Raymond's Newbie Thoughts

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

7 minutes ago, City_Slider said:

Now my Garden is calling my Name ;-)

Take you time Oliver, I knew how important it is, Today when I saw your question in CFI thread, I found many lovely references in Pinterest.

[City_Slider 2,716]

3 Kg Red Currant from only one Plant. Sounds like Work for me... yummy Jam. I´ll do the Rest later on.

Whats about the NAM Ray? You was going to test it and let us know how it´s working for you?

Regards, Oliver

[Propfam 2,288]

2 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Thank you my friends, @mattb325 @BartonThinks @chfzdn, 

Yes, I have seen @TropicalWeatherEP in Xannepan's thread for many times, I presume that he is good at MATLAB as well,  These days I have finished reading his posts, It seemed I have to learn programming first, so I was learning Python with my boy these days.

I couldn't agree with you after reading through all of Xannepan's posts, Your previous tips were absolutely right there, Well, If you insist it (20%), I must confess that I just thought I understand 50% of his posts, (in fact 5%).

I readed many posts about how peeps tried to figure out adding submenu, They are all great names, @GoaSkin made one of the most notable progress close to it, IMO, Now at least I have had some vague notions about the relation between UI file and game's codes, And as GosSkin mentioned in another thread, we could achieve it by writing DLL.

---------- Brushes ----------

Brushes.zip

Hiya my friends, These are all Brushes I have made for my taste. Hope at least one of them would be helpful to your CJ works. You can find them in your Create Fauna of God Menu.

Patterns.zip

Hiya Oliver @City_Slider, This zip file "Patterns" above are some Patterns (FSHs) for the Brush "Pattern" in the "Pattern" folder of Brushes.zip. (Oh my goodness,Hope you can understand.), Please note that only put one FSH file into Pattern folder, For example, FSH3 is a CoriBoom Pattern and FSH21 is that eagle Pattern, sometimes, You may need to adjust parameters for a good result with Reader, I will tell you how to adjust them in a dedicated thread as soon as possible.

Yay! After some time of stagnation, this topic is finally back again! I'll test them, if I have the time.

Sorry for my hiatus. I don't have anything to do right now. I would like to get some input here but it'll be off topic.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

My friends, Frankly, I had many questions while digging recently, so Before go back modelling, I really want to ask some to you, I will try my best to make them more concise.

1.  Has anyone heard that someone made a comprehensive tutorial or research about Terrain INI?

Along with digging, I readed some posts by Lokwee and Ennedi, they seemed more focused on explaining the texture table (temperature" and "moisture"), However there are more parameters in that INI file if you open it with Reader, 

https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Terrain_Texture_File

Wiki said: The Terrain Simulation and Water Simulation parts of the file are just mock up data that was never completely implemented.

After tweaking some parameters of Rain or River there,  (hydrology) I just observed some weird effects, I'm not sure what and how they work exactly, But… A bit curious that why didn't heard anyone mentioned them before, Anyway, from the description, I did think Maxis planned to make different levels water system.

2.  Item submenu and Item Button IDs

From Wiki:

Item Button IDs are optional Exemplar properties that tie an item to a button ID. They are not menu placement IDs. They are listed below.

Item Submenu, If needed: which sub menu this item belongs to.

Then first of all, No Exemplar uses "Item Submenu", Second, I couldn't understand "Item Button IDs", I can see some Exemplars use this Property, But when I tried to overwrite it for a testing, I found that some of them couldn't be overwrote, For example, 00000005 Erode and 00000006 Smoothen, Then I really don't understand what the roles of these Exemplars.

I don't think nobody found them, There had to be some reason or I just haven't found out them in Google, Anyway, Much Appreciate any tips from your valuable experiences. Thank you!

[BartonThinks 3,416]

Glad to see the SC4D links were helpful, Ray. I think it's safe to say you're miles ahead of the rest of us on a bunch of this stuff.

