megaplex4

The building is miniscule - less than 1/16 x 1/16 of a tile, which is that standard size I use for most of my lots, so changing the lot size doesn't make any difference. I have made a landmark descriptor file - I've even checked it using reader and SC4Tool, it's definitely a landmark lot, and I've tried putting on different landmark lots - the sphinx, big ben etc. There doesn't seem to be much that can go wrong with my modding. Make a blank gmax shape, exaclty the same as my other lots and exactly the same as what I did for the previous lot I made, export it, open up the plugin manager, put the model into the landmark slot and then open up the lot editor and...it's not there. Why? Why not? Aaargh!

Can't find landmark building in Lot Editor Hi, I'm using Simgoober's tutorial on making a functional landmark lot. I've done this once before and now it's frustrating because I know I've done it successfully already. The problem is that after moving the Model over to the Landmark slot in the Plugin Manager and editing the properties, I save it and then open up the lot editor to make a Lot to test it in the game - as per the instructions in the tutorial. The problem is that it doesn't show up. I've checked the Plugins folder, and the DESC file is there, and I'm trying to find it using a landmark lot, but it still won't show up.

Huh. You're right. I bulldozed it, re-plopped and next thing you know people are going in there to buy groceries and pick up their mail. Heaps of water and no abandonment. Thanks for the advice!

Abandoned due to lack of water on Simgoober's functional landmark lot I used Simgoober's tutorial entitled "Making a Functional Landmark Lot" to make a ploppable commercial lot. I plopped the lot and soon there was a 'no water' sign above the lot. I put in a water tower right next to the lot but then it comes up with jobs 0/0 and adbandoned due to lack of water. And it stays that way. I've looked through the tutorial but I can't find anything that suggests why this is happening. I have all the parameters reltaing to the welath level set to "Low wealth" or "CS$1" etc etc.

But it worked fine before Simtropolis was updated - in the sense that the pictures came up ok. I looked at the tutorial before the update and decided to to do it later. Then the website got updated. Now I can't see the pictures.

I've been trying to use a tutorial on the Omnibus called "Making a Functional Landmark Lot", by Simgoober, but none of the pictures appear when I load up the page. I been trying for several days now and it always comes up with placeholders instead of pictures. When I bring up other pages the pictures load up ok,, except for pages on the Omnibus. This is very frustrating because you actually need to see the pictures to follow the tutorial.

Hi, I've made what I hope will be a nice set of fences, along with some farming lots, but I can't get my props and buildings to follow the ground. I've looked around for a solution and explored beyond my knowledge of the iLives Reader but I don't know how to fix the problem. Basically there are two problems, though both are related. Firstly, how do I stop the ploppable lots from extending across the terrain horizontally and building a foundation underneath? How do I get them to follow the slope the way the roads do? Secondly, I have been putting 'blank' buildings on lots, like the ones on the parks, for example. However in my lots there is a foundation under the builidng when it sits on slopes, like there are with houses. When I plop a park down on a slope this doesn't show. Why not? I'm ok with using the reader, as long as it's fairly clear what I have to do.

I must admit this had occurred to me - make the building REALLY small so that you don't notice the foundation - but then you've still got a little, albeit, tiny bit of thing jutting out from the ground, it's hard to click on, and - how do parks do it? Parks confirm to slopes. Parks have big blank building thingies on their lots. Why don't stick out like sore thumbs?

I saw in an announcement about the NAM 2009 that a new rural roads mod is going to be released soon. I was wondering who was working on this and when it was due to be released?

Thanks for that info, although it took me a little while to realise that you were talking about the lot editor in SC4Tool (I think) and not THE Lot Editor. Anyway I fixed up the lots - thanks to you - and now they are all running up and down the slopes nicely. The only problem left is the building itself. Like I said before, these are not actual buildings, but blanks plonked onto landmark lots for the sake of having a "building" on the lot. How do I get rid of the retaining walls for these buildings? I can't find a property anwhere that seems to relate to that.

Changed rural buildings to residential but still show up as rural in LE I recently downloaded some rural buildings like "Waldau Farm" and "Bremen Farm" etc. However I don't want these buildings on farm lots, I want to use them as residential buildings instead. So I opened them up with SC4Tool and changed all the properties I could find from rural to residential. Now when I open up the lot Editor they still show up as rural buildings. They won't show up in the residential buildings menu at all, so I can't actually create a residential lot and plonk them down on it. What is it that I'm missing?

