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[rsc204 21,808]

Did you install the CAM and use it in a pre-existing region? There is a problem with how SC4 handles the distinction between data in the save file and that in Plugins. So even though the data in Plugins may have been changed so as not to require water, but so far as the data in the save file they still do and the only way to update the save data would be to rebuild them with the altered properties present. In other words you need to bulldoze such farms and let them grow again and you shouldn't see this problem anymore.

[A.U. Tocrat 8]

No it was in a new empty region. I haven't played in more than a decade, so except for the tutorial region everything else is empty.

[rsc204 21,808]

Well I’d have to look at the files to say for certain, but that suggests that despite what any documentation may say, these buildings do actually need water. 

[A.U. Tocrat 8]

How would I go about checking that myself? Seems like getting the game up and running the way I'd like will require some work on my part anyway, might as well get started with this.

[rsc204 21,808]

So a copy of any altered Maxis content is part of the CAM files. Open that with either Reader or PIM-X, find the farms (buildings exemplars) and see if they require water (Water Consumed) property. If this is greater than 0, the farms need water. 

[A.U. Tocrat 8]

Thanks, I will give it a shot!

[rsc204 21,808]

I found a moment to have a look at the CAM files and indeed all the IR (Farm) Buildings Exemplars do seem to have a water requirement:

So I guess somewhere there has been a cock-up here.

[A.U. Tocrat 8]

Thanks for checking! Would it be a question of setting those to 0 for the intended behaviour? Also I'm wondering, is there a difference between the fields and the main building? Because iirc the building didn't display a no water symbol, but the fields definitely all do.

[rsc204 21,808]

Farm lots consist of two parts, the farms themselves and the fields, but only the former contain the water consumed property. That said, the game will likely apply the water setting to the attached fields too, which might explain why the zots appear on the fields.

Indeed simply setting all of them to 0 should mean they don’t need water anymore. 

[JeffSalisbury 59]

As many of the resources seem dated, is there an up-to-date set of resources to learn how to create BATs and in turn, set them up as growable lots?

[rsc204 21,808]

Well frankly things have not really changed that much. For making models you are probably going to need SC4 BAT (gMax) to make the models. There isn’t a whole lot of SC4 specific things there, sans the method of exporting your model. For me the best way to learn is to start with the gMax tutorials (not part of the main download), which will provide a decent introduction to using gMax and modelling in general. From there this tutorial helps explain how to build a Spline-based model, which is what Maxis used. Although the modelling method isn’t all that important, since the end export is pre-rendered, in other words alternative ways of model creation are equally fine in-game.

Once you’ve managed to make a model itself, PIM-X will be more useful than the Maxis tools for creating mods. Everything you need to know to turn that into a growable is covered in the PDF manual that now comes with it. 

[JeffSalisbury 59]

8 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Well frankly things have not really changed that much. For making models you are probably going to need SC4 BAT (gMax) to make the models. There isn’t a whole lot of SC4 specific things there, sans the method of exporting your model. For me the best way to learn is to start with the gMax tutorials (not part of the main download), which will provide a decent introduction to using gMax and modelling in general. From there this tutorial helps explain how to build a Spline-based model, which is what Maxis used. Although the modelling method isn’t all that important, since the end export is pre-rendered, in other words alternative ways of model creation are equally fine in-game.

Once you’ve managed to make a model itself, PIM-X will be more useful than the Maxis tools for creating mods. Everything you need to know to turn that into a growable is covered in the PDF manual that now comes with it. 

Interesting. Truth be told, it's a bit daunting as I don't consider myself overly imaginative. I'll hopefully have some time over this summer to get acquainted with the tools.

[Topher2112 0]

I got a question. I'm new to SC4 and wondering if the oil mods I see here are functional or just for looks? Like could i make neighbor deals for oil that goes towards oil power building?

