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Another strip mall because we can never have too many of them....

2010 Renault Clio RS: 2014 BMW i3: 2020 Iveco S-Way: 2011 Caterpillar CT610: 2002 International DuraStar tow truck: Beach sims vol 2:

Hi. Residencial Luiz Conceição (Brazil) with textures.

Some sweet, sweet progress and customs in Flughafen Charlottenburg!

Hi! Use the game water pollution mode, which will make viewable the surface underneath the water. I hope it helps! - Tyberius

Okay, looking for advice, what do y'all think this needs?

Since you're using an HDR I think it just needs to be brighter. If you look closely you can see that it is actually being reflected, but very dimly. You can make it brighter when you load the HDR but it's easier to do it by making the "Output Amount" higher down in the standard bitmap settings. When I made mine 30 it seemed to be a good brightness when I render it, even though in the material editor it looks way too bright.

In the Arch & Design material you can effectively replace the background that's being reflected without changing the environment. I would avoid changing the environment because the environment also affects lighting. Doing it this way in the material lets you replace the reflections without affecting lighting. I recently suggested the same to IDS2 who also has a reflective surface, and I'm doing this on some BATs that I'm working on right now which have water which is reflecting the sky. In the "Advanced Rendering Options" rollout of the glass material, there's an area for reflections. The Max Distance option makes it so that nothing from outside of that range will be reflected. So if you made that 5 meters, the glass would reflect the facade parts right next to it, but it wouldn't reflect the ground plane, because it's further than 5 meters away. If you put a really big number in, then all of your scene will still be reflected, but you'll effectively replace the default sky with that texture. And then you can also put a texture in there. At the very top of the bitmap, there's a selection for either "Texture" or "Environ" and you want to choose environ, and then you can choose a mapping type. So if you download a spherical sky map you can put it in there, and choose environ and spherical, and the result should be that your upwards facing reflections reflect your sky texture. It's possible that this will also solve your detail problem. But my guess is that the problem is because of the orthographic projection itself. There are a lot of features which don't work with orthographic projection. I hope there is a solution.

The new textures for Paeng's bicyclepaths are available at the STEX:

Ah, i see, vetram, to align them does need some efforts. you are probably referring to the scene of NBVC's pics: Sorry that i couldn't help you now due to modeling, but i'm sure that our CJ masters could give you more better advices on this. Good Luck! Sincerely, -- Raymond

Uruguay is a country of 3.5 million known for its verdant interior and beach-lined coast. The second smallest country on the continent, Uruguay has long been overshadowed by it's more well known neighbors of Brazil and Argentina - but the country is home to some of the region's best kept secrets. From beautiful inland wineyards, pristine white sand beaches, distinctive colonial architecture, and plenty of impressive sights dotting it's historical capital city of Montevideo - it's a country that you don't want to miss out on. In today's update, let's experience the best of what Uruguay has to offer. Our trip to Uruguay begins with a trip to the wine country and the small town of Garzón. This historical rural village is home to some of the world's best vineyards and the award winning Bodega Garzón boutique winery and restaurant, all which have become popular destinations over the years. Uruguay's coastlines are quite beautiful - and one of the best places to explore the country's south Atlantic shoreline is at Cabo Polonio. Cabo Polonio is a small beachside hamlet located on the eastern coast of Uruguay in the Rocha Department, and over the years has gained national park status as one of the country's most beautiful sights. Cabo Polonio has no roads leading to it and is located about 7 km from the main highway - accessible only by walking through the dunes or by 4x4 vehicles, it's quite the trek to reach it but you'll be rewarded with some truly incredible views once you're there. For the next couple of sights, we're taking a trip back into Uruguay's past with a few historical postcards from the early 1900s, beginning with Piriápolis' Piria Castle. Completed in 1897, this unmistakable castle used to be one of the country's most prized landmarks - perched on a hilltop, it proudly looked over the seaside town founded by the castle’s owner, Francisco Piria. Over the years however, it's suffered from a lack of maintenance and has started to become run down - hopefully recent restorations in the talks will bring it back to former glory. Our next sight takes us to Colonia del Sacramento - a city in southwestern Uruguay, across the Río de La Plata with a rich past. It's known for its cobblestoned Barrio Histórico, lined with buildings from its time as a Portuguese settlement - and although it's historical district today still has many remnants from the past (and even some old cars lining the streets to prove it), back in it's heyday of the early 1900s it was truly the sight to see. Our journey now takes us into Montevideo - the country's vibrant capital city. Montevideo was founded in 1726 by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala to counteract the Portuguese advance into the area from Brazil. During its early years, Montevideo was mostly a Spanish garrison town - and over the centuries many impressive landmarks were built like the Palacio Legaslativo. Construction started in 1908 and ended in 1925 - and once complete, it was a truly impressive governmental building. We move ahead into modern day with a look over the country's capital city of Montevideo. The city's sprawl is quite impressive from above. Our look at Uruguay concludes with a trip to Playa Pocitos. This popular city beach has beautiful white sands and is known for its lively boardwalk, sweeping views & beachfront activities. Don't forget to comment, like, and follow True Earth if you haven't already! -korver

