR line and the street embankment, so that it looks nice.

On the north side, after raising the ground by 10m (15m for the flyover minus 5m for the GLR depression), we need to create a smooth transition to ground level in the usual way. However, we're going to be using FAR-2 to connect the GLR bridge to the rail bridge, so we need to smoothen additional tiles to the right of the embankment like so:


Doing this allows us to drag FAR-2 on a slope without any additional drama.

Now we can extend the abutment on the south side, running from the north-south street, build the flyover, and connect it to the rail bridge using FAR-2:


I'm pretty sure we've covered dragging FAR-2 before, so I'm going to assume you can do it. If you need a reminder, take a look at the NAM documentation, which shows you the appropriate dragging pattern.

The plan for this situation should be clear from the above picture. We're going to upragde the north-south street to a road. This is a simple enough task, but requires replacing one of the street bus stops with a road version. At the other end of the station, bring the road down to ground level in the usual way:


At this point, a little househeeping is necessary. We need to rebuild all of the fences and retaining walls we demolished in the course of building this flyover. Remember that the GLR fences should run to the ends of the flyover, so that there is no way for pedestrians to walk onto the tracks:


Of course, placing the fences in this way does not completely prevent track incursions, because someone could still jump over the flyover barriers and on to the tracks. However, this is a sufficiently rare event that we don't need to add any further protection to our flyovers.

Moving swiftly on to a much less morbid topic, let's continue our road to the south. Shortly after reaching ground level from the sunken GLR station, a junction is planned with another road. Since we're in what will be a suburban area, we can use a roundabout. Don't forget the filler:


After going diagonal to the west, we run into another road, which means building another roundabout:


Notice how I've dragged the diagonal roads into the roundabout so that there is a small turn on the side of each road going into the roundabout, with exiting traffic getting a straight run. This is done to slow traffic down for the roundabout, and we've covered a similar technique for avenue roundabouts previously.
The effect can be achieved by paying attention to the preview as you drag out the roads. It should look like the completed roads above.
Remember that I'm using LHD here as I'm from England, so the turn occurs on the left hand side of the road going into the roundabout. Those of you who have RHD will need to put your turns on the right hand side of the road going into the roundabout.

Our current road will continue to the southwest, curving to the west. We're going to do something fancy to make this turn - transition from diagonal to FAR-2, then to FAR-3, and finally to orthogonal. This is to give a little bit of added interest.
We're going to build this curve from the other side, starting with the orthogonal and FAR-3 section. We've already covered dragging FAR-3 and orthogonal - FAR-3 transitions, so let's progress to the transition between FAR-3 and FAR-2.
You need to drag out road exactly as shown in the following pictures, in the exact same order:








The finished article should look like this:


Now let's do the transition from FAR-2 to diagonal. Again, drag exactly as shown below, in the exact same order:




And here's the finished long curve:


It's now time for another 4-way junction. This time, since we're in a denser urban area, we're going to save some space by using a TuLEP junction instead of a roundabout.
However, because the road to the south leads into the CBD, and the road we're building runs from the suburbs to the northeast, we're going to get a lot of traffic coming along the road we've just built and turning left to enter the CBD.
So we're going to add a slip lane to create a dedicated route for traffic making this turn, increasing the capacity of the junction. The slip lane is built as shown below. Note that the slip lane necessitates moving the relevant turn lane arrows, as you can see here:


I've only labelled the pieces needed for the slip lane here - you should be familiar enough with TuLEPs by now to do the rest.

Let's finish off our first road now by running it to the western edge of the city tile. A section of FAR-2 is required here to avoid the motorway:


That's one road down, several more to go, so let's move straight on to the next road.

We'll do the road leading into the junction we just built going north into the indusrial area next. Immediately we run into the main motorway, which, being a diagonal RHW-8C, is not conducive to flyovers or FLUP underpasses.
The low-lying terrain also prevents us from building a standard tunnel, as we'll get a small lake if we try to dig down far enough.
At this point, things seem rather hopeless. But there is a way to get under the motorway. First dig 5m holes using a suitable combination of ground lifters and hole diggers, smoothen out the approaches on the sides furthest away from the motorway, and then place some on-slope car-subway transitions:


Unfortunately I couldn't find a link to these specific lots, but there are other lots on the STEX which do the same job and also look good.
That job specifically is converting road traffic to subway. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that the next step is to connect the two tunnel entrances with subway:


We now need to rebuild the soundwalls and any grass fillers we demolished in the process of making the tunnel. We're also going to add some retaining walls to the sides of the cuttings. With the soundwall set I'm using, it's necessary to extend the walls away from the motorway in two places to prevent them from floating over the cuttings:


Notice that the retaining walls on either side of the tunnel are different, because the motorway here separates two different parts of town. The left side is a residential area, so a mossy, more natural design is needed here which will fit well with houses. The right side is industry, so here I've gone for a more grungy dark concrete texture, creating a more grimy look befitting of an industrial estate.
Oh, and the walls I've used are from the pack we used for the GLR-underground transition which we built into the hillside in Lesson 21. There should be a link there.

With the tunnel in place, let's extend this road to the north, and connect it to the east-west road running next to the nearby el-rail station. Since we're in an industrial area, either a standard crossroads or a roundabout can be used. I've gone for the crossroads here - we can always upgrade it to a roundabout if it gets congested:


We now need to head northwest, up the hill. At this point, your plan is of secondary importance to the prevailing terrain. Your roads must be routed so that they fit the terrain as best as possible, with a minimal amount of cutting and filling. Small cuts and fills are fine when they are needed, but big cliffs are to be avoided. If that means your road has to deviate significantly from its planned course, so be it:


In this case, the road was initially planned to climb the hill diagonally to the northwest, but the steepness of the hill in this direction meant that I had to head west before curving north instead.
Shortly after this, the road curves northwest and exits the city tile, so let's move on to do the rest of the industrial roads, starting with the one next to the el-rail station shown earlier.

West of the junction with the road we just built, this new road simply continues in a straight line:


At this point we need to make sure that the road we've built is smooth. Jerky bumps like the one shown below are not at all realistic, and we need to get rid of them:


You may remember that we had a similar problem with our railway line, and fixed it with the God Mode smoothen tool. You might guess that the same technique can be applied to roads, and you'd be absolutely right:


Keep smoothing until you no longer have any bumps in the road:


Now, on the other side of the el-rail, we need to build another 4-way junction with the road connecting to the second roundabout we built. Building this connecting road requires another subway tunnel, which is built in a similar way to the first one a few pictures up. Because of the planned course for the road, however, there is one important difference.
Because the tunnels we're building use subway, they don't have to be straight, although we're still restricted to orthogonal exits. Just remember to leave enough room (at least a 2x2 square) to create the illusion of a smooth underground curve when placing the tunnel entrances:


By now you should be experienced enough to recognise how the rest of this road was built. Note in particular that the smooth 45-degree curve on the south side is kept in the cutting.

