Monthly Challenge December 2014

Complete The Interchange









This month we are starting a new type of challenge. We’re calling them monthly challenges, as they start at the beginning of each month and run until the end of the month. These will consist of specific things to do within the game, and will usually be accompanied by a region or city for you to build in. These challenges are more involved and require you to make more and submit more than you would for the weekly challenges. What you submit will be more tightly controlled, but this will make the competition fairer for everyone who submits. Winners will have a bigger reward, as well as an entry in the Hall Of Fame and an achievement they will be allowed to create the theme, and any regions or add-ons if they want, for the next round. Winners get a huge say in how they think these challenges should progress, its also a fun way of keeping these challenges different every month. So, with out further adieu we present the first monthly challenge.





We want you to complete the intersection. There is a region set up and waiting for you to dive in, check the download link below, which has four regional connections to different RHW setups.







These RHW stubs need to connect to each other in some way. How that happens is up to you, and it doesn’t have to be one interchange either, you can have multiple, so long as every highway connects to the others. There are a couple things you can’t do, and they are listed below in more detail, but essentially we don’t allow you to terraform the city. You can use slope mods, and minor terraforming, but part of the challenge is working with that terrain to complete the interchange. There is also an existing railway which we don’t want you to effect by too much. What we will allow is for you to change the rail tiles, just not where they are placed. So if you want to change part of the STR to normal rail thats fine, or if you want to tunnel under the rail and place a bridge thats fine too, just don’t move the railway from where it has been placed. You can use any mods you want, change the terrain textures, place trees and buildings, anything! Just complete the interchange!





Submission Requirements:

Now, heres where things get complicated. We are going to try out restricting the size of image submissions for a main image which will display the entire city tile or region along with any other addition images you may want to include. So that large images don’t have a visual advantage over smaller ones, in the interest of fairness we are going to restrict your image aspect ratio to 4/3, or multiples of 800 px wide by 600 px high. You can make the images at a higher resolution than this, 1600 x 1200 for instance would be acceptable, however we are restricting the aspect ratio so that the built-in ST image resizing will shrink the images to around one image per screen. We hope this will keep things fairer. Additional images or video can be of any other size, however these will be hidden inside a spoiler tag in the voting thread So, an aspect of 4/3 or multiples of 800 by 600 will be accepted for one main image

We will only accept multiple images or videos, so long as the main image conforms to the requirements above.

One view of the whole city tile or region and any other views of the interchange in a ratio of 4/3 or multiples of 800 by 600 for main image. Additional images or video can also be supplied of any size which will be hidden by a spoiler tag in the voting thread.



Building Rules:

No major terraforming, minor alterations (like hole diggers) and slope mods are allowed Railway line must remain in the same position, but the tiles may change (for instance to overpasses or normal rail) RHW must start from the four stubs already existing although can go anywhere you want after that. You ca use any mods you want and use cheats any way you would like.



Required Mods:

NAM version 32 with RHW and STR installed

Submission Dates: This thread will be open for submissions until midnight pacific time on the 31st of December. Voting will then be open for a week which will declare a winner. Following this the winner will have the month to create the rules and any appropriate files for the following months challenge. The winner of this month will create the challenge for February, the winner of January will create the challenge for March etc. I’ve already started the challenge for January which will give the winner enough time to get ready for the next month. If you don’t think you will be able to get time to set up a challenge for the following months, then try not to enter, however we will have some ready to go if unforeseen circumstances mean you can no longer help out.





Download The Region Here





Installation:

Really simple, most of you will know how to do this, but just a quick recap. Move the entire folder, which can be downloaded from the link above, into your regions folder. Thats My Documents/SimCity 4/Regions on windows and Documents/SimCity 4/ Regions on mac. Launch the game and load the region.



Let me know in this thread if there are any issues with either the download link or the challenge rules. This month is essentially a trial run for next year, so there are bound to be issues, with your help we can solve these early on in the process. And feel free to use this as some kind of journal thread, if you want to share what your working on as the month progresses feel free, although you will need to explicitly state on your final submission that it is your final submission. I will also post in here in the next few days showing examples of image sizes and how we imagine images would be combined in one file to adhere to image ratio rules.



Happy building mayors!

