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More work on the hydro dam. Not sure if I should go with the curved (right) or straight (left) transition between support wall and PEG dam. Anyone have a strong favorite? Also, not totally loving the curved walls on the upper seawall, and the sharp corner on the lower. I might switch to alternate where rounded corners are possible (suggestions?)

A small bird supplies store for your cities.

I'd start my research here: Immortal Lot Syndrome - Cause and Cure and then also look at RJ - Immortality Killer (v1.0).

Very early stages but heres some stuff I've been working on...

Holy carp @WolfZe This is really eerie man! I started this project last night. I just noticed your post now, right after I posted mine. Dude do you have a camera in my office? Great minds think alike! Prince Shoal Lighthouse...almost done. . Simmer2

I think the right side overall looks much better. I'm going to redo the entire dam in that style.

Thanks! That seems to be doing the trick!

There are loads of R$$$ lots in the Lot Editor that I've never seen before, of all the sizes I listed in my previous post. I'm really not sure if these are currently used in the game. If not, then that means they could be put to use! Has anyone ever seen a mansion develop into another mansion? I've never seen it. One of the things I don't like about mansions is that they have a depth of three or four squares, and therefore don't fit well visually with other residential zoning. It looks a bit silly that when a block of 1x2 houses upgrades to mansions, the mansion will have expand to have a road in front and behind it. So a mod could be made that doesn't use the existing 3x3, 3x4/4x3 lots, but instead uses the lots with a depth of two or three squares, like other residential. Residential capacity could be reduced in turn to compensate for the smaller lot footprint size, so it all balances out the same. Here's a screenshot showing some of the R$$$ lots in the Lot Editor. Same buildings are used as vanilla mansion lots, just lot size is reduced. Firstly, are some 2x2 lots, and then some 3x2 lots. (P.S. Anyone else get a slight optical illusion with this picture, that the squares are slightly tilted anti-clockwise?)

Phase II complete.

I've not managed to find an Exemplar property that controls this. ------------------------------------------- I'm still not sure if there's any actual gameplay difference between "Land Value Desirability Factors" 2.5>1 and vanilla. It may be that it is just a visual thing, giving better definition than vanilla's "everything at max 255 Land Value" approach, thus providing the Land Value map with a gradient effect at high-wealth levels, and meaning one can get an accurate Land Value reading for all lots. The mansions abandoning screenshot I posted earlier happened the same with vanilla, so it wasn't an effect of the 2.5>1 mod. Also, laying parks next to lots that are apparently maxxed-out with Land Value and Desirability in vanilla still gives them development growth boosts from transient aura effect. Furthermore, high-wealth residential is more likely to grow by water in vanilla than in other areas which also have maxxed-out Desirability and Land Value. So these things suggest that vanilla and 2.5>1 mod are not different in gameplay terms. I think it's preferable to use the 2.5>1 for the reasons stated. The only reasons I can think of why the developers might have changed this to 2.5 is so that placing parks has a more noticeable graphical effect on the Land Value map, as with the reduced intensity of 2.5>1 it's much more faint, especially at lower levels. Of course, there could be unknown unknowns that I don't know about... The "Less Abandonment" mod has been working really well and I definitely recommend it. I am thinking, though, of adding an additional factor to prevent the appearance of mansions in areas they are unwanted, which is enabled through use of the 2.5>1 mod. With the better definition of Land Value that the 2.5>1 mod gives, one can see actual Land Value of individual high-wealth properties, rather than them all being uniform max 255 with vanilla. Looking at my existing city, the boundary that I personally felt that mansions should appear at was around Land Value of 130, slightly higher than default 120. So I might also try using the Land Value Range Exemplar property, setting it for R$$$ at 130 minimum, so that mansions will not normally appear below this level. I might also in turn raise R$$ from 70 to 80, although that wouldn't matter as much, since it's easy to increase Land Value at this level. The transient aura effect temporarily raises Land Value (and Desirability?) so high that these limits described above can be temporarily overcome. Therefore, understanding of the transient aura effect is crucial for promoting and preventing appearance of high-wealth mansions. If one wants high-wealth, then one must plop the zoning and then plop the parks etc to feel the full benefits from the transient aura effect. If one wants some park in a medium-wealth or lower area, but doesn't want mansions in that area, then one should lay the parks first, wait a few months for the transient aura effect to wear off and then place the zoning. ---------------------- I was looking through the R$$$ residential lots. Stages 1-4 use the same buildings, so it's garden size that is the difference, and the gardens get smaller. So lowest-stage R$$$ look more impressive than slightly higher stages, since they have bigger gardens. Stage 5 also uses a lot of the same buildings. Here are the numbers of lots the vanilla game has in each size at each of the lower-density stages: R$$$1 4x5: 6 R$$$1 4x6: 6 R$$$2 3x4: 4 R$$$2 4x3: 4 R$$$2 4x4: 6 R$$$3 3x3: 6 R$$$3 3x4: 2 R$$$3 4x3: 2 R$$$4 2x3: 6 R$$$4 3x2: 6 R$$$5 2x2: 10 R$$$ 2x3: 2 It's strange, as I don't recall ever seeing mansions in anything other than 3x3 and 3x4/4x3. Anyone seen other sizes? I had an idea about doing some modding of this, but the vanilla mansions probably do not vary enough in size to create two tiers of mansions. Another idea I had would be to create some sort of pre-mansion high-wealth housing, perhaps at 2x2 and 2x3 size. Using the "Land Value Range" property, mansions could be set to only appear at a higher Land Value than pre-mansion high-wealth housing. It would need some new pre-mansion high-wealth building models, but maybe such buildings exist in ST Exchange.

