Plugin mania

[thesohappy 0]

thanx man,I found the problem,dont know wich bulding was but it's solved,I started another city neways .. thanx .. now I have another headache,I can't frigging change a lot from CO to R$$,i know i'm doing something wrong but i dont know what it is,i'm using sc4 tool and ilive reader ...

[OffTopic 3]

Actually I have like 100 files in my plugins....no noticable slowdown. Im probably due up though

[Lh 0]

Thanks for the info. What I really have problems with is downloading a texture pack like the trees or a lot pack and having to search hard for the dependencies. What I need to just do is to ask for the stex dvd for my birthday that is coming up since it has most of the stuff I would need anyway.

[zach9311 0]

I already go through harmful crashes but I download and install so much I never know the root... I can't make deserts....and I can't play simcity 4 for past 3 hours or it stops saving....So yes Im still feeling the heat from when I first joined simtropolis...I took one look and jumped through about 60-85 pages staying up all night.....Sucks when I figured out lots need other downloads to work properly...So I had about 85 lots and 85% of them did not work....heh....And I was NOT about to go through 80 pages downloading millions of prop packs,textures...etc.

IF ONLY I FOUND YOUR THREAD THEN.....

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, it is a sticky.  Download in haste, repent at leisure.  The only way out is to start over, I think.

[bbfan02 23]

how do you test each download though?

[bbfan02 23]

How can u test each download to see if there is something wrong with it?

This is a large international board.  Posting as a way to prompt an answer doesn't work here because people are often not on line.  Please don't do this again. NOB.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You test a download by placing it in your plugins folder and running your sandbox region and placing the lot.  If it is a growable, you have to be patient until it shows up.

This precludes jamming a whole bunch of new downloads in our plugins all at once.  That is a form of plugin suicide.

Because of the billions of possible combinations of game, machine, and plugins, it is impossible for the authors to test comprehsively.  That is up to you.

If you don't do it, on your head be it.

[smstevenms 7]

I dont know if this the right thread for my question (didn't know where), but I'd love to know when will BSC Textures Mega Pack be unlocked? Already check SC4Devotion as suggested but could not find (not a very good search system).

[High5flyier 7]

smstevenms: The Mega Pack was replaced with the new "BSC Textures Vol 01. You will find find it on page two of the LEX under dependecies-texures. It also states in the readme that this is the successor to BSC Textures Mega Pack. Good luck

[smstevenms 7]

Originally posted by: High5flyier smstevenms: The Mega Pack was replaced with the new "BSC Textures Vol 01. You will find find it on page two of the LEX under dependecies-texures. It also states in the readme that this is the successor to BSC Textures Mega Pack. Good luckquote>

 

Sweet, thanks alot.

[Nereus 0]

I hope i am in the right place for my question.

But is there a way to place the plugin folder anywhere else? The thing is that my c: drive is getting a bit full and I just placed a new HD in my PC. I want to place my plugin folder in the new HD.

[smstevenms 7]

Nereus, yes and no, more so no. You have to keep the plugin folder where it is other wise nothing you put in there will be there when you start your game. Now you could install the game into the D drive but the last time I tried it didn't work. This might be due the need for the disk, it installs and looks find but when you try to run it nothing loads just the start screen. So you might just have to clean and sacrifice, or new computer. You might want to move any other programs you can to the other drive, I do this whenever I can or when it doesn't matter. Hope I helped.

[crazyyaya 4]

Good advice, its not so much the memory thou for me. theres so many plugins it takes me several minutes to find certain landmarks cuz my menus are crowded.

[smstevenms 7]

You know what did was break down all of my plungins into sub folders. ei Buildings, Parks, Utilities, Prop Packs, etc. Then in those folders break it down again, ie buildings - into MB after unzipping or installing, Utilities - power, water, garbage etc.. Parks - parks/plazas, trees, sunkin hwy stuff. You get the idea. Then when your needing to find or install something you'll know nearly by heart where everything is. This will also let you see at glance how much (MB) you have of something, to see if you can rid yourself of stuff you dont need. Buildings always take up the most (if you like the 5x5 & bigger).

[castironpigeon 1]

NOB: Great advice in your original post. This should not only be a sticky in this forum, it should be turned into a banner and placed right across the front page of ST and any other fansite with custom content. Figuring out this lesson the hard way has cost me more time than I care to think about and has probably driven away more uninformed newbies than any other mistake in SC4.

Unfortunately, I don't know if there's any perfect way to organize and sort one's plugin folder. I've tried it by author, I've tried it by theme, I've tried it by building type... there will come a critical size where any method you use to sort doesn't work anymore either because an author posts under two groups (his own name and a group like BSC), because you forget what theme a plugin was supposed to be under, or because you can't remember if you put those nifty el rail shops under commercial or transportation. And sorting dependencies is even worse because some dependencies are their own building while some are just prop packs in addition to the above mentioned problems with sorting in general. The only real answer, as NOB said, is to keep your plugins folder as small as possible while still allowing you to do what you want with the game.

[politicman 1]

I don't know what do you talk about

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Originally posted by: politicman I don't know what do you talk aboutquote>

Well, I tried to put it in pretty basic English.  What is it that you don't understand?

[smstevenms 7]

castironpigeon, that's so true. It's all of depencies and prop pack fault. The only sure fire way to keep things in order is to remember what you have. Download, install, & make sure it works, then repeat. If there was only one program to design from, organizing would be a sinch. My idea is the best I've come up with, onlong with saving the original download on a flash drive.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I have a separate downloads folder, and i save it to a DVD once a month.

[smstevenms 7]

Yea me too, but not as often. I use lightscribe and those aren't cheap.

