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Working on the next entry

I think the trail set aka Forest Paths is ready, just need some icons if there are any volunteers

There is @FANTA1990's Steam Boat Generator and @AP's Steam Paddle Tug. Note that the latter is only a model and needs to be lotted. Details are in the description. As for the pre WWII commercial passenger aircraft, that is much trickier. There are very few pre WWII aircraft. I only know of the USS Macon by @airman15 and a double-decker plane which is part of FANTA1990's World Travel Airlines Plane Pack. But neither are passenger planes. Perhaps you could use the DC7s. They are from the 1950s and were made by @Voltaire. All links listed below:

2000s version is finished. In game testing tomorrow! also made progress on Aisan

Mieza castle, Franz region

those are really nice, good job.

Good on you for your proactive approach to the problem, and I wish you swift, llama-flavoured success in fixing it.

Good morning Everyone, As many of you may know, I am the author of the 'SimCity 3000 ordinances for SC4' mod series. The goal of this series is to revive old ordinances in SimCity 4 as many of them did not make it into the SC3000 successor. I recently received a complaint that one of the ordinances I uploaded into STEX did not work as intended and, alas, after more detailed investigation it turned out to be true... This is why I decided to create this thread which shall act as a support topic for my mod series. This is your place to discuss my "ported" ordinances and report any problems or unintended effects that you discover while playing. Coming back to the problem just discovered, it was caused by my incorrect understanding of the format that "Boost" effects use. This resulted in creating effects that are either ridiculously weak, or totally opposite from the ones intended. I intentionally omit links to my resources for now, because all ordinances are under review to identify those which contain incorrect values. As soon as the situation is tackled, new files will be provided and links added to this topic. Thank you for your attention and I'm terribly sorry for any inconvenience and disappointment caused!

I've been getting some help here and this post pretty much lays it all out on how to do it:

Tropical Cyclone Disaster (Developing) The goal is to allow a single cyclone object to evolve naturally over time instead of spawning a new disaster for each development stage. I am currently researching disaster-related functions, including LUA scripts and DLL plugins responsible for disaster management. I am also investigating how EffectDir resources are loaded and how the update loop handles active disasters. Based on everything I have described for the upcoming update, this project is becoming more than just a disaster mod — it is evolving into a game engine extension. If I can identify the disaster manager and understand the EffectDir update logic, I will be much closer to creating a tropical cyclone system that can realistically develop from a tropical wave into a major hurricane instead of appearing at full strength immediately. A natural lifecycle system is needed because a cyclone cannot realistically grow from a tropical wave into a Category 5 hurricane if each stage is controlled by hardcoded disaster spawning.

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 190th entry. Here is a selection of photos from across Dimland.

Some suburbia pictures to share ...

It looks like all SC4 files have been restored on the STEX. Plus that would probably be better as a separate tool, and I have no idea how you would get data on what each site is missing.

This looks great. There are quite a few buildings I don't recognise. Where can I get these:

Thanks! I love the murderous amounts of crime too. You're welcome. Please enjoy your accumulated demand responsibly.

Not entirely. There is a difference between mods that double occupant numbers. These are safe to use. It's the mods that increase demand that need to be used cautiously. From a gameplay perspective, using ID doubler / quadrupler does have a merit, because you save space that would otherwise be taken up by the industry... It could have been the case in which they did not manage to find jobs, had no water or power. In these cases especially, the wealth level will drop. This is a fairly good attempt! The key to generating additional traffic is to help direct it through the commercial zone, sometimes by forcing your Sims to use certain throughways. The best part? You don't really need very high traffic to achieve "high" number of customers (which motivates buildings to upgrade. An even bestest part? If you have a decent commercial area, there will be Sims working there... Often, the number of people working in your commercial zones will be enough to accelerate growth in these zones! This is especially true of cities where CS and CO is the most desired employment opportunity. Sadly, they don't. Just like you say.

