Editing regional highway possible through modding

[fatbuster 44]

Looks like someone over on Reddit was able to modify the regional highway (and create new highway roads) by enabling some hidden debug tools. Looks like the changes even save to your city when you quit!

 

Here's the link to the Reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit_highways_outside_of_city_boundaries/

[ice444 1]

Works a treat! No region stuff of course, and you have to stay in your city, and there's no way to save the city unless you reconnect... but it's something. The "20 minutes" Kotaku reported on being able to stay playing for before being kicked to main menu for no connection is a random figure the devs put in, very odd.

The simulation continues just fine without

 

Could be quite interesting - if people figured out how to mod so we didn't need online, disabled the region "features" (which don't work anyway), unlock larger maps and modded the ai - we might have a better game?

[libellibicus 396]

So basically, if some modders just completely altered the games structure it would be a better game.

[thomascs 1]

With the release of the game as is, maxis showed us what an incompetent bunch of morons they are. But they did had the resources to develop the skeleton of an engine and nice graphics. Now it's up to the modders to make a true Simcity game out of it!

[croxis 150]

I would say rushed release and not properly calibrated beta. IIRC this is end of the financial year for EA so they wanted the game out to improve their end of year earnings (don't quote me on this). In heinsight they should of done an open beta sooner without the hour time limit*

 

*The one hour time limit does serve a useful purpose, it gave them a lot of data to balance the first couple hours of gameplay which is important. The downside is they got very little data on the extended data. The following two betas could of done this but instead they limited to a day to test serverside bottlenecks instead.

[blunder 1,079]

 Now it's up to the modders to make a true Simcity game out of it!

 

And why would we want to waste time doing that?

[JaceTwice 115]

Now it's up to the modders to make a true Simcity game out of it!

And why would we want to waste time doing that?

Maybe because SimCity has potential far beyond anything sc4 could ever accomplish? It got a lot of catching up to do but it could very well shoot past what we have now.

[SirChick 184]

 

Now it's up to the modders to make a true Simcity game out of it!

And why would we want to waste time doing that?

Maybe because SimCity has potential far beyond anything sc4 could ever accomplish? It got a lot of catching up to do but it could very well shoot past what we have now.

 

Indeed it has huge potential if they got rid of stupid city size, allowed us to import buildings it would be golden.

 

I also like the first youtube comment:

I'm getting tired of Players always having to fix developer's work

 

They manage to get that working in less than a week and yet its still taking over a week for Maxis to fix alot of other things that are relatively simple to solve.

[blunder 1,079]

Yes, it does have a lot of potential.  But Maxis should have realized much more of it before they released this turd of a game.  At this point it's just absurd to financially reward EA/Maxis for releasing an unfinished, terrible product (and lying to us the whole time) and then cleaning up their mess for them. 

[majortom1981 1]

Looks like someone over on Reddit was able to modify the regional highway (and create new highway roads) by enabling some hidden debug tools. Looks like the changes even save to your city when you quit!

 

Here's the link to the Reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit_highways_outside_of_city_boundaries/

The problem is we still do not know if you will be banned from the game for using the mod yet. maxis employees welcome it and Ea so far says you will get banned.

[warrior 169]

Looks like someone over on Reddit was able to modify the regional highway (and create new highway roads) by enabling some hidden debug tools. Looks like the changes even save to your city when you quit!

 

Here's the link to the Reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit_highways_outside_of_city_boundaries/

The problem is we still do not know if you will be banned from the game for using the mod yet. maxis employees welcome it and Ea so far says you will get banned.

 

Some EA CS reps say you will get banned and some say you won't: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1ab6cp/ea_customer_support_states_users_will_not_be/

 

With the devs welcoming it and EA unclear, it seems mods are ok.

[Cob92 360]

I would say rushed release and not properly calibrated beta. IIRC this is end of the financial year for EA so they wanted the game out to improve their end of year earnings (don't quote me on this). In heinsight they should of done an open beta sooner without the hour time limit*

 

*The one hour time limit does serve a useful purpose, it gave them a lot of data to balance the first couple hours of gameplay which is important. The downside is they got very little data on the extended data. The following two betas could of done this but instead they limited to a day to test serverside bottlenecks instead.

 

The beta was too limited in scope. They should have had the one hour beta be an open beta, so that the servers could have been properly stress tested. That might have averted the launch issues. The closed betas should have been more open gameplay wise to give testers the chance to really abuse the game. You're not going to find out what flaws a game has if you only play it the way that the developers intended it to be played.

[Inge Jones 18]

Someone on my site has made a small utility that will unlock the debug UI without players having to do their own modding.  You can get it from http://www.den.simlogical.com/denforum/index.php/topic,1842.html

[gibbed 10]

That looks like something that patches the original .package file, which is (probably) bad.

[Inge Jones 18]

We don't yet have a way of adding small mod packages like we have for The Sims 3.  I am sure that will come.  For now, treat this as potentially unsafe and experimental, of course, like any mod at this stage of modding.

 

Obviously, there is always the option to reinstall if it all goes horribly wrong.  And your actual games are stored on EA servers, so it's doubtful you'd actually lose your cities by reinstalling.

[gibbed 10]

how to override content without editing existing packages.

 

There is a debug enabler that uses this method available here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1abddh/bagoftrix_version_3_added_unlimited_offline_timer/

[Inge Jones 18]

Oh thanks!  That's useful.  Are you the Gibbed that I know from MTS? (real name begins with R) ?

[gibbed 10]

Oh thanks!  That's useful.  Are you the Gibbed that I know from MTS? (real name begins with R) ?

Yup. Haven't talked to you since MTS IRC died, I think?

[Inge Jones 18]

We could do with a resource.cfg.  Maybe EA will add one and mods folder as part of their intention to support modding better.

[gibbed 10]

We could do with a resource.cfg.  Maybe EA will add one and mods folder as part of their intention to support modding better.

It'd be nice, but GlassBox/Spark isn't based on the content system TS3 has, but based on Spore's engine. So getting that specific system is probably out of the question. The current system is liveable, if it becomes a problem a tool to set modification timestamps on packages based on a list would probably work (something like BOSS).