deezedgod

What is the CAM Revival Project? With the CAM Revival Project, I want to provide high-quality CAM-patible lots for popular creators and buildings. As a new player, it's often hard to find CAM versions of popular buildings—or you end up having to mod them yourself to use them with the CAM. I wanted to make it easier and more accessible for all players to grow their collection of CAM buildings by creating packs of CAMelots for popular creators that have never released CAM-patible versions of their buildings. Want to contribute? See the section below for how you can be part of the project. The Long Explanation Let's talk about the CAM! For those not in the know, the Colossus Addon Mod is a classic SimCity 4 mod that "expands" the game upwards by adding more growth stages to the game. If you want a much better explanation than I can provide, check out @Tarkus's excellent blog post on what exactly the CAM does. The problem is that CAM is getting old and hasn't had a lot of love in a while. There was @InvisiChem's excellent version 2 of the CAM, but there hasn't been much fanfare since. There's still tons of CAM packs on the LEX, but a problem with a lot of these buildings is that they're very old. Not to diminish the work of classic SC4 creators, but many older buildings just don't look as good as some more recent custom content, with extremely detailed BATs and lots. Even if you don't mind installing older buildings, you're still missing out on so many amazing newer buildings! To a new player looking into CAM for the first time, like I was upon returning to the game recently, it doesn't look like CAM is really worth the trouble anymore. So if you're looking to install the CAM today, you're going to have to track down the few newer CAM-patible buildings or manually go through and PIM-X a lot of in-CAM-patible buildings yourself. A lot of us on this forum are crazy enough to recompute hundreds of buildings ourselves (myself included) but most people aren't going to want to go through the hassle. This got me thinking... what if we had sort of a "CAM revival" of sorts and published tons of CAM versions of popular creators like the days of old? I think the game is a lot more fun with the CAM and I'd like to share that with others. It felt weird sitting on my stack of CAM-ified buildings like a dragon for them only to be used by myself. That's why, over the coming months, I'm planning on going through a lot of my favorite creators and releasing growable, CAM-patible versions of their buildings. Sort of like @kingofsimcity's Diego Del Llano growable pack. It's great, but I want more! (I'm actually planning on making parts 2, 3, and 4 of the @Diego Del Llano growable pack... stay tuned!) There are lots of other great creators that have great towers and skyscrapers but all of their buildings are released either as ploppable only or stage 8 growable. CAM versions are easy to make but not everyone is going to want to get their hands dirty editing the lots themselves. That's why I want to make it more accessible to everyone with this project, the CAM Revival Project. (Pretty catchy, huh?) Besides releasing CAM-patible buildings myself, I wanted to highlight a list of CAM-patible creators and buildings already available. It's not as easy these days as just going to the LEX and getting your CAMelots from there, as many of the best CAMelots can be found only on the STEX (if you know where to look). How to Contribute While I plan on doing a lot of the work myself, I of course would be very grateful if anyone else wants to contribute. However, I want to make the quality of the CAM Revival Project high and consistent across different uploads, so I want to add a few guidelines if you wish to contribute to the project. For an example CAM Revival Project lot pack, you can download one of my packs here as a general idea of how it should look. Files should be grouped by the original creator. I think the best way to organize is by a single creator. For example, if you want to create CAM versions of @AndisArt's buildings, they should all be released together as a singular pack so users don't have to download so many separate files. However, if there are too many buildings in a single pack (20+), they can be separated into their own packs. (I like to separate by year released.) Of course, if a building has been released somewhere else