Raymond's Newbie Thoughts

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

Ah, i have known why the planes couldn't take off from my port, it needs land not water, This is going to be difficult unless i could crack the secret of Tag, All i knew by now is that we could change the tag's property from helipad type to airplane hanger type, or opposite, Then there will be a helicopter even though the Tag is airplane.

Don't be surprise, I just know i could drive UFO. Fire as will!

-- Edit --

After hours digging into effdir, i have found out the takeoff effect of copter and plane, i have no idea if i could make plane take off from water by editing them, and the most important is i was just aware that i haven't known how to isolate ot create a individual effdir, so i gave up this thought tentatively.

And also i found out a script of Spore, don't know too much about this game, but they have the same Graphic engineer, and Spore has an effdir Editor which could decode and encode effdir, so i thought it maybe useful to research in future:

Spoiler

custom laser beam .pfx code:

CODE: SELECT ALL

 

ribbon ribbon-217 -flags 0x00000199

 alpha 0.6

 width 2.0 1.0 3.0 4.0 2.0 3.0 2.0 1.0 3.0 4.0 2.0 3.0 2.0 3.0 1.0 4.0 2.0 3.0 2.0

 offset 0.5 0.3 -0.3 -0.5 -0.3 0.3 0.5 0.3 -0.3 -0.5 -0.3 0.3 0.5 0.3 -0.3 -0.5 -0.3 0.3 0.5

 taper 0.7

 fade 0.8

 life 1.0 1.0

 startAlpha 0.0

 endAlpha 0.0

 segments 20

 segmentLength 0.066

 texture D7DE3DD2x1 -draw additive -sortOffset 0.2 -light -noFog

 tileUV 10

 slipUV -4.0

end

ribbon ribbon-218 -flags 0x00000199

 width 2.0

 offset 0.0

 taper 0.6

 life 1.0 1.0

 startAlpha 0.0

 endAlpha 0.0

 segments 20

 segmentLength 0.066

 texture D7DE3DD2x1 -draw additive -sortOffset 0.2 -light -noFog

 tileUV 10

 slipUV 10.0

end

effect UFM_ddklaser_beam -flags 0x10 -lodDistances 1.0 200.0 500.0 1000.0 2500.0

 ribbon ribbon-217 -sizeScale 0.7 1.0 1.5 2.0

 ribbon ribbon-218 -sizeScale 0.7 1.0 1.5 4.0 8.0

 sound -name ufo_laser_loop -soundFlags 0xa -field_18 #20322034 -field_1C 0.025

end

export UFM_ddklaser_beam

The most important thing for modifying effdir, IMO, it's understanding the meaning of those numbers, some of them i could understand since they are similar as 3ds max's Particle modifier, but the others with simple desc names are difficult.

So there maybe another way i could think of is to deceive the game as the plane's Tag has been already in the land, i haven't figured out how to do this, since it seems hard to overhang a Tag, so…that's it, i should go to prepare for the publish right now.

BTW, along with digging, this one is interesting:

Why don't we paint our seawall or mountain in this way!  @CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom @BartonThinks @Terring @catty-cb

-- Edit again --

Opps, i found that some effects reference to Lua, then looked through Lua, it calls some effects. It reminds me that is it possible there is a parameters which defines the behavior of plane? i remember that have seen some Automata Lua when i was consulting Cori.

-- Edit again and again, --

Simply replace the plane parts with helicopter, Then… The plane could take off from the sea!! Just a little weird since it has a propeller (maybe effect) and rolling in the sky. haha.

[Terring 6,476]

I gave a try to the new versions of the vertiport. This is the one with the small base and the lack of a custom icon. And look! We already have a helicopter flying around.

Let's go now to the second version, with the bigger base and the custom icon. And now we can see the helicopters at their pads, ready for action. But unfortunately we'll also see a serious case of the infamous Water Bug. A case so bad that no matter how many times I changed to the zones and water pollution views and back, that big hole was refusing to go away. I even exited the city and entered it again, but still nothing.

