Goggles

@Monk's Dream: No problem, glad to have helped @skylaiden: i'm having trouble grasping cap relief. i've been looking for a simple explanation of what it is, but the best i could find was the site below and it just confused me more.quote>There are actually two things that can prevent development in a city, besides the usual effect of pollution, parks, crime etc. The first is the RCI demand, which is easily visible in game. The other thing is demand caps, which are invisible to the player in the Vanilla version of SC4. These don't affect the RCI demand, but they are a limit on how much of a particular wealth and zone can exist in a city. This means that for example, you can have a low wealth residential demand of 8000 in your RCI meter, but if you have reached the limit of your demand cap no more will grow despite the visible demand. You can increase the demand caps however, by placing certain items in your city. i also want to understand the numbers in the cap relief chart below. i get that it explains what's good and bad, but besides the "population cap relief" column, i don't get what those other columns *really* mean.quote> Which brings me to this chart, which shows the demand cap relief of a whole bunch of buildings. The relief that the buildings provide for each individual zone type and wealth level is shown in numbers that represent individual population units. So each basketball court you place provides a demand cap relief of 1000 for all residential wealth types, and this applies to the city as a whole. YIMBY and NIMBY are Yes/Not In My Back Yard, and effect the desirability of areas of your city. The size of the area they effect is limited, and is shown as a distance radius. So, any individual basketball court you place will increase the desirability of its immediate surroundings to within 30 game tiles, and increase it by 30. I know that radial effects sometimes have a drop off in the game, as happens with pollution, but I don't think that happens with parks and such. I couldn't tell you however, where 30 stands on the scale of desirability, but you can get a good idea by looking at the other buildings in that list or by placing one in the middle of nowhereville and looking at the desirability data view If you install the useful RCI query mod that Blue Lightning linked to earlier in the thread, you can also view the demand caps when you query your buildings. Hope this helps

EDIT: I should probably tell you they are wealth dependent not density dependent. quote>Maybe you misunderstood - there are two different variations on the sidewalk texture for streets in the game, one is a solid paved texture and one has a grassy strip along both edges. The same goes for the road and avenue, I believe. Except that with road and avenue, all ploppable buildings appear to 'upgrade' the grassy sidewalk to solid paved sidewalk, whereas with the street, it would seem the only development that can upgrade the sidewalk is medium and high density residential and commercial zoning. Its the textures IIDs I believe. If I know correctly, there is a setting somewhere, probably in the .exe, that has the IIDs for the sidewalk textures, that changes. If they are all the same textures (for all of the IIDs) they wont change.quote>I understand this, but changing the grassy sidewalk on street texture to paved would change it for all street developments, including suburbs and rural areas. Unless there are separate street textures for each different type of development? What I was hoping to do was tweak a lot so that it would trigger the sidewalk to upgrade next to it, without losing the grassy sidewalk elsewhere. I'm guessing the extent of the modding that can be done in game is limited to editing the dat files, in which case this may prove impossible!

Ah now hex I do know, I studied computer science at university I was referring to the talk of Exemplars and Cohorts and such. But as it happens, I educated myself over the last couple of hours and it all seems quite straightforward, especially to an Object Oriented Programmer I had a slightly more detailed discussion with Swamper77 over at SC4D https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=6771.0, but generally it doesn't look promising. My only hope is that someone knows of some global settings somewhere that control the thresholds that deal with changing the texture of the road from grassy sidewalk to solid paved sidewalk, because essentially the only things that seem to able to change this look are the medium and high density res/comm zones. EDIT: Unless it could somehow be related to, or stored in an RUL file?

I'm posting this here because in my not-so-infinite wisdom, I figured it might be somehow related to a transit function or some other clever piece of the game that you guys have crafted at some point when making the NAM. When you place low density res/comm zones next to a street tile, the street tile has a strip of grass next to it. If you upgrade the zones to med/high density, the sidewalk texture changes. Same goes for road. All other buildings (as far as I can tell) only develop the street to the low density version. However for road (and presumably OWR and avenue are the same but I haven't tested them), all buildings that I tried would generate a higher density sidewalk. Only when zoning low density res/comm zones, does the road retain a low density sidewalk. After summing 2 + 2 as 5, I figured this might be something to do with Exemplar properties. Belonging to network pieces. But in reality I don't know an awful lot about all the funny writing I see in the reader.

