OpenGeofiction
I have been trying to compare my city to other cities (real and OGF) to see how my streets match up, but a problem I am constantly running into is the scales between maps not matching up perfectly. When comparing the Petersburgh area to Gobras City and Columbus, OH (with OpenStreetMap), the scales don’t match, which makes it difficult for me to gauge whether or not I should add or remove streets.
If anyone would like to look at Petersburgh and offer suggestions, particularly with the suburbs in the southern part of the region, I would appreciate it!
Discussion
Comment from Luciano on 29 May 2015 at 22:52
Scale will not match up perfectly unless the latitude is the same at both cites. Nevertheless, if you have Openstreetmap and OGF map windows open at the same “zoom” you will have a scale similar enough that you can make valid comparisons - you can see that the “500 m” scaling bar in the lower left in each zoom below is different in length by only a few pixels.
So here is Petersburgh at zoom 14: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=14/18.2492/4.0527
Here is Columbus, Ohio at zoom 14: osm.org/#map=14/39.9586/-82.9777
Here is Gobras City at zoom 14: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=14/20.7320/86.7432
Here is Villa Constitucion at zoom 14 (VC had some MAJOR scale problems in its early life, and is still “recovering” from those issues, in small steps) http://opengeofiction.net/#map=14/-24.3380/123.7571
I don’t think you have major scaling issues, although I would recommend maybe some careful revisions in interchanges. I have had a lot of problems designing realistically scaled highway interchanges, and railroads need a lot of work to get realistic curves.
If I could offer any comment about Petersburgh, it’s not scale but rather, your coastline and water features need a lot work.
Comment from iBallasticwolf2 on 29 May 2015 at 23:56
I think my cities have alot of scale problems too. In Freemont I have partially fixed it in downtown but East Freemont doesn’t even have blocks and the St. Anthony tunnel is WAY too long.
Comment from iBallasticwolf2 on 30 May 2015 at 00:33
Ok. Alot of the offscaling is from my the early work I did which had alot of overscaling. I’ve improved.
Comment from Easky30 on 30 May 2015 at 14:14
I have the same problem with First Harbor in Orinoco with most of the down town blocks being only 150 to 200 ft wide. I thought about redrawing the area but decided to leave it as is. Orinoco’s capital Ravalin on the other hand has blocks and interchanges that are too large. It wasn’t until I started editing in Khaiwoon and Gobras City that I was finding it easier to draw to scale.
I found this interesting regarding U.S. city blocks.http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/6002/the-variety-of-american-grids/
Comment from Portopolis on 30 May 2015 at 15:05
Also take in mind block size varies if you are trying to make a U> city your blocks might be the right saize but basically any other country in the world besides maybe Canada has a way smaller block size that I am just guessing is around 1/2 of the U.S block size.
Comment from Portopolis on 30 May 2015 at 15:11
Also Block size varies within countries and in the US block size may only effect the downtown area and surrounding neighborhooods, with the vast majority of the city not having any defining blocks
Comment from PColumbus73 on 30 May 2015 at 19:30
I’m also wondering about the suburbs on the south side of the city. How do they measure up?
Comment from Portopolis on 1 June 2015 at 18:19
The Suburbs seem fairly accurate but your blocks just seem to big.
Comment from isleño on 2 June 2015 at 00:34
Here’s how those southern suburbs compare to street layouts in various cities:
http://i.imgur.com/B9bpe6f.jpg
The big blocks are quite big compared to most, but the question of whether or not they’re “correct” depends on what kind of city you want to build.
(Like Luciano, though, my main piece of advice for Petersburgh would be to add detail to the coastline. It’s also unusual to see such a large coastal metropolitan area without any kind of port.)
If anyone is interested in more tips for building cities, check out our Making realistic cities page in the wiki.
Comment from bhj867 on 2 June 2015 at 00:52
My golden rule is between 150 to 300 feet in width for a city block. The larger the block, the more “American” the style. The smaller, the more “European” the style.
Comment from PColumbus73 on 2 June 2015 at 11:34
I am planning on adding small streets and alleys to help with the grid scale. The suburbs in the south are supposed to be upper-middle class neighborhoods.
The larger grid in the northeastern side of the city is more for warehouses and light/medium industrial.
I like the big sweeping bay, so I don’t want to disturb it too much.
The area was settled in the mid-19th Century (around the same time as Dallas, Texas)
Comment from Sarepava on 4 June 2015 at 23:48
Coastal cities, even large ones, don’t all have to be ports though. Look at Brighton, Blackpool, Eastbourne and Bournemouth which were all sea bathing resorts from the nineteenth century and would be poor harbours due to the shallow sea, beach and lack of a natural harbour. Other coastal settlements might have had large ports in the past but have been abandoned for commercial reasons or have silted up. Port cities tend to have a river mouth as this creates deep enough water to sail big ships near to the land (Felixstowe, Southampton, Rotterdam, Shanghai etc)
Comment from Luciano on 5 June 2015 at 01:51
Although it’s true that not all coastal cities have to be ports, there seems to be a tendency in the modern era for significantly large coastal cities that lack adequate ports to simply ENGINEER major port facilities. The most notable example of this, of course, is Los Angeles/Long Beach. Historically there was no major port there, and the natural coast was not amenable to a major port. However, over the last 100 years, through a series of breakwaters, land-fill and dredging of the Los Angeles River (NOT a major river), one of the world’s largest-volume ports has been created (I think around #8 world rank solely by container volume, not to mention non-container bulk facilites, especially petroleum and grain). Completely artificial.
I think in general, modern ports tend to fall in this category, even where historical ports also existed.
Having said all that, I think Petersburgh still doesn’t NEED a port. Clearly it’s part of a bigger “metropolitan region” that includes St Johns City, which seems to have a port. But even without a port, the coastline should have more character - the curves of beaches, or the bumps of rocky promontories, etc. Something to show the character of the coast there. Is it a rocky coast like California, with intermittent beaches? Is it just a bunch of sand, like Florida? If it’s like Florida, there would be strings of lagoons and inlets (not necessarily used as ports) and barrier islands.
My rule for realistic coastline is that I go along my coast and eliminate any single way-segment (node-to-node) that has a length of greater than 100 m. This adds A LOT of nodes to your coast, which entails dividing the coast into several ways (because of the 2000 node max on ways), which of course ends up risky if you make a mistake, causing rendering floods. But in the long run it’s worth it, for the realism you can create.
The average length of the coastal way segments around Petersburgh appears to be 2-3 km in length. So there’s definitely room for more detail.