discovery Modifying .sc4 savegames: It IS possible!

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

This thread is starting to look sticky -- it's laying the foundation for a long-term development arm. If it grows development branches, it might even warrant its own subforum to hold all of the discussions for various mods, how-to articles, Q&A, and research lines.

If I understand correctly, this new technique only runs on saved games while SC4 is not running, is that right? If so, then we're looking at mods that are little executable external programs rather than something added into SC4 itself.

I saw Node.js mentioned above as the author's personal favorite language. What other language(s) could implement this technique? Not all of us are equipped to use Node.js. For instance, I'd rather use Java (in the Eclipse IDE). I also wouldn't mind using C++. Would anyone else be interested in developing this tech in a language other than Node.js?

We should think about how to generalize and share some common functions so that multiple implementations of virtually the same thing do not end up being written into a bunch of different mods. Since these mods will be external to SC4, I think we'd stay out of SC4Fix.dll, creating a new library (or library per language) instead. Am I comprehending this rightly?

 

[smf_16 1,835]

5 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

If I understand correctly, this new technique only runs on saved games while SC4 is not running, is that right? If so, then we're looking at mods that are little executable external programs rather than something added into SC4 itself.

That is correct. You need to close the game, run the program that alters the savegame file and then open the game again. Perhaps that it might work as well to temporarily change regions instead of fully exiting, but I haven't tested this.

6 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

I saw Node.js mentioned above as the author's personal favorite language. What other language(s) could implement this technique? Not all of us are equipped to use Node.js. For instance, I'd rather use Java (in the Eclipse IDE). I also wouldn't mind using C++.

In principle this whole thing is language-agnostic. What we're doing here is actually what we do when editing plugins with the reader as well: we're just changing some values inside files. Hence I think that an important step can be that the reader implements the checksum algorithm so that it is capable of modifying savegames. What I'm doing with my script is basically just automating some tasks as it can become rather cumbersome to mark all buildings historical in the reader as well, for example.

 

10 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

We should think about how to generalize and share some common functions so that multiple implementations of virtually the same thing do not end up being written into a bunch of different mods. Since these mods will be external to SC4, I think we'd stay out of SC4Fix.dll, creating a new library (or library per language) instead. Am I comprehending this rightly?

I have thought already of this as well and this is definitely not an easy question. One thing I had on my mind for example was to develop some kind of central "savegame manager" with a public API that can be used by modders to publish "plugins" for (which are actually pieces of code in this case). If it were completely up to me, I would do this in node.js as it has the benefits that:

• JavaScript is quick and easy to learn. This can lower the barrier for some people that are no programming experts.
• JavaScript can be run on any platform without hassle. No need to separately compile for Windows, Mac, Linux, ...
• Node.js is tightly coupled with C++ as it can call C++ libraries from within JavaScript easily. This means that if you're more of a C++ guy, that should also be possible.
• I know that bindings exist between node.js and C# so this might be an option as well.

Of course this is all from my personal point of view, having a lot of experience in this domain. I have to be honest as well that I cannot say at this point whether I will be around all the time to follow this up closely. SimCity always comes in waves with me, the last wavetop being more than 2 years ago until recently... So I am absolutely open for other proposals as well.

It's definitely unexplored terrain here. We're no longer dealing with "put-this-in-your-plugins-folder" mods as we're no longer creating content, but actually programming something to do with the content. As you said, this might be the foundation of an entirely new development arm. Quite exciting, right?

 

- Seba

[smf_16 1,835]

So, about those ploppable residentials... I tried some stuff with an existing city of mine. My first finding is that the sudden appearance of a new building that needs a way out does shock the traffic simulator a bit. It was going completely nuts after I started the simulation, including No Job Zots and people from my existing suburbs actually commuting to my new appartments. They were probably just curious about all this "fuzz about Ploppable Residentials". 

Anyway, after a month or so the situation normalized and the No Job Zot disappeared. People from the new appartments were commuting to their job normally:

I went on a bit and while paused I built an entire neighbourhood and ran it through the program. The same thing happened when I re-entered: quite of a shock with plentiful No Job Zots, but after some time they disappeared without any abandonment and people were commuting normally. As such I think we're looking here at the first functional plopped residential neighbourhood ever. I tried to make it look good for this occasion 

 

TL;DR: Don't be shocked if you see a lot of No Job Zots after running the script. It seems like the simulator needs some time to process the new situation. Give it a few game months and for all I've discovered the game behaves fine afterwards. Perhaps just go easy on it and don't build an entire 4x4 tile at once.

