matias93

Originally, Maxis designed the night view of the game buildings as a semi-transparent layer of lit windows and some lights, to be shown over the day texture, hence reducing the demand for disk space and RAM when running the game, but the look of it was a bit lackluster, particularly because the lights didn't illuminate the surrounding surfaces. To simulate dawn and dusk, the game applies and removes the night layer randomly to an increasing number of buildings, making it look as if they were turning their lights on and off bit by bit, instead of having the entire city lit at once. Trying to fix this, BATters developed several techniques, the most known one being TruNite, to replace the semi-transparent night layer with a fully opaque layer of the building, completely rendered in a night scene. This both demanded more resources when running the game, and made BATters spend double the time rendering their buildings, but looked much better and became very sought for. The dawn and dusk scenes, which depend on a slow gradient of colours applied over the entire scene, aren't compatible with this TruNite (and then DarkNite) buildings, because they include their fully rendered night scenes, so they always look either light by the sun or in full night. A related problem arises when using TruNite buildings with the DarkNite mod, or viceversa: as the buildings are fully rendered in a different configuration, they appear as too light or too dark for their night environment. There's no real solution to this, is just a compromise to have more detailed night views of buildings, and most new custom buildings are rendered in this way, so dusk and dawn views have became more or less incompatible with a modded game at this point.

There's a very cognizant omnibus article by @Morgan R from 2019 about this same topic, and even with the caveat that it is written with the restriction of only 4 sets in mind, it gives a great conceptual basis to define other sets using the same method. Said that, my opinion is that maybe we shouldn't use all sets, and yet tweak the existing ones somewhat, to make the adaptation from their current usage as frictionless as possible, while also improving gameplay control. A first thing to consider is that, increasingly since the 15th century and decidedly since the mid-19th century, formal architectural styles around the world became mostly international, so the need for regional style sets, in a simulation that usually represents cities not much older than that, would be quite narrow. Instead of devoting whole sets to specific places, I would follow Morgan R, and Maxis for what is worth, and mostly operate on a temporal basis, with the tilesets representing broad periods that can be selected sequentially to simulate the slow progression of architectural trends on a city. Another thing to consider is that, even with the number of custom buildings the community has created in these two decades, there's still not enough diversity to even produce functional tilesets for some styles, this is, having at least 3 or 4 different buildings per each combination of zone, wealth level, density and growth stage. According to the Building Index, Maxis included something close to 100 different buildings for each of its sets, even if, admittedly, some of them are repeated, for example, using the same model for a commercial office and a commercial service. I don't think we have enough buildings to make many of the proposed tilesets functional: for example, how many BATs of suburban Middle Eastern houses have you seen, or of low density and high wealth Latin American commercial services? We probably would have a good coverage of skyscrapers for most sets to be sure, but cities are mostly small-scale buildings, not CBDs, and while it would be perfectly acceptable to reuse some of the buildings and lots of the other sets, this approach also has its limits. What I would propose instead is to use the existing tilesets as a rough architectural periodisation scheme, and then evaluate how much of them can be disaggregated to justify adding extra tilesets. Following Morgan R, I would propose using Chicago as the Neoclassical tileset, New York as the Noveau/Deco tileset , Houston as the Modern/International one, and Europe as the Postmodern one. Aside from those four, other sets could be constructed as deliberately incomplete and intended to be used only in addition to one or more of the full ones, given their historical specificity. For example, an early Baroque set (including Mediterranean and colonial-styled Latin American buildings) could be constructed so as to be capped and not include high rises in the higher growth stages, but only increasingly dense low-rise buildings. Then, to simulate the advancement from there to the big-scale architecture of the 20th century, the player would need to activate another tileset, and its buildings, with bigger occupancy numbers, would naturally replace the existing ones. This approach, which, in my opinion, would be the best suited for very local tilesets or historical or fantasy sets, would also be flexible enough to allow for the posterior inclusion of high-rise buildings on the tileset, if some BATter were so inclined. Subject to the availability of buildings, I would also back making a second set of period-based tilesets, for example, some sort of Pan-Asian alternate series, but again, I'm not sure of how much distinctive it would end being in the later periods, or if things like the huge Hongkongese condo complexes should just be considered as high density and max growth stage Postmodern residential buildings, that would naturally don't grow on a less dense city, built according to European or North American standards.

I would bet that the "all the dependencies" pack is the problem, because it's almost impossible to maintain such a thing, so it's most probably not up to date, or only applies to a certain set of mods. Your best chance would be to post a screenshot of the affected lots, with their query open, on the Can't Find It thread, so that someone can recognise it : If the boxes are too big and obstruct the view of the lot, you can use this mod that reduces them to a tiny colourful flag, allowing to see and recognise the lot by the remnant buildings and props in it:

If I remember correctly, adding T21 props to el-rail and GLR isn't the kind of things that alter RUL files, and thus, can be done by someone external to the NAM team. And I remember having catenaries on GLR, I think a set modified by @rivit but done by someone else. It wasn't complete, but existed, so it might be that some of the work is already done.

Those are jeronij's rural retaining walls. I don't think they ever were on the STEX, but they might have been included on one of the BSC packs at SC4Evermore, I'm not sure. My sidewalk mod includes a SCILT compatible set. It's probably not a perfect fit for everyone, but it's fairly neutral, so you might want to give it a try. You only need the SCILT file for it, not the full mod.

