Realistic Cities For Dummies

[yochananmichael]

SimEurocat i point you to this post http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=33.0 that should explain how to insert an image into a post. Hope that helps

btw Chris amazing update as usual your rural areas are cool to look at and man I can't wait to see what you have cooked up for us in the next update!

[metarvo]

Good update, Chris.  I've been doing some agricultural zoning myself lately (albeit on flat land), and I've been a long-time SPAM user, so this is right up my alley.  The idea of adding tractors via MMP to farmland is a good one, and the cross-quad strategy is also quite useful.  For non-SPAM farms, there are ploppable fields available here, but they include custom farms that you might not be using, and they don't include new farms which were released later.  In any case, the ploppable fields are eye-candy only and are not actual farm tiles, so your method is more "real" in terms of farming jobs.

[SilverCyric]

SimEuroCat: hey buddy, I understand where you're coming from. The RHW can be quite intimidating and frustrating. You can work for 20 minutes, lay one tile wrong and mess up the whole thing. What helped me was to get a sandbox region and 1 large tile is RHW experiments. The trick is to learn all the exits, transitions and how to prep the land. RHW functions much better on flat land, as most any modular kits... But just spend a few hours build a 4 lane, then build a 6 lane and then do a roundabout junction, a trumpet junction and also a regular overpass junction. Also get good with the on slope pieces, they translate to the overpasses most realistically. Remember you'll need hole digger and raising lots to make it function best.... Luck!

[SimEurocat]

This is the picture that I was talking about. Seems that all goes well until I try to make a curve.

Any suggestions?

[SimEurocat]

SilverCyric: Thanks for the help. I have spent hours trying to get this one thing right, so frustrating is definitely the word to use. I will try a flat surface and see what happens. Seems a little on the wrong side to do so since nothing is ever flat. I'll give it a go!

Thanks

[Swordmaster]

SimEurocat, it's always a good idea to ask here when you have trouble with the RHW. You'll usually get helped in short order. You current problem is quite common in the beginning, so don't get disheartened. Practice makes perfect!

@Chris: sorry for hijacking. I like the farms, good start.


Cheers
Willy

[SilverCyric]

Yeah I have that problem too sometimes. The trick is to understand how sensitive those pieces are, say you drag the left lane up, then go diagonal one( up one over one), the use the draggable tool to pull it back and around with out connecting to the piece that goes diagonal in the left lane. It's a little tricky, but I think you will get the hang of it. Remember that the angled piece can end in 2 different spots in the same square, you have to extend it just that half a diagonal sometimes to get it to grab on correctly

[SimEurocat]

I agree with Swordmaster, sorry for hijacking the thread.

SilverCyric: I agree with you on this and have been practicing with it. It is slow going though. I will start this in another thread if, I should say when, I need help.

Thanks all.

[SimEurocat]

Trying to replicate, or come close, Chris' railyard here. I would just like to have them for my other cities as well. I am trying to find lots like this that I could put in my rail system, but not finding much success. Can someone direct me to the correct place to find such a thing?



Thanks,

Kelly

[nemanjanv7]

Hey mate, here's the url for that station you wanted - Container Freight Yards 1

[SimEurocat]

Thanks for the help nemanjanv7. How did you come by this lot? I've been searching for a while for it.

-Kelly

[nemanjanv7]

@Kelly

You welcome, glad to have helped.
I don't remember how I got it, I've had it for a long time now. And I found it on web by google-ing the name of the station and there it was on the Simtropolis


Anyways, enjoy

[smileymk]

Woah, that lesson caused quite a reaction! Because of that, we have now gone comfortably past the 250-post milestone, which, as you all know, is the halfway mark on the road to the Classics section.
So I'd like to thank you all for your continued support and for helping this MD to reach that milestone. There's still a long way to go though, so please keep the comments coming. If every lesson gets a response like the last one then we will find this MD promoted to the Classics section in relatively short order, and that would be wonderful.

With that in mind, it is a good time to do the replies:

wallasey: Thanks! Have fun revolutionising your farmland :)

SilverCyric: I think this is a question of realism vs. aesthetics vs. practicality. Put simply, for a farm to be realistically sized, according to your research (which I'm glad you're doing), it would have to cover approximately the area enclosed by the red lines and the corner of the city tile in the picture below:


Now, that is quite a large area. The sight of all that space dedicated to just one farm may well be overwhelming from an aesthetic perspective. There is also the issue that the game requires zoned farmland tiles to be reasonably close to a road, and I imagine 85 tiles is not, in the game's book, 'reasonably close'.
If I were you I think I'd downsize the farms to around 40x40 - 60x60 tiles, with 20x20 of that being zoned farmland and the rest consisting of eyecandy lots/MMPs/fillers etc. That should produce some nice results.
As for me, well I quite like my small farms so I'll continue using them. But that's just my playing style, and if you want to make 60x60-tile farms, go for it.