Entry 70: Potter's Slink and Cindersville Welcome back! Thank you for your comments for the last entry. Over the past two weeks I've been working hard on Cindersville. In this entry I have one final area from Potter's Slink to show, a rather industrial area, then there are several pictures from Cindersville. {---} 1. In this entry we explore the south-eastern corner of Potter's Slink. 2. 3. 4. The area where I spent the most amount of my focus going diagonal... 5. The "bulky" low density residential homes. 6. With the right fillers completing this diagonal area was rather straightforward. 7. All while keeping the textures seamless. 8. Why have True Night when one can photoshop? 9. The green of the residential suburbs fades away before the omnipresent grey of industrial and commerce! 10. 11. 12. 13. For the small park area I used rsc204's overhanging R$$ triangle grass textures to create a more vibrant look! 14. 15. 16. 17. And the last picture from Potter's Slink. 18. There are six distinctive areas to complete. In green is a tiny area to the south that needs some more undergrowth and rocks. In red the northern and eastern side of the mountain needs to be spruced up. In turquoise there is an area close to the highway that needs some urban MMPs. In yellow, to the northwest will be the next area I'm working to complete. Then it will be the orange area which needs a whole bunch of undergrowth, ferns and possibly meadows. Finally, in purple, will be the final area to complete. I hope to get this all done by the end of August. 19. To the top right is a new kind of rocky floor texture I'm working upon. 20. I also added in some animals in the midst of all this nature. 21. And here's what the product of all this MMPing produces. 22. There's still quite a bit to do! Right then, the next entry will be in early September from Cindersville. See you then!

I've never gone to the extreme of building a city around the concept but I have built up enough demand that I was able to use a small tile, completely fill it with HT-I and C$$$ and no residential. Kind of funny seeing a bustling city with a population of 0. It was rather accidental though. I just kept adding more to to see if I could drop the RCI, it was adjoining several built up cities and people kept showing up to work from outside so I kept putting the zones down as an experiment when I realized what was going on....

On a Mac, I tried for a while... I ended up setting up Bootcamp to run Windows 10 (available free from Microsoft these days) to run SimCity stuff. You could grab a Win10 ISO and set up VirtualBox to get a small virtual machine going, as an alternative.

Hi there, I presume you're using this file which makes all 3 versions of the City Hall possible to upgrade, or the automatic one that simmaster developed. It appears how there are MMP items that are showing instead of the trees on the lot Maxis made originally. This is seemingly because the IID of some custom MMPs matches that of the flora contained on the City Hall lot. To resolve this, there's a fix which prevents it happening. As follows: What this does is removes the offending props, and replaces them with standard maple trees instead. I hope this works for you.

