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CSGdesign's NATURAL GROWTH

Started by CSGdesign, November 20, 2009, 12:50:42 AM

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ecoba

Ah, something not completely expected, I'm sure. But, anyway it was still a nice update. Also, the update with the little girl's perspective was, interesting. Yeah, I'll put it at that.

Ethan

planetechef

Like very much the way you make your presentation, it's more then a simply city growing, it's a great story to follow  &apls
& coming soon "Sakura Republic".

CSGdesign

#282


Quote from: warconstruct on February 20, 2010, 04:03:37 AM
wow very good update  &apls
Thankyou warconstruct - I'm glad you liked it.

Quote from: nedalezz on February 20, 2010, 08:52:57 AM
Tradegy indeed :(

It kind of hits a soft spot because although I live in Africa (Ghana), I am a Lebanese national, and I was in Lebanon when the Ethiopian Airlines crashed into the sea last month. In fact, my home just to the south of Beirut is situated on a hill and overlooks the sea and the area where the plane crashed, and there were a few people whom were acquiantances on the plane. So yeah, :(
I'm very sorry to hear about that.  It must have been very difficult for you.

Quote from: Faded Glory on February 20, 2010, 08:56:57 AM
Nice update, though very somber indeed. I love how you can manage to take both the good and the bad from your region and turn it into well-written stories. Also, that bottom picture looks a lot like an older version of Sarah Palin. Lol
Haha yes now you mention it, she does look a bit similar.
I try to show a lot of variety in as many aspects of the story telling as possible, from writing style, subject, location, political angle, etc... makes it more fun to write.

Quote from: Tomas Neto on February 22, 2010, 04:20:18 AM
Very realistic the fire on the forest!!! Fantastic update!!!  :thumbsup:
Thanks Tomas.  Photo-shopped of course.

Quote from: Battlecat on February 22, 2010, 10:01:15 AM
Quite the sobering update today, although it's very well done.  You've done an excellent job with the images here. 
Cheers Battlecat, glad you liked em.  Ya it can't be all fun and games in a city over 1mil.

Quote from: canyonjumper on February 22, 2010, 03:57:44 PM
What a tragedy. Great pictures though.

                 -Jordan :thumbsup:
Someone will be held responsible for this... you can't have such a high profile disaster without someone taking the fall for it.

Quote from: ecoba on February 22, 2010, 05:44:13 PM
Ah, something not completely expected, I'm sure. But, anyway it was still a nice update. Also, the update with the little girl's perspective was, interesting. Yeah, I'll put it at that.

Ethan
How...cryptic.  ???
Haha glad you liked it... not sure what you mean about the girl's perspective one though.

Quote from: planetechef on February 23, 2010, 06:28:57 PM
Like very much the way you make your presentation, it's more then a simply city growing, it's a great story to follow  &apls
Glad you like it planetchef.
Even though it's a collection of seemingly unrelated short stories, they do knit together and refer to each other from time to time to keep the entire region in focus.




The Tellequin Point - Tunnings Rail Line, completed in 1985, has served Grimey Industries very well for the last 8 years.

In addition to shipping ore and supplies between Tunnings Quarry and the industrial harbour at Tellequin Beach, the line also served to move workers between Tellequin and Tunnings, as not all workers chose to live in Tunnings (the town) itself.

But as Boston grew around Tellequin, Tunnings, Kelly Bay, Cape Noddi, Tranquillity Harbour, Oyster Cove and further east, demand for public transport in towards Tunnings grew.  With the advent of the SimNational Highway project connecting Kelly Bay to not only Boston CBD but the rest of SimNation, the need for a connection to Kelly Bay from the eastern most densely populated areas was made increasingly important.

A short rail-link was proposed that would connect Tellequin Beach and Kasmir Point to the existing Tunnings Line (also called the "Southern Rail Link"), with the long-term plan to connect that southern network to the existing central Boston rail network within the next five years.



The proposal involved restructuring the existing passenger rail station (built, owned and operated entirely by Grimey Industries until now) with a higher capacity rail station that would allow passing train traffic.

