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tutorial Cori's Guide to Displaying Fancy Game Variables
CorinaMarie posted a topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
Cori's Guide to Displaying Fancy Game Variables by CorinaMarie Intro In this tutorial we will learn how to do some quick editing to display internal variables which are now available when using @Null 45's DLLs. At a minimum, you'll want to install: Query Tool UI Extensions DLL for SimCity 4 Lua Extensions DLL (Not needed initially, but we'll prolly dip into it in a Part Two or Part Three.) Also you'll need to insure the file we create here loads after any other override for the Maxis Coal Power Plant and the Power Query UI. (I'm using them for our demo.) See here if you need to learn about load orders: SC4 Folder and File Loading Order The Plugins Directory - How are files loaded? General Load Order Software Archeology - Plugin Load Order Getting Started After installing the aforementioned DLLs, you'll also need Reader 0.9.3. I will assume y'all have a wee bit of familiarity with Reader, but hopefully this'll still be clear enough if not. Our goal is a quick down and dirty bit of editing to allow us to see the newly revealed internal Age Degradation variable. (Second paragraph here and my pic in the next post there.) I'll number these as steps to correspond to the pic numbers and that can help if there are comments or questions. Edit: I just noticed Null released an update to the Query Tool UI Extensions DLL (see version 2.6.3 details) and that simplifies the code in my Steps 25, 31, 36, and 38. Feel free to use his cleaner method, or continue with this tutorial as-is. It will still work exactly as intended. Step 01 In Reader, open simcity_1.dat Single click on any exemplar to activate the Navigator button. Click said Navigator button, expand the Power tree, then the Lots tree, and right click on the Maxis Coal Power Plant: Then click on Group Add to patch. Step 02 That will pop up this dialog box: ^ Click OK. Step 03 Close Navigator, then click on the Patch button. Next control-click the top Exemplar, the TRK file, and the PNG file entries. Then click the Remove button. Step 04 Here we see we still have the Building Exemplar, two LText entries, and the UI file. ^ Click Create DAT. Step 05 Name it whatever you want. I went with: Age Degradation UI Display v0.01 by Cori.dat Like so: ^ Then click the Save button. Step 06 I personally close Reader then reload it. My idea is that clears up the memory that was in use for the big file. Anyhow, we next open the .dat file we just created. On my system there seems to be a weird bug such that the pre-highlighted Exemplar doesn't display the data for its properties. Step 07 So, I click on some other entry: Step 08 Then click back on the Exemplar and it'll populate the fields: Step 09 This is an interim step which will later show us we are referencing the correct exemplar once we get into the game. ^ Double click the Exemplar Name in the right-hand panel. Step 10 That'll pop up this dialog box: Step 11 Rename it to something else which you will later recognize as your own text: ^ Click the bottom Apply button after editing in place or if editing in the "Value as text" box, first click the other Apply (which is like a Set button) and then the final Apply. Preparing for Later LUA Coding Step 12 We'll go ahead and get this ready in case anyone would later like a Part Two of this tutorial which shows how to do data formatting (such as showing a specified number of decimal places). Right-click on the first LText entry, then click Generate new instance. Step 13 Notice how the IID has changed to some other hexadecimal number: Step 14 While that LText entry is highlighted, click the File Info button. Then click Edit: Step 15 Here's what it'll look like with the exception that your "Instance" number will be different. Step 16 Edit both the Type and the Group numbers to be ca63e2a3 and 4a5e8ef6 respectively. ^ And click OK. Step 17 Notice it still says LText and also still shows the old T and G numbers? Step 18 Click a different entry, then click back on the LText we are working with. Notice it now updates both the Type and the Group numbers. It does not, however, recognize the category change. Step 19 So, click to save the file and yes, we are happy to overwrite our existing one. Step 20 Close the file then re-open it and notice how it properly recognizes this as a LUA entry. Step 21 Single-click the LUA file entry. We are going to put some placeholder Lua code in here. ^ Click the Edit button in the right-hand panel, highlight the existing text, and paste the following right on top of it: --#-package:03092f5a# -- package signature -- -- For Lua file entry IID 0xf3092f5a --EOF Step 22 Notice the two hexadecimal numbers. The 2nd one needs to be edited to match the IID you generated in Step 12 (and seen in Step 13). Then the package ID will be the very same number, but replace the first hex digit with a 0. (Note: Any package signature number greater than 0x7FFFFFFF will not be recognized by the game. Only positive integers are allowed when it converts those to decimal.) ^ Click the Apply button when you are finished editing. Back to the Main Part Step 23 Right-click the remaining LText entry and select Generate new group & instance. Step 24 Notice that both the Group and Instance numbers are now different. Step 25 Paste this over the existing text: #null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value(hex2dec('00000020'))# Edit: The Query Tool UI Extensions DLL was updated to v2.6.3 at the same time I was gathering pics and writing this tutorial. As such, I've shown the method which was in effect via v2.6.2. Fortunately both code methods will still work. If you have v2.6.3 or later, you can use the following code instead. (I'm not going to update the picture.) #null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value('00000020')# Note: The # on each end of the code makes this a Token which means the UI will display the value it produces rather than the code itself. Also Note: It needs pasted from the right-click menu. For some reason Ctrl+V is not allowed. ^ Then click the Apply button. Step 26 This'll be the down and dirty part in which we are just going to steal a spot in the UI to display our data (rather than expanding it nicely like @Kel9509 does). Right-click on the UI file entry and select Text View. Step 27 I have Reader smaller than I typically do for editing so the pics here can be smaller. As such I have to scroll the right-hand panel a wee bit. What we are looking for is the line where the word Efficiency is displayed. We are going to replace ea5524eb,8a5ba2a7 with the values we created in Step 24. Step 28 Mine are 4721f708,820e0172 so that's what I paste in. Be sure to use your own T & G as generated in Step 24. ^ Click the Apply button. Step 29 Now we save the whole file again and yes, we are happy to overwrite. Step 30 Finally the fun part! Load the game and plop a Coal Power Plant then Query it. ^ You should see whatever text you used in Step 11. This was a mini goal which shows we've correctly edited the UI to use our own unique LText and the proper code to access the data provided by Null's DLL. Step 31 Remember the linked post above? We are now ready to use that 0xc910b4cf which Null tracked down to display the Age Degradation of the Queried Power Plant. Re-edit the LText to be: #null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value(hex2dec('c910b4cf'))# Edit: The Query Tool UI Extensions DLL was updated to v2.6.3 at the same time I was gathering pics and writing this tutorial. As such, I've shown the method which was in effect via v2.6.2. Fortunately both code methods will still work. If you have v2.6.3 or later, you can use the following code instead. (I'm not going to update the picture.) #null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value('c910b4cf')# ^ And then click Apply. Step 32 Let's now do a Save as... Step 33 Increment your version number while leaving all the rest of the file name the same. This will cause the 2nd version to load later than your first one and so we don't need to clean out our folder just yet. Step 34 We go in the game, plop a Coal Plant, query it, and we see the Efficiency word instead of any data. ^ Close the query and run time till the next month. Step 35 Now when we query, we see a zero. This tells us that the value retrieved was nil when we first plopped the power plant, but that it updated to a numeric response after running time. Step 36 Quit the game and let's take care of that nil value borking our code. Paste in: #null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value(hex2dec('c910b4cf')) or 0# Edit: The Query Tool UI Extensions DLL was updated to v2.6.3 at the same time I was gathering pics and writing this tutorial. As such, I've shown the method which was in effect via v2.6.2. Fortunately both code methods will still work. If you have v2.6.3 or later, you can use the following code instead. (I'm not going to update the picture.) #null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value('c910b4cf') or 0# That or 0 part is handy. If the first part doesn't even exist (the nil value) then it makes the answer be zero. Apply and Save. Step 37 Back in the game and now we have our 0 the moment we plop the power plant. (Quit the game again.) Step 38 The other thing going on is Maxis programmed the UI to automatically truncate any decimal portion of numbers displayed and that's very good for things like population. However, we are wanting exact data to be shown. As such, we can fool the UI's hidden code by making our number into a string. The following code will concatenate the middle dot to the end of the number we want to see and then the UI replaces it with a space. Paste in: #(null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value(hex2dec('c910b4cf')) or 0)..string.char(183)# Edit: The Query Tool UI Extensions DLL was updated to v2.6.3 at the same time I was gathering pics and writing this tutorial. As such, I've shown the method which was in effect via v2.6.2. Fortunately both code methods will still work. If you have v2.6.3 or later, you can use the following code instead. (I'm not going to update the picture.) #(null45_query_ui_extensions.get_property_value('c910b4cf') or 0)..string.char(183)# Click Apply, then Save the file. Step 39 Back in the game. We already know we get a zero when first plopping so this pic is after running time to the next month. This shows how a Float32 variable handles the number. Step 40 Run another month and check again... Conclusion That should be enough to get your feet wet. Special thanks to @Cyclone Boom for following this tutorial, providing feedback, and for fancy tweaking of the post to make it presentable. -
Hi, First timer here, interested in trying out SimCity 4 with mods. I was just wondering is it safe to download all the dependencies listed in the guide that's mentioned in the topic of this post, or do they conflict with each other? Of course the "Dark nite" and "Maxis nite" is clear they conflict, and you choose only one of them. But what about the others? And do those dependencies cover all the dependency needs for all the other items in the guide? I just want easy way to get as many dependencies as possible and not worry about them, and then just get into choosing which mods i want to get. The modding just seems so convoluted in this game with all the mods requiring specific dependencies. And I did check out the "Mod manager" type of tool, which does this for you. But I don't want to setup it, I just wanna do it manually as crazy as that sounds. -
sc4pac [Guide] How to Setup Your sc4pac STEX Token