The anchors however look fixed. It's not all grey anymore. By the way, you should rename it from "This is a Vertiport" to "This is an Awesome Vertiport" because it's true

Another annoying game bug is what I call Big Lot Crime Bug. Large lots, like airports, malls, the university and your vertiport, attract a lot of of criminals because the game doesn't allow the police forces of the in-game police stations to enter those large lots. Fortunately the are custom-made police stations that have been modded to combat crime on those mega lots. @mattb325 has made a few of them and enlisted some of them available at LEX. I think that with some extra research you can find more modded police station at both LEX and STEX. If having high levels of crime at your vertiport bothers you, you can either cut it at two smaller lots, or place it inside the radio of a modded police station. I always build Matt's Modern Police Station next to my airports, because it solves the problem and fits nicely in my futuristic cities.

By the way, are these airplanes?

Oh boy, there are airplanes on your vertiport, ready to take off

But if you don't have the Maxis-made air strip or the Area 5.1, you can't take them off and fly with them, right? Actually, you can! You can still UDI those planes, as well as any vehicle. To do this, you'll need the SimCity 4 Extra Cheats Plugin made by @Buggi, which adds many additional abilities to the game, like ploping any building or lot at will (very useful for testing grow-able lots), setting by yourself how much money you want in your city's treasury anytime, and even adding snow to your terrains, as well as many other additional functions. Such as getting the control of any vehicle, including the helicopters and the airplanes that your vertiport deploys! Here is what you need to do.

1) Download the mod and unzip the file SimCity 4 Extra Cheats Plugin.dll to the root directory of your plugins folder. This means, put the file in C:\...\My Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins. DO NOT put the file into a sub-folder, it will only work if placed into the main directory. If you have a digital version from GOG (like me), put the file (and only the file) on GOG Games / SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition / Plugins.

2) Open the game, go to any city that has your vertiport, and zoom close enough so you can see easily the airplanes. It's very important, trust me.

3) Press the key combination [CTRL] + [x] and a cheat box will open at the left-up corner of the screen. Right click anywhere within the cheat box and you'll see a drop down list appear with many cheats to choose.

4) The cheat you need is the udriveit. Select the cheat by clicking on it and press the ENTER key to confirm your selection.

5) Now click on any airplane you want to fly and voila! Good speed, pilot . You can use this cheat to UDI any vehicle you wish, such as those that are never meant to be controlled like the green train track checkers and the white cement mixers.

But even then, you can't take off your airplanes. You can rotate them but you can't move them at all. Why? Because you need something else too. As @KonstantinII told to me many years ago, at the start and end of the runways there should be a diamond prop named 0x2c5d0000---Tag1x1x3_Runway---Gnome. If you don't have them, then your runway will not work and your airplanes will be stuck there forever. Put those props at the edges of your runway and your planes will fly again.

Of course as you can understand now, your planes will need to run through your vertiport to get the necessary speed for taking off. But that's OK, because now your vertiport will work like some of the concepts for the GDI Airfield from the Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars game

By the way, this picture:

11 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

...reminds me the Tenzing–Hillary Airport in the town of Lukla, eastern Nepal. Hands down, one of the most dangerous airports on Earth

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

15 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Besides, How could i find out the sound file which belongs to the take off effect? i want to make a custom sound.  

Here's a general overview of how sounds are stored and referenced.

 

12 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Spore has an effdir Editor which could decode and encode effdir, so i thought it maybe useful to research in future:

Is this a downloadable tool? Or is it built into the game?

For a good initial investigation of the Effects Dir, see this topic over on Devotion. This post on page 1 gives an example of how to locate things starting in Section 13 of the Effects Dir to then find the hex code (which needs converted to decimal) that leads to the line in Section 12 which then gives the line number to look up in Section 1 where you can find the Resource IID which will lead to the S3D and, as you know, the Mat Tab in the S3D will yield the IID of the FSH for it.

As I understand it, the effect dir is rather complicated with mutli-tree linkys within itself and so a full editor has never been made. However, @xannepan did release a script for use with MatLab (a program which is not free). Attached to this post in that thread is the file EffectEditScriptJENX.zip which contains three separate scripts to use with said program. Since I don't have MatLab, I didn't research any further.

 

12 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Opps, i found that some effects reference to Lua, then looked through Lua, it calls some effects. ...<snip> ... Simply replace the plane parts with helicopter, Then… The plane could take off from the sea!! 

The concept looks viable. I would suggest using that info and creating a new, separate Automata group. (I'm saying this in case you were planning to overwrite the existing code which would then affect other automata that utilizes the existing groups.)

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

Dear @CorinaMarie and @Terring, Thank you so much for your thorough elaborating, I really appreciate this, Thank you!

1 hour ago, Terring said:

And look! We already have a helicopter flying

Yes, Terring, with this first version, i made this Lot with 3x5 dimension, the base texture is hiding under the port. and also the Tags which generates aircrafts, since i couldn't overhang these special props.

1 hour ago, Terring said:

But unfortunately we'll also see a serious case of the infamous Water Bug

I'm very sorry about this, Terring, i thought it maybe caused by without base texture in this version. i should avoid it.

1 hour ago, Terring said:

what I call Big Lot Crime Bug

Yes i know this Bug which brings annoying advisor to my Airport during playing, but i don't know how matt solved it, I thought you may don't have this problem with the first version.

Thank you for the patient explaination, Yes they are planes and which are driving me crazy by now, Just as you said, i couldn't make them take off. By testing i have figured that it's because of water, when i put the tile where i put the Tag (plane) into water, they couldn't take off, but after i added a Land tile and put the Lot half in land, they could. It's different from helicopter.

1 hour ago, Terring said:

0x2c5d0000---Tag1x1x3_Runway---Gnome

And regarding Runway, yes i have noticed it as well, i thought it matters to the Effect Take Off which Robin shared to me before, and i saw them within Airport Lot, But you do remind me that i might overlook something, maybe i need a pair of them for taking off?! THANKS Terring, i will give it a try tomorrow.

2 hours ago, Terring said:

get the necessary speed

Yes, i have found it out from Lua file of aircraft, we could change it to zero, however it didn't work for my take off from water issue. 

2 hours ago, Terring said:

reminds me the Tenzing–Hillary Airport in the town of Lukla, eastern Nepal. Hands down, one of the most dangerous airports on Earth

Yes, Pretty funny, Haha, will definitely give it a shot someday.

-----

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Here's a general overview of how sounds are stored and referenced.

Thank you Cori, i have found out them and plan to replace a sfx with more realistic sound.

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Is this a downloadable tool? Or is it built into the game?

It's a downloadable tool, i didn't try it with SC4's effdir, This is just a wild thought came out suddenly at then.

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

good initial investigation of the Effects Dir, see this topic over on Devotion.

Thank you Cori, Lowkee and xannepan they are really masters on this, i will learn it later.

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

MatLab

Ah, now i understand how does xannepan make those amazing Effects, he made an Editor in MatLad, Is it right? what a great work. Cori, i thought you are the best who should study the effdir, i'm too stupid.

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

concept looks viable. I would suggest using that info and creating a new, separate Automata group. (I'm saying this in case you were planning to overwrite the existing code which would then affect other automata that utilizes the existing groups.)

After trials and errors, I found that the plane could take off from water only after i changed plane's (fireplane's parent) class id to helicopter's id 8ba98eda, then i searched and got this id from savegame's DBPF, where says it's a C++ Class named cSC4Helicopter, this was all i was able to figure out by now, unless this class has been decoded, then i may could modify its parameters by inheriting.

Then i made some tests as possible as i could,  i tried to guess out some methods or parameters in that helicopter Class, so i wrote some parameters which i found them from other relevent LUAs, i ran into crashing after i made a mess there, then i also tried to let fireplane inherit two parents (helicopter and plane), Failed, seemed the second statement would overwrite the first parent.

I haven't tried if i could make A inherit B inherit C, Anyway, Just trials and errors.

