Night Lights on Mac

[mapwizard 0]

Could someone send me the download for building night lights. 

[Hamish 1,369]

Hi,

There isn’t really a download for nightlights on the Mac like there is for the windows version. All buildings that are nightlight capable need to be specially created. 

Have a look at this collection of files, these are all the buildings on the STEX which have Mac compatible lighting. 

https://community.simtropolis.com/tags/mac compatible/

 

Hope these help 

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

On 9/28/2017 at 5:11 PM, Hamish said:

All buildings that are nightlight capable need to be specially created. 

Do you know the process for specially creating them for the Mac? Could you write a tutorial and share it with us all? I have a feeling some creators would be willing to put in full Mac nightlight support if only they knew how. Thanks!

[rsc204 21,808]

Just a little digging in the Apple store .sc4model file and I think there is nothing from a modelling point of view needed here.

Each object in SC4 must have a TGI (Type, Group and Instance) ID. For a normal SC4 model export, the Type ID is always the same, since it defines the object at that ID is a model. The Group ID defines the unique ID in-use by this particular model, then the Instance ID allows SC4 to identify the various zoom/rotation levels. Usually, the IDs of textures linked to a given set of S3D files, will keep the same Group ID as them. When you alter this, normally it will break the model, leading to textures not appearing in-game. There is no way to manually set the Group ID for the texture for such models (S3D files).

What's different about these models, is that the textures take on the Group ID 1ABE787D. But that GID 1ABE787D is special, it's the one Maxis used for all their content. Likely the code was only set to link to the nitelights, when this Group ID was used, hence all the Maxis models work. That's probably what the Windows NiteLighting update changes, so the game works with the newer ID scheme that SC4BAT uses. That would explain why the use of this different ID scheme works for Mac users.

But, if this is what's happening here, we have a problem. Many objects already use this ID, so preventing conflicts is made tricky. It would be very easy to accidentally mess with any of the original content or even similarly modded content. Practically speaking, it does mean Mac users willing to put in a bit of effort, can at least make NiteLighting work. To that end, I've included one of my models using this adapted ID scheme as an attachment. It's a Ploppable Lot, find it in the Parks Menu. Not having a Mac version of SC4, I can't test this myself, but if it works, it proves all the technobabble above is actually correct. After that we can work out how viable it is.

MGB PedBridge_MacLightTest.DAT

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

2 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

Just a little digging in the Apple store .sc4model file and I think there is nothing from a modelling point of view needed here.

Each object in SC4 must have a TGI (Type, Group and Instance) ID. For a normal SC4 model export, the Type ID is always the same, since it defines the object at that ID is a model. The Group ID defines the unique ID in-use by this particular model, then the Instance ID allows SC4 to identify the various zoom/rotation levels. Usually, the IDs of textures linked to a given set of S3D files, will keep the same Group ID as them. When you alter this, normally it will break the model, leading to textures not appearing in-game. There is no way to manually set the Group ID for the texture for such models (S3D files).

What's different about these models, is that the textures take on the Group ID 1ABE787D. But that GID 1ABE787D is special, it's the one Maxis used for all their content. Likely the code was only set to link to the nitelights, when this Group ID was used, hence all the Maxis models work. That's probably what the Windows NiteLighting update changes, so the game works with the newer ID scheme that SC4BAT uses. That would explain why the use of this different ID scheme works for Mac users.

But, if this is what's happening here, we have a problem. Many objects already use this ID, so preventing conflicts is made tricky. It would be very easy to accidentally mess with any of the original content or even similarly modded content. Practically speaking, it does mean Mac users willing to put in a bit of effort, can at least make NiteLighting work. To that end, I've included one of my models using this adapted ID scheme as an attachment. It's a Ploppable Lot, find it in the Parks Menu. Not having a Mac version of SC4, I can't test this myself, but if it works, it proves all the technobabble above is actually correct. After that we can work out how viable it is.

MGB PedBridge_MacLightTest.DAT

Uh, can I just skip the technobabble (for now at least) and DL the file and see if it works?

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

Oh, my parks menu is like a hundred plus items long and I'm not sure I could find that specific item. Can you make something for one of the other menus? power, disposal, water are very short. train or other transit are short enough. pretty much anything that isn't parks or landmarks are short enough.

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

21 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

MGB PedBridge_MacLightTest.DAT

Okay, I tested it out. I had to unpause it to get the lights to turn on at night, but it did, indeed, work!

ZOMG have we finally cracked this? Because I can think of a few files I would DESPERATELY like nightlighting on. (Namely the OMG Iconic Cathhedral which is part of a pack of 4 churches that I don't seem to be able to find by doing a Google search.)

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

To that end, I've included one of my models using this adapted ID scheme as an attachment.

I see how in your original it's like this:

 

And then in the Mac version you've changed the GID of the FSH plus the IID of both the FSH and S3D as well as the Material ID within the S3D like this:

 

I'm curious what magic tool you've used to change all those so quickly and precisely. Is that a feature within Reader?

[rsc204 21,808]

Well I'm guessing someone else already worked it out before. I guess hardly anyone used this, since practically nothing supports Macs.

I can write up a how 2 at some point, it's not terribly difficult to do, you just need to alter some IDs. But some understanding is required to do this with multiple items because there are limited IDs that you can use. I have to delve a little deeper into the ID scheme, because I think it may be limiting, such that it would be unthinkable to make BATs en-mass with these ID changes. But, within the confines of each users personal Plugins setup, this problem isn't so important, provided you keep track of which IDs are being used.

20 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'm curious what magic tool you've used to change all those so quickly and precisely. Is that a feature within Reader?

I've used both Reader and SC4Model Tweaker here. In Reader, click on Tools / TGI Editor. I've converted all IIDs to start FFF not 000:

Note I've had to manually copy the S3Ds/FSH files from the original .SC4Model to get them both in order of ID and grouped as separate S3D / FSH files. Otherwise, this gets very messy. Because the list in this function is just a list of IDs. For added fun, it's in reverse order to the DAT itself. But if you understand the ID groupings and make sure your files are ordered, this process is pretty quick.

Note this first ID change is not strictly necessary, but is to ensure when I change the GID for the FSH textures, we don't get conflicts from the resulting IIDs. Moving forwards, a user would need to manually check there were no conflicts. However this is only limited to objects also using the Type ID 0x5AD0E817. But certainly, FFF isn't a catch-all solution here.

Now we can alter the GID of all the FSH files to 1ABE787D:

Lastly, we need to change the MAT setting for every texture to start FFF not 000 (mirroring the first change), which SC4 Model Tweaker makes a cinch:

I can follow up with more specifics later, but I think you'll have no problems working this out.

[rsc204 21,808]

2 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Note this first ID change is not strictly necessary, but is to ensure when I change the GID for the FSH textures, we don't get conflicts from the resulting IIDs. Moving forwards, a user would need to manually check there were no conflicts. However this is only limited to objects also using the Type ID 0x5AD0E817. But certainly, FFF isn't a catch-all solution here.

So let me expand upon this, because indeed my initial thoughts do create a problem for using this setup for many objects. The information in this tutorial may help to explain some of this better.

So normally, given a fixed Type and Instance ID, we're left with 4,294,967,296 unique possible Group IDs. But, by comparison to make Mac Nitelights work, we need fixed Type and Group IDs for all textures. But that's really not the full story here, because we can only use the first 3 of the 8 Instance ID to control a single unique model. That's only 4,096 unique IDs, meaning in theory Mac users would have a limit of 4,096 total files that can make use of Nitelights. Unless another GID besides 1ABE787D can be found which also works.

That isn't the end of the story either, let's look at an example Type, Group and Instance ID we need to define a network texture/Mac Bat texture:

0x7AB50E44 - 0X1ABE787D - 0X###45678

So the first two are fixed here, but for the instance IDs, the # symbols represent the IDs we have free use of. The other five are fixed. 4 is usually 3 when exporting a BAT, in theory we might be able to use other IDs. 5 is 0 for day textures or 8 for night ones. 6 is the zoom level (0-4). 7 is the rotation (0-3). Finally 8 is a unique ID, which allows up to 16 textures for a given combination of the other settings. Whilst a lot of gaps exist here in the IDs, I don't believe the game is setup to work with other numbers.

Making things worse, use of 5 for the first IID digit is reserved by the NAM team. So we have just lost 1/16th of the possible IDs. On top of that, Maxis used this GID pretty extensively, meaning many of the 3,840 IDs remaining have already been used. Essentially any textures using the Type/Group ID above that use a given combination of first three digits for the IID, which has already been used, can not be re-purposed here. Making sure the three digit ID you choose doesn't conflict requires checking every SC4 DAT file, SimCity_1-5 dats, EP1.dat and all the addon content that contained new models/textures, like extra landmarks we all use. Add to that, that out in the wild of the STEX or LEX, there will surely be some other textures with the same Type and Group ID too. Thankfully that's rare, since most textures are lot based, which use another GID entirely.

With so few unique IDs to start with, there is no practical way to manage them, such that creators could all make Mac compatible models, without a hideous potential for conflicts. It's very clear to me now why Maxis needed to update the ID system in the NiteLighting patch. This was probably necessary only when they released SC4BAT, because until then, there simply were enough IDs for all the potential objects. Coming back to the ridiculous number from before, 4,294,967,296, the likelihood of conflicts there are lower than winning the lottery, by a huge margin. In fact the random ID allocation works on a time-stamp basis, which too cuts down on the possibility of conflicting IDs. This system has held up remarkably well over the years we've been adding content to the game. Comparatively, it just doesn't when the GID is restricted in this way. As such, I am of the belief that the only practical use for this method would be users themselves re-IDing BAT textures for their own game. This way they could use tools like datanode to ensure no conflicts. Hypothetically lets say 2,000 potential usable IDs exist, that's not so bad in this context. Not every model needs lights after all, although 2,000 is still enough I suppose to run out of IDs. With some trial and error, maybe more IDs could be freed up, for example 4, perhaps all 16 ID's could be used there, not just 1. That alone would potentially give 15x more IDs to play with, which would perhaps change things.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@rsc204

I've tried to follow along and make one as you showed. (That's prior to your new news of the super limited IIDs available.) I grabbed the Sim Cathedral as my test BAT. It appears to only be lighted on two sides, but should still work for a test. I can see now too that my same use of the FFF would conflict with your bridge.

Anyhow, the only way I could get the tweaked version to show up was to also change the ResourceKey Type 1 in the Lot file:

 

And while I can plop it in my game, the nightlights don't show whereas they do with the original. Is that to be expected since I'm not on a Mac? Here's my test with alterations to the Model and Lot files. The original is the dep for the Desc.

Mac Sim Cathedral - Model and Lot.zip

 

[rsc204 21,808]

2 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Anyhow, the only way I could get the tweaked version to show up was to also change the ResourceKey Type 1 in the Lot file:

I may have forgotten that step. Whichever Exemplar is linking to a model will indeed always need to have this value updated to reflect the changes.

11 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

And while I can plop it in my game, the nightlights don't show whereas they do with the original. Is that to be expected since I'm not on a Mac?

I did wonder myself, but I tested the bridge and probably because this functionality remains for Maxis content, it works even with an updated Windows version.

Peeking at your file, I see you gave the GID to both the FSH and S3D files, which is why it's not working. The S3D files should keep the original GID 0x0E9982D3. When I changed that back for both the model and RTK link, I got working nightlites on this building too. Try FFE to avoid conflicts for now .

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

5 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

I see you gave the GID to both the FSH and S3D files

Ah. I tried to take a shortcut. Now that you mention that, I understand where I goofed.

[rsc204 21,808]

Yeah, that's why I used two steps for the ID changes, you can of course change both at once otherwise. But if you've not come across this re-IDing tool in Reader, it's much quicker than other methods. Especially for bulk jobs like this.

[rsc204 21,808]

And just for fun, proving the conflict problem is very real, I give you Bridgethedral:

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

This is all very interesting, and expertly explained @rsc204 for the process how nightlights can be added for the current Aspyr Mac version of the game, and then @c4bl3fl4m3 and @CorinaMarie for the testing. I personally never knew of the implications here for the Mac game constraints. Not having the benefit of seeing the same lighting is certainly an inconvenience, but good to know there is a viable method (at least for self-use due to the limited ranges available).

Using the "TGI Editor" tool in Reader looks handy for batch updates, as does SC4 Model Tweaker for use in the method with replacing material IDs.

It's also a perfect example how replying to older topics often leads to insightful and additional technical discussion. Let's say this thread is Exhibit A for such.

 

5 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Likely the code was only set to link to the nitelights, when this Group ID was used, hence all the Maxis models work. That's probably what the Windows NiteLighting update changes, so the game works with the newer ID scheme that SC4BAT uses. That would explain why the use of this different ID scheme works for Mac users.

What makes me wonder is what could happen once SC4 is ported over for 64-bit Mac systems.

Whether they might include the nightlights 1.1.640.0 equivalent patch which overhauls the TGI system, matching how the BAT exports .SC4Model files and allows a wider range of possible IIDs. Ideally they do, and this would be a longer-term solution for those who choose to upgrade to the newer release. Another thing is that 1/1000 Rep bug for the transit and some civic capacities (and potentially others), which is only prevalent for Mac users.

I suppose we can hope, but it probably depends on the developers being aware of these underlying issues and then crucially they're willing to fix them.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

3 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Try FFE to avoid conflicts for now .

/me has completed her homework assignment: Mac Sim Cathedral - Model and Lot FFE.zip

(Still needs the original .sc4desc as its dependency.)

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

And while I can plop it in my game, the nightlights don't show whereas they do with the original. Is that to be expected since I'm not on a Mac? Here's my test with alterations to the Model and Lot files. The original is the dep for the Desc.

Mac Sim Cathedral - Model and Lot.zip

This file works for me w/ the night lights (simply lighting on the outside of the building... any way to make light shine through the stained glass windows?)

 

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

3 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I give you Bridgethedral:

I've heard of a stairway to heaven, but that's just ridiculous. ;D

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

16 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

/me has completed her homework assignment: Mac Sim Cathedral - Model and Lot FFE.zip

(Still needs the original .sc4desc as its dependency.)

This one works too:

 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

5 minutes ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

any way to make light shine through the stained glass windows?

Yes, but it's an insane amount of work. You can export the FSH as BMPs, edit the colors you want for the night lighted windows, convert back to FSH, and then re-import them.

 

1 minute ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

I've heard of a stairway to heaven

There's also a Highway to Hell. (I guess they're based on the amount of traffic expected.)

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

2 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

(at least for self-use due to the limited ranges available)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a way, isn't "self-use" impossible, because the tools required to make these changes aren't available for the Mac?

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

5 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Yes, but it's an insane amount of work.

What if you have the BATs that have nightlighting in the stained glass windows that works for Windows. Any way you can just modify the file (using the above jibberish I don't understand?) to work on the Mac? (I'm REALLY hoping I can have this one file fixed with the nightlighting. I've seen screenshots of it and it's positively GORGEOUS.)

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 hours ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a way, isn't "self-use" impossible, because the tools required to make these changes aren't available for the Mac?

This would be a case where Mac peeps would run Parallels (or whatever it's called) to have Windoze to do their own editing. Or visit a friend who has Windoze, edit there, and bring the finished file home on a flash drive. Or via email. Or such.

 

2 hours ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

What if you have the BATs that have nightlighting in the stained glass windows that works for Windows.

Yes. The above technojibberishbabble will allow you to have the exact same Maxis Night night lights as Windoze on a per item basis. But, if the BAT's windows are not already painted/lighted in the Windoze version then they won't show up after the conversion either. Or if they are dull and boring, but working on Windoze then that's what you'd get.

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

4 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

The above techojibberishbabble will allow you to have the exact same Maxis Night night lights as Windoze on a per item basis.

Okay that works for me.

I finally found the files I was looking for (looked for it all afternoon with no help... but found it almost instantly doing it the easy way. *facepalm*)

Would one of you be so kind as to do the large triangular cathedral (ploppable, not reward) (EDIT: Sandbox version, not MTP sandbox) for this? It looks AMAZING glowing from within at night.

 

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

5 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Windoze to do their own editing.

What program exactly are you using? Maybe we can get it working in Wine (the problem is, getting the files to load and save outside of Wine as well. Sometimes it's trivial but not always.)

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

Can we give @rsc204 an award for figuring this out? Solutions to major Mac problems should be rewarded. (Oh, and I should update the file I wrote about Mac issues saying we have a fix for this!)

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

7 minutes ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

Would one of you be so kind as to do the large triangular cathedral (ploppable, not reward) (EDIT: Sandbox version, not MTP sandbox) for this?

Mission Accepted!

Coming right up. Cori is onto it now.

 

4 minutes ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

What program exactly are you using?

The 2 programs involved for the process are:

• Reader 0.9.3
• SC4 Model Tweaker

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

6 minutes ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

Would one of you be so kind as to do the large triangular cathedral

Let's see if we can get @Cyclone Boom to do it so we know he understands the process too.

 

4 minutes ago, c4bl3fl4m3 said:

What program exactly are you using?

Reader 0.9.3 and Model Tweaker.

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

1 minute ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Mission Accepted!

Coming right up. Cori is onto it now.

 

1 minute ago, CorinaMarie said:

Let's see if we can get @Cyclone Boom to do it so we know he understands the process too.

Uh, folks? I love you both, but SOMEONE do it already. <3