discovery Modifying .sc4 savegames: It IS possible!

[csq246 20]

Finally ploppable functioning residental. I just about gave up on this.

[justforfun 7,802]

Hi, I have only read page 1 and 4 of this thread, so I'm not sure if this has been mentioned. Do you plan on releasing a mod on the STEX to make grow-ification easy for all users, maybe as an expansion of the extra cheats plugin?

[smf_16 1,835]

On 23-8-2019 at 11:31 AM, justforfun said:

Hi, I have only read page 1 and 4 of this thread, so I'm not sure if this has been mentioned. Do you plan on releasing a mod on the STEX to make grow-ification easy for all users, maybe as an expansion of the extra cheats plugin?

Unfortunately this is not possible. Basically plopped residentials are not working because of a bug in the .exe. There's no mod that can change the inner workings of the .exe. The growification script simply circumvents the bug in the .exe by manually fixing the "corrupted" data in your Savegames.

As for the extra cheats plugin, I think that this might be possible, though this would be an entirely different thing because you don't need to edit a Savegame, but actual in-memory objects. That's definitely not something I am able to do.

I you want to use the growification script, I strongly suggest you read at least my posts in this topic. Installing my script is relatively easy thanks to the node.js platform, though I understand that it might be a bit scary for less experienced users. I remember that @CorinaMarie once mentioned that she was thinking of making a GUI around my script, but I don't know if she actually did something for this.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, smf_16 said:

I remember that @CorinaMarie once mentioned that she was thinking of making a GUI around my script, but I don't know if she actually did something for this.

I found what I'd said:

On 6/23/2019 at 3:15 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Woot! Thanks.

(Later I have in mind to create a front end for your program so peeps can just double click an icon they'd place on the desktop (or somewhere) and save them from that scary dos prompt window and as such I'll need all parameters to be passable.)

 

This was in relation to when you had made it all interactive without the passed parameters. Basically what I had mind at that point would be a batch script that would read the variables from a user created text file and from there call your program by passing them in the %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 format which Dos can use.

I haven't pursued it at all at this point since we still don't have stable growified residentials and by that I mean even when changed over they will not regrow if abandoned due to extended loss of power, water (when required), or road access. As I recall you were still looking into the rest of the subfile information needed to fix that.

[justforfun 7,802]

2 hours ago, smf_16 said:

Installing my script is relatively easy thanks to the node.js platform, though I understand that it might be a bit scary for less experienced users. 

Yes, that was the gist of my question: I was hoping something was in the works to simplify growification, and that you would eventually upload on the STEX an easy tool to edit the savefiles, but after some more testing is done I'll definitely follow your instructions for node.js -being able to turn ploppables into growables is a dream come true, so, well worth the effort! 

[smf_16 1,835]

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to let you all know that I've published an update of the tool on npm. I've fixed a problem that was still present with the growify command. If you ran that command, commuters were properly able to find a way out of the building, but as @carlosmarcelo pointed out the building would never redevelop, not even if you demolished it. You had to manually rezone it if you wanted something to grow again on it (see also this post).

Now, back in March I found out why this was happening during to my research in my other thread about programmatically generating a Savegame. Apparently not only the zone type had to be changed in the lot subfile, the SimGrid with all zone types - which is basically the graph you get to see when you open the zone overview in a city - had to be updated as well. However, due to the work I had on my card game website as a result of the quarantine I did not have the time to update the growify command. That's what I finally managed to do now.

So, in short you can update the command line tool as always by running

npm install -g sc4@latest

and then use the growify command as usual. You will notice that the buildings that were growified will now properly redevelop as if they were truely grown. Also you'll be able to draw roads and plop other things over it - which wasn't possible before.

Beware! This means that if you don't want the growified buildings to automatically redevelop, you should mark them historical! This was not required before because the game refused to redevelop them, but this was actually due to the growify command not being complete rather than being intentional!

And by the way, remember that this is all still experimental work so don't forget your backups!

[rsc204 21,808]

41 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

This means that if you don't want the growified buildings to automatically redevelop, you should mark them historical!

I suspect since many will probably want to keep buildings they've manually defined in this manner, I wonder... Would it be possible to use a command switch or different command that would automatically mark such buildings historical when added to the save file in this manner?

[smf_16 1,835]

Yes that's a good point, I'll see if I can add it, shouldn't be too hard. I'll probably make it the default as well.

[smf_16 1,835]

It's done, latest version is 0.0.18 and can be installed running 

npm install -g sc4@latest

It now asks if growified buildings should be made historical which defaults to true. If you're using the --no-interactive flag you can use the --no-historical flag to turn it off.

