A Thread To Discuss DLL Mods

[Jackspital 391]

Hey all!

I have been back and forth here over the last few months keeping up with some of the new DLL mod breakthroughs such as submenus and themore building styles plugin DLL. Since the recent 3D Camera mod came out on April Fools, I have been blown away by some of the photographs that people have been uploading. (I actually commented after I figured out that it was, in fact, not an April Fools joke!) I never thought I would see this sort of movement in the community, especially after the old 3D camera April Fools joke and the countless conversations about the chances of an update for the game from EA.

Not only have I seen news stories about us as a community, but I have seen more activity here and on Reddit. It gives me much hope for the community going forth, and the fact that the game remains timeless after 20 years. I therefore thought I should create a thread asking people what sort of DLL breakthroughs they would hope to see, or maybe people's viewpoints on an OpenSC4 going forwards? I think its a great question to revisit after memo's and other's work.

Another question that I have is where will these breakthroughs take us?

I understand that the 3D Camera mod is in its infancy, but have these DLL mods enabled more of the games inner code to be studied? 

I am in the loop somewhat, and at the same time understand little about coding. I however am very intrigued over the future of the 3D camera mod and the more building styles as both of these have the ability to really open up the game for future BATs and an ease of access for new members.

I would love to hear what others in the community think of future DLL breakthroughs, or how this may change the community?

 

 

[rsc204 21,865]

To take your example, the 3D Camera Mod, you must understand that SC4 always used a 3D renderer, it just locked the camera angles around the isometric system the game uses for BATs. So in essence what the DLL has done is to take something that existed and modify it in a way that allows us to use it differently. This is really a core concept of DLL mods and their capabilities, far too many people seem to think that DLL mods make anything possible and that sadly just isn't reality. What we're most likely to see are minor fixes to deal with annoying problems, small additions that make playing or developing content easier and some things which we previously thought impossible becoming a reality. But, and I can not stress this enough, what DLLs won't likely do is become a way to re-write the .exe or fundamentally change/alter the way the code was written and works.

Examples of things that simply aren't going to happen no matter how many times people ask are:

• MultiCore (CPU or GPU) support - impossible without a complete re-write of code, it's not something you can simply flick 'on'.
• Improved performance (to any major degree) - if something were not optimised by Maxis, it could maybe be patched. But to get bigger changes we're again in re-write territory.
• Larger city tiles or the ability to see more than one concurrently - again this is re-write territory and would tank performance to an unacceptable level too.
• Fixing the External Commuter loop problem - this stems from the game not sharing data about neighbouring cities, again only a rewrite and huge performance hit could resolve this.

Sorry if that seems like a downer, but you wouldn't believe how many times the exact same things get brought up. This can become a little irritating when we have to repeat such things over and over, so better get it out of the way first.

What is clear is that DLLs are already revolutionising what is possible, it's hard to know what will happen in the longer term, I mean who'd have guessed a week ago we'd have the 3D Camera unlocked to play with? But it's great that some really talented coders are finally wrestling with the game, this was always possible and Buggi produced a DLL mod in the early days of modding, albeit mostly just restoring developer functions that existed already. However it was many years before Simmmaster2 came along and brought us SC4Fix and a handful of other useful DLLs. The longer Memo and Null45 have to dedicate themselves to this type of modding, the further down the rabbit hole they will surely get. But at this rate, I think in a year or two we could have quite the transformed experience, who knows where that might lead?

Spoiler

OpenSC4 is another subject entirely, because if you can edit and manage the entire code, everything is possible. Frankly there are two barriers to this, EA have not (and show no signs of), open sourced the code. In fact that's always been EA's red line, don't modify (directly) the executable (.exe), so whilst you can build one, I suspect if you did a cease and desist letter would quickly evaporate your hard work.

That's before considering how much coding is needed to write a game of this size, it's not exactly a few people project for some hobbyists in their spare time. We're talking about a full time job for a team of coders over many years, unless you can take what exists and start there, you have to build it from scratch anew. Now I won't say categorically that it could never happen, because that increases the odds of egg on face, but the likelihood of that is real small in reality.

