Siilijoki

[kelis]

My friend you have a computer in your mind, right ? Those interchanges are crazy !! I can't wait to see that roundabout completed.

I would like to thank you for that tribute on SC4D and it's birthday and for that you are doing and you did for the community, thanks 

Thanks so much my friend, I'm glad if my little tribute offered a bit of something nice to the people of this great site. I very much hope to contribute more as time goes forward and having such nice support certainly helps keep my love of SC4D going or maybe even growing Do still have high hopes on finishing the roundabout, though now it'll be situated in a new city, but one sharing much in common with the one here. Hopefully I'll even get it functioning well and pass it along for others to enjoy. And the day I stop with the crazy interchanges will be the day--I don't know, some day that would just never happen 

-Noah

[Tyberius06]

Woooow!!!!

Those highways! I got a lot of inspirations from the way how you build up your highway and railway system. I'm the middle of a lot of background project and the last 2 months I didn't open up either of my cities, but recently seen WIP city project from others (including you) gave me ideas. Thank you so much!
Oh, I don't know what is your plan with the already showed very nice new tram-in-avenue textures of yours, but whenever they will be ready, I think it worths a release.
Thanks to showing these nice pictures!

- Tyberius

Thanks Tibi, very glad to provide ideas! I haven't been actively working on the texture set in a while but do hope to resume. In the meantime I make all my working files available on request. Lots of work still to be done with them but there's enough done that they're fairly usable.

-Noah

[brick_mortimer]

...I hope you enjoyed my little bit of a show attempting to tribute SC4D

I always like a good show

Your attempt to pay tribute to SC4D was succesful, don't you worry 

Thanks a lot, glad I didn't disappoint

-Noah

[Seaman]

Woooow!!!!

Those highways! I got a lot of inspirations from the way how you build up your highway and railway system.

I can second that. I've actually downloaded some of your transit network pictures and spent quite some time analyzing them in order to get some inspirations. In respect to RHW and RRW, I consider your style to be exemplary.

Can't think of a lot nicer compliment--thanks ! Very happy to offer ideas and inspiration

-Noah

[Themistokles]

Firstly, it is very interesting to read your reflections on the site and the game. Even though RL allows one time sometimes and sometimes not, SC4 always comes back. You and all the other administrators are doing a wonderful job to allow us who do not have time to participate that much a possibility to enjoy and share aspects of the game.

Secondly, you know what I think about interchanges in general, but I have to say... those are works of engineering art! I especially love how they snake around the rails and the rails weave through them.

Thirdly, that roundabout and tram station are going to be epic!

Thanks a lot! Really an honor to have a chance to help out with this site and I hope to be able to be more active with it And I'm tickled you like my interchanges given your feelings about them--though I think we share a lot of the same feelings on that, just with rather different conclusions. While I don't plan on returning to the previous region at present the content projects started there like the tram stuff are very much still intended to continue.

-Noah

[art128]

Interesting approach with the power plants along the river waterfalls. These interchanges are absolutely marvelous. I have no idea how you can come up with the designs of them and manage to create them so well in the game.

Also looking forward to the roundabout.

Thanks a lot man! I'm wanting to do something pretty similar with the power plant and waterfall again but not sure how or where--hopefully I can sneak it in somewhere anyway; the northwest section seems designed for that. Thanks for the kind words on the interchanges and roundabouts

-Noah

[Gugu3]

Oh my...this is just incredible! I have always loved how your transport system fits the surrounding environment...but this one is just insane and so complex too!!! Great work

Thanks a lot Guglielmo! Will try to do the same type of system again here

-Noah

[Badsim]

Hi Noah ,

Anyone would have to be blind or a completely stupid person to do not measure your involvement for our community and the game ... well , at that degree of involvement , it becomes everything but a game . Unfortunately , not obvious to avoid that this « everything but a game » turns to an addiction , with its cycles of pleasures and frustrations ... personally , as long as I have more pleasure than frustration , I can live with the awareness to have a deep addiction . 

BTW , I can see greatness everywhere in your pictures , whatever the subject matter you're broaching . I'm particularly fond of what you did with Poseidon's Mods ... I feel the need to copy that ... urgently !



Cédric.

[noahclem]

Thanks so much to everyone for the last warm response, especially those I've not yet thanked (for whom replies are now half a year overdue )! I hadn't realized quite how long it's been since I updated or how much I've actually worked on and not shared. I decided not long after the last update to scrap the region and worked for quite a while on yet another new airport. In both the new and old cases I hadn't actually created a new region but was just working on tiles I planned to later integrate into a real region. In both cases I'd originally planned to hand-terraform it to my plans but a while back I decided to use RL ones since the main point of starting the new region was to use fjords and I doubted my ability to do them very realistically. Not finding a map that had all I wanted I decided to stitch several together, thereby also allowing myself more unique terrain to build on. The process has been long and pain-staking, especially as my laptop's performance seems to have declined significantly and I was getting a ton of lag in GIMP with the huge images involved--I started with 24x24 large tiles to be able to see, compare, and integrate the regions involved, over 6000px square with lots of layers, including 2 for everything (grayscale topo ones and terraformer-colored ones) with file sizes upwards of 300MB. Finally, I've finished the first rough draft, which is the final of this sequence of progress shots:

(click)








I've now got it down to a "slim" 20x20 or 80x80km or 1600km^2. I believe there are now 10 separate maps included with at least one that should be familiar to some, albeit rearranged into three separate chunks with changes to elevation and orientation as well. Since fjords and other glacial geography were much of the goal everything's from high latitude and/or high altitude regions. I'm curious of any of the regional terrains are recognizable though they very well may not be since they've been chopped up, rotated, and sometimes scaled in all three dimensions.

The main city center is planned for the island just south of where the two northern fjords encounter a transverse wateraway. There's still a considerable amount of work to be done to get the map into relatively finished condition, mostly terraforming the numerous remaining rough edges where non-watery parts of maps meet. I also plan on extending those two northern fjords up to the northern border, extending the northeast river toward where those fjords end with a delta, and possibly adding more interesting stuff to the mountains like a very high massif west of where the western fjord meets the northern border and an additional volcano that's not isolated from other mountains. Before that though I think I'll start building. Getting a bit tired of pixel-pushing

I think I'll post an update fairly soon on the work on the "new" airport and any map progress. Hope you found this interesting

edited attempting clarity with area figures

[Alan_Waters]

It's grandiose!
I will not say that this is mine, because many mountains, and little space for cities, I like the more densely populated landscapes, but the work is done immensely. 
A lot of respect! 

Thanks! It's indeed very difficult terrain for city building--maybe even worse than it looks But I'll be adding flatter area around the main city area I mentioned and smooth out that island as well, either manually or just by scaling elevation down in terraformer. There's also pretty flat spaces for smaller towns in the southeast, southwest, and northeast and I'll flatten other areas as needed--very sloped area is just too much of a pain to work with for more than a small part of development

-Noah

[Seaman]

Wow, what a plan. It's kind of a meta-project since the beautiness of the region will only be seen outside of SC4 by stiching?

I decided not long after the last update to scrap the region and worked for quite a while on yet another new airport.

[...]

I think I'll post an update fairly soon on the work on the "new" airport and any map progress. Hope you found this interesting

You have me on the edge of my chair, here! 

PS:
In case you need some help with the fjords, you can ask Slartibartfast. I think he has done tremendous work in Norway. He really loves their "lovely crinkly edges" and argues that they give a continent a lovely baroque feel...

Once I get the elevations between the different region segments to transition smoothly (what I'm calling stitching together) it should look pretty nice in the region view but the biggest advantage will be the quality and variety of different terrains involved. This project both reminded me of how many great maps there are out there and was, for me, unprecedented in that I actually put all the interesting regions into the game and peered around, finding lots of neat stuff I otherwise wouldn't have. I will definitely share the other developments sooner than later--only have an overview handy right now and would rather show some more detailed stuff at the same time I give away the whole plan and layout of that whole area

I hope Slartibartfast would be pleased    I'm a Douglas Adams fan and it also turns out that he's referenced in this map that is one of the regions I've used

-Noah

[Gugu3]

Great to see you back with new content Noah! Looking forward to seeing where this goes...

