index SimCity 4 Prop and Texture Catalog

[Ducio 285]

I just wanted to say THANK YOU! This is incredibly useful and it must have taken a huge amount of time. I'm not super techy so I am mostly doing basic relotting, but this really helps and I love finding nice prop buildings that I can easily add to create new lots. 

[nos.17 5,255]

 

🎉 Version 2.2.1 is now live. Get it here 🎉

This is a minor update. Changes for this version include:

• Laid groundwork for HD prop toggle
• Added multiple prop + texture packs: A_1P_WindIndustry_ComponentLogistics2, A_1P_beach_set2_props, A_1P_beach_set3_props, BCH Props1, BSC - VIP girafe carpack vol. 1 & 2 remastered, Davide1983it - Trabant601, KK Timed Prop Pack v1-Gizmo, KK_ja-att Restricted Sign Props, Outdoor Set V1, Outdoor Set V2, Playground set, Raymond_VintageCar_Props, SM2 Mega Prop Pack Vol5, TCC - Diagonal Jetways (Singtel), Tatra 603 - Wartburg 353, and cloqloparking  

[Sinister 11]

Thanks developers for this catalog..will be trying it soon. Can't wait 

[nos.17 5,255]

 

🎉 Version 2.2.2 is now live. Get it here 🎉

This is a minor update. Changes for this version include:

• Updated Grfe_Urbanpack to version B
• Added Grfe_hedge_3m_Ortho + Diag, Jayo-Props, cogeo's LogisticsPack, Mntoes-Prop pack1, PC Mega Props 2, SG_Models_IM2
• Added texture TGIs to TGI search list

 

You are now able to search by texture TGIs too - it's been set up to be able to do that for a long time, but I had just never added them into the list in the first place. That is fixed now. Enjoy!

[AsimPika3172 1,155]

Thanks for update! 

[nos.17 5,255]

Hi all!

It has been awhile since the last update, but I've been working on version 3 a bunch in the past few weeks. A demo/draft for version 3 is live now at https://sc4proptexturecatalog.azurewebsites.net/.

It's been completely remade from the ground up to perform better, which was a necessity with an ever-growing database. This version adds over 200 packs (courtesy of the dependency list by jeronij, I found a lot that I had missed before), for a total of over 165k TGIs indexed so far.

It's still a draft with some bugs to work out (the db seems to be duplicating items), but if you have any feedback/suggestions feel free to let me know. As a consequence of redesigning it, I can and am planning to add more cool things, like filters by pack/author, in addition to the search string. Adding thumbnails of each item is also on the roadmap.

  Edited February 18, 2023 by nos.17  
replaced screenshot

[junspud 1,069]

Been using this a lot lately, really like how the demo version changes the TGI format to match the groups.ini file PIM uses (and the Reader entry copy function). I was actually just visiting this thread with the intent of humbly suggesting it.

[nos.17 5,255]

21 hours ago, junspud said:

Been using this a lot lately, really like how the demo version changes the TGI format to match the groups.ini file PIM uses (and the Reader entry copy function). I was actually just visiting this thread with the intent of humbly suggesting it.

Glad you like it

The format is purely accidental - I just did what seemed natural to me, but I'm happy it worked out for you!

[junspud 1,069]

On 2/21/2023 at 5:15 PM, nos.17 said:

Glad you like it

The format is purely accidental - I just did what seemed natural to me, but I'm happy it worked out for you!

I think it adds a certain utility, you can use it to copy/paste props directly into the groups.ini file for PIM groups now. IDK if it's necessary to remove the spaces (I assume it probably is, I haven't tried not doing it) but that's not much work.

 

Edit in case anyone reading isn't clear how to do it;

You can open the groups.ini file in the PIM-X directory, it's a plain text document. Find the group you want to add the prop or texture to, it's easiest if you already created the group inside PIM-X, and have added at least one prop or texture into the group.