Happy testing people! What a great way to start the weekend I'd say!  

Oh and hey, don't forget to backup of course!  

 

- Seba

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

4 hours ago, smf_16 said:

JavaScript is quick and easy to learn.

Tell that to the folks who won't hire me  :/

Hey wait a second... If I provably come up to speed on this for SC4, maybe you could tell them (if I use you as a reference after writing something that works).

[smf_16 1,835]

10 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

Hey wait a second... If I provably come up to speed on this for SC4, maybe you could tell them (if I use you as a reference after writing something that works).

Would be happy to!

In the meantime I've experimented a little more, this time with bridges. I started a city, made a bridge in it and plopped a lot right next to it. I exited the game, wrote some code that moves the lot

let lot = lotFile.lots[0];
lot.minZ -= 3;
lot.maxZ -= 3;

and opened up SimCity again. The city opened happily and this was the result:

Some interesting stuff to note here. The base textures and overlay textures are moved correctly and are displayed correctly even under the bridge. No conflicts here with any reserved tiles or something. Buildings and props didn't move though, but that seems logical because if you're editing props or buildings in the lot editor, the changes won't be reflected in the game before rebuilding the lot. This is not the case for textures (I guess a saw the term "hot reloading" somewhere). Apparently the game simply extracts any props from a lot and puts it in its own props list and no longer has the props linked to the parent lot, but I think that this behaviour was well known already.

I also tried drawing a road over the  space that now should have become available, but this wasn't possible. It still tells me I can't place on top of reserved tiles, so I guess somewhere in the savegame is still a record of reserved tiles as well. I don't know if this has been figured out yet, but I don't see any reference to it in the wiki. This also made me think if the same thing happened with the ploppable residentials and indeed even though the ploppable residentials did have a green zone rectangle underneath, it was impossible to build roads over them as you are able to with "normal" growables. Not really an issue though because bulldozing those plopped residentials seems to work after all. I think we really have to figure out how these reserved tiles work.

Some interesting stuff also happened when saving. Saving by Ctrl+S did not crash the game, however when I exited to region without saving, the game crashed. Still, when I opened up the city again, the changes that I made actually were persisted. This is rather interesting as you would expect that exiting to region without saving does not need the city anymore. Moreover, when I opened another city in the region and exited to region without saving here, the game did not crash and showed the region correctly. So it doesn't have something to do with building up the region view, it is actually related to the city itself, but the weird thing is that you'd expect "Exit to region without saving" to just leave everything alone.

I decided to see what happens if I move back the lot to its old position using the same script. This is the result:

The base textures have been moved back into place, but interestingly the textures under the bridge that now fall outside of the lots boundaries are still there! I have absolutely no explanation for this. Are the textures being kept somewhere in the savegame after all? No clue.

I tried to save again - which was successful - and then exited to region without saving. No crash this time, so the previous saves did not critically corrupt the savegame due to a lot being under a bridge.

While putting lots under bridges is all fun and stuff, I think the real value here will lie in putting functional transport networks under bridges, but this will require some information about the network subfiles in a game. And even if we succeed to draw roads under bridges by modifying the savegame, the question still remains open whether the exit-to-region-without-saving crash would also occur in this case. While the city still seems to be functioning after normal saves, I think it's a no-go to have this exit-to-region crash as a side effect.

As for @Wiimeiser's questions about bridges, I'm inclined to say that:

• The game will probably be able to handle bridges that are adjacent.
• Concerning crossing bridges I'm less sure, but personally I think it's possible.
• It is unknown whether this "exit-to-region-crash" would be present as well. Unfortunately I'm inclined to say that it would.

 

- Seba

[Handyman 765]

This is a very impressive development. I will certainly run some tests as soon as I can. (This is my busiest time of the year)

Keep up the good work.

[Wiimeiser 444]

Testing adjacent and crossing bridges may require we find a way to spontaneously generate them rather than move existing ones.

