Kaysland

[scott1964]

Some nice pictures 

[RickD]

Great new MD.  I like all the close-ups and that you are caring about small details. It creates a nice small town atmosphere.

[Swordmaster]

Great. I like your building style.


Cheers
Willy

[City Planner]

Thank you everyone for the kind comments.  I had a little free time on my hands.  Here is an overview of the town of Sanderson.

[vester]

Nice little town you got there.

That last pictures is in PNG-format and they are rather big.
I opened your pictures in IrfanView and saved in jpg-format with a quality/compression rate set at 75 %.
That made your picture around 1/10 the size of the original. (1.86 mb to 192 kb)

[Themistokles]

The level of detail that you're putting into your work is really paying off and you've captured the American style really well. I especially like the realism of the commercial lots. Something I thought of when I saw the latest picture was that, in such an open landscape, wouldn't there be farms and cattle fences - or are you planning to urbanise it all?

[Bipin]

The level of detail here is phenomenal! A level of complexity that I can attest to; it's not easy to do, but you've done it well. The MMP work is spot on.

[City Planner]

Its been a minute but I'm going to post a few teasers to get the blood flowing.

First of all, replies

Bipin - Thank you very much.  Its quite an honor to hear that from you.

Themistokles - Thank you.  At this point this is just going to be a beach town,  As we move further outside of town limits there will be tons of agriculture

Vester - Sorry bout that.  Thanks.

Now lets see whats new around town.  If you look back a few pics there was street that had the mcdonalds, Eckerds, strip mall and gas station... Well that street is complete,  Sanderson has built a bar and a market.   This is for the local citizens.  Also across the street there is office space available in the new office building.



Here is a close up for some details for the lot editor junkies out there like me..



Now lets head down the block from the bar.  A mix of medium wealth and low wealth homes are popping up.



Different angle




Remember the lake behind the hotel,  Here is a quick glance of the neighborhood behind the lake.



Thats it for now guys,  I am currently working on the town hall and a few facilities around that area.  New pics will be up soon.

[benedict]

Good to see another update. Very nice details along the water's edge.

[art128]

Nice update. I like the little commercial strip.

[weixc812]

Wow, such a lovely small town you've got! 

[City Planner]

Thank you everyone for the wonderful comments.  I wanted to go in depth on how to control the residential growth of your city.  Of course you know it is impossible to plop Residentials.  But today we are going to review/learn how to control the growth of your residentials.  In my CJ all the residential buildings are fully functional and none are abandoned (knock on wood). 

First thing we need to do is Check the demand of your map.  Sometimes there can be a demand for only commercial and not residentials.  If there is no demand for residentials, they will not grow.  As you can see here on the chart below I have demand for R$$, R$$$, CO$$$ .  I-AG , I-D, I-M , I-HT


Find a residential that you want to use that fits your demand .  In this case,  I am looking for a R$$ that can fit the feel of a small American town.  I chose the 1935 Marion house.  Now I load it up into the Lot Editor.


Add your effects to the lot.  The bats usually come in lots that are not complete so you may want to add your own touch to the lot based on your surrounding areas. 
First I add the mandatory things like mailboxes, driveway textures, garage, etc.


Now we move to the backyard.    Lets place the textures


We add then add some backyard props. 


Now we are done with the Lot.  Save as...  Change name.  Also keep in mind that this is a Stage 3 R$$.  It tells you on the bottom right corner of the editor next to Growth Stage.


Now we need to make sure that it works in the game with the correct properties. We have to Open Ilive reader.  Make sure you make copies of the files before you begin modding.  First we need to see how many people actually live in this house.  If it is too high or low we can change the amount to fit the demand of our city.  Open up the .desc file of the building you are working with.  Load up exemplar.  This file contains the Capacity Satisfied values.   These values tell you the maximum amount of people that live/work in that building.  I have highlighted it for you.