Making a competing game that might nerf SC4 sales would not make EA happy, although they probably couldn't do much about it. But if you wanted to use their assets and asset creation tools, then you give them an opening to introduce those friendly lawyers once more. OpenSC4 doesn't make sense to me, if you are that keen on city builders, make a new one that is Open Source and can be perfected over time, this is more likely frankly and would be of more benefit overall. I mean if we are going to all that effort, I assume the goal is a full 3D game, in which case starting with an isometric one as it's base doesn't make a whole load of sense. However, look at the median salary for a head coder that is capable of making a game engine, then you can get a sense of how much money such an individual would have to be willing to let go to work on such a project. That's why it won't happen, because no one has that much free time who is that skilled, it would take a crazy level of devotion, motivation and not caring or needing the hundreds of thousands of dollars they could have made working in software development instead. That's just one person, you'd need a team of coders realistically, although with a really talented head coder, the others need not be at a similar level necessarily, but heck still a big ask. 

If you think Unity, Unreal or any other game engine you can licence can make a (good) working city simulator, well then I respectfully say you don't understand enough about programming/games. Ignoring of course too that by licencing such an engine, you've just ensured your project isn't open source any more. Just as with the argument in the previous paragraph, we are essentially getting into Commercial territory, you know where folks need paying and that is sort of incompatible with Open Source as a concept.

Maxis were so generous if you think about it, from the ground up they made most of SC4 support modding, no doubt one reason for it's success. It very sad then that the shift in the industry to focus on DLC and paid addons, has been partially to blame for the failure of SC (2013), CS:2 and pretty much everything that came after SC4 in the same genre. We're not going to get a commercial product that is as open as SC4, simply because doing so would be counter to the strategy of monetising games which the industry has become obsessed with.

[Null 45 3,100]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

Buggi produced a DLL mod in the early days of modding, albeit mostly just restoring developer functions that existed already.

The Extra Cheats DLL was created by Maxis to enable the internal cheats and other things they used when developing the game. As I understand it, Buggi contacted Maxis and got them to publicly release it.

[Jackspital 391]

On 4/6/2024 at 10:26 AM, rsc204 said:

To take your example, the 3D Camera Mod, you must understand that SC4 always used a 3D renderer, it just locked the camera angles around the isometric system the game uses for BATs. So in essence what the DLL has done is to take something that existed and modify it in a way that allows us to use it differently. This is really a core concept of DLL mods and their capabilities, far too many people seem to think that DLL mods make anything possible and that sadly just isn't reality. What we're most likely to see are minor fixes to deal with annoying problems, small additions that make playing or developing content easier and some things which we previously thought impossible becoming a reality. But, and I can not stress this enough, what DLLs won't likely do is become a way to re-write the .exe or fundamentally change/alter the way the code was written and works.

Examples of things that simply aren't going to happen no matter how many times people ask are:

• MultiCore (CPU or GPU) support - impossible without a complete re-write of code, it's not something you can simply flick 'on'.
• Improved performance (to any major degree) - if something were not optimised by Maxis, it could maybe be patched. But to get bigger changes we're again in re-write territory.
• Larger city tiles or the ability to see more than one concurrently - again this is re-write territory and would tank performance to an unacceptable level too.
• Fixing the External Commuter loop problem - this stems from the game not sharing data about neighbouring cities, again only a rewrite and huge performance hit could resolve this.

Sorry if that seems like a downer, but you wouldn't believe how many times the exact same things get brought up. This can become a little irritating when we have to repeat such things over and over, so better get it out of the way first.