 

For the reserved tiles, are there any subfiles with unknown contents? Do these change at all when plopping a lot? That should be investigated.

[carlosmarcelo 975]

On 21/06/2019 at 11:31 AM, smf_16 said:

Let me know if this explanation was clear for you. And I know I said it before, but please backup any work you're planning on modifying. We don't know yet if there are any side effects so it would be a shame to lose valuable work in an rush of excitement.

Hi! Yesterday I did some tests and plays. It's very funny! 

First: your explanation was clear! The node js framework is very easy to install. I believe that plataform, code language is not important in this moment: I think the community should focus on the impacts of changes in savegame file and after jogability. Maybe, in soon, to create a subforum with a each topic to each discuss possibility. Now is early.

I liked so much transform lotplop residentials in functional residentials because now I can build zones this way (thanks a lot @smf_16 and @simmaster07):

 

I will try sumarize my conclusions a some small problems I saw.

First, I used historical, it works good! I thought that did works just in Residencials, but I saw it works in Commercial and Industrial Zones. Thats ok.

When I used growify, I observed:

1. When I use --force, the savegamefile was zero.
2. It does not matter if I choose R1 (R $?), R2 (R $$?) Or R3 (R $$$?), It does all 3 always.
3. The plop build growified, if abandoned, no matter what you do, it will never become "not abandoned" (here I have doubt if this is possible in "normal grow builds")
4. The plop build growified, if it is demolished, it does not allow another building to grow: it is necessary to rezone.

About item 4, I have this pictures:

After demolish a plop build growified (it was SG Princess Tower, R$$$ around 2000, abandoned). I waited some years and... Nothing happened. I remember that this color means zone residencial occupied.

Then, I rezoned: same size, same type, same direction.

In less one year, a new build R$$$ growed in the same space.

This was all for this weekend, people. 

I have .sc4 files "before and after" case someone wants to see, too. 

In the next weekend I will try new tests. 

 

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

5 hours ago, smf_16 said:

I think we really have to figure out how these reserved tiles work.

Prior work on removing "immortal lots" might shed light

[smf_16 1,835]

2 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

First, I used historical, it works good! I thought that did works just in Residencials, but I saw it works in Commercial and Industrial Zones. Thats ok.

That is correct, for the moment it simply sets historical for all lots (even parks and non-functional landmarks, although these don't show a "make historical" checkbox if you query them). It is definitely possible to allow some more fine-grained control here but I simply did not include it for the proof of concept.

2 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

When I use --force, the savegamefile was zero.

I noticed this yesterday as well. This only seems to happen though if you put the --force in front of the city name. I did say you have to do it like that in my original post, but I modified it. The correct syntax would be

sc4 growify --zone-type="R3" "path/to/city.sc4" --force

where --force is at the back. I corrected my original post and also published an update of the module on npm that protects against zeroed savegames if you mistype it. You can update to the latest version running

npm install -g sc4@latest

 

2 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

It does not matter if I choose R1 (R $?), R2 (R $$?) Or R3 (R $$$?), It does all 3 always.

Perhaps the naming isn't too clear here, but this is the zone that it should put underneath the plopped residential, where R1 is Low Density, R2 Medium Density and R3 High Density. This is a bit confusing, I know.

2 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

The plop build growified, if abandoned, no matter what you do, it will never become "not abandoned" (here I have doubt if this is possible in "normal grow builds")

I don't really understand what you mean here. Do you mean that if a building was abandoned and you "growify" it, it is still abandoned? In that case that is true, however I guess it should be possible to convert abandoned buildings back to normal as well. Haven't figured out how that would work though.

2 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

The plop build growified, if it is demolished, it does not allow another building to grow: it is necessary to rezone.

I think this has something to do with the reserved zones as I mentioned in one of my posts above. I'm going to try if I can figure out how I can unset this. I thought that it might have something to do with the Building subfile here - meaning that if there's a building, you can't build over it, even if that building is now part of a lot. However, if you say that no new buildings would grow, there might be some other factors here too. Definitely needs some more research.

Many thanks for testing and sharing some feedback! 

