RedImperator

Originally posted by: Andreas Roth You can restrict any lot to a specific zone density by setting the "LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes" property in the lot exemplar file to a specific value. Those values are 0x01/0x02/0x03 for low/medium/high density residential zones, 0x04/0x05/0x06 for commercial and 0x07/0x08/0x09 for industrial zones. But I guess that this is as much work as any of the other approaches.quote> Well, I grow rowhouses on alternating strips of medium and high density. So if I restrict the midrises to high density, that's only half the rowhouses in danger of being overgrown, or several hundred little tickboxes I don't have to click. Since I have to make a building blocker for all the midrises anyway, I'll just fix the density while I'm in Reader. Not elegant, as you say, but 6 years of SC4 should have me used to kludging my way around anyway.

Originally posted by: mrbill67401 Sorry for the two month bump, but I just wanted to thank RedImperator for his great instructions regarding this topic. All day long I've been struggling with the iLive Reader trying to make sense of it all. I finally stumbled across this thread, and voila, I found the answers to my questions. Thank goodness for the screen shots as they were extremely helpful in figuring out what I needed to do to reduce the number of jobs that a few of my downloaded Industrial buildings had in them. Kudos to you RedImperator, and kudos to LE0 as well for asking the questions in the first place!quote> I'm glad you found it useful. I had been meaning to write something like it for a while, and LE0's question gave me the opportunity. I'm planning another one on building blockers pretty soon.

Originally posted by: Andreas Roth Unfortunately, there is no elegant solution. What you could do is using a blocker for all unwanted buildings (say, Houston and Euro buildings in your case), and relocate some of the rowhouses to these two tilesets. You could switch to Houston in order to get the desired midrises, and back with the NY or Chicago tileset, you could continue developing smaller rowhouses. In any case, using the "Make historical" feature a lot is the only way to achive somewhat consistent neighborhoods.quote> I was afraid of that. Is it possible to mod the midrises so they'll only grow on high density lots? That would mean I'd only have to make half the rowhouses historical.

Recently I started a new city with a mind to make it less relentlessly gridded than my previous attempts. Unfortunately, there's a limited selection of even diagonal buildings, never mind fractional-angle roads or curves, and since there's only so many diagonal "parkways" you can build and I hate the look of staggered buildings, I was stuck with an orthogonal road layout. The solution? Let the game draw the roads for you. What you end up with is a mishmash of grids that don't quite meet up, odd-sized blocks at transition points, two roads running parallel which don't connect to each other, and lots of other weirdness. I also laid out a bunch of farms in more or less random sizes and shapes, and then as I expanded the city over them, I preserved the old property boundaries, creating more roads that break the grid. On top of all of this, I laid a grid of 12x4 blocks. The result looks surprisingly good and presents some interesting transportation challenges (such as a city of 45,000 which has only one north-south arterial road that runs the entire length of the city, and no contiguous east-west route).

I know this is dead-simple, but have you created large enough zones for the Stage 8s? I've never gotten them to grow without holding down CTRL and zoning a solid 4x4 zone.

I'd take small, manageable steps towards greater economic and diplomatic cooperation over the course of fifty years, gradually eliminate barriers to the movement of goods and people throughout the continent, establish a continent-wide set of health, safety, and labeling standards, slowly admit other European countries as they reach a predetermined level of economic and social development, and finally establish a common currency that can perhaps one day replace the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. Oh wait.