Tomorrow, i will make the final test, If still no.luck, i will release the first version, after all it's not that bad as Terring said.

BTW, it's an interesting delving, There are also 8b79c707 = cSC4TextDecalOccupant (Painted Labels class id) and ab72fbb3 = cSC4SignpostOccupant. i'd like to delve into these LUAs more deeper later.

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

1 hour ago, Raymond7cn said:

Cori, i thought you are the best who should study the effdir,

As it turns out, I'd been investigating exactly that during the past couple of days.

I've looked into it some more today and with what I learned, I've been able to successfully edit it in hex mode to revise the resource IIDs of some of the effects. After saving, closing, and reopening the copy of the effdir, it did then show my modifications in the Section 1 tab. Ofc, this was merely a proof of concept edit rather than anything useful as the equivalent change could be made by simply replacing the S3D/Exemplar pair's contents.

Based on the notes and file structure breakdown in @xannepan's MatLab scripts I do see how it would be theoretically possible to create an editor, but that would be a monumental task and one which doesn't interest me nearly as much as other projects such as the Reader Lua that @Cyclone Boom and I have been working on the past couple of weeks.

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

So, I grabbed a copy of @xannepan's Buzzards creator and then hex edited the Effect Dirs:

^ Ofc, as mentioned before, this very same effect can be created by renaming the S3D file, but here I'm showing that hex editing the Effect Dir directly also works.

[Cyclone Boom 17,032]

Local residents in Corillion look to the skies, as a synchronised aerobatics display is performed, unlike any other...

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

5 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Local residents in Corillion look to the skies, as a synchronised aerobatics display is performed, unlike any other...

 

9 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Ofc, this was merely a proof of concept edit rather than anything useful as the equivalent change could be made by simply replacing the S3D/Exemplar pair's contents.

I do have a feeling it's almost like friends are always supporting around me, i have looked through xannepan and Lokwee's posts, what you have done is very important for trials and errors testing. we will finally conquer Effdir someday!

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

Hiya Cori, @CorinaMarie i'm not sure if i could use your splendid tutorial in my vertiport to make it acts as a seaport. Frankly i haven't understood all the points, but i will give up this thought if things becomes too complicated, For instance, Modifying the Seaport Controller. Thank you!

 

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

Hiya, Raymond. ( @Raymond7cn )

Technically, yes it could be made into a Seaport, but then the logistics of making it play nice with all possible combinations of other seaports peeps have would be a nightmare. Until the master controllers are revised to be much more logical so one can easily mix and match (and which can be done, but requires a complete overhaul), I'd suggest to not adding the seaport option.

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

I've been poking around some more and I found a built-in effect that doesn't seem to be included in Gizmo Effect Props (v2.0).

And zoomed in showing the in game animation:

[Wiimeiser 452]

Flowing water? In the vanilla game?

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

57 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I've been poking around some more and I found a built-in effect that doesn't seem to be included in Gizmo Effect Props (v2.0).

And zoomed in showing the in game animation:

Woww! Cori @CorinaMarie, Do you hear those cheers? Those are for you, My Lady!

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

1 hour ago, Wiimeiser said:

Flowing water? In the vanilla game?

Yep. And just now I hex edited the Eff'n Dir to change the color.

 

That is, ofc, prolly too blue, but any RGB value can be converted to floating point numbers as a percentage of 255 for each color channel.

 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

Wait -- what? You found rivers??

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

2 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

Wait -- what? You found rivers??

Yep. They can be bouncy too as they take into account the momentum as they find the most logical path downhill.

^ Hex edited the Eff'n Dir again with the RGB code @Cyclone Boom suggested.

[Cyclone Boom 17,032]

This thread sure is a wonderful diary of discovery.

Flowing water is really something I never expected to see in SC4 before, and the ability to change the colour too here as Cori showed above. It reminds me of how the lava on volcanos flows to the terrain undulations, and how there's the particle simulation which is a little known thing about the game mechanics.

Here's a few extra previews...

