GrampaAl

Ooops! Me Bad! Since it won't let you do the SaveAs, just do the save. This will put your modified lot into the MyDocs/SimCity4/Plugins root folder. From here you will need to change the IID of the lot you just saved so it does not over ride the original in game lot. So you were right in the first place about making a new IID. Can I assume you know how to make a new IID that won't conflict. If not,here is a simple method which works. Take the little grassy park, open it in the LE, and do a SaveAs with that. It will allow this. Now in the Plugins folder as above, find that park and write down the IID. Now DELETE that park lot, and use THAT IID for your farm lot. To change the IID of the exemplar for your 1x1 lot, just select the exemplar and then click on the FileInfo button. Then in the resulting dialog, click on edit. Now in the Instance box at the bottom of the dialog, type in 0xNNNNNNNN using of course the 8 digits you wrote down to replace the N letters above. Now click on OK, close the dialog box, and click on Save on the toolbar to save the changes. Now follow the previous steps and place that IID you just used in your growable lot in the Field Lots property. This acts as a pointer to that little lot you made. At this point, go and grow your farm again in your test city. (You can just grow another one if you wish to see the difference). Good luck

Congratulations! You have gotten your first farm to grow. I am also happy for you. When I first did that, it was not with such specific instructions, it was sort of an accident. I wasn't trying to make one grow, it just happened. Well, let me tell you I looked at the one that grew for a LONG LONG time to try to figure out what the difference was between that one and any other that didn't grow. Back then it was quite difficult. I'm glad to say it is so much easier today. ------------------------ Now the next step. What you want to do is: Using the LE, open one of the EXISTING FARM FIELDS, then modify it to your own desire. Then SaveAs. Now don't change one thing on that little 1x1 lot, but write down the IID that the LE creates for you. Now place THAT IID into the Field Lots property of the Building exemplar or your lot, and use ONLY that single IID. Don't put any others in there or you can have MULTIPLE field lots that appear with each farm. Happy lot building! You may be destined to be one of the great lot builders here on ST.

What did you do now? The Lot Exemplar above as your first one was correct, but this one below is messed up. Notice the three lines Zone Types, Wealth Types and Purpose types. These should NOT all be zeros. This will not grow as it is shown. The zone type for Argricultural (as shown in the first picture you showed) is 7. The Wealth Type for Agricultural low wealth or 1. And lastly the purpose type for Agrucultural is 5. So where you have three zeros in a row (how did THAT happen) should be 7,1,5 in that order. Change this with the reader by double clicking on the line you want to change and typing in the correct number then clicking of the Apply button at the bottom. Kind of curious here, up above you already had the correct information in the Lot exemplar, and now below you have it wrong, what happened in between to our exemplar? ----------------- No need to worry about the Building family here, in fact if you wish you can delete that line altogether. Second, the presence of industry and other things is not likely the problem but it IS recommended that you use a BRAND NEW city, with nothing else in it for testing. By doing this, you are not messing up some nice useful city when things don't go right. Again, just to repeat previous instructions: When making your brand new city: 1. Draw a piece of road at least 10 tiles lont. 2. Zone a Argicultural zone at least 10x10 or larger. 3. Zone 3 or 4 lots of residential 2 or 3 deep. 4. Place a windmill next to the zoned area for power. Now run this test city. You SHOULD see your farm grow first. Then shortly after you SHOULD see a couple of houses grow. Once you farm appears, there are jobs available which triggers the houses. After you see your farm grow, you have reached the stage I thought you were at yesterday.

Well, good you have arrived here at the ST Exchange forums. From here I can help you better. You now have made and saved the lot right? I see the lot exemplar, in your post. And you saved as a stage 1 right? I do NOT recommend you make this a stage 3, at least not yet. You need to test this next, so leave it at stage 1. Very good. Now the barn itself is going to be the main building here, it is the building which will have the scaffolding around it when it grows. At this point, I would make a brand new city, draw a road, zone a 10x10 farm or larger. Give it a windmill for power, and also zone about 3 residential lots perhaps 2 or 3 deep. Once you have this city, save it, and exit the game. I always just use a name such as Farm Tester for the city. This can be any size, since it is brand new. I use medium tiles only, but you can use small or large also. Also, if you don't have it yet, you should go to the mods area and download my Prevent_I-r_Lots.dat mod. Place this mod in the Plugins folder, and also MOVE any other custom growable lots you have in either plugin folder out to some temporary location. KEEP THIS LOT in your plugins folder. It should be the ONLY farm lot in there. Now, go back into SC4 and open that city you saved, and start it running. You should be surprised to see your farm growing! Presto! Good luck. It should be working. Also note that the name you gave it, Sues-Sunflowers should appear in the query as the lot name. Also it should appear in the hover query as well. You need to place the hover query tool over the barn of course. Any other problems or questions, just post them here. I will try to guide you along. Oh! BTW! When you are satisfied with your growing lot, just post a small screen shot of it grown right here. Not to brag about it, but to show that you have gotten to the next step. Once you have the lot grown, save the city once again. You will use this test city in the future for further testing. Now remember, you need to move the Prevent_I-r_Lots.dat mod out of the plugins, and move the other custom growables you may have back in. You can now go on to whatever is next.

Date: 10/8/2004 6:59:49 PM Author: Fairlane500 I am not seeing parts on some of the airport lots, for example, the terminal connection piece is just the base landscape. What could be causing this?quote> Sounds like you are missing a prop or a texture. I don't know which airport lot you are talking, but I don't have most of them anyway. First I would suggest you read any readme file that came with the lot to see if it tells you what props and/or textures you may need. If there is no readme file, then you can send a PM to the author of the lot, and they can likely help you find the missing item.

