Memphis Tn USA

[ddhm]

EPISODE I

I've always wanted to do this

Howdy guys,
It's my intention to try to journal my recreation of Memphis Tn on the mighty Mississippi. It's my home and always has been, so I'm VERY familiar with the city. I'm not sure just how faithful I'm going to be with this. The main reason is because I've been away from SC4 for many years and lots of things have changed. I'll fumble through them as best I can figure out which I'm sure will lead to LOTS of mayhem I'm sure. I've also always wanted to see a better transportation system here... especially mass transit to the airport.

My main difficulty now is with F.A.R. and my Main St. Main is a pedestrian mall with a trolley running through it for a portion of it. Things straighten out for most of the city but it started with F.A.R. I suppose this is why the bulldozer exists, hahaha. Since I have a lot more of the city drawn, I can easily blow up Main and give it a better go when I learn more.

I was fortunate enough to find an already existing map of the region (the NHP Memphis map... I'll link later, can't seem to find it now) and wanted to figure out the rest as I went. I had no idea how to begin but quickly found Google Maps to be of great value. It provided a lovely measurement feature that allowed me to get perdy dang close when I began laying out streets. I'll be leaning on this heavily I'm sure.

As far as Plug ins go, I've installed NAM and CAM as well as a host of things for CAM. I doubt anything will really be new to anyone but if you see something that I have that interests you, I'll be happy to try to figure out what it is and link it to ya. I am hoping that I can get someone to mod a Pyramid for me. Bass Pro Shops bought our old concert venue that's shaped like a pyramid and it's just off the river by the bridge. It's a very important feature here. I'll get that one a request forum shortly.

So, off I went drawing streets, naming them, shouting particularly foul things at the FARs, alt+tabbing between my calculator (yes, I'm that lazy), SC4 and Google maps. It wasn't too bad honestly. I began with the "New Bridge" (I-40) and worked my way East. It's taken all my free time on my days off (I don't have much or many) but I finally made it to the edge of the map. I went North and South then and continued the streets. I'm starting mostly with major streets just in case I need to "float" things a little here and there. The wacky curved streets will also come later. I'd rather lay out some grid stuff and fill in the other stuff after I've gotten my head wrapped around the scale of things.

Unfortunately, the map doesn't cover as far as I'd hoped. I'd be more than happy to lose about 2 rows on the West side of this map to gain two on the East (where I happen to live). I did find a Germantown Map that I think will cover part of what I'm missing. We'll see if I can figure out how to merge the 2 without messing everything up. That will probably land around episode 4 or so and result in lots more profanity in my office. I'll spare you guys that in any detail (but I might mention that it occurred).

Edit: Well, it seems that I need more like 5 large maps to the West. That is a lot more to go.

Be good or be good at it,
  Dan

It's nothing spectacular yet but I know how folks like pics. Here's the first of hopefully many!

[Swordmaster]

First off, welcome to the wonderful world of MDing

Memphis looks like an interesting city to recreate. Certainly a challenging downtown grid, and a big railyard   Good luck!

I do suggest you convert your images to JPG, though, and upload them to a dedicated hosting service and link here with [ img ] tags.


Cheers
Willy

[Themistokles]

I like the many angles of the downtown road grid. Even though it's an ordinary grid all the different angles really makes it more interesting. Am looking forward to seeing your building selection for the different areas of the city! And the tram of course

[MushyMushy]

I live there as well. In the past I considered building Memphis in SC4 but dropped the idea due to the layout and (spread-out) size of the city. I'll definitely follow this project! Your grid looks fairly accurate so far from what I can tell.
That aside, it is possible that I might BAT some more of the buildings from Memphis, particularly downtown. I currently am working on one from East Memphis, actually.

[compdude787]

Looks like fun! I hope you can keep with it.

[ddhm]

@ Willy
Thankee for the welcome The downtown grid was indeed a hairy place to start. Rails are second on my "to do" list after the roads I think. In order to really connect things for mass transit, perhaps joining the rail system to the tram system is a good possibility down the road? Time will tell.

