Playing Around with the In-Game Lot Editor

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

So, today I was poking around and figured out how to access the In-Game Lot Editor.

Upon invoking it for a new lot the game jumps to the north west corner of the city tile. The first thing I did is adjust the Lot Size:

 

I selected 3 x 3:

 

Now we need some textures:

 

Refresh the 3D view to see how it looks:

 

I rearranged the textures outlines better (tho the editor seemed to figure out they need to align on the cell boundaries). Next I selected a building family:

 

I plopped it randomly:

 

Then I moved it:

 

Click Add New Flora from the menu:

 

Select a random flora family:

 

I plopped a bunch on the left side:

 

Then I moved some of the trees around and selected Cycle Lot Condition:

 

Now it's distressed:

 

Cycle some more and it's abandoned:

 

Attempt to save and no go:

 

But, it can be saved within the city tile:

 

So, it was an interesting experiment which prolly has no practical use at all.

[Lucario Boricua 7,052]

Trust me, having the ability to use the full screen of the game and the in-game assets within the game environment can provie useful. I at least feel it more useful than my otherwise very limited ventures into the external Lot Editor.

[Terring 6,476]

Wait a minute! There is an in-game lot editor? How did you find that?

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

1 hour ago, Terring said:

There is an in-game lot editor?

Indeed.

 

There's also an in-game Networks Editor which I haven't figured out what to do with it:

 

And a Script Console which I presume is for running a Lua Script just like one of the the Extra Cheats options that I have successfully used:

 

And, apparently, a full Exemplar Viewer and Debugger:

 

Some of these appear to have been partially disabled so I'm working to add back the missing code to make them functional. (No luck yet tho.)

[matias93 7,535]

Ok... this is, well, way too much to process. I guess @rsc204, @Tarkus and/or @simmaster07 could know more or be interested on it.

For the moment, I guess that having some way to create custom lots inside the game would be useful for highly customised CJs, but only if the location can be changed from the corner.

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

Wow! These may well be items never seen before outside of the Maxis development office.

Cori, I believe what you've found here is an important and potentially valuable discovery. It appears to be an internal tool which the Maxis devs would've used for testing. While the ability to save a created ingame lot would make this more practically useful, I believe as mayors we could be seeing this for the very first time!

I can see there'd be undoubted advantages for lotting this way too. How it would allow the ability to see a real time visual preview of a SC4 created lot. Aspects like the slope of the terrain (as is an option) could be beneficial for lot design. That way to view how lot objects conform to the undulations of a landscape with foundations. Also I wonder about effects props if they'd get rendered in the game. In the stand-alone Lot Editor these only appear as green diamonds.

With potential scope for other built-in elements of the UI to be used too, this really could be a big breakthrough to lead somewhere. Great sleuthing once again!

(Topic featured for greater visibility.)

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

1 minute ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Also I wonder about effects props if they'd get rendered in the game. In the stand-alone Lot Editor these only appear as green diamonds.

Do you happen to know the Hex value of any said effects prop? If so, I can try adding them to see what they look like in the game while using this editor.

 

I also wonder if the filelist.xml in the install folder could be updated so all those scrollable lists show the family names in the selection windows.

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Do you happen to know the Hex value of any said effects prop? If so, I can try adding them to see what they look like in the game while using this editor.

Sure, how about the Effect_farmhorses effect?

T = 0x6534284A
G = 0xC977C536
I = 0xAA739FA7

Exemplar preview:

 

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

I also wonder if the filelist.xml in the install folder could be updated so all those scrollable lists show the family names in the selection windows.

I'm not sure if this is the same file format, but I notice how there's one of those inside the Lot Editor manual folder inside:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Lot Editor Manual_files

This one appears to be what references the images as the manual uses with how it loads it up from the HTML file:

<link rel=File-List href="Lot%20Editor%20Manual_files/filelist.xml">

 

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

17 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Sure, how about the Effect_farmhorses effect?

T = 0x6534284A
G = 0xC977C536
I = 0xAA739FA7

That works! (As you know already.)

The zoomed in part while using the IGLE:

^ GIF made by @Cyclone Boom from the JPGs series I created with the in-game Recorder.

[carlosmarcelo 982]

On 10/7/2019 at 5:30 PM, CorinaMarie said:

So, today I was poking around and figured out how to access the Ingame Lot Editor.

It's fantastic!! 3 great discoveries in the same year: first, the possibility changing savegame file, after, hypnosis of houses to seaport, now we have ingame lot editor! What we will be have soon? I came back the right year!!! 

 I have 2 questions:

1. How you invoke this lot editor?

2. Can I create custom big parks and save in city?

 

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

On 10/8/2019 at 3:56 PM, carlosmarcelo said:

1. How you invoke this lot editor?

Magic.