Let's get back to the road we were building, the east-west road. Once again, we need to build a subway tunnel to get under the motorway. Afterwards, we complete the 4-way junction which appears as a T-junction in the above picture, and extend the road to run into the first roundabout we built:


Having started this east-west road, we might as well finish it, even though it takes us away from the industry I previously said we'll complete the roads for first.
The next junction is a 4-way junction in the inner city, so requires TuLEPs to save space. But the road exiting to the south needs to curve 45 degrees immediately after the junction. This creates an issue, because there aren't any curved or diagonal TuLEPs.
Fear not. We can use the ARD-3 network from the NWM to extend the TuLEP turn lane around the curve. First drag out the junction and curve:


Then place the ARD-3 puzzle pieces shown below. The numbers in the picture indicate the correct order in which to place the pieces. You may need to drag a section of ARD-3 around the starter piece to complete the look:


Be careful when placing these pieces, as you need to ensure that the two-lane part of the ARD-3 is on the correct side. The two lanes should be on the side of the road where the traffic is approaching the junction - that's the left side as you go into the junction for LHD users, and the right side for RHD users.

The rest of the junction can now be completed using the standard TuLEP pieces:


With this powerful technique in mind, let's continue building the east-west road and connect it to the urban motorway:


Let's also replace the fountain roundabout filler at the eastern end of this junction with something more suitable for an inner-city area next to a motorway:


This filler is the pedestrian underpass filler from this set. It gives a very urban feel to our roundabout, which is what we're after.

Moving on to the eastern side of the junction, we reach a tricky obstacle:


The road is planned to continue straight over this rail intersection before curving northeast to head towards the airport. However, the lack of viaduct rail interfaces with FLUPs and 7.5m road flyovers means that we can't just run the road straight over the rail line.
Instead, we'll have to curve the road to the north before curving it back east again, with the curve being built under the ground railway by means of a FLUP underpass:


The route of the underpass is marked in red above. Note that this underpass has a 2x2-tile footprint, so that we can legitimately pretend that there is a smooth 2x2 90-degree road curve underneath our railway line.
You also need to replace the rail fences, and run them so that they meet the underpass ramps, like the one circled in blue above. This is similar to what we did with the flyovers, and serves the same purpose.

We now need to run the road under the viaduct rail, which is a simple and quick exercise:


Before extending the road any further, let's go to the eastern end of it, where it leaves the city tile. There is an obstruction that we need to get around:


I've marked the road stub we need to connect to by placing a single road tile next to it, so that you can see where we're heading. The correct stub is, as always, identified by counting tiles from a known fixed point.
You can also see the obstruction - the junction between our northern main railway line and its freight branch to the port.
We could simply tunnel under this embankment - but we don't need to. There is enough room to replace a section of the freight branch just after the points with a flyover going over our road. As this is a cheaper option, it is what we will do.
First, we need to demolish a section of the freight branch, extend the embankment so that it remains 15.5m above ground level immediately after the flyover, and then use single road tiles to cut through the embankment:


You can now put in the road and then place the rail flyover. Don't forget to replace the fences either:


We can now complete the road by connecting the underpass to this new rail flyover. Notice how I've left a 1-tile gap between the rail viaduct and the road to allow space for a smooth curve on the left of this section:


Another road done - let's move on to the last industrial road in the west of the city tile.
You may remember that in Lesson 21 we built an el-rail station in the north of our planned industrial area, which was accessed by a north-south road. We are now building that road, and going south, we must first get over the railway line.
Due to the fact that the road is slightly above the railway to begin with, a flyover makes sense here. But to get the flyover looking nice, we have to flatten the railway where the road will go over it. The difficult terrain means that we can only do this by dragging out a level crossing, and place single road tiles around it:


We then need to demolish the level crossing and smoothen the railway line so that it transitions nicely between the gradient and the flat sections, as opposed to jerking between the two like it does now.
This requires the God Mode Smoothen tool, and a lot of patience and rebuilding, but you should get there in the end with persistence:


The 7.5m road flyover can now be built, moving the nearby bus stop to a flatter location, and replacing the catenary and fences as appropriate:


That was pretty difficult, but with this road, the flyover is only part of the story. To the north, the road curves northwest, running around the side of the hill. To the south, we've got to get down to ground level to meet with the east-west road we just built and go under that curved subway tunnel.
In this case, the terrain meant that I had to build a small switchback section at the top of the hill in order to get the road low enough to descend it:


For those who don't know, the switchback section is the bit in the middle where the road curves 180 degrees before sloping down and turning east. This design is used to build roads through mountains.

We can improve the appearance of the switchback section by smoothing the terrain in between the road sections. This can be done by dragging any one-tile network:


And with that, the industrial area is fully road-connected. Let's now move to the inner city and CBD.

Our attention starts with the westernmost north-south road, which had to do that massive deviation from its planned course to fit the terrain.
Shortly after intersecting with our first road, another road branches off it to the west. The road we're building then curves southeast into the CBD.
At this point we're in a dense urban area, so we have to stick with turn lanes and slip lanes. We've also got the curve to worry about.
Because this curve goes the opposite way to the one we applied the ARD-3 technique to, and I'm using LHD, we need a different technique, because there won't be turn lanes on the south side of the junction.
The solution is to use TLA-3. The strategy is similar to that of the ARD-3 curve - you need to place the following puzzle pieces:


Here the TLA-3 extends the central reservation to provide a smooth end to the TuLEP junction.
Now, if you use RHD, you will need to use the aforementioned ARD-3 technique to build this junction. You guys will need the TLA-3 technique when you have a right turn into a T-junction with a side road to the right.

Since the side road from this junction only has a short run to the edge of the city tile, we might as well get it built now. Notice here that I've kept it reasonably far away from the first road in order to leave room for development and stop this part of the city being dominated by roads:


Moving back to the road we were building, let's build the next junction - another standard 4-way with an east-west road. Again, we may as well extend this east-west road to the western of the city tile now, as it's a short run and there are no further junctions along the way:


The north-south road we're building now curves east to meet up with the city's inner ring road, which fringes the central CBD. Since this ring road is rather important, we're going to use an avenue to build it.
As you might have guessed, we're going to intersect our road with this avenue with a 4-way TuLEP junction (the road was initially planned to terminate here but I decided to extend it to improve traffic flow). But this is an avenue, so we're going to extend the turn lanes on each side to 2 tiles, as opposed to the 1-tile setup we've been using so far:


Notice that we've added a slip lane here to facilitate likely evening traffic going home to the suburbs from the CBD, and applied the ARD-3 technique at the eastern end of the junction to extend the turn lane around the bend.
You may be wondering why we haven't curtailed the ARD-3 yet. This is because there is another junction to build after this, which is immediately after the road curves back to the east, so also requires the ARD-3 technique.
But the ARD-3 for this junction needs to be the other way round to the ARD-3 you can see above, so to switch the lanes around, we need to place a Road Type A TuLEP Compact Transition (found in the TuLEPs tab ring) at some orthogonal point in between the two junctions:


The junction can then be built in the usual way. There are no more major junctions planned on the road we're building, so we can extend it to the southern edge of the city tile some way to the east.
So we know where we're heading, we're going to do the eastern edge of this road first, where it leaves the city tile. This will be a diagonal section of road, which we will then transition to FAR-3.
I don't think we've covered diagonal - FAR-3 transitions before, so let's go over how to do that. As with all the dragged curves, it's a purely mechanical task. You need to drag road exactly as shown below, in the exact same order:










Once that's done, it's a simple task to connect this stub with the existing road:


Let's move on and extend the avenue ring road south to the next road, where the ring road will terminate (the road in question runs alongside the southern river).
Whilst we can simply drag an avenue into a crossing road, the resulting T-junction won't really look right, and won't be fixable with TuLEPs.
So to end the avenue more elegantly, we're going to convert it into two splitting one-way roads that will meet the road at two separate junctions.
First, we need to make the conversion to one-way road. You need to drag a stub of one-way road going into the avenue, and another one from the avenue going out. Which side of the road you do which drag on will depend on which side of the road your cars drive on - the direction of travel for each stub needs to match that of the avenue carriageway it connects to:


We can now achieve the split in the carriageways by placing smooth one-way curves. Here, I've built the curves by placing the relevant puzzle pieces, but they can also be dragged in the same way as the equivalent road curves.
In any case, the curves are directional, and so you must take care to orient them correctly - the curve pieces feature arrows on the preview to help you:


Finally, as you can see above, I've added some slip lanes to our junctions with the riverside road to aid traffic flow and make the ring road ending more visually pleasing.
The finished ending is much more satisfying and interesting than an avenue simply running into a road at a flat T-junction.

Let's turn our attention to this new riverside road. West of the avenue, the road continues alongside the southern river to the end of the city tile with no drama.
On the other side however, we meet the road running south from that ARD-3 side switch transition we built a little earlier. But the riverside road doesn't intersect with this other road, because the other road is busy going over it to become a bridge over the river immediately after leaving the current city tile.
So we need to build a flyover to act as an approach for this yet-to-be-built road bridge. Since the bridge is in the next city tile, we'll need to make a neighbour connection with the 15m flyover pieces. This is done in the same way as a street neighbour connection:


The 15m flyover is used instead of the 7.5m flyover because of the bridge to the south. It will look much better for the extra elevation when we eventually come to build it.

We can now complete the bridge approach - but we're not going to use an embankment here. That takes up too much room in the centre of a major city.
Instead we're going to use the 15m Long Transition piece, found at the end of the 15m Road Viaducts tab ring, to bring the bridge road back down to ground level:


The road at the top is that which ends with the diagonal - FAR-3 transition we finished a few pictures ago. You can also see that the riverside road leaves the city tile just east of the bridge approach flyover.
The riverside road can now be connected to the avenue junction. I'll leave this task as a routine exercise.

What's next? Let's do the road south from the second roundabout we built at the start of the lesson. This runs diagonally southeast for a bit before turning south, where another road will branch off it to the east. This branching road will then immediately turn north to meet up with the first ARD-3 TuLEP junction we built.
Because the branching road turns north immediately after it starts, we need to use the ARD-3 90-degree curve to extend the turn lanes for the junction around the bend.
On the straight road, we also need to use a piece I previously didn't know the purpose of - the Road Type A T-End TuLEP transition. This goes on the opposite side of the straight road to the turn lanes, as you can see here:


The purpose of the T-End piece is to provide a smooth connection at a T-junction between the junction itself and the road without the extra lane for turning traffic. This means that if you have RHD, then you will need to have your T-End and turn lane pieces on the opposite sides to what you see above.

With that done, let's connect this branching road up to meet the first ARD-3 TuLEP extension we built:


Let's continue by extending that road pointing south in the picture above. It is planned to meet the ring road avenue at a standard TuLEP junction, which you should be able to build for yourself by now, before running into the city's main market square.
An east-west road is planned to intersect with the road we're building at this square but, given the importance of the square, we can't just plow roads through the middle of it. We have to build around it.
When we built the urban motorway through this city tile, we ended it at a roundabout, which we built using smooth one-way road curves.
We're going to do a very similar thing here, except we're going to use the large 5x5 curves instead of the 2x2 ones we used for the motorway terminus. Place the curves so that there is 1 tile of straight one-way road in between each one to make room for the road exits. We're basically making a big roundabout, so you need to be careful to get the direction of the pieces right - clockwise for LHD, anti-clockwise for RHD:


We now have a very pretty large roundabout in which to fit a nice market square. We'll build that market square in a later lesson, but for now, let's connect up all of the CBD roads we've been building:


This is nothing you haven't done before. Note that the avenue curves are made using the FLEX Curve pieces, so that we get the pavement textures when we develop the CBD.

Let's continue by extending the avenue ring road. The next junction along this road is a T-junction, with the branching road being the avenue connecting to the urban motorway.
Normally, being in a CBD, we'd use TuLEPs for this, but this is a very important junction, so we can get away with placing a large avenue roundabout here. We then have the task of filling it with something suitable for a CBD - and this big horse statue fills the role perfectly:


With that done, we can proceed to complete the roads on the eastern side of the CBD:


Note that the ring road ending on this side doesn't have slip lanes. On the left, a slip lane would facilitate a route that is better served by other roads and is hence unlikely to attract much traffic, and on the right, we have a diagonal one-way connection, which does not need or support slip lanes.

Our branching avenue also needs connecting to the urban motorway, so let's do that now:


The next task is to extend the east-west road in the above picture to meet the urban motorway terminus roundabout:


The road on the other side of the motorway junction has already been built, so we're done with our CBD roads.

We've only got 3 roads left to build in this city tile. The first is the last of 6 routes from the central urban motorway junction we just connected our avenue to. It's a simple route to the northern riverbank, where it terminates at a roundabout:


The second road is the road at which the previous road terminates - that which runs along the north river. The main challenge with this road is the rail embankment. Due to the rail curves, we have little choice but to put a tunnel here:


This then connects to the port road - use the counting tiles method to find the correct road connection stub.

Our final road is more challenging. The first task is to cross the main railway line with a 7.5m diagonal flyover, before curving north to run alongside the urban motorway.
Diagonal flyovers are a little more complicated than their orthogonal counterparts. The embankment on the left in the picture below is the standard embankment pattern used to make a diagonal flyover. On the right, we've had to create additional space for a smooth 45-degree curve:


Placing the diagonal on-slope pieces correctly is also a little tricky at first. There should be a row of 3 tiles of embankment on the inside edge of your flyover abutments - you need to have the cursor on the second tile of this row, with the rest of the preview sticking out over the embankment edge, like so:


We can now construct the flyover, replacing the catenary and fences as appropriate. The diagonal flyover pieces can be found by rotating their orthogonal couterparts with the End key a couple of times:


The flyover is now complete, but the next part of the road is where things really start to get interesting. We've got to get the road over the freight railway line before shifting it to the left to make room for the road to curve, so that it can then go over the urban motorway. There is also a curve on the urban motorway which restricts the space we have.
In this case, we're in luck. We only need a lane shift to the left of 1 tile - and we can do that in a distance of 2 tiles by building a 2x2 road roundabout. To give the roundabout a purpose, I've also added a third exit to the roundabout, connecting to a suburban street:


We can now build the flyovers over the motorway and freight rail branch, taking care to replace anything we demolish in the construction process:


After bringing the road down to ground level, we need to run it out of the city tile to the north. Here I've made the neighbour connection using FAR-2, partly because it was planned and partly for a bit of added interest:


This can simply be dragged. To get it right you'll need to make a neighbour connector stub of 2 tiles, and then drag road next to it in the usual way to create the FAR.