When a building gets abandoned for whatever reason (long commute, low demand, low desirability), it will usually be reoccupied as a lower wealth level for a time. In the picture directly above, you have CO$$$ with high crime, which will lower desirability dramatically. In the left side of your city, you put high density on the road instead of the nearby avenue, so the traffic is going on the road instead of the avenue. It should be the other way around. On the other side of your city, you have two avenues running parallel so close together to serve industrial, which doesn't have many jobs, therefore there is not a lot traffic and it gets spread so thin by two avenues so close together. One of the main principles of smart growth is getting people to live closer to work (including mixed use zoning), so you don't want to make commute difficult, and of course long commutes have negative impacts in the game too. Plus, this game already has way too much micromanagement, you don't want to micromanage every citizen's commute either. Here is an example of a new neighbourhood in my city. You can see my attempt to create some corridors. They are continuous, higher capacity, zoned for commercial and high density residential. Another also-relatively-new neighbourhood. Streets are slower than avenues and roads, and if they are laid out in a way to discourage through traffic, then (hopefully) the traffic will be concentrated on the avenues and roads where the commercial buildings are. Notice also the industrial located on the side streets instead of the main roads. A new industrial area. I try to preserve the land next to the main roads for future commercial and high density residential.

Do you have plans to release this amazing mod in the near future?

Thanks again for the help in this thread.

I recently saw that the sacred text itself says "Each job creates demand for roughly two Residential Sim" https://archive.org/details/SimCity_4_Rush_Hour_Prima_Official_eGuide/page/n69/mode/2up You're probably right that most of the time I've seen lower occupancy it was related to desirability. However, certainly it is possible to not have the right demographics which could lead to the same thing? For example: It looks pretty desirable to me, but it fell a wealth level. Maybe it was due to lack of higher wealth sims? Yes, this is what I was alluding to lamenting the grid layout. I don't think perfectly get how to layout commercial zones yet. I know traffic is important for customers, but I've struggled to consistently create it. I made a neighboring city that tries to do this more deliberately: The residents on the left are forced to take the high way and exit on one of the two avenues. The avenues have branches that end with industrial high tech. If you look closely, the roads spanning the industrial zones at the bottom are not all connected. They have cul-de-sacs. Commercial zones are on the way to the industry. You can see some comm success near the highway. However, I found low traffic on many of the branches. My scheme to make people go to the end of the streets for industrial work was inadequate. Actually, I found many people take the train and walk the rest of the way. I don't suppose pedestrians count as customer traffic. Maybe you could post your city or examples you have for these corridors?

Low occupancy is a reflection of low desirability rather than low population. For any building, residential or commercial, if you increase desirability it will increase the amount of occupants. You don't need 120k jobs for 120k population. It's more like 1:2. My current city has 190k people, 110k jobs, no problem. But even so, the amount of employment land will be disproportionately high compared to residential land. Job demand can be fulfilled easily enough even with the low max occupancy of industrial buildings, so mods that increase double or quadruple industrial occupants may have unintended effects, and completely unnecessary anyways from a pure gameplay perspective. Ultimately, the game is in an unfinished state, and only so much we can do about the bugs and unbalanced gameplay. The issue with high density is even one new building can fulfill demand too fast, and thus create negative demand. Looking at your city, I don't see any obvious corridors for commercial zones. This is also one of the central tenets of Transit-Oriented Development: minimizing the distances of residents and jobs to major corridors. Establishing strong corridors means carefully zoning and laying out streets and major roads. One important thing to note is intersections increase travel times, so assuming you have any pathfinding fix installed (such as NAM), commuters will naturally gravitate to major corridors that have fewer intersections. Likewise, you can find ways to make it less convenient to travel on side streets.

@CasperVg I've been trying out the newest Plop&Paint mod. Great new additions to this mod, especially the terrain decal function, it allows to fill a lot of gaps left by NAM networks. However, there seem to be a few issues. Also, I'd like to make some suggestions on how to improve it: As already mentioned, the mod cannot paint textures ending with 5 or A. That would be great if you could add that to the game. The mod only reads lot textures - it would be great if it could also read traffic textures, such as those from the NAM. BTW, lot textures have a GID of 0x0986135e, and traffic textures a GID of 0x1abe787d. With the installation of version 0.9.1, I seem to be unable to raise props I'm about to paint. Is it just me, or is this feature suddenly missing? Also, is it just me, or does version 0.9.1 interfere with the Season Jumper DLL? After installing version 0.9.1, the Season Jumper DLL suddenly stopped working. Also, a few questions: Does the terrain decal function allow for more than one texture to be painted? This is important if you want to place a base and an overlay texture. BTW, as far as I know, both of these textures use the same GID, the only difference is: The game considers textures with transparent or semi-transparent parts alsways to be overlay textures and fully opaque textures to be base textures. Does it distinguish between base and overlay textures, like the LE?

