Guinnessmonkey

Date: 5/28/2005 3:08:42 AM Author: Daeley hmm... might be getting closer... gwyned do you also have Simcity 4 Deluxe? If so, we have a pattern here quote> Just in case you care, I am runnin' SC4Deluxe with little to no issues (now). Though I have noticed one difference from the way my file works and yours. Yours put the dialogue permanently in the news, so I could check on regional population at will. Now that seems to go away. If I pick regional population I get that ONCE, having to exit and reload to get it again. Also, if I pick population I can't get farm data without leaving and reentering as well. Annoying. I'm sure I screwed something up accidentally. I once thought of myself as fairly LUA literate, but the more I work with them the more I realize that I don't know diddly.

Date: 5/27/2005 1:41:02 AM Author: pauld I reinstalled SC Deluxe again and chose not to save my cities this time (have a backup on CD) when uninstalling. I'm now back to original game. The only plugins I have installed are the: bsc_Essentials_OG.dat BSC_RegionalCounter.dat. No Joy so far. Have checked for the two files you suggested, BSCfields and popfile.dat in the apps folder and neither one of them exists. Also checked my backup disc of SC Drogram FilesMaxisSimCity 4 DeluxeApps and the two files aren't there either. Looks as though I've never had them which probably explains why I've had no success. Are these two files written/installed in apps folder by your regional tracker mod or some other bat/lot/mod? One last question, LUA? I did mention earlier that my knowledge lies somewhere between zero and nil...lol Kind regards quote> A: Yhea. The two files are indeed written/installed into the apps folder by the tracker (AFAIK). B: LUA files are the files (within the dat files) that contain actual conditional code (i.e. they determine what the requirements for a reward are, what the text of popups are, etc). I'm sympathetic to your confusion, as only a few weeks ago I was tryin' to figure all this stuff out on my own. It's a testament to how lame I am (i.e. how much time I was able to spend on SC4) and how helpful the folks on this forum were that I'm already modding nearly every lot I download. I've got a setup where commercial office buildings show up much later than services, where residentials have realistic populations (3-8 people per house), where all lots have neutral names (no BSC House, just Modern House or whatever), where all rewards have been tweaked to appear at variable and realistic times, and where most maxis lots have names chosen by me (#city# Police Department (Small Station) instead of Small Police Station), and all that after only a few weeks gettin' into the groove. Man, is this game worse than crack.

Date: 5/26/2005 5:47:19 PM Author: Daeley I've been experiencing some wierdness as well lately... one time the mod didn't show up at all... I restart the game and suddenly I do get the popups... I don't really know what's happening, but my guess is it's probably somewhere something in the internals of the game we don't know much about... I will look into ways of making the mod more robust... I'm sure there's an additional way or two I can force a popup to appear I'm still a bit amazed we didn't find these bugs earlier just shows software development is a tricky business quote> I'm not surprised. As a longtime betatester for a gaming company, I got used to bugs that creep up long after you thought you were bug free long ago. Nothin' like being a couple days from gold and then realizing you have a CTD bug that noone managed to find before.... Either way, speakin' of CTD's, I just did so (the old NAM + TE lots bug/feature). So I'll be sure to load up one of those already-tracked cities to see if I get the popup this time.

Date: 5/26/2005 3:48:01 PM Author: Daeley the uploaded file is basically the same as guinessmonkey posted... I'm guessing the problem must be somewhere else... as long as you have th BSC_essentials_OG.dat file I don't see where it could be though... can you check your program files simcity folder (the one with the simcity4.exe file) and look for a folder called Apps. Please tell me if there are two files called 'BSCfields.dat' and 'popfile.dat'. These files should be automatically created but they are required for the mod to function properly. Perhaps if they're not there you have some sort of write-protection mecanism that disables LUA from writing there... quote> Yhea. That could be it. Beyond that I can only assume its something wierd, like some custom mod that has the same instance as your LUA or something (though I wouldn't bet on it). Oh, and I really wish I had been more careful while I was bughunting. I accidentally deleted my popfile.dat. Before only two cities weren't showin'. Now I have to reload all of 'em. Oh, well. This, in turn, wouldn't be a huge problem if it wasn't for the fact that my region is HUGE, as well as that I'm a perfectionist. Whenever I load up a city just to track it, I always notice a couple things to fix while it loads. Next thing I know, I've spent half the day tweaking a small rural community. Edit: And I'm assuming this is either my imagination or else a mistake I made which you won't repeat, but I am having some problems with my version of the file. It tracks every city correctly, but the news item that allows you to check on it again seems to be missing. Similarly, I just loaded up a city that is already being tracked and I got no welcome back message. Wierd.

Date: 5/26/2005 1:59:34 PM Author: Daeley but a fixed version will be uploaded in a few minutes quote> Actually, as far as I know, a fixed version is uploaded already. *looks up to my last post* Been workin' like a dream all day long.