[Ulisse Wolf 4,412]

10 minutes ago, Topher2112 said:

I got a question. I'm new to SC4 and wondering if the oil mods I see here are functional or just for looks? Like could i make neighbor deals for oil that goes towards oil power building?

They are only for aesthetics. they are considered as normal industries or whatever (depends on how the lots were created)

[Girafarig 1,379]

On 18/03/2024 at 5:42 PM, Topher2112 said:

I got a question. I'm new to SC4 and wondering if the oil mods I see here are functional or just for looks? Like could i make neighbor deals for oil that goes towards oil power building?

It depends on the mod, but it's mostly the former. Oil power buildings are paid for from your budget, you don't need to supply oil.

Having said this, there's a bunch of oil mods that give you cash for having them on your city (sometimes in exchange for a polluting lot or something). So, in a way, you can have an oil rig in your city and have that pay for your oil power plant.

[Monochrome1094 0]

Any UI mods?

 

With the Network mod there's so much stuff in those tiny icons it makes it a pain to do anything especially in modern resolutions.

[rsc204 21,808]

Sorry no one has to date made one and SC4 doesn’t support UI scaling. Eventually someone will I guess?, but I suppose not so many of us have 4K screens yet. 

[Haljackey 17,302]

SimCity 4 supported 1600x1200 back in 2003, which was a absurd screen resolution at the time

I'm still amazed it runs at 1080p without any fuss. I think for general game-play 1920x1080 is fine, but if you want to take screenshots and whatnot you can up the resolution of your computer/monitor supports it. You can change your resolution to this size via your display settings to have it look a bit better on 4k monitors.

[rsc204 21,808]

The problem is that most flat panels only look sharp when used at their native resolution. I can play in 1080p on my 2k screen but it looks crap, so I play at 2k and it looks as crisp as SC4 always has.

So yeah, a 4K screen can be run a lower resolutions, but it won’t look great.

But here’s the problem, take Icons we see in menus, they are 44x44px in size, you can’t do anything except upscale them to something larger. It’s not like we can change the standard. Assuming a 4K display was the same physical size as a FHD one, those icons are currently 4 times as small in real terms. Because they still use 44x44px, but that amount of pixels fit into a quarter of the space.  (Higher PPI).

Now consider the text and that’s before we get to the UI elements, which are just PNG/UI files that can be easily replaced with larger ones. But, it is vastly less easy to alter the font size of text in the game, although I believe possible. However, how can we make icons larger?, i don’t think the game has a mechanism to upscale them, so the icons are going remain small.

It’s not what SC4 players with 4K monitors want to hear, but bottom line SC4 doesn’t work well on 4K or higher displays. 

[Haljackey 17,302]

It's like how old skool NES players still keep crappy, bulky CRT TVs around- they just don't look the same on a 65" 4k flat-screen. Some games like Duck Hunt actually rely on the curvature of the screen to work.

While it is a pain to set up/take down, you could buy a 1080p monitor - you can get 27" ones pretty cheap here these days - to play SC4 and other games suffering from the up-scaling issue. You could put it next to your 4k if you have the space/use dual screens or perhaps temporarily in front of it. Not ideal but that's a possible solution for now unless/if a solution is discovered.

[Munzo 8]

My apologies if this isn't the right place to ask this kind of question, (if it isn't I'll gladly be pointed in the right direction) but could anybody hook me up with the CAL SG Canals baseset?

(I've managed to find an old SG brick canal baseset, extras and narrows in my backups from 2017 but the water color is wrong)

I'm coming back from a long absence and building up my mods again as best as I can with the disappearances of old avenues for downloading so I'll probably run into a few more questions like this, so maybe the question should be if there's a place where people can ask for files that are currently unavailable online?

[eaglesong 108]

They will probably be uploaded to https://www.sc4evermore.com/ at some point. @Tyberius06 may be able to answer this.

[smf_16 1,835]

@Munzo if you're coming back from a long absence and are building a plugins folder again, I highly suggest you take a look at sc4pac, a package manager for SimCity 4 that is currently being developed.

