LowGenius

heheh...it's stolen from an old King Crimson song (Discipline, if I remember right, or maybe something off Three Of A Perfect Pair). I'm not a huge KC fan, but if you want weird, the Fripp-Levin-Belew-Bruford era stuff makes Primus look like a pop band. Edit: GAH! And now that I re-read your post, I realized you didn't need me to tell you that. One day I took it out to see if I still liked it. I DID! (Talk, talk, it's only talk...)

bahahah five friggin' years playing this game and it never dawned on me to try and expand that window. Now you know why I'm a low genius! Thanks

You guys talk as if there's some way to actually call out what building style is used...is there a modd I'm missing for this somewhere? @Xylo - thanks for the tip on sizing. I have a tendency to make everything in 6x6 blocks, terrain permitting. I'll see if I can't get myself into a more varied design mode here.

Well, I just started playing again about two weeks ago and I'm already up to about 175Mb thanks to ST @Hahayoudied and everyone else: I'll edit this post with a link when I get the article written that I intend to write in regards to viruses, keyloggers, trojans, etc. Hopefully the mods won't be upset when I post a link to one of my own sites; no sense in keeping this information localized when the whole world can use it. Edit: As promised, the article.

Note to self (and everyone else) Don't set your construction to only change styles every 25 years. I just decimated my city because I got sick of the homogeny and bulldozed like 40 Simon and Franks, 25 Khoury Art Buildings, and a good dozen Sky Rize Deluxe Condos. Here's hoping that some of these growable lots I'm slowly downloading start popping up in the holes. I suspect that Simon, Frank, and their associates are rabbits or hamsters or something, they reproduce on an exponential curve... remembering how to play ftw...

Request: GLR bridges. Observations/Justification: I've seen this mentioned a few times in the various NAM threads, but so far the best available solution seems to be 'use the GLR/El transitions and make an EL bridge.' Which is what I've already been doing for water crossings. It works, certainly...but aesthetically it kinda sucks, plus you end up using 12 tiles that could be used for GLR intersections. Plus, this solution fails in one major regard: crossing sunken ground-level highways. The whole GLR-ground highway conjunction issue is quite problematic, and a nice draggable bridge system similar to that used for standard rail would make for a really nice solution here. (NB: I haven't tried using the hole digger/tunnel method to run my GLRs *under* highways; my first thought on this is that they'd end up turning in to El-rail the way they do with bridges.) (EDIT: I tried it. After being unable to force a tunnel after running 6 tiles back from the highway, I gave it up since I wouldn't be gaining anything from it anyway) I'm not a modder or modeler, and I don't really have the tools to *be* one due to my being stuck in rural hades with no high-speed access. I can suggest, though, based on what I know of the game and general programming logic, that a knowledgeable modder might take a look at the existing rail bride logic for possible solutions. Right now, it is quite possible to drag a standard rail over a sunken ground level highway and get a nice, flat little bridge that goes across. Roads work, too. I'm sitting here thinking "oooh, and a ground highway over ground highway would be sweet!" but I *suspect* that as I play around with the sunken highway concept, I'll find that I can fake this by running ground highway crossings up to the edge of the sunken highway on both sides, and then connecting them with elevated highway. I'll let y'all know how this works when I try it. (EDIT: Tried it, it works. Of course, you can't use the cloverleaf ramps this way, but you can cobble a fake cloverleaf together with road ramps easily enough) Finally, huge, huge thanks to the whole NAM team, past and present, for their hard work. I did a lot of modding for Morrowind back in the day, and I know how time-consuming and difficult it can be. I've also done some playing around with iLive and SC4 modding, but it was years ago, and the work was completely redundant - pollution eliminators, radical radius expansion for fire/police buildings, that kind of thing - so I never bothered releasing it (and I don't even use my own modds now!) Anyway, I'm rambling: just wanted to let the NAM team know that their work is highly appreciated, and to beg for some love for those of us who use your GLR tools far more often than we probably should Best, LowGenius

If you are having troubles with this .dll file in Vista (or any other MS OS) when placing it under the 'My Documents/...' folder tree, try putting it in the root of your install folder instead (default c:/Program Files/Maxis/SimCity 4/Plugins/). It works fine for me there, under both XP and Vista 64 Ultimate. Now if I could just figure out what all this stuff *does*....