as a CAMelot, don't re-release it in your pack. Only include CAMelots in the pack. If the building is under stage 8, generally it shouldn't be included. However, if the author has not released a growable version of a building under stage 8, feel free to include it as well. Buildings should all be created using PIM-X. The exemplar names should be in this format: OriginalCreator_NameOfBuilding. A User Visible Name Key with just the building name should be provided as well. For filling degree, your best judgement should be used, but I will add a couple of examples so we aren't too far off from one another. Lots shouldn't be changed (much). The original lot should stay mostly the same, but a few small changes can be made (like converting an overhanging lot or rotating the building to face the correct direction). Only .sc4lot and .sc4desc files should be included. No .sc4model files or other dependencies should be included in the file. These should all be linked separately for the user to download (with instructions to only copy the .sc4model files). The directory structure should stay the same. CAM lots should be under CAM/original author/separate folder for each building. A readme.html and image.jpg should be included inside the .zip with building stats. For the readme template that I use, you can download it here and modify it for your lot pack. Please make sure that both Maxis and DarkNite versions work, if possible. Releases should be marked somewhere as CAM Revival Project to indicate that they are part of the project. Post in this thread as well so it can be added to the list of CRP files. If you want to create a pack for a creator, please post what you're working on in this thread to avoid duplicate work. However, for now, leave the NDEX, @DuskTrooper, @eburress, @ILL Tonkso, @oneil_1, @Chris M/DragonAnime, @SimRabbit, @SimRabbit123, @Superstar, @kd5rax, @Equinox and @Glenni contents as is, as @Tyberius06 is currently working on expanding these CAM lot packs. If you have any questions, please contact him. If you have any questions regarding these guidelines, please post them in this thread and I'll do my best to answer them.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a thousand pictures. As much as I like City Journals, I've always enjoyed watching YouTube videos of cities coming together. SC4 cities are living things and I feel like the medium of video does them the most justice. There's been hundreds of SC4 YouTube channels, but I wanted to show off my favorite, as well as showcase channels still uploading content semi-regularly. (No decade-old content here.) If you know any good channels to add to this, please let me know and I'll add it to the list. Active Channels These are channels that have still uploaded SC4 videos in the past year (as of 2022). If you'd like to subscribe to channels that are still posting, check these channels out. saus tartar - Small-medium sized cities with lots of breathing room. Rafael Zeratai - Cities with lots of realistic details. doormysh - Lots of great city timelapses. Wibbs Builds - Curvy cities and a few good tutorials as well. Misk - Gigantic regions. Includes commentary as well if you're into that. Haljackey - @Haljackey's classic skyscraper jungles. If you want to push the RHW to the limit, watch this. redbycarter - Lots of streams on YouTube as well if you're looking to watch live. TheCouncill0r - @TheCouncill0r's channel. A few SC4 videos from a NAM member. Ulisee Wolf - @ulisse's channel Frequent videos and livestreams from a NAM member. Lucario Boricua - @Lucario Boricua's channel. Not much content, but contains some SECRET NAM development. Inactive Channels These are channels that have stopped uploading SC4 videos for whatever reason (as of 2022). You can still find lots of great videos by digging in the archives, though. Rob's Red Hot Spot - Iconic SC4 YouTube channel with commentary. MGB NAM - @MGB's channel. Lots of classic NAM tutorials from a NAM developer. TarkusSC4 - @Tarkus's channel. Lots of NAM content from a iconic Simtropolis member. Strictoaster - Home of one of the greatest SC4 series of all time. Has lots of other good series from similar games as well (e.g. Cities Skylines, OpenTTD). Raymond Lee - @Raymond7cn's channel. Not much content, though. Ganaram Inukshuk - @Ganaram Inukshuk's channel. Some old NAM content. sc4jenx - @xannepan's channel.