Yes it is possible but you have to invest some time to learn how it works. I recommend you: 1. The readme of the submenus dll - describes how to add submenus (dat files in your plugin folder) and how to edit lots lots to appear in these by tools like ilive reader 2. The submenus dll topic here in the forums: 3. The sc4 cli tool which is my way to go:

mk Compilation is now online. It was much harder than I expected. Files were all over the place, most images are unavailable, and some files are still missing. So there will be updates.

Thanks! I think I have this control only in this city, the others are mostly a concrete jungle. Thanks for your comment! Thanks! Yes, that is my idea Thanks!

Expansion to my previous Asian Shopping District night shot showcase with additional buildings. Special thanks to my good friend and fellow Simtropolis member, pclark06, for providing me a number of SCCN BATs I otherwise would never have been able to get my hands on.

I was working on an apocalyptic scene before the server debacle. I have since shifted to a scene where my city crumbled during the downed server time and its spread was secured by a wall. Still learning so at this point I am making a city block of about 7 lots with residential, commercial and park attributes. If I can work it out, I would like to just make 1 lot with all the effects combined. I have 90% finished 3 lots, this was my first test residential....of course, only zombies...I mean Simbies will live here. Not sure it will fit into many game scenarios, but I am thinking to incorporate graffiti on the walls and buildings with the names of those who gave up their time to get the STEX back up and running.

My new city Terina

City life

Been working on releasing these.

Next model that I`m working on. I haven`t finished the model, it`s still pending the final detailing, but I already started testing the polycarbonate material that I plan to use on the brisè (sort of), kind of liked the result. The previous project, the duplex house, its already finished. I`m too lazy to finish the final steps of the lot editing, but I plan to post it on this weekend maybe.

This guide is for Linux users who are trying to get dgVoodoo 2 work on WINE and Proton through Steam. The instructions are intended for Steam users running SimCity 4. Before starting, make sure to download (and install if needed) the following: Working installation of WINE, Winetricks, and Protontricks you can get these through your package manager of choice. A copy of dgVoodoo 2_79_3, this is because newer versions of dgVoodoo 2 do not work on WINE as reported in this thread, you can get this version from here. You now should have everything you'll need for the rest of the guide. Open and extract your dgVoodoo2_79_3 file, in here you'll want to open up these two folders. From MS Look for the x86 folder and copy all four dlls into your SimCity 4 apps folder. Then for the Cpl folder look for the x64 folder and copy and paste dgVoodooCpl.exe to SimCity 4's apps folder. Then lastly copy the dgVoodoo.conf file into the apps folder as well. Now launch Protontricks, and look for SimCity 4 Deluxe: 24780 and select it. Select the default wineprefix then run winecfg. Once in winecfg, select the libraries tab. Then add the following overrides: D3D8.dll, D3D9.dll, DDraw.dll Then click apply and OK. That's it for configuration within wine. Now all that is left to do is set your dgVoodoo 2 settings as usual, if you need more information on how to setup dgVoodoo 2, just refer to this thread. Following all those steps you should now have dgVoodoo 2 working in SimCity 4 on your Linux distro of your choosing. Happy modding and building!

