wheeeze

Thank you @nos.17! About the DBPF explorer, you can check it out at https://github.com/OpenSC4-org/OpenSC4, which is the new repo. Feel free to use it. I'll certainly try to edit the SC4D wiki at some point.

About the UI, this is the kind of problem I encounter with the region view. The bottom-left corner exists 4 times! A very similar issue happens with the bottom-left corner UI in the City view. Reading the wiki and examining the source code (TGI: 0x00000000, 0x96a006b0, 0xaa920991) doesn't help me understand why this happens, except for the fact that there are in fact four elements with the same image that are defined in the source code, one of them being the child of another one, even, which makes selective hiding not an option

Hi everyone! After a long period of inactivity, I've come back to this project. In the meanwhile, it seems like three new contributors have arrived. As for myself, I spent the last week improving my homemade DBPF explorer rather than working on the game engine itself, since I found it was very much needed to work on guessing where each files goes. Thought it certainly isn't as good as Ilive's reader right now, it's getting pretty decent. However, the documentation on the UI is rather incomplete, including on the sc4devotion wiki. For instance, many interfaces appear triplicated and I'm unsure exactly why. The answer must be in how the unhandled, mostly undocumented attributes should effect the controls. I've been trying to locate Ilive's reader's source code, if it's even public, or find the original "UI editor" that was most certainly used by the Maxis team, but to no avail. These would allow me to improve a lot on the UI.

If it makes you feel any better, I had zero ideas of the inner workings of SC4 too, until I started working on the project

Small update: while I've been on vacation for two weeks in the first half of august, work hasn't stopped! Special thanks to @wibbert for implementing most of the base terrain rendering in the city view, plus some other fixes on my code, here's what it looks like : On my end, I've done quite the progress on UI rendering and handling, here's what the region UI looks like. Some buttons are functional and some aren't, the positioning isn't perfect, and there are, for some reason I ignore, extra images, but the hard work on the UI rendering is behind us :

If I they contain the proper TGIs, yes definitely! Thank you

A bit of an update since this thread hasn't been posted in for over a week: the project is not dead, I just recently found out UIs were defined in the game data, so I'm trying to read them and avoid having to recreate all interfaces by hand. However there are dozens of different UI definitions in the game files, and knowing which is which is far from easy.

Oh crap, that means I'm working on a redundant project

Thank you! Looks like the terrain map was really simple after all

There is no reason for that to happen. Nothing has to change at all.

By the way, allow me to shill for the small Discord server I've made to discuss my OpenSC4 project: https://discord.gg/heDXuJvNf7!

Would you happen to know where I can find the documentation on the savegame's terrain subfile (0xa9dd6ff4 0xe98f9525 0x00000001) format? Wiki says it's been fully decoded, but no link there

They're free as in free beer, but not free as in freedom, i.e., they're proprietary. Besides, they have good graphic capabilities, but to my knowledge, they're no better than anything else for the simulation part.

Unreal and Unity aren't free software

It works, thank you

Hi, I'm the OP from Reddit. Despite nearly two decades of playing SimCity 4, this is the first time I use this forum, so please excuse me if I'm breaking any rule. @ulisse, the answers to your questions: Within Godot. First thing I'm doing is loading and interpreting the game files. For more technical details, the answer is, I'm not sure yet. I'm still discovering how the files are arranged in SimCity 4, the limitations of GDscript, and adjusting the code based on that. Getting a functional region view is the first goal/milestone, it should not be too hard. For the city view/actual gameplay, Godot is powerful enough to take care of UI and rendering with as little hassle as possible. The automata simulation will most likely require me (or someone else brave enough) to use Godot's capabilities to run C++. I don't reject using another language, it's just that C++ is the one I happen to be the most comfortable with, in the realm of "fast" languages that is. If, by then, I feel confident with Rust, or find that C is a better target, or C# is good enough, then so be it. I wish it to be so, but it is low on my bucket list, and I'm not quite familiar yet with the technical aspects of modding. If, as I understand it, modding consists of DBPF files, there is no reason they shouldn't be compatibles. Patches that alter the executable cannot be compatible. I'd also like a modding API to exist, that could give a lot of freedom on how the simulation works, but it's not an immediate concern. They're hidden enough that I don't know that, so they can't be included Hopefuly none negative. I'm rather positive the law is on my side, but I'm not a lawyer, and even if I were one, my budget and ability to fight in court is somewhat lower than EA's. If they want to crush me, they'll do it. I hope they stay either neutral or lend a hand (let a man dream). @Cyclone Boom First goal is a 1:1 implementation. Altering the gameplay, implementing what I think are "improvements" (besides obvious technical ones like higher resolutions support) is not a goal of the project in itself. An exception to this, I'd like to add a multiplayer capability in the form of a shared region where everyone works on their own city. I remember such a tool was made several years ago (around 2017 if my memory is right). But, again, this is long term and not my focus right now. @TogaMasterJohn I'm absolutely not an expert on the topic, but my understanding was that a clean-room implementation meant the developer, who hasn't seen the sources, worked from a specification written by someone who obtained knowledge of the proprietary techniques and sources. Since I work from the SC4 wiki specs and have never even decompiled the game, I think I'm, for now, OK on that aspect. After all, there are already many tools out there who are distributed by people other than EA, and which work on their proprietary formats. OpenSC4, in a way, would just be such a tool. Feel free to correct me if there's something I misunderstood about the concept of clean-room development. Although, as I said above, if EA thinks this project must not go on, it likely won't go on, regardless of whether the law is theoretically on my side or not. Regards and thank you all for the support you've expressed