WINE, Boot Camp, or Mac?

[Synergy67 88]

Greetings, fellow SimCivilians and Mac users. I am so glad this community persists. It seems I am late to the draw often when it comes to things like technology. I started playing SimCity 4 Rush Hour on a G4 Mac only in 2009, and a bit later on my MacPro 1,1, which I still stubbornly use now as my only computer. I love Snow Leopard and seriously dislike every Mac OS since then for a variety of reasons, so am determined to use this machine as long as I can. Meanwhile, I recently got nostalgic/excited to reacquire and play SimCity 4 again, which I had eventually let go, and am glad there has been a bit of life breathed back into the game thanks to the updated reissues in the wake of the disaster that was SimCity (2013). SimCity is a fantastic game, despite its many flaws and challenges, and I love how much the world community of fans has done to make it a much better game and keep it going long after the shelf life of most games. You folks here are amazing. Truly amazing.

So, my DVD Deluxe copy (the old original Mac release) arrives in the mail on Monday. I only had to pay $7.50 for a virtually new, intact copy I found on eBay, yay. Meanwhile, I have been preparing to get reinvolved, especially since I lost my games related backup volume which had all my accumulated mods and maps and information: I've been busy making many downloads here again and from SC4D to reassemble all those plugins and mods, and see what's new and improved. The I-HT fix is complete and I see we've solved the Prop Pox problem (not that I can utilize it yet). I've been reading up on all the latest info, especially as Macs and my options for how to play the game again are concerned. I have virtually never used Windows in my life, and was only vaguely aware that it was possible to run Windows on a Mac, since way back when my MacPro 1,1 was introduced (but I didn't get mine till, what, five years ago, when it was already "old technology" and cheap.) Reading about the disappointing Aspyr port for the new Steam version which did -not- add the EP1 patch or night light fix, Ive been contemplating, and discussing a bit here elsewhere already, my options for how I want to go about playing this game at this point. So, following are the parameters I have to work with. Please help me figure out what would work best for me, because I keep waffling as I read more information about each option—none seems very easy or ideal. The Steam version is out of the running, because that would require an update in both my hardware and my OS.

What I have to work with:

• MACPRO 1,1 "quad" core 2.6 GHz, using OS 10.6.11, 11GB of RAM.

• A Crucial SSD I am also just now acquiring, my first ever, which I know I will be happy to have, whether or not it will speed up the gameplay at all. It should speed up load time I would think at least. Does that sound likely? I know I am still limited to 3GB SATA speed with this older MacPro instead of 6GB. Oh well.

• GRAPHICS: two options: I had been using an NVIDIA GeForce7300 GT video card with my MacPro while I was using this computer for the game my last go around. I eventually upgraded the card to a Radeon HT 5770, which actually slowed down graphic performance for this game rather badly. It got intolerably choppy scrolling across a city. I was really surprised and disappointed to see that, but I was mostly interested in playing CIvilization 4 at that point, which was running nicely enough with the card. That's when I abandoned this game until now. I still have the NVIDIA in slot 2, and I suspect I'll have to use it with the game, if I want to play on this machine again. Would the only way to do this practically be to switch cabling to my monitor from the NVIDIA when I want to play? I could run a second monitor simultaneously too, I suppose, rather than keep swapping every time I want to play, though I wonder how that might affect the game graphics, running two at once. That's my first query, is there anything I should know or am missing regarding the  graphics card situation here? Is there a way to get the better performance the Radeon should be providing, or will I need to use that NVIDIA which is more native to the way the game graphics were designed to run, but less powerful?

• In the process of researching things related to the game, I just now really learned how Boot Camp works on a Mac and about the existence of WINE, which sounds very cool in function, less so in utilizing. Each of these is tempting, so I can play the patched Windows version. Pluses for Boot Camp include that it is going to run faster and more probably reliably than in WINE. Downside is having to buy Windows (I'm advised to go with XP), and it's selling for $100 on eBay! Wtf? It's ancient. I also really dislike the thought of having to boot up in Windows just to play, because I use my Mac as a continual music server and other things, while I am at home/playing a game. I can't do that practically through an actual Windows environment. So, the downside is the expense to buy an old overpriced OS I have little other use for besides running some of the exe files related to SimCity like the SC4Mapper I've not been able to use before, plus losing my Mac environment/background I am so very fond of.

Please be aware, I'm not super tech savvy in this stuff. I am pretty good at researching new information, basic logic, organization (I'm good with my plugins), and following explicit directions. My eyes start to glaze over in a hurry when someone throws a ton of tech jargon at me that a non-coder is not likely to comprehend. I need this kind of stuff coming from the approach that I know nearly nothing that a normal casual computer user would not know. I know next to nothing about anything coding related. Reading about configuring and installing WINE sounds daunting and problematic to me so far. I did (in anticipation) already download the Winebottler app which -appears- to make it easy and does most of the harder work for me. Or does it? I do like the idea of being able to run Windows version SC4 right from within my Mac environment and still be able to run iTunes and have access to my music library, email, internet, etc. On the other hand, WINE sounds potentially very twitchy and challenging to get working properly, and I suspect it could take a long time, a lot of hunting down answers for issue after issue, seeking a lot of advice in stages here, etc. just to understand all the things I have to do to get it successfully running satisfactorily. Or maybe it's not that bad a process. Like I said, I'm no dummy, but my mind is not primarily mathematical—it's intuitive and reasonably logical when someone explains things very concisely, so I understand the what, how, and why of things.

So, that's my primary query here: For someone in my situation with my hardware, software, and limited understanding of or patience for coding/nonintuitive kinds of computer tinkering, what route would you advise? WINE? Boot Camp + XP? Work with the Mac version as before? I can live without night lighting and I know the NAM has largely addressed the pathing errors of the Mac version, despite the Mac version never getting the EP1 patch. I forget...was there anything else very critical or annoying that was not fixed for the Mac version that hasn't been fixed otherwise here by the modding community? I will have the Mac version back in hand Monday to get started on seeing how things are performing at this point.

Help please, from much more knowledgeable computer/Mac people than me. Thanks so much. I love this place. I'm glad to have a reason to return, but I also feel like I missed out on the glory days of this game, catching only the tail end of it years ago when I first played it.


 

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

Disclaimer first: I've never used a Mac.

18 minutes ago, Synergy67 said:

Radeon HT 5770

It might be that you can follow this: How to configure SC4 to work with your new hardware (It is written for Windoze, but maybe you have the same data file options to tweak.)

For the rest, I have no idea and this Mac forum is less frequented so give it plenty of time for the Mac peeps to log in and notice your topic.

[Hamish 1,369]

Hi there,

 

My first reaction is to say that you have a perfectly good version of SC4 ready and waiting to go. It will run a little slower, it won’t have many nice nightlights, but it is all ready to play and you don’t have to pay any more money to do so. 

The SSD and the graphics card will help, although I can’t really tell you how much of a difference they will make. It’s an old game, and I’m not sure how well optimised it is for current tech. Follow @CorinaMarie‘s link to help get the most out of the graphics card (translate notepad to text editor and crontrol panel to about this Mac), the SSD should help somewhat without you needing to do anything. 

 

Mac vs Bootcamp vs Wine?

I play all of my SC4 on bootcamp now. Bootcamp is exactly like playing on a windows machine. You get all the benefits over the Mac version without much hassle. Wine tries to emulate windows, and I haven’t found that it works as well as I would want. For someone at your level I would suggest not trying wine. 

That brings us to Bootcamp vs Mac. To be honest, Bootcamp is the more refined version. It lets you play the windows version, which has patched all of the Mac issues. However, you do have to purchase a copy of windows and another version of SC4. On that basis alone I’d say play on Mac for now, you don’t have to spend any more money and you get to play a good version of SC4 right away. If you find you want to upgrade down the line, then Bootcamp is waiting for you. You can bring over all your saved games and plugins if you do decide to make the switch. 

 

If the nightlights do start bothering you , check out this curated collection of stex files which have working nightlights for macs.

 

MacInjector has recently been developed allowing us to install .dll files. This means no more prop pox and extra cheats and tools! Follow this tutorial on how to use it.

 

Hopefully this has helped answer your questions, if you have any more feel free to ask 

[Synergy67 88]

5 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

It might be that you can follow this: How to configure SC4 to work with your new hardware (It is written for Windoze, but maybe you have the same data file options to tweak.)

Thank you, CorinaMarie. It looks like Hamish is suggesting there is an equivalent process I can undergo with my Mac, so I'll address that when I get to that point. It would be nice if I didn't have to mess with the old graphics card at all, but I'm glad I held onto it in case I do want to use it. This game makes going to certain...lengths...worth it.

It's kind of ridiculous how much time I have spent this week just getting things back together so I can play again. I've had a lot of fun revisiting a lot of threads I remember visiting before, and all the custom content. I'm totally bummed we lost A Nonny Moose in the interrim. He was a wonderful man, and was so kind to me last time I was around. I also hadn't been aware before of the rift between PEG and ST...so long ago now already. Man, I feel old. I was glad to see that most of his stuff made it onto the STEX after the demise of Simpeg. And I see we lost a lot of jpegs due to Imageshack and whatnot dropping a ton of content. I hate that aspect of the Internet, how vulnerable or volatile things can be which I wish would last forever. I had saved as browser archives many pages of discussion and some amazing city journals years back, but due to losing my own volume with that material and what's lost here, now I can't even recreate or revisit them. That's a pity. And this site burped during a formatting upgrade and lost a bunch of content too, didn't it. But, so much remains, and that is a very good thing. I'm grateful for what is. OK, on to....
 

2 hours ago, Hamish said:

My first reaction is to say that you have a perfectly good version of SC4 ready and waiting to go. It will run a little slower, it won’t have many nice nightlights, but it is all ready to play and you don’t have to pay any more money to do so.

If the nightlights do start bothering you , check out this curated collection of STEX files which have working nightlights for macs.

MacInjector has recently been developed allowing us to install .dll files. This means no more prop pox and extra cheats and tools! Follow this tutorial on how to use it.

