SC4 Deluxe : British Modpack, blocking American buildings only!

[nekomaster 11]

Because I was born and raised in Ontario, Canada, I mostly set up SimCity 4 with American and Canadian styled buildings, mostly stuff that fits into the majority of Canada, The North East, North West, Mid West and Central parts of USA.

Though lately I've been thinking about building cities in a different style like United Kingdom or Asia.

I did get the no maxis files mod to block all levels of Residential and Commercial, though I wonder is there a way to just block American buildings in general and leave the European set alone?

Other then that I know where to get british themed lots and what not so that wont be an issue for me, I just want to block the American stuff for my British SimCity 4 setup.

 

EDIT : I KNOW THAT YOU CAN DISABLE THE AMERICAN TILE SETS, but not all of the mods/lots I download may fall into the European category and thus may not spawn if I just disable the American tile sets alone. I'm downloading stuff right now that mostly looks british in my opinion but may not actually be strictly European/British and may not be enabled in the European tile set.

I just want to disable the American buildings and leave the European stuff in, that way I can enable all the Tile Sets and let the European set grow and let mod lots/buildings grow incase they don't end up under the European tile set.

[twalsh102 1,601]

Nekomaster,

The simple answer to your question is you can't do that through the use of a mod. 

Here are the technical reasons why you can't do this with a mod.  First, you need to understand how the current mods, that either block certain lots from growing, or prevent certain lots from being listed in the menus work.  Also understand that all the currently available mods affect only Maxis lots.

For every mod that blocks certain items from a menu, the person creating the mod created copies of existing building exemplars for each building he wished to affect.  Then in each exemplar copy, the property that affects where an item is placed in the menu: "item order" is deleted.  Without an "item order" property, a lot with that particular building will not show up in any menu.

For every mod that blocks certain lots from growing (for example, the No Maxis mods you mentioned, the mod creator has created a new lot exemplar and then changed the Growth Stage exemplar to have a hex value of 0xff, which causes a lot to not grow. 

For your purposes, one would first have to be able to identify "American-looking" lots or buildings (as opposed to African, Mediterranean, Asian, European, etc.).  Such a property does not exist.  So from the get go, even if you were willing to create such a mod as those mentioned above, there is no way to identify "American-looking" stuff except visually.

To accomplish what you want to do, the best you could do would be to manually browse through every lot you have in your plugins folder and remove the "non-European-looking" ones, or alternatively, create a separate plugins folder with only "European-looking" lots.  You could then switch out your general plugins folder for your European-specific one when you wanted to grow a strictly European city.  Of course, you would have to come up with some set of criteria that determines what differentiates a European-looking building from "American stuff."  Next, you would need to come up with enough "European-looking" content distributed amongst the various growth stages to prevent you from ending up with a city that consists of a thousand copies of only 3 or 4 different buildings at the lower growth stages.  And then once your city grows beyond a certain point, except for certain iconic ones, a skyscraper is a skyscraper no matter where in the world it's built.  Very few skyscrapers have any cultural attributes that would allow one to determine on which continent it was built, strictly by looking at it.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

[nekomaster 11]

Well if anything, I know that Residential and COmmercial buildings in SimCity 4 use names that sorta identify what tile set they belong to, like Houston, NYC, and Chicago.

Is there an easy way to go through the American buildings and disable their growth so that I can keep the American tile sets active without the Maxis American buildings appearing?

Only tools I'm sorta familiar with are the Lot Editor and iLives Reader, if theres a better program for individually going through each american building and disabling them, I'd like to know.

So far I have found a decent amount of "British" styled stuff that I feel looks british enough, though some things can work in most set ups (I'm finding a lot of Post 1970's towers and skyscrapers tend to look the same throughout the world, except for really compact stuff like pencil towers that you may find in Asia)

 

Also I'm having a little problem where even though I have a bunch of residential house and row house lots some lots repeat through out the city taking up 80-90% of the housing styles. This is part of the reason why I'd like to keep the European tile set buildings around so as to add a little extra styling and competition to repetitive lots (considering maxis buildings tend to pop up a lot as well)

[rsc204 21,866]

As twalsh102 states, there is no simple ready-made mod that will work as you envisage.

For the Maxis content, the mods that block them weren't designed to give you that level of control. For one it would have made the mod much more complicated, both for development and end users. The other problem, both of us could look at a building, but we may have different views about it fitting our chosen theme.

It's probably the easiest solution to install the Maxis Blocker files, but modify them. Basically, every building you want to see, needs it's LotConfiguration file removed from the mod. If you think about it, this way round is quicker, because there would be less buildings to remove from the mod, than buildings you'd have to find/disable otherwise.

If you open iLives Reader, select the SimCity_1.dat and open the Navigator Window. You can then search by zone type/wealth through all the Maxis lots. So for example, at the top is Residential $. You'll note that all of them are named in the format "R$1_1x3", which is really unhelpful. Since these are the files copied to make the Maxis blockers, those files are similarly named. Therefore the only practical way to do this, is using the TGI (ID) of the lots as reference.

To find the TGIs, select a lot in the navigator window. Then select/open "LotConfig" / "Lot Preview", you can see an image of the lot in question. If you don't want the lot you see, click to the next lot in the list. But if you do want to keep it, right click where it says "LotConfig" and select Synchronise. Assuming that when you opened the Navigator Window, you didn't select Fill List, there will now be just one Exemplar in the main Reader window. I'd recommend going through each zone/wealth type in one go. So go through all the R$ lots, "synching" all those you want to see in game.

You can close the navigator window, but keep the main window open, at the same time, open the corresponding Maxis Blocker dat. Use the list you created to reference the files to be removed from the Maxis Blocker file. It should be noted, you only need to work with the Instance ID (IID), since all Type and Group IDs should be the same. Repeat this for the other zone/wealth groups until you're happy.

It sounds more complex than it is, once you've done a few, you can start to process them pretty quickly.

[Bombardiere 591]

14 hours ago, nekomaster said:

 

EDIT : I KNOW THAT YOU CAN DISABLE THE AMERICAN TILE SETS, but not all of the mods/lots I download may fall into the European category and thus may not spawn if I just disable the American tile sets alone. I'm downloading stuff right now that mostly looks british in my opinion but may not actually be strictly European/British and may not be enabled in the European tile set.

 

I think the best way to achieve this is that you modify your custom content. If a building that you want doesn't have European tileset, you can edit that. It can be a bit tidous, but I think it is doable. I edit all the custom content I download.

 

My preferred tool is PIM-X but this can be done with other editors, such as SC4 Tool or iLives Reader.

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2260

 

 

[His Divine Hand 244]

As it appears that what nekomaster wants to do is block all non-Euro tile set Maxis buildings (which begs the question why you don't just change the tilesets allowed in game. . .) from growing in his cities, it needs to be mentioned that blocking lots at the lot level may not be best due to how Maxis set up building families so that one lot can represent all four tile sets.

[nekomaster 11]

Well after reading peoples comments I can see it will be a bit of a tedious process but can be done one way or another. I may just go with the route that Bombardiere suggested and make sure all my mods are set to appear on the euro tile set, this way I can play the game with the European stuff activated and flesh things out a little more and provide some competition to repetitive lots.

I thought I had things going well a couple days ago but I had a feeling things werent going right when some ot Mattb325's small low wealth houses kept popping up and no other types of housing where appearing except for high wealth and Medium and high density stuff. Once I removed the small low wealth and medium wealth houses I got from the LEX, nothing except for Ill Tonkso's Portchester Gardens appeared for residential.

I'm currently redoing my British mod pack bit by bit, so Bombardiere's solution may work better for me as I go along here. It will be a long and hard road and I may get bored of playing SimCity 4 after doing so much set up and play testing, but at least in the end I'll have a British modpack to play with for the future, and I just got a 2TB hard disk from my uncle that I will be storing all the less important stuff that I don't want clogging up my Main 2TB Seagate Constellation. I hope to have a bunch of SimCity 4 regional/country mod packs to play with in the future, which once I can confirm that things are working properly, I will be dat packing my modpacks to make things easier for future me (especially if I get drunk)

 

[nekomaster 11]

Update, got PIMX and already figured out how to use some of its features, like setting the style/tileset.

[Bombardiere 591]

22 hours ago, nekomaster said:

I thought I had things going well a couple days ago but I had a feeling things werent going right when some ot Mattb325's small low wealth houses kept popping up and no other types of housing where appearing except for high wealth and Medium and high density stuff. Once I removed the small low wealth and medium wealth houses I got from the LEX, nothing except for Ill Tonkso's Portchester Gardens appeared for residential.

I'm currently redoing my British mod pack bit by bit, so Bombardiere's solution may work better for me as I go along here. It will be a long and hard road and I may get bored of playing SimCity 4 after doing so much set up and play testing, but at least in the end I'll have a British modpack to play with for the future, and I just got a 2TB hard disk from my uncle that I will be storing all the less important stuff that I don't want clogging up my Main 2TB Seagate Constellation. I hope to have a bunch of SimCity 4 regional/country mod packs to play with in the future, which once I can confirm that things are working properly, I will be dat packing my modpacks to make things easier for future me (especially if I get drunk)

 

Yes, it is important that all growth stage have good and varied selection of lots and buildings. The SC4 prefers to grow buildings that has highest occupancy within a particular growth level. This make the game prefer some buildings / lots over others. I often need to edit the buildings stats, so that a custom building works better in game. User created content can have flawed stats. Especially if those are made without PIM X.

 

I really like this program. I gives me good and and solid stats in mere seconds. The stats can be quickly changed using "recompute properties"  and then changing the "filling degree." For example, if I feel that some particular building grows too often then I can lower the filling degree. Or I change the lot to a higher growth level. However the Pim X has a minus that in most cases, I can't edit a single stat. Sometimes I just want to edit a capacity satisfied or lot's density level, but I would like leave other value as those are. Then I need to open ILive Reader.

 

Yeah going through the custom content is very time consuming, but often it is needed as many great batters are not good with stats. I think I have modded more that I have played. Especially as I am mad enough that I don't accept Maxis models or low quality custom bats for my Brit city and I want only high quality period British styled Bats. It is serious madness I know, I doubt if I ever build my dream British city. But it has made me to Bat myself and I have learnt new skills. So as long as SC4 community is live there is hope.  

 

At the moment I am focusing in playing. I need to relax from batting so that I will not lose enthusiasm. But I have couple British bats in pipeline, which could be ready for realise before ... hhhhmmm ... well let say ... before Christmas.  

[nekomaster 11]

9 hours ago, Bombardiere said:

Yes, it is important that all growth stage have good and varied selection of lots and buildings. The SC4 prefers to grow buildings that has highest occupancy within a particular growth level. This make the game prefer some buildings / lots over others. I often need to edit the buildings stats, so that a custom building works better in game. User created content can have flawed stats. Especially if those are made without PIM X.

 

I really like this program. I gives me good and and solid stats in mere seconds. The stats can be quickly changed using "recompute properties"  and then changing the "filling degree." For example, if I feel that some particular building grows too often then I can lower the filling degree. Or I change the lot to a higher growth level. However the Pim X has a minus that in most cases, I can't edit a single stat. Sometimes I just want to edit a capacity satisfied or lot's density level, but I would like leave other value as those are. Then I need to open ILive Reader.

 

Yeah going through the custom content is very time consuming, but often it is needed as many great batters are not good with stats. I think I have modded more that I have played. Especially as I am mad enough that I don't accept Maxis models or low quality custom bats for my Brit city and I want only high quality period British styled Bats. It is serious madness I know, I doubt if I ever build my dream British city. But it has made me to Bat myself and I have learnt new skills. So as long as SC4 community is live there is hope.  

 

At the moment I am focusing in playing. I need to relax from batting so that I will not lose enthusiasm. But I have couple British bats in pipeline, which could be ready for realise before ... hhhhmmm ... well let say ... before Christmas.  

BTW Can't I use PIMX to CAMify things? I don't mind having regular stuff in my game because from my experience, sometimes big stuff pops up in small cities like my own town, we already have a couple of pretty big buildings and apartments despite only having 150,000 people

Also I wish I knew how to BAT, I've tried multiple times to do anything 3D but I can never make heads or tails of anything, meaning I still havent been able to make any custom buildings for SimCity 4, Cities Skylines, or Cities XL... it'd be nice if things where as easy as SimCity 3000 and its BAT tool.