State of Paradisia

[Lach77]

This is my first attempt at showcasing my region - Paradisia.

This region was a British Commonwealth settlement until the early 1900s. Named due to its mild climates and an abundance of natural resources and space that offered refuge from the oppressive political systems in Europe and the harsh climates. Consequently the more early established cities feature heavily in English and European style architecture.

But due to its settlement in the mid 1700s and that significant wealth did not begin to acquire until the late 1800s very little remains of the original colonial buildings. Therefore the extravagent architecture that dominated many European cities won't be found in this State. However there was enough wealth circulating in the mid 1800s that generated a class of wealth from the boom in industrys such as wool, gold, timber and other materials and exotic wares. This wealth generated a boom in the burgeoning construction industry and many Victorian era suburbs and towns date back to this period.


The main port city of this region, Altdorf became a bustling trading centre and this expansion coincided with the development of railway and tram lines that connected the satellite towns and inner suburbs together. The tram lines are gone but the radial heavy rail suburban system has been expanded and upgraded to the present day. More recently an underground metropolitan system has been added to handle the load from the more densely populated inner suburbs.

Recently the Victoria era architecture has given way to modernist and contemporary styles with a large commercial centre in Altdorf. This has also occured in high density suburbs where in many cases entire blocks of terraces have been demolished replaced with modern apartments. Currently there is more attention being put into preserving what remains of the original architecture.

Currently I'm going to show my most recent suburb, "New Kensington"

This is an inner western suburb which forms the boundary between the inner suburbs of Altdorf and the expanding Western suburbs. The main western railway line passes directly through this region at New Kensington Station before intersecting at a major junction. From this point the Main Northern Line and Inner Western Line branch off to the North and Southwest.

For image is a transport legend (red shows the path of the railway network).



View over New Kensington Station and main town centre which is divided by the Main Western Railway Line. As you can see most of the buildings are modern apartments and carparks but some victorian era highstreet shops remain. As with any bustling suburb that is centered around a major transport node you can find plenty of amenities including vehicle parking stations, retail stores, restaurants and high density housing.







Before New Kensington became an urban suburb of Altdorf the area was primarily farmland. When urban pressures and agricultural interests declined in the area the largest and wealthiest landholder who owned land to the South/SouthWest of New Kensington Station donated a large block of vacant land to the Altdorf Historical Trust under agreement that the land would forever be owned by the people. Consequently the land was developed for 3 purposes. The Northern section features a large hospital as seen below - This hospital was built at a time when it was believed that one of the best ways for sick patients to heal was to be connected with nature. Hence the hospital is centred around immaculate and beautiful gardens.




The Central section features a historic park that still contains one of the original farm houses used by the original landholders. The Southern section features a public golfcourse, the profits are donated back into the maintenance of the parks and to provide frequent exclusive dinners to the members of the historic fund.




One rail station East of New Kensington is the suburb of Tarrowood which also sits on the Main Western Line. This suburb is much quieter than New Kensington but is still well sought after due to prime access to excellent public transport. The 2 Northern railway tracks bypass this station as they are the main intercity lines that carry passengers to Altdorf from the outer Northern and Western satellite suburbs. Note that the curves are wider to allow intercity trains to travel at higher speed limits.




The suburb of Westbourne sits 1 railstop West of New Kensington. It heavily features contemporary medium density apartment housing which is popular with sims that like the convenience of close access to the suburban rail line.






South Kensington has been declared a heritage suburb due to its outstanding example of early Victorian sandstone row houses that was once fairly common in the inner metropolitan areas but is now largely rare in large blocks except in some of the inner Eastern suburbs.

[sim_link]

You're off to a great start! The suburbs looks very well thought out and I like your extensive use of rail. I look forward to seeing what you have in store.

[vester]

Looks like a promising start.  Very green.



One thing. Your images is in PNG.
Please convert your images to jpg. If you use quality/compressing ratio 70-80 % you save a lot on file size and loss of quality is very small.

Lets take your first images:
6.06 mb in png convert to jpg with ratio set to 80 %. Resulting file size 298 kb.

You can use the free program IrfanView to convert to jpg.
It can also be used to do screencaptures directly to jpg from the game.
Then you can also get ride of that toolbar down in the corner.

[Swordmaster]

Welcome to the world of MDs! Good start. Some interesting things to see in your pictures, for sure.

Some remarks on layout: like Vester said, JPG is a must, although I think a 90-95% compression is good enough. Lower than that you'll lose too much quality. Also, minimize the UI when you take pictures, and install this mod. Lastly, disable the u-drive-it icons and the no-road/no-job zots. That'll make perfect pictures


Cheers
Willy

[catty]

Hi Lach77

A great start to your MD   

But the pictures are PNGs and very big the first one is over 6mbs in size     my computer is still trying to download them and its been a five minutes since I opened up your MD, while PNGs pictures aren't banned in MD's we do ask people to keep them to a minimum as it does effect the site bandwidth and it will also stop people viewing and commenting on your MD if they can't open it.

I would very much appreciate it if you can change some or all of your pictures to JPGs.

thanks

-catty
Global Moderator

[Lach77]

Hey guys thanks for the supportive responses, much appreciated. I will definately make the changes that have been suggested here, but due to the Christmas break coming up, I'll be away for about a week so it will take me some time before I can fix this thread. Please be patient.

Thanks

[Dantes]

Welcome  Wow, looks good, your street network is fantastic and I like your Main Rail Station 

[Lach77]

I decided to retake the initial images and for a test I'm placing one new pic in the opening post to provide an easy comparison. If people are happy the quality of the JPG compared to the originals, I'll change the rest over.  Please comment if you're happy with this especially if I should make the size a bit bigger, I'd like to get it right before I continue.

