Gahagan

I had this issue awhile ago, where SC4 wouldn't load on my Windows 7 machine. After I fried my hard drive, I found a solution quite by accident. The game installed and ran fine, without anything special done. Ran fine in maximum resolution, no lagginess, nothing. However, I alt-tabbed out to find a new wallpaper as I had done a full, fresh install, and after I had done so Sim City 4 no longer loaded properly. I haven't done a full spread of monitor sizes, but my monitor is 1920 x 1080 and Sim City 4 won't load if I have a 1920 x 1080 background. It will, however, load, if a default Microsoft background is used, or a 1280 x 1024 background. Hope this helps someone who had the same problem.

Those look great. Functional lots would be neat, but eye candy is almost as good. Thanks for the help tracking those down!

Hello. Sorry for the request topic, but I'm trying to find some nice looking parking lots that can serve as extensions to buildings, such as a train station or commercial area. All I've been able to find is parks, amusement parks, park trails...basically everything except what I'm looking for. I tried SC4 Devotion as well, more of the same. So my question is: can anyone who uses some good old paved paradise, ground level parking lots point me in the right direction?

Requesting the following three puzzle pieces to be put to NAM: El-Rail corner over Road T-Intersection El-Rail T-Intersection over Road T-Intersection GLR across ground rail I've enclosed pictures of the situations where the pieces would be used. E-Rail corner over road t-intersection E-Rail T-Interesection / Road T-intersection: GLR across ground rail: If these exist and I'm just missing them, I'd appreciate that information as well.

Just an update - I managed to get it to work with a 1900 x 1200 wallpaper. So I'm really at a loss as to what causes the issue. And in response to forcing it into a different resolution - it loads in 1600 x 1200 fullscreen. But only sometimes, and as near as I can tell that sometimes is dependent on what wallpaper you're using for your desktop. There's no forced resolution required (which I understand was the fix - but I didn't like the smaller resolution much). So far my game is batting .500 with 1900 x 1200 wallpapers, and 1.000 with 1024 x 768. My monitor itself is a 23'' widescreen.

Here's a switch I made in an attempt to make a realistic railroad. Using the NAM FARR and 45degree diagonal components, this switch occupies 13 x 11 squares, the longer being in the direction the switch "opens" towards. 1.) Lay out a 13x11 grid: 2.) Place a FARR turnout. Using a FARR turnout creates an ease-in into the corner itself, making it easier to negotiate for trains: 3.) Place a FARR to diagonal conversion: 4.) Place a 45 degree diagonal curve: And that's it. I've filled the remainder in with zoning & parks in this picture:

A suburban passenger route in Olleta:

Two suburbs from my current city. Mostly vanilla content.

New highway I'm working on building. No traffic yet as it's not finished.

Hope this is still of use to someone. Just installed Sim City 4 Deluxe on a Win7 64 bit machine. * nVidia GTX260 card * 6GB ram * Core i7 'Bloomfield' (2.66ghz?) processor Game wouldn't boot standard. Tried XP SP 2 & 3, as well as Vista vanilla & SP2 compatibility modes. Didn't work. To get the game running, take the following steps: 1.) Create a shortcut from the Sim City folder on the desktop. 2.) Right click the new shortcut, go to "Properties" 3.) Under the "Shortcut" tab will be a box labeled "Target" and should include the pathway for running the game. 4.) At the end of "\SimCity 4.exe" hit space, once, and then paste the following without the quotes: "-w -r1280x1024" 5.) Game should now run. I only ran it for 5 minutes, but it appeared to be free of crashes and graphics glitches.

$$$ Sims in all of my cities lately have been having problems finding jobs and staying employed, and their patchy lawns are starting to bother me! I have tried resolving this issue with a clean run of SC4 and the problem is similar -- the houses continue to dilapidate once my city hits the 'high tech' phase of growth, when expensive offices and high tech industry are in demand. I have tried supplying all of my Sims with jobs by driving my $$CO, $$$CO, $$CS, $$$CS, and IHT demands as low as they will go (without going negative) but the issue persists. Has anyone who has had this problem found a way to keep the wealthies employed?

Thank you for all the suggestions. I downloaded the I-HT mod and started taxing the heck out of R$$$ to cut back on how eager they are to abandon houses in my city. Hopefully that will help.

Look for the April version of the Network Addon Mod (NAM). It's included in there.

I believe that road and rail connections have decreasing returns. Let's say the first rail connection adds 10 demand cap relief, the next one only adds 8 or something, for 18 total instead of 20 if it was a set value. That means at some point additional connections would give out. Actual transit across the connection should not affect the demand cap. I'm not positive though, feel free to correct me. I would think it would be VERY easy to mod a 1x1 park lot to give insane ID demand cap relief, but I'm not good at ze modding so someone else may need to do it for you.

I've been using EL-Rail a lot now that it can be placed above roads. Now if there could just be an above-road station it would be perfection. But if you get the latest NAM you'll find that EL-Rail is a LOT easier to work with.

Hey, a Show Us Your... thread where my stuff doesn't look leagues worse than everyone else's! Some railyards. Rural freight station with a high speed commuter passing by. Some EL lines (that's still a railway, right?) Those last three courtesy of NAM for making EL rail AWESOME to use in a cluttered downtown. Every one of my cities is Chicago now.

I've just got a few requests for the EL rail puzzle pieces (which is now my favorite mode of transportation to use, thanks to being able to put it above road). Maybe these have been mentioned already, I admit I didn't look through all 52 pages. -- EL T-intersection over road/street T-intersection -- EL T-intersection over straight road/street -- EL + intersection over road/street T-intersection -- EL + intersection over straight road/street I've got a non-grid city, so at times it's bothersome to have to work around the puzzle pieces I have.

http://earth.google.com/ Use that thing, look at a city you want to model, do it. Sim City 4 is a somewhat outdated game. You'll never be able to accurately model a large metropolis within the game without extensively modifying the game's internal code, which I'm fairly sure at this point is something not possible to do. As far as a "tutorial" for making a realistic city, there isn't one. It's like trying to write a tutorial on common sense. I try to make my cities look and function as realistic as possible, so I use some mods like Trolca's Train Set and this Amtrak Mod (not sure if it includes the cars, but searching "Amtrak" shouldn't be very hard for you), and of course, the Network Addon Mod, which adds a lot of things that make sense. I'm really not sure what else to tell you as far as realism goes. I'm pretty sure that every single CJ on the site strives for some sort of realism, so look at what the authors did to make their city look that realistic, and apply those techniques to some map you find on Google Earth. If you want more of a "tutorial" than that you're better off asking someone more experienced with the game make a city for you.

I've got a two-part question, hopefully someone can help with both parts. First, is there a "Crime Variable" anywhere in SC4 that anyone has encountered? There seems to be certain buildings (airports spring to mind) that attract crime like a magnet. I've had airports surrounded 6-8 tiles deep with Deluxe Police Stations and the crime just doesn't go away. I'd imagine that if there were such a variable it would show up in the Plugin Manager, but I haven't seen a way to modify it from there yet. Second question, if the first one is true: Is there any way to modify existing SC4 building variables through the plugin manager, or some other program? Again I tried this through the plugin manager but it only loads player-created lots and models. Can a list of lots and models from SC4 be imported into the PM? Thanks for any help you can offer.

Oh, there it goes. Didn't think it would take 10 minutes to save a few changed numbers in the code. Thanks for the help.

Thanks, looks like just what I need. No more donuts for the precinct if they can only run three tiles. Now if I could get the thing to save after I modify an exemplar I'd be good, but it seems to lock up every time I try and do it. Any possibility of being able to help with that?

I've been looking for the better part of the day, but I can't seem to find any tutorial threads for how to create new car/train/plane and other "odds and ends" graphics within SC4. I'd like to get into some car and train detailing, to replace the defaults in the game with more realistic and visually pleasing models, but I don't see any how-to threads. Anyone got some links, or if there aren't any, some pointers? I've got BAT, gmax, and the plugin manager, and I'm somewhat familiar with how to use them.

What everyone's said here is basically correct. If you spike your commercial population you'll get a chance to upgrade the airport, but there's nothing you can do about the crime. I've surrounded my airports with deluxe stations and they still attract crime. I do have a question, though. What's the plugin you're using to shift your demand / mayor rating / budget info? It looks very nice.