Realistic Cities For Dummies

[smileymk]

Hey guys. The wait for Lesson 28 is finally over. But first...

yochananmichael: I see. Thanks for providing that information, it will be useful to the US readership here no doubt and to others who might want to create a US-style city.

Frenchie1985: Firstly, welcome to SC4 Devotion! Secondly, thanks for the kind words. You're right about the RHW, it takes time, patience and a fair share of muck-ups to master. Like many aspects of realistic city building, it requires a concious effort to do properly. You will get better at it with practice, don't worry about that. And you will, one day soon, make an RHW creation you can be proud of.

bossmafia: A very warm welcome to SC4 Devotion for you as well. Honestly, I'm quite flattered that you made an account just to comment here. That commitment and interest is very much appreciated, believe me. With regards to slope mods, they do take a bit of getting used to (I speak from personal experience here), and they can make mountain passes quite a challenge, but they are invaluable and once you get the hang of them, they make all the difference. In the meantime, a word of advice on slope mods - a bit of forward planning will go a long way.

And second...

Lesson 27½ - Flyovers with the RHW

A couple of weeks ago, a member of the forum PM'd me asking for help with RHW flyovers. I offered to do a quick video if he felt he needed it, an offer which he took.
So here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/v/S10oS6WWrHg

And now, at last, we get to the main event:

Lesson 28 - Improvements

We've come a long way and covered an awful lot of stuff in this project. Some of it was done very nicely indeed, and I'm pleased with the results. However, there are some things in our city that I feel could be made better, and in this lesson we are going to make the changes to allow them to be better.
Improving things and exploring ways to make them better is a vital part of building a realistic city - it's up there with planning and detailing in terms of importance.
Motivation to make improvements to our cities can come from several sources - new finds on the forums and exchanges, feedback from others and, perhaps most importantly, our own judgement on our city can all be catalysts for change, and at least one of these factors has been a motivation behind all of the improvements you'll see in this lesson.

Let's crack on. The historical district we built in Lesson 15 is shown below:


You can see that several of the buildings are inappropriate for a historical area (which arose from us zoning lots rather than plopping them), and it was suggested to me that a more medieval-styled church would fit the bill better, a critique I wholeheartedly agree with.
Fortunately, since this 'historical' district was created, I've managed to source the dependencies for Paeng's Old Town Centre, which is a set of old-style buildings that are much more appropriate and, when plopped, make all the difference:


That newer, much more suitable church is King's College Chapel, a recreation of a very famous church (in the UK at least) in a certain famous educational establishment that I will keep my opinions of to myself. It certainly contributes to a much more historical-looking district in this scene.

We move on to our roads, which the advent of NAM 31 has enabled us to significantly improve the appearance of with the new draggable smooth curves and FAR. Let's start with this long S-curve, created from 2 45-degree curves:


First, demolish the current setup. You now need to manually drag out the curves with the Road tool, and afterwards, click in the tiles circled in red in the picture below:


With a little gap-filling, you should end up with something like this:


Notice that our newly-dragged smooth curves now have proper pavements, whereas they didn't before. Those pavement textures are wealth-dependent too, so they won't appear in rural areas. The result is a much more realistic road.

We can also rebuild our FAR sections using Draggable FAR, a major feature of the latest NAM. Let's start with one of our existing FAR sections:


As before, start by demolishing the puzzle pieces. You now need to drag out 6-tile stretches of orthogonal road, one next to the other, but with each one shifted 3 tiles from the next, like so:


(As an aside, FAR-2 is dragged similarly, but the stretches need to be 4 tiles long and the shift between them needs to be 2 tiles.

To create the transitions, you need to create a 2-tile stretch of orthogonal road, next to the last FAR section and shifted 3 tiles as before. Then drag straight out from the next tile:


Do this on both ends of the FAR section, and you end up with a FAR section with wealth-dependent pavement textures, which looks much more realistic:


One of the biggest advantages of draggable FAR is that you can create junctions on it wherever you want, whereas before you were restricted to building junctions in the middle of the individualR FA sections. We exploit this functionality by adding a new access road to our suburb:


Simply drag the street until it meets the road such that the preview shows a nice clean intersection. You may need to drag over 2 tiles of road.

We can convert S-curves as well. Let's sort this textureless piece out:


Simply demolish the old piece and extend the orthogonal sections of road into the previously occupied tiles:


The end result is as pleasing as it is with the 45-degree curves and the FAR:


There is another new piece in the latest NAM that allows us to give 45-degree smooth avenue curves proper pavement textures. That is the Avenue 45-degree Flex Curve, which is found at the end of the Wide Radius Curves tab ring in the Roads menu. This curve is not dragged - instead it exists as a puzzle piece. You must therefore demolish the old curve and put this new puzzle piece in its place:


There are lots more draggable smooth curve setups available, details of which are given in the NAM documentation.

Let's move on to something completely different. You might remember in Lesson 18 we learnt how to build a university. It was suggested to me afterwards in the comments that I place a small sports stadium in it, which is a feature of many American universities. I've not done this because UK universities don't have their own sports stadia - but it did make me add a sports complex to our university:


You can see that we've featured a large number of different sports pitches here. Many universities have teams in pretty much any sport you can think of (and some you can't!), so don't be afraid to incorporate some 'foreign' and/or unusual sports into your university campuses.

We now address a problem that can easily arise from zoning lots:


That white building in the middle may have successfully grown on a low-density commercial lot, but it's about 10 times higher and is massively bigger than the buildings around it.
This building is out of place. It does not fit with its surroundings and does not belong in this part of the city. It needs to be swiftly demolished.

This problem can, in theory, be solved by plopping your buildings instead of zoning them. But to do so would take an enormous amount of time which can be better spent on other things. There are thousands of buildings in a city, and so it's completely impractical to plop them one-by-one. Instead, you just need to be vigilant when it comes to lots like this and keep that bulldozer ready.

We now turn our focus to solving a problem that is bound to hit your city sooner or later - congestion.

Let's take a look at this street, for instance:


You can see that there's a lot of orange and red on that street, indicating that traffic is piling up to excessive levels. We need to upgrade this street to increase capacity, and we will do this by converting it into a stretch of AVE-2.
This presents us with a challenge. We need to do the conversion to a high standard whilst trying to minimise the effect on the suburb. We want to keep the number of buildings demolished to an absolute minimum.

Why AVE-2? In general, an effective method of minimising disruption is to upgrade to a network which is the same width (in terms of city tiles) but is of higher capacity. You should not resort to widening roads into neighbouring city tiles, nor should you suddenly upgrade an avenue-type road into an expressway, unless it's absolutely necessary (for example, if a section of TLA-7 is congested and creating relief roads is impractical).
The nature of AVE-2 also makes it suitable for use in a suburb, like you're about to see here, but has the same capacity as a regular road.

To start the conversion, first pause the game so you can focus on the upgrade without having to deal with abandoned homes and suchlike. Then remove a bit of street and place a Road - AVE-2 Transition at the end of the stretch to be upgraded, and drag out a bit of road to the first curve:


We now come to a slight problem. Whereas we can get away with using sharp Maxis curves on our suburban streets, the AVE-2 is a road and so we should really use smooth curves on it.
So, in this case, we will have to demolish the scetion of the street to be upgraded featuring the curves and place AVE-2 45-degree curves in its place. (These curves are not draggable, existing only as puzzle pieces.) Inevitably, this is going to result in a couple of side streets being cut off from the rest of the road network, but we'll sort that out in a minute:


We need to tidy this up before we continue. The side streets that have been cut off need to be reconnected to the rest of the road network, either to other side streets or somewhere else on the main street ideally such that we don't have to demolish houses or at least can move the plots elsewhere. It may also be necessary to re-apply SAM textures to some of our cut-off streets:


We now address the junction at the bottom of this picture. The AVE-2 needs to continue to the existing connection with the main road at the bottom, doing a shift in the process. Doing this is going to require the use of AVE-2 Small 90-degree Curves and some selective demolition and rerouting of streets (just like with the 45-degree curves):


Having done this, we can fill in the rest of the AVE-2 up to the main road using a starter piece, coupled with some additional dragging if necessary. Finish off by adding TuLEPs to the junction between the main road and the AVE-2 like so:


When done, you'll end up with a satisfying stretch of AVE-2:


But have we solved our congestion problem? Let's take a look:


OK, so the traffic hasn't completely gone away, particularly around the junction with the main road, but it's better than it was before.

You may also experience congestion problems in transit-enabled lots. If a transit-enabled lot shows up as red in the Traffic data view, but the street/road it sits on is green/yellow, then this tells you that the street itself is fine, but the transit-enabled lot does not have sufficient capacity and needs replacing, like you see here:


The two red tiles here are occupied by a bus stop lot. It's clear that this alone is causing congestion, and so we need to replace it with a higher-capacity lot.

Fortunately, the RTMT features SAM bus stops with a capacity of 5,000 (I think), so let's waste no time replacing our woefully over-capacity bus stop with the RTMT offering:


A quick inspection of the updated Traffic data view shows that this replacement has indeed alleviated the congestion:


(Yes, some tiles are still yellow, but this just means that the street is a bit busy, not jammed up and so upgrading this street is unjustified.)