Cyclone Boom posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Allowing Unlimited downloads from the STEX I'm pleased to formally announce a new greatly superior method to handle sc4pac authentication. I've been working with @memo and @smf_16 to develop a system which allows downloading using his sc4pac tool, without restrictions from ST's end. Understandably STEX download limits are a barrier to sc4pac working efficiently, so we had to come up with a solution. To surmise: As many of you will know, we maintain server integrity by placing limits on guest downloads (max of 20 per day and slower speeds). This means by default, downloading using sc4pac you're seen as a guest, with such restrictions implemented. Briefly there was a cookie authentication method to avoid that, but there were drawbacks in both security and ease of use. Now I've developed a Token system which will allow unlimited full speed downloading, while being secure and much simpler to implement. This means you can generate a personal token for your own use, to then input into sc4pac. The token is a series of 64 random alphanumeric characters, which is unique to your own Simtropolis user account. Then whenever downloading using sc4pac, it sends the token to the ST server. I've implemented server-side logic which handles this, and looks up your token to make sure it's valid. Once accepted, sc4pac downloads from the STEX as a guest, but crucially bypasses the daily downloads limits and speed limitations. How do I generate a Token for sc4pac use? Please watch this video tutorial I've made which explains the process entirely... Where is the Token page? It's located at the following URL: https://community.simtropolis.com/sc4pac/my-token/ Note: You must be signed into your ST account in order to view this page. Only you can view your own token. As explained in the video, there are options to generate a new token at any time, and revoke (delete) your current token. Doing so wipes out that token completely, which would require adding a new token into sc4pac in order to continue authentication. Tokens once set do not automatically expire. You are free to continue using a given token for as long as you'd like. By the way... Please avoid posting your token in public, and also don't share it with anyone. (We do keep track of usage.) What is this "sc4pac" thing anyway? Quite simply, sc4pac is a tool developed by @memo (and others) which allows you to automatically download and install SC4 custom content. The process from start to finish is fully automated, and allows you to select from an ever-growing list of sc4pac compatible plugins (more are being added). You'll notice a black "Install with sc4pac" button on many STEX files to download using sc4pac. Of course, you'll have to first install the tool in order to benefit from this feature (it uses a local URL protocol). The latest GUI version of sc4pac can be obtained from the STEX: It comes available in 3 flavours depending on your system: Windows, Linux, and a web-app version which runs in browser (cross-platform). See the main sc4pac support thread for more info, and if you'd like help with using the tool itself. So, what was wrong with the cookies authentication method? Previously the only way around the daily downloads limit was to paste your ST session cookie data into sc4pac. Then the site would see you as downloading. You might be wondering why we don't continue with this. The answer is while cookies worked, there were 3 main issues: 1) Security As many of you will know, cookies are plain text data files containing information for a website to read. In this case, we're talking about ST login cookies. These allow you to remain signed into the site, after checking the "Remember Me" box. Previously sc4pac needed them to make sure ST knew you were downloading as yourself, not a guest. This way it worked around the daily downloads limitations. While sc4pac remained secure, there's always a risk with handling one's session cookie data. There was at least one instance of someone posting their cookie data in a public reply seeking technical help, which was quite a concern. Anyone who obtained such info could sign into the member account the cookie belongs to. No password would be required, because a session cookie is the password. As such, it seemed far from ideal. 2) Ease of Use Copying one's session cookies from browser inspector was a technical challenge. It was doable, but for some users who might not prefer to fiddle around with this sort of thing, it wasn't ideal. Also given it had to be copied into the exact format, there was risk of mistakes being made. 3) Convenience After 3 months the cookies data would expire and need adding again. This would require you to go through the same steps to re-authenticate, because one's session cookies are only validated once signing into ST again. By using a token, this is now a moot point (since tokens don't expire). To surmise visually: So from the v1.1.0 update, sc4pac no longer supports cookie authentication. The new tokens method fully supersedes the previous implementation. This means from now on, ST will download with guest permissions if the request doesn't have a sc4pac token. If you're still using the cookies authentication, we highly advise upgrading to the latest sc4pac version, generating your token, and adding it to your sc4pac instance. This is simpler to use, much more robust, and has no download restrictions. What about my STEX downloads history? When downloading using sc4pac with your token, it assigns downloads to your own account. This means you'll still appear in the Who downloaded this? lists for any file you're downloading. In effect you're downloading as a guest, but using your member permissions. However, you still might want to lookup previous downloaded files and differentiate them from your regular STEX downloads. Here's a preview of an upcoming site feature I'm creating which will do exactly that... Concept Design Only (this is still under development) As can be seen, there'll be a indication icon for any sc4pac downloads (as I did for the NAM slope mod). It'll allow determining if there are newer versions of files, and ability to filter between those which have updates available. You'll also be able to see on STEX files themselves if you've download them before. This was a very helpful feature on the old LEX, which we'll finally be bringing to the STEX at long last. The idea is a front-end preview which can help you navigate the STEX alongside sc4pac for managing your plugins. I'll post further details once I finish developing the downloads history feature. Please post below if... You've any questions, comments, or feedback about sc4pac tokens or anything I've explained. That means this topic is intended for replies about tokens. But no worries if asking about sc4pac we'll move posts to the correct thread. (And thank you to @CorinaMarie for encouraging and providing me with moral support as ever!) We hope collectively this gives you more freedom to use @memo's excellent tool. -
This might come off as weird but... does anybody know any tips about manually terraforming a region? By "manually", I mean using the tools within SimCity 4, no import image or anything like that: just getting into the city tiles and painting the terrain. I love painting the terrain in such a way, but things can be quite frustrating sometimes. I know about the reconcile edges feature, but I still have problems with them. For example, there are a lot of times where I would love to reconcile only one edge of the map, but the tool reconcile all four at the same time. Honestly, what I'm looking for is really only abut methods and tips from those who like to manually paint the landscape like this. I will be honest with you guys and say that the edges between the tiles is my main problem, really. Even with reconcile edges, you can kind of notice them in the regional view just by looking at the topography itself; they tend to be smoother, specially with mountains (water bodies, plains and plateus are okay, big problem really lies with altitude transitions). I already opted to work with regions composed entirely with the largest city tiles; this reduces the number of edges between cities, thus reducing the effect of this problem. But apart from this, any other artistic tip is welcomed too (how to paint better mountains or lakes, where to place forests, an interesting way to create a geological feature).
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SimCity 4 IN ITALIANO Salve a tutti costruttori italiani! Ho appena deciso di fare una serie in italiano su tutti i segreti di SimCity 4 dove andiamo a vedere i vari passaggi di configurazione di SC4, gestione delle mod, creazione di mappe e mod etc.. In questo thread potete vedere tutti i capitoli che publicherò man mano nel mio canale Youtube Come configurare SimCity 4 sui moderni computer (GOG - Origin/EA App - DVD): https://youtu.be/XXYgPMV-_lc?si=pH_IS7c_S-2jYKKE Come configurare SimCity 4 sui moderni computer (Steam): https://youtu.be/8eRhwY0ue34?si=NDWlVZfUQDhl7A9n
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SimCity 2000 is a quintessential game in the SimCity series, taking everything from the first game and cranking it up to eleven. While EA hasn't neglected this game the way they did the first game, the version for sale is not the "best version", which I'll go into later. Now, the MS-DOS version is still being sold on digital storefronts, so if you want to play this version of SimCity 2000, to avoid legal trouble, it's best if you buy it from GOG. However, the Windows versions of SimCity 2000 are still classified as "abandonware", meaning that while they are protected under copyright, EA will probably not sue anyone for having copies of the Windows versions on their PCs. NOTE: This installation guide is only for the Windows / DOS versions of the game. There were many versions made for many other platforms, like SNES, Sega Saturn, PS1, Game Boy Advance, and more. Every single one of them requires their own specialized emulators to work on modern PCs. Now, if you’re still here, follow me. MS-DOS As I said before, the DOS version of SimCity 2000 is available on digital storefronts. I recommend going that route, as it's easier to set up, without the risk of legal trouble. EA: Buy SimCity 2000™ – PC – EA GOG: SimCity™ 2000 Special Edition on GOG.com While this version can be made to work on a Mac, many reviewers have rightfully pointed out that the DOS version is inferior to the Windows versions. People have said it felt clunkier to use, being stuck at a lower resolution and taking slower to launch than the Windows versions. Furthermore, this version is lacking in features found in the Windows versions, like the intro videos (Windows 95 exclusive) and an extra zoom level. I'm not saying you shouldn't buy this version. Just know what you're getting. Windows Ideally, the Windows 95 version is the one you should play. However, it is also harder to get working. This version of the game is the definitive version of SimCity 2000, with brand new intro videos that always play when starting up the game. The main problem is that this version of the game has a save bug that causes the game to crash upon pressing the “save” or “save as” buttons (this is also a problem with the Windows 95 version of SimCity Classic). First, download the game here (https://archive.org/details/SimCity_2000_Special_Edition_Maxis_Inc._1996). After extracting the .iso file, download InstallShield 3 Engine (http://toastytech.com/files/Is3Engine.zip). Go into the folder labelled “WIN95” and place the file “setup32.exe” into that folder (which should contain “SETUP.EXE”). Then, launch “setup32.exe” instead of SETUP.EXE. The setup should launch and go on without a hitch. If it doesn’t launch, restart your PC, then try again. To fix the save game bug, we are going to use sc2kfix (https://github.com/sc2kfix/sc2kfix/releases). Download the "winmm.dll" file, then move it to your game's directory (C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 2000 by default). To get the intro and Will TV videos working, go into the "DATA" folder at the root of the CD and copy its contents (NOT the folder itself, the files inside it with the extension ".SMK"). Then, go into your game's directory (C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 2000 by default) and make a new folder titled "Movies". Paste the .SMK files you copied from the DATA folder of the CD into that "Movies" folder. SimCity 2000 can be found on “SimCity.EXE” and the Urban Renewal Kit can be found on “WINSCURK.EXE”. Overall, installing SimCity 2000 requires a bit of work on your part. However, it’s well worth the effort, as what you get is a timeless classic that remains fun 30 years later.
