Lot - Resources / Help

[Jasoncw 11,839]

0. INTRODUCTION

 

Welcome to the Lot - Help thread.

This forum's moderators are: @Jasoncw @JP Schriefer @MushyMushy @T Wrecks @Toothless Stitch @elavery @Terring

Below are links to the different sections of this thread.

1. Resources

A list of links which you might find useful.

2. Help

If you need help, or have any lotting related questions, you can post about your problem in this thread and someone will try to help you. Over time, an archive of questions and answers will develop, which you will be able to browse through to see if someone else has already had the same problem as you. This thread is the right place to post questions for anything lot related. 

[Jasoncw 11,839]

1. RESOURCES

 

Lot Editor and Plug-In Manager Forum Archive 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017

When the Lot Editor and Plug-In Manager forum was merged into the BAT - Open Discussion forum, all lot development threads and other substantial threads were moved, while all of the remaining "quick question" type threads were merged together into yearly archives.

Lot Editor Help and Plugin Manager Help

These are the old help threads, created in 2005, for posting lot editor and plugin manager questions in. They may contain useful information.

SC4Tool - Reference and Visual Editor for BATs and Lots

A modding tool which contains a database of Maxis buildings and their values, like tileset or pollution. It also contains a tool for transit enabling lots, and more.

[Jasoncw 11,839]

2. HELP

 

Feel free to post any lotting questions in this thread. Someone will try to help you. 

You can post here no matter which program you're using. If you need help with something lotting related, post here. Lotting can involve a wide range of tools and tasks. If you feel that what you need help with is lotting related, you can post your question here.

[Dead_End 1,617]

Hi! I have been playing SimCity 4 pretty much ever since it first came out, but until recently had not tried the Lot Editor. I've spent the afternoon experimenting with it and feel like I've gotten the gist of it.

As a Dutch person I absolutely love using the buildings by Vanderaap in my cities. The only downside I have come across is the custom brownish sidewalk which he/she used in front of the buildings. It fits the building, but looks rather off next to the standard Maxis sidewalk. I have done some reading on customs Lots and apparently it is impossible to remove this bit of the Lot as it is a part of the building and not a texture of some sorts. I have tried various props with a similar texture to the Maxis sidewalk, but none of them work in covering up the brown sidewalk. I really hope there is some sort of workaround for this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[RRetail 7,906]

I know your pain. There's a good number of buildings I would of loved to have been able to remove the unmatching sidewalk, but because the sidewalk is a part of the building, there is no way to remove it using lot editor. Sorry about that. 

The only way I believe it could even be edited is if the original uploader were to change it.

[Dead_End 1,617]

That was not the answer I was hoping for, but I kind of expected it. I had a thought and it might be completely impossible, but since the Lot Editor prioritizes buildings over props, would it be possible to create a new lot where the building itself is in fact a prop? The sidewalk could then be covered up with a building file that has the Maxis sidewalk texture.

Again, I don't know that much about the Lot Editor so this might be completely impossible.

[rsc204 21,804]

There is nothing worse for someone who's spent as much time on sidewalk unification as I have, than when a BAT messes it all up because the sidewalk or other textures are "baked-in" to the model.

When you make a model and render it in SC4BAT or similar, you essentially create a S3D model (LODs) and a texture for each zoom/rotation (20 total) of the game, which get's mapped to those LODs. You can edit either the LODs or Textures and replace them, but it requires a lot of understanding of how things work. It's also very tedious work that often does not give good results. So technically editing the Textures would work, but honestly if you need anything explained I've written in this paragraph, realistically you can forget this as a viable option.

Another potential solution is to make a small object that you can place on top of the existing sidewalk part as a prop. This comes with drawbacks too, since you need to make said prop, although that doesn't have to be terribly difficult. It may also suffer from z-fighting, i.e. the prop colliding with other things on the z-axis (height). To solution might mean the prop looks like it's floating and doesn't properly cover the original texture. Not to mention, such a prop will never have any sort of slope tolerance, so if the building isn't flat, this won't help much either. If you can live with these issues, I might be able to make such a prop for you. But, if the sidewalks are of varying heights/widths, you'll likely need many different sized props, which is a bit of an ask.

So yes, there are potential solutions to such issues, but they are all clunky and won't work perfectly. The only real solution is to remove this part of the model and re-render it without it. That way a replaceable texture could have been used instead. Sadly not possible without access to the original resources and even then, it may not be as simple as it seems.

[mattb325 28,878]

You know, in real life, I haven't seen everything match up 100%, ever.

While I appreciate some folks will state that the Bats 'mess up' their sidewalk mod,  it is important to remember that these bats are quite old, made before retexturing mods were generally available, and vanderaap would have made them for his purposes which he then shared with the community, so they were done by him, for him. Not the other way around.

But to address your issue, I would approach the problem from a totally different angle to what has been suggested here as batted pieces will always have graphical glitches and probably give you less than satisfactory results as the LODs of vanderaaps buildings extend to include the brown sidewalk area.

My suggestion is simply to get a sidewalk mod that lessens the contrast between vanderaaps batted pavement and the in-game versions. All of vanderaaps buildings used that same pavement in his bats, so getting a sidewalk mod to match that is the easier of the two solutions, especially if you love his dutch buildings (and what's not to love, they are great little recreations!) 

There are some textures in this set: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2850 that may suit your purposes and are certainly closer in colour to the vanderaaps pavement (the preview image from his file is in the picture), and CP also made lot editor textures which can then be used to replace the standard white Maxis overlays that are used. You can browse through the numerous versions here: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_search_00.php?query=eyJjcmVhdG9yIjoiMjUiLCJleGNsdWRlX2xvY2tlZCI6IjEiLCJleGNsdWRlX25vdGNlcnQiOiIwIiwicXVlcnkiOiIifQ== 

There is also this set, which is an OK match:

 

But there are plenty of others, such as paengs' mod etc...just do a search to find one that suits your taste 

[Dead_End 1,617]

Thanks for the replies. I figured that if there was an easy solution out there people would have come up with it by now.

If I understand it correctly using one of C.P.'s sidewalk textures will automatically affect all lots that used the original Maxis texture, right?

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I'm not all too familiar with C.P.'s mods, but the ones made by Gobias came with two components: a "mandatory" part that overrides all sidewalks on network tiles, and an optional part that also overrides most default Maxis lot textures so that the lots match your sidewalks. Leaving out the second part means that your lot textures will remain unchanged, only the new sidewalk will show. Maybe C.P.'s mods are made in the same way.

As for your original question, it would indeed be possible but tedious. You'd have to export all the FSH files (these are the rendered 2D graphic textures that get pasted onto the invisible 3D LOD shell) to PNGs, manually delete the sidewalk part, save the altered files, and overwrite the FSH's in the original model file with your altered versions. Probably not a realistic option because vanderaap has made so many buildings and you cannot automate the editing process in any way. (If it was a simple change in brightness, you could batch process the files because you'd apply one and the same parameter change to the entire file, and to all of them in the same way.)

[rsc204 21,804]

Whilst I can agree in the real world, nothing matches 100%, things also tend to blend into each other rather than contrast wildly and abruptly. I suppose from a game aesthetics point of view, unified sidewalks and other textures are important to some, but not to others. The problem is that certain game-limitations prevent a system that is realistic, my preference is therefore to unify textures, so at least they have a coherent style.

I'd add I have a lot of respect for creators that take reasonable efforts to maximise compatibility of their works, or otherwise to make them as flexible as possible. So yes, I do feel when things like this were done (baking in sidewalks), it was a missed opportunity to do things better. I certainly avoid using such buildings, if they don't fit the way I want my game to look.

7 hours ago, Dead_End said:

If I understand it correctly using one of C.P.'s sidewalk textures will automatically affect all lots that used the original Maxis texture, right?

It depends on what's included. A basic sidewalk mod alters the sidewalks that appear when zoning next to dragged networks. Many include basic Lot Texture overrides, covering the basic three wealth lot textures. But if your mod doesn't include them, I've a handy resource for automating their creation:

This optionally includes many other Maxis Overlay textures, to give an even more unified appearance. If you want to expand that further, so any specialised network pieces with baked-in sidewalks also match, take a look at the Automated Sidewalk Mod link in my signature. I've been working for a long time on tools for users to avoid the whole mis-matching problem which was previously a drawback of using a custom sidewalk.

[Dead_End 1,617]

Thanks a lot. I'll definitely check those out!

[mattb325 28,878]

4 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I'd add I have a lot of respect for creators that take reasonable efforts to maximise compatibility of their works, or otherwise to make them as flexible as possible. So yes, I do feel when things like this were done (baking in sidewalks), it was a missed opportunity to do things better. 

As I stated, Vanderaaps bats are very old. In fact, amongst the first ever created for SC4, long before many other mods were made available or even thought of. His bats have also aged very well and still hold up today, which is very rare for stuff so old. To expect such creations to be flexible for things that he couldn't have forseen, but that you want a decade after their release, is quite unreasonable.

 

8 hours ago, Dead_End said:

If I understand it correctly using one of C.P.'s sidewalk textures will automatically affect all lots that used the original Maxis texture, right?

CP's SCILT textures are all interchangeable with each other (so you can swap one SCILT pack for another) and give many extra options for matching textures when you are using the lot editor.

So for instance, if you were to download the SMP Sidewalk mod from Simtropolis, it will only change the sidewalk textures adjacent to the networks. The SMP one doesn't, for instance, change the white base/overlays used on the lots. For this you have essentially two options to deal with the lots, either modding to over-ride all Maxis textures as rsc204 has pointed out above, or altering the textures using the lot editor, which is where the SCILT is useful (CP has made a matching SCILT for the SMP sidewalk) .

[nycsc4 5,250]

After a bit of research it looks like there may be some kind of limit on how many props/textures can be used on a lot in the Lot Editor.  Does anyone know what that limit might be?  I am working on a big lot and the same props and textures are missing after each re-edit attempt.

Thanks!

[redfox85 659]

@nycsc4 Yes there is a item limit of 1,280 items. That includes everything - base textures, overlay textures, prop, building, transit enabling etc.  There is a property in both reader and PIM-x called LotConfig... something. The ID's range from 88EDC900 to 88EDCDFF, anything after 88EDCDFF will not show on the lot.

[redfox85 659]

I built a bunch of lots in Plugins Folder A. Plugins Folder A  was strictly dependices for lots and lots in folder 1, and stuff like the NAM and terrian textures in folder 2.  I moved folder 1 to Plugins Folders B (my main plugins folder)and now some of those lots are missing there base texture in game, others are missing there building. I can load these lots fine in Lot Editor, even save them again, and that still wont fix the issue. Does anyone know how to fix this, or did the tile become corrupt?

[rsc204 21,804]

If textures do not appear on lots in-game, then logically the dependencies needed for them are probably missing. I'd guess they use resources you keep in one of your working folders that simply don't exist in the play folder. Same story with the buildings.

I don't know why people rush to assume or pinpoint file corruption so quickly. The fact is, this is very unlikely and happens only in very specific cases. It's really not a catch all for random issues which are most usually simply explained.

[redfox85 659]

3 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

If textures do not appear on lots in-game, then logically the dependencies needed for them are probably missing. I'd guess they use resources you keep in one of your working folders that simply don't exist in the play folder. Same story with the buildings.

I don't know why people rush to assume or pinpoint file corruption so quickly. The fact is, this is very unlikely and happens only in very specific cases. It's really not a catch all for random issues which are most usually simply explained.

It's the same texture that is on the underside of sam-11, which I believe is maxis texture. And only some buildings wont show, others will. Even loading just there original plugin's folder wont show the buildings or that missing texture. Thats why it points to possible corruption - but why I'm posting, encase there are other scenarios.

[Dead_End 1,617]

On 3/26/2018 at 7:45 PM, mattb325 said:

CP's SCILT textures are all interchangeable with each other (so you can swap one SCILT pack for another) and give many extra options for matching textures when you are using the lot editor.

So for instance, if you were to download the SMP Sidewalk mod from Simtropolis, it will only change the sidewalk textures adjacent to the networks. The SMP one doesn't, for instance, change the white base/overlays used on the lots. For this you have essentially two options to deal with the lots, either modding to over-ride all Maxis textures as rsc204 has pointed out above, or altering the textures using the lot editor, which is where the SCILT is useful (CP has made a matching SCILT for the SMP sidewalk) .

I've finally taken the plunge and downloaded Paeng's sidewalk mod together with CP's matching SCILT. The textures look absolutely amazing and it's definitely a right step in the direction of having a 'Dutch-looking' city. There's just one issue I'm a bit puzzled with. Paeng's mod has the option to show a different texture depending on the wealth level. Going for uniformity, I chose the option that changes the sidewalk for all levels of wealth to that of low wealth. I believe I chose the matching SCILT (CP_SCILT_Paeng_OfA-1tex_low.dat), but at the moment the default texture for lots seems to be Paeng's medium wealth one. I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Am I doing something wrong?

[rsc204 21,804]

On 11/04/2018 at 12:19 AM, redfox85 said:

It's the same texture that is on the underside of sam-11, which I believe is maxis texture. And only some buildings wont show, others will. Even loading just there original plugin's folder wont show the buildings or that missing texture. Thats why it points to possible corruption - but why I'm posting, encase there are other scenarios.

Even then, this doesn't say corrupted file to me, something is wrong however, especially if Maxis textures don't correctly show up in-game on lots. Maybe we need to start with how you've been editing them, can you tell us which application you use for lotting and whether or not you've been editing the files in iLIves Reader or a similar application?

It's also possible that this is a load order issue too. If you've duplicate lots hanging around, it could be unedited variants are being loaded after altered ones, in effect cancelling out the changes. Just a thought.

12 hours ago, Dead_End said:

There's just one issue I'm a bit puzzled with. Paeng's mod has the option to show a different texture depending on the wealth level. Going for uniformity, I chose the option that changes the sidewalk for all levels of wealth to that of low wealth. I believe I chose the matching SCILT (CP_SCILT_Paeng_OfA-1tex_low.dat), but at the moment the default texture for lots seems to be Paeng's medium wealth one. I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Am I doing something wrong?

Firstly, it's important to understand what mods all do, because sidewalk mods can get quite complex in this respect. So whilst the SCILT pack does great things for unifying sidewalks, it will only affect those lots that were made using the SCILT textures. They aren't all that old and I don't think they cover all that many released works right now. In short, if nothing you've downloaded lists SCILT as a dependency, the chances are having it installed is doing nothing in real terms to change your game.

The base sidewalk Mod by Paeng covers the sidewalks that appear where zoning takes place. Paeng also includes textures that replace the LE textures used on many of the default Maxis lots and commonly used by modders in their works too. It's those that I suspect are showing a medium wealth texture and so more than likely any issue here is actually with the files used from Paeng's mod and not SCILT. A quick look at the mod and I can see that the "control freak" options are included only for the basic sidewalk mod. They don't extend to the LE replacement textures "Base Overlay Mod" part of the mod.

The simplest solution to making a set of LE overrides which use the $ Wealth sidewalk texture, would be to make use of my automated version of MTRDK (I linked to this before). Note you can find a suitable texture to extract for use with this process, inside the file "base_overlay_textures.dat", found inside the "Base_Overlay_Mod\Texture_Pack" folder of the download (Instance ID - F5F841F9). There should be sufficient instructions in my download to explain how all this works, but feel free to ask if you get stuck or have questions.

[redfox85 659]

@rsc204 I use lot editor. And the lots in question have not been touched in Ilives Reader. (However some in that tile have). All lots in question were LotPlopped. SC4Save under the Lot entry shows 4 plopped lots with 00000000 Lot ID and Building ID. Another 47 show a 00000000 Lot ID however contained a building ID. The building entry shows one building as disabled. The tile was nearly prop poxed before the fix became available and prevented the issue. There are still 10 props disabled and hundreds that have a blank TID, GID, IID and ObjectID. only the IID1 shows.

[Dead_End 1,617]

8 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Firstly, it's important to understand what mods all do, because sidewalk mods can get quite complex in this respect. So whilst the SCILT pack does great things for unifying sidewalks, it will only affect those lots that were made using the SCILT textures. They aren't all that old and I don't think they cover all that many released works right now. In short, if nothing you've downloaded lists SCILT as a dependency, the chances are having it installed is doing nothing in real terms to change your game.

The base sidewalk Mod by Paeng covers the sidewalks that appear where zoning takes place. Paeng also includes textures that replace the LE textures used on many of the default Maxis lots and commonly used by modders in their works too. It's those that I suspect are showing a medium wealth texture and so more than likely any issue here is actually with the files used from Paeng's mod and not SCILT. A quick look at the mod and I can see that the "control freak" options are included only for the basic sidewalk mod. They don't extend to the LE replacement textures "Base Overlay Mod" part of the mod.

The simplest solution to making a set of LE overrides which use the $ Wealth sidewalk texture, would be to make use of my automated version of MTRDK (I linked to this before). Note you can find a suitable texture to extract for use with this process, inside the file "base_overlay_textures.dat", found inside the "Base_Overlay_Mod\Texture_Pack" folder of the download (Instance ID - F5F841F9). There should be sufficient instructions in my download to explain how all this works, but feel free to ask if you get stuck or have questions.

Your guide seems easy enough to follow, but SC4Tool freezes up for me whenever I try to scan for textures. Not sure as to why though. Is this a known issue?

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Hm, never happened to me AFAIR. This is just a wild guess, but are you scanning a very large plugins folder? Similar to the Lot Editor, SC4Tool may have trouble scanning a humongous amount of assets.

[Dead_End 1,617]

That was my first guess, but changing my plugins folder in SC4Tool to a much smaller one didn't have any effect. With my best Google-fu I found this helpful post from 2012. I ended up running the program in compatibility mode for Windows XP servicepack 3 for it to work correctly. With that fixed I was able to change my textures!

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Ah, glad to hear you got it resolved.

[rsc204 21,804]

On 12/04/2018 at 5:28 AM, redfox85 said:

@rsc204 I use lot editor. And the lots in question have not been touched in Ilives Reader. (However some in that tile have). All lots in question were LotPlopped. SC4Save under the Lot entry shows 4 plopped lots with 00000000 Lot ID and Building ID. Another 47 show a 00000000 Lot ID however contained a building ID. The building entry shows one building as disabled. The tile was nearly prop poxed before the fix became available and prevented the issue. There are still 10 props disabled and hundreds that have a blank TID, GID, IID and ObjectID. only the IID1 shows.

Well the term "nearly prop poxed" doesn't really hold up. Either you did or didn't have prop pox, which may be very important here. In fact in terms of your originally reported problem, this fact kind of changes everything, it's really not the sort of information you can leave out and get an accurate response.

• Were these affected lots already placed at the time of the problems?
• If so, have you tried bulldozing and simply replacing said lots?, does that resolve the issue?
• Moreover, for a really proper test, before looking at external factors, what happens if you simply try to use these lots in a new, blank tile?

[juranga 0]

Hello everyone. I have a quick question on the lot editor. I have been playing SC4 since it came out and I am barely staring to use this feature. My question is there are several lots I downloaded that have missing props, even though I have all dependencies. I want to delete the prop that causes a graphical error when playing (see pic). I can locate the prop in LE, delete it and save, but when I reload the lot, the prop appears, as if I didn’t save it.

Can anyone help? Thanks!

[T Wrecks 10,209]

First of all: Yes, I'm confident that we will be able to help you sort out your problems.

As for your first question:

11 hours ago, juranga said:

there are several lots I downloaded that have missing props, even though I have all dependencies.

this is a contradiciton in itself, I'm afraid. There is no missing props despite having all dependencies. A missing prop always and inevitably means you don't have them all. It's a computer, and this part is pure, cruel logic. What often happens, however, is that there are either undocumented dependencies, or that a dependency package has been updated and your version is outdated, or that you simply forgot something (it all has happened to me), and similar things. I guess this is the case here as well.

This is a Japanese BAT, right? It may very well be that it uses an elusive or less wide-spread prop pack that the author/uploader forgot to mention. In this case, it helps if you are as specific as possible:

• What is the exact BAT? (Name, author, download link)
• What are the listed dependencies?
• What dependency packages do you definitely have?

This should make it possible for other users to point you in the right direction.
___________________

Regarding your second question, I can only guess, and my guess is as follows:

• The Lot Editor saves files in the root plugins directory. The lot you are editing is in a sub-folder. Now when you save the edited lot, the old version remains in the sub-folder, and your new copy is saved in the root plugins folder.
• When loading, both SC4 and the Lot Editor scan your plugins for files. Files in sub-folders get loaded after files in the root plugins folder.
• Since your edited lot is in the root plugins folder, it gets loaded first. Later, another copy of the lot (the old original) with the same ID is found in a sub-folder. The old original therefore overrides your new version. I guess this is what's happening here.

To remedy this, simply move your edited lot from the root plugins folder into the sub-folder. Unless you changed the file name, you should now be asked whether you want to overwrite the existing file. Confirm, and then your new lot should be the only one that is loaded.

_____________

This should do the trick - if it doesn't, please don't hesitate to let us know. There are more possibilities, so no reason to give up. I don't want to get too deep into technical details, though, if the simple solution works.

 

Finally, a general piece of advice: If you want to edit something, it's always a good idea to rename your regular plugins folder to something else temporarily (e.g. "plugins_normal"), create a new plugins folder, and only copy the lot to be edited together with its dependencies into that folder. For even better overview, I recommend putting all the dependencies in a "dependencies" sub-folder so that your root plugins folder only contains the files you are working with.

[hugues aroux 3,779]

Hello,
To make a Lot with an invisible Building like for a park, parking or a Runway (!), in SC4PIM-X, is it better to use the file "blank" (of other Models) or a file like "PZ1x1_Grass"? or ... ?
Thanks for your advices.

Regards

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Actually it's ideal to use one of the invisible models that Maxis has used for their park lots, sucg as the "PZ1x1_Grass" one that you mentioned. Unlike a custom blank model, it will not create a foundation, so the lot will look good on any slope.

The only disadvantage is that you'll have to remove or adapt the "UserVisibleNameKey" and "UserVisibleDescriptionKey" properties because these will still point to the description LTEXTs of the original open grass lot. However, this can be changed by removing the properties and inserting new ones using LEProp.

However, I still think the solution is preferable over the alternative - not least because it eliminates one dependency.