Surprisingly, it's so super simple I'm astonished that the gurus hadn't discovered it already. I'm still exploring things with it and because there are unknowns and potential for destruction and corruption in a city tile, I feel I should prolly hold back on the secret for a little while.

 

On 10/8/2019 at 3:56 PM, carlosmarcelo said:

2. Can I create custom big parks and save in city?

Sort of. When invoked for making a new lot it creates a raised terrain plateau in the upper left corner. From there you can select a lot size of up to 15 x 15. It draws a road around those 225 cells and they are not part of the lot. Because I've not yet succeeded with actually saving the created lot, there's not much use for this other than if wanting to preview a building on a slope or watching the prop animations animating.

It's true that whatever is created with the IGLE can be saved with the city tile. However, it's limited to that upper corner as best I can determine. And it could play havoc with the city's save data structure so I wouldn't recommend this in any city tile you care about.

 

Here's how it looks starting out and setting the lot size to 15 x 15:

 

Here I've set the building to allow up to a 30 degree slope before needing a foundation, then I set the ground slope to 29 degrees:

 

Btw, someone named speeder over at Devotion was apparently looking for this based on what they said Paul Pedriana said:

Quote

The lot editor was built into the application, and I think it was accessible via a cheat code. I don't recall if that was enabled in the shipping binary though.

If speeder is still around over there, someone could point them to this thread.

 

And don't worry, I won't keep the magic secret for too long. Just give me a bit more time to see what I can figure out. (Tho I did just get a call and there's work again so my vacation is over.)

[mattb325 28,891]

Wow!

What a fantastic discovery!!!!!! Who knew this old game could keep divesting so many secrets? 

Very clever indeed. 

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

This is great, See the wisdom of these SC4 people, they can make chips talk! I appreciate you guys's effort here, The game thriving again. Thank you and look forward your remarkable achievements someday!

[Tarkus 6,933]

9 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

There's also an in-game Networks Editor which I haven't figured out what to do with it:

The "Networks Editor" appears to be an in-game method of editing Type 21 Exemplars, AKA "T21s" or "Network Lots", which are used to place props along various network tiles.  Having in-game tools like this could be a pretty huge timesaver in a lot of ways.

-Tarkus

[nycsc4 5,250]

Wow!  I do a significant amount of lot editing and will spend hours bouncing between the game and the LE creating various lots.  This could be a huge time saver!

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

42 minutes ago, Tarkus said:

"Network Lots", which are used to place props along various network tiles.

Makes sense then cause it has options for placing flora and props.

 

There's also Add New Network Node in the IGLE:

 

Then right clicking the Node shows this:

 

The first option brings up a simple selection for the type of network:

 

The next two bring up the same selection menu:

 

The other option brings up a place to type something if one knew what those numbers are for:

 

And after random selections that popup looks like this now:

 

Then going crazy adding them and refreshing the 3D view:

 

And this was from a different test, but I'm not sure what I did to get it:

 

So, I'm guessing all of this part is for Transit Enabling a lot.

[Tarkus 6,933]

48 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

And this was from a different test, but I'm not sure what I did to get it:

Most likely, the combination of network flags you used with the transit enabling, combined with the Road around the border, ended up matching the INRUL flags for the Orth Road x Ending FA-3 Road T-Intersection. 

Strangely enough, underlying TE flag setups can in fact trigger RUL code of various types--we found this out the hard way with NAM 28 (May 2010).  There was an earlier attempt to make Fractional Angle Roads draggable via the RUL0 AutoPlace feature (which actually caused static puzzle pieces to appear if a certain flag pattern is met--this is also how the default Maxis Highway interchange prompts work), and it happened that the pattern for the base FA-3 piece matched the underlying flags for the default Car and Passenger Ferry.  Since this was in the days before SC4Fix.dll, the effect was that this auto-placed a puzzle piece on top of a TE Lot, causing an instant CTD whenever the Car and Passenger Ferry was built.

(NAM 29 removed this "feature", and we re-implemented Draggable FAR in NAM 31 with the current INRUL method, which is far safer and more flexible).

As far as the "Set path ID for connection" box goes, it's most likely a way to specify a custom path file for the transit-enabled tile in question.  By default, with a TE tile, the game will look up the network flags in the appropriate INRUL, and give the tile the paths of the IID specified there for that combination, in the appropriate rotation (for example, in the case of 0x02020202 for the Road network, it would give it the path at IID 0x00020700), but it is possible to specify a custom path file instead, which would override the default.

