Eyelevel's Tours through regions

[eyelevel]

... 4-28-17 Updated to Flickr...

Introduction:
Since this is my first city journal entry, based upon my first region, started back in 2004 at age 12, a lot of this stuff in this region isn’t going to be as well organized as some of my other regions created later. This first region, which is the in-game default Timbukto (named differently to avoid overwrites), will feature my earliest creations with Sim City 4. If you notice the right and bottom sides of the region are bigger than the maxis region. I did this to try to expand out what I felt should be some rather appropriate geological formations, as well as to expand this rather small region from a less claustrophobic size. Also I’ve added many smaller island in the lakes. I did this way before I decided to create a new region. My intention here was to fill out every tile regardless if it made since in any way. Since this is a default region you may notice the five city names that don’t disappear when city names are hidden; again, I simply reincorporated the existing aspects of these cities into my now personalized region. Don’t worry the names they show aren’t what I call them, but the names I pick for my cities may not always be as creative. I now use a random city name generator to avoid this, but these were made back in ’04, F.Y.I. I had dial up at my parent’s place until 2009, which is when I graduated high school. Yikes!

I’m not going to start off with my first city, which is one tile to the right of Big City Tutorial, again I call it something else, but since It is my first city I’ve tried to keep it’s original appearance without modifying it too much, but I’ll show that city off later. This city, Glendbroke (pronounced Glend-brooke) however, has gone through a major overall since it’s inception, or incorporation, back in ’04. The bad news, is that I do not have any old photos of Glendbroke’s earlier days, if I did though, I would still have them. Sidenote: this game I have had installed on four different computers, but I never lost any of my files. I will now show the rather extensive modifications of Glendbroke and I’ll try to add a backstory or some fictitious characters and significant historical events if needed…


Glendbroke is a costal town on a peninsula of some type, I don’t know what because I never named it. It has three smaller islands in the “great lake,” again not named. Fishing is it’s main focus and all the fishermen on invisible boats and invisible docks catch large fish of which I never really though about until a few moments ago. My plans for this city are to finish this city’s coastline with the Historic Harbor set as well as some plopable boast and maritime fishing nets that I’ll download somewhere. For the time being, we’ll just have to imagine that these things are here.

Let’s focus our attention to the layout of Glenbroke. First the city is very hilly, it looked worse before I added these retention walls about a year ago. Secondly It is served by four highways: Hwy 10, HWY 250, which splits into two segments here, Hwy 20 and HWY 321. In some of my upcoming cities some highways may appear useless which is likely a result of my older less organized system, once again way before I could easily download these awesome mods and enhancements.  The Regional Rail System operates an active train line throughout Glenbroke, it mostly serves tourists that visit nice beaches just east of town.

This is the mostly populated side of town. I didn’t mention or show before that this is a medium sized city, 2km². The nice little neighborhood, or neighborhoods, are full of nice green grass and the sounds of lawnmowers, just like yours; I hope. Don’t worry about the rail line, the noise isn’t that bad and it doesn’t affect property values too much.

Here we see the three islands. The fishermen like to bring their boats here and fish for some reason. The ferry supports the offshore population’s access to the mainland.

The Mosaic of my retention walls provides a nice view. It didn’t always look this nice. From 2004 to 2013, this thing would not have looked this good, if you like it that is! As a bonus can you see the two oddities in this picture. I’ll show them off in my first update in a few days.

Full Size:https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/t31.0-8/q81/s2048x2048/12377980_718822408219679_9205299218852556562_o.jpg
The small Industrial side of town. Most factories and few farms exist just west of Glenbroke. So things here remain relatively quiet. The older “abandonded-esk” looking houses at the bottom probably should be replaced. I’ll give them a grocery store whenever the locals agree to where one should go but not disrupt the scenic beauty too much. Perhaps a referendum on the ballot should decide where…


Okay, so here is the store that has been determined to be built by the town council. Where should it be built?


So here are four choices...



Obviously the open areas are easier to build but is there something I might have overlooked? What do you suggest?

[compdude787]

Nice start to your MD! It's great to see some new MDs starting up! I'm amazed that you've stuck with Timbuktu for so long. Me personally, I ditched Timbuktu soon after I got back into SC4 in February 2014 (I've had it since ~2005) because I couldn't stand having to deal with such steep slopes and I knew that I'd have a much harder time using the RHW on such steep slopes as the ones in Timbuktu. Also, I hate building anything on steep slopes because then you have all those stupid retaining walls on all your lots, something that I've always found to be highly unrealistic. So, I'm impressed with the amount of dedication you have with Timbuktu. I certainly wasn't that dedicated to this region.