The rail line would pass to the east of the bulk of the built up areas, through farmland (to keep costs down), up to the north of Eastlook, and across the inlet and into Kasmir Point, where it would terminate.



This would involve the construction of Boston's second causeway, the first being a road across to Portsmouth Island some years ago.  Unlike the causeway to Portsmouth Island, this one would be significantly less expensive due to being a widening of an existing natural causeway over much shallower water, rather than the filling of a natural channel.

Tuckmore Marina were less than impressed with the concept due to the disturbance to their "pristine natural attractions" and the impact it would have on their business, but their protests were only one of many businesses to express input, and most businesses agreed that it would be a boon, especially in Kasmir Point.



The existing passenger station next to the Tellequin Minor League station would have to go, being upgraded and replaced by a new and better station.

Several businesses and homes in the area would be resumed by the development, but the overall positives of the project greatly outweighed the disadvantage it put a few sims at.  The fews sims that were displaced were, as always, paid very fairly for their homes, and all objections were over-ruled by a lot of well-funded legal pressure.

Development always trumps "but I was here first" in Boston v2.

Want more? Visit my blog.

ecoba

Haha, yeah I guess I was being a little cryptic. I'm like that, you'll find that out after a while. Anyway, about the one with the girl it was an, um... interesting read, I guess you could say. A little bit strange, but still good, is what I was trying to imply.

Anyway, it looks like you have some good plans in store for the train stations. Are you planning on using some non-maxis stations. ( ;)  :D )

Ethan

CSGdesign



Quote from: ecoba on February 27, 2010, 07:19:02 AM
Haha, yeah I guess I was being a little cryptic. I'm like that, you'll find that out after a while. Anyway, about the one with the girl it was an, um... interesting read, I guess you could say. A little bit strange, but still good, is what I was trying to imply.

Anyway, it looks like you have some good plans in store for the train stations. Are you planning on using some non-maxis stations. ( ;)  :D )

Ethan
Haha strange.  Yeah I guess - I was trying to bring a completely new type of narration to the journal.
I do that from time to time.

Yes definately non-maxis rail stations.  All new stations for the last 10 game years or so have been new non-maxis train stations, starting with my own modification of the maxis one, then moving to the Marrast set.  I'm combing through various other available custom content ones too - but I don't want big grand ones, just humble realistic platform based ones (for now anyways).
I'd make my own but I'm committed to too many other projects at the moment so I might as well use some of the already available excellent custom content.



On the heels of the SimNational Project Colorado Lumber and the Boston City Council had some unique opportunity to harness the public acceptance of large-scale woodland destruction to seal some important contracts that would last some years into the future.

Current contracts for Colorado Lumber were far out west, where by and large there were a lot of trees and the Wilderness Warriors had a weak argument when challenging this logging due to the fact that the logging operation affected such a tiny area of forest compared to the areas left untouched.



Closer in to the built up areas, this was not the case.  Forests here were already under a great deal of pressure from expansion and property owners clearing their land to "improve" it, and so the added pressure of a logging operation was much easier for the Wilderness Warriors to gain public support against.

The SimNational Highway Project, in particular the M2 (formerly known as the Eastern Seaboard Highway South, or ESBH South) had created a lot of acceptance in Kelly Bay due to the destruction of forest being a desired alternative to the destruction of Kelly Bay's heart.  Readers may recall the protests against this project in Entry #59 "Kelly Bay Crossing Rejected".

The end result is a great weakening in public support for any protests the Wilderness Warriors have against logging and development in the immediate areas (especially around the highway itself).  This in turn means that now is a golden window of opportunity for Colorado Lumber to snatch up some contracts in the area, and for Boston City Council to make some good coin on the tailcoats of the SimNational Highway Project.



These contracts represented around 20% of the contracts being evaluated by Boston City Council and Colorado Lumber.  The others were much more scattered than these contracts.  These logging permit contracts were evaluated and signed hastilly while the public remained reasonably accepting of major development in the area.

