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DB Coopers 416 huge city region of the US "teaser"

Started by D.B. Cooper, January 12, 2015, 11:32:48 PM

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D.B. Cooper

Work in progress: This is a sat. map of The US, spread out over 500 of the largest city tiles in SimCity 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wbl0jRrCEk

The game is heavily modded, but I have used no cheats. Every city is making money and inter-connected trading resources and jobs.

This is just the first step in building the region. I have mainly just laid a single two lane road from Maine to Seattle, Washington only letting a few cities get above 10k population.

I am growing this region naturally and only placing buildings when they are unlocked in each city. Zones are placed along the two lane road from coast to coast, using almost no powerlines to spread electricity.

These zones are spread evenly along the road and once an area becomes populated like at a crossroads, I will start to add civic buildings like schools police and fire as needed.

These crossroads usually become very busy, and allows for commercial development to thrive and this my friends is how our towns can natuarlly develope. More housing and industry follows and creates a very easy to control cycle of development, never running out of demand.

Commercial zones begin to repalce the low density housing where ever the traffic gets heavy and neighborhoods are formed around the new commercial development creating an amazing urban sprawl that is dictated by the traffic flow.

As we grow and begin to add highways, rail and mass transit some towns may become replaced by newer towns springing up next to highways or railways causing historic districts that are no longer the best option for commuters.

Again this gives us a more realistic growth pattern where as the country grows, cities will begin to form around our highway and rail systems, just like in real life. Once thriving towns will stall in growth or even decline as newer cities pop up and begin to grow.

Most of the cities havent even been touched yet, and alot of the named cities dont even have roads and its already at 1/4 million in population. My goal is over 300 Million for this region without wall to wall skyscrapers.

More to come, i'm going to make a compilation of the cities themselves soon and post updates as the region grows.

Im new to making videos, editing and posting so I need some help making these better. If anyone has any tips please let me know.  thanks and enjoy!!!

D.B. Cooper

#1
Showing Maine, Augusta, Dover, Boston, Hartford and New York.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Men_A_D_azY

Due to the massive scale of this region, there is no way to create the beautiful cities others have. I have always been a region builder anyways so will mainly focus on the growth mechanics of the region but we will still have some really nice looking cities.

I'm keeping the mods light for now to reduce any chance of something getting corrupted but you will see them mixed in with the normal buildings in every city.

As cities grow I will add more mods in to start making the place look better. Like using curved roads, rural highways, canals, and custom landmarks.

I will be using the city of Roswell, New Mexico for mod testing and experiments. So this area may look a little crazy at times but trust us...ALL IS NORMAL IN ROSWELL. ;)

Enjoy, please hit the like button and subscribe to see more updates!!!!

Oh, if there is a way to let you watch the video directly from this page, please let me know. I will fix it.

D.B. Cooper

#2
Heres the map im using and a link: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/28910-48-states/  Its scary big but has to be the greatest map I have ever seen, which is what inspired this.




resized image ~ Erik GM







FrankU

Hey, The_Dark_Knight,

This is a very interesting approach of building in SC4. Funny enough, because in fact it seems very obvious now that you write it down for me. The natural growht by starting a long road over several tiles and then let several tiles grow together.... A perfect use of the region mechanics.

I'm interested how you develop everything.

Maybe some useful tips.
1. If you are interested in agricultural developments you certainly shoud install CAM, see the LEX. CAM also works very well once your cities grow into megalopolises, but in the rural development it is useful too.
2. Use Region Census and/or Region an city viewer. Both you can find here.
They give you the opportunity to watch the region and make images of it without all the Maxis UI's. Very versatile.

Oh... by the way... Interesting map! Looks familiar.

vortext

#4
This is gonna be exciting to watch, I like your approach!  :thumbsup:

Also as Frank said you might want to use the Region Census to get a picture of the entire region - provide your pc can handle it - and a couple of ingame pictures would be nice, too.

As for embedding youtube, you'll have to use the flash tags and specify the size of the player which is 200x200 by default. 

[flash=200,200][/flash]

Next you'll have to slightly alter the youtube link. So this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wbl0jRrCEk

Becomes this:

https://www.youtube.com/v/9wbl0jRrCEk

Putting it together you'll end up with something like this:

[flash=640,480]https://www.youtube.com/v/9wbl0jRrCEk[/flash]

And finally here's how it looks like embedded.

https://www.youtube.com/v/9wbl0jRrCEk

Also the preferred maximum image width is 1024px. You can resize larger images with the width tag.

[img width=1024][/img]

This way regardless of monitor dimensions everyone can see the entire picture at once and clicking on the picture will expand it to full size.
time flies like a bird
fruit flies like a banana

D.B. Cooper

#5
Thank you everyone for all the help!!

I have the Nam and Cam installed right now but havent downloaded many farm lots yet. I have never used them before and fear things I dont know considering the amount of time I have in this. Im always afraid of a crash but honestly no joke in hundreds of hours I can remember one crash, right when I started.