@art128 Mental Ray stopped being included starting in 3ds Max 2018. And after that Mental Ray as a whole was discontinued so I don't think it's even possible to get it separately. I have the general intention of installing a newer version of max with Arnold, the renderer that now comes bundled with Max, and remaking the lighting rig and rendering setting defaults for Arnold and updating BAT4Max. Hopefully Arnold has the right features to be a good renderer for BATing. But anyway, 3ds Max 2017 is the last version which you can use for BATing right now. @Girafe myRen.FinalGatherUseRadiusInterpolation = true can be removed. The setting made sense at the time. It allows you to interpolate final gather samples by pixel, which makes sense because BAT renders are basically pixel-art, with multiple zoom levels. Without this setting, you'll probably want to decrease "Interpolate over Num. of FG Points". By default it's 30, and the lower it is, the higher the quality. Actually, even for people using 2016 or older, turning off "Use Radius Interpolation Method" and changing the other setting to a low number will improve the quality of the rendering.

Thank you so much Jason, I will try it tomorrow and report the result here, I don't know if it could solve the details issue, but i'm sure you already help me with the color issue, i mean lighting, Yes you are right there, Just as you mentioned, the environment map also affects lighting. i have been through this headache issue these days, I never thought of it could be dealed with in this way, Thank you!! Yours, -- Raymond

I was doing some digging on SC4D last night, and I'm 99% sure I found where this came from (at least, the version with the driver). The creator is Romualdillo and you can find in-progress shots of the model in this thread: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=16518.440 It looks like the version shared by Rivit was an early draft, with the driver added to the original Maxis model. Romualdillo ended up revising the textures and created a number of color variants, plus an open-top version, and a fire engine version. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like these were ever made widely available, and Romualdillo hasn't posted in nearly two years. Very tempted to send a Hail Mary PM in his direction to see if he's willing to share the files. Now for the good news. I checked out Romualdillo's LEX profile, and it turned out he released a prop pack for a bunch of R$ lots circa 2015. I had seen the pack in the LEX a couple times before, but I had never downloaded it, since it looked like it only contained props for Spanish cities. This time I decided to take a peek, and while there aren't any Model T props in the pack, there is a minor treasure trove of smaller HD props that can be used for 19th century and early 20th century American cities. Some fun things that aren't readily apparent from the screenshot: Since the prop pack was designed for Latin American/Spanish cities, I've skipped a bunch of stuff that didn't feel like it would fit in U.S. environments. (Admittedly, the streetlights would look a little out of place in American settings, but I love the quality of the prop.) Anyway, the pack is BIG. Almost all of the props pictured come in a bunch of variants. For example, there are 10 clothesline variants, 24 types of sheds, and 48 street posters. For the structures, about half of the variants aren't a great fit for U.S. cities due to the roof textures. But there's at least 4 or 5 versions of each that should work. The majority of the props come with slope-friendly foundations. Even the dog houses, kennels, and clotheslines are designed to handle slopes. Each plank of the wooden fence is it's own unique prop, which means any fence created with these props will conform closely to slopes. One set of props I left out was a series of utility poles and cables that can be used for telegraph networks or power lines. I haven't tried them out, so I don't know well they work with other props or if they can handle slopes. However, they look really nice in his lot previews. Not sure how much of this stuff will fit the projects that you're working on right now, but I figured you'd be interested in at least some of this stuff. I know a bunch of these props are going to be a game changer for the lots that I'm working on right now. Link to prop pack on the LEX: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3228 (Don't mind me if you're already aware of this pack. SimCoug is credited as troubleshooting a number of the props, so this pack might not be the secret I think it is. It seems like they came out about a year after SimCoug stopped updating New Sorgun, so that might explain why I've never seen them before.)

No not at all - you happened to put up exactly the sort of info we needed. With a bit of luck a few others verify the find.

Thank you so much Raymond7cn i appreciate that , but i already know it . My problem is how to align those modular parts!...

