Alright - so, considering the fact that my old Arcadia thread appears to have been lost in the ether, I'm gonna go ahead and post a brand new one.
A bit of an intro first - I've been working on Arcadia, or a city by that name, on and off for about a year now. The plan for version 1 included a vast metro area, a set of freeways, a massive downtown etc etc. Anyway, I ran into some technical troubles with the original version, so I took parts of version one and translated it into version 2 - the small, dense island of highrises you see today.
All of this is done in the Half Life 2 game engine, using the freely available modding tools that developer Valve release for anyone with HL2. Unfortunately, there will be no fragging in Arcadia any time in the near future, as I've had to make the whole thing at an impossibly small scale, to the point where a regular human is over 70 metres tall... I've experimented with putting enourmous baddies in the map, but it really wasn't very much fun.
Anyway, on with the city!
Arcadia, Oregon is a city with a metropolitan population of 2.5 million people. The city's central business district is situated on a small (around 650*850 metre) rectangular islnad, connected to the mainland by a tunnel at what is, in real life, Newport, Oregon (On the coast, South-West of Portland). Arcadia was established in 1874, and has 9 buildings over 500ft (plus 2 with antennas that put them over 500ft), as well as (if I recall correctly) around 50 buildings over 300ft.
Now, I've actually got a hell of a lot of info about Arcadia - a fairly exhaustive history, key information for most buildings over 300ft, information on important figures in the city's history - what can I say, I've gone a little overboard.
At any rate, I'm not gonna dump all that stuff one you at once, so I'll start out with a few overview pics to give y'all an idea of what Arcadia looks like...
A view from the water, looking approaching Arcadia Harbour. From here, you can see many of the city's tallest buildings - the bright blue UrbanStyle Tower, MRP House - with its distinctive pointed crown, the Chrysler-esque Ansonia Tower, the Rockerfeller centre-esque AH Building, and a few more besides.
A view from the air, highlighting the density of the North of Arcadia Island
A similar shot, but this time taken from the top of Arcadia's tallest building, the Ansonia Tower, and giving us a view of the 2nd (or 3rd, depends if you count the antenna) tallest, ArcadiaLife Tower.
An aerial view of the whole city - here, you can see the grid pattern of the streets, intersected by the 2 diagonal avenues - this shot also illustrates well the row of huge towers along the East (top) edge of the island.
Well, that's about it for the photos (for today at least - there's plenty more where those came from
), but I thought I'd post the first section of my History of Arcadia for those of you who're interested -
Quote:
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Founded in 1874, the city of Arcadia takes its name from Arcadia Island, situated just off the Oregon coast at current day Newport. The first settlers of the area were a group lead by John Lewis Fremont – immigrating to the West from Illinois, approximately 100 settlers followed entrepreneur Fremont towards the Pacific Ocean, establishing a settlement at Newport, Oregon in 1868.
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Anyway, I'd love to hear any comments, critiques, suggestions, thoughts, ideas y'all have.
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