Upgrading streets is all well and good, but what happens when your roads get congested like this one has?


Once again, the NWM will come to our rescue. We'll simply upgrade this stretch of road to an NMAVE-4, which will give us a 25% capacity increase and will fit right into this urban setting.

We start by placing an NMAVE-4 Starter Piece directly onto our road at one end of the stretch to be upgraded. Then we demolish a couple of tiles of road and tidy up. Now drag from the NMAVE-4 up to the tile before the end of the regular road, like so:


Notice how the preview changes to half a transition - indeed, letting go of the mouse button now will produce a nice draggable transition:


(Lots of other NWM transitions are also draggable in this way, although with some you need to drag to the road and not to the tile before it ends. Consult the NAM documentation for more details.)

In theory, we should be able to simply drag out the NMAVE-4 (using the Road tool) along the section we want to upgrade. However, life is never that simple:


If you simply drag NMAVE-4 through this lot, you will make the bus stop immortal - the textures will convert but you won't ever be able to properly demolish the bus stop.
Therefore you have to demolish this bus stop before you drag NWM networks through that tile. You can then place an NMAVE-4 bus stop (one example of which can be found here) in place of the original stop.

Now we are free of obstructions, we can drag out the rest of the NMAVE-4. You might need to selectively place starter pieces to ensure the override continues along the entire stretch of road.
At the other end of the section being upgraded, create another transition using the same method as before, which will give you a complete stretch of NMAVE-4:


Is the traffic better thanks to our upgrade? Let's take a quick look at the Traffic data view and find out:


Much better.

Whilst we're on this tile, let's look at a couple of other small changes we can make, starting with this junction:


We have arrows to turn left and right, but what do you do if you want to go straight on here?
Now, at the time this junction was made, there was no TuLEP piece featuring an arrow to go straight on. At the time of writing this update, there still isn't a TuLEP piece with an arrow to go straight on. So the above setup was done as a compromise.
However, since making this I've decided that the alternative TuLEP style, the A1 type, is a more preferable compromise and the junction should be modified forthwith:


This isn't ideal - in England we have arrows on all of the lanes - but it will have to do for now. There may not be any arrows on two of the lanes but the drivers should now be able to figure out which lane to be in from the context of the junction.

I've also decided to change these rail catenaries:


Into these rail catenaries:


Why have I done this? Simply because the latter ones are British-style catenaries whereas the former ones are European-style catenaries, and I wasn't aware of the British-style catenaries when I originally built this railway.

Let's move north now to the football stadium, which we built in Lesson 14. After I built this, a fellow member of the forum suggested I add additional bus stops next to the stadium. I think that's a pretty good idea:


We have one more improvement to make in this lesson, and that is to this expressway junction:


At first glance, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with this setup. But, as was pointed out in the comments, we can make this junction safer by adding acceleration lanes leading up to the ramps, giving traffic entering the expressway time to merge with traffic on the main carriageway safely.
One way to do this is to use the Narrow Exit Lane pieces that appear as cosmetic pieces for the RHW-4, but these only feature Type A and Type B ramps, and not the Type C or Type A Wide styles that would be useful here.
So instead we're going to replace these ramps with RHW-6S Type F1 ramps and construct a small section of RHW-6s with the intention of using the extra lane as an acceleration lane:


We want to end the acceleration lanes about 7-10 tiles from the ramps. To do this, we use the RHW-4 to RHW-6S Transition with Block Markings (Lane 1), and then place RHW-6S Block Markings (Lane 1) (found in the 2-tile Cosmetic Pieces tab ring) in between the transitions and the ramp. You may also need to move any road signs that you've built, which are circled in red in this picture:


Now repeat this process at the other end of the junction, and, et voilà, you should end up with something like this:


This new setup looks pretty good and is a lot safer for the drivers using it.

Making improvements is an absolutely vital aspect of realistic city-building and you should always be looking for opportunities to make things better. There are, no doubt, many other things in our city we could improve. But you have to stop somewhere, and for this lesson, that 'somewhere' is at this point here.

And that concludes the lessons of Project 2. We are done with this project. In the next couple of weeks I will be giving a summary of everything we've learnt in this project, some of the best bits of this project, and then I'll talk about a side topic for one update. But after that, we move on to our next project - the major city.

I have a concept for this project in my head, and it will definitely feature the following:

- Mining and oil industry
- Mountains
- Large freight seaport and major ferry terminal
- International airport
- 4-way motorway interchange
- Urban motorway made using Project Symphony
- Fully integrated public transport system featuring metro/tube lines, trams, HSR, suburban rail lines, etc.
- An interesting landmark in every city tile
- A terrain mod
- Region landscaped using SC4 Terraformer
- Large city park
- 18-hole golf course with range and putting green

We will also use the Lot Editor to create lots from scratch using existing buildings and props.

There is plenty of scope to add things to this list, so if you want me to cover something in the next project, then please say so, either by comment or by PM. (One thing I will definitely not be covering is BATs - that's reserved for Project 4. Aside from that, I'll take requests on pretty much anything.)

I also feel this would be a good time to have a little audience participation in this MD. I'd like you guys to suggest possible names for our major city. It can be as typical or as unusual as you like - just keep it clean please. I will choose my favourite one from the suggestions posted.

And with that, the lessons of Project 2 have come to an end.

See you for the Summary, the Best Bits, the side topic, and ultimately Project 3!
-Chris

[CharlieLord]

Great lesson Smiley (as always!). I found the NAM stuff especially helpful, the new draggable stuff is too devilishly clever for my simple mind 

Looking forward to seeing project 3, I'm full of admiration over how much time you put into this project

Also, if you're looking to make a mine, I'd recommend using Paeng's Coal Mines Cheat sheet found here: http://www.simpeg.com/forum/index.php?topic=10358.0 (That is if you haven't seen it already).

Good luck!

[dyas]

Made account to reply. So your doing good. I am going to just go for a whole region with planing. I want it to not be one city, but multiple cities, that span multiple tiles. I will post a picture when I have it. And NAM has a steep learning curve.

Edit:
I'm starting a CJ for my region based on your input. Don't know if I can do as good as you did, but I'm going to work on it.

What is a good slope mod?

[smileymk]

Hey guys. Our summary of everything we did in Project 2 is coming up. But first...

CharlieLord: You, sir, are a star for providing that link for us all to make use of. Now we'll all be able to make elaborate mining complexes! And yes, the NAM does take a bit of getting used to... keep practising!

dyas: Firstly, welcome to SC4D! Secondly, your link to your CJ over at ST is appreciated, although I strongly encourage you to put it into your signature instead of posting it on a thread (especially an MD) in order to avoid being accused of hijacking the thread. (You're more than welcome to post pictures here for critiquing, and you can ask me to have a look at some of your work and give suggestions, but keep it at that please.)
On a less whiny note, I've seen your CJ and it certainly looks encouraging, although there are a couple of alterations you could make to your plan to improve it. I will post my suggestions, together with an annotated map, over on ST when I have time.
And in response to your question, I use the Ennedi Slope Mod, which has slope parameters for the RHW as well as all other networks. I highly recommend it.

Now, let's go over what we've learnt in Project 2.

Project 2 Summary

Believe it or not, we've been working on this project since 2011 (!). So you'll probably have forgotten a few things we did in this project, particularly in the earlier lessons. It's also good to go over what you've learnt anyway to reinforce the content and make sure it sticks in your head.
Therefore I've compiled a simple bullet-point summary of all the key points from all the lessons in this project for easy reference.
Keep in mind that I will assume you know all of what is listed below when we do Project 3, so I encourage you to make a private copy of this Summary for your own personal reference. Here goes:

Planning and Advanced Planning

- Design your region as if it were one large city tile. (This is critical!)

- Larger projects require more detailed planning.

- Create a brief outlining what the aim of your project is, in reasonable detail, before you start planning it.

- Plan out the region as a whole first, including city tile borders for reference only.

- Maintain a strict colour-coding scheme for your plans, and add appropriate labelling.

- You do not need to draw your plan to scale. A rough sketch will do.

- Once your main plan is complete, plan out the individual city tiles in turn, as well as road interchanges and other complicated aspects of the region.

- Include more detail in your city tile plans than in your region plan.

- Separate estates with transport networks or natural features, not city tiles.

- A random number generator combined with the index of a map can be used to name your region/city/estates/streets/etc.

- After you complete the terraforming for your region, adapt your plan to fit the terrain.

Preparation

- You can easily create a new region without ever loading SC4.

- To make a region, you need to create a folder in the 'Regions' folder, located under My Documents\SimCity 4.

- Create a file named config.bmp in the new folder using image-editing software (such as Paint). Size it as 1 pizel per small city tile and colour it according to your arrangement of city tiles.

- Create a file named region.ini using a text editor (such as Notepad). Use the equivalent files from other regions as templates, changing the name of the region given in the file and, if necessary, the terrain parameters.

