Simtropolis Returns!

[justforfun 7,878]

Great to see you, @Andreas Roth! Do you think you can bring some SFBT BATter back into business?  At the very least, they should make some nice building to celebrate your birthday!

[Tyberius06 12,214]

1 hour ago, Andreas Roth said:

I happen to celebrate my 50th birthday today

Wow, Happy Birthday, Andreas! 
Coincidentally, my best friend, who lives in Austria (close to the Hungarian border), is also celebrating his birthday (43 - he caught up to me finally) today!  

1 hour ago, Andreas Roth said:

I wonder how feasible it is to update everything to the current standards (such as the Submenu DLL feature etc.)

I went into a rabbit hole with this regarding most of the LEX/BSC stuff, so I would say, doing that kind of deep cleaning that I am doing not necessarily a worthy thing - takes up a shit loads of time, often demotivating.
I updated some of the SFBT transportation stuff (I need to reupload them now - wednesday or thursday I'll have the time to do so) with current standards and with submenus, but I think there's just a few thing that I would consider kind of necessary to update in general: transportation stuff to current NAM standards ( @CasperVg is working on a 2026 version of the SC4PIM-X bringing it into our timeline, which will include complete and easy to use transit enabling, preset transit switches for most type of now "standard" station types and many other features - good old SC4Tool after 20 years of hard working can finally retire after the release of this), submenus for larger sets (parks or modular stuff) and the most headache considering that the SFBT made a tons of them, adding the w2w OG and w2w building style marker properties for the w2w growable contents... This can be a kind of copy/paste, but I know that there are a lot of w2w buildings in the SFBT collection... 

[Andreas Roth 614]

You're definitely right about that "rabbit hole", and I'm well aware that it's a daunting task, esp. since there are so many lots that needs some work. An updated version of PIM-X that is being able to handle all this sounds very exciting, maybe this could ease some of the work that needs to be done along with the SC4 Command Line tool that also allows batch-editing for submenues and stuff. I'm glad that there are some people with programming experience which are able to create such invaluable tools for the community, otherwise, all that custom content wouldn't have been possible. 

As for reviving the good old SimForum BAT Team, I doubt that's possible, since most members have gone MIA ages ago. But at least @N1_2888 is still holding the flag up, presenting one or another Christmas present from his personal collection.

[Cyclone Boom 17,016]

On 31/05/2026 at 8:57 PM, simmering said:

Could you let us know once the process is completed? Thanks!

Confirmed completed now.

Here's a post with the details (inside the new info topic):

 

[Wiimeiser 445]

On 02/06/2026 at 3:03 AM, Dirktator said:

and then I missed the warning emails that came after it.

I know that feeling, I keep forgetting to check my email. Executive dysfunction is a nightmare, I rambled about it to myself last night as I was lying in bed.

 

8 hours ago, Andreas Roth said:

As for reviving the good old SimForum BAT Team, I doubt that's possible, since most members have gone MIA ages ago. But at least @N1_2888 is still holding the flag up, presenting one or another Christmas present from his personal collection.

I think most of the teams have disappeared, actually. Not sure who is and isn't left, beyond the NAM and CAM still being active. Which is a shame, as we have a lot more tools now than we did before...

[carlosmarcelo 981]

Finally, I caught stop to write. Even without playing SimCity nowadays, it was nebulous days without simtropolis.   Even staying busy every day, I visit here to see the new and how are the peoples. 
Fortunately, all site is come back and with community more united.  And everything that's missing is just reasion to we have more and more good news in the nexts weeks and months. 
Thanks all for devotion to return the site for us. 
Long life to simtropolis. 

[FlyHigh 181]

I'm very glad to know ST is back and alive! Thank you. 

It's commendable the effort and speed you got the website back online considering the severity of what could have been. After SimPeg's and SC4D's catastrophic disappearance, Simtropolis remains the anchor to a beloved game and awesome community from another era. Makes me happy not having to say goodbye to this comfortable and familiar corner of the internet.

[bulgus 11]

 I was back yesterday from 20-year hiatus from SC4 and wondered what happened  Glad Simtropolis.com is back  

Can someone pls update mipro essentials as it's blocking update queue in sc4pac? Or perhaps if someone have a file - just PM me I will be very grateful.

[CaptCity 4,874]

On 6/8/2026 at 9:41 AM, bulgus said:

Can someone pls update mipro essentials as it's blocking update queue in sc4pac?

Done... (link)

[PolluxTK 3]

Thank you all for your enormous efforts to bring this wonderful site back to life! Thank you!

