SC4PIM-X 2026 & New Properties Update Out Now!

[Ulisse Wolf 4,461]

SC4PIM-X 2026 & NEW PROPERTIES UPDATE OUT NOW!

After several months of development, the new remastered and improved version of PIM-X is finally available to the public!

This new version includes many changes, which can be summarized as follows:

• Completely redesigned Lot Editor: The asset browser now supports searching, sorting, favorites, adjustable thumbnails and detailed hover information. Assets (props, flora, families, effects, textures, ...) can be searched by name, family member or source filename. The renewed editor also adds:
  •   Editable object position and rotation
  •   Alignment, centering, rotation and mirroring tools
  •   Configurable grid snapping
  •   Fit-to-lot and additional close-up zoom levels
  •   Layer visibility controls (i.e. temporarily turn on/off certain asset types to focus on others)
  •   Separate land and water placement constraints
  •   Better keyboard shortcuts and toolbar controls
  •   Persistent window layouts and column sizes
• Undo and redo in the Lot Editor: Lot editing is no longer a one-way process. Object placement, movement and other edits can be undone and redone, making complex lot work much safer and less frustrating.
• Timed, seasonal and animated prop previews: The Lot Editor preview system now understands more of what actually happens in-game. Date and time controls can be used to inspect timed and seasonal props, including playback and looping. Animated S3D and ATC models can be previewed and represented by animated thumbnails, while family variations can be inspected and selected directly.
• Day and night rendering in the Lot Editor (both Maxis night and SimFox DarkNite)
• Transit-enabled lot editing: The original release offered very limited support for transit-enabled lots. This edition adds a dedicated transit workflow with:
  •   Transit-object placement and inspection
  •   Edge-direction and edge-byte editing
  •   SC4Path discovery, parsing, previews and selection (i.e. the ability to assign custom paths to a TE tile)
  •   A structured Transit Switch Points editor
  •   Data-driven presets for common stations and transport combinations (thanks to @Tyberius06 for his wealth of knowledge on this!)
  •   Automatic calculation of relevant transit properties, costs and capacities
• Safer property / Filling Degree recomputation: Recomputing exemplar properties now opens a comparison showing what will be added, changed or removed. Individual changes can be selected before they are applied, helping preserve intentional manual overrides (i.e. OGs, etc.) and preventing unexpected bulk edits.
• Dedicated property editors: Several complex properties no longer have to be edited as opaque lists of numbers. Purpose-built editors are provided for areas such as:
  •   Occupant Groups and Occupant Type
  •   Transit Switch Points

  Building submenus

•   Response curves
•   Prop timing
• A new dependency report: The dependency dialog has been redesigned to find and clearly display all missing resources rather than stopping at an incomplete result. It understands additional resource types, and can use the SC4 Prop & Texture Catalog (thanks @nos.17 for providing this!) to provide more useful information about missing props and textures.
• Major loading and browsing improvements
• Additional improvements:
  • Configurable SimCity 4 Plugins location
  • High-DPI display support for crisper text and graphics for people with Retina or 4k monitors
  • MacOS compatibility (experimental!)
  • Numerous fixes for lot creation, exemplar values, models, textures, animations, ...

With these changes, a unified platform for SC4 modding is being developed, which will make it easier to create new mods even on modern systems where PIM-X previously had execution issues. Furthermore, with multiplatform support, mod creation has expanded to include operating systems that were not previously supported, such as Mac OS

What will happen to the old PIM-X?

The old PIM-X will still be available to the public to ensure a smooth transition, but after a certain period (about a year), it will be delisted from various exchanges, and the new PIM-X will be the only tool for mod development.