What is clear is that DLLs are already revolutionising what is possible, it's hard to know what will happen in the longer term, I mean who'd have guessed a week ago we'd have the 3D Camera unlocked to play with? But it's great that some really talented coders are finally wrestling with the game, this was always possible and Buggi produced a DLL mod in the early days of modding, albeit mostly just restoring developer functions that existed already. However it was many years before Simmmaster2 came along and brought us SC4Fix and a handful of other useful DLLs. The longer Memo and Null45 have to dedicate themselves to this type of modding, the further down the rabbit hole they will surely get. But at this rate, I think in a year or two we could have quite the transformed experience, who knows where that might lead?

  OpenSC4 thoughts (Hide contents)

OpenSC4 is another subject entirely, because if you can edit and manage the entire code, everything is possible. Frankly there are two barriers to this, EA have not (and show no signs of), open sourced the code. In fact that's always been EA's red line, don't modify (directly) the executable (.exe), so whilst you can build one, I suspect if you did a cease and desist letter would quickly evaporate your hard work.

That's before considering how much coding is needed to write a game of this size, it's not exactly a few people project for some hobbyists in their spare time. We're talking about a full time job for a team of coders over many years, unless you can take what exists and start there, you have to build it from scratch anew. Now I won't say categorically that it could never happen, because that increases the odds of egg on face, but the likelihood of that is real small in reality.

Making a competing game that might nerf SC4 sales would not make EA happy, although they probably couldn't do much about it. But if you wanted to use their assets and asset creation tools, then you give them an opening to introduce those friendly lawyers once more. OpenSC4 doesn't make sense to me, if you are that keen on city builders, make a new one that is Open Source and can be perfected over time, this is more likely frankly and would be of more benefit overall. I mean if we are going to all that effort, I assume the goal is a full 3D game, in which case starting with an isometric one as it's base doesn't make a whole load of sense. However, look at the median salary for a head coder that is capable of making a game engine, then you can get a sense of how much money such an individual would have to be willing to let go to work on such a project. That's why it won't happen, because no one has that much free time who is that skilled, it would take a crazy level of devotion, motivation and not caring or needing the hundreds of thousands of dollars they could have made working in software development instead. That's just one person, you'd need a team of coders realistically, although with a really talented head coder, the others need not be at a similar level necessarily, but heck still a big ask. 

If you think Unity, Unreal or any other game engine you can licence can make a (good) working city simulator, well then I respectfully say you don't understand enough about programming/games. Ignoring of course too that by licencing such an engine, you've just ensured your project isn't open source any more. Just as with the argument in the previous paragraph, we are essentially getting into Commercial territory, you know where folks need paying and that is sort of incompatible with Open Source as a concept.

Maxis were so generous if you think about it, from the ground up they made most of SC4 support modding, no doubt one reason for it's success. It very sad then that the shift in the industry to focus on DLC and paid addons, has been partially to blame for the failure of SC (2013), CS:2 and pretty much everything that came after SC4 in the same genre. We're not going to get a commercial product that is as open as SC4, simply because doing so would be counter to the strategy of monetising games which the industry has become obsessed with.

Thank you for such a detailed response. I think it helps me to read this and understand that these dll mods just unlock what was already set by the developers. I think definitely its important to look at where the recent mods will take the community, but as you have said they won't ever enable features that a modern game has without a rewrite that could potentially backfire and involve a lawsuit. 

Despite this, I think the biggest thing for myself is that these mods have got people talking and reinvested in the franchise, which in its own way has to have a discussion about the future I'm sure. 

[CorinaMarie 29,877]

On 4/5/2024 at 3:20 PM, Jackspital said:

I would love to hear what others in the community think of future DLL breakthroughs, ...

I'm still catching up with two year's worth of posts and I've deliberately saved all the DLL related files and topics for last because those are so exciting and I want to savor them rather than rush thru.

So, ofc, I'm not sure what all of them do yet.

However, on my wish list would be if a DLL could push the Landmark Aura data to the Lua side then we could create a mod similar to the Parks Aura.

[SneakyDeaky 1,130]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'm still catching up with two year's worth of posts and I've deliberately saved all the DLL related files and topics for last because those are so exciting and I want to savor them rather than rush thru.