[kergelen 741]

Hi Simtropolis staff and all members,

It's a pleasure Simtropolis is back :)))))

Thank you for all your efforts recovering Simtropolis!!! We missed it so much

[Scbilder 64]

Words fail me at times. Music hardly ever!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmm3KTa601s

[Gunzerino 26]

WE ARE BACK, BABY! 

[BallOpener 10]

OMG you guys are back! I thought Simtropolis would be forever gone... Thanks for the hard work!

Sucks some things have gone, but I hope you guys will develop better processes, so we don't have never get this issue again.

[CorinaMarie 29,785]

6 minutes ago, BallOpener said:

I hope you guys will develop better processes,...

Oh my!  Yes!  We did.  

See CB's post here for more details.

[QuantumChicken 89]

I find it absolutely bizarre that your original provider was willing to resort to a antimatter annihilation equivalent attack against ST as a whole. I am so glad that your were able to recover from this farce.

[Turnstyled 526]

I don't know if this is already a thing, but I give permission to restore my own images if they're found on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. I've been so tired with my mother's broken arm. I really don't have much energy to partake in a project like the restoration currently ongoing. Though I did look for a few of my uploaded images on the Wayback Machine and the only capture of the webpage that the image was on triggered a Cloudflare block from the webpage being captured.

[simmering 2,706]

@CorinaMarie, @Cyclone Boom, I have a more general observation which I post here instead of in the recovery pages.

Are we sure that nothing was lost prior to 17 June, 2024? E.g. for the file I link below, there are a great many comments going back to 2012, all with images. And all the images have a placeholder. I am certain I have seen placeholder images before in posts older than 17 June, 2024.

 

I also notice that the original image name for all of these is "%3C". Maybe this helps investigating it.

[CorinaMarie 29,785]

4 hours ago, simmering said:

I am certain I have seen placeholder images before in posts older than 17 June, 2024.

Oh, sure. There've been a million images lost over time. A site called ImageShack yanked the rug out from under peeps even before I joined. Then PhotoBorket did the same to me (and others) in my first year here. And many peeps delete their pics from ST after a few months so that also leaves database entries pointing to nowhere.

I believe all of those will be detected as broken linkys. (Or when CB gets back, he can give us the real answer.)

[tgp1994 28]

18 hours ago, Turnstyled said:

I don't know if this is already a thing, but I give permission to restore my own images if they're found on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'm sorry to hear about your mother, I hope she gets better soon. I had raised this before, but for some reason Internet Archive had not been archiving this site. We could've saved a lot more content if it had been. I'm not sure if there is an explicit block or something else was going on.

[simmering 2,706]

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Oh, sure. There've been a million images lost over time. A site call ImageShack yanked the rug out from under peeps even before I joined. Then PhotoBorket did the same to me (and others) in my first year here. And many peeps delete their pics from ST after a few months so that also leaves database entries pointing to nowhere.

I believe all of those will be detected as broken linkys. (Or when CB gets back, he can give us the real answer.)

I see, so those are long lost images, which might have had an ImageShack or PhotoBucket placeholder that now has been replaced by an ST placeholder in the course of the restoration work. That makes sense. Thanks!

[Cyclone Boom 17,016]

7 hours ago, tgp1994 said:

I had raised this before, but for some reason Internet Archive had not been archiving this site. We could've saved a lot more content if it had been. I'm not sure if there is an explicit block or something else was going on.

I feel to clarify, there is actually much better news on this front. Long before the site crash, we specifically allowed the Internet Archive to index ST pages. While there may sometimes be crawl failures on certain URLs (typically those with long query strings), we were certainly not blocking the Wayback Machine intentionally. 

You may have observed the few weeks prior didn't have many pages saved. Aside from this it was actively indexing the site, and still does frequently. I also know some people had been manually indexing pages, which all helped.

A summary of what the Internet Archive was able to restore can be seen from this post:

 

Using the automated import, it allowed us to salvage over 6,000 images. 

We might also be able to find certain STEX files too from prior years, which could be especially helpful in restoring previous versions. These would be saved from the ?do=download URLs which fetch each STEX file.

[tgp1994 28]

16 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

I feel to clarify, there is actually much better news on this front. Long before the site crash, we specifically allowed the Internet Archive to index ST pages. While there may sometimes be crawl failures on certain URLs (typically those with long query strings), we were certainly not blocking the Wayback Machine intentionally. 

 

That's fantastic to hear! I had tried about four different topics during the downtime which all had errors so had given up hope at that point. But this is relieving to see. Thanks again for your work.