The advice you gave about the RHW is good advice, by the way. I'll come to that in more detail in a moment.

mike3775: I don't know that much about the inner workings of the CAM and SPAM so I won't go too in-depth there. What I will say is that I use the CAM and SPAM together and it doesn't cause any real issues. From the fact that my farms end up being SPAM farms, I presume that the SPAM is overriding the CAM when it comes to farmland. I may be wrong, however. But no Stonehenges have appeared in any of my cities yet.

Reform: Thanks for providing clarity to everybody on the issue of using the CAM and SPAM together. The fact that these mods change the mechanics of the game is a serious point that needs to be made very clear to everybody. I think this emphasises the importance of reading Readme files, especially those created for major mods like the CAM and SPAM.

jmyers2043: To my knowledge, the SPAM alters the game mechanics to allow agricultural landscapes to grow even after cities have been built and education levels have risen, making it possible to create large-scale rural areas. Also, I believe the game is designed so that there can be jobs available without there actually being anyone to work it (hence why you can grow industrial areas at the start of the game, and why plobbable C and I lots work much better than ploppable R lots). So you don't really have 52K workers, but you do have 52K jobs available. I believe this mechanism ensures that there is residential demand as a result of 52K farm jobs being available so that when you do expand the city, the houses end up being built.
I believe the large number arises because the number of jobs is dependent on the area that the farmland occupies, not the lot it uses.
You are correct that the player needs to be aware how the SPAM and CAM work together, and you are also absolutely right not to use the SPAM if it's not right for you. However, I made my comment about the SPAM being a 'must-have' mod because, in my opinion and from my experience, the SPAM completely transforms your game to a similar extent as the NAM or a terrain mod does. Also, please bear in mind that a lot of people (myself included) don't know how to create their own farms with PIM-X, and these lessons are written on the assumption of no/very little knowledge or experience of modding. So I recommend the SPAM to these people as an easy solution, and I stand by my assertion that it is a 'must-have' mod, at least in my opinion.

legoman786: Thanks for providing that clarification to everybody - it will (and I'm being serious here) be extremely useful to a lot of the readership here.

apeguy: Thank you. Glad you're finding this MD useful.

mave94: Spot-on analysis. In fact from my experience this analysis is also true for dirty industry - hence why you can build factories at the start of a game.

SimEurocat: The RHW, like many aspects of this game, is something that takes time and effort to master. The only way to improve is through practice and through watching others. It can be difficult at first because of the complexity and modular, build-it-yourself nature of the RHW, however with patience, persistence and experience, it will become easier and eventually you'll be able to knock up a parclo without really thinking about it. If you need help, then the RHW board is the best place to go first, but you can always ask questions here if necessary. I don't consider it hijacking my MD - on the contrary it helps to make it better because it will be more comprehensive as a result. You won't be the only one wondering how to make an RHW-6C curve, so I've included a little tutorial on it below.
If you need help with junctions, the RHW Interchange Guide and Asteconn's RHW tutorials are two of the best places to find it. Good luck!
Also, if you need freight terminals, simply type 'freight terminals' into the STEX and download all of the ones you like. It's good to have a choice.

yochananmichael: Thanks. I can only hope that this lesson coming up lives up to your expectations.

metarvo: Thanks for the kind words and the link. I will have to check out those ploppable fields, as they might be useful for when I want to extend a pasture/field-based farm (as opposed to a crop-based farm) over a city tile boundary. As for the tractors, well it comes under the scope of detailing, which is a very important aspect of realistic city-building and which we will discuss in a much more detailed manner (no pun intended) in a later lesson.

Swordmaster: You're not hijacking my thread at all. You're doing the readership a favour by pointing another member in the right direction. There will be lots of people reading this with the same problem, so by all means help them. To quote my old analysis lecturer, we're here to learn, so let's learn together.

nemanjanv7: Many thanks for providing the link.

And now, before the main lesson, I'm going to treat you to a bonus mini-lesson which I decided to make in response to some of the responses to Lesson 24. Here you go:

Lesson 24½ - Making a Smooth RHW-6C Curve

The first thing I will say is that it is best to flatten out the area where you plan to put the curve beforehand. From my experience puzzle pieces and sloping terrain don't mix.

With that in mind, let's begin. First we drag out the curve manually. This is so we know where to place the smooth curves later, and so that we don't get any problems with reversion to RHW-2 when we place the smooth curves. The RHW-6C does not have a diagonal starter piece nor a diagonal filler piece (yet), and so if we get reversion, we're in trouble.
The curve is created by dragging as shown in the pictures. I've turned the grid on to hopefully make it a bit clearer:










Note how we have dragged the diagonal section of RHW sufficiently far (15 tiles) to prevent it reverting to RHW-2. We should now be able to demolish the area around the current curve:


The diagonal RHW-6C may go a bit funny in the adjacent tiles to the ones demolished. Simply demolish additional tiles so that the diagonal section has a straight ending - i.e. you can draw a line parallel to the edge of the diagonal section that runs through the corners of game tiles, like the red line shown in the picture.

