The Noro Cooperative

[j-dub]

Darn, looking at the visuals in this MD, versus the more cartoon-tone graphics of the new one, there is no comparisson.


Hehe, no cartoonish looks here! Thanks man!

-Noah

[noahclem]

More ideas for the basic region layout plan. I think this process will be easiest if we start with the basic things we're in agreement on and move forward from there. In this pic I've tried to include some of those basics:



The road layouts are imprecise but I think in general we can agree roads should go in these places, as most are determined primarily by geography.

1. Road(s) heading north from the center along the river valley. Where the valley widens/forks I figure the road will as well.
2. A road heading south from the center along the coast of the bay. The hills and water dictate pretty precisely where this will have to go. This road would be part of a large system circling the bay between the hills and water.
3. A road heading east from the center along the coast of the bay. Part of the same system as road #2.
4. Roads connecting the east shore road with areas east, probably to a city somewhere around Wr and/or Wy and surroundings. Hills leave us few options for paths here.
5. Road(s) connecting the south shore road with the border and local areas off of the main road there (tile Lw for example).
6. A main road connecting the center to the northeast. Plenty of options for routes as the terrain is not as difficult in this area.
7. A road heading west from the center along the valley ending at As.
8. A road heading southwest from the center along the valley ending at By.
9. A road through the valley between Du and Lu.
10. A road following the line of hills between Fq and Jq, joining the radial routes together.
11. One or more beltway systems around the center. Geography leaves these routes pretty flexible so I didn't include them on the map.
12. An airport somewhere along the river valley north of the city. This is essentially the only area with large areas of very flat land which makes it a fairly obvious place for the airport I think. How far away from the center to build it is a less obvious question....



Going beyond the area's of more likely agreement I made a couple other maps of some more ideas.

Possible city areas circled in black
Possible nature preserves circled in purple
Possible seaports circled in orange
Possible airport circled in blue

One more.... I find myself fascinated by the possibility of a 5-way motorway interchange on the outskirts of the main city. Talk about something that might require outside ideas--does anyone here have ideas for a 5-way interchange in a suburban environment? (based on NAM 31 publicly planned specs of course, because this won't be built before then)


These are just vague and very general ideas. The future is wide open 

What do you guys think?



NOTE!  The Rs-Us route is cancelled as a major highway due to poor planning (guess who's  ) and excessive mountains. Instead a primary route is likely to run from Su to Wy. In fact, that route has already been constructed in secrecy as a very minor road--likely (if I'm able to convince you all and my team mates) to eventually become a MHW-override network, aka a Project Symphony route

[MTT9]

Really like this new layouts! I can't wait to see what happens


Glad you like them and hopefully they work well. We're still fairly early in the process of planning and Willy has some interesting things planned that will be shared soon.... Thanks!

-Noah

[MandelSoft]

All right! I see quite some planning up ahead


Thanks Maarten! Lots of planning coming indeed. Thanks again for your planning ideas earlier, they've been very helpful.

-Noah

[Shroud]

That region map is awesome. This going to be an MD to watch!


Thanks and welcome to the Noro Co-op! We hope you continue to enjoy it and participate here 

-Noah

[Swordmaster]

So, planning eh? 





I've always felt a plan needs to communicate feelings rather than just transit setups. Or rather, that the transit layouts will draw themselves after how the structure of the metro area is laid out. This is hardly any different from what Noah posted but it employs a different strategy.

So what we need to know first is:

     1/ an idea of scale and size;
     2/ an idea of density and development patterns;
     3/ an idea of basic economics, preferably with some historical thought as well.

You can draw lines of motorways and railways but why exactly are they there? Which one was first and has historical pre-eminence? How did transit affect development and vice versa?

Don't worry folks, we don't need to get down in the details of all of this too much. But you'll want to end up with a coherent and harmonious urban area, or at least something that makes sense in a realistic way. (Or however we perceive reality, of course.) The building will be twice as fun then.

This kind of planning also has the advantage of conjuring up mental images of how an area will look like. At the same time it forces you to think about historical development, which in turn will draw the road & rail map for you.

So this map is just a rough sketch of how I feel the geography lends itself to certain setups. If I were to build this map, I would cluster all the major economic hotspots and older parts of the city around the central river valley. Then more recent sprawl areas radiate from that along the highways. With "Secondary Cities" I mean commercial centers with medium density development (think White Plains). Inner cities are R$ mid or high density, optionally with public housing projects. Sprawl and middle class areas are low density by definition. Note: I'm not talking about architectural style or which kind of plugins here; just density and function.


