Guinnessmonkey

Indeed, that was what I had in mind... I just didn't wanna go into specifics because I'm similarly clueless on how to do installers.

Date: 6/16/2005 12:44:46 PM Author: Pheonix Rising The only real difference I could find between a user created link and the maxis link was for the start in item. This: CROGRA~1MaxisSIMCIT~1 the Maxis link does 2 things. First, the start in folder in the MAIN SC4 folder, not the apps folder. Second, it uses 8.3 naming not the long files names under winxp which a user created link uses. In addition a user created link also goes directly to the apps folder. Exactly what the problem is i dont think we will ever know.. thats the nature of some bugs sadly. Glad this seems to have fixed the problem for everyone quote> Yhea... That seems to be the only difference I see as well. I reckon' we should probably put a maxis-style shortcut in the installer for the mod... Might solve lots of problems down the line.

Hooray! The bug was fixed! Though how very, very wierd... Looking at the shortcut I use (which COULD be the Maxis one... I can't remember) I don't see anything special on it... Maybe all those who were having problems had something added to their shortcut to remove the intro movie or something.... (I just deleted my intro... Game just skips it and goes on to the menu) I don't use any command line modifications to simcity, nor does my shortcut...

Cycledogg.... Have you given any thought to releasing your marvelous trees as props? I'm sure lots of folks (particularly those who use the trees for their terrain) would find uses for them.

Go Tierusu go! *cracks the whip!* Oh, and there's no way to split up the workload at all, is there? I'd be more than happy to help with such a worthy project. Edit: And Tierusu: It might not be mooing yet, but at least its standing up on four legs.

Yhea... Personally if we can get true diagonal streets, leaving us with a free ANT, I'd prefer to do what Maxis wanted originally: some sort of rural highway. It would be great to have the option to have a higher capacity rural road which didn't have the fresh asphalt look of the inner city roads. Something with big, wide, lanes with a tar-sealed street kinda texture... Something which looks more at home linking dirt roads with the city than regular roads do. Having the rural highway (or whatever you call it) as our extra draggable would mean that the ideal texturing solution for most would be to have the rural dirt roads with some sort of NAM puzzle piece solution for those strets you want to be brick, cobblestone, dirt, tar sealed, whatever. Currently I love the brick streets, for example, but the way they grow due to game limitations (such as a rich neighborhood with one $ house might make the entire street brick except for the corner or the intersection....) is frustrating. Be nice to be able to pick and choose the brick areas, as they don't need dragging nearly as much as the dirt roads. After all, frankly I like the idea of having the ability to let some rich neighborhoods be brick but others just be street textures, cobblestones, whatever. -GM Edit: Doh. That'll teach me to wander away from a post before I'm done... By the time I finished writing Andreas posted and makes it look as if I'm replying to him. Either way: woot! Download!

Date: 6/8/2005 4:39:40 AM Author: vadvaro now that regional tracking is possible, could a real regional money transfer system be in the works? i like the bank, but find it easy to cheat. quote> My bet is no (though who knows what Daeley really has up his sleeve ), as it's one thing to TRACK how much money neighboring cities have (assuming that it is even possible to do that, as I dunno if there's a preexisting way to do that in LUA code (unlike counting examples of specific lot types or counting populations).... If not than even tracking money could be difficult...), but something else entirely to actually ALTER what other cities have through dialogue choices.... The tracker could track how many, say, ports you have in your region, but it couldn't delete ports. Though... I wonder if you COULD set it up so that (particularly after we have a series of buildings which utilize the tracking info) you have a bank building where you could choose to deduct $100,000 from your city. The tracker could be set up to track how many times you do that throughout the region. Later, in another city, you could use the same bank building to deduct $100,000 from the account. In tracker terms one might just delete a count from the file (i.e. if you have put in $100k 5 times the count will be 5. Pull out $100k and the count drops to 4). I guess the trick would just be setting it up so that you can't get the dialogue which allows you to withdraw funds unless the count is greater than or equal to 1.... Daeley knows a lot more (well, obviously ) than I do about how this kinda thing works, so he'll know much better.

Date: 6/1/2005 2:20:14 AM Author: CycleDogg I suppose you already know this, but you can bulldoze a huge rectangular area of trees at a time, by holding down the mouse button and dragging the bulldozer diagonally across the landscape. quote> I would certainly hope that everyone knows that. Either way, my main trouble was just that I had gone overboard with the first trees and then got anal, so I had to go in close and bulldoze trees from nooks and crannies in my cities... That and, like I said, my region is enormous.

If there is, I've never found it.... You can always use the erode all tool (or whatever the blowing wind dude is) if you haven't actually started building on that city yet, but if you have, unfortunately, it's bulldozer time... Hey, at least it's free to bulldoze just trees.... Look on the bright side, you could have it worse, like I did: I have an ENORMOUS region which I had carefully terraformed and planted trees for. I build a bunch of cities, then the first Cycledog tree mod came out. I went in, spent FOREVER killing all the Maxis trees and planting Cycledog trees everywhere... To be honest, I went a little overboard, planting trees wherever the moisture was high enough to allow me to... Then he came out with a better (more varied) tree mod. I eventually resigned myself to my fate: I had to kill all the old Cycledog trees and replant trees over the entire region. Again. Thing is, it was worth it.

