Custom regions on Steam SC4?

[sandcastle1122 0]

Hi all,

I've been trying to build a custom region for a few days now but nothing seems to run properly. Specifically, I want to have lots of 4x4km maps and have seen a lot of tutorials on how to accomplish this. So far, I've been doing the following:

1. Creating a new region in SimCity to harvest documents from (ie: "Template Region"), then quitting the game

2. Going into SimCity 4 in my "Documents" folder, then into the Regions sub-folder, and creating a new folder (ie: "Test Region")

3. Copy-pasting a region.ini from Template Region's folder into the new Test Region's folder, turning region.ini into a .txt, setting the value to "1" for ocean and entering "Test Region" as the name, then re-saving it as region.ini

4. Copy-pasting the BMP from the Template Region's folder, editing all the colours in a graphics editor (Paintbrush for Mac) as follows: 255, 0, 0, for red, blue, and green respectively, blue = 4x4, green = 2x2, red = 1x1.

5. Starting up SimCity 4

 

Then it crashes.

Can anyone think of what I'm doing wrong?? I have to delete the Test Region before I can get the program to run again, though I oddly got one test region working, albeit it was missing all the green (2x2) maps! 

Help greatly, greatly appreciated!

[ericmckneely 1]

I just bought the SimCity 4 app on my Mac and when I type the code to upload a custom region, I'm unable to select or use the search box to find my .jpg. Any help?

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

5 hours ago, ericmckneely said:

I just bought the SimCity 4 app on my Mac and when I type the code to upload a custom region, I'm unable to select or use the search box to find my .jpg. Any help?

For some goofy reason the search box on the Mac version will not allow you to browse your folder structure like it does for the other versions. After the Shift+Ctrl+Alt+R (or the Mac game equivalent), you'll need to type in the complete full path including the file name in that popup box. While I don't know how the drive and folders are named on a Mac, it'll need to be something like: C:\MyHardDriveFiles\SomeSubFolder\Whatever\Images\MyGrayScale.jpg

Btw, the .bmp type of image is a better format for the grayscales when creating a custom rendered region because .jpg compresses the data and while it looks fine to the naked eye, the computer can tell the difference. I also used .jpg for a while to make custom regions, but noticed some of my subtle tweaks didn't show up in the final render in game and it was because of the averaging .jpg does. (Ofc, for posting images on the site, .jpg is the way to go cause it'll have a much smaller file size.)

[ericmckneely 1]

7 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

For some goofy reason the search box on the Mac version will not allow you to browse your folder structure like it does for the other versions. After the Shift+Ctrl+Alt+R (or the Mac game equivalent), you'll need to type in the complete full path including the file name in that popup box. While I don't know how the drive and folders are named on a Mac, it'll need to be something like: C:\MyHardDriveFiles\SomeSubFolder\Whatever\Images\MyGrayScale.jpg

Btw, the .bmp type of image is a better format for the grayscales when creating a custom rendered region because .jpg compresses the data and while it looks fine to the naked eye, the computer can tell the difference. I also used .jpg for a while to make custom regions, but noticed some of my subtle tweaks didn't show up in the final render in game and it was because of the averaging .jpg does. (Ofc, for posting images on the site, .jpg is the way to go cause it'll have a much smaller file size.)

Thanks for the .bmp advice!

I've opened the search box and entered in the Mac path /Users/(yourUsername)/Library/Containers/com.aspyr.simcity4.appstore/Data/Documents/SimCity 4/Regions/(Region Name)/(Image .bmp)

My first map just crashed my game, however, a second map worked.

The SimCity 4 Mac app is a fickle god!

Thanks guys!

  Edited September 8, 2018 by ericmckneely  
Problem solved

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

4 hours ago, ericmckneely said:

My first map just crashed my game, however, a second map worked.

Woot! (in reference to the second part)

Out of curiosity did the one that crashed have a space in the region name and the one that worked did not? It could be you need to put quotes around the whole path and file name part. If it's not that was there possibly a typo in the whole shebang such that the game tried to find something that didn't exist?