Thanks for the suggestion on pic management. I'll have to get a photobucket or something.

@Themistokles
The tram is probably going to play a big part in this city. Subways and regular rails will most likely all play parts in the grand mass transit scheme. Of course, I have LONG way to go before I get to that.
Downtown is largely late 1800s and early 1900s stuff,  Midtown kinda starts 1920s and the buildings obviously get later as you move West so those will be a part of my building choosing criteria for sure. I've not yet decided how I'm going to go about this. Will it be "Neo-Memphis" or "faithful Memphis"? That's probably a topic I'll cover on in Episode 2.
I'm glad that the grid here isn't... too grid-ish. I am taking liberties with small road shifts and things that really square things off more than I like. To be perfectly honest, I'm kinda thinking that this might be a practice run on laying out streets since I really want a map with a lot more to the East.

@Mushy
Yet another example of "Memphis is the world's largest small town", huh? I didn't really expect to find another Memphian here. Good to see one though
Memphis is most certainly spread out, has lots of trees and is full of low density stuff. This is yet another reason I might do "Neo-Memphis". I like having a lot of that BUT I think I'd like to add about a million people to the population.
I could not tell you how cool it would be to have some of the actual Memphis buildings in my Memphis! Batting is not something I've tried yet... with so much content, there has never been a need for me to. There are a few things that I'd LOVE to see: the Fed Ex Forum, Redbirds Stadium, Graceland, the Zoo, Crosstown, perhaps CBU and Rhodes. Now that I think about it, there are LOTS of things, hahaha! Anything that you (or anyone else) would like to make would be more than appreciated.

@ Compdude
Thanks for having a look and I hope I can keep updates coming fast enough to keep folks interested!

EPISODE I (.1)

Time for some research and decisions

I beileve that I'm going to use my free time to look into the Germantown map and see what it might take to extend the map 5 more large maps East and perhaps knock 2 off the West. The config part will be easy, it's the rest that I'm worried about. Wish me luck!

[ddhm]

Episode I (.2)
That didn't go as planned

Well, this is about the 3rd time I tried to wrap my head around mapping. The first 2 were really more reading and not "hands on" but "hands on" never became an option in either instance. It just escapes me. I thought I'd try "hands on" this time but unfortunately, I can't even get one of the tools to open. Forums have been poured over, google abused and I'd swear that everything is in order (even the one optional .dll). I still have an option or 2 but I'm just not getting it to work. I decided that I'd try another route: Begging.

I went and found the creator of the map I'm using and fairly well begged him (or her?) to extend the map for me. We'll see if my attempt at humor/pitiful begging proves fruitful (fingers crossed). If it could be extended, I'd not even have to redo my streets. If that's not an option, I don't really care. I'd be more than happy to trade redoing the streets for having the whole city. The config file and the roads might be changed later anyway. That tool is working, haha!

Alright y'all, tomorrow is Valentines day and I have a little prep work to do. Have a happy one.

[threestooges]

Sorry to hear you weren't able to sort out either of the mapping programs. Could it be an issue of just needing to run them in compatibility mode with an earlier Windows version? Whatever the result, good luck. It'd be nice to see what you can do with your own home town.

[ddhm]

Episode I (.3)

Roads, roads everywhere!

It's been a good moment since I've been here (sorry about that). I hope that everyone's Valentines day went well. Since then, I've been happily gridding away the roads I could. I'm working my way towards 8x8 KM+ of grids. Every single road is not there but I wanted a little wiggle room. There have been a few "creative decisions" that I had to make. Roads that were just a little off straight, some small curves that will be put in later, you know. I've also started adding a little rail. I feel like that will ad a level of realism to what I'm seeing.
A number of questions have come up along the way. The primary one being " How should I start this?" being followed with "Should I start this?" I wanted to get most everything gridded before I press play but man, I am chomping at the bit to see buildings grow and traffic happen! The logical thing is to start in the more gridded part of downtown I think. Establish a small community, move along to the next map, rinse and repeat. That way, I can make a little cross map traffic happen. I also think I'll nip all the smaller streets that cross the borders to further establish main route traffic and let the small streets dead end on the edges of each map. It seems like I am supposed to keep my border crossings a good distance from the corners (eternal commuter issues I think), so I'll have to take that under consideration as well.

