BartonThinks

Amazing stuff. Hard to even conceptualize how much time and effort has gone into this region. To make something at this scale with this level of coherence and detail is really, really something.

Streets allows car, freight truck, and pedestrian traffic, whereas pedmalls only allow pedestrian traffic. That means people can walk to your seaport when it's connected by pedmall, but the freight trucks that deliver cargo cannot.

I think @BadSim (more active on SC4D) is the reigning expert on using the Zoom cheat with ultra-HD assets. Worth checking out their Mayor's Diary thread if you have the time or inclination. They (proudly) refuse to learn how to BAT. Instead, they mastered the art of FSH editing , which has allowed them to add hundreds (probably thousands) of custom ultra-HD assets to the game, as well as editing other users' models for personal use. Some of their ultra-HD models using the Zoom cheat: City screenshot with mix of custom and edited assets:

I believe the boxy waves are unrelated the mod itself -- that should simply be a function of how the game animates waves. You may want to play around with your graphics settings to see if that improves the appearance. (Note: It's been a while since I've played around with terrain and water mods and I might have this incorrect -- it's possible that playing around with different water mods will lead to more realistic looking waves.) One mod that might be worth checking out is Xannepan's Poseidon Mod over on SC4D. It includes a number of water mods, including ripple effects, two different water color mods, and a number of paintbrushes that change the color of water and shorelines. Two caveats: 1) the mod is meant for advanced users, and some of the effects it includes can damage your city if used incorrectly; 2) the mod never made it past BETA release before Xannepan retired from modding, so it might be glitchy in areas. As far as different water and beach mods, finding the right mix will probably take some trial and error. You may want to start with the HD Beach Pack by Gobias. It includes 4 variants that have been specially tweaked to work with the Appalachian terrain mod. Gobias also has an HD Water Pack with 3 variants that are designed to work well with his beach pack. Maybe start with LK St Lucia Beach.dat or LK Cape Cod Beach.dat from the beach pack, then test each of the three "LK" waters to see if you can find a good match?

Cannot express how relieved I am to read this. Thank you, CB, for keeping us updated.

Top row, fifth from left...

This is devastating news, and I truly, truly hope we hear from @CorinaMarie soon. It is hard to think of anyone else leading this community with more kindness, open-heartedness, and generosity than Cori, not to mention the thousands of hours she's put toward the site and the wealth of tools and expertise she's shared with the community. On a personal level, I owe Cori a massive debt in my own modding efforts. Her encouragement also helped me play a more active role in the ST community. She is irreplaceable as a community member, a leader, and a person, and I hope she realizes how deeply this community appreciates her and her contributions. @Cyclone Boom, I can only try to imagine how awful this past week has been for you. I hope you'll take as much time and space as you need to take care of yourself under the circumstances, whatever that means for both yourself and the community. I'm so, so sorry to hear this.

Adding to the convo a bit. I'm also a PIM-X user, so I can't speak to the Maxis lot editor. It's also been a while since I've used Reader/PIM-X for this kind of thing, so I'm mostly working off of memory and might be hazy on the details. Changing lot size: If you want to change the lot size, you'll need to use the Reader. I have done this before for some lots, but I can't remember off the top of my head if it requires changing multiple properties or just the lot size. One significant issue is that the building, textures, flora, props, etc. for the lot will all be tied to a specific axis point, and they will shift to new positions when you change the lot size. This means you will need to realign everything on the lot to fit the new dimensions. If you miss anything, you could have items that exist outside of the lot boundaries, which can trigger the immortal lot bug. (With PIM-X, I find that it's easier to simply create a new lot and copy/paste all of the textures/flora/props over to the new one. You 'll still need to everything, but it doesn't require any HEX editing in Reader, which makes it a little easier to do.) Deleting/adding buildings: Since I don't use the Maxis lot editor, I've never tried this before in that program. I know that it's not possible in PIM-X, as @twalsh102 mentioned. I have managed to do it using the Reader, but it is really tricky work. (Instead of deleting and replacing buildings, I usually just create a new lot with the correct building in PIM-X, and then copy/paste all of the textures and props over to the new lot. That takes about one minute worth of work in PIM-X, so it might be the best solution.) Transit Enabled Growable Lots: Transit enabled lots are definitely possible for road and street networks. That said, I have never heard of a growable, transit-enabled lot for rail networks. I assume the idea is that the lot would grow first, and then you would connect it to the rail network after the lot is built? That would definitely be worth a try. This thread should give you a guide to how to accomplish it. However, there's an app called SC4Tool that's more or less essential for transit-enabled lots, so I don't think you can do this directly in the Maxis Lot Editor. Multiple Buildings: Exactly what @twalsh102 said. You can't have two buildings, but you can create a prop out of any existing building model. At that point, you can add the prop to the lot. (Again, I would recommend PIM-X for this. It has a drag-and-drop feature for creating new props out of existing model. It also has a feature that allows you to tweak a building's stats based on occupancy. This way, you can modify the building file so that the jobs, pollution, cost, etc. are more realistic.) Edit: Follow-up about deleting/adding buildings. I had a theory and just downloaded the Maxis Lot Editor to give it a test. It looks like there are two possible reasons that the building is not showing up: The building type needs to match the lot type, so if one of these buildings has been modded as a growable Industrial building, and the other has been modded as a ploppable Landmark, you would need to mod the building exemplar or create a new building. (It looks like the SFBT building is growable industry, but the fukuda building is a Landmark with industrial jobs, so this would be my first guess). The Maxis lot editor will only allow you to add a building to a lot if it fits within the bounds of the lot. If the dimensions of the replacement building are larger than the lot dimensions, you won't be able to add it.