It's probably worth noting that both EA/Maxis and the trademark holders of branded lots (i.e. McDonalds, Wal-Mart) don't bother enforcing their trademark rights (or in EA's case, the eula) because of the symbiotic nature of the lots. Taking Wal-Mart for an example. In theory, Wal-Mart could have their lawyers come in and wave a bunch of threats at ST to have the Wal-Mart lot removed; equally, EA could do the same as such a lot clearly "promotes another product or business," in clear violation of the EULA. BUT: Wal-Mart gets a free advert from it (and the notion that a city with a Wal-Mart is "more realistic looking" is actually far more valuable to a marketing geek than simply using the trademarked name and logo), and Maxis/EA get an incresed satisfaction level from (some of) their customers without having to jump through legal hoops to license Wal-Mart's trademarks. Because these lots are clearly "organic," that is, created by a third party with no vested interest in either promoting Wal-Mart or in making money from SC4's BAT, the lawyers likely choose to leave it alone. NOW: If I build a Wal-mart Lot with a QI that read something like "Sims are oppressed here for lower-than-average wages to pay outrageous markups for cheaply-made goods manufactured in Second Life," I bet my chances of pulling the attention of Wallyworld's lawyers would be better. They couldn't go for libel because the fictional nature of the game makes it pretty laughable to think that a consumer seeing it would take the information seriously...but they *could* force ST, any other site, or me as the creator, to stop distributing the lot by invoking their trademark rights. If they wanted to play dirty, they could even lean on EA to enforce their EULA as well, say under threat of refusing to stock EA's line of games at all (which would cut them out from a substantial percentage of their customer base). Basically what I'm saying is that a) don't think that these lots are purely legal just because nobody's *****in' - they're not, really; and b) I wouldn't expect a trademark holder, or EA/Maxis, to raise a lot of noise about them *unless* either someone's making a clear profit (i.e. selling BAT services or 'stealth uploading' branded lots) or there's a negative PR tilt to some aspect of the lot (as in the theoretical QUI above). Side note: Although given SC4's age I wouldn't expect it to happen, another scenario that could provoke lawyers would be if a competitor uploaded material that was unflattering - i.e. a guy working for Burger King who uploaded a McDonalds lot that looked like crap, was surrounded by hoodlums, was always in low-income areas, had a derogatory tooltip. Basically, the way I see it, the EULA is there for two reasons: 1: to stop people from profiting off EA's rightfully owned property and 2: To avoid messy legal battles should a trademark holder decide to enforce their trademark. It also covers EA's butt...if Wal-mart got a burr under their saddle and *did* want to sue someone, EA could get out from under the gun by simply pointing to the EULA and saying "hey, look, we did everything WE could do to prevent this, you'll have to talk to the guy to made the lot." Just my 2 cents.

Hiya, kids, sorry I dropped out for a bit. I have quite a few other irons in the fire.... I'm not sure we'd even need the muscle of SQL Server to do this, honestly - it could likely be done in Access easily enough, and unless you're talking in excess of a million unique keys, the Jet engine can handle it just as easily as SQL, but without the additional learning curve (Access I know: SQL I'm not nearly as familiar with). Resolved: This would be pseudo-opensource, i.e. write access limited to a group of people known and/or proven to have a clue about what the heck they're doing. Fair enough - we don't need a database full of guesses. Resolved further: There should be some discussion mechanism included which will allow information to be compared/tested/argued about before it's inserted into the database Resolved further: Updatable existing records to allow for discovery of new information about old topics Resolved further: The data structure should be fairly simple, at least for someone who knows a bit about data structuring. I do. sidebar: Since for everyone BUT me the interface would be web-based, the *nix v. windows discussion is herefore deemed irrelevant, if interesting /emoticons/2.gif> So let's talk data structure. It seems that the identifiers are are in an 8-byte hex format (i.e. 0xffffffff) This is fine, except that there seems to be no easy way to tell the difference, based solely on the hex ID between an identifier for an OBJECT (exemplar/cohort) and an identifier for a PROPERTY. Looking further at iLive, I'm finding my head spinning quote quickly. What I really need is for someone with an understanding of the inherent data structure of this thing to help me understand it - what would the tables in a normalized database containing all of this information look like, is what we need to determine. Once I've got my head around that, I *think* I can figure out how to ask the right questions that will allow you guys who actually have the data and have already been working with it to get it to me in a fashion that makes it easy to parse in the work that's already been done, tie it together, and build a web interface which could then be used to display, maintain and update the information. I'm pretty good with relating data, but this is such a complex set of information that I'm just not getting my head around it by randomly examining various entries in the simcity_1.dat file as displayed in iLive. I can, for instance, copy all properties to clipboard...but holy crap would it take a long time to do that by hand for every single cohort/exemplar! And even if I was inclined to take the 2 or three years to do that, I'd *still* have to figure out how to sort it and categorize it and format it for importing as data. There's just too much here that I don't know or understand, and as enthusiastic as I am about trying to do this, I don't want to waste my time or anyone else's by having to re-do all the work that's already been done. Even if I could get a huge set of comma-delimited text that was at least grouped in some meaningful fasion - say, one that has the exemplars for all the....BRIDGES or all the Terrain or all the police stations...just so that I can have confidence that the data structure for each record would be the same for that particular group of data, which I could then use to build a bunch of files that would help me understand what my columns might look like and what information is unique or repeated and so forth - it would be a big step forward in my ability to get my head around this thing. Surely someone has an understanding, at least, of the data patterns for (say) ALL THE FIRE STATIONS or ALL THE POLICE STATIONS or ALL THE TERRAIN or ALL THE R$$ LOTS and could arrange it into some fashion that my ignorant self could grasp? That's where I'm lost at - I just don't understand the data well enough to be able to look at it for a few minutes and go Ok, okay, all of the X will have properties A, B, C, and D, so my table will then look like so. Sorry, maybe I'm in over my head with this attempt, or maybe the existing tools are the best way to handle it. I'd like to think not, but don't be afraid to say so if that's the case./emoticons/41.gif>