New Properties

New Properties has been updated, but now comes in two versions, allowing users to choose which type of algorithms they want to use, which provides flexibility. However, we recommend choosing the version that best suits your projects. As a general rule

• New_Property.xml -> Recommended for a vanilla or hybrid vanilla experience
• New_Properties.xml-patches -> Recommended for a CAM experience (CAM, CAM-SPAM, and CAM-Vanilla) or a hybrid experience

The only major differences between the two versions are

• In the New_Property.xml file, public services (Education, Healthcare, Safety) have values equal to half those of Maxis, forcing the player to build a greater number of civic buildings, in line with the BSC Team’s vision. The New_Properties.xml-patches version has values four times higher than those of the BSC Team and twice as high as those of Maxis.
• New_Property.xml is subject to delays in updates compared to the New_Properties.xml-patches version, which is updated quickly

Apart from this difference, the rest of the files are identical in both versions, which can be summarized as follows:

• The utilities have been revised to include new types of power plants, electrical substations, and batteries, as well as to re-enable features removed by Maxis, such as the Freshwater Pump, Desalination Plant, and Incinerator.
• Transit-Enabled (TE) buildings comply with NAM-MTA specifications
• All additional properties created by the DLL Mods have been added
• Update all Occupant Groups (OG) by adding the recovered ones and the new ones
• Added Farm Files from SPAM and Colossus Farming, in addition to updating the BSC ones
• The park system has been revised and improved compared to the BSC & Maxis version
• Added additional buildings from the CAM expansions
• Additional buildings and properties from the CAM expansions have been added
• Ability to generate farms up to Stage 10 (Requires CAM or SPAM for Stages 4 and 5—Requires CAM for Stages 5 through 10)

In SC4PIM-X 2026, New_Properties.xml is installed by default, but you can install New_Properties.xml-patches by downloading the file and installing it in this location: %APPDATA%\sc4pimx\

The files (SC4PIM-X 2026, New Properties, and New Properties Patches) are available on GitHub, Simtropolis, and SC4Evermore

 

[Propfam 2,307]

I wonder how can AI took out Python code. I know AI can indeed spit out a much better version. But, I'm still confused how AI can reverse engineer a thing called PIM-X. @CasperVg, may I ask to you?

[CasperVg 587]

1 hour ago, Propfam said:

I wonder how can AI took out Python code. I know AI can indeed spit out a much better version. But, I'm still confused how AI can reverse engineer a thing called PIM-X. @CasperVg, may I ask to you?

The reverse engineering/decompilation of SC4PIM-X 2009 itself wasn't done by AI. The process was quite simple thanks to the uncompyle6 tool (since Python is fairly easy to decompile) and I described it in the GitHub repository.

Quote

The original SC4PIM-X was recovered by decompiling its library.zip:

1. Unpack library.zip from the SC4PIM directory with a short Python script (a normal ZIP extractor will not work):

   
   import zipfile
   with zipfile.ZipFile('library.zip', 'r') as zip_ref:
       zip_ref.extractall('./library')

    
   This yields many .pyo files in the library folder.
2. Decompile the useful ones with uncompyle6:

   
   uncompyle6 SC4PIMApp.pyo > SC4PIMApp.py

    

The recovered Python 2.4 sources were then modernized to Python 3.11+ and a number of performance and QoL improvements were made. The original decompilation is preserved in the archive/decompiled-py24 branch and tag.

 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,109]

I wonder if this version will run more successfully and less crash-y than the old one.

It seems to be a frequent woe to many. As far as I'm concerned I found out that PIM-X frequently stopped working anytime I rearranged or renamed my plugin folders.

I always liked this app for the automatic occupancy calculation option. Saves time trying to compare building sizes vs. Sims within... I'll have to recall it. Could be fun to start using this again...

[kaimai 1,067]

PIM-X will not start on my system. This may be the expected behavior (Mac OS 15.7.4, mid-2019 iMac, running SimCity and PIM-X under Wine 64-bit, version 21.1.0, in Windows 10 compatibility mode with dgVoodoo—this setup probably "shouldn't" be supported) but in case it isn't, what should I look for in the backtrace in terms of troubleshooting?