One reason I mentioned @TropicalWeatherEP is that I saw a post from 2012 or 2013 where they asked for Xannepan's script, but then said that they didn't have access to MATLAB and/or didn't know how to use it. So I thought it might be possible that they figured out a new way to edit the effect dir since then.

As far as water and the terrain ini goes, the most detail I've seen about this is on the first page of Lowkee's Terrain Mod thread. When he started his project, he had some ambitious goals about activating some of the game's disabled water and moisture features. He posted in some detail about what he found in SimCity_1.dat, and a few users (Andreas and Cogeo) were able to share some information about what is known of the game's water-related effects and simulations.

One notable point from Andreas in Lowkee's thread is that it seems that a lot of these features were disabled within the .exe, and not just in SimCity_1.dat. That would mean that activating these features would require a DLL.

There are a few other things that I've seen on SC4D about how Maxis had originally planned to release an expansion pack that would add new weather, terrain, and nature features. That project was apparently cancelled because EA thought it wouldn't be profitable. Based on this, I would assume that most of these features are similar to features that were included in Rush Hour. That is, the game originally included bits and pieces of these features, but some of them were incomplete, and activating the features requires changes to the .exe.

That said, it sounds like no one has ever figured out these features in detail, so it's still possible that some of these features can be activated through .DAT patches.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, Raymond7cn said:

1.  Has anyone heard that someone made a comprehensive tutorial or research about Terrain INI?

I've not seen anything comprehensive on it, but I did tinker around in there myself a while back. I even made a mod for someone and attached it to a post, but who (CB?) knows where?

I forget what all I learned specifically, but as I recall most of them are only relevant when rendering in the game from a grayscale image. That's when most (or all?) altered settings have a noticeable effect. (Similar to the  Water Min  and  Water Max  in region.ini, but much more granular. )

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

14 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I even made a mod for someone and attached it to a post, but who (CB?) knows where?

Here it is...

[Linky]

(Cori gave me the file name, which I queried in the site's database to locate her post.)

The INI file is inside and can be opened in Reader 0.9.3 and edited that way. For anyone giving this a try, just make sure to hit the Apply button atop the right side panel to ensure changes are saved. I've made this mistake all too often to not realise it's necessary to commit the changes prior to actually saving the .dat file.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

 @Cyclone Boom @CorinaMarie @BartonThinks, What can I say? I have the best friends here, How lucky I am! 

I realized that a Terrain Mod is not that simple as I thought before, and this word "comprehensive" is not appropriate here, As Barton mentioned, I have seen Lowkee and other Modder's ambitious goals, I also have seen even Lowkee and Xannepan had some unsolved puzzles somewhere along the line, I'm not saying their abilities are inadequate, It's just since what they want have hit that barrier, Hard coding.

This barrier seems more bigger or higher to me, It means I need to learn some programming from scratch, I'd like to start it from what I desire, An Editor with Python, Well, Enough talking, Actions speaks louder.

A result by tweaking Terrain INI, It may prove that some arguments work there, whereas I still couldn't figure out "Sediment" means what.

Cori is right, The Lots couldn't be plopped in God Mode (Not a Cheat God Mode), And same to Bulldoze, whereas I don't know why MMP could be.

@CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom You must know this, CoriBoom, It even contains Breakpoints! 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

23 minutes ago, Raymond7cn said:

A new waterfall effect??? 

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

58 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

A new waterfall effect??? 

Ha-Ha, Barton, It's just an argument in Terrain INI file called "Rainfallfactor", (I'm not sure now due to lying in bed ), when I set it from 0.0001 to 1, The whole Terrain (a Mountain) became to this by just one click of "Erosion", Probably it's interrelated with other arguments, since I just tweaked them one by one and didn't roll back all of them, Anyway, Still looking forward some fun tomorrow. 

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

3 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

A new waterfall effect??? 

I thought he was designing furniture for IKEA, on the side.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

5 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

@CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom You must know this, CoriBoom, It even contains Breakpoints! 