Effectively these contracts doubled the area of land that had been contracted to Colorado Lumber.  The terms of many of these contracts were that the logging needed to be completed within a few short years and started immediately, while the iron was hot, so to speak.




This suited Colorado because they could invest in new staff and equipment and expand their operations in quick time.  It suited Boston City Council because Colorado was taking care of the deforestation of areas that Boston intended to on-sell to developers to cater for the population boom that the SimNational Highway Project was bringing...

Land always fetched a better price if it required less expense to develop.  Flat cleared land was far more valuable to developers than forested hilly land that required a lot of clearing and terracing.

Everybody won.
Boston's surrounding wilderness lost.

Hardly anybody noticed.

Want more? Visit my blog.

Faded Glory

Ahhh, anti-conservationism (?) wins again.  &mmm Ah well, it had to happen eventually. On an unrelated note, on that last pic, how did you get the SAM texture to end like that? It always spreads to the surrounding streets on mine.

jdenm8

I believe that the PEG dirt road texture doesn't have a custom texture for that configuration, so SC4 reverts to the default and does not carry custom onto other defaults past the problematic tile, nor does it force the default on the custom.


"We're making SimCity, not some dopey casual game." -Ocean Quigley

Battlecat

Nice pair of updates.  What you've done with the forest lots in update 78 is very realistic!  Particularly the part about accelerated cutting of forest blocks isolated by highway construction.  Interestingly enough, much the same principal often applies to agricultural land.  Looking forward to more, especially those canals!  The development in your blog has been very interesting to follow!

CSGdesign

#288


Quote from: Faded Glory on February 27, 2010, 08:14:13 PM
Ahhh, anti-conservationism (?) wins again.  &mmm Ah well, it had to happen eventually. On an unrelated note, on that last pic, how did you get the SAM texture to end like that? It always spreads to the surrounding streets on mine.
It's a technique I developed shortly after starting to use SAM because I got irritated with that runaway effect you mention.
I discovered that it only extends a certain distance away from where you click, made less-so by multiple curves and intersections.

So to extend it whatever distance I want, I simply place the street first, then plop the SAM piece over the top of it at some point in the middle of where I want that SAM type, and then use the normal street tool and plop a street tile over the street itself on either side of the SAM piece, at some distance.  I see how far that makes the SAM convert the standard street.  If it's not far enough, then I'll plop another normal street tile on top of the converted SAM street, but a little further along, and generally that will extend the SAM conversion by the same distance... it's not an exact science, but I can generally get the SAM to stop within 1 or 2 tiles of where I want it to.

Quote from: jdenm8 on February 27, 2010, 09:19:24 PM
I believe that the PEG dirt road texture doesn't have a custom texture for that configuration, so SC4 reverts to the default and does not carry custom onto other defaults past the problematic tile, nor does it force the default on the custom.
That might be true, I never studied it, but the above technique means that for me it doesn't really matter...

Quote from: Battlecat on February 27, 2010, 10:06:46 PM
Nice pair of updates.  What you've done with the forest lots in update 78 is very realistic!  Particularly the part about accelerated cutting of forest blocks isolated by highway construction.  Interestingly enough, much the same principal often applies to agricultural land.  Looking forward to more, especially those canals!  The development in your blog has been very interesting to follow!
Thanks Battlecat.  I'm looking forward to doing the really cool tiles, like little jetties and boat ramps and culverts and things.




Two months on and Colorado is certainly maintaining their end of the contract.
A little too strictly to the letter, actually.



Contract #0801a is 65% depleted, and Contract #0801b is now almost 35% depleted.



The contracts did not stipulate that the land needed to be rehabilitated in any way, so Colorado is leaving a swathe of destruction in its wake.

Stumps, stunned and terrified animals, and trees and shrubs too small to interest Colorado have been left behind the advancing chainsaws and machinery.

Needless to say, Boston City Council is less than impressed... the only thing it got out of this deal besides royalties was cleared land ready to sell for a good price to developers.

Now developers still needed to put in the same amount of time, effort, and machinery to prepare this land for sale, so the deal has become quite sour for Boston City Council.