Anyway, I would go with something like Option 1, but put it on the other side of the avenue. I don't think it's the best idea to destroy that tall building just to build a supermarket. But the avenue still provides the best access to a big store like this, which would create a lot of traffic with people going to and from the store to buy stuff.

[Themistokles]

Yes, nice start and always nice to see a new MD on the block! I like the way you mitigate the slopes with the curving roads. The way they cling to the slope looks really natural. However, I think that the rail line needs a little more attention, like straightening and upgrade with custom commuter stations, to come into its right.

And regarding the region, I'm actually also using Timbuktu, precisely because I wanted the challenge with the steep slopes. And it'll be interesting to see where your city will be heading!

[Unconstantean]

i like the slope work. pretty cool

[vortext]

Great start to your MD, nice presentation! 

As for the new store, I'd go with #2 because it's a central location.

[eyelevel]

Thanks for the warm response to my new journal. As things progress you will be seeing more custom content, like rail stations and schools and fire/police stations. I'd like to focus on a few more of my first cities before I switch to some fairly recent cities I created. With that said, lets continue on...
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Continuing from last time, I will mention the two odd balls in Glenbroke, As seen in this picture, both involve the rail line. On the left you see a rather unusual highway underpass that shifts north about 112 meters. The second oddity is the apartment complex above a rail tunnel.

This apartment complex, named Railside Manor, is an old historic building dating back to Glendbroke’s inception. This manor proved too elegant to be destroyed when the railroad was realigned. So the solution was to dig and go under. This historic manor housed Glendbroke’s elite tourists from the surrounding region and only catered to the very best.
Glendbroke-Oct. 14, 471370652121 by Harley Trader, on Flickr
Here is a close up of HWY 250 northern branch crossing under the railroad. My original intention here was to perform and elevated overpass above both the rail and 250N but limitations a few years ago prevented me from doing so. I did experiment recently with an elevated rail (didn’t save it), but I feel the underground road allows for me to have more liberties with the transitions and lets me imagine that the incline is more smooth than what it appears. Ignore the yellow image labels as this picture is  just personal notes and thoughts I wrote out. I may try a L3 to L1 transition at some point to see if that looks good or not.

Enlarged Right Image:Glendbroke-Oct. 2, 481450384582 by Harley Trader, on Flickr
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Chapter 2: Velapoint

Let’s move just a bit north now and talk about the City of Velapoint. Created way back in 2003, this city has gone through a major rejuvenation a few years ago. I don’t have photos though, but like Glendbroke, this city looks drastically different from what it did ten years ago. A lot of this is due to the RHW and how it makes highways more realistic in size, and the sense that this city has lost it’s vastness, in my eyes, over the years. I want to illustrate and describe some key differences to what this city used to look like before its major renovation, so to do that I will overlay illustrations on a current screenshot.

Let's go closer...

and closer...for the wide shot of Velapoint...
Slide 2_6 by Harley Trader, on Flickr
The big differences here in Velapoint are that the area under the green circle used to be all forest and resembled a more realistic miniature peninsula. The area under the blue shape was low shallow water, a marsh almost. Hwy 17, in white always remained the same and it is older, by five or six years, than Motorway 69, shown in green. Hwy 63, green and blue, was the major southern route and It intersected 17 before M-69 was build. It had a local alternate route, shown orange. Rt 8, violet, hasn’t changed much except for the eastern incline. The red Xs show borders that were added a few years ago when I added the RHW to this city.
Slide 2_7 by Harley Trader, on Flickr
Bardon Park is the neighborhood that has taken the area of the old peninsula and forest on it. It has nice mid sized houses and parks around them. To the east side, Bardon Park boast a respectable sized business community with their own parking garage to attract commuters.
Bardon Park by Harley Trader, on Flickr
The viaduct is actually quite useless and was built as an experiment to what I could do with the NAM at the time that specific version was released. I believe it was the first edition of the nam I used as well. I might remove the road and some of these walls around Bardon Park soon.

 

The rail line here used to go across diagonally to the lower right corner of the screen originally, right after passing the passenger station, making for an interesting crossing near route 8 and 63A.
Slide 2_10 by Harley Trader, on Flickr
This oddity, It looks more strange in the next photo, is the result of realigning the highways around this industrial district and also now having to deal with a slope mod that didn’t exist when I built this area. So to compromise with the existing area and not tearing up everything here, since it is also on an incline, I decided to make just one road go down this hill and isolate this area as an industrial district. I might change this, but I don’t know when exactly.

 

Yes, I did use pedmalls as retention walls here!