- Place the config.bmp and region.ini files in your new region folder.

- Name your region folder according to the name you gave it in the planning stage.

Organising the Plugins Folder

- Keeping a structured, neat and tidy Plugins folder is essential in managing your mods and downloads, and makes things a lot easier when you come to do modding.

- As far as possible, keep all of your mods and downloads in one of the two Plugins folders used by the game.

- Certain essential files (such as the city background PNG files and the Extra Cheats DLL) should remain in their default positions in the Plugins folder. Everything else should be organised into subfolders.

- Use an easy-to-follow system (such as the Maxis menu system) in your Plugins directory.

- Do not use more subfolders than you need to. Keep it simple.

- Put downloads of the same category from the same creator into a dedicated subfolder.

Terraforming

- Your landscape should be irregular. Avoid patterns.

- Beach areas should be made smooth and not excessively kinky, curvy or straight. Gentle bends work very well.

- Fine-tune areas with smaller brushes - in particular, use the Shallow Valley tool to smooth out the 'wave' coastline pattern that appears after using the terrain lowering tools to create water.

- Make a straight and level coastline for marinas.

- Make sure your landscape flows continuously and is smooth over city tile boundaries.

- Do not terraform large hills directly next to beach or marina areas - leave a 1-2 mile gap in between. Cliff areas are a different story.

- Use the grid to show the land contours more clearly and help you to get the right results.

- Hills should be rolling, i.e. they should link together and flow smoothly from one hill to the next.

- Reconcile the edges only when starting to terraform a new tile to get a reference, or when the region is complete.

- Spikes and other wild fluctuations in the terrain caused by reconciling edges should be smoothed out.

- Use the God Mode tree tool to place trees on the flats (but not too close to coastlines), on hilltops and in valleys.

- Use MMPs to place a variety of trees and plants on flat and gently-sloped areas.

- When trees are placed on hills, they should run straight up the hill.

- Trees should be together in clusters. No tree should sit in isolation.

Railways

- It's helpful to build the transportation infrastructure first in a given city tile, and helpful to build railways before other forms of transport.

- Station lots should be selected carefully according to their purpose.

- Main line termini should be large and elaborate.

- Be sure to provide appropriate road and bus access to your stations. The more important the station, the more elaborate the transport connections should be.

- Always use smooth curves when building railways. (There are exceptions, but we'll cover these in Project 3.)

- To build 45-degree curves, first transition to FARR and then to orthogonal/diagonal.

- Flatten out the terrain before placing smooth curves and FARR pieces.

- Main lines and important branch lines may be electrified. (Note: Most railway lines are not electrified! Bear this in mind when planning your railways.)

- Catenary masts should be spaced every 3 tiles on orthogonal track, every 2 tiles on diagonal track, and appropriately on FARR and point sections.

- Unimportant mainline stations should be fairly compact and unspectacular.

- A small car park and bus stop is sufficient for a small mainline station.

- Railways should be routed according to the terrain so that slopes are kept to a minimum.

- Do not build railway tunnels unless absolutely necessary. Remember it is much cheaper to build around the side of a hill than it is to tunnel through it.

- Branch lines can be more curvaceous than main lines.

- When making STR curves, drag out a section of STR beyond the curve to ensure stability is maintained after the smooth curve piece is placed.

- Place an STR Starter Piece on the first tile when an STR line enters a new city tile to change it from double track to single track.

- Do not forget to flatten out stubs where a railway line exits a flattened area.

- Branch line stations, especially STR stations, should be small, short and have few, if any, facilities.

Motorways and Expressways

- Use RHW or Project Symphony to build motorways and expressways. Maxis highways and avenues really aren't suitable.

- 3-level stacked roundabouts/volleyball interchanges are great for expressway-expressway or motorway-expressway interchanges - NOT motorway - motorway interchanges.

- Use fractional angle (Type C or Type F) ramps wherever possible.

- Use neighbour connector pieces when an RHW network crosses a city tile boundary to make the connection functional.

- Use cosmetic pieces where appropriate.

- RHW curves are pre-dragged in the same way as STR curves, but the smooth curve piece may be placed directly over the dragged curve, without any pre-demolition.

- Run motorways on as flat a course as possible. The 'around the hill, not through it' rule applies as much to motorways as it does to railways.

- Roundabout and dumbbell interchanges are good interchanges to use with expressways and surface roads.

- RHW-4 is fine for all but the busiest expressways.

- When dragging road into a rounadbout interchange, use AVE-4 to AVE-2 followed by AVE-2 to Road to create a nice transition. Remember to give the curvier path to traffic going into the interchange.

- Expressways can go straight over hills, provided that the gradient is not too steep.

Roads

- Start from existing infrastructure such as motorway junctions.

- Road layouts should be designed to distribute traffic, eg. use avenues at the end of a motorway to spread out the traffic.

- Urban roads should be more or less straight.

- Always use smooth curves - you should be making frequent use of the draggable smooth curve functionality and of the FLEX pieces found in the latest NAM.

- Use flyovers and underpasses to take roads over railway lines. Avoid level crossings where possible.

- When a road goes over an electrified railway line via a bridge, catenaries should be placed immediately next to the bridge, on both sides.

- Short avenue stubs can be used to give road connections into avenue roundabouts.

- Make good use of FAR when appropriate.

- Flat junctions between main roads should always be complimented with TuLEPs.

- Coastal roads should follow the coastline fairly closely. Remember to leave space for beaches/marinas if you plan to build them.

Buses

- Park-and-ride facilities, if you have them, should be placed on or near a main road. Use TuLEPs to connect the main road to the facility.

- To create a park-and-ride facility, create a turning circle for the buses and surround it with a car park after placing the terminal.

- Central bus terminals should not take up too much space, but should have the capacity for the job.

Pedestrian Walkways

- Mark out the route with road beforehand. Use rail to smoothen out slopes when necessary.

- Add plenty of short branches to connect to the street network in your estates.

- Use Ped Mall to create your walkways if you want them to be functional. If you don't require functionality, parks or MMPs will do the job.

- When a pedestrian walkway meets a main road, place a bus stop to activate the paths on the Ped Mall.

Power Stations

- Your building has got to be big. The Maxis offerings simply won't cut it.

- If your power station is served by rail, provide a single-track freight terminal.

- Provide an access road to connect the power station to a main road.

- Add car parks, transformers, snack vans, cooling towers, a security fence with a gate on the access road and, if it's a coal-fired power station, a tailings pile.

- Power lines should be run along main transport routes and be kept as straight as possible.

- Do not run power lines through city estates if you can avoid it.

- Run multiple lines from the power station to go off in different directions.

- Place transformers wherever power lines meet railway lines or towns, or when the lines end.

- Use negihbour deals to supply power to all city tiles in your region.

Water

- Reservoirs are a realistic way of supplying water to a region.

- Reservoirs need to be extremely large (about 50-100 tiles long and 15-25 wide) and flat.

- Mark out the border of the reservoir with road.

- Use MMP ploppable water to create the reservoir.

- Choose a suitable water facility to go next to the reservoir. It needs to have enough capacity to supply your whole region and look the part.

- Add water treatment facilities and road access.

- Give your water source its own transformer. You can also put a security fence around it if you wish.

- Lay pipes along surface roads. Add to your pipe network as you expand your road and street network. Do not route pipes along railways, expressways or motorways.

- Use neighbour deals to supply water to every city tile in your region.

Recycling Centres

- These belong in industrial estates. Small recycling bins may also be provided outside supermarkets.

- Recycling centres require good road access. They should be easy to get to.

- You should choose a lot that is fairly compact and unassuming. The centre should have a security fence around it.

Landmarks

- Landmarks give your city a unique identity.

- Stadia need to be sited in a location that is relatively flat and has plenty of transport connections.

- Use appropriate SAM textures for streets and car parks.

- Provide fast food and retail outlets in stadium complexes, as well as ample parking.

- Use TuLEPs wherever a stadium access road meets a main road at a flat junction.

- Lighthouses can be built by flattening an area by the coast and placing a suitable lot.

Historical Districts

- Border your historical areas with a city wall.

- Provide plenty of bus stops near the area for tourists.

- A large, medieval-styled church should be included, as well as a market.

- Streets within the district should be textured with the SAM-8 (cobblestone) textures.

- Use Sandstone Ped Mall tiles as well as plaza filler pieces to fill in gaps. Remember to leave space for buildings.

- RCI buildings within the district need to be chosen very carefully. Be sure to make use of ploppable buildings and the LotPlop cheat.

- Do not zone RCI. Use ploppable buildings instead.

Marinas

- You need to create an artificial harbour using the God Mode terrain tools. Make it big. Really big. Be sure to provide plenty of room for boats to manoeuvre.

- Add a seawall around the outside edge of your marina, and plenty of dock pieces within it.

- Use filler pieces to fill in the gaps.

- Provide large car parks and commercial development along the waterfront.

Beaches

- Flatten out your urban beach areas beforehand. Leave space for a promenade and retaining wall.

- Use God Mode terrain tools to smoothen out the shoreline, and RHW to smoothen out transitions between urban and rural sections of beach.