JENX weather mod + Simfox Day & Night mod = Welcome to very darkness city ever!!!

I actually use both MODs, but I never had the problem with this kind of a dark night. All I can say is, that I love the effects, not so much the snow, but I hate snow in RL a lot either. But I also gotta say, that I play in daylight most of the times, so I never had a big storm during the night. I only modified the lot, that is plopped, the way so that it is more recognizable when the city grows. nothing's worse than when you don't know anymore where you plopped it and you don't find it in between all the other green park tiles you plopped. Kind regards!

Small shop set 3 that will mostly focus on fictional brands. This is a small store that sells sewing equipment called "Needles"

Sign by @jtportland FA-3 depth 1 in red brick

Read all about it....

Some updated rail infrastructure in Vancouver's eastern reaches around the boundary with the City of Burnaby. Thanks!

I've discussed the problem of mansions popping up all over the place in this thread. I feel that a key part of this issue is that it seems to be too easy to get most of the city up to maximum Land Value. In this screenshot of my previous city, one can see that most of the city is at the highest level of green Land Value. Using the SHIFT + CTL + ALT + Query Tool, I was able to confirm that most of the city was at the maximum allowed Land Value of 255. This means high-wealth mansions can appear pretty much anywhere in the city - the default Medium/High wealth boundary is 120. I've been going through the list of known Exemplar properties trying to find something that might have an effect on this, and have then been creating some modified .DATs to test out in the game. I've been through a few and haven't noticed any effect, but I've now found one that looks very interesting, even though I don't know exactly what it's doing. There an Exemplar property called: 0x47e2c331 Float32 Land Value Desirability Factors Size of effects (see IDs) It's default value is 2.5. I changed it to 1. I then loaded up my city and the effect is instantly obvious on the Land Value data map. Instead of most of the city being maximum 255 Land Value, everything is reduced significantly. The highest I could see was 172, and then all kinds of numbers below that. Lots of land had gone below the High-wealth default threshold of 120. So I don't know exactly what's happening here or how it will affect other aspects of the game, but it looks promising.

Well, phooey. That thread and mod are the only things I know about it. I've not personally experienced a recalcitrant lot that wouldn't go away. Hopefully the experts will pop in with more advice.

No. It's a simple toggle for the whole city tile. You can find some more info here, here, here, here, and here.

Run 10 or 20 years in game and see if the trees grow. Many of them are modded with saplings that will grow over time.

I've been looking into the Avenue and other car networks and I don't see anything related to land value for them either. As a quick test I did compare a small house adjacent to a street and then adjacent to an avenue and the land value of the home does change: So something is going on.

I gave step-by-step instructions in the post linked above. But in-short you'll have to manually finalise this part of the install. There would seem to be a gremlin in the installer somewhere and the creator has since gone inactive, so I wouldn't hold your breath for a fix.

Yep. I've seen 2 x 2 low density, high wealth mansions. This is in a game which I've set to build only Chicago 1890 from the beginning and in which I've been using No Kickout from the start too.

No worries at all. We no longer get upset about bumping an old thread when the new post pertains to the topic at hand (regardless of the age of said topic). This part I'll have to leave to the experts since I don't know.

