Who Plays Buck Nekkid?

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

No photos please.

I've been going through my plugins, cleaning house, so to speak. Getting rid of ugly lots, non-functioning buggy content, lots missing dependencies, duplicates and cheats that don't work. I started by emptying out all the plug-ins, and reloading them little by little. The first thing I noticed was how fast the game loaded. Then I started seeing game lots I had blockers on, some for the first time in years. The police kiosk you needed 50 of, just to stop tree TP'ing. The Statue of Liberty which was only of use if you always played NY. I knew all this stuff was still in the game, as I scrolled past it thousands of times in BP. Kind of weird going back to 2003. I'm kind of tempted to play a city without all the bells and whistles we've gotten used to.

So, does anybody here go "commando" occasionally?

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

Playing SC4 without any custom content is something I do occasionally, but it's more for diagnostic purposes to determine why certain items aren't working. As you say, along with the game starting noticeably quicker and loading empty tiles taking a second or so, the prevalence of the Maxis  Nuclear Blue water is hard to ignore. Adding a water mod and a terrain mod makes a massive difference, and for any new mayor who'd like to quickly enhance how their cities appear, I highly recommend visiting Cori's Shoppes.

I personally believe for anyone new to SC4 looking to get into custom content, it's well worth starting small and first learning the basics of the vanilla game. There's lots to discover, and easy to instead become overwhelmed by the many mods, the brilliant BATs, and the lovely lots available. It can be simple to overlook what Maxis created for the gameplay itself, and even though things like the traffic simulator have shortcomings which the NAM fixes. There's still fun to be had even with absolutely zero plugins installed. Even for a touch of nostalgia, the great thing is the ease of renaming one's Plugins folder to something else and starting up SC4.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

18 hours ago, SIM-ple Jack said:

So, does anybody here go "commando" occasionally?

Yep.

Oh. And I played vanilla SC4 for a long time too. Even now my plugins folder is 276 MB total of which 176 MB is NAM.

[Prophet42 1,501]

6 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Yep.

Oh. And I played vanilla SC4 for a long time too. Even now my plugins folder is 276 MB total of which 176 MB is NAM.

Since you are a master of rural areas (and I do mean that sincerely, I really like your rural creations) have you added any JMyers farms to your plugin collection?

[IDS2 3,346]

I almost exclusively play vanilla these days. I do have the NAM installed, but that's pretty much it. I was always the type of player to have an enormous plugins folder (it usually hovered around the 5-6 GB range), but after so many years of waiting ages for the game to start, each city tile to load, and the landmarks menu to populate, I got sick of it. I do still get the urge every now and then to rebuild a nicely curated plugins folder, but I haven't really kept up on the past 2-3 years of STEX/LEX releases, and the thought of having to sift through all of that gives me anxiety. 

It's weird - creating custom content of my own has given me a much greater appreciation for the breadth of custom content we have available to us, but I just have the most fun playing vanilla. I like the constraint of not being able to essentially god mode my way to success with a nearly unlimited selection of buildings and mods.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

3 hours ago, Prophet42 said:

... have you added any JMyers farms to your plugin collection?

Those are definitely on my short list for some day.

I'm at the point where I want to start my Plugins over from scratch by testing each and every basic fix the game needs. Until I get that solid foundation established, I feel it's best not to add more to it. Currently, I have a small selection of custom content like some rural fence lots, no-deps-required basic parking lots, some of the Wild West collection, really cool automata improvements for trains, cars, and now horses and carriages, along with a bunch of mods I've made for myself or are basic fixes for my play style like the No Age Degradation for Maxis utilities.

[TheCrybKeeper 300]

Not completely vanilla(SC4 Deluxe), but fairly close. My plug-ins folder is 24 MB.

That's all I can say right now, There's this nekked Buck beside me, asking for another rootbeer.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

On 12/29/2019 at 3:45 PM, IDS2 said:

I almost exclusively play vanilla these days. I do have the NAM installed, but that's pretty much it. I was always the type of player to have an enormous plugins folder (it usually hovered around the 5-6 GB range), but after so many years of waiting ages for the game to start, each city tile to load, and the landmarks menu to populate, I got sick of it. I do still get the urge every now and then to rebuild a nicely curated plugins folder, but I haven't really kept up on the past 2-3 years of STEX/LEX releases, and the thought of having to sift through all of that gives me anxiety. 

It's weird - creating custom content of my own has given me a much greater appreciation for the breadth of custom content we have available to us, but I just have the most fun playing vanilla. I like the constraint of not being able to essentially god mode my way to success with a nearly unlimited selection of buildings and mods.

I've probably went through the STEX SC4 content 4 or 5 times by now. Every time I do, I find new goodies. My plugins are around 675 mb now, after doing a little inventory clearance last month. Seems like a lot to some, but I use most of it all the time. NAM accounts for about 300 of it. I keep an auxiliary plugin for special stuff. That one is about 6-700 mb.

[c4bl3fl4m3 405]

...this thread is not about what I thought it would be about.

On 12/29/2019 at 1:33 PM, Prophet42 said:

have you added any JMyers farms to your plugin collection?

I'm not @CorinaMarie, but I have some, as well as a few others, and the SPAM. (I lived & died by the SPAM back about a year or so ago, but I'm seriously thinking of ditching it now, because of wanting to grow more BSC lots for BSC rewards.) Do you have a question about them? (I'm asking because there's a farm (definitely BSC, not sure if JMyers) I'm getting a brown box on the main house and I *know* I have all the dependencies, and I'm wondering if you're having the same issue.)