J_McSim

Date: 9/14/2005 4:48:46 AM Author: serge an other idea is to change a bat (for exemple a parc or anything else) to have a desirability (or undesirability) effect like YIMBY and NIMBY but just for one kind of commercial or residential weahlt (just R$$ or R$ for exemple) I tried with 'R$ Proximity effect' and 'Deirability Effect values' but I don't really understand how its works... help please !quote> 'R$ Proximity Effect' is a 'Growth Developer' property, you can't attach it to a building exemplar, as a mod it might, if tweaked just right, be able to give a more consistant spread of wealth level development, not so mixed as is standard in the game. 'Desirability Effect Values' is a building property, and might be usable for what you suggest, I'm not familiar with it unfortunately, you would want to find an example of it in use first, though it appears to be a [ radius, max, min ] triple for each of the developers, but I couldn't even tell you for sure how many developers there are, if there's only one residential developer, you'd be out of luck, if there's three, you should be able to hobble R$$$ and R$$ desirability around the lot. Probably not much help to you, but all I can offer right now, I'll do a scan for building exemplars that have a 'Desirability Effect Values' property and let you know what it should look like... The property prince_of_sims alluded to, Tract Developer Kick Out Lower Wealth, is proving interesting, the game's default is 'true', when set to 'false' the effect is quiet obvious in game, much more testing needs to be done though. anyway, I'll let you know how the scan goes....

A very interesting topic, transit switching in this game, I'm beginning to beleive, is a most curious creature. The entry cost idea is a good one and works well, ofcourse for custom stations . . . I noticed these rather interesting 'actual usage' numbers a while back, never got around to looking into it though . . . https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//ss-jpm-01.jpg align=baseline> the GLR and El. Rail stations perform as you'd probably expect, the stations out in the open draw no new passengers, but show an 'actual usage' equal to the number of passengers passing though... ie they 'switch' in the station and count towards usage. The subway station in the open however has a usage of 0. 96 sims are passing through there, but none of them are counted on the stations usage, so subways are much more efficient than may have been assumed. . . as I said, never got around to looking into it, maybe there's something 'wrong' with the default subway or el rail station, probably worth investigating anyway, I haven't the time, but if anyone has the time and knowhow, this would be worth looking into. https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//ss-jpm-02.jpg align=baseline> https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//ss-jpm-03.jpg align=baseline>

Date: 9/5/2005 2:23:40 PM Author: prince_of_sims i would just like to point out something that i found while messing around with the fixed exemplar. there is a value Tract Developer Kick Out Lower Wealth which is set to True. the description says that if it's set to true, higher wealth buildings can replace non-empty lower wealth buildings. i set it to False and ran the game. to my surprise, i found this setting works! so now, it is theoretically possible to create true suburbs and such. possible, yes. practical, i don't know. it's tricky, requires a lot of patience, and won't work if low wealth demand is too high. there's a lot more values in there we've never experimented with, simply because we didn't know those values were there. so, i would like to really thank J_McSim for his awesome contribution. and i remember him mentioning some more exemplars that were like this. any word on what they are or if they're fixed or not? 1. Yourself, mr Tropod and all others are most welcome, glad I could contribute something :-) 2. the three other exemplars I have trouble with are due to, what appears to be, another subtle bug in my decompresssion code . . . 3. I was playing with 'Tract Developer Kick Out Lower Wealth' myself just the other day. I was most happy to see that it appeared to work too!

I've scanned the cohorts, and (unfortunately?) there's no properties of type Uint16, or any other new data types ... no more previously hidden properties... Andreas: I'm not sure I understand your first paragraph. . . If your talking about lot designers 'accidently' overwriting default game items by unknowingly using the same TGI, you could just load everything in the same order the game does, overwriting duplicate TGIs as you go. I don't think this is what you meant though . . . As to reinventing the wheel, I'm no fan of it, but when I started coding (some months ago now) there seemed little choice... the readers source is a horrible mess, and the newer datgen needed a lot of work, especially in regard to handling SC4 stuff. Having played with SC4Tool a little bit now, I can offer FSH loading/display/conversion code, one of the first things I implemented... [EDIT:] Oooops . . . had the compose window open a little long . . . simrolle: I think I'll certainly have a look at what's in your lib... you're clearly a lot further along than I. I am in a good position to do the analysis with own code now though, so I'll probably go ahead and do that... You did say reading/writing procedures though... I can only read images and exemplars at the moment, and write neither... so I might well take you up on the offer, I'll be in touch. Cheers, - James

Date: 8/29/2005 3:00:57 PM Author: Eskiman Just wondering, but is anyone planning on doing a left-hand drive version of the Euro Mod? I only noticed because of the street into road T intersections have the white line on the right-hand side. You guys are doing a great job here. Keep it up! Without you lot, Simcity wouldn't be at all European!quote> There is a UK road mod in the works . . .