And that, at last, is our city tile's road network complete. Let's take a look at the significant progress we've made in this lesson:


This city tile is really starting to come together now, but there's still plenty of work to do.

Next time, we'll be doing the city centre's tram line.

See you then,
Chris

[art128]

Nice work on the Center road layout. Very well done.

Can't wait to see the tram line chapter.

[smileymk]

Hey guys.

art128: Thanks. I like how the roads turned out, and think that the city is really coming together nicely now.

Now let's build some tram lines.

Lesson 24 - Tram Lines

In this lesson we'll be building a circular urban tram line around Mapleford's city centre. Like most urban tram lines, we'll be running the tram line along city streets, which as well as adding a good bit of interest will create a couple of new challenges for us.

So let's get started. We've already built the first station on our tram line - the one connecting to Mapleford's main railway station. We're going to continue south out of the station, then turn west into the city. Our first task is to get the tram line across the central ring road:


Since we want our tram line to run along city streets, the majority of the route will be built using the Tram-on-Street puzzle pieces. However, we don't have the puzzle pieces to take Tram-on-Street over a diagonal avenue. In addition, the avenue is a very important road which will eventually have the traffic volume to match, and holding that much road traffic up for frequent tram services isn't the best idea.
So instead, we're going to take the tram under the avenue. The first step in doing that is to add one-way road turnoffs on either side of the avenue as shown below, as well as the following Tram-on-Street puzzle pieces:


The purpose of the one-way turnoffs is to smoothen out the sharp turn for traffic entering the avenue from the streets. Note that we don't run the street over the avenue, in order to improve the flow of traffic along the avenue. The junction isn't important enough to justify a crossing.
Notice that I've left a 3-tile gap in between the road turnoffs and the Tram-in-Road/Tram-on-Street transition pieces, so that we can fit in the underpass entrances. The entrance in question is the Tram-in-Road - subway transition, created as part of the RTMT and now incorporated into the NAM:


These lots are transit-enabled for roads on the first tile from the road-only side, so roads should be dragged to the entrances from the one-way turnoffs.
We now need to connect the two entrances to complete the underpass, and for that we use the subway tool:


And that's the underpass complete. Having just seen how to do it, you should have no problems constructing another one. The second underpass here is further down the line, taking the tram line under a section of FAR to the east of the city square. I've also put down a bit of the tram line here, and have labelled puzzle pieces we haven't seen already:


You might be wondering why I've left a gap in between the underpass and the straight section of Tram-on-Street. It's so we can put a tram stop there.
However, we first have to make the tram stop, and that means quitting the game and going into Lot Editor.
The lot we're going to work on is the SFBT Simple Tram-on-Street Stop, which, to my knowledge, is the only publically available Tram-on-Street station in existence. Let's open the lot up in Lot Editor:


There are a couple of things we need to do to this lot before placing it in the city, the first of which is to add platforms.
The platform props we'll use are those found in the SFBT Tram-in-Road stops, and I've underlined the Lot Editor name for the prop in blue in the screenshot below. These props are 4m long, so it follows that you need to place 4 of them back-to-back on each side of the road:


Let's now extend the platforms a little bit on either side of the station using the overhanging platform prop from the SFBT set. They need to be placed carefully on the edge of the lot so that they line up with the existing platforms:


This lengthens our platforms from 16m to 24m, which is still short but is an improvement on what we had before.

We now need to widen these platforms, which can be done by highlighting an entire platform and using the Duplicate Selected function to place a copy of the platform adjacent to the existing one.
In addition, we need to remove the original tram stop signs, replace them with generic timetables, as well as adding station name boards, a catenary mast and some kerbing to go next to the mast with the aim of protecting it from road traffic:


The timetables are in the middle of each platform, the station name boards can be found in this Ill Tonkso prop pack, and the catenary mast is the 1F_mittig prop found in the SFBT catenary set.

Our tram stop is now complete, so let's save it and place it in our city. Before plopping the station, we first have to place straight Tram-on-Street pieces either side of the station, leaving 1-tile of empty space to put the station in:


We can now put our new station in the gap we've left. The original tram-on-street is transit-enabled in such a way that the paths are activated by clicking on the station with the one-way road tool. In modifying the stop, we've done nothing to change this transit-enabling, so we also transit-enable our station by clicking on it with the one-way road tool:


You may be wondering why we didn't just take a suitable existing GLR station and redecorate and mod it to take Tram-on-Street. Whilst the redecorating is easy enough, and would give us longer platforms, the modding is not, due to the fact that Tram-on-Street is a dual-networking setup not covered by SC4 Tool's TE Editor. The modding requires Reader and possibly the Path Creator as well, and is hence too advanced for this project. For now, the method outlined above will suffice.

Let's go and connect the station we just built to the underpass by the station. At this point, we need to think carefully about the route our tram line is going to take.
We must always remember that our tram line is running along city streets, and so we have to route the line to fit the street layout.
In the CBD, I plan to use a random layout of through streets, so the tram line I'm building needs to feature plenty of curves and street junctions in order to fit into the random street layout. This requires the use of some new puzzle pieces, which are labelled below:


I haven't labelled the diagonal sections of the tram line, so that we can now look specifically at how these sections are made:


With our first section of tram line built, let's extend the line south from our second underpass towards the southernmost road, east of where the avenue ring road ends. There are a couple of Tram-on-Street stops to build along the way - these are circled in blue below, and puzzle pieces we haven't used yet are labelled as before. Remember to place the Tram-on-Street puzzle pieces before placing the stations, and to keep to a random street layout:


Notice that we've used a flat crossing across the road in the centre of the above picture. This is how most road crossings should be done. We only use underpasses when we either don't have the pieces to cross the network in question, as was the case with our second underpass, or the crossing road is so heavily used that a flat tram crossing would cause major hold-ups, like in the case of our avenue ring road.

The next section of tram line is going to run parallel to our southernmost road as a regular GLR line under the bridge approach, before which we'll put a station. This is mainly because there isn't a puzzle piece for a 15m road viaduct going over Tram-in-Road, and partly because the area to the south of the road is a riverbank, along which I don't plan to place any buildings, so there's room to fit a GLR line.
As per usual, we need to place the puzzle pieces first. We also need to rebuild the bridge approach flyover, so that we can put the GLR line underneath it.
However, we can't place puzzle pieces on the tiles adjacent to where the station will be, as this will prevent us from being able to put the station in that location. So instead we have to place all of the other puzzle pieces and then place the station before putting in the puzzle pieces adjacent to it:


The station lot is this Ill Tonkso offering. Notice that we're using the regular urban GLR puzzle pieces, as we're in a dense urban area.
We can now put in the missing puzzle pieces to complete the station. Be very careful to keep the cursor away from the station whilst you do this to prevent a CTD:


We now need to bring the tram line back across the road and send it heading northwest. Since the road running parallel to our GLR line becomes an FAR-2 stretch immediately after the flyover, we have little choice but to construct another tram underpass. However, on the southern side, since we're not building the tram line along a road, we can use the proper GLR-subway transition lots we've used before for a smoother, and hence better, slope into the underpass:


