Adara - Update 184 - March 26, 2012

[canyonjumper]

Very nice, kinda reminds me of a bay I saw driving along the Sea-to-Sky this summer

                      Your friend,
                                     Jordan

[art128]

Indeed, the diagonal interchange is very sweet!

I know this feel about completely flat city tiles, I also put a hills or mountains or water spots on every tiles I develop to not make it looks repetitive.

It's funny because the large flat spot you have up to the tile you've made look rather nice for a medium city. With the downtown core at the middle, and the suburbs going to the river, further the power line and along the coast.

Take care,
Arthur.

[threestooges]

The scale of the game is a strange thing indeed. While an interchange can seem vastly oversized compared to surrounding buildings in the game, in some instances it's perfectly normal. It looks fine visually here, and is actually within scale. By a rough estimate, it looks like it's maybe 20 tiles across, which, at 16m/tile, you're looking at about 360m.

In some more sprawling areas (like Palm Desert, CA) that actually seems to fit real life scale pretty well. No reason to cram it in there when you have plenty of land.

[mave94]

I like the terraforming. That flat area is indeed a nice location for a city. Maybe a lookout point on the hill on picture 169-2?
Looking forward to the other tiles as well.

-Matthijs

[bat]

Another great update!

[noahclem]

Nice update! The terraforming and transit planning is coming along very nicely! 

[Dantes]

The region looks designed very realistic view.  It's really difficult.  I'm looking forward to more. 

[Nanami]

A nice transportation network there!

[metarvo]

As a big fan of diagonals, I must say I'm impressed with your diagonal interchange.  I'm always playing around trying to build things like that.

The unusual mountain is in fact not entirely unusual, and neither are flat areas.  In this country, we have a region of plains which looks very much like a new city quad in SC4 (albeit much drier).  However, there are places in which a lone mountain will rise above the flat land, much like the ones in Saltery Bay.

I'm looking forward to seeing the fishing resort.  It makes me dream about going to the lake, but all of the lakes are drying up around here due to the exceptional drought.  Keep up the good work, Battlecat!

[Battlecat]

SCWTC4: Well first of all, thanks for taking the time to read through the entire thread!  That's no small feat and it's greatly appreciated.  Glad you enjoyed it.  I do indeed have plans to develop those tiles in the near future.  In fact, I'll make a point of at least introducing the tiles during this busy month if all goes according to plan! 

Although I have to admit, I'm not entirely looking forward to that particular tile, building the roads on the mountainside I have planned is going to be an exercise in frustration!  But no worries, it'll be fun as well!  Thanks for stopping in!

Jordan (canyonjumper): I did target that feeling a bit.  Funny enough, Saltery Bay is actually the ferry dock for Powell River when traveling north through the ferry chain along the Sunshine Coast.  It's located here if you're interested!

Arthur (art128): Thanks!  That observation is made all the funnier because the tile setup is ideal for farming as well.  There will be a couple small-medium sized towns over here, but most of the land is going to be farmland in this area.  The area with the RHW6 I'm revisiting today is a different story though.   

Matt (threestooges): Agreed, scale can be very frustrating in this game.  The wide radius curves look really good and are worth the space they take up!  Actually a big part of the problem is that the game isn't designed for large scale rural areas; it's always pushing towards urbanization.  But that makes for interesting challenges. 

Matthijs (MrMAvE94): Thanks!  I think there will be a lookout or something up there, it would be a great view!

bat: Thanks very much!

noahclem: Thanks, glad to hear it! 

Dantes: Thanks!  The composites are a challenge but the results are well worth it!

976: Thanks!

metarvo: Glad to hear you liked it.  I actually tried to use the diagonal RHW interchange pieces back in Alexandria but they had the hole digging bug back then.  Glad to hear the mountain looks more realistic than I thought!

Update 170
North Delta – Fractional RHW6

Today we're heading back to North Delta to revisit the RHW6 through that community.  Arthur made some excellent suggestions last week that panned out perfectly!

170-1: Here's the area that I'm revisiting today.  It was pointed out by Arthur that it might look better with fractional angle highway sections rather than the repeating diagonals.  I have to agree so I got to work with the bulldozer.


170-2: Of course, this highway is actually a RHW6S, not 4 so I wasn't entirely sure if there would be appropriate pieces.  But it appears that there are a few, so I started to fire things up.


170-3: Unfortunately, one of the curve sections (RHW6S Ortho->FAR outer curve) seems to have the hole digging bug in the current release.  I'm not aware of any solution to this bug other than waiting for the next release.  But, fortunately, all is not lost!


170-4: There are two different classes of RHW6.  There's the 6S and the 6C.  The RHW6C is much twitchier to build but at least the fractional sections don't have any glitches!  At this tile boundary I've transitioned from the RHW6 to the 6C. 


170-5: Here's the resulting highway, it looks a lot cleaner!


170-6: Just to wrap things up, I decided to play with the FLUPS.  There are indeed pieces for going under all the different RHW sections which was a fantastic find! 


170-7: I'm going under the highway rather than over here for reasons that will become apparent in a couple more updates.  I hope to discuss the primary purpose of this island in a few more updates. 


And that's a wrap for today.  Like the last revisit, I'll update the regional composite to include these changes along with the new tile.  Tomorrow we'll head to the south west corner of the region and have a look at those islands.  See you then! 

[art128]

Ah yes! It is looking much much better with that fractional angle there.  Nice to hear there will be farmlands in the area of the previous update.

Also, on the region view, I can see that the lake at the right part of the region is on an higher level than SC4's sea... Are you planning to expand the mountains too the coast and make some nice waterfalls in this area?

