discovery Modifying .sc4 savegames: It IS possible!

[MaxMen011 18]

Attached is a screen shot of what i've been seeing.

[smf_16 1,835]

When you specify a path to a city that contains spaces, you should wrap it in quotes and make sure the path is correct. Currently you're already in the C:\Users\Windows directory which means that your command should become:

sc4 growify "documents/SimCity 4/Regions/Upland/New City.sc4"

It's often easier if you open up the command prompt in the correct folder. To do this, you can go to the folder in Windows explorer, then click on the address bar, type "cmd" and hit enter. It will fire up a command prompt where the working directory is set to your current directory. You'll then be able to use the command as

sc4 growify "New City.sc4"

but it still has to be wrapped in quotes as the city name contains spaces.

[MaxMen011 18]

So I did just that, and i'm still getting an error message. See attached screenshot

[smf_16 1,835]

Are you sure that New City.sc4 does exist in the folder? What is the name of the city that you want to growify?

[rsc204 21,808]

New City is very generic, if you have a single city tile without development, that might exist, but if you have than one without names, you’ll have New City_001, 002 and so on (or something along those lines). Once you’ve named a new city and saved, the file names change to the city’s name. Certainly seems like that might be the problem. A screenshot of the Region folder’s contents would clear this up. 

[MaxMen011 18]

5 hours ago, smf_16 said:

Are you sure that New City.sc4 does exist in the folder? What is the name of the city that you want to growify?

I'm exactly sure that its in the same folder. What you're seeing in the screenshot is what it is and the name of it.

[MaxMen011 18]

4 hours ago, rsc204 said:

New City is very generic, if you have a single city tile without development, that might exist, but if you have than one without names, you’ll have New City_001, 002 and so on (or something along those lines). Once you’ve named a new city and saved, the file names change to the city’s name. Certainly seems like that might be the problem. A screenshot of the Region folder’s contents would clear this up. 

I used this for other city files with different, less generic names before and had the same issue. I settled on New City because it's simple and generic enough to try this on and its also a city I want to experiment this on first to troubleshoot on before using it on my actual cities.

[rsc204 21,808]

Just now, MaxMen011 said:

I used this for other city files with different, less generic names before and had the same issue. I settled on New City because it's simple and generic enough to try this on and its also a city I want to experiment this on first to troubleshoot on before using it on my actual cities.

OK. But what we're asking would take you about 2 minutes, just so we can be absolutely certain something is wrong. Whereas, what you are asking the developer, would require a considerable effort to look into. I'm certain if there were a bug, smf_16 would take the time to look into it and resolve it. But if it were my code, I wouldn't do that until I saw the screenshot and had absolute proof first. I know this perhaps sounds like we don't believe you, but trust me the number of times I've had this exact same conversation, is precisely why I wouldn't invest the time until you provided what was asked. Because 9 times out of 10, it usually turns out that the user in question has in fact, made an error. But even if you have not, seeing the files and folder path, would also be useful for troubleshooting any fix too. Just my 10c of course, but again it doesn't seem like a big ask for you to take a screenshot and upload it.

[MaxMen011 18]

23 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

OK. But what we're asking would take you about 2 minutes, just so we can be absolutely certain something is wrong. Whereas, what you are asking the developer, would require a considerable effort to look into. I'm certain if there were a bug, smf_16 would take the time to look into it and resolve it. But if it were my code, I wouldn't do that until I saw the screenshot and had absolute proof first. I know this perhaps sounds like we don't believe you, but trust me the number of times I've had this exact same conversation, is precisely why I wouldn't invest the time until you provided what was asked. Because 9 times out of 10, it usually turns out that the user in question has in fact, made an error. But even if you have not, seeing the files and folder path, would also be useful for troubleshooting any fix too. Just my 10c of course, but again it doesn't seem like a big ask for you to take a screenshot and upload it.

I'm really confused as to what it is you're asking me to do and the kind of odd tone you're taking isn't helping. I'm not refusing to upload a screenshot and I have been following his instructions, I just uploaded a few of them, so I'm not sure what you mean. I'm not refusing to do what you're asking if that's what you're insinuating.

[rsc204 21,808]

5 hours ago, rsc204 said:

A screenshot of the Region folder’s contents would clear this up. 