Ah, many thanks for the ideas and informations, Hamish. I like your advice. I'm hoping that I will be content with the Mac version and I won't feel a pressing need to bother to do anything further. I truly hope that the little video card hack might make a difference too. I might have to inquire about that a bit further when I get to that point. Unless it's unplayable, I'll be using the Mac version first for a little no matter what.

Which reminds me, do I need to somehow turn off one of my cores when running the game, and if so, how do I do that?

Despite how much else I'd gotten back up to speed with around here this week, I hadn't yet gotten to those fixed night light files you linked, but was aware some existed, including the cool Apple cube store building, I see. Thanks for the link. I'll be using some of these. I also had gotten the impression that MacInjector only was for a new OS, but I dummy ran it already (without the game installed, so it eventually choked,) but the installer worked up till that point, so this should work fine on Snow Leopard. That other dll, the one to fix the prop pox wasn't linked from the MacInjector post, unlike the other dll's, but I can apply it the same way? That will be of some comfort, though I don't think I ever triggered prop pox in my prior games, but I never got my cities larger than 200,000 residents or so. I usually would struggle with stagnation, or rather, stability, around that point. And I suppose it will be nice to not have to worry about any PEG products I might use, since we know part of the CDK was a likely trigger source.

Are most of the trains stations/mass transit lots on site fixed/okay to count commuters properly on a Mac, or are a lot of them still off by a factor of 1000? I did find several that were repaired some years back when the problem was being addressed. 

I love some of those old BLaM industry BATs like that gigantic steel mill, but it looks like many of them have some significant problems, wrong stats and such, which I encountered last time I was playing. I don't see any sign that many of the oldest BATs or LOTs from the earlier years were ever fixed by anyone, which is weird to me. If I were skilled enough to build something like that and spent such a labor of love to do it, I'd be inclined to take the time later on to fix it if I learned it was defective or incomplete. I also recently learned for the first time about immortal buildings. I encountered that once on an old Nexis...winery or strawberry farm as I recall. I tried to bulldoze it, and it wouldn't go away. I thought it was a buggy Nexis product. I see MrBisonm is still around, which is nice to see. He made a lot of rather lovely, sometimes ridiculous eye candy parks and stuff very early on. I don't think I ever got to see a lot of those early City Journals (like the Nexis one) by the time I got to the game five years after most everyone else and this site was already well matured.

On that note, is there anything significant lingering you folks think I should be aware of or avoid that is not clearly indicated in the likely places around here for a Mac user? I remember a pollution cleaning device I used in a really cool city I built up, which I later bulldozed, after which it dumped all the accumulated pollution into my city, and because I had just saved the game before it manifested, I lost my city, unable to fix it. The pollution didn't register until I next loaded the game. I don't like those cheaty hacks in the game much anyways, and am sometimes disappointed when I see a really nice BAT or LOT I like, but then it has unrealistic/unnecessary effects. I'm a bit envious of people with the skills and know how to use editors to check, fix and modify any BAT or LOT to their own liking. That must be a lot of fun to have that degree of custom control over this game. You don't even have to build your own new material. You can just tweak everyone else's to suit your own wishes. I wish so many lots which were only ploppable were growable. Was that a thing in the early days of modding, to make things be plopped rather than grown?

There aren't too many things I'm going to tweak except to implement basic fixes, building fixes (Opera House, landmarks, etc.), maybe the civics radius doubler and industry jobs doubler, definitely the crimedoesntpay. I might employ the BlackHole waste incinerator. I kind of like some of those early BSC Reward chains and pretty seasonal farms, but I was never confident that adding all those additional rewards into the game wouldn't really mess up its balance, or if they had any other undesirable altering effects. I really don't want to use anything that will ruin the proper function of the game or damage my cities irreparably. I think I'm pretty clear on what those things are likely to be at this point, but then again, you don't know what you don't know.

I'm not entirely clear on this one: is roadtop mass transit (like those in-lane bus stops) fixed entirely? I remember it was a problem in how it counted and/or slowed traffic a while back. I plan to use PEG's SPAM mod for farming, which I never tried before and am looking forward to, because I rather like farms, and that Industrial Revolution mod, which I remember trying once before,  but think I had some troubles with and gave up on. Any reason I shouldn't use either of those at this point? It looks like they worked the bugs out largely, but I remember reading that something about SPAM still skews/improperly something related to jobs or demand or...something.

Is it possible/not too much work for someone who can use SCMapper to retro-create a grayscale jpg old school map of a region which was prepared via SCMapper? There are a few newer maps I would loooove to be able to make into regions. I note that approximately the first half of the maps in the STEX are the old type with the grayscale jpg and bmp, and the newer half is almost exclusively SC4M maps. I would love to have that new version of the Pacific Rim National Park, and a couple by Cycledogg at least.

In addition to my practical technical concerns, these are the sorts of things I'm curious to assess, so I can avoid any regretful decisions or time-wasters.
You -did- tell me to ask any further questions. I tend to ask a lot up front. Which you might have noticed.

Thanks for the replies, which have already been helpful. If someone is still around here to answer, I'm assuming they are not entirely sick of talking about the game and won't roll their eyes too much at any of my naive inquiries.

Cheers!

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

6 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

It looks like Hamish is suggesting there is an equivalent process I can undergo with my Mac

Since our dear @Hamish is a Mac user you can trust you will get much better advice from him than I can conjure up. Even tho I have read the posts in this forum for the past year or so and I might have some idea what other peeps have said on any given topic, I have no first hand knowledge. ( For me a Mac is Big and I get them at McDonalds. )

 

6 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Are most of the trains stations/mass transit lots on site fixed/okay to count commuters properly on a Mac, or are a lot of them still off by a factor of 1000? I did find several that were repaired some years back when the problem was being addressed. 

This is something I happen to know a bit about because a Mac user PM'd me back in April. They were not able to use Reader so they pointed me to some troublesome files and I made tweaks to the appropriate data and sent it to them. So, those which had the 1/1000 bug before then worked with the correct capacity on their Mac. It turns out this also affects the number of students in schools and the number of patients for medical facilities. Many variables are really data arrays having more than one value. Said array tho can (and often does) have only a single data element. The trouble is when the number of repetitions is flagged as 1. This doesn't bother Windoze, but causes the 1/1000 bug on the Mac. Simply changing this to a rep of 0 then makes it play nice for you.

Once you are up an running I'd suggest any of those you download to test in a sandbox region and if you find one that is affected send me a PM with a linky to it and I can patch it up for you.

 

6 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Is it possible/not too much work for someone who can use SCMapper to retro-create a grayscale jpg old school map of a region which was prepared via SCMapper?

This is something I could look into eventually. I have another XP comp kind of buried where I'd installed Mapper. (Don't hold your breath tho as it's been on my agenda since last December to dig it out and make room for it and I still haven't gotten around to it.) The one thing that could be a problem is that Mapper overcomes the limitation of map heights. Rendering from a grayscale image the game can only handle 256 (0-255) discrete height elevations. One can alter the ImportImageScaleFactor from the Maxis default of 3.0 to get visually higher elevations, but at the cost of less realistic slopes.

If a Map you love is highly detailed with considerably more elevations via Mapper it's going to get smooshed when rendering from a usable grayscale. A possible way forward is for someone to open the Mapper Map on their Windoze comp and then zip up all the .sc4 tiles it creates and send them to you via a large file hosting service such as WeTransfer.Com. (They have a free option which allows up to 2 GB. The linky it gives is temporary and the file is removed from their servers after 7 days.)

[Synergy67 88]

@CorinaMarie: Yikes, I did not know the capacity glitch also affected schools and hospitals. I wonder what percentage of community made school and hospital BATs have this problem. I remember using a large urban high school and probably a variant clinic or hospital in the past. I don't remember encountering any that seemed to be grossly underpopulated. That is very good to know though. I will watch for that and let you know if I encounter one which is still malfunctioning in this way. I'm definitely going to sandbox test any unfamiliar or suspicious BATs and LOTs ahead of time. I didn't really do any of that last time I was playing this game. I just, er, rushed into it and used all kinds of things, went a little crazy, had a ton of fun, and at times had a lot of problems with my regions eventually with weird abandonment and stagnation issues. Some of that was possibly my gameplay, but I also think my stats were pretty messed up from custom material and unremedied Mac version issues. I think I built things to avoid the commuter loop problem and such, which I had read about. I'm looking forward to trying it all out again with my expanded knowledge and all the other fixes and improvements accumulated since then. 15 years later this game is better than ever. I imagine a world in which games are this public domain labor of love where a community such as this would have access to the source code and could forever improve or tweak and mod it to their heart's content. The profit motive for all things in the world sure dampens creativity. I think this community and the one for the Civilization games in particular have demonstrated what a wonderful thing collaborative, communal effort is to make something great for the world. I think it's a lovely model for doing many more things freely and openly in the future. It has created a game rich with content and possibility so far beyond what any one company can or will spend the resources to ever do all on its own.

Meanwhile, I didn't realize the SC4 Mapper maps were taller in elevation. I do have the original Mallowthecloud height plugins to shift elevation for a map the old way. The Pacific Rim Park region is a dramatically tall coastal area on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. I live in the Seattle area, which is not far south from Vancouver Island. It's very rugged, unspoiled, beautiful terrain in real life—I've been up there to see. This was one of my two favorite region to play on in the past. I also did extensive playing on a good rendering of the San Francisco Bay region in particular. I've never been to San Francisco, but I spent so much time there in a virtual rendering, I'd probably recognize all the terrain! This is the picture of the original Pacific Rim Park map which was made with a grayscale jpg a year before they improved and updated it with Mapper.

This is the updated one below. I actually made a request last week on the Reddit SC4 forum for someone to render the region and upload it, because I saw that someone else had made a similar map request there and someone actually created it for the person, which was a very generous act. I've had no reply yet, but we'll see. If anyone reading this cares to go through the bother with this one, I'd be delighted and grateful. I wonder what the smooshing of elevation will do though, if it will effectively ruin the region.
 