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Hi All and welcome to my symposium on Education within SimCity 4! We will be covering what drives the education level (or education quotient, EQ) of our sims and its effects on Industrial and Commercial demand (the Workforce Drives). This will also require us to have a look into the residential simulator. Once the mechanisms are established, I will explain the effects of the settings within the base game and present my modifications. These modifications have not been made into a package at this time, but if the community enjoys the results of the modifications I will make it available with a little help. Let's get Started What is the Point of an Education Anyway? As what is generally observed in the real world, the purpose of education within SC4 is to give sims the opportunity to work in higher paying, cleaner, safer, and more engaging work. Or, to look at it from the view of an employer, the purpose of education is to provide a workforce qualified for the jobs available. (Of course, education has many other benefits in real life, but this is as far as the game goes) So, how is this accomplished in SC4? Well it is all to do with the Workforce Drives! The Workforce Drives exemplars are how SC4 generates Industrial and Commercial demand. There is a detailed posting by RippleJet on SC4 Devotion, link here: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=963.0 Here is my Workforce Drives table (slightly modified from CAM1.0 settings to get my preferred mix): Occupation: CO$$$ CO$$ CS$$$ CS$$ CS$ I-HT I-M I-D I-R Wealth Education R$$$ 150-200 70% 10% 35% 25% 10% 100-150 60% 30% 30% 5% 15% 10% 50-100 30% 52% 23% 15% 22% 8% 0-50 22% 60% 10% 23% 10% 15% 15% 16% R$$ 150-200 45% 15% 10% 30% 30% 20% 100-150 22% 38% 40% 15% 35% 50-100 10% 40% 30% 10% 50% 15% 16% 0-50 30% 25% 20% 55% 30% 160% R$ 150-200 22% 53% 15% 23% 22% 15% 100-150 22% 10% 30% 53% 40% 16% 50-100 5% 10% 40% 40% 65% 160% 0-50 50% 115% 1600% From the table, we can see what type of occupation a sim seeks out is determined by their wealth level (R$, R$$, R$$$), and their education quotient (EQ) (0-200) which is chunked into 4 groups. An EQ of 0-50 is EQ1, 50-100 is EQ2, 100-150 is EQ3, 150-200 is EQ4. Uneducated sims (EQ1) seek out I-D and CS$ jobs. As they become more educated and reach higher EQs, they soon demand I-M and CS$$ jobs, followed by I-HT, CO$$, CO$$$ jobs when they reach the higher EQ ranges. As city planners, if we want to control the demand for the various industrial and commercial occupations, our primary tool is to influence the education quotient of our sims. So, How Does Education Work? There are two main factors driving the education quotient of our Sims. There is the Residential Simulator, which controls how the sims education quotient changes throughout their lifetime, as well as their starting values. Then there are the ploppable educational buildings. First, let's talk about the Residential Simulator. This primarily drives education, health and life expectancy, the chance of education and medical strikes, mayor ratings for health and education, etc. We will stick to just the factors that effect our sim's EQ. Residential Simulator education properties hex decimal Average age reset value 0x28 40 EQ Decay n/a 0.2 EQ Reset percent n/a 80 low wealth EQ 0x14 20 medium wealth EQ 0x28 40 High wealth EQ 0x3C 60 low wealth average age 0x19 25 medium wealth average age 0x1E 30 high wealth average age 0x23 35 R$ sims start out in life at age 25 with an EQ of 20. R$$ sims age 30 EQ 40, R$$$ sims age 35 EQ 60. This applies to all newly moved in sims. If some sims move out, and new sims move in, these will be their values. So, what is Average age reset value? Well, when a sim reaches average life expectancy, they are reincarnated! That's right, when the sims living in a residential building reach life expectancy, their age is reset to 40. Furthermore EQ reset percent, 80, means that 80% of the sim's EQ is retained when they are reincarnated. This has some major implications which we will discuss later when we move on to the educational buildings. The remaining variable of significance is EQ Decay, 0.2. This is a decay of 0.2/month, 2.4 per year, 24 per decade, applied to all sims. When we get to the library building this will be important. Testing Environment Before we get into the buildings, I'll describe the simulation parameters. Welcome to the town of Education Test! (creative name, I know) Education Test is a sleepy little town with a fair balance of industry and commerce that can support a residential population of 3,500 with plenty of excess jobs available. Power, water, and refuse services have been provided as well as police and fire coverage. Taxes have been adjusted to discourage all but R$ sims from moving in (A key to proper analysis is to reduce or eliminate as many variables as possible). There are no traffic problems in Education Test. The residential zoning has been sized to fit within the catchment area of the small elementary school. A census facility has been provided for data collation and collection. The town is profitable once the supported population moves in. We start the simulation by plopping our educational buildings in the town square and clicking cheetah speed, running for ~100 years for each test. It takes <5 years for all the sims to move in and from there the population remains stable. Let's have a look at the results: Educational Building Properties Elementary (Primary) School elementary school Effectivenes cost EQ boost radius age 20 age 30 age 40 age 50 age 60 age 70 age 80 capacity 300 24 384 5 5 0.5 0 0 0 0 500 EQxEffect 120 120 12 0 0 0 0 The Elementary school "Educates young Sims." If by young we mean ages 20-40. I suppose that's fair though considering age 20-30 is the youngest cohort, despite what the population graphs show. Anyway here are the results. I will discuss below. When our new sims move in at age 25, the Elementary school immediately goes to work educating them, and it does a mighty fine job. Within 16 years their educational attainment has peaked at an average of 145. Looking at the map, there are many residences that have reached above 150, putting them at EQ4- these sims could go on to work in I-HT at Andrews Semiconductor, Max's Microchips, or even a nuclear power plant. In fact, they demand it! However that won't last too long. As they lose EQ at a rate of 2.4/year they will soon find themselves in EQ 3, then 2, then 1... So, we ran this test for a 100 years, where is the 2nd generation? Well, they're here, but they don't get educated at elementary school. Remember, sims are reincarnated at age 40, with 80% of their knowledge (EQ) retained. If you look closely at around 75 years, you can see a small dip in the chart, that's when the reincarnation happens and the sims lose 20%. In a stable population where sims are not moving in and out, an Elementary school only works once. It has no effect on subsequent generations as they are aged out of the school's age effectiveness brackets. Maybe you've noticed it yourself, elementary schools in old neighborhoods of a city have few or no students. This age 40 reincarnation is why. Library library Effectivenes cost EQ boost radius age 20 age 30 age 40 age 50 age 60 age 70 age 80 capacity 250 0.3 512 30 30 30 30 30 25 20 30000 EQxEffect 9 9 9 9 9 7.5 6 The Library "Keeps adult Sims from forgetting their education. EQ Decay sucks 2.4 EQ from our sims per year. The library has a very small EQ boost x Effectiveness at 9 for most age brackets, and this is 9 spread over 10 years, or 0.9 per year. Thus a library will reduce EQ Decay from 2.4/year to 1.5/year, a 37.5% reduction. Since the library on its own cannot overcome EQ Decay, I have run the simulation with an Elementary school and a library. Let's have a look: As with the Elementary School, it took 16 years to reach peak EQ. The library contributed 0.9 per year, adding 14.4 EQ over those 16 years. Thus, the census shows us an average EQ of 160, 15 points higher than the Elementary School result. Furthermore, as the decay is reduced for every age cohort, we can observe the slope of the EQ chart is not as steep. We peak at 160 and drop to ~85 as the first generation is reaching their life expectancy, vs. 145 to 20 for the school alone. That's a loss of 125 reduced to 75. Not bad for $12 a month. High (Secondary) School High School Effectivenes cost EQ boost radius age 20 age 30 age 40 age 50 age 60 age 70 age 80 capacity 650 24 512 0 0.5 5 2.5 0 0 0 750 EQxEffect 0 12 120 60 0 0 0 The High School "Educates teen Sims." We can see the age brackets are "higher" than that of the Elementary School, with the peak effectiveness centered at age 40. Interesting. Looks like EQ peaked at 159, that's a bit higher than the 145 the Elementary School provided. When did it peak? 33 years. But wait, there's a factor going on here that's more exciting. The chart rebounds at 75 years when the 2nd generation begins. What is the saying? Life begins at 40? Anyways, since the High School primarily educates the age 40 bracket, it is actually effective as a multi-generational institution, unlike the poor Elementary School. However, the second generation's peak is lower than that of the first. Well, let's add a library and see what happens. That's better. Museum Museum Effectivenes cost EQ boost radius age 20 age 30 age 40 age 50 age 60 age 70 age 80 capacity 450 40 5800 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.75 1.5 3 900 EQxEffect 12 12 12 12 30 60 120 Hmmm, so the Museum EQxEffect is only 12 for ages 20-60, but EQ decay for 10 years is 24. What to do? Yep, this test will need the be run with a library. Ah, and the museum has quite a strong EQxEffect on the elderly, I wonder how that will go? WOW. Bet you weren't expecting that. Simply a museum and a library turned our sims into certified geniuses! Furthermore, they reach their peak EQ at end of life, meaning the next generation retains 80% of a very high EQ. Furthermore, the sims remain in EQ4 from one generation to the next; no change in industry or commercial demand. The coverage area of the museum is 5800 m, that's bigger than a large tile! All of that for $58+ $12 = $70 a month. It only took 70 years... College City college Effectivenes cost EQ boost radius age 20 age 30 age 40 age 50 age 60 age 70 age 80 capacity 1000 24 5800 0 0.5 1.5 5 2.5 0.5 0 7000 EQxEffect 0 12 36 120 60 12 0 The College "Educates young adult Sims". Age is just a number, right? 