T Wrecks

This puts it in a nutshell. I agree with this pretty much 100% - currently in theoretical terms. But I know this was what I enjoyed when I was still playing, and what I might enjoy again once (if) I start playing again. In any case, and particularly @Raymond7cn: Thank you - yes, indeed, I'm enjoying that modding and lotting stuff. I guess it's another way of imagining things, working on them, and seeing it come together slowly.

Wait, you can play this game? These days, I mostly play Lot Editor, iLive Reader, LEProp, SC4Tool, Plugin Manager, GoFSH and Excel in relation to SC4... with the goal of playing SC4. Eventually. Soon...ish. Hopefully. Maybe. Who knows?

This one may be possible using the Lot Editor, probably even with Maxis props. There are rocks of various sizes and colours. Pile two small ones on top of one another and try to hide the seam as good as possible, then pile a big one on top - finished. Copy and rotate a few times or use slightly different rocks, distribute these over a tile with grass/dirt texture, and you should have something that looks reasonably close to the real thing. The rocks released by Cycledogg, Pegasus, or nbvc (plus maybe other authors that I'm forgetting right now) might also be useful.

Wow, these are lovely! I totally missed the second post with the diagonals, too. One thing I'd like to mention for the orthogonals: If you want them to be compatible with other US W2W buildings (such as the ones made by NYBT, Jason, nofunk, and a few others), these all use a setback of 1 paver from the front edge of the lot - since the standard base texture has 10 of these pavers and a tile is 16m x 16m, this corresponds to 1.6 m. I don't think this is possible with your current design if you keep those little front yards. So it's a design decision at this point: Lose a bit of realism for better compatibility in game, or live with different setbacks in game and have a fully realistic recreation? There is no right or wrong answer here; it's simply a trade-off, and the decision is a matter of taste and preference. I just wanted to bring this little aspect to your attention. ...and with this being said, I'm looking forward to your next progres shot because I know it will be amazing again.

Well, this image attached to the post with the Census Repository screenshots indicates that, in this particular city, ~8,000 out of a total ~12,000 industrial jobs are high-tech, with dirty and manufacturing industry each addding another ~2,000. Demand for I-D is bottomed out at -6,000 due to 20% tax rate, I-M and I-HT are encouraged by 0% tax, but demand is practically zero. This would indeed suggest that I-HT jobs were driven up artificially (0% tax) to an unnaturally high proportion, with demand only being as high (!) as zero due to the tax cuts. I'm pretty sure if taxes in this situation were reverted to a normal level, I-HT demand would plummet. Let's assume for a minute that this was your first (and only) city in the region. If you now start a neighbouring city, you'd initially inherit that zero demand from the first city (and this is only assuming you'd set I-HT taxes to 0%, too!). Then, your new Sims would come in in that current city. They'd start with a lower EQ and at a younger age (where your EQ isn't that high yet). This would drive I-HT demand in the current city even lower. If the original "inherited" I-HT demand started at zero, it would eventually become positive again as the Sims in your current city become better educated (and older). However, if more of your cities have these artificially high levels of I-HT, chances are you're creating negative demand in many places, which will accumulate and "unload" on any new city. My advice is: play with the game mechanics, not against them. As EQ increases, I-D demand will plummet eventually, and you can bulldoze huge areas of I-D that's no longer used, i.e. the buildings will still be there, but few if any Sims will actually work there (remember the route query!). In the beginning, it's a nice growth booster, though. Exclusions by 20% tax are quite a radical measure already, but at least they can be reverted easily. Tax cuts to 0%, however, will throw your city out of balance gradually, and it can be really hard to recover from that. You are improing nothing by plopping the buildings that won't grow, either. You're just adding to the imbalance this way. Playing the long game and reaching good I-HT levels "organically" usually pays off.

Yeah, that's why I suspect there are external factors. In a region with connected cities, demand is carried over across city borders. Build a huge metropolis with massive positive demand. Then switch to an adjacent (and connected) city tile and don't build anything yet. You'll have huge demand from the neighbouring city even if you didn't do anything in the current, empty city yet. Of course, this also works with negative demand. EDIT: To make it clearer why I'm writing this: I suspect the city in question would actually have intrinsic I-HT demand, but this is canceled out by huge negative demand from the region.