Originally posted by: MariusBleekCities were run down after WW2???? WHAT??? Post WW2 was an urban boom period for many cities. Large scale construction projects were undertaken after the war, but they werent necessarily investing in the proper infrastructure. Come on now.quote> Why do you think they were investing in huge urban renewal projects in the 50s in the first place? You had cities full of block after block of buildings that saw little or no maintenence between 1929 and 1945. You had virtually no new buildings built in that same time period. The entire housing stock of all the big East Coast and Rust Belt cities was at least fifteen years old (and much of it far older; Manhattan's housing stock was turn of the century or earlier; Philadelphia and Boston had eighteenth century houses in use as tenaments). I don't mean that the cities were run down in the sense that, say, Cleveland is today--they were all functioning, vibrant economic centers. I mean they were physically run down--the housing stock was old, ill-kept, and inadequate. I didnt really want to bring race into the topic, but i suppose ur right since everything in the U.S. seems to feed off racial strife. quote> Race is inextricably linked to the postwar suburban boom, from white flight to redlining to the Projects. It's not possibly to honestly discuss the history of suburbia without addressing it. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but I've always felt that if history doesn't make you uncomfortable, you're doing it wrong.

Originally posted by: MariusBleek U have to remember why people started leaving city centres in the first place; a lack of well paying jobs. U look at manufacturing cities like Cincinatti, Detroit, Philly etc. Many businesses moved away in the 50s and 60s especially because property prices became too high to locate ur company there without paying taxes that were through the roof.quote> Except that's not what happened. People moved out of the cities because 1) after the Depression and the Second World War, the cities were run down from 15 years of deferred maintenence, 2) the Federal government massively subsidized suburban development with subsidized mortgage loans, mortgage tax writeoffs, and the Interstate Highway system, 3) the Federal government actively discouraged investment in the cities through redlining and other practices, and 4) southern blacks had moved into the cities to take war work, and northern whites wanted no part of them (if anyone cares to contest that, he might want to explain why the suburban developments had restrictive covenants which outright barred blacks from purchasing houses there, even if they met every financial qualification). Businesses stayed in the cities for several decades afterwards, though there was a steady trickle out to the suburbs from the beginning. It wasn't until the 80s that you really saw large-scale suburban industrial and office development, partly because the highways built to bring workers into the cities were so overloaded that workers couldn't get to their own jobs. But far more city jobs were lost to foreign countries, not the suburbs. Every Rust Belt city except New York was absolutely dependent on manufacturing, and we let our manufacturing sector rot. That's where all the jobs went.

Originally posted by: SoltStan I'd say NYC and LA. So much smog, and unorginizedquote> Wait--New York is unorganized? The city with the relentless grid from SoHo to the Harlem River? And more grid in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens? THAT New York? Unless you mean lower Manhattan or the Jersey suburbs, your criticism makes no sense. As for Jersey: yes, New Jersey has been almost totally ruined by unplanned suburban development. North Jersey got the worst of it, but in the Philadelphia area, western Camden county is a crudscape nightmare and until the housing crash stopped them, the developers were in the process of ruining Gloucester and Burlington counties, too. Fortunately, SE Pennsylvania and New Castle County absorbed more of the suburban overspill from Philadelphia, and the Pine Barrens are protected state forest, ensuring SJ will always have wild, undeveloped land. Still, I wonder why Jersey gets so much crap from the rest of the country. It's always either, "HURF HURF, JERSEY SMELLS", based on the refineries and chemical plants along the Turnpike up near Elizabeth, or else, "HURF HURF, JERSEY IS SPRAWLVILLE". Well, yeah, Elizabeth does stink (I used to work in those refineries), but they also provide thousands of well-paying, blue-collar jobs--the kind of job you can't find in a lot of places anymore (I'll bet Michigan would welcome a few refineries with open arms right about now). And yeah, we're a suburban crudscape, but guess what? So is virtually every other part of the country with people in it. I dare you to tell me the difference between a subdivision in Pasadena and a subdivision in Monmouth County. The difference between Jersey and everywhere else is that we're so small and next to such big cities that the crudscape has metastisized from one end of the state to the other.

Pennsylvania Station, New York City: Torn down in 1964 to make room for a toilet-bowl arena and a dreary Modernist slab (like New York doesn't have enough of those). The present train station on the site is a charmless claustrophobic warren that's hopelessly over-capacity. Progress!