Sadly, in its haste, all of the contracts around Kelly Bay have neglected to address a cleanup process, so Boston City Council is down many millions of Simoleans on what it thought it was getting out of the deal.

This will definately NOT persuade them to cooperate with Colorado Lumber Pty Ltd so willingly in future, but with the next 5 years of contracts laid out before it, Colorado will cross THAT bridge when it gets to it.

The merry sound of dozens of happy chainsaws,  and the cracking of falling trees is heard from sun-up till sun-down, every single weekday, in western Kelly Bay.

Want more? Visit my blog!

limeyfox

I am still very much enjoying following this journal!  One thing that impresses me the most is how you come up with settlement/landmark/geographical names.  Do you have a technique for generating a place name, or do you just make them up off the top of your head?

antimonycat

It's interesting that the slightest details, such as your use of typography on the 'Grimey Industries' and 'Skipper Bay' logos gives an image so much more character than if you just used a plain font.

You've put a lot of work into your MD overall, looking forward to the next update.

Battlecat

Gotta watch that fine print when dealing with logging companies near cities!  Colorado Lumber is making out like bandits with no requirement to clean up after themselves! 

canyonjumper

And there go the forests. Ah well, at least it made for a good update ;D!

                     -Jordan :thumbsup:
I'm the one who jumped across the Grand Canyon... and lived.

CSGdesign

#293


Quote from: limeyfox on March 01, 2010, 08:03:42 AM
I am still very much enjoying following this journal!  One thing that impresses me the most is how you come up with settlement/landmark/geographical names.  Do you have a technique for generating a place name, or do you just make them up off the top of your head?
Hey again limeyfox... I'm really glad you're still enjoying this - you've been following it since pretty much I started transferring it across onto sc4d.
The names are completely impulsive, like my growing technique I'll look at an area and a direction for a road, location for a farm, or a name for a town will pop into my head and I'll use it immediately.  No fore-thought, only reaction.
Some of them are reactive to previous names... for example Tunnings Town was named after the Tunnings Quarry it was built to service, and Tellequin Harbour and Tellequin Point were both named as different areas of Tellequin Beach... turns out Tellequin Beach actually exists in a reader's home-town... total coincidence.

Quote from: Battlecat on March 01, 2010, 08:24:33 AM
Gotta watch that fine print when dealing with logging companies near cities!  Colorado Lumber is making out like bandits with no requirement to clean up after themselves! 
The thing about screwing someone is you wanna make sure it's not the law-makers yer tryna screw.  In the words of the famous adage - you can't beat the law.

Quote from: canyonjumper on March 01, 2010, 03:27:46 PM
And there go the forests. Ah well, at least it made for a good update ;D!

                     -Jordan :thumbsup:
Thanks Jordan.  :)



There's a delightful order to things.  A balance.
Some express it in terms of good and evil, right and wrong, dark and light.
It's all the same thing - water finds its own level. You can't push too far in one direction without forces coming together that force you back in the other direction again.

Colorado Lumber thought they'd gotten one over the City Council of Boston v2, for contracts stretching the next five years and worth many hundreds of millions of simoleans.

What Colorado Lumber failed to realize is that Boston City Council were are particularly well organised bunch, not the insipid poorly structured local government that Colorado had become used to dealing with in other regions of SimNation.

Colorado Lumber (and pretty much all lumbering companies of the era) relied on heavy machinery to rapidly process the forest into logs ready to be carted to a mill.

Much of this heavy machinery was in the form of log-moving and in many cases tree-cutting equipment.  Without this equipment men with chainsaws would cut a tree down, strip it of branches, and then be forced to use block and tackle or beast of burden (like oxen or Clydesdale horses) to wrestle each individual log onto a truck or train for transport to the mill.  Machinery made this process tens and often hundreds of times faster and therefore less costly.  Less cost equaled higher profit.