[Andreas Roth 629]

I just discovered this yesterday, and downloaded the new PIM-X today, toying around with it a little. Needless to say, I'm very impressed by all the new features, this actually renders a bunch of other tool useless, and we get a proper workflow for pretty much every aspect of lot creation and modding in one tool! Thank you for this massive amount of work, it's another step for making our beloved SC4 immortal! 

Naturally, I was looking around if there's the ability to translate the program, just as the old one, and thankfully, pretty much all of the old text strings are still in place, so I've assembled a German translation, based on the English language file. Some translations might be not perfect yet, but it's a good start, I'd say. However, I noticed that quite a few entries in the category tree are not translated. I tried copying the text strings in the old language file and adapt the prefix pattern accordingly, but then the program would crash at startup. Attached below is a copy of my German language file, feel free to integrate it into the next update. Not sure if the rest of the strings can be added somehow, but now the mix of German and English looks a bit odd (see screenshot).

The all-new Lot Editor looks great as well; as a "mouse guy" I can never remember all the keyboard shortcuts, so the toolbar is very helpful alright. Compared to the old LE, I think the only things that are missing are rotation buttons for the preview, and maybe separated zoom buttons for preview and lot editing area (sometimes, you want an overview of the lot AND precise placement for items). I'm curious about the Transit Switch Editor, that was something the good old SC4Tool was popular for, but sadly, it wasn't reliable all the time and never got fixed properly.

 

de.toml_v2.zip

  Edited Sunday at 08:28 PM by Andreas Roth  
Updated German language file

[CasperVg 587]

On 10-7-2026 at 9:51 PM, TheMurderousCricket said:

I wonder if this version will run more successfully and less crash-y than the old one.

It seems to be a frequent woe to many. As far as I'm concerned I found out that PIM-X frequently stopped working anytime I rearranged or renamed my plugin folders.

I always liked this app for the automatic occupancy calculation option. Saves time trying to compare building sizes vs. Sims within... I'll have to recall it. Could be fun to start using this again...

The new 2026 version should be a lot more stable than the 2009 version, especially on larger Plugins folders.

On 11-7-2026 at 5:44 AM, kaimai said:

PIM-X will not start on my system. This may be the expected behavior (Mac OS 15.7.4, mid-2019 iMac, running SimCity and PIM-X under Wine 64-bit, version 21.1.0, in Windows 10 compatibility mode with dgVoodoo—this setup probably "shouldn't" be supported) but in case it isn't, what should I look for in the backtrace in terms of troubleshooting?

Hmm yeah definitely not a setup that I can easily replicate. If I understand correctly this is an Intel Mac? I could try to build a custom binary for that platform via GitHub Actions, see if it helps? I don't intend to support officially any thing other than Win x64 and Mac Arm64 though.

8 hours ago, Andreas Roth said:

I just discovered this yesterday, and downloaded the new PIM-X today, toying around with it a little. Needless to say, I'm very impressed by all the new features, this actually renders a bunch of other tool useless, and we get a proper workflow for pretty much every aspect of lot creation and modding in one tool! Thank you for this massive amount of work, it's another step for making our beloved SC4 immortal! 

Naturally, I was looking around if there's the ability to translate the program, just as the old one, and thankfully, pretty much all of the old text strings are still in place, so I've assembled a German translation, based on the English language file. Some translations might be not perfect yet, but it's a good start, I'd say. However, I noticed that quite a few entries in the category tree are not translated. I tried copying the text strings in the old language file and adapt the prefix pattern accordingly, but then the program would crash at startup. Attached below is a copy of my German language file, feel free to integrate it into the next update. Not sure if the rest of the strings can be added somehow, but now the mix of German and English looks a bit odd (see screenshot).

