OrSpeeder

I tried to do this in other games but it didn't work... maybe I will resume working on SC4 if it is possible to do on SC4. Basically I want to allow slums to show-up on non-residential zones, for example people building slums on farmland, industrial areas, retail areas, etc... Idea is allow a more organic growth of the city, like it happens IRL, sadly you can't make growables show in zoneless places as far as I know, so this is the best that would work. So is it possible, to make a "farm" or "industry" that provide housing capacity and people can live in it?

I am currently trying to talk to EA by various means, if all of them fail I will try to convince Paul Pedriana, or see if I find other devs.

Yes. RDTSC was supposed to tell you how many clock cycles happened since last call. SC4 uses it for that specific purpose, it calculates how fast your processor is and adjust the game rules accordingly. Except right after SC4 launched, because most programmers were using it wrong (they were using to count TIME instead), Intel and AMD decided to change what RDTSC does, and make it count time, instead of counting processor cycles. This causes a bunch of issues with SC4. The only way to play SC4 in a way that makes it behave perfectly, is use a computer from around 2002 :/

I already poked around to see what need fixes and even know how to fix some of them, but I need EA permission to make it official. RDTSC is the first fix I would do, it would immediately stop all complaints on Steam about SC4 crashing, and could even improve performance.

About DX7 issues someone mentioned. I had a nVidia Optimus laptop, and found out because of it, that nVidia since 2007 or so (so SC4 was only 4 years old then) will outright lie to the operating system and the game when it receives requires using the DX7 API. nVidia since 2007 basically decided DX7 was out of support and so they stopped trying. I just installed SC4 on a AMD GPU machine, so no idea if it will be buggy or not, but nVidia I know since 2007 breaks stuff in SC4.

Hey Buggi! I am trying to do same thing. Even found Paul Pedriana and Bob Summerwill. Can you help out? I couldn't figure out even how to reach EA lawyers in first place. I wanted to release the source, if not possible, then create a team to make official updates for SC4, starting with me removing the stupid RDTSC.

I have a file here I don't remember where I got it. I think I made parts of it? Don't remember anymore, I found it on my source codes here. allGZIDs.h

Just found this thread! WHOOOOA! So, you are "wrong" about it "appearing" to be internal tool, the wrong part is the "appearing", I can confirm this IS the internal tool. Back in 2016 I exchanged e-mails with Paul Pedriana and asked about all this stuff, and he said that it existed, in fact all Maxis lots were made with this tool. Back then we believed all of it was dummied out, I am surprised that someone found out how to launch it! As for the script editor, it is not supposed just to be an editor, but a full blown debugger. The other thing you found out there is called "Ingred" from what I understood it was how Maxis edited the stuff we currently edit with iLivis Reader

I bought it, it is really good. I came here just to ask the same question hehehe. They are making the game intentionally very mod friendly, its building editor is launched from the game main menu even!

As you people probably noticed elsewhere, I am making a gameplay overhaul mod. Some mods, are overriden by my mod, so I can't use them anyway (example: any mods that alter how police stations or how fire stations work). Still, I want to know what mods you want me to include it, directly, or by importing features from them somehow. Also, authors of the mentioned mods, please mention if you give permission to get included or not in a future installer pack or something. Here is my own list so far: NAM compability (ie: my mod can work with, or without NAM , I am testing with NAM installed) Opera House Fix (someone know if the author of this mod let me include it?) Spaceport Fix (I dunno if I will use the original mod, I suspect that for balance reasons I will have to "recreate" it, with values compatible with my mod balance) Slope mod (optional I guess?) Census Repository (optional... I just use it during testing to make testing easier). Industrial Revolution Mod... I like it at least. (can I include it in some way?) SPAM, to be a farming counterpart to IRM (can I include it in some way?) Landmarks with jobs mod? Notable mod that will be forever incompatible: CAM, unfortunately CAM and my mod have lots of overlapping stuff, adding CAM support would require a inordinate amount of work... at least for now. Any other fixes and whatnot that you people remember should be included directly or indirectly?