Yep. We've seen those when I discovered how to access the IGLE. Thing is we haven't found a way to make use of them.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

I just couldn't help exploring these days, Everyday my head is full of Puzzle ABCDEF…, when I was digging Puzzle F, Then a new Puzzle G came out, You can guess out why there're so many Puzzles, since I'm a Newbie.

Let's skip those countless tests I made, since most of them were to no avail, even as for some success tests, I found that I just followed the steps of those Giants, Nevertheless I did learnt a lot of basic principles of the game.

 

I just could understand some of @smf_16's great works recently, Then threw some questions to him, Thank God we have Specialists on almost every areas.

I tweaked Cori's code a bit to get all Exemplars which haven't used in game. I haven't gotten notable finding, However this one (exist) was interesting, Item Button ID.

The agriculture and commercial and industrial and residential zone (low, Medium, high) occupied the range from 0x01 to 0x09, then landfill is oxoe, so I wondered why doesn't have 0x0a ~ 0x0d there? then I copied high industrial's Exemplar but modified the ExemplarIID and Item Button ID to 0x0a ~ 0x0d.

It's Interesting, when I queried those area I dragged with these new zone types, You can tell they were : Military Base, Airport, Seaport, Spaceport. What's your thoughts about this, My friends.

Besides, The Item Button ID also exists on some UDI transports and Terrain forming (erode, smooth, raise, lower, ) and even a disaster (fire) and Mayor Floras, I have tried to modified 4 flora's Item Button ID to Palm's, Then They all planted palms in game. Still couldn't figure out specific function of it.

Actually, I was designing a whole new UI mod as well, Not just modifying different color themes this time, But a different layout and new icons, I know it's a big challenge to me, Especially some issue were related to hardcode, Nevertheless, I did find out some new PNGs and got some skills of UI, so… It looks promising.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

Wow, that's weird indeed! Could it be that space ports and military bases could have been growable zones but have been scrapped for some reason?  Nice find!

[BartonThinks 3,416]

4 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Wow, that's weird indeed! Could it be that space ports and military bases could have been growable zones but have been scrapped for some reason?  Nice find!

The thread linked below is a good place to read more about these zones. I never played the earlier SimCity games, but apparently the seaports and airports in those games used growable zones. So it looks like Maxis originally planned to carry over this feature into SC4, but decided against it. One of the most likely explanations is that using growable zones for things like airports tended to produce really ugly and unrealistic results.

You can skip ahead to @simmaster07's post below, in which he demonstrates his experiments with these zones. He was able to place the zones in the game, but he wasn't able to get anything to grow on them, and he suspects that this would require a DLL patch.

 

One thing I noticed after re-reading the thread just now is that I'm not sure anyone bothered to fully test whether the zones could be enabled through exemplar modding. Simmaster said that he tried to get the Air Force Base to grow on a military or airport zone that fulfilled the requirements for the Air Force Base, but it sounds like that was the extent of his testing. I'm not sure if anyone else did further testing to see whether it's possible to either: (a) render these zones functional by modding existing developer exemplars (seaport/airport) and then creating new census and workforce exemplars to induce demand; or (b) repurpose these zones to create new types of RCI zoning.

I only have limited experience with modding zones and developers, and from the limited amount I know, I'm not super-confident that either option is possible without a DLL. But unless someone else has tried this already, I might poke around a little bit more and see if I can find viable way to test either option in-game.

[junspud 1,066]

On 7/21/2021 at 9:16 AM, Raymond7cn said:

---------- Brushes ----------

Brushes.zip

Hiya my friends, These are all Brushes I have made for my taste. Hope at least one of them would be helpful to your CJ works. You can find them in your Create Fauna of God Menu.

Patterns.zip

Hiya Oliver @City_Slider, This zip file "Patterns" above are some Patterns (FSHs) for the Brush "Pattern" in the "Pattern" folder of Brushes.zip. (Oh my goodness,Hope you can understand.), Please note that only put one FSH file into Pattern folder, For example, FSH3 is a CoriBoom Pattern and FSH21 is that eagle Pattern, sometimes, You may need to adjust parameters for a good result with Reader, I will tell you how to adjust them in a dedicated thread as soon as possible.