Yup. Works now. Thanks. Here's my edited file.... I suppose we're tag teaming, as now it's my turn for bed.

Hmm... I've been having problems with this the XRAX homes. I'm just about positive I have every required prop, yet some of the lawn textures are missing. It doesn't always show up as missing, which is even more annoying: Any ideas?

So... Should I edit the tracking text, too? I'll try just the link fix, first.

(figured it would be best to move this stuff to a seperate post, just in case you were already notified of the post, but ignored it, as it was just a thanks post) Either way: Still not workin'. The apostrophe's in the crop tracking LTEXT wouldn't do it, would it? Or maybe there's still somewhere where the cityname isn't suitably segregated from anywhere where the game can consider it code.... *shrug* Reckon' I'll experiment a bit, unless you have an idea already. And, in case you're wondering, I tested it by removing the mod totally, saving my city, exiting, reinstalling with the fixed mod, and loading the city up again. Same result, where I click on a selection and it just closes the menu.... Oh, and feel free to PM me if you'd rather bughunt somewhere where it doesn't clog up your nice, pretty thread.

Excellent! Thanks for the quick fix! Edit: And there's only so many places the bug can be, so my bet is that it was in the selection ltext.

Date: 5/25/2005 7:12:28 AM Author: Daeley edit: yup, found where it comes from... not in the LUA btw... quote> Where is it, then? Anything I can quickly edit for myself? *is curious where it is, if it isn't in the LUA*

Been bughuntin' a bit more with the regional tracker... I've got a few cities in my preexisting region which simply refuse to track. They seem to be the larger ones, though this doesn't seem to be a rule. Either way, the popup comes, but no matter what is clicked on the popup (in those cities) just closes, and the city's tracking information is not entered. To experiment, I deleted all the tracking .dats from my Apps folder and uninstalled/reinstalled the tracker. Loading up these cities I got the same situation again. Opening up the newly created popfile.dat the game created, I saw only: $beginfile $nextregion $endfile I even tried manually entering the cities into my popfile.dat. I copyied/renamed another entry in popfile.dat, hoping that upon loading the game would be smart enough to simply take the entry for that city and update it with the new stats. Nope. Same problem. Any idea what I might have done to bug it up like this (assuming its something I did)? Has anyone else had any trouble having it track preexisting cities of any size (these large cities aren't really that big. None are bigger than 25,000ish...)? Either way, since right now its only tracking my rural small towns and ignoring my cities, the regional tracker is nearly useless... The majority of my regional population isn't being tracked.... Edit: Eureka! I think I found the bug! I was experimenting, tryin' to figure out if the city file was somehow bugged. I tried backin' it up, deleting it, and starting a new city with the same name (so I could replace it with the old city more easily). No dice. Then I realized something. Both the cities which were always bugged had apostrophe's in their name: Miller's Crossing and Devil's Island. I tried creating a new city with the name of Devils Island. It worked. I'm now gonna take a look at the LUA to see what's invalidating citynames with apostrophes. Edit2: I tried the simple route (autoreplacing all apostrophe's in the LUA with quotation marks, but it didn't work. I'll take a fresh look in the morning.)

Man. After lookin' through the residentials I have in my plugins right now I realize just how much a standardized list really is needed. I have some medium wealth buildings worth $800 or $900, whereas there are some high wealth buildings worth just $200. Nor is there any correlation between how nice a house is and its listed value. Some dumpy lookin' houses are valued at 5x the value of particularly nice ones within the same wealth category. Now it's kinda obvious to me why some spring up like weeds and others are quite rare (yhea, I know... Old news to those who have been modding simcity for a while )

Date: 11/2/2003 2:48:51 AM Author: Karybdis KeyCFG hotkey format complete. To quote maxis here's the spec with descriptions = [[[] ] ] [] example: Control M = 0xec3e82f8 0x8bd88057 'Build Passenger Ferry Terminal' KeyCombination is any combination of the keys that you want to activate this function MsgID is the coded ID in the games exe that activates this command. Kinda wierd that they would call this a message ID, but oh well. Perhaps it calls an ingame message code. data1,2,3 are specific data IDs (which are usually exemplars) that are used in conjunction with this action. The above example has the data1 as the exemplar for the ferries. Description is a simple description of the function of the key combination ---------- These can be used in pretty much any way you want. Adding a new key combo is reliant on knowing the MsgID for it as far as I know.quote> Strange that my searching didn't find this page before... Anyway, that info is very useful. Thing is, does anyone know a good way to find out what the various MSGID's are? I'm tryin' to find a way to create a hotkey for labels and signs (would make labeling roads less of a chore)... I can't find anyone posting a way to reference the label tool...