2 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

Testing adjacent and crossing bridges may require we find a way to spontaneously generate them rather than move existing ones.

I think so too. The moving of the lots was simply to check if the game could handle this, or whether it would crash spontaneously. I couldn't do this with transport networks because I haven't figured out a way yet to generate them. I don't know if there's anyone - perhaps someone from the NAM team? - that has more info about this.

 

- Seba

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Just a tiny update atm: I've successfully run the historical option on a fully developed city and every building I checked is appropriately marked.

[TekindusT 3,809]

Wow, these developments can mean a revolution to how we play the game! Thanks for your hard work to you all!

[Wiimeiser 444]

There must be something strange going on behind the scenes with lots... Hmm...

 

Download and install the BSC Waterfronts (I think those are the ones) and put two parking lot segments next to each other facing an existing road. If you did this correctly the NAM workaround for FAR T-intersections should kick in and override the lots, making them immortal, and leaving the frame behind if you do manage to successfully demolish them. What is going on there, I wonder?

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

I'm pleased to also report complete success with setting existingly built RCI buildings to historical. First of all I created an new region named "Saveland" for the general purpose of testing here. Then I made a new city on a small tile named Historical Hill.

As follows:

(Of course, with such a name, there really is a small hill there too.)

 

Sure enough, once I'd confirmed it worked on all RCI buildings:

Even knowing how this would work, it was quite the amazement to see it actually transformed in front of my eyes. It's unbelievable!

One thing I've discovered so far is how the historical preference applies to zones and not individual lots. This means how if bulldozing any RCI lot and they are still marked as historical when growing again with a new building. As @carlosmarcelo found earlier with needing to re-zone with the plopped residentials, this also applies to anything historical. Perhaps it's actually quite a useful feature thinking about it. Because then how the land is assigned to have the building preserved, and if wanting to redevelop a building then it'd save the need to toggle the checkbox each time, which might be easy to forget.

As can be seen, my test was done using a mixture of custom and Maxis lots also, which proves how there's compatibility of the functions for custom content too. I thought about testing in plain vanilla, but figured how extra variables might actually prove everything is working. Now of course, I'm yet to test in a bigger city tile and running for an extended period. This initial proof though is very pleasing to see how it does work.

Now to try some plopped residentials I think...

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@smf_16

Ofc, I don't know what I'm doing having never coded in JavaScript, but I did tweak lines 29, 86, 162, and 262 in Cli.js and you are welcome to copy and paste them if you like what I've done. ( Or there's prolly a better way to accomplish this which I don't know. )

The sc4 --help looks like this with the changes:

 

Attached file: cli.zip

Edit: I see I forgot the new line for --Block, but I'll leave it as-is since I don't know if you even want or need this.
(And it could use a description of Low, Medium, and High density after the R numbers.)

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Disregard the above.

I've since figured out one can use sc4 <the command name> --help to get the options list.

[Lucario Boricua 7,028]

I was wondering if progress with deciphering the game save files could later help in figuring out the inner workings of tunnels and bridges, two areas in which the NAM has actually experienced more limited development compared to other transport networks.

[simmaster07 1,220]

On 6/19/2019 at 10:33 PM, smf_16 said:

I'm actually interested in the story behind how @simmaster07 found the checksum algorithm. From what I've read he uses the Mac version which is non-obfuscated or something. Still it's remarkable that it hasn't been noted that this could make editing savegames possible as well.

Right. Specifically, the Mac version of SimCity 4 retains symbols, which means that the names of functions and classes are still embedded in the executable, unlike the PC version. This still requires some reverse engineering work, which is touchy to discuss on this forum since the legality of it depends on your jurisdiction. (Granted, the SimCity 4 EULA allows reverse engineering "to the extent permitted under applicable law.")

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

So, back to testing. I created a ploppable residential lot and have it in the Rewards menu so it's not all cluttered up in with Landmarks.

 

And then creating some places to work, plopping the residential while the game was paused, running your Growify command, and then letting some time run after reloading the game:

 

I'm really hoping plopped Industrial can be Growified too so the freight trucks can get out of the lot.

