Realism

I think the Subject and Description say it all so here is it:

How can we upgrade our cities to add more realism?
Should we use alot of skyscrapers or use small ones?
Should we just let it grow or add custom buildings?
Should we have more water than needed (useless canals or lakes, rivers etc.)
etc.

Tell us now what you think!

Is this city a great realism?


Do not be shy, say what you think!
If it's a no, say why
If it's a yes, say why also.

Thank ya. :affraid:

I think the general complaint I have about realism in cities is that a lot of them seem to have skyscrapers for the sake of having skyscrapers and they tend to lose their character and become rather generic. They become "square."

It's not such a big problem in the AIN, but it's something I've noticed in general.

I think the best way to approach realistic city design is to start with the question: "What type of city do I want?"

The approach I take is that cities need to be unique. They need to have a character that is theirs and contrasts well with the other cities in your region or country. This is why Redding City and Providence are so very different from each other.

ok, I understand your point but by saying square, you mean like it's only square buildings or that there's no circle or roundabout or european style things? For the type of city that I want, it goes with the region and the population. By example, Lydosia is a white French majority in North America so it's normal that it'll look like a North American Nation. Well for Bougainville *pic above*, It's in mid of Oceania, near Australia but with a pop of metis. So it will be very mixed up since the pop speak french but act like oceaniansl. It's like Hawaii with USA.

Well I think for realism a city should have more territories effects *as I said above*. That mean we should include the population and terrain with our cities. Example, a asian city won't use European buildings except for embassies. The only style of city that will use alot of different places styles of buildings will be colonian nations like Québec or New England with their colonial buildings that still there.

What I mean is "square" in the abstract sense, as though there is no real shape to them. Cities should be distinctive. You should be able to identify them just by looking at them.

oh, ok. So could you reconize by example Prodisiac by a pic? Or could I reconize Providence by a pic? Do you mean a special thing in the city that make you remmber it such as the Empire State Building for NYC or the Sears Tower for Chicago, The Sydney Opera for Sydney? Well I think you're right with this but not every city have something like that... I think the landscape should be taken in count *example: Rio*. As you can see every cities location is different.

For me realism should be the buildings rise level. If every members had a control with that, it'll be very helpful. I need to get down some buildings in my cities.

danspaceman wrote:What I mean is "square" in the abstract sense, as though there is no real shape to them. Cities should be distinctive. You should be able to identify them just by looking at them.

This is easier said than done, things are hampered by a lack of really good content out there, if we had thousands of buildings we could use you might see some more shape and culture to them. That's the other big thing.... we can't include a culture of sorts into a city, most buildings on the STEX are built for Western European, American, Australian and a few Asian cultures, and the scenery we have to deal with, trees, parks etc. don't help to break that cycle.

I think if countries are to truely have there own shape to them and culture then we'd need a ton more in the way of content on the STEX that was geared toward building a culture of our cities. This has to start with the unions, with out a doubt the SCJU has the highest standards when it comes to union involvement and sits as the head union in many cases. The big problem with the SCJU is that there cities and countries are all very uniform, cut from the same mold with a basic western European style. If the AIN is to break that you guys (and I'll help to since I'm pretty much assuming the role of, defacto member; I just don't wanna vote or send in my PAS and run for office and all that stuff) need to work on how we. 1. play the game, 2. build our countries, 3. Present them... now that I think about it... that's something that the community as a whole has started to forget... this is a Sim City Community, not a mass political role play. Truethfully how many pics of Perthshire have you guys seen? 3 maybe 4? but you all know that it exsists and treat it as if I had showed you guys thousands of pictures. My advice a lot of times, is political in nature, and how to run the forum with as little problems as possible... very little of it, is about playing the game or building citties with any realism to them (and frankly I'd be hard pressed to find too many other people handing out that advice) much to our dismay people who have built great citties like Mitos don't ussualy talk more than presenting there CJ and disapearing... but even Dimland... is a very cookie cutter Western European country very much in the style of greace.

So what do we as players do? How do we ban together to build better, more realistic countries? Do we completely scrap what we have and start from scratch???? I'm not too happy aout that idea, I've filled about half of my region and it's taken me almost a year now... I'm not too keen about starting from scratch again. Do we start these second countries on the side? Start from humble origins and work very slowly posting pictures, asking advice and working to build a culture and shape unique to our own and to where we say our country started off at? I think this is a likely idea but I like Perthshire, and I like working on Perthshire, I don't have time to do 2 regions... I barely have time for 1. I think the first and foremost is... instead of role playing wars, summits and sporting events (as fun as they are) we need to focus a little bit on the game it self, and reworking the regions and countries we have so that they are more realistic. We need to give each other, respectfull, and warented advice on building these citties, try to imagine yourself standing in the picture on the side walk if you were there, if you were a sim resident would you believe that this place was a real place or would you shake your head and just think its not possibly real?