 

Quote

group = GroupProxy( "Z props" , 2 )
group.AddItem( (0x6534284a,0x2d34309e,0x8e22da1c) )
group.AddItem( (0x6534284a,0x2d34309e,0x4de0400f) )
group.AddItem( (0x6534284a,0x3056c8d3,0x10cbe3be) )
group.AddItem( (0x6534284a,0xb18eca66,0xd206c4cc) )
group.AddItem( (0x6534284a,0xd2c27f89,0xd4e98716) )

Excerpt from a group in my file named 'Z props'. Copy one or more of the group.AddItem...' lines. Next you can paste the new lines under the 'GroupProxy' line, or into a new text document to edit first, or whatever. Copy and paste the TGI from the prop/texture catalog in place of the original TGI. Remove the spaces and save file, or continue editing. The props will be included in the group when you next open the PIM-X lot editor. PIM can be running while you do this, as long as no other lot editor windows are currently open.

[Nero55 313]

I was wondering where to find something like this yesterday，Here！It's so amazing，thanks a lot！

[nos.17 5,255]

🎉 Version 3.1 is now live. Visit the site. 🎉

With version 3.1, I am beginning to ad in thumbnail previews for all the items in the catalog. For the moment, there's only texture thumbnails. The FSH files from textures were pretty easy to extract and convert to PNG, but buildings/props/flora will be a bit more difficult in dealing with items that are bigger than a certain size which would have more than one FSH that would need to be stitched together. I expect to start trickling those in over the next few weeks and months. However, with just textures, I'm up to 22,600 thumbnails for 104mb.

When using the search option on the main page, there is now an option to show thumbnails, and specify the size of thumbnails returned.

 

There is now also a new page, View a Pack, which is aiming to emulate the old pictures of the packs I had taken in PIMX.

[Ducio 285]

Really impressive work! 

[rsc204 21,866]

9 hours ago, nos.17 said:

The FSH files from textures were pretty easy to extract and convert to PNG, but buildings/props/flora will be a bit more difficult in dealing with items that are bigger than a certain size which would have more than one FSH that would need to be stitched together.

Why not load such items up in PIM-X, it will create a series of Thumbnail Previews which are saved as JPGs in the App's install \ImageDB or \ImageDBLarge folders. The filenames are the TGI address of the models, which may create some complications organising things, but it would save creating the images yourself.

I've just seen I've 20,017 such previews (or models) from all the time working with PIM-X since my last Windows install.

[nos.17 5,255]

3 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Why not load such items up in PIM-X, it will create a series of Thumbnail Previews which are saved as JPGs in the App's install \ImageDB or \ImageDBLarge folders. The filenames are the TGI address of the models, which may create some complications organising things, but it would save creating the images yourself.

I've just seen I've 20,017 such previews (or models) from all the time working with PIM-X since my last Windows install.

This is a good call. I had previously customized the install directory of PIMX and it never created any of these thumbs - the only thing there was Maxis assets. A reinstall to the default install directory fixes that.

I had been working with TGI as the file name, so that's actually exactly what I need.

This is huge. Thank you!

[jonnboy1976 220]

@nos.17 This is truly an incredible accomplishment you have done here.  An enormous task!  Thank you sir.  Amazing work!

[nos.17 5,255]

On 4/14/2023 at 2:04 AM, jonnboy1976 said:

@nos.17 This is truly an incredible accomplishment you have done here.  An enormous task!  Thank you sir.  Amazing work!

Thank you! Glad you like it

[catty-cb 4,412]

Great update to the Catalog, love the ability to search either by hexadecimal or decimal format

https://sc4proptexturecatalog.azurewebsites.net/PluginPacks?searchid=0x14A0230D

plus the little picture 

[nos.17 5,255]

🎉 Version 3.2 is now live. Visit the site. 🎉

13 new packs were added bringing the total up to 689, with 82,500 TGIs indexed.

The important update in 3.2 though is the inclusion of a new Plugin Pack page you can use to search for Plugin Pack IDs (those numbers that show up in game when you are missing a dependency) and hopefully find out what file the number pertains to. The data is fed from @catty-cb's Plugin Pack Index, so be sure to send her a thank you if you found the data helpful

[Lazarou Monkey Terror 1,838]

Could you tell me which are the 13 new packs? I think I'm up to date otherwise, thanks to your fantastic resource!