- Piers make a good addition to any seaside town.

- Piers should be straight, narrow and reasonably long.

- Add a retaining wall or some other means of separation between your beach and your promenade.

- If desired, a pathway along the fringe of the beach (next to the wall) can be made using appropriate MMPs.

- Fill the gap between wall/pathway and shore using a sand or a shingle MMP, depending on personal preference.

- Add streaks of sand along the retaining wall to represent the effects of the wind blowing the sand about.

- Fill your urban sections of beach liberally with detail such as people, surfers, little boats, etc.

- Rural beaches need very little detailing and can be separated from the mainland with grass.

- Add common seaside features like tennis courts, mini-golf courses and playgrounds.

Facilities

- Facilities should be placed in easy-to-get-to locations.

- Law courts should be placed in the CBD.

- Place major facilities of one type in one tile, and then build smaller units in other tiles so that the whole city enjoys coverage.

- Facilities are best placed on level ground.

- Police and fire stations should be placed on or near main roads.

- Primary schools should have a small grass field, a small playground and a low-key fence.

- Middle schools should have at least one playground, a larger field, a sports pitch and a proper escape-proof fence.

- High schools should feature a substantial field with numerous sports pitches.

- All education and health establishments should feature ample car parking and (with the exception of primary schools) a bus stop.

- Private schools may be included as well. Be sure to give them reasonably big fields and a couple of sports pitches.

- A good ratio for primary schools to middle schools to high schools to private schools is about 32:16:8:1.

- Provide a college for those students who want to do vocational courses.

- If building a university, be sure to include, at the very least, at least 3 departmental buildings, a library, a sports centre, and residences.

- Provide plenty of car parks for your university and border it with MMP trees.

- Central libraries, museums and theatres can be placed in your CBD.

- Each city tile in your city should have a clinic. The region should also feature a large hospital.

Basic Modding

- SC4 Tool can be used to transit-enable lots and modify descriptors.

- Lot Editor can be used for adding driveways and for tinkering lots.

- Be sure to select the appropriate network when transit-enabling lot tiles and to set the direction correctly.

- When transit-enabling a tile with one-way road, be sure to make the arrows point out from both directions, not just one.

- Use the Lot Editor to add, get rid of, or move props to improve the appearance of lots.

- After modifying a descriptor, you need to change the corresponding lot in Lot Editor so that it features the new building with the new descriptor rather than the old one, otherwise the game will continue to use the old building. Identify the new building by comparing TGI references.

- If you modify lots, then you need to demolish and rebuild them in the game in order to see the changes.

Industry

- Industrial areas should be built as estates.

- Lay out a network of main streets that cover the industrial estate and link to main roads. Don't make them too curvy.

- Add dead-end streets to fill in the gaps.

- Provide a water supply and a good few bus stops. Place the bus stops on your main streets.

- Use the parcelised zoning technique (holding the CTRL key whilst zoning) to zone for industry. Provide gaps between factories.

- Provide commercial zoning along the main roads bordering the industrial estate.

- Add paths and grass to fill in the gaps. Border the estate with MMP trees.

Suburbs

- Create a main street network linking all parts of your suburb with the main roads surrounding it. It's a good idea to base it around your existing facilities.

- Suburban streets can (and should) be more curvaceous than industrial streets.

- Add side streets to cover the suburb. Go for an unpatterned and seemingly random layout. Vary your street endings.

- Use SAM asphalt textures for all of your suburban streets.

- Extend your suburban streets into neighbouring city tiles using the Underground Rail piece method outlined in Lesson 21.

- Include open fields, paths, playgrounds, bus stops (on main streets), and sports pitches.

- Place commercial zoning along the main roads bordering your suburb, as well as around high schools and clinics.

- Small dedicated commercial areas (local centres) can also be placed in your suburbs. These contain local shops for the local residents.

- Zone 1x1 low-density residential plots along all of your suburban streets.

- Fill in the gaps with MMP trees.

Inner City and Coast

- Grid street layouts are appropriate for inner cities, but you can go for more elaborate street layouts if you wish.

- Zoning in inner cities should be medium density.

- Place amenities and shops in central locations within your inner city, and fill the rest with residential zoning. Zone commercial along main roads.

- Commercial zoning should be provided next to major transport hubs.

- Diagonal streets can be used to corner off the edge of an inner city neatly.

- High-density commercial should be zoned along the coastline in dense urban areas, and low-density, high-wealth residential should be zoned along the coastline in less dense areas.

- Hotels and apartment blocks should be placed along the coastline in dense urban areas.

CBD

- The street layout should be tight and compact.

- Construct numerous car parks, a city hall, at least one shopping centre, and anything else you want to include.

- CBD zoning should be exclusively high density. Place commercial zoning near landmarks and fill the rest with a mix of commercial and [bolor=green]residential[/color] zoning.

- Be sure to place plenty of bus stops!

Rural Land

- Use of the SPAM (see Lesson 24 for a link) is highly recommended to create realistic farmland.

- Lay out a sparse network of streets textured with SAM-4 (gravel textures). Include some curves and diagonals - make the layout interesting.

- Agricultural plots should be fairly large - no more than 3 or 4 plots should fill a 'block' of land enclosed by streets.

- Separate farm plots from other farm plots and major transport networks by a gap of at least one tile.

- Do not zone farmland on excessively steep slopes.

- Pause the game whilst zoning farmland.

- Put a house in every farm plot. You can also add extra details such as tractors where appropriate.

- Keep a sharp eye on what grows in your residential plots, and be sure to delete anything out of place that might grow (such as flats).

- Neaten up plots with diagonal fillers and border them with MMP trees.

- Add grass, flowers and other details in unzoned areas.

- Use filler lots or trees to extend your farmland smoothly over city tile borders.

Detailing and Finishing Touches

- Use rocks, grass and trees to provide a smooth transition between lakes/reservoirs/rivers/streams and land.

- Add signs and traffic to your roads and railways.

- Add a variety of appropriate details to your estates. Don't forget about people!

- Avoid clichés.

- Make use of roundabout fillers, matrix signs and footbridges where you can.

- No town is ever complete without a couple of fast food outlets! Supermarkets are just as important.

Improvements

- You should always be looking for ways to improve your cities and regions.

- Ideas for improving your city can come from several different sources.

- Make use of new, better mods and downloads when they are released.

- Upgrade congested networks to networks of the same width but which have a higher capacity. Do not widen roads into neighbouring tiles unless absolutely necessary.

And that just about covers everything we've learnt in Project 2. It's a lot to take in, so rather than going through it all at once, I recommend once again that you make a private copy of this Summary and keep it for future reference.

In the next week or so, as time allows, I'll be showing the best bits of the city we've made in this project.

Until then, take care,
- Chris

[dyas]

Chris -

Sorry, I did not mean to hijack or anything. Fixed my post as such. My city doesn't look near as nice as yours. Do you not worry about monthly payment? How can you afford so much stuff?

[smileymk]

Hello folks.

dyas: Apology accepted, I know you meant well. I've seen your work and for someone new to the game and the NAM it's pretty good (certainly better than some of my first cities!). There's a few small improvements which I'll suggest to you on ST soon, but once those are made you'll have a very nice-looking region.
As for how I can afford so much stuff, the answer to that is very simple - the stuff is free! All downloads on all the main SC4 exchanges are completely free of charge.

Now, the Summary was quite a read. I think it's time for some pictures showing my favourite scenes from our Project 2 city.

Project 2 Best Bits

You guys did enough reading in the Summary, so I'm just going to let the pictures do the talking. First up is one of my favourite scenes from the coast:


Now two shots of our CBD, at day and at night:




Market day in the historical district:


Now, every city has its rougher parts - here's Troon's:


Yeah. Let's move swiftly away from there and take a look at out beautiful rural land:


We zoom in and see a train flying through the farmland:


Nice. Let's head down the road and get another view of our stadium, just because of the impressiveness of the structure:


We can't have a Best Bits section without showing a section of our city suburbs, which I'm pretty proud of:


And finally, a bit of Cops 'n' Robbers to finish off Project 2 in comic style:


And with that, we finally bring Project 2 to a close.

Before we start Project 3, I'm going to do an update discussing a topic I'm sure many of you will be interested in - that of recreating a real-life city in SC4.

After that, we will start Project 3 (the major city). We still need a name for this new region guys! Please post your suggestions in the comments, as well as anything you'd like me to include in addition to what I listed in the conclusion to Lesson 28.

See you next time,
- Chris

[APSMS]

Chris -
Do you not worry about monthly payment? How can you afford so much stuff?

Hello folks.

dyas: Apology accepted, I know you meant well. I've seen your work and for someone new to the game and the NAM it's pretty good (certainly better than some of my first cities!). There's a few small improvements which I'll suggest to you on ST soon, but once those are made you'll have a very nice-looking region.
As for how I can afford so much stuff, the answer to that is very simple - the stuff is free! All downloads on all the main SC4 exchanges are completely free of charge.

Um, Chris (if I may call you that), I think he was referring to your city budget ingame, rather than how you could afford all the downloads.
I am also interested in how you managed that, since I have similar trouble with my cities w/o resorting to money cheats (like "moolah #").

This is an interesting CJ, even if I find irrelevant to my type of cities (Los Angeles, San Diego; California/American style).

[dyas]

Yes I meant in game. I would also appreciate any help if your willing to follow me over there. I'm quite proud of my latest project in making it real. But enough about me, I love those pictures. It gives me something to look forward to. I am also curious how you will approach project 3, as that is closer to what I'm trying.

For planing, I have come to an interesting conclusion, as you have don't a region the size I choose. I find that I need to do a region plan for the wide area. This includes the major highways and were large neighborhoods (estates) are going to be. Maybe even some avenues. I like them although I should try getting into the RWM more. I feel that they have a good place between highways and roads.

Once I have the region done, when I go to start a tile, I need to than plan that tile. This will include a more detailed look at facilities, how neighborhoods should be broken up by major roads. Roads being larger than the small streets, but smaller than the regional avenues.

All and All I'm curious to see how you tackle your planning. One major thing i choose not to due however is terraform. I have no interest. I just download a region I like and go for it. I'm having trouble with the slope mod though. Is that just a practice thing? And again, looking forward to more.

[smileymk]

Hello. Time for a side topic methinks. But first...

APSMS: Ah, I misunderstood. Thanks for clearing that up. With regards to city budget, I usually just give myself billions of dollars with the moolah cheat early on and then I don't have to worry about money. That side of the game isn't that important to me - for me SimCity 4 is a platform for the realistic modelling of cities and regions, and my main objective in building regions is to turn them from blank slates into works of art. That, for me, is enough of a challenge in itself. And yes, you can call me Chris. And finally, in response to your remark about this MD not being especially relevant to US-style cities, I have decided, because of this response, to include a US-style suburb in the next project city.

dyas: See my above reply with regards to the city budget. Your approach to region planning is pretty much identical to mine, although my basic region plans only usually show towns and major transport routes, with the towns themselves being planned out individually. Tile-by-tile planning is a very good strategy, though, so I recommend you to continue doing that.
I'll be honest, I don't do much terraforming either. For most of my side projects I've just downloaded a region I've found which fits the brief of the project in question and planned the project around it. For my recreation of Milton Keynes the only terraforming I'm doing is for bridges and cuttings. Terraforming is not my strong point, so I don't do it. I'm very pleased to hear that you play to your strengths and interests, because that is exactly what you should be doing. It's also the best way to make your city, well, yours.
As for the use of a slope mod, it's like anything else in SC4 - it takes practice and experience to get used to it and use it well. A slope mod really is a must for a realistic region, and it's well worth you practising using it on a blank tile if you're finding it hard. A bit of forward planning (see Project 2, Lesson 5) can help too.

And now, let us go over some of the key ideas of recreating a real-life city in SC4.

Recreating a Real City in SimCity 4

Firstly, why would we want to recreate a real-life city in SC4? After all, the game provides you with the tools to make the fictional landscape of your dreams, right? Surely recreating a real place doesn't give that flexibility and satisfaction that creating a region purely from your imagination does?
To answer this, let's look at railway modelling. Many railway modellers like to create models of real places and real railways, usually set in a particular point in history, running the actual trains that ran at that location at that time, and they get great satisfaction out of doing this.
When we play SC4, we're effectively modelling a city. And the range of tools at our disposal far exceeds that of the railway modeller. And we don't have to pay for them either. So there's no reason at all why we can't recreate a real place in SC4 with reasonable accuracy and get a lot of satisfaction out of it.

In the opinion of the author, recreating a real place is a highly worthwhile project that is worth pursuing. It presents a completely different set of challenges to those you get from creating a fictional place, and it's possible, with time and effort, to create a replication that is accurate and very satisfying. So how do we go about doing so?
This update will be a short essay on the fundamental ideas behind recreating a real-life city in SimCity 4. Let's start right away from the very beginning:

Pick a location you know well. This should be obvious really. Simply put, if you know a place well then you will be aware of its little quirks and features that don't show up on maps of the area. You'll know exactly where the shops are and where the houses are, whereas a map will just show small shops and houses as 'built-up areas'. This makes it far easier to recreate the place accurately. This is why your hometown is an excellent starting point when considering a real place to model - where else are you going to know better?

Strive for accuracy. Again, this is fairly obvious. There is no point in trying to recreate a real place if you're not going to do it accurately! You should aim to have an area completely done, as accurately as possible, before moving on to the next area.
Accuracy comes from an in-depth knowledge of the area being recreated, which leads me into my next key point:

Do your research. Even if you know the place you're recreating extremely well, it's very unlikely you'll know absolutely everything about it. Here's an example:


This is a path connecting two side streets. It has a playground on it as well (circled in white). You wouldn't know about something like this existing in your chosen location unless you either lived there or did your research. Here's another one:


Would you know that there was a roundabout sign there? Would you know that it's right in front of the bus stop? These are little important details that you need to include if you want accuracy, but you won't know about unless you do your research. To put it into perspective, I thought the sign was further forward, away from the bus stop, until I saw this picture, and this sign is in the suburb of Milton Keynes where I live and hence know extremely well.

It's important to use a wide variety of sources when doing your research, as it is often the case that certain things appear on some sources but not others. Some possible sources are listed below:

- Paper maps
- Google Maps and Google Street View (you need to use both!)
- Photographs (look at pictures from the Web, and don't be afraid to get out there and take some yourself)*
- Memory
- Videos
- Books

(*Caution: Please don't go around taking pictures of people's houses without asking permission first. It's just common politeness.)

Maps are your main source, and you should definitely be looking to make good use of them. However, you need to be careful, as there are some pitfalls to be aware of:
Paper maps miss out a lot of things. For example:


This map seems like a fairly accurate depiction at first glance. Now take a look at the same map, this time annotated by me to show all the other significant features of this area:


Yeah. That's quite a lot of stuff you won't find on a paper map.

Google Maps can be out of date. To see this, let's take a look at its satellite image of Milton Keynes Central railway station:


From this picture, you would think that the track layout of the station looks like this:


That, however, was the track layout about 6 years ago. Since then, the station has been upgraded, and the track layout now looks like this:


So not only do some of the platforms do different jobs to what Google Maps would have you believe, there are 2 whole platforms that haven't been put on the system yet! That's not all:

Google Maps can be inaccurate. Let me convince you of this with an example:


Most of the labels you see here are 100% accurate - however, look at the disparity between where Google Maps thinks St. Lawrence's Church is (circled in red), and where it actually is (circled in yellow).
The building labelled as 'St. Lawrence's Church' in this map is actually a house. Clearly Google have made quite a big error there.

These examples illustrate exactly why you need to use multiple sources when doing your research. One just won't give you all of the information you need.

Let's move on to a couple more key points you should consider when recreating a real city in SC4:

Be prepared to mod and BAT. There will be things, like key landmarks, in your chosen location that you feel you absolutely must recreate in order for your city to be a true recreation of your chosen location. But they won't be on the exchanges. Therefore you will have no choice but to do some modding and BATing at some point. We will cover BATs in detail in Project 4, but there's no reason why you can't get ahead of the game and try making some simple models using the tutorials in the software.
For example, I'm making a series of UK road signs for use in my recreation of Milton Keynes (as well as my other side projects). Here's one of them:


However, there's another key point that derives directly from this:

Don't BAT everything. In general, trying to BAT every single house and every single shop in your city is a waste of time. So is trying to plop every single house and shop. It's much better to download buildings of the appropriate style (UK buildings for a UK city, for example) and let them grow in the game. Save the BAT for the most important buildings. That way, you'll get to spend more time playing and shaping your recreation, which, from my experience, is far more enjoyable and rewarding than entering property values in Plugin Manager. This leads me to my next point:

Be prepared to compromise. As we've seen above, it's not practical to BAT everything. Neither should you expect everything to be in exactly the right location, exactly the right distance from everything else.
The main reason for this is that in SC4 you are restricted to a grid. You can't accurately create the intricate street layouts like you see in the example pictures above because the game won't let you. You're unfortunately going to have to make some allowances. However, with proper planning and a bit of thought, you can keep the allowances to a minimum.

Make good use of downloads. They're there, so you might as well use them. Some of them might be just what you're looking for. MMPs are especially useful as they don't follow the grid, and can be placed anywhere. Use them to create natural scenes, footpaths and other small details.

And finally, let me give you the most important key point of them all when it comes to recreating a real city:
Take your time, put the effort in, and don't accept an area as complete until you've done it to the best of your ability.

That should apply to EVERYTHING that you do in SimCity 4, but it's especially important in real-place recreation. If you don't follow the above rule, your work will suffer for it and you won't do the place justice.

So that's all I have to say about recreating a real-life city in SimCity 4. Let me leave you with an overview of my effort for inspiration; my recreation of Milton Keynes, as it is so far:


Next time, we will start Project 3. As always, the first lesson will be on planning. Unfortunately, now is the time for some bad news.

