Back with a new batch

Back with a new batch! (and a hatchet that I bought from scratch).

So I wonder how many blogs / projects / etc. are started on the Internet and then abandoned within a few weeks? A million? Anyway, this shall not be one of those (at least not yet).

After getting kind of frustrated trying to figure out the RHW and NAM mods and doing the downtown interstates, I decided to punt that for now and start with something “easier” (air quotes definitely intentional)

So I decided to work on the 4×4 (256 pixel by 256 pixel) large city that I called “Madeira”. This is a square going from latitude 39N 10.029 to 39N 12.264 and from longitude 84W 20.991 to 84W 23.826. So… somewhere around here.

It seemed like the logical first place to start would be to get the major roads coming in to Madeira and where they hit the border. I started with Interstate 71. I-71 is kind of weird here because it is going kind of east, then it turns north and then moves northeast through the square. I started out looking on Google Maps for where it crossed the southern border (39.16716 latitude), but then realized that actually it hits my square from the west, crossing the -84.3971 longitude at 39.17905 north latitude (sorry for all the geeky map numbers).

Anyways, I used my handy dandy spreadsheet (I built a spreadsheet that can convert Google lat/longs (in decimal format) to atlas lat/longs (which are in minutes and seconds to pixels. So 39.17905 is 81.75 pixels from the bottom of my 256×256 city. Since highways take up 2 pixels, I put a highway stub at pixel 81 and 82 from the bottom, on the west edge. I similarly stubbed out the highway where it leaves the north of the square (just north of Exit 12 – Montgomery Road).

Then I moved on to Kenwood Road, which hits the 39.2044 north border at a longitude of -84.37966, which is 93 pixels from the left. It was at this point that I realized that I had a bug in my spreadsheet that was switching the pixels from left and pixels from right (due to longitudes in the western hemisphere being negative).

I stubbed that out and ran the road south past Kenwood Towne Centre. I was trying to figure out the best way to do it. I started it as a RHW-4 (4 lane Real Highway) but that wasn’t working out for me. Then I swapped to an avenue (one of the original in-game road types) but that is more of a divided median type road, which wasn’t what I was looking for.

So then I noticed that they had upgraded to a new version of NAM – version 29. So I downloaded that thinking – but then something wasn’t working right, so I uninstalled everything and then installed the new version. That caused all of the RHW pieces I had put down all evening to disappear, and the RHW pieces to disappear from the menu (so I couldn’t even put any new ones down).

I was already feeling kind of bummed that I spent 2 hours or so on this and all I had accomplished was stubbing out 2 roads :-). So I quit for the evening. But don’t worry dear reader! In the next post, I will explain how I figured that out.