[nos.17 5,255]

19 hours ago, Lazarou Monkey Terror said:

Could you tell me which are the 13 new packs? I think I'm up to date otherwise, thanks to your fantastic resource!

Sure! They're in this list here.

[nos.17 5,255]

It has been quite a long time since I've worked on this project but I now have some progress that I'm super excited about.

v4 of the Catalog

The current version of the catalog certainly contains a lot of content (650+ dependencies if I remember correctly), but it is far from comprehensive or complete. It still doesn't really help people when they get that Missing Plugins Pack Identifier message. I have since incorporated @catty-cb's plugin pack id list into the Prop Texture Catalog, but it is far from complete and there are tens of thousands of different plugins that are missing from that list. I have always wanted to dramatically expand the list, but never have gotten around to it because it is a huge task.

Around two years ago I revised the cataloging process to version 3 and began using a SQLite database to provide a structured way to store all the information about plugins (file name, source url, author, version, TGI, exemplar name, etc.), which makes things pretty easy to query. This significantly helped my organization and also made querying the catalog significantly quicker. However it still had some significant drawbacks. My workflow to add items was a pretty tedious process of manually downloading a plugin pack, stashing it in a properly named folder so my code could correctly ingest it into the database, and manually maintaining a separate Excel spreadsheet with all the information about an upload which would get copied into the database. I was never able to do much more than the prop/texture dependency packs because it would quickly become unmanageable.

Enter the sc4pac cache

What changed that would be able to make maintaining this list significantly easier and allow me to include non dependency buildings, flora, etc, was sc4pac. When you download something from sc4pac, it stashes a copy of the file downloaded from an exchange into a cache folder. This is so you only have to download something one time if you need to re-install or re-reference a package. The super convenient thing for the purpose of the Catalog is it also organizes them in a very neat manner with each upload in a single folder named with the STEX id and upload name. Inside of each of these folders is the single (or multiple) zip files presented when clicking the download button on the STEX. This takes away my need to manually organize things into clean folders, and it also allows me to relate individual files and their TGI contents to where they come from on the STEX.

The other nice thing is this applies to any exchange, not just the STEX. SC4Evermore, ToutSimCities, Hide Inoki, etc. are all handled similarly with each download named according to it's unique id on it's respective exchange.

Extracting the data

Next, I need to be able to read the contents of each of the files to be able to scan the TGIs inside each file. The Instance (I) part of the TGI is the bit of information that will help you uniquely identify something within your plugins folder. I didn't want to risk messing anything up in this folder for sc4pac, and I wanted to maintain a raw unchanged copy of each file exactly as it is downloaded from the exchange, so put together some code to help me copy each of these folders to a different location on my computer and use 7 zip to programmatically extract each one.

The next issue is installers. Despite our (and specifically @Tyberius06's) efforts with ProjectZIP, there's still a lot of Clickteam installers floating around. This is where our old friend cicdec comes in handy. Take one more loop over all these newly extracted files and programmatically run cicdec on anything with an exe file extension. I now have all of the files extracted and organized, and I can use nearly the same code I created in version 3 to scan the files and insert into a database, only now I have access to a significantly wider variety of downloads, not just dependencies.

Maintaining metadata

To address the issue of maintaining my Excel spreadsheet with information about a plugin (author, url, name, version, etc.) I can make use of sc4pac metadata as well, which tracks a lot of valuable information about an upload that I would like to have. These are all saved as YAML text files. For example,

group: jasoncw
name: benjamin-pump
version: "1.0"
subfolder: 500-utilities
info:
  summary: Benjamin Pump
  description: |-
    With the city growing, the need for more water became evident.  To cope with demands, a new pump was built in Benjamin Park, providing not only water, but recreation, and a new neighborhood focal point as well.