[Crissa 1]

I download everything to a directory outside my plugins, so I always have a copy of the documents and relevent files - noting down things I change. That way what I put in my plugins directory is only want I use in this particular region

-Crissa

[LarksTonguesInAspic 28]

Originally posted by: smstevenms  Now you could install the game into the D drive but the last time I tried it didn't work.quote>

 

I tried several different ways, I believe it is somehow copy-protected or otherwise intentionally prevented from operating w/o disc 2. I haven't found any fixes on ST yet.

[smstevenms 7]

I have also created a rich text document for every file I download and copy any info the creator wrote in. A lot of the times there's no read me's or the info in the read me is different/less than the discription. This really helps a lot & sometimes the pic is worth saving if the discription is long or isn't self explanatory. And I save the link of the download just in case & if someone needed it.

Crissa, are you saying you have two copies on your computer of everything you download? If so that's not wise, this is excessive memory & will only help to slow your computer down. You should get a RW-DVD and place everything on that or a portable memory card (1gig or more).

[KingTitan 6]

Originally posted by: bbfan02 How can u test each download to see if there is something wrong with it?

This is a large international board.  Posting as a way to prompt an answer doesn't work here because people are often not on line.  Please don't do this again. NOB.quote>

 

I think a better approach would be to say "Use your edit key" Im sure it was a mistake...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Originally posted by: smstevenms

Crissa, are you saying you have two copies on your computer of everything you download? If so that's not wise, this is excessive memory & will only help to slow your computer down. You should get a RW-DVD and place everything on that or a portable memory card (1gig or more).quote>

Well, if you have the available disk space, I don't see what the problem is.  It doesn't slow down my computer to have the My Downloads stuff spinning away, all nicely compacted on my hard disk.  After all, it is not being accessed.

Of course, people with little disk space are best advised to keep something like this off-line, perhaps on a DVD-RW, and mounted at appropriate times.  I currently have enough disk to manage all of this on one of them which is loaded for XP, and the other physical hard disk which is given over to Linux (Ubuntu Feisty Fawn flavour).  The other machine in this room has nearly a Terabyte, but is loaded down with mpeg's and other graphics stuff.

[smstevenms 7]

N_O_Body, you just repeated what I said. To reiterate my first point, when it comes to memory you should have only you need, or use often on your computer. The closer you get to maxing out your memory the slower things load, not to mention deframenting gets longer and longer. So if you can afford DVD-RW disks then that's much better idea than keeping copies on your computer. The point here is also to keep everything in a safe place if the worst should happen, and which is safer??

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Originally posted by: smstevenms N_O_Body, you just repeated what I said. To reiterate my first point, when it comes to memory you should have only you need, or use often on your computer. The closer you get to maxing out your memory the slower things load, not to mention deframenting gets longer and longer. So if you can afford DVD-RW disks then that's much better idea than keeping copies on your computer. The point here is also to keep everything in a safe place if the worst should happen, and which is safer??quote>

Perhaps I misunderstood your post.  I was beginning to think you don't differentiate between storage and memory.  To me, and people of my generation, memory means RAM, and only RAM.  Storage is where you keep stuff until you need it in memory.  Usually hard disks, but many other media are available.  Keeping stuff in storage has no impact on the speed of your machine unless you are running out of storage so badly that you don't have any swap or temp space left.  If you don't do proper system maintenance, this can happen pretty quickly on small disks.

[smstevenms 7]

A computer with less "junk" on it will be much easier to maintain. Less time defrag., and less worries about a system crash. I have nearly 200gigs of memory but only 1gig of ram (which is partially my problem). 2gigs of ram recommended for Vista as a min. So in turn in your ram isn't up to par you don't want to cram to much into any space if you don't have the speed to retrieve it. We are both saying the same thing just in a different way, I think.

[FrankU 354]

It is possible to move all your plugins to another disk. What you must do is move the My Documents folder to another place. You can do it, because I did it. I have all my programs and virtual memory on C:, I have all my documents and other data on D:. Makes it also easy to backup on an external drive.

I am not sure what to do to move your My Documents folder.... Hope you can find out.

What I did last week, took me about four full days: I started a new pluginsfolder from scratch. Downloaded almost every lot anew. I saved the zip-files in an separate folder, then unpacked all these files and installed them in the pluginsfolder. For every topic I have subfolders: harbour, residential, commercial, farming, landscaping (things like trees, rocks, plopable water), canals, etc etc. Within these folders I have a subfolder per download, that contains all the files that are part of this download, including the readme's. This means I have to move a lot of files from the folder they were installed in to the place I want them. Sometimes there is no readme. In that case I copy the text from the Exchange and put it into a textfile. Also I copy the pics. So that I know what the plugin represents.

This leaves me with a large amount of sub-subfolders and files in my pluginsfolder. Then I read all the readme's and search for the needed dependencies. All these go into one large dependencies folder. Indeed... it took me a lot of time. But now I know I forgot nothing. AndI am quite sure I have the most recent ones and no doubles.

I copy this folder to a safe place (E-disk and External drive). The original pluginsfolder now also is full of pictures, textfiles, html-pages etc. I delete them all, because they can confuse (?) the computer and can make the machine crash.

In the end now I have about 1 Gb of plugins. I can even make several copies of this folder: rename them to cities or regions they belong to, so e.g. I can then delete the harbour-folder for cities that don't have a harbour. Of course the dependencies stay in de dependency-folder. Nothing I would like to do about that.

But for now I load everything. Takes me some time, but I know why it is, so no complaints there.

I can find every lot within seconds and know exactly what it is, beacuse I saved it with the readme's. Yes organising takes some time, but it is in itself a very thankful job to do. I have a fresh start with brandnew files and downloads.

Now I can play again!