[brick_mortimer]

Your new map looks impressive!
That's the kind of effort I'm not willing / able to make.
If it comes to terraforming I'm quite lazy. Either I go for a flat region, or I take a premade region and that's it 

Btw, if you're honnoring Slartibartfast I suggest you make your region 42 x 42 

Looking forward to what you will do with it   

[Sunset_baby]

Hi Noah!

In your november update, I notice that you are using a custom el-rail texture mod (if only for terrain smoothing).
If I recall correctly that very similar to something Buddybud was working on long ago.

Is this mod back in the works again? Will it (hopefully) be a part of a future NAM update?

[noahclem]

Happiest of wishes for you and yours in 2019!!! Things have progressed here but (shockingly) I've been having trouble drawing the line at which point whatever work I'm up to should get at least a public progress report, if not something better. This won't be the first new year that I make an effort to adhere a bit more closely to that lofty goal ( ) but at least the arrival of 2019 seems to have given me enough of a nudge to finally post a thing or two.

EDIT: this update got delayed by about everything I could imagine, even needing to find new image hosting (and then to re-find pics planned for sharing), and while that was the least of my problems I pushed through just to get it behind me while leaving a good bit of silliness and not-particularly-refined plans or presentation I'm sure. Hope you'll bare with me.

Fortunately I did finally finish my fjord-forward, famously frozen, fell-infested, fully forested region that I started stitching together almost a year ago. Moreover, there's a multitude of much more mountainous mega-peaks making mere miniatures of more minor mounts that might make many mates moan when a mention of ascension is rumored to be murmured. The game's altimeter gets well into the "redline" in multiple areas of the map, with the highest aforementioned peaks being borrowed from the Karakorum range and with not-as-vertical-but-very-voluminous volcanic vistas that are mostly borrowed from Kamchatka (NORO). Hopefully the alliteration bug is out of my system   

click for full size

In any case, I really am happy with how the map turned out, though I will likely make substantial changes to it in the future, most obviously cleaning up some seems, but probably adding new features as ideas, suggestions, and possibilities reveal themselves. The extreme relief will cause tons of headaches in building cities and transit but the potential for top-notch, scenic transit connections appears very real--note my intentional placement of watershed divides in multiple places in order to require tough mountain roads with tunnels, passes, switchbacks, and loops.



After finishing the map much of my attention has gone to bridges--they're real fascinating in the real world and have so many possibilities in SC4! For me they've always been a huge limiting factor in game but after intense study of how they work in RL and SC4 I'm eager to put in some solid work in the area. I've got a number of side projects with those but the main thing has been trying to adapt srainy's Shanghai Minpu cable-stayed bridge to work well in the game. The author tried working with the NAM to get his bridge working with that mod and up to standard but apparently due to language trouble or lack of time or interest he decided to do an as-is release on ST rather than have the files just sit unused and un-shared. It's never been as big of a problem but bridges require a single controller to reference them in much the same way you can only have one (conventional) NAM controller and the release required a manual edit of that file's text which, combined with the unusual "MHW8" implementation, resulted in it getting almost no use. Taking him up on his suggestion to bring things up to NAM standards, I've made modifications to the IIDs so that a new or modified controller is no longer required, and made changes to the models and textures and introduced a suspension bridge variant as well: the cable-stayed version will never really function right over a range of possible lengths until new bridge RULs are made for it I'm really hoping someone else might still be willing to deal with that end of things    It's nothing too tough but I kept making syntax errors trying to edit it and it needs to be told exactly how to handle a couple hundred lengths or so. I'd rather use my energy to get frustrated about something else, like an extended width transition in the first 3 or so tiles Anyway, here's some pictures of work on that,

Here's the original-but-re-IID'd cable-stay alongside a remodeled and retextured suspension variant:


Perhaps my favorite skin texture, I was real disappointed to notice how similar it looked to the Maxis long suspension bridge. Still great though, and it features the wider/normal width upper deck paired with a full-width lower deck, which allows the truss work of the model to be easily visible.



