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The Noro Cooperative

Started by noahclem, January 30, 2013, 03:41:12 PM

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What type of airport should NORO's new one be?

Passenger only
Passenger & military
passenger & general aviation (private & charter aircraft)
Passenger, military & general aviation

cmdp123789

So not only water mods, but also make canal water replacements too? Cause I would love to see callagafx's canals with that muddy water.. London calls for it  ()stsfd()

MandelSoft

Hmmmm... that's some nice trickery you've shown there. Great work, Noah! :thumbsup:
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compdude787

Looks pretty neat! It will be cool, especially for rivers, to have different colors of water. If I'm understanding this right, they can all exist simultaneously, correct? In that case, it'll be cool to have one river that has pretty clear water and another with muddy water, and then when they come together, then the resulting river will be half-muddy, half-clear! This is just like some rivers IRL, so it'll be cool to do this in SC4.

And since I have a place where two rivers converge in my region, and I'm already thinking of making one have muddy brown water and another have cleaner blue water, and downstream from their confluence, half of the river will be brown, and half of it will just be blue. Would I be able to achieve this with publicly-available files, or are there other things that you'll need to release?
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vortext

Nice pictures which do a great job demonstrating the new water textures!   &apls

I'm curious as well to see how they mix together. And the idea of making another set to blend with plop water is great.  :thumbsup:

Also nice to hear you're enjoying the Historic Harbor!  :)
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Gugu3

Wonderful pictures and as always good quality stuff Noah!like that interchange with the diagonal on slope transition ;)

Swordmaster

Amazing work my dear friend! I truly regret not being a part of it (currently), but you're certainly doing a great job  :thumbsup:


Cheers
Willy

noahclem

Thanks for all the kind feedback everyone  :thumbsup: I'll try to get responses up soon.

Lately I've been working on the central areas of Noroway, including the central tile Ko-Noropolis and the one immediately west of there, Io. In Noropolis I began with trying to make some progress on the core itself, which was as close to a diagonal grid as I could make with a tram system and the area's geography. The biggest task there is adapting content to fit the grid. Darknono and reddonquixote have between them released a substantial collection of top-quality diagonal skyscrapers, without which we would never have even tried this project, but in many cases the lotting doesn't fit for our purposes--often either the building overhangs the lot in a way that the lot isn't adjacent to the road network or the building is situated such that there's essentially no place for pedestrians to pass between the building and the adjacent roadways. Fortunately these are fairly easy to resolve with model tweaker and LE but it's a bit tedious, not hard (for me) to make mistakes with, and there's a lot of buildings to do. I probably got through about half of what I wanted to before getting too bored and annoyed to continue. In addition to the selection of diagonal skyscrapers available there are a number of irregularly-shaped CBD-appropriate buildings normally situated on square lots but suitable for diagonal or irregular placement if they are re-lotted/modded as overhanging. I've barely even begun on that and the whole center diagonal project reminded me how much I could use some help.

There's also, of course, a reasonable number of W2W and smaller diagonal buildings as well, but even with all that it just seemed like the diagonal area was too big, especially since there are a number of diagonal routes radiating from the center to points more distant that will also need to be dealt with. After discussion with Maarten on the diagonal problems I went ahead with some changes to the grid:

Before:


After:


I don't have much from Ko today but thought I'd throw in this little stretch of river that's been redone. I spent forever figuring out how to get GLR across the river in a way that would look good and wouldn't seem obvious that it was done that way because TIA can't cross water yet.
The result:


The how:

I loved that bridge but it was el-rail when I thought I needed GLR. Then I realized that could be an advantage that would allow me to slope the bridge a bit for more boat clearance without having to slope the bridge approaches on each side. Yay  :bnn:

After I got sick of getting plugins prepared for building the diagonal center I made a number of other tweaks there and wanted to build a but part of building a commercial core means people to work there, preferably commuting from elsewhere. So I went next door (just to the west) and started with the transit network.

I was fortunately enough to hear from Willy, who's been the chief designer of the region's railroad plan, and get an update from him (the draft rail plans I had available before only covered a portion of the tile)

I did some rail-building to the plan and am looking for input on how to cross the river with the main heading west from the central station into Io. Basically how many tracks and real bridges or viaducts. The current alignment of the tracks and river has the crossing occur over the tile border which adds an interesting twist. The last two pictures show the area I'm referring to.

The center of the 4-way interchange in Io is just under 3km from the very center of the city so space is more of a factor than it is in the more distant areas. The east-west highway is the main way out from the center to points west while the north-south road is one of the region's major routes, running from the northern border to the southeast where I'd been building just prior to this, roughly 33km away. Therefore, a high-capacity solution is necessary. Finally, local access ramps were desired, due to the area's planned significant density and the relative scarcity of local access interchanges in the area due to the number of freeway crossings (there's roughly a grid of highways in this part of the region spaced about 4km/1 tile from each other).

I began with some sketches and decided to try building based off this design:

The arrows are different possible options for connectivity to the highway going right. North is left.
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After that I started building. In all images up is west.

