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Rain City Progress
tjstreak
Posts: 808 Member
I have not done much with Rain city since last fall. In fact, I have not done much with the Sims for most of 2012. While Pets offered some new stuff, it really did not capture my interest all that much. Showtime, as expected, was a big disapointment, and it failed to maintain my interest in the game.
During the past week, however, I pulled out Rain City and started to work on it again. Some of these things are not new to this forum, but are new to the Alpha 5 version. I gutted the downtown and added a couple of custom skyscrapers. I also have a new Space Shaft.
I spent the past couple of days revising my monorail system, converting it into one big object. Before it consisted of hundreds of bits and pieces, which probably did nothing for performance. So I combined all of those bits and pieces together. There are still a few odds and ends to work out, but the tracks and trains are about 99% done.
The above picture shows the current state of the floating bridge between downtown Rain City and Money Island. A monorail speeds between the traffic lanes. On the Rain City side, the road disappears into a tunnel.
The northern part of Money Island will be a commercial area. So far, I have a shopping area over a tunnel over the main highway. This part of the shopping area is pure deco.
In the background one can see my take on the Tacoma Narrows bridge to the right, and the small farming community of Simview on the left. The monorail terminates at Simview, allowing the community's residents quick access to other parts of Rain City.
Money Island is where the rich sims live. The commercial area to the south consists of a number of Town Life buildings, along with some other custom buildings. There is a beach/park at the southern tip of the island. The commercial area is served by the Rain City monorail.
You can pretty much see where the custom distant terrain meets the world. Eventually I will do a better job in blending this, perhaps in the Alpha 6 version of the world? For some reason, Nessie, who lives in the distant terrain, did not show up.
While I want to keep the number of lots down, I really did not want to make deco versions of some of the mansions. Doing this would take a lot of time, and most of these buildings are one off items. So I am doing an experiment: the zoning on most of the residences will be set to No Visitors Allowed. (One can set this zoning in CAW without losing residential stuff like refrigerators and stoves.) I am hoping that this turns these lots into the equivalent of deco buildings, so they don't cause routing problems.
The eastern wilderness is still pretty rough. I tore up this entire section of the world, and have not gotten around to fixing it again.
When I started this world, I wanted a little bit of everything. Since then, Twallan's Traveller mod came out, and I don't know if I would do the big a-little-bit-of-everything style mega world again. It seems one can make microworlds for different styles of game, then use the Traveller mod to move between these worlds. But I am committed, or perhaps should be.
The above picture shows part of my farming area, to the north of Simview. Several things are worth mentioning. The area beyond the railroad tracks is all distant terrain. Some of the textures are rather screwy and need to be reworked. The railroad bridge to the left is a custom item, as is the railroad overpass to the right.
The farm buildings are derived from models I downloaded a long time ago, and made substantial revisions to. The more distant one served as the home for one of my early sims families, and is a transplant from one of my Sunset Valleys.
Eventually, I would like to add more Pets features to this part of the world. I probably will replace the equestrian center with a county fairground. Then have a bunch of critter spawners in this area.
Rain City does have a slum area, Little Transylvania, which is largely inhabited by Transylvanian immigrants. The Transylvanian immigrants suffer from a sunlight disorder. As a result, most of the homes in Little Transylvania are built without windows. In an effort to appear more "normal," some Transylvanian houses will have shutters, but no windows.
Also, the Transylvanians have a strange superstition about mirrors; one will seldom find a mirror in a Transylvanian house.
The Transylvanian population faces considerable prejudice from the other inhabitants of Rain City. There are many viscious rumors that the Transylvanians drink blood. As a result, there was a considerable uproar when the city counsel decided to build a monorail station in Little Transylvania. Many Rain City residents were concerned that this would make it easier for the Transylvanians to victimize the other residents of Rain City. Of course, these fears were totally baseless and simply were reflections of the bigotry of many Rain City residents.
One of the stranger characteristics of the Transylvanian community is their tendency to build castles on the top of hills. One wealthy Transylvanian built this version of Bran Castle overlooking Little Transylvania.
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Comments
One of the things that strikes me about most worlds is the lack of cheap housing. Cheap housing is not only for played sims, but for NPC sims as well. Generally, things like Twallan's story progression will not allow sims to move into a house unless they have the funds to pay for it. In the typical world, most non-played sims remain homeless because they do not have the funds to pay for housing. When low cost housing is made available, they start to move into town.
The first area is called Mobile Home Hell. It is the larger of my two trailer parks. It has four lots/real homes. Everything else is deco.
It is also on the border of my distant terrain and Rain City. The road to the left is right along the edge of the distant terrain. The far left row of mobile homes is mostly on the distant terrain. Of course, no sims can actually live there, but it is an effective way of covering up the boundary between the real world and the distant terrain.
I may expand the mobile home park so that more of it sits on the distant terrain, blurring the line between the distant terrain and the "real world" even more.
Of course, I have other plans for this part of the distant terrain. I want to have the runway, complete with landing lights, for a major airport come up to the mobile home park. This will make it an even less desirable place to live. Railroad tracks on one side, a commercial area on the other, an industrial area on the third side and an airport on the fourth.
The deco mobile homes are one big object. It has a simple texture which is used by all of the individual deco homes. But the deco homes all are in one big object.
The next high density are is my Ticky Tacky neighborhood. Made exclusively of my Ticky Tacky starter home, all of the homes look just the same. Inspired by the Levittown Cape Cod, there homes come in at a little over 12,000 Simoleons, leaving your starter sims with a little change in their pockets. The name of the homes, of course, come from the song "Little Boxes."
20 percent of the homes are "real" -- that is, they sit on real lots and are in-game houses. The remaining 80% are deco homes and consist of one large object.
These are low poly models, which allows for a lot of real estate to be covered at a low overhead.
Without a doubt, my favorite starter home is the His and Her Homes. They offer style and comfort for a reasonable price. In fact, I like them so much, I made an entire neighborhood of t hem. All told there are 80 of these homes: eight "real," and 72 deco.
I made a deco version of these home a year ago. The trouble with that version is it has a high poly count. Gamers don't realize it, but adding things like railings and fences add considerably to the overhead of an object. I stripped it down, replacing my nice railings with simplified versions.
The result was pretty pronounced, from over 3000 vertices per home, it came in at slightly more than 300 per home, for nearly a 90% savings.
This allowed me to place all of the deco homes as a single object. The texture for each home is 1/4 the size of the original texture -- 512 x 512 as opposed to 1024 x 1024. All 72 of the deco homes share this same basic texture. I took a similar approach with the mobile homes and the Ticky Tacky hoems -- all of them share one texture.
I also stripped down the real world versions so they could remain starter homes. When I placed them on lots, the price shot up. So I stripped out all of the frills so starter sims could move right in. Of course, they might be broke after moving into one of these homes, but at least they can move in.
Individually, these homes are rather neat starters, however as a group they do lose some of their appeal. Imagine going down the street looking for your home while slightly intoxicated!
Here is another shot of Mobile Home Hell showing both trailer parks, the monorail which connects it tot he rest of Rain City and the southern part of the Boing! Flying Machine Company.
The suspension bridge is a place holder until I can replace it with a more modern structure. Somehow a 19th century bridge is terribly out of place here.
The bridge itself leads to the shipping island, which currently is in its infancy. The shipping island will have cargo ships, cranes, shipping containers, and giant tanks containing petroleum by-products and toxic sludge. It will be the perfect place for zombies to spawn.
Can you please tell me if there will be any CC in your world
Thank you