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[CorinaMarie 29,605]

21 minutes ago, paulmc said:

Does anybody knows why some items on the menu doesn't show the thumb picture, like it's blank, and makes it hard to identify what it is.

• Missing PNG image for the icon
• Corrupted PNG image for the icon
• Incorrect IID in the Item Icon property of the Building Exemplar

Those are prolly the most likely.

Have you edited any files yourself? And if so, have you used Reader 1.5.4? If the latter, see this post by @twalsh102.

Then if not, are you able to plop the lot from the blank icon slot? Like to try to find out what lot it is.

[FelixFawkes 2]

Hi Simtropolis.

First post on my new account (I lost my old password for @Oceanborn09) I have played SimCity 4 as long as I can remember, but I have one big question for SimFox's Darknite mod. I know a lot of people on the discord say that its highly recommended. My big worry is that I have an absolute load of bats and props and plugins that I worry that installing it would mess up the look of the city. Is this true or are my worries just worries?

In a way are all of the Maxis files edited to be compatible with darknite or does darknite complement those buildings, so props I have would work?

  Edited November 21, 2024 by Oceanborn09  

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

34 minutes ago, FelixFawkes said:

(I lost my old password for @Oceanborn09)

(I can prolly help with that tomorrow if you want it back.)

 

For your DN questions, I'll defer to the experts as I use Daytime Only.

[FelixFawkes 2]

1 minute ago, CorinaMarie said:

(I can prolly help with that tomorrow if you want it back.)

Yeah, that would be nice, but I will probably stick with this account as the main since I never really logged in with it. Thanks for doing that if you get around to it, no big rush.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 minute ago, FelixFawkes said:

Yeah, that would be nice, but I will probably stick with this account as the main since I never really logged in with it.

Well, you get one or the other. It needs a really good reason for us to allow more than one account per person.

If you get the old account back then we merge it with the current one. Since there's no posts on that one it'd just be these recent posts being added to it. About the only reason in your case to recover that account is to have the older join date.

[FelixFawkes 2]

2 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

About the only reason in your case to recover that account is to have the older join date.

And that's the only reason I really want it haha.

[matias93 7,535]

46 minutes ago, FelixFawkes said:

In a way are all of the Maxis files edited to be compatible with darknite or does darknite complement those buildings, so props I have would work?

All the buildings that come with the game work both with the normal nightligting and DarkNite, because they don't have a full night texture, only overlays for the lit windows. The rest of the building looks exactly the same as during the day, but with the blue overlay that covers the entire scene.

Now, the reason why DarkNite buildings look different from the buildings included in the game is because they are fully rendered in a night scene, so the lights bleed over the other surfaces. Some Maxis buildings simulate this partially, using translucent night textures over walls, but the result isn't as convincing as a full night rendering. The only way to produce that result would be to recreate those buildings in full, something that has been done for exactly 5 of them, all skyscrapers, by @Diego Del Llano:

 

[Daeris 1,116]

o/

Does anyone know if there is a limit to how many signposts you can have in a city tile?

Thanks!

[archon_wing 16]

So what happens when you open someone else's city file when you don't have the same mods they have? I know it usually comes up with an error message but usually the game doesn't crash.

Mostly asking because I'm going to download some mods and was wondering how badly that would affect the portability if I want to send my city files to people.

[Daeris 1,116]

6 minutes ago, archon_wing said:

So what happens when you open someone else's city file when you don't have the same mods they have? I know it usually comes up with an error message but usually the game doesn't crash.

Mostly asking because I'm going to download some mods and was wondering how badly that would affect the portability if I want to send my city files to people.

I'm not an expert in this matter, and I'm sure it varies on what mod you may not have, but from my understanding if you load a city tile and you don't have texture files for certain lots, you'll get the "brown box of death" lot. Kinda like this:



Other mods may crash the game if you don't have the right files. I think flora/terrain/water texture mods can sometimes cause crashes if you don't have them.

Like I said I'm not an expert or anything though, so hopefully others have some more information.