[SCWTC4]

Thanks for stopping in!

thanks to you for creating such wonderful MD, i'll wait for whatever comes next, it will be definetly worth of any wait.. 

[threestooges]

Shaping up nicely. Hopefully this'll give me the incentive to finally start fooling around with the RHW. Watching it go step by step like this helps.
-Matt

[canyonjumper]

Ha, that's awesome Saltery Bay isn't the only name you've taken from BC The highway looks a lot better with the FAR, shame about the glitch though.
           
                Your friend,
                               Jordan

[TiFlo]

You sure are making up for the long down time. I'm really curious to see what you'll do with more urban areas. Looking forward to it! 

[Battlecat]

Arthur (art128): Glad to hear you approve!  There will be mountains but the large lake actually already has a major outfall through the main valley by the hydro electric dam.  But there will indeed be some good waterfalls and some rugged coastline to the East of Saltery Bay.   

SCWTC4: Thanks very much! 

Matt (threestooges): The only way to really get a good feel for the RHW is to start playing with it.  It's insanely deep, especially with the modular interchange components.  It's challenging to use but the results are superb!  Glad you're finding this helpful!

Jordan (canyonjumper): Yeah, I've taken quite a few in the past.  I'd say about a third or more of the town names in Adara are BC town names.  Winfield, Salmo, and Vavenby are all BC names.  And some of the stuff today is taken from the local area as well, although it's a bit more obscure!  I find it's fun to take existing town names and change them into places with a very different character compared with the real version!

TiFlo: I'm certainly trying!  Plus the OSITM feature made this extra important!  I won't be able to keep this pace up forever! 

Update 171
Delta – Ferrying Around

In today's update we're going to look at the tile with the three islands that was visible in the first update of our OSITM tour.  The tile is named Delta, since the main community on the tile is near to the outfall of the main river in the region.  I've also got names for the islands which we'll go over as I set them up.

171-1: This bay is where the town of Delta will be located.  It will be another small coastal community with the added twist of a major ferry terminal in the community. 


171-2: Here are the first two islands.  The small one is called Matia Island and the larger one that crosses the border is Parker Island. 


171-3: Part of Parker island is visible here as is the third island, named Thetis Island. 


171-4: Starting on Matia Island, this island is small enough that it will only have access by pedestrian ferry.  There are a small handful of cars on the island but they are shared among the residents for carrying parcels and groceries from the ferry to home.  Everyone works on the mainland or on Parker Island. 


171-5: The ferry terminal is the small passenger dock created by CSGDesign.  It has a low capacity and impact which is perfect for exurb residential islands! 


171-6: Next stop is Parker Island.  There will be a small town nestled into the bay here  and exurb residential around the edge of the island.  I expect there will be a couple other little details around but that will be for another day! 


171-7: The important thing today is to establish the ferry terminal.  In this case I'm using the one that is part of Pegasus' wharf series.  Given a choice between those and the standard maxis products, it's an open and shut case.  Plus, these will transition nicely into the marina that will be present on this island as well. 


171-8: I've established a few roads already and you may notice a bit of work on setting up a mountainside road as well.  Parker island is going to be pretty significant in size, the bulk of will be in the neighboring region when and if I create it. 


171-9: Thetis Island is another small island.  When all is said and done there will be a chain of smaller islands like this. 


171-10: As a smaller island, it too only has a passenger ferry.  I've only sketched in the streets; I'll revise them with wide radius curves another update since I was running out of time to wrap this one up.


171-11: The town of delta's main starting feature is a ferry terminal.  I was pondering quite hard how to set this one up and then it hit me. The City of Nanaimo in the real world has a pretty serious problem from its ferry terminal.  The main road from the terminal goes right through a residential area.  I've applied the same problem to Delta with a pair of solutions. 


171-12: One is a two lane road departing from the terminal to handle the large slug of traffic that comes from Ferries unloading.  The road as you see it will probably be carried across the border and all the way through to the diagonal highway interchange on the Saltery Bay tile but right now it ends early. 

The other was to cut off one of the old intersections that would be seriously congested from ferry traffic and replace it with a pair of dead end streets and a wide radius curve for highway traffic.  The rest of the town will grow up around this initial setup.  There will be good reasons why this was preferable to going straight up the hill.  The main reason is that Delta will be a slightly sprawling town and there will be housing on the small escarpment overlooking the terminal. 


171-13: That's all for today's update.  To wrap things up we have a tile composite image.


171-14: And the latest version of the regional composite, including the revisions to North Delta.


171-15: And last but not least, the reference composite. 


That's all for today!  Next time we move one tile back north and find out what the plan is for that large island I keep talking about! 

[SCWTC4]

you left me speechless once again, nice planning for the islands 
i'll wait for the big island

[bat]

Great work with the RHW on update 170.
Also nice work on the new area...

[noahclem]

Great highways!    I love the new content of the RHW-6C (FA & diag with smooth transitions, for example) and am glad you're enjoying it too. I like the use of an underpass instead of an overpass in the new interchange and am very curious what the purpose of this island is, as you've alluded that you'll share with us soon. Really loving the new part of the region so far! 

Weird that you had that problem with the RHW-6S FA stuff, but that type of error sometimes only happens in very particular circumstances (piece rotation, neighboring pieces, etc). Anyway, sorry I didn't catch it before and I'll pass your bug report on to the NAM guys in case they don't see it here.

EDIT: While I was checking out the RHW-6S FA glitch you updated 

The new islands are looking great! I like the use of ferries and that's a really good idea having the assymetrical road leaving the ferry terminal. Certainly looks to be a promising area. I think I'm getting a suspicion as to what role this area will be playing in the region... 

[art128]

Nice work on the further development, Battlecat!

What you have planned so far is looking great, especially these islands.