Now you can place an RHW-6C Diagonal-FA smooth curve piece. Place it so that the FA end is 1 tile across from the orthogonal RHW, and use the preview of the puzzle piece to help you align it correctly with the diagonal section:


Now simply place an RHW-6C Orthogonal-FA curve in the gap, and you're done:


Now that is one beautiful smooth curve. The technique can be applied to the RHW-6S as well. With the RHW-4 and RHW-2 you have 45-degree curve pieces, so you can use those in that case.

Hopefully that little mini-lesson will have been helpful to some of you. Now to the main event:

Lesson 25 - Basic Modding - Tinkering

Warning: There are 48 pictures in this lesson (and that's on top of the 9 we've had already). Some of them have had to be downsized to 1024x768 (because they are taken in Lot Editor, which uses every pixel of my laptop's 1366x768 screen). They are all JPEGs, and it is necessary to have this number of pictures in order to explain the content of this lesson properly. However, if you have a relatively slow internet, this lesson might take a bit of time to load completely, so please be patient. There isn't a lot of text in between, so it shouldn't be too big a read.

In this lesson we will use Lot Editor, the Plugin Manager and SC4Tool to help make small modifications to certain lots and buildings so they either look better or function more realistically in our city. This is quite simple stuff and takes far longer to explain than it does to do, but there are a couple of pitfalls you need to avoid, so pay close attention and follow the steps exactly.

Note: Should you spot your lot being modded in this lesson, please do not think that your lot is bad, because it's not - I wouldn't have used it in the city if it was. It is included in this lesson purely because I have identified an opportunity to make it fit into our particular setting better.

Without further ado, let us see what we will be tinkering with:


Those fountain lots are nice, but the textures don't match up with the rest of the plaza, and the trees don't really work in this situation. This needs to be modified.

Our next item of business is this middle school:


The thing we're looking at here is the play equipment circled. It simply isn't appropriate for a middle school. It's not even really appropriate for a primary school. You can also see that the basketball court is split in two! It would be better if we could rotate those two half-courts to make one full court. We also need to give that car park actual road access and a proper ending.

Staying with schools, I've also identified our high school lot as a modding opportunity, namely to get rid of the football pitch that forms part of the lot:


The reason for getting rid of the football pitch is to improve the school's flexibility and to give us more options for constructing the grounds. At most of the high schools I've seen, the sports pitches are quite a bit back from the building and it would be nice to not have to have a football pitch right next to the building.

Our final lot to be modded is our central bus terminal, which you might remember me transit-enabling in Lesson 19:


Because we have transit-enabled this lot, we need to make changes to it in order to ensure that the tarmac is placed where the buses will go, and that the bus stops lie along the route we created in Lesson 19.

We will use Lot Editor to make our changes to the above lots.
However, there are other lots that we need to make changes to. Before you read the answer, see if you can figure out what I might want to change here and why:






Know what it is yet? Yep, it's the coverage areas. They're too small! I did say in the Facilities lesson (Lesson 18) that, in real life, one clinic, two fire stations and one police station would be enough to service our entire city. In SimCity 4, unfortunately, coverage doesn't extend beyond the tile boundaries, so we have to have one of each building per city tile. The least we can do is ensure that these buildings cover the whole city tile, and then we will have some realism here.
There are also issues with the capacities of these lots - the clinic has far too low a capacity, and the police station has too many police cars. In my hometown, there is one doctor's surgery and one walk-in centre. This is in a town of 200,000 people, so the clinic must serve more than 1000 people. And no police station has 31 squad cars - 20 would be more than enough.

So we will make the necessary changes to these lots - which will require the use of the Plugin Manager and, in the case of the clinic, SC4 Tool.

Now that we know what we're modding, let's go and mod it. Open up the Lot Editor and find the fountain on the station plaza:


(Note that the lots are identified by file name - so you might need to look up the file name in your Plugins folder if you don't know it. And you won't find it unless you have a well-organised Plugins folder. Just thought I'd remind you of the importance of that.)

OK, our first job is to get rid of those trees. To do this, open up the Props tab, which is underlined in red in the above picture.
You then need to click the blue squares on the right that represent your trees. Finding them is simply a matter of trial and error - once you have selected a prop, it will be highlighted in the preview on the left. So keep clicking until the trees highlight. Don't forget to hold down the CTRL key whilst you do this so you can select multiple props:


Once these are highlighted, simply press the Delete key to remove them:


We now need to replace the textures, and removing textures is just like removing props. Go first to the Base Texture tab (highlighted in red in the above picture), select all of the tiles, and press Delete. Then go to the Overlay Texture tab (underlined in yellow) and repeat. You should end up with this:


To add the new ones, go to the Base Texture tab and click the Add Item button. A window will pop up with all the base textures in your Plugins folder. In this case, we want to find the Ped Mall Open Paved texture which is what we used to create our station plaza. Once you find what you're after, click it and it should highlight:


Click OK, and then place the texture into the tiles of your lot by clicking on the tiles. You may need to use the Duplicate Selected button to allow you to copy the texture onto all the tiles:


Now click Save, and you're done. Pretty simple stuff.