50 is young. Like the museum, the college coverage radius is 5800, covering an entire large tile. Let's get to the results. Lowest cost yet for 3,500 sims at $40, and our sims became rocket scientists after 30 years, with EQ peaking at 184 after 40 years. Without a library to help maintain that EQ, our sims did dip to EQ3 later in life, but the next generation came roaring back. Not much else to say here. I won't cover the large Elementary School and large High School. They have the same stats as their base schools, but with extended catchment areas and greater capacities. I also won't be covering the rewards educational buildings University, Major Art Museum, Main Branch Library, Opera House, Private School. Thoughts on this Educational System Whelp. As we can see, practically every educational institution provided will turn an uneducated sim into a certified genius. That's great if our goal is to get to High tech and High Wealth commercial offices as quickly as possible. Furthermore, this process can even be sped up by overlapping the services of multiple educational buildings. If that is your goal, the information above can help you achieve the highest EQ faster, or for less cost, or help you to maintain it between generations. As for myself, I'm looking for a bit more out of the game's educational system. I view the system shipped with the game as far too easy. As mayor, I would like to be able to tailor my city to focus on dirty industry and low wealth commercial services, or manufacturing industry and mid-level offices, or high tech industry and high wealth commercial offices. As hinted in the topic title, I have achieved that through mods. Stay tuned for the next post which will cover that topic. P.S. if you like the educational data map used in the posting, you can find it here:- 46 Replies
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SimCity Classic + Terrain Editor - Guide To Installation (Windows)
Marble_1 posted a topic in City-Building Games
SimCity Classic is a game that propelled Maxis to enormous success. However, it seems like EA has neglected this game, relegating it to the status of “abandonware”. Now, as many people before me have already talked about, the legalities of downloading abandonware are quite murky. The game is technically still protected under copyright. However, EA doesn’t see a dime from the game anyway, being that it isn’t sold anywhere, so they probably won’t hunt people down for having copies of SimCity Classic on their PCs. NOTE: This installation guide is only for the Windows / DOS versions of the game. There were many versions made for many other platforms, like Macintosh, Amiga, SNES, Unix, and more. Every single one of them requires their own specialized emulators to work on modern PCs. Now, if you’re still here, follow me. MS-DOS The DOS versions of SimCity are the easiest to get working on modern PCs. All you need are the files for them, as well as DOSBox, then you can launch the DOS executable (through DOSBox, of course!), and play the DOS version to your heart’s content. Your cities will even save to whatever subdirectory the game is in! SimCity v1 (1989): https://www.myabandonware.com/game/SimCity-ri Terrain Editor (1989): https://www.myabandonware.com/game/sim-city-terrain-editor-2is SimCity v2 (Classic, 1994): https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimCity_Classic_1994 (note that this version of SimCity Classic has a built-in Terrain Editor) Note that these versions can also be made to work on a Mac. Windows Ideally, the Windows versions are the ones you should play. However, they are also harder to get working. If you want the Windows 3.1 version, you’ll need a copy of the game, which can be found as part of the CD (https://www.mediafire.com/file/e1sk7fijxvf4cb9/SimCity_Classic_for_Windows_95.iso/file). However, to run it, you’ll either need an old PC, or you’ll need VirtualBox or WineVDM. To run the game in WineVDM, extract the .iso file, then simply open “otvdmw.exe” and run BOTH the setup file (found in the WIN31 folder) and the game file (C:\SIMCITYW\SCW.EXE) using WineVDM. You’ll need to run the game .exe directly from WineVDM EVERY TIME you want to play. There is music in the Windows 3.1 version. However, WineVDM doesn’t play it, even when the sound effects still play normally. This is because of one of those bugs that come with running the Windows 3.1 version in modern Windows. To enable music, go to “SCW.INI” in the game directory and set the boolean “Music” to “No”. Then, enable music in-game through the menu options. Do note that there is no Terrain Editor built specifically for Windows 3.1. The version of the Terrain Editor that comes with the Windows 3.1 version is actually the MS-DOS version, which can be run from Windows 3.1. If you find yourself wanting to use it for your cities made in the Windows 3.1 version, the MS-DOS version is your best bet. Now for the Windows 95 versions, and oh boy, this one’s a real doozy. You’ll wanna sit down for this one. This version of the game is the definitive version of SimCity Classic. The music is amazing, the graphics are improved, everything is improved. However, it’s also the hardest to get working. The main problem is that this version of the game has a save bug that causes the game to crash upon pressing the “save” or “save as” buttons (this is also a problem with the Windows 95 version of SimCity 2000). First, download the game here (https://archive.org/details/SimCityWindows95). Then, download InstallShield 3 Engine and place the file “setup32.exe” into the same folder containing “SETUP95.EXE”. Then, launch “setup32.exe” instead of SETUP95.exe. The SimCity setup should launch and go on without a hitch. If it doesn’t launch, restart your PC, then try again. Then, download this, and extract the files and place them inside the game directory (C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity Classic). SimCity Classic can be found in “CLASSIC.EXE” and the Terrain Editor can be found in “TERRAIN.EXE”. Do note that Windows continually has these drivers updated, which means that these files will not keep the Windows 95 version running stably forever. You’ll simply have to keep checking the GitHub repository for new updates to the dxwrapper plugin. Overall, installing SimCity Classic requires a bit of work on your part. However, it’s well worth the effort, as what you get is a timeless classic that remains fun 30 years later.- 1 Reply
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How to build a fake RHW-12S Idea: This RHW-12S, that I came up with consists of the inner part of RHW-10S and the outer part of RHW-8C. The paths look like they work, at least I couldn't despawn myself in the You-drive mode. It's very janky to build though, especially since FLEX-pieces try to "fix" my unstable mess. Also it looks ugly since the central line markings are cut off. Wouldn't recommend using it, but it works. If you need an RHW-12S, this might be the solution for you, although at some point in the future there will probably be a real RHW-12S available in the NAM. Crossing test with ELR, monorail, rail viaduct, EMHW, Road viaduct. Especially the rail and road viaduct are very unstable and tend to cause the RHW-12S to "decompose" to its RHW-10S and RHW-8C components. Having the crossing networks close together also increases decomposition risk, which is why I left at least a 1 tile gap here. How to build: (1) Place the RHW-8C and RHW-10S starters (2) Erase the unwanted parts (don't bulldoze!) (3) (not pictured here) Drag out the RHW
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Introducing Network Addon Mod is the new product format of the NAM Team to show the public the new contents of the new NAM versions that are coming out. In these live streams you can see the new features that will be in the new NAM versions as well as interact with the NAM Team. Interaction with the public is essential to understand features most requested by the public or talk to the NAM Team for possible problems. Below is the link to the most recent video NAM 48: https://www.youtube.com/live/K-XH4OvMk4s?si=r3yKTLFdHzahP-kQ Below you can find videos of older versions. Videos shown under this section correspond to content introduced during previous NAM versions, which are considered DEPRECATED once the next version is published. NAM 47: Introduction to Network Addon Mod 47 has not been realized. On the other hand there are two Secret Weapon Video -> https://youtu.be/sftw_49ozXQ & https://youtu.be/fahTw4Z4rqg NAM 45: https://youtu.be/u8PZ4Wz8IdU NAM 46: https://youtu.be/cGIBvHn61ys Enjoy and we can't wait to see your reactions to new NAM content
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The Ultimate Guide to SimCity 4 Mods for New Players
deezedgod posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
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!- 18 Replies
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HI guys its been forever, like 10 plus years since I have played this game. I discovered there was a mod for this game. After some difficulty installing it since I am rusty with my computer skills, it is amazing. I am actually overwhelmed at the amount of options available now. I am working on my train systems and I really do not know whats going on with everything. I am looking for a detailed user guide. Can someone point me to where I may find one? I have searched but have not been able to find an in depth guide.