You shoud think so, right? Just like you should think that "Jobs: 533/700" means "700 on offer, 533 taken." It's really not intuitive. My guess is that only local factors specific to the building's environment are considered for the calculation of how much of the building's theoretical capacity (residents or job vacancies) is available under given circumstances. This is something that should be relatively practical and low-effort. By contrast, if every single building also had to evaluate cyclically how demand has changed, wouldn't that put a huge strain on the simulator? I guess it would also change how the game plays... imagine you have a thriving industrial area, almost all job vacancies filled. Now demand slowly dwindles to zero because the population is almost fully employed. With demand reaching zero or falling a little below (let's say a last factory was built that tipped demand over into the negative), wouldn't all buildings in that compound then have to readjust and reduce their job numbers? This, however, would effectively result in demand coming back... and the cycle would probably repeat. It sounds much easier to me if the simulator only needs to consider local conditions (desirability) to calculate job capacity, and if there's demand for 4,000 I-HT jobs, then the game will grow enough I-HT buildings to employ 4,000 Sims in HT jobs, by which time demand will reach zero so no more I-HT buildings grow. Whether the Sims then actually get to their jobs or not is your job as a player, and the buildings will remain. Current demand is then only even a factor to be considered if it's positive: Are free zones available, or can existing ones be overgrown? Once this has taken place, global demand becomes a non-factor again for the building. This is what I speculate at least... @Whte_rbt: How dare you interrupt our rambling! Nah, just kidding - good catch, and good point! This could very well be part of the problem. @The Edge: If some commuters go there, this might indicate that your city would have some suitable workforce for I-HT jobs, but that some external factors plunge I-HT demand into the negative, thus preventing I-HT from being built in the first place. Do you have any connected cities with a huge amount of I-HT?

Ah, this is what I hinted at in my previous post: Those ain't job numbers. Not in the sense of "look who's working there!!". Query window figures don't tell you anything whatsoever about Sims working there. No industrial or commercial query window ever does that. What this query tells you is as follows: Hi, I'm a high-tech industry building I could theoretically provide 700 high-tech job vacancies if conditions for me were perfect However, under given conditions I can only provide 533 out of a potential total of 700 job vacanciess Below are some factors that may help you determine why conditions aren't perfect for me Plopping these buildings might even reduce your high-tech demand even further because the number of job vacancies keeps increasing. If you want to know how many Sims are working there, how many actual jobs are filled, you'll need to use the route query tool. If it says "45 Sims commute here", this means that the building could provide 700 job vacancies, currently provides 533 job vacancies, and employs 45 Sims. This difference is very important to know if you want to understand what's going on in your city. Maxis didn't do a good job at making that clear, I'll have to say. This is also why using ploppable buildings with jobs can be "risky" - not in terms of any real-world risk, of course, but it might not have the effect you wanted, and it can certainly increase any existing imbalance unless used carefully.

Just downloaded it and took it for a spin in my break - works like a charm, and the selection in the first step has become a lot more comfortable! I can't thank you enough for this tool and your ongoing work on it. One of these days, I'll recolour all of SimNation with it, muhaha! Erm... I mean, I like it a lot.

It does? Whoa, I didn't know that.

