ArchangelMichael

The sound can also start looping if you use a mod that makes network construction super fast. After I started using Ennedi's slope mods, I was checking them out in the Reader and decided to try making the networks build instantaneously (à la SimCity 3000), but this sound kept replaying incessantly in the area where the more than five tiles of street/road/whatever were built, and faded to silence as I scrolled away from that area. The sound would be gone after saving, exiting, and re-entering the city, but that's a waste of time. Thus, I wanted it gone completely. So, I made a mod that would, in theory, replace the road construction sound with an empty value, i.e.: silence. This method had worked to eliminate the annoying helicopter sound, but it did not work for this. The only thing that prevented the sound from looping was reducing the construction speed of the networks. Specifically, for those wondering, the sound will loop if the value for "Construction Crew Time" is set below 0.0015 (at least for me -- YMMV). to the "Construction Crew Vehicle Speed" value. If anyone succeeds in creating a mod that stops the network construction sound, I want to know about it, please!

If this is the first city you've played after installing the NAM, make sure you are using the correct NAM traffic direction for your region-specific copy of SimCity 4. If I'm not mistaken, UK and Japanese releases of the game require the left-hand drive version of the NAM. If you live in North America, for example, and you accidentally installed the left-hand drive NAM, the lack of traffic may be attributed to this. It may be a good idea to re-install the latest NAM version (v32) using the Custom Installation setup type while paying careful attention to the settings for the "Traffic Driving Side (Usually shouldn't be changed)" option.

Come to think of it, I hadn't played the game in quite a while, and in the mean time I got a new computer with Windows 7 -- the old one was XP. So, it could, in fact, be an issue with Windows 7, or perhaps a bug with the GPU. I use nVidia. Some input from other users -- those still using XP or using Windows 7 with a different GPU -- might help pin down the issue. Either way, I'm glad your region view is fixed!

This happens to me occasionally. The trick I've learned is to save the city using Ctrl+S and pay attention to how long it takes for the save to complete. If it saves really quickly, that's when I typically end up with this in the region view. So, when it does this I just hit Ctrl+S again for as many times as it takes to get a slower save, then exit to region without saving. For older cities that contain more data to be saved, the time difference is easy to notice, but for a young city like the one in your screenshot, it will be trial and error. My advice for small tiles or cities with little development is to just use Ctrl+S three to five times before exiting without saving (because if you save on exit, you may end up with this anomaly). Another option is to use Ctrl+Alt+S to do a quick save. This does not update the region view snapshot of the tile, so if you've made major changes to the city, you won't be able to see them in region view. I wish I knew what is causing this, as it has never been an issue in the past. If you're only using NAM and CAM (are you sure you have not other mods?), I'm guessing it has something to do with the latest NAM (v32) because I don't use CAM.

Don't try to put Sims on buses. That's impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth: there are no buses. Sorry, I couldn't resist

When you get the zone to the size you want, hold the Ctrl key before releasing the mouse button. This will create one big, contiguous parcel. Now de-zone a single-tile area and the whole zone will revert to single-tile parcels. You can also achieve this by plopping a park or transit station (or any other building) into the large parcel. Sometimes the parcel sizes will change automatically based on the density selected or the type of network they touch, but I have not figured out the specific triggers. For example, when dragging a tract of medium-density commercial zoning that faces a road, I usually get single-tile parcels UNTIL the zoning tool touches an avenue intersected by the road. Then, the parcels all switch to two-by-two's. Nudge the zone tool one tile back in the direction from which I was dragging, and they all go back to single-tile parcels. With low-density, sometimes it does this, and sometimes it doesn't. Weird! So I just use the Ctrl-zone trick mentioned above when I want all single-tile parcels. The same trick also allows you to zone industrial parcels of specific shapes and sizes. It can take a long time to cover a large area with individual 3x3 and 2x3 zones, but you avoid undeveloped tiles and boring filler lots that way. Additionally, you can prevent the act of zoning from causing shifts in terraforming by holding the Ctrl key while zoning. If you're registered at SC4Devotion, you can get more detailed info about Precision Zoning.