Welcome to SimCity 4! SimCity 4 by itself is already a pretty great game, but as you probably know, you can take the game so much further by adding mods, buildings, and more to totally re-imagine the game. Maybe you've seen some YouTube videos of the game with crazy mods and you'd like to do the same. There have been other threads with the same goal, but one of the big problems is that SimCity 4 plugins are extremely overwhelming! There's always hundreds or thousands of recommendations. Which ones are the best? If you're a new player, I would recommend not installing a million plugins right off the bat. It takes a long time, there's tons of dependencies to install, and let's be real--you want to play the game, not spend all day downloading files! So in this guide, I'm going to recommend a few must-have mods, some mods to make the game look better, and then a few recommendations for some high-quality buildings with not many dependencies. After that, the sky is the limit! Installation Most mods and buildings can be installed by unzipping the file you download and dragging the files to your My Documents/Simcity4/Plugins folder. Some mods (like the NAM) will have an installer that will automatically do this for you. A readme file will usually be included. Make sure to read this, as it will often contain important installation information. Must-have mods You've probably heard of the NAM, or the Network Addon Mod. It's the most popular mod by far and everyone recommends it. It's basically a fix for the transportation portion of the game, as the AI by default is very simplistic due to technical limitations when the game was first released. Besides the fixes, NAM also adds tons of great features, like smooth road curves, avenue roundabouts, new highway interchanges, and more. There's a lot of content, and it can take a while to wrap your head around it, but it's all essential content! I would also highly recommend installing SC4Fix, which fixes some major bugs and game crashes. Having been victim to all of these bugs before, I can't recommend it enough! Must-have bugfixes The Maxis team had deadlines, so there are still a few bugs left in the game. These are some mods to fix most of them. They're pretty essential, so I recommend downloading all of them! I-HT Jobs fix - There's a bug where no R$$$ sims can work at High-Tech Industry. This fixes it. HippoTank Demand Fix - This fixes missing R$$$ jobs for the Medical Clinic, Solar Power Plant, Nuclear Power Plant, same as above. Opera House Fix - The Maxis Opera House is meant to be a functional educational building with a slider, and not having it causes your education to actually go down. This fixes it. Space Port Fix - The Maxis Space Port claims to raise I-HT demand, but doesn't. This fixes it. For more information, this page has more detail on these bugfixes. Want more money? A popular mod that many want is more money. Maybe you like designing your city without worrying about money. The best way is to download the extra cheats plugin. Now open up the cheat menu in the game (Ctrl+X) and type in moolah 1000000 to set your money to 1,000,000. (Or more!) Want the game to look better? Be careful, changing terrain and tree mods in an already existing region can cause issues. It's advised to start a new region if you plan on changing these. By default, I'm not a big fan of the game's default grass and water textures. You can make them look much better by installing a terrain and water mod. Cori has compiled some great showcases of every possible terrain and water mod so you can choose your favorite. (But if you need help deciding, I recommend Sudden Valley Terrain, which also comes with beach and rock textures, and PEG Brigantine Water!) You may also want a tree mod. They replace the default Maxis god-mode tree brush with some more detailed trees and more variety. But be aware, they usually require downloading a lot of dependencies, so you may want to save it for later. Cori's Terrain Shoppe Cori's Water Shoppe Cori's Side Water Shoppe Cori's Rock Shoppe Cori's Beach Shoppe Cori's Tree Shoppe Want a darker night? By default, the in-game night looks a little unrealistic. It's a little too bright and a little too purple for many people's tastes. If you'd like to have a darker night, I'd recommend the SimFox Day and Nite Mod. Note that if you download this mod, you should select the DarkNite version (DN) when downloading buildings instead of the original Maxis Night (MN) version. Want more buildings? There's a million and one buildings to download. Instead of giving you a ton of different recommendations, I would recommend finding a good creator and downloading a lot of their content for a more uniform look to your custom content. Below is a list of a few of my favorites. (Hint: Sort by Most Viewed to find their most popular content!) When you download a building, make sure to download all the dependencies listed or you may get brown boxes instead of the actual building. If you see this, it means you don't have all dependencies installed. @mattb325 has released literal tons of great content in every category. You can find small houses, mid-rises, high-rises, industry, civics, safety, and more! You can't go wrong downloading any of these, and they usually have only a few common dependencies. Click here for a list of their downloads. @madhatter106 has lots of great small shops and mid-rise office buildings to add more variety. They're also released in packs to save time. Click here for a list of their downloads. @Jasoncw has lots of mid-rises and skyscrapers. Click here for a list of their downloads. @Diego Del Llano has some of the best giant skyscrapers. (But can only be placed from the Landmarks menu and won't grow.) Click here for a list of their downloads. Want more? These creators will already cover a lot for you, but if you want the mother of all building recommendations, check out @Indiana Joe's excellent plugin recommendation thread for even more custom content recommendations in every possible category. Enjoy! Have fun! There's tons of content you can download, but it's just a testament to the game's longevity that there's so much great content. My best recommendation would be to install the essential mods, download a few cool buildings, and start playing! You can always add more buildings as you go along. I've had times before when I got way too obsessed with building up the perfect plugin folder, but the whole point is to have fun with the game!

