Adara - Update 184 - March 26, 2012

[Cyclone1001]

Looks very good, love composites, congratz on 1,000 posts!

[Stray Cat]

Congratulations BattleCat on making a second tour of OSITM!!!  I know first-hand that it is well-deserved.  And congrats on 1000 plus posts!

Cheers!

Scott

[canyonjumper]

Congrats on OSITM and 1000 posts! This update was great!

             -Jordan

[tooheys]

Jeez that was timed well, 1000 replies and a second time in OSITM. A great MD you have going here Battlecat and the honours are well deserved 

Looking forward to see what you come up with over the next month, although it will be difficult to improve on your normal efforts.

Enjoy the month

Dave

[Tomas Neto]

Congrats on 1000 posts! 

Fantastic update again!!! Nice work!!! 

[dedgren]

Excellent, just excellent.  It's great to see Adara recognized again as being of special interest, and to see the comments and views start to pile up.  50,000 page views isn't that far off- we'll be looking at 100K here down the road, I'm sure about that.


David

[nedalezz]

Seeing how you developed the city tile step by step was really nice, and I certainly took some pointers from you. Its amazing to see how it starts out and how it ends up.

Alexandria looks stunning...I was google earthing once and was looking at Idaho and Montana, and for some reason it just reminds of an area I was looking at there.

And finally, congrats on your second tour at OSITM! You definitely deserve it.

[metarvo]

Congratulations on OSITM, Battlecat!    The suburban development continues to look very good.

[Battlecat]

Will (penguin007): Thanks very much for your kind words!

io_bg: Thanks, glad you like the layout.  I had fun just laying out streets in odd patterns for this one.

djvandrake: Thanks for the congratulations!  I really strive for green cities, Adara is shifted slightly away from reality into a greener realm.  Just wait till you see the zones after the trees are in place today!  

BuildingUp: Thanks very much for your enthusiastic reply!  The Dollar Tree building is one of the lots in Simgoobers Small Shops Pack.  Most of simgoober's older work can be found a series of megapacks on the LEX, just do a power search for simgoober and you'll find a huge number of his custom lots.

Geoff (calibanX): Thanks very much!  I'm not sure if it's commitment or obsessive compulsive behavior ;-), but I'm glad you're enjoying the regular updates!  I'm really looking forward to putting together some of the extra bonus shots for later in the month!  I've got a number of different things in mind!  

Jacob (ShultzCity): I'm not sure what I'd do with a whole section to myself, but thanks for your support regardless!  Thanks for stopping in and for your kind words!

sumwonyuno: Thanks for your kind words in the earlier post edit!  Some of the empty lots are simply a result of the simulator being slow to grow some spots, others are indeed a result of demolition.  I try to avoid 3 or more identical homes adjacent to one another.  I'm not sure if I want to consider the historical persistence a bug or a feature, but it sure comes in handy!  

Connor: Thanks very much, glad you like the composite!

Cyclone1001: Thanks for providing the 1000th post! Glad you enjoyed the composite image!  

Scott (Stray Cat): Thanks for your kind words!  

Jordan (canyonjumper): Thanks very much on all counts!  Glad you enjoyed it!

Dave (tooheys): It's funny how thing work out sometimes!  If things go smoothly through this month, I might hit 100 updates as well.  It's going to be a challenge to add more, but the bonuses should do the trick for the next month.  Thanks very much for stopping in, glad you enjoyed your visit!

Tomas Neto: Thanks very much!  

David (dedgren): Great to see you once again!  Thanks for stopping by!  It's hard to believe sometimes how quickly the year has gone by and how fast things have grown here.

nedalezz: Glad you're finding the approach helpful.  The choice of developing tile by tile is as much for my sanity as anything.  It's kind of nice to break up the project in discrete pieces with a clear beginning and end.  It helps that I'm going for a fixed eyecandy snapshot in time rather than ongoing growth.  Thanks very much for your kind words and congrats, hope you enjoy today's bonus!

metarvo: You just slipped in as I was about to post today's update!  Thanks very much for your congratulations and kind words! 

Update 96
Ellison Flats – Suburban Blitz II

I've decided to finish most of the remaining suburbs today in an effort to finish Ellison Flats sooner rather than later.  Urban development is kind of funny in this game.  There's lots of detailing work to do, but it can generally be done in parallel across the entire city.  I've got a couple of cross border shots in today's update to help illustrate the layout before and after Monday's development.  

96-1: The small single tile homes developed quite unexpectedly into these nice little single family homes.  Quite a quirky result, but one I'm happy to work with.  


96-2: There's a couple more parks to place in the area as the last block of residential starts to develop.  


96-3: Here's the first one now completed with trees.  


96-4: And this will be the site of the second one.  Both these parks are designed to provide access to the nearby commercial sites.


96-5: It's nice to see the trees in place in these parks, they really put a finishing touch on the area.  


96-6: The 1x1 homes have mostly finished developing.  An interesting result for the experiment, I'll have to consider this layout more in the future.  


96-7: The trees have finished growing so I'll just pop in a few shots of various suburbs.  This is one of the cross border parks that will connect to a currently undeveloped tile.  


96-8: And this is the main one.  As you can see I still haven't had a chance to replace that fountain yet.  I'm still undecided whether it will be necessary to make the change.