The all-new Lot Editor looks great as well; as a "mouse guy" I can never remember all the keyboard shortcuts, so the toolbar is very helpful alright. Compared to the old LE, I think the only things that are missing are rotation buttons for the preview, and maybe separated zoom buttons for preview and lot editing area (sometimes, you want an overview of the lot AND precise placement for items). I'm curious about the Transit Switch Editor, that was something the good old SC4Tool was popular for, but sadly, it wasn't reliable all the time and never got fixed properly.

<snip>

de.toml_v2.zip

Awesome, thanks @Andreas Roth! I've integrated your translation file as well as your ideas for independent zoom (and rotation) for each of the panes (2D and 3D) now in the new version v2026.7.7 that was uploaded to the STEX and is available here on GitHub Release v2026.7.7 · caspervg/SC4PIM-X.

Features

- Language selection, plus more category translation coverage (Andreas will have to update his German translation file to cover the extra categories that are now supported)
- German (Deutsch) language added
- Separate 2D and 3D pane controls for zooming and rotation, plus scroll wheel zooming

Fixes
- More fault-tolerant S3D and XML parsing (see Error reading XML for model · Issue #4 · caspervg/SC4PIM-X, thanks to TiepiNL for the GitHub report)

[Kel9509 1,483]

@CasperVg, congratulations on this release.  It is an incredible achievement!  I appreciate your efforts and your willingness to take user input.  

A couple of questions:

1. If we're using custom building styles,  how do we add those to the tileset selector?

2. For custom submenus, again how do we incorporate those?

3. Is there a way to re-select a folder or subfolder in your plugins to scan, apart from exiting and restarting the program?

4. The lot editor in-game preview always shows a blank lot surrounded by roads & streets as well as some random buildings.  Is the lot you're working on supposed to go into that blank area? It's not in that location, if it's supposed to be, but it appears underneath it for me.

5. More operationally, I see that you've retained the right-click option to create a growable lot from a building.  But I was wondering if it's possible to extend that flexibility to basically take any building and/or lot, and transform it into any other type of building?  For instance, could you take a lotted building and convert it into a school, without having to drag the model and copy the props from the lot?  Like, a right-click option that says "Convert building to...." and then you could select from the list? And it would copy the building model and the lot and apply the standard new properties conversion as-if you were dragging it over originally?  I think this could be a useful way to convert buildings/lots quickly to different types, particularly if you're making an override.  I'm thinking of the case of converting an eyecandy building in to a functional civic building.  For instance, could you take a lot that consists of a blank building which is like a parking lot (like @hugues aroux's modular parking lots), and make it into a functional garage or bus stop?  

[Andreas Roth 629]

@CasperVg: Wow, that was fast! I've been going through the language file and updated everything that was missing, and also fixed some of the text strings that had typos and such.

de.toml_v3.zip

[CasperVg 587]

@Kel9509:

For #1 and #2:   Both the submenu list and the style/tileset lists come from new_properties.xml. You don't need to edit the one inside the program, SC4PIMX looks for a personal copy first and falls back to the built-in one, so you can just drop your own version in the user data folder (%APPDATA%\sc4pimx\new_properties.xml on Windows)

Submenus: For a one-off, you don't even need the file: open the Building Submenus editor and paste the submenu's Button ID into the "manual hex" field. If you want a submenu to show up named in the list for every building, add an entry under the "Building Submenus" property. The <HELP>SubMenuROOT…</HELP> line just above it  decides which category it's grouped under:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
<HELP>SubMenuROOTLandmarks</HELP>                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  <OPTION Value="0xDEADBEEF" Name="My Custom Submenu"></OPTION>                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
Building styles: The tileset selector is intentionally fixed to the four Maxis tilesets (Chicago/NY/Houston/Euro). Custom community styles are OccupantGroups I think? You can add them as <OPTION> entries under the OccupantGroups property (0xAA1DD396) and they'll appear in the Occupant Groups editor. Styles for the More Building Styles DLL (0xAA1DD400) don't have a dedicated picker yet. Need to check with @Null 45 how this should work                                                                                                                                                                                             

Your personal new_properties.xml takes priority over the bundled one and survives updates, so it's the safe place to keep additions.  