There are cyclepuppy/dogg maps made with SC Terraformer I'd love to render into regions, including several in this four-pack. Does Terraformer do essentialy the things that SC4 Mapper does? Bonus question: Does anyone know the story on why cyclepuppy became cycledogg? What happened, the puppy grew up? I love his Pacific Coast terrain mod too.

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1975

@CorinaMarie, what's your story? You're pretty new here, but clearly you have a deep love for and involvement with SC4. When did you start playing/fall in love with it? When did you discover this site? Thanks for the ongoing assistance. Hopefully by this time tomorrow I will have that SC4 DVD in my hot little hands.

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

57 minutes ago, Synergy67 said:

I wonder what the smooshing of elevation will do though, if it will effectively ruin the region.

I'd better clarify: It depends on the map itself. Maps can be made within Mapper that also conform to the limits of the grayscale game rendering limits. Those would then prolly be equal from either source. One thing to note about rendering from grayscale is that individual terrain mods have often tweaked many of the variables which only apply during the actual render itself such as, but not limited to, the ImportImageScaleFactor. For instance if you render any of my maps from the STEX, they all expect the Maxis defaults. Also, if you happen try any of mine, the later the upload date the better the map. My earliest ones were me fumbling around.

Should you be interested in making your own random, but fairly decent real life looking maps you might be interested in my C.O.R.I.M.A.P.S. - A Tutorial for SimCity 4 topic. Then to help selecting terrain related mods you can peek at these:

• Cori's Rock Shoppe (Linkys to and Pictures of every Rock Mod)
• Cori's Water Shoppe (Linkys to and Pictures of every Water Mod)
• Cori's Beach Shoppe (Linkys to and Pictures of every Beach Mod)
• Cori's Terrain Shoppe (Linkys to and Pictures of every Terrain Mod)
• Cori's Jolteon's Tree Shoppe (Linkys to and Pictures of almost every Tree Mod)

 

57 minutes ago, Synergy67 said:

@CorinaMarie, what's your story? You're pretty new here, but clearly you have a deep love and involvement with SC4. When did you start playing/fall in love with it? When did you discover this site?

Mine's a slightly unusual story. I was an oops later in my parent's lives. My only brother is 18 years older than me. This was actually a good thing since I got pre-trained parents. They'd offer me all kinds of things to play with and encourage me with whatever I took a liking to. Both of them are skilled at crafts and mechanical things. (Mom was a welder and dad grew up on a farm.) Dad was always interested in electronic stuff and was a tinkerer. I found I enjoyed that and became a Tinkerer Too. I believe I could use a screwdriver before a spoon.

For computers dad started me out with the original IBM 8088 and later clones using the 8086 processor. At the time used ones were $5.00 each and usually there were enough good parts in three comps to fix up two. I learned all about Dos and writing Batch files (which are now-a-days called scripts). We got games off eBay which would run on these old dinosaurs. The original SimCity was one such game I fell in love with. Every couple of years we'd move up in technology. So, 286s, 386s, 486s, low end single core Pentiums and so on. I learned to program in several languages as well as play a variety of games. SC2000 and SC3000 among them.

I'll skip all the other details in between then and now cause my life story would take a lifetime to tell.

I bought SC4 a couple of months before Rush Hour was to be released. My comp at the time barely met the minimum requirements (which proved to be woefully inadequate). I set the game on a shelf for later when I'd have better equipment. When RH came out I bought it and the Prima guide and set them on the same shelf. Then I continued playing Diablo II LOD for another decade. I finally accomplished all I wanted there and I'd written the definitive guide for a Melee Sorceress who could solo any part of the game in 8 players including killing the Diablo Clone and running for torches in Uber Tristram.

Having finished all I cared for in D2 I installed SC4 on my now way better comp, cut the shrink wrap off of RH and installed it, and started playing. As I'd run into trouble I'd Google up my question and find the answers I needed. About 80% of the time I found ST had what I needed so about 6 months later I joined because a particular post spoke to me and I wanted to reply. From there I just got really involved in the forums and peeps seemed to like me. Along the way I was offered the Green Badge and later Dirk himself recruited me for my current position here.

Even tho I'm a member of the staff now, I still see myself as the same girl playing and enjoying the game and interacting with all the wonderful peeps here.

[Cyclone Boom 16,851]

Hi there @Synergy67 and welcome back to ST and SC4.

I see you've received detailed informative advice from Hamish and Corina already here. I'm personally not a Mac user myself, so I don't really feel best positioned to address your other questions. Since I imagine there are many subtle differences in functionality between the Windows version, and I wouldn't want to lead you down the wrong track.

 

23 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

If anyone reading this cares to go through the bother with this one, I'd be delighted and grateful.

However with this part, being familiar with SC4Mapper I feel more confident I'm able to assist.

Following the idea @CorinaMarie had, I've created Pacific Rim in the program which then outputted each city tile in rendered form. By default it's composed to make up a 7x7 region, so there are 49 tiles in total. Seeing as it's a common type of region layout and the default as the author intended, I've run it using the standard included config.bmp of all large tiles to replicate this. However if you'd prefer I could re-run the render to use a combination of small, medium, and/or large tiles.

I've created two versions:
 

#1 - SC4Mapper Rendered
The standard output with coloured tile snapshots. Basically this is how SC4Mapper exports them. When entering inside each city tile, the terrain and water will appear as normal depending on any mods which adjust these. Then once saved, the snapshot preview per tile will be updated accordingly to match.

Preview:

Download Link from WeTransfer   18.2 MB
(Expires 1 week today on June 25th.)

 

#2 - Vanilla Rendered
Based on the standard output, then saving all 49 tiles and turning off the grid. This gives the appearance of the vanilla Maxis terrain in region view. Each of the files I've paused on Jan 2nd (as quick as I could), and all of them are still in God Mode meaning the tiles are yet to be activated.

Basically this is the same, but I've just done this for your convenience.

Preview:

Download Link from WeTransfer   29.2 MB
(Expires 1 week today on June 25th.)

This is slightly larger due to each city being saved. One thing is seeing as I've done this running SC4 on Windows, I'm not 100% whether this 2nd one will be cross-compatible with the Mac Aspyr version. But I figured to upload both here just in case.

 

Finally giving an idea of an alternate appearance, here's a preview of how it looks using my terrain and water mod...

Spoiler

Full map preview:

 

The top NW corner in region view:

 

So I hope this helps and works out for you. Installing is a simple task of extracting the contents of either zip file to your SimCity 4 Regions folder. I presume this is an option on Mac systems? Then the map should appear in the list of regions available inside the game. I kept both using the original name "NHP Pacific Rim National Park", but this can be changed should you wish by editing the "Name" property inside the included region.ini plain text file.

I'd be more than happy to render and upload any other SC4Mapper type maps you wish. Just let me know.

[Synergy67 88]

@CorinaMarie Hey, thanks for sharing your backstory and links. I did notice after my general request that you had some of that story and numerous useful links on your About page. Many of those links I've already rediscovered over the last week of poring though things here again and prepping with all the downloads of interest. Some I was unfamiliar with, so thanks for gathering them so handily, and I also enjoyed seeing how you created maps out of clouds. Whodathunk? I'm curious about people on a community site like this as much as I like knowing about the game itself. I am amazed at the technical skills and patience many people here have to do custom work and research into this game, since it's mostly Greek to me and my more psychological—philosophical, rather than technical, mind. I do enjoy reading many of the technical discussions to see how the game actually works, and how people have extrapolated results or resolved bugs. I'll be spending some time perusing many of your linked articles and downloads.

Ten years on Diablo II, huh, Corina? Now I don't feel so sheepish about pretty much only playing Civilization III/IV and SC4 over the last decade. I did do beta test playing of Spiderweb Software fantasy role play games over the last decade also to help support a local Seattle company that actually makes some pretty successful games on a small budget, but I think I'm pretty much all done with that at this point. I just want to build stuff and make it as aesthetically pleasing as functional. I think I'm tired of fighting and killing things. I just want to build stuff, which has always been my greater passion anyway—building, organizing, optimizing, and beautifying. SC4 by far is the most satisfying game to scratch that itch. I wish it could be upgraded and improved forever, instead of left behind to be replaced with dumbed down misguided new games. I don't like what happened to the Civilization series after 4 either. 4 was the magic number and the early 2000's were a magic time for games, maybe. Now, if they ever release the source code, this game could really be made to last a long time.

 

[Synergy67 88]

@Cyclone Boom Thank you most kindly! This is very generous of you to help out thusly. I see you are also newer on this site as well. Same questions to you: how/when did you get into SC4 and how'd you get involved here?

OK, I've downloaded both region variants you provided to test out. Meanwhile, I notice that in the Maxis-rendered version of the region (from the grayscale map version posted a year earlier, linked below), that a 2000m.dat import mod is required to render it correctly.

I recall hunting down the elevation import dats and doing that when I played the old version of this map. I'm not sure if that implies the SC4M version is likely to be smooshed or truncated in the Maxis rendered version. I suppose I'll find out. But not today. Seems the person who sold me the SimCity 4 Deluxe for Mac game DVD on eBay a few days ago and very promptly mailed it, so that it arrived today, does not know the difference between SimCity 4 2xcdr for Mac and SimCity 4 Deluxe DVD for Mac. So, much to my disappointment, I have to return this and again attempt to find a viable/reasonably priced old copy of Deluxe for Mac. Arrrrgh!

Meanwhile, I also noticed that the recommended terrain for this map, the Columbus Terrain mod (which was hard to track down online), only comes in exe installer form, a File Juicing of which extracts precisely zero files, so I can't even extract and distribute the contents manually for this one. The same thing happens with the "Columbus Textures for jeronijs mod" download here on site. I'm almost certain I used the CPT Olympic Coast Tree Controller + CPT Olympic Terrain mod for this map with pleasing results last time (it matches the terrain in the mountains around here), but I did not get any snow with it. My memory is fuzzy on what it takes to get snow on trees. I think it takes special tree sets + seasonal controllers to get them? What terrain and water mods did you use for your textured example, Cyclone? I almost always used the very popular Brigantine water mod.