Thanks guys

[Schulmanator]

Welcome! Glad to see you here and you are off to a nice start.

[Swordmaster]

The compression looks right, but I would keep the 1280px width. You can then include  [ img width=1024 ] in your tags to get the "clickable" pictures that expand on the spot to their original size.

Cheers
Willy

[catty]

Thanks Lach77



Its good to see you making a start on converting the pictures

-catty
Global Moderator

[Lach77]

Hello All, well I couldn't hold out any longer from showing off more of my region (by the way the existing pictures have been fixed for about a week and I just added another one onto the first post).

Tonight you are seeing the first pictures of the suburb of Waterloo. This is another inner city suburb to the South of the CBD. Much of the inspiration for this city comes from Sydney's (my home city) inner Southern suburbs of Surry Hills and Zetland. Surry Hills is an older suburb that was dilapidated for many years but in recent times has become a very trendy suburb for new age yuppies. Zetland, further south was originally an industrial suburb that has also in recent times been gentrified and is now one of Sydney's newest up and coming high rise residential suburbs. In my attempt to recreate this you'll notice in the pictures below that the North side of Waterloo is a heritage Victorian era suburb with terrace houses and high street shops. To the South you'll see a transition into contemporary style apartments. In fact I probably should rebuild many of these seeing there are way better BATs available now then the Maxis ones when I started this zone.

In this city there are major North/South traffic arteries that move commuters between the CBD and suburbs further South. What I'm showing off here primarily is a section of the city centered around the Southern Motorway

The Southern Motorway offers motorists a world class freeway which completely bypasses all surface intersections. This road is inspired from Sydney's Eastern Distributor/South Dowling Street which is a system of tunnels and sunken slot/trenches that bypasses the narrow and congested surface streets. I've attempted to replicate this here as best as I can. The first photos are from Sydney's Eastern Distributor so you can see what I'm trying to do here.

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I've made quite a lot of changes to this part of the city as my citybuilding skills have improved. The pics you see below are current, and I'm pretty pleased with the result.

This first image shows part of the "sunken" slot road that sits in the the surface road. RHW converts to avenue for tunnels and sections that are too short for RHW. So I have used Marrasts M TEL Lots (tunnel side road pieces) to construct this section of sunken freeway except I've taken the concept quite a bit further here. I like this style of road because it creates a much tighter and more compact appearance of a really built up city where you feel that space is valuable.



The second image shows a RHW SPUI piece that connects to the Marrast Tunnel edge pieces that I've used for the surface interchange. I realise I also need to go back to this and fill in the gaps to the West of image 2 and 3.


The third image shows traffic movements in the sunken motorway demonstrating a functional road network.



The fourth image shows a close up of the Victorian era terrace houses and wall-to-wall high street shops.



Here's something you can give feedback on though, which road design do you like better, 1, 2 or 3?

1.This is the current design for the overpass (Personally I like the extra tunnel under the road which allows for more greenspace on the surface - after all this is a residential zone)


2. Alternative (no greenspace just a simple overpass. Unfortunately the corners don't line up perfectly


3. What I used to have. I decided to drop this one as I thought its unrealistic not to have more freeway crossings.

[Tandini]

Hi, I want to join in with the others: Really well done start! I especially like your 'green finger' - that makes the scenery looking very attractive.
To your sunken motorway: Version 2) is definitely a realistic approach because of lower construction costs, but version 1) is also used when more green-space is wanted. If your sunken motorway passes several blocks I would alternate between 1) and 2): The first crossing after the SPUI piece as a version 2)-bridge, the next crossing as like version 1), and so on.

[catty]

Very nice pictures and thanks for changing most of them to jpg's it certainly makes viewing a lot more easier ... your sunken highways are 

-catty

[Swordmaster]

I like the overpass version better than the tunnel. Very clever implementation. The wall texture isn't too good, though.


Cheers
Willy

[metarvo]

Although the sunken highway seems unusual, it is nonetheless well done.    As far as the RCI portion goes, it looks as though you've got a primarily medium-density area.  The choice of buildings is fair despite a little bit of building repetition in images 2 and 3.  As far as the road choice goes, I like Option 2 (overpass without grass) the best.  Nice work, Lach77! 

[Kergelen]

Great work with the sunken highway. Remember me one in Barcelona 

[noahclem]

Great start    Sunken highways and Sydney's highways are both things of great interest to me. A lot of cool pictures and transit networks in the first update.

A few ideas and suggestions on the sunken highways:
I think you'll get a better look using these tunnels.
If you don't mind the traffic being converted to subway you can also use Buddybud's underpasses. Height is 8m.
If you decide to do tunnels instead of overpasses I would make the highway less sunken. 8 meters should look much like the pictures you showed than the current 15 meters.
If you're interested I've got some M-TEL relots with nice wall textures on the sides I could share with you. I know there's some pictures of them in my MD buried somewhere but don't recall where.

Looking forward to more 

[Lach77]

Thanks for the feed back guys

Metarvo: Yeah I think I should go back and remove some of the maxis buildings. I have installed some really good medium density apartment BATs in the last few months so they should come in handy. Building repetition isn't an issue with terraces. For apartments I think it can look good if the architectural style is consistent.

Noahclem: That is really useful advice, I'll try out those new tunnels but can you bulid tunnels at 8 meters? I can't remember what the minimum depth is, I thought it was around 15m. And as for M-TEL lots with nicer textures I would love to see how that would look, if you don't mind sharing them.

I won't have too much time to work on this before next week, life seems to keep getting busier, but I'll try and fit some time in somewhere I guess.