Date: 5/27/2005 12:44:11 PM Author: The Evil Octopus Man I think it's supposed to be one of, if not the, biggest building in America in terms of land area. This is looking great Oppie! Can't wait to see this one finished! quote> IIRC it's the largest office building in the world that only leases office space to one corporation (other companies do exist in the pentagon, as there's, a bank (or was it two banks?), food court, etc.... They just don't have office space) Date: 5/26/2005 6:58:12 PM Author: MTLT_17 In the middle of the Pentagon Inner Courtyard there is a Gazebo with a snackbar, If you really want to know. Little insider information. -MTLTquote> Yup. I have to say I was actually dissapointed to see that the BAT doesn't have it in right now, as the gazebo amuses me, as it has a cool story: (possibly apocryphal) During the cold war the Soviets had their version of bunker busting nuclear warheads pointed at the Pentagon, of course. Their intel sattellites could see the roof of the gazebo but not what, exactly it is. Being Soviets used to places of power go in the center architecture, they assumed that the building in the center of the courtyard must be the entrance to the central command center, with an underground elevator to the secret bunker underground. They therefore pointed all their missiles at it in order to achieve maximum penetration into our command center in the even of a nuclear war. They were quite embarrassed after the Cold War when the realized that had millions of dollars in nuclear weapons pointed at a hot-dog stand. It just hadn't occured to them that the US would make the very center of its military headquarters building a little park for employees to relax and eat lunch and whatnot (not exactly the kind of facilities one might expect as a Soviet conscript ). Anyway... Keep it up. As I now live in the district I drive by the sucker every day (and my dad worked in it on 9/11), so I'd love to have it in as a super-reward. Maybe it could even eventually get tied into the regional tracking mod: If you have enough military facilities in your region (Peg naval ports, AF bases, Army bases, Missile silos, etc) you can earn a Pentagon reward, which should create an ENORMOUS boost to any city, as it employs about a jillion people. Though as a quick question: Is the plan to include the subway station and bus terminal that exist as part of the real Pentagon? Also, will the final model include (at least part of) the sprawling parking lot, or pretty much just the building itself?

Date: 5/29/2005 1:40:04 PM Author: pmiller19574 O a note: if you are setting the houses to a lower amount of people to live in it. I have found they tend to pop up pretty easy or least thats the way the hobbit ones work. I have most of them set for 10 people. quote> Doh. Should have rememberd that: I have tweaked all the pops down. 4-6 people per house, IIRC. Maybe that's the difference. I've tweaked all my houses that way... I had figured that it would have the opposite effect, as before it seemed like the houses I forgot to tweak down would pop up more often after I started workin' with population... Either way, I figured you'd like the picture. They look nice when they pop up in a good ratio.

Wow, that's kinda funny, actually. You had trouble getting 'em to grow and I had trouble getting 'em to not grow. When I first downloaded this lot my region was in a peculiar situation which might have led to the problem I had. I had just been forced to erase and start over fresh with a couple cities in my region (they looked funky after a terrain mod was added), so my demand was kinda screwy for a while. Those two cities had contained much of my regional residential population, including a good deal of middle class housing, so deleting them caused residential demand to skyrocket and nearly killed my commercial and farming sector. As I started a few cities of only low-density res to even things out, these houses were everywhere. I quickly raised their stage to 4 (now I get them but only about as often as other large-lot medium wealth homes). To be honest I then bulldozed many of them to even out the city (particularly as I was still missing that texture then and therefore having a ton of those homes was ugly), so there aren't as many examples of them taking over as I would like anymore. I've still got one, IIRC, that shows a hint of what I was talkin' about. I created a couple blocks and let 'em grow right after I downloaded. This was the result: 12 Xrax homes. I also, you might note, have a lot of Victorian spire houses. Those were set to be stage 1 as well... Also since changed. Luckily, I exited this city soon after and forgot to go in later (its an out of the way city in an enormous region), so the evidence still remains.

Date: 5/28/2005 7:28:09 AM Author: Daeley yes, but only the one you selected (if you selected one). You only get the choice dialog once. and 'squares' is quite correctquote> Actually, now that I think on it, it might have only stayed in the news for cities where it didn't work (i.e. the ones with apostrophe's pre-fix). Or maybe it randomly happened once... Who knows. *shrug*

Date: 5/28/2005 5:58:54 PM Author: pmiller19574 Date: 5/28/2005 4:14:23 PM Author: Guinnessmonkey Which one?  I don't see a texture pack listed in the dependencies....quote> JBM Texture pack Volume 3 ver. 2 This is the pack.quote> Thanks very much. Oh, and while searchin' through the file for what I was missing, I noticed that these houses are set to be stage ones. Considering they're quite big, may I suggest you tweak 'em to be stage 4's or at least 3's. Otherwise they can take over a city quite easily.

Which one? I don't see a texture pack listed in the dependencies....

Huh. I must be goin' insane then. I woulda sworn that before it lingered in the news box, so that I could go back and read the stats at will. *shrug* Either way, yhea. A simple building would be nice, perferably something that blends in well (i.e. not another enormous civic building), as it will be in nearly every city pretty much by default. Though, now that I think of it, this would be a perfect feature for a small post office lot. I always thought it would be awesome to have a chain of post office lots: a tiny one for starting out (maybe two squares (what do you call that in SC4? They're not hexes... Is squares the correct nomenclature?) or so... Either way, something that wouldn't look out of place in a small farm town of 400 folks), a medium sized one for larger cities (40,000 plus), and a central post office for really big ones (100,000 plus or so....). Each could be technically a reward, with actual requirements. They could also all hel with residential or commercial caps or something. I reckon' businesses prefer to locate in a city with an efficient postal system. Either way, I'm gettin' a bit off topic...