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tutorial How to Download Offline GOG Game Installers (including SC4)
Cyclone Boom posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Download your GOG games offline as standalone installer files, without GOG Galaxy. This can be useful to ensure one has a source copy, as opposed to relying on the GOG Galaxy client or other download managers. For those who are interested in purchasing SC4 from GOG (or might've done so already), it's an important consideration. It makes certain the game is downloaded in its purest form as Maxis intended, without any other superficial software layers to otherwise complicate matters. I've made a video which shows the exact process for how to do this from your GOG games library: (In future I might make some more SC4 and site related tutorials too.) This explains the steps to obtain the offline installer for SC4 and also other GOG games you may have. Most games should allow this (including SC3000 and SC2000), although there might be some which are an exception. Once you've obtained the installer file for any given game, it'd be a wise move to make a backup copy on your local storage media in more than one place. An example would be on flash drives, or ideally a more robust method of storage such as an external HDD separate from your computer. Hopefully this helps to clarify and might come in useful. -
(Tutorial) Updating Lot Monthly Cost While Avoiding Phantom Budget Predicaments
CorinaMarie posted a topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
(Tutorial) Updating Lot Monthly Cost While Avoiding Phantom Budget Predicaments This tutorial is in reply to @TheMurderousCricket from his post here. The key part being: This is an advanced concept I introduced in Crime and Police Station Fixes for ModPacc Zero. I'm going to use the vanilla Open Grass Park as the sample for this tutorial. Here's the extracted version if'n y'all want to follow the steps: Open Grass Sample for Cricket - File 1 - Original Extraction.dat Step 01: Pic showing the initial file opened in Reader 0.9.3: In File Explorer, copy that to a new file and give it a new name. I made mine Open Grass Sample for Cricket - File 2 - Cori Updated - v0.01.dat. Step 02: Control + Click the first three entries: Right click them, select Copy File(s) then right click in the white space below the DIR entry and select Paste File(s). Step 03: It should now look like this: Step 04: Right click the newly copied LotConfigurations Exemplar and select Generate New Instance ID: Step 05: Edit the IID of the new Building Exemplar to have the same IID as the new LotConfigurations: Step 06: Generate a new IID for the newly copied LText and update the verbiage: Step 07: Go to the corresponding original LText and update its verbiage: Step 08: In the original Building exemplar, open the OccupantGroups property: ^ The 0x00001006 value tells it in which menu to will appear. Step 09: We want to remove it from the menu so it can no longer be selected. Remove the 0x00001006 and it now looks like this: ^ Be sure to click the first Apply button followed by the 2nd Apply button. Step 10: Update the name in the new LotConfigurations entry: ^ This isn't strictly necessary, but you'll thank yourself for it later. Step 11: Change Rep 13 of the LotConfigPropertyLotObject (the one that starts with 0x00000000) to the IID of the new building exemplar: ^ Apply and Apply. Step 12: Update the name in the new Building Exemplar: Step 13: Update the IID in the User Visible Name Key to match the IID of the new LText: Step 14: Update the Lot Resource Key to match the IID of the new LotConfigurations entry: Step 15: Update the Budget Item Cost: ^ Note: In this case I'm going for minus 10 Simoleons per month. While it converts an entry to 16 hex digits, you need to only enter 8 digits. So for this I typed in 0xFFFFFFF6 then Apply and Apply. Step 16: Here's how it looks with those changes: Step 17: Single click the DIR entry: Step 18: Right click and select Remove File. This pic shows it is now gone: Step 19: Save the file. Close the file. Reopen the file. It'll now have a new DIR entry: Ofc, be sure your new file loads last or you've removed any other overrides for the Maxis Open Grass lot. Step 20: In the game when you query a previously plopped Open Grass lot it'll show the correct original cost and it'll have the new name we gave it: Step 21: Find the Open Grass in the Parks Menu: ^ Note: Only the new one will show because we told the original to hide (by removing the 0x00001006 OccupantGroups value). Step 22: Hovering over a plop of the new one with the query tool will show the new name: Step 23: And here's the query of the updated lot: -
Things keep changing as Apple updates macOS - this process is the latest as of this post's date for Big Sur 11.4 and NAM 41. I will update this post with any changes affecting the installation if/as issues come up. Other bugs or quirks discovered in gameplay will be posted as a reply to this topic farther down. As of now this has been found: Immortal Lots. Unable to bulldoze lots/buildings that overlap a modded plop. Solution found. Installing Mods (NAM) on Big Sur for SC4 MODS WILL NOT WORK WITH THE NEW 64-BIT SC4 GAME FROM THE APPLE APP STORE. If you have it, forget about adding mods - Apple's configuration does not allow it. Delete it (and all its associated files) and get the Steam version. Steam's downloadable version is 1/4 the price (~ $5 USD) and the NAM installation actually works. Steps (in order) Purchase SC4 and download/install Steam (free, but Steam account creation is required with a couple of back and forth confirmation emails). Steam will not run on Big Sur without this adjustment: Copy this command: rm -r ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/Steam.AppBundle , open the Mac's Terminal app and paste it, click Enter and close the Terminal app. Download the latest NAM package and unzip it. Open the folder to see the files to run below. Right-click (not double-click) to run and install the OpenJDK11U-jre_x64_windows_hotspot_11.0.8_10.msi file included in the package. MacOS may give you a hard time but there's a way in. Right-click (not double-click) on the NetworkAddonMod_Setup_Version41.jar file in the package and select Open, continue past MacOS warning dialog. A window opens for the NAM installer. Click to agree to the usage terms at the bottom of the Welcome tab (do not change the defaults in the Files tab - they will not work), click on the Install tab, and click to Start Installation. A list of files will begin to fill the window for a while – keep scrolling to the bottom of the list until you see the notice that all files were loaded, then quit the application. Open two finder windows. On one search for the Network Addon Mod folder, right-click to Duplicate it, then drag the copy to your Desktop. Go to https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/index.htm to download the JDATPacker tool. Register and then click https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3140 to go straight to the item to download. Unzip the downloaded JDATPacker archive, then right-click on the JDatPacker-0.1.3.jar file, continue past the warning to open. On the JDATPacker tool, Source Directory: click Browse and scroll to find and select the Network Addon Mod copy folder that you dragged to the Desktop. Target Directory: Browse to find and select Desktop. Execute and close the tool. From Desktop select all the new .dat files just unpacked (including the NetworkAddonMod_Controller.dat file, which may still be inside the z_NAM Controller_RHD_4GB_Full folder), and drag to drop them inside the SimCity 4 folder's Plugins folder you previously removed them from. At the end of the process the folder contents should match the screen shot attached. You can move all the download archives and unneeded files to Trash. The files in the image below are all you need. Launch the Steam app to finish its setup and connect to your Steam account, then run SC4. Open a city and check the menus for new mods, and put some down and bulldoze them to be sure they work. Looks like the vast majority of people here [players and modders] are WIndows users. We few Mac users are usually just players so there's not a lot of tech wizards who know Macs well, although they are very helpful. Any time you can help with problem solving please pitch in.
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Hi, I'm new to this community and wanted to know what software or tutorial guides I might need to help begin my first mod building in this community. What software may I need to download/Is it virus-free? Do I need to download SimCity4 Software for these certain programs? Is there a complete tutorial guide to starting and understanding the program software to make a mod building? Thanks. TownDev2!
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tutorial How to Create a Transit-Enabled Growable Lot
ncamferdam posted a topic in SC4 BAT & Lot Workshop
I just spent a couple days working on this, and since it caused me so much trouble figuring out each of the steps, I thought I'd write up how I did it. This information is of course already available, but it's spread out and can be somewhat difficult to track down and consolidate. In any case, this is very much a "this worked for me" tutorial. There very well could be an easier way to do all of this, and I don't really have the technical knowledge to explain why some of the stuff works the way that it does. And of course, this could all be a bad idea, so I would emphasize that I'm no expert, and that if you try this you should be very careful creating backups of your game files. But it seems to be working so far for me, so here it is. I wanted to add the Ping An Center to my city, specifically at an ideal location straddling one of my main avenues. This lot comes as a transit-enabled ploppable commercial lot. However, I didn't want any functional landmarks if I could avoid it, preferring to grow all of the lots through zoning. In addition, the lot is transit-enabled for road traffic, and I obviously needed to change that to an avenue. So, I had to figure out how to create a transit-enabled growable lot from scratch. Creating the Lot The first step was using the Ping An Center model to create a growable lot. This was done using the PIM-X tool. A detailed step-by-step explanation for how to do this starts on page 8 of the SC4PIM User Guide. The resulting growable takes the form of a SC4Lot file and a SC4Desc file, automatically placed in my plugins folder. Next, in the PIM-X window, I right-clicked the Lot Config Exemplar to open up the Lot Editor. A detailed explanation of how to navigate and use the LE can also be found in the User Guide, starting on page 64. Starting out, this is what the growable looked like: Before going further, I wanted to mark out where the avenue was going to go (the same route as the road in the provided ploppable). This required a slight adjustment of the building model from its default position, and the addition of an avenue texture. There are a few different options to choose from, but I used a texture numbered 4da444e0. You'd have to download BSC Textures Volume 01 to get it, but it matches the default avenue pretty seamlessly. There are other textures for roads and such nearby as well. The result became this: Transit-Enabling the Lot Now, this was where I had the most trouble figuring out what to do. For a while, I wasn't sure if it was possible or (more likely) advisable to make a growable lot transit-enabled. This thread has a ton of information on the subject, and while it's fairly old and there's some disagreement over a few points, it does lay out a lot of potential pitfalls to watch out for. Regardless of the truth, my main takeaway was to keep it simple: one type of transit network, running through the lot in one place, going in one direction. In order to transit-enable the lot, I had to use SC4Tool (get the file by simrolle and Andreas). Specifically, I had to use the TE Editor (a tutorial for which can be found in this thread). But in order to use that, I first had to combine the files produced by PIM-X. As mentioned, the growable lot takes the form of a SC4Lot file and a SC4Desc file. The first contains the Lot Config Exemplar, the second contains the Building Exemplar. Now, for whatever reason, the TE Editor in SC4Tool will not work if a lot is in this state. Once you load in the lot, the icon next to it will be red, and you won't be able to add or modify transit switches. What you need to do, is pack the Building Exemplar into the SC4Lot file. This is accomplished using the iLive Reader, and is fairly involved. Again, you can find instruction in the PIM-X User Guide, starting on page 15, but you can also follow this writeup by BarbyW. In the end, you'll have a single SC4Lot file containing both exemplars. This is the only file you need to deal with from now on, and the TE Editor should work with it. Again, the thread linked at the start of the last paragraph was enough to help me through the process, but to summarize, you have to first mark out the path of the transit network on the lot. Keep in mind that direction is important. Then, you have to add in transit switches. Again, I'm no expert, but as I understand it, transit-enabling a lot essentially turns it into a functional transit station. An avenue does not actually "go through" the lot, at least not as the game sees it. Instead, certain transit types enter the lot, and certain transit types exit the lot. What transit switch you have applied to a lot controls this action. For something like a bus stop, the switch is obviously "pedestrian in" and "bus out" and vice versa (hence the "switch" name is obvious). However, in order to properly simulate a road passing through a lot, we need to make the growable operate like a monorail station: the same transit type in and out. And, since this is a road network, we need to include every type of vehicle traffic. For reference, here is what my TE Editor ended up looking like for this growable (note the north-south direction of each transit tile, and the north-south transit switches): The last element to point out here is the capacity. I made sure to match the transit switch capacity to the capacity of normal avenues. Since I'm running NAM with a 2.0 capacity multiplier, that ends up being 24,000 for me. Whichever transit system you wind up using, you can reference this post for capacity numbers. Now, obviously you can get a lot more complicated than this, adding built-in bus stops, train stations, etc. I can't speak to how well that will work, and from what I can tell, you run the risk of significantly slowing down or crashing your game if you're not careful. Again, I tried to keep it simple. Implementation Now that the lot was transit-enabled, I went back to the PIM-X Lot Editor to finish off the design. Note how, now that the lot has been transit-enabled, the tiles across which commuters will traverse the "station" are marked out in red arrows. You can look at these to verify that the path is correctly oriented. Finally, I finished off the lot with some additional props and textures, closed the LE, saved the Lot Config Exemplar, and closed all the tool windows. I should also note that at every step of this process I was opening up the game to test out the lot on a blank map. Usually I would just use the lotplop cheat to see how it looked and verify that I could drag an avenue through it. I would recommend you do this as well, keeping it far away from anything you'd like to save until it's absolutely done. Even then, you should still back everything up, and most importantly, make sure any instance of the building is deleted before you exit and modify it. Don't mess with the lot or exemplars if it's saved in a city somewhere. Once it was ready, here is how the implementation looked. First, I cleared out a section of the city, including the target avenue, and used ctrl to zone out a correctly-sized lot. Make sure the lot is oriented properly to line up with whatever transit network you're connecting to (assuming it already exists). In the next picture, you can see the lot under construction, with the avenue texture clearly visible. Here you can see how, just as a monorail track does not actually pass through a monorail station, the avenue never actually bisects the lot (even though in both cases you can drag the network all the way through). Again, the game sees this as commuters entering a "station" on one side and coming out the other. Since, as is clear in the TE Editor above, commuters never change mode of transport, this is visualized as (and effectively operates as) commuters driving straight through. This can be seen in the final picture. And there you have it: a growable, transit-enabled lot. So far, everything has worked out well. I've saved and re-opened the city many times and it all runs smoothly. There haven't been any impacts on commute time, and as far as I can tell the avenue is functioning exactly as it had before. One danger I will note though is that I think abandonment shuts down any transit function. I'm not positive on this, and there may be a way around it by changing the properties of the lot to never abandon, but this is something to be aware of. You should be confident that the lot will remain desirable for the long-term. In addition, transit-enabling a growable seems to prevent new lots from replacing it. Once you've grown one, that's the building that will exist on that patch of zone forever, until you demolish it manually. Hopefully this has all been helpful in some way. I probably got a few things wrong (please let me know if I did), but I think on the whole this is a good procedure to follow for this very specific goal. And I didn't mention it at the beginning, but big thanks to @TowerDude for creating such an amazing model. -
Hi guys, I want to create BAT buildings, but its tooo hard. i want a guide or something like that to start my BAtting journey. i saw a similar topic but its outdated, i=and i cant see any other forum, so please help me, i have many interesting ideas for sc4 buildings.