Project 3 Lesson 1 will not appear until June 15th at the earliest (indeed, I won't be making the content for it before this date). The reason for this is that my first-year university exams (which run from May 29th - June 14th) are fast approaching, and these obviously need my full attention. With all due respect, SC4 is a distraction I don't need at the moment.

Now the good news.

I'm going to take a different approach to this project - instead of developing the region as a whole, we're going to build tile-by-tile, and complete one tile in its entirety before moving on to the next. I'm doing this because I want you to see how to apply the techniques across the city tile and how everything fits together to create a masterpiece.

And secondly - I still need a name for the Project 3 region! Here are some possibilities I plucked out of an online name generator:

- Silverglass
- Fairshore
- Mapleford
- Brightdale
- Redholt
- Bellmarsh
- Crystalbush
- Fallgate
- Southfield
- Coldrock

Let's have a little audience participation please, folks. This guide is for you guys and it would be wrong of me not to let you play a part in it.

And with that, it is time for me to say goodbye for now.
- Chris

[yochananmichael]

my vote is for Silverglass

[dyas]

I would not count out zoning maps.
http://www.ci.lynnwood.wa.us/Assets/City+Wide/Maps/Official+Zoning+Map.pdf

[yochananmichael]

sweet Dyas how did you find this and how could one find zoning maps for other cities and towns on the web i.e. how to search to get a map like that?

[dyas]

May not work for all, but I searched for city name plus zoning i think. I know I found North Bend for my state as well. The are public information for US.

Edit:
I just did a search "find my city's zoneing map" on Bing (No, I don't Google). I picked SF in Cally just randomly and got the below. I am sure most are out there.
http://ec2-50-17-237-182.compute-1.amazonaws.com/PIM/

I even found Milton: http://www.milton.ca/en/build/resources/UrbanZoning.pdf with search on Bing of "Milton Keynes zoneing map"

They are out there. They are required for builders. Make your city real. I hope Chris you like this advice and pass it on as well.

[CharlieLord]

First off, another good lesson there Smiley

I'll be sad to see you go (and will be counting down the days until your return!), but nonetheless best of luck in your exams. (I'm currently mid-way through my AS exams as well).

As for my vote for the new region name:

Mapleford, just because

[Burndawger]

Just stumbled onto this. It took me about a week to go through and catch up as well as implement some of the lessons into my work. I found some of this very helpful and enjoyable. I've learned quite a bit, although I wouldn't do everything as you have. 

[smileymk]

Hello folks. Now that my exams are done and I'm home again, it's time to get back to business.

yochananmichael: Thanks for your vote. The results of the vote will be published in the following lesson.

dyas: Oh, very nice. I don't think I've ever seen a map like that in my life. It's certainly a useful source for researching US cities. Not sure it's as useful for UK/Euro cities though, we don't really have those kind of maps here.
As for that link to the Milton map, I should point out that the town depicted is not Milton Keynes but Milton, Canada, about 3,000 miles to the west! Never mind though, the information you provided is still extremely useful.

CharlieLord: Thank you. I'm pleased to say most of my exams went reasonably well and I'm confident I've made it to the second year. I realise the exam season is coming to a close so it's a bit too late to wish you good luck in your AS exams, but may I say that I wish you all the best in your results.

Burndawger: Firstly, I'm very glad you're finding this MD helpful. Secondly, I wouldn't expect you to do everything exactly as I've done. People's playing styles and ideas of realism vary greatly. I often say in lessons to pick the lot you like for a particular situation. Any download I link to is a mere suggestion, an example of a suitable lot. In fact, it's better to deviate from the lessons to suit your own playing style, because by doing that your creation will become individual and unique.

And now, let us begin Project 3.

Project 3 - Major City

Lesson 1 - Preliminary Planning

IMPORTANT: I will assume in this project that you have read and understood all of the material in Projects 1 and 2. If not, you MUST go back and read the bits you don't get, otherwise you will struggle to keep up to speed with the content in this project.

You know why we should plan our cities before we attempt to create them, so I won't go into that. Suffice to say that we will take the same approach as before - we create a master plan of the region as a whole, then individual tile plans depicting more detail, and then structure plans showing how we will build complicated areas of the region.

Before we do that, however, it is useful to create a brief for the project, like we've done previously:

BRIEF
To create a large port city on a region of 4x4 large city tiles, surrounded by large hills and mountains, with mining and oil industries being the main economic interests. The city is to be served by a medium-sized, one-runway airport, and a fully integrated public transport system incorporating rail, light rail, bus and tram systems. The city should also feature a golf course, an urban motorway, a 4-way motorway interchange, a large city park and an interesting landmark in every city tile.

In short, the brief summarises what you're trying to do and sets out the requirements for the project, giving a framework from which to plan the region.

With the brief set out, now is the time to create our master plan - an outline of the region as a whole:


This might look like a bit of a mess at first, but it makes sense once you look at it more slowly. As with previous plans, I have used strict colour schemes to aid clarity. The colour scheme used here is as follows:
Black: City tile boundaries and rail lines (it should be easy to distinguish the city tile borders from the rail lines, though).
Dark Blue: Coastlines and riverbanks.
Bright Blue: Motorways
Dark Green: Changes in landscape
Light Green: Avenues
Grey: Roads
Red: City boundary
Brown: Landmarks

Note that only main roads are depicted, but all rail lines are shown, as well as all significant landmarks. We have also marked the position of the airport runway on our plan.
You can see clearly where everything in our city will be, and that all conditions of the brief have been saisfied... well, most of them.

There is one glaring omission from the plan, and that is that of the public transport system. I included this on my paper plan but left it off the master plan above for clarity.
So we're going to create a separate public transport plan. Now, before we do this, let's have a look at a real-life public transport system, namely the London Underground, to get an idea of how to plan out a public transport system realistically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:London_Underground_with_Greater_London_map.svg

There are a few points to note here. Firstly, note how all lines conglomerate in the centre of London and then spread out as they go into the suburbs. You can also see that most of the lines meet most of the other lines at some point on the system - nearly always in central London. Another thing to observe is that many of the lines branch out and serve multiple routes and destinations.
We will want to replicate all of these features in our public transport system.

There is another vital feature of public transport systems that isn't shown in the above map. To see it, let's instead look at a geographical scale map of the Central Line:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Central_line_%26_London_map.svg

Here you can see the distriution of stations on the line. As you would probably expect, the stations are more frequent in the centre of London and then get less frequent as the line heads out into the suburbs. This is simply because there are more useful destinations in the centre of the city than there are in the suburbs! Also, people are travelling from the suburbs. They can drive to the suburban station but won't have their cars with them when they get off in the City - hence the need for more stations to reduce walking distances.

This feature is common to all Underground lines and is vital to incorporate on any public transport system you might build.

So, with these points in mind, let us formulate the plan for the public transport system in our city:


Like with the master plan, we have stuck to a strict colour scheme for clarity. We're using purple for metro lines, light blue for tram lines and green for the rack railways we will build in the hills in the south of the city. Stations are clearly marked.
Note that we've only included relevant other features on this plan for reference purposes - rail lines, water bodies and landmarks. These just help us to get a better idea of where we want our transport lines to go by relating their position to other features in the city.
Also note that we have taken all of the points mentioned above into acocunt - there are more stations in the centre and less in the suburbs, most lines meet most other lines, and we have added branches to some lines.

And finally, don't plan your bus routes! There is no point in doing so, as a) it will flood the plan with bus lines and make it look messy and hence unclear, and b) you can't define bus routes in the game anyway. Bus stops will be built when we build the estates, and we will use good judgement to determine where we need to put them.

Now we've done that, we can now plan each tile individually. This is where you can add a bit of extra detail into your plan.
To show the individual tile plans for all 16 tiles here would be excessive, so I'm just going to show you one tile, our CBD tile:


Some of the extra details we've incorporated on this tile plan include motorway widths (you can go a step further if you wish and show road widths, but you don't have to), and estate boundaries. For example, you can clearly see where we want the CBD to end and the inner city to begin.

It is important not to include too much detail - otherwise the plan will be unclear. You can always decide to incorporate certain items when you come to build the city, and indeed may only spot an opportunity to do something when you build the city.

However, complex features of the city should be planned, like airports. Here is the plan for our airport, again using strict colour schemes and only showing the important features:


We will also plan our motorway junctions. However, instead of planning them all individually like before, we're going to show the plans for all of our interchanges on one image.
We do this by drawing a schematic diagram of our motorway system - i.e. we only show the junctions and how they are connected by our motorways. We do not care about geography or distance one bit. It's the same idea as that used on the maps of underground systems:


You can see how our motorway system is going to be built, what networks we will use, and you can also see what types of interchange we're going to use where. It should be easy to match up interchanges by comparing the above picture to our master plan. You can see how I've simply represented our motorways with straight parallel lines. Again, this plan doesn't care about where the interchanges are - we can look at our master plan for that. It simply tells us what interchange we will build in which location, and what network we will use in between.