    ... [file description runcated] ...
  author: Jasoncw
  website: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/19622-benjamin-pump/
  images:
    - https://www.simtropolis.com/objects/screens/0023/ce8568ecb8acaccc5b6ec0f49412364b-BAT-Frame---Benjamin-Pump-1.jpg
    - https://www.simtropolis.com/objects/screens/0023/ce8568ecb8acaccc5b6ec0f49412364b-BAT-Frame---Benjamin-Pump-2.jpg
assets:
  - assetId: jasoncw-benjamin-pump

---
assetId: jasoncw-benjamin-pump
version: "1.0"
lastModified: "2008-04-03T19:31:47Z"
url: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/19622-benjamin-pump/?do=download&r=44445

This data can be parsed and stashed in the database to provide all those extra fields I'm looking for about a specific upload. I especially no longer have to manually maintain the version information about a mod, especially for ones that get updates regularly.

A new API for the catalog

Despite the fact that this may help a lot of people finally be able to identify a missing plugin by its Id, a potentially even bigger benefit is being able to help in uploading metadata to sc4pac. @smf_16 created a series of scripts which makes the process of adding sc4pac metadata significantly easier by automating a lot of the process. Without going into too much detail here, one of the available commands will scan each package you are adding and validate the dependency list. It compares the list of dependencies the author specified with which Instance Ids actually appear on the lot. It then spits out a table of every instance where an Id is not found.

This is incredibly helpful - about 50% of the time, I can search this instance id in the Prop Texture Catalog and find the missing dependency. The other 50% of the time when the instance id is not in the catalog ... we're boned.

What I will be able to do now, however, is any time an instance gets listed here, I can query the catalog and hopefully return the actual name of the dependency or package that is missing. We are finding that especially with some creators who are "loose" with their dependency listings or have a lot of lots in a package, this table could be hundreds of items long and it often takes multiple passes of copying and passing random ids into the catalog to identify them before I'm able to correctly identify everything. This can be condensed down to a single list of dependencies that are missing, dramatically increasing the efficiency and accuracy of this process.

This is the part that I'm most excited about and still have to develop, so more news to come. I'm also updating the appearance of the website too stay tuned to this thread for those updates! 

[catty-cb 4,412]

This sounds great and lots of thumbs up 

[memo 1,473]

Indeed, this sounds awesome and will be very useful.

Regarding the metadata files, all the YAML files are converted to JSON files by sc4pac for internal use. The JSON format is a bit more static and non-ambiguous, so may be easier to read programmatically than parsing the YAML files – though the YAML format is better documented.

[smf_16 1,838]

Awesome. I just wanted to add that the dependency tracking script is also integrated in my sc4 cli tool, both in interactive mode (by simply clicking the sc4.exe), or by using it from the command line as sc4 plugins track, so it should be straightforward for everyone (especially creators) to easily generate a list of (missing) dependencies.

 

[nos.17 5,255]

9 hours ago, smf_16 said:

Awesome. I just wanted to add that the dependency tracking script is also integrated in my sc4 cli tool, both in interactive mode (by simply clicking the sc4.exe), or by using it from the command line as sc4 plugins track, so it should be straightforward for everyone (especially creators) to easily generate a list of (missing) dependencies.

Cool! I didn't know it was in there too. So that's definitely more people that could benefit from this. 

This might turn into a dev thread for a little bit while I show my progress, so bear with me. I've got a basic query set up to mimic the functionality of the existing catalog to search for an arbitrary string across any field:

And also to return the results for a specific instance id:

Using those two, I was also able to create a tiny proof of concept to query this with Javascript:

 

The bulk of work is yet to come though. I have about 1300 uploads from the STEX (48000 TGIs) in the database already. I'll need to do the same thing with SC4Evermore, which should get me the bulk of all the dependencies. Right now, I pretty much have the structure to define the contents of an upload. The next thing is to expand the metadata saved in the database as to be able to record the information about a specific upload - things like the author, version, name, url, etc. Fortunately, a significant portion of this (if not all) can be automated).

By the way, so far all of this the code is happening here: https://github.com/noah-severyn/SC4PropTextureCatalog/tree/v4-rewrite. Don't judge too hard, I'm learning. 

[TiepiNL 182]

4 hours ago, nos.17 said:

Cool! I didn't know it was in there too. So that's definitely more people that could benefit from this. 