As we've seen already, tram lines can make sharp 90-degree turns. The subway network in SC4 also has this capability, so we exploit it here to complete the underpass:


It's now time to go back to Tram-on-Street and construct the west side of the tram line. This involves the construction of 3 of our tram-on-street stops (circled in blue below), a flat road crossing and an underpass under the avenue ring road. All the puzzle pieces used here are ones we've seen already, and the rule about following a random street layout has been followed throughout:


Our tram line now heads east, along the road at the top above, before going back to Tram-on-Street towards a pedestrianised road. We'll also put a Tram-in-Road station on the road.
Let's do the first section of Tram-in-Road now by placing the Tram-in-Road puzzle pieces shown below. The street-road transition piece is found in the Tram-on-Street tab ring - you've used it already:


The next 3 tiles are where we're going to put the Tram-in-Road station, but as with the Tram-on-Street station, we need to make the station first in Lot Editor.
When it comes to Tram-in-Road stations, you have a bit more choice than with Tram-on-Street. Examples are publically available from both the RTMT set and from SFBT. We want long platforms, so we're going to use the longest tram-in-road stop that I know of - the 1x3 stop featured in the SFBT set:


We need to get rid of everything circled in red above, replace the platform props with signs on them with the regular platform prop we used in the tram-on-street stop, and add timetables (circled in red below) and a catenary mast (circled in blue) in exactly the same way as on the tram-on-street stop:


The station can now be saved and placed in our city. As always, the surrounding puzzle pieces need to be built first. In this case, we also need to remove the turn lanes from the nearby road junction - there aren't any puzzle pieces for interfacing TuLEPs and tram-in-road:


After placing the station, activate the paths by dragging one-way road through the station lot, in a similar manner to what you did for the street stop.

We now return to Tram-on-Street and continue the tram line eastwards. This section of line features one station and one new puzzle piece:


At the eastern end of this section we're going to do something a bit different. The tram line will run along a wide pedestrianised street, constructed with ped mall, from the street exit at the east of the above picture to the north-south avenue leading to the urban motorway.
We're going to use the pavement ped mall texture, which has a nice red pattern that will go well with a shopping street. First, let's construct the tram line. In the GLR puzzle pieces tab ring, you'll find the GLR over Pavement Ped Mall piece, which is what we're after. Place it along the route of the pedestrianised street:


Then line the tram tracks on both sides with the regular pavement ped mall tiles:


When placing the ped mall pieces, it's important to rotate the pieces so that the wavy brick pattern on the pieces lines up with that featured on the tram line pizzle pieces. To do this, place the ped mall pieces with the arrow pointing parallel to the tram line:


Doing this gives a neat, consistent look to the pedestrianised street, which can only be a good thing.

When the pedestrian street hits the main road, we would ideally like to create a lot which gives the junction between the road and the tram line ped mall textures. This, however, requires another complex transit-enabling job in Reader to deal with the tile where the two networks cross. So instead we're going to settle for a crossing using the standard GLR x Road puzzle piece, splitting the pedestrian zone into two sections:


Let's now do that eastern section of pedestrian street/tram line, running across to the northern avenue, where the tram line enters another underpass. This underpass is created in a similar way to the one we made at the southern GLR station - a proper GLR - subway transition at the ped mall end, and the RTMT tram-in-road - subway transition at the other end:


You'll almost certainly have noticed the 2 3-tile gaps I've left in the tram line, and as you might have guessed, they are for stations.
We're going to use the ITS tram stop we used earlier on, but we first need to go into Lot Editor and create a version with pavement ped mall textures and a catenary mast:


I've underlined the IID of the ped mall base texture in red above so that you can find it. Make sure that the brick pattern is ponting the right way - the bricks should be crossing the tram line, instead of running parallel to it.

With the new station created, let's waste no time in plopping it in our city:


With that, we've built all the stations on our tram line, so you would be forgiven for thinking that all we have left to do is to connect the line back up to the main stop next to the train station. However, we have not yet provided anywhere for the trams to be stabled when they're not in service, or for them to be maintained. What we need is a depot, and since we're near the most important station on the line (that for the main train station) where most tram services will terminate, it makes sense to put one here, just after the avenue.
For this depot, we're going to use the ITS Small Suburban Tramshed. Place a couple of them next to each other next to the tram line, and add street access and a small car park for the tram drivers and maintenance workers:


This might seem quite small, but our trams are very short, and we won't need that many of them to run a frequent service, as the tram line is quite short at about 3 miles.
We now need to provide tram access to the depot, and to save space we're going to use the running line to provide the access. We need to add the pointwork puzzle pieces shown below, as well as a GLR turning loop to allow trams to access any track in the depot from either direction:


After placing these pieces, our depot is complete and we can connect the running line up to the train station, as you can see above.

We've now completed the track, stations and depot for our tram line, but we're not quite done yet. Nearly all tram lines in existence today are electrified with overhead catenary, and so we need to incorporate this into our tram line if we want it to be realistic. We've already added masts to most of our stations for this purpose, but there's still one station we need to convert. We also need to add masts along the plain track, as far as possible.
The first task is to make room for our catenary lots. On the pedestrianised street, this means demolishing ped mall tiles, and on the street sections, demolishing some of our puzzle pieces.
Catenaries for tram lines work in a similar way to those for regular railways. The masts should be placed every 3 tiles dropping to 2 tiles if stations, corners or other obstructions demand it. This means that you need to demolish every third ped mall tile or puzzle piece. It's quite laborious work, and you'll almost certainly end up taking out other bits of tram line in the process. For this reason, I recommend doing a bit at a time, rebuilding any extra sections of track that are demolished before moving on down the line:


Any darker pieces, a couple of which can be seen in the above image, can be fixed simply by placing a new piece on top of the existing one.

It's now time to make the catenary lots themselves. For these lots we're going to use the SFBT catenaries, as they fit in with the masts we used for the stations, and are easier to fit into a 1x1 lot than the Frogface catenaries we've been using for regular railways.
Let's do the ped mall lots first. The lot we're going to start with is the Bripizza Change Walk to Walk lot, which, as well as looking the part, acts as a transit switch to allow access to the pedestrian mall:


We need to remove the existing props, add the 1-tile double track catenary mast (which appears as SFBT_Oberleitung_1F on the Lot Editor prop list), and replace the base texture with the pavement ped mall texture. This texture should be rotated so that the brick pattern runs parallel to the catenary mast:


For the Tram-on-Street catenary, we start with the SFBT Tram-on-Street stop, remove all props and install in their place the one-sided catenary mast (called SFBT_Oberleitung_1F_einseitig in Lot Editor):


We also need to make a catenary lot for our Tram-in-Road section. To do this, we're going to use the RTMT T-RAM/Bus Station, as it is a 1x1 lot:


Again, we need to replace all of the props with a catenary mast. Since the tram line is separated from the road here, we can use the central catenary mast we've used for our stations:


Finally, we need to create a new version of the ITS tram stop we used for the station by the road flyover which contains a catenary mast:


That's all the lotting done, so let's place these catenary lots in the game. The paths for the tram-on-street and tram-in-road lots should be activated using one-way road in the aforementioned way:






Due to the difficulties in transit-enabling tram-in-road and tram-on-street lots, we can only place masts on orthogonal sections of these networks. We'll have to just pretend that the diagonal sections are wired up.
We can, however, negate this problem to an extent on corners by placing masts adjacent to the corner on both sides, like so:


The final task is to wire up the turning loop by the depot. This requires a standard 1-tile mast at the bottom and an end mast at the top:


And with that, our tram line is complete. Let's take a look at our work:


That's a nice tram line we've got there. Our work for this lesson is done.

