I wanted to make sure to throw this in before it is too late:
Please try to have the roads, highways, and other traffic ways be at least somewhat credible.
As in, having highway exits and train stations at positions where they make some sense, wide streets where there'd be lots of traffic, and no ridiculously long detours to get to the other side of a block, or train tracks that go all the way to the other end of town although there is no station there.
Because everyone will eventually superspeed along a highway or the monorail tracks (I read it has one?) and it will be very obvious then when it makes no sense, and kills some of the immersion. (At least for me, Am I alone with that?)
I would even suggest doing the highways with exits and monorail with stations and that first, and then putting the houses around it as that's likely easier than trying to squeeze it in later. Plus it may help in determining what buildings go where, like cheap tenements and warehouses under highway bridges, malls near exits, industry where it's noisy, posh homes where it's not, etc.
(A good negative example are the highways without any convenient exits in Metropolis in DCUO http://s68.photobucket.com/user/Tournsol/media/DCUO%20Maps/MetropolisMAP126.jpg.html )
rah.
This is supposed to be set in New England. If we're going for realism, most of the cities up there DO have a dysfunctional traffic grid.
... of course, I can't say much, since I live close to Pittsburgh... where the bridge, highway, tunnel, and local road designs were the result of a drunken bet between M.C. Escher and Erno Rubik. I sometimes suspected that the world designers of CoH were natives of the 'burgh due to the similarities. :P
And in some cases, the monorail/train had to be routed around a building due to its being of historical importance.
Dysfunctional New England roads have been taken into account for building the city, lore-wise. As have a number of other transportation-related aspects. While the details have not been nailed down yet, they have been discussed and considered.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Conundrum of Furballs
[color=#ff0000]Composition Team, Staff Writer[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Ah, that is an aspect I was not familiar with and did not consider, I have to admit.
I'll be looking forward to it however convenient or ridiculous the traffic grid will be then. Thank you. :)
rah.
I half-suspect that's why they chose to base this game in a New England setting. That way they have a ready-made excuse for when someone complains about the crazy traffic situation in-game. They can just claim it's all "realistic for the setting". ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
The thing you have to realize about New England Roads is that most of them happened LONG BEFORE there was even the hint of City Planning. So you wind up with road systems that follow the contours of the land in ways that were "useful" to people centuries (plural!) ago, but which are no longer "useful" to people who want to drive at high speeds in cars. In other words, these road systems grew out of an unplanned mess, which is why they aren't arranged in "neat" grid patterns.
The real problem with Paragon City (and to a lesser extent, the Rogue Isles) was that all roads needed to be orthogonal ... meaning everything was laid out in right angles ... so you got these crazy weird hairpin turns all over the place that in and of themselves would be nothing more than a traffic hazard producing wrecks every day in a "real" city. Fortunately, Imperial City managed to break this pattern, by having roads which could be laid out on diagonals as well as orthogonals, and which could have features like medians in the middle and so on. So long as the roads in City of Titans aren't ridiculous hairpin "corners" but instead have curves in them, this aspect at least ought to be better.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Not only New England, but Titan City is sort of a Boston (though not exactly Boston) and Boston, even among New England cities, is infamous for its poorly laid out roads.
My solution: Every zone is like Skyway. :P
Former Online Community Manager & Forum Moderator
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
On the topic of cities being laid out, one of the towns I lived in had a very obvious layout, even though some city planning went into it.
We had a nice grid pattern, arranged based off of the railroad tracks.
[color=green]BIZZARO MEDIA FOLLOWER[/color]
[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42230002/Memes/favicon.ico[/img]
My hometown has a grid pattern arranged off the the railroad tracks, 3 rivers, and the baseline of the mountains. Unfortunately, none of these grids really ever matched any of the others and where they overlapped, things got messy.
They overlapped everywhere.
A good portion of the land around it is even worse- The roads are based off the winding and nonsensical paths once made as drunken farmers rode into town and back with their wagons.
Anyone familiar with San Fransisco should agree we need to have a "Lombard Street" somewhere...
___
"Listen, and understand. City of Titans is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely [i]will not stop, ever,[/i] until we are live!"
Warcabbit
Or at the very least, a "main drag" street ...
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Lombard Street is not a good example of a 'main drag'. Still, that would be a fine idea. At least one street should be long and straight and pass through multiple zones. CoH never had that. Heck, CoH didn't have a Single road that went straight across an entire zone.
Be Well!
Fireheart
We could put a super highway through the city, I-24, after the Issue that never was. I know there is a real I-24 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_24) but hey, this isn't the real world, why can't we put it up north?
-----------------------------------------
I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
At this point, I'm almost wondering if it might not be a good idea to "Play SimCity" in order to build up the necessary layouts and environment for City of Titans, if only to get the proper "organic" feeling for how a city "grows up and out" over time.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
On this topic... gas stations! There need to be gas stations! It's one thing I can't recall seeing in CoH, and I think CO has... one, maybe? And besides, they make great locations - a gas station can host a petty robbery, a high-tech swindle, assorted dealers selling black market whatever, a pyromaniac villain threatening to detonate the entire block, a tech villain trying to feed nanobots into the gas supply to convert every automobile on the road into a robot under his command, or it could just be a convenient source of flammable materials when the local hero needs to face off against the evil Ice Cream Man and his plan to convert hapless civilians into sno-cone yetis.
Phoenix Rising Token Minidragon
And charging stations / EVSEs. 'cause you know that there's only one thing Tesla's Ghost would be caught dead driving.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Tesla? I'd bet on a flying, lightning-spewing doomsday machine. That powered (when it didn't outright fry) every electrical device within a fifty mile radius. Seems more Tesla's style than any mere "car".
Phoenix Rising Token Minidragon