It's not that complex. The simulation merely determined that there are jobs in an adjacent city, and that the commute time to the map edge (plus maybe a flatrate addition for cross-city travel) is shorter than the commute time it would take to find a job in the existing city (if a job even exists there). At this point, the simulation in the adjacent city picks up: It starts with the commuters arriving from the neighbour connection and tries to find jobs for them. Should another neighbour city exist and should the way (=commute time in simulation terms) to that city be shorter than the way to find a job in the current/ city, the process will repeat. The commuter traffic might very well go through the entire loop and return to the original city eventually! Like a snake biting its own tail... This is known as the "eternal commuter" loop where commuter traffic will go from city to city without ever actually finding a job. It might help to regard your region as city, and the individual tiles as neighbourhoods. @Raymond7cn: Airports do nothing in terms of actual transit as far as I know - the just offer demand cap relief for commercial, i.e. they increase the capacity for commercial buildings in your city. Seaports do nothing in terms of transit, either - they are simply an alternative freight destination for industry. Industry generates freight that tries to reach either the city border or a seaport. Shorter freight trips increase desirability for industry, so a seaport can be useful if it shortens the freight trips for your industrial zones. I should think that, as long as the city tile is "active" (meaning you have entered a city name and started building there) and there is a connection, demand will be shared. Water pipes should not influence demand or anything. My guess is that a water pipe neighbour connection simply acts as a switch: "Water trade deals possible? => Yes" Cities sharing demand is actually a very powerful tool because you can use this to "channel" demand to a particular city tile. Enter the cities around, let the simulator run for a while. Let's say commercial demand builds up a bit. Save and exit, go to next city, run the simulator a bit... maybe more commercial demand builds up. Enter a third city, lay out some commercial zones, and the built-up demand "unloads" there. The downside is that this may create the "empty jobs" I mentioned above. I like to build cities from the outside, saving up commercial office demand for when I finally build the CBD. A good means to save up some demand is playing conservative with the zones. If you have a commercial office demand of 5,000, but there are many medium-density zones with small buildings on them, then you might see hundreds of medium-density commercial lots upgrading to bigger buildings, i.e. the demand is eaten up by many small upgrades. If, however, all your existing zones are largely maxed out and cannot grow anything bigger, you could lay out a nice high-density zone, and if you're lucky, all the demand will go into a nice skyscraper because that's the only way left for the game to satisfy it. All this shouldn't be overdone, though - in my experience it's best not to play with tax cuts to 0% or "tax blocks" (20% to keep them out) too much or rely on commercial-only, industrial-only or residential-only cities too much... "exporting" e.g. a slight commercial demand overhead from one city to its neighbour, however, is unproblematic in my experience. The route query tool is really a good city health indicator: Do people actually go somewhere meaningful, or do zones lie there unused while Sims only spin in circles in the aforementioned "eternal commuter" loop?

Yeah, sure. Here's a set of pics that I showed in the "Show us what you're working on" thread - it's a BAT by beutelschlurf (and a really good one!) next to a Maxis building: Below is the result after exporting the textures, batch processing them through my picture viewer, and re-importing (it obviously takes a bit of trial and error, particularly because I lack profound theoretical image manipulation knowledge and an "educated eye" for these things): In this particular case, the result even took the modding decision (CO$$ or CO$$$?) for me - standing next to this high-wealth Maxis apartment, it certainly looked pretty upscale as well and ended up as high-wealth commercial office. Here's a way more subtle example. Look at the three office mid-rises that I plopped into the Rush Hour tutorial city, a 100% Maxis environment: Once again, these are beautiful BATs. I love them. If you look a little closer, however, you might notice that their colour hue differs slightly from the backdrop. They have a slight greenish tint to them. The tallest one to the bottom left (the one with the arched windows in the top floor) is probably the one to show this most clearly of the three. Once you see it, it's hard to un-see. Take away a few notches of green, sometimes a slight gamma/contrast adjustment, sometimes a bit more blue and/or red, and you end up with something like this: These aren't even good. I'm certainly not 100% satisifed with them. The two left ones are too "cold". Still, when you zoom out, none of them stands out against its backdrop any more. And this is only BATs vs. Maxis. BATs from different authors used in combination are yet another story. They are all awesome, but put them next to another, and you'll see how one is noticeably darker or has a colder hue than the others. I might find some better examples if I poke around a bit more. This is just an example to show an idea of what can be done with GoFSH.

Would this fit the bill? (Sorry if someone posted it already, I only skimmed the thread and didn't see it)

Yeah, the demand graphs you showed in your last screenshot makes it pretty clear that your city simply needs more residents at this point, with all three green residential demand bars standing this tall. It's a relatively foolproof technique to follow the demand bars, i.e. build what they suggest. One things that's worth watching out for is what I like to call "empty jobs", i.e. commercial/industrial buildings that grow but aren't actually being used. This means that they take away from your city's demand without actually employing any Sims. You can check this using the route query tool (the bottom one of the two-piece question mark tool): If it shows as many Sims travelling to a building as the building provides jobs, then it gets used to its fullest, which is good. If no Sims actually travel there, it provides these jobs and reduces your demand, but doesn't actually employ anyone. The numbers in the query window (e.g. "46/50") don't mean that any Sim actually works in that building. It means that the building currently provides 46 job vacancies out of the potential maximum of 50 job vacancies that it could offer if the conditions were perfect. Only the route query will tell you how many jobs are actually taken. The key to getting Sims to use the jobs provided is good transportation - the NAM goes a long way in making this possible while keeping a halfways realistic city. With the vanilla game, it's pretty hard because the maximum travel distances (actually: commute times) and network capacities are rather low and the pathfinder is very primitive (which was probably done to make the game less resource-hungry back in 2003 when people were playing it on cast-iron toasters. CS$ and CS$$ demand are really hard to quench typically, but that's nothing to get overly nervous about. Unless residential gets built a lot so that residential demand decreases towards zero, but without industrial and CO$$/CO$$$ demand kicking in, I wouldn't worry too much about these two. Occasionally cater to them, yes. Try and get them down to zero, not worth it.