-Tarkus

[tariely 4,499]

Just watching (this goes so over my head that I get vertigo)  But that you can find such a thing in our good old game and perhaps be able to turn it into something new and collectively useful is just WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW.

[rsc204 21,866]

Fantastic job scouting this out Cori, you seem to have a talent for finding new discoveries. I wasted 15m of my time earlier, typing every possible variant of LotEditor I could think of into the Extra Cheats box!  Certainly exciting to see something I never thought existed though, I'm sure I'll kick myself when the magician reveals the trick.

I'll second Tarkus in saying an in-game T21 editor would be extremely useful. T21s are a PITA because you need to copy the LotConfigPropertyLotObject data from T21s to 1x1 Lots to actually see the positioning of your Props. However, the Prop data format used for both is identical, making me think if you can't save Lots, the same would be true of T21s. I note the error message you showed:

On 07/10/2019 at 11:30 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Attempt to save and no go:

It's just an educated guess really, but I wonder if there is a hard-coded path at play here. Since it's a dev tool, one assumes they would have had a way to save the files. Perhaps that's simply a path that doesn't exist on your system, but if there's some LUA behind this, it might be editable.

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

I wasted 15m of my time earlier, typing every possible variant of LotEditor I could think of into the Extra Cheats box!

Did you try Lot Configurations?

Spoiler

That's not it either.   (I didn't access it via the cheat box.)

 

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

I'm sure I'll kick myself when the magician reveals the trick.

If you've ever used Reader (and I'm guessing you have ), then yes. Yes, you will.

 

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

It's just an educated guess really, but I wonder if there is a hard-coded path at play here.

That was my second idea.

First I tried with no extension (assuming it'd know what to tack on). Then I tried .sc4lot, .dat, and .sc4desc (tho I didn't have any faith in that last one). I also tried cori_lot_0x123abc42.sc4lot and variations with no luck either. It does pop up a folder browser, so I tend to believe it's not path related. I do know the development path for the game items was sc4000\sc4000data\ and then either Tutorial or Automata or Lua and such.

I also put the game into its internal debug and test mode and tried all of the above again. That didn't make any difference. Other indications are that it needs to be married to an exemplar before creating the lot.

 

[carlosmarcelo 982]

14 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I do know the development path for the game items was sc4000\sc4000data\

Let me give us guesses?

I worked with software support for 6 years around 2001 to 2007, and I already resolved software bugs just creating a temp folder in C: (c:\temp), with everyone full control.

Other guess: when SC4 was create, windows was more liberality with your folders and registry and you used to use admin user for everything, all the time. You can try run SC4 in admin mode. I would bet in problem permission.

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

2 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

Let me give us guesses?

Excellent suggestions!

Unfortunately, neither one solved the problem in this case. It could also be looking for a specific mapped drive letter like is common in a local area network such as assigning a folder on a server to be seen as Drive S or such. I'm fairly certain I've found the internal table which contains all of the development paths and I'm parsing things out so I can recreate that for myself.

In the meantime, I'm guessing some of the other experts will soon find what I've found based on my vague clue to @rsc204 in the hidden text box above. It'll be like a scavenger hunt for those so inclined to go peek and poke.

[carlosmarcelo 982]

18 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'm fairly certain I've found the internal table which contains all of the development paths

How you got this paths?   How someone let this informations "available" in software?  

And how you activate ingame lot editor? 

Yes... I'm curious! 

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

4 minutes ago, carlosmarcelo said:

How you got this paths?  

Within some comments of the Lua code there are specific references to paths so that's text that can simply be read.

 

5 minutes ago, carlosmarcelo said:

How someone let this informations "available" in software?  

This part has to do with the dofile and _dofile_from_resource table. For the release version, the dofile Lua command is rewritten and the loop there strips out all path related parts to leave only the file name itself. It's that table I'll be parsing to get the full list.

 

6 minutes ago, carlosmarcelo said:

And how you activate ingame lot editor? 

Magic!

Everything I know about this will be revealed in time. (And should I get bonked by a falling space station or other calamity, you need not worry that the secret would be lost. @Cyclone Boom also knows the method and has copies of my creations to invoke each of the things I've found.)

[tariely 4,499]

[simmaster07 1,221]

On 10/8/2019 at 8:32 AM, matias93 said:

Ok... this is, well, way too much to process. I guess @rsc204, @Tarkus and/or @simmaster07 could know more or be interested on it.

yes hello

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

First I tried with no extension (assuming it'd know what to tack on). Then I tried .sc4lot, .dat, and .sc4desc (tho I didn't have any faith in that last one). I also tried cori_lot_0x123abc42.sc4lot and variations with no luck either. It does pop up a folder browser, so I tend to believe it's not path related. I do know the development path for the game items was sc4000\sc4000data\ and then either Tutorial or Automata or Lua and such.