This might turn into a dev thread for a little bit while I show my progress, so bear with me. I've got a basic query set up to mimic the functionality of the existing catalog to search for an arbitrary string across any field:

And also to return the results for a specific instance id:

Using those two, I was also able to create a tiny proof of concept to query this with Javascript:

 

The bulk of work is yet to come though. I have about 1300 uploads from the STEX (48000 TGIs) in the database already. I'll need to do the same thing with SC4Evermore, which should get me the bulk of all the dependencies. Right now, I pretty much have the structure to define the contents of an upload. The next thing is to expand the metadata saved in the database as to be able to record the information about a specific upload - things like the author, version, name, url, etc. Fortunately, a significant portion of this (if not all) can be automated).

By the way, so far all of this the code is happening here: https://github.com/noah-severyn/SC4PropTextureCatalog/tree/v4-rewrite. Don't judge too hard, I'm learning. 

A search option for BuildingPlop 🤩

[nos.17 5,255]

On 8/27/2025 at 1:59 AM, TiepiNL said:

A search option for BuildingPlop 🤩

In a way, yes. This would work outside of the game while it's not running. Incidentally, have you seen Casper's Advanced Lot Plop? Just posted. 🔥

----------------------------------------------------

I am working on a fun new visual to show the status of everything from the STEX that's being indexed in the new catalog, inspired by Github's contribution calendar you can find on people's profiles. The filled blocks represent items that have been indexed in the catalog so far. Because it the catalog uses the sc4pac cache for its data, it's also a rough approximation of what's been included in sc4pac too, assuming I have downloaded the item at some point.

Yes, there's 37000 squares being rendered on the page, one for each STEX id. I'm a JavaScript noob so I had AI help with some optimizations so loading and scrolling the page isn't too bad, but the page is still a little laggy. Looking forward to publishing this! 

[junspud 1,069]

Recently I've noticed a lot of the search results have become rather vague, with no links to the files and/or names of the prop packs, such as;

[nos.17 5,255]

14 hours ago, junspud said:

Recently I've noticed a lot of the search results have become rather vague, with no links to the files and/or names of the prop packs, such as;

The links are broken for the moment, but can you explain more about the search results being vague? What was your search query here?

The whole catalog is in a transition state for the moment, and it should be getting a facelift and a whole new back end shortly, when I can find the time.

[nos.17 5,255]

A lot of work has happened since my last update with the API and I can't believe it's been that long since I updated this thread. The previous API was set up using C# and ASP.NET. I didn't really know what I was doing on that front and had some troubles figuring it out, so ultimately two months ago in November 2025 I decided to transition over to a JavaScript API using Express. I was able to have Copilot build a simple proof of concept for me and was pretty happy with how it looked. Even with my minimal JavaScript experience compared to C#, it was much less code and seemed much simpler to maintain, customize, and understand what is happening.

Anyways, the short of the story is the API is now operational and publicly available. At the moment, it has two endpoints, /api/search?term=... where you can search against any text string (example), and /api/iid?value=... where you can search against a specific Instance ID (example). I am still using an SQLite database on the back end. However, one significant difference is the scope of content that will be covered in the package. Instead of tediously manually maintaining a huge folder of all dependency files, plus a large Excel index of each of these dependencies with their name, author, version, url, categories, etc., I wrote some scripts that allow me to leverage the sc4pac cache as a source of the files, and the sc4pac metadata for all of the information about the files. This will firstly make it much easier to keep up to date when new dependency packages are released or when existing ones update. Secondly, it finally allows me to include all files in the catalog, not just prop and texture packs.

In practical terms, the separation of the data (into the API) from the user interface code, allows any program, written  by me or someone else, in whatever platform or manner they like, access the catalog data. This is a huge advantage. In the case of the Prop & Texture Catalog itself, this means it can turn into a very simple static HTML/CSS/JS website, and just send off queries to the API for any data it needs. I have the home page set up to query based on any string, as is the case in the past.

 

My current time is working on the 'View a Pack' page, in which you target a specific package and see all information about it, including thumbnails of textures, and hopefully eventually, props, buildings, and flora. So far I've been able to implement a significantly improved search function to search for a package.

 

One final thing I implemented is a light mode/dark mode toggle for the entire site. I'm pretty proud of how this turned out.