96-9: Here's a quick overview of the lowland neighborhood now that the final touches are in place.  


96-10: Since it's visible in 96-9, here's a closer look at the tweaked edge of the industrial site.  I'll be looking more at this area in a future update.


96-11: Here's a quick preview of part of today's focus.  This will wrap up the last of the highland suburbs.  


96-12: Even better, I finally get to put a few border mosaics together!  This is a quick leap back in time; you might remember this shot from update 95.  This is the cross border version just to give you a bit of context with the rest of Winfield before I start the edge details.  Also, if you look very carefully, there's a minor problem at the border where the street crosses that needs my attention.  



96-13: It's a bit easier to see the problem here.  The road at the bottom is right, but the upper street is actually about 7 meters too low.   I guess I accidently leveled the neighbourhood.  Fortunately this is fairly easy to fix.  


96-14: A quick terrain query in Winfield gives me the benchmark I need to shoot for.  Here's the area that had to be demolished to level the area.  I use the mayor mode tools for this since they're much slower than the god mode tools.  The problem seems to have been caused by the street intersection wanting to be level.  I had to adjust quite a large area, but it's only off by about 0.1 meters now.


96-15: My primary concern today is ensuring that the urban styles line up nicely.  I'll deal with the shoreline separately because it's a fairly big job.  This shot comes after a round of revisions including cleaning up the repeating lots from Update 95.  The tower near the lakeshore at the city border is on the chopping block.    


96-16: Nice little bit of luck here, three other apartments of the same style developed on this road on the Winfield tile.  I think this will provide a nice bit of thematic linking between the two tiles.  I'm going to abandon attempts at getting a fourth apartment and just bring the forest down to the road.  


96-17: And here's a fresh look at the corrected street crossing.  I'm pretty happy with this, and consider the adjustments a success.  In the middle of this shot is the boundary between the Ellison Flats and Winfield tiles.  I think things are lining up quite nicely now.  


96-18: This cross border shot should wrap up the day nicely, except of course the bonus shot.  This small mosaic crosses from Winfield through to Ellison Flats.  This should help you all get oriented since there's been some confusion about where Ellison Flats falls relative to Winfield.  The farmland starts just a short distance down from the edge of this image.



OSITM Bonus 2: I'm going to continue posting these large mosaics throughout the first few OSITM updates since they're actually taking me less than 20 minutes each to put together!  Today we're revisiting Vavenby once more at Zoom 2!


That's all for today.  I'm not entirely sure what will be in Fridays update, but there will be something.  I've got some interesting ideas for that area, but it'll depend some on how much custom lot work I can get done over the next few days.  See you soon!

[mightygoose]

superb work, and fantastic mosaic. congrats on OSITM.

[Cyclone1001]

Yay, more composites! And yeah, I like them. So yeah... Hint hint...

[djvandrake]

Bravo!  Your neighborhoods really look great, especially with the trees!    Those single tile zones sure turned out nice too.  Are those R$$ homes?

Another wonderful update. 

[sumwonyuno]

Heh, the difference between features and bugs is that features are bugs that are documented.   

Great mosaic!  Just have to complete the lake and it's perfect!

[dedgren]

The mosaic (OSITM Bonus 2) [linkie] absolutely took my breath away.  There are just a few folks who've truly captured the potential that consistent use of wide radius curves and the FAR and FARR offer for creating a truly natural look- welcome to a very small club.

Sorry for sounding like a fanboy, but going back through Adara tonight and finding something inspiring on just about every page was really a great way to spend a couple of hours.


David

[TiFlo]

That city is really getting sweet. I was afraid at first that you'd have too many mid-rises compared to the entire surface of ground taken by the city, but I see now that you're having little suburbian areas spread around. I am however still somewhat undecided regarding the high use of trees in the downtown area. It looks great, almost like an ideal place to live in, but I'm not sure whether it is believable or not (although after two weeks of being forced fed BC tourism commercials telling me it is the best place to live in the world, I'm sure I'd buy anything you tell me about it  ).

Question: what are those tree lots you're using, the deciduous (and growable it seems) ones? As used in 96-6 to enclose the houses. And are they seasonal? I'm asking because so far I've been using dedgren 3RR ploppable seasonal trees. They are great for country areas but not so much for urbanized zones as they don't have any base texture, and don't fit so well with park lots like BSC / SFBT.

Great work, thank you! 

[Tomas Neto]

Great update, nice suburbs!!! Nice see the growth of your city!!!

[Stray Cat]

Well, there is 45 minutes of my life that I was thrilled to spend gazing and reading that update!  Wish it could have been longer but unfortunately I had to break.  I'll be back later to re-read and stare some more! :p

Those are amazing suburbs there BC.  I love the flow of the houses with the roads and the greenery is balanced very nicely.  Overall, very aesthetically pleasing and very lifelike. 

Cheers!

Scott

[penguin007]

Wow what an awesome update that tile is one of the most realistic I have seen

Will

[canyonjumper]

Very beautiful! The composite is awesome!

                 -Jordan

[Yan077]

Congrats with that second OSITM   

Your updates are always splendid, this one looks so natural, really good job once again 

Yann