Place your music and/or playlist files in the Mayor\Music folder along with the default .mp3 files from Maxis. Don't delete those. You also don't have to un-check them in the audio options dialog, unless you would prefer to not hear them at all. The first several songs are the surreal, ambient, Hearts of Space type music for region view, so I typically leave those checked. Don't worry about the command-line thing. If they play for you in a regular media player, they should play in-game. The only way to know for sure would be to use some freshly ripped or downloaded music files and test whether they work in-game. You also might try placing some files in the Region\Music folder to see whether they will play in region view (you won't be able to hear them when building your cities, though). One thing that occurred to me is the possibility that the length of file names could be an issue, or maybe just the length of one or two songs. It's a long shot, but you could rename a couple of your music files that have long names. Shorten them to about ten or twelve characters. Maybe use underscores instead of spaces. Leave only those couple of renamed files in the Music folder along with the Maxis .mp3's and see if that works. On that note, maybe you have just one bad music file that is ruining the whole bunch, as far as the game sees it. Try removing half the music files. If they still won't play, remove that half and put the first half back in and try again. If you get success, place groups of files back in the Music folder until you find the culprit. It's possible that some aspect of your game has become corrupted. The files, the registry entries, some custom content, who knows? If I were experiencing this problem myself, the first thing I'd try is to remove all my plugins, start the game with music or playlist files in the proper folder, open a blank city, and try to turn on the custom tunes. If it worked, that would mean that something I downloaded was somehow blocking the custom music. Granted, that doesn't make much sense and is unlikely, but it's quicker and easier to try than the next option: I'd back up my regions and plugins and do a thorough re-installation of the game. Uninstall SC4, run a registry cleaner (or just uninstall with Revo in Advanced Mode -- it will find the registry tracks for you), reboot the computer, then re-install the game and re-apply the necessary patches and updates. The most up-to-date version of the game executable (SimCity 4.exe, found in C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps) is 1.1.640.0 if you installed from a disc and applied the downloadable patches, or 1.1.641.0 if you downloaded the game from Steam (in which case, the patches are already in place). If you still can't get custom music to play in-game after going through all that... I'm not sure what to tell you next. Maybe someone else will have some ideas or experience to share.

Welcome to Simtropolis! I've never actually copied MP3 files into the music folder, so I'm unable to help you with that, specifically. I always thought it would take up too much space to copy all the music I'd like to listen to, and it seems silly to have it in two places on the hard drive. I just use a playlist in *.m3u format and it works perfectly, even with the music stored on an external drive. One thing I can tell you is that SC4 will automatically randomize the playlist no matter how you have it organized, although it will often begin with the first song on the list. I'm not sure how it handles multiple playlists -- I haven't tried that yet. If it starts playing a song you don't feel like listening to, open the audio options (F10 key) and turn off the music, then turn it back on and the game will randomly select another file to play. The sampling rate of the files makes no difference. My music files have many different bitrates and they all play just fine. MediaMonkey, foobar2000, and VLC will save playlists in *.m3u format. Windows media player probably will, too, but I don't use it. I recommend foobar2000 because it is lightweight (can be used as a portable, stand-alone program), easy to customize, easy to use, and allows you to work with multiple playlists at one time. Double-check the file path to make sure you actually have your music files or playlist in <\Radio\Stations\Mayor\Music> and not <\Radio\Stations\Region\Music> or one of the parent folders. I drag-n-dropped a playlist too quickly once and my Custom Music button was also grayed out. I finally discovered that I had accidentally copied the list into the Mayor folder. My only questions here would be, Does regular (default) game music play for you? and Are you using a command line argument in the shortcut's target field to disable music or audio?

NIMBY = not in my back yard (something undesirable to that development type) YIMBY = yes in my back yard (something desirable to that development type) The column headers on that table are not properly lined up with the numbers (at least not for me, that is; maybe others can see them just fine), so the whole table is a little hard to read to begin with. "C" represents commercial, and "R" represents residential. Industry is not represented here because there are no buildings that are specifically intended to increase local desirability for industrial development, although it should be noted that High-Tech likes the same type of stuff that residents like (such as parks & trees, high land value, low pollution, etc.). The colored numbers denote the magnitude of the effect, and will tell you whether that building increases or decreases local desirability for a certain development type -- green for a positive (YIMBY) effect; red for a negative (NIMBY) effect; double dashes (no number) for no effect. The black numbers (which are supposed to be under the "Range" heading) denote the radius of cells around the building over which the effect will reach. Some buildings increase or decrease local desirability for both commercial and residential development, while others have a positive effect on one type of development but a negative effect on another. Stadiums, for example, should be plopped in your commercial districts because they will make those areas more desirable to businesses. This reflects real life. A stadium will draw large crowds; large crowds generate heavy traffic; heavy traffic equates to more customers for local businesses, but also loud traffic noise, garbage, air pollution, and crime which residents don't like. The numbers under the cap relief headings show you how much of a cap relief you'll get for that specific type of RCI development when you plop that building. Parks and plazas increase the cap for all three residential wealth levels, but do not offer cap relief for commercial or industrial development. Scroll up to my first post and visit the links regarding the demand simulator and workforce & census drives to learn the technical details about development caps and how to work with them. Landmarks increase local desirability for commercial zones, but they have no direct effect on residential desirability. They do improve your mayor rating (except for Alcatraz) which will make the whole city more attractive to high-wealth development across all three sectors (res, com, & ind).

Ro-Bo is correct on both issues. Road access is not required by parks, plazas, temples, churches, stadiums, landmarks, retaining walls, and the like because they don't offer employment. If you have the "landmarks with jobs" mod or if you use custom commercial ploppables with jobs, then those will need to be plopped next to a network that is accessible by cars and/or pedestrians. All civic buildings and most utility buildings need road access. I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think the windmill and some of the water utilities can be plopped away from roads. Keep in mind, though, that if you place parks or forest lots out in the middle of nowhere, they will attract crime that the Sim police will not be able to act upon. This is why mayor mode ploppables are the best way to add eye candy flora and water to mountains, hillsides, pastures, etc. All lots generate crime; MMP's do not. Park and landmark effect radii are measured in tiles rather than meters. Thirty meters, for example, is less than two tiles (each tile is 16 meters square), which would be a nearly unnoticeable effect. Watching the land value and desirability data views for several Sim months after plopping a park, you can see that the effect is strongest at the center and dissipates toward the outer edge of the effect area, as Ro-Bo pointed out. The effect starts out quite strong, then weakens within a few months. This is called transient aura effect, and it also occurs in response to plopping mass transit stations, civic buildings, and mayor mode items. Getting back to the OP's question about generating new growth in an old city, this brief window of high desirability can be exploited for that purpose -- just scroll up to the top of the thread I linked to and you'll see that Z was experiencing the same problem when he noticed sudden growth in response to plopping RTMT stations. You can even swipe the god mode tree brush over an area in which you want to see development and it will increase desirability and land value even if there's no place for trees to take root. The cap relief and mayor rating effects of ploppables is static and cumulative. Although cap relief and mayor rating will decrease if you bulldoze the items, there is not a reverse transient aura effect that will decrease desirability and land value in response to bulldozing them.

What you've been doing is correct -- plop the stadiums and large plazas. You may already have a list of cap busters, but for anyone who doesn't, they can be found as a table here, and as a jpeg here (the image contains a little more info than the table). If you are registered for SC4Devotion, you can get technical details about the demand simulator and the workforce & census drives. Sims love parks, and placing several small parks together in such a way that they form one really big park looks great in your city and will help lift the residential cap. The default parks are boring, so I recommend the BSC Parks Set. In order to see the download link, you must be registered for the LEX, which is different from the forum, but members can use the same username and password for both. Many other add-ons for the BSC parks are available, and once you get them all, you'll have more parks than your Sims will know what to do with. Various canals, streams, and ponds are also basically parks and offer the same types of benefits to the city in which they are plopped. Your only other option is to create your own park and/or plaza lots that raise the cap more than usual, but that can be somewhat of a cheat if you go overboard. I'd say a really nice model like the Gothic churches and other historical European structures made by debussyman would qualify as the type of landmark that would draw huge numbers of Sims to your city. Vienna Votivkirche is a good example of a cathedral that would be a good tourist draw, and it would be reasonable to mod it for equivalent cap relief as one of the stadiums. For that matter, you could search the STEX for stadiums and amusement parks, then add higher cap relief to them, as well. Just stay away from demand mods -- they are definite cheats and can lead to imbalances and other trouble.

I was never able to get seasonal MMP flora to work for me. I'd plop them on September 1st, then run the simulator, and some would change, but others wouldn't. And the changes were never consistent. Some trees would change once, but never again. Others would remain the same for a long time, then change to the wrong season. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working and decided that I didn't really need them anyway. I'd still like to know if there's a solution to the problem, though. Anyone else experience this? I should probably post in Lowkee33's thread at SC4D.

I forgot to ask if you modified the lot in any way (particularly regarding capacity or monthly cost). If so, you would have to implement the exact same changes before following the procedure I outlined above, and even then it might not work because it would still technically be a different file. Basically, you'd need your original modified lot (that's why I recommend never actually deleting any custom content you've used). Were you able to see the building in-game after returning it to your plugins folder? I'm also curious to know what the budget says. I've been doing some more research, and a post by mikeld in this thread (in which RippleJet describes the phantom slider bug and the usual solution) indicates that you may have to choose whichever you consider the best of two possible solutions to your situation: run the city without healthcare (which I have done many times with no serious problems as long as I'm not trying to generate demand for R$$$, CO$$$, or IHT), or obliterate the city and begin anew. This post by Tracker seems to echo that. I also found some information here indicating that anyone experiencing this problem should run the simulator for a couple (maybe several?) game months before each step. There is a third option, as well. You could convert the city to an all-jobs city. Commercial and industrial development do not need healthcare (or police protection and education, for that matter). This could be done slowly by re-zoning a few tracts at a time, and would require a lot of saving and exiting to work on neighboring cities in which you would have to create and juggle demand for jobs and residents. The result of meeting this challenge successfully, however, could be quite rewarding, and would prove a good learning experience regarding the processes of urban renewal and re-purposing of real estate. A quicker way would involve implementing disasters to wipe out large portions of the population in just a couple stages of destruction and rebuilding (tornadoes & fires are fun in the suburbs, and I like the robots for high-rises), but the regional impact would be more pronounced, causing demand for jobs to drop rapidly in neighbor cities, possibly leading to mass abandonment. Problem-solving is essentially the essence of this game. If this happened to me, I'd probably make a backup of the region and fiddle with the timing and sequencing of plopping the lot, running the simulator, saving, exiting, removing the plugin, restarting, bulldozing, and running the simulator some more just to see if I could actually find a solution. I'd probably modify the lot and plop the modified version, to determine what would happen if I took the steps that typically cause the bug in the first place (and I'd be hoping beyond hope that this would somehow magically reset or overwrite the original bug). Ultimately, though, I'd get tired of it after a couple days and either try the all-jobs-city solution or simply omit healthcare altogether. Healthcare is good for two things: making Sims desirable to high-salary employers; and resulting in mass-retirement-induced economic depressions. That's what led me to experiment with running cities that receive nary a clinic from day one... and it worked. The lady with the bad haircut complained incessantly, but the city grew just fine. It seems quite likely, though, that you're right about the problem existing permanently in the code of the savegame file. If, however, you decide to keep working on it, take notes about the processes you implement, and if you're able to find a solution, please post it.