If you’re like me, SimCity 4 just isn’t the same without a good tree controller. When combined with a quality terrain mod, seasonal flora transforms the look of the game—even if you’re playing with plain old vanilla Maxis buildings. There is, however, a downside to most tree controllers: they have a steep learning curve. Trying to cover a full city tile in seasonal trees can be a painstaking process. That’s especially true if you like realistic shorelines, or if want to include meadows and pastures. Additionally, all of the seasonal flora in your city will change at exactly the same time. That can be a little jarring when your city goes from summer green to autumn orange in the snap of a finger. This tutorial offers a handful of shortcuts to help address these problems. These shortcuts are designed to work relatively quickly. That way, you can build a beautiful landscape in a matter of minutes, instead of spending who-knows-how-many hours manicuring each square-foot of your city. In this tutorial, we’ll be covering: How to cover your city with seasonal trees quickly How to make flora change seasons more gradually How to give your shorelines a more natural appearance How to develop natural-looking meadows and plains And here are the mods we’ll be using: Blunder’s Cascadia Tree Controller (plus its dependencies) Cori’s Moisture DataView Mod Whatevermind’s Standalone Flora Brush Mod Girafe’s Daisies & Girafe’s Narcissus Lowkee33’s Appalachian Terrain Mod* Raymond7cn’s Cutaway Texture Mod* *Optional, but strongly recommended! If you don’t like the Appalachian Terrain Mod, you can check out other HD terrain mods here. Step 1: Planting the Trees Let’s start out by opening a new city tile. The first thing we'll need to do is fast forward to autumn to start planting trees. In the instructions for most seasonal tree controllers, the creator will tell you to plant all of your trees on September 1. This is to make sure that all of the trees change seasons at the same time. We’re going to do things a little bit differently. Instead of planting all of our trees at once, we’re going to plant the trees in two passes. We’re also going to plant trees in two different months. Half of our trees will be planted in October, the other half will be planted in September. This way, our trees will change seasons more gradually. Half of the trees will change seasons in one month. The other half will change seasons the next month. For our first pass, we will fast forward to October 1 and pause the game. (Note: Any date between September 5 and October 4 will work.) We will then use our flora brush to cover the city tile with trees. To speed things up, we’ll use Whatevermind’s Standalone Flora Brush mod, which makes the flora brush much bigger. This allows us to cover the city in trees in just a few seconds in Zoom 1. Right now, it’s okay if you can still see gaps of grass between the trees. We’re going to fill those areas in when we get to the next step. Next, we will fast forward to September 1 of the next year and pause the game. (Note: Any date between August 5 and September 4 will work.) Now, we’re going to use the flora brush again to add more trees. At this point, all of the trees we planted the previous October should be green. The new trees should be autumn colored, so they will stand out against the existing greenery. Our goal is to get a roughly 50/50 split of summer trees and autumn trees. And we’re done planting our September trees. Now, instead of all our trees changing season at once, they will change seasons at a more gradual and natural rate. So far so good! And it took less than five minutes to get to this point. But now we have a bit of a problem. We’ve added trees to the city, but they're covering all of the available land. That might work in a rainforest region. But the tree-choked shorelines and lack of grassland look a little out of place in our tile. To fix this, we're going to start by reclaiming some of the space along the shores of our city. Step 2: Clearing the Shores When I first started using the Cascadia Tree Controller, I didn’t like how some trees seemed to be growing right out of the water. That’s not a problem with the controller itself. Instead, it’s an issue with the game, which tells flora to grow wherever it’s wet. This creates a bit of unrealistic look, since most seas, lakes, and rivers have beaches or banks where trees don’t grow. Banks and beaches tend to be low-lying areas where water from tides and flooding prevent large trees from growing. In SC4, it's almost impossible to plant a bunch of trees quickly without having trees grow on these areas. At first, I tried to create beaches and river banks manually using the Bulldozer tool. However, this took a lot of time to get right, and I was never happy with the results. My shores always looked kind of blocky and unnatural, no matter what I tried. That's when I decided to try using CorinaMarie's Moisture DataView Mod! This mod maps out SimCity 4’s moisture levels, which makes it a perfect guide to low-lying shorelines and flood-prone riverbanks. To access the Moisture DataView, we’ll need to establish our city so that we can use the Mayor Mode tools. Now, let's zoom in a bit. In the screenshot below, we can see how the trees have grown right up against the edge of the river bank. Next, we’ll