That Unused Moisture Data View

[vortext 573]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

^ This part confuzzles me. I live in the northern hemisphere and the grass is green in the spring and summer then dies off and turns brownish in late fall and all thru winter. Using February and August like your pics, here's the real world data for the US:

So it seems to me the game is backwards for where I live.

Well, the only enabled terrain texture table is called 'TropicalTextureMapTable', and based on the odd moisture patterns, which has been noted before, it's been sort of understood that apparently the hydrology simulation is tropical as well. Hopefully less confuzlling now.  

Oh and in case anyone is wondering, the other Texture tables are called Desert, Temperate and Artic respectively. 

[matias93 7,535]

In fact, it is because the game simulates the Pacific coast, with a Mediterranean climate pattern: dry and hot summers, cold winters with concentrated rains on those months and almost no snow. I'm not sure in any case that that would be very 'tropical', but is closer to it than the other alternatives.

I'm really comfortable with that part of the simulation because is the same climate where I live and a very similar one to the location of my CJ (which is more moderated for seawater temperatures and currents, as it is on an island). 

What I would like to change (but i guess would cascade to become much more difficult) is the northern pattern of seasons (which would make all seasonal MMPs incompatible) and the north-south orientation of sun, moisture and heat (which would make the shadows in all models incompatible).

I guess my best chance is to get along with what can be easily done and simply assume that months and cardinal points are reversed.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

If you always play your map with north down like in your pics, wouldn't that handle that part? And when I was doing my terrain shoppe I'm pretty sure one of them had options for changing the angle of the sun. If that was going to mess up shadow models why would it have been included? I assumed the shadows are calculated in game rather than being hard coded into the bats. (Prolly showing my ignorance here, but I'll learn something from the answers.) As for the months: just pretend your Sims spell February A u g u s t.

[matias93 7,535]

Yes, that would work reasonably well, but now my region would be located on the southernmost tip of the island, so some storytelling details will have to be amended...

About the shadows, there wouldn't be any problem with the ones cast in the game (in fact, they move rather inconsistently when rotating the view, which i used to find moisture before your mod made it much easier), but the ones modelled during the rendering are fixated, and that's more common with the most detailed buildings, so that alternative looks like a big no. 

And about spelling, that remembers me that there is work to do developing the basics of a polynesian+mapuche+spanish+dutch+english pidgin. This is going to take me the entire life 

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

 

4 hours ago, matias93 said:

In fact, it is because the game simulates the Pacific coast, with a Mediterranean climate pattern: dry and hot summers, cold winters with concentrated rains on those months and almost no snow. I'm not sure in any case that that would be very 'tropical', but is closer to it than the other alternatives.

I'm really comfortable with that part of the simulation because is the same climate where I live and a very similar one to the location of my CJ (which is more moderated for seawater temperatures and currents, as it is on an island). 

What I would like to change (but i guess would cascade to become much more difficult) is the northern pattern of seasons (which would make all seasonal MMPs incompatible) and the north-south orientation of sun, moisture and heat (which would make the shadows in all models incompatible).

I guess my best chance is to get along with what can be easily done and simply assume that months and cardinal points are reversed.

 

So as Cori found, these are the only changes I made to the Weather Tuning Parameters:

On 1/22/2017 at 0:07 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Original:

• mfYearlyAmbientTemperatureVariationFactor: 0.5
• mfYearlyAmbientMoistureVariationFactor: 1

Seasons Switcher.dat

• mfYearlyAmbientTemperatureVariationFactor: -0.5
• mfYearlyAmbientMoistureVariationFactor: -1

 

This is definitely the change I made to flip the seasons.  I thought I had made another change to increase the texture variance, but it turns out I was mistaken.  I guess the yearly variation had always been there, the same as in your screenshots with the LBT terrain mod.

Adjusting these two parameters to other values would presumably affect how much the ambient temperature and moisture increased or decreased throughout the game year.  As for affecting the sun angle, I believe Lowkee found out how to do this.  I'll have to dig back into his threads.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

On 1/23/2017 at 6:30 PM, Indiana Joe said:

As for affecting the sun angle, I believe Lowkee found out how to do this.  I'll have to dig back into his threads.

If I were to guess, I'd say it's here in General / Automota tuning / 21:

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

A tad bit off topic but here's an old blog post by Ocean Quigley about designing the terrain for SimCity 4.

http://oceanquigley.blogspot.com/2009/04/simcity-4.html

And we're still figuring out all of the intricacies of what he describes there.

Gotta say I love that man, SC4 has some of my most favorite artwork from any strategy game ever.  Wish I'd had the chance to thank him three years ago when he was all the buzz.  Can't help but feel sorry that his 2013 game flopped so hard, causing him to leave EA, and probably the world of city designing, forever.

[rsc204 21,836]

8 hours ago, Indiana Joe said:

Can't help but feel sorry that his 2013 game flopped so hard, causing him to leave EA, and probably the world of city designing, forever.

Man the world of videogames in general is in a depressing state. Look at some of the studios and talent within that was ruined by greedy coorporate idiots, who don't have the first idea about what a good game is, meddling with things to maximise profits.

Rare
Bizarre Creations
Twisted Pixel
... I could go on, but I'm already depressed just mentioning those three...

Pretty much any decent studio bought by Microsoft or Activation basically. They are set up to fail, then get closed (blamed) when it all goes wrong. Meanwhile the idiots in charge are probably sitting pretty with a salary that would fund a successful new game.

[carlosmarcelo 981]

I'm reading about water max and water min parameters in region.ini file, I'm doing tests with "Radiation View as Moisture.dat" and I'm think very cool this discoveries. But, I ask me: what I will do with these rich informations? How this informations influences the game behavior? 🤔

I supused the moisture influences water pump and water tower supplies. After some tests, I concluded that moisture don't change water suplies. 

I supused the moisture influences vegetation and trees. I got more  vegetation density when I use elevated numbers to max and min (max=min=200).  For less numbers, the diference is small. 

But, is it just? Do you know more effects with region dry (max=min=0) and region "wet" (max=min=250)? 🤔

[rsc204 21,836]

It was originally intended to include a full moisture simulation in the game, which is why these properties/features exist. But that never got completed so it's not particularly useful, except maybe in relation to flora placement, more specifically when making a custom tree controller.

[carlosmarcelo 981]

Thanks!

I think that the more trees before starting the city, the better. So, in the next region that I will do, I'll put max = min = 250 to have the maximum flora (I use the default flora of the game). 

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

9 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

But, I ask me: what I will do with these rich informations? How this informations influences the game behavior? 🤔

As @rsc204 mentioned, it does mostly nothing. The two things I've noticed is when using a seasonal terrain mod (like Columbus v2) is the moisture affects where the brown splotches are for the drier parts and the green grass is for the wetter parts and this changes with the seasons. (You have to zoom in or out to see the change tho.) It also seems to have some slight affect upon which type of trees grow where, but even that seems more tied to altitude rather than the ground moisture.

If you discover anything useful, I'd love to hear about it.

[Lucario Boricua 7,031]

On 1/23/2017 at 1:29 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Very nice with the contrasts between seasons and showing the terrain mod can be seasonal.

^ This part confuzzles me. I live in the northern hemisphere and the grass is green in the spring and summer then dies off and turns brownish in late fall and all thru winter. Using February and August like your pics, here's the real world data for the US:

So it seems to me the game is backwards for where I live.

 

It depends on the specific climate. Some notable examples include:

* Subpolar forests or Taiga (Canada, northern Europe, much of Russia): dry spring, humid summer, autumn and winter with intermediate humidity

* Oceanic temperate climate (British Isles, Pacific Northwest, south-central Chile, New Zealand): fairly uniform humidity with a slight uptick during winter.

* Mediterranean (west USA, central Chile, South Africa, southeast Australia, shorelines of the Mediterranean Sea): dry summer, wet winter

* Humid tropical climates in islands (Caribbean, Indonesia, many of the Pacific Islands): dry winter/spring, split wet season at the start of summer and then at the start of autumn

* Tropical monsoon in India: most of the year is super dry while the wet season corresponds to summer and early autumn.

 

[matias93 7,535]

Depending on how your tree controller was made, moisture patterns can have a really strong effect on what kinds of trees grow in which places. IIRC, I'm using the Italia Tree Controller by CP, and it has a strong moisture variation; if you also plant god mode trees in a more manual way than covering the whole city tile with them, the moisture view can be useful to guide where to plant, which produces interesting and very life-like patterns, specially on slopes.

[carlosmarcelo 981]

19 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

If you discover anything useful, I'd love to hear about it.

Still playing and testing, I noticed something intriguing: the smaller the value I put in the "water min", the more trees I get near the water, and if I put more value in "water min", the trees do not grow next to Water. Look at the pictures.

Cenario 1 (water min = 30; water max=250): we can see too that trees don't like high altitutes 

Cenario 2 (water min = 250; water max=250): here is diferent; trees like high altitutes  and they don't like water (trees isn't near water).

Another observation: whenever I try to put weird values (eg 025 instead of 25) or outside the expected range, the simulator itself, during the generation of the terrain of the region, changes to the expected values (something between 1 to 250).

When I have new discoveries, I will bring this topic. 

 

[Lucario Boricua 7,031]

Gonna be attentive to this topic, I'm learning some things in preparation to one of my future projects--gonna make the first God Flora mod in ages to fill in the lack of proper tropical vegetation available for SimCity 4.  The one other thing I need to get a hold of is the SC4 Devotion tutorial on making God Mode flora mods, I want to make something comparable to CycleDogg's flora mods, but with the tropical theme in mind.

[kim026 298]

Not sure if it's been mentioned or not, however I thought i'd share what I noticed about moisture and god mode trees:

I also use Italia trees as i love the variation and the trees and bushes included. I noticed a considerable change in tree types depending on WHEN you plant the trees. Winter months spawn more dark green trees while summer months spawn a lot of eucalyptus and generally lighter green trees. Ground textures also change during the year. To activate the change just save the game. I use this method a lot to create variation.

Also loving the moisture data view Corina  

[doldrum 67]

Just a quick note: (and please excuse me, I haven't replied to a topic in well over a decade!)

I  found these pages in search of something that has probably disappeared into the Internet ether, but thought it might bear on what I was looking for. It doesn't, but was interesting in its own right. Applause for your diligence.

I downloaded your "Air Pollution/ Moisture" file. Worked as advertised. The "Radiation Pollution/ Moisture" file did not. Looking at in the Reader, other than the Exemplar Name property being different, I could not find a problem, but it continued to show Radiation Pollution, which I verified by cheating the Advanced Research Facility into a city.

Long story short, though I had put the file into a MyDocs/Plugins/zzzz_tmp folder, something was interfering . After much gnashing of teeth, I remembered an obscure passage from another forum msg. about load order. As a matter of general practice, I use sub-sub-subdirectories in my plugins. That obscure reference indicated that SC4, though loading files alphabetically, does that for sub-directories only on the same directory level. After loading my zzzz_tmp sub, it then proceeded to a deeper sub-directory where I had  the HiResDataview_Mod/THL_DataViewMod_MoreDetail.dat installed. That file is intended to render more detail in other DataView areas, but does contain a Radiation Pollution exemplar. Renaming your file with a z_  prefix in a higher level sub-directory DID NOT prevent the THL mod from being loaded after yours. It only worked when I moved your file into the same sub-directory, with a z_ prefix ( 'R' comes before 'T' ). The Air Pollution version worked in a higher sub-directory, because the THL mod does not have a conflicting exemplar. Thought you might like to know, in case others complain, "It don' woke!!!"

On a slightly related note,  the simcity_1.dat contains 3 ( I suspect for graphics level reasons ) UI's for the DataView window, in which the text for the "Air Pollution" / "Radiation" map choice buttons is hard-coded into the UI. One is at TGI:0x00000000,0x96A006B0,0xEA287193 - the others at TGI:0x00000000,0x96A006B0,0x2BC9060F & TGI:0x00000000,0x96A006B0,0x0B72F276. I am not terribly familiar with UI's, so can't help you there, but there are others in the community who might help if you want to polish up a v1.1

One additional note, ( I know a picture would help, ), but once the Radiation as Moisture view was working, the legend header was "Environment", and the legend was limited to a few colors with "Yes" & "No" at the top and bottom. I haven't a clue where that info comes from, but again, someone who knows their way around UI's might be of help.

As to what I was looking for, perhaps you or someone reading this might be of some help. Many years ago, circa 2006,  I found in a Simtropolis "Modding - Research and Development" forum ( no longer in existence! ), a thread by someone experimenting with the Rain tool. It was a long thread of many pages, filled with pictures. He had some success limiting flooding to small areas, avoided eliminating bridges & tunnels, and some limited success in saving the above sea-level water. Obviously, he was ultimately unsuccessful, or we would be building statues to him. Nevertheless, his research had promise. Unfortunately, I had other fish frying at that time, and did not take the time to make notes.  Do any of the older members here remember any such thread, what member it was, or (God love ya') some saved web pages from that thread, or other communications from the original researcher and other members of the community? If so, I would love to hear from you.

Again, CorinaMarie, great work, thank you!

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

7 minutes ago, doldrum said:

After loading my zzzz_tmp sub, it then proceeded to a deeper sub-directory where I had  the HiResDataview_Mod/THL_DataViewMod_MoreDetail.dat installed. That file is intended to render more detail in other DataView areas, but does contain a Radiation Pollution exemplar. Renaming your file with a z_  prefix in a higher level sub-directory DID NOT prevent the THL mod from being loaded after yours. It only worked when I moved your file into the same sub-directory, with a z_ prefix ( 'R' comes before 'T' ). The Air Pollution version worked in a higher sub-directory, because the THL mod does not have a conflicting exemplar. Thought you might like to know, in case others complain, "It don' woke!!!"

This is excellent detective work! Should anyone mention a problem with my Radiation override not working I can point them directly to your research.

 

8 minutes ago, doldrum said:

I am not terribly familiar with UI's, so can't help you there, but there are others in the community who might help if you want to polish up a v1.1

@Cyclone Boom has polished this up with all the right text and it's been on a back burner to update the file someday. Since so few peeps are interested in the Moisture View it hasn't been a priority.

 

10 minutes ago, doldrum said:

I found in a Simtropolis "Modding - Research and Development" forum ( no longer in existence! ), a thread by someone experimenting with the Rain tool.

For the thread itself, it might be over on Devotion.

And I believe the two completed mods are:

• JENX JUPITER Weather Controller (v1.0)
• JENX AURORA (v1.0)

I've never played around with either of them, but those might be a good place to start.

[doldrum 67]

Thank you, Corina Marie. I know how frustrating it can be to track down something not working as it should. This is an obscure side-effect of that page loading order, regarding sub-directory levels that I suspect most people, including knowledgeable modders overlook, as evidenced by the "use a zzz_ prefix" statements. IT IS NOT a surefire solution. I am sure not many people use sub-sub-sub-directories in their plugins. I knew about the NAM DataView plugin, and looked there first. I just happened to remember an old ( the THL ) plugin, and investigated the deeper directory problem. Had to experiment to determine that was the problem.

As to MY search, after I finish with Simtropolis, SCDevotion is my next stop for a week or so of digging. Perhaps they have some remnant of the thread. As to the Jenx mods, I have downloaded them, though not yet looked into them, but I suspect they are not what I am hunting for. I think they are primarily effects, as opposed to an actual terraforming tool. I am reasonably certain NO ONE has created real, above sea-level water, that networks will recognize and bridge, the purpose the Rain tool is most used for. If such existed, it would have been greeted with trumpets and much fanfare. I just want to do my own research on the possibilities, and am hunting for clues.

[rsc204 21,836]

Actually what you describe does sound an awful lot like Teirusu's Rain Tool:

The JenX Poseidon mod is the "water-based" one, although it's very different in terms of usage, you may want to check that out too. Aurora and Jupiter add celestial and weather effects to the game.

[Cyclone Boom 17,016]

Just adding to what @rsc204 said regarding the "Rain Tool" there, I found a topic which appears to be a development thread.

As follows:

 

Based on the date, it was started quite early on in the history of SC4 modding. The board software happens to automatically archive any being inactive for a decade, so it was omitted from appearing in search results and with replies disabled. I've now run the process to restore and manually exclude it from the archive for you. This means it can be replied to again as normal, and which is perfectly fine to do given we've no hard rules on topic bumping these days either.

It's possible there might've been other topics also, and over a decade ago there were database issues which sadly caused the loss of some.

Perhaps this might be what you had in mind though, and so just thought I'd mention it in case. There must be so much modding research documented in these older topics too. It's very interesting to see these early developments, and how previous concepts even if not fully implemented could inspire new discoveries.

I see there's also this mod linked there in the description too: Additional God Mode Terrain tools

 

5 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

@Cyclone Boom has polished this up with all the right text and it's been on a back burner to update the file someday.

Oh yes, I remember this!

After checking into the format again, here's a preview with the labels edited:
 

 

Of course, what I did here to clarify the display (through LTEXT locale editing) wouldn't have happened without Cori's initial technical implementation. To help also, one thing I recall meaning to look into was whether the scale there can have Low/High labels instead of Yes/No as default for the Radiation data view. Previously I found a way to override this to display as blank for the key as previewed, but it'd be the icing on the cake if possible to have that added as well. I'll see what can be done there too.

In the meantime before getting around to releasing on the file entry, I'll attach here a preliminary v1.1 release:

Radiation View as Moisture_v1.1.zip

 

@doldrum

This can be used instead of the original file (since it builds upon it slightly). As you discovered with the loading order for subfolders taking precedence, just make sure it overrides any other mods which use the same exemplar (like the THL one).

Thanks for sharing your detailed findings and posting about this, and welcome back to ST also. A mighty fine returning post as well.

[doldrum 67]

On 07/09/2019 at 8:50 PM, rsc204 said:

Actually what you describe does sound an awful lot like Teirusu's Rain Tool:

...

The JenX Poseidon mod is the "water-based" one, ...  weather effects to the game.

The Teirus's Rain Tool is exacty what I am talking about. It was incorporated into the "Extra God-Mode Mayor Tools". As it exists today, it is primarily used to create network bridges on land. One pro/con is, the water it creates is not saved. Pro if you want a railroad trestle over a valley, con of you want to have a permanent stream or lake. (It also doesn't flow, just sits in a depression.) It is also very tricky to use, in that it often floods the whole city, destroying existing bridges, tunnels, and power lines. This is why, other than creating bridges, it has been superseded for most city builders by 'plopable' water. I appreciate the info about the Jenx mods, I am aware of them, but effects is the key word. Technically, from what I've been able to learn, the Rain tool uses  several effects, but manifests a real (if only temporary) change to the underlying terrain, that is, changes the attribute of the cell  to something else.

 

On 07/09/2019 at 11:31 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

Just adding to what @rsc204 said regarding the "Rain Tool" there, I found a topic which appears to be a development thread.

I have read it. Not the one I'm looking for, but thank you.

 

On 07/09/2019 at 11:31 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

It's possible there might've been other topics also, and over a decade ago there were database issues which sadly caused the loss of some.

My point exactly. MUCH has been lost. At the risk of offending the board's owner & moderators of that time, I wish more effort had been made to salvage more than just the text of those threads. Some way to translate the inter-site thread link formats to the present format. File attachments.... Pics! "I did this impossible thing, too complicated to explain in words, See the pic below:"

As to the archive - I get excluding replies. Why exclude it from search? I started reading this forum backwards from page 83, to find those old posts. Days!

 

On 07/09/2019 at 11:31 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

Of course, what I did here to clarify the display (through LTEXT locale editing) wouldn't have happened without Cori's initial technical implementation. To help also, one thing I recall meaning to look into was whether the scale there can have Low/High labels instead of Yes/No as default for the Radiation data view.

Not sure how you change the labels, and don't know what changes you would have to make to adjust the color ranges in the legend, but as to the button labelled "Radiation", why not just copy the UI's (per my post) from simcity_1.dat, and make the relevant change.

 

On 07/09/2019 at 11:31 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

Thanks for sharing your detailed findings and posting about this, and welcome back to ST also. A mighty fine returning post as well.

Thank you. I try to be precise and informative.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

1 hour ago, doldrum said:

My point exactly. MUCH has been lost. At the risk of offending the board's owner & moderators of that time, I wish more effort had been made to salvage more than just the text of those threads. Some way to translate the inter-site thread link formats to the present format. File attachments.... Pics! "I did this impossible thing, too complicated to explain in words, See the pic below:"

I'm certain the board's owner and moderators of that time would also wish more could've been done to salvage everything intact. Changes from one vendor's software to another and the conversions didn't always work as hoped for. Then it would be to the point peeps would have had to spend hundreds of hours to try to manually patch those borked linkys. And for pics that go missing those would mostly be hosted on other CDN sites which have now either disappeared or have nixed their free hosting option. Keep in mind storage space was costly over a decade ago and it's quite likely it simply wasn't affordable for Simtropolis to have space to store all the images.

Additionally, around a decade ago there was a "hack attack" in which malicious code was executed on the server and caused data loss at the time for older topics. So, it's also possible topics you'd like to find got corrupted by this and then lost from the database.

Alas, it is what it is and that shows the ephemeral nature of things on the internet. Hindsight is 20/20 and our wishful thinking, unfortunately, won't change reality.

 

1 hour ago, doldrum said:

As to the archive - I get excluding replies. Why exclude it from search? I started reading this forum backwards from page 83, to find those old posts. Days!

This is a setting in the board software to lessen the load on the server itself. It needs to be balanced for the overall site slowdown for maintaining the search tables vs the likelihood that peeps are looking for the old posts. To improve this while (hopefully) not over taxing the server, @Cyclone Boom has tweaked the current setting from an 8 year threshold to 10 with the additional rule it will not archive any topics which have 30+ replies.

On a positive note, when we are able to update to the latest version of the IPS board software (which we now use) the search could be handled in a completely different way and CB and I have discussed how we could potentially reverse the entire archiving function and bring all those topics/posts back to being searchable.

Btw, we might parse out this discussion into its own topic as we've gotten a bit sidetracked from the original theme of the thread.

[doldrum 67]

 I understand this is off topic, and would be happy to go anywhere else you wish, or drop it now. Let me make one final point:

I am 70 yrs. old, have been a member here since circa 2005. I know of the hack. I am aware that the board has undergone software changes. I know things come & go on the net. I regret the loss of all those pics, and file attachments, but understand the realities.

What peeves me is when I encounter things like this, from 2006, post #49 from Sam:

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/10760-sc4terraformer-a-tool-for-regional-handterraforming/?page=2

 

-------------------------------------

 

Originally posted by: prince_of_sims the elevation limits can be changed by modifying the terrain exemplar. i think 3300m might be a non-standard value that someone put in when creating a mod.quote>

 

I think it could be MallowtheCloud's mod. Quite a few people use terrain height mods. Mallow has listed the maximum heights and step levels (meters per greyscale shade) in the mapping tutorial. The standard unmodded game values are here: https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=120&threadid=64968&STARTPAGE=1#593679

The values for the various mods are here: https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=120&threadid=64968&STARTPAGE=1#593682

It would actually be really handy for the user to be able to specify which custom values they wanted for these things in the program. I don't know if this is possible though.

-------------------------------------

The referenced links information may or may not exist, and I'm sure if it does exist, it may be found with some exhausting search work. If I got a '404' error, I'd shake my head and move on. However, clicking those links takes you to the very top of the Simtropolis Forum Page. I don't understand why no effort was made to translate an old inter-site link format to the newer format (maybe as part of the search function). I would be satisfied if I got a 'Page No Longer Exists' message, but given that some of those old threads and posts (including some referencing Simtropolis tutorials) were salvaged, I have to believe some of it still exists somewhere.

Ok, I'm done. I'll move along. I still like you.

 

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

6 minutes ago, doldrum said:

I understand this is off topic, and would be happy to go anywhere else you wish, or drop it now.

To clarify, I'm not in any way saying it needs dropped. Just that I'll prolly carve it out to it's own thread elsewhere.

 

7 minutes ago, doldrum said:

What peeves me is when I encounter things like this, from 2006, post #49 from Sam:

Yep. That's an excellent example of things which got borked and would then (and now) take a long time to fix up.

 

9 minutes ago, doldrum said:

If I got a '404' error, I'd shake my head and move on. However, clicking those links takes you to the very top of the Simtropolis Forum Page.

The current software goes to as much of the URL as it understands. That's actually a really handy feature for STEX entries where you can find something by only knowing the file ID number. In cases where it jumps to the Simtropolis Forum Page, just pretend that says 404 for you.

 

11 minutes ago, doldrum said:

I don't understand why no effort was made to translate an old inter-site link format to the newer format (maybe as part of the search function).

Maybe because no one knew how to manipulate the database directly and peeps at the software provider level wanted to charge per hour to work on it? Perhaps staff at the time didn't feel like spending days or weeks trying to track them all down manually? It's a bit of a guessing game for me since I'm a much newer addition to the site.

 

14 minutes ago, doldrum said:

Ok, I'm done. I'll move along.

You can continue along the same lines if you like. I'm not offended. And if you find where those linkys really should point to, you can let us know and we can fix them.

 

15 minutes ago, doldrum said:

I still like you.

Cool. I like you too. I feel like you'll be able to help others here with knowledge you have. (Like that Query.txt thinger and such.)

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

I can see topic IDs in the example of broken links. Because the topic ID alone is enough information to uniquely identify a thread, we should be able to train the site to successfully reach the OP using a URL having this form:

community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/64968/

(a thread URL without its title at the end). If the site could do  that much, then anyone encountering an old broken link could at least harvest the topic ID from the URL and fat-finger it into a URL that would go to the beginning of the desired thread.

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

54 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/64968/

That by itself went to an error page.

But, https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/64968-x/ does go somewhere. However, the thread it lands on is called Urban flight? with 3 posts and doesn't seem to be related at all to what the original linky says will be there. I suspect the topic numbers were also converted to something else when moving from one iteration of the board software to another.

 

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

21 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I suspect the topic numbers were also converted to something else when moving from one iteration of the board software to another.

So much for that idea. I guess we're down to Google to find old referenced threads/posts.

[doldrum 67]

@CorinaMarie

I've been roaming around threads, found mention of the 'flora bast' cheat, experimented a little. There is an extremely close correlation of tree placement to your Moisture View. You may already have noted this, just verifying you're not alone in your observations. In RL, are you working in some related field, i.e. Hydrology? (Also, personal question - are you a Night Owl by nature, or just live on the other side of the globe from me?)