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[justforfun 7,802]

7 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Nary a clue.

I do have all of the Maxis Lua code extracted from SimCity_1.dat so I can use N++ to Seach in Files to find most anything I'm looking for, but I don't have the same bus stops as you so I've no clue at all.

It is puzzling because my bus stops don't contain any LUA files at all, just standard station exemplars. 

Meanwhile I found the time for my first upload of the year! 

 

[matias93 7,535]

10 hours ago, simmering said:

So my traffic guy keeps asking for airports. I built him two already but he doesn't seem to notice. Is there a way to resolve this or can I fire him?

That's because those airports have a relatively small capacity (which you can see on the query). It's not strictly necessary to build more airports, but it helps to avoid commercial caps in very developed cities (which doesn't seem to be an issue in your case, seeing as the commercial demand is quite strong).

I cannot remember with which airport pack it does come, but there is also an airport shuttle bus terminal lot available as custom content, which for all simulation effects is a big airport, but doesn't look like one, which helps to avoid the unrealistic aspect of those minuscule Maxis airports, especially if you plan to build a real scale one elsewhere in your region.

[atsf189 460]

8 minutes ago, justforfun said:

It is puzzling because my bus stops don't contain any LUA files

The people might be one of those prop things that generate sims.

Look for a green triangle thing in the lot editor. 

I do not know how those work but I had one of those in my train station

and the sims kept running in front of the trains.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

16 minutes ago, justforfun said:

It is puzzling because my bus stops don't contain any LUA files at all, just standard station exemplars.

If they are generated via Lua, the actual code could be anywhere. Perhaps it's even the standard Maxis Lua Generator? I don't recall looking at vanilla bus stations enough to see any of the Sims are queuing up. But, if they do and the code is based on the position of the station plop then that would be on the sidewalk for vanilla yet the middle of the street for an on-street station.

@Ryuu Tenno's idea holds merit too. That even seems more likely as I don't recall any standing Sims otherwise.

(Oh, and the only link from the building exemplar to the Lua code is the Hex IID of the OG the generator has assigned by the Lua.)

[justforfun 7,802]

16 minutes ago, atsf189 said:

The people might be one of those prop things that generate sims.

Look for a green triangle thing in the lot editor. 

I do not know how those work but I had one of those in my train station

and the sims kept running in front of the trains.

Oh yes, you mean the animated props available in the LE, like "random walk", etc. Well my bus stops don't feature any of those, however when a bus stop is in the proximity of some crowd-generating landmark, the sims cross the road and queue across the stop. Crazy little people! 

3 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

But, if they do and the code is based on the position of the station plop then that would be on the sidewalk for vanilla yet the middle of the street for an on-street station.

That seems to be the case really. If so, the solution would be to locate the Maxis LUA and patch that. But my hands are too full right now. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, justforfun said:

Well my bus stops don't feature any of those, however when a bus stop is in the proximity of some crowd-generating landmark, the sims cross the road and queue across the stop.

It rather sounds like the Landmark is causing the Ogle Sims and they just happen to be standing on your bus stop?

[justforfun 7,802]

4 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

It rather sounds like the Landmark is causing the Ogle Sims and they just happen to be standing on your bus stop?

It is indeed the ogle sims, yet when they cross the road they don't finish the crossing but stop and queue, piling up towards the middle of the road. Are they all suicidal? XD It would be interesting to know whether anyone using on-road stops experiences this too. 

[Propfam 2,288]

I'm sorry to distract from the current topic on hand. But I have noticed some strange things in the Prima Guide.

It turns out that two images in page 51, the camera angle doesn't look that right. This is confirmed by the rectangle on the minimap. If you spent playing SC4 for too long, you see that the rectangle is always angled, which in this case, because of we're looking north, the rectangle is tilted slightly to the left. But on the image, the rectangle is on a straight angle. Maxis has figured out 3D camera before anyone of us even trying. We can replicate what's happening on the image using @memo's mod:

Before

After

CameraYaw 0

Compared that to the images in the guide:

Top Image 1: the meteor struck to the ground | Bottom Image 2: when the meteor is going to the ground. Minimaps are scaled 10x with GIMP.

