oppie

This is something I've touched on before and something I feel quite strongly about; in my opinion, mods that regularly cause rollbacks should not be released. I'm already on the fence about scripts mods (since they have a tendency to not load properly and behave very randomly), but rollback-causing mods will definitely cause some huge problems sooner or later (I'm betting on sooner). I hope we're all on the same page on that front.

Guys, Besides the path appearance mods I've released over the past few days, I've been looking into UI modifications - I've done a few tests, and there are some really interesting possibilities there. The specific thing I've been attempting is to display certain unit properties on the rollover windows. For example, showing the total workers and available jobs per wealth level - or in theory - every single property that's available on a unit (provided that we can access them.). My experiments so far have been mainly with the kPropUnitRolloverExtendedItemIDs property. This property contains a uint that somehow refers to a UI element which contains one or more properties in a certain display mode. I've been experimenting with the casino rollover, on which the green "profit today" text is referenced by a single uint - similarly, the "Hotel guests ($$$): '4/100'" data row is also one single uint - so, the piece of UI code that is referenced determines both the data and the display format of this data. However, so far I haven't been able to locate where these uints are defined or what they refer to. If anyone else has an idea on where to look (or perhaps knows where the kPropUnitRolloverExtendedItemIDs name was found), I'd be very happy to hear.

I hate to be 'that guy', but I must admit I'm torn on this one - As much as I'm very impressed with the research and work that went into this mod and I'm always happy to see that things like this are even possible, I'm not sure if releasing it publically is a good move. Consider posts like this one by maxis developer ryani; http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1gcfbn/animal_farm_debugged_city_inspired_by_sc_halby/caj5w3j - especially the line "if you're mod-friendly, you don't want to give any ammunition to people who would claim they harm the game". Whether we like it or not, we do require some level of support from Maxis because what we do has an impact on their 'multiplayer game'. This is why I've personally only released visual and non-gameplay affecting mods. Please don't take this as me telling you to remove your mods or anything - this is just a general concern I have with gameplay affecting mods and the reaction that might follow from EA/Maxis when they start affecting the leaderboards.

Additions to the game are implemented both client- and server side. Most resources for additional content are added into the SimCity_DLC0.package file, while some others are distributed among the other packages. Secondly, each DLC gets its own EcoGame scripts package, which contains most of the gameplay affecting stuff - the scripts also exists on the Maxis servers and are used to check against cheating and will trigger rollbacks if it detects differences between the client and server versions. Long story short - we can't use the method Maxis uses to add new content since additional objects also need to exist server-side.

I'm pretty sure that some instance/property ID's are not the result of FNV hashes - like warrior said, there are many sequential numbers (for example, most array properties used in tables follow this pattern) which we won't be able to decode from FNV hashes. Nevertheless, seems like we've made some great progress already.

Wow, wasn't expecting this! Thanks everyone! ...and congratulations to timmie as well!

@potorium - Decals are the logo's, text and other little details which are like little four color 'stickers' that are pasted on buildings and surfaces. I added a viewer for the decal dictionaries to SimCityPak that should make viewing (and eventually modifying) them a whole lot easier:

I've been looking into the decals/raster images lately and I've got them figured out now to the point where I can add a new decal in a separate package file. The property files that hold this stuff together are a pain to work with however, so I'm going to try to build an editor that makes this easier.Here's a screenshot of a completely new custom decal:

Very sad to see you leave the modding community ProcsKalone - you've been one of the pivotal members in getting modding off the ground for this game, but I understand that after a while, I can get tiring. Thanks for what you've done and I hope to see you back someday.

I definitely agree that the XML registries need to be overhauled. I like the idea of separating the 'built-in' entries from the 'user-specified' ones, which should make the process of sharing instance/property information easier. Instead of making an entirely separate file for them, I'd imagine having an additional XML attribute to differentiate between the entries. The XML file would then be sorted so that your user-specific entries are on the bottom of the file. Other than that, I think I'd like to put the Property registry in a separate file and add an attribute that specifies the default property type for this property. Ideally, I would also like to have a 'consistency check' that parses the XML files for duplicates. Nevertheless, I only have a limited amount of time to dedicate to this project, and while the user experience is important, making all of the file types readable and editable currently has the highest priority. While I'm on that subject, I might as well share my progress on that topic; RASTER Files - I think I've got these figured out now - they are bitmaps with mipmaps, and are usually used for paletted images - for example, most decals such as logos are RASTER files, where the different color channels are used as layers. To smoothen the appearance in-game, all layers contain a form of "outer glow". What I have yet to discover is where the colors of each decal are located - since the ID's of the decal RASTER files are not really referenced in any property files, I strongly suspect that this information is located in the yet-to-decipher EFFDIR files. MAP Files- I've attempted to make an importer for these, but it doesn't work correctly yet. The good news is that once I get it to work, we will be able to edit region (but as far as I've seen, not city) terrain. RW4 Files (buildings) - For some reason, all RW4 model files have wildly varying vertex formats. For the vehicles, these are usually the same, but for buildings (and anything that's animated) this isn't the case - for example, the normals are not always stored in the same byte. I'm under the impression that one of the unknown sections in the RW4 file specifies the vertex format, but I haven't been able to wrap my mind around that yet.