Firstly we can see the water splashing as it falls from the edge, and then disperses with the raised mini mountain I formed:

 

Then seeing how the water interacts with the lava from a volcano:

(Also the water seemed to extinguish the burning trees too.)

 

Finally, here's another promising one we've found, and placed to recreate a waterfall effect:

 

These are effects in the game, and they could be used combined to create different variants. Like with making the initial waterfall, and then allowing the stream to flow along further, since that travels a further distance in conforming to the terrain slopes. This means they can be assigned as props which allow plopping onto a lot, and then removing the base texture so they appear transparent (and no water bug since there aren't any overlays). The above is only a test to show what is workable.

One possible idea which sprung to my mind is as a tool to determine where low lying areas are situated. These would constitute flood risk areas, and could be seen as an aid to assist city planning. Like seeing this as a simulation to know where are the most suitable locations for RCI zoning (as in the real world).

Of course, it does need some more experimentation to see what we can do, but this is just as a little taster for now.

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

@CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom Allow me to babble a few words again, Cori and CB, you are the true treasure we have in simtropolis. Robin has said that if someone could relive this technique which is to be lost, we all would follow him or her, He maybe wrong there, we have followed you before that long ago.

I used to feel ptiy about @xannepan doesn't keep shocking us with his great works, and even though i want to learn it, i felt weak of ability to learn so much, Maybe i understand why Effects couldn't become an indispensible part of SC4, people are probably afraid of those amazing effects would slow down their comps. But i thought we won't be afraid of it if we conquer it. we could use it into some places where we couldn't dream to be before, we could change the parameters of Particles so that it could beautify our cities more decently, since we have CoriBoom™ nothing is impossible.

Learning is a long Journey God shows to the end of my life, i'm happy to have you along this way.

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

②⑤ Automata phase 1 :

Thank CoriBoom™ so that i could more focus on modeling a while, This is my next project which includes:

    ➊ Futurist vehicle @Terring

    ➋ Vintage car @BartonThinks (actually maybe props)

    ➌ Tractors @CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom

    ➍ Boeing 787-9 @dmn finished

    ➎ Ferry boat

    ➏ London Bus Prop and Lot have been finished

It's a long way to go, i may release them occasionally, Hope could get your supports with reference pics (basically most of them i have never seen in RL) as usual.

[Terring 6,476]

That's some really cool water effects, CoriBoom Team. Combine them with the plop-able water mods the community have already made, such as @Pegasus' Pond Kit Deluxe Edition and PPOND KIT, and you'll get incredible natural wonders

By the way...

On 16/9/2020 at 4:35 AM, Cyclone Boom said:

Give your cars some wings and propelled engines, and you'll get these fellas flying around your city!

[BartonThinks 3,416]

@Raymond7cn

For the vintage cars, I believe the easiest and most manageable approach would be to focus on two or three of the vehicle series made by Ford in this period. The way that Ford made cars during the early 1900s is they would design a core model, and then they would create variants of that model for different uses. This would allow them to create several types of cars based on a single design. These variants included basic cars for middle class drivers, luxury cars for wealthier buyers, as well as utility vehicles like delivery trucks -- all of which would be based on the same core design.

You'd be able to do the same thing with 3D models, which would give you an easier way to make multiple types of vehicles. The other advantage to choosing Ford is that their cars were by far the most popular made during the 1910s and 1920s. At one point, I believe more than 50% of all US households owned a Model T.

One of the best places I've found for reference photos is OldCarBrochures.com, which contains brochures printed by the Ford company containing illustrations of all the different variants of their vehicles. I've picked a two of my favorite ones and included pictures from the brochures below. I put the pictures in spoiler tags to avoid overwhelming the thread.