[carlosmarcelo 975]

7 hours ago, smf_16 said:

It's done, latest version is 0.0.18 and can be installed running 

Hi! How are you? Has your card game website grown?

First, thank you for taking the time to do something nice for us! 

Well, I tried install but I receive a message error:

C:\me\clouds\google\SC4>npm install -g SC4@latest
npm ERR! code E404
npm ERR! 404 Not Found - GET https://registry.npmjs.org/SC4 - Not found
npm ERR! 404
npm ERR! 404  'SC4@latest' is not in the npm registry.
npm ERR! 404 Your package name is not valid, because
npm ERR! 404  1. name can no longer contain capital letters
npm ERR! 404
npm ERR! 404 Note that you can also install from a
npm ERR! 404 tarball, folder, http url, or git url.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     C:\Users\me\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache\_logs\2020-07-13T22_07_32_250Z-debug.log

But, I tried with "sc" lowercase letters, (npm install -g sc4@latest) and works well.  Should I always use lowercase letters now?

Unfortunately I can't take a moment to test, but I'm certainly anxious to testing. 

[justforfun 7,802]

1 hour ago, carlosmarcelo said:

But, I tried with "sc" lowercase letters, (npm install -g sc4@latest) and works well.  Should I always use lowercase letters now?

The same happened to me, I used lowercase letters, I tested and it works.

[smf_16 1,835]

Well I actually wrote it in lowercase (as that's the correct way) but there seems to be an autocorrect feature on the site somehow that always uppercases "sc4" to "SC4". Even when I edit my post it changes it again. Perhaps that the staff can do something about this? I guess that it would make sense to turn off this feature in code segments, but I don't know if it's technically feasible.

1 hour ago, carlosmarcelo said:

Hi! How are you? Has your card game website grown?

First, thank you for taking the time to do something nice for us! 

The website has caused me quite a lot of stress during the past months, but luckily it has gotten a bit less the last weeks. It's still running good and attracting quite a bit of people though and I even founded my own company for it (next to my day job), so it's here to stay.  I'm having some time off and adding this update to the growify tool was something that was already on the list for way too long now!

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

24 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

Well I actually wrote it in lowercase (as that's the correct way) but there seems to be an autocorrect feature on the site somehow that always uppercases "sc4" to "SC4". Even when I edit my post it changes it again. Perhaps that the staff can do something about this?

Oh dear, my bad. Sorry about this and the confusion caused.

This was an internal site setting indeed, and I added it as a conversion word filter for making sc4 get capitalised to SC4 instead since it was quite commonly done. I've now removed this so it no longer does the capitalisation, and I've gone through the above posts to make sure they're updated to lowercase.

It won't do this again now.

[Propfam 2,288]

Is there a plan to add commercial services and offices to the growify option? I need more stable commercial.

Thanks.

[carlosmarcelo 975]

5 minutes ago, chfzdn said:

plan to add commercial services and offices to the growify option

I may be mistaken, but the studies and experiments of the community, even before the excellent work of @smf_16, indicated that the types of ploped buildings that were abandoned were only those that need an exit, which was the case with residential (only exit) and industrial (with entrance and exit). Commercials only have entry. 

I have done this test myself in the past: when installing a commercial building, it is able to offer jobs normally. What usually happens (I include myself in this ) is that we want to put a very beautiful and mega master commercial building in the city, which offers zillions of jobs, but there is no demand for it, then it is abandoned due to lack of demand, and not because it is not growified. 

Please, if I'm wrong, correct me! 

[Propfam 2,288]

10 minutes ago, carlosmarcelo said:

I may be mistaken, but the studies and experiments of the community, even before the excellent work of @smf_16, indicated that the types of ploped buildings that were abandoned were only those that need an exit, which was the case with residential (only exit) and industrial (with entrance and exit). Commercials only have entry. 

I have done this test myself in the past: when installing a commercial building, it is able to offer jobs normally. What usually happens (I include myself in this ) is that we want to put a very beautiful and mega master commercial building in the city, which offers zillions of jobs, but there is no demand for it, then it is abandoned due to lack of demand, and not because it is not growified. 

Please, if I'm wrong, correct me! 

But, I want more than that. I want those plopped commercial service and office to be counted in the census. That's because I have another city just with residential and there are lots of unemployment due to lack of jobs. I struggle to get higher buildings despite the demand is high. So, I need to plop some buildings with lots of jobs from the game using buildingplop cheat. I think, the building need to be counted by the census to reduce the unemployment happening in the other city.

Thanks.