As promised, I've released a new version of SimCityPak at https://simcitypak.codeplex.com/releases/view/107793. Some of the new features are still experimental, but I'm very happy with the RASTER image preview, which sheds a little more light on how they work (which is quite interesting - they use the different color channels as layers). Also, I've finally added a logo and icons.

I'm probably releasing a new version of SimCityPak tonight or tomorrow - I've recently been focusing on the RASTER files, and I think I've got them completely figured out now. They define either lot ground textures, building textures or paletted decals. They contain four channels (A,R,G,B) which are all counted as a different 'layer'. @joostpas94 - We don't know yet - turning lanes are not going to be possible any time soon. Also, please post all mod requests in the official mod request thread here:

The plop point for ferries and other ploppables that can be built on the coastline are defined by a pre-defined path that goes along the water. In fact, most snap points are along a path one way or another. If you take a look at the small police station for example, you'll notice that you can only place the additional police car parking spaces along a road. The same is true for the police precinct, bus terminal and many others. I suspect this is one of the reasons why terraforming is not included in the game - this would require the coastal snap point path to be built dynamically.

I'd still kinda expect this one to cause a rollback at some point - I've meddled with bin capacities in the past but that invariably led to rollbacks. Although my tests were mostly with agent capacities so you may be onto something anyway.

If you can provide the filenames, I can probably automate the process of FNV calculation and identification in SimCityPak.

Exporting and importing the region map files is slightly more difficult than I thought, but I'll have it working somewhere this week. I did manage to make an import/export function for the RASTER files, which are basically the building/lot/decal textures.

That's awesome! Would an import/export function for the terrain bitmaps allow us to create our own city maps? If so, I'll add that to SimCityPak this evening.

@Meisterlone - ProcsKalone has looked more into the city boundaries than me, but it's definitely not as simple as you describe it; the main problem is that the maps which define terrain height, water table, pollution and so on are limited to the city box area; for the time being, there is no possibility of enlarging these, meaning that while we can put things outside the city box, it has very limited functionality; for example, placing a building outside the city border will not flatten the terrain around it and can never add pollution or subtract resources. So, first of all we'd have to find out how to modify the maps at all - while the bitmaps that define the terrain can be found in some of the packages, the actual regions and cities seem to be created on the servers, meaning that we can't yet create our own. This is just the first hurdle we'd have to cross, because then we'd have to figure out how to make the maps larger, how to make the game save these to the server - the list goes on and on. I'd like to hear ProcsKalone's opinion on this, but personally I believe that sadly, the chance of the community being able to truly increase city size is extremely small. That's not to say that it will never be possible, but for the moment it's not something I'm focusing on because there are too many things that are just plain impossible without Maxis making some alterations first.

@Felgard - Can you tell me which lines specifically I've misspelled? I've been looking at the function and it seems fine to me. I've checked in a fix for the transforms not saving properly, but if there's anything else wrong in the code, might as well fix that before a new error shows up.

I've used those same properties to add wagons to the trams. Basically, there's a property for the first wagon (the engine) and one for all of the wagons behind it. I haven't tried using the 'wagon' property as an array yet, maybe that will evaluate the length/bogie position per wagon instead of all of them?

@Felgard - I had the same problem at some point, and I came to the conclusion that the files are being read in alphabetic order - and anything that's being read before the SimCity_Game (and so on) packages takes precedence over the ones that are being read later. This is why I prefix all of my package files with 'Oppie_'.

@warrior - I'm pretty sure that the example is simplified for demonstration purposes - while the rules are definitely "hard coded" (not so much into the .exe, but rather into compiled files), all variables are defined in the property files to make tuning possible. Everything from bin sizes to agent speed to worker amounts are variables that are first being read from property files and then used in the actual rules. This would allow a certain amount of community driven tuning but so far I've found that any variable change that could possibly be used in rules (such as costs, bin capacity etc.) always leads to rollbacks. This really makes me wish that we had an offline mode, because even without being able to change any rules, there's so much possibilities there for improving the game - but it is what it is, and I'm still optimistic that at some point (possibly the first expansion pack, if there's going to be one) an offline single player mode will be added.