Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Prior To The Second Week of September

FRIDAY I've got enough references now that I shouldn't have the need to go through the never-ending pages of buildings and roads seen at the few large skyscraper discussion boards. Flickr turned out not to be as reliable as I hoped for pictures of offices, shopping centers, homes and so on. They have more of an emphasis on artistic shots than any interest in urbanity. Their search engine might be adding to the difficulty with finding relevant pictures. On the contrary, they've got quite a lot of great pictures featuring larger structures like convention centers and malls, which are definitely worth checking out. Thanks skyscraper forums and Flickr!

SATURDAY Parking lots were low priority when making the first block, which contained apartments, but now it's something that requires attention. All space needs to be used in this block. Due to the odd dimensions in between the apartment units, this gave room for a larger park where parking couldn't be used. The main road north along the right side of the apartments now features an appealing landscape.

SUNDAY Having sidewalks weave through landscape, instead of strictly bordering road helps distance pedestrians from traffic which increases safety for walkway users, discourages misuse of the walkway, and provides an appealing addition to the area in which it's laid. A real-world con to this sidewalk would be space, having many of these more decorative sidewalks will take more land in a city. Fortunately, the only matter for a virtual city is aesthetics.

The weaving sidewalk would provide pedestrian access like any regular walkway bordering road, with a few differences. For now, the district will feature two kinds of sidewalk, one weaving through either grass or dirt along side road, or a weaving sidewalk alongside another sidewalk attached to road. As this city is more devoted to being scenic than functionality, I'll go ahead and completely avoid typical road & sidewalk paths as much contiguous concrete leads to concrete sickness

Monday, October 3, 2011

Fourth Week of August

MONDAY After redoing the turbo roundabout many, many times, I've finally conquered it's complex curves. In all, it's 101 objects, with the center island expanding to 270 meters and the roundabout expanding to four football fields. When I look at it's completion, I could've perfected it's porportions which are obviously wrong if you look at it for a moment, but this is good enough for now. I've spent too much time designing the much needed roundabout. I knew I had to finish this, because finishing this roundabout meant being taught the skills I needed to create curving roads, especially those that intersect. This was quite difficult to complete, moving on..

Having neglected the confusing manner of scale for awhile, I ran in to a measurement crisis again which I should've been over. As I was designing the main roads connecting to the roundabout, I remembered I had done something tricky with the draft's scale compared to the ingame scale. It took me some panicked time to realize everything I've designed so far is to scale after I stopped doubting the dekameter square foot I made in the draft. I reminded myself that each pixel is the equivalent of one foot. Although the pixels probably won't scale right in meters, it is irrelevant as each pixel will take after an ingame Meter if I were to place the draft directly in the game. So to summarize, the inkscape draft interpets one pixel as a foot, and the ingame Meter can be interpreted as one draft foot.

TUESDAY I just noticed I'm up to 834 references now, there's quite a few pictures I can use for reference now. It's nice to not be so reliant on Google Maps and Bing Maps. Despite how great those maps are as tools, it's also nice to see lots of buildings up close from the ground! Street view doesn't always suffice.

It was today that I finally set up this blogspot account. I had been saving my blog notes as text documents until I was ready to post. baywords.org proved enough to me at this point that it wasn't coming back anytime soon, and if it was, I've waited long enough! So today involved lots of tinkering with the new blog.

FRIDAY baywords.org is partially online. the old LFRZDG blog can be browsed again, though I can't log in to the account. Hopefully I'll be able to sign in and remove the blog soon.

SATURDAY After a quick google search wikianswers claimed that the average two-bed manhattan apartment can be upwards to 1600 sq feet in size. Using this to get an idea of how big, or, really how small these suites can be. One square dekameter is too small to have ingame, so perhaps this apartment will count as a luxury facility featuring 400 sq meter suites. One apartment unit should be able to handle 12-15 suites per floor. The apartment complex should be capable of housing 182 suites. Now that I've spent many hours on the complex, it looks good enough to move on to something else. I won't be finishing it's parking markers

SUNDAY I have been very pleased with how the apartments turned out. Aesthetically, they are not as rigid and tiny like the first commerical block I had planned. The first block I designed was unconvincing, it looked very unnatural, kind of like the block-ness you'd find in any Sim City game. What made a big difference was making an effort to include landscaping with every building, and natural flowing roads.

I'm now working on the lot to the left of the luxury apartments. It's turning out to be a commercial lot with a medium-sized parking lot, sufficient enough for a grocery store or restaurant. While making this, I'm finding some stubbornness with myself when it comes to changing a design I've made. I've been having to redo the building lot a few times to make room for sidewalks, and make the lot look not too much like a box. I guess I'm afraid I'll end up making a design that looks even worse? Either way, redoing things from scratch seems to help remedy this fear.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Third Week of August

WEDNESDAY Skipping last week I'm up to 450 images in my references folder. There's quite a lot to see, and it's all inspiring or technically-pleasing to the eyes! I've been working in a program called Synekism, coming up with a sort of quick-sketch of an urban area that keeps me thinking and working with cities. Like my references, this is also inspiring. I've got a heavily dense city that can't be any bigger than 16 sq km featuring two-million people, and only two-lane roads. I can't say the city layout is all that realistic, but it's certainly interesting to look at, and was quite fun to develop. This is also a good alternative if I'm not in the mood to mess with 3d-modelling.