I notice now that the new SC4M version of this region is zoomed in a little more than the original version of the region I linked above, thus it being 7x7 large city tiles rather than the original 8x8 large tiles. This is probably fine, since we're not losing much workable land with the zoom. The all large city tiles setup is fine, even probably preferred, by me in this case. I often prefer the large 4km x 4km tiles like this to build on. It gives me plenty of space for everything I want in a city and have room for some countryside to boot.

I extracted the zip files. The vanilla version rendering you posted gives me 49 normal, properly named sc4 city files. The SC4M version gives me the same number of city files, but they are numbered all goobledygook, (shown below) which also happens to some file names extracted from exe files with File Juicer for Mac. Usually I can figure out how to rename files to make them work, when this happens. That might not be so doable here, unless...


 ...if I sequence the 49 city files by creation date/time, and then rename them sequentially counting up from 1 in that selected order, they may wind up in the correct order properly named again. I'd have to rename all 49 files, but it could be worth it to see what happens. I'll have to wait a week or more now to actually have the game back in hand to test this, but I will report back how either of these works through the Mac game, when I finally am able to. I will also almost certainly take you up on rendering a few more of these I'd love to try out. CycleDogg had a few very nice, dramatic maps I really like the looks of, especially. I'll wait till we have the results from this experiment first though, to make sure it's working okay. Thanks again. I'm excited. Now if I could just get someone to sell me the actual right game, so I can get on with it.

[Synergy67 88]

A happy update, aka "think outside the box": Rather than wait for an affordable SC4 Deluxe Mac DVD edition to materialize to buy, which are currently ridiculously listed at $50-$100 on eBay, I've instead cancelled my cancel on the not Deluxe as listed Vanilla SC4 I got today and just bought a $3.00 Rush Hour Mac add on disk instead. Resulting total price for the equivalent Deluxe game including postage? $10.50. I can't complain. If I'm lucky, I'll have the game rolling in about three days.

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

3 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Ten years on Diablo II, huh, Corina?

Yep.

Some pics if you are curious:

Spoiler

In Uber Tristram before waking up the nasty monsters.

 

In the heat of the battle. The way I designed my toon it's safer to take them on all at once rather than dividing them up.

 

And after vanquishing all three. (The large charm is the torch before being identified.)

 

3 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Civilization III/IV

I played Civ II for a couple of years. I eventually got to where I could conquer the world on the largest map size with the maximum opponents on the hardest difficulty. After the initial turns getting going it wouldn't be unusual for a single turn to take me an hour.

 

2 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Columbus Terrain mod

That's the one I use now. I'm not sure if I moved out any parts of it as I use a different rock and beach mod. (I forget what the original installs.) I can do a fresh install of it and then send you the extracted files for it and the texture deps. (But not this morning as I have to get ready for work in a few minutes.)

 

2 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

The SC4M version gives me the same number of city files, but they are numbered all goobledygook, ...

That shouldn't hurt a thing. They haven't been started in Mayor mode so you can just go into the city tiles and they will get renamed as you assign the new name and Mayor.

[Cyclone Boom 16,851]

14 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

My memory is fuzzy on what it takes to get snow on trees. I think it takes special tree sets + seasonal controllers to get them?

It's been a long while since I've tried a tree controller, but I believe that would be correct. There are a few mods which add snow effects or alter the terrain textures to give this impression. Though as far as I'm aware the actual tree models (or MMPs) must be specially designed to represent snow.

While on the subject, there's the Extra Cheats Plugin for Mac. Included in the list of commands is a "snow" function which would usually only show up in SC4 on Christmas Day from detecting the system time. As can be seen from the preview pic below though, this still only shows up at ground level.

Like so:

 

14 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

What terrain and water mods did you use for your textured example, Cyclone? I almost always used the very popular Brigantine water mod.

I have used PEG's Brigantine before and also the 2.0 edition by shokthrpy.

Now I'm currently using the Appalachian terrain mod along with the starter sets for water, beach and cliffs. The terrain mod is available here on the LEX as a Mac specific version. I'm guessing the only difference there is how the file isn't in installer form, which should avoid the need for FileJuicer. Included are a range of variants which alter the appearance. I've personally settled for the "High Jagged Coast" one, but there are lots of them to choose from and it all depends on personal preference. Much like how there are loads of different types of terrain, tree and water mods, there are often also numerous sub-variants included with each one.

 

12 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

That shouldn't hurt a thing. They haven't been started in Mayor mode so you can just go into the city tiles and they will get renamed as you assign the new name and Mayor.

And I can confirm.

This is how SC4Mapper has named the rendered tiles for some reason. Checking the sequence it appears to have done them in batches of 7 (since the map is 7x7), and then incrementing up in 4's for both the left and right number in the parentheses. To create the "Vanilla Rendered" version this involved taking the export which SC4Mapper provided initially, then going through to save all 49 tiles. This then proceeded to rename the files accordingly.

Indeed once establishing a city and setting a name, this will be added to the file name in the form: City - <Name>.sc4

 

14 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

I see you are also newer on this site as well. Same questions to you: how/when did you get into SC4 and how'd you get involved here?

For me it all began back in 2003, shortly after the vanilla game was released. At the time my family computer was pretty basic and so I'd always struggled running most games. It seemed to be the usual story of seeing the latest greatest something on the shop shelves, but checking the system requirements and realising it simply may not run. Or giving it a go, from where the same result ensured of realising it simply did not run.

Before getting into SimCity 4, I'd previously played the first two Roller Coaster Tycoon (RCT) games. I collected the expansion packs and enjoyed many hours building and managing theme parks. That was fun and I liked the challenge of it being a creative strategy with so many possibilities. I also played Microsoft Flight Simulator (2000 & 2002) on and off throughout this time, even though it was more about trying to fly virtual planes than succeeding far in doing so.

So when SC4 was released, it was a natural progression really. Being a simulation for building a city, it seemed similar to RCT on the principles of taking control. But what sounded especially appealing was the larger scale. Not just being confined to boundaries of a theme park, but having the power to create a unique diverse world.

Soon enough although there were similarities with the simulation genre, I realised there was something very different about SC4. This was the first SimCity game I'd ever experienced, and so I wasn't aware how it compares with what came before. I was only experiencing what I was seeing right there and then. I remember learning by experimenting through trial and error. I'd play the Timbuktu tutorial cities and then start a new region and just try all sorts of different techniques. Play around with the terraforming options, use various strategies, and really just to get familiar with the toolset and figure out how best to build a city.

One of which was aptly named "Bad Region" as follows:

 

A few months later I picked put the Rush Hour and also the Prima guide. The expansion pack added yet more tools to the toolbox, and the guide taught me about the finer strategies, making me more aware just how complex the gameplay was. While I didn't follow the advice like an instruction manual, I learnt more about city planning and it broadened my knowledge of how to get from A to B. Most often though, I ended up at C, or even somewhere in-between.

Admittedly back in my early days of playing SC4, I simply had one goal which was to build a mega metropolis. I wasn't interested in creating smooth rural to urban transitions or anything of the kind. But as much as I tried to get there, the bottleneck again was the computer hardware not being up to scratch. I therefore struggled to run much more than a large town. In a large tile once development began to sprawl, lag quickly became unbearable, along with the odd crash thrown in too. This limited my enjoyment of the game to a point where my interest in SC4 began to fade slightly. Even though I tried to make the most of what was possible, the motivation for developing small towns didn't last very long. I aspired to accomplish the feat of constructing a big city, and this was all before discovering the online community which at the time was still in its infancy.

One thing SimCity 4 had done is planted a seed. At this time I decided not to play it as often, but that wasn't without valuing SC4 for what it is as a city-building simulator "game". I hoped that one day I'd be able to return and explore further. Just then I felt a bit frustrated, and inevitably RL and school began to take over.

It was about 5 years later when I got the urge to return to SC4. I recall reading the Prima guide again and the page describing the Lot Editor and official website. I then found the lot exchange from where I was amazed at all the new possibilities this created. But this was no comparison to what I soon discovered with Simtropolis and the STEX. Somehow I happened to stumble upon ST not from a Google search, but from finding mention on some random lot on the official exchange. So I joined and quickly began downloading all sorts of items. I struggled to believe all this had been going on in my time away from the game. It seemed like a completely new game had been developed by the many talented mayors from around the world.

Inevitably I fell afoul of the all-too-common trap of downloading too much too quickly. While I did learn and enjoy many new items of content, I quickly became overwhelmed by dependencies and lack of proper organisation. Then when studies kept getting in the way, I didn't overcome the high hurdle I'd set myself.

A few years on and I got a new computer which was more capable of running SC4. This would be the solution to the issues I'd had in the past in terms of the game's performance on large tiles. Then instead of continuing to download from the STEX as I'd done previously, I made a focussed effort to register a new account and start afresh. Then as they say, the rest is history. After posting in the forums for a few months, in March of 2013 to my surprise I was recruited to the site staff as a moderator. This was at a time when SC13 was at the forefront of the community. But as you may have heard after much anticipation, it was a major let-down. The disastrous initial release and also the concept behind how it was developed was a great shame. For me personally, I've never even considered giving that game a go. With all the restrictions and forced this and that, it just doesn't sound like SimCity to me (even though that was the title). What I most like about SC4 is the endless freedom to be creative.

For a short while I did try my hand at Cities: Skylines, but I realised how this seemed to lack the charm of SC4. Even though both games are comparatively in virtual form, everything there from the graphics to aspects of the simulation seemed like an artificial world. It also struggled to run adequately even on this being a more capable computer. Really if anything, the awareness of both SC13 and CSL have made me much more appreciate how SC4 got it right well over a decade before. The vibrant and intricate gameplay and also the visual perspective which I feel adds so much to inspire one's imagination. Fancy 3D graphics are nothing on their own.