The seemingly pointless roads are there to check which crossings are possible or exactly how much space a given piece takes up. I was really surprised that diagonal L3/L4 MIS/4S wouldn't cross any highway except for Symphony.

I spent way too much time on the other two interchanges in the tile but ended up really happy with them (even though the one at top isn't really unique)


That stadium is just an example of what could go there--great, and huge, bat but I'm not even sure if Norowegians play American football. My thought is to use almost all the space under the interchange for parking, as it's not much good for anything else, and something like a stadium or convention center area could take advantage of the excellent transport connections and parking in the area.


So there you have it. 5 levels (I would have liked to have done 6 but it didn't want to work with the aforementioned L3/L4 crossing difficulties) and something like 18 ramps with lots of local access. It's not completely a "finished product" yet (those FLUPs are eyecandy only and some curves are too sharp) but something designed to be perfect once the technology catches up to it ;)

Also in that last picture you can see the rail I mentioned earlier. What do you think I should do with it?

Thanks for reading :)

Gugu3

Excellent Noah!that last interchange is huge!! :o :o

odrzutowiec

This diagonal grid is interesting, can't wait to see buildings there. And the interchange... I'm speechless  &apls

epicblunder

always good to see more action from Noro.   &apls

Kergelen

Although I prefer the previous intechanges which were less regular, this one is amazingly complex. &apls

The new downtown grid looks good and, as you said, better adapted to availables BATs


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vortext

The el-rail bridge is really neat!  &apls

Are the suspension cables a default feature? Can't recall I've ever seen it before and it adds a lot of character to it!

Also curious about the diagonal grid, can't wait to see it filled in!  :thumbsup:

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art128

I agree about the el-rail bridge used as tram bridge, quite ingenious.
As always, splendid work. I'm eager to see the work you'll do on the downtown.
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APSMS

Lots of wonderful work here, and certainly more time spent than I'd care to think about. Often SC4 gets to be such a chore for me that as much as I enjoy it, I have to stop and take breaks from the game or risk pulling my hair out.

The obvious solution for the rail line is to drain the water (use viaducts) or use a DBE technique to cross the water (not sure exactly how that works.

A creative solution? I'm not too sure. I usually try to avoid these situations (neighbor connections over water) in the first place.
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compdude787

Quote from: APSMS on December 16, 2014, 07:30:37 PM
I usually try to avoid these situations (neighbor connections over water) in the first place.

Yeah, me too. Personally, I'd just move the rail line a bit north so that you can build an actual bridge. Or, do some terraforming! :D
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MandelSoft

I'm still baffled how you came up with such a monster interchange :o. I did build a cloverleaf there previously, but this interchange is much more appropriate. Most excellent work, Noah!  :thumbsup:

It's also nice to have a stadium there. I was looking for an appropriate spot to place such a thing.
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romualdillo

How many hours did you spend doing such an interchange? You're doing an amazing work here!!!  &apls

The tram bridge looks great, too!! How could we suspect what hides into the water??  :thumbsup:

noahclem

Thanks for all the kind words everyone :)  I should have mentioned last update that part of the feedback I was looking for about the rail crossing was how many tracks should go there. According to Willy's map the main line and commuter lines heading to the south and west have already split off, as well as a commuter line heading north but there are three major stations, including the airport, and a classification yard that way, as well as the main traffic heading north.

I made a little mod for NORO to replace pedmalls with Gobias' modern cobble sidewalks, as we've been using. Feel free to try it out if you like. Seems to small to put on the LEX but maybe I can make a set--pretty straightforward work and I might even have another one laying around already I made for Arthur a while back. I also have the Brooklyn brick one made by Willy for Siilijoki.

I've also, finally, gotten back to a little texture modding. The article I mentioned first in the urban planning in current events reminded me how much current lane widths bother me and made me realize how much larger some are than they need to be. The immediate impetuses (why can't it be "impeti"?) were noticing the RHW4-to-avenue transition widens substantially toward the avenue direction and the sudden prospect of an old tram station coming to fruition.

This pic shows the ped mall mod and the latest TIA textures:



A look at experimental TIA & avenue textures near other networks with original TIA & avenue textures visible at intersections for comparison:



Note that in this alignment/width scheme avenue, RHW4, TIA, and OWR all line up with each other (they are intentionally a pixel or two off where one network would ideally be aligned a bit differently than the other)

TIA texture:



Avenue texture:



Given the scale of the effort that would be needed to do a project like that I don't know if it makes any sense to try. I like the way it looks though  ;D

memo

#518
Quote from: noahclem on December 18, 2014, 09:04:42 AM
(why can't it be "impeti"?)

U-declination, my friend. ;) Meaning the Latin plural would be "impetūs" (long u), wheras "impeti" would suggest an o-declination origin which isn't the case. In German, it doesn't even seem to have a plural at all. Now, I just need to look up the actual meaning... ::)

Anyways, I am looking forward to your new Avenue textures!

Thanks Markus :D  I would probably never have ended up understanding that if you hadn't posted. Glad you liked the textures :)

Gugu3

#519
Very nice Noah! &apls

Thanks!