So I'm in the process of rebuilding a hopelessly borked city, and one of the things I'm doing is taking more care with the residential layouts, to try to create distinct neighborhoods. One of the things I'd really like to do is create a Chinatown; sadly, however, a search for "Chinatown" on the STEX produces one Chinatown gate (already downloaded), a few modern Chinatown buildings for Asian cities, and some lots labelled "Chinatown" which look very, erm, 2003. So I was wondering if anybody had some more suggestions for American style Chinatown buildings. Just to be specific, my city is modelled on big, dense East Coast metropoli like Philadelphia and New York, where the Chinatowns are generally composed of W2W 19th century walk-ups, constructed in Western styles but often with Eastern architectural flourishes added to the facades later. Even the buildings without those flourishes will have prominent signs in Chinese characters, with signs in English either less conspicuous or entirely absent. I have an idea that the pickings are pretty slim, but I'll take what I can get. I'd also be interested in any prop packs featuring large commercial signs in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese (since modern "Chinatowns" are typically home to many Asian nationalities), as well as other approppriate props, so I could, if necessary mod existing W2W BATs on my own.

niloluiz: I wasn't able to replicate the problem either. The city involved was pretty borked anyway, so I ended up just annihilating the entire thing and starting over, which actually gave me a bit of an opportunity to experiment some more. I settled on the 3x job mod (I altered the mod by removing the industry job multiplier since I already had the industry quadrupler), res. jobs 25%, and no demand lockers. After I restarted the city and restored all my neighbor connections, and with tax rates for all RCI jobs at default, I had astronomical demand for all types of commercial except CS$$$ (and even that was high, over 4000) and maxed out demand for all three residential types (industrial demand was low across the board, but this wasn't surprising because there's a large industrial city next door). So far I've brought back about 30,000 residents, all R$$ (I set taxes for R$ and R$$$ temporarily to 20%), without making a serious impact on R$$ demand. Meanwhile, I've filled CO$$$ demand easily by plopping skyscrapers, and let the simulation naturally meet the other types of commercial demand. CO$$ is down to about 3000, CS$$$ is low and generally staying low, CS$$ is high and, so far as I can tell, I've made not a dent in CS$. I expected the high commercial demand because I'd obliterated nearly a quarter million commercial jobs. Traffic queries show the jobs multiplier is working. I've filled Cx$$$ demand rather easily, but I'm not sure how much of that is the mod and how much of that is the 430,000 or so residents who haven't returned yet. What I'm really curious to see is when I start to satisfy residential demand, especially R$$. The population of the previous iteration of this city was 460,000, a substantial majority of it middle class, when the jobs mod apparently caused a demand crash. I want to see if I can reach similar numbers with the same external conditions (i.e., no changes to neighbor cities and the same number of connections). If I can, then the demand crash was a one-time thing and probably caused by some unique wonkiness in the previous city. EDIT: After looking over your list of potential causes to the problem last time, I can tell you it wasn't taxes (city had fewer than 1 million residents and taxes were at 6, 2, and 6% anyway). I didn't notice any new traffic problems (though I can't rule out the possibility of existing bottlenecks getting worse). I considered overbuilding R$ and R$$ in a pair of neighbor cities as a culprit, but 1) R$$$ crashed too, and 2) R$ and R$$$ maxed out once the jobs mod was removed. I'm inclined to believe the cause was somehow related to the 1.2 million vacant jobs the mod created. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out if the simulator just went kerflooey when faced with a million job vacancies magicked out of nowhere.

For me, 3k feels a bit like a "lost" game. Despite the graphical upgrade, it felt somehow "colder" than SC2k; little touches like the long "love letter" to cities you got when you queried the library in 2k were absent. And this may be petty, but I hated the fact the signs were gone and it constantly irritated me. The gameplay was much more involved (3k deserves credit for introducing concepts such as neighbor deals and business deals, medium density zoning, landmarks, and a host of other things which SC4 would elaborate upon) and I appreciated bigger cities, but I just never loved it the way I did 2k. There could be some nostalgia involved, too: I played 2k in high school, in the prime of my gaming life (along with Civ 2 and Tie Fighter on the PC and Link to the Past and Super Mario World and Final Fantasy games which were actually good on the SNES). By the time I had a computer that could run 3k, I was in college and more concerned with schoolwork and chasing girls. And then of course SC4 came along and just crushed 3k graphically, while building on the complexity just enough for me to feel like I could actually create a realistic-feeling city, especially after the modders got their hands on it.

Oh man, SimTower was great. Stupidly, I was just up at my parents' house and found the disc while looking for something else, and I didn't take it back with me.

Originally posted by: LE0 Sorry, i dont like datpacker, so will that affect anything? yes i have CP's 19th Century homes, i also have simgoobers res pack vol 1 from the LEX quote> No. You don't need to have Datpacker to mod anything, or to open up a .dat that someone else datpacked.

Okay, so suppose some helpful person has created a big set of residential lots and packed them into a single .dat. Well, she's made it a lot easier to keep your Plugins folder clean, and a single dat will generally take up less space and load faster. However, if you're following the tutorial, I told you to find the .SC4Desc file, and there won't be one if the lot has been datpacked. Fortunately, Reader can open .dat files and give you access to all the subfiles within. Here's how you do it. First, you'll need to find a .dat. In this example, we'll be using c.p.'s excellent set of early 19th century houses (available here--you'll need to be registed at SC4Devotion to download). c.p.'s houses actually come as seperate files, but I packed them myself using the Datpacker program, also available on SC4Devotion. OK, so that will bring you to the display screen again. As before, push the big "Fill the list" button and you get... ...a huge mess. Crap. What's happened here is that I combined every file from a big set of buildings. That's all the models, all the lots, and all the exemplars. Worse, there's more than one kind of exemplar. Fortunately, reader gives us some tools to make this situation more managable. For the next step, click the "Analyzer" button on top of the screen. Once the window open, press "Search". You should see this on your screen: All right, that's the contents of the entire .dat. Now, click the Filter button to open this box: This is the filters window. There are actually two different filters here; for now, we're going to ignore the one on the left. On the right hand side, you're going to click the "Uncheck All" button, then click the tickbox next to "Buildings", then click "Refresh". After you close the filters window, you should see this: See? Out of the 4000 or so files in the original .dat, we're down to just thirteen. Now, select all the files in the window, either by control-clicking or dragging the select box. Right click, and this menu comes up: Click "Add to patch". Close the filters window. Back at the main window, up in the row of buttons across the top, is a button called "Patch". Click that, and you'll bring up this screen: Click "Create DAT". Save the .dat as "zzwhatever". Open up that file, and then follow the tutorial above to change the values you want.

How do you mean, got stuck? Did you get stuck because I didn't tell you something you need to know, or did reader get stuck? Just in case it's the former, all you need to do is open the DAT; it should contain all the exemplars you'll need. I'll have some pics up later.