Now for a mosaic...

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Let's add some underground rail, to get around this motorway. I'll have more rail in the next update btw!
Slide 2_14 by Harley Trader, on Flickr

Bonus Image of RR setup:Velapoint-Sep. 25, 911370647304 by Harley Trader, on Flickr
...and let's wrap things up for now showcasing the northwest corner of Velapoint, residential in nature with one old farm from back when this area was rural. The houses here really aren't that desirable since they are close to the rail line, but apparently this hasn't stopped people from living in them, must have some good soundproofing!


 :)Thanks for reading

Teaser image of next update! Is that rail crossing a busy highway?

[eyelevel]

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Small update... related to...http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3303
Here we have the map of Atherton University, a mid sized university which dates back to the establishment of the Town of Atherton. Atherton is now consumed by the large business district of Downtown London, fictitious, and today mostly serves as a residential annex of London.
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Labeled Map...
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Larger parking lot and building...
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Wide shot of Atherton U. with parking lot and nearby Downtown London, bottom of screen.
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I may add new the new parking lot set recently uploaded to the stex to replace this existing lot, or I might split the parking up into smaller lots.

4-28-17 Rewritten and reorganized on flickr...




Expanded commuter parking and student parking... as well.



That's the business studies department building at the bottom, this one I added after the University of Clayhurst Expansion set was released.

[eyelevel]

Chapter 5: Crystal Lake


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Hard to believe it has already been a year since I last updated this city journal that I started eh? While I look around for an easy to find alibi we can jump back in where I left off. First, a major highway with a railroad crossing, yeah that was only temporary, mostly until I could finalize what I wanted to do with the rail line and if I even wanted it to run diagonally across the highway where I placed it.
This is the second city that I actually created in Sim City 4, back in ’04. The problem with transferring game data between multiple computers is that you don’t retain the original file creation date, so I can’t exactly remember when it was. I believe October is somewhat accurate. This city journal entry is basically going to show off the major changes I made to this city over the past few years, from the original layout where I just threw stuff down, to my current attempt at making things appear more realistic. Unfortunately, on a side note, some city connections might appear, and probably do, suffer from the “eternal commuter glitch” that is so prominent in many player’s cities. I have remedied this to a degree, but I like the general rough layout of some of my original roads, so I am going to try to preserve most of those while eliminating some of the nearby redundant ones.

Here is the original map, minus the new rail and highway on the bottom side. Hwy. 608 was added to provide a realistic connection to my city to the west which didn’t have any outside connections really, so It looked odd without an access point. The railroad is practically on its original alignment and has been built smoother. Motorway 69 at the south end, was only added in the past few years. If you go back and look at the picture that I have illustrated on, you will see how the main roadway, Highway 17, followed the coast.

In this shot, we see the finalized layout of the new highway as well as various redevelopments I’ve done. You can also see what I have not touched yet as well.
Back to the railroad crossing…

A close up of the underground rail line.
 

This area of the north-west corner was redeveloped and rebuilt to handle local traffic. I added the traffic circle since I like the angle between highways 20 & 22 and I felt a roundabout looked better.
 
The northeast corner is pretty much the same. The maxis highway is still here primarily due to my indecision yet as to what I want to do with my first SC4 city file that is just north. Since it has a large amount of smaller details I’d like to preserve I haven’t replaced the MHW near and within it yet. Also shown is a rather atrocious bend in motorway 69. This was done to provide an access that allows a path to remain on the original highway 17 south, provided I decide to remove the old highway 17-A “Alternate” entirely at some point. Highway 122 also is now connected to the city east as well. This also served to provide traffic a route while I finished construction. I did this in phases over the course of a few weeks irl.




This is a south-oriented photo showing Crystal Lake College next to Motoway 69. Highway 17 is at the top.




Basically, when I realigned highway 17 I made it straighter and I used it’s east-west arraignment to build a new road for it westward, which then led me to continue with a connector avenue to this point in the picture where I build a new offramp to serve the “downtown” center of Crystal Lake. The rail line in the bottom of this picture is one of the only segments that I didn’t reused at all. To have a nice slope on the motorway. I had to move the railroad to a new southern alignment. This also allowed me to redevelop this area for a nice quaint neighborhood.

I can’t even remember the order of what I did first. You can see the railroad was revised later on in the lower left.


You can certainly see what I have not updated yet!

"Downtown" pictures...

[praiodan]

This town indeed looks still very... I don't know. Primordial might be the word I'm looking for.  Some nice work on your city improvements, a couple of nice interchanges. Although, have you considered using a softer slope mod? You also might want to turn of the game grid by pressing [G].