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As you might have seen on the STEX () I've recently had great success with a proof-of-concept custom building, which served as a test to see whether I had successfully identified all the different elements that make a SC2013 building. This is a very significant development since it marks the point at which I can not only confidently say that I know how to create a custom building model from scratch, I can also actually get a model from my 3d software into SimCity. However, as it stands this process is difficult and cumbersome, as a lot of the 3d modeling software and intermediate file formats (.obj, collada) don't support the very specific features I need to make our dreams a reality. I'll go into the technical details in a bit, but first I'd recommend reading Ryan Ingram's blog post about how SimCity's buildings work in the first place. (https://www.simtropolis.com/omnibus/_/simcity-2013/building-and-rendering-simcity-2013-r247). This might seem extremely difficult (and it is), although a lot of the most difficult work has already been done - right now what I'm looking for is a way to bring everything I've learned over the past few months together into a tool that supports building a completely new custom model from scratch like Maxis' gmax-based BAT did. Techical Details I'm going to skim over a few of the more nebulous concepts that aren't really necessary for understanding how buildings work. Essentially, each building model contains of three distinct texture layers - I'll call them the 'interior', 'exterior' and 'decals'. These layers are textured using 'sprite sheets'; a large square texture that contains all the smaller textures to be used on a single building. These smaller textures are then defined in each model element by defining the coordinates of the top corner, height and width of the sub-texture that needs to be extracted for the specific element. You'll notice that even the sprite sheet that defines the color (the left one) only contains a masked area for each individual color of the element. The actual color is drawn from a palette that is attached to the model as a separate image. In essence, each 'element' of a model is defined as follows; Each vertex contains multiple UV coordinates for each layer, so in essence each vertex will have three sets of UV's; one that defines the interior layer (the rooms), one that defines the exterior layer (base texture layer) and one that defines the decal layer (top texture layer). The colors are drawn from the Color1, Color2, Color3 and Color4 values. The Problem All of this has knowledge combined has enabled me (through a lot of trickery and hard labor) to create my first new building model. However, as you can probably tell a lot of the requirements for a SimCity model are hardly covered by any 3d modeling software or export format. This is mainly where I'd need help - first of all I need to be able to create a new building model in any 3d modeling software according to these specifications and then I need to be able to import it into SimCityPak. The requirements are as follows: One mesh must be able to have multiple UV and texture layersNormals, Tangents and UV coordinates must be able to be exported per vertexTextures should be 'croppable' and cropping dimensions should be exportablePreferably colors should be chosen in the modeling software itself according to an imported paletteAs you can imagine, hardly any 3d modeling software I managed to get my hands on supported all of these features. Blender (http://www.blender.org) seems to be the best candidate since it's free and it supports multiple UV channels (and a very rudimentary cropping feature), but I'm not very familiar with it and I would probably need help with writing plugins to display the palette, make cropping easier etc. Any help is appreciated, and if you need more information, I'll see what I can do.

I've had some problems with my internet connection for the past few days (my modem died) but in the meantime I've been making some decent progress on making the process of creating buildings easier. I'll first create another building from start to finish myself and then release the tools here so people can start testing them and create their own custom buildings in the process. I expect that this'll probably only be another week, so keep an eye on this thread!

Your .dds file probably isn't in the right format. Make sure that it's in saved in the DXT5 format. If that still doesn't work, can you attach the .dds file so I can try myself?

For those interested in creating custom buildings - Below I'm going to dump some details that might be interesting to anyone who wants to create their own models. First of all, for the time being I'm focusing on 3d studio max and creating integrated tools for exporting models to a format SimCityPak can read. Crimsondesigns is providing great help on this. Obviously models will have to be low-poly and will eventually need multiple LOD levels I'm using OpenCollada (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenCOLLADA) to export models from 3ds to SCP. The .obj file format that I was using before doesn't really provide the flexibility needed, such as including multiple UV channels and other parameters. The textures can only be a cropped section of the sprite sheets mentioned in the first post. There are multiple sprite sheets already included in the game; look for RASTER type files in SimCityPak Colors for the textures are chosen from predefined palettes The interior (rooms) are mapped using UV channel 1, the exterior layer also uses UV channel 1 and the top layer (decals) uses UV channel 2 For the time being animated models are not supported If you have experience with 3ds and think you have what it takes to start modeling, let me know - I'm interested in helping some experienced modelers get started to see if my process is adequate.