The workhorse of Colorado Lumber's logging machinery was the Tigercat 726A, and the more recent model Tigercat 735A.  These machines were designed to grasp a tree at the base, saw it off near the ground, then roll the tree through a set of blades that stripped the tree down into a trunk, then carry the log to the nearest truck.  All without ever letting go of the tree from the jaws at the front of the Tigercat.  The entire process took less than 40 seconds, which was around a tenth the speed it would take a man with a chainsaw just to fell the tree to the ground, not counting the stripping.

Colorado Lumber as part of the contract process (in particular the stipulation about the contracts expiring in around five years) had invested in dozens of these machines - at a cost of about $750,000 simoleans EACH.  A significant investment.



These machines were very wide - too wide to fit onto conventional trucks, requiring massive convoys to move them between sites or inter-region.  Fortunately for Colorado local road rules were such that providing these vehicles traveled on main roads, with a pilot vehicle, in the left lane to allow overtaking, and with lights flashing, they could travel without being carried by a semi-trailer.  Effectively there were dozens of these machines moving back and forth between sites throughout Boston more or less at will, saving Colorado Lumber many tens of thousands of dollars every time one of these Tigercats needed to move from one site to another.

...

Now, the official story is that it's a total coincidence that this happened less than a month after Colorado decided to play hard-ball with the council about clean-up stipulations in the contracts.

However, shortly afterwards new local road laws were passed that stated vehicles of this size could not move back and forth without being on a trailer, with an advance pilot, a trailer pilot, and a distant advance pilot, as well as a pre-registered route being submitted to (and approved by) council, as well as being limited to being moved between the hours of 2am and 4am on week-days only.  Effectively these Tigercats were on a lockdown at sites they were operating at, and could only be moved under EXTREMELY tight (and expensive) conditions.



This was made doubly worse in that there were only four vehicles within several thousand kilometers that were able to move these Tigercats, and all of them charged a LOT of money and started billing from the moment they left their home-base cities... whether the Tigercat was on board or not.

So costs to move these Tigercats went from almost nothing to many hundreds of thousands of Simoleans EACH, between every single contract site, and the limited number of vehicles that could move them combined with the conditions under which they could be move effectively meant that it would take months to relocate a fleet of them from one site to another.

The maths was simple - Colorado would be only able to lumber around 25% of the contracts they had acquired (and paid for) before they reached their tools-down date.  And each one would cost millions upon millions of Simoleans more than had been catered for to complete.



And so it was that on the 14th of June, 1992 that Colorado Lumber generously offered to go above and beyond the terms of their contract and clean up their logging sites by grading stumps and reducing all sites to cleared earth when they'd finished operations.  They even offered to draft a new contract that included this clause.

Wasn't that lovely of them?
See? Big Business sometimes does do the right thing afterall.

Want more?  Visit my blog.

BuildingUp

Hooray for progress! Great update, love the layout of things so far!  &apls

Stray Cat

Simply awesome updates CSGDesign!  I love the detail of the story. I know nothing about logging and the logging business but I could very much believe that you are describing a real operation and the resulting difficulties there.  And the screenshots are awesome as well!  Great work!

Thank you.

Cheers!

Scott
Just a stray wandering through life heading to the big litter-box in the sky...

Battlecat

Ahhh, that was fanastic!  Very well done by Boston City Council.  Only problem there is it's a lot easier to get a law onto the books than it is to get it back out again! 

Faded Glory

Haha, City Council is doing what they do best; revenge. Take that, Colorado Lumber! On a side note, this law would definatly help in the future to reduce congestion.  :thumbsup:  Second side note; will Skipper Bay recieve an update before you finish your canals, or afterwards?

scott1964

Nice deforestation  $%Grinno$% Where did you get the props? Your areas look very good.  :)

Shadow Assassin

Heheh, this is when council does something right for once.

I bet the people of Kelly Bay are happy about this (especially considering how they almost got screwed over by the SimNational highway project) as it means that the land left behind can actually be cleaned up and sold off to developers for a nice price which then can be reinvested back into the region.

The question is, though: parklands or housing developments? I'm sure most people wouldn't really want to live near a highway though...

Just seen Entry 81 as well - I'm interested in seeing how that pans out for the southern part of the region in future updates beyond that one.
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