Next we will mod the bus terminal. First open it up in Lot Editor:


Our first job is, as before, to delete all the unnecessary props and textures - the car park and cars within them have to go:


It's exactly the same procedure as before. Now we want to fill that empty space with the same base texture as is present on the unchanged half of the lot.
To do this, open up the Base Texture tab and click on any textured tile. Now press the Duplicate Selected button, and move the cursor to an empty tile. You will see that a preview of the same texture appears on the tile you're hovering over. Click the tile to place the texture in it, and repeat until all of your tiles are filled:


Now we need to add the road textures. These are found in the Overlay Texture tab. Simply source the correct textures (which in this case are T, straight and 90-degree curve one-way road textures) and place them in the appropriate places:


That's looking a lot better already. Now we just need to move the bus stands so that they line up next to the roads. Go on to the Props tab and click the blue rectangles representing the bus stands (remember that selected props turn green on the left preview when selected) and drag them into place:


And that's done. Time to move on to our middle school. Our first task upon opening the lot is to select the play equipment that was highlighted at the start of this lesson and duly delete it:


Now we need to sort out that basketball court. There are two instances of the same prop here. We need to move them and rotate them so that they join to form one big court.
First use the Page Up and/or Page Down keys whilst the props are selected to rotate the props to the correct orientation, then simply drag them into place:


Note that we have had to move a planter here (highlighted in yellow in the above image) so that it doesn't lie on the court. This is a pedantic step, but a very important one - small details like this are what make the biggest differences to the quality of your cities overall.

We have more work to do with this lot. We need to change the leftmost ending of the car park so that it doesn't run off the lot. That's simply a matter of changing the overlay texture to something more suitable, and you know how to do that:


Don't forget to use the Page Up/Down keys to rotate the texture to the correct orientation.
Also be aware that this is a transparent texture, so the main Lot Editor window shows up through the non-paved areas of the texture concerned. This shouldn't be an issue for you, but it's wise to be aware of it.
When done, you whould end up with something like this:


We also need to add a driveway to the other end of the car park so that our teachers don't have to drive over the pavement to park their cars. If you were paying attention to Lesson 19 then you will know that we use the BlAM Overpath Props to do this, and you will know how to make use of them:


The middle school is now complete, so let's go and mod the high school:


We begin, as usual, by stripping the lot of the textures we don't want - in this case the football pitch:


As we are deleting these empty tiles for good, we also need to delete the props that are on the empty tiles:


Before we can eliminate these empty tiles from the lot for good, we need to nudge the building to the left a little bit, so that it lies entirely within the 6x6 footprint of our new lot. Go on the Building tab, click the building (the grey square) and use the arrow keys to nudge it onto the textured tiles of the lot:


This nudging has, unfortunately, made it necessary for us to move the trees on the left of the lot so that they don't crash into other objects on the lot. It's just like nudging the building, except you need to be in the Props tab:


Now we can remove the empty tiles from the lot for good. Go into the Lot tab and change the Width (and, if necessary, Depth) values as required - in this case we need to change the Width to 6:


Now our high school is complete. Since we have altered the size of the lot, it makes sense to save it as a new lot. So click Save As (not Save) and enter a descriptive name for the new lot:


Then click OK and you're done. Note that it's really important to use descriptive names for all of your files - this will make managing them much, much easier in the future.

Our work in Lot Editor is, for now, done. We move on to dealing with the coverage radii on the facilities we highlighted, and for that, we need the Plugin Manager (if you don't have it, click the link, accept the EULA, go to the BAT link, and find the Plugin Manager there), and for one file we will need SC4 Tool.

We will deal with the fire station and police station with Plugin Manager, as these involve SC4Desc files. You need to find these files and place them in this exact directory:


Obviously your directory probably won't start with 'Chris', but everything after and including the My Documents folder needs to be exactly as you see above - otherwise Plugin Manager will not read your files.

Once you have done this, open up the Plugin Manager and click on the Descriptors menu on the left of the window. A list of all the descriptors in the relevant directory will appear - you need to find your file within it.
The files we are modding are circled in red for the fire station and blue for the police station respectively:


We first mod the fire station. Open the descriptor file by double-clicking it, and a new window will appear:


In order to mod the building, we need to edit the values of the properties indicated in the picture. You edit these values simply by clicking the relevant property and typing in a new value (the property will become editable):


We choose the values for these properties in accordance with what they would realistically be in real life. Importantly, we change the coverage radius to 255 so that the whole city tile is covered by the lot, and change the Center Strength and Exterior strength properties so that the station enjoys full effectiveness over the entirety of its coverage area. The PM has a very helpful and intuitive user interface, so you should have no trouble editing these properties.
When you are done, you need to first click the Apply button to register your changes, before clicking OK to save the edited descriptor file. A message box will pop up saying 'Plugin saved successfully' if you've done it right.