[archon_wing 16]

5 minutes ago, Daeris said:

I'm not an expert in this matter, and I'm sure it varies on what mod you may not have, but from my understanding if you load a city tile and you don't have texture files for certain lots, you'll get the "brown box of death" lot. Kinda like this:



Other mods may crash the game if you don't have the right files. I think flora/terrain/water texture mods can sometimes cause crashes if you don't have them.

Like I said I'm not an expert or anything though, so hopefully others have some more information.

Yea I've seen those boxes from other people's files lol. Though honestly it's still somewhat playable.

I mostly just want some custom growable lots.

[rsc204 21,808]

The real problem is flora and or MMPs. If those are not present then you may well find the game crashes.

But even in cases where you see brown boxes, or maybe not since if the Building Exemplars are missing, the game can’t know what model to display, so you get a missing model without the box. Those conditions are bad for the save file, since it will be missing vital data needed to handle the game’s calculations.

If you plan to share regions, you should ideally have a complete list of all the downloads needed to play it correctly. That way others can at least play your city without problems.

Note that a big exception is overrides of things. For example if you used custom automata, beach/rock/water mods, users without these files would just see the defaults. Terrain mods are not the same, since in addition to textures, they also change a lot of the terrain parameters, so again if those files are different expect a CTD trying to open the save file.

[archon_wing 16]

11 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

If you plan to share regions, you should ideally have a complete list of all the downloads needed to play it correctly. That way others can at least play your city without problems.

Ah. Oh man that sounds like kind of a pain. I suppose the best way would be to use a command prompt and dir > list.txt but that could be annoying to keep up with.

With friends I could just send them my entire plugins folder though that BSC set is huge, so I would just make them dl/install that seperately.

[rsc204 21,808]

If you are just sharing among friends, use one of the online services like OneDrive or Google and upload the entire Plugins folder as a .zip file or similar. The problem with just making a list of the file names, is that doesn't allow you to find all the downloads needed to get these files, you need a list of the download links realistically.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

If you are just sharing among friends, use one of the online services like OneDrive or Google and upload the entire Plugins folder as a .zip file or similar.

Have we (as a community) finally embraced this idea?

I recall in the past it was taboo to discuss with any seriousness. It was more likely an open secret where everyone knows friends do share their plugins (since cultivating a working, harmonious set takes considerable effort), but was frowned upon when more than a what if scenario.

From a personal standpoint, I'm certainly not against the idea. I'm just checking if we've all finally matured enough so this doesn't unleash chaos when openly discussing it?

[archon_wing 16]

5 hours ago, rsc204 said:

If you are just sharing among friends, use one of the online services like OneDrive or Google and upload the entire Plugins folder as a .zip file or similar. The problem with just making a list of the file names, is that doesn't allow you to find all the downloads needed to get these files, you need a list of the download links realistically.

Yea I already do this as backup but the thing is the plugins file is growing in size and it becomes a pain to upload.

[Daeris 1,116]

9 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Have we (as a community) finally embraced this idea?

I recall in the past it was taboo to discuss with any seriousness. It was more likely an open secret where everyone knows friends do share their plugins (since cultivating a working, harmonious set takes considerable effort), but was frowned upon when more than a what if scenario.

From a personal standpoint, I'm certainly not against the idea. I'm just checking if we've all finally matured enough so this doesn't unleash chaos when openly discussing it?

I remember this topic used to cause some disagreements. Personally I was always very interested in where this discussion went, because I viewed it as something that could very much help new players trying to get into the game, but having 20+ years of mods they need to catch up on and they can easily get lost in. Having an extensive plugin folder readily shared with them would get them right into the fun sooner.

[rsc204 21,808]

19 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Have we (as a community) finally embraced this idea?

Well I am talking about sharing privately with a small group. To my knowledge that’s always been tolerated, I mean we can all pretend it never happens I suppose. 

As for doing this in a public way, that’s still not OK, because every time we approach the idea a bunch of creators threaten to pull their content.

[sander97 657]

Is there a mod that erases all the dirt next to the rails? I mean the dirt that appears when you place buildings next to the rails

[Tyberius06 12,189]

27 minutes ago, sander97 said:

Is there a mod that erases all the dirt next to the rails? I mean the dirt that appears when you place buildings next to the rails

RUM for RRW has option for that, but bear in mind that will mean that you will loose the dirt texture along side of agricultural zones too. For some reasons these two (rail and agri zones) are tied together hard coded and if you modify one it will modify the other too.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, sander97 said:

Is there a mod that erases all the dirt next to the rails? I mean the dirt that appears when you place buildings next to the rails

Rather than removing the dirt , I personally change it to a grassy texture that CB and I made long ago. You can find it attached to this post if you'd want to try it. It's a simple override. Drop it in plugins to see the effect, remove it to revert to Maxis standard.

CB shows Before and After pics of it here.

[Null 45 3,041]

15 hours ago, Tyberius06 said:

For some reasons these two (rail and agri zones) are tied together hard coded and if you modify one it will modify the other too.

Maxis probably just reused the texture for simplicity, and didn't consider that modders could want them separate. I found the game code that implements this, the logic in pseudo-code is:

bool lookupWealthTexture = networkType is Road or networkType is Highway or networkType is Street or networkType is Avenue

if (lookupWealthTexture and not IsRailIntersection)
  underTextureID = UnderTextureIds[zoneType][wealth]
else if (zoneType is not None)
  underTextureID = <dirt texture>
else
  underTextureID = 0

UnderTextureIds is a 64 item lookup table listing the textures for each of the game's 16 zone types and 4 wealth levels. The agriculture zone has all 4 wealth textures set to the dirt texture.

[albireo38 340]

Hello everyone !

I would like to use the cheat simdate, but impossible to adjust the date. How should I write the date I want to go ?

Thanks

[Null 45 3,041]

4 hours ago, albireo38 said:

I would like to use the cheat simdate, but impossible to adjust the date. How should I write the date I want to go ?

The format is: SimDate <month> <day> <year>.

[Kel9509 1,363]

While trying to read everything RippleJet ever said about extrapolation, I stumbled across the CAM Manual v1.0 and various forum entries where I found out about Park Caps.  Looking into that, he said:

Quote

The CAM is bringing two basically unused stage caps into use, the Park Cap (which in RH is used only for R$$$, set at stage 3), and the Fire Cap (which is unused in RH).

The park cap means that, in order to grow past the stage set, the lot has to be within 20 tiles of any kind of park.

Where is this Park Cap ever documented in official Maxis documentation?  I didn't see it in the Manual or the Prima Guide.  In fact, it seems to only have been discovered via the Exemplars of the game.

[Propfam 2,288]

hmmmm... what is this?

I also found so many references to the old UI and a quite different advisor for some reason.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

23 minutes ago, Jidan said:

hmmmm... what is this?

Looks like a little tool they used during development. They could reference that image generically while creating exemplars and then if the new item was game worthy, they'd send the specs to the art peeps to have the real version created. And then the IIDs would be changed once completed.

 

25 minutes ago, Jidan said:

I also found so many references to the old UI and a quite different advisor for some reason.

I've noticed old UIs in SimCity_1.dat too. I suspect some are from the pre-RH days.

It's similar to how there is still old tutorial info in there. (See the Restoring the vanilla game "Getting Started" tutorial [Solved] thread if you are curious.)

[hugues aroux 3,784]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

I've noticed old UIs in SimCity_1.dat too. I suspect some are from the pre-RH days.

There are 3 interfaces: 1 dev or rather a series of windows (I think Cori that you did some "research" work that used it), 1 small screen UI 800x600 +- and the 3rd UI that we all know which uses graphic elements in transparent and non-transparent mode! That is 3 & 1/2, right ?!

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

7 hours ago, hugues aroux said:

(I think Cori that you did some "research" work that used it)

(That certainly sounds familiar.)

I do remember posting my split out copies of them in this post. That's every one which can be found in the main .dat file, but I was cataloging them and then that's as far as I got.

[Kel9509 1,363]

How do you do a line-break in iLives Reader 0.93 for LTEXT.  Every time I hit "Enter" it ends up displayed as an entirely blank space in game, like this:

Quote

Line 1

Line 2

I'd like to display it like this:

Quote

Line 1
Line 2

I saw elsewhere that the answer might be Ctrl+Enter, but that doesn't work.  Alt-Enter doesn't work either.   Does anyone know?