Unimplemented Zoning?

[fredinno 54]

http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=DLC:Air_Force_Base

 

This entry talks about an 'unimplemented' airport (?) zoning- apparently this is the only building that can grow on this unimplemented zoning type.

 

I wonder if there are other unused zoning like this that can be used for mods, or if that's even possible.

[rsc204 21,808]

There are 16 types of zones technically, but in practise I've rarely seen them used for anything but T21s:

0     -   None
1-3  -   Res Low-Mid
4-6  -   Com Low-Mid
7     -   I-AG
8-9  -   I-Med/High
10   -   Military
11   -   Airport
12   -   Seaport
13   -   Spaceport
14   -   Landfill
15   -   Plopped

As for how you could use these zones for mods, I don't know. I'm pretty certain it would be very difficult to impliment a new type of zoning in-game. In the list above most of the zoning types are created through plopping buildings, not growables. In any case, such alterations would likely need a .dll-style patch that changes the games code. Unlike some earlier SC games, the airports/seaports in SC4 are a fixed size, although airports can be upgraded. It's also possible to have similar upgrades for other rewards, as proven by @simmaster07's patch for the upgradable city halls.

[fredinno 54]

Well, #10, 11, 12, and 13 are potentially usable, and at least #11 is implied to have originally intended to be a zoning type, since it describes the air force base as 'growable' on it.

 

And someone made a mod for upgradable seaports.

[rsc204 21,808]

But upgradable and zoning are not the same thing. I mentioned before it's possible to make rewards into upgradable rewards. But as for adding new zoning tools that would allow custom-size buildgs of that type to grow, I think that's highly unlikely to be possible.

[CorinaMarie 29,608]

Another aspect to keep in mind is that just because there are things discovered within the game's exemplars and what-not, that doesn't mean they are fully ready to be used even if one knows how to call on them. See, the Maxis programmers had grandiose ideas and were planning to implement so much more than the release version actually contained. (The evil bosses holding the purse strings limited what the programmers could do.) Those items could be mere stubs in the game code put in place for later expansion, but said expansion code may simply be nonexistent.

Ofc, you are encouraged to write mods that use those other zoning types and if you create something that works that would be wonderful. Good luck.

[metarvo 710]

The thing is, we had zoned airports, seaports, and military bases in SC2K, with the former two also being in SC3K.  You would zone them just as you would RCI, or in the case of SC2K's military, the zone was placed for you in a location deemed suitable by the game.  By SC3K, though, people seemed to lament the hodgepodge airports and seaports the game would give you (as if the SC4 Maxis ones are that much better ).  Players such as myself started using plop cheats to build more realistic airports.  I guess we still build SC4's airports in much the same way using custom lots.

On that note, it feels like I can remember someone talking about free zoning one time, as either a desired addition to SC4 or perhaps part of an independent city builder.  In other words, there would be placeholder zones that wouldn't develop but would just be used to reserve land for future use.  If these zones could be activated but still couldn't be used for development, maybe they could serve that purpose instead.  This would still feel like a waste, though.  I suppose we do at least have signs and labels in game which can be used for that.

By the way, since T21 was mentioned, here are some T21 mods Pegasus made a while back for airports and seaports.

[simmaster07 1,220]

On 1/1/2017 at 4:42 AM, rsc204 said:

As for how you could use these zones for mods, I don't know. I'm pretty certain it would be very difficult to impliment a new type of zoning in-game. In the list above most of the zoning types are created through plopping buildings, not growables. In any case, such alterations would likely need a .dll-style patch that changes the games code. Unlike some earlier SC games, the airports/seaports in SC4 are a fixed size, although airports can be upgraded. It's also possible to have similar upgrades for other rewards, as proven by @simmaster07's patch for the upgradable city halls.

I haven't done much more than superficial testing, but I built a modified version of my extra cheats DLL to try zoning with the four unimplemented zones (airport, seaport, spaceport, military), and surprisingly the game doesn't crash! The results are nonetheless disappointing, though.

 This is the zoning tool icon for airports.

 Zoning tool icon for seaports.

 Zoning tool icon for spaceports and military zones.

The spaceport and military zones were probably cut earlier since they don't even have unique icon assets.

These zones appear to have normal mechanics such as zone size limitations:

In the zone view they all appear as orange ploppables, probably as a fallback:

In region view, however, the airport and seaport zones (top left and center, respectively) show up as airports and seaports with no functioning buildings. The military and spaceport zones (far right and bottom left, respectively) appear as ploppable buildings.

The SC4Devotion wiki article cited says "The Air Force base is the only known building which can grow on the unimplemented Airport zone without modification, which it is a Stage 3 building for." I don't think this was actually tested as a growable since I'm not aware of any other means for placing unimplemented lots, and I'd bet that someone saw that it had some property that indicated that it would grow on that zone and assumed as much. I figured I'd test this by placing a military zone in a city that fulfills the normal reward requirements and seeing what happens.

Nothing ever actually grew there. I followed that up by demolishing an airport and using an airport zone in its former blueprint; nothing grew there either. The mechanics for growable lots are largely governed by the "tract developer" code, and the airport and seaport developer code only deal with plopped buildings, so this isn't terribly surprising in retrospect.

What steps could be taken in a DLL to create working tract developers for these zones? Well, you could have a service running when a city is active that, on every tick, checks for those special zone types and tries to find candidate lots designed to grow on them to build there. This sounds relatively straightforward on paper, though the problem of figuring out which lots to place probably makes this more complicated than is currently practical. SC4's own tract developer tries a couple of different methods of picking zoned areas for a lot (aggregation and subdivision) and scores and sorts lots to try to find the best lot to place, and even this is still susceptible to issues like the repetition of Wren Insurance.

If you want to download the DLL I used for testing this you can go here.

For what it's worth, there's also no way to extend the number of possible lot types beyond the pre-existing 16 (though you could reassign 10-13 if you managed to overcome the hurdles mentioned above). That limitation is hardcoded in a few different parts of game code and trying to patch that out with assembly hacks would be a lot of effort for something without much reward.

[CorinaMarie 29,608]

@simmaster07

Goodness gracious! You astound me with your knowledge and efforts delving deep into places many of us couldn't even find let alone know what's what in there.

[simmaster07 1,220]

11 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

@simmaster07

Goodness gracious! You astound me with your knowledge and efforts delving deep into places many of us couldn't even find let alone know what's what in there.

I mostly thank Aspyr for not removing the debugging information from their original Mac release. 

[rsc204 21,808]

Very interesting to see these things can be activated, even if they don't really work. However, without someone willing to make a set of lots, similar to how Farms / Industrial zones work, where a coherant airport/seaport etc will eventually appear, I still have doubts as to the usefulness of them. Add to that currently no code exists to support them either, it would take a lot of effort add such a feature in a viable way.

Nonetheless, it's facinating to see some of this stuff. If only Maxis could have been supported to continue development of SC4. Even if we only got a version with all the extra features that didn't make the cut, that would be more worthy of the SC5 monkier than the mess they released as Sim City (2013).

Thanks @simmaster07 for taking the time to investigate/show us this. I think realistically you are about the only active community member with any knowledge/access to these things. Makes you wonder, if we could have unlocked the code back in the glory days of SC4, how much further it could have been pushed. I fear the community is far too small to see many new large projects. Just the few little tweaks you've been able to release are already making the game so much better. You are my personal hero for the PP over TE lot bugfix. The number of times that caught me out over the years, I lost countless hours of work. It was starting to make me hate the game, then suddenly you come along and fix it.

[matias93 7,535]

What could be worthy would be to take some lots with this uses (RMIP terminals, tyberius' seaports, SNM bases, etc.) and try to remod them to point to this zones, so to try to allow them to have something to grow. The content that can be used is very extense, but in many cases it will require relotting efforts (particularly on the hyper modular RMIP), and I guess that, if something coherent is desired, there should be a way to mimic the behaviour of industrial zoning, with three kinds of growable lots (p.e. terminals, taxiways and runways for airports). 

But all of this sounds absurdely far fetched and I guess it won't be really possible to do until EA gets bored and release the source code, in many more years. Well, at least this could be useful as a guide on how to interpretate those parts of the code, in case that release gets to happen.

[metarvo 710]

I think that EA's reluctance to release the code for an old game like this, which won't even hardly play on new machines without some doing, is a declaration of which city simulator they believe is better.

That aside, the prospect of implementing anything new like "hidden" zones is still exciting.  At least using them as "free" zones sounds a lot more feasible now (even if that still feels like a waste to me).  SC2K/SC3K had airport zones which would spawn runways separately from the hangars, tarmac, and such.  Runway tiles were 1×1 and yet they developed coherently in a straight line as a runway would be.  SC3K had a number of "special" constructions; runways and taxiways (in airport zones), farms (in light industrial zones with minimal traffic, minimal air pollution and low land value), estates complete with fences (in light R-§§§ zones), and rowhouse blocks with greenery in the middle (in medium R-§§ zones).  I view this as a prototype for the anchor, out, and mech format we have with industrial zones in SC4.

[fredinno 54]

3 hours ago, metarvo said:

I think that EA's reluctance to release the code for an old game like this, which won't even hardly play on new machines without some doing, is a declaration of which city simulator they believe is better.

That aside, the prospect of implementing anything new like "hidden" zones is still exciting.  At least using them as "free" zones sounds a lot more feasible now (even if that still feels like a waste to me).  SC2K/SC3K had airport zones which would spawn runways separately from the hangars, tarmac, and such.  Runway tiles were 1×1 and yet they developed coherently in a straight line as a runway would be.  SC3K had a number of "special" constructions; runways and taxiways (in airport zones), farms (in light industrial zones with minimal traffic, minimal air pollution and low land value), estates complete with fences (in light R-§§§ zones), and rowhouse blocks with greenery in the middle (in medium R-§§ zones).  I view this as a prototype for the anchor, out, and mech format we have with industrial zones in SC4.

All of them are in SimCity 4, in their own way, or are with mods.

 

Aside from airport zones.

Which brings into question if it's possible for us to modify the ACE Modular Airports

using SimMaster's modified DLL to build on AP zoning? Or are there other problems that make it harder?

 

AP= Airport Zoning

SP= Seaport Zoning

SPP= Spaceport Zoning

MIL= Military Zoning

PLOP= Ploppable

[rsc204 21,808]

37 minutes ago, fredinno said:

using SimMaster's modified DLL to build on AP zoning? Or are there other problems that make it harder?

Did you read his findings above? Whilst you can zone an airport, no mechanism exists to develop airport lots, neither do any lots for the purpose. A lot would need to happen for either, let alone both to become a reality. Not to mention, it wouldn't look any better than using modular-ploppable sets. If anything, the randomness could actually have the opposite effect. Although careful prunning of buildings, much as most players do for Ind and other zones may be sufficent to overcome that.

[fredinno 54]

On 2017-01-02 at 11:52 AM, rsc204 said:

Did you read his findings above? Whilst you can zone an airport, no mechanism exists to develop airport lots, neither do any lots for the purpose. A lot would need to happen for either, let alone both to become a reality. Not to mention, it wouldn't look any better than using modular-ploppable sets. If anything, the randomness could actually have the opposite effect. Although careful prunning of buildings, much as most players do for Ind and other zones may be sufficent to overcome that.

I guess the latter would be a problem.

 

I thought the lack of buildings was because of the airport zone not having any instructions for anything to grow on it, or at least that was the impression I got..

[rsc204 21,808]

6 hours ago, fredinno said:

the lack of buildings was because of the airport zone not having any instructions for anything to grow on it

I.e. no code to work. Which to my knowledge, the only person right now that has a chance of addressing that, is SimMaster07. So IF, he was willing to add the code and someone was willing to start upon the lotting, a similar endeavour in terms of effort to TWrecks IRM mod IMHO, then maybe this idea would go somewhere.

But the reality is that both will require many months of work, possibly years. You have to ask yourself, to what overall benifit too? Because we can already build airports, I'd argue it's not worth the effort to make them zoneable. Just not enough benifits for the work required. By the same token, many would not have spent 2 years developing their sidewalk mod into something all could make use of. Most would have created what they wanted (which I had  long time ago) and been done with it. My point here is that you never know what people want out of the game and are willing to devote themselves too. But for any such idea to become a reality, some really dedicated and capable people are needed to make it happen. Very few mods can be accomplished without a lot of work, so when discussing ideas, you need to keep your expectations in check. Most mod suggestions (like BAT requests), simply never get beyond the suggestion phase.

[matias93 7,535]

"wait, but this guy did such a pharaonic tas... Yeah, precisely that." 

If you ask me, I think the most probable new zone to see work on it (which doesn't mean that it would result on useable mods) is seaports, provided the issue of zoning over water is resolved. Why? Because their lots are generally of an uniform size, on relatively simple patterns (lines along the coast, instead of areas as in airports), and with easier-to-follow rules for adjacency.

Oh, and of course, the human factor: @Tyberius06already jumped on the daunting task of creating a port mod, is still active and has said he pretend to keep including pieces in his fantastical work, so I could see the chance he gets interested on this if the technical problems are possible to overcome, and are effectively overcame (and frankly, I'm tagging him simply because I think this could result interesting to him).

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Off the top of my head the most useful thing for those would be to have more fine grained densities. So there could be Very Light, Light, Medium, High, Very High zones, and the current stages could be redistributed among them.

Right now, light density residential is anything from rural houses to dense 1920s american inner city single family neighborhoods. Medium density is Manhattan, and high density is Hong Kong.  Light density commercial is anything from shopping malls to small multistory urban buildings. 

As it is, the game automatically has certain stages grow on certain zones (I don't remember if this is hardcoded or not), but individual lots may also have a property that defines which zones they grow on, and most do. If a tool could be made to automatically strip lots of that property or block that property, and if the unused zones could be used as normal zones (just with a different stage distribution) then it could work without being a mega insane amount of work. 

My dream scenario with this would be a .dll which rearranges the unused zones and blocks the lots' zone property, and a separate .dat that let the user define which stages grew on which zone densities. 

[fredinno 54]

9 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I.e. no code to work. Which to my knowledge, the only person right now that has a chance of addressing that, is SimMaster07. So IF, he was willing to add the code and someone was willing to start upon the lotting, a similar endeavour in terms of effort to TWrecks IRM mod IMHO, then maybe this idea would go somewhere.

But the reality is that both will require many months of work, possibly years. You have to ask yourself, to what overall benifit too? Because we can already build airports, I'd argue it's not worth the effort to make them zoneable. Just not enough benifits for the work required. By the same token, many would not have spent 2 years developing their sidewalk mod into something all could make use of. Most would have created what they wanted (which I had  long time ago) and been done with it. My point here is that you never know what people want out of the game and are willing to devote themselves too. But for any such idea to become a reality, some really dedicated and capable people are needed to make it happen. Very few mods can be accomplished without a lot of work, so when discussing ideas, you need to keep your expectations in check. Most mod suggestions (like BAT requests), simply never get beyond the suggestion phase.

I thought it could be done by modifying the .dats of the airport lots to 'point' to Airport instead of 'Plop' with the iLiveReader or something...

 

[fredinno 54]

4 minutes ago, Jasoncw said:

Off the top of my head the most useful thing for those would be to have more fine grained densities. So there could be Very Light, Light, Medium, High, Very High zones, and the current stages could be redistributed among them.

Right now, light density residential is anything from rural houses to dense 1920s american inner city single family neighborhoods. Medium density is Manhattan, and high density is Hong Kong.  Light density commercial is anything from shopping malls to small multistory urban buildings. 

As it is, the game automatically has certain stages grow on certain zones (I don't remember if this is hardcoded or not), but individual lots may also have a property that defines which zones they grow on, and most do. If a tool could be made to automatically strip lots of that property or block that property, and if the unused zones could be used as normal zones (just with a different stage distribution) then it could work without being a mega insane amount of work. 

My dream scenario with this would be a .dll which rearranges the unused zones and blocks the lots' zone property, and a separate .dat that let the user define which stages grew on which zone densities. 

An extension of CAM?

Well, we have 4 different ones to work with- we could use 3 for a 'medium high' or 'ultra high' density, and maybe the last one for 'coastal development', or maybe even 'mixed development, something that's severely lacking in SimCity 4-

 

The unused 'AP' zoning is used for C and R mixed, 'SPP' is used for C and I, while 'MIL' is used for CS and CO, and 'SP' is used for a coastal mixed development lot.

Controlling the density would be difficult though.

Which may make it a better idea to make 'AP' C and R mixed low density, with 'MIL' and 'SPP' being used for higher densities of the mixed lot, and 'SP' used for coastal development lots (mixed, fixed to medium density, like they tend to be IRL).

[matias93 7,535]

The problem with mixed uses is not the lack of a dedicated zone, though, but the problem at making a lot to both recieve (C) and spawn (R) sims. I'm not sure if that's hard coded, but I guess if not, it would have been already asserted by some modder in the past. 

[BugeyedDragon 412]

One of the most confusing things I'm seeing here is Spaceport zoning. I can understand zoning seaports and airports and military to a degree, but spaceports?? Wow.

[fredinno 54]

44 minutes ago, BugeyedDragon said:

One of the most confusing things I'm seeing here is Spaceport zoning. I can understand zoning seaports and airports and military to a degree, but spaceports?? Wow.

I think it was to connect to the cancelled SimMars Project, or maybe someone at Maxis went to Cape Canaveral on Vacation.

Either way, it would have been cool to see, since it would probably give CO$$$ and I-HT boosts.

2 hours ago, matias93 said:

The problem with mixed uses is not the lack of a dedicated zone, though, but the problem at making a lot to both recieve (C) and spawn (R) sims. I'm not sure if that's hard coded, but I guess if not, it would have been already asserted by some modder in the past. 

I've never seen it. Honestly, I've only seen one building that has CS and CO anyways.

We need someone who has more knowledge of this stuff.

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

makes me really sad that SimCity 4 only got one expansion pack. wish they had given it some more love. -sigh- 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

What would the "Capacity Satisfied" property even look like for a mixed use building? 

[fredinno 54]

On 06/01/2017 at 10:21 PM, Jasoncw said:

What would the "Capacity Satisfied" property even look like for a mixed use building? 

Two entries?

[CorinaMarie 29,608]

17 hours ago, fredinno said:

Two entries?

It appears to be a site glitch. I've hidden @Jasoncw's duplicate post.

Btw, you can use the Report Post option when you see something like this.

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

1 minute ago, CorinaMarie said:

It appears to be a site glitch. I've hidden @Jasoncw's duplicate post.

congrats on being a moderator!! just noticed. 

[CorinaMarie 29,608]

5 minutes ago, AprilAero said:

congrats on being a moderator!! just noticed. 

Thank you!

[fredinno 54]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Thank you!

No I mean, in the exemplar, there would be two entries.