Hiya @vetram, I'm sorry that i couldn't show you this in game now, However the only thing i remembered is lower the land which is adjacent to the water until it's a bit higher than the sea level. I usually use vanilla Maxis seaport for that, Or you can give Peg Leveller a try. That's all i could suggest, hope it helps. Sincerely, -- Raymond

I didn't catch that part at all. My bad. One was from my disc versions (SC4 + Rush Hour expansion pack) and the other was from GOG. However, that does make me wonder if it's just the digital version itself that has the issue, as I think the digital versions from Steam and GOG are the same; the version numbers are the same (looking at MichaelJBull's exception report and my exception report from my GOG copy). For grins, I want to look into it some more. If I see anything odd and/or different, I'll do a follow up. I have the SC4Fix installed. It must be a plugin then... don't know which one though. I have a lot of various plugins. (That is for another post and another time though )

Those two SimCity exes have different version numbers - the one at the top 1.1.640.1 seems to report the max system memory available on the process stack 4GB and NT6.1, but the second version 1.1.641.0 on an OS labelled NT5.1 doesn't see the memory as 4GB but as 1GB. Now I'm running Win10 64bit with the GOG version on a 16GB machine, also 1.1.641 and in the logs it also says 1GB not 4GB on a patched version. I wonder if that "faulty reporting is a feature" of the GOG version? because the program runs exceedingly well without problems, and it certainly uses more than 1GB of memory. In other news 0C5 exception in SimCity is almost always a faulty plugin (often null values where there should be a reference) - other CTDs caused by transit enabled lots colliding during plopping can be avoided by using the SC4FIX here on the front page.

Tanzania is a country of 56 million known for its vast wilderness areas. They include landscapes populated by the “big five” game and Kilimanjaro National Park, home to the continent's highest mountain. Offshore lie the tropical islands of Zanzibar, with Arabic influences, and Mafia, with a marine park home to whale sharks and coral reefs. In addition, the country is home to sprawling modern cities like Dar es Salaam that offer plenty of attractions and diversions for tourists and locals alike. Today, let's explore one of the world's most diverse and beautiful countries. Our look at Tanzania begins with a quick stay in the country's largest city and former capital - Dar es Salaam. Over the last century, Dar es Salaam has grown from a sleepy Zaramo fishing village into a thriving tropical metropolis of over four million people. Straddling some of the most important sea routes in the world, it is the region's second-busiest port and Tanzania’s commercial hub. Despite this, and its notorious traffic jams, the city has managed to maintain a low-key, down-to-earth feel. Tanzania is best known for its incredibly diverse flora and fauna, and one of the most popular ways to experience it safely is from high above in a hot air balloon. The Great Migration is the largest terrestrial mammal migration in the world and it's especially spectacular from above. Next up, we take a brief stay in the country's official capital city since 1996, Dodoma. Originally a small market town known as Idodomya, it's grown over the centuries under the shadow of the Lion Rock - and unlike other planned capitals around the world like Abuja, Brasilia, Washington, and Canberra, it was grown organically and rejected the grid iron. The city's true potential hasn't been reached quite yet however as many monumental government buildings and landmarks have yet to be built and many of the country's government offices still reside in the former capital, Dar es Salaam - but the future still looks bright as the city continues to grow. We travel north from Dodoma along Highway 104, taking in the beautiful sights along our way - until we've reached one of the continent's most iconic sights, majestic Mount Kilimanjaro. Rising 19,341 feet above the landscape below, it's the world's highest freestanding mountain - truly a breathtaking natural wonder. After exploring the areas around Kilimanjaro - we explore another one of Tanzania's most iconic natural wonders, the enormous Ngorongoro Crater. The "Cradle of Life" is the world's largest unflooded and unbroken caldera, and is home to some of the richest biodiversity on planet earth. We travel to Tanzania's coastline once more for the final leg of the journey, stopping at one of the country's most iconic destinations - Zanzibar. This beautiful ocean archipelago is located some 15-30 miles off the country's shoreline and offers some stunning resorts and beaches - like the ones on Prison Island. Our look at Tanzania finishes up on the country's shoreline, with a trip to Kilwa Kisiwani. Historically, it was the center of the Kilwa Sultanate, a medieval sultanate whose authority at its height in the 13th-15th centuries stretched the entire length of the Swahili Coast. Today, the entire complex has been reduced to ruin - but the beautiful backdrop and rich history makes it a popular destination for both tourists and locals. Don't forget to comment, like, and follow True Earth if you haven't already! -korver