By the way, @JP Schriefer once modelled the original buildings I'm replacing here, but you know, real life's tyrannical grip tends to make those kind of big projects quite hard to end:

I'm not sure if the game could count specific props from the inside, but now we are in the realm of crazy DLLs, so maybe? Without that, what I would think of doing would be this: T21 props are located in a semi-random fashion, as prop families over repetitive sequences of network tiles. For example, lamp posts are located as a family of 1 prop (so it's always the same for the same mix of density and wealth of the adjacent zoning) and a frequency of 1 over 2 (so they appear each every network tile). If you were to put a T21 transformer, lets say, every 32 network tiles, you would have to use a frequency of 1 over 4 (which I seem to remember is the maximum available, but I might be wrong), and then use a prop family with 7 blank props and 1 transformer prop. That way, you would know that, for every 32 tiles of the given network (let's say it's road) built in the city, you have 1 transformer. And the game can count network tiles, so that's feasible. Now, if you were to vary the density of transformers for zoning wealth and density (which makes complete sense), then I don't know if you could keep using this method, but maybe using overall stats for those factors would allow you to ponder for them in aggregate and still reach a reasonably close number. EDIT: Here's a guide on T21s, if you want to check how it's done:

That's perfectly doable and wouldn't require coordination with the NAM team necessarily, by making or modifying a T21 mod, like the ones that include more trees on the roads and streets. You could, in fact, do something as simple as overriding a tree model by a transformer model and get it done, but in that case the transformer would appear wherever the tree is supposed to be.

I've used this replacement more than once: MS Jubiler by @moto.kloss As a stand-alone for the buildings on the Santiago's Civic District, which are basically the same size but host ministries instead of boutiques. Of course, because I'm not doing a recreation but merely imitating things, they look quite different once in place:

Reconciling is really super hard without external editing tools, but you can try some options: Use the terrainquery cheatcode to survey and fix specific points in both sides to use as a reference. For example, if you have a hilltop divided in two cities, you can check with terrainquery if the altitude of the top is the same in both sides, and if not, correct it with precision. Use a set of customised slope mods and use networks to terraform. For example, if you know that the el-rail tool makes slopes of 15 metres each 6 tiles (as mine does), you can make soft slopes with that one, while using the street tool (that gets those same 15 metres of altitude over only 2 tiles) to get more steepness. This is particularly useful for detailed fixes and to preserve slopes when building over them. Adjust the size of the terraforming tools with the number keys. When using any of the terraforming tools, you can press any number key and have them resize from bigger to smaller, allowing finer control or a less tedious application. Still, you'll most surely still find weird artifacts even if you get the terraforming perfectly. For example, the (unfinished) moisture simulator of the game tends to assume that the western margin of all cities is the wettest, and so in the regional view you'll always get weird bands of wetter terrain at the western margins of cities. You can somewhat mitigate this by using ploppable water effects (like the ones in JENX Poseidon Mod) to force the moisture simulation to identify another side as the wettest, but this will also affect your overall moisture distribution, which is particularly evident in sloped terrain. Depending on the compatibility of your terrain and tree mods, your sloped terrain will change colour accordingly, and the god mode trees you make grow will be of different species. Most of this will probably sound very confusing if you don't get a clearer view of how moisture works in the game, so I recommend you to first check this fantastic dev thread by Corina Marie:

Those buildings are only growable, so you might be playing in cities where the demand is insufficient, or where you haven't reached the development stage to get them to grow.

It should be possible with Flex pieces if the NAM is correctly installed (and there is no older copy of it in the plugins folder), but it's not the best practice, because many of those pieces also serve as starters, and can be a little bit unpredictable when plopped over a built network.

The ones with the benches are Paeng's Playgrounds or another of his packs: Those simpler paths I don't recognise them, but I remember that @Terring made some similar ones recently.

How close are the RHW-4 starters? You could get a better result by having them as close as possible on both sides. If that doesn't work, then there might be an issue with the overriding for that specific piece.

That's not an MMP, but a grass texture applied to the base of the railway. I haven't seen that released, but you can do it yourself with GoFSH and the RRW reskin set made by @rsc204, replacing the 'dirt' texture with a grass one.

I might be wrong, but the Fz_ at the beginning suggests to me that the missing prop is one that Fantozzi directly added for the game. I would try to reinstall Colossus Farming and see if that solves it.

Ductile

6061 With this comment, we are also getting a rare 5-comment-a-week streak on this thread, something that didn't happen since 2022!

Playing with this site that illustrates the results of a research paper on modes of commuting across the world, and thinking on how it could be used to plan cities in the game, or even, as a novel way to visualise the game data. This triangle puts all the cities in the study in a given crossing depending on how many people commutes to work by car, transit or by walking/cycling: the top is all walking/cycling, the left corner is all transit and the right one is all car. https://citiesmoving.com/visualizations/ I guess I'll do a more detailed thread later on what their results mean, on the off-topic sub-forum, so check there, but I'll also put a link here. Meanwhile, where do you think your city would be in the triangle?

To my knowledge, @justforfun is the only person that has made true 3D buildings for the game, instead of the typical pre-rendered BAT models, so you can have some, but definitely not build a full city only with them. As an alternative, you could try to mainly use buildings that are naturally rectangular in shape, as they get less distorted than more curved shapes. Also, very tall buildings will also tend to get distorted on the top, so trying to use mostly mid-rise ones might also help.

weird situation: I recognise the building from real life (because it's in my city) but not the specific model. That's the Torre Banmédica located in Apoquindo 3600, Santiago. MattB325 did a different version of the same building, with some modifications from the original, which you can find here: