Farm field lots and zoom visibility

[adam forrest 51]

So I'm hoping this question is placed in the correct forum.

I am currently working on placing farms all over my region. I often zoom right out (zoom 1, I believe) to marvel at my fields layout and half the fields don't show in the farthest zoom.

So here's the question.

Is there a way to get information for what level of zoom a farm field will/will not show properly? Maybe there's a way to find this info in a reader property or another Sc4 tool or program? My guess is that if there is not I will have to assign a farm building with all field lots I have. Eventually removing ids to get them all to appear and collecting the info the old fashioned way, in game.

Thanks

Adam

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Hi Adam,

let me start by saying that I have encountered the same problem in the past.

The problem is related to the props that are used to display the field crops. Fields are composed of individual 1x1 tiles. If these field tiles are only a flat texture, they will display just fine at any zoom level. However, if each field tile consists of a texture and one or more props to represent the crop, then the problem that you noticed might occur.

This is because all props have a visibility flag to control at which zooms they will be displayed. Maxis did this to recuce the load on your computer. If such a visibility flag didn't exist, the game would be forced to render even the tiniest objects such as small rocks, shrubs, trashcans, traffic pylons and the like even when your city is zoomed out as far as possible - so far that these objects are hardly (if at all!) visible.

As you zoom in, the aforementioned objects will begin to reappear because they become visible again.

To deactivate this behaviour for your farm fields, you'd have to open the affected field lots and determine the IID(s) of the prop(s) on it. Then you'd have to locate the origin of these props (they are probably part of a dependency prop pack). Armed with this knowledge, you could then open the prop pack(s) in question in iLive's reader, find the prop(s) you are looking for, and change the appearance zoom flag to the value of "1F", which means "visible in all zooms".

I hope this helps you a bit to understand what's going on under the hood.

Regards
Thomas / T Wrecks

[adam forrest 51]

Epic answer T Wrecks to be honest, thank you. I was expecting to have to pick and choose based off field zooms. Now I can use whichever I see fits my idea in a region. It seemed silly really knowing I have certain fields and not seeing them all the time, namely zoom 1 and in the region view. To me I felt it makes a huge difference to now have them visible across my region. 

Thanks again

Adam

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Hey, you're very welcome.

You know, it sounds like you made just the same experience. I remember how disappointed I was when I had a nice colourful patchwork of farm fields (I even lined up their edges across city borders by making sketches of how many tiles away from a road or rail line a field extended!), and in the region view much of it didn't match the view in game. To make matters worse, some crop props looked nice from closer up, but absolutely garish from zoom1 or region view.

Good luck tweaking your fields and happy farming!