I don't know where else to bring this up, so I'll do it here. Why I understand that a lot of the long-time members here are disappointed with SimCity 2013 and Maxis/EA, I've noticed that the articles on the front page (which I think should be objective, not an opinion piece by one author) have a pretty clear bias against the game. The most recent case is this news post (https://www.simtropolis.com/news/_/simcity-2013/ea-takes-20-cut-from-new-red-cross-dlc-for-charity-r563) where the headline "EA Takes 20% Cut From New Red Cross DLC-For-Charity" does not reflect the content or the spirit of the article it links to at all - it's a very obvious jab at the only thing that might be framed as questionable about this specific DLC. Another example is this post (https://www.simtropolis.com/news/_/simcity-2013/simcity-2013-earns-a-spot-among-the-most-disappointing-games-of-this-generation-r560) which originally had the title from the article it linked to changed to "The WORST games of this generation" (instead of disappointing) until someone called the author out on it. Once again, while I accept that many people here are biased against the game and while I'll defend anyone's right to criticize it, in my opinion front page news posts should reflect the actual news objectively rather than putting the author's personal spin on it (which I think would be rather tacky).

I think I might have misunderstood your question the first time I read it - I guess what you mean is that you clicked on the blue link when the "no results" dialog popped up? To shed some light on your problem; the link is merely a pointer to a different PROP entry in the package file. The 'network' property in the file you exported is merely a pointer to a certain 'TGI' combination - clicking it will trigger a search in the currently opened package file for the entry referenced by this property. If it's not found (which it isn't since you probably closed the SimCity_Game.package), a box saying that there are no results will pop up. In short, to modify the network property, you will also need to export the PROP entry that defines the network appearance into its own package.

Nice video! Being shown how something is done is always better than merely reading it off a tutorial page, so I'm hoping that this video will help people who want to get into modding.

It's absolutely correct that Maxis uses Maya. Ryan Ingram said as much in a reply to one of my posts on Reddit: However, since what ends up in-game is just triangles, vertices and a bucket load of metadata, in theory we can use any 3d modeling software we want as long as it can provide an easy way to create such models and allows exporting them. This gives us a lot of freedom (I've considered using Sketchup at some point) although of course I'll be looking at the option that's the easiest to implement first.

That sounds great! I've looked into the possibilities of 3dsmax myself, and while the multi-layered approach seemed slightly complicated to me, perhaps with the proper scripting and plugins, we can make a proper toolkit that will in the end allow us to seamlessly export buildings from 3dsmax to SimCityPak. I was thinking of the following roadmap towards creating a set of tools; First of all we'd need a proof-of-concept .max file that contains all the necessary elements which we can use to base our exports on. Secondly we should make sure that all these elements are exported to a file format that SimCityPak can read (this is probably where a lot of scripting comes in). The last step would be making the process of creating the .max file in step 1 as easy as possible. If we can accomplish this, I can add the necessary code into SimCityPak to make the process of importing the building model into the game easier.

Right now the only thing that stands in the way of "True Modding" is the server-side validation that's being done to prevent cheating on the leaderboards. If we can convince Maxis that it's worth putting development time into removing this restriction, the possibilities for modding will increase exponentially.

First of all, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind about SC2013; I understand why you're disappointed and that's fine. However, this site is also a destination for those who do enjoy the game, and I'm sure Simtropolis wants to provide a home for those fans as well. I think the admins and moderators here have done an excellent job thus far, with possible exception of a certain bias regarding news reporting. Here I disagree. I understand that charity is a sensitive topic politically (which is why I don't think it should be a point of discussion on a game site in the first place), but I just don't see the problem with Maxis/EA trying to recoup some of their development cost for the DLC. Especially taking the following points into consideration: They state up front that some of the money will go towards recouping development costs. In fact, the article states that the Red Cross will be getting "a minimum of eighty percent (80%) of EA’s proceeds"; this means that the actual percentage can end up higher if the development costs are recouped early on. Even if you'd accept that Maxis/EA will take 2 dollars from every purchase, that still means that 8 dollars is going to the Red Cross from a person who might otherwise have donated nothing. Consider if they would have created a DLC called "Sims' Cross" that cost 2 dollars, would you still have a problem with it? I'll leave it at that; like I said, I don't think a game site is the place to fight over social justice issues.