I.e., open the SimCity 4\Regions folder in Windows Explorer. Then find the folder for the region we're talking about. Take a screenshot of that folder (showing the files with in it and their names), then upload it.

I didn't say you were refusing, but in fairness you neither did so nor asked for clarification either. I was merely pointing out that from a developers perspective, this is a really important point to be absolutely certain of before potentially wasting hours going through code, looking for a problem which may not exist. As such, even if it doesn't seem important to you, or perhaps if you don't feel it necessary, you should still do it.

Again, if this were my code, I simply would not take this any further until I had rock-solid evidence of the path/file name, so I knew for certain this wasn't user error. Perhaps my tone doesn't come across as the most friendly, for which you will simply have to excuse my personal failing, in that I simply know of no other way to make this point.

[carlosmarcelo 975]

On 01/02/2021 at 8:07 PM, MaxMen011 said:

Attached is a screen shot of what i've been seeing.

Hi! I think I know what's happen: the complete name path has a space. You need call the parameter of command with quotes.

Example:

sc4 growify "users\me\SimCity 4\my city.sc4”

Note the error message tell us about a file that, in really, it is a folder.

I hope this help you.

[MaxMen011 18]

2 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

Hi! I think I know what's happen: the complete name path has a space. You need call the parameter of command with quotes.

Example:

sc4 growify "users\me\SimCity 4\my city.sc4”

Note the error message tell us about a file that, in really, it is a folder.

I hope this help you.

This worked out for me and it works just fine now! Obrigado! You were very helpful! 

[Kloudkicker 4,561]

Interesting topic and very intriguing. I was wondering if this only has to be do once to a city, and not every time after a new save. Or after ploping a new item? I don't remember reading anything about either way. That's the only questioning I have before trying.

Thank you,

Kloudkicker

  Edited February 3, 2021 by Kloudkicker  

[smf_16 1,835]

8 hours ago, Kloudkicker said:

Interesting topic and very intriguing. I was wondering if this only has to be do once to a city, and not every time after a new save. Or after ploping a new item? I don't remember reading anything about either way. That's the only questioning I have before trying.

Unfortunately you have to run this everytime you have plopped a residential. The reason is that - without DLL modding - there's no way to tell the game that it should treat a plopped residential differently. My tool circumvents this by fixing the .sc4 savegame itself, tricking the game into thinking that the residential is a grown one when you open the city the next time. This is also why you need to save and exit the city first, otherwise there's no .sc4 file to work with. Note that exiting to region is sufficient, no need to quit SimCity entirely which speeds up things considerably.

Obviously you don't have to run my tool after every item you plop. You can entirely plop a functional Manhattan if you like, but you have to make sure that your residentials don't get abandoned before you're able to run the tool. That's why you should always plop your residentials with the game on pause.

[carlosmarcelo 975]

23 hours ago, MaxMen011 said:

This worked out for me and it works just fine now! Obrigado!

Por nada! Você fala português?  

A tip I give to you is run sc4 app with a copy of your city in the same directory.
For example:
1. Save and close the city.
2. You select the city file in region folder and copy to desktop.
3. Run the follow similar comands in prompt:
cd\users\me\desktop
c:\users\me\desktop>sc4 growify namecity.sc4
or
c:\users\me\desktop>sc4 growify "my name city.sc4"
4. After, put your city file come of back in region folder.
5. You load the city and have fun.

ALWAYS DO BACKUP in each operation. Fica esperto! 

[MaxMen011 18]

22 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

Por nada! Você fala português?  

 

I've been to both your country, Brazil. and Portugal, so I can speak and understand a little Portuguese. Mas nao e muito bom.

[smf_16 1,835]

Hello everyone,

I've been away some time, but I wanted to pop in to say that I've published a website called growifier.com which basically is a GUI around the growify command of my tool. I decided to create a separate thread for it here: 

 I hope that this makes growifying your residentials a bit easier if you're not used to using the command line a lot!

 

- Seba

[justforfun 7,802]

Thanks a lot, @smf_16. Any chance of having commercials growified as well? Although not strictly necessary, it would help with pavement selection and automata generation (and to see the blue on zone maps). 