I have hundreds of Dependencies installed but have held off on the actual lots for some reason. Prob. worried of a missing file, can anyone reccomend some good Cam farm lots to use? Also I dont know how people make such huge farms but would like to learn, they look great. Do they produce more jobs the bigger they are?

The early days of Chicago


Stores pop up only where traffic is heavy


I try not to rush too much but there is alot of ground to cover here, this is a heavy farm area on the Mississippi River, just north of New Orleans.


D.B. Cooper

#6
New York just getting started.




and growing...



Boston's early days.




and growing...


D.B. Cooper

Quote from: FrankU on January 13, 2015, 12:02:58 AM
Hey, The_Dark_Knight,

This is a very interesting approach of building in SC4. Funny enough, because in fact it seems very obvious now that you write it down for me. The natural growht by starting a long road over several tiles and then let several tiles grow together.... A perfect use of the region mechanics.

I'm interested how you develop everything.

Maybe some useful tips.
1. If you are interested in agricultural developments you certainly shoud install CAM, see the LEX. CAM also works very well once your cities grow into megalopolises, but in the rural development it is useful too.
2. Use Region Census and/or Region an city viewer. Both you can find here.
They give you the opportunity to watch the region and make images of it without all the Maxis UI's. Very versatile.

Oh... by the way... Interesting map! Looks familiar.

Im having a hard time using the region census. Im wondering if this is simply to large to use with this program. The region and game appears to be installed in the My Documents section which I think is the problem. I have all my mods in the programs folder though but it wont load the region when I select it in the documents folder and isnt in the programs folder. Not to mention I get the missing simcity dat1 error when I start the program.

D.B. Cooper

#8
Atlanta will be a major transportation hub for the south so will be very diverse in industry growth.




Notice the trees filling in?


Atlanta will be the largest city in the southeast.

D.B. Cooper

#9
Our nations capitol Washington DC, has humble beginnings.




As the country grew, demand for proper government facilities were in order.


So we nearly bankrupted our city building shiny things.


An explosion in growth to DC followed.





D.B. Cooper

#10
Houston was nothing but farms, but has grown fast ever since the expansion out west.




A small downtown formed due to the amount of traffic coming through.


The state fair was offered because of all the farms in the area, which helped bring in a community college and high tech jobs.




Rapid growth followed and soon a seaport was built to ship the regions goods further away.





FrankU

Wow, such progress!

You post too quick for giving us the opportunity to reply!  :D

What bothers me a bit the bumpiness of all the terrains and the steep river banks. I fear it will hardly be possible to cover them with seawalls or the like. Except when you are going to do some heavy terraforming. It's the map of course, but I think your plans should include some terraforming in order to get rid of the bumps on every street corner.

But besides that: great work! It's nice to see the thing grow on all sides.

vortext

Large buildings for such a small city indeed, the mayor appears to be a megalomaniac!  $%Grinno$% :D

Some pointers: you can use the 'modify' button to edit a post later on, or maybe spread your posts apart. Otherwise it's a lot to take in at once. You might also want to consider using a slope mod because the roads are quite bumpy indeed.

Other than that I'm curious to see everything grow out and up!  :thumbsup:



time flies like a bird
fruit flies like a banana

D.B. Cooper

#13
Sorry guys I just realized that I forgot the most important part of this journal. I forgot to add the word "teaser" to the title like it is on the Simtropolis forums. The actual journal will begin with entry #2 over there. I'm thinking I'll have to close this one out and start a new journal once I'm ready to start it here. Unfortunately such a huge region requires a huge wall of text to explain so I apologize in advance but I did add a few pics if it helps. I didn't want to bombard you guys with so much so fast but here goes...

My vision for this journal is to show a fully functioning region with big cities, suburbs, and small towns from the start while still resembling the original game but on a much larger scale. If this were a paint job I would consider this stage to be the primer before the paint. Once the region is large enough I want to wipe my mind clean of any care I had for the region and everything will be on the table for demolition...even entire downtown areas.

Who else freaked out when they saw the christmas snow the developers left us? I know I did!!!! :laugh:


As I build I hope to show a transformation over time as the region is built out and remodeled with all the wonderful mods offered by the community. My main focus though will be the region growth and not so much on the cities themselves but I will strive for as much realism as possible given that the scale of the buildings vs the map, restricts city layouts greatly.

Basically I'm going to be building this thing twice. Imagine a downtown with simple avenues getting upgraded with the newer road systems available. Entire blocks will be redone allowing room for the newer and wider road and transit systems. I always keep in mind that everything I build will be upgraded or demolished to make room for the new. I feel this reflects real life pretty well as cities over time have changed drastically going from plain Jane to masterpieces over time.



Our plan for the region is to lay a footprint for each city using mostly what maxis provides us out of the box. I want to build a functional region first, focusing only on the Nam's capabilities and how much further people are willing to commute to work. Against my advisers daily warnings I want to spread each city out as much as possible using the stock streets and roads before building upwards.