So, ofc, I'm not sure what all of them do yet.

However, on my wish list would be if a DLL could push the Landmark Aura data to the Lua side then we could create a mod similar to the Parks Aura.

That would be cool! There's so many cities now that have so many landmarks under the National Historic list that a mod that could at least minimally help plan our Historic sites would be nice. I use the park aura mod!

[SneakyDeaky 1,130]

4 minutes ago, SneakyDeaky said:

That would be cool! There's so many cities now that have so many landmarks under the National Historic list that a mod that could at least minimally help plan our Historic sites would be nice. I use the park aura mod!

I'm quoting myself because I like this idea and wanted to throw in my two cents. 

One problem I have about this idea is so many landmarks on the many download sites are pretty much ploppable versions of growable lots, IE they have jobs ect, effect the economy and growth of the city; excuse my basic understanding of the game, but to me, that is different than a "landmark." A landmark may have jobs but there's more, historically, to distinguish it from just a commercial. But, so many creators have uploaded ploppable versions of their bats and lots for our convenience, which usually fall into the "Landmark" category, but that doesn't necessarily define them. Is there a difference between the effect a plopped Landmark has VS a plopped Landmark/with jobs? 

I'm curious when I plop Grand Central Station without jobs, the vanilla version, VS when I plop the "functional landmark" version, with jobs, is there a difference other than those jobs? 

[CorinaMarie 29,877]

@SneakyDeaky

In the early days peeps needed a menu in which to place ploppables and Landmarks was the default choice since everywhere else was more specific like Parks or Transportation or whatever. Then just because they are in that menu doesn't meant that they have a Landmark Aura, but they certainly can have. That's a property which can be set in an exemplar.

So the answer is: Yes and No. It depends on if that was included in the modding phase.

[SneakyDeaky 1,130]

22 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

@SneakyDeaky

In the early days peeps needed a menu in which to place ploppables and Landmarks was the default choice since everywhere else was more specific like Parks or Transportation or whatever. Then just because they are in that menu doesn't meant that they have a Landmark Aura, but they certainly can have. That's a property which can be set in an exemplar.

So the answer is: Yes and No. It depends on if that was included in the modding phase.

This is all very interesting to me, because mostly I build my "downtown" areas to have as many commercial jobs, especially C$$$ jobs, (because I don't want those R$$$ sims leaving their expensive townhouses) as possible. BUT, it would be interesting to build purely for the Landmark Aura-- tourist traps-- and a mod that helps me wrap my mind around that would be pretty cool. 

[Null 45 3,100]

6 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

However, on my wish list would be if a DLL could push the Landmark Aura data to the Lua side then we could create a mod similar to the Parks Aura.

The data view source types are hard coded in the EXE. The aura simulator has a landmark map that SC4 uses for the desirability and growth calculations, but for whatever reason Maxis didn't expose it in a data view.

Looking at the data view list in Ingred.ini it has a large gap in the numbering, the first part of the list goes from 0 to 30 then it jumps up to 64. I wonder if Maxis had more data views planned, but scrapped the idea at some point.

[Jackspital 391]

I would love to know what other plans they had with the data menus, I always loved the pie charts and menus in SC3000. New data views would be an amazing thing for SC4. I've actually wondered if its possible to contact old devs from SC4? Would they be able to give a definitive answer on what was planned after Rush Hour before we got nothing else?

Just something I had thought about from reading the thread and wondering if that jump to 64 would allow new data views to be placed into the files.

[Null 45 3,100]

1 hour ago, Jackspital said:

I've actually wondered if its possible to contact old devs from SC4?

There have been people who were in contact with various SC4 developers over the years, and according to this post by Karybdis EA even paid to fly a bunch of early SC4 modders out to San Francisco to talk about that topic. Buggi had a contact at Maxis who was able to get a DLL Maxis created to activate their internal development cheats released to the community as the extra cheats DLL.