Sorry to regurgitate an old thread but it's probably better than starting a new one. Does anyone know anything more about this now than before? Is it possible to change the sidewalk texture that automatically appears next a building? I'm not talking about using different textures such as in the street side mods, what I mean is can a building be forced to generate low density or mid/high density textures in the adjacent roads. Maybe this is possible using the reader? EDIT: Thought it was worth mentioning that changing the Wealth property only changes the colour of the sidewalk (slightly more pink for high wealth).

If you follow Blue Lightning's linkie to the extremely useful RCI mod, you'll find an enclosed HTML file with a little more information about Demand Caps and how to increase them.

Open Paved Area - random textures Hi all, I'm pretty much a newbie with the Lot Editor. I want to make a series of Plaza lots that are all based on one of the textures in the Open Paved Area. So, questions: 1. In the Lot Editor, the standard Maxis Open Paved Area has a single texture with the ID 0x258e3000, the generic plaza texture. However when you place the lot in the game, one of 5 random textures appear. How is this made possible? 2. Can the 5 random textures from Q1 be extracted somehow? Is the answer somewhere in the simcity dat files? 3. If so, is there a simple way to determine which entries in the dat files correspond to the textures in the Lot, to avoid searching through a ton of dat entries? Sorry for all the questions, but I couldn't find the answers in any of the tutorials EDIT: Ok, I figured most of it out. The texture is stored with the same instance ID as the Texture ID in the Lot Editor - just had to trawl through each Simcity dat file to find it. The texture itself is an FSH file, with 4 different textures inside - presumably the game chooses which one to display as it is placed.

I have the same problem. Does the difficulty level of the game at all affect how desirable your city is to higher wealth sims? Also, is there a way the desirability data view can be tweaked somehow? It seems to be very sensitive to even the slightest change in desirability. Right now 30% of my large city tile is apparently 100% green for R$$$... and I only have a population of 16,000 with about 30% of the map developed...

All, I have (had) a wonderful low wealth slum with rows and rows of SimGoober's scuttlebutt and sardina row housing, feeding into my dirty industry estate and seaport. Unfortunately on the other side of my large city tile, I built a city college to help increase the EQ of my high wealth sims, and this seemed to be enough incentive for R$$ and R$$$ to move in to the slums (as the college radius covers the whole map). My question is, how do you all prevent this from happening? They seem to have all but overtaken the slum and now I have a massive demand for R$ and negative demand for R$$ and R$$$, which has dilapidated my R$$$ development by the college. In a nutshell, how do you prevent R$$ and R$$$ from overtaking everywhere?

Actually the one warrior showed was exactly what I had in mind. Great, can't wait for the next update! EDIT but thanks for pointing me towards the RHW too haljackey... something I never looked at before. Possibly as great an addition as the NAM itself...!

Thanks guys, seems a lot of people know how irritating Vista is :rolls eyes: Meanwhile, I ended installing XP on my laptop so now I can dual boot between the two... it was so worth the hassle!

Hi all, The NAM is fantastic - no doubt about that. But I feel it's missing something. Does anyone know if it's possible, has been tried and failed, or exists even, a highway on/off ramp that looks something like the picture attached (sorry about the horrible paint art, I'm using a laptop mousepad!) To give a written description, a highway ramp that merges into a single road tile at the end, pointing in the same direction. Now before you say it, I know there are existing ramps that meet a T-intersection (commonly used on sunken highways) and ramps that meet a perpendicular piece of road (commonly used for over/underpass roads), but I'm thinking is something like highway ramp, with a join at the end, and possibly one piece of road. It's fairly common around the motorways of the UK, where an off ramp might meander for some distance before meeting the tributary road it leads to. Also, I think it would be nice to have the flexibility where desired to have the off ramp last a lot longer. Just wanted to know if this is possible. I've been missing it in my cities, and I've seen some other people miss it in their CJ's too, where an elevated highway has a parallel off ramp with an ugly extra piece of road leading to nowhere.

Hi everyone, I'm not totally sure if this is the right forum for this post so apologies in advance if that's the case. I'm having a problem trying to view and edit FSH files. I've tried using DatGen and the FiSHMan and both programs throw the same exception when I try to view an image. Exception is as follows: Parameter not valid. at System.Drawing.Image._SetColorPalette(ColorPalette palette) at System.Drawing.Image.set_Palette(ColorPalette value) at FSHLib.FSHImage.Load(Stream s) at FiSHMan.frmFSH.OpenFile(String path) Specs as follows: Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1), 32-bit 3 GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 @ 2.00GHz, 2.00 GHz DirectX 9.0c (for the benefit of the SC4Terraformer)