Our plan is now complete - we simply need a name for the city.
I put it to you guys to decide on the name - and the vote was split evenly between Silverglass and Mapleford.
So to ensure a fair decision, I made use of a random number generator to determine the name to be used out of these two.

The random number generator determined that the city shall be known as Mapleford. And a good choice it is too. It's an attractive and realistic name in my opinion.

And that completes this lesson. I've rushed through it a bit, mainly because you should already know most of it, and a lot of the rest is common sense. That said, it is important to make sure you understand this lesson before proceeding with future lessons.

Now we can create the region. As promised, we will do so using SC4 Terraformer, and so the next lesson will be on terraforming.

See you next time,
Chris

[Harry29]

Wow...This project looks really interesting. Can't wait to see more.

[dyas]

This looks good. I figured out you need a region, and tile plan. I also learned the hard way I needed more detail. While I think I made a valiant effort in my region, I am considering putting that up. For those interested, what I learned in my play. Interchanges, they are big. Bigger than you might think, or at least I did. So the regional plan is needed. I didn't plan each interchange as shown above. Bad idea, than you run out of space. SC4 has a limitation in that you can't put an interchange at edge of map, unless you run your single lanes to next time.

I have since been dabaling in other games. I might make another stab at a region slightly smaller than my last. I will also say, I think I will keep them all small squares. I find it easier to complete a small square and just migrate the city to next. As said above, to each there own though.

I must say I'm glad to see you back as well. I'm glad you liked the zoning maps.

[yochananmichael]

Wow this is going to be HUGE, Chris. Mapleford is certainly a good name and the detail you put into the planning is just stunning. I can't wait to see the next update and get Mapleford off the ground. Also you showing how to uses SC4Terraformer is going to be huge for me because I want to be able to use it correctly but its ways are so cryptic to me and not all that intuitive. All the best, and good luck on your second year.

[smileymk]

Hey guys.

Harry29: Firstly, welcome to SC4 Devotion! Secondly, thanks for the kind words. They're appreciated greatly and it's a nice way to introduce yourself to the community.

dyas: Thanks, I'm glad to be back doing RCFD myself. (I never really went away...) Anyway, I really think you should continue with Usher. The work you have produced in it is excellent, and I genuinely believe that region is a masterpiece waiting to be created. Yes, you are still learning, and learning the hard way (as you described). We've all been there, myself included. It takes time and trouble to learn to create beautiful scenes in SC4. You have the potential to be something special - you've just got to believe in yourself and your region and stick at it. It will pay dividends in the end, trust me.

yochananmichael: Thank you. I'm pleased to say I got my results on Thursday and did indeed make it into the second year, scraping a first in the process. Returning to business, this lesson was my first experience of the Terraformer and I must say it is actually very easy to use, although as with any program there are a couple of small things you need to be aware of, which will be covered in the lesson. That said, the hard bit is terraforming the region so that it looks good, not using the program to do the terraforming.

With your comments answered, let's learn to terraform a region with the SC4 Terraformer.

Lesson 2 - Terraforming

Before we begin, let us ensure we have the right tool for the job at hand, namely SC4 Terraformer.

What is this program, and why are we using it? For those who don't know, SC4 Terraformer is a program used to terraform regions. We use it because it allows us to do terraforming on the entire region as a whole, rather than terraforming tile-by-tile like we have to do in the game. This means that we can create smoothly flowing landscapes across large areas much more easily than we can by terraforming in-game.

However, even with this tool at our disposal, terraforming is still a lengthy and difficult process, and you will still need to put a large amount of time and effort into your work. Remember that you cannot possibly create a realistic region if it sits on an unrealistic landscape. Do not stop until you are 100% satisfied with what you have done.

With that important message in mind, let's get started. The first thing we need to do is create the region folder and also the config.bmp file to go in it:


If you don't know how to create a region folder and/or a config.bmp file, go back and read Project 2, Lesson 2 (Preparation) before proceeding with this lesson. Suffice to say our region is a 4x4 grid of large city tiles, and hence our config.bmp file needs to be 16x16 pixels and coloured entirely in blue.

Once this is done, we can run SC4 Terraformer. The first thing you will see is a small window prompting you to choose a region folder. Select your new region folder and click OK:


Then a second window will appear featuring an enlarged version of our config.bmp file (with colours altered slightly to show individual city tiles clearly):


The point of this window is to enable you to prevent terraforming on particular tiles if, for instance, you have developed some of them.
We do not have any developed tiles in this region, and we want to terraform on all tiles, so let us click the Unprotect all button (circled in red above) and then OK (circled in blue above).

That window will now duly disappear and 4 new ones will pepper your screen instead:


What you see here is the main interface of SC4 Terraformer. The big blue and black one is the main window where we will do our terraforming. Notice that there is a brush on it (an area of blue/yellow dots) To its left is the menu where our tools are listed. Note that it is effectively attached to the main window and moves with that window, so to move both windows you have to move the main window.
The window headed 'Overview' is precisely that - a bird's-eye view of your region, and is a good place to refer to regularly as an alternative reference - it will pick out things the main window won't.
Lastly, we have the Radius and Strength bar. It's that little rectangular window at the bottom with the slider. Let's have a look at it more closely:


It doesn't take a maths and statistics student at Warwick to figure out what these sliders do to the brush on the main window. Suffice to say you will be using the top two a lot, and the bottom two pretty much never.

Now we know what everything is, we can begin. Let's first press G to turn on the gridlines, and then go to Configuration tools in the menu window and tick the box marked 'Show city borders'. You will end up with this:


While you're at it, make sure the Render water tick box, located directly below the 'Show city borders' tick box, is ticked as well. The other two boxes do not need to be ticked.

Note that the white lines denote city tile boundaries, the grey lines form a 1x1 km (1 small city tile) grid which we will use to accurately position our landscape features in accordance with the plan, and the black lines (which you will see if you zoom in close enough) denote individual game tiles.
I mentioned zooming in - let me tell you how to do that now, as well as move the camera around in general. To move the main window camera, you first need to click the main window to make sure it is the active window, and then press one of the following keys:

- +/-: Zoom in/out (respectively) (use the ones on the right of the keyboard, remembering to ensure Num Lock is turned on first)
- Arrow Keys: Move around
- CTRL + Left/Right Arrow Keys Rotate the camera

Be sure to make good use of these when terraforming, in conjunction with the Overview window, and check your work from different angles. That way you can spot any deficiencies which you would have otherwise missed.
We will first rotate the camera so that it faces north, which will make cross-referencing our work with our plan easier. The corner shown in the main window at startup is the north-west corner, so use that fact to help you position the camera correctly.

At last, we can begin terraforming. We must first lower the entire region from its default height of 280m to a height of 256m, which is just above sea level and will enable us to create our water bodies without having to do a lot of smoothing work afterwards. We do this by using the Lower Terrain button in the Global tools menu. A window will appear prompting you to enter an amount by which to lower the terrain:


You need to type in the text box the number of metres by which you want to lower the region. I think you're all capable of figuring out that a drop from 280m to 256m is a drop of 24m, so we need to type 24 into the box and click OK.
Being a global tool, this will affect the entire region and lower it by 24m.

Now we will start work on the water bodies. Creation of rivers and seas is done with the Make Valley (new) tool, which is found in the Zone Tools menu. Being a zone tool, it only affects the area under the brush which you can see on the main window. I found that setting the radius to 6 and the strength to 10 gives a river of an appropriate width. You simply drag the brush along the planned course of the river:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/109/u2r5.jpg/

(I had to give a URL to the image because the direct link just didn't want to know. Sorry about that.)

Obviously the river will widen as it approaches the sea, and to that end I increased the radius to 7 and then to 8 as it got about 2 miles and 1 mile from the river mouth respectively (although these are not hard-and-fast distances - use your own judgement to come up with something appropriate). Also remember that any river you make should have at least some degree of bend most of the time.
Since you are using a round brush, your river will probably look something like this at first:


Clearly this is not what you want. You want the river to be of a consistent width and you want the banks to be smooth, as opposed to the bumpiness we have above.
Fixing these areas is simply a case of giving them another pass with the Make Valley (new) tool until they look a bit like this:


You can see that the river here is fairly consistent in its width, its banks are smooth and consistent, and the river bends and takes a definite course. This is what we are looking for.

I need to make you aware at this point of one of the Terraformer's most useful and important features - the undo button. It's located in the Configiration tools menu, is marked 'Undo last terraforming' and is circled in red in the picture below:


You will inevitably make mistakes when terraforming, so make sure you use this button! You can also use other zone tools like Flatten and Smooth to help correct mistakes.

(WARNING: The undo button will only undo your last action. It will not undo the one before that if you click it again. So you need to be careful.)

Going back to water bodies, you may also find during the course of terraforming them that you get jagged riverbanks, such as the one circled in red below:


Such riverbanks need to be smoothened out using the Smooth tool (found in the Zone Tools menu):


Be sure to use an appropriate radius and strength (I used vales 8 and 10 respectively here), or you may find you either have a huge riverbank or your river disappears altogether.