My Current Project. Located at 621 N Citrus Ave, Los Angeles. The main thing I have difficulty with is the roofs so if y'all have suggestions about that or anything else let me know.

So, I was able to get the game to crash two times purposefully on Machine #1! I was never so excited to see it crash... something I never would have wished to happen, especially in a serious session. Anyways, I did experiment a bit with this. i wanted to see if it was related to the digital version itself. As a reminder for Machine #1's specs: (Windows 7 Ultimate, 8GB of RAM, 2.4GHz Quad Core Intel i7, Intel HD Graphics 4600) With Machine #1's disc based installation (which is fully patched to version 1.1.640.0), I made a backup of the disc executable and replaced it with the digital 1.1.641.0 version from Machine #2 instead. To my surprise, the game launched and played perfectly fine! For experimental purposes, it is cool to see that it will run nonetheless. After seeing it run fine, it was time to get the game to crash. A little bit later, it successfully crashed after completing known triggers. It still shot out the same exception code [0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION], which to me is odd. But nonetheless... The result in the exception report? ... it recognized 4GB of RAM! Not to mention the correct amount of RAM it is capable of seeing (4GB) and how much was free! So I'm not sure if it is related to the digital version's executable itself. it might be something else that is causing the miscalculation of overall and available RAM. As noted in a previous post, I believe the Steam and GOG version are the same, as hinted in the exception report included in MichaelJBull's original post. However, without verifying the hashes of each executable, I can't come to the conclusion that they are the same. But wait! There's more! As I was looking through the folder with all of the exception reports, I did find some exception reports that do date back all the way to 1.1.638.0 (disc based version). To my surprise (with laughter, rolling my eyes, shaking my head), this is the first one I saw: "System memory: 4096 Megabytes total, 4096 Megabytes free." ...so this is odd! The plot thickens! While I am not sure if this is affecting gameplay for some users, I haven't seen any issues on a personal level (I am used to a crash once in a while). I'm not sure if it plugin related or hardware related. Is this hardware or software related? I will continue on with experimentation and examination today and this weekend. If anyone has any ideas or if you'd like to try it out yourself, please let me (well everyone who is interested) know and/or try away!

It absolutely has to be something in your plugins as @SIM-ple Jack surmised. I can vouch for the fact that Mayor Rating will stay under 60 in vanilla until there is health & fire coverage and garbage collection. With those three basic things handled, it will get to 60 plus or minus a few points.

The only other things I can think might be going on are that you are using some kind of custom content that is skewing your rating unnaturally, or you are using a cheat intended for one thing, but is doing something else too. If you can post a screener of your plug-in content, maybe I or someone else can figure it out. Either that or, indeed, you are the greatest mayor of all time!

Thanks! Spent way too long trying to figure out bootcamp, couldn't make it work. But I'll try the researching the Win10 ISO thing!

Excellent work, though you may want to consider desaturating your colours a little bit. Try -20% as the colours seem a little on the bright side and I found that desaturating my models helped them blend into the game so much better. Or feel free to ignore me because if you're happy with them as is, that's all that matters.

I think the white roof should be a yellowish or grayish tile, or maybe copperplated or tin.

Hmmm. I've never had the game crash at the intro video. I'll give that a try tonight if I get the chance. I did forget to mention that both of my installations of Windows 7 are indeed 64-bit, updated with the most recent updates. Then again I have 8GB in each machine. What's going to be interesting is getting the game to crash once again... purposefully!