The only other which I can recall would be 4x4 lot sizes. Although since I use No Kickout and limit the growth of them to certain neighbourhoods (in desirable locations), larger mansion sizes don't come recently to mind for me either. However according to a spreadsheet-based RCI Buildings List which usefully documents all Maxis growables, it reveals there are the following varieties for some (not all) types of mansions: 2x2, 2x3, 3x3, 3x4, 4x4, 4x5, 4x6 (For example with Stone Mansion and Modern Villa.) This reference list also includes the Name, Tileset, Type, and Capacity for all lot instances. So based on this there can be a maximum of 7 sub-variations of each kind. Collectively encouraging the larger sizes to grow, I suspect it may require using the precision zoning technique of holding the Ctrl key to define the parcel area. As you may already be aware, this and the other methods can be a useful means of controlling what grows where. When the game decides which growable to select for development in a given location, I believe considerable factors are the lot size along with occupancy. Then depending on the demand and conditions being desirable, to support the growth stage and density of each developer type (per wealth). One key consideration is how demand is which RCI can potentially develop, not necessarily what needs to. (As a side note, for some reason the list has the last 20 pages showing blank, but those can be removed by downloading a local copy and editing the PDF.) For additional info on the properties of RCI lots, you may also find this site of use which displays exported data from the SC4Tool exemplar analyser.

Now that... that is an amazing shopping center! I still see some more stubs on the bottom... is there going to be a phase III?

Let's go with some non-overplayed good old Iron Maiden in their absolute prime

Really beautiful work with the block and stone textures!

I love those buildings, did you make them or do you have a link to download?!? And I have been working on a similar waterfront area, trying to get to where I can upload some pics...

Hey Fantozzi, your message was actually a great motivation boost. I'm right now exporting a bunch of cranes. Besides I'm currently working on a set of sheet piles.

Time for more ore storages! They fill up with 2 different piles besides empty. I like submeshes. I improved the pile models a bit, but I haven't taken any new screenshots yet.

OK, I thought I'd share another little progress update. This time it's about a BAT that's obviously top quality, and yet I somehow felt I wasn't quite happy with it. Sure, the colour hue might benefit from an ever so slight adjustment, but what else? Here it is - Pheasant Run Apartments in its original state (not sure about the lot, but the BAT is straight out of the box): I slowly came to realise that it was the scale that bothered me. While those Maxis mansions you see here are pretty overscaled and you could argue that other buildings are somewhat underscaled, upon closer examination the building looked too big in most surroundings. Since we have not only GoFSH to change textures, but also cogeo's Model Tweaker to change size, I used both tools and ended up with this (plus a new 3x2 lot): if you look closely, some of the lines have become a bit 'squiggly', as is typical for a resize. However, since this mostly affects the roof shingles, it ain't so bad. That slightly greenish hue is also gone now, and the building doesn't stand out at all from further away now. Here is a comparison of the new size (which enabled me to put the building on a 2x2 lot) with other 3-storey apartments (back) and some 4-storey apartments (front). The building is now roughly as tall as others with the same storey count, and slightly lower than buildings with an additional storey: I think this is acceptable. As a bonus, I could even squeeze the building onto a 2x1 lot, which - coupled with its built-in slope-friendliness - makes it very versatile. Here is the small lot: ...and in yellow: This is not the most impressive modding in the world (neither by nature nor by quality of execution), and it is certainly not the Holy Grail of Simtropolis. I merely wanted to show how much can be achieved using the tools that circulate freely in this community even if you're not the ace big shot elite BAT artist. Don't be afraid to use those tools, guys! They can go a long way in helping you get the most out of the huge but chaotic treasure trove that the STEX is. Thanks for reading, and keep posting your awesome stuff here - this thread is always a joy to visit thanks to you guys and gals.

SM2 Locomotive Was Station is now available here.... SM2 Underground parking is also available here... and...SM2 Subway Stations Pack

I've taken a look inside the mod and it's prolly the most complicated one I've ever seen. I haven't any clue how to make changes to it. However, it does say this in the ReadMe file: So, the author was well aware that it gets too dark at times.