We also need to look at the histories that we set up for our nations, we need to actually set up histories for our nations, how realistic is it to beleive that one day Perthshire sprung up on the map and have history from 2003 onward, its something that I use in mine and something that Kumba didn't realize I was doing and made some arrogantly stupid comments about. (one of the reasons I hate him so if you weren't around then) Countries need to have a story, a life, a culture, and a style more so than a shape, because face it the grid does a lot to inhibit that. That's where we need to work, not on our roleplaying and our summits and our games and our simlympics and all that good stuff we need to work on playing SC4 to the best of our ability and making it as much of a sim as possible. This is one of the main reasons I left the AIN, so that I could spend time working on Perthshire and playing the game instead of getting wrapped up in all the politics. I am not saying leave the unions by any means, but the unions as a whole should be focusing on playing the game of Sim City rather than the roleplaying.

as for dans orriginal questions

Should we use alot of skyscrapers or use small ones?
This is all dependent on the culture of the nation you want to build? If you want to build an economicly sound country well developed and with a lare metropolitan center than yeah, skyscrapers are a must. If you want to build a small nation, with no real metropolitan center than no keep em small. that's your desicion alone to make.

Should we just let it grow or add custom buildings?
As for this I think custom buildings would be the preference, maxis did a great job with the game but the lack of content makes the citties often repetative and it makes for more of a 'game play' rather than a sim.

Should we have more water than needed (useless canals or lakes, rivers etc.)
Again depends on what you want... if you want to build a costal, shipping heavy city than yeah more water, more things like that. Perthshire for instance, the main cities of Ludmellia and Perthshire are both costal citties so almost half of the large city square is devoted to ocean. from there put lakes, rivers and canals as you see fit, I have a few small lakes anre canals in the city of Perthshrie and surrounding areas because they look good, I lake by the race track in the back woods, a lake in the major park downtown, small little ponds and canals around the simlympic green that I have built. Just for effect its all based on how you want to enhance these areas.

Manifesto Complete

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. In cases where a city doesn't have a defining feature in its skyline, its geography makes up for it. Like, as you pointed out, Rio de Janeiro, or Vancouver.

The point you make about building height is also a good one. In Arcacia, the three main cities do three very different things. Redding City shoots up out of nowhere and then falls away again into the suburbs. Yorke follows a curve from North to South and Providence, given it's European feel, is fairly low level, except for a few distinctive spikes in downtown. The only real way to constrain building height is to limit population growth and also to be careful when adding custom content. I have downloaded several buildings that I will never use because they are just too tall.

Thomas makes a good point - we are limited by what's out there to download, though I think despite this it's all in HOW you use it. Two artists can have the same palette and yet paint completely different pictures. It comes back to my original question: "What type of city do I want?" We might be limited in our capacity by how much/what we can download, but how we go about using what we have is really unlimited. I have seen many of the same buildings in many different cities, but they have all been used in very different ways and for different functions, which gives cities that would otherwise look exactly like eachother a very different character, simply because they were used creatively.

Arcacian cities are very different because I didn't want them to be a carbon copy of each other. Another thing I did to achieve this was to design the layout of each city differently. Redding radiates out from a central plaza, Yorke is on a grid and Providence was designed around a circle with a bite taken out of it. When I designed Providence, I was largely inspired by Walter Burley-Griffin, who designed Canberra.

Just to illustrate the point I was making before, I have attached pictures of Arcacia's three largest cities with the focus on the city centres.

Providence

Notice how the city radiates out from the centre, with a wide boulevard leading off to the south which leads to the capitol complex (out of frame).

Yorke

Notice how the building height is lower at each end of the CBD, rising to an apex in the centre.

Redding City

Approaching Redding City from the North, it appears to rise out of the sea almost all at once, but then falls away into its suburbs. The circular design avoids rows of skyscrapers. The one issue with Redding City is that population density means that there are rather more residential skyscrapers built than I would otherwise like. A couple of them are marked for demolition, but whether they just rebuild them is probably beyond my control without a suitable mod.

Yeah, I know your point, well I'll do the same:
Prodisiac:

You know it, it's truly based on Montréal with a old town and a downtown.

Makadewa:

Makadewa is the biggest city of Lydosia and is very dense. The Downtown is on a peak. There's water everywhere. We can nearly reconize it by the Freedom Tower that dominate the skyline. Tell me if it's realist. I don't really think so.


Palo:

My new city, I try to do the best I can and make it realist. I made this thread to get new ideas.

The Problem is the Terraforming in alot of cities. I saw alot of on realism terra: like a big epic montain just behind the burj dubai and alot of high skyscrapers (not in AIN). Either, adding vegetation help alot cities.

Realism is very hard when many cities are plopped - I think they should all slowly grow from small villages to big metropolises, so that you get the spread and things, and they aren't just block skyscrapers, plopped or unplopped.

Thomas makes a good point , though sometimes it's difficult to get a city looking the way you want it when you grow it slowly. I'm fairly impatient when it comes to city building.

Blakeway - a good terraforming tool is SC4 Terraformer which you can get from Simtropolis. I used it to make Saint Vincent. Had I known about it earlier, I would have used it right from the start.

Dan, I know for the SC4 Terraformer, but it doesn't work on my comp. I tryed that one + SC4 mapper, same thing. I terraform in-game. It take me so much time but it work. Now on at Palo it's an easy terraform because there's not alot of mountains on the Buka Island.