Some of the gzcom-dll code was given to simmaster07 by the late Paul Pedriana (SC4's Lead Architect & Engineer).

1 hour ago, Jackspital said:

Would they be able to give a definitive answer on what was planned after Rush Hour before we got nothing else?

Possibly, but I would not get your hopes up. It has been 20+ years and they could have forgotten or still be under some kind of NDA. Ocean Quigley (SC4's Creative & Art Director) has a bunch of old blog posts about SC4's development with development screenshots and other info.

[EternallyAries 2]

First time poster here. (Even though my account is pretty old at this point)

With DLL's having this much functionality now, could we finally unlock the FPS for this game? Or have it locked to your monitor refresh rate? The speed your game runs at determines your FPS and it can be quite jarring when running the game at max speed and it becomes a choppy mess. I think it drops down to 25fps for max speed.

And when screen sharing SimCity 4 to my friends on Discord, the screen share actually locks your mouse to SimCity 4 refresh rate for some ungodly reason, And when changing the in game speed the mouse absolutely moves extremely choppy and the only way to bypass this is to force SimCity 4 in a proper Windowed mode. It's choppy in Fullscreen and Borderless.

[Null 45 3,100]

50 minutes ago, EternallyAries said:

I think it drops down to 25fps for max speed.

It is actually 15 fps for the max speed/cheetah, 20 fps for rhino, and 30 fps for turtle or paused. I suspect the reason SC4 does that is to give more time for the per-frame background processing as the simulation speed increases. At 15 fps the game would have up to 66 milliseconds per frame that it can devote to background processing, versus only 33 milliseconds at 30 FPS.

56 minutes ago, EternallyAries said:

It's choppy in Fullscreen and Borderless.

The windowed mode behavior makes sense, the OS is probably forcing VSync in that case. I doubt SC4 is using VSync in full screen.

[CasperVg 575]

On 6-8-2024 at 8:43 AM, EternallyAries said:

First time poster here. (Even though my account is pretty old at this point)

With DLL's having this much functionality now, could we finally unlock the FPS for this game? Or have it locked to your monitor refresh rate? The speed your game runs at determines your FPS and it can be quite jarring when running the game at max speed and it becomes a choppy mess. I think it drops down to 25fps for max speed.

And when screen sharing SimCity 4 to my friends on Discord, the screen share actually locks your mouse to SimCity 4 refresh rate for some ungodly reason, And when changing the in game speed the mouse absolutely moves extremely choppy and the only way to bypass this is to force SimCity 4 in a proper Windowed mode. It's choppy in Fullscreen and Borderless.

Yes definitely. I just released such a DLL here: caspervg/sc4-disable-fps-limits: A DLL Plugin for SimCity 4 that disables the default FPS limits. (github.com) You can already download it from GitHub under the "Releases". It's too early for an official release, I want to make sure a couple of other people have tested it on their machine before I do that

[EternallyAries 2]

On 8/7/2024 at 1:03 PM, CasperVg said:

Yes definitely. I just released such a DLL here: caspervg/sc4-disable-fps-limits: A DLL Plugin for SimCity 4 that disables the default FPS limits. (github.com) You can already download it from GitHub under the "Releases". It's too early for an official release, I want to make sure a couple of other people have tested it on their machine before I do that

This is awesome, can't wait to try out this mod. Thank you so much Caspervg, glad to know I wasn't the only one thinking if this was possible.

Edit: This DLL to unlock the fps completely fixes the mouse cursor issue from being choppy when I screen share the game itself on Discord. This is absolutely amazing.

[CasperVg 575]

New version (v0.1.1) of the sc4-disable-fps-limits DLL release on GitHub: Release v0.1.1 · caspervg/sc4-disable-fps-limits (github.com). Due to an oversight on my end, I uploaded the debug build by accident, which meant that the DLL didn't actually work for most people without Visual Studio 2022 installed. The new release mitigates this.

 

[Samu64d 360]

I'm wondering if with DLL mods it's possible to resolve the region scrolling bug