So what you end up with, it having to disguise the boundaries of every building you put down, or discard a big chunk of assets. The same is somewhat true of industrial/commercial areas too - although the bigger the building the less I mind putting time in altering it with props/PO's.
This is fine if you're imagining every house sits on a square plot in a grid system. Most of the vanilla assets, and workshop assets, come pre-decorated, often with hedges and fences. I can't achieve what I want without loads and loads and loads of assets. Google maps is great for inspiration, but what you then end up realising is. I end up looking at how few negative spaces there are in the real world - and it becomes clear that really, every square unit of a map needs to be worked on to make it feel real. One of the things I've noticed is that it really helps if you build a story with your city as you go, think about what an area is, how it works with its surroundings, and what it would look like.
But, it still takes time to learn which mods do which, and how to use them to actually achieve what you want. So, as you you get slightly more familiar with the various heavy mods (stuff like Procedural Objects), a lot of what you see people like CityWokCityWall, Skibitth, Ajraus and $2.20 doing, starts to actually make more sense, and get's a little less daunting - though I have to say, it takes much longer than you may realise from watching their time lapses.
So, I guess I'm trying to do a lot, I want functional, pretty and real. At the other end you get people like Biffa, will slickly running cities, but very little detailing done, and essentially, pretty, but vanilla looking. When you watch a lot of the really good detailers on YouTube, often there cities are totally knackered and plagued with issues that are effectively just hidden by mods. You can get around this using mods of course (block services are the cure all IMHO), but I don't want to do that, I want my city to work. My goal is to build the biggest, reasonably well detailed, fairly realistic city I can, and have it look somewhat better than my vanilla flavour modded cities - by which I mean obviously there's the vanilla game, and then there's mods/assets - the more you move towards the heavy detail work - and making things look good, the vanilla game mechanic breaks down. This is just a mini rant really, with no constructive advice, but anyway. So, despite all the other **** going on in my life at the moment, I'm still messing about with CSL a lot, as I'm keen to make the most of my new hardware. Swedish architecture, rowhouses and terrace houses: The football club is great for making smaller football arenas: This concrete barrier is really nice, especially the terrain conforming version:
Functions as a garage (it's basically a park with a parking space inside the building). They are really good if your road has a slope, since each module is just one or two squares wide. The asset is modular so you either place a single building or place several next to each other to make a larger building. Ocean City Apartments: Very nice looking contemporary apartments. The rural utility lines are nice when you want to give a remote area access to the power grid, but don't want to use the big vanilla power lines: The runway approach lighting system is very nice for detailing airports: This road with protected bike lane and parking space: The author has a lot of other nice nature assets that you might be interested in as well. Probably bad for your fps if you make an entire forest but for detailing they are perfect. Highly realistic, both from a distance and up close. It's not good for your framerate though, so it depends on whether you prefer a smooth playing experience or pretty graphics. Everything blends perfectly together and especially the cliffs look very realistic. Not just in terms of resolution, but also in visual quality. Probably the highest quality textures available. Also, putting bus stops on these roads is just pure art (you will see why). They are essential as they fill the rather big gap between highways and dirt roads. At the top of the list are these rural roads: