Mister Giggles

Djplay: Depends on what you're willing to do, and how much time you plan on dedicating to it. I've hit 16 million my largest city. No abandonment, dilapidation, everything grew naturally, and there's enough jobs in the city for everyone. A patched CAM installation, lots of large civic complexes, and powerful custom cap busters allow you to get really big, 6+ million. Subways, obviously, are a must. A way to reduce air pollution is required. To get over 10 million, you'll need to engineer large civic buildings to cover less area so they don't trigger a strange bug where they're always overcapacity. You'll be wanting custom power and water providers because, wow, big cities need a lot of resources to function. 16 million, well. You'll need to be altering the calculations for how many of what fits into educational and health buildings, because otherwise it's functionally impossible to have 100% education/health coverage. Many, many subways - thousands of them. If you're willing to let tens of millions commute out of town, you may be able to get 25+ million. This may not be possible given how SC4's engine starts narrowing the scope of its pathfinding searches as the city starts requiring much more CPU time to maintain, let alone do all that silly stuff like making sure the stuff it grows can stay. <_<

Seconding RSC. A severe malware infection can lead to a damaged operating system, such that it no longer works as intended. Think about it like this: Even if you survive flesh eating bacteria, you may lose an arm in the process. Certain computer malware acts in similar fashion, except replace arms with vital Windows files. Before we can even try to help get SC4 working in a manner on your machine, first the machine must be sound.

Steam and disk versions, probably all of them, use the same bits of the registry. Uninstall one, the others break.. You've technically removed both games by uninstalling one. All that remains are the data files for the disk version, which can be safely deleted.

I'm not sure it's WINE for the graphical issues. Could be several things. Need to test them. Bleh...

Linux runs SC4... mostly. On Mint, using the Nvidia official drivers, I currently have some edge of screen tearing and an odd issue where the clickable area for buttons is lower than the actual buttons. Allowing the game to change resolutions seems to be somewhat terrible for Mint as a whole, though, what with the system freeze.

The new copies you buy from online storefronts are new copies. Your old stuff isn't needed at all.

You may have luck with JDatPacker. Rivit sends you betas of his program? Lucky moose.

I didn't notice the gap between the power poles before you mentioned it. You have manually checked every lot in that block and verified the number of jobs they're offering? What are the exact circumstances of that block's existence? Was it ever part of the industrial areas to the north, east, or south of it? If it was ever a part of another block of jobs, the simulator may not have had enough time to rejigger the routing to reflect the current circumstances. What does the traffic query say for the surrounding industrial sections? You altered capacities before these buildings existed, yes?

You'd be surprised. Perhaps more than most, given that you don't have nearly the stuff a lot of other people do. Let's see... You have LBT files. That means you probably have the mega prop pack. That means you have a 10 meg file with only a few dozen of the thousand props used. I was able to cut mine down to 2.9 megs. BSC props vary greatly in how heavily utilized they are, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the prop packs you have are lightly used. Edit: Don't use Files2Dat for consolidation. Use DatPacker. The former doesn't have deduplication functions. You'll see a massive decrease in load times if you compress your plugins from 4,500 files to a few hundred. It proved to be my biggest speed boost, going from 4 minute load times to 2 minute load times.

That gigantic block of industrial buildings looks to contain many more jobs than just 500... The Census Repository Facility has its census drives formulas contained in several exemplar files, such as instance 58276345. These formulas confuse me completely. SimCity 4 has to split its CPU cycles between maintaining what already exists, and expanding the city. When many new buildings grow in a large city, the game may not actually get those buildings connected to the road system before they abandon. Yes, that seems to be an odd design decision. This is why Reed Place does dandy, and all your Cape Cod houses don't.

RSC: Based on my experience, it's like pulling teeth if you do the process with each and every new thing that enters your plugins folder. You'll always be going back to, say, BSC MEGA Props - SG Vol 01, to add a few props. On a sidenote, that's the most used prop pack, with thousands of lots relying on its plant props. Simgoober should be proud. When you have most of the plugins you'll ever have, it's quite easy to see what prop packs are heavily used, which ones aren't, and to cull/move props in bulk. In my opinion, it's best to consolidate all lot/building exemplars so you don't miss anything when you're checking for what's being used or not. For example, I have 3 plugins I have containing all my lots and buildings, with no graphical files included. In my mind, the hardest part of the whole process is getting to where it's the reasonable next step. Consolidating plugins, removing useless files, merging files - those are all steps that should take place beforehand. Though, be careful with merging prop packs. Those can contain thousands of individual files, and you do >not< want to be trying to slim down a mega prop pack with 20,000 files in it (Not to mention Reader starts throwing a fit with gigantic files). I'd say that was my biggest mistake, merging several massive prop packs together before I decided to remove their unused props. Nonny: The primary benefit to slimming down your prop packs is quicker loading times if many megs worth of props are removed, and stability. You'll be removing prop overwrites, which removes many problems - prop pox is the best known of these, but it's quite obvious SimCity 4 pukes all over itself when overwritten plugins are substantially different from what's overwriting them. You're also eliminating the absolute number of things SimCity 4 has to load and keep in memory. SImCity 4, all by itself, has about 105,000 TGI, total. With my 4 gigs of plugins, that jumps to 900,000. I used to have 1.1 million before I started culling unused props and graphical data. I noticed during this process that SimCity 4 grew progressively more responsive. Just removing one or two unused props isn't going to do much - but removing hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, that adds up... It's also something of a pass time, considering the time sink involved.

That is a more descriptive step 6, yes, but only part of accomplishing the topic creator's stated goal: To only have the props that are attached to something that appears in game. I'd prefer it not be a mess of programs and obscure functions, either. Alas. Datanode can say what is missing, but not what is used. PIM-X can say what isn't used, but can't remove it. Reader can remove it, but lacks the information needed to understand if it should be removed.

I like you. You have a tremendous curiosity about how this game works. SimCity 4 is able to merge/unmerge industrial buildings for routing purposes as the game's engine deems appropriate. What you're seeing is not 4,543 sims working at Havoc Bioenactments, but 4,543 sims working at the entire industrial "complex". I only came to understand this phenomena within the last year, myself. Jobs do not take into consideration whether or not they can be filled. As long as demand exists, the area is desirable, and other requirements met, buildings will grow like Mongol hordes out of an avalanche. It is entirely possible to fill your city with 10 million, mostly unfilled jobs. What you're observing is normal behavior for the simulator. You'll want to look at the "Drives" numbers in the Census Repository Facility for determining how much of what the city can sustain by the buildings existing within it. It's only important for residentials, as they'll start leaving the city to look for work, or abandoning, if their drives are exceeded. There's a problem with the drives numbers, however, in your game: You changed the census numbers with your patch. The Census Repository Facility's calculations are written assuming vanilla census drive numbers, so you're going to get slightly off numbers for drives.

http://members3.jcom.home.ne.jp/somy000/index.htm Scroll down until you get to smaller, clickable pictures. Fukushima is the first one.

It's a giant pain, currently, to decompile mega packs and such for individual props or to cull unused ones. It's (Somewhat) easy to isolate a solo prop and its constituent parts, but there's many steps and rules involved. A tldr version is this: Always make a backup. Just in case. 1: Run Datanode. Take note of how many missing dependencies there are. 2: Open up all your buildings and lots in PIM-X, along with the prop pack you wish to remove things from. Depending on the size of your plugins and how you have them organized, this may be a somewhat messy process. 3: Check each and every prop you want to remove to see if they're used on a lot or building. 4: Prop families are problematic. They are better left alone unless you care to cross reference everything in the family to make sure you're removing everything and none of the family is used. 5: Never remove LUA, UI, or sound files. Datanode doesn't/can't check to see if these are used. 6: Once you've confirmed a prop isn't used by the game, you can use iLive's Reader to remove it and its related files (BMP, FSH, 3DS, etc). Most of the time all related files are clustered together when you organize the list by "Number." 7: Run Datanode again. If you have the exact number of missing dependencies you had before, you're good to go. Sometimes graphical files are used for multiple things, and this is when you'll find out. You'll need to re-add them or remove the other prop/s using them. An alternative version involves removing a prop pack entirely, noting which lots/buildings are missing things (Via Datanode), and adding the missing things back in one at a time (Copy from the original prop pack into a new, empty one). Depending on how used the prop pack is, this may be a bigger bang for your buck. I've been able to get rid of about a gig worth of unused props/graphics using these methods.

Well, there is one, but that won't solve the underlying issue: Missing dependencies. Please read this thread, it may prove informative. If you can narrow your query down to specific items, we'll be able to help more.

I can't wait for Nonny's commentary on this one. Someone thought this was a good idea. In a kid's game. Designed to teach kids about the horrors of slavery. There are a lot of ideas involved that someone thought were good to put in this game, come to think of it...

Nonny: It's hard to fix a broken perception of reality... Terring: That video is horrible. But parody. Slave Tetris isn't parodying anything, it's just a terrible idea that someone thought would be an awesome teaching aid. Alas, children around the world will no longer be able to experience the joys of slave tetris. It's been axed. Reality seeped in, I suppose.

You technically already have it in the form of the Maxis coal power plant. There is one that never quite existed, one available for download here, and a model file.

Are we talking something like a werewolf, where she becomes a bear? Or a woman in a bear suit? Married to a bear? The result of a fusion dance between woman and bear? Inquiring minds wish to know.

The regional thumbnail for the city was damaged. It is possible to load the city using Terraformer. First, make sure the city has been loaded into an actual region; it can't be left in the Downloads folder. The program will attempt to protect the city from alterations, make sure to uncheck the protect mayor boxes. Alter a small piece of the city. Once saved, a new thumbnail will be generated and you'll be able to access the city. You'll want to make a backup of the city first, of course, because it'll be quite easy to damage it when terraforming.

If it will not unduly burden you, have an easter egg mode that keeps the bearded ladies and programmer art. "Wait," you say, "People want to see my art?" FOR THE LULZ! <_<

The city population number isn't skewed. What you see for city population is the total of all residential buildings' current occupancy numbers. Now, if you had said "Some of these buildings have way too many residents for their size"...<_<