[smf_16 1,835]

8 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

One thing I've discovered so far is how the historical preference applies to zones and not individual lots. This means how if bulldozing any RCI lot and they are still marked as historical when growing again with a new building. As @carlosmarcelo found earlier with needing to re-zone with the plopped residentials, this also applies to anything historical. Perhaps it's actually quite a useful feature thinking about it. Because then how the land is assigned to have the building preserved, and if wanting to redevelop a building then it'd save the need to toggle the checkbox each time, which might be easy to forget.

If I'm not mistaken this is actually standard game behavior. If you were to make everything historical by hand, the same behaviour is observed that any lots that grow after you've demolished a historical building will be historical themselves as well.

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'm really hoping plopped Industrial can be Growified too so the freight trucks can get out of the lot.

I have no reason to believe that this wouldn't be possible as well. Planning to try this out in the coming days.

5 hours ago, Lucario Boricua said:

I was wondering if progress with deciphering the game save files could later help in figuring out the inner workings of tunnels and bridges, two areas in which the NAM has actually experienced more limited development compared to other transport networks.

Yes, I think that this might create some very interesting opportunities. Most notably I'm thinking of:

• Creating diagonal tunnels (although still with an orthogonal entrance). If you use drawpaths when having a tunnel, you can see that the path goes directly from the entrance to the exit, so I'm thinking that if we can generate these paths this might enable diagonal tunnels (and by diagonal I'm meaning any angle, not just 45°).
• Creating tunnels with three entrance/exits that join somewhere in the middle.
• Creating roads & other networks under bridges.

Based on @OrSpeeder's list, I guess the tunnels are stored in subfile 0x8A4BD52B as this corresponds to cSC4NetworkTunnelOccupant and bridges in subfile 0x49CC1BCD as this corresponds to cSC4NetworkBridgeOccupant.

- Seba

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I did some testing forcing different hex values for the zone change and here's the list you prolly already know:

0x01 = R - Low
0x02 = R - Medium
0x03 = R - High
0x04 = C - Low
0x05 = C - Medium
0x06 = C- High
0x07 = I - Low
0x08 = I - Medium
0x09 = I - High
0x0A = Military
0x0B = Airport
0x0C = Seaport
0x0D = Spaceport
0x0E = Plopped Building
0x0F = Plopped Building
 

Ofc, the ones at 10 and up aren't useful in anyway for this project.

[smf_16 1,835]

Thanks! While I guessed it would be something like that, I didn't know for sure yet. Will certainly be helpful!

How did you manage to show the hex values in the Savegame explorer instead of "R - Low" etc? I didn't find a function for this in the Savegame explorer.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

22 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

How did you manage to show the hex values in the Savegame explorer instead of "R - Low" etc?

I didn't.

What I did do was plop my 4 x 4 residential lot in the game, save, and then edit this part of your source code:

let zoneType = ({
    "R1": 0x01,
    "R2": 0x02,
    "R3": 0x03
})[type] || 0x03;

I changed each hex value to 0x04, ran it, and then peeked in Savegame explorer to see what it said the zoneType was. I did that up thru 0x10 and SGE did show a colored square, but said the description was 16 so I knew it didn't have a name. While I don't quite understand how the code knows if the lot.isPloppedResidential (or rather if it's not cause of the ! in front of it in line 123), I did check that changing all 4 of those hex values caused it to change the zoning of my lot in the game.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

2 hours ago, smf_16 said:

If I'm not mistaken this is actually standard game behavior. If you were to make everything historical by hand, the same behaviour is observed that any lots that grow after you've demolished a historical building will be historical themselves as well.

Cool. I didn't realise it works that way by default, as I'd never previously thought to bulldoze a historical lot. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

33 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

How did you manage to show the hex values in the Savegame explorer instead of "R - Low" etc? I didn't find a function for this in the Savegame explorer.

If you're referring to the extra data in the right hand column, this would be from an update to the program to include newly decoded subfiles back in 2012. This package contains a Python script named external.py which is to be replaced with the existing file. Then as @CorinaMarie previewed above, upon startup and the extra data can be seen once navigating through the categories as listed. So maybe this could be useful for greater understanding of the saved file composition, including for comparison purposes.

The description there goes on to say:

Quote

With this new information comes a slight update for the SC4 Savegame Explorer, which enables browsing all these newly decoded subfiles. However, none are editable because SC4 uses a certain checksum algorithm, voiding the entire subfile if anything is changed.