 

[rsc204 21,808]

10 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

I have done this test myself in the past: when installing a commercial building, it is able to offer jobs normally. What usually happens (I include myself in this ) is that we want to put a very beautiful and mega master commercial building in the city, which offers zillions of jobs, but there is no demand for it, then it is abandoned due to lack of demand, and not because it is not growified. 

Please, if I'm wrong, correct me! 

No sir I can not!

It has bigger consequences too, because tests showed that placing buildings when demand for them did not exist, leads to other problems.

It would be nice to mod Plop Buildings so they could only be placed when sufficient demand exists. I know we can set conditions, but I've yet to experiment with whether than can accurately tap into demand. But my idea was something like if 200% of the demand required exists, then let it be Plopped.

10 hours ago, chfzdn said:

I need more stable commercial.

9 hours ago, chfzdn said:

That's because I have another city just with residential and there are lots of unemployment due to lack of jobs.

If those residents wanted jobs of the correct type that had grown and could get to them, then they shouldn't be unstable. If your thinking goes, to force lots of Commercial to fix this, you may be ignoring the bigger picture. You have to ask yourself, why are those Commercial buildings not sustainable, this is the game's way of telling you something is wrong. The mix of who works where is not as simple as Sims work, there are different levels of jobs that require different levels of EQ and wealth sims. Imagine an Office in the real world, to function most of it's employees could be reasonably educated middle class ($$ wealth) employees. But, if a few upper class ($$$ wealth) managers weren't also working there, who'd run the office? Likewise if no lower class ($ wealth) cleaners worked there, it couldn't function as a safe space for working. This is a simplified example, but the point being the right mix of employees needs to exist to meet the needs of shops, offices or industry. If one part of the chain is completely missing, you can expect problems. It's also possible a commuting problem prevents workers from taking those jobs, who would otherwise be suitable.

[smf_16 1,835]

On 23-7-2020 at 12:45 PM, chfzdn said:

But, I want more than that. I want those plopped commercial service and office to be counted in the census. That's because I have another city just with residential and there are lots of unemployment due to lack of jobs. I struggle to get higher buildings despite the demand is high. So, I need to plop some buildings with lots of jobs from the game using buildingplop cheat. I think, the building need to be counted by the census to reduce the unemployment happening in the other city.

I'm sure that it is technically possible to growify commercial as well. I did not add it because as @carlosmarcelo pointed out there's simply no need to: the jobs can be properly reached when plopped with the BuildingPlop cheat.

I'm not an expert in the how the entire RCI simulator works, but as @rsc204 points out there are probably other reasons than the commercial building not being growified. Think for example about jobs that civic buildings such as schools provide: they don't belong to a zoneType - which is basically what "growifying" is: changing the zoneType - and still they're properly taken into account in the simulation.

[Wiimeiser 444]

So AFAICT plopping RCI creates garbage data outside of the game's writing range. Or, more accurately, it creates garbage workers with no resident info attached, so it can't delete them.

[rsc204 21,808]

On 24/07/2020 at 4:56 PM, smf_16 said:

Think for example about jobs that civic buildings such as schools provide: they don't belong to a zoneType - which is basically what "growifying" is: changing the zoneType - and still they're properly taken into account in the simulation.

I'd have to do some digging here to jog my memory, but I do recall something about this affecting demand. I know such civic jobs do not show up in the Census Repository, so if I'm remembering right, having a large percentage of such may actually be really negative for the simulation.

On 31/07/2020 at 4:59 AM, Wiimeiser said:

So AFAICT plopping RCI creates garbage data outside of the game's writing range. Or, more accurately, it creates garbage workers with no resident info attached, so it can't delete them.

Something outside of the "Game's writing range", i.e. data that doesn't conform to the index or has no suitable place in a data array, would either be lost, corrupted or attempting to access it would cause a CTD/Error trapping routine of some sort. I'm not sure where you are getting this idea from, it's certainly not the same as saying they are garbage workers or that they can't be deleted? Is this simply your conclusion or have you seen signs to this effect in-game?

But if such Civic jobs could not be "deleted", that would be a problem for every player. Find a Police/Fire station, hospital or other Civic Building. Using the route query tool, trace that back to a commuter's home. Make sure this is a stable city where sims are mostly staying in the same jobs. Then delete the Civic building, if all the sims in the Residence after the change is refreshed at the simulator level, (run for a couple years to be sure), find other jobs, then we can be pretty confident your hypothesis is not correct.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

On 7/30/2020 at 7:59 PM, Wiimeiser said:

plopping RCI creates garbage data outside of the game's writing range. Or, more accurately, it creates garbage workers

I think those ploppables create jobs, not workers. The problems arise elsewhere in the simulation (somewhere among drivers and demand etc, black magic as far as I'm concerned).