The "skins" remain something of a WIP but I call this cor10 after the steel that's designed to weather and maintain its appearance like that. Note narrower lower deck but same tower crossbar height as the previous one, lower than in the first pic.



The bridge models use two main .fsh files for their textures and this is an example of one. I had high hopes for this "aluminum"-patterned light blue but it just never looked right at scale.

I'd want to avoid large-scale RHW texture changes almost like the plague but I'm really happy with the highway texture! The original concrete wasn't me but everything else I made from scratch. I've not yet encountered a scenario where the lower deck rail would even be visible, much less have a chance at functioning, but I like the way my HSR one turned out too (no doubt also better suited to relatively short bridge spans than a whole region's worth of HSR) and that one was all from scratch...


Wanted to go into road deck texture again. The non-end models are modified by me for narrower median (75cm wide concrete anyone?), having a usable/existent shoulder, and adjustment of UV mapping to have the fsh texture fit without any stretching or compression. The left-hand end model is original while the right-hand one shows the width transition I'm working on and hoping to extend over ~3 tiles. I've kept the lane width similar to srainy's at a bit under 4m, noticeably less than RHW but a good bit wider than major, urban, 8-lane bridges (NYC's GWB's 14 lanes are less than 3m each for example), which I think will suit almost everyone aesthetically if the transition is done well, though a bridge drawn in the conventional way like this will lack true 8S capacity and thus not please some. Fear not though, I've already drawn up a compact 6S version My view is that several width and height combinations, not all of which need be installed and potentially clog bridge selection, would be the ideal outcome here.


Almost thought I'd be done with bridges for today but thought I better show this one off. Cosmetic only for now, though the streetlight placement isn't really helping that cosmetic label   I do hope we'll get this one to work one way or another.



Time to be done with bridges for a bit    I'm planning my city's central station as Gare du Nord, fittingly sitting a couple km north of this station, which is not a terminus but is a secondary central station where all trains stop (final implementation along this style would involve custom lots with underground rail or tunnel to leave the station in both directions). I've struggled to come up with anything I'm particularly happy with for it and may well revise things as soon as a suitable train shed prop came about but i'm relatively happy with a setup building off of this. If the terminus has 12 tiles/24 platforms then maybe 8-10 tiles is about right for a station in this type of environment? Hope I'll get a chance to show off the actual development and planning of the city pretty soon but no promises


If you made it this far, thanks!

[manga rivotra]

The map is really very impressive! 
Even more than the pronounced relief, it is the presence of water everywhere that seems to me to be the difficulty (or perhaps the great interest of this relief according to the point of view with which one approaches the thing  ).
I can not wait to see you build this delta. 
Bridge reskins are always a good idea because I think, it's been a few years now no downloads about it has been published, and your progress are very interesting. 

[Gugu3]

Impressive as always! Love the map and the effort you have put inot bridges!

Big fan of railways so can only be excited by the work on the central station!

Keep it up

[mattb325]

Awesome work with the map  . I love what you've done with the central station and those bridges are brilliant. If you hadn't pointed out the lights I'd never have noticed 

[noahclem]

Please mind the gaps Anyway, thought I'd post now after finally getting my new map's basics together--hopefully I'll find good ways to fill in the gaps, though I've already cleared up the biggest stitches where maps meet near the city center. The core of the map is the heavily fjorded Tofino in the northwest and the aptly-named Noatak in the southeast. Others included are Mt Russell (halved topography from part of my last map in the southwest), Thunder Bay (east of city center), and Quebec City (northeast quadrant).

Blue for motorways or major highways, red for rails, purple for HSR. First (rough) draft



Here's a fun project I started after coming to terms with my limitations as a batter and the limitations of available 3DS max: just editing fsh files


Because everyone needs a drunk tram for some reason:


And finally, in these troubling times, stay safe, stay sanitary! (don't swim in our toilet!)