AF

Work and exploration continues. Aside from looking at the main game, a target of interest here has been WinSCURK. With WinSCURK several upcoming improvements: - If you're able to extract the native Macintosh MIF tileset(s) from the resource fork of the SimCity 2000 or Urban Renewal Kit binaries, they can now be natively loaded (with appropriate palette transation occurring). - TIL -> MIF conversion will now convert the Small and Tiny tiles rather then downscaling the Large tiles to both. - Added and "Unabridged" version of the TIL/Macintosh object set conversion process - available via a new sub-menu under "File" - Improved DOS/Macintosh palette translation - aside from certain indices that were outside of the normal palette, most others that would have been set to black have now been set to suitable near-equivalents. - Issues within the drawing area that prevented modification of the far-most left and right column of pixels have been resolved (An extreme example of this is the Plymouth Arcology: - Left-most case - problems with the shrink/down-scaling call. - Right-most case - this column initially wasn't drawn on the screen at all due to the horizontal scrolling being off-by-one. - A vertical off-by-one issue that plagued all TIL object-sets when converted has been resolved - the shape would be moved down by one row and those pixels lost. - Over-clipping of pixels on the right-hand side (this was most visible on 4x4 objects whereas you'd then see one pixel from the object being eliminated from the tile base). - The colour-selection table now references "row 10" - this includes valid palette entries that were simply not included. - The "Transparent" palette entry is now available at the end of "row 10" (it appears as a shaded entry for differentiation) - it can now be used for many uses - such as "Fill". - Added a new "Move Object..." facility under "Edit" for the "Paint the town" section - this allows you to move an object by N number of pixels up/down and left/right. There are various other subtle and overt tweaks as well, however for the most part the above are the highlights. They're available for both the 1995 (primary) and 1996 (Network Edition) English versions of WinSCURK. This should result in an improved experience in that area.

A dive into the various tile drawing calls has been performed and the very old discovered cases of "edge bleed" that resulted from >= 2x2 objects on map-edge have been squashed. Various unusual and creative maps were checked to see whether anything unwanted had cropped up, thus far it doesn't appear to be the case. The Military handling has also been revisited in order to squash a few warts: 1) Strangely shaped Naval Yards (with the odd remote orphaned tile) 2) Certain uncommon cases that could result in a spawning Army Base erroneously overwriting tiles 3) Re-weighted the Silo spawn chance a bit as well as adjusted certain minimum parameters 4) The case of the phantom Air Force base should be squashed - ie it mentioned that a base had been placed but one was never present As far as (1) goes, the Naval Yard spawn should now be reasonably equivalent to how it would have appeared in the DOS (and Mac) versions. For more information, the PR for this is as follows: https://github.com/sc2kfix/sc2kfix/pull/84 If you'd like to give it a test run, you'll want to go to the Actions tab, select the most recent run titled "Rollup: Map Drawing, Item Placement, Military Handling, etc" and download the sc2kfix-dev entry; at that point extract the contained winmm.dll into your SimCity 2000 directory and see how it goes. NOTE: A GitHub account is required in order to download action-generated objects.

Rumblings are still going on within the project.. For anyone that has experienced a problem with the "Place & Pick" picker dialogue in WinSCURK under Windows 11 (24H2+), a fix has been implemented into one of the pending merges. Thus far it has been tested under 7, 10 and 11. The latest generated test build can be acquired from here: https://github.com/sc2kfix/sc2kfix/actions/runs/20090333240 (A GitHub account is required in order to download from this section)

The adventure continues, much subtlety (and "interesting" aspects) is still coming out of the woodwork. Some of the bugs encountered in the Win95 version are definitely amusing.. while others are indeed frustrating since there's no rhyme or reason as to why they exist (especially after function reconstruction has occurred which then doesn't result in the buggy behaviour in question..).

I'm currently thinking over a better approach, though that may take a bit of time. The current pull request avoids the aspects that will end up causing the biggest headaches. May have also had a flash regarding an improvement with the Army Base (depending on certain plot spawn cases one of the length or depth-way road drops may not occur - which likely explains the 'if' checks after each drop in the DOS version and the 'word' vars.). Nice indeed.

The "fix" at the moment focuses on two aspects: 1) To make sure the Navy landing zone is valid (mostly to do with which items can be overwritten and also whether you'll end up on a slope) 2) There was an issue with the "building validation" check during zone spawning that resulted in unintended items and sections being overwritten. I will stress that this isn't perfect, but at the very least it will avoid the unintended overwriting (and subsequent crash) and also lessen the chance of an invalid Navy drop.

I think I see what may be going on concerning the attempted base spawning in this case, it's specifically to do with the Navy case. It's more generic than it having an effect on the roads.

If you end up setting up another communication medium I would be very interested, though it can very much end up as a stream-of-thought approach as aspects are considered and/or handled.

That definitely helps to clarify the "AutoSave" setting that was otherwise not referenced outside of the registry entry at the time. I wonder if either of the following (or both) led to it being consigned as a leftover: a) They ran out of time b) Too many problems cropped up

Heh.. those articles.. Regarding the "Newspaper is on strike" case, there are three possibilities that have cropped up (two of which do cross-over): 1) Memory allocation failure (as you mentioned @araxestroy) 2) It cannot find the necessary data archives 3) The Language attribute isn't set correctly (which can cross-over to (2) since it uses this as part of the path/filename construction): a) The Language that's set doesn't match the edition of the game (if it's not specifically for the "USA") b) The Language that's set is simply invalid (missing letters or just outright incorrect). Perhaps there could be room for improvement in this area if it were to do a search of the Data/ directory and then set the language based off of what has been found. The instance is a bit bizarre though, I just hope that it isn't something daft like.. case-sensitivity (which shouldn't make any odds on Windows). "If" case-sensitivity does have something to do with it, perhaps it's a case of making sure the value of the Language key is adjusted from 'usa' to 'USA' (if this re-occurs).

Got to love those mysteries when they crop up. As for the error message.. a transient file lock or attempted double-access? That one is strange. If it didn't cause any anomalous behaviour aside from the requester itself.. hmm; again a mystery.

Ahh got it, I suspect since the multi-threaded music was introduced in a version post-dating that which you were previously running that's likely why it's not present. I did a hash check on the SimCity.EXE that's present here though just in case: f7a51b6244328bddcc85c2db4d205716b504eb9b6cc51b2f1556adaece96e5bb A bang-on match.

Have you thus far encountered any interesting results depending on what's being passed?

Now that is indeed quite something (an understatement). It'll be interesting to see where it will lead and how far it can go.

Interesting, I'll see if I can reproduce that on the W10 system here. Odd, haven't been able to reproduce it on this system thus far. With the referenced faulting address it points towards an apparently empty function (according to IDA anyway). @TogaMasterJohn This is a bit of a shot in the dark on this end, though what happens if you disable bSettingsUseMultithreadedMusic in the registry?