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W S S N C O P F L (Working Simulated Street Neighbor Connection Overhanging Prop Filler Lots) From its humble beginning with this post / question: @Cyclone Boom and I are proud to present a set of overhanging lots which fulfills this particular need. Ergo: Background In a new area of my Corillion region I have a small island which straddles a city tile border. Most of the Sims living there commute to the adjacent tile: I have a crappy little R$ area and it's connected to the neighbor. Like @Daeris, I feel that part which is road looks horribly out of place and spoils the illusion. Using our new WSSNCOPFL mod, it now looks like this. Or, if you are using CB's No More Neighbour Connection Arrows mod, it'll look like this: And it's still a perfectly working neighbor connection! Contents of the new Mod We've made overhanging prop lots for the vanilla Maxis street as well as each SAM of the Street Addon Mod (excluding SAM 1 Parking Lots). Because our lots each have a single, permanent texture for the S3D (said model created by @rsc204) that makes the overhanging prop static. We didn't want a zillion (and 7) lots in the menus, so we picked a wealth and density level they would represent. This allows any nearby sidewalks and grass to match up when they are the same wealth and density. In the following pics, they are thus grouped first by low wealth, low density, then Robin's industrial one, and finally, high wealth, low density. Vanilla Maxis Street: SAM 2 - Peg Dirt Road: SAM 4 - Peg Gravel Road: SAM 5 - Trolca's Dirt Street: SAM 7 - Hableurg's Asphalt Street: SAM 11 - MGB IndustrieSAM: SAM 2 - Herringbone Brick Street: SAM 6 - Klinker Street: SAM 8 - Cobblestone Street: SAM 9 - Brisk Red Brick Street: SAM 10 - Moonlight's Japanese Street: How to use this Mod When plopping these lots, the road and adjacent cells must be level or there will be goofy graphical glitches. So, start out by leveling the area using road stub plops: Edit: Pro Tip from @SIM-ple Jack: For those road stubs that come thru from another city tile which are 3 cells in length, you can bulldoze off two of them (leaving a single cell of the road with the connection arrow) and then connect the street to that. Now you only need to plop one of these filler lots. (I'll make new pics for the release version of the docs to show it that way.) Now back to the original (partially wrong) guide: Then bulldoze the road stubs and grab the corresponding WSSNCOPFL from the Miscellaneous Transportation menu: ^ Note: For this beta version those have been ordered to appear at the top of the menu. For release, we believe they should be buried far down so as to not be annoyingly in the way as they will only be used once or a few times per city tile. Next, simply plop them one by one to cover up the road. The arrow is automatically attracted to the network so they will be in the proper orientation for plopping. Plop the second one: And a third one: Lastly, replant the trees: ^ Note: The invisible part of the plopped lots does allow both God mode and Mayor mode trees on them. This also means other MMPs could be used instead. Known Goofinesses If plopping on uneven terrain you could see this: When first plopped (even on level ground), it can have this little oddity. Simply zoom in or out one time to fix that. This pic is zoomed to 200% to better show it: Zoning density makes a difference for nearby sidewalks. Here are some small homes which grew in high density zoning: ^ Ofc, if y'all don't mind this look, it's not hurting anything gamewise. Another thing is because the S3D can only have one FSH with no MIPs (specific textures for each zoom), the Klinker Street will show a Moiré pattern when zooming out. This image was taken at zoom 3 in the game and then I increased it to 300% so it's not tiny here: There is a wee bit of an alignment mismatch for these filler lots because the S3D model has to be raised 0.2 meters above the terrain. This is so they don't cause graphical glitches (aka z-fighting). For instance, here's a posh neighborhood where I have gaps between the actual zoning of the residential which I filled with Park Grass plops. Then in the upper left is a larger park. Notice how that one cell of the Brisk Red Brick Street decides to show dull R$ grass? So, I bulldozed a spot where the invisible part of the overhang lot could go (which I would then fill with trees) and plopped the overhang. Due to that height difference there is a bit of visual offset: ^ This same anomaly will happen at the neighbor connections too. Nothing can be done to fix it for all rotations. So, this glitch is one you have to decide if you can live with or not. (For the neighbor connections I'm willing to accept the slight alignment discrepancy in order to hide the more obvious road texture.) The Controller Cohort File I'm introducing what I believe to be a completely new concept for menu management. One can simply accept having very full menus with everything installed available. Or, use Menu Management Lots (MMLs) to hide them when not needed. Or, use the DAMN Manager with the DAMN Program. The first option is inconvenient due to the amount of scrolling needed. The MMLs have the slight drawback that one must re-select from the menu for each plop. And DAMN can be damn difficult to setup and get working properly. (There's nothing wrong with the DAMN program. It's merely more complex than other options.) Since I don't personally use DAMN, this next part is only about using the in game menus. The other issue which is tedious to setup properly for oneself is the order of the items in menus. What one person uses every other click in the game might be a once a week item for someone else. They would then have different ideas of how far towards the top or bottom they should go. Also, when having a large set of items, the reorganizing of their location has heretofore been a royal pain in one's posterior region since they must each be edited. With the method I've created, the location within the menu (as well as which menu the entire set will appear in) is controlled by one Cohort file. To move this entire set up or down within the menu needs only one simple edit using Reader. More specifically, the Item Order property in the Buildings exemplar: ^ This is shown with the hex value 0xFFFF8300 which is minus 32,000 in decimal. (The more negative the Item Order value, the higher it is in the menu and the more positive the value, the lower it is.) For this beta release, I've made it very negative for the convenience of accessing our lots quickly. Again, the beauty of this method is one single edit and the whole set can move to another position in the menu. This, IMO, is so much easier than editing every single lot's building exemplar. Then a second feature, tho not as useful, is that which menu they appear in can also be determined for the entire set with a single edit to the OccupantGroups property: Hiding Icons Even more useful for things which are plopped only a few times in a city tile's life is that removing the Controller Cohort file from Plugins causes all their menu items to disappear, but all plopped items are still fine in the city tile. This helps reduce clutter in said menu. To test this part, remove the WSSNCOPFL Controller Cohort.dat file from your Plugins folder. (Leave the other .dat files in place.) Plop Costs The plop cost is the other part which designates the position in the menu. We've simply set them from $1 to $11 so they will sort in SAM number order. The plop cost is located in each individual building exemplar. (Unless wanting to change the order within the set of icons, they are already set logically.) Design Consideration Each lot is a single 1 x 1 ploppable with an overhanging prop offset by exactly 16 meters. They are all completely neutral with regard to stats. Ergo, no pollution, no auras, no montly cost, or any of that stuff. The prop is facing away from the arrow so they will auto orient themselves towards the road. The 1 x 1 lot itself has no textures at all which makes it invisible after plopping and does not suffer from the water bug. ^ Ofc, you cannot zone in that invisible area nor plop any other lot on it. SNAFUs and Their Resolution Right from the start, there was a glitch. With the lot plopped the overhanging texture would sometimes ghost itself and look goofy. I believe this is the infamous z-fighting. ^ Per Robin's suggestion, this could also be fixed by raising the model more, but that would also exacerbate the alignment differences so I went with Plan B (described in a moment). ^ Edit: Robin did not say the above. I misunderstood. Then, also, the necessity of the S3D being raised by 0.2 meters made it such that the prop texture appears a wee bit too wide to match up to the ground textures of the road/street. While really only noticeable at zooms 5 & 6, increasing that to zoom 8 (using the sizeof 8 cheat code) it bothered me. My Plan B resolved both of those issues by making a copy of the original textures and adding an updated Alpha channel. Now it looks like this: ^ It lines up very nicely IMO. Additionally, SAM 6 (Klinker Street) and SAM 10 (Moonlight's Japanese Street) won't work at all by simply calling the NAM's textures. ^ Neither of those have the grass area so some road shows thru. Nor do they produce pretty sidewalks without a proper grown wealth adjacent. For 6 and 10 as well as for 2, 8 and 9, I baked in the good sidewalks when making full sized textures. Menu Location Per @Naomi57's suggestion, we'd hoped these could go in the Road sub-menu, however as best I can figure out the only things which can go there are tools (like the draggable streets, roads, or the like), placeholders for network plops which are in a Tab Ring, or a Maxis defined sub-menu. So, we've tossed them into the Miscellaneous Transport sub-menu. Beta Testing Ofc, CB and I have tried to test these every which way. However, there's nothing better than having other peeps also put them to rigorous testing. We have decided to have a closed beta which means we are not posting the file directly, but are asking for a few peeps who are willing to thoroughly test the complete set and report back with both comments and pictures of good and bad aspects. @Kloudkicker has specifically volunteered and we believe @Naomi57 did too by adding a Yes reaction where we'd asked about this in the original thread. While @Daeris reacted with a Like, we aren't certain if that was a commitment to help test. We would like a couple or three more peeps to join the test group. Let us know by replying below. When the file is ready (prolly later today or tomorrow), we'll send it attached to a Private Message. Beta Expectations Remember, we do expect feedback and pictures to be posted about the testing y'all do. We reserve the right to use any posted image in the final release. Credit to you will be given by editing in your ST name into a corner of the pic. If you happen to be proficient using Reader, also test moving the set to a different menu as well as the position vertically (Item Order) within the menu. (See the Controller Cohort section above for this latter part.) There's no particular rush, but we'd like to have a finalized version ready to post on the STEX within a couple weeks if possible. Download Beta See our post here to download the WSSNCOPFL v1.0 package. Conclusion Thanks for reading everyone. -Cori & CB