Originally posted by: LE0 So, you know how when you query a house, it has alot (unrealistically too many) of residents. how could i change all the R lots (maxis and custom) for my personal use, so for example a R$ trailer house would have 2-3 people instead of like 10. Also even in my small towns and farm towns, they are not congested, I have Z Medium NAM simulator, and 'Radical', there is FAR too much pedestrian/cars/ frieght trucks, even at night. UDI is nearly impossible and a pain, and its one of my favorite parts of the game. So, how could i make a mod like this for myself and REPLACE the lots, not create additional ones. I think i need LEProp??? quote> I can't help you with UDI, but I've been making my own homebrew mods lately so I have a little experience with the Reader. First, someone has already made a residential halver for all the Maxis buildings: https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=12383 This will save you a ton of time, since there's almost 250 Maxis residential buildings and they all have to be modded individually. Now, to do the same to your custom content. First, you will need ilive's Reader program. If you don't already have it, it's available here. Okay, now open the reader and find the file you want to mod. It helps to have an organized plugins folder for this. Typically, a lot (any kind of lot) will have three files associated with it: an .SC4Model (the 3d model of the building), an SC4Lot (the lot, including references to all the props and base textures), and an .SC4Desc file, which contains the values used by the simulation. That's going to be the one you want. Sometimes, all you'll have is a single .dat file--usually that means the modder packed everything inside a single dat file to save space and load time. The files you want are in there. Let's illustrate with examples. For this exercise, I'm using Bixel's HK Orange House, a 2x2 R$$ apartment tower housing 800 Sims. First, open the reader and find the file: See why I said you should keep your plugins organized? Anyway, select the .SC4Desc file of the building you want. Most creators are pretty good about having their filenames make some kind of sense (the most common format is the RCI and wealth type, followed by the lot size, followed by the name). If not, you're going to have to do some detective work. Anyway, select your file and open it. You'll see this screen: To save loading time, when reader loads a file, it doesn't immediately display the contents. I'm going to show you the simplest way to show them. Note that for big files, like the main SimCity_1.dat file, this isn't the best way, but for most custom content, especially individual lots, it will work just fine. Ready? Here goes: So, erm, yeah, you're going to want to push that button. When you push that button, this is the screen you'll see: Now look at what we have: on the left, a blue bar with two open .dat files (keep blank.dat open; we'll need it later), a middle panel listing all subfiles contained in the open .dat, and, on the right, a long list of terrifyingly incomprehensible argle-bargle. Feel free to panic, if you'd like. Finshed? Good. Because I have good news: all that incomprehensible argle-bargle is none of our concern. I don't even know what that XML file does. It could just be a practical joke, for all I know. What we want is the Exemplar file, just below the XML. Much better. Most of this stuff is still arcane, but at least it looks like it was written for a human to read, instead of a machine. If, you know, people counted in hexidecimal instead of base-ten. At any rate, this is where we want to be. As you can probably guess by the names of the values, this is where all the lot's "internal" properties are set--that is, the properties which determine how it effects the simulator and how the simulator effects it. Now at this point, you have a decision to make. If you just want to mod the file, skip down to the next step, though I strongly recommend either making a backup or keeping a copy of the zip file you downloaded. However, I recommend creating a new .dat. To create a new dat, first right-click on the exemplar, select "copy file", then select blank.dat, right click again, and select "paste file". What you should now see is this: Save the new file as zzwhatever. The "zz" is important. SC4 loads plugins in alphabetical order, and the later plugins always override previous plugins (the exception to this rule is the SimCity_#.dat files, which are always loaded first; thus, if your mod only affects Maxis content, you don't need to bother with the "zz"). Now, you've probably noticed I highlighted the "Capacity Satisfied" property two pictures ago. This is what we're interested in. So go ahead and double click it. You should see this: Oh hooray. It's a list of eight digit numbers. Eight digit numbers with letters in them. I think I'm just going to go play Mario Bros. now or something. Actually, what you're looking at are hexidecimal numbers, which I mentioned above. Without going into a dissertation on hex code, hexidecimal is simply another way of counting--in base 16, to be exact, as opposed to base 10, which are the numbers with which you're familiar. In base sixteen, the first ten digits are the same as base ten--0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, and 9. After that, however, we have A, B, C, D, E, and F, which equal 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, respectively. Then the ones place rolls over to 0 again, and we add a 1 in the tens place--10. Hey, that looks familiar. Except in hexideicmal, the digits 10 represent the number sixteen. 11 is seventeen, 12 is eighteen, 13 is 20, 14 is 21, and so on all the way to 1F, which is 31. Then it rolls over to 20, and so on and so forth. If hex code hurts your brain, you're not alone. You could try to learn it so you can read hex numbers, or you can just use the calculator that came with Windows and convert hex to base ten, and vice versa. Anyway, as you can see, we have four values here. Two of them are the demand ID: that's the type of RCI capacity the building satisfies--number of residents for residential, number of jobs for commercial or industrial. Now, documentation for the Reader program is unfortunately pretty thin on the ground. Fortunately, when you highlight a property, the program will give you some information about it down at the bottom of the screen. Ah ha. So 1010 and 1020 are our demand IDs, and 0262 and 01F8 are the actual number of residents. Plug those numbers into the calculator to turn them into base 10, and we get 610 and 504 (this incidentally does not match the description given by Bixel in the STEX, but it's more than possible I've edited this lot already; I tested several other buildings and the capacity satisfied numbers match the in-game numbers). Now, decide how many people you want living in this building. Let's say, for the sake of example, we cut it in half: 252 R$$ residents, 305 R$ if the building becomes dilapidated. Click on the values, and change them, like this: Then, click the bottom "Apply" button. This is important. If you don't click apply, none of the changes you made will stick. Finally, go to the file menu at the top of the screen and click "Save" to save your mod. This is also important. I don't know if it's a bug in reader or only in my version or only on my computer, but using the Ctrl-S shortcut will not save the updated file on my machine. You have to go through the file menu. Reader will ask if you're sure; say "Yes". And that's it. Every instance of that building in the game should have a smaller population. Now, if you want to mod a bunch of buildings, you don't need to make a new mod file for each one. Just go to your next building, copy the exemplar into the .dat you just made, and edit it. Repeat for every building you want to mod. What you'll have at the end of this process is a single file which changes the number of residents in every custom building in the game. If you download new custom content, just add its exemplars to the mod. I'd suggest making a backup copy of your mod somewhere, just in case you screw something up--otherwise, you'll have to do all this work over again. And that's it. Have fun modding.