You are slightly wrong. Like Nonny Moose said, people DO move to A to C if they don't find what they want at B. I built a region that was like this: I==R | C F I is a industrial tile, it is also the ONLY tile that has powerplants and garbage collection R is my original tile, and turned in a balanced town, but skewed toward residential C is my "downtown" F is a farm tile. = and | are roads, = is a RHW 10s and | is a RHW2 C has 160k people, R has 100k people, I has 5k people, but 50k jobs, and F has 10k people and more 50k jobs When I use the route query tool, I can follow some sims from C to F, from C to I, and so on, when I consider their travel type (for example, once I was mucking with some stuff, and ended with buses going directly from C to I, thus I knew that all buses arriving at I were residents of C). all my "road" tiles have tiny towns (about 50 of population and 200 jobs) in them, my intention was to simulate gas stations and their surroundings. Also there is a guy from "F" that is a hero, it is a single sim, that WALKS from F to C in the morning commute, and WALKS back at the evening commute, I have no idea why (probably congestion in the RHW2 resulted in walking being faster for that guy). My RHW 10s starts at the southmost part of C, and ends right at the entrance of I, this is because I made "I" to be a industrial park of sorts, the RHW splits in several smaller roads, and there are tollbooths to enter "I", this is inspired by a industrial park near my home (ie: it is a single neighbourhood with tollbooth in the entrance that employs something like 50k people, and everything beyond those tollbooths are industries, I was there a couple times to deliver parts).

Doing my best to pull a new golden age from my side, lets see if I can pull off something \o/ (I only wanted to finish my mod, but now ended working in 4 or 5 SC4 projects, I even lost count)

I-HT fix is slighly incompatible with my mod (I change the same files, but the numbers used in I-HT were also used on my mod, so it is "included"). Opera House Fix... OK, will see that (I think I have it installed here already) Private school fix, I remember meddling with that, but I don't remember anymore what it was, I will check. Crime Doesn't pay is completely incompatible with my mod, and not needed anyway (my mod change crime rules quite a big, and fix the same issues that Crime Doesn't Pay was supposed to fix in a better way). Spaceport fix I installed recently, will take a look more into it later. 3xCityHall... what is that? Grand Railroad Station fix I thought wasn't needed in Rush Hour or Deluxe? SPAM I decided to not include at all, I really liked SPAM, but instead I decided to make new agriculture rules, I will study later if there is a way to make my mod compatible with SPAM models though. IRM I am still thinking what to do with it... the problem is that the game default industry system suck, and IRM fixes it, but the fix involves messing with lots :/ I didn't want to include lots of lots.

I want to "autodetect" SC4 folders... Anyone know how? I assumed they would be in the windows registry... but they aren't (at least on my machine). Also, I wonder how to find them on OSX port, and how to find it on Wine

I made a unintentional test here. I re-installed NAM after cleaning my folder of plug-ins (they were making my mod get buggy), I changed the automata options, to "radical" then I installed this mod: Now the result is that even a tiny city with only 4 farms, 2 residential city blocks and 1 commercial city block there is already lots of cars, and some traffic jams.

I tried this on a region of mine with RHW and normal roads, it worked fine. Probably your issue is the lack of station then. A solution might be make like happened in the real world: along long rail tracks, people would build a small station and a tiny village around it. (at least where I am from there are several cities taht started this way)

I speak portuguese. He is complaining that the game CTD when building long roads... I never heard of that bug before, anyone has a clue?