Back to SimCity 4, and after creating a few content items of my own which I'm quite proud of, it's only more recently where I've discovered the true benefits of taking it slow with custom content. There's no doubt they extent the plethora of mayoral tools available. But whether it be BATs, lots, mods, or maps, the idea to test items with knowledge that each is being used for a purpose. Not just selecting items which look cool, because there are many thousands which could fit into that category. Also from the many helpful folk here, I've since learnt more about the gameplay and just how there isn't need to rush when developing a city.

For me personally, no longer are the desires to build a sprawling concrete jungle. Instead understanding just how much depth Maxis has packed in, and realising a ton of custom content isn't necessary to fully enjoy the game for what it is.

Skip to the summer of 2015 and I was invited by our Dirktator to join the admin ranks. This has given me a few more tools in my site toolbox. Nowadays I must admit my duties as an administrator consume most of my city-building time. Even though @CorinaMarie encouraged me to get back to SC4 resulting in this region (which I'm planning to resume progress at some stage). It's not because my role at ST is a chore or a bore, but what I genuinely find so rewarding. Whether that be helping keep the site running smoothly from the technical side, posting here and there in the forums, and also assisting where possible with projects big and small behind the scenes.

I must say being involved with Simtropolis has been an incredible journey which is still ongoing. Through the good times and the challenges, it's a huge privilege for me to be a part of here. This is a community where many people from around the world can come together to share a common interest.

I'll always have an interest and fond memories of SC4 and this community, and look forward to this continuing for many, many years to come.

[Hamish 1,369]

13 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

I've instead cancelled my cancel on the not Deluxe as listed Vanilla SC4 I got today and just bought a $3.00 Rush Hour Mac add on disk instead.

Be careful with this, I can’t remember for sure and don’t have access to my disk, but I don’t think the SC4 vanilla or Rush Hour installer on the disk has been update to a universal app. That means it can’t run on any intel processor only Macs, only PowerPC. These are the old processors that were used back when SC4 was made. The Deluxe release fixed this, I think, but I don’t think the original or rush hour was. 

Can you not buy it from steam or the App Store? These are the options that I guarantee will work. 

[Synergy67 88]

@Hamish Oh, I'm running an old MacPro that couldn't even use the universal/Steam app, since I'm running Snow Leopard. I have Vanilla SC4 installed now and running on this machine, but bleah, it is at least as annoyingly slow as I remember it. I mostly played on my G4 Mac and I think it may have played better on that. I have to try to do the graphics card hack/fix to see if that improves anything—haven't tried yet.

I am probably going to upgrade this very outdated MacPro to another "outdated" MacPro, the 2010 MacPro 5,1, which is pretty much the same as the 2012 MacPro 5,1, which was the last good MacPro that was made. That machine could run the universal version, which I have to research again and see if it is worth the bother. I read in one review of the Steam Mac version rerelease of Deluxe that the largest size city tile was now smaller than it used to be. I would NOT want to go to smaller city tiles. That was one of the pathetic failings of SC13. Can anyone confirm if that is true? I searched all over to confirm that casually mentioned sentence in one review, and could not find a reference to the fact anywhere else. 

I am also trying to decide if I want to try Boot Camp or Parallels and even possibly switch to Linux in the longer run. I am way behind the curve on all these possibilities and find the learning curve daunting, though I will keep trying to make sense of it all. I just learned I can actually run Snow Leopard on a MacPro 5,1 (the 2010 one but not the 2012 one), and could run Parallels or any other way I might want to run the older Mac OS along with the newest, as well as Windows and maybe Linux. I would LOVE to emulate rather than reboot, so I can use anything on the fly. I'm kind of overwhelmed with all the options, but I'm going to have to do something, because I don't think I'm going to be able to stand to play SC4 on this machine any more, especially once I get Rush Hour installed with all my plugins. 

I'm either going to want to run the new Mac Steam version or better yet, the new Windows version, I think. Computers are so much work. I like to set things up the way I like them and barely touch them for years, which is what I have done with this MacPro 1,1. But web browsers are breaking. Just three days ago, without any announcement, FB Messenger stopped working on the latest version of all web browsers I can run on this OS, with, thankfully the exception of the (two year old) version of Chrome I can run on this Mac. I don't know how much longer it will be till that breaks too. I can't use Skype on my desktop any more. Microsoft broke it a year ago when they decided to try to force me to upgrade my OS, which I can't on this machine. That kind of thing pisses me off, because the older Skype worked perfectly fine and they didn't have to lock me out of it.

 

[Synergy67 88]

How does reputation work on a member profile here? Based on the number of reactions you get to your posts?

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

1 minute ago, Synergy67 said:

How does reputation work on a member profile here? Based on the number of reactions you get to your posts?

Yep. Any of the 4 positive reactions (Like, Thanks, Haha, & Yes) add 1 reputation point. The 3 other reactions are neutral with regard to your rep. Also, if you get 10+ rep on any given post then it get's a Big Heart in the upper right.

[Synergy67 88]

Cute. Thanks, Corina. 

@Cyclone Boom Thanks for sharing your story. Very entertaining and relatable. It sounds like you are implying you may have been around here on ST earlier, but under a different moniker. If so, is it a secret, or who were you? Maybe I saw you before returning this time, even though I mostly lurked the first time I was involved here. Those are some nice mods and maps you've made. The region view background one in particular I might put to use. I downloaded your Parva Montes map, which might be fun to play on. I relate with the levelling off terrain elevations into broad plateaus. I used to do massive manual terrain reworking with roads and slope mods to build my cities on many different terraced levels of elevation. I found it fun squeezing things onto ledges over other things and even going way up the side of a mountain.

I am going to work hard to not overdo my plugins and lots this time. I learned through much trial and error in my early days of playing just how much badly made custom lots and bats or other mods can royally mess up your game, and often in ways you don't even know is happening or what's causing it. I also recall how annoying it got having 50 different parks in my mayor menu along with all the other custom stuff that winds up in the parks menu alone. It also bothers me how rewards and landmarks start getting all mixed up with civics buildings and such with custom lots additions. Less is more. I want to get back to basics and learn how to play this game more effectively, though I did pretty darn well last time, I read so much from this site, SCD and more. There are so many more fixes and improvements since then. If I can get a proper hardware/OS  environment together to make this game truly playable, I expect to enjoy it for years and years to come. 

Let me also say that I tremendously appreciate a person like you, who cares and is inspired to contribute so much and to be so helpful to this community, years and years after its heydey. I love to see that kind of enthusiasm and generosity. I like to give it too however I am able. I know I'm asking tons of questions and issues trying to hammer out so much up front here. I think I've foregone a lot of other questions I might have had by deeply exploring the forums and STEX as well as SCD again over the last week, many hours of it. It's fun for me to get so immersed in a virtual world with so many creative and fun possibilities. I only stopped in the past because I was a bit burnt out from overplay, frustrated with the slowness and brokenness of my Mac version, and got busy with some other things for a while, like Civ III and IV. So, thank you. Please know I very much appreciate the smallest to the grandest bit of help you and others here like Corina and Hamish are so kind to give. 

I like the look of that basic city you've got started in the region you linked, where Corina was also showing off her farmlands nearby. I see you've not strayed far from the basic elements of the game with tons of custom content or anything, but it looks very neatly and rather organically designed. It looks aesthetically pleasing as well as functional in a fairly realistic way for a starting town. That's how I'm going to be building city tiles for a while I think, kind of the way the game expects the beginner to do: have a bit of everything like IR and ID on a starter city and grow it in whatever direction you want over time. Then I'll start specializing tiles in a region when I'm more adept again, with farming regions and small towns in countryside around a denser city area. I don't even want a gigantic metroplex anywhere. That's kind of exhausting. Smaller areas of high density in lovely surroundings with more realistic functioning will be my thing. I know the scale is all off in this game, and a real city according to the tile sizes would take up multiple large tiles (which many people do build eventually). Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting going, and i'm worried it might be months till I really can, because I have to keep figuring out how to best upgrade my entire system, which I think I have decided I really have to do since Messenger broke the other day, and i will have to find a used newer MacPro affordably, etc. And learn more about all the boot and emulation options. I love the sound of Parallels, but it hardly seems to get mentioned here. I have a bad feeling someone is going to tell me why I shouldn't use it but it sounds perfect for how I'd want to run things: Boot up in the latest Mac OS on a powerful machine running Snow Leopard and Windows in Parallels so I can do everything at once however I like.

[Synergy67 88]

Also, I want to randomly declare that those @Haljackey highway building/instant mature downtown design videos on utube are mind-blowing. I'm amused also by how much it is possible to love high capacity road networks in and of themselves. I can only aspire to one day get that proficient with making good looking highways. It would take a lot of playing with NAM pieces and such, there's sooo much in there to learn, far more than I ever tried in the past. I'm also going to have to figure out if I want all or just some of the high capacity transportation systems in my downtown cities. I didn't do much with el rail in the past. I really enjoy trains for some reason, as retro as they look and as much space as they take up. 

[Cyclone Boom 16,851]

@Synergy67

Thanks for the kind words, and I really hope it works out for you with getting SC4 working smoothly on your chosen system setup.

The great thing is this game has become a hobby for many people. It matters not being released over 15 years ago and counting. It's about letting one's city-building imagination run free in the expanses of a creative and timeless virtual world. Once you're able to run SC4 again, it may seem a bit overwhelming at first. But it's good to have questions and the willingness to learn and explore. Since after all, that's why there's a friendly community of mayors here to support and inspire each other.

 

18 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

It sounds like you are implying you may have been around here on ST earlier, but under a different moniker. If so, is it a secret, or who were you?

Yes, I did have an old account which happens to be...
 

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

I'm fairly sure it had a double digit number at the end like yours, but it's been so long ago now...

 

 

19 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

How does reputation work on a member profile here? Based on the number of reactions you get to your posts?

Reputation does add up cumulatively for all positive reactions as Corina mentioned. In the board software there is an option to add negative ones, where they'd deduct from a given member's reputation total. But say if there was a "Bad" reaction, we figured this would only spur negativity which does no one any good.

On user profiles, you may have noticed there is a total for "Most Liked". This relates to the Leaderboard feature which was added early last year. Each day there is a podium ranking the top 4 users who gain the most reputation from the previous 24 hours (using the Vancouver PDT time zone). The daily winner is awarded a gold trophy and the most recent win status is updated on one's profile page, with a link to the summary page. Then for each day, as a showcase it's possible to view content which has received the highest total reputation for that defined period of time. This can be a useful way of finding notable community contributions. Then over in the middle tab, the Past Leaders provides a chronological list of daily winners dating back to when reputation was first introduced as a site feature.

There does happen to be a bug where the daily totals aren't listed correctly there. So I've been manually triggering a rebuild each time to fix this.

[Synergy67 88]

@Cyclone Boom I started this as a reply to our conversation, but it turned into a city journal. Will you move this post there, if that's more appropriate? I'm going to reply separately. This first part is from the Pacific Rim National Park region. It's all huge tiles.

 

I started this ambitious city, Vulcan Vale, in a far backwater area to work my way out westward in time. I made an old volcano and plateau to spice up the terrain. It looks like this in zone mode when I finally got started on the city.

I much enjoy tunnels and clever routing, trying to make it both aesthetically pleasing, but also optimally functional. It doesn't always work, and on this project, I started getting no work zots due to long commutes. That can be a problem with huge city tiles.

Layout for my large industrial district up on the high volcano plateau, complete with rail for quick freight out and passengers in.

A bit further along, here is the city center proper in the flatlands below. Oh, the things I do to get the Farmers Market...that farming is for expedience and won't stay there long, because i didn't plan to invest in making this a pretty farming community. This is practice after five years away from the game. Even with passenger rail carefully designed to funnel the citizens to the trains, I'm getting zots on the far side of town already, even though there is plenty of industry work up above the city. I think the tile is so huge that all that industry is too far away? It's only a couple miles by scale though. I do not have NAM installed yet—this is Rush Hour on an old MacPro. This post includes various cities I have been playing with, testing things out, remembering how to play.

The rest of this journal shows some of the cities I am tinkering around with in an old favorite, the San Francisco region map. Here is Industry Cove, a primarily industrial city, surprisingly enough. I designed it to funnel all the freight out on the rails only, and all the workers in on mostly on rails and buses. That avenue connection from the city to the north I removed, and you have to travel to the left, down, and back up and then right (on a street!) to get to the industrial area by car. This was the initial layout before I reworked it a bit to control traffic better.

Much further along, I have provided teeming hordes of R$ workers to populate the factories. This is a city built for function, not aesthetics. All residents travel to the right until they hit bus stops and rail stations. Meanwhile, you can see that all the freight is all going on trucks to two carefully placed freight stations. This is the fourth city in the SF region, Industry Cove. There are about 45K citizens to the north in those three cities (maxed out for now) one smallish HT industry on the coast  and commercial in the other two cities. I'm trying to force people to use the trains mostly and buses secondly. Eventually I decided to educate the population here, since industry never really took off as heavily as I hoped here due to regional pressures towards commercial already.

So, I began to add a commercial district to this city, in the SE quadrant. The grid workers to the NW are all becoming highly educated. Meanwhile, there was so much demand building for R$, for fun I experimented with a new block of massive density low wealth tenement to the south in that square. It very quickly added thousands of R$ residents. I added them too quickly without enough new jobs, apparently (I hoped they would make industry grow more). You can see all the resulting zots. These high rises of 1-2K R$ people continually filled up and vacated. The population here wavers between 16K and 32K as a result, ha. You can see I already earned a Minor League Stadium. I had so much money, I started adding subways here and to the neighboring cities. That made the zots go away in the NW little houses, here, but not in the high rises. I also did not see much intercity travel increase. City workers seem highly motivated to work in their own tile very close by. I know the NAM fixes this better. I can't install it yet, actually, which is why no roundabouts or angled streets, yet.

With Industry Cove stuck in a loop of massive population growth and abandonment in that dense city block, and work demands and population pretty flat in my other finished cities, so far, I decided to start a new city several tiles up, north of my first city, working up the west side of the SF bay. I started in the middle on the west, working south up to this point. This new city is intended to primarily add as much population as I can, to allow my other cities to become denser in turn, since they are mostly all maxed out and stable. I chose a tile I recognize as one I spent a lot of time on years ago, and I remember having horrible traffic and no job zot problems I could never fix here, I think on a bigger scale map of this terrain because this one is a medium tile. This city I dubbed Twinridge.

 

In addition to my affinity for tunnels and unusual routing, I like to get really creative with raising and lowering terrain to interesting effects. I made these industry pits, because, well, industry belongs in a pit. That smog can stay in there. It doesn't really, but I like to think it does.

Did I mention I really enjoy tunnels? That pit in front I eventually connected with a road, and the two tunnels link all three pits together. The freight whips around to the right on the avenue and goes away quickly. I figured it wasn't worth trying to force it onto a train since this is not a very big industrial area and it's already near the edge...even though my tracks run right by and I almost felt obligated to use them.

You might notice I added subway stations in each pit for zippy transport in, rather than driving around to get in there. It's not working as well as I hoped yet, but maybe in time, as the town grows. It's weird when I use the routing query as industry grows in here, how many buildings are occupied by SimNation workers. It says it has x number of workers in a building, and I can see the freight going out, but the workers are not mine! You can see the town layout below, looking over the harbor from the east. I thought to start off with a quaint shoreside sleepy cottage community, meandering back toward the central highway—an avenue, which I almost always line with commercial zoning through my region. 'Cuz, you know, people driving a long way have to stop and buy snacks and get their oil changed an' stuff. And, you never know when your dog's toenails might suddenly need clipping.

To the left (south) is my first city I built in this region, Cozy Bay, a humble thriving residential/commercial hub stuck at about 22K. I will grow it taller when cities like this add to population and regional commercial totals. Because, as it turns out, I soon started to push this city heavily in a commercial direction, despite the token nod to industry, which, as it turned out, I didn't even really need, growing slowly, while the commercial all immediately took off, despite my totally uneducated population. And I do plan to educate them pronto, so I built all the amenities in the little town center taking form around the schools and medical clinic.

 

I placed a ranger station on this lonely little point. It seemed like a good place to appreciate nature.

You can see the town taking basic shape near the main drag, as I begin to let the clock run.

 

The mayor's house is in. Look for the telltale red bricks. (Wouldn't YOU live on the cliff on the coast here if you were mayor?). So too, are the church and cemetery—the latter strategically placed to help buffer the smog from the industry pits. Dead don't breathe, after all. Everything builds as fast as I place it in this city. My demand shows between 5-6K each for R$ and R$$. I spend a lot of time laying out another chunk of residential + commercial, and then press go for a while to let it all fill up. Then I'm back to careful layout and terrain modification again for another combined chunk of residential + commercial. At times I add in trees and decoration, bit by bit. It's a lot of work. I can't do it all at once. Right now this city needs to GROW. I'm often playing with ways to control the size and layout of them houses I get, traffic functions, and something pleasing to look at, like the neighborhood below that unintentionally wound up looking like a face.

I used lifters and lots of road dots and dragging to form that elevated ridge in green behind the town center. Resies like to have a view. Despite the fun construction of the housing near the shore including plenty of bus stops and subway stops, I still kept getting a bunch of zots in the face neighborhood. Arrrgh. What does it TAKE? It takes the NAM, for starters.   

Okay, I was kind of regretting not making this a commercial district to begin with, so let's rework some of the shore area. My medical clinic was already maxing out, so I built a big ugly hospital, which looks quite out of place in a town this size. I hate that $@!@$$* helicopter. Is there a way to deactivate the U-Drive It buttons or missions? Those perpetual wandering zots annoy me to no end. 

The expanded commercial district took off like a rifle shot. While it grew, I took some time to pretty things up a bit with some trees and logs and stuff.

As we can see, my reworked downtown has made a very successful transition. I added the resort hotel, because this looks like nice bit of coast, to get away to, doesn't it? I next turned my attention to working my way inland and a bit uphill to the west, raising some more terraced terrain for houses above, commerce down below. It filled up in seconds. I didn't like the look of all those bright green grass tiles I put on the slopes, so I ended up removing most of them.

The industry pits never got very messy. They went high tech pretty fast. 

No sooner had I prepared the lovely terraced mixed district inland, than I realized, what the heck am I thinking? There is a fair bit more land beyond this to the west. I need at least an avenue here! So I rebuilt the tunnels and the roads over them, which you have to remove in order to run them, to accommodate the east-west avenue, which I was happy to run all the way down to the shore to help feed the new downtown there as well. I have not built any highways yet between my six cities. I have a main drag avenue running between each, a train line, and more recently, interconnected subways, even though my largest cities are still under 30K residents. I'm not going for massive density in most cases.

And here is the result so far and where I am at. 28 years in, just under 10K population. I'm not sure if I like those art deco style $$$ high rises which popped up. One way or another they will go away eventually. They look impressive and foreboding for now, like a wall of giant statues guarding the western district.

I have a lot of space to the west to fill in still. I'm going to do something creative and amusing with more terraces and tunnels perhaps. I 'm enjoying how it's turning out so far...and the only zots I'm getting are from the three cabins next to the ranger lookout. I think I figured something out from this region: once you start getting enough regional demand to crank out masses of residents at will, try to only do it with an accommodating amount of very nearby new job opportunities. If you don't, they seem to get stuck not finding jobs, near or far, and vacating. Also, new jobs not taken by your available population get taken largely by SimNation workers and those jobs don't seem to switch hands very quickly to your own workers. That's the problem I have with that grim housing tenement at the far other end of this region I still have to fix. My thought is that as I add commercial and population here to the region, it will eventually cause Industry Cove's commercial district to grow taller, and eventually those vacating resies will have more places to work. Nothing I've added there has helped yet otherwise. They even do not seem interested in traveling very close by on the subway to the city I made of all industrial just to the west—Grit and Bear It. I think they want commercial. Maybe I should swap that city to commercial services and see how that flies for them. In order to do that though, I have to increase regional demand for such, and CS was flatlined when I was in Industry Cove last time.

I offer some parting views of Twinridge thus far.

The industry pits are finally filling in nicely.

 

You can see we have room to grow here for a while, especially since I am zoning most of the NW quadrant entirely medium density from the get-go. I'm kind of mixing my trees all up. This is just practice and testing for me. I'm planning to return to where we started: Pacific Rim National Park. That first city there needs some help.Here is the SF region view:

It's been great to get back to the greatest computer game ever made. Long live SimCity 4! I hope you have enjoyed my wholly self-indulgent contribution. All comments, advice, criticism, reflections, reactions, contributions, observations, musings, and mumblings welcome.

 

 

 

 

[Synergy67 88]

@Cyclone Boom Yes, as you can see, I greatly enjoy the creativity and inventiveness aspect of this game. It's like the perfect fusion of all that plus the rational, functional, and strategic. This game scratches so many of my itches all at once! Thanks again for the Pacific Rim National Park region upload. As you can see, I got it working fine. Those tiles are so huge and those mountains so tall, it took me 15 minutes just to brush trees over them in that first city I started. And then, due to my hardware limitations after that, it took a long time to redraw all those trees whenever I change views, strongly pushing me to stay in zone mode a lot, when moving. However, all in all, with the old Vanilla + the Rush Hour expansion cds all installed, this game is running as well or better than I remember before. I haven't looked at changing the video driver script, though I see I can easily edit in some text into that file. It might or might not make a difference. I should try it and find out. The game is playing pretty well so far, though i don't have any city over 30K yet. I can happily play for a while, I think, before focusing on any hardware/software upgrades and maybe switching to the Windows version. My friend was recommending using Parallels for emulation which runs like WINE, rather than Boot Camp which boots up a different OS just to play. I love playing in windowed mode on my Mac so I have ready access to my music or reference material, etc. I don't want to be in an isolated bubble to play, if at all possible. I already go into a bubble enough as it is when I play.

REQUEST: I discovered that the only available version of the NAM is an app that only new Mac OS versions will run to install. So I can't get into them NAM files, unlike years ago where I could just unzip and manually place everything. So, that's my next big favor to request for an upload? Can you maybe simply zip the NAM folder as it shows up after running the installer, so I can manually place it myself?

I have been doing better than in the past with controlling no job zots, but they still show up way too much, which was one of the frustrations I had with this game in the past, even with the older version of NAM running. I keep trying to figure out how to prevent them. I used to focus mostly on roads and such, but the computer does weird things with route choices (especially without the NAM). Despite my best efforts to offer fast, low traffic routes to job areas, there are certain neighborhoods that the simulator gets all hung up on and can't seem to find anyone in parts of them any jobs. I think the best thing I can do so far is to be careful to add new residential and new work zones simultaneously. The very first time your new Sim looks for a job seems like the most important and likely one. If (s)he gets a job then, (s)he's usually good forever after. If (s)he doesn't, it can be an endless series of no job/vacating/coming back.

QUESTION: Has anyone explored how you get jobs back from SimNation workers working in your factories and such? I just discovered for the first time after all these years, that a work building can occupy and work, but none of the workers inside are yours—they are invisible SimNation workers. And moreover, they don't seem to get replaced very fast or at all by my own workers, once they get installed there. That means I am building more buildings than necessary to keep my own workers employed. So, again, it points to balancing demands for both residential and ind or comm at the same time so when you push play, both grow up new together and get linked up together. If I just add a bunch of residents only due to regional demand, a lot of them seem to never find a job after that. 

I tried TWrecks impressive industrial mod, but oddly decided I still liked a lot of the original lots (especially high tech) a bit better so uninstalled it. It would be nice to have a plugin just to make dirty industrial grow only on low density industrial zones. That was a good change. I haven't tried PEG's SPAM mod yet for farming. I'll get to that later on. I haven't been doing much with farming at all yet. Shhh, don't tell Cori. There are a bunch of old gshmails and Simgoober farms plus their BTE reward chains they made way back in the early days of SC4 I remember using and enjoying before, especially visually, since the vanilla SC4 farm (field)s are so boring.  I'm not sure if I can integrate any of those with SPAM or what. A lot to research and try out there just with farms alone. I really need the NAM too so I have more road and transportation options. I'm delighted at things I didn't have ever before, like functional/upgrading seaports and city halls. I also have the IHT fix fully properly installed, because I actually got my hands on the reintegrated dat file with the needed tweak already added into it. Yay for that. I can't believe how many bugs and issues this game had upon release, many never discovered or fixed by Maxis or EA. Thankfully the community has been able to fix a lot of them.

I am so thrilled to be playing again. It's as fun or more than ever. I appreciate this game more than ever, considering the highly disappointing games that have been coming out ever since. Civilization 4 was the last new game I got excited about, and that game is now nearly as old as SimCity 4! 

[Cyclone Boom 16,851]

That's a most excellent start and great to see you've got the game up and running, along with the Pacific Rim map. Those trees you've planted make the area come to life with an alpine feel, and your chosen terrain and water mod complements the theme well.

Since it all revolves around creative problem solving, I've realised patience goes a long long way in SC4. My early days in office as Mayor were all driven by trying to build outwards and upwards. In the end these lofty aspirations made it more frustrating really, and I don't think my Sims were too happy either. Already I can tell you've got a very measured and systematic approach to planning and developing, so that should stand you in good stead for achieving the all-important balance with the RCI population. Although in truth there's no right or wrong way to play this game. Beyond anything else, what matters most is to have fun, and SC4 offers endless possibilities to achieve that.

Just a few little tips you may wish to consider for helping with screenshots:

• The game's grid can be toggled off by pressing the G key.
• The game's UI can be hidden by pressing Num Lock (or the equivalent on Mac), or clicking the minimize button in the bottom left corner.
• Speaking of which, there's a little mod which makes said button invisible (while keeping it functional).
• That yellow pause border can be removed using this mod.
   
• For those UDI mission icons, they can be disabled from the My Sims menu by toggling this option as highlighted:
  
  
  
  

 

10 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Those tiles are so huge and those mountains so tall, it took me 15 minutes just to brush trees over them in that first city I started.

Yeah, it does take a long while. For this I recommend using the Flora Blast command which allows planting them automatically.

The big advantage here is it really saves a lot of time over using the regular God Mode brush tool. Once entering the command containing the 3 parameters, it will mass plant them throughout the tile. Depending on the strength and coverage radius, this can take between 10-30 seconds. These would be the regular trees though I believe, but it may also plant a custom controller should that modify the flora from the default brush.

My post here explains the steps for this.  (To access the cheats dialog, I guess it may require a different key since I don't believe Macs have the Ctrl key do they?)

 

10 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

REQUEST: I discovered that the only available version of the NAM is an app that only new Mac OS versions will run to install. So I can't get into them NAM files, unlike years ago where I could just unzip and manually place everything. So, that's my next big favor to request for an upload? Can you maybe simply zip the NAM folder as it shows up after running the installer, so I can manually place it myself?

Sure, that can certainly be arranged.

I'm guessing you've tried the Mac specific version of the NAM as available on Mod DB (official mirror). While I've not downloaded this myself to check, maybe this will be in a zip file so the contents can easily be extracted and configured? I do know the Windows version featuring an installer is very advanced with all sorts of clever logic built-in. So that may well explain if FileJuicer isn't of any help there. Let us know either way if this doesn't work out for you.

Maybe this thread could also be of help:

 

11 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

I started this as a reply to our conversation, but it turned into a city journal. Will you move this post there, if that's more appropriate?

Absolutely, I can move your CJ post into a new topic inside the SC4 City Journals forum if you wish. Just let me know what title you'd like it to be called and I'll just click a few buttons to make that happen. Or equally it's perfectly fine to be kept in here if you'd prefer it that way.

  Edited June 27, 2018 by Cyclone Boom  
Added link to the NAM for Mac thread.

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

7 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

QUESTION: Has anyone explored how you get jobs back from SimNation workers working in your factories and such? I just discovered for the first time after all these years, that a work building can occupy and work, but none of the workers inside are yours—they are invisible SimNation workers.

I believe you are referring to when you query a building and it pops up the various stats. When you do that for a residential building the first number is truly the number of Sims living there out of the maximum that building could hold. However, for industrial and commercial it's completely different.  The first number is the number of potential jobs in that building at that moment based on all other economic factors.  The second number is similar to the residential one inasmuch as it is the maximum jobs the building could offer. To see how many Sims work in C or I, you need to use the Route Query tool (located just below the regular query tool) and click the building with that. It'll then show how many Sims work there and draw pretty colored paths showing you how they get there from their homes.

No Sims from SimNation ever travel into your current city tile (or any other tiles for that matter). The undefined tiles (SimNation) only function as a place that freight can go.

[Synergy67 88]

@Cyclone Boom I am learning more useful new things, thank you! The UDI killer alone made my day. Thank God. Flora Blast is a great tool I will start using. Is 3000 the maximum density for any size city tile or do I need to adjust that number for some cases? I would want maximum possible density if I were to use it. Did anyone ever find out what happens when you Flora Blast over a built city? I would assume it would do the same thing as running the god tool over the city...it inserts trees anywhere it can, including some which show up in parking lots and other weird spots I've noticed if you're not careful with it. I have one in a mall parking lot right now from using the god tool.

My trouble with the NAM installer is I can't even run it. It requires a much newer Mac OS to run, and it's the same reason I started this article about how I could possibly run the newer version of SC4 or the Windows version. In the longer run I'll be implementing something, but that is going to be months off at least, I wager. Later on, these things shouldn't be issues for me,  but I would love to have that NAM now and get on with it. Otherwise I will be building and playing for months without it. 

