How do I separate buildings as Landmark or Growable?

[Rpbaileysr 10]

I am running rush hour on a MacBook and I don't want to load too many plugin files (haven't had that problem yet). Where can I look to find out which files are needed for each lot, Landmark or Growable? Sometimes it is hard to tell. Most of the time I don't want to use a Landmark that is only eye candy, but don't know which files to leave out to save space in my plugin folder. Any help for this? Any tutorials to explain it? Thanks. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Ideally the file description or included ReadMe would say. Next best would be to open the individual plugins in Reader and peek at the OccupancyGroups line. However, that's a Windoze program. So, my guess is trial and error would work. Start with an empty plugins folder, add one, open the game in a sandbox region, and check if they appear in the menus. If so, it is a ploppable. But, to confuzzle things, some are both ploppable and growable.

[Rpbaileysr 10]

Ok, sometimes it is easy to tell the Landmark lots because they have included LM in the filename. Those files definitely belong to the landmark lot. Sometimes all the lot files unzip in the same folder(only one folder) and sometimes its hard to tell. I don't know anything about building lots YET. Are there any files that are common(normally used by both LMs and Growables), or are they completely separate files for each lot. Where can I find out what each file does?

Thanks, Robert

[twalsh102 1,601]

All lots, regardless of whether they are ploppable or growable, must have three things to work properly:  a Lot Exemplar (commonly the .SC4Lot file), a Building Exemplar (commonly the .SC4Desc file), and a model (commonly the .SC4Model file).  The model file may not be included with the download because it was created by another content creator, and is therefore a dependency.

If a particular download offers both LM (or ploppable) and Growable versions of a particular building, the .SC4Model file will usually be common between the two versions, or be a common dependency.

In general, for a ploppable, the contents of the .SC4Lot and .SC4Desc file are combined into the .SC4Lot file.  A Growable usually has separate .SC4Lot and .SC4Desc files.  Although that is the standard convention, it isn't necessarily gospel.  There is nothing that forces content creators to do it that way.  And the game really doesn't care one way or the other.  It is entirely possible that you could end up with everything (lot exemplar, building exemplar, prop exemplars, ans model files) within a single .dat file.  Again, the game would not care as it doesn't care about files, only exemplars.

Assuming you are using Aspyrs port of SC4, vs. running the Windows version in Parallels (or some other virtualization software), you are missing out on all the tools that would make it easy to figure this out.

Here's a possible worst-case scenario:  you end up with a download, which upon unzipping, leaves you with 2 x .SC4Lot files, 3 x .SC4Desc files, and 2 x .SC4Model files, all in one folder.  Based on experience, i would look at this and determine:

a.  I probably have both a ploppable and growable version of a lot, but maybe not.  There could be two different size growable lots.

b.  I possibly have 1 x .SC4Desc file that is redundant and can be deleted without affecting either version of the lot, but maybe not.

c.  I likely have 1 prop here (a single prop requires an .SC4Desc file and an .SC4Model file - as opposed to a Prop Pack which will include all prop exemplars and model files in a single file), but maybe not.

Unfortunately, barring any hints in a download description, or in any included ReadMe files, and without access to any tools that can look at the contents of the SC4Lot or SC4Desc files, there is no absolute, without a doubt, way to tell what is what.

 

[Rpbaileysr 10]

Thanks for the info. I tried to get ilivereader and leprop. Downloaded wineskin winery, created 2 wineskins, one for ilive and one for leprop. They seem to have put together correctly but there is a problem. When I launch either one it will show up in the top bar for about 2 seconds then they close. Anyone have any ideas? MacBook, High Sierra 10.13.6 , made sure the gui box was not checked in winskin setup. Took me plenty of attempts and a lot of hair pulling to get this far. Help plz!!

Robert

I tried winebottler but could not get that to work at all, and peeps say that one is so easy. Sureee!!