The next one is most certainly "What stuff do I download before I get started?" I'll have to first decide how much growing I want to allow to happen I guess. Most of it I'll let grow I think. I'm not going to try to specifically model every business and home in Memphis. That might (will) be too tedious. Certain things, sure.

Now, back to what to get. I've seen some flora mods out there that were impressive. Perhaps the ploppable nimby stuff? There are some seedy joints around here for sure. Railroad and car automata? Probably. Any suggestions? I suppose some modular airport stuff will be in order. What else? Who knows, hahaha.

Before I address those things, I REALLY have to answer what I'm going to do here. Am I building a pretty faithful recreation of Memphis or Neo-Memphis? I want to be somewhere in the middle. The city will begin and grow for quite a time as it exists, that much is certain. The zones and density will be close to real life. As I get everything "up to speed" with my few creative embellishments, I just know I'll want to grow things. I did after all install CAM, right? I'll have to fix the problems that arise and there are a few things that I've always wanted to see here. Our public transport system is a joke. There needs to be tram from the airport to downtown and from there into midtown. Perhaps 2 lines into midtown. Heck, I COULD run it along the Wolf River and all the way into Cordova (if Cordova were there). I'm sure that there is a route from the airport West too. If nothing else, I could join it to the rail system, right?

As a side note: If anyone reads this and gets interested enough to try doing this, I suggest using google.au. Maps there are in English and meters as the default measurement. Regular google shows meters too but they are the 2nd and smaller measurement. It's the little things, isn't it?
While we ponder those questions, I'll keep plopping streets.

Y'all be good!

[Themistokles]

Great to see you're pressing on with this! It'll be interesting to see what it'll look like when things begin to grow. And that FAR grid looks interesting too, but I do anticipate that it'll begin to be a pain as soon as things start growing... I'll follow how you'll tackle that for sure.

[noahclem]

Hehe, just realized the Johnny Cash song "Big River" was playing in my head more or less the whole time I was devouring your work here

Looks like a very promising project! I love the way the grid looks. The grid will make some things difficult, though there's at least a good selection of wall-to-wall diagonal BATs that will fit reasonably well in North American cities. Don't recall the city's layout now, but taller buildings could help to deal with the lack of FA buildings in that part of the grid. There are very few ready-made wall-to-wall FA buildings now but I think a surprisingly large amount of FA building that could be made w2w using PIM-X if one was ambitious enough.

Will be paying attention here; it's an impressive project you have so far 

[ddhm]

@ Themistoklest:
I honestly can't tell you how badly I want this to start growing too. It's becoming more and more difficult to resist the temptation to zone some R$ and get this party started! I've thought "I could just start a small community, you know... on each map. I'll get to the rest of the roads, right?" Fortunately, I'm not foolish enough to believe myself, hahaha!

The FAR grid is a bit scary indeed. To make it more interesting, that's my downtown. I can imagine that it will prove difficult to get stuff to look right there. I think that my next test city will include a FAR grid. I've got to prepare for that part before I get there.

@ Noahclem
If nothing else, at least I can say that I've brought a good tune to someone's mind, right?

Thankee fer the kind words. I've always wanted to make this happen but haven't had the ability (or so I thought). It might take a while but it's most certainly gonna happen!

Fortunately, there will need to be lots of big buildings in the FAR grid area. It's my downtown. I'm still VERY nervous about what I'm gonna have to work with.  Like I mentioned to Themistoklest, I'll have to try a FAR grid in Testville 2 (which does not exist yet). I'll also have to wrap my head around the NC pieces for RHW. Thankfully, that's a fantastic opportunity to do so 

[ddhm]

Episode 1 (.4)
Interlude

Well, I've taken a moment to re-familiarize myself with SC4, Nam and all the goodness that I've found. I made a small test region and went to it. About 100k simmies in my 1st tile. I just don't seem to be able to build a ghetto in Testville 1 though. There's demand for about 24k R$ currently. I'll certainly have to change my methodology in order to make some low$ stuff happen in Memphis. I'd have to also really make mass transit work or M-town will be a traffic nightmare. Oh wait, it IS a traffic nightmare during rush hours. Hmmmm, more to think about.

