mrodgers

Sims 3/4 is what led me to try SC4. My youngest daughter loves The Sims. We are tech deficient and only had an old desktop in the basement from 2005. My brother-in-law gave the girls his old laptop with missing keys, etc, and the youngest was excited, she wanted to play The Sims (had been trying out the freeplay on her old iPod and such.) I got her Sims 3 just months before Sims 4 came out. So, had to get her Sims 4 not much later. My laptop I bring home from work isn't the greatest. I could load Sims 3 since she is now heavily into playing Sims 4 (ie, I could use the Sims 3 disk.) I played around with it a little bit, mostly designing and building houses and such as others have said. I could only get so far before the laptop just couldn't handle it any more (start the game loading, go eat dinner, clean up dinner, go shovel the driveway, come back and wait the remaining few minutes left for it to load kind of slow.) I was searching around the net looking for stuff to download for my daughter. I came across a post about SC2000 being free on Origin. I downloaded it, tried it out, was a little lost, and glanced online to seek info on how to run. That's when I started seeing how SC5 sucks and the comparisons to SC4. Started reading about SC4 and ended up buying it. Still haven't created anything other than a few starter cities and downloading some regions. I've been working on creating a region that is quite large (20x28 city tiles) but I'm having trouble with it working with such huge files on the laptop I have available. Waiting for the refund check to grab up a current spec laptop. I want to mock up where I live, western PA. I don't plan on recreating perfectly, but I want to play around with all the little towns along the Allegheny River and such. I have a pretty good map of rivers and streams from north of I-80 where I live down to Pittsburgh, but don't have any elevation. Not worried about the flatness, I just want the rivers. I have a custom config file to center all the towns I want to create, but using the config file, the map renders all flat with no water. If I create (sc4Mapper) the region without a config file, all the rivers and streams are rendered, but the city tiles split up the small cities into multiple tiles. I don't know why I can't use my own config file where I have medium city tiles tossed around in strategic places to center the small towns on a large tile.

So, been working on creating quite a large region that my computer is sure not capable of handling, but for now it's all I have until the tax return comes. I didn't get any response from my last thread. Perhaps I won't for this either, I don't know..... I just need to confirm the following is I am guessing a RAM problem. I created a 20x28 city tile region. Been working on it forever now in Paint.net with this slow computer. Finally got it working but when I created it in SC4Mapper, there were areas of the map shooting into the sky. It rendered fine, I found it was artifacts in the JPEG conversion. I cleaned the JPEG conversion up and now it doesn't show any of the rivers when I load the region. It is showing mostly all flatland rendered with sections unrendered but the rivers are there. Here's a screenshot. There should be rivers running all through this. The rendered parts are all flatland. When I open that single tile, the river does show up. This river should be running all through the region. As I said, when I did the first render I had artifacts that created super high blotches all over, but all rivers did show up (I don't have a screenshot of that...) I can't see how this is a computer spec or RAM problem because I have previously created the region from the same size image file and had all the water areas. Can anyone shed some light for me?

Yes, really need portability. Not so much portability, but compact. I can not set up a desktop on the kitchen table every time I want to use the computer and take it all down every evening when we eat dinner. That's 2 things that we seem to be of the minority in the US. We don't live in a McMansion and we eat dinner together at the table. Literally no space anywhere for a computer desk and desktop computer. I'm moving out of the cold damp spider filled storage basement with a computer purchase. We buy one about ever 10 years. Portability to use on the couch or in the bedroom. It's all we have, 3 bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, and living room. Portability to take out in the garage when I'm working on the car or working on some other project. Portability to take out and sit on the deck while the kids are swimming.

