Contour Lines

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

I know there is a way you can enable Topographical Lines in SC4. I just can't remember how to do it. They are like Contour Lines. 

[matias93 7,535]

I've never seen contour lines on the game, but there are on map editors, particularly the SC4 Terraformer.

I don't think this helps a lot...

[Cyclone Boom 16,854]

I think you may be referring to those that toggle on/off when pressing:

Ctrl + Shift + C

Like so:

(These are included in the game by default, and don't even require the Extra Cheats DLL.)

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

yea I guess the reason why I wasn't seeing it in my other city was that the terrain elevation differential wasn't high enough for it to show up. Cheers mate. 

[huzman 445]

10 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Ctrl + Shift + C

This is something! You do that from within the game? This could help me a lot. Got to take it down to my local SOUP.

[TekindusT 3,809]

Played SC4 for 9 years. Still learning new things.

[huzman 445]

Aren't we all... You know anything more about those contour lines? I'm very curious and interested about them...

[RobertLM78 1,597]

Ever since finding this cheat years back I've disliked how spread out the lines are (128 m difference in elevation between lines).... it'd be great to see a mode address this with something more useful.  

(Though I suspect a forgiving slope mod would be helpful too - the next region I build on is not going to be as flat as the one I'm working on now)

 

Edit: However..... it looks like the lines on the image from @Cyclone Boom are not so far apart.  I will check right now if perhaps the graphics detail level might be to blame)

[Cyclone Boom 16,854]

2 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

Ever since finding this cheat years back I've disliked how spread out the lines are (128 m difference in elevation between lines).... it'd be great to see a mode address this with something more useful.

That would be of benefit and the contour lines do only appear recurrently at very steep gradients in the terrain.

From the example I showed above, using the TerrainQuery command I was able to confirm they do indeed have a frequency of every 128 metres.

The 10 levels are at the following heights from bottom to top (based on the y value):
355, 483, 611, 739, 867, 995, 1123, 1251, 1379, 1507

(See the south east tile in my Frontierland map if curious. My pic was taken at zoom level 1.)

To me it does seem a bit odd why this 128m interval was chosen, since for some maps there'd only be 1 or 2 shown at best per tile. Instead having them more frequently at every 32 metres or so would be a much more useful distribution for terrains with gradually sloping gradients.

Rummaging through the game's main data files and I've only found a solitary reference to the contour lines:

Control Shift C         = 0x2a94a04b   "Toggle display of terrain contours"

This is from inside the keyboard configuration entry (KEYCFG file) with an IID of 0x6A9362EF where there's just the above one line.

The basic format there seems to be the keyboard command, the instruction, and finally the description of what it does in the quotes. Nothing much to work from. I tried searching through all the entries in each of the "SimCity_X.dat" files for the 0x2a94a04b hexadecimal value, but alas this was the only result. I therefore suspect this is something hidden away and locked deep down within the game's executable, and isn't possible for us to modify.

I do hope someone could prove me wrong though.

[RobertLM78 1,597]

3 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Rummaging through the game's main data files and I've only found a solitary reference to the contour lines:

Control Shift C         = 0x2a94a04b   "Toggle display of terrain contours"

This is from inside the keyboard configuration entry (KEYCFG file) with an IID of 0x6A9362EF where there's just the above one line.

The basic format there seems to be the keyboard command, the instruction, and finally the description of what it does in the quotes. Nothing much to work from. I tried searching through all the entries in each of the "SimCity_X.dat" files for the 0x2a94a04b hexadecimal value, but alas this was the only result. I therefore suspect this is something hidden away and locked deep down within the game's executable, and isn't possible for us to modify.

I do hope someone could prove me wrong though.

Nice investigative work!  

Yeah, 128 m is pretty ridiculous.... that's a big change - 32 m would have made much more sense.   Ah well.... 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,048]

On 23.08.2018 at 5:53 AM, Cyclone Boom said:

The basic format there seems to be the keyboard command, the instruction, and finally the description of what it does in the quotes. Nothing much to work from. I tried searching through all the entries in each of the "SimCity_X.dat" files for the 0x2a94a04b hexadecimal value, but alas this was the only result. I therefore suspect this is something hidden away and locked deep down within the game's executable, and isn't possible for us to modify.

I was wondering - has there ever been any progress on this?

I find it extremely odd that the goddamn SC4 Terraformer is able to show us isohypse but the game cannot! How does it do it then? Is there also no method that would at least allow to save the height lines from the Terraformer?

[Null 45 3,023]

On 8/22/2018 at 9:53 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

The basic format there seems to be the keyboard command, the instruction, and finally the description of what it does in the quotes. Nothing much to work from. I tried searching through all the entries in each of the "SimCity_X.dat" files for the 0x2a94a04b hexadecimal value, but alas this was the only result. I therefore suspect this is something hidden away and locked deep down within the game's executable, and isn't possible for us to modify.

Quoting the Maxis KEYCFG documentation:

Format of these keys are:
    <KeyCombination> = <MsgID> [[[<data1>] <data2>] <data3>] [<Description>]

The only parts SC4 cares about are <KeyCombination> and <MsgID> [[[<data1>] <data2>] <data3>], it ignores the description. When the key combination is pressed, the game's internal messaging system will broadcast a message with the specified message id and data. The only city keyboard shortcut that uses the message data is "Build Passenger Ferry Terminal", where the message id (0xec3e82f8) tells the game to activate the Place Lot tool with the lot exemplar IID from the data1 parameter (0x8bd88057 for the Passenger Ferry Terminal).

1 hour ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

I was wondering - has there ever been any progress on this?

The contour lines are rendered using a terrain overlay texture (TGI 0x7AB50E44, 0x1ABE787D, 0x07F94205 in SimCity_3.dat), but I have never tried to override that file. The in-game snow effect is also rendered using a terrain overlay texture (TGI 0x7AB50E44, 0x1ABE787D, 0x07F94207 in SimCity_3.dat), in that case the game uses a bunch of math to configure the texture locations.

[Lucario Boricua 7,027]

@Null 45 I do wonder if it's possible to modify the contour lines to show up on a much smaller increment (perhaps 10m instead of the current 100m), or to have two line thicknesses to represent major and minor increments (ex. 50m for major increments and 10m for minor increments).

[TheMurderousCricket 5,048]

21 minutes ago, Lucario Boricua said:

I do wonder if it's possible to modify the contour lines to show up on a much smaller increment (perhaps 10m instead of the current 100m), or to have two line thicknesses to represent major and minor increments (ex. 50m for major increments and 10m for minor increments).

I think we can all agree that this would save us a lot of trouble in making topo maps or while laying down ponds and lakes in the middle of the continent...