[smf_16 1,835]

From memory, I remember briefly looking into this last Summer, but the conclusion was that it was not as straightforward as I thought. The problem is detecting when something is a "plopped commercial". For residentials this is easy, I just check if it has residential capacity and whether its ZoneType is set to "Plopped". For commercials, this doesn't work iirc as it would interfere with landmarks with jobs. I guess my conclusion was that this would require looking up the building exemplar from the plugins folder, which just wasn't worth it, given that plopped commercials are more or less functional anyway.

Again, this is from memory, could just as well be that I didn't have enough time to look deeper into it. In any case, if someone has the knowledge on how to tell whether a building is truely a plopped commercial, that would surely help. This code might shed some light on it as well.

[justforfun 7,802]

6 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

The problem is detecting when something is a "plopped commercial".

Thanks, Seba, that sounds entirely correct to me, so I think for now you could just growify the actual commercial buildings and perhaps look into landmarks with jobs later on. It would then be responsibility of the player to make sure their commercials are actually commercials, before growifying them. Please let us enjoy all that is possible for the moment. 

[twalsh102 1,601]

CAVEAT:  While I don't understand everything @smf_16 's code does, I can understand enough to determine what it's looking for.

Just to review: any lot with an RCI-type buillding, and which has the ZoneType set as "Plopped" is technically a landmark. Thus Commercial and Industrial lots with a ZoneType of "Plopped" and referencing a Building Exemplar that has a "CapacitySatisfied" property designating Jobs, is a "Landmark with Jobs." This has been a thing for a long time. However, Residential Landmarks (i.e. a Residential-type building with a CapacitySatisfied property designating Residents on a lot with the ZoneType set to "Plopped") has never been possible before because a Plopped Residential Lot would always abandon within a short period of time (hence the need for smf_16's code).

So, it appears that the basis for smf_16's code (as currently written) is that it only works on "Landmarks" (i.e. Plopped lots), as this is what it is checking for. While he does include code that will recognize Commercial and Industrial types, unless there is some sort of flag in the savegame file that designates an RCI growable lot as having been "plopped" (using the lotplop "cheat"), there's no way to differentiate such a lot from a growable lot that actually grew.

Unless I'm totally mistaken (and of course that's NEVER happened before), that is the gist of his comments in his last post.

[smf_16 1,835]

@twalsh102 Yeah that pretty much sums it up I guess. For all I know, the only thing LotPlop does is setting the ZoneType of the building to "Plopped". (That actually makes sense because the game can't know what density it should give to the zone underneath the lot). So basically, if commercials were growified in the same way as residentials, it would cause them to be vulnerable to abandonment and redevelopment too. This means that your commercial "Landmarks with jobs" would be eligible to become abandoned too, and that's probably not what you want and expect! But there's no way to make a distinction between a "landmark with jobs" plopped from the menu, or a growable commercial that was plopped using LotPlop and hence you're stuck with that. So as a conclusion I would say that it's definitely possible to growify commercials, the question is just whether it is desirable because it breaks what people expect.

By the way, the same problem would exist if there were a lot of "landmarks with residential capacity" too, but nobody ever bothered to make them because they get abandoned anyway!

[Wiimeiser 444]

Don't power plants have jobs? If so, would a building have to be a power plant and thus produce power to have jobs, not become abandoned, then not turn into something else?

[justforfun 7,802]

13 hours ago, smf_16 said:

it's definitely possible to growify commercials, the question is just whether it is desirable

I certainly desire it, and I'm not sure I understand how making a commercial subject to redevelopment would be less desirable than making a residential subject to redevelopment. Thanks to your tool I plop 100% of my cities and I rarely run into redevelopment issues. Besides, you have kindly included the option of marking the growified buildings as historical, so I assume commercials could be marked historical in the same way?

I think your great tool is already only used by a small minority of users who pretty much know what they are doing. You run no risk of disappointing anyone, in fact you can only make us happier by providing a further option. 

[Flann 1,709]

1 hour ago, justforfun said:

I certainly desire it, and I'm not sure I understand how making a commercial subject to redevelopment would be less desirable than making a residential subject to redevelopment. Thanks to your tool I plop 100% of my cities and I rarely run into redevelopment issues. Besides, you have kindly included the option of marking the growified buildings as historical, so I assume commercials could be marked historical in the same way?