I assume you're already familiar with Romualdillo's set over on SC4D? If not, it's well worth checking out. The buildings only fit a certain type of mid-density R$ environment, but it's a particularly impressive set.

I know in my case that things stalled out, partly because I wanted to get the LEX folks on board with a trial run and they were busy with NAM projects at the time I asked, partly because I replaced my computer and it's taken time to get SC4 back up and running, and mostly because my work life no longer allows for as much time modding SC4 (though SC4 might be to blame for that a bit -- a lot of the soft skills I picked up through modding the game have proven really useful at work). As far as ModPacc Zero -- @CorinaMarie and @Cyclone Boom have both mentioned that they also put their project on hiatus due to a combination of workload issues and trouble finding users to help test different mods. Thankfully, Project ZIP by @Tyberius06 has been making a LOT of progress recently. That's making it a lot easier to download and install a number of older content.

I think the biggest challenges to something like this are: A lot of players are really knowledgeable about the mods they personally use, but any given player is only using a small fraction of the mods available Many mods are incompatible with each other, while other mods use existing mods as dependencies, which makes it hard to be flexible when testing different mods Mods that are compatible can interact with one another differently, often in unpleasant ways, which makes testing even more challenging Would definitely be helpful, but it's hard for me to imagine someone wrangling all of that info together.

@Lemonade For what it's worth, CAM doesn't require stage 4 farms, and most players who play with CAM simply use the first 3 stages for agriculture. The only reason you would need to install additional farms is if your personal play style requires high-density farming. Most players switch over to dirty industry, manufacturing, and high-tech to support the industrial side of their economy. But it's also possible to play CAM with a largely agricultural region that maxes out at stage 3. Unlike the base game, CAM will support demand for agriculture in small and mid-sized cities, which makes it really valuable if you want to build an agricultural region. Short version: CAM has no dependencies, because playing the higher growth stages is entirely optional, and the extended stages are just a small part of how CAM improves the game.

Thanks, I'll give the Wrapper a shot. I'm not very technically knowledgeable when it comes to graphics, so I think I misunderstood whether the wrapper solution might work with Intel GPUs.' I'll give that a shot when I have some spare time to configure the wrapper. At this point, I regret not just shelling out an additional $300 or so for a decent graphics card when I bought the machine. It's primarily for work, so I invested heavily in my CPU, RAM, and storage, but then I went with the cheap option on the GPU to keep the cost down a bit. Outside the GPU, the machine's powerful enough to act as a gaming PC, and while I'm not into a lot of graphics-intensive titles, it would be nice to try out some other games if/when I have the right hardware.

Bumping this thread as I'm running into a similar issue on a new machine, but I'm stuck (at least for the moment) with an Intel UHD 750 GPU. My old PC had an Intel HD 620 GPU and seemed to render the game without any issues, so I went with an Intel card on my new machine. I'm now running into some of the same graphical glitches, such as this issue with waves (I also get the same problem with lot and network previews): Is there anything I can realistically do to fix this with the Intel UHD GPU I have? Or should I just go ahead and invest in an Nvidia or AMD GPU?

All of those files go into the plugins folder. The first contains the information for the lot the building uses. The second contains information for how the building functions in the game. And the third contains the model of the building itself. If you want to keep your plugins folder navigable, you can place all of these into their own folder (e.g. Plugins/Grutzehaus) or, better yet, nest them inside multiple folders (e.g., Plugins/Maxis/Grutzehaus).