RHW has proven very interesting. It's really been my focus as of late. There is so much more than I remember. Yup, NAM has gotten HUGE! There are a few things that have messed me up here and there... it's the on and off ramps mostly. I'm getting a better handle on it all now.

I did however continue making roads all the way to Southhaven Ms. and Olive Branch Ms. O.B. is the South Eastern corner.  It looks like I won't make Church Road. Heck, I might not even make Goodman Rd., I can't remember right this moment. I'll include a new pic shortly.

It's a short update, I know. There's just not a lot to report yet. I'm starting to think I should have waited to start this MD until I had my streets ready. Sorry for being anticlimactic y'all.

Be good gang,
  Dan

[ddhm]

Episode 1(.5)
The Trainwreck

Well now, it's been a goooooood long while since I posted. It seemed that when I tried, the site was having maintenance done and it slipped my mind shortly after.

So, for a while I continued making streets and filling stuff in. After that, I got hit with that Windows 10 forced update and I had to take some time to get that reverted back to 7pro. YUK to W10 btw. It's just not for me. I came to a point that I realized I'd missed the locations with some of my streets.... like bad missed. By 30 or so tiles missed here and there. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how it happened but it meant that all my stuff was out of place. Almost every street. Crap.

I took a hard look at the situation:
- Every street is slightly (at least) out of place. My bad
- It appears that I didn't do something correctly and the RHW is not showing up on my region view. Oh lort!
- My map never covered what I really wanted. It only covered about 1/2 the city as it really is.

The short list here lead me to decide on just starting over. I've only got about 80 or so hours in this, right? Better to call it a wash now and be happy with the end result. That decision quickly led me to wanting the map to actually cover Memphis and all it's neighbors. I've been beating my head against SC4Mapper and USGS maps. I think I'm just going to ask one of the mappers here to take care of me.

Now, I've seen a few things that indicate why RHW might not show up in region view. I might not have opened the map view or I might not have installed NAM properly. I'll have to do a test region and have a look.

Wish me luck!

[Seaman]

Wish me luck!

we do 

[ddhm]

EPISODE 1(.6)
Mapping away

Man, USGS data is tricky. I've not been able to get a reader to work yet. I beat my head against it for quite a while but unfortunately, I just couldn't get it to happen. That forced me to switch gears. With the USGS data, I got some thumbs of the maps... well, I think that's where i got them. It might have been from Terrain Party or something? As a matter of fact, I think that's where they came from. This whole thing has been a whirlwind. I've not turned my computer off for days. Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, The thumbs (or whatever they were) were small but not terrible. I got 4 of those and butted them together using GIMP (a free photo editing program that I found a while back). The image was small so I had to enlarge it. How much exactly? I had no idea.

What I DID have is the other map of Memphis that I'd downloaded. I used that to get a size (it was tall enough for me already) and I made that square. It's 4.096 by 4.096 km. I opened that in SC4mapper and exported it as a ummmmm, something... I can't remember now... probably a .jpeg which I then opened in Gimp.

I went to Google maps Australia (because it displays in meters) and drew a measure of 4.096 km going from North to South. It started at my Northern most edge and ended at the Southernmost edge of my proposed city. I screencapped that and pasted it into Gimp. I had to scale it to match the already existing map of Memphis and BAM! I had a guide map in my photo editor. I should have made it a little larger. I kinda missed about the top large city worth of tiles It should be an easy fix. I can also do that later

I then imported my config bitmap and scaled it to size. Boy, that thing got blurry, hahaha. With a little mathing, I determined a size at that scale for each size city. It only took a moment or two to get my scaled config in a usable state. I could then use the transparency function to fade the config over the google map so I could see exactly how the city would lay out. I made a few adjustments to the config and started working on the elevations.