I think your great tool is already only used by a small minority of users who pretty much know what they are doing. You run no risk of disappointing anyone, in fact you can only make us happier by providing a further option. 

I really have no skin in the game here, but it seems like if it would be doable to make this function, then maybe it could be done and made optional?  Just a thought

[smf_16 1,835]

20 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

Don't power plants have jobs? If so, would a building have to be a power plant and thus produce power to have jobs, not become abandoned, then not turn into something else?

If I remember correctly, those are just "jobs", not commercial jobs, so those wouldn't be growified if I specifically look for commercial jobs.

 

9 hours ago, justforfun said:

I certainly desire it, and I'm not sure I understand how making a commercial subject to redevelopment would be less desirable than making a residential subject to redevelopment.

Well the problem is not making "growable LotPlopped commercials" subject to redevelopment, but "functional landmarks with commercial jobs" too, as there would be no way to distinguish them.

 

9 hours ago, justforfun said:

Besides, you have kindly included the option of marking the growified buildings as historical, so I assume commercials could be marked historical in the same way?

That's correct.

 

9 hours ago, justforfun said:

I think your great tool is already only used by a small minority of users who pretty much know what they are doing. You run no risk of disappointing anyone, in fact you can only make us happier by providing a further option. 

I agree that the tool is currently mostly used by people who know what they are doing, but the goal of growifier.com is to making it more accessible to the general public.

 

8 hours ago, Flann said:

I really have no skin in the game here, but it seems like if it would be doable to make this function, then maybe it could be done and made optional?  Just a thought

Yeah, just like growifying residential and industrial is currently optional, commercial could be made optional as well, perhaps with a giant warning of the side effects this might have on funtional landmarks. I'll see if I find some time to experiment a bit with this in the coming days.

[justforfun 7,802]

36 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

just like growifying residential and industrial is currently optional, commercial could be made optional as well, perhaps with a giant warning of the side effects this might have on funtional landmarks.

That's precisely it, Seba, let me give you a HUGE thank you even before you start off doing this. I do think this is the perfect solution. 

[smf_16 1,835]

It's done. Implementing it was easy peasy and I've published a new version of the tool on npm, so you can install using 

npm i -g sc4@latest

I am going to wait a bit to update the website though until I get some feedback. Everything seems to work fine. This is what I've observed:

• Buildings providing civic jobs (such as power plants, schools, ...) are not growified, as expected.
• Jobless landmarks remain landmarks.
• Both plopped landmarks with commerical jobs and LotPlopped growable commercials are properly growified. A blue zone shows up underneath them and the sidewalks are adapted once you draw a new road on top of it. The "drawback" here is that the buildings lose their "immortability", meaning that it's now possible to plop other buildings or draw roads on top of them, something that wasn't the case before. Likewise, if you destroy them, the blue zone underneath it stays and will soon get redeveloped. Again, this was to be expected.

[smf_16 1,835]

Now that growable commercials are a thing, I've decided to look into the infamous phantom slider bug. I didn't really have much experience with it, so I still had to do some research first. I dug into the Budget Subfiles and found that the cSC4LineItem (0xaa313c9f) file was the one I need. Basically this groups the costs for a specific building and purpose. This means that an entry exists for the combination (small elementary school, staff) and (small elementary school, buses). Such an entry basically holds 4 things:

• The number of times the building occurs in the city
• The total monthly cost if all buildings were funded 100%.
• The actual total monthly costs (called the expenses).
• The total monthly income.

If you divide the expenses by the total costs, you get the value that is shown in the slider in the budget window for the small elementary school. I also found on the wiki that the funding percentages of the individual buildings are stored as an SGProp, so I pretty much know now where all the variables involved in the slider bug are hiding.

Next I created an empty city and plopped a small elementary school in it, which has a base monthly cost of 300§ (buses excluded). At that moment, the cSC4LineItem for it held 300§ as total monthly cost, and 300§ as monthly expenses. I then changed the total monthly cost tot 310§ with my program, while keeping the expenses at 300. (Note that I did not modify the monthly costs of the school with the reader!)