[justforfun 7,802]

I think you should definitely growify commercials too. If nothing else because ploppables and growables are by default associated with different sidewalk textures. When you plop a building, the network next to it will show grass as in low-density. This is something I have always found annoying with landmarks, for example. But if you growify that building, the network will display sidewalk textures according to the density you choose. 

On top of that, it would be nice to see blue and orange distinct in the map when checking the zoning. 

I suspect, but I'm not certain, that plopping or growing commercials also makes a difference in terms of automata traffic. 

So please, by all means do growify commercials. Thanks to your tool I am building a region with 100% plopped buildings and it's a delight. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

20 hours ago, justforfun said:

I suspect, but I'm not certain, that plopping or growing commercials also makes a difference in terms of automata traffic. 

It so happens I've done a lot of automata research in the past couple of weeks and I can confirm this to be true. The random automata has up to three different variables it uses to decide what to spawn near:

-- zone type, wealth, & purpose filters for automata families
-------------------------------------------------------------
-- Zone types compatible with automaton (none == can appear in any zone)
ZoneTypes = {
    residential = 1,
    commercial  = 2,
    industrial  = 3,
    res         = 1, -- abbrevs; same as above
    com         = 2,
    ind         = 3,                                
}
-- Zone wealth values compatible with automaton (none == can appear around any wealth)
WealthTypes = {
    low    = 1,
    medium = 2,
    high   = 3,
}
-- Zone purpose types compatible with automaton (none == can appear around any purpose)
PurposeTypes = {
    residence     = 1,
    services      = 2,
    office        = 3,
    tourism       = 4,
    agriculture   = 5,
    processing    = 6,
    manufacturing = 7,
    high_tech     = 8
}

And as such, a plopped building wouldn't meet any of the criteria (with the possible exception of Zone Purpose = Tourism).

[justforfun 7,802]

18 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

And as such, a plopped building wouldn't meet any of the criteria.

Thanks for confirming this. I haven't investigated in depth yet, but this is something I've noticed very clearly with industrials. Before growification, plopped industrials would provide jobs but zero freight automata. After growification my roads are congested with trucks. 

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

Dunno if theres a plan growify plopped industrial too but this would be most useful as plopped industrial freight can't leave the lot if I remember correctly.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

9 minutes ago, Whte_rbt said:

Dunno if theres a plan growify plopped industrial too but this would be most useful as plopped industrial freight can't leave the lot if I remember correctly.

Tis already in the program.   (See the commands list in this post.)

[smf_16 1,835]

On 16-8-2020 at 12:16 PM, justforfun said:

Before growification, plopped industrials would provide jobs but zero freight automata. After growification my roads are congested with trucks. 

I guess that's because before growification, freight is unable to find it's way out. If nothing finds its way out, there will be no automata I imagine. For commercial this would be different as they only serve as destination.

It should be doable to growify commercial as well, but I still need to do a bit of research for it. The program needs to be able to tell what a plopped commercial looks like. What I do for the residentials is checking whether the zoneType is set to 0x0f (plopped) and checking whether it contains residential in its demand source index (see https://github.com/sebamarynissen/sc4/blob/master/lib/lot.js#L76). If it is, then I simply set the ZoneType to something residential instead.

The same strategy could be applied to commercials, but I think this means that third party lots that include a ploppable commercial will be growified then as well, not only the lots that are "true" growables, but plopped with the LotPlop or BuildingPlop cheat. I suspect that this is not an issue, but I am not 100% sure of it. As mentioned before, all my spare time is currently invested in my website so I can't say when I would be able to test this.

[justforfun 7,802]

6 hours ago, smf_16 said:

The same strategy could be applied to commercials, but I think this means that third party lots that include a ploppable commercial will be growified then as well, not only the lots that are "true" growables, but plopped with the LotPlop or BuildingPlop cheat. I suspect that this is not an issue, but I am not 100% sure of it. 

I'm not sure about ploppable commercials. They are typically landmarks with jobs, therefore fit both requirements, however would your tool turn them from landmarks into commercials? Would that even be possible to achieve in the savefile? If not I can see CTD risk. I'll be looking forward to your testing. 

Meanwhile, you could always make a version to be used only with growable commercials plopped through cheats.

[MaxMen011 18]

Hello and greetings! I'm having an issue using your program. I'm getting the error message when running it saying that "it's not A SimCity 4 savegame" when it is. The files are properly saved as .sc4 and i'm typing it in correctly in the proper and correct directory. I'm using your latest version 0.0.17. Is there something i'm not doing right? Thanks!

[smf_16 1,835]

Could you show me the exact command you're using and the exact output? It's probably related to the path to the city not properly being specified.