The capacity satisfied values are in Hexadecimal form.  You can use a hexadecimal to decimal converter to find out what numbers you want to use.  The value of this R$$ before I changed it was (0x00000002A) 42; this was too high for a house this size and technically the demand is not there for it. So as you can see in the example below I changed the R$$ value to (0x0000000C) 12 and the R$ value to (0x0000000F) 15.  The red highlighted location that shows 0x0000000f and 0x0000000C  is where you would change the values.  The top is for R$ and the bottom is for R$$.  Hit Apply on the right 1st and than hit apply on the bottom 2nd.  Click Save...   




Now we need to Change the Growth Stage.  This will guarantee that it builds as soon as we zone it.  In the Ilive reader open up the lot file that you just created in the Lot Editor.  Load up Exemplar files.  You can see that the growth stage for the lot has a value of 0x03 which means Growth Stage 3.  We want to change this to Growth stage 1 which is value 0x01.


We are going to zone the residential lot that we just created next to this house . 


And Voila!  Within a few months it grows.  Make it historical and you're done.  As you can see there are commuters and the max size is 12 just like we put in the ilive reader.




And this my friends is how to control residential growths.  I hope you enjoyed.  This should help you in creating cities that you can control based on supply and demand.

[ﾕﾐーちゃん]

Wow! This is really good! Keep up the amazing work! 日本の国からのご挨拶！

[City Planner]

Wow! This is really good! Keep up the amazing work! 日本の国からのご挨拶！

Thank you,  I tried to steer away from the normal update and give out some good and worthy information.  I'm glad you liked it. 
Even though this has been discussed before; it was placed in different threads.  I combined a few different tutorials into 1.

Main Tutorial - How to Control Residential Growth
This consisted of 3 sub-tutorials
1st Tutorial -  Lot Editor Tips
2nd Tutorial- How to Change Capacity Size (Maximum amount of people that habitat lot)
3rd Tutorial- How to Change Growth Stage

[vortext]

Always nice to see someone have a go at custom lotting and you definitely have a great eye for detail! 

What's not so great, however, is the way you've changed the lot to 'fit' the demand, which in itself is a bit backwards honestly. If a lot won't grow, one needs a larger city and/or more demand but that's not the issue here.

The point is growth stages are determined by lot density (residents/jobs per tile), which is a function of Occupant Size and Lot Size among others. To put it another way: there're good reasons (i.e. calculations) for any given growth stage and as such, it's bad practice to change it at will without properly adjusting related values, which includes more than just Capacity Satisfied. Otherwise the discrepancies will accumulate and over time become detrimental to the RCI simulator, causing a plethora of frustrating issues (e.g. no growth despite seemingly healthy demand, lots not upgrading, random abandonment, etc)

Fortunately, all is not lost. Instead of manipulating the building desc by hand in the Reader, I'd strongly suggest you start using the SC4PIM to do this. It's far more suitable for the job because it uses the so-called Filling Degree property to (re)compute all the necessary properties for you, thus ensuring the lots are balanced. Though it should be noted that even in SC4PIM it's ill-advised to set the growth stage more than one above or below what it assigns automatically. Again, fiddling with growth stages is a surefire way to screw over the entire RCI simulator.

Other than that, I also think you'll the find the build-in Lot Editor in the SC4PIM more convenient for your lotting, which is rather excellent indeed!   

[noahclem]

Great to see your recent updates! Excellent townscapes and promising lotting 

[City Planner]

Thank you to everyone that commented on my tutorial.  I am going to leave you with a quick update for the weekend.

This is the Town Hall for Sanderson,  This is composed of the Town Hall building, Clock Tower Park and Mayors House


Next is a quick up to date view of Sanderson



Enjoy your weekend!!

[City Planner]

Hello guys,  I was working on a boardwalk area by the beach and lighthouse.  Here's a few pictures around the area.  Enjoy!!

[art128]

Nice looking beach!

[benedict]

Excellent work as always.