First, if you've plopped anything on top of the original locations that once contained the Memorial Hospital, enter those cities and demolish whatever you may have plopped there, save, and exit the game. Then, follow these steps: 1: Re-install the Memorial Hospital. This should make it reappear in your cities. It will never go away unless you do this... or unless you obliterate your cities that contain it. You must always bulldoze all instances of a lot in every city in which you've plopped it before removing it from your Plugins folder. Always. Must. Period. 2a: Open each city you've plopped it in. You should be able to see the Memorial Hospital now. If the space it occupied is empty, try plopping it again, run the simulator for a couple game months, ignore the slider bug, save, and exit. Proceed to part b. 2b: In the cities where Memorial Hospital exists, bulldoze it and every healthcare structure in the city (including the Farmer's Market, if you have it). Check the budget and health data view to make sure they're all gone. Place in-game sign posts on their locations so you remember where you had them. 3: Run the simulator for a Sim month or two, just so the budget recognizes the change but not so long that wealthy Sims move out. 4: Save and exit each of these cities, then exit the game. 5: Remove the Memorial Hospital from your Plugins folder. Don't delete it. Just move it into a "back burner" or "do not use" folder in case you missed one somewhere in a forgotten city. 6: If you want some custom hospitals that have greater radius and capacity, grab a few from the links I've provided below and install them. Use to make any changes to them before plopping them! (Some quick advice: don't make the HQ boost too high, or your Sims will age rapidly and retire before your city gets off the ground. The default value is 11.52.) Typically, making almost any kind of change to a civic building that already exists within a city is what causes the phantom slider bug. 7: Start the game and open the affected cities. 8: If you are replacing the same hospitals, place them at the sign posts you put in during demolition. This is so the radii will still cover the same tracts that they covered previously. If you are replacing the old hospitals with new custom hospitals that have larger or smaller radii, the sign posts will probably not be relevant and the custom hospitals can be placed where their coverage areas are most effective (some bulldozing of other structures may be necessary here). 9: Adjust the monthly costs for each hospital to make sure they don't go over capacity. You can probably afford to over-fund them for a couple months until you complete the next step. 10: Run the simulator for a few months and keep your eye on the healthcare budget. It should not change. Also check each healthcare building's funding to make sure it is the same as what you set in the previous step. 11: If the healthcare budget changes automatically, the phantom slider bug is still present. Exit without saving, post an update here and we'll see what we can do. As for custom hospitals (and other custom content, especially civic buildings), the first piece of advice I can give you is to check the upload date. If it was uploaded many years ago, you should probably avoid it. Back then, not enough research had been done about how the game files interact with one another, and some mods and buildings cause bugs or game breakage. The best place to get custom content is the Lot Exchange (a.k.a., the LEX) at SC4Devotion because all uploads must go through a scrutineering process to make sure they work without causing problems. If you aren't already signed up, I suggest you register now. Registration for the SC4D forums is separate, but you can use the same username and password. Bookmark this list of lists. It's a gold mine. Of special interest to this thread is the list of healthcare plugins, which is a great place to start looking, but it is by no means a complete list. Also bookmark this thread to learn how to convert legacy STEX links. My recommendations: the SimGoober Healthcare Assortment. Pretty much anything from SimGoober is going to be a marvelous addition to your game, and he is an excellent modder, so everything works. The General Hospital by frogface is a nice choice -- double the capacity of the in-game large medical center and not too flashy looking. You don't have to place it over a road if you don't want to. Mercy General Hospital by Colyn and Bywater Springs by Callagrafx will keep very large populations healthy. These are just a few. There are many, many more to choose from. Some searches on the STEX and LEX will reveal even more hospitals and clinics. Pick the ones modeled in the style you like most. Lotting and modding can be re-done later, if need be. Happy hunting! Let us know if you need more help.