All right, I'll do that. I'll start a new city this weekend and see what happens; in the meantime, I'll play with the residential demand mods. I'll let you know if I see anything.

Originally posted by: blakesterville Very very creative! wouldn't a thought of it! it acctually looks quite good, although I wouldn't wanna be there. I dont quite get one thing: Why spend money on education if only R$ sims will move there??? I might try it myself, but I usually just build a utility area arou8nd the corner of my city. -blakesterville.quote> Because the way the simulation works, every commercial and industrial lot (except I-Ag., I-D, and CS$) generates a mix of $, $$, and $$$ jobs. You actually need a pool of low wealth sims to supply workers to every commercial and industrial lot. However, higher wealth jobs still require sims with higher EQs, so you need educated poor sims. The easiest non-sadistic way to achieve a pool of educated low-wealth sims is to make a neighboring city and set the R$$ and R$$$ taxes to maximum. jmusacha has found another way, one which takes care of the region's garbage problem as well.

OK, so last night, I tested it with a developed city, and I got some really counter-intuitive results. Using the 10% res. jobs mod and the 3x jobs multiplier, I was expecting commercial and industrial demand to go down and residential demand to go up. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Despite there being more than a million and a half unfilled jobs in a city of 450,000 (according to the census repository), commercial demand maxed out in four out of five categories, along with I-HT. Meanwhile, residential demand absolutely crashed--bottomed out completely for medium and high wealth, below -5000 for low wealth. It's not my residential caps (they're at 6, 12, and 6, respectively), and it's not commuters from elsewhere in the region taking all the jobs. So I'm stumped. I took out and res. jobs mod and put in the 6x multiplier and got the same result. I took out the job multiplier entirely and put in the res. jobs 25% mod, and my residential demand soared. Without any of the RCI multi mods, my R$ and R$$$ is high, but R$$ is depressed (I figure that's because I recently overbuilt R$$ in several cities). So, any guesses as to what's happening here?