As soon as I opened the city, the bug kicked in. The funding slider of the school slowly went down and I kept a log of it by inspecting my city each month. It looks like this:

Spoiler

# I've used € instead of § to make it easier in Excel

Funding	 Cost 	 Expense 
100%	 € 310,00 	 € 300,00 
97%	 € 310,00 	 € 291,00 
94%	 € 310,00 	 € 282,00 
91%	 € 310,00 	 € 273,00 
88%	 € 310,00 	 € 264,00 
85%	 € 310,00 	 € 255,00 
82%	 € 310,00 	 € 246,00 
79%	 € 310,00 	 € 238,00 
77%	 € 310,00 	 € 230,00 
74%	 € 310,00 	 € 223,00 
72%	 € 310,00 	 € 216,00 
69%	 € 310,00 	 € 208,00 
67%	 € 310,00 	 € 201,00 
65%	 € 310,00 	 € 194,00 
63%	 € 310,00 	 € 188,00 
61%	 € 310,00 	 € 182,00 
59%	 € 310,00 	 € 176,00 
57%	 € 310,00 	 € 170,00 
55%	 € 310,00 	 € 165,00 
53%	 € 310,00 	 € 160,00 
52%	 € 310,00 	 € 155,00 
50%	 € 310,00 	 € 150,00 
48%	 € 310,00 	 € 145,00 
47%	 € 310,00 	 € 140,00 
45%	 € 310,00 	 € 135,00 
44%	 € 310,00 	 € 131,00 
42%	 € 310,00 	 € 127,00 
41%	 € 310,00 	 € 123,00 
40%	 € 310,00 	 € 119,00 
38%	 € 310,00 	 € 115,00 
37%	 € 310,00 	 € 111,00 
36%	 € 310,00 	 € 107,00 
34%	 € 310,00 	 € 103,00 
33%	 € 310,00 	 € 99,00 
32%	 € 310,00 	 € 95,00 
32%	 € 310,00 	 € 95,00 
32%	 € 310,00 	 € 95,00 

Basically what happened is the following. At the end of each month, the game used the ratio cost/expense to recalculate the funding % of the school. That's basically what happens when you use the general slider in the budget window: it will take that percentage and use it to compute the new funding percentages of the individual buildings. However, it looks like the game also recalculated the expenses based on the monthly costs from the building exemplar (i.e. data that is not in the savegame) and the freshly calculated funding %, and then updated the expense of the line item! It keeps doing this month after month, but interestingly it stopped once it reached an expense of 95.

So, I think this confirms what was already known about the phantom slider bug that a difference between the total monthly cost (i.e. the expenses at 100% funding) and the live monthly costs (i.e. the costs based on what is stored in the exemplar files, which can be changed by mods) causes the game to get stuck in some kind of loop.

Having this knowledge, I can think of two possible solutions for fixing corrupted cities. One option is to simply programmatically delete all the lots and remove the corresponding line items. This would not require reading in the plugin folder, but I don't know yet how to fully delete stuff from a savegame.

Another option is to recalculate the total monthly cost per line item based on the latest values in the plugin folder and then reset all funding to 100%. The downside to this is that it requires reading in an entire plugin folder, which makes it not really suitable to put on a website. The huge upside of this though is that this allows modding monthly costs and capacities without fear. Heck, you could even run your entire regions folder through the program and have every city updated automatically.

TL;DR: Fixing cities affected by the phantom slider bug should be possible, but won't be as straightforward as growifying or making historical. Let me know what you think. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

That certainly would be useful if there could be a simple (to the player) fix for phantom sliders.

I've explored this from the game side and developed a method to figure out exactly how much the discrepancy is between the numbers so I can make a lot which is deliberately off by the right amount. Plop it, save, then quit, then delete if from plugins. Back into the city tile and bulldoze it without the mod in place and that compensates. This works for all except medical funding itself. My own investigation for that seems to hint that medical funding has the info stored differently than all the other funding inasmuch as it adds up stored numbers on the fly and my offset plop and bulldoze method doesn't work for that one particular thing. For those I still calculate the difference and then make a lot which is off the correct way by that amount, plop it, and it must remain in the city tile.

So yes, if you can work something out that'd be so much better.