Looks great! I think a script for downloading dependencies would make it so much more accessible, so please share your progress. I was thinking of doing the same but couldn't wrap my head around a user-friendly way to do this on all platforms (Windows/MacOS/Linux).

Nice! A lot of static hosts (e.g. Netlify) also give you a "domain" that isn't too bad (e.g. growifier.netlify.app). If you want to reduce costs even further, it's what I do for some side-projects.

Personally I've never minded the original Maxis capacities, as the way I play the game, I use the Maxis civics for small/medium sized cities and just use custom content for larger cities. I'm not sure if 3x'ing everything will still make it balanced for smaller cities without feeling like cheater lots, but considering the Maxis civics by default are pretty weak, it might be fine. I'm planning on starting a new CAM region soon so I could test how it works in a real game. (I'm also planning on trying out CAMPR as well.) If you want to go through the trouble of making these, it would be greatly appreciated.

I believe this is only true for the original IRM pack. I've CAM-ified some of the IRM expansion lots and they all use the model for the building. The only thing you need to watch out for is that some lots contain additional buildings as props, so make sure to calculate those too.

Thanks! I didn't want to add any big, game-changing mods like the SPAM, IRM, or CAM, as many of these conflict with each other and can cause some headaches down the line if they aren't well-understood. I was thinking about adding more, but I think @Indiana Joe's thread covers the rest (including SPAM) for more advanced players. These are great recommendations as well. Can I safely replace the link to @toroca's Opera House Fix with this one?

Go for it! I was thinking about doing it but hadn't done much yet. Even if @T Wrecks never finished the original expansion, I think it's worth going over the lots he did finish. I think it would be fine to go over all of the lots, even the stage 1's, as the capacities generated by PIM-X are very different to the capacities T Wrecks set. They could maybe be organized by creator, like a pack for @tag_one models, @SimGoober models, a misc pack for the rest, and a W2W pack. Optionally you could also include a version "A" and a version "B", as the creator of the IRM CAM version included two versions, one with I-M growing in high density and one where it only grows in medium density. Still waiting for T Wrecks to come back though.

I'd highly recommend downloading the PIM User Guide and browsing through it. Unfortunately the LEX is down now but it should be back later... The manual should answer just about any question you have, and it's much easier than trying to find decades-old tutorials with broken images. (Trust me, I've been there.) But to answer your question, the "filling degree" is what percentage of the yellow bounding box (cube) the building takes up. So if you have a building that takes up roughly half of the yellow box, that would be a 0.5 filling degree. With some weirdly-shaped buildings it can be a little difficult to guess, but that's what your spatial reasoning skills are for. Doesn't have to be perfect, but try to wager a good estimate. Once you give the filling degree, it should automatically compute all the other stats for you. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that PIM-X was designed with CAM in mind, so for some larger buildings it might compute a stage higher than 8 (or 3 for industrial), which won't grow without the CAM. It might also give your building a crazy-high capacity in the tens of thousands which also won't grow. In these cases I go into iLive's Reader and manually set these values back to non-CAM levels (stage 8 for buildings and around 7,500 for capacity).

I've released several more CAMeLot packs. I've released two CAMeLot packs for @Diego Del Llano (2018, 2019) and one for @Reddonquixote (here). You can also help the project by suggesting creators that I should CAM-ify next! (Right now, I'm working on lots from @Darknono35, @JP Schriefer and some additional IRM lots from @T Wrecks.) I'm also building a list of CAMeLots. I want to compile a list of available CAMeLots from different creators. The goal is to help players find CAMeLots from different creators, especially on the STEX where it can be difficult to tell which files are CAMpatible and which ones aren't. Right now, I've compiled a very WIP list inside this Google Doc. Ideally, I'd like the list to become something like the original CAMeLot list from SC4Devotion, just more up-to-date. Although I'm not sure of the best way to organize it. I'd prefer to categorize the lots by the original creator, as I like to download every building from a creator if I like their work. But the original list categorizes them by lot type (e.g. R$$$, CO$$, etc.), so I'm not sure. I'd appreciate any feedback or ideas on how to organize this. Would it be better in a spreadsheet? Eventually, I'd like this to be a resource people can link to if someone is downloading CAM for the first time.

What a discovery! Who's going to be the first to make SimCity 4: Comic Sans edition?

What do people recommend these days between Monorail, HSR, and BTM? I'd like to use HSR as I'm not a huge fan of the vanilla monorail appearance, but I'm wondering if I'll run into any issues down the line since it isn't being actively developed.

Thanks for the advice @everyone. I think for now I'll use the BTM as a reskin (at least until the RHSR is released).