Hey all, figured there's some folks that know more about computers here than I do. I'm still laptop shopping. Pulling the trigger soon. Have a few questions on feature comparison. Wondering which you would chose and why when comparing features. First item is HP business laptop with i5 processor running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. I really don't want anything to do with Windows 8. Heck, I'm brand new to Windows 7 at work a week ago (XP both at work and home prior.) This is $600 order online only. Second item is Leveno consumer i7 processor running Windows 8.1.(32 or 64 bit unknown.) $550 available in store or online. All other specs/features are same or similar, 8 GB, regular 5200 rpm drive (size doesn't matter), DVD writable, 15.6 inch screen (no touch on the Win8.1 machine.) Intel HD4400, etc. I do a lot of photography and image work with older versions of Photoshop/Lightroom/Paint.net. I want to play SC4 as probably the most I'll get into gaming. Maybe a little Sims3/4 but each of those run on my current ancient pokey AMD Sempron 1GB laptop. Wondering if you would chose the faster i7 processor with Win8.1 for $50 less over the i5 Win 7 Pro machine with all else being equal. As I said, I have played around in the store with Win8 and really don't like it at all. I want functionality rather than fluff (I despise most current program versions like Office 2010 I am forced to use at work because I want menues and such rather than pretty little icons and pictures to try to figure out what to do.) But, if an i7 is dramatically better than an i5 for a cheaper price even, perhaps you folks can convince me the trade-off of undesireable 8.1 would be worth it over Win7. One thing I see is the HP Windows 7 machine is labeled as a business laptop (G350 model or something like that.) I am guessing there would be much less bloatware loaded on it. Can anyone convince me one way or another?

Don't know if anyone is reading this since no one responded yet, but I'm getting somewhere at least. Didn't realize my large file was the wrong dimensions by 63 pixels. I resized it and was able to load it into SCMapper. I'm home now and tried to load it into SC4. I ended up with very narrow rivers with straight up and down banks along with towering pillars miles into the sky. I loaded it into SCMapper by RGB Jpeg using a white background and the blue water as my preview above. I'm trying more with different colors but playing with a 37 mb Paint.net layered file is torture on this laptop, LOL. The original image I created came from stitching together 1km height images taken from Yahoo maps. I filled in the bridges across the water and erased everything in the image that wasn't water. I have no idea how to get actual terrain data per the many tutorials I've found because most of the tutorials are years old and sites aren't around anymore, or have been updated that the tutorials don't work any more. I'm trying to get a region of western PA distanced from where I live down through Pittsburgh. I don't want to try to replicate it all exactly, but want to build most of the small towns and rural sections with putting a city in the 3 rivers area for playing around with high rises eventually. I can't find anything for download that is of western PA.

Thank you, didn't realize there was a section like this. I'll take note of the hosting site vs upload as well in the future. I use Dropbox and getting the link from the website never seems to work vs. through the DB utility on my home computer. I'll work around that next time though.

I am a bit confused at region creation. I have an image file I made. I'm not worried about flat terrain, the image file is the river system I want to use. The file is large, much larger than I can even create on my current laptop being used, but a new laptop is on it's way. I created this on another computer. I am trying to figure out how to get it from an image to a region file. The image file size is large (you folks are probably use to large images, I am not coming from an ancient computer from 2005.) I have an 8 bit bmp file I saved, 5120x7168 and 35mb. I did this all in Paint.net so I can convert to whatever file I need. I have SC4Mapper. I can not run SC4Terraformer on this computer (I can install stuff, but don't want to add the files that might be missing from the list in the readme.) Can anyone tell me what I need to do to create a region from this? Most tutorial stuff I read is either using Photoshop or the tutorial is too old that images are no longer present. Here is a preview of what I have reduced down to allowable resolution for posting....

Ah, thanks for that. Maybe it was with the leveling tool. I could swear he was placing road tiles, but sometimes folks move so fast in the videos I can't see what they are clicking on and maybe missed him selecting the level tool. I'll have to look again.

Answering my own question.... Dragging it across the ground level road and railroad did the trick. I just didn't think of that when I was setting it up. I thought you had to place an intersection/overpass section there to go over another road. Now I am having difficulty from after the railroad, I'm going across a river and it's not letting me. Looks to me that the ground is ever so slightly lower on the other side of the river. I've seen in video, Haljackey do a trick I think where he clicked one side of a river and matched the height on the other side. At least that's what it looked like, but there was no explaination. I've got to figure that one out if that's what he did.