Hi everyone! Another weeks and new update about what's going on with my projects. Well I joined to the NAM and the RTMT Team, and also started to revisit some of my older custom lots, to bring them to a sort of shape which can be useful for others too. They won't get official release on exchanges, but I will share them via my Google Drive and they will be listed in the First POST of my development thread over at SC4 Devotion. Also the ]Heretic-Caribou's Long Slope Transitions ReLots got an UPDATE with the third ramp. So now you can have the L0 to Underground ramp too with proper paths. Also I updated the LHD paths to the lots, because the previous version was faulty. Next thing... Some of you might remember that I made a bunch of fillers for my own use. (since than I lost my pictures multiple times, and I didn't find the motivation to restore those pictures in this thread or in my development thread over at SC4 Devotion). These were those fillers: Well some of them will get a new treatment, regarding the used textures. I have a new standard for them, I made a couple of overlays thanks to @kingofsimcity and his GoFSH script, and I'm about to update my IRM wall set too and expand the set with a bunch of variations for KOSC Lots. This will be the Heretic Various Walls and Fillers Set (the IRM part will get an official release probably, but I'm not sure about the rest. We are talking about 100+ new filler lots which would invade one's menus, and I won't make MMLs for them.) and I just finished the Phase 1 with Jeronij Modern Concrete walls and Mas71 Walls Set 2. Also I decided that apart from the last volume of the GLR set (which is still waiting for some props to be sent to me or to be released, right @Simmer2? ), the other stations will get separate releases from now, but will be entitled and organized to share on the same subfolders once one installed them. So I still have a bunch of small projects which I have to clean up, also the french building relots are on hold... that's a way too massive and repetitive lotting stuff for my current mood, and there's a bunch of paths to take care of... Anyhow stay tunned until the next update... - Tyberius

Thanks for the replies and info. Here are some of today's thoughts: 1) To recap, since Desirability affects Land Value, I can't see an easy way to reduce the size of R$$$'s Desirability area. 2) Here's another issue that I'm not sure what the consequences would be. The next screenshots shows Land Value around the Central Business District in my city. Flanking the avenues are lots of higher-density commercial, with many at C$$$ level, especially at the top of the picture. The first screenshot is vanilla. While the land adjacent to the avenues is lower in Land Value than the surrounding bright green, presumably due to traffic and pollution, it is still above the 120 threshold for high-wealth. The second screenshot is using the Land Value Desirability Factors 2.5>1 mod. With all Land Value now reduced in intensity, the land adjacent to the avenues is now in the Medium-wealth bracket. Would this prevent High-wealth commercial from developing there? I'm not sure if other aspects of Desirablity would override the Medium-wealth Land Value and High-wealth would still develop there - the C$$$ Desirability map still shows most of the city at maximum green. 3) The "No Abandonment" mod modifies the "Desirability Threshold Growth" property, with which "tracts with desirability less than this value never develop" - R$$$ is changed from 50 to 120. The problem that would seem to be with this is that Desirability is so high - see the maxxed-out green in the vanilla screenshot for R$$$ earlier in the thread - that this seems pretty irrelevant. Since so much of the map is at maximum desirability, one could potential set this to the maximum 255 with no change in effect. 4) There's a property called "Land Value Range", with default values of 0-255. I did a test and set some Low-Wealth Housing to have a range of 100-255, and no housing would build unless the Land Value was over 100. One could potentially set this at 120-255 for R$$$, 120 being the Medium/High-wealth threshold. While this wouldn't make a difference with vanilla, since everywhere is at 255 Land Value, with the 2.5>1 mod it would make some difference. Testing it in my city, it didn't have any apparent effect on buildings that had already been built, such as making them abandon. 5) There a couple of Exemplar properties that look as if they would be interesting to experiment with, but I haven't been able to locate them in Reader: 0xcab1ce3a Sint32 Subjective Factor Threshold (Min value) Min value of desirability for subjective factors (pollution,garbage,school,hospital,crime,traffic,triplength). 0xcab1ce3c Sint32 Subjective Factor Threshold (Max value) Max value of desirability for subjective factors (pollution,garbage,school,hospital,crime,traffic,triplength). 6) I think that in the vanilla game, it can be too easy to get areas up to High-wealth land value. Build hospital, schools, police and fire coverage, some park, and an area will be High-wealth. An experienced player is not going to have much difficulty in accomplishing this, so everywhere becomes capable of High-wealth. I feel it would be better if to make an area into high-wealth, one had to do something extra. The obvious category to something to push an area into high-wealth is to add extra parks/beautification. So maybe there are some adjustments that could be made to Desirability settings to accomplish this. 7) There's also the "Land Value Wealth Boundaries" - Low/Medium boundary, Medium/High boundary - that could potentially be increased slightly. Default is 70 and 120.