Oh, oh - if you're working on a new version, there's one little thing I'm wondering: I regularly select the day FSHs for decoding only, and unless I have been missing something all this time, you need to select/deselect them one by one. Would it be hard to implement a selection logic as used in the Windows Explorer, for example, where you can [CTRL]+click / [SHIFT]+click to select a range at once? It's totally not a problem as it is now, I just thought asking couldn't hurt.

Since this topic has popped up once again, I might as well take the opportunity to say that I have been using GoFSH pretty much on a daily basis throughout the recent weeks because I'm assembling a new plugins folder and I'm colour-matching all the BATs so they play nicely together and nothing stands out. Not only does this enable me to give my existing plugins assortment a much more coherent look, but it has also opened up new possibilities and widened my BAT selection because some that I originally skipped due to some texture issues I had with them are suddenly an easy fix and look surprisingly good when placed among the others. I have also made another Maxis night => DarkNite conversion, and more are coming up. So thank you very much for this superb tool that has become a staple in my SimCity toolbox, and as far as I am concerned, you're a bit of a legend for me as well. Thanks again and keep it up!

@Edvarz: Hey, it's been a while since I've last seen you around here - didn't even know you were still active, man! Feels good to see you again. And I'd totally have said the same if you hadn't brought such awesome grid-busting pictures with you. @dubaidude303: Impressive RHW job and great flora, with an extra bit of fun thrown in - those two cement mixers about to take the exit (and both making a mess out of it) are a very entertaining little detail. That industrial bit with the pipes is a great shot, too - really has character.

@Dreadnought: Lemme try... Keep a backup of the original model in case you screw up or the new scale turns out to be wrong/unconvincing Open the Model Tweaker Select "File" => "Open..." and navigate to the desired model file to open it. You should now see a window with the name of the model in its title bar inside the Model Tweaker. The window should contain a line with a set of S3D files - that's your model (if you open a DAT file with multiple models, you'll see multiple S3D sets here) Click the line. You'll notice that some toolbar icons in the main window turn from greyed out to coloured, indicating that they can be used now. Click the "Scale" tool (or use the [Alt]+[C] hotkey). A popup will appear. Select which axis (or axes) to scale: All three of them, only height, only width, only depth, or width & depth. Guess you'l need "all three of them" if you want to keep the proportions. This is the default option, too. Select/enter a scaling factor - either fractional or decimal. Let's assume you want to scale down to 80% of the original. In this case you'd have to select either 80% = 80/100 = 8/10 = 4/5 as a fraction or 0.8 as a decimal value (100% × 0.8 = 80%). Click "OK" when you're done. The building is altered now. Save and enjoy the result! (Or rinse and repeat, i.e. delete the rescaled model, get a copy of your 100% scale backup, and try again) 10 steps - looks like we did it! HD or SD shouldn't really make a difference because S3D is S3D, and an HD model only has a few more of those. @JojiTX: That's a sweeeet lotting job you're doing there, no doubt about that! Some very creative ideas, too. I concur with @Scaley McSlither - these would be great on the STEX and breathe some new life into these old models, which are still really good. You won't need permission because your upload would only contain the lots - the McMansions would join the (probably long) list of dependencies.

Everybody's posting awesome stuff and I'm just sitting here GoFSH'ing... Before: After: Good enough for me. Next!