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ReShade and SimCity 4: A horrible experiment
Toby Ferrian posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
After seeing the recent discussions about using DirectX wrappers to run SimCity 4 at higher resolutions, I thought, can I use this to run ReShade with SimCity 4? The answer, to quote myself from Discord, is: In this thread I will share the results of my experimentation. Prepare yourselves, we are about to tread on unholy ground. To make this work, I used the dgVoodoo2 wrapper, along with the latest version of ReShade at the time of this writing, ReShade 4.8.2. I also ran the game at 1440p. If you wish to try this yourself, download dgVoodoo2 and extract the files within the MS\x86 folder within the zip file into the game's Apps folder, same as the game's exe file. ReShade comes with its own installer, so I will not provide instructions for that here. (Note: The performance impact of all this is minimal on my system, but your mileage may vary.) Once both are installed, simply run the game, and you should see the following: The ReShade overlay at the top of the screen, and the dgVoodoo2 watermark in the bottom right. If you see both of these, you are now able to see the horrors I have witnessed with your own two eyes. Now let's move on to my experiments. Antialiasing Easily the best use of ReShade within SimCity 4, at least in my opinion. It simply smooths out jagged edges in an image. It does not make a huge difference, but it results in a softer image. In my opinion, it looks much nicer than it did before, and is the only effect I can recommend using for normal gameplay. HDR HDR will make the image look more vibrant and colorful. With the right settings, it can look great. However, I don't recommend enabling it for normal gameplay, only for screenshots. The reason: Like all other effects, it also affects the user interface. Bloom don't just don't but if you do anyway, it will allow for some fantastic night shots: It can also be combined with other effects for an even better result: It might even look good during the day, but in my experimentation I found that it mostly ends up too bright: However, do make sure you hide the UI and unpause the game first, otherwise the bloom from the UI will bleed into whatever you're taking a screenshot of: And do be careful when adjusting the settings, otherwise you might find your eyes dripping down your face from the blindingly bright images: This is everything I have tested so far, but feel free to experiment with ReShade on your own and share your results here. -
tutorial Rob's Guide - the Network Addon Mod for Beginners
rob_mtl posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Hey kids! After many requests in the YouTube comments section I've finally gotten around to making my Network Addon Guide for Beginners. This tutorial video will probably be a bit basic for many of the Simtropolis habitués, but I hope that new players will find it a good starting point. I know that when I first downloaded the NAM, I was completely lost in the acronyms, tooltips and puzzle pieces! As always, let me know what you think. I'll be doing follow up videos (at some point) on more specific topics--suggestions are welcome Cheers, Rob- 14 Replies
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Hello, This is the link to the Prima Guide in case if you need it: https://archive.org/details/SimCity_4_Rush_Hour_Prima_Official_eGuide You can use this tag to quickly jump to this topic: https://community.simtropolis.com/tags/prima guide/ Thanks.
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[CSL] Fix for low or no RCI Zone Demand residential, commercial, industry
perafilozof posted a topic in Cities: Skylines General Discussion
This guide will show and explain to you how to fix low or no demand for RCI (residential, commercial, industry zones) in Cities: Skylines. Not only will you learn simple fixes for particular problems but also how to avoid getting into such problems in the future. In case you prefer to listen and watch than to read, here is a video form of this guide: Now let's start this guide with the simplest fix for low or no residential demand, and that is to reduce your Cims unemployment percentage. You do this by making sure you have a lot of open jobs in your industries, commercial or office zones. Your target unemployment percentage should be 8% because only at that point will the game allow more cims to move into your city. You can find out what your current unemployment percentage is by going into the population info view. Now you might start asking but how do I zone more commercial , industries and offices to get more open jobs if I don’t have any demand for commercial or industrial zones? Well that is something I will explain in more depth during this guide. Now I am going to show and tell you about other solutions for low or no RCI demand as well as some not so obvious ones but I am also going to explain the causes for this problem so you will have an easier time implementing these solutions and even finding your own ones. Each RCI bar can be low at times and even all three can be almost non existent if your city hits a few specific conditions. I have already briefly explained the problem and solution for low residential demand as this is something I see most players struggle with, and now I will address low or no demand for both commercial and industrial which are heavily intertwined and codependent as you will soon discover. What you must understand is that in this game a lot of the simulation is not realistic or driven by real world rules. This is something a lot of players have a hard time understanding and it’s why they struggle with the game. Cities: Skylines functions by its own rules and if you understand those rules and apply them to your cities you can’t fail. First of these rules is that an empty city has only the demand for residential zones for the simple reason that Cims want to move into your city so that the game can begin. In this the game is breaking from reality at step one because real people don’t move to an empty field in the middle of nowhere with no utilities or services if they want to live in a civilized manner, which you Cims obviously do want, as they don’t like not having water, power or garbage collection. Naturally this is so you could start a city in this game and as soon as your Cims move in they will start expressing needs. Besides the basic ones I just mentioned they have the need to work somewhere, earn money and spend it somewhere buying goods. This is where your first demand for industrial zones comes from. Newly moved in Cims need a place to work and earn their paycheck. This is directly tied into the employment / unemployment game mechanic, as unemployed Cims create a need for jobs and you get a demand for open jobs which you fill by zoning industrial or later office zones. Now that your cims have basic utilities, and a job at which they earn money, they need a place to spend it. This is why you slowly start seeing a rise in the commercial demand of a new city. Because industrial and commercial zones are liked by the production and sale of goods they each set off a chain of demands, to be profitable industrial buildings have to have somewhere to sell goods and for commercial buildings to have goods to sell they have to get deliveries. The demand and subsequent filling of the demand for one of these directly causes the increase in demand for the other. And so for a Cim to spend his paycheck a building in the commercial zones has to have goods on sale, and for it to have those goods it needs a delivery from a goods producing generic industry buildings. This is something you can see using the outside connection info view, where goods produced, imported and exported are shown in purple. This demand triangle, of residential for industry and commercial, commercial for industry and residential, and industry for commercial and residential is what keeps a healthy RCI demand system going. So why am I explaining all of this when the point of the video is a fix for low or no demand for RCI? Well it’s for you to be able to understand how you are wrecking this in game system I just outlined and creating this problem in the first place. As previously explained, an unemployment percentage above 8% will prevent new Cims from moving into the city as they have nowhere to work at, and the simplest solution is opening up new workplaces to have more room for new Cims to come to your city and work there. But what you are facing are empty demand bars for commercial and industry and you don’t know how to open up more jobs. In most cases this is caused by the players themselves as they have zoned too much commercial, industrial or offices and whacked the mentioned in game system out of balance. One hidden thing which is really easy to miss but will ruin your city and game is the fact that Cims can live with much fewer commercial zones in the city than the commercial demand shows. And it’s this overbuilding of commercial zones to satisfy an unnecessarily high commercial demand is to blame for knocking the RCI system out of balance, in most cases anyway. Now since this is not the subject of this video I won’t go more in depth as to why there is more demand for commercial zones then it’s necessary and I will leave it for another video. But it’s there and to prevent creating problems for your city just try to play with this simple rule in mind: leave the commercial demand bar at 50% all the time. So back to the city you built before you learned this. It has an excess of commercial zones which is about twice as much as it’s population really needs. This puts a major strain on your cities demand for goods deliveries diffusing the amount of goods which are produced or imported across a lot more shops than necessary and preventing them from operating with normal profit margins. Cims don’t enter all shops as there are too many, and each they enter doesn’t actually have enough goods most of the time. This leads directly to low or even no demand for C zones. So what is happening to industrial zones during all this? They are busy trying to produce massive quantities of goods and keep failing as there are just too many delivery requests. They order up massive amounts of products from the region or local specialized industry but the game can handle only so much and even in this city of Bedrock with a population of a million cims the actual quantities of products imported are really minimal compared to the number of Industrial and commercial zones. This is the reason I had a lot of trouble balancing RCI in this city. And since these industrial buildings are also not working properly as they are unable to produce all the needed goods since the game is unable to supply so many products, locally or from import, they are not operating profitably, can’t upgrade and start to go abandoned, and you lose jobs. With a loss of jobs your unemployment goes up, residential demand goes down and your over built shops in commercial zones lose even more profit as there aren’t as many shoppers as before. This is the final nail in the commercial zone demand as without buyers or suppliers of goods they can’t operate. This is the point when everything starts to break down and the entire RCI demand flatlines. You can do similar damage to your cities RCI balance by having too many specialized industry buildings and exporting your products out of the city, depriving the game of vehicles and agents to import enough goods to keep your commercial zones working. Similarly, concentrating on office zones to open new jobs instead of generic or specialized industry forces the game to bring in goods for commercial zones from outside, removing one keystone of commercial demand and that is providing a place for local generic industry to sell goods at. Since offices and the industry share one demand bar your loss of demand for commercial zones reduces the need for industry to sell them goods and in turn that means you can build fewer offices. Your takeaway from all I have said and shown should be that the fix for low or no demand is to find out which RCI you overbuilt and bring it down and into balance with other zones. When balance is restored and each zone starts to influence the other two in the way the game was designed, your RCI demand will once more be optimal and work in its intended cycle. New Cims move in, more jobs are demanded, more industry is built and opens up for Cims to work, demand for shops is created, new shops open up to let Cims shop for goods they produced in factories creating more need for industry which creates more open jobs which lets new Cims move in. And that is how you fix low or no demand for RCI in your cities. I hope you have both found this guide helpful. Thank you for reading and happy gaming. -
