Care and feeding of Plugins from Maxis.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Today, I had a Plugin missing notification when I opened a city I hadn't used for some time.  It wanted Plugin Pack 007.

 

Turns out that this is the air force base, which the Maxis executable installs in the the system residency.  Because I reinstall frequently as versions of the operating system update every six months, I must have done an upgrade since last opening this city.

 

So, I reinstalled the Transportation.exe (Air force base) file, then promptly moved the file it installed from the system residency to my user space plugins file in <me>.../Plugins/EAPlugins/  whereupon the problem disappeared.

 

This is yet another example of why one should not install anything in the C:\Program Files ...\SimCity 4\Plugins folder.  Just leave the sky textures there, and move anything else back to the user area.  Reinstalling the game refreshes this folder and its contents are just replaced, not saved.

[arozarker12 51]

And yet another reason I wisely walk carefully when it comes to the program files!  yikes!  Bad, bad things can happen!

[AcmeSigns 97]

Hey Nonny...

Can you define the 'user space plugins file' a bit more? Is this some extra add-on to the shortcut coding you did to tell the game where the plug-ins are? I'm really interested in this as I try to not keep anything of importance on a C: drive that could be lost in the case of an HD failure (I've had that happen too many times already ~ lesson learned). Now anything that is 'saveable' is stored outside of the programs directory on additional hard drives.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

When the game installs there are two plugins folders.

 

C:\Program Files ... \SimCity 4\Plugins should be used only for the default sky textures.  It is universal to all players of the game on the same machine with different accounts, so should not be polluted by a single player's choices.

 

C:\<user>\Documents\Sim City 4\Plugins is the user space plugin folder where all custom content should live.  Every account on the machine that plays the game gets an unique one of these.

 

Stuff in Program Files should be considered part of the Operating System and played with at great risk.  Installers will replace the content of the entire structure as needed.

 

Windows is a multi-user operating system, as are all home PCs today.  You can have separate accounts for each user.  Only one of them needs to have administrator privileges, and the rest can be ordinary users.  The game propagates for regular users simply by starting the game or when the administration account makes a custom shortcut for a new user in his own space.  Starting the game when there is no user structure creates it and copies in all the default regions.

 

Because of this kind of set up, the game can also be installed on a server and run by anyone with access permission to it.  If you have never thought about what is really underneath that desktop. there is probably more than you ever imagined.

[AcmeSigns 97]

Since both of these are on the same C: drive (the only drive I've ever had fail ~ I'm guessing from extended use as everything that's done on a computer runs through it) is there a way to add coding to the SimCity shortcut 'Target' line (like the -intro:off one or the custom display size you explained in another post) to designate where the plugins & custom content are to be referenced? If not then I guess my weekly off-C:\ drive backups aren't such a bad idea.

 

The only thing(s) I like having on my C:\ drive are the OS and some (but not all) program files. Everything else I have (whether it be program files, videos, images, whatever) reside on one of my other 4 hard drives (4-500 Gb & 1-2 Tb).

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Yes, you can have your user area files anywhere. 

 

 

Code: (Change Path) [select]

-UserDir:path

Specifies the directory where the users game directory is. If the default subdirectories of "Regions\", "Plugins\", and "HTTPCache\" arn't found, then it creates an instance of, (in the case of Regions, it copies the default set over). The default game data directory defaults to being the same directory as the game installation directory. Quotes are necessary if the path name has spaces. Make sure there is a "\" on the end of your path or it creates directories like "testPlugins\" and "testRegions\"

 

For all the options see: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3683.msg113280#msg113280

[AcmeSigns 97]

Thanks Nonny. That's kind of what I thought, I just wasn't positive about it (and, apparently, I was too lazy to just try it out and see what happened).

 

Off to play with my 'Target' line now.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Good luck.  I hope you are using a separate physical drive and not just a partition on the same drive.  Windows has a rather silly file system left over from MS-DOS.  The idea of having to bother with drive letters is one of the things I particularly dislike.  Linux can treat every on-line storage device as one big tree if you set up your mounting tables correctly.  Currently I have only two separately accessible partitions across three HDDs.

[AcmeSigns 97]

No partitions on any of the drives but, yeah, they all have different drive letters. Doesn't bother me though as that's how I've been doing things for years. I know fairly well what resides on which drive.

 

Thanks for the 'Target' line info. It should be a big help.

[ProcessGamer 3]

What happened is that my game crashes in the loading screen when opening my city and now it is fix, it doesn't crash anymore but, ALL the plugins doesn't work at all in the game it said something about packs that are not available in the "machine". Can you me with that problem?

 

Thanks! 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I think you'd better start a new thread with this one and more details.  This particular thread is about how to use plugins not diagnosing problems.

[ProcessGamer 3]

okay, thanks! but i don't know how to create a new thread. can you tell me were to create a new thread? (I am still new to the website).

[AcmeSigns 97]

okay, thanks! but i don't know how to create a new thread. can you tell me were to create a new thread? (I am still new to the website).

Sure. It's pretty simple.

Go back to: https://community.simtropolis.com/forum/59-simcity-4-players-forum/ and pick a forum that you feel covers what your question might be.

On the right is a black button that says, 'Start new Topic'.

There you go.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Go to the forum home, and the button is at the top.

[ProcessGamer 3]

Thanks guys!