Plopmatic 9000

[lhrob 213]

Now that I have the answers to my other questions about reinstalling the game, I have another one:

 

A while back I was feeling a little bold and wanted to have a little fun watching skyscrapers pop up in my little sleepy riverside small town.  So I decided to do something I said I'd never do...I downloaded a plugin which affected my RCI demand.  It's called - and at first I was really having fun with it, watching residential towers soar out of the ground and commercial zones quickly fill up with high-wealth boutiques and office buildings.  But then I decided I'd had enough fun and wanted to resume normal gameplay so I could watch my city grow naturally by keeping an eye on the RCI graph and adding zones according to the appropriate demand.

 

BUT...... 

 

After I demolished the pretty little Plopmatic tree lot, and removed the plugin from my Plugins folder, my demand for each type of zone remained high.  Since then I've been constantly having one residential tower after another spring up...same with my commercial and industrial buildings.  In short, my demand is all screwed up and I'm not sure how to fix this....or if it even can be fixed.

 

I know, I know....I'm an idiot and I never should have messed around with it.  If you need to lecture me, that's fine...I deserve it.  But can you also tell me what I have to do to get normal demand back in my city?  My greater fear is whether this has affected my entire region.  Do I have to scrap the entire region, or just the city?

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Have you removed all the files contained in this plugin? Demand should be restored to normal unless this plugin somehow affected the five core DAT files of SC4 Rush Hour.

 

Try out a new region and see what sort of demand is shown in the RCI graph, if you properly removed the plugin then demand should be back to normal.

[lhrob 213]

No, I haven't tried a new region yet.  I'll have to consider that.  But if it has affected the core DAT files, am I totally....how do I say this in PG terms....up a creek?  Would the adverse effects carry over from my backed up Regions folder in case I want to reinstall the game later, or are the core DAT files a separate part of the game?

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

Don't worry, it won't have affected the DAT files, as it's just a LOT file.

 

I've had a look at it using the Reader tool. Basically, it increases RCI growth using a radical "demand created" property, contained within the exemplar file. If there are any permanent effects, they should only be within the city where you plopped the lot. Having said that, I very much doubt this will be the case.

 

Usually with demand mods like this, the effects can be visible for an extended period of time, even after bulldozing the lot from the game, and removing it from your plugins folder. When saving a city, the current demand is captured like a snapshot. This means when re-loading the city, it will see the demand as it was at this current point. So it might be worth entering the city, and running cheetah speed for a while. This should encourage the game to "refresh" the simulation, and restore the demand to it's usual thresholds.

[lhrob 213]

Okay, I'll try that and see what happens.  If it doesn't normalize, is there any way to "remove" the city from the region and start a new one there?  I mean, I know you can obliterate it...but would that take care of the problem if the demand doesn't return to normal?

 

EDIT:  Well, I let it run on Cheetah for about 75 years, and the demand seems to fluctuate up and down more now, but my commercial demand is still maxing out.  The only thing that has dropped considerably is my residential demand, and my I-D demand.  Everything else is sky high.

 

You know, the weird thing is, I played around with it a bit and demolished every single industrial zone I had....nothing left.  And I still didn't get any no-job zots!!  Something's definitely whacked out with this town.  I may just obiterate it, or replace the .sc4 file with an older copy from a previously backed up Regions folder.

[KonstantinII 1,106]

So if plopmatic has too many adverse affects, can anyone recommend a milder demand mod for me?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I haven't heard of any "milder" demand mods.  Usually, the skew the game so badly that it ceases to be worth playing.

[lhrob 213]

@KonstantinII - I'm going to agree with Nonny.  It wasn't my intention to play continuously with a demand mod installed.  I was only doing it for a little while to have fun, because I was curious to see some skyscrapers grow.  But after I removed it, my game was totally screwed up....or at least the city was in which I used it.  As I said in my edit above, I've completely wiped every single industrial zone out of my small town....and I STILL have demand through the roof, and I don't have any unemployment at all.  I have absolutely no idea what needs to be zoned and what doesn't.  So I've wiped out the city, and even uninstalled the entire game so I can reinstall it.  That probably sounds a little drastic, but I need to redo some things anyway.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

@lhrob: Reinstall is a little drastic, but only if you have changes loaded in the game's private *.dat files in the program files residency.  Because I am using wine on Linux, I sometimes reinstall the entire game on a new wine prefix if I want to test something drastic.  It is one of the conveniences because an install in a new prefix takes about five minutes.  Sometimes a fresh start is a good thing, and the user data space is saved anyway.

 

Every wine prefix (usually called .wine) is a folder that contains the necessary files to pretend to be Windows.  It is not an emulator or a virtual machine, but a JIT conversion system that runs the code native converting Windows calls on-the-fly.  There are some minor problems, but nothing intolerable.  For the curious, here is my current wine prefix file tree:  Forget it!  It is over 8000 lines.  Anyone who is that curious can PM me.

[lhrob 213]

Eh, I already uninstalled it last night, so now I need to reinstall this afternoon. But it's alright. I had other reasons for doing it anyway.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Have fun.  I answered your other thread about options.  I hope you got it straightened out.

[lhrob 213]

Oh, it's a regular day at the amusement park.    Somehow or another I'll figure out the other issue.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Just send in the clowns.  They can fix anything.