Andy80586

This is so cool. I miss these old games, I'm glad to see people are still playing and making new content for them! I still dream of having a modern city builder where we can drive and fly around the cities we build.

Originally posted by: El Burro SC4 IS broke though... theres things about SC4 that get us down and annoy us... i'm sure anybody with a plugin folder over 1GB will have told you about the random crashes SC4 suffers... and untill EA release the Source code (wich will be NEVER), those problems will never actually be resolved. SC4 could be alot better... and EA are scwandering their Sim City time away with this stupid Sim City Societies game, when really, they should be focusing on a real SEQUEL to Sim City 4! This may sound ambitious... but this game WILL be the (unofficial) sequel to Sim City 4...quote> It is ambitious, but then again, so was this, and it has come quite a long way from 3 years ago when I just got started modding it. Before that, I was quite active here, contributing stuff like improved avenue/road textures I remember doing once that I think got incorporated into the NAM. Of course, Vice City (VC) and SC4 are 2 games almost polar opposites of each other, but their differences fade rapidly as soon as you start modding the map. The original goal I had in mind was taking a city (and eventually a region but it never got off the ground) from SC4 and converting it to run as a VC mod (merge SimCopter into Streets of SimCity and update it to make it work with SC4 and you get what I had in mind). State of Liberty only does half of that: the program I wrote lets you add tons of objects to the map, but I have no way of extracting terrain data or anything else. Basically, one proprietary platform + another proprietary platform by another company = a lot of logistic issues. If we get Urbs Urbis right (which I plan to contribute as much as I can to the source code and simulation logic), not only are we off the proprietary platform issue, there are endless other problems that get solved. Problems such as: 1. We have a zillion BATs here now, all made in full 3D in Gmax. Can't convert them to SC5 because it's closed-source, too time-consuming to hack, and/or we won't have control over what goes in it? Urbs Urbis will handle them and make SC5's building diversity look like a joke. 2. Some CEO gets worried about some idiot getting offended over something stupid (e.g. Hot Coffee), suing the company, and getting $(some integer) * 106 for it and having to screw over the game and make it impossible to mod? How about a game mode that implements objective, non-ethnocentric racism and stereotypes of every ethnicity? EA might try that after they release the source code to SC4, Duke Nukem Forever comes out, and hell freezes over. Do this right, satirize both racism and political correctness, and make SC5's "societies" look like another complete joke. 3. Some coder makes a cool feature for the game that has 2 bugs and can't get them fixed in time for final game to get assembled and shipped and on the shelves by 12/1 this year, so they get stripped and incorporated into an expansion pack that never gets released because parent company is too busy working on a game that makes them far more money and it slips through the cracks? Moot. 4. Anyone can develop for the game. Thought of something? Either code, test, and compile it in or find someone who can, then increment the version number and release a new beta. Right now we wait 4 years only to discover that nothing happened, the roads are still straight, and the first screen looks like something you could find on one of the Tomorrowland machines in Disney* (and I can see Walt turning over in his grave from it). So I have come back to make this work.

I tried to lengthen the life of Mayor Mode trees by saving to patch, but that didn't work. I tried it again by saving directly to simcity_1.dat, and it worked. My conclusion is that there are some mods that require the simcity_1.dat (or whatever installation file) to be modified directly. However, I would definitely back up the file first, and create a log file documenting any changes made to the file in the backup archive/.zip file. That way, if (this is a big if) there is another expansion or patch released by Maxis you won't have to reinstall the whole game in order for it to work properly (or at all).

This zip file is intended for use with my new map on the MEX. Anyone interested in learning how this process works can download the map and unzip the attached file to the SimCity 4\Plugins directory. The .dat file itself is just a copy of the Terrain Properties with the exemplar for the scale factor adjusted to 9.783.