The EP1 patch that I don't have with my game—many of the fixes are for very minor things I don't care about, reading over the list. The following are the ones which I suspect makes this game harder and buggier for me:

Fix for query incorrectly reporting trip length after abandonment.

Fix for incorrectly reported commute time during inter-city travel.

Path fixes for various networks and intersections.

Fix for several network intersection resolves.

Improved usage of parking lots and transit stations.

Improved variety of industry building development.

Fix for intercity commute where bus traffic was periodically being treated as car traffic.

Adjusted toll booth capacities for 2-tile wide toll booths.

Fix for prevention of pedestrians from using neighbor connections.

Fix for commercial traffic and road noise map calculations to accommodate multi-tile morning and evening commutes.

Fix for variety of path bugs related to roads, rails, highways, avenues and elevated rail.


I think this is the sort of stuff that contributes to the buggy persistent no jobs zots I get in little areas of my map often no matter what I do.

So, yes, please,  if you would be willing to upload the NAM folder, I would be exceedingly grateful. Thanks!

My Twinridge City is all built out now, and has maxed a bit over 20K population. Now I am back in Industry Cove adding in the last bits of housing and commercial I had planned to squeeze in there, staring with low density this time, since throwing that high density block in there caused so much trouble—too much too fast + exacerbated by lack of NAM and above list of various pathing bugs, no doubt. At this stage of my regions I find all my cities seem to stagnate at a stable population unless I go build a whole new city and add more regional cap relief/population. I struggled with this a lot in previous games, though I eventually managed to make a much bigger city a few times by focusing entirely on maxing everything possible to enable it. Is this the way the game is supposed to work? You can't really build a dense/tall city on a smaller tile without building many supporting cities to enable larger growth anywhere/everywhere? Or, what else am I missing that might cause the stagnation? Education is maxed, desirability, rewards, parks, plazas, neighbor connections placed to lift caps (my cities all have caps in single digit percentages for the most part right now). 

I downloaded the stuff for taking prettier in game pics. I hadn't planned on posting a journal and had just taken those pics with my Mac's built in "take a picture of the desktop" function, for my own private documentation of my progress. It was a fluke I decided to show some here. Yeah, we can leave that post above in this thread, since it's part of this unfolding saga, if you're cool with it. I know it's nothing so fantastic that I want to go out of my way to show it off in City Journals. I'm just testing and tinkering with cities so far. I haven't installed much content (especially growable bats) yet for decorating, and I can't build things the way I want without NAM yet either. 

 

 

[Synergy67 88]

9 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I believe you are referring to when you query a building and it pops up the various stats. When you do that for a residential building the first number is truly the number of Sims living there out of the maximum that building could hold. However, for industrial and commercial it's completely different.  The first number is the number of potential jobs in that building at that moment based on all other economic factors.  The second number is similar to the residential one inasmuch as it is the maximum jobs the building could offer. To see how many Sims work in C or I, you need to use the Route Query tool (located just below the regular query tool) and click the building with that. It'll then show how many Sims work there and draw pretty colored paths showing you how they get there from their homes.

No Sims from SimNation ever travel into your current city tile (or any other tiles for that matter). The undefined tiles (SimNation) only function as a place that freight can go.

@CorinaMarie Thanks! I loooove the Route Query tool, but forgot it existed until a couple days ago and rediscovered it. Wait. I'm confused on ind/comm buildings. If I click on one building, in this case Modde, Inc., and it says Current Jobs 110/112, doesn't that mean 110 of my residents are working there out of maximum building worker capacity of 112? So, the potential jobs is the -second- number, not the first, yes? No? I'm confused. Can you elaborate more on this? When I count the workers traveling to the building with the route query, I get a total of 133! So, things don't add up the way I thought. Are some of those extra Sims the non-commercial building workers: the janitors and such?

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

3 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

I click on one building, in this case Modde, Inc., and it says Current Jobs 110/112, doesn't that mean 110 of my residents are working there out of maximum building worker capacity of 112?

Nope. Those two numbers both relate to job capacity of the building. The second number, the 112, is the maximum jobs the building will ever offer in ideal circumstances.  The 110 is how many it offers in its current location taking into account all the surrounding influences. In this particular case its capable of nearly full employment.

 

3 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

When I count the workers traveling to the building with the route query, I get a total of 133! So, things don't add up the way I thought. Are some of those extra Sims the non-commercial building workers: the janitors and such?

I believe this is a goofy part of what the game is showing you. If you follow the paths back to the Sim's homes you will likely find that some of them walked to a bus or subway station and then rode that to work and yet both types of trips are included when you add up the totals of everything.

The part I'm absolutely certain of (from learning it here on ST) is that for C & I the building query numbers are possible-jobs-now out of total-possible-that-could-ever-be for that particular building.

[Synergy67 88]

Oh wow. I -never- knew that, and I've never seen anyone mention it out of the many articles and discussions I've read over the years.

OK, so back to the other part of this that does still confuse me. On industrial buildings, if I click on one, I get the two numbers you've just described. Then when I query the building, sometimes it has workers, and sometimes not. The building looks normal whether it has zero workers working in it or a full crew. But, after an industrial building has had some workers in it, then has too few, it gets dim and dilapidated looking, indicating it is understaffed. Why doesn't it look like that or abandon entirely when it has zero workers? The cases I am describing are when a building has built, but never yet had workers in it. It sits there looking exactly the same as buildings with workers, or in the case of houses, if a house built it automatically gets occupants. I realize that's not the case for a ind/comm building, but I have industrial buildings with zero workers that are shown by the query tool to be shipping out freight! This is why I first thought it meant SimNation workers were invisibly working the building since I didnt' have workers for it. Now I don't get what it means, zero workers, but lit up like it's full and shipping freight. These buildings can sit like that for years, and unless I query them, I've assumed my workers are working in the building. I don't think I've ever seen a commercial buildlng build which doesn't immediately get workers and just sits there empty for years and years without dilapidating. Do you know what I am talking about? This is also something I never discovered until now.

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

Yeah, I do know what you are talking about.

I recall reading that some industry (and farms) can toodle along just fine without any actual workers and they will ship out freight. That's so the game can keep things going creating residential demand. I've had that as well as small commercial with no workers keep going without abandoning. Once you move into large commercial you are out of my league as I've mostly specialized in rural farmland with little towns sprouted up hither and yon. Only recently have I gotten some of the smaller (big) stage 7 commercials in a test city. It happens that the demand is good and the residents can get to them to work so I've not experienced the abandoned commercial yet.

My (mis?)understanding is even the tallest commercial will do ok and not dilapidate if there are enough customers (high traffic) but, again, I'm not an expert on this part.

[Cyclone Boom 16,851]

20 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Flora Blast is a great tool I will start using. Is 3000 the maximum density for any size city tile or do I need to adjust that number for some cases?

After only recently discovering it this past year, I've found it's such a timesaver.

I don't believe there's a hard limit for the density the game attempts to plant, and instead the maximum is determined by what can be planted. In other words, the command represents the volume of trees the game is instructed to process. Then it tries to do this, but there's only so many flora instances which can fit into any given area specified. Much like if using the regular brush, the tool keeps on trying, though nothing happens if the radius being covered is already filled up.

Personally I've not experimented too far with varying the 3 parameters in the Flora Blast command. Going for a lesser extent, I did find using 400 for all 3 provided a sufficient density of trees for me. But I recall Cori tried using 5000 (x3) in her region, and that gave an even denser coverage than the 3k as per the example pic in my linked post. I did find that visually from a comparison, there seems no discernible difference between 5k and 10k. So maybe that suggests no more trees can fit in once that density level has been reached. Something to possibly ponder is since each item of flora is a model the game renders, it could create slightly more lag while scrolling. This will also depend on whether your Graphics Options have shadows set to Low, Medium, or High. Since shadows are something extra in addition to rendered objects themselves.

So my recommendation would be to have a play around in a blank "sandbox" region and see what options work best for you. I did find when running the 400 for my large region map, it didn't quite fill the tile borders seamlessly. As in the edges were slightly obvious from where trees didn't get planted uniformly.

 

20 hours ago, Synergy67 said:

Did anyone ever find out what happens when you Flora Blast over a built city? I would assume it would do the same thing as running the god tool over the city...it inserts trees anywhere it can, including some which show up in parking lots and other weird spots I've noticed if you're not careful with it.

I did indeed...

Alas, I'm afraid everyone flees and the city is completely destroyed. The result is a mass unstoppable and irreversible implosion across the entire region. Civilization is sent back before medieval times, and all that remains are trees, trees and more trees. Game over!
 

Spoiler

Blasting isn't quite as dangerous as it sounds, but there are considerations when to use it.

Depending on the coverage count radius set, it'll be planted throughout the city to the maximum extent possible. This includes farm fields and lots (even those with concrete textures). The only items which won't be covered are transit networks and buildings themselves since there's a restriction preventing flora (and MMPs) from being placed on those. For this reason it's probably worth blasting in advance before developing a city. At least for the Maxis defaults (oaks, pines, shrubs), the trees which show up at each of the terrain elevations are identical to those from the God Mode flora brush.

 

There is a trick to remove all flora in a tile while preserving all other development, and that's to use the command:

flora off

Simply enter it into the cheats box, then upon running this will result in them all being felled in a matter of seconds. However if you've placed any, it will also remove MMPs in the process. This includes those default trees from the Mayor Mode menu, since technically these happen to be "flora" items also.

Once done it's advised to toggle flora back on though using:

flora on

Otherwise I think there's something with seasonal effects which won't function properly. I'm not 100% sure on that though. What I have found is the "off" command won't work until setting it to "on" again. I presume it works like a toggle switch, where nothing happens if already at the mode being set to.

Once happy with the level of density, one other tip I suggest is to type out the command and copy it to the clipboard. Then the process is simplified for each tile, and becomes the case of opening up the cheat box, pasting it in (using the Mac equivalent of Ctrl+V), then finally hitting Enter to run. I found once getting into the flow of the task, it becomes easy to keep going and getting into a system. Also with the knowledge that it's saving so much time compared with planting each tile by hand.