Fewer residents per home, less cars/peds mod?

[LE0 5]

So, you know how when you query a house, it has alot (unrealistically too many) of residents. how could i change all the R lots (maxis and custom) for my personal use, so for example a R$ trailer house would have 2-3 people instead of like 10. Also even in my small towns and farm towns, they are not congested, I have Z Medium NAM simulator, and 'Radical', there is FAR too much pedestrian/cars/ frieght trucks, even at night. UDI is nearly impossible and a pain, and its one of my favorite parts of the game.

So, how could i make a mod like this for myself and REPLACE the lots, not create additional ones. I think i need LEProp???

[RedImperator 16]

Originally posted by: LE0

So, you know how when you query a house, it has alot (unrealistically too many) of residents. how could i change all the R lots (maxis and custom) for my personal use, so for example a R$ trailer house would have 2-3 people instead of like 10. Also even in my small towns and farm towns, they are not congested, I have Z Medium NAM simulator, and 'Radical', there is FAR too much pedestrian/cars/ frieght trucks, even at night. UDI is nearly impossible and a pain, and its one of my favorite parts of the game.

So, how could i make a mod like this for myself and REPLACE the lots, not create additional ones. I think i need LEProp???

quote>

I can't help you with UDI, but I've been making my own homebrew mods lately so I have a little experience with the Reader.

First, someone has already made a residential halver for all the Maxis buildings:

https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=12383

This will save you a ton of time, since there's almost 250 Maxis residential buildings and they all have to be modded individually.

Now, to do the same to your custom content.

First, you will need ilive's Reader program.  If you don't already have it, it's available here.

Okay, now open the reader and find the file you want to mod.  It helps to have an organized plugins folder for this.  Typically, a lot (any kind of lot) will have three files associated with it: an .SC4Model (the 3d model of the building), an SC4Lot (the lot, including references to all the props and base textures), and an .SC4Desc file, which contains the values used by the simulation.  That's going to be the one you want.  Sometimes, all you'll have is a single .dat file--usually that means the modder packed everything inside a single dat file to save space and load time.  The files you want are in there.

Let's illustrate with examples.  For this exercise, I'm using Bixel's HK Orange House, a 2x2 R$$ apartment tower housing 800 Sims.

First, open the reader and find the file:

See why I said you should keep your plugins organized?  Anyway, select the .SC4Desc file of the building you want.  Most creators are pretty good about having their filenames make some kind of sense (the most common format is the RCI and wealth type, followed by the lot size, followed by the name).  If not, you're going to have to do some detective work.

Anyway, select your file and open it.  You'll see this screen:

To save loading time, when reader loads a file, it doesn't immediately display the contents.  I'm going to show you the simplest way to show them.  Note that for big files, like the main SimCity_1.dat file, this isn't the best way, but for most custom content, especially individual lots, it will work just fine.

Ready?  Here goes:

So, erm, yeah, you're going to want to push that button.

When you push that button, this is the screen you'll see:

Now look at what we have: on the left, a blue bar with two open .dat files (keep blank.dat open; we'll need it later), a middle panel listing all subfiles contained in the open .dat, and, on the right, a long list of terrifyingly incomprehensible argle-bargle.  Feel free to panic, if you'd like.

Finshed?  Good.  Because I have good news: all that incomprehensible argle-bargle is none of our concern.  I don't even know what that XML file does.  It could just be a practical joke, for all I know.  What we want is the Exemplar file, just below the XML.

Much better.  Most of this stuff is still arcane, but at least it looks like it was written for a human to read, instead of a machine.  If, you know, people counted in hexidecimal instead of base-ten.  At any rate, this is where we want to be.  As you can probably guess by the names of the values, this is where all the lot's "internal" properties are set--that is, the properties which determine how it effects the simulator and how the simulator effects it. 

Now at this point, you have a decision to make.  If you just want to mod the file, skip down to the next step, though I strongly recommend either making a backup or keeping a copy of the zip file you downloaded.  However, I recommend creating a new .dat.  To create a new dat, first right-click on the exemplar, select "copy file", then select blank.dat, right click again, and select "paste file".  What you should now see is this:

Save the new file as zzwhatever.  The "zz" is important.  SC4 loads plugins in alphabetical order, and the later plugins always override previous plugins (the exception to this rule is the SimCity_#.dat files, which are always loaded first; thus, if your mod only affects Maxis content, you don't need to bother with the "zz").  

Now, you've probably noticed I highlighted the "Capacity Satisfied" property two pictures ago.  This is what we're interested in.  So go ahead and double click it.  You should see this:

Oh hooray.  It's a list of eight digit numbers.  Eight digit numbers with letters in them.  I think I'm just going to go play Mario Bros. now or something.

Actually, what you're looking at are hexidecimal numbers, which I mentioned above.  Without going into a dissertation on hex code, hexidecimal is simply another way of counting--in base 16, to be exact, as opposed to base 10, which are the numbers with which you're familiar.  In base sixteen, the first ten digits are the same as base ten--0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, and 9.  After that, however, we have A, B, C, D, E, and F, which equal 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, respectively.  Then the ones place rolls over to 0 again, and we add a 1 in the tens place--10.  Hey, that looks familiar.  Except in hexideicmal, the digits 10 represent the number sixteen.  11 is seventeen, 12 is eighteen, 13 is 20, 14 is 21, and so on all the way to 1F, which is 31.  Then it rolls over to 20, and so on and so forth. 

If hex code hurts your brain, you're not alone.  You could try to learn it so you can read hex numbers, or you can just use the calculator that came with Windows and convert hex to base ten, and vice versa.

Anyway, as you can see, we have four values here.  Two of them are the demand ID: that's the type of RCI capacity the building satisfies--number of residents for residential, number of jobs for commercial or industrial.  Now, documentation for the Reader program is unfortunately pretty thin on the ground.  Fortunately, when you highlight a property, the program will give you some information about it down at the bottom of the screen.