My problem with data entry is actually twofold - not only do I not particularly enjoy it, but straight up, I just don't know enough about the information to make it meaningful. For instance, I'm sure that the file I put up should have the properties broken up into 'parent' and 'child' attributes - the 'parent' attributes would be unique (say, a building name) and the 'child' attributes would be non-unique (say, the exemplar ID# for ohhh, pollution generated at center). Plus a further set of 'child' ('grandchild?') attributes which would actually be explanations of values. As you can see, I don't even know enough at this point to come up with a good three-level example /emoticons/41.gif> I dig the heck out of modding communities like this, and would like to help, but I don't want to 're-invent the wheel' so to speak by having to take months to learn everything that you folks have already figured out. I guess that sounds lazy or selfish or whatever, it's not intended to be; I just know my limitations - data structuring I understand, but in this case, I *don't* understand the actual data itself. That's actually the underlying purpose of this thing I'm concieving, right - helping idiots like me make sense of all of these interrelated values. I'd like to kick this around some more, maybe get the people you mentioned involved; perhaps between the top-tier modders, we can figure out a way you guys can break the existing info (i.e. the current xml files) down into separate groups of 'parent,' 'child,' 'grandchild/valuelistdesc' or something as a CSV or whatever that I can then plug in and build the data structure for as a strictly reference work (as opposed to creating an actual tool - between DataGen and iLive's reader, that niche is filled quite nicely!) It's worth noting that - unfortunately - iLive's XML file *won't* parse automatically into Access (or even Excel) - I had to break it down into a CSV and import it that way in order to make it work. I haven't checked yours yet. *sigh* It's always something, eh? I'm at a huge disadvantage also in not being terribly familiar with XML /emoticons/15.gif> This is what I get for being old... Anyway, I talk too much. I'd love to figure out how to do this - once I get a handle on how the data is actually structured, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to recreate that in a RDBMS format and set up a querying tool via ASP, and it would be a nice way for me to add something to the community even in the face of my utter lack of knowledge about the tools and information - indeed, the long-term effect *should* be to make it much easier for a larger number of people to use DG and IR effectively to create mods. The problem, again, is actually populating the database - I just don't know enough about things to do that, and if I took the time to learn, SC8 would be out before I finished writing the program/emoticons/3.gif> Right now, I'm just throwing ideas around and looking for input, trying to gauge what the best way is to handle this. I sure would like to hear from the rest of the squad or anyone else that might have input. Maybe I should start a separate thread for this part of the discussion?

I would like to help take this thread to the 'next level.' In another thread in the open mod forum, I mentioned the notion of creating an 'open-source' knowledge base for SC4 modders. It seems that this is the same purpose that this thread it serving, however, an actual database would be much more functional and useful, in my opinion. What I would like to do is create a set of pages at my website that will allow anyone (with registration, free) to examine the known information about a given exemplar and add notes to it, explain parameters or define variable values, etc. Just for grins, I took the latest iLive .xml file, converted it to .csv and parsed it into a database, and then set up a VERY SIMPLE .asp to view the data by browsing the property name. Currently, of course, this only returns the information that is already contained in the iLive properties.xml file, but hey, it's a start, right? You can see that page at http://www.lowgenius.com/sc4 Ideally, I would be able to set something up that pulls up information like: ID Type Name Description 0xGGGGGGGG Float32 VariableFoo Got Foo? Values = Description 0 = false 1 = true 2 = maybe 3 = who wants to know? What I need to know is if the modding community would be interested in participating in this. I've stepped up before to create big projects like this, and then nobody uses 'em. I don't want to waste my time, or anyone else's, if nothign is going to be done with this. What I need from the mod community is your knowledge and willingness to fill out the forms to register and add information to the database. Data modelling I love; data *entry* I hate /emoticons/3.gif> Look forward to your thoughts...