Editing the descriptor for the police station is done in exactly the same way:




Save the descriptor, quit the PM, and return the descriptors to their original location in your Plugins folder.

We only have the clinic left to mod. But the descriptor for this lot is contained in a DAT file, and the Plugin Manager can't deal with DAT files. So we have to use SC4 Tool to mod the clinic.

The part of SC4 Tool we use to mod descriptors is the Exemplar Editor, which can be accessed in the main menu via the button marked 'Edit all properties of BATs and lots in a user-friendly editor' (or something like that). Open this up, click the Open button in the window that appears, source the DAT file and open it:


As you can see, a list of all the properties contained in the descriptor is shown on the left. There are more properties visible on here than there would be on the Plugin Manager, making SC4 Tool quite useful for more advanced modding. But for now, let's concentrate on the task in hand.
You can probably see how this will work. You select a property by simply clicking it:


Notice the display on the right changes to show the value of the highlighted property - in this case, 384.
That's a coverage radius of 384m - about 400 yards. Let's change that so the clinic serves the whole city tile. To do this, we click the box with the '384' in it, and simply type in the maximum allowed value, 4096, in its place:


Why 4,096? Because that's the length in metres of a large city tile. So setting the coverage radius to this value will ensure the clinic covers the whole of the city tile it lies in, as we require.

We also need to change the value of the Hospital Patient Capacity property to something more suited to our purposes (I've used 10,000, which isn't an unreasonable number of people for a typical town clinic to have on their registers).
Any property that affects the effectiveness of the clinic over its coverage radius also needs to be changed to the maximum value allowed (I can't remember if such a property is displayed in SC4 Tool). This will ensure that the clinic serves all the people in the city tile it serves equally well.
The process of making these changes is identical to changing the coverage radius, and makes a good exercise for the novice modder.

Now that all 3 of the descriptors and all 4 of the lots have been modded, you might think that we're done and that we can go into the game and admire our handiwork... right?

WRONG.

As I found out the hard way, there's one final step you need to do when you mod a descriptor.
You see, when you change the descriptor, you change a property called the TGI reference of the building. TGI stands for 'Type, Group, Instance', and consists of 3 hexadecimal numbers (I will probably cover hexadecimals in detail when we do more advanced modding in later projects, but for now, if you don't know what they are, just think of them as sequences of letters and numbers) that, together, uniquely identify objects in the game.
Even though we have changed the descriptor of the building, the lot still uses the building with the old TGI reference - and, as a result, the old properties. So we need to go into Lot Editor and change the building from the old one to the new one.

If we go into Lot Editor, open up our fire station, go to the Building tab and click Replace Item, we find that one building has become two in the list:


We need to pick the new version, and, as you've probably figured out, the new version is the one underlined in red. How do we know it's the right one?
We simply locate the descriptor in the Plugins folder, expand the window so that the entire file name is displayed, and you will see that the file name ends with... 3 hexadecimal numbers:


Indeed, it is a TGI reference, and you'll see that the last number, the Instance ID (or IID for short), matches the underlined hexadecimal number in the building list on the Lot Editor. There is only one descriptor - we didn't make another copy, so the building with this IID must be the new building.

Place the new building in the lot and save. Repeat for all lots whose buildings have had their descriptors modded.

And now, after all that work, we are finally done. Let's go into the game and test out our modded buildings to see if they work:






Notice how the properties underlined in red have changed to the values we wanted, and that the coverage circle has disappeared. This happens because the coverage circle is entirely off the map - our facilities cover the whole city tile so there's no coverage limit within the tile. Our mods work perfectly.

Now let's test our lots. Note that when you load up the game initially, the lots will be unchanged. Therefore you need to rebuild them if you want to see the effects. Like changing the building in Lot Editor when its descriptor has been modded, this is an easy thing to forget to do, and will result in a lot of frustration wondering why on earth the mods don't work if you forget to do it. Don't make this mistake.
Having heeded that warning and rebuilt our lots, we see that they are, in my opinion at least, much more suited to the situation they're used in:








Those revamped lots look pretty good, don't they? And all that came from some simple changes that are really easy to do. It took me far longer to write up this lesson and explain its content than it did to actually do the modding and create the content, illustrating how tinkering with lots and descriptors like this is a quick and easy way to improve the realism of your cities.

So 57 pictures and 10 pages of text and BBC code (on MS Word) later, this lesson is complete.

We're almost done with this project. There are just 3 more lessons planned for this project before we wrap it up and move on to the next one.
The first of those concerns one of my favourite and undoubtedly one of the most important aspects in the game - detailing. In many ways this lesson was a bit of a detailing lesson as we've made small changes to lots and descriptors to make a big difference to them in the game, but Lesson 26 will concern in-game detailing, with no modding whatsoever.