This is what I get

If you have nothing but poor in your city, it is easy to make them happy. It's when they start getting educated and move up to middle class, that they start getting disgruntled and unhappy with the way you run things. Then you'll see that rating drop. Put some schools in. Wait till you see how bad your rating gets when you get wealthy sims in there.

My vague recollection is that this can happen in some setups (OS + graphics drivers) when the game is loading and tries to present the Intro. Everyone should use turn the intro off to rule out that possibility. I think there are both 32 and 64-bit versions of Win7 pro (and at least one SP for it). To make the best use of RAM, one should use a 64-bit OS (on 64-bit HW of course) so at least some things on the computer can be shifted out of the range that SC4 wants to use.

Just so you know, you can do this with industry and commercial buildings too. Load up cities with either, make a bunch of road connections), plop a census repository(so you can see how many jobs you get and at what levels), run it for about 30 to 45 seconds in slow(until the mayor rating hits green), pause, save and leave, never to return. Build your city with nothing but Sims and civic and surround it with your C/I and Utility cities... and watch it grow.

I am not trying to get off topic here (this is a RAM related thing), but this is response from an earlier post on this thread. As most people know, the WIndows version SC4 is only a 32bit program. Unpatched, it only has access to 2GB of RAM. Patched, of course, lets the game use 4GB of RAM. I'll call this Machine #1 (Windows 7 Ultimate, 8GB of RAM, 2.4GHz Quad Core Intel i7, Intel HD Graphics 4600) - this is the latest and last exception report. I don't play SC4 on this machine anymore as my other machine plays it better (with high shadows! ). This is Machine #2 (Windows 7 Professional, 8GB of RAM, 3.2GHz Quad Core Intel i5, AMD Radeon HD 3450) - this is the latest exception report I have: ... it does seem that the game does seem to have issues recognizing the amount of RAM installed. This might be incompatibility issue with modern machines and/or x64 operating systems or it might be that the game mistakingly reads the amount of RAM. The 4GB Patch installed on both installations of the game on my two machines. Our fellow Simtropolis user MichaelJBull's exception report showed the same "System memory: 1024 Megabytes total, 1024 Megabytes free" as Machine #2's exception report. I have not seen any issues with the game, other than the usual crash every now and then. The same exception code [0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION] appears in all of them. I'm not sure what exactly the cause is. I have not had the issue that MichaelJBull had/has, but to me it is rather interesting.

A green tile ver. of the same house. I also slightly change the flat roof part, trying to play with color and see what it does in the game.

So I did this in the game I was in just to test out the concept. I learned two things so far: 1) Cheetah speed is a no-no. As soon as things take off and you don't have a the comfort of your own supply to fall back on things go south. I would advise not to touch it until your almost done with the city and are not really going to be pulling anymore utility or outputting anymore garbage. 2) Waste to energy in your Utility City are a sweet deal. I have nexus garbage mod but the vanilla ones work as well (just need more of them). Put them down, they make money by selling electricity and they make money burning the imported trash.

Fantastic work! Your layout is so clean and pleasant to look at and I've always considered you to be among the community's best at MMP's. I'm so pleased that you're back and active again as I love to learn from your examples!

decorate the highway

New overpass

Second LA house.

A while back (January actually, time flies ) I posted here about a small 'Dutch' texture mod for Paeng's bikepaths I was working on. Since then I've hammered out a few small issues with the textures and it should be ready for uploading at the STEX. The only remaining obstacle is that due to a re-use of textures by Paeng the two tunnel lots have a bit of white marking extending from underneath the tunnel props. This was already present in the original textures, albeit in a somewhat lesser extent. It's really only visible in the two highest zoom levels on 1/4 rotations, which is why I decided against changing the marking. Would it be okay to upload it with a disclaimer?

The Mayan: Hotel & Residences. An original Design by Diego Del Llano.