And here's the 4x AI upscaled version of those images. It's a bit crude but you get the idea. (Again, with the same image 1 and 2)

Left Image 1 | Right Image 2

As you can see, the AI does interpret the rectangle as a bit skewed one. But, it's nowhere as drastic as rotated rectangle you see when looking north. So, we can assume that the rectangle is indeed using yaw of zero, instead of 22.5 that we have now.

Additionally, the sun angle on the terrain is angled to the northeast, instead of the east. Here's my attempt to recreate that:

Pretty interesting, right? But the question is, how Maxis achieved this? Are they using something like IGLE but for the camera? I'm not really sure.

[Null 45 3,041]

31 minutes ago, Jidan said:

But the question is, how Maxis achieved this? Are they using something like IGLE but for the camera?

They had the source code, so they could just modify the angles and recompile. But there is evidence in the game of cheats and other internal development features that were removed from the shipping binaries, so they could have had one that adjusted the camera angles.

For example, at some point in SC4's development Maxis appears to have had a cheat to make the game ignore the park and fire caps. The code that queries if that mode is enabled is still present, but the code to activate it was removed.

[Simizen 1,098]

probably development stuff to tweak how they want the game to function.

It's common to see different things within a game from a development perspective that the average person wouldn't likely see when playing. Case in point, @Haljackey discovered one of his highway junctions wasn't properly connected until after the camera mod was released. So it's quite possible that they had access to the 3D camera for things like that, to prove that everything was connected up properly.

But we do know that they originally intended on having a 3D camera for this game, but ran into complications. So, it's possible that this was shortly before they finally decided to nullify it for those reasons. This key reason, is probably why it was unlockable in the first place, as the code was still there, just turned off for a moment.

There's some articles somewhere where they mentioned that they did well in making a virtually 3D game in 3K, but then wanted to actually do it in 4, but hardware limitations prevented that from happening. We've mostly got it, but the limitations are still there to some extent (notice that the 3D mode that's been activated isn't even a proper one still), due to being single core and such.

That said, it is interesting to see some of the stuff that's been released over time regarding features of the game that we've not had before. Guides are often a gold mine of that kind of stuff, and if SC4 or even RH had demos at any point, we could always mess around with those to see what else may have been added during that time, but since removed. Cause likely it's just been commented out/turned off. Meaning that we could always reactivate it. The only thing that we wouldn't be able to rely on, is if we get videos of early game demos, but those demos themselves, weren't ever released. In which case anything added there and later removed, would likely be removed before any potential production quality versions are released. Unless it's been backed up on a developer's system at some point.

[Null 45 3,041]

1 hour ago, Ryuu Tenno said:

We've mostly got it, but the limitations are still there to some extent (notice that the 3D mode that's been activated isn't even a proper one still), due to being single core and such.

Multi-core didn't exist at the consumer level when SC4 was being developed. Plus the recent attempts at a fully 3D city builders have shown that the performance is often bad, even with multiple cores. Although that could also be due in part to the switch from SC4-style statistical simulation to agent-based simulation.

Ocean Quigley's 2009 blog post How we trashed buildings in SimCity 4 describes a lot of the building details they used or originally planned to use, and the comments provide more detail on the type of 3D projection SC4 uses.

[Propfam 2,288]

45 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

Multi-core didn't exist at the consumer level when SC4 was being developed.

While multi-core didn't exist at that time, multi-threading did exist and SC4 is also bad at it. The 1st widely-available consumer CPU released with hyperthreading was the Northwood Pentium 4 models released in November 2002 included in various Gateways and on April 13, 2003 for the retail version. AMD released Palomino Athlon MP, back in 2001. MP was what we call now as entry-level Xeon or Threadripper, possibly even Ryzen 9. Sure, it's a bit more expensive than typical consumer CPUs. But, it's still attainable by many people. If EA somehow managed to waste their time supporting arguably unpopular PowerVR graphics, why didn't they optimize the game for at least multi-threading? And also, multi-core was eventually available to the consumer afterwards starting in 2005, the timeframe which EA still supports SC4.

I think the reason isn't because multi-threaded CPUs wasn't available. It's because it takes lots of time for just I think less than 1% of consumers, at that time. They have sunk so many hours into the project that rewriting just the simulation isn't worth it. The same reason why SC13 feels so small. SC13 was released at the time of fast hardware and internet. Sure, there were places with slow internet, including mine. But we're starting to get fiber internet. And I don't think those places made enough revenue for EA to be supported in any way (heck, gaming in general wasn't taking off in my country until 2015-2017 when Steam and Google decided to support local pricing). And yet, EA decided that small maps were enough because they sank so many hours into Glassbox that it's not worth the time and effort. Not to mention, EA has very strict scheduling, which means anything ambitious would be straight up cancelled (cough weather and water simulation).

[Null 45 3,041]

1 hour ago, Jidan said:

I think the reason isn't because multi-threaded CPUs wasn't available. It's because it takes lots of time for just I think less than 1% of consumers, at that time. They have sunk so many hours into the project that rewriting just the simulation isn't worth it.

I agree.

It is also likely that the base game ran very well on the Pentium 4 systems some Maxis developers used, it is well known that they had to simplify the traffic simulation for the minimum CPU requirement of a 500 Mhz Pentium 3. I also don't think Maxis could have ever envisioned people would be running the game with multiple gigabytes of custom content, which is probably why the didn't multi-thread the plugin loading the game does on startup.

SC4 uses multi-threading for background loading of models when scrolling in the city view, but even that can be turned off. The Rizzo-Gonzo framework was several years old by the time SC4 was being developed, it dates to at least 1996 based on the Maxis copyright in the files Paul Pedriana leaked. It would likely need a rewrite or complete replacement to properly handle multi-threading.

[Simizen 1,098]

9 hours ago, Null 45 said:

Multi-core didn't exist at the consumer level when SC4 was being developed.

yeah, that's basically what I was pointing out. That the lack of multicore, both at the time, and now, is preventing it from having a proper 3D camera. Like, we're able to do the 3D camera in steps, so long as we select the angles we want manually. Whereas, if we had a multicore function built in, we could probably adjust it to have a smoother, and more free to control 3D camera. And, currently, that's tied into the OpenSC4 project, unless someone discovers some weird, hidden code that would allow for multicore functionality (even if just for the camera).

Another thing to consider with the camera, and a possible reason for it's deactivation, is that we know that people will have issues if they leave their cities in a particular view, and then save and quit to the region view. The city tiles get a weird angle to them. So, it's possible that, coupled with other reasons that it got deactivated and limited to the 4 angles we use now. Hard to say though, cause the city tile view in the region may have occurred after deactivating the 3D camera mode, and therefore not caught during development

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

Just a small question before I try it out...

I'd like to download census repository and the main reason for this is that I would like to have a very precise data regarding the demand quantities in my city.

I remember, however, that at one point @CorinaMarie made a very deep analysis of how quantities presented in the demand bars are very inaccurate compared with the real amounts.

The question is - is census repository immune to this problem? Or does it simply return whatever it is fed by the misleading demand bars?

[Propfam 2,288]

39 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

is census repository immune to this problem?

Nope. @Kel9509 has been trying to address this problem but there are significant parts of the stats that aren't immune from misleading data. Here are some of them: (read the whole topic if you're pretty curious)

Here's an example of many data are simply unimplemented at all:

And yes, he's working on the revamped census repository. Let's see how far he can go. Hopefully he can release it asap.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

I remember, however, that at one point @CorinaMarie made a very deep analysis of how quantities presented in the demand bars are very inaccurate compared with the real amounts.

That would the Those Stretchy RCI Graph Demand Bars.

 

4 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

The question is - is census repository immune to this problem? Or does it simply return whatever it is fed by the misleading demand bars?

It returns the exact numbers Maxis feeds it.

I suspect this would be way beyond the scope of the Repository update. One wouldn't want to lose all the exact numbers since that's how they've been displayed forever. And from a play standpoint, the stretched demand bars are in proportion to each other so my mod is an interesting peek under the hood, but certainly not required.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

It returns the exact numbers Maxis feeds it.

I suspect this would be way beyond the scope of the Repository update. One wouldn't want to lose all the exact numbers since that's how they've been displayed forever. And from a play standpoint, the stretched demand bars are in proportion to each other so my mod is an interesting peek under the hood, but certainly not required.

I don't understand. 

So it is better to get Census Repository or your anti-stretch mod from this topic (thanks for remembering and linking to it).

[Kel9509 1,363]

1 hour ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

I don't understand. 

So it is better to get Census Repository or your anti-stretch mod from this topic (thanks for remembering and linking to it).

As others have said, the demand bars shown in the game do not display the actual (active) demand, probably because of the way the bar graphs were created to show both positive and negative demand.  I'm not aware of any mod that actually "fixes" the bar graph to display the correct amounts though, because the only way to really fix it is to make the bottom a zero-line which would end up removing the negative numbers when they occur.  Also, if you use any mod that artificially provides positive demand all the time instead of playing a regular game with normal up-and-down demands (or a regular CAM game with its larger up-and-down demands), then the bar graphs become useless anyway because demand is always artificially high.  So I don't think you'd really want an anti-stretch mod "fixing" the bar graphs, because you'll lose out on the ability to see the negative numbers.

@CorinaMarie's park mod does display t he actual (active) demand versus the apparent (bar graph) demand when you click on a park, in her "CoriBoom Actual Demand vs Apparent (+6k to -6k ) as Park Query - v1.0.dat" that she linked above.  If you play a CAM game, you'd want to instead get the "CoriBoom Actual Demand vs Apparent (+54k to -10k ) as Park Query - v1.0.dat" instead.  I  have her regular park mod and it's very useful.

The Census Repository (which will be receiving an update very very soon) also shows the actual (active) demand.  So does my RCI Query DLL upgrade mod.  So Cori's Park mod, the Census Repository, and the RCI Query DLL upgrade mod all shows these amounts.

Keep in mind that for a regular game, demand is a range of +6,000 or -6,000 per zone type, and for CAM the amounts differ but are generally higher (I think the demand for a zone is 24,000 max but I'm not sure).

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

Thank you for additional, very informative details @Kel9509!

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

3 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

So it is better to get Census Repository or your anti-stretch mod from this topic (thanks for remembering and linking to it).

Kel explained it well and the cool thing is you need not trade off. You can have both at the same time.

The massive Repository screen only comes up when clicking one of their lots. My Stretchy chart is tied to any Maxis Park. (It could be tied to its own building if one wanted to mod it that way.)

And, additionally, the Stretchy thing is more of a scientific peek under the hood with no real practical value. I noticed something which made me think: WTF?!? and after research and a lot of testing with CB's help, that little mod was the answer.

[Propfam 2,288]

Can anyone figure out how to modify MAD files?

[Null 45 3,041]

35 minutes ago, Jidan said:

Can anyone figure out how to modify MAD files?

MAD is a long obsolete proprietary EA format video format. The format has been reverse engineered enough to for FFmpeg and VLC read it, but AFAIK there are no public encoders for it.

[paulmc 391]

Hello, recently the airport ramp textures got updated and now look the same as the taxiway (yellow), I would like to go back to the old texture (red). Is it possible to do ?

 

[Ulisse Wolf 4,412]

1 minute ago, paulmc said:

Hello, recently the airport ramp textures got updated and now look the same as the taxiway (yellow), I would like to go back to the old texture (red). Is it possible to do ?

 

You have to do it manually and edit each lots. This change was made primarily to avoid a conflict where Sidewalk mods were overwriting Maxis base textures creating aesthetic problems with airports.

[paulmc 391]

2 minutes ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

You have to do it manually and edit each lots. This change was made primarily to avoid a conflict where Sidewalk mods were overwriting Maxis base textures creating aesthetic problems with airports.

How is it done ? I don't think I know how to edit that, any tips ?

[Ulisse Wolf 4,412]

38 minutes ago, paulmc said:

How is it done ? I don't think I know how to edit that, any tips ?

Install PIM-X and read the PDF file where it tells you how to do it

[kergelen 727]

I recentlly downladed SC4D LEX Legacy Ultimate Airport Pack.

My question is: how game calculated Airport Demand? I've read that it depends on CO demand. So, when I plop an airpot in a city, the demmand depnd on CO city demand or overall regional CO demand? 

My though is it depends only on the city demand where the airport is, and the airport in a city does not satify the demand in other city or in the whole region. Is that right?

[philforhockey51 4,211]

I have a random piece of grid showing through, anyone remember if opening a view corrects it or something else?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

6 minutes ago, philforhockey51 said:

I have a random piece of grid showing through

Isn't that when you have something selected on the cursor like a zoning tool (or basically anything else too) and the partial grid showing follows the mouse around?