Thanks, that makes sense. I've updated the filenames so unique files aren't overwritten. I actually have 4 unique readme files, as the MN version is missing a building/dependency (due to the creator not releasing a MN version). I've also included a line in the readme about choosing the correct night version to download—good idea. (Just to make it a bit clearer.)

Thanks for the feedback! This is my first time publicly releasing any lots, so having another pair of eyes to look everything over is appreciated. I've changed the readme and splash files to have their own unique names (e.g. readme_cam_dn). As for DarkNite and Maxis Night models, I saw during some testing that most lots can use either the DN or the MN model files. But I saw that when I tried to do the same for Diego Del Llano's buildings, I got a brown box, so I just relotted the MN files as well. So most of the time I won't have a separate version for DN and MN, just for Diego Del Llano (and any other BATter that does the same).

The first release of the CAM Revival Project is here! The first CAM lot pack is a collection of @Diego Del Llano's excellent BATs from 2017. You may remember the first pack from @kingofsimcity, which I thought was great and provided a ton of new CAMelots. But since then, Diego Del Llano has released a smorgasbord of new BATs. Since kingofsimcity never released his long-awaited Pack Two, I decided to take matters into my own hands and make it myself! You can download it here: Diego Del Llano Growables - 2017 Pack Two Of course, as part of the CAM Revival project, the focus is on new CAM buildings (with a few non-CAMelots but still CAM-patible buildings). But I've also released a Vanilla version for non-CAM users. Hopefully this whets your appetite, with 24 new CAMelots. Of course, I'm not even finished with all of Diego Del Llano's BATs. Expect a 2018 and 2019 pack in the future as well! This pack (at least the CAM version) should also serve as an example for anyone else who wants to contribute to the project. If you're interested in being part of the CAM Revival Project, I've added a new section on How to Contribute to the original post!

No, the scope of this project at this time is strictly to add more CAM-patible buildings to download and to make it easier to find them. Besides, I can't imagine what additional improvements to the CAM one could make at this point. I think it's pretty feature-complete at this point.

I think it's a good idea to establish some ground rules as well to keep the quality consistent and high. Like you said, running things through the PIM-X is fairly simple, but there should still be some rules set in place to ensure that the project isn't all over the place. I'm planning on releasing the first file soon, and that should serve as an example. But here's my (preliminary) list of rules for releasing something under the project name. Files should be grouped by the original author. I think the best way to organize is by a single author. For example, if you want to create CAM versions of @AndisArt's buildings, they should all be released together as a singular pack so users don't have to download so many separate files. However, if there are too many buildings in a single pack (20+), they can be separated into their own packs. (I like to separate by year released.) Of course, if a building has been released somewhere else as a CAMelot, don't re-release it in your pack. Only include CAMelots in the pack. If the building is under stage 8, generally it shouldn't be included. However, if the author has not released a growable version of a building under stage 8, feel free to include it as well. Buildings should all be created using PIM-X. The exemplar names should be in this format: OriginalAuthor_NameOfBuilding. A User Visible Name Key should be provided as well. For filling degree, your best judgement should be used, but I will add a couple of examples so we aren't too far off from one another. Lots shouldn't be changed (much). The original lot should stay mostly the same, but a few small changes can be made (like converting an overhanging lot or rotating the building to face the correct direction). Only .sc4lot and .sc4desc files should be included. No .sc4model files or other dependencies should be included in the file. These should all be linked separately for the user to download (with instructions to only copy the .sc4model files). The directory structure should stay the same. CAM lots should be under CAM/original author/separate folder for each building. A readme.html and image.jpg should be included inside the .zip with building stats. (I plan on creating a template in the future that others can use.) Please include both Maxis and DarkNite packs, if possible. Releases should be marked somewhere as CAM Revival Project to indicate that they are part of the project. Post in this thread as well so it can be added to the list of CRP files. Am I missing anything? Optionally, if you'd like to be nice, if the original author hasn't created vanilla (non-CAM) growables you can also upload a vanilla version by using the Reader to truncate the growth stages to 8 and the building capacities to 7,500. I believe that buildings with capacities under this number can be grown in the vanilla game--but I've heard conflicting things about this, so if someone with more knowledge can fill me in, that would be helpful.