Now as I write this it is 2.15AM in the UK, I have a 12PM lecture to attend and I'll be finding out just how badly I did in my Analysis exam in the morning as well.
So I will call it a night and see you in Lesson 26.

- Chris

[eldaldo]

Wow, that was really helpful.  I have worked a little with lot editor, but adjusting radius and coverage levels is something I've always wanted to be able to do.  Thanks for the tutorial!!!

[SimEurocat]

A wonderful  lesson!!!  Thanks for the tips on bending the RHW highway, I will be using them.

In Lesson 9 - Industry (I know I am well behind the rest of the group here - sorry) you mention a finance mod and even give a link to it. The only thing is that this link takes me to a map to download and I never  get to the mod. Am I being directed to the wrong download page? Just trying to figure out what I may be doing wrong here.

Thanks

-Kelly

[smileymk]

Hello folks. I'm quite looking forward to giving this lesson, and I will do so right after this:

eldaldo: You're welcome. It's nice to know that the lesson did its job well. I learnt a lot myself last lesson - mainly that you have to replace the modded buildings in LE to get them to work in-game. So we're learning together - that's a nice thought.

SimEurocat: Thank you. Don't worry about being behind - it won't hinder the progress of the MD or anyone else following it, and these pages will still be here when you're ready to read them. So please don't feel pressured into catching up because there's no need to. Project 1 is important - it teaches the basics of realistic city-building and lays the foundations for what we're doing now and what we will be doing in the future, so it's good that you're taking the time to read through it before moving on.
Regarding the link you referred to, it originally led to a mod I made that made the Maxis grass park free to build, maintain and demolish, so you could build large grass areas without going bust. For some reason it's disappeared (probably lost in the ST upgrades), and I've just taken the link down. And no, I won't be reuploading it because since then, MMPs have come to the fore and I've started to used them as they're better (and also free in most cases). I strongly recommend using MMPs instead of grass lots, like we did in the Industry lesson for this project.

And now, time for the lesson.

Lesson 26 - Detailing

As far as I'm concerned, there are 4 key ideas behind making a realistic city/region.
One is planning. You should know by now how important that is and why.
The second is the idea of making your region look like one massive city tile. This project has aimed to cement and implement that idea, and we've seen it put into practice in the CBD, Suburbs and Rural Land lessons.
The third is the concept of continuous improvement. We'll cover that in Lesson 28.
Finally, we have what is possibly the most important concept of them all - detailing. Simply put, a scene that lacks detail just isn't complete. It is the small details that turn a good city into a great one, that transform a screenshot from a game into a lively, fully believable model of a city. I believe that the best cities are those with the highest attention to detail, and that the detail is the aspect that wows the viewer.

Clearly, there are thousands of potential ways to detail a city. We've covered quite a few already - putting people on the beach, putting fences around our schools, modding certain lots to fit the scene better, it's all part of enhancing the look of our city.

We'll cover some more ways to detail a city in this lesson. Let us start with the reservoir that supplies our city with water:


As you can see, as it is this reservoir is dull, lifeless and boring. Time to bring it to life with details. First, we line the shore with MMP rocks:


Now here I've covered the entire shoreline with rocks. That's just my playing style, and you don't have to go that far. However, there should be a clear separation between land and water, and one alternative way to achieve that is to put the water in a small trench.

Returning to my method, we now add cat tails and suchlike to the shoreline:


I'm now going to add lily pads to the lake. This is an optional feature as well, but who doesn't like lily pads?


At this stage I like to add rye grass to the shoreline, which I think has the effect of helping the MMPs to blend in with the land. Notice that adding the rye grass creates a green 'border' around our lake:


We finish off the lake by surrounding it with trees - there should always be trees near a body of water (except the coastline):


And that's our lake detailed. I think you'll agree it's massively improved as a result of being detailed.
Of course, there are as many techniques to detail a lake or a stream as there are players of the game. Experiment with various methods and MMPs and find a technique that works for you.

Now to the immediate southwest of our reservoir lies an expressway junction, which is also a good candidate for detailing. Let's start by adding some road signs and putting trees in between the slip roads and the main carriageway:


Notice how we've not put trees at the end of exit ramps. If we did, they might obscure the view of drivers approaching the roundabout from the slip road, which would make our junction quite dangerous.
Regarding the road signs, I've used MandelSoft's UK signs here, however, their placement and use is appropriate only for a UK city. There are sign packs available on the STEX for quite a few countries. You need to use the signs that are appropriate to your particular setting, and you need to place them according to how they are placed in that country. This varies from country to country, so if you don't know how to appropriately sign your roads then you need to go out there and take a look.