This is a basic rail map I think would make sense in that environment:





Cheers
Willy

[rambuckel]

Wow, impressing plans that you have. And I guess we can look forward to hundreds or even thousands of brilliant pictures!

I'm very curious!

I'm glad we have you curious. There will be a lot to see soon enough. - Robin

[rooker1]

So I guess it's my turn now.  Here is my vision/thoughts.


I'm not sure why my Photobucket account keeps changing my 5000x5000 image to 1024x1024.
This also my first attempt at InkScape while using Maarten's Tutorial.  I think I still need some practise.

Robin

[MTT9]

Seams like the three of you are getting to a unite idea for the general layout. I'll stay tuned

We are on the same page for sure as we have been having very indepth conversation everyday now for a few weeks.  I hope you enjoy. - Robin

[Shroud]

I love the map btw. That river delta looks amazing.

We are glad you like the map as much as we do.  If you go to the first post you see the link to the map. - Robin

[noahclem]

Some developments on the cooperative/cloud end of things recently that we think could be interesting to you.

There are a number of potential difficulties sharing a region like this. The most obvious problem is if two people are editing a tile at the same time. Additionally, the way the game's simulator works, whenever a tile is saved all surrounding tiles are saved. This is how neighbor connections and region demand are passed throughout the region. Because of this we must take care not only to not play the same tile at the same time, but to not play tiles separated by less than two other tiles at the same time.

Additionally there seems to be a risk of corrupted files when more than one person is making changes to the region at the same time. To mitigate those risks we've decided it's best to play the region not directly from the shared cloud folder but from ones within our own computers.

Our plan now is to open up a new thread in our private board (yes, there's a super-secret extra level of the noro cooperative  ) where anyone of us wanting to play a tile will need to make a post "checking it out", along with all neighboring tiles. After playing, the user will need to upload all affected tiles back to the cloud and make another post noting the changes made to the shared region folder and the new availability of the area. Whenever an upload post is made everyone should update their region folders to reflect the changes.

We've asked Tage/Ripplejet for a bit of help, trying to confirm that things will indeed work the way we think they will. We've not heard back from him yet but will have more confidence in the plan once we have.

The main other work lately here has been sorting out the rail network style plans: diesel vs. electric and maximum slope being the primary questions. The current thinking is an all diesel freight network, operated on completely separated tracks from the passenger systems. The target maximum slope for rails is a 2% grade, which corresponds to a slope of about 1.33 in SC4 terms, taking into account vertical distortion from SC4's projection system of about 30%. Pretty realistic but not so easy--it takes the length of almost an entire large tile to rise 100 meters, and the NORO region is not so flat. The very tentative plan is for the passenger/commuter rail systems to be electrified with a bit less strict of a slope target. We've also confirmed we'll be blocking all Maxis lots.

Sorry, no pictures for today 

[sunv123]

I personally love the idea of the rundown part of the inner city. I have a ton of ideas for it, as i am thinking back about my recent trip to the Bronx/Manhattan island.

Can't wait to hear more about the situation.

P.S. It's great to hear that it's going to be Maxis Free.

We would love to hear your ideas as indepth as you would like, please. - Robin

[noahclem]

What are you guys' thoughts on nomenclature? I assume we'll want to involve the SE Canada/NE America theme. In those areas there are a bunch of traditional English/Canadian/American names, as well as a number of Native American named features. One other thing I've considered is incorporating some names related to the real-life location of the NORO project in Kamchatka. More importantly, I've been thinking that all tile/city names should be prefaced by their coordinate letters/numbers. For example Whale Inlet would be titled "Uu Whale Inlet". This will make it much easier for us as we upload our changed tiles (with their surroundings) back to the cloud.

[Jmouse]

I have seen this thread in the list of recent posts, but I didn't know what it was. Now that I have taken a look, I'll find time to go through it from the beginning.

This looks like it will be very interesting...
-Joan


Thanks Joan.  I hope you'll be able to find time to go through it all and keep up to date in the future. I can see us speeding along very soon as we are just about set up to start. - Robin

[Badsim]

Hey there ! What are you doing ? 

Ambitious project ...  how to be not excited ? While 3RR is  down , while a coming casual game pretends to catch our attention  , and not only our money , we really need something of that vein . Thank you ! 

Cédric.

Hey right back at you.  Good to see you in here.  We would love to hear your thoughts on our little project.  We hope you really enjoy it. - Robin

[rooker1]

 Some more developments that we think could be interesting to you.