Thanks for posting these, I've actually desperately wanted something like this for years lol. Looking forward to being able to use these for even coastlines/ridges which have always been tedious and a slog.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

38 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

I never played the earlier SimCity games, but apparently the seaports and airports in those games used growable zones.

Correct - in SC3K it works that way.

It actually looks quite good with the seaports. Airports, however, indeed do look goofy in that game.

In any case, the assumption that Maxis would want to implement growable military bases, airports or seaports but ultimately didn't is reasonable. 

[Terring 6,473]

As a SimCity 3000 player, I can confirm that the airports and the seaports were grow-able instead of plop-able. Zoning for them might sounds great because you can give them any size and shape you want, but you'll always end up with an ugly mess of randomly placed buildings

And I'm really curious to see how those new zones could be used in SimCity 4. Maybe we could use them to introduce new type of zones, just like NAM used an unused type of road to make the RHW project, or just give them back their original function, but I'm not sure if that's possible at all.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

1 hour ago, Terring said:

Maybe we could use them to introduce new type of zones, just like NAM used an unused type of road to make the RHW project, or just give them back their original function, but I'm not sure if that's possible at all.

I'd be cautious doing this. First thing to check is if these zones are used by the game at all. I suspect they are as maxis airports show up as a different zone type on the map. Not sure if Military base does this too.

That being said, if it came down a choice between using the military base or getting a new zone type to use, I'd lose the base and take the zone.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

46 minutes ago, Whte_rbt said:

I'd be cautious doing this. First thing to check is if these zones are used by the game at all. I suspect they are as maxis airports show up as a different zone type on the map. Not sure if Military base does this too.

That being said, if it came down a choice between using the military base or getting a new zone type to use, I'd lose the base and take the zone.

As far as I can tell, three out of four of them are currently in use by Maxis lots, and two of them can be completely ruled out for repurposing.

The airport and seaport zones might be the easiest to test out, since the developer exemplars already exist. However, they would need to be kept off the table for repurposed zoning, since the Maxis Airports and Seaports rely on these zones, and there's a bunch of custom content that uses them too.

On the other hand, the military zone and spaceport zone appear to be safe bets for repurposing. The military zone seems like it was only used for the Army Base and Air Force Base. The spaceport zone wasn't used at all. (The in-game Spaceport uses the "Plopped Building" zone type.) From a quick glance at some of the custom military and spaceport content out there, it seems like most or all of this content uses the "Plopped Building" zone type as well.

Unless I'm mistaken about this, the military and spaceport zones could be re-purposed with only the Army Base and Air Force Base as conflicts, and it would be relatively easy to create a patch that mods these buildings so that they use the "Plopped Building" zone type. Players would need to demolish and replace existing instances of these lots, but that would be a small price to pay for two new growable zones.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

3 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

I'm not sure anyone bothered to fully test whether the zones could be enabled through exemplar modding.

I know I did not make any such tests.

It's really only in the past few months after looking into other things that I believe it might be possible if creating all the related exemplars. Ofc, as I mentioned in another thread, it would be a lot of work with no guarantee.

[Propfam 2,288]

I just want mixed use buildings. In the past, someone suggested that. But due to our lack of knowledge of plopped residential at the time, the experts simply didn't think possible. Now, @smf_16 has proven that we can have plopped residential reliably. So, it shouldn't be a problem for a mixed building to have residential in it.

Speaking of mixed zoned buildings, while you can replicate it using dual entries in Capacity Satisfied (and I'm really curious what happen if you do that), there's an enabler here that discussed on one reply in ST:

Unfortunately, the CAM 1.0 developers concluded that it wasn't finished. I hope this can be fixed.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

29 minutes ago, chfzdn said:

I just want mixed use buildings. In the past, someone suggested that. But due to our lack of knowledge of plopped residential at the time, the experts simply didn't think possible. Now, @smf_16 has proven that we can have plopped residential reliably. So, it shouldn't be a problem for a mixed building to have residential in it.