I also put the game into its internal debug and test mode and tried all of the above again. That didn't make any difference. Other indications are that it needs to be married to an exemplar before creating the lot.

The directory that you save the file to needs to be married to a completely undocumented component, a directory files segment. Aside from saving the file, that component is also supposed to generate TGIs based on the file name and enable a reverse lookup where you give it a TGI and get the original source file path. I have no idea what's happening there, though. There are some parts of the code that reference a file, (SC4InstallDir)\Sys\Resources.ini, and from what I can tell it would  be populated like this:

[DBSegmentDirectoryFiles]
C:\sc4000\sc4000data\

But I've had no luck getting it to work.

On 10/8/2019 at 12:56 PM, carlosmarcelo said:

How you invoke this lot editor?

I know Cori's been keeping this under wraps until there's more info, but I'll spoil the surprise

Here's the secret sauce: there's a way to edit the game interface in iLive's Reader to reference some unused UIs, including the lot editor. If you edit one of the other UI elements to reference the abandoned debug tools then that tool will appear. I had issues getting mouse input to work properly with this method, though, so I found it easier to make a DLL that adds some cheats instead.

https://github.com/nsgomez/gzcom-dll/releases/tag/poc-hidden-uis

You should be able to use the cheats ShowLuaConsole, ShowLotConfigChooser, ShowNetworkLotChooser, ShowSimulatorControl, and ShowExemplarDebugger to bring up the hidden UIs.

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

49 minutes ago, simmaster07 said:

If you edit one of the other UI elements to reference the abandoned debug tools then that tool will appear. I had issues getting mouse input to work properly with this method, ...

I did it a wee bit differently by assigning the IID of the unused UI to the Query exemplar GUID in a ploppable lot and had no rodent trouble at all.

Main example:

 

Here's the list of unused IIDs which I've tested a wee bit along with some tentative notes:

• 09234182 - Lot Configuration Editor - Main Lot Editor?
• 49889894 - Big Empty Rectangle (To Test)
• 49AEE843 - File Paths of Exemplars That Have Changed, but Not Saved
• 49BFFBFE - Configure Columns
• 49D55C68 - Set Compatibilities (Network)
• 697CEF4C - Select Prop Families
• 6987B3F7 - Select Lot Textures
• 69C6C985 - View Selected Exemplar
• 6BD5521E - Breakpoints
• 891C9259 - Lot Configurations - Lot Scroll List - Access Lot Editor by Clicking "New" Button
• 89404462 - Select Flora Families
• 89AAD2AA - Lot Configurations - T21 Scroll List ?
• 8A10B4F5 - Simulator Control (Main Entry Point?)
• 8C1A5C9F - Empty, Invisible Box (may not be related)
• CB40CFD5 - Apply or Remove Label (with Text Entry)
• CBA2AEDC - Script Console
• CBA9EF16 - Script View
• CBD5251D - Variables
• E9263D01 - Select Lot Texture
• E9263D4C - Text Entry Box
• E9263D4D - Set Compatibilities - Network
• E9263D4E - Select Foundation or Retaining Wall
• E9263D4F - Select Building Families
• E9263DE5 - Set Lot Size
• E9A56248 - INGRED Itself (Large Grid with Many Buttons)
• E9AB008C - Lot Configuration Editor - Small - T21 Editor ?
• EBD5251B - Call Stack

A few of them will cause an immediate CTD such as Breakpoints, Variables, and Call Stack. These are also accessible from the Script View which itself is accessible from the Script Console one. And, ofc, many are just sub-windows accessed from others already in the list.

 

Be very careful if you decide to play around with these. Do not use them in any city you care about.

[matias93 7,535]

We don't deserve you both

[carlosmarcelo 982]

What silence!  I think everyone is doing tests with pretty new toys...  hua hua hua! 

Thank's @CorinaMarie and @simmaster07!

 

[simmaster07 1,221]

On 10/12/2019 at 4:07 PM, CorinaMarie said:

A few of them will cause an immediate CTD such as Breakpoints, Variables, and Call Stack. These are also accessible from the Script View which itself is accessible from the Script Console one.

Yep, that's more-or-less the expected behavior. Those windows are programmed so that when the game spawns them it expects their windows to have a Script View parent, so that the subwindows can tell what script is being referenced. They're also not programmed to handle the case where there is no parent window, so the game just crashes.

Simulator Control seems to be a completely abandoned UI. I can't find anything in code referencing it.

And as a last fun fact, it seems speeder on SC4D mentioned INGRED a few years back. Surprising it took another three years to figure out how to enable it