open up the Moisture DataView, which indicates wetter areas in blue. All of the blue and blue-green areas along the shorelines represent the river banks where we want to get rid of the trees. At this point, we’ll select the Bulldozer tool. Using the Moisture DataView as a guide, we’ll start to clear the trees from the river bank. If you want narrow river banks, you can bulldoze trees from only the dark blue areas. I prefer wider banks, so I’m going to bulldoze some of the mid-tone blue-green areas as well. Using the Moisture DataView as a guide, it takes only a minute or two to clear up one side of the river. And here’s what the entire city tile looks like once we’ve cleaned up all of the shorelines. If you like, you can use seasonal flora (like cattails) or ploppable props (like rocks and driftwood) to decorate the river banks at this point. However, that takes time, and I promised this would be quick. So let's move on to the meadows. Step 3: Creating the Meadows As Smokey Bear is fond of reminding us, only you can prevent forest fires. The good news—at least for our purposes—is that you also have the power to start them. Instead of relying on the Bulldozer tool to make our meadows, we’re going to create them by dropping lit matches and burning cigarettes in some very irresponsible places. The neat thing about this technique is that it’s actually true to life. A lot of meadows and grasslands are created when a disaster (such as a wildfire) clears an area of trees. Before creating any meadows, I’d recommend saving your city. This way, if you don’t like the results, you can easily start over. To begin, we’ll open up the Disasters panel and select the Fire tool. Then, we’ll pick the starting spot for our meadow and light a few fires. Unlike real forest fires, ours won’t spread to many other trees. So once the first set of trees have burned off, we’ll start spreading fires to surrounding trees. We’ll keep repeating this process until we’ve created a clearing that we’re happy with. By this point, there should be a number of trees left over from the fires. We’ll keep a few clusters for our meadow, but we’ll use the bulldozer tool to clear out any trees we don’t want. (If we want to, we can also get rid of some of the burned stumps from the fire.) And here’s the result once we've tidied things up: Now, if you like the look of open grassland, you can stop right here and start building your city. Personally, I prefer to have some flowers in my meadows—I just don't like to spend a bunch of time planting each flower one-by-one. Luckily, this is another area where the Moisture DataView can speed things up. To add flowers to our meadows, we’ll use Girafe’s seasonal daisies and narcissus, which are available from the Mayor Mode flora menu. Unlike most seasonal flora, Girafe’s flowers need to be planted in the spring. So we’ll starting by fast forwarding to March 1 of the next year. Next, we’ll re-open the Moisture DataView and examine the meadow. (You may notice that the moisture patterns are different than they were in the fall. The changing patterns are a feature of the game’s moisture simulation.) Right now, we’re looking for any blue or darker green areas in our meadow. These are the wettest parts of our meadow, which makes them prime targets for flower fields. To add the flowers, we'll start with Girafe’s seasonal daisies. At this point, you can click and drag to paint the daisies across the wet areas by moving your mouse slowly back and forth. We don’t need to be precise at this stage. We just want to make sure that the wet areas have a thick carpet of daisies. Using slow, click-and-drag movements will create a dense area of flora. After we’ve filled in the wettest areas, we’ll fill in other parts of the field with more flowers. We want the flowers to get sparser as we move away from the wettest areas. To do this, we'll use the same click-and-drag technique to paint the flowers across the grass—just move your mouse back and forth more quickly over these areas. First we'll do a pass with the seasonal daisies. Then we'll do another pass with the seasonal narcissus, filling in gaps between the daisies. The result should look something like this: It can be hard to tell the difference between the daisies and the narcissus in the above screenshot. To see the difference more clearly, let’s fast forward to the month of June, when Girafe’s flowers are in full bloom. I’ve covered a large part of the meadow with flowers, but I’ve intentionally left some areas grassy. Here you can see how the flowers get sparser toward these areas. And if we Zoom out, you can see how the entire meadow looks while in bloom. That just about wraps things up. We’ve applied a bunch of seasonal trees quickly. We’ve made it so that they change seasons more gradually. We’ve created some natural shores and riverbanks using the Moisture DataView. And we’ve added a pleasant meadow with some flower fields. All in all, the whole process took about 20 minutes. It’s a small city tile, so that makes things a little easier. Larger cities will take more time, especially if you're adding large sections meadows. But these techniques should give you a much faster way to get the job done. Wondering what the final results look like? Here’s a gif showing how our city appears throughout the year...