It's still missing a lot of content, but there's already a solid base collection of plugins. But most importantly, the experience is way, way, way better than manually downloading everything.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,412]

1 hour ago, Munzo said:

My apologies if this isn't the right place to ask this kind of question, (if it isn't I'll gladly be pointed in the right direction) but could anybody hook me up with the CAL SG Canals baseset?

(I've managed to find an old SG brick canal baseset, extras and narrows in my backups from 2017 but the water color is wrong)

I'm coming back from a long absence and building up my mods again as best as I can with the disappearances of old avenues for downloading so I'll probably run into a few more questions like this, so maybe the question should be if there's a place where people can ask for files that are currently unavailable online?

Currently you have to wait for us to upload all the LEX content to SC4Evermore but you have to be patient as we are reviewing all the mods to fix bugs and problems. So you have to wait.

Also if you are rebuilding the modpack I recommend you to see this guide 

 

[Propfam 2,288]

19 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

@Munzo if you're coming back from a long absence and are building a plugins folder again, I highly suggest you take a look at sc4pac, a package manager for SimCity 4 that is currently being developed.

It's still missing a lot of content, but there's already a solid base collection of plugins. But most importantly, the experience is way, way, way better than manually downloading everything.

It'd better if Simtropolis and that app support auth API, which allows unlimited downloads as a logged in user instead of guest.

[Munzo 8]

28 minutes ago, smf_16 said:

@Munzo if you're coming back from a long absence and are building a plugins folder again, I highly suggest you take a look at sc4pac, a package manager for SimCity 4 that is currently being developed.

It's still missing a lot of content, but there's already a solid base collection of plugins. But most importantly, the experience is way, way, way better than manually downloading everything.

Thanks for the tip, but my plugins folder is already sitting at 4gb so I'm not sure it's for me. Also I don't really mind hunting for dependencies. Definitely worth keeping an eye on though.

[kaimai 1,042]

On 3/20/2024 at 3:52 PM, Haljackey said:

SimCity 4 supported 1600x1200 back in 2003, which was a absurd screen resolution at the time

I'm still amazed it runs at 1080p without any fuss. I think for general game-play 1920x1080 is fine, but if you want to take screenshots and whatnot you can up the resolution of your computer/monitor supports it. You can change your resolution to this size via your display settings to have it look a bit better on 4k monitors.

weirdly enough 1920x1080 is the one resolution that will not run at all on my machine, either in windowed mode or fullscreen. I just get a black screen. I can run it at my monitor's actual resolution (2304x1296), at any of its scaled variants (1280x720, 1680x945, 2048x1152, 2560x1440), or at any of the other standard resolutions from 640x480 up to 1600x1200. I've never figured out why but it's also not a big deal, except for the bottom of every large tile disappearing in region view lol

[smf_16 1,835]

10 hours ago, Jidan said:

It'd better if Simtropolis and that app support auth API, which allows unlimited downloads as a logged in user instead of guest.

There is a workaround with cookies though, but it is a bit cumbersome if you're not really comfortable with the command line and environment variables. I've made a suggestion on how this could be improved with dedicated tokens, but it will require some changes on the side of Simtropolis as well.

[Propfam 2,288]

1 hour ago, smf_16 said:

it will require some changes on the side of Simtropolis as well.

The problem is @Dirktator, CB, and Cori has been inactive for a while. It's pretty hard to implement any changes these days. Fingers crossed, anyway.

[Silur 3,304]

My freight rail car dependency packages (second hand) are being asked to be placed on STEX at the request of Simtropolis members.
This project was inspired by the great author Badsim and his work in AntigOne's Projects: Elsewhere on SC4 Devotion (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=217.2780).
I also visited the rhb-trainsim and UKTrainSim sites in 2019. The end result was these railroad freight cars.
Simtropolis Administration!
Is this a violation of any rules of this site or someone else's copyright?
Thanks.