The Plugins folder is now about 98% ready to go.  I have done my usual super organised folder setup, but this time they include pictures for now until we all become accustom.  The plugins folder is as of right now 4.16GB and has 8,768 files in 1,703 folders.  And this doesn't include the size of the new NAM, which we still need to collectively discuss what options we are going to go with.  With this size we may need two Google Drive accounts.

We will be using CAM to promote even growth but we plan to use a money cheat when necessary.  Maybe as the cities and or towns become sizable and more stable so will the the income be in the black.  The only other cheat we may use will be to increase the radius of certain civics.  We may want a large hospital or fire station to cover more area than they do now.  Possible even schools in smaller towns may need a wider bus radius.  We will be trying to make realistic city layouts as best we can.

We have had our discusion with Tage (Ripplejet) and preformed a few tests to be sure, but only the immediate tiles next to the tile you are playing (in) are affected by game save.  So several people can play the region at the same time provided they are more than two tiles away from each other.  To make things a lot easier for us our great friend wouanagaine has made us a very nice program that will help us out with who has what tile and how close we can come to each other.  We will still use the Private Sign out and in thread to start the process so that no two people will be trying to start a tile while someone else may be doing the same thing.  At the end of game play the person will sign the tile back in and upload the affected game save files so others are always up to date before they play.

As for nomenclature we have decided to go with the prefix before the tiles official name.  This just makes more sense as it will be much easier for us all to find the tiles.

We will be going with a separate freight and passenger rail lines.  We still need to figure out their skins and whether or not the passenger rails will be electrified or not.

We are also talking about what other modds will be needed, such as train, tram, police, fire and ambulance skins.  Snow capp height, although  I think we have nailed our terrain and water modds.  I think we may work on or tweak a tree controller for our region as I think there will be a lot of trees.

I believe once we have the NAM options worked out, we will be ready to start play, most likely next week.

Sorry no pictures today.

Robin

[epicblunder]

I think we may work on or tweak a tree controller for our region as I think there will be a lot of trees.

I don't know how much tree controller experience you guys have but if you want some pointers at any point i can offer some input, and i'm sure vortext will be glad to give you his $.02

Building separate freight and passenger rail lines (and keeping them non-intersecting) is fun, i look forward to all this rail goodness that's sure to come.

Now hurry up and get building!   

[Swordmaster]

No no, hurry up and wait   Both Noah and I have got some RL business these days, so it's all Robin talking to himself mostly    However, this project is getting a lot more exciting than what shows up at the surface -- more details soon.

In the mean time, make an exercise for yourself and think about what it would entail to play SC4 in a real "multiplayer" way, without ruining your game. Not just shoving around city tiles through a cloud server, but really building simultaneously on different tiles in the region. Think about neighbor connections, demand, save files, plugins, the whole thing.

Yes, it's really exciting because we think this may end up working perfectly.


Cheers
Willy

[rooker1]

Outside Robin's comfort zone.


Thanks everyone for your patience.  It may seem like not much is going on here but I can tell you that we have been very, very busy in the back ground.
First off I would like to welcome a new member to The NORO Team.  Without him we would be stuck doing a ton of work every time someone wanted to take thier turn playing.  This person is one of our best programers in the SC4 Community today.  He once counted to infinity twice.......he walked into a room one time with Mr. T and the room immediatley exploded because it couldn't hold in the awesomeness!  This person is none other than wouanagaine.  Now the Team consists of rooker1, Noahclem, swordmaster and wouanagaine.  The team will still most likely grow in the future, but for now this will be it until we have at least several game turns accomplished between us all.
Noah was the first to go ingame and do some experimenting and even showed off some pictures.  But I am the first to go in after our plugins have been about 98% completed and actually use our logging system.  Everything so far looks like it is going as we expect and we don't see any problems yet.  Hopefully we won't run into any.

So I do have a few pics to show off.  This is my interpetation of a small camping scene along side a river.  Slightly outside my comfort zone.  Please enjoy and give all the feed back you can.

Click on picture to see full size.


















Robin

[Swordmaster]

Robin, I hope you never return to your comfort zone. This is a good a scenery as I've seen anywhere.

Crazy thought - on the day of SimCity 2013's release we're doing multiplayer in SC4. I went into the tile Robin edited and there I was, no problems whatsoever.


Proof:




Cheers
Willy

Thanks a lot Willy.  I for one have no intentions of playing the new game.  I am more than happy with the one we have now.  And just for the record, I may return to this zone again.....outside my comfort zone.  - Robin