tutorial How to Create a Transit-Enabled Growable Lot

[ncamferdam 1,490]

I just spent a couple days working on this, and since it caused me so much trouble figuring out each of the steps, I thought I'd write up how I did it. This information is of course already available, but it's spread out and can be somewhat difficult to track down and consolidate. In any case, this is very much a "this worked for me" tutorial. There very well could be an easier way to do all of this, and I don't really have the technical knowledge to explain why some of the stuff works the way that it does. And of course, this could all be a bad idea, so I would emphasize that I'm no expert, and that if you try this you should be very careful creating backups of your game files. But it seems to be working so far for me, so here it is.

I wanted to add the Ping An Center to my city, specifically at an ideal location straddling one of my main avenues. This lot comes as a transit-enabled ploppable commercial lot. However, I didn't want any functional landmarks if I could avoid it, preferring to grow all of the lots through zoning. In addition, the lot is transit-enabled for road traffic, and I obviously needed to change that to an avenue. So, I had to figure out how to create a transit-enabled growable lot from scratch.

Creating the Lot

The first step was using the Ping An Center model to create a growable lot. This was done using the PIM-X tool. A detailed step-by-step explanation for how to do this starts on page 8 of the SC4PIM User Guide. The resulting growable takes the form of a SC4Lot file and a SC4Desc file, automatically placed in my plugins folder. Next, in the PIM-X window, I right-clicked the Lot Config Exemplar to open up the Lot Editor. A detailed explanation of how to navigate and use the LE can also be found in the User Guide, starting on page 64. Starting out, this is what the growable looked like:

Before going further, I wanted to mark out where the avenue was going to go (the same route as the road in the provided ploppable). This required a slight adjustment of the building model from its default position, and the addition of an avenue texture. There are a few different options to choose from, but I used a texture numbered 4da444e0. You'd have to download BSC Textures Volume 01 to get it, but it matches the default avenue pretty seamlessly. There are other textures for roads and such nearby as well. The result became this:

Transit-Enabling the Lot

Now, this was where I had the most trouble figuring out what to do. For a while, I wasn't sure if it was possible or (more likely) advisable to make a growable lot transit-enabled. This thread has a ton of information on the subject, and while it's fairly old and there's some disagreement over a few points, it does lay out a lot of potential pitfalls to watch out for. Regardless of the truth, my main takeaway was to keep it simple: one type of transit network, running through the lot in one place, going in one direction.

In order to transit-enable the lot, I had to use SC4Tool (get the file by simrolle and Andreas). Specifically, I had to use the TE Editor (a tutorial for which can be found in this thread). But in order to use that, I first had to combine the files produced by PIM-X. As mentioned, the growable lot takes the form of a SC4Lot file and a SC4Desc file. The first contains the Lot Config Exemplar, the second contains the Building Exemplar. Now, for whatever reason, the TE Editor in SC4Tool will not work if a lot is in this state. Once you load in the lot, the icon next to it will be red, and you won't be able to add or modify transit switches. What you need to do, is pack the Building Exemplar into the SC4Lot file. This is accomplished using the iLive Reader, and is fairly involved. Again, you can find instruction in the PIM-X User Guide, starting on page 15, but you can also follow this writeup by BarbyW. In the end, you'll have a single SC4Lot file containing both exemplars. This is the only file you need to deal with from now on, and the TE Editor should work with it.

Again, the thread linked at the start of the last paragraph was enough to help me through the process, but to summarize, you have to first mark out the path of the transit network on the lot. Keep in mind that direction is important. Then, you have to add in transit switches. Again, I'm no expert, but as I understand it, transit-enabling a lot essentially turns it into a functional transit station. An avenue does not actually "go through" the lot, at least not as the game sees it. Instead, certain transit types enter the lot, and certain transit types exit the lot. What transit switch you have applied to a lot controls this action. For something like a bus stop, the switch is obviously "pedestrian in" and "bus out" and vice versa (hence the "switch" name is obvious). However, in order to properly simulate a road passing through a lot, we need to make the growable operate like a monorail station: the same transit type in and out. And, since this is a road network, we need to include every type of vehicle traffic. For reference, here is what my TE Editor ended up looking like for this growable (note the north-south direction of each transit tile, and the north-south transit switches):

The last element to point out here is the capacity. I made sure to match the transit switch capacity to the capacity of normal avenues. Since I'm running NAM with a 2.0 capacity multiplier, that ends up being 24,000 for me. Whichever transit system you wind up using, you can reference this post for capacity numbers. Now, obviously you can get a lot more complicated than this, adding built-in bus stops, train stations, etc. I can't speak to how well that will work, and from what I can tell, you run the risk of significantly slowing down or crashing your game if you're not careful. Again, I tried to keep it simple.