As we know, times have changed since said statement was written.

Given SC4Devotion is currently experiencing technical issues, for the benefit of others I'll attach the small yet significant 15 kB file below:

SC4SaveUpdate.zip

 

[carlosmarcelo 975]

19 hours ago, smf_16 said:

I don't really understand what you mean here. Do you mean that if a building was abandoned and you "growify" it, it is still abandoned? In that case that is true, however I guess it should be possible to convert abandoned buildings back to normal as well. Haven't figured out how that would work though.

When a build is abandoned, usually for demands and jobs problems, it can back if this problems was solved. I didn't reach to do this with this build, but I can't affirm that it happened because that is a plop "growificated".

 

19 hours ago, smf_16 said:

I think this has something to do with the reserved zones as I mentioned in one of my posts above. I'm going to try if I can figure out how I can unset this. I thought that it might have something to do with the Building subfile here - meaning that if there's a building, you can't build over it, even if that building is now part of a lot. However, if you say that no new buildings would grow, there might be some other factors here too. Definitely needs some more research.

Well, if I put a especific build there, I don't see problem to re-zone or to re-plop other build that I want. But, after I saw all thread here, I noticed that the challenge is discover about this reserved tiles.

 

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'm really hoping plopped Industrial can be Growified too so the freight trucks can get out of the lot.

YES!!! YES!!! I would like this. The same to the freight trains, correct? Both are out of the lot.

 

3 hours ago, smf_16 said:

I have no reason to believe that this wouldn't be possible as well. Planning to try this out in the coming days.

Thanks! I'm not developer, I'm sorry can't help too.

 

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I did some testing forcing different hex values for the zone change and here's the list you prolly already know:

0x01 = R - Low
(...)
0x0D = Spaceport
0x0E = Plopped Building
0x0F = Plopped Building

Cora, using cheat ctrl+x and typing PlaceZone ID, Xi, Zi, Xf, Zf (ex: PlaceZone 1, 5, 5, 10, 10) you put this zones in your city with this area. But let me add informations in your list:

0x00 = no-zone

0x0E = landfill

0x0F = city owned land

And others informations can be help in researchs:

cost to de-zone = (cost of "construct" no-zone + cost de-zone selected)

cost to zone = (cost of "destruct" no-zone + cost zone selected).

When you de-zone a place, the game, internally, do a zone of the no-zone, so it sum cost values of no-zone and de-zone selected. The same to when you to zone: the game sum cost of destruct a no-zone land with cost of zone seleceted.

I discovered this playing with values of the plugin ReZonePlus.dat.

 

  Edited June 23, 2019 by carlosmarcelo  
added informations about sums de-zone and re-zone

[smf_16 1,835]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

While I don't quite understand how the code knows if the lot.isPloppedResidential (or rather if it's not cause of the ! in front of it in line 123), I did check that changing all 4 of those hex values caused it to change the zoning of my lot in the game.

Have a look at line 195 in lib/lot-file.js. First of all it checks if the lot has it's zone type set to plopped (0x0f). If this is the case, it still has to check what type of plopped building it is. We don't want to "growify" our parks and non-functional landmarks as well obviously, so it looks at the jobCapacities entry, more specifically to the demandSourceIndices it finds here. If it finds either R§, R§§ or R§§§, it decides that it's a plopped residential. The full list of demand source indices is

0x00001010 = R§
0x00001020 = R§§
0x00001030 = R§§§
0x00003110 = CS§
0x00003120 = CS§§
0x00003130 = CS§§§
0x00003320 = CO§§
0x00003330 = CO§§§
0x00004100 = IR
0x00004200 = ID
0x00004300 = IM
0x00004400 = IHT

We'll have to use a similar strategy if we want to growify Commercial and Industrial as well.

2 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

If you're referring to the extra data in the right hand column, this would be from an update to the program to include newly decoded subfiles back in 2012. This package contains a Python script named external.py which is to be replaced with the existing file. Then as @CorinaMarie previewed above, upon startup and the extra data can be seen once navigating through the categories as listed. So maybe this could be useful for greater understanding of the saved file composition, including for comparison purposes.