Following UK practice, I've placed an exit sign at the start of each exit slip road, and a distances sign (called a 'route confirmation sign' in the UK) at the end of every entrance slip road:


I've also placed advanced junction signs 50 tiles either side of the junction (equivalent to half a mile):


UK motorways are signed similarly, although you need to use the blue signs instead of the green ones, and you need to place another advance junction sign 100 tiles (= 1 mile) either side of the junction.

However, this is UK practice. It is different in other countries, and you should sign your roads according to local practice. If you're in France, for example, you need to place junction signs on motorways 63 tiles and 125 tiles (= 1km and 2km respectively) in advance of the junction.

We can also add traffic to our roads using traffic generators such as this one to make them more realistically occupied:


Place them at every point where a major road enters a city tile - for this set, use the heavy generators for motorways and avenues and the toned-down generators everywhere else. That way you won't have long empty stretches of road before your first junction.

If you have them, you can also place train generators on railway lines:


This serves the same purpose as the road traffic generators - to get trains running down our line. Like their road counterparts, they should be placed at every point a rail line enters the city tile, like so:


You can see a train coming from the other end of the city tile in this picture - and it came because of our generators. The addition of the train enhances the picture by making it come to life a bit more, so to speak. Something to bear in mind.

Now we've got our roads and railways nice and busy. Our sea is full of pleasure boats and surfers thanks to our work on the beach and marina. There's one aspect of transport we haven't covered - aircraft.

Troon doesn't have an airport, but that doesn't mean we can't depict a plane flying over our city:


There are numerous plane models available on the STEX and LEX, so take your pick. (Be aware that many of them are designed to depict planes on the ground - so ensure that you keep the landing gear hidden behind the body of the plane.)

Our estates offer huge potential for detailing, so we should exploit that. For example, we can make our suburbs more interesting by mixing various trees and plants together like so:


Notice how in between the big bright green trees (coming from Jeronij's Leafy Green Forest MMP) have been complemented by a birch tree MMP (the smaller, less green trees) that I have in my Plugins folder whose origin I sadly cannot remember. Please tell us if you can source this, as it will help the readership as a whole.

This is just one of infinitely many things you can do to detail a suburb. Some other possibilities are to use seasonal trees instead of evergreen or to use MMPs to detail gardens.

We can also detail our industrial estates. For this task I'm going to make use of the MMPs provided in Murimk's Industrial Props package. Let's see just some of the ways we can detail our industry with this set as well as some other MMPs:


1) This particular lot looks like an oil storage facility, so I've added a few oil barrels to complement it. I've also added an office and a skip to some of them to give the impression that they are in business.
2) Like in the suburbs, I've added some birch trees in some of the gaps between the factories, in order to a) give variety to the species of tree in the city and b) provide an aesthetically pleasing gap-filler for this estate.
3) Here some spare pipes and other similar items have been added. Note that they are just left lying around, as would probably happen in real life! They are also placed on an asphalt path MMP and surrounded by the same fence that we used around our primary schools to provide security and give the items an appropriate setting in which to reside.
4) This lot looks like it could possibly produce girders and pallets, so I've decided to include some spare parts outside, much like with the pipes.
5) Fencing has been provided here. Most industrial lots are quite secure places in real life, so we need some means of providing that security when the lot doesn't do it for us.
6) And finally, with this lot I've gone for some spare tyres and suchlike, for the same purpose as in 3) and 4).

These are very minor things, but I think you'll agree that they've enhanced our industrial estate - which is the whole reason for detailing it in the first place.

Now, what's one really obvious but very easily overlooked thing that no city could possibly exist without? People! A city needs people, especially in its denser areas like the CBD. Therefore we should put down some ploppable people wherever the game will let us:


(There is an MMP to do this, and it's what I've used here. It should be available on the STEX.)

Similarly, in a CBD all the car parks should be full or close to full. For this we need to place ploppable cars wherever we see a parking space and whenever the game will let us place a car in that space:


Again, it's one of those small things that will make your CBD look more like the part.

To finish, I'm going to add some mobile burger vans - except I don't know of any such lots. Therefore I will use the MAPP Small Food Stand as a substitute. These burger vans appear all over a city, at least in the UK - most UK readers will probably be familiar with their local one. They can appear at power stations:


Or in suburbs:


Or at stadia (ours being to the right of this picture):


Or perhaps at park-and-ride facilities:


The possibilities truly are endless. And that goes for all detailing. Experiment and try out various ideas. Detailing is a great way to make your city unique, so go with whatever takes your fancy.

One thing I will say though before I wrap this lesson up is to avoid clichés - as nice as it may be to have a white wedding taking place at the local church, or as nostalgic as it may be to have 4 strangely familiar-looking musicians traversing a zebra crossing, it's been done. Railway modellers will testify to that. Why should the opinions of railway modellers matter? Well, you are, in effect, modelling a city. It's the same sort of concept. So whilst there is nothing to stop you depicting the scene of the Abbey Road album cover, it won't make your city unique.

And now it is time for me to wrap this lesson up. Next lesson's topic is finishing touches.

See you next time,
Chris

[smileymk]

Hey guys. I know it's been a while since the last lesson. Blame analysis and linear algebra.

Before the lesson, some bad news. At the request of a fellow member here at SC4D, I have made a video that was initially going to be posted as a prelude to this lesson covering the construction of flyovers and smooth curves with the RHW.
However, I have decided to postpone publishing this video until Lesson 28. There are 2 reasons for this:
1) The new NAM, as I'm sure you're aware, is quite fragile at the moment and there are a lot of bugs, some of which show themselves in the video. I want to redo it when the NAM is all nice and patched up again so that the video, when posted, is of the best possible quality.
2) I have heard that EA are being a little touchy about people posting new SC4 videos on YouTube at the moment due to the new SimCity being released, so, just in case this is true, I'll give it a couple of weeks for the publicity to die down, after which it shouldn't be too much of a concern to EA if the video is posted (in theory).

This means that you're going to have to wait until NAM 31 is patched up, and then probably a few days after that, for Lesson 28. I know this shouldn't be a problem because you guys are very patient. I'm just giving you a heads up. Thanks in advance for continuing that patience.

And now, lesson time. It's a very short one today, but I hope it's useful.

Lesson 27 - Finishing Touches

In many ways, the content of this lesson is just an extension of the last lesson on detailing, and a generalisation of all the work we've done in previous lessons with regards to adding the essential small things that make some element of a city complete, such as adding turning lanes to a road junction or a market square to a CBD or even transit-enabling lots. In this lesson we'll look at a couple more things you can put in to polish a city and make it complete.

We start with roundabout fillers. By and large, most roundabouts have something in the middle of them, and there are several lots on the STEX designed specifically for putting in the middle of NAM roundabouts. So it makes sense, both from a realism and an aesthetic standpoint, to take advantage of that:






By and large, there's no real rule for what kind of thing you should put in the middle of your roundabouts, but in the vast majority of cases, a few trees and some plants (like you see in the pictures) will do just fine. Occasionally, you might want to put other things in there, like underpasses (this one is one of my favourites), statues or phone masts. Things like fountains don't tend to be placed in the middle of roundabouts and so shouldn't be used as roundabout fillers - that is, unless you've got a FLUP underpass running under the roundabout, in which case you have no choice, or you're more concerned with aesthetics than realism.

Moving on, we can also place pedestrian bridges/underpasses on busy roads to provide a safe means of crossing these roads to pedestrians and reduce road deaths in our city:


We can also make our motorways more complete by adding matrix signs to them:


These matrix signs (which can be set up to display any sort of message to drivers as and when necessary) are commonplace on UK and European motorways (not sure about US), and you should certainly be looking to include them if you're modelling UK or European motorways.

We finish by looking at a couple of items that no town worth its salt should come without. One is a supermarket:


Notice how I've used SAM-1 streets for the car parks and also included a petrol station. The supermarket itself is an Aldi, which is available on one of the exchanges somewhere. There are lots of other supermarkets out there, so have a look and choose your favourite company to serve your city.

Another thing that your town simply has to have in order to have any merit whatsoever as a town is fast food restaurants:


What you see here are two of kevdan25's fast food outlets - McDonald's and KFC. Every town, no matter where in the world it is based, should have a McDonalds, at least in my opinion. KFC and Burger King also have outlets in pretty much every UK and US town and should be included somewhere too.

That will do for now. There are infinitely many other ways you can polish a city to make it complete (try using a fancier type of bridge/overpass, for example), so experiment and find ways to make your city unique.

The end is nigh, and the next lesson will be the last of Project 2.
It will cover a very important aspect of city-building - making improvements to what we have already built over the last 27 lessons.

As I've said before, I don't plan to start it until after the patched up version of NAM 31 is released, so it might be a short while before it comes. It will be worth it though.

So I will see you then.
- Chris

[yochananmichael]

nice work Chris, In response to your not knowing if those Matrix signs as you call them that display road information/conditions are used in the US, I can say that they are. I know that in most of the larger cites you see a lot of them as well as out of cities where you can run into inclement weather like mountain passes and such. So yes these exist too in America as well.

[Frenchie1985]

This is all just fantastic. I've been playing SC4 for years and there were always areas that I just could not master, such as the Network and freeways. Traffic problems would always arise whenever I reached about 200,000 inhabitants. The RWH and NWM have been great. Still figuring out how to create functional highways with the RWH though. It takes patience I guess."I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself, down through the generations...westward the wagons...across the sands of time until.....aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' again. Well....hope you folks enjoy yourselves. Catch ya later on down the trail."

[bossmafia]

I made an account specifically to comment on this!
This is really fantastic. As a person just starting out on making believable, nice looking cities, your guide is irreplaceable! I'm still going through the beginning parts of it, since I'm a bit late to the game, and working with the slope mod makes things interesting for me, but so far it's been a huge help. Thank you for your incredible work!