I agree wholeheartedly. OpenTTX with all its modding opportunities is really great. I especially like how you can make cargo heavier so the power of a locomotive becomes relevant. In vanilla TTD, buying anything but the fastest one wouldn't make sense. In OpenTTX, you have a motivation to get a slow heavy hauler for cargo trains and a fast runner for passenger trains. Station building options are also great, and I love how ships can be used to great effect with a few mods. This would also be a game that's overdue for a remake IMO. Better graphics (the resolution makes it hard to see on today's screens), better AI and maybe a more advanced cargo system (actual destinations rather than freight & passengers just piling up) would be all it really needs. I once watched a Train Fever 2 LP on YouTube and got the game from GOG when it was on sale for 9 dollars or something, but I've never really come around to playing it and checking if it scratches some of ye olde Transport Tycoon itch. I'd also like to mention Civilization 1. Still enjoyable, with the exception of the difficulty levels. The AI remains as stupid as ever, but you'll need 5 battleships to kill a bronze-age phalanx.... As a remote (or not-so-remote) relative of Civ1, I should also mention Master of Magic. Still a great game! There's also a mod for it called "Caster of Magic" which has a lot of balance changes and new units. More recent games that come closest to it are the Age of Wonder games, I guess. Speaking of "Master..." games, I must add Master of Orion and Master of Orion II - Battle at Antares to the list, two absolute 4X classics. MoO 1 looks pretty plain and sparse, but I gotta say the game is really great. Even in a huge galaxy, you aren't bogged down with micromanagement. That was a bit of a problem with MoO2, although I like many of the new features the game introduced. There has been a reboot of the franchise that I'm currently watching an LP of. It seems to be a mixture of the two first parts with a few new elements sprinkled in. Another somewhat older game that I have come to like for a little short-term distraction is Future Pinball. It's a free pinball simulator and editor that enables you to (re-)create your own tables and download & play tables created by others. Many classic pinball tables have been recreated, even some from other computer games. It's great to take a break from modding.

The spinning green diamond is used as a placeholder for animated props. For example, some represent animated fountains. There's also one called something like "randomwalk_smallcrowd" that represents Sims randomly walking around, spawning at the point the prop is placed. If you are in the Lot Editor, clicking on the prop and reading its name should give you a clue about what it does, but ultimately the only way to check what precisely the prop does is plopping the lot in game and seeing what happens on it. To mention just one example, there are several animated fountain effects, and their names don't really tell you anything about the animation pattern, only about the fact that it is an animated fountain. If you want to see the exact animation, you need to look at the lot in game. The cars on parking lots that appear and disappear are timed props. These can be placed on the lot just like regular props, but they have a property that makes them appear in a certain time slot (e.g. from 08:00 to 17:00) only. So this has nothing to do with the spinning green diamond placeholders.

The crime problem is simply due to the size of the lot, and is the root cause of the low desirability. R$ is more tolerant to crime because these poor fellas don't have high standards in the first place, but R$$ and R$$$ will not want to live where the crime rate is high. Large lots are prone to high crime rates because the police dispatches have a certain maximum effect radius. Large lots mean that the effect radius of the police dispatches does not reach far enough onto the lot, so the lot ends up as a "blind spot" for police coverage, which means skyrocketing crime rate. This is a problem that cannot be fixed on the side of the lot. It can be alleviated by a mod that increases the dispatch radius and effect strength of police dispatches. I don't have time right now to dig up a link, but the problem is known and has been dealt with for Maxis police stations at least. You may have to copy the solution over to custom police departments if you use those.

Aw, jeez. It's always so sad to witness such things. I hope you'll be able to enjoy the whiskey part and let the others turn sour when their lofty lectures fizzle and the world somehow refuses to accept their generous gift of wisdom and revolve around them. Even if a critique in itself should be factually correct, the famous quote from The Big Lebowski comes to mind - "You're not wrong. You're just an a**hole." The older I get, the more I come to realise just how much truth is in that sentence. If you reverse that quote a little, it means that you can say surprisingly many things as long as you are not a complete dick about it. Showing some basic manners and respect for others really goes a long way. I don't really now what else to say, I'm just trying to provide some moral support. I'm also pretty confident that I'm not speaking for myself alone when I say that those people who only complain instead of contributing (even if it is only with some basic friendliness and respect) shouldn't matter much, but that you matter to us. This being said, if you receive PMs that you think may cross the line between being annoying and harassing, or if there is any particular person whose behaviour you perceive as iffy you can always contact the site staff - maybe the person in question already has a track record, and your input gives the final push to address this person. Doesn't have to be a ban or time-out - we can always try to speak to members, bring up the subject, and see what happens. The response often gives a clue about whether it's someone who went somewhat overboard without realizing it and can use a little reminder or whether it's someone who has a habit of being really annoying and will need a more serious talking to. It can't hurt to ask "Do you think this is okay, and does that person do this a lot?" Moderator hat taken off again, I'll hoist one for you tonight and hope that you feel a little better already whenever you're reading this now that you got this rant off your chest and with a little time (and another whiskey sour?) inbetween. (I'd offer to share a whiskey sour with you, but there's an ocean and a continent between us...)