1912 Model T (Link to Full Brochure)

Spoiler

 

 

1930 Model A (Link to Full Brochure)

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

Some additional notes:

• The Model A brochure only includes cars, but Ford made a number of trucks using the same chassis. So here are a few pictures of the 1930 Model A as a delivery van and a pickup truck: Van 1 / Van 2 / Van 3 // Truck 1 / Truck 2. Also, here are a few additional photos of the 1912 Model T as a van or truck: Van // Truck
• If you're able to, I think it would be really helpful to create two versions of the props -- one set that's shiny and new, and a second set that's a little bit dirty and worn down. For example, if you made a shiny new 1912 coupe, I could use it on R$$ lots for the 1900 to 1925 period. Then, if you made a dirty, worn down version, I could use it on R$ lots for the 1925 to 1950 period (since most lower class people would have to buy used versions of older cars).
• If you want to look at manufacturers other than Ford, here are a few brochures that I found from other companies from this period. Oldsmobile 1905,/ Packard 1913 / Chevrolet 1921 / Buick 1922 / Chrysler 1926

Thanks again for offering to make these, and congratulations on releasing the Vertiport. I'm glad I could help, even if it was only in a tiny way. 

[TogaMasterJohn 711]

Oh my gosh... I AM SO EXCITED!!!  I never would have guessed that it was possible to have flowing rivers and the like! Am I sensing a CoriBoom™ release here at some point with this functionality enabled? If so, I can't wait!

I showed my father this (he is what got me into the game years ago) and he was amazed. This, to me, is a groundbreaking discovery in SC4! Who would have ever thought that this was possible originally? If it weren't for this thread, who knows...

Cori, Cyclone Boom, and Raymond... this is some amazing stuff! Before I start work each day, I come on here and I always look forward to seeing updates in this thread. Pure genius!

Keep up the tremendous, excellent work here. I love this game and I love this place!

[CorinaMarie 29,899]

40 minutes ago, TogaMasterJohn said:

Am I sensing a CoriBoom™ release here at some point with this functionality enabled?

We do indeed have that in mind.

Are we sure that xannepan, Lowkee33, DarkMatter, or GoaSkin, etal never discovered this? It really isn't hidden and I found it after just a couple days poking around in the Eff'n Dir.

The Maxis colored water is the default so it's a fairly simple task to create the required prop exemplars and a few ploppable lots which trigger the effects. Ofc, ideally, they could have a U-shaped rock enclosure so the source of the streams could be masked somewhat in the game. That might be something our dear Raymond could work into his To Do List. Edit: CB mentioned that peeps can use MMP rocks. (Since I've not gotten into that yet, it didn't occur to me.)

Now, for any other color of water and that has to be edited via the hex itself as there's no other tool for the job. For my tests, I've extracted the single, large Effects Dir from SimCity_1.dat and I'm making my edits in that copy. By loading this last, it does override the vanilla settings. Ofc, if any other mod uses this same thing then whichever of those loaded last would override the other. Then there's the question of just which color blue to make the water. We'd all prolly have a different preference.

Ideally, extracting just the required entries from the Effects Dir would be the best like xannepan was able to do. I don't have the million dollar program to run his scripts and writing my own code to parse the info would be way too involving.

It might be best if we release the props and lots and I write a guide to walk peeps thru changing the colors themselves.

 

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

1 hour ago, BartonThinks said:

Thanks again for offering to make these, and congratulations on releasing the Vertiport. I'm glad I could help, even if it was only in a tiny way. 

Thank you Barton, I do feel relieved after publishing, That big model indeed is a torture to my computer, and it's definitely not a tiny help, Please allow me to consult you again while it's progressing.

1 hour ago, TogaMasterJohn said:

I AM SO EXCITED

Me too! Actually i'm just in charge of asking, they are in charge of amazing us.

50 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Ofc, ideally, they could have a U-shaped rock enclosure so the source of the streams could be masked somewhat in the game. That might be something our dear Raymond could work into his To Do List. Edit: CB mentioned that peeps can use MMP rocks. (Since I've not gotten into that yet, it didn't occur to me.)

Whatever you need Cori, You can trust in me and please just let me know, This is the only thing i'm good at (at least IMO) and could be helpful, i will try my best to provide sufficient models as you need even those @Terring mentioned. 

even though you want to put some dragons into your castle, and UDI it into the sky…

[catty-cb 4,413]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

We do indeed have that in mind.

