The environment report bar

[Toby66 155]

This part of the reports compared to the other areas as health, traffic, education etc. seems impossible to please all the time but i try and i try. But what´s the secret to having a full green bar in your report if anyone knows how to please the sims in that area?

I just think it seems to go down no matter what really easily.

I try to not build the city blocks so crowded and with some park\recreation spread out here and there. A couple or more patches with trees and neat green´ery but i wont bend over totally just to accommodate the game in that area. Enough is enough and i move on eventually.

But any SC 4 pro who know´s this?

[Cyclone Boom 17,016]

In an increasingly developed city, it is a challenge to keep any of the Opinion Polls fully green. This is determined by the average air and water pollution in the city tile, and so the key is to minimise this to the maximum extent possible. Planting a significant number of trees can help, and using the God Mode Flora brush in an established city is one way. Like for the terrain tools, access this by holding Ctrl+Shift+Alt and clicking the God Mode button.

I once ran a test to prove how sporadic planted trees can reduce pollution to negligible amounts from a coal power station.

As follows:

See my post here for further details.

This was with the Mayor Mode trees which are planted as small seedlings and grow up big. For some reason they end up shrinking again though over time, while the flora planted using the God Mode brush remain the same size and just spread naturally over a wider area.

It might take planting trees throughout a whole city tile to sway the average in favour, as it'll need to counterbalance the prior effects of pollution.

To combat water pollution, placing one or more Treatment Plants connected to your water supply network helps there. They're not cheap though. Alternatively looking at custom content, and one such building I'm aware of (and have personally used) is this MCP Plant:

(I'm not sure where the "MCP" acronym comes from or what it represents, but it sounds cool.)

Some may class this as "cheating", but it really all comes down to personal preference. The same for those who like to use RCI demand mods, or the CAM for added growth stages. It's not for everyone, but can be worth looking into and make a choice either way.

If the MCP sounds interesting to try, it has the ability to simultaneously treat both water and air pollution of a large city tile, pretty much reducing this down to negligible levels. Then planing a few trees throughout, even making use of the Flora Blast command, and it keeps the environment nice and healthy for everyone living in a city. As @CorinaMarie explained there as linked, said command is most useful before establishing a city. Otherwise trees get planted on undesired places like airport runways.

[Toby66 155]

Thanks a lot for that reply.

Yes, you mention that any modifications to the game can be considered "cheating".

Makes me start to think about how we perceive things, things in general perhaps in a wider range as well, and i guess it's just  about what floats your boat.

Without any other participants of this GAME\simulation to consider no rules apply but what you want to put in there for yourself.

That plant you refer to could be interesting for me to download since i have a beef with the original plant which just holds TWO measly jobs for that whole place. But to have it treat the air as well and i'm not that keen on it though.

That's not even realistic and it's close to cheating, (for ME), but thanks for your input in the subject here Cyclone!

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Just beware that spamming trees (especially seasonal ones) can add to processing lag. Use them, but use them wisely (spray hundreds, not millions).

[CorinaMarie 29,775]

3 hours ago, Toby66 said:

That plant you refer to could be interesting for me to download since i have a beef with the original plant which just holds TWO measly jobs for that whole place. But to have it treat the air as well and i'm not that keen on it though.

You could, ofc, mod the Maxis one to have however many jobs you feel is appropriate.

And for the MCP one you could remove the air pollution reduction. It's the one I use and I set its life time to nearly 5,000 years as I don't care for rebuilding it. (Same for the other Maxis power and water facilities).

[Toby66 155]

Yes and NO Cori, i'm rather lazy overall.

I set a new definition to the word itself since i always try to avoid doing stuff and just ask myself "why?", "Is this necessary?" and do i really need to do this that BADLY.

It's deSSSSSPicable as Roger Rabbit would have put it while spit talking.

But i hear you, i just need to motivate myself and i end up becoming REALLY tired just now thinking about it, it's true. (not just for trying to be funnah now).

Sorry, thanks.

[CorinaMarie 29,775]

10 minutes ago, Toby66 said:

Yes and NO Cori, i'm rather lazy overall.

That's fine, ofc. Not everyone likes the modding side of the game. But, other peeps (myself included) find it rather rewarding to take something that's not how I want it to be in my game and tweak it to perfection (Corilogically speaking).

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

19 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

other peeps (myself included) find it rather rewarding to take something that's not how I want it to be in my game and tweak it to perfection (Corilogically speaking).

We could call that the Coriolis Effect 

[rsc204 21,836]

On 01/05/2019 at 10:23 PM, jeffryfisher said:

Just beware that spamming trees (especially seasonal ones) can add to processing lag. Use them, but use them wisely (spray hundreds, not millions).

Actually I'm not so sure seasonal trees makes things any more taxing. In order to display any tree, like any other model in SC4, the game must render the LOD and then apply the texture to it. With a seasonal tree, those are changed to different models 3 times in every year, which of course is a little taxing, but only for a brief moment. Otherwise a seasonal tree takes the same resources as an identical non-seasonal one.

I suspect what gives people this impression, is that by and large seasonal trees tend to be in HD, which is more resource intensive. But even then, that's more a question of how much data your GPU needs to keep in VRAM. This too is unlikely to tax any sort of modern dedicated GPU, especially since SC4 is amazingly frugal with resources in the GPU department.

The real killer though is simply shadows, if the game must render detailed shadows for thousands or many thousands of objects, that does give the rendering engine a lot of work to do. I suspect if it was optimised for today's hardware, even this wouldn't be a problem. However, if you turn shadows down to medium/low or even off altogether, you'll likely find even a large city tile full of trees doesn't lead to any noticeable lag. Of course this is somewhat hardware dependent, but bear in mind this game was designed to run on GPU's with tiny amounts (by today's standards), of VRAM, approximately 128MB-256MB.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

21 hours ago, rsc204 said:

The real killer though is simply shadows

Aha -- I'll have to check that. I don't need no steen-keeng shadows.