Ah ha.  So 1010 and 1020 are our demand IDs, and 0262 and 01F8 are the actual number of residents.  Plug those numbers into the calculator to turn them into base 10, and we get 610 and 504 (this incidentally does not match the description given by Bixel in the STEX, but it's more than possible I've edited this lot already; I tested several other buildings and the capacity satisfied numbers match the in-game numbers).

Now, decide how many people you want living in this building.  Let's say, for the sake of example, we cut it in half: 252 R$$ residents, 305 R$ if the building becomes dilapidated.  Click on the values, and change them, like this:

Then, click the bottom "Apply" button.  This is important.  If you don't click apply, none of the changes you made will stick.

Finally, go to the file menu at the top of the screen and click "Save" to save your mod.  This is also important.  I don't know if it's a bug in reader or only in my version or only on my computer, but using the Ctrl-S shortcut will not save the updated file on my machine.  You have to go through the file menu.  Reader will ask if you're sure; say "Yes".

And that's it.  Every instance of that building in the game should have a smaller population.  Now, if you want to mod a bunch of buildings, you don't need to make a new mod file for each one.  Just go to your next building, copy the exemplar into the .dat you just made, and edit it.  Repeat for every building you want to mod.  What you'll have at the end of this process is a single file which changes the number of residents in every custom building in the game.  If you download new custom content, just add its exemplars to the mod.  I'd suggest making a backup copy of your mod somewhere, just in case you screw something up--otherwise, you'll have to do all this work over again.

And that's it.  Have fun modding.

[LE0 5]

Your tutorial , when i tried it, i download residential PACKS, sometimes packed into 2dat files, so when i tried your tutorial it got stuck

[RedImperator 16]

How do you mean, got stuck? Did you get stuck because I didn't tell you something you need to know, or did reader get stuck?

Just in case it's the former, all you need to do is open the DAT; it should contain all the exemplars you'll need. I'll have some pics up later.

[LE0 5]

I saw FSH and S3D files, not XML files

[RedImperator 16]

Okay, so suppose some helpful person has created a big set of residential lots and packed them into a single .dat.  Well, she's made it a lot easier to keep your Plugins folder clean, and a single dat will generally take up less space and load faster.  However, if you're following the tutorial, I told you to find the .SC4Desc file, and there won't be one if the lot has been datpacked.

Fortunately, Reader can open .dat files and give you access to all the subfiles within.  Here's how you do it.

First, you'll need to find a .dat.  In this example, we'll be using c.p.'s excellent set of early 19th century houses (available here--you'll need to be registed at SC4Devotion to download).  c.p.'s houses actually come as seperate files, but I packed them myself using the Datpacker program, also available on SC4Devotion.

OK, so that will bring you to the display screen again.  As before, push the big "Fill the list" button and you get...

...a huge mess.  Crap.

What's happened here is that I combined every file from a big set of buildings.  That's all the models, all the lots, and all the exemplars.  Worse, there's more than one kind of exemplar.  Fortunately, reader gives us some tools to make this situation more managable.

For the next step, click the "Analyzer" button on top of the screen.  Once the window open, press "Search".  You should see this on your screen:

All right, that's the contents of the entire .dat.  Now, click the Filter button to open this box:

This is the filters window.  There are actually two different filters here; for now, we're going to ignore the one on the left.  On the right hand side, you're going to click the "Uncheck All" button, then click the tickbox next to "Buildings", then click "Refresh".  After you close the filters window, you should see this:

See?  Out of the 4000 or so files in the original .dat, we're down to just thirteen. 

Now, select all the files in the window, either by control-clicking or dragging the select box.  Right click, and this menu comes up:

Click "Add to patch".  Close the filters window.  Back at the main window, up in the row of buttons across the top, is a button called "Patch".  Click that, and you'll bring up this screen:

Click "Create DAT".  Save the .dat as "zzwhatever".  Open up that file, and then follow the tutorial above to change the values you want.

[LE0 5]

Sorry, i dont like datpacker, so will that affect anything?

yes i have CP's 19th Century homes, i also have simgoobers res pack vol 1 from the LEX

[RedImperator 16]

Originally posted by: LE0

Sorry, i dont like datpacker, so will that affect anything?

yes i have CP's 19th Century homes, i also have simgoobers res pack vol 1 from the LEX

quote>

No.  You don't need to have Datpacker to mod anything, or to open up a .dat that someone else datpacked. 

[mrbill67401 0]

Sorry for the two month bump, but I just wanted to thank RedImperator for his great instructions regarding this topic.  All day long I've been struggling with the iLive Reader trying to make sense of it all.  I finally stumbled across this thread, and voila, I found the answers to my questions.  Thank goodness for the screen shots as they were extremely helpful in figuring out what I needed to do to reduce the number of jobs that a few of my downloaded Industrial buildings had in them.

Kudos to you RedImperator, and kudos to LE0 as well for asking the questions in the first place!

[RedImperator 16]

Originally posted by: mrbill67401

Sorry for the two month bump, but I just wanted to thank RedImperator for his great instructions regarding this topic.  All day long I've been struggling with the iLive Reader trying to make sense of it all.  I finally stumbled across this thread, and voila, I found the answers to my questions.  Thank goodness for the screen shots as they were extremely helpful in figuring out what I needed to do to reduce the number of jobs that a few of my downloaded Industrial buildings had in them.

Kudos to you RedImperator, and kudos to LE0 as well for asking the questions in the first place!quote>

I'm glad you found it useful.  I had been meaning to write something like it for a while, and LE0's question gave me the opportunity.  I'm planning another one on building blockers pretty soon.