When we do the sea, we need to bear in mind that the sea will get deeper as we get further from the coastline. To represent this we simply apply the Make Valley (new) tool to the sea such that its depth generally increases as we get further away from the coast:


Completing the water bodies is just a matter of continuing to apply the techniques outlined above and following your plan. Mapleford's completed water bodies are shown below:


For the delta, I just used the Make Valley (new) tool over smaller radii (3 - 8 depending on the situation) and for the sea I used the same tool but with radius 50 (its maximum setting), using smaller radii near the coastline to sculpt the coastline so it looks like it does on the plans.
Note that, like you see above, different channels in deltas should have different widths.

When you're done, use the Equalize tool (found under Global tools) to apply a smoothing effect across the entire region, which will make all your coastlines and riverbanks nice and smooth:


Having completed the water bodies, let's turn our attention to the large hills in the south of the region.

As these are supposed to be big hills, we're going to make use of the Make Steep Hill tool found in the Zone Tools menu. This works in exactly the same way as creating water bodies - set the brush radius and strength (here I'm using radius 50 and strength10 and click-drag out the hills:


I recommend you do the outer edge of the hilly area first before filling in the area in the middle, as by doing so you can ensure your hilly area ends where you planned it to. Remember to use smaller brush radii where necessary and be careful to keep your brush away from water.
When complete, you will end up with something like this:


It looks alright, but it's not what we want! We wanted a hilly area here and what we have is a mountain range. Our first job is therefore to apply the Make Valley (new) tool to the white and red areas to get them down to under 650m (there is an altimeter at the bottom of the main window for you to check the height):


This bit is easy enough, but we're not done by a long shot. We now have on our hands the painstaking task of ensuring we have a smooth, flowing and consistent landscape. We want the landscape to be smooth, flowing gracefully from one hill to the next, and it certainly isn't that at the moment.
To sort this out, we need to apply the Smooth tool across this whole area until we get a flowing landscape. We also need to raise up any valleys within our hilly area using the Make hills tool (again in the zone tools menu) so that the height there is in keeping with the rest of the hilly area. As a guide, the main hilly area should be a consistent light yellow colour, with the occasional bit of very light green or light brown.
In particular, we need to get rid of any light spots that appear, examples of which are circled in red below:


These are eliminated by applying the Smooth tool around the edges of them. With big ones like the one below, it will take a while, but it will be more than worth it:


One thing you need to keep a sharp eye on, whethere you're creating hills or mountains, are your region boundaries. It's really easy to have a massive valley where your region ends and that's pretty unrealistic. Try to continue the hills over the region boundary.

Keep smoothing everything out until you get a smooth, flowing and consistent landscape. You'll know you've got something good when the different colours blend together smoothly like they do here:


Looking good. Encouraged by how this turned out we proceed to the big hills we have planned for the northeast of the region. These start out just like the southern hills - using the Make steep hill tool, lowering any areas that get too tall (here I'm limiting the altitude to 700m except for one hill in the southwest corner where the castle will go), and smoothing out:


Note that browns and occasional light yellows are the order of the day here, but note that we don't want any cliffs here (which show as dark grey on the Terraformer).
Now we're going to do something a little different. We're going to apply the Talus erosion and Water erode (enhanced) tools (both in the zone tools menu) to the area to give it a more rugged feel, as these are quite big hills that are unlikely to ever be urbanised:


I have found that the Talus erosion tool is much more effective in getting the desired effect, and the water erode tool can ruin the landscape if overused, so make much more frequent use of talus erosion than water erosion.

We're done with these hills, so let's move on to do the mountains in the northern bit of Mapleford. The only difference between creating mountains and creating hills is that instead of using the Make steep hill tool, you use the Make mountain tool located above it:


You need to be careful with the strength of the brush, otherwise you may end up recreating the Himalayas, which would look both spectacular and also completely out of keeping with the rest of the region. I found using a strength setting of 12 to be effective here.

When done, you should initially end up with something like below. Remember to pay attention to your region boundaries and to raise areas that are too low:


In stark contrast to the big hills, here you want rugged, rough terrain and you also want to welcome any cliffs that appear. This is a mountain range, and so the more rugged your terrain is, the better.
Now finish off by applying the Talus erosion tool extensively to the area. This will, above all else, give a very rugged feel to the area and make your mountains truly look like mountains:


Now that we've done that, let us turn our attention to the valley wedged in between the mountains and the large hills, as per the plans, because there's something there I want to point out:


If you look at the altimeter (underlined in red) then you will see that the height at this point in the valley is not at the base level of 256m.
I'm pointing this out because I want you to know that this is a good thing. Don't be under the impression that valleys are paper flat, because, with very few exceptions, they most certianly aren't. The elevation of your valleys should vary within reason, and it will provide added interest as well as realism to your region.

Having made that point, now is the time to move on to the mountain range at the western edge of the region. There's nothing new to teach you guys here, because I created this in exactly the same way I created the mountain range to the north:


Note that in the northwest corner, where the mountain range meets the river, I have used a smaller radius and strength setting to smoothly bring the mountain range down to the river. The key word here is 'smoothly', and it's a word you're hearing a lot of this lesson. That's because getting your landscape to transition smoothly between different areas, as well as getting it to flow smoothly within them, is the most important aspect of terraforming realistically. I cannot stress it enough - the main bulk of your time spent terraforming should be spent on achieving a smooth, flowing landscape. Only then can you hope to get realistic results.

We're making good progress, but there's still lots to do. Let's go and create the main hilly area in the centre of the region.
Using the Make hills tool, position the cursor to where you want the hills to go and make a single click there. Repeat until you have an area of hills, and try to get the hills overlapping each other like you see below:


It's best to use a large radius and medium strength brush here.
This hilly area will run into the mountain range to the west, and we want to get a smooth transition between the hills and the mountains. To do that we make the hills higher as we get closer to the mountains. Specifically, instead of doing single clicks, we do 2 clicks when we're quite close to the mountains, and 3 clicks when we're very close to the mountains. Now I'm not going to tell you precisely what constitutes 'quite close' and 'very close', because it varies. Nature does not do consistency in these matters, so neither should you. You'll just have to use your own aesthetic taste and good judgement.

Once we've filled the area, we'll want to smoothen the edges of it, particularly where it goes into flat terrain. To do this we add small hills (small brush, low height) to straighten the edges of the hilly area, and then smoothen out the area using the Smooth tool:


The main rule with hills is that they should flow smoothly from one hill to the next. So now we need to spend some time making sure this is the case with our region. We use exactly the same principles and techniques that we used on the large hills in the south of Mapleford - smoothen out, blend the colours together, ensure a consistent height, and get rid of light spots:


It will take you a fair bit of time and patience to get this right, but it's time well spent, as you can see above, so be sure to put the effort in.

One final detail to add now and we've finished the terraforming. If you were paying attention to Lesson 1 you will know we have planned for a port in the east of the city, just north of the river mouth of the southern river. SC4 Terraformer has a Make harbour tool, found under Zone tools, that lowers/raises the area under the brush to just above sea level, and it is designed to shape the terrain to make port construction a lot easier.
We'd be mad not to make use of this. Let's use radius and strength settings of 15 and 20 respectively, and place the cursor so that the edge of the brush is just touching the coastline, like it is here:


It's important to keep the brush out of the water, or you will undo all the hard work you put into getting that coastline just right. You don't need to hold the mouse button down - a single click is all you need to get the right effect.
We just apply this tool to the area where we will build the port, remembering to use smaller brushes to get nice smooth edges like before. Don't make the port area too big:


And with the port area completed, we have, at last, finished terraforming the region. Let's zoom out and take a look at our creation:


Beautiful, isn't it? Let's have a look at the overview, just because we can:


It's a good idea to save the overview, and there's a button to do just that at the top of the Overview window. We can use it for final planning.

Now, don't go off and have a few drinks to celebrate just yet, because we still have to get this region up and working in the game! The first job is to create the region's region.ini file in the Mapleford region folder:


This was also covered in Project 2, Lesson 2, so I'm not going to go over it again. Instead I'm going to move on, because now we have our region.ini file ready we can run the game, and if we click the 'Load Region' button, we should find Mapleford on the list. Click the Load button and, et voilà, our region lives:


Except... it looks like it does on the Terraformer, and not like any of our other regions. That's because we still need to render the region.
Fortunately, doing this is very easy and will be familiar to anyone who has downloaded a map off the exchanges. You need to load a city tile, then, once it loads, save and exit to region. You do this for each city tile in turn. It's that easy. Once you're done, your region will look a lot more like what you're used to regions looking like in SC4:


Oh, hello, what do we have here? It looks as though the Meadowshire Terrain Mod has been applied to our region! This is the promised terrain mod that we will be using in this project. It's the one I use for my side projects and I think you'll agree it's very, very good indeed.

Now we can get the beers out and relax, because we are done. Our region looks fantastic and is ready for play.

And that's the end of the lesson. I'm quite pleased with what we've done here. We are ready to move on, and Lesson 3 will be covering the final planning of Mapleford - adapting plans to fit the terrain and suchlike.

See you then,
Chris