Hey all. Having a bit of trouble here. I have a 15m Avenue crossing overtop a ground level Avenue that I can't connect up. I have a screenshot of what is going on. I used a drag-able elevated road and I can't drag it to the overpass overtop the other avenue. Same is going on with the overpass over the railroad. The end of the drag-able overpass shows the end loop of a regular Maxis Avenue. Just thought of this though and haven't tried it out. I used a puzzle piece to get the overpass. Perhap maybe you can just drag the elevated Ave overtop of the underneath Ave and it works? I just thought of it but can't try it out now. How do I get this elevated road attached in the screenshot below?

ot You can do all of that by dragging now too by the way. Best thing is practice, as you found. 4 hours down to 5 minutes is pretty significant, don't you think? All the NAM stuff follows similar patterns, if you got the hang of the rest of the game nice and quick it won't take that long to learn the NAM.

Wow, I just spent 4 hours working on something as simple as the following. I couldn't figure out how to attach the overpass to the Avenue on the sloped tile. I think I cycled through every single option in the roads menu. The good thing is, after figuring that out, it only took about 5 minutes to build this... [img}https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57899348/SC4/WPA%20CJ/City%20Journal-2015-jan-30-008.jpg That said, shown in the 2nd image above is one problem I mentioned when first starting this thread in how the previews of the pieces are really faint and difficult to see. How am I suppose to figure out what to use when it looks like that? LOL. Is this a problem with my graphics card I'm guessing? I'm on a really crappy laptop, AMD Sempron 1GB Ram with an ATI Radeon X1250. Ancient stuff, but I'm currently stuck on my work laptop since I'm trying to save up some cash to replace my 2005 desktop that broke over Christmas time (hopefully a Win7 Pro, i5, 12GB Ram laptop is getting ordered tomorrow, depending on how much the quarterly bonus is....)

Wow, while at work I had searched for the manual to read through while my equipment runs. Kept coming up with posts in threads asking about this stuff referring to the intensive manual that I found very lacking. I didn't realize I only had the NAM manual. Found the actual RHW manual to look through. There's all the pictures and descriptions! Ha! I never looked in the download file at home because I thought I had already looked through the manual. No wonder all I could see was a list of components and no more information.

Hey all. Question on RHW pieces. Wondering if there is a site that has more than just a list of the components available. I'm looking for images of the individual pieces and puzzles. While I am tabbing through the options, because I'm on a small laptop with a 14 inch screen and only an Intel 2d graphics card for now (work laptop, shhhh.... ) the pieces I see while scrolling through looking for what I want or might want is difficult. My graphics are no where close to as crisp and clear as what I see others' photos show (all Maxis options maxed). Also as I scroll through, the pieces are faded out so I can't see them very clearly until I put them down. As I hunt for tutorial stuff on RHW/NAM and not finding a whole lot other than videos showing stuff being built at supersonic speed, I am having trouble figuring it out. I was being yelled at by my hugely expensive "highway to nowhere" by the dudes in the game, lol. I had an elevated highway crossing 2 rivers and traversing through the entire city tile. Somewhere there must have been breaks in the highway, I am guessing at the bridges as I haven't figured out yet how to make a bridge high enough for water traffic without a 70° slope from ground level. I ended up completely demolishing it with about $4000 left in funds and rebuilt using Maxis Avenue road minus the bridges until I had the money to finish the 2 bridges to reach a residential area on the south end of the city isolated from everywhere else. (Residents were very patient as they waited access to their properties to build, LOL.)

Yeah, already read through that and many others I've browsed. I downloaded NAM and looked at that stuff, but it's confusing. I can't seem to get anything to work with it. Looking at a thread on the front page about FAR, it seems a little strange to do, not just clicking the end of the roads and getting what you want. I ended up with a road at 18 degrees or something and couldn't do anything but keep dragging it on. Tutorials aren't real easy to find on the net for NAM. Will have to try youtube, but videos don't run very well on the current laptop I'm using. Looking at the thread on the front page of this forum section, it seems like you have to build 2 small (or more) sections of roads with endpoints or something, then that gets replaced with some of the tools like the curves and such. I think I really need to figure that out as I have the vision of roads and railroads following along many river banks and the tools in NAM looks like the way to do it. Might just load one of the stock regions and just play a while with NAM.