Simizen

even with this, you can select the option to add a shortcut to the desktop, which bypasses the launcher. The launcher should still track hours played though. Of course, all of this is still optional

party like it's 2005!! and a fun one from last night that I saw, lol

thought I'd share the incredible repetition of numbers, lol (the percentage)

possibly, but expect a serious grind getting there. Had that a few days ago just trying to go up from 10 to 11%. I wouldn't mind making it to 20% myself, but i know that'll take a while for sure,

lol, that's fair

oh, cool!! thank you for the link!!

ah yes, a closed court. At least I won't have to type up the raucous nonsense from the audience in the mix now

had that feeling, but figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. that's cool. Now I know why at least. I just thought it was some weird thing y'all had going on for like, inventory/moderation or something, but that makes sense

and I broke 300k!!

as we have updated letter-color combination icons for members who've not changed up their avatars, I was wondering if maybe we could also get an update to the guest avatars as well? I noticed it when downloading a file also, we have a STEX bot? kinda wanna request an update to that avatar too, but I wouldn't know what to change it to while doing it justice, cause I do like the logo. But, yeah, otherwise, i was wondering if maybe it's possible to update the guest avatar, to maybe supply it with something similar to the default member avatar style, but maybe provide a random color each log on? Granted, the random color thing is generally pointless, but might be neat to see when checking out the "who downloaded this?" list. But, I figured, since we've already updated the default member avis, why not update the guest one too.

nice!!

okay, that's awesome!! Last I could remember there was just an overall issue with it, but I'm very glad that got fixed now.

Well, a couple things with it, are: there's still an underlying issue regarding ploppable RCI; though I think it's mostly regarding Residentials not working properly not everyone would necessarily want a specific location for these types of FARMs basically, there's likely to be players interested in just having them around, but not necessarily caring what's actually growing there, save for maybe not wanting regular farms. Mostly these are to add more aesthetic value to the cities. But, also, not everyone really wants to sit there and run ploppable lots and decorate every little aspect of a particular lot. Plenty do of course, so ploppables should definitely be made as well imo, but, there's plenty of people who don't care and would rather just let the game grow them. I personally would rather they grow, as I feel it could be fun to see, and just an overall interesting challenge for me in some respect. But I do see the appeal in the ploppables, even though I, personally, would rather not paint my entire city exactly the way I want it. I like watching stuff grow and change and advance over time as various factors change and adjust. And watching some of these lots change over time as education and technology improves is just something I've always liked. But, again, I'm certainly not against there being ploppable lots for people that want them. And, as far as I'm concerned, I kind of view them as being a bit of a requirement, so that people can have/enjoy them if they so choose, as I'd rather not outright restrict everyone to one particular play style.

nice!!! I wonder if they can be turned into automata? especially those giant ones on the right

So I see we've broken the 2 million mark at some point (and my percentage is down to 13.5%. Yo, if i make 15% i get a free drink!!) And in other news, three of the jurors have decided it's time to throw paper airplanes around, and one dude is just throwing a crumpled up ball, cause, and I quote "It's gonna get crumpled up anyway. Might as well eliminate the middle man" 🤦‍♂️ I'm now wondering if the Judge might be able to drop the SgtCity trial to focus on this nonsense...