Good investigative work. I really like where you're heading with this. As a data view which can more granularly define the segmentation between RCI wealth types, it does seem the land value would be much more useful scaled this way. I believe when adjusting these values it's the multiplier which is being reduced, and how at the default 2.5 it'd be maxing out at the 255. This happens to be the upper limit for several things in the game including grayscale heights for maps, and if I remember correctly it's an 8-bit binary limitation in the code. As a comparison between the standard Land Value and Desirability for R$$$, there does seem to be a clear correlation (click to flick and compare): Land Value R$$$ Desirability The green shaded areas are mixed residential wealth, with predominately R$ based homes and still having a uniform coverage at the high end of the spectrum. So as the description says, this does prove how the Land Value Effect property has an influence in terms of: "How much land value is a factor in desirability." From what I can tell, it does seem this is very possible. It appears that property has the Rep values in pairs (18 in your dialog preview). So providing they scale up in the same way when adding extra values, it should be feasible to add others in there to create a more gradual fine-tuned scale as desired. I think it'd be beneficial this way, since a high wealth neighbourhood would encourage other R$$$ houses of the same type to be constructed in the local wider surrounding area. As in there being a smooth transition from bright green to a lighter shade of green, then leading into the red lower value of less affluent areas. From my limited knowledge in this regard, I don't know about any possible unknowns. However, that's not to say there aren't unknowns, because they're likely not yet known. What I do know is if knowing about them (which would require knowable knowingness to investigate), it would mean said mystery could be knowingly solved. In all seriousness... I believe by modding the data views, my best guess is it can be considered a visual display of the data. In other words, much like having raw data in a spreadsheet, this is still present in the background which the game uses for internal calculations and outputs. Then what's happening here involves editing the graphical display to adjust how it's displayed as information. Therefore to implement a more gradual transition in the data view, I think it'll be a matter of either it works or not, and there shouldn't be ill effects with disrupting the simulation for RCI demand. To have this as an adjusted data view would make it more visually accurate, even if the game still considers areas of land as more equally distributed for similar developer types.

I re-did it and it's now stable. I set all Land Value below 120 to be -100 desirability for R$$$. The map looks pretty good. If possible, it might be good to make a smoother transition so that borderline high-wealth do not suddenly go -100. I presume I can just add some extra values to the Exemplar property? So this plan looks like it might work - land value has been reduced from full throttle, and desirability can also be calibrated. I can't think of any known unknowns, but there may be some unknown unknowns. Can anyone think of any known knowns or known unknowns that may complicate things? EDIT: By reducing desirability of sub-120 Land Value for R$$$, that has somehow itself affected Land Value, and hovering over these areas now has them at really, really low amount. Knew it couldn't be this easy and straightforward...

Regarding SimCity.cn, the fact that they're redistributing content without permission has been long known, but it's kind of been accepted given the difficult situation under which the Chinese SC4 community has to operate. The "Great Firewall of China", as it's often called, has, at various times, blocked Chinese users from being able to access Simtropolis and SC4 Devotion. Them uploading the content onto SimCity.cn is pretty much the only way many in the Chinese community would even be able to have custom content for the game. It's also a large part of the reason why, despite there being a sizable SC4 community in China, which produces quite a bit of its own content, we see very little of it here on the other side. Indeed, I would theorize that part of their registration restriction system is partly a matter of ensuring that only the users affected by the Great Firewall are using the site to access this content, but may also have to do with government restrictions and/or bandwidth considerations. As far as content accessibility goes, the ecosystem we have on the LEX is close to being able to allow us to actually assemble large packs on-the-fly with a single click. There has been some behind-the-scenes progress on that, so stay tuned. -Tarkus

Hi Ben, welcome to Simtropolis! I see you've been a member here for couple of months, so may have had a chance to look around and see what goes on. Great to see that you've made your way to active posting here in the forums. Unlike some places on the internet, this really is a pleasant and friendly community. If you've any questions about SC4, there's still an active following with many helpful folk in the Players and Builders sections. Then there's the STEX which can be considered a vast workshop of 20,941 tools (and counting). Starting out with the NAM is certainly a solid place to begin. It sounds like you've played SC4 for a while without custom content, and that should stand you in good stead having become familiar with the base game, learning the intricacies of the simulation. If there's one quick tip to give about the NAM, it's something which can be applied when looking into any mods, buildings (BATs), and lots. That's to start small and try to test items before using them in your main regions. Then it's easier to get a feel for useful types of content depending on your play style, and also ensuring they all function correctly. In the NAM it's possible to select the "Custom" install from where selected components are listed. This can be run again at a later stage to add or remove certain features, and there sure are many parts included that each add something new to the game's transportation networks. There's so much to explore, and we hope you enjoy the site.

Certainly! of course if you can make sense of my ridiculously amateurish models-- I mean rather I don't want anyone to feel obligated to finish my half-baked work, there's still a lot of actual modelling needing to be done aside from the textures. I will though include the textures I have done but you can discard them outright of course, texturing has always been the hardest part IMO and mine are pretty meh... anyway, Im rambling this out in hopes Simtrop stays up long enough for me to post. I'll try to post a dropbox link (or maybe just STEX) sometime this weekend for everyone to download Commerce Court and 1 King