I've been fiddling around with a .dat file of lots that I downloaded from the STEX using Ilives Reader. I don't know what it is that I've done, but whenever I click on "Exemplar" in the list the program stops working. I can click on the ohters but "Exemplar" shuts it down every time. Why?

Ok, I've downloaded Trolca's dirt roads, but I don't like the grassy bits on the side. What I want is a dirt road - just dirt and nothing else, that stays dirt no matter what zone it touches, and also stays dirt when it's not touching a zone at all. PEGs roads are great, but they only work when they're touching agricultural zones.

Hi, I've got a request concerning dirt roads. I've downloaded Pegasus' rural roads but they only go dirt when they are running directly up against farm zones. If they touch any other kind of zone they revert back to streets again. Basically what I want is a mod that will make all streets into dirt roads, and all roads paved with dirt footpaths (sidewalks in US, pavements in UK etc) Pegasus' mod gives me roads with dirt footpaths, but the streets are only dirt when they run up against farms. Is anyone able to make a mod that does this? I don't want lots either, I want actual, lay-em down roads. Sorry if this sounds demanding.

Much of this rivalry is aired by the rival that feels it has more to lose from the comparison. While I prefer Melbourne over Sydney, I feel, like a lot of other people here, that Sydney captures people's attention and imagination because of its iconic status - bridge, opera house harbour etc, whereas Melbourne, which has so much to offer, is often overlooked internationally because it doesn't have such symbolic status. So while you might hear Sydneysiders comment on the rivalry, it is probably kept alive by Melbournians who sometimes feel that the world has its eyes on Sydney, when it would do well to cast a glance at Melbourne from time to time as well. Possibly the same kind of thing is going on between Melbourne and Adelaide, but the other way around.

I downloaded a school and used SC4Tool to change the parameters to make it the same as the city college. This is because I want a city college but I want it to look old, not modern. However when I plonk it down in the game it crashes before the plonk sound has even finished plonking. Can anyone tell me what it is that I might have done wrong? Even if you could just point me into a vague direction, otherwise I'll have to do a trial and error, line by line testing thing and I don't think I can listen to "Challenge Everything" over and over again. I just can't.

Cool, thanks for that, that's useful to know. By the way, on the subject of hospitals, what is the difference between demand created and demand satisfied, and why doe the hospital only have demand created ?

I did that but I just BATted a 1x1x1 cube and used that as my building, and then put the props from the downloaded school over the top of it. There is a way, I know there is because I've done it before but I've forgotten how to do it, of BATting a building that you can "see" but that doesn't "show" - if you know what I mean. I tried using just a flat spline but it wouldn't render. It's like when you have the SC4Desc file without the model and you end up with a grey square in the LE without being able to see the actual building. One of those would be really useful. Thanks for all your help by the way. It's good to know this website is here otherwise the visual aspect of the game would wear pretty thin after a while, and I really don't have the time or the mind to get techy with it all.

All well and good, but the ploppable lots don't let me put just any old building on it. If I open the city college lot for example, I can only put two buildings on it - the city college and the university.

When you say to use the LE to copy the old school building onto a blank lot - where do I get a blank lot from ?

So I'm going to add this: -introff ...and where exactly do I put it in the shortcut ?

When I use SC4Tool, with windows Vista, even as an administrator, it opens up the files REALLY slowly while these little lines run down the open file dialogue box. Finally I get an error message saying that the file I've requested is in use by another program, even though nothing else is open. Furthermore, the iLive Reader, when I change the properties and hit save, it seems to save ok and everything, but when I open it up again, everything looks just the same as it did before I made any changes. Basically what's happened is that I used S4Tool on my old XP computer to make big changes to deadwoods small shops, and now that I want to make one more small change on my new Vista computer, SC4Tool won't open the file, forcing me to use the Reader, which then doesn't save it.

It works ! Thanks for that, I was getting really impatient waiting for those bars to go down.

Ok the problem with the reader was that I wasn't running it in XP mode as an administrator. Still, the grey lines in SC4Tool remain, and it's a pain. If you really want to see something agonisingly frustrating, check out my more recent thread on the phantom sliders.

I run SC4Tool in XP compatibility mode but not iLive. I'll try that and see what happens. The thing with SC4Tool is really weird. In the exemplar editor the little Open dialogue box has three light coloured grey lines that look like meters running out one after the other, and then there's a dark grey line that runs along the bottom. When that one's finished, the list of files comes up. I had a problem when I first tired to use SC4Tool with Vista and I posted something somewhere and someone told me to run it in XP compatibility mode as an adimistrator and it it worked. Sort of. I'll try the same with iLive reader.