SC4 tool problems

[duack 14]

A while ago, I downloaded the Chippendale terrace houses from the stex, but they wouldnt grow because their capacity was 18 while other maxis row houses are about 30. So i used the SC4 tool to modify them but now they wont even grow. To complicate matters, I downloaded matt's (the creator's) mega prop pack that included the chippendale terrace building files, and had to remove the old model and desc files. I even tried manipulating the building capacity from the new file, but still it doesnt work.
Need help. The tutorial that came with the SC4 tool hardly helped at all.

[Sam 163]

Its not normally a great idea to modify capacity in isolation from everything else. If you modify it too far the lot will indeed become ungrowable, because it is so easy to put the lot out of its density/growth stage range. Tweaking capacity is something that needs to be done in moderation.

The lot stage is determined by the lot's capacity (jobs or residents) and the lot area (eg 1x2). Lot capacity is normally determined by the volume of the building LODs. The lot also has density markers, low density grows stage 1-3, medium grows 4-6 and high grows 7-8. So if you put the capacity up to 30 (from 18) and that turned it into a stage 4, and the zoning flags were still set to low, then the lot is ungrowable.

This is not a problem with SC4 tool, this is a consequence of overextrapolating your figures. If you want to change capacity you should do only minor changes. When done, load up a copy of your lot (not the one you are working on) into the Lot Editor and see what it thinks the stage should be (get rid of this copy of the lot when you are done). When you know that, you'll need to open the copy you are working on in Ilive's Reader and set the density flags (LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes property) appropriately. You'll also need to alter the growth stage property to something to match the capacity and the Zone Types property. Then you'll need to zone in your game appropriately as well.

Modding the capacity is temperamental though you usually have to spend a lot of time tweaking capacity to get the growth level you want (normally you don't want to alter the area of the lot or volume of the BAT, so the only lever you can pull to change the growth rate is the capacity. I think in this case you may have pulled it a bit too far).

If you don't want to do that then you'll need to make the lot bigger (increase its area) in the Lot Editor and save it. You usually don't want to save someone else's custom lot in the LE though, so the first option is usually better.

Like I said, its temperamental. You need to be gentle with it.

Deleting the original model file for an updated prop pack shouldn't be a problem (at the worst you'll get a brown box, it won't stop the lot from growing).

The problem is in the descriptor file (the building exemplar, which may be modded into the lot file or a dat file rather than being in its descriptor file still). If it comes to the worst and you can't fix it, you'll need to get the lot/model/descriptor you downloaded out of the zip file and replace your broken one with the one you downloaded. Since you said you had to download Matt's new prop pack, you'll probably need to replace your broken one of those with a copy from the new prop pack's download file, as this is where the building exemplar most likely is now.

Edit: If you were modifying the descriptor file and something went wrong, then normally deleting the descriptor file and replacing it with a backup copy should normally be enough to fix the problem. (If you installed the new updated prop pack and removed the broken descriptor that should have fixed it to).

Did you go back into the LE after you changed the capacity and before you deleted the problem files? If so then the LE will have tried to adjust the growth stage to something suitable on its own (which may be higher).