For #3 no, you'll need to reload the application if you wish to enable/disable more folders unfortunately.

For #4 that's a remainder from old PIM-X's LE, just very seldomly used. You can disable the background images via Layers -> 3D -> Background. If you want to use them and modify where your lot sits, go to Pan mode and then press shift while panning in the 3D mode to move the lot independently from the background to position it nicely.

For #5 you might like this wizard (that is not available yet):

[Dead_End 1,630]

Lots seem to have some issues displaying correctly. Is this a bug or am I just doing something wrong? This happens to both existing lots (created with PIM-X 2009) and newly created ones.

[CasperVg 587]

1 hour ago, Dead_End said:

Lots seem to have some issues displaying correctly. Is this a bug or am I just doing something wrong? This happens to both existing lots (created with PIM-X 2009) and newly created ones.

Turn off the background terrain layer from the top toolbar. There’s a Layers menu button there. Click it, go to 3D and turn off Background picture in that submenu

[TheMurderousCricket 5,109]

I just had a first go at new PIMX and I absolutely love it with regards to my needs. The option of automatic value calculation, which I always coveted, is there, and seems to work fine, giving plausible and quick results. No more observing, guessing and figuring out if the building has correct or incorrect number of tenants, power use etc. It always felt as if I had to put on x-ray glasses along with composite eyes to get these variables right. No more!

Many thanks to all Contributors as well as the original Author.

 

 

[Andreas Roth 629]

I had the same problem with the preview layer as @Dead_End, so I ended up disabling it, getting the same look as in the Maxis LE. Speaking of the latter, somehow, I'm still confused with the yellow color of the props in the 2D editor, since they used to be blue in the Maxis LE.  The main reason why I mention this is because a lot of base and overlay textures have brown, grey or beige hues, on which the yellow isn't as contrasting as the original blue. I'm not sure if others ever thought about this, but maybe there could be an option to change the color?

Another thing that I noticed is that some of the editor dialogs apparently don't have translations for all UI elements. For example, the "Demand Created" editor has button tool tips still in English, although they're the same buttons as in the Budget Item: Department editor. Also, the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons in all dialogues seem to be untranslated as well. "OK" is the same in German, but "Cancel" is "Abbrechen". The search field in the Lot Editor assets doesn't seem to have a translated label as well (like those in the main PIM-X window). There might be a few other occasions as well, but most UI elements show up in German for me now (I've seen you've added some lines that were already present in the old language file).

[Kel9509 1,483]

21 minutes ago, Andreas Roth said:

I had the same problem with the preview layer as @Dead_End, so I ended up disabling it, getting the same look as in the Maxis LE.

I think this was my question as well, but CasperVg said to just pan while holding shift, and now you can move the building into the empty green space or wherever else in the preview.  Takes a bit of trial and error to get it to move properly while panning, but it works.  Changing the zoom, however, doesn't keep the building in the same relative position probably because the background is just a fake image.

17 hours ago, CasperVg said:

For #5 you might like this wizard (that is not available yet):

This is a feature I've always wanted, so seeing this build preview is very encouraging.  Will it apply to lots, buildings, or both? (EDIT: Nevermind, I see it says "Convert Lot and Building...")

[kaimai 1,067]

On 7/12/2026 at 4:52 PM, CasperVg said:

Hmm yeah definitely not a setup that I can easily replicate. If I understand correctly this is an Intel Mac? I could try to build a custom binary for that platform via GitHub Actions, see if it helps? I don't intend to support officially any thing other than Win x64 and Mac Arm64 though.

Yes this is an Intel i3, so don't worry about it unless it requires 0 effort lol. If I'm still too broke to afford a new computer by the end of the year I'll probably have to learn to code myself.