guide Tutorial: Changing IIDs for BAT Models Using Reader
Cyclone Boom posted a topic in SC4 BAT & Lot Workshop
A method to make unique instances for BAT models - This is a tutorial explaining a way to set a new IID instance range using Reader for a given BAT model. I've written this in response to the request @Urban Abstraction made here in the BAT FAQ thread, and posted in case it'll help anyone else looking to do this also. For the purpose of this explanation, I'll be using the excellent commercial store BAT which Urban created. (Which is now available to download on the STEX from this file.) Prerequisites Reader 0.9.3 installed. (Other versions of Reader likely will work too for this method, but I'm using 0.9.3 since it's the most stable and familiar for me.) Basic familiarity of Reader is recommended (as this guide explains), but isn't required as I'll be covering each of the steps to do this. Create a backup of the model file (.SC4Model) to be edited with a new IID allocation. Copy this to some safe place. Step 01 Firstly open the model you'd like to edit: Initially the file entry list will look like this: Step 02 Next we'll sort the Instance column so the ordering is sequential in digit order. Double click this column heading (at the top as I've annotated in orange). As follows: Step 03 Now with the list sorted, it appears logical for what we're going to do next. This step is to generate a random Group and Instance which can be used for setting the unique TGI for the entries. For the Type column and these will be kept as they are which is necessary for certain file entry types. Note: If you have a textures IID range, skip this step and go to Step 04 to set from your allocated range instead. Go to the Tools menu in Reader and click the TGI Generator option. It'll open up a dialog window: Click the Generate button in the middle, and it'll generate the Group and Instance randomly. Each of these are 8 digit hex values (ranging from 0-9 and A-F). If you're a little fussed about these things like me, then there's no harm in keep clicking the button until there are digits you're happy with using! Copy both of these to an empty document. I just used regular Windows Notepad for this, but you can use anything of your preference. They'll be needed for the remaining part of the process to make sure the IIDs are set correctly. Note: For the IID and we only need the first 4 digits, so you can just copy these to your document (e.g. a1fd as I did here) and ignore the other 4 at the end. This is important because of what fits into the following step for preserving the trailing digits. Those are what determine the zooms and rotations, and what the game does is pieces these all together so it knows which texture to display onto the model from different perspectives. Step 04 With this done, go to the Tools menu again in Reader and click the TGI Editor option. This window will open up: In here, for the Group box and I've pasted in the IID which I generated in the prior step. Do this with yours also, and then it gets onto the Instance box as well. Each of the # are placeholder masks, which preserve the values at that particular digit place. By entering in: a1fd#### As this pic highlights with the selection: What this means is to set a1fd for each of the entries. However, to still keep the last 4 digits as they already are. It might even be possible to do this for randomising the initial 5 places in the generation (like a1fde### for example), but I played it safe here and just did it for preserving the final 4 digits at the end. The key thing is how they'll be unique enough as they are. Step 05 The next step is to set apply the Group and Instance to the entries. Reader makes this super easy too. Click the 1st entry listed, then hold down the Shift key and then scroll down to click the bottom one. Then click the button to confirm this. Like so: If not selecting anything, then this error will popup to make it known: Then after closing the TGI Editor (click the X in the corner), the entry list will be updated. Here's how I see it after doing the above: But, there is one more key part of the process... Step 06 Click the Entry column heading twice as we need to group the S3D files: This makes the next part easier as they're now all listed together. You'll notice how if clicking one of the S3D file entries, the preview of the model will appear completely white with no texture. Like so: Oh dear. But, don't panic! What the following steps involve is to edit the IIDs so the textures are associated with each of the S3D files. Step 07 With the first S3D file selected, over on the right hand panel are the controls for editing the data. Click the Mats (materials) tab. Then right click the entry and choose the Change Instance/Name option from the context menu. As follows: Step 08 For this part, it only needs the 4 digits from the Instance ID which we've now set using the TGI Editor for the file entries. What this involves here is applying this to the internal reference IID for the S3D files for each sub-instance. The next thing to do is replace the first 4 digits with those as allocated for the main entries. For this I'm using a1fd because it's what came from the random generation: Doing this for the Name isn't necessary, but I figured it might as well be updated too. Click OK to confirm the change, and then back on the main panel, click the button to save. This is an essential step, and Reader will throw a warning otherwise: There might be some S3D entries which have more than one. Continue through each of these and update the IDs accordingly the same way. Like so: Step 09 Rinse and repeat the process for all other S3D entries. This took me a few minutes, and it's easy enough to do once getting into the flow of it. When adding each new ID and for these multi-part files you'll see the preview updating with each new piece of the puzzle. Then it's a good idea to go through and do a visual double check that they're each set correctly. All being well you'll see them all showing up. For example: (Previewing the superb BAT which @Urban Abstraction created. ) Step 10 Finally this isn't necessary in Reader 0.9.3 as it does the re-indexing automatically (other than LotConfig entries, but that's a different thing). But what I did was delete the DIR file and then right click and choose Rebuild Directory File from the context menu. Then click ReIndex too. The DIR file is what contains an index of all compressed entries, and somehow I find this logical to appear at the bottom of the list. Another little thing I'll mention is how the XML file contains the old Group and Instance still. I went ahead and updated this also, but according to DataNode (which @rivit created as a highly useful tool for diagnosing SC4 file relation conflicts), the XML is ignored and not read by the game. The final (final) step is to Save the file. Yes, it would be completely silly to lose all this work now, wouldn't it? So, click the button and it'll all be done. (As ever, a special thanks to Cori for helping me with the proofreading.) -
guide How to run SimCity 4 Natively above 1920x1080 in Hardware Mode!!!
Durfsurn posted a topic in SC4 Bugs & Technical Issues
So I recently bought a new computer screen with the jaw dropping resolution of 5120×1440 and was looking into getting SimCity 4 to run at something closer to native resolution. It has been known to the community for some time that SimCity 4 is locked to resolutions under 2048ish pixels either wide or high in hardware mode, the source of this limit is DirectX 7 which cannot handle resolutions any higher. This could be circumnavigated by running SC4 in software rendering mode (CPU only) but this caused other issues and notably reduced the graphics. However I have found a fantastic repository which can breathe new life into many games that use DirectX 9 or earlier called dxWrapper which includes a Legacy Hack for removing the resolution restriction, among other tricks. Anyway, with the help of one of the fantastic developers (elishacloud), a configuration was found that enables resolutions such as 4k and beyond! You can follow the Github Issue here but I will provide a summary below; IMPORTANT DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP: Make sure your game is patched with the NTCore 4GB patch! Download the latest release of dxWrapper from this link: https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper/releases Open the .zip in 7zip or WinRar and separately navigate to your SimCity 4 Deluxe/Apps folder. Extract the following files from the .zip: dxwrapper.dll, dxwrapper.ini, Stub/ddraw.dll and copy them into your Apps folder (next to your SimCity 4.exe file). Open the dxwrapper.ini file and paste the code below into it. Use a SimCity 4 Launcher to select any resolution you like! I am hoping to follow up this post with a guide on how to run the game at higher than native resolutions and scale it down to provide the greatest graphical fidelity. - Billy dxwrapper.ini: >;; Config file for DirectX DLL Wrapper [General] RealDllPath = AUTO WrapperMode = AUTO LoadCustomDllPath = ExcludeProcess = IncludeProcess = RunProcess = WaitForProcess = 0 DisableLogging = 0 [Plugins] LoadPlugins = 0 LoadFromScriptsOnly = 0 [Compatibility] Dd7to9 = 0 D3d8to9 = 0 DDrawCompat = 0 Dinputto8 = 0 DisableGameUX = 0 DSoundCtrl = 0 DxWnd = 0 EnableDdrawWrapper = 1 HandleExceptions = 0 SingleProcAffinity = 0 [DDrawCompat] DDrawCompat20 = 0 DDrawCompat21 = 0 DDrawCompatExperimental = 0 DDrawCompatDisableGDIHook = 0 DDrawCompatNoProcAffinity = 0 [ddraw] ConvertToDirectDraw7 = 0 ConvertToDirect3D7 = 0 DdrawOverrideBitMode = 0 [Dd7to9] AutoFrameSkip = 0 DdrawