Content Compilations? Archives?

[Waterclaw 80]

I'm curious. I want to get back into Simcity 4 as I haven't touched it really in 3 or 4 years now and since then I've deleted all of my CC to save space. I backed up quite a few of them in Drive before I deleted them (smart, but there's no organization except for the Japanese and Finnish/Scandinavian themed mods, and even some of these aren't in the respectable location.), but I know there'll be problems with a few things in there, and I don't actually want quite a few things in there. What I'm really looking for are packs of some of the biggest authors works in one, and then I can look for the newer and smaller stuff. I remember the pain of first finding a lot of these CC and having to take like 20 to 30 seconds to download one thing because every one had a separate installer with a forced read-me when I knew how to install things manually. I also know that there's a crap ton of outdated stuff (I do know that NAM has had a major update since I've been gone though, so that I'm aware of at least). Some mods I probably have used in the past may of disappeared from the web too. Several sites for Japanese mods that I went to were really old when I visited them years ago, and many weren't even around then. They were some of my favorites, and while I have some of the buildings saved, they are so disorganized and I may not have some of the dependencies. Does someone have or know of some archive that may of saved some of these lost files?

TLTR: Does anyone have a folder(s) full of essentials and must have buildings like PEG's works and stuff? Maybe some archives?

[rsc204 21,837]

The basic problem here is that each creator that makes content owns the rights to their works. It's a long standing community rule that redistributing the works of others is not accepted practice. Therefore if someone did had such a folder full of stuff to offer, doing so would be in violation of the rules, which would probably lead to being banned from the community altogether.

Whilst I personally think that's a little stupid and have argued the case for change, progress on this front is slow. I get the feeling attitudes are changing somewhat, but realistically I still do not think we will see the ability to package curated sets of mods for distribution any time soon. You can follow that debate here if you are interested:

So as much as it sucks, the only way is to go through the exchanges and once more manually setup a working plugins folder. I totally agree about installers, most cause more hassle than good. This came about because creators got sick and tired of answering support requests about installing content. So by including an installer, users without experience of file handling would have everything handled for them. Sadly many installers still haunt the exchanges, but most recent content has been packaged into .zip archives. There is also a reasonable chance that work will begin on stripping away these needless installers in future. Don't get me wrong, I'll package my work in an installer where appropriate. But I tend to do this for only complicated to install/setup mods with specific load order needs. I'm also using NSIS, the installers can be opened with 7zip bypassing the install process where desired.