Those proved a BEAR! I was lucky enough to find a grayscale chart here ( http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=13196.0 ) that proved VERY useful. I went back to my google map layer and copied it. I used this layer to paint over all the bridges that went over water. Now, I can use that layer to select all the water. How cool is that? I made a new layer that is all the water and painted it in to be the highest water level color. Now i used the modify selection (shrink by 1 pixel or 2, 3, ect) to make ever deeper water. After that, I went to the highest level water and modified the selection to grow by 1 pixel. That I colored as lowest land color.

The grayscale map I was using was extremely dark and most of the land was under water. Had I really understood that, I could have skipped the whole google maps water part. Oh well, you live and learn. As I started trying to fix the colors,  I found the curves part of the color menu. It allowed me to specify the grayscale darkness in a most interesting way. Play with it if you've not dabbled with anything like it. I had to determine where the highest and the lowest land point in Memphis was and what color those were represented by. After that, I also had to find out where those fell on the curves scale. Once I did that, I simply matched the curves and I was darn close. Close enough? I'm not sure yet. I've not loaded a city on the water yet.

I really wanted to get this out there. I mean, here's a free way in 2016 to make maps. If you can discern my ramblings and fill in the blanks anyway (best of luck). Hopefully, I'll get some pics of a decent looking map out shortly.

Y'all be good!

[kelis]

It's really nice to see that you are taking this project to another level. Maps to me is one of the most important thing when you want to start a region...
I would like to see more SC4 pictures in your updates, I'm pretty sure that you got some nice skills for this game.

Greetings and Good luck 

[kbieniu7]

Hello ddhm! It's actually the first time, I've ran into this topic. I've read all your posts since the beginning. It seems to be a very ambitious project. I (and not only me) wish you to have the best effects on this   

I had some feedback experiments with in-game recreation of real places. Even in sc4. Unfortunately, I neither finished nor even reach a half of it with any of them. Very detailed recreation is very hard, time consuming and tiring. So In my opinion the better way is to create world and cities not 1:1 but just inspired by the reality. I do this in my sc4 thread and do this for 9 years almost. I've found, that is way more easy, way more aesthetical and the best to show it to the community as you can concentrate more on single spot and recreating the AMBIENCE of a real place instead of measuring each single street (what with FAR is even harder).

Recreation done by local residents are awesome, because you may actually find the real atmosphereand details of that place presented in our "common platform ". So I keep my fingers crossed and wish you a good luck, whatever you chose - let it be a pleasure and entertainment for yourself

[ddhm]

 @ Kelis
Sometimes a project takes to the level that it thinks we need to go to and this one has certainly done that. They say "it's the journey and not the destination", right?

A map can certainly make or break a region. It's not an absolute decider but it helps Heck, a good map is just nice to look at on it's own to me.

There will more pics in the future episodes. There just hasn't been much that I'd think of as picture worthy since I decided to redo the whole thing. As soon as I start laying roads, there will be many pics! Hopefully my pics will live up to your expectations

@Kbieniu7
  Welcome to the party my friend. Pull up a seat, grab a sweet tea and kick back. It is indeed a rather ambitious project but it's one I've wanted to do since I started playing Simcity 1. Since I've come this far, I'll bet I'll see this one to completion. I'm also looking at doing my home away from home New Orleans next. It's good to have a plan, right

I do agree with you in the thought that an absolute recreation might be a bit of a drag. Rest assured that I'll have to take some liberties, I'll choose to take others and it will all be fun. Hopefully, I can figure out how to best capture Memphis as I know it. It's a bit gritty, a lot laid back and barbecue fueled. It's sprawled out a bit and it's always an adventure.

[ddhm]

EPISODE 1(.7)
Land Ho!

Could it be? Did I finally find the magic combination of numbers in Gimp? I could ask a bunch of other dramatic questions but I'll cut to the chase: I think I did.

I deserve some dinner and I think an adult beverage. Grilled tuna steak and a Dos XX (or perhaps 2).

More updates to come... stay tuned.

Ps. I know folks like pictures, so here ya go!