yeah, I honestly had a feeling the farms were locked to the 1x1 tiles. That's honestly been my biggest concern since I first had the idea. Cause, if it's locked to 1x1, but we supply 3x3, then the whole thing's just going to be an overall broken mess. If we're able to convince it to build larger lots, that would be absolutely wonderful, and honestly, would make farming way more interesting at that point, regardless of all previous mods. yeah that's true. My thought here was we could basically lock the new FARM types behind different styles. That way players could turn them on/off as needed. But, I also don't doubt that just adding these extra lots would take quite a bit of work regardless of what route we take. Like, even if the Building Styles do work, there may still be other work involved in getting it sorted out the way we'd want. And, of course, just a ton of work overall if the DLL doesn't work in our favor. And, yeah, I also figured the DLL thing probably wouldn't allow for overriding the way the densities work. If it is possible to utilize DLLs to swap out how the densities work, I fully expect it to be a completely separate one. But, I honestly think it's more along the lines of the same issue we have with attempting to add new zones. Like, we could potentially reuse some and replace what's currently there, but, without a better understanding of the code, we're stuck with whatever we've got (not to mention any hard coded limits). yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I am curious as to what all it does when we're able to finally break it down though. Cause I'd be curious to see how it handles the other zone types (res + com) as well. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A question I'm curious about now, is, how large of a lot is acceptable in the game for growing? So like, let's take an oil well field for example. You'd have say a handful of oil pumps on a decently large lot, and let's say it's tied into either of the higher density Industry zones. How large can a lot be, before the game can't use it? Cause, I know the default logic in the game, is that Residential can go about 4 tiles in, Commercial's typically 3 tiles in, and Industrial's typically 5 tiles in, before there's development issues. Much of this is a carry over from 3K from what I can tell, with the added layer of it allowing deeper development due to custom lots. So like, is there an overall limit in how large a (growable) lot can be before the game says "nope, can't do it"? Or is it just strictly demand related at that point? Like, I was thinking if the oil field lot was say, 20x20 tiles, idk if that would be too large for the game to handle. Cause initially, before deep diving into it, the farms can make you think "oh, it can go pretty deep" but, they're the exception, and run off of an entirely different set of rules (mainly, they're just spamming a singular 1x1 lot past the initial Anchor). So, I'm not sure if there's like a hard limit to their size, or if virtually anything's allowable. And, the reason for this is, we could potentially bypass some of the limitations. Like, we know that you can shift/ctrl/alt click the lots to force a direction, and any lot that fits the intended size can grow there, so long as one exists. So, if we were to make a 20x20 oil field, and zoned it out with that kind of facing, would it still grow? It's certainly not perfect, but it's at least an option to see if we can't expand on some of the resource acquisition lots.

yeah, I knew the last couple were more for the high tech and futuristic stuff. Even though I've read through it a couple times, I actually forgot that CAM allows for timber industry as an option, so that's certainly interesting to see. And, yeah, most of the extra stuff is likely in a grey area with all of that, but I really do think that the Building Styles DLL may actually be a possible solution, at the very least, in the short term. I'd personally love for it to be way more dynamic, but, that's going to require a complete rewrite of the game at that point; so the current focus is to see what all we can convince the current structure of the game to do. I do wonder though, since the last couple stages are hardly utilized, if maybe we could rearrange some of the stuff to be able to fit some of these ideas in? Of course, if needed, the stages could also be increased to 15, alongside the rest of the zones. I'm just not sure what kind of work that would entail if all of that were to happen. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Another thought had come to me regarding some of this, and that is, I wonder if it's possible to maybe convince the other densities that they're farms? Like, it would probably still rely on the Building Styles DLL, but, basically, if there's a way to make it so that the other two zone types are convinced that they're also farms, then maybe we could move some of this over there instead. Which would allow regular farms, as well as the custom FARM content. Of course, if that is possible, then we likely could do the reverse, convince the farming density zone that it's a Low Density Industrial zone. This would then allow us to further separate the lots found in IRM. Course it's possible that convincing these densities that they're other zone types may require a DLL mod itself. But it would certainly be an interesting thing to look into at least.

yeah, that was actually the original intent that I started off with a few years back. There's been some interest in attempting to expand on the zone types in the game if possible, but atm they're stuck staring at the code to sort out if anything could be changed on it. Currently we're limited to a handful of zones (13 or 14 i think?), and they all seem to be hard coded. If there is the ability to change out one or two, we could possibly see some expansions, namely, an additional Light Density Industrial zone. But, I don't know what the options are beyond that currently. But, generally, if it's somehow possible to just add a handful of extra types, yeah, giving both Industrial, and Agricultural their own 3 densities would be the goal. This would then allow for extra farm types as mentioned above. But, for the moment, we'll have to assume that's not possible, and simply work out how we want these extra farm types to fit into the game. And for me, that may very well rely very heavily on CAM (or a modified version). Since CAM's added extra stages to each zone type, then we could probably take advantage of them for the extra farms. But, of course, there's the overall limitation of trying to get only a specific type to show up as needed, and not have either a complete mix (as both CAM and SPAM allow, which is great for default farms), or have them show up in some awkward manner that would require demolishing and rebuilding the farm types. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And, yeah, these sound like they could work with my idea. I mean, mine's currently limited, as I can really only think of a handful of extra resource types to "farm". Currently the list I could come up with would be: Trees/Forest Rock Quarries Oil/Gas Coal Metal I mean, I'm sure there's others, but I wouldn't know what they'd be honestly. That said, you did bring up a great idea that I think could actually fix a lot of this pretty quickly: the Building Styles DLL. This thing's already being used to give us an optional way to activate W2W lots, which was part of the original idea behind separating Agriculture and Industry when I had first come up with it. But, with the introduction of DLL modding, and the fact that we can flip through building styles as needed, we could probably pop these extra lots behind a building style option. Additionally, we've got the Moisture Data View as an optional chart currently (though preliminary work is being made currently to see if the Data Views [and possibly charts, idk yet] can be condensed to free up some space, which may make it a more permanent option for people). And with this chart, it shows the location of where the ground has the most/least water within a city throughout the year. So, we could easily set it up so that certain farm types could potentially grow on areas that have a certain amount of water on them (or a rough average), and then other types could grow on the drier spots. The catch of course, is that it could possibly rely on quite a bit of coding/programming to get it to work properly. And that will take quite a bit of effort to pull off for sure. Granted, the whole point of this thread was to pop out my ideas, and then teams could be made for each thing, to help move things along much more quickly. I believe there's already some lots for things like oil wells/pumps currently, so those would likely require a simple relot to get them to work with this mod. Also, i believe someone's figured out a way to give Agricultural lots all 3 building types that the typical Industrial zones have (Anchor, Mechanical, and Out lots), meaning that if we can tap into that, we could easily adjust some of these lots to work as we intend, rather than to have them just spam the same handful of tiles over and over again like we get with regular farms. Though, to some extent, this is likely to occur regardless. And I do like this, and I greatly appreciate your reply! I'd absolutely love to see this be a thing for sure. And, of course, if you've got any other ideas to add to it, feel free! There's not too much going on with most of my mod ideas currently, as most are still in a concept state. But, working out how some could be done is definitely providing a boost.

these look great!! And I have to agree with Kel9509 here, I didn't even think of the search lights as an option. Which, really, if you think about it, completely makes sense. I mean, 20th Century Fox is literally known for it due to being in their logos since they've been around, lol

are lookup tables an option? Like, if we already know the size of a lot, maybe we could store that somewhere so that the code could just count the number of a type of building and then multiply that by the number of tiles it uses. So like, if we used a modified bus stop that's 2x2 tiles for example, we could have say that there's 13 large bus stops, and the table would tell it that it's 4 tiles in size, and then immediately run the math (13 x 4 = 52). Theoretically, this could reduce the time to run the math significantly, since it wouldn't be attempting to count every individual tile of all lots. Though, this also assumes that the game does that to begin with, and I have no clue what it actually does in regards to tracking everything, lol

GLR doesn't natively exist in the game. Since it's part of the NAM, there's likely some weird coding logic behind it to get it to work properly. Cause the closest you can get with it, is the Elevated Rail, or Subway Rail (these are native to the game). But it's likely that the NAM team had to give it a road flag to get the textures and such to work properly so that the GLR could be a viable option. So it's likely showing up as both road and elevated rail in the system. And there's technically no real limitation to this, due to the fact that they're programmed to be able to cross in the base game. @Ulisse Wolf, @Lucario Boricua, or @Tarkus (and probably a couple more) could easily explain what's going on. Mine's purely guessing, due to the limitations of the game, and the evidence you've provided.

HD versions!! lol okay, but can we at least keep the really cool 3D effect with them? everything online is already flat, bland, and excessively sterile. I'd like for some pockets to retain life 😶 (yeah... the windows one is kinda flat, lol) but, generally, something like the below, not necessarily as shiny of course, lol

holy cow, that's awesome to know and i completely forgot that windows has it's own emojis to pull from xD but I really don't want to switch over to my phone for stuff like this, so I'm very grateful for this that's also cool!! definitely will have to keep both of these in mind