With the exception of the central underground network, which we're going to do during construction of the CBD, our major transport infrastructure for this city tile is now finished. So let's go and do some development. The next lesson will focus on the suburbs at the north of the city tile.

See you then,
Chris

[Themistokles]

The road lay-out is looking good and I like the concept of an urban circular tram line. However, I think that heavy rail catenaries risk looking a little out of place for an urban tram network and also for those of us who don't have the patience to go into LE every once in a while I recommend this excellent mod of MandelSoft's: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=1138.msg396331#msg396331

[Catalyst]

hey chris, fantastic lessons, hats off to you!
It must have been A LOT of work to add all those catenaries. Are all those lots functioning tram-stops? And do the paths actually work (did you check with the show paths cheat or try to UDI a tram around the circuit?) And how many CTD did you suffer while making the last lesson   
I'm really looking forward to seeing some british styled suburbs.

[builder]

Hello!

I have a question about power distribution. I'm not sure if it has been asked already and answered. If so, my bad, but there's a lot of posts in this huge thread! 

When you made the power lines, you made several right by each other, and sent them to the different parts of the region, but normally you can only make neighbor deals with the adjacent city tiles. Do you have a special trick that enables you to send that power from one city tile to the entire region through neighbor connections?

EDIT: The same question goes for water supply as well, although I imagine it's much the same thing.

[yochananmichael]

Builder

All Chris did was run power lines from the city tile where he generates power to two adjacent tiles and then from those tiles to the last tile like a daisy chain. He sets up a deal to the two neighboring cities to supply them power and then in one or more of the adjacent cities sells the excess power to other cities farther down the chain. The same is true for the other utilities as well like water and garbage.

Hope that helps

[builder]

Builder

All Chris did was run power lines from the city tile where he generates power to two adjacent tiles and then from those tiles to the last tile like a daisy chain. He sets up a deal to the two neighboring cities to supply them power and then in one or more of the adjacent cities sells the excess power to other cities farther down the chain. The same is true for the other utilities as well like water and garbage.

Hope that helps

But I thought the game was limited to neighbor deals with only adjacent cities. I thought that if you wanted neighbor deals to go further, that the cities needed to produce it's own power somehow. Also, if an adjacent city is using 20K amount of power, and the city wih the power plant produces 32K, it will only offer to sell 21K or 22K amount of power? So if you'd sell that excess power further on to a third city not adjacent to the power plant city, you could only buy maximum 2K power. I've tried testing it, but only small-scale so I haven't gotten any major power usage.

[yochananmichael]

Builder

That may be true but also take note that this is a 4x4 region so this is a little more contained than the standard maxis generated regions which are just huge. Also Chris is not using standard maxis power plants for this either. He is using a combination of a downloaded Oil fired power plant that may generate far more power than an ordinary maxis plant. Also he is using power substations as well when he built his plant so thats even more power. Now this is far from done so he may have more tips for us on that front but it is very possible the way he is handling this goes around the limitations you are facing. What I think your problem is this. City tile A is producing the 32K of power and you are able to sell the excess power that City A doesn't use so that would be your 21-22K. Then in city B your using say 20K of that power so when you get to City C and want to buy power from city B it only has 2K of excess power to sell. I suspect (and I could be wrong Chris is free to correct me if I am) that if City A had more excess power to sell to B and B's power requirements didn't change than it would have more power in excess of its needs to sell to City C. At least that is my understanding of the mechanics. There is a good thread that I found here. Hope this helps

[builder]

Builder

That may be true but also take note that this is a 4x4 region so this is a little more contained than the standard maxis generated regions which are just huge. Also Chris is not using standard maxis power plants for this either. He is using a combination of a downloaded Oil fired power plant that may generate far more power than an ordinary maxis plant. Also he is using power substations as well when he built his plant so thats even more power. Now this is far from done so he may have more tips for us on that front but it is very possible the way he is handling this goes around the limitations you are facing. What I think your problem is this. City tile A is producing the 32K of power and you are able to sell the excess power that City A doesn't use so that would be your 21-22K. Then in city B your using say 20K of that power so when you get to City C and want to buy power from city B it only has 2K of excess power to sell. I suspect (and I could be wrong Chris is free to correct me if I am) that if City A had more excess power to sell to B and B's power requirements didn't change than it would have more power in excess of its needs to sell to City C. At least that is my understanding of the mechanics. There is a good thread that I found here. Hope this helps

I understand now, thanks! I thought that you could not make cascading city-deals like that.

[yochananmichael]

Builder

yea no problem glad to help out. I just can't wait till Chris gets his next lesson out it should be good.

[smileymk]

Hello everyone.

Themistokles: Thanks. The catenaries you linked to do seem more appropriate for a tram line, and I'll put them on the lots I made in a future lesson. I'll probably get rid of the T21 file though, as that causes catenaries to appear on my metro lines as well, where they're not needed (the metro lines being powered by a third rail I'm pretending is there).

Catalyst: Thank you. Yes, all of the lots are functional, being modded versions of the SFBT tram stop, and I was able to run a UDI tram around the line and through the lots (except of course for the underpasses, as those were connected using tube lines).

And how many CTDs did you suffer while making the last lesson?

Very few. As long as you place the puzzle pieces before the transit-enabled lots as much as possible and you're careful, you shouldn't have many problems with CTDs.

builder and yochananmichael: The daisy chain analogy for regional utility distribution is a good one. Let's say that you want to take power from City A through City B to City C - all you need to do is run power lines through from City A to City C, go into City A, sell power to City B, and then go into City B and sell the power bought to City C. If you ever need more power in City C, then you can simply go into City B, buy more power from City A and sell it on to City C.
Water and waste work in exactly the same way.

Also, if an adjacent city is using 20K amount of power, and the city wih the power plant produces 32K, it will only offer to sell 21K or 22K amount of power? So if you'd sell that excess power further on to a third city not adjacent to the power plant city, you could only buy maximum 2K power.

From my experience (someone can correct me if I'm wrong here), the game will only allow the receiving city to buy what it needs, irrespective of the production of the power station. So city A can only sell 21-22K to city B because city B doesn't need any more than that. Why would you buy power you're not going to use?
If city C needs more than 2K units of power, then you should be able to go into city B, buy more power from city A and then sell it on to city C.

With the comments done, let's begin.

Lesson 25 - Central Suburbs

We've built plenty of suburban estates in the past, so this lesson will partly be a revision of previous techniques which you should already be familiar with. But now, as a result of our increased level of sophistication and modding prowess, we can take our suburbs up a level on the realism front. We'll also see a few new ideas that can add a bit more variety and interest to your suburban areas.

So let's get started. We're going to start in the south-west corner of the suburb by widening the embankment south of the sunken GLR station we built a few lessons ago, so that we can fit in a suburban street and zone along it, leaving room for a bit of separation betwwen the houses and the commercial zoning we're going to have running along the main road. The widening is easiest done by running a rail line along the edge of the top of the embankment, and then another parallel line next to it on the side where the embankment is to be extended:


Now we can start on the streets.
In the past, we've gone for a random street layout consisting of dead-end side streets branching off main through streets, with short connector streets between the main streets in places, keeping all streets at least 2 tiles apart. This is the standard approach to laying out suburban streets and is exactly what we're going to do most of the time here:


Although you'll usually want to be using a random street layout for your suburbs, it doesn't have to be all random, all the time. There is scope to include some nice designs and patterns from time to time, and there a fair few real-life examples of designed suburban street layouts.
You can see a couple of designs in the above picture. The first is the 'fan' design at the top - a main street leading into a roundabout, which has 3 more streets leading off it that end at roundabouts, with side streets added in places:


The second design is at the bottom. There are two main streets that curve round 90 degrees, with a fairly consistent separation throughout. They are connected by a single diagonal street, and the side streets in the middle are designed to follow the curve of the main streets, as far as possible:


At the other end of the suburb, I've gone for another design. This one consists of two circular streets, one inside the other, with consistent spacing and connecting streets running along the north-south and east-west diameters of the circle:


In general, when it comes to designs and patterns, anything that isn't a tight grid goes, so feel free to be creative and imaginative. However, don't overdo it. The random street layout should always be your staple design, and too many patterns will give a contrived and unrealistic look to your suburb.

So let's leave any more patterns for another day and continue to fill in the rest of the suburb. Our next feature of interest is a small corner of the suburb wedged in between two railway lines and the urban motorway. A road runs along an embankment parallel to the urban motorway, and it is from this road that we will provide access to the suburb by means of a descending street.
After widening the embankment to take the street, we can bring the street smoothly down to ground level using the usual pre-smoothing with rail technique:


But that's not the only access we're going to provide to this area. You can see in the above picture that there's enough space to run a street underneath the urban motorway, and we're going to take full advantage of this, connecting the small corner to the section of suburb to the south-east.
To get the conecting street under the road, we're going to use the street version of the underpass entrance lots we used in the Roads lesson for running roads under the main motorway:


The entrances can be connected with subway to complete the underpass, just like we did with the main roads:


A big advantage of this is it allows us to fill the space in between the urban motorway and the main road with housing, rather than having to leave it as a dead, unused space. We've still got a space to the south of our initial access street which we can't fit any housing developments into, which was unavoidable, but I've got a plan for filling that space which you'll see later.

Let's move on and look at a couple of extra ideas and things to bear in mind when doing your suburban streets.
You may remember from a few lessons back that we used the short diagonal street construction piece to shift a street one tile in an aesthetically pleasing way. There's no reason why we can't do that here to add a little extra variety and interest to the street layout:


We can also end our side streets with these short diagonals by placing the construction piece so that it starts at the end of an orthogonal section of street:


Our suburb is planned to run into the city tile to the north, so we should route some streets into the next city tile. This not only applies to our main through streets, but also to a couple of our side streets as well:


We can, and should, also do the reverse of what we've just done - have a side street entering the city tile from the north and terminating in the tile we're developing:


Of course, we won't get any development on this street until we develop the city tile to the north, but by doing this we create the impression that the suburb continues beyond the city tile boundary, which is exactly what we want, so it's worth it.

Using these techniques and continuing the random street layout across the estate, we can now complete the streets for the suburb. Remember to leave space for facilites like schools and doctors' surgeries:


Having left space for the amenities, let's go and build them. Let's start with a middle school, which we'll place in the south-west of the suburb.
To get our middle school up to the standards we're after, we've got to do a little bit of lotting first. The first job is to improve the Maxis basketball court by replacing the grass base texture with a more realistic concrete texture:


For the school perimeter fence, we're going to use the RMIP airport fences like we've done in the past:






To give us additional flexibility in how we build our fence, we're going to create an additional square corner lot, made from two straight fence props:


Now that we know how to give lots transparent base textures, we can make these fence lots transparent, so that we can have the terrain showing through instead of a grass texture that looks a little out-of-place in a school setting.
With the lots completed, we can build the school, add the basketball court, the fence, an MMP grass field and playground, and a car park:


Notice how I've used the car park as a means of providing a visual connection to the driveways on the school lot. Specifically, the connection on the right was made using the T#2 piece of the grey HH Modular Parking set.
On the left, I've extended the car park using the combo lot from the Overhanging Parkings set. A similar extension has been done by the entrance of the car park, using the left triangle lot from the Overhanging Parkings set, providing access with the HH T Left Entrance piece.
You can see that the two sets go together virtually seamlessly and allow us to extend the car park right up to the pavement of the main street, giving a crisp and sophisticated look to the car park.

The building, by the way, is the Ardnox Comprehensive School, with the clay tennis and football courts that come with the default lot removed in Lot Editor. It's a little small, but this is made up for by it being a 2-storey building. Ideally, I'd have put a proper football pitch on the school field, but there wasn't enough space.

Let's move north and construct a primary school in another part of the suburb. This is a particularly simple task - all we need to do here is construct a fake street connection for the school lot's in-built car park, add another small car park, and then place the school. Since there is a self-contained small playground and field, we don't need to get our MMPs out to add either of these - nor do we need a fence as the lot already features one:


The lot used is the Parkside Elementary school from volume 1 of the JB Simio school pack. Since this lot comes with things like slides, play equipment and tether ball poles which are never seen in UK schools, these props were removed in Lot Editor before building the school. Those making US-style cities should keep these props on the lot.

We'll carry on and build another two schools in a minute, but for now, let's turn our attention to an empty area east of the urban motorway junction. This area is about the right size for a supermarket, so let's go ahead and build one.
The supermarket here will go at the end of a side street running off an avenue roundabout next to the urban motorway. Many suburban/out-of-town supermarkets in the UK also have a petrol station, so I'm going to put one in here, accessed from a roundabout on the street leading into the supermarket. I'm not sure how common this feature is in other countries, so I recommend using your experience to judge whether or not a petrol station next to a supermarket is suitable for your cities.
Let's place the petrol station and build the street access first. We'll need two fake street connections for the petrol station - one for the entrance and the other for the exit:


Now we can place the supermarket in situ:


For those who are interested, the supermarket is vivydu29's rendition of Tesco, whilst the petrol station is the 2x4 HBS BP garage, a link to which appears to be eluding me at the moment. That said, the lots you choose will be very dependent on the location you're setting your city in.

What we need to do now though is make a couple of changes to these lots. The car park of the supermarket is our first target. You can see that the entrances to the car park are not centred, meaning that we can't create a visual connection to them using a fake street connection.
The solution to this is to remove the car park in Lot Editor, along with the trees, cars and other props that appear on the car park:


After working on the petrol station, we'll place this relotted supermarket in the game, constructing a new car park using SAM-1 streets, which will maintain the road access whilst giving us a neat connection to our access street.

You can see the improvements we need to make to the petrol station from the picture of it - the grass covering part of the entrance needs to be removed, and the cars next to the pumps need to be rotated 180 degrees, as they're currently facing the wrong way round - they should be pointing towards the shop and the exit.
Making these fixes is a quick and easy task in Lot Editor and should present you guys very few problems:


With the changes made, we can place our new and improved supermarket and petrol station in the game, adding a SAM-1 car park for the supermarket:


That's much better. Let's continue placing facilities and construct a fire station in the south-west corner of the suburb. All we need to do before placing the lot is to construct another fake street connection for access:


We've got a bit of space on the other side of the road, so let's put a police station there, along with a small car park around the side and back of the police station:


The building used is the Simville Local Police lot, and is nicely sized and in keeping with suburban architecture.

On the other side of the suburb, we're going to put down a local doctor's surgery. As with the fire and police stations, a small and relatively modern building is what we're after. Here I've gone for the SG Urgent Care Clinic, which has had its capacity increased to 10,000 and its coverage radius extended to cover the entire city tile, so it can properly serve your suburb.
The lot conveniently features a suitably sized car park, so like with the fire station, all that's needed before placing the lot is a fake street connection for the car park:


To the south of this, we're going to place a high school. Here, we need a large building that is multi-storey at least in places. In this case, I've gone for this offering from Simtroplis, which, although it is a conglomeration of several buildings, is large and tall enough for the job.
Let's start by constructing the school and the basic facilities - a fence built using the transparent airport fence lots we made earlier, a tarmac court, made using the basketball courts we created earlier, and sports pitches. I shouldn't need to remind you that the sports pitches chosen should be appropriate for the location your city is set in.
To allow access to the courts and astroturf sports pitch shown below, I've made an extra path on the school lot (circled in red below) by copying and pasting the path overlay texture circled in blue below in Lot Editor:


With the path built, all we need to do to complete the school is add an MMP access path to the basketball courts and astroturf pitch from our extra path above, and fill in the field with MMP grass. Note that I've also placed MMP grass on the grass areas of the school lot and football pitch to create a consistent appearance:


There's one more school to build, and it's another primary school, which we'll put a little to the north-east of the high school.
It's crucial to vary the buildings you use for facilities, so we can't place another Parkside Elementary school. Instead I've used the Lincoln Elementary school from the same set.
This lot needs a little more additional work to complete the school than the Parkside Elementary lot, as its playground and field aren't nicely fenced off. So as well as constructing a fake street connection for road access, we've got to put our new transparent airport fences around the back of the school for security, leaving space to add a small playground, made with an MMP tarmac path, and a small MMP grass field:


The final large-scale amenity we're going to build is a large park on the eastern edge of the suburb, which will feature a bowling green, a large field and tennis courts. The tennis courts require some attention before we can place them in the game, however.
Most recreational tennis courts feature fences around them to prevent balls from flying off and ending up in undesirable locations such as thick bushes or people's homes. The Maxis tennis courts do not, of course, feature a fence.
But there is a lot whose tennis courts do feature fences - the PEG Tennis Park:


The fact that I've got this lot opened in Lot Editor means that you know what's coming. But to do the necessary Lot Editor work, we've got to get rid of the transit-enabling that is on the lot as downloaded. This is a simple task in SC4 Tool which I'll leave to you as an exercise.

Once that's done, it's time to strip this tennis park in Lot Editor down to just the tennis courts and the fences - all of the other fancy features on the lot are unnecessary. We're going to use the width of the lot to our advantage though, replacing the path on the right with another tennis court:


Now we can put these tennis courts in the game, along with the bowling green, the field, and a nice winding MMP path. I've left space for plenty of trees, which we're going to add later:


We've now done the main amenities. We now need to build all of the short paths in between streets, and the small play areas that go on some of them.
The paths are made using a dark tarmac MMP path, and they should be built between streets that are close together but aren't right next to each other on the road network, so that the paths act as useful shortcuts for pedestrians.
Most of the time, the paths will stand alone and you won't have space to put any extras in. But when we do have the space, we can put in our small parks. In the past, our default choice of park has always been a small playground, and that's what we're going to put along some of our paths:


However, this is not our only choice for a small park. We could, perhaps, construct one of our newly reworked basketball courts instead:


Or, if we have a little more space, a larger playground:


Or a skate park:


And who said our parks can only have one path going into them? There's nothing stopping us from having 2 paths going into a park, or indeed, as many as we want:


And who said we had to put down a lot? We could very easily get our MMP grass out and make a simple open field:


As always with these things, variety is key. Use lots of things and use them creatively for the best results.

Now, I should point out that since some of our streets extend beyond the city tile boundary, some of our paths should too:


Our final detail item concerns that 'dead space' we left earlier when building an access street to a small corner of suburb from a road embankment. I said I had a nice plan for that area, and that plan is to fill it with a small pond.
The pond itself is made using the PEGPond ploppable water, and I've added rye grass and cattails around the edge of it. There's also an MMP path running to the pond from the nearby street to allow locals access to the pond:


Ideally, we'd lower the terrain where the water is by 1-2m for maximum realism, but there wasn't the space to do that here.

With the pond done, it's time to make our final preparations before we start zoning. Let's first zoom out though and see where all of our paths and parks are:


The final task before zoning is to place bus stops around the suburb. Stick them on the main streets and roads, and think about the route a bus might take when deciding where to place them.
Here, the locations of all the bus stops I've put in this suburb are circled in red:


And now, after all that hard work, it's the moment we've all been waiting for. It's time to start zoning.
As per usual, we're going to zone 1x1 low density residential plots along our suburban streets, using the alternative zoning technique covered in Lesson 11, and 1x1 low density commercial plots along our main roads.
Bear in mind that you can't have zones facing bus stops, so be prepared to rotate the relevant plots if necessary using the Alt key. Also, there should be a gap of at least 1 tile in between power lines and any development, and there should be no zoning at all along the sides of embankments. This means that you'll probably have to fill in some missing pavements using the 'invisible zones' technique we learnt in Lesson 14.
The good news is that, as long as you have a good supply of custom suburban houses and you haven't paused the game, your zones should start developing pretty quickly:


It's immensely satisfying watching our suburb come to life, at least for me. But it's also the cue for us to do the final stage of detailing - filling in all of the empty areas with trees and grass.
We're going to continue with the combination of seasonal ash, birch and maple trees that we've been using so far in this project. We will want to put trees in most places, but not under power lines - grass should go there instead:


Let's now fast forward to the in-game summer and admire our finished suburb:


And that's it for this lesson. It's been quite short compared to some of the previous lessons, but has, hopefully, been worthwhile.

Having done one of the estates in this city tile, we'd now like to go and fill in the rest. But before we can do that, there's a very important technique that we need to master - that of blending borders.
This will be the topic of the next lesson. We briefly touched on this topic in Project 2, but not in any real detail - we'll cover it much more extensively next time.

See you then,
Chris

[Vizoria]

Great tutorial. You have an interesting way of building cities.