Are we sure that xannepan, Lowkee33, DarkMatter, or GoaSkin, etal never discovered this? It really isn't hidden and I found it after just a couple days poking around in the Eff'n .....

I've been roaming around the various sc4 sites since ..... 2006 or thereabouts and I could be wrong but I don't remember anybody creating rivers .... there was talk about it as people were aware that maxis had built stuff into the game files that wasn't getting used, and most people assumed the programmers had run out of time and these things would be released at a later date .... of course that never happened 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

2 hours ago, catty-cb said:

I've been roaming around the various sc4 sites since ..... 2006 or thereabouts and I could be wrong but I don't remember anybody creating rivers .... there was talk about it as people were aware that maxis had built stuff into the game files that wasn't getting used, and most people assumed the programmers had run out of time and these things would be released at a later date .... of course that never happened 

For whatever it's worth, there's some information about this stuff on the SC4D forums if you know where to look and which search terms to use. Lowkee's terrain works thread details his efforts to figure this stuff out, for example. But it looks like he ended up abandoning most of his experiments with rivers and moisture by the time he released the Appalachia mod.

I've included a couple choice excerpts from his thread below:

Quote

It would be real neat to see the output of a water pump be related to the moisture level.  Going through SimCity_1.dat it seems like they had big plans for water that never panned out.  Rivers were defiantly one of them as they talk about water from a river changing the color of the water it flows into.  There are also hints to erosion that could happen in-game.  I guess it wouldn't be fun if your downtown got washed away

 

Quote

 Opening this up in Reader there are two exemplars.  One for the Lake tool, and one for the Rain tool.  There is actually a 3rd exemplar in SimCity_1.dat called Spring (?), and the LText says something like "to make rivers".   These tools interest me very much, because I feel like if there is a way to make real rivers happen it would be in here.  I will have to try to make the spring tool work.

dit: Another Lowkee quote from a separate thread.

Quote

I think the biggest downfall of rivers was the edge of a city.  If the source of moisture is rain and slope, how do you make a river flow from one city to another?  One remnant of a solution is that the left side of a city is more moist than the right side.  Since Moisture causes erosion, the left side of your city is going to render wrong.  There doesn't seem to be any way to turn this "left side moisture" off.   

Second edit: I've never bothered to try Xannepan's Poseidon mod, but I'm going over the readme now and it's pretty interesting what he managed to accomplish -- even if the results were kind of buggy. No idea if the effects that he used overlap with the ones @CorinaMarie is tinkering with, but his thread on SC4D also contains a bunch of notes about his experiments with effects.

[Terring 6,476]

2 hours ago, catty-cb said:

there was talk about it as people were aware that maxis had built stuff into the game files that wasn't getting used, and most people assumed the programmers had run out of time and these things would be released at a later date .... of course that never happened 

Those things were supposed to be part of a second expansion pack focused on nature, that adds weather and salt water among others, but never made because "that would made the game too complicated"

[Wiimeiser 452]

17 minutes ago, Terring said:

but never made because "that would made the game too complicated"

I think that was the then-new CEO (who took over shortly after RH was released) who said that, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

(Also wasn't aware that the second expansion was supposed to be about nature. I wonder what else is left over...)

 

EDIT: Looking at the Vertiport, I sense a future upgraded version that will work with these. Also, I didn't know you could just plop FLUPs in water...

  Edited September 17, 2020 by Wiimeiser  

[Raymond7cn 6,776]

I'm afraid that peeps would spend too much time on the way to my Vertiport, so I'm gonna make them an offer they can't refuse (Don Vito Corleone), underwater Subway station. 

[catty-cb 4,413]

4 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

Also wasn't aware that the second expansion was supposed to be about nature. I wonder what else is left over...)

I used to be a member of the sc4 maxis forums and in those days the programmers were still talking to and answering people's questions about the game .... one of the things I can still remember is one of the programmers explaining that they were under orders to make the game playable on most people's computers which meant cutting out anything that would have required what at the time would have been a very expensive high-spec computer .... now of course we would consider those computers to be bottom of the range