Building is flying

[Tomato660 25]

Hello. Sorry for my english. I installed the Denver Art Museum (https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/30964-denver-art-museum-frederic-c-hamilton-building) and decided to put it in city. But museum is floating in the air. In another region, it works fine. Has anyone encountered such a problem?

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

6 hours ago, Tomato660 said:

But museum is floating in the air. In another region, it works fine.

That's rather bizarre. I've never seen a building floating and it's really weird it works fine elsewhere. I have no answer, but I'm following your topic to see what the expert's advice will be.

[Tomato660 25]

I tried to put the museum in different places, something strange is happening in the mountains.

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

Ah! On some of those slopes it's trying to create a retaining wall and, apparently, the textures (or model or prop or whatever it is) isn't there. Now that I have a good idea what the trouble might be, I'll download it too and take a peek in Reader to see if I can figure out what is causing that.

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

So, I'm still confuzzled. Here's what it looks like in my game with retaining walls:

 

At this point you should prolly test it by itself in plugins to see if something else you have is overriding.

[Tomato660 25]

I removed all the plugins except the museum. Unfortunately, the problem remains. (._. )

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

I confess this is beyond my knowledge level now. I did notice in my testing how sometimes I would only see the base and the building was missing. Other times it plopped just fine.

Hopefully the gurus of SC4 will pop in with some advice.

[Tomato660 25]

The height of the location not changes the height of the flying building. It is fixed at a certain height.

[Tomato660 25]

The building does not fly if placed on a retaining wall.

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

2 minutes ago, Tomato660 said:

The building does not fly if placed on a retaining wall.

So, that definitely rules out my prior guess for the problem being the retaining walls missing. This is the oddest thing I've seen. I've no idea at all what could be causing it.

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

I'm searching other topics and I did find this in relation to another building:

On 7/14/2017 at 5:46 AM, Bombardiere said:

Also, if the prop building is not done properly, then the ingame building can float on the air when there is even a slight slope.

 

However, there's no further explanation to help us. At least we can infer that there is something in the modding which is the likely culprit.

[Tomato660 25]

I tried to level the area as much as possible, but that didn't help.

I thought a mistake in my region that I created myself. But I tried to put the museum in the standard game region "New York" and the problem repeated.

in the test region, with a completely flat surface, everything works.

Apparently a mistake in the building. very sad, this museum looked good in my city.

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

10 minutes ago, Tomato660 said:

Apparently a mistake in the building. very sad, this museum looked good in my city.

While it won't be immediate, I'm sure the experts will pop in to say what the cause is and then @Diego Del Llano will most likely issue an updated version.

[Cyclone Boom 16,914]

It's quite a curious case is this flying building. I've had a chance to investigate this, and thought to test by creating a new lot for it. I did this using the PIM-X tool with loading the model file and dragging it over to the ploppable museum category. Then I right clicked and made it as a 5x11 sized lot.

I tested this with @CorinaMarie and we both found how this did plop properly on elevated terrain.

Like so:

(The original at the top side, and the fixed lot plopped below.)

 

@Tomato660

Here's the file if you'd like to give it a test drive:

PLOP_5x11_Denver Art Museum.zip

You'll just need the model file from the original archive. The modding properties I've set to match the original as @Diego Del Llano designed.

(For a quick test in a tile, it might be worth using the moolah cheat included with the Extra Cheats DLL.)

 

If anyone's interested in...
The Techy Details 

So this proved the model was fine as rendered, and made me wonder what might be causing this odd behaviour.

As we investigated the LotConfig properties in Reader 0.9.3 to see what might be the cause, Cori astutely noticed how the first entry for the LotConfigPropertyLotObject began with a 0x00000002 there. According to the format (archived Wayback page as the actual on the SC4Devotion Wiki is missing), this represents a texture which might not be quite in the correct place in the lot configuration exemplar.

The data of this being:

 

Then at the bottom of the exemplar there was a LotConfigPropertyLotObjectData entry beginning with 0x00000000 which represents a building.

As follows:

 

With realising it was likely out of place, I deleted this entry:

 

Then right clicked to "Reindex LotConfig" (an important step to ensure no format corruption).

Back in the initial LotConfigPropertyLotObject as shown at the top, I copied over the first 11 Rep values from my newly created lot.

As follows:

0x00000000,0x00000000,0x00000002,0x00280000,0x00000000,0x00580000,0x00001999,0x00001999,0x004FE666,0x00AFE666,0x00000000

 

Then set the Rep 13 to match the IID value of the Buildings exemplar (which references the model file):

(The value highlighted in blue above.)

 

Once saving the file in Reader, finally to test in game with plopping several times on a hillside...

Problem solved!  (Hopefully) 

Now it's not clear how this might've happened, but it seems this does the trick to resolve the issue.

[Diego Del Llano 5,206]

omg !! thanks for solve that I really don't know how to use those tools ! 

[Tomato660 25]

7 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Here's the file if you'd like to give it a test drive:

Thank you very much! 

[catty-cb 4,401]

15 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

....According to the format (archived Wayback page as the actual on the SC4Devotion Wiki is missing), this represents a texture which might not be quite in the correct place in the lot configuration exemplar.....

The original document still exists on the Sims Wiki website

http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Category:SimCity_4_Modding

[markussaage 762]

On 31/08/2019 at 7:37 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

As we investigated the LotConfig properties in Reader 0.9.3 to see what might be the cause, Cori astutely noticed how the first entry for the LotConfigPropertyLotObject began with a 0x00000002 there. According to the format (archived Wayback page as the actual on the SC4Devotion Wiki is missing), this represents a texture which might not be quite in the correct place in the lot configuration exemplar.

Unfortunately this is the case quite often, when you open .SC4Lot file open in ILive's Reader and the actual building is NOT at the first row 0x00000000 LotConfigPropertyLotObject. Most of the time it is a 0x00000002, a texture. I've also seen 0x00000001, Props, and even 0x00000007, TE-enabled texture.
That's why I fix this with every building, before I put it into my Plugins. Better be safe than sorry, right?!

Kind regards!