The original road layouts and neighborhoods will look outdated and a lot of them will be replaced. We could cut an entire residential area in half with a modern highway system forcing the area to transform around the new infrastructure effectively moving downtown areas which happened all over the country when our real highway system was authorized in 1956 and completed 35 years later.

Dallas


I have to use modded civic buildings to achieve such spread which is the only reason I'm even using them this early. Really the only mods being utilized right now is The Nam, civic buildings and a different water texture "to make the region view look better". This is all for function as that's my only priority right now. Once the region gets to the point of being a functional country I'm going to essentially start over with what I have and grow the region from there adding mods as I go. That will be the beginning of my mayor journal.

Cleveland


I have a great amount of respect for everyone here that makes these beautiful cities with all the amazing mods available. They are truly artwork. I consider myself more of an engineer than an artist though but will do my best to make things look as good as possible given the amount of time it takes just to speed build a single maxis road from coast to coast. It took months just to get a road across this map as I refuse to build roads without zones along them plus I either use a single or triple spacing between each zone at the beginning which takes even longer as I'm not just dragging out huge lines of zones. My focus from the beginning has always been sheer size and scale of the region along with function.

LA will be in the valley, but I didnt want to ruin the mountains trying to build a city there. The scale isnt right and LA must be huge.


It's a very difficult process for me to balance growth vs looking good as I want everything to look good while its being built but must sacrifice looks for speed with so much ground to cover. There are 58 large city tiles along my original route across the country. This is from Maine down the east coast to Miami, then along the gulf coast to the Mexican border. From there it follows the Mexican border "somewhat" and connects LA then stretches up the west coast to the Canadian border. Every residential zone is either single or triple spaced apart and is only 1x2 in most cases. Commercial and industrial zones are only 2x2 and are spread out unless its at a crossroads.

Miami


I do have a lot of CAM enabled lots installed but they wont appear until demand calls for them. I'm not plopping anything at this stage unless it must be plopped, like landmarks, civic, utilities, transportation and things like that. The great demand for jobs has caused a few Cam industrial lots to appear already though. I thought about using different trees and terrain mods but didn't want to change to much to soon. I'm not sure if it would be safe to start using a tree controller or slope and terrain mod at this point but if you guys think it possible and not to time consuming or risky I'm open to it. I kind of like the maxis trees while building nothing but low density but I will want to add the nicer ones once the transformation begins. Merging stock vs modded will be interesting and may not come out the best but I'm going to try.


oops...wrong decade

To be honest with everyone I started this region as my own personal revolt to the new restrictive map sizes in the new version. I thought, lets see just how big of a region we can make using SimCity 4 and once it started growing I thought I would try and show everyone its progress. Oh and the pics im using on this thread are just random pics I have out of over 800 now in my steam library. Im just throwing them out there in no real order just as a preview of the region as it grows. Thank you for the advise everyone. Please keep it coming as I have a lot to learn about using all the mods I have installed.

FrankU

Hi D.B. Cooper,

So you finally did really count the amount of tiles in your region... Less than 500, but still an enormous amount of space.
Maybe you now get the feeling that the first colonists had when they realised just how large a whole continent is!

Your approach is very interesting and you say you are not an artist, but an engineer. So let me tell you that engineers are responsible for some of the most beautiful buildings on Earth. Like the Eiffel tower and numerous bridges. So don't be humble for the wrong reason.

Your work is relly a completely different approach and I like to see how it develops.

D.B. Cooper

Frank and Vortext, the encouragement means a lot so thank you, and yes I don't know why I was thinking it was over 500 but I counted them over a year ago lol. At this point I'm not noticing much difference between the two its freakin massive. I have at least 250,000 civs living in low density 1x2 zones spread all over the country. Boston and New York are the only cities so far with medium density commercial or residential. Believe me its a chore :angrymore: laying out all the low density but i want that to be the backdrop of the entire region...

"Large buildings for such a small city indeed, the mayor appears to be a megalomaniac!  $%Grinno$% :D" LOL Is this about the huge hospitals or the DC landmarks? I must admit I got anxious to see where I should place the landmarks so I marked the area off with roads until satisfied but after seeing NYC and Boston grow so fast i couldn't stand it any longer and spent all of DC's funds on the White House, Congress building and monument...  I waited hundreds of hours to do this so prob should have waited a little longer until DC was larger but man was it satisfying to finally see our capitol with some shiny buildings.

Could anyone recommend a few good examples of journal layouts I could look at? I have tried a lot of ways to do this but there is just SOOO much content to show, its hard for me to lay it out without being difficult to follow. I eventually just made a video which is the only way to quickly show the entire region without spending 15 mins scrolling...

Basically each chapter or entry is going to be us traveling from coast to coast showing the region as it grows. I'll stop off at interesting cities and show them in detail but even just one pass across the region is around 50 cities and that's just following the coasts and Mexican border.

I'm still trying to find an efficient layout or idea for a very picture heavy journal without a lot of reading besides descriptions of whats in the picture... I could just do it all on Powerpoint and make it fancy but I think that would take a long time to load for some people and would rather have it laid out here on the forums. Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)