OK, I see two questions here. One about props and another about computers. First, In order to see the nightlighting you need the very latest PATCH file from Maxis. Don't know if this is on the BAT page or another page, but look for SimCity4 Patch SC4Update4BAT.exe dated 2/5/2004. Second for just about any lots released after the BAT was released, you will find more and more CUSTOM props, which are available. For ALL BSC lots, you will definately need EVERY PROP released by almost everyone. We make very extensive use of not only custom props but custom buildings, and custom textures as well. So I recommend downloading EVERY ITEM YOU SEE ON THE PROPS OR TEXTURES tab on ST. Some may not be used much, but many or most are. You have plenty of hard drive space, so I see no problem there. And lastly, I do still see one rather serious problem with your brand new computer. You may think that 512 Megs of RAM is plenty, but IT IS NOT! If you are to use the custom props and custom lots, I heartly recommend a MINIMUM OF 1 GIG of RAM. Keep in mind that every single building, prop, texture, or mod, that you have in the plugins paths of SimCity4, will need to be loaded into RAM! We can't just have it load when needed. It loads during the loading process of the game. The more you have the more time it takes and the more RAM it takes as well. The larger buildings with literally millions of polygons are going to take a couple of megs of RAM all by themselves, so if you load a whole bunch of SkyScrapers or ANY large building with lots of details, the more RAM you are going to need, whether they grow in your city or not. Smaller props like boxes or flowers or such small things and also textures take very little memory, but they still take some. So trot right away to your favorite Dell support center and get that RAM upgraded to 1 gig or more. All games will want more RAM as well. Now as for the rest of the fancy stuff, Graphics card, DVD, Soound, and so on, who cares. Almost anything will work here. Even a low end cheapy graphics card is good enough since it the RAM that is used for just about everything! Good luck

Greyviels answer to the Rising Sun is correct. However, in some cases there will be no way at all to remove the offending lot of the debris created. It that happens, I suggest you simply zone your trash dump around it and treat the whole area as a dump. Second question. Organizing your files. Pesonally I prefer to have anything that should only be used once placed into the Main Program files plugins path. In a subfolder preferably since they can help you if you need to do troubleshooting by removing folders. So this applies to .sc4model files as well as .sc4desc files as well. Only .sc4lot files should always be placed into the MyDocs/plugins path, and they should also be in subfolders for the same reason. The only exception to this rule, is if you are a BAT creator or a LOT maker, or wish to work on something with the PIM. In that case you need to think of your MyDocs/SimCity4/plugin folder itself as your working directory and you MUST have your working files in this folder itself, NOT in any subfolders. Everything else should NOT be in this folder during this work session. For BATTERS, you may find it better to have absolutely everything removed from BOTH folders during the BAT rendering process. Hope you find this useful.

Date: 9/17/2004 10:47:00 PM Author: red_dragon_2 When i build on of my downloads, i get a simcity4.com box instead of a building, or no building at all what do i do?quote> The brown box package indicates you do have a reference to a model, but you don't have the model. So, first make sure you have extracted everything and put it the proper folder. If that is not the problem, then next, you should read the readme (if there is one) and make sure you have all the correct dependant files. It that doesn't help then you should PM the author and let them know that they have forgotten the model.

For the farms, the Sims will drive in as far as you provide tiles for them to drive on, then they turn around and leave. Be warned, this action tho pretty also slows down those Sims if they are going elsewhere. Not all of Barby's lots are transit enabled. The transit enabling will not affect the leaving of Freight trucks, but I should not that Freight trucks will NOT leave from Plopped lots. Only growables will have the freight trucks leaving. I'm not sure about the Sims arriving at the transit enabled entrances, I think they will, but don't remember anymore since I only do growables now.

Well, I can't speak for DatGen, since it is a wizard like interface, and I think it tries to determine what you are wanting to do and possibly fills in or deletes some things that it thinks you want or don't need. So, I don't have any advice for that one. Now, I am not sure I understand what you are trying to do here. I would recommend that 1x1 farm lots be used ONLY as field lots that will grow AROUND the main farm. Those don't want or need to be transit enabled at all. So far the smallest real farm in the game is the pumpkin acres lot which is 1x2. Also for transit enabling of a lot, if you only want to see the automata (which is what BLS GA and CSX do in general), you only have to use the LE and the reader, to change that overlay texture you place for the roadway, to the values given in the tutorial. It would seem that you have done that part. You will NOT see transit arrows, because you don't really want to make it into a bus stop or something do you? In otherwords, having it show the Sims arriving and the freight trucks departing should be good enough. It would seem rather strange indeed to have a farm have a bus stop function wouldn't it. If however, you ARE trying to make a bus stop, then you will need to ADD to the farm lot, the transit switch point property, as well as the transit capacity (or catalog capacity) I don't remember which, as well as a few other budget items. (A bus stop has maintenance costs, and possibly also generates transportion revenue via ticket sales?) Not sure on that one. So if you are actually going for a 1x1 bus stop, I would recommend starting with the bus stop lot in the first place and simply covering over the bus stop building with your farm house or barn prop. (It will need to be a rather small farm house or barn, since the lot is only 1x1. Either that or you have the bus stop on the dirt road. Hope I have helped.

Doing the tranist enabling using the LE and the original tutorial, will NOT have any impact on the menu at all. So, sorry to say, you must have done something wrong, assuming that the lot was on a menu in the first place. The transit enabling area is primarily in the Lot exemplar, where all of the menu properties are in the Building exemplar.