I was referring to the fact that it seemed like she found a way to show the hex values instead of the textual zone types, but turns out she had to do it "the hard way" as well.  My savegame explorer looks pretty much the same, so I'm guessing I already have the latest update. Going to check just to be sure though.

EDIT: @Cyclone Boom Turns out I didn't have the latest version. This indeed does provide a lot more information. Thanks a lot! 

2 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

As we know, times have changed since said statement was written.

They did, they absolutely sure did... 

[carlosmarcelo 975]

8 hours ago, simmaster07 said:

This still requires some reverse engineering work, which is touchy to discuss on this forum since the legality of it depends on your jurisdiction. (Granted, the SimCity 4 EULA allows reverse engineering "to the extent permitted under applicable law.")

Sorry if it to be a very dumb questions: someone already asked to EA about unknown parts in savegame file?🤔

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

40 minutes ago, carlosmarcelo said:

already asked to EA about unknown parts in savegame file?

Oooh... Like connections. If we could reverse-engineer connections, then maybe we could cool-off infinite commuters, and create mods to deliver freight to neighbors, and - and - and...

I can imagine a future in which a game-launcher automatically runs some save-game apps after the game exits (modifying any save-game files updated since the launcher started). Such a launcher / script would "save" us from having to remember (and fat-finger) the command lines every time.

[smf_16 1,835]

Hello everyone, this is Seba speaking from the flight deck,

 

I released a new version of the sc4 program on npm. You can all get the latest version by running

npm install -g sc4@latest

in a command prompt.

There are quite a few changes:

• The historical and growify commands are now interactive. This means that you no longer need to use the flags such as --zone-type. You can simply run

  sc4 growify "path/to/city.sc4"
  sc4 historical "path/to/city.sc4"

  and an interactive interface will ask you some questions about what it should do.

• I've added support for plopped industrials & plopped agriculturals in the growify command. The interactive interface will let you specify which ones you want to growify. By default all types are selected. I've ran some tests and it seems to be working correctly.
  
   
  
  
   
• The historical command now allows you to specify what types of buildings you want to make historical. You can choose between residential, commercial, industrial or agricultural. By default, all types will be made historical.

Test away, folks!

 

- Seba

 

EDIT: For those of you running v0.0.8-alpha, there was a bug where "force mode" didn't do anything when being used with the growify command. It's fixed now, so run

 npm install -g sc4@latest

to update to the latest version! You can check your version by running

sc4 --version

 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

6 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

Cora, using cheat ctrl+x and typing PlaceZone ID, Xi, Zi, Xf, Zf (ex: PlaceZone 1, 5, 5, 10, 10) you put this zones in your city with this area. But let me add informations in your list:

0x00 = no-zone

0x0E = landfill

0x0F = city owned land

Seems it could very well be the difference between the data that the Savegame Explorer uses and the names in the game itself. It certainly makes sense that 0x0E would be the landfill cause otherwise it's not listed. And the 0x0F as city owned land makes sense cause that was the original intention Maxis would've had for the plopped buildings.

 

5 hours ago, smf_16 said:

Have a look at line 195 in lib/lot-file.js.

Ah! Now it makes perfect sense starting there and then seeing what it does in lines 201 to 211. Thanks!

 

1 hour ago, smf_16 said:

The historical and growify commands are now interactive. This means that you no longer need to use the flags such as --zone-type.

I've tested and the interactiveness works. (I personally prefer passing the parameters since I create a separate .cmd file for what I want to do.)

 

2 hours ago, smf_16 said:

For those of you running v0.0.8-alpha, there was a bug where "force mode" didn't do anything when being used with the growify command.

I installed the latest and I have 0.0.9alpha.

Note to other peeps: The --force switch is no supported. There will be a y/N question instead for overwriting the city as the last step for both the historical and the growify.

 

I did do a quick test for the historical and selected only residential and that worked fine in an existing city. The Ag, Industrial, and Commercial were left untouched as expected. I also did a growify with one plopped residential and that too  worked fine. (For the growify test I told it to growify all types and it figured out there was only one residential in that test to modify.)

I've got another project to work on for a while today, but I'll be testing more as I have time.