Speaking of mixed zoned buildings, while you can replicate it using dual entries in Capacity Satisfied (and I'm really curious what happen if you do that), there's an enabler here that discussed on one reply in ST:

Unfortunately, the CAM 1.0 developers concluded that it wasn't finished. I hope this can be fixed.

Enh, not sure about that. The enabler you're talking about has been tested by some people over on SC4D, and they couldn't get it to work.

Edit: Not saying it isn't worth exploring. It's definitely a feature I'd like to see. If we had new zones available, mixed-use R + C would be at the top of my list if it's available.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

3 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

mixed-use R + C would be at the top of my list if it's available.

Oh yes. Couldn't agree more. I'm always astonished as to how could Maxis overlook apartament blocks with this small bakery or post office at the ground level.

But then again... wouldn't it just be possible to simply mod already existing buildings in such a way that they satisfy C demand and provide some jobs? 

I don't know - is it a question of just adding some exemplars (or even values alone) or is it more complicated?

[smf_16 1,835]

I would be surprised if the unused zone types could ever be used for something that is practically usable (not just technically possible). In my opinion this will depend on two factors: 

• Does the game consider these zones for growing something on it? My guess is that only RCI is hardcoded in the exe, because we still have the demand simulator that sits in between. As far as I know, there is no ZoneType that you set on lot exemplars, you just set its OccupantGroups. This means that the exe needs a way of linking OccupantGroups to ZoneTypes, even for the unused zones. I doubt that this is implemented. For RCI for example, it's a combination of OccupantGroup and GrowthStage that determines what ZoneTypes a certain building can grow on. Of course you always have DLL modding, but this looks like a complex task (if at all possible) that just isn't worth it.
• Is there a way to easily zone them? Basically you would have to add a new zone type to the RCI zoning menu, and I'm not sure this isn't hardcoded either.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

On 7/29/2021 at 4:42 AM, smf_16 said:

I would be surprised if the unused zone types could ever be used for something that is practically usable (not just technically possible). In my opinion this will depend on two factors: 

• Does the game consider these zones for growing something on it? My guess is that only RCI is hardcoded in the exe, because we still have the demand simulator that sits in between. As far as I know, there is no ZoneType that you set on lot exemplars, you just set its OccupantGroups. This means that the exe needs a way of linking OccupantGroups to ZoneTypes, even for the unused zones. I doubt that this is implemented. For RCI for example, it's a combination of OccupantGroup and GrowthStage that determines what ZoneTypes a certain building can grow on. Of course you always have DLL modding, but this looks like a complex task (if at all possible) that just isn't worth it.
• Is there a way to easily zone them? Basically you would have to add a new zone type to the RCI zoning menu, and I'm not sure this isn't hardcoded either.

The first part is incorrect, at least insofar as how the game controls which lots use which zones. The property "LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes" controls which types of zones a property grows on, or which type of zone it creates once plopped. This can be used to override which lots grow on which zone densities (e.g., it's possible to have a stage 1 lot that only grows on high density zones). That said, I've never experimented with trying to assign a zone type to a lot that doesn't match up with the occupant group of the lot's building. And it's possible (or probable) that the "growability" of different zone types is hard-coded in the EXE. The strongest argument I can think of for this is the fact that agricultural and industrial zones use different growth behavior than residential and commercial zones, and this behavior appears to be hard-coded in the EXE.

The second part was solved by simmaster. He made a DLL that activates all four of the zones using a cheat code.

 

On 7/29/2021 at 12:38 AM, TheMurderousCricket said:

Oh yes. Couldn't agree more. I'm always astonished as to how could Maxis overlook apartament blocks with this small bakery or post office at the ground level.

But then again... wouldn't it just be possible to simply mod already existing buildings in such a way that they satisfy C demand and provide some jobs? 

I don't know - is it a question of just adding some exemplars (or even values alone) or is it more complicated?

Someone (I forget who, will need to look it up, but I'm on my phone) found a way to make this work, but the catch is that it mods all of the buildings within a given RCI class to include mixed zoning. So, for example, you could mod it so that all of the farms in the game also include R$ capacity. But this method doesn't allow you to pick and choose which buildings within a given class are mixed use and which are not. So if you wanted to add R$ capacity to a C$ building, you would need to add R$ capacity to all C$ buildings.

(Edit: I misremembered how this worked. The mod in question adds jobs to residential lots, but the jobs don't fit any of the typical commercial or industrial categories, and they may not count towards the game's workforce capacity. See this post for more details.)

As chfdzn mentioned, there is a property that can be added to buildings which appears to allow for mixed use occupancy. However, when people have tested this property, it has appeared to be nonfunctional. It might be something that Maxis either failed to enable, or it might be something they disabled after the fact. It's also possible that this property is functional, but that it requires other properties to be configured in a certain way. But if that's the case, I don't know how you'd figure out the correct configuration without help from the people who designed it in the first place.

[mattb325 28,880]

As has been discussed, the BSC tested the possibility of multiple zones many, many years ago: the exemplar is "Allow Joint Occupancy | 0x27812836" which you set to '1' in the reader for true and then add the appropriate listings under "Capacity Satisfied | 0x27812834". 

Unfortunately nothing worked - whether starting with a residential and adding commercial, or a commercial and adding residential, etc.

At that point, if I recall correctly, Ripplejet concluded that the zone type was not enabled/deliberately disabled. Adding the property of joint occupancy didn't result in a CTD, but it's been years since I helped test it out, so would need to make some new versions to see if anything else can be done. We did the tests with growable buildings, but this has got me thinking it may work for ploppables (say, Commercial Services + Commercial Office types) but a ploppable would probably exclude a residential + commercial as residential workers can't leave a plopped building (even if it is just to travel downstairs).

I'll make a quick test and report back, but I'm not expecting any amazing results, lol....

[mattb325 28,880]

Sorry for the double post, but the test was quick and simple, and, as expected yielded no results. I used a little batted monopoly hotel piece for the testing

These are the steps:

1. Create a new ploppable building/lot in the PIMX with the monopoly hotel. I used CS$$ as the template
2. Open the reader
   • add 'Allow Joint Occupancy'
   • add the Office exemplar to the Services exemplar under 'purpose'
   • add a number of Office jobs (CO$$ in this case) under capacity satisfied
3. Save the lot
4. Open a brand new blank region with empty plugins, except the lot, model and the census repository
5. Create a new city, build a road, zone some residential, plop the census repository and plop the dual occupancy monopoly hotel lot
6. Run the simulator and query the census repository.

I've attached the picture of changes made in the reader, plus the screenshot of the census repository results.

The ploppable lot worked without crashing the game, and accepted employees, however, when queried in the census repository, only the CS$$ jobs were counted and the game did not recognize the office jobs. Additionally, zoning extra residential in attempt to soak up the extra office jobs just showed no job zots once the CS$$ component of the building was filled. In other words, neither the game, nor the census repository recognised the extra CO$$ jobs within the lot.

At this stage, unless there are other properties that I have failed to add, it looks like this part of the test also turns up no results with regard to dual occupancy (or perhaps it means it was not intended for RCI in any form)

 

 

[Kloudkicker 4,561]

1 hour ago, mattb325 said:

unless there are other properties that I have failed to add

Try also adding CO$$ to the OccupantGroups and Occupant Types fields and see what happens.

[mattb325 28,880]

Well spotted  Unfortunately it doesn't make a difference (OG among other things largely determine menu placement) - I even added a school on the very slim off chance that lack of education might play a part in sims not taking a co$$ job...