I'm getting very tired of the bias against EA and Maxis that has been displayed on Simtropolis lately. There are plenty of good things about this DLC but the headline is the one thing that might be construed as negative if you're already biased against SimCity 2013?

I must say that while I immensely enjoy SC2013, I'm not sure if I'm happy with expansion packs that are based more in fiction than in reality. It seems that they're releasing this futuristic scenario as a tie-in to the "into to the future" The Sims 3 expansion pack that's being released a month earlier Nevertheless, even though someone already mentioned that the premise to this expansion pack is identical to Anno 2070, I'm probably going to buy it.

Even ignoring the issue of legality, expanding the city box is way beyond our capabilities right now - there is an excellent mod by ProcsKalone that lets you build outside of the boundaries, but as you'll notice using that mod, the terrain outside the city won't conform to your roads, won't have lot textures and doesn't have any 'maps' (such as water/pollution/resources) attached. This is the problem we're facing with city size. In any case, it's not as simple as it might seem. Short answer; don't expect modders to give you larger cities any time soon.

It's been a while since I added any updates to this thread - but that doesn't mean I haven't been working on the tool. I'll quickly sum up the progress on several of the areas I've been working on. Note that while I've got a lot of important information on hand that should enable us to do some exciting things, I'm very limited in time - if there's anyone here with some 3D, .NET and WPF experience who'd like to help on some of the graphics programming, I'd gladly share all of the technical details. Anyway, these are the things currently in the works; Custom Buildings This one's a biggie and progress is slow - I'm fully aware of the basic file structure but all of that is so complex that exposing all of those possibilities to the user through the tool is very complicated. I think I've stretched the possibilities of WPF 3D and the .obj file format to their limits and need to look at alternatives. I'm going to attempt to retool the importing of 3d models to the COLLADA intermediary format, but that's a long term goal. RW4Model decoding In my attempts to reverse engineer the file format for the buildings I've identified most of the important elements of the RW4 file format such as the vertexformat and parts of the materials. The vertexformat in particular is interesting because it identifies each element of the mesh, where in the vertex it's located and in which format - for example the vertex position which is always the first element and usually in a FLOAT3 type. This means that in theory I should be able to create an importer/exporter that works with every mesh and I've already updated the viewer to work with the new information RASTER images and decals I'm fully aware of how these work but they're finicky to work with because of the fact that each color channel is a different layer, and the actual colors are defined by a decal atlas. Like I've shown in a picture previously posted in this thread, I know how to modify them, but the process to do so is still more tedious than it should be.

@kaiuaki - I looked into the Plant Forest tool a long while ago, when I had the idea that if the game writes to the forest map, it might as well be modified to write to the terrain height map (thus allowing terraforming). I abandoned this shortly after I realized that most of what I was after was in the scripts folder. The way I understand it, the Plant Forest tool works as follows - first of all, there's the visual of the planting tool - e.g., the circle of which you can modify the diameter and color etc. Secondly, there's the unit that plants the actual trees. If you look at the tool, it has a tiny square at the center - this is the indicator for the unit to be built. When it is built it runs its rules (add to the forest map in a certain radius) and then deletes itself again. So what you're looking for is not so much in the tool, but rather in the unit that is built - this will definitely be in the scripts packages. With a bit of luck,the values for its radius and strength may be available for editing, and with an lot of luck modifying them will not lead to rollbacks. With an extreme amount of luck, you might even be able to modify the map the unit writes to and make it a terraforming tool, resource refilling tool or even a pollution/radiation removal tool! For the record, I doubt that this will be possible without rollbacks, but it might be worth trying. Good luck!

For the past few weeks I've been working on deciphering the building model file structure. I've made some major strides, but until now I haven't had much to show for it. However, today I finally managed to put everything together for a first taste of what's to come. My first goal, building recolors:

I always figured Maxis was going to release the Roman Casino as DLC at some point.

I've also been having a few issues with the latest version due to the Sqlite binaries not being found (I've only just loaded the latest sources) - can someone point me to the right binaries?