Date: 5/17/2005 4:49:08 PM Author: Daeley Date: 5/17/2005 2:11:12 PM Author: Guinnessmonkey 'Why leave something as vanilla when you can tweak it?' quote> I can answer that one right away... If I would've had infinite spare time to spend on SC4, I would've done a lot more mods already quote> Lol The way your message showed up in my email box, your sig kinda flowed into the message. The see all those BSC rewards on STEX? yup... I made that happen, so you can give me suggestions on how to do better if you don't like it made it seem as if you were actually getting pissy and defensive. Then I realized my mistake. (has been up for a long, long time at this point... Bloody grad finals...) And yhea, I know what you mean... I remember playin' SC4 when it was new and liking it, but not loving it. It was SOOOO slow on my old computer, buggy as hell, and there was no lot editor. So many SC3/2 features were gone... And the patch was taking forever it seemed. So I wandered away from it. Picked up Rush Hour a while back, but hadn't even bothered to load it up, as my old hard drive was just packed. Finally got a new hard drive (40GB-->140GB... So much room... ), reloaded games I had uninstalled for the space, and figured I'd give SC4 a try, now that all those custom lots are out and that expansion pack and such. Next thing I know, it's a few weeks later. This game is worse than crack. Not only is the game itself essentially based around aethetic perfectionism to its full, anal extent, but the lot editors allow me to tweak to my hearts content. It's funny... The older I get, the more time I spend tweakin' instead of just playing. In my old age its almost as if tryin' to figure out LUA files is more fun than the game itself. (BTW, what I learned about LUA files is that they LOOK understandable, but really I should just use your templates and move along. )

Great stuff! Now I won't have to open up simcity_1.dat just to check out a couple of standard building stats while I'm tweaking. I reckon' we should eventually cobble together a rule of thumb guideline... i.e.: two story one family residential homes average stats:

Hell, now that I think about it, it might be neat eventually (once we get a good LUA template for rewards that read regional tracker info) so that folks who want a ton of realism can get a mod which restricts most of the Maxis landmarks to one per region (essentially a LUA that returns it as false if the regional count for that rewards is greater than zero... Hell, I reckon some landmarks could be more flexible than others... Some you could be limited to 3 per region or whatever. ). You'd actually have to think and strategize: Do I want the Empire State Building in this city, or would it be better somewhere else? It could make landmarks into, well, landmarks, totally unique buildings that make your sims oooh and ah. Edit: my modding philosophy is Why leave something as vanilla when you can tweak it?

Date: 5/17/2005 6:41:51 AM Author: Shadow_Assassin Hmm, I have all three mayor mode tree mods (Jeroni's, Andrea's, and Cycledogg's), and I've never had any problem with them.quote> Then... Maybe not. Ignore me, as I've got nothin'.

Date: 5/17/2005 3:22:27 AM Author: calm_blue_sea I forgot to mention that all the trees show up in the major menu and I have no problems plopping them. However, the entire set of trees is duplicated 9 times in the menu! I have the same problem now with a set of mayor trees I installed earlier. Perhaps there is a conflict between the two?quote> Indeed. I can only imagine that a mod that changes the mayor trees would run into conflict with a seperate mod that changes the mayor trees... IIRC we were supposed to delete every mayor/god tree mod if we wanted to use the full gamut of Cycledog trees.

*hugs his new regional tracking mod, dreaming of all the stuff we can eventually squeeze out of it....* *Thinks about regional rewards that can only exist once in a region. Hugs it again* Either way, I've got a TOUCH of wierdness. It's worked fine for most of my prexisting cities (and I noticed that it's clever enough to track cities with 0 population (one where I just drug rail through), but not list them in the list of tracked cities, meaning that it doesn't get cluttered with cities that don't really exist. Thing is, I did have ONE preexisting city where the UI to track it came up, I selected show farm report, and it just closed the menu. Either I accidentally hit close (I don't think so), or else it was some strange script bug... Either way, even when I reload the city it won't let me track it. Is there any way to manually force it to track? Or is the best solution just to reinstall and open/track/save all my cities again? And Question #2... This is probably the best thread for it... Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had ever made a mod so that all the Maxis rewards get your wonderful query that lists all the requirements, let alone the actual reward effect (which might be nice for Maxis landmarks, too). If not, someone should. Who knows... Maybe after grad finals are wrapped up I might take a crack at it. I've been experimenting and trying to learn LUA coding, though eventually it was just a matter of stickin' by your format and just changing the constants and texts... It seems anything interesting I tried tended to just not work. Either way, I did manage to convert a bunch of STEX rewards that previously had no requirements (such as the Hockey Venue, the Pier Mall, some of the BSC churches and cathedrals) into real rewards, though they're not truly ready for prime time yet (that and I'd have to talk to all the developers, first).