FRIDAY I've begun designing a six-lane turbo roundabout as one of the first intersections for the first district. It is a 70 kph roundabout featuring a 30 meter median, four edgelines, and a 130 meter center island. I've been putting off designing this three football field behemoth for several weeks now and I've finally worked up the courage to deal with tackling it's proportions. More to come later.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

And Now Begins the Blogging


A WHILE AGO Somewhere in the midst of June, I began revamping this project, again. It had a complete face-lift. The first thing I did was reorganize my directories, deleted unneeded files, and began a crucially inspiring References folder. I went ahead and signed up to forums of future interest, and started pulling many photographs of urbanity off these forums and to my desktop. Having some inspiration to lean on, I decided to begin designing the first city district of the project. I started designing with my favorite vector graphics program at a 100% zoom. It's most sensible to design at 100% rather than scale up, which was tempting to do since the ingame Meter is too small. Scale turned out to be one of the biggest design headaches thus far in the project. I had to determine what a pixel would represent in Inkscape. It took me about a month to finally form sensible measurements, and how they'd be scaled ingame. After this, I revamped my google docs files that were collecting dust. The project was nice and tended to once again, no dust to be found anywhere, everything was brought up to date.

First Week of August

THURSDAY I've spent some time reformatting several documents that were in need of proper format, especially ones copied directly from notepad. Keeping google docs uniform makes it less of a visual headache when browsing it's contents. Now that documents are easily readable it's time to refit the design files. I've been working in the first district plan, trying to come up with both concepts and trying out designs for road markings which eventually derailed to doing many other things in the first district blueprint. Eventually after working in this one file for several days things began getting very cluttered and had to stop and begin separating my work among new files.

FRIDAY Spending some time gathering more pictures. I've been browsing many endless threads on skyscraperpage.com for reference images. I've gone ahead and organized my references a little more, having folders for skylines, parks, and buildings. So far I've accumulated 316 images from several urban forums, and flickr, with most of the images in admirable quality and resolution. It's good to see detail, and quite dire when seeking designs. Thanks to the great photographers for displaying their work! Now, I'm in the process of putting a turbo roundabout in the middle of the beginning development of the first district, meaning I'll have to redesign the main road and some of the neighboring shopping plaza.

SATURDAY Re-categorized everything on google docs as well as updating the project launch plan. Baywords has been down, apparently, for quite some time. If this continues for the next couple weeks I'll end up having to move to another blog host.

Introduction

Welcome to LFRZDG’s blog, a codename for my virtual micronation under development, a rasterized nation based in the series of tubes that is the internet. It is a virtual world akin to Second Life, albeit with a focus on city-building rather than being a social hub. Cities are the name of the game here. Currently, I am carefully planning the mechanics, website, and the first city of the sovereignty.

This blog will be a continuing story of development, logging the progress of this micronation project step-by-step. Right now this is a one-man project, and will continue to be so until a large urban area is built virtually. For now, I will only be designing the blueprints for the first district of the first city.

Foresight

Unlike city-building games, this project will deal with building urban areas piece-by-piece. Each road, bench, and building needs to be made from scratch. I'd like to say that this project lives up to the game genre name considerably more than the typical games of the genre you'd find that are out today. If buildings are furnished ingame, this would certainly push the project towards being a hybrid, since establishments could be explored like a virtual world.

Background

The virtual land that this project is being held at had it's first ground broke as far back as July 2000. I had found a virtual reality program to play in when I was a child and started a town in my own claimed virtual space. This megaproject is sort of a continuation from the remains of an abandoned virtual town I built in with my friends so long ago. LFRZDG is this town reincarnated as an already fabulous and vast land to look at, even with the megaproject barely in it’s pre-alpha stage.

I had dabbling thoughts for building a micronation began in late 2006, amongst many other ideas. I began covering vast amounts of land around my old town, creating a contiguous grassland that enclosed my childhood creation. For many years I hadn't done anything with the land, and stayed torn between thoughts of what I wanted to do with the land. The second best candidate was using it for a large puzzle, but I decided on developing a virtual micronation, which brings me here today. In homage to my childhood town in in what is now a large grassland, the micronation carried it's name. Since 2006, development of a micronation atop the 2006 land has been very spotty, and mostly non-occurring. Finally, in late 2010 I started LFRZDG to deal with developing one city, and to begin with, perhaps just a portion of a city district. Time for me to get working then!