Traffic congestion is already in the game... Or you mean see the game render a long line of stopped cars? I think those are related to automata settigns modding, nto traffic simulator. I think we have some mods here on STEX that set automata to never disappear, except buses (that insist in disappearing when they reach a bus station)

I would like to point out that SC4 unfortunately was released at the "wrong" time for this, the game was aiming to run in Pentium4, it is extremely CPU intensive, and the newest Intel CPUs, are only 3 times as fast as the Pentium 4 was in single-core performance, after 14 years, it is clear that Moore's Law is slowing down, and soon it probably will stall completely. The smallest transistor that can be made, if you could use exactly 3 atoms of width, would be 5 nm, AMD is releasing a 14nm CPU this year, and IBM is working on a 7nm one, 14 years from now on, it is probable taht the CPUs will be like only twice as fast as today ones, this is still not fast enough to emulate SimCity 4 This also applies to many other games of the same era (Kotor for example), also back then CPUs and GPUs had many changes that now are coming back to bite (example: RDTSC assembly instruction counted CPU cycles, but now it returns the value of a arbitrary frequency chip). Our only hope for games of that era, is ensure they work in new hardware somehow, without emulation.

So, I decided to re-create the extracheats dll, because I concluded that I need some custom DLL to finish my mods. It will take a while, LOTS are missing, despite the partial source from buggi, and from Paul Pedriana, the cheats dll rely on lots of stuff that was never released (so far... I am nagging EA, lets see what I can convince them to lend me). I noticed some stuff that you might think it is interesting: 1) Indeed, cheats.dll was compiled from a Maxis-owned computer, or at least it looks like that. 2) Buggi partial source, was carefully edited to remove some proprietary stuff from EA, this is why noone has been able to do anything with it. This made me suspect that indeed, Buggi was a Maxis employee hiding among us. Also, no matter how much we pester him (if we find him, since he is seemly gone), he can't help rebuild the dll, at this point unless he was moved to the The Sims team, he is probably fired from Maxis (EA fired everyone in early 2015, the date also coincide with Buggi last forum visit, but that might be just coincidence), so he can't access the source anymore. Also the reason EA never released the "DLL SDK" as many people wanted, is because the DLL SDK is the whole Rizzo-Gonzo framework, used to make all Maxis games since 1996, it is probably not possible at all create some DLL SDK that don't reference anything from Rizzo-Gonzo.

I decided to post the Particle Effects documentation I have. http://web.archive.org/web/20021201103028/http://simcity.ea.com/dev/effects.html http://oceanquigley.blogspot.com.br/2010/03/simcity-4-animation.html

The missile data, along with jets, and some other fake-automata are particle effects. The game particle engine understand some sort of programs, not just settings, unfortunately noone reversed them properly yet (something that would be awesome, since they control a wide range of stuff, including some cursors! for example the "circle" when you are using the terrain tools is a particle effect!) There is a video by some of the SC4 artists where he showcase the particle jets after he designed them.

I've been trying to understand how the simulators work (so I can mod the rules and balance the game better, and fix the commute time bug). Part of that ended with me studying how save files work. I think I can code a savegame editor, but I will only do it if there is some serious interest, do you people want it?

I am using only the debug symbols of Aspyr port, and only "roughly", there is a bunch of stuff that don't match, mostly because windows version use STLPORT and early EASTL while Aspyr use regular STL. I suspect this is why Aspyr port is also quite buggy.

Oh, DATASOURCE_ID is a enum that I made I mostly copied it from here: http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=DataSourceID (mostly, because some stuff I figured by myself, I plan in updating the wiki later). As for how it reads, I don't figured much yet, but seemly it uses a stream system, that MAYBE (I am not sure) is based on STLPORT streams. The stream system that reads for example has these functions according to the Aspyr port debug symbols: Skip GetSint8 GetUint8 GetSint16 GetUint16 GetSint32 GetUint32 GetSint64 GetUint64 GetFloat32 GetFloat64 GetRZCharStr GetGZStr GetGZSerializable GetVoid GetError SetUserData GetUserData You also find references to this in Ingred.ini In fact, I am almost sure that the save files are written and saved in a way identical to any stuff that Ilive's Reader can read. By the way: I am not sure yet what is "UserData" Error or Void, Serializable I think reads a entire class, GZStr reads a GZString (it is a string that has some custom data + inherits from stlport basic_string on Windows and from std::string on Mac) RZCharStr is just the C classic null terminated string, but seemly supporting UTF-8