Implementation

Now that the lot was transit-enabled, I went back to the PIM-X Lot Editor to finish off the design. Note how, now that the lot has been transit-enabled, the tiles across which commuters will traverse the "station" are marked out in red arrows. You can look at these to verify that the path is correctly oriented.

Finally, I finished off the lot with some additional props and textures, closed the LE, saved the Lot Config Exemplar, and closed all the tool windows. I should also note that at every step of this process I was opening up the game to test out the lot on a blank map. Usually I would just use the lotplop cheat to see how it looked and verify that I could drag an avenue through it. I would recommend you do this as well, keeping it far away from anything you'd like to save until it's absolutely done. Even then, you should still back everything up, and most importantly, make sure any instance of the building is deleted before you exit and modify it. Don't mess with the lot or exemplars if it's saved in a city somewhere.

Once it was ready, here is how the implementation looked. First, I cleared out a section of the city, including the target avenue, and used ctrl to zone out a correctly-sized lot. Make sure the lot is oriented properly to line up with whatever transit network you're connecting to (assuming it already exists). In the next picture, you can see the lot under construction, with the avenue texture clearly visible.

Here you can see how, just as a monorail track does not actually pass through a monorail station, the avenue never actually bisects the lot (even though in both cases you can drag the network all the way through). Again, the game sees this as commuters entering a "station" on one side and coming out the other. Since, as is clear in the TE Editor above, commuters never change mode of transport, this is visualized as (and effectively operates as) commuters driving straight through. This can be seen in the final picture.

And there you have it: a growable, transit-enabled lot. So far, everything has worked out well. I've saved and re-opened the city many times and it all runs smoothly. There haven't been any impacts on commute time, and as far as I can tell the avenue is functioning exactly as it had before.

One danger I will note though is that I think abandonment shuts down any transit function. I'm not positive on this, and there may be a way around it by changing the properties of the lot to never abandon, but this is something to be aware of. You should be confident that the lot will remain desirable for the long-term. In addition, transit-enabling a growable seems to prevent new lots from replacing it. Once you've grown one, that's the building that will exist on that patch of zone forever, until you demolish it manually.

Hopefully this has all been helpful in some way. I probably got a few things wrong (please let me know if I did), but I think on the whole this is a good procedure to follow for this very specific goal. And I didn't mention it at the beginning, but big thanks to @TowerDude for creating such an amazing model.

[rivit 3,391]

First well done - its a big step forward to start on Transit Enabling things.  There is one thing to keep in mind if you want to publish.

1) SC4Tool has a write bug on saving a TE lot that affects Apple people . This can only be fixed in Reader by editing the Building Exemplar and looking for these fields:

  SC4Tool makes the Rep values 1 and this should changed to 0

[Propfam 2,288]

2 hours ago, rivit said:

First well done - its a big step forward to start on Transit Enabling things.  There is one thing to keep in mind if you want to publish.

1) SC4Tool has a write bug on saving a TE lot that affects Apple people . This can only be fixed in Reader by editing the Building Exemplar and looking for these fields:

  SC4Tool makes the Rep values 1 and this should changed to 0

I thought who are Apple people and it turns out the Aspyr version (aka Mac version) player.

[rivit 3,391]

@chfzdn   Thanks for the save, I was a little   v a g u e   there.

[bch0899 1,203]

Thanks for the topic, I've been looking into doing this recently. I ran into a really basic problem, I'm not sure if it is because I'm blind or if windows is not running sc4 Tool correctly. To transit enable a lot in SC4 Tool I need to open it in SC4 Tool, but there is no open button. The tutorials say it is in the top left corner, but it not there and none of the drop-down menus have an open function. Hopefully, someone can help me with this. 

[ncamferdam 1,490]

When you open SC4Tool, what do you see? There should be a welcome window that can take you directly to the various editors, including the TE Editor. And when you click Editors>TE Editor in the top left corner, you say there's no option to open up files? Can you post what the TE Editor window looks like for you?

One issue I forgot to mention in the original post is that you'll probably have to run SC4Tool in compatibility mode with Windows XP (Service Pack 3). Running it on a newer operating system can cause problems for people, but that should allow it to work properly.

[Propfam 2,288]

I was experiencing this amazing phenomenon before with BSC Airports' SimGoober Helipad. It is a ploppable, but it can be upgraded thru a script ofc. When the time arrive and you accept the offer, the building is reconstructed and the avenue and the rail which previously connected are closed off. When the reconstruction is completed, the avenue and the rail are reconnected again automatically.