Date: 8/29/2005 8:37:00 AM Author: Andreas Roth This sounds like a good idea; one of my motivations for creating SC4Tool (or better, the predecessor of it) was to provide some reference material for balanced BATs and lots - esp. when it comes to pollution values and such, since the Plugin Manager suggests ridiculous values in many cases. Maybe you could work together with simrolle, since SC4Tool already features scanning routines for dependencies (both for props and textures). Wow, I wasn't aware it did props too, I've downloaded it, but yet to install and play with it. Your original building database was really my motivation, I'd started to experience the garbage problem, but wasn't aware it was all the custom content until your building database thread first showed up. While I would sincerely like to work with simrolle, I'm not sure I have the time to learn how to use a new framework, I'm using Java, which I'm familiar and confortable with... Now, that said, I do have Visual Studio .NET installed . . . just never got around to learning .NET, collaboration on such projects would be a good thing. . . but I'm a busy man at the moment, so I'll likely be sticking with Java. Out of interest though, what language is simrolle using ?

Ok, I've attached a dat file with the exemplar in question in text format, the Reader can see it all, except the one property with the Uint16 type. I plopped it in my plugins and ran the game for a while, no problems... I then changed the Uint16 to Uint32, which is what properties.xml states its type should be, loaded the game, ran it for quiet a while, changed building styles, no crash... I have however decided to upload the version that is just a text version of the original, extract and change it's type in notepad if you wish, it didn't crash for me. Haven't had time to scan the cohorts yet, will hopefully do it tomorrow night... Tropod: I use reader most of the time, I was until recently planning some modding tools, simrolle seems to be doing quiet nicely with SC4tool atm though, so my goal now is a content management system, detecting broken plugins, missing deps, and perhaps most importantly checking their pollution levels, water and power usage, and value, and changing them if they don't fit, statistically, with the default buildings of the same purpose & wealth level. I am going to create a gui for displaying dat's and their contents along the way though. so there will be a reader/datgen like dat editor, eventually. Not much time to work on it in general atm, though my other half is in Perth for a couple of weeks, so I'm making good progress now... should be something worthy of downloading in a couple a months.

Hi guys, Made an interesting discovery on the weekend

Date: 8/26/2005 1:24:03 AM Author: roko1 I had been wondering about my garbage level since I started downloading BATS from here... We should maybe compile a list in this topic of those which are badly out of whack so everyone knows which ones they need to re-edit. Such a list would grow very large, very quickly... assuming enough people with the know-how and time could be mustered to do it. If you can handle waiting a couple of months, I have a program in the works, tentatively titled

The link on the web page is broken, here is the official thread, the download you want is linked on page 7, you just want the euro_highway_textures.zip ... https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=59577&forumID=124&search=1&searchstring = Date: 8/24/2005 9:55:54 PM Author: Natewill25 I was wondering if someone could send me the asphalt highway mod. I can't seem to get it to download for me on the website.  If so i would really appreciate it

brtim2: LODding your buildings in this fashion is, perhaps, unwise. You're effectively turning the model into a real deal 3d object in game, something maxis didn't do for good reason. For a few railways stations, or somesuch, you might not notice, but if many buildings in a city are LODed like this, it will cause serious lag. You should try to keep your LOD as simple as possible, cutting out (nice simple) sections as needed for props, or in this case automata. Date: 7/26/2005 2:32:38 PM Author: brtim2 Custom LODs aren't hard. In fact they are probably the easiest part of batting. Everyone of my models has a custom LOD. Usually I 'select all', 'clone', 'hide unselected', select one object, 'turn to mesh', 'attach list', 'select all', 'do not modify material id's', rename to LOD3, clone twice, 'unhide all', and i'm done. Real easy and I have custom LODs identical to the building. Now depending on what I want to do with that building I might have to attach a mesh here and there to make it turn out right, but you have the general idea of what I do to make my LOD's. And that works for holes in buildings too.quote>

This would certainly be nice, but to do cool things with access roads might require an inordinate amount of work. A small section of Whitehorse Rd (aka Maroondah Hwy), through Mitcham . . . https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//whitehorse_rd.jpg align=baseline>

Hi builderman, I'm new here, but have been programming for years, I downloaded the reader source a while back now, and after some minor problems got it to compile, I have not however successfully linked it yet. . . may I ask, where did you find '3dsftk.lib' ?? Not sure if I'd be a help or hinderance to you, I was going to start writing my own tools in Java, a language/environment I'm more comfortable with, but it would be nice to be able to play with the reader, my MFC skills are somewhat rusty though. And from what I have looked at from the reader source, it's patched together from a million bits and pieces, and not well documented... but that's par for the course, I guess. Cheers, - James Date: 7/17/2005 1:08:10 PM Author:builderman OK, I'm back, from another extended vacation (approx 8 months.)  During this time, I was still working on SimCity related things.  One of those was reviving ilive's reader project.  I've gotten the program to successfully compile in MS Visual C++ 2003.  I haven't done much experimenting yet, but it looks very good.  I'm interested in suggestions and comments you have about the last version of the Reader (0.9.3)  I might try to program new features, but it is one hundred thousand lines of code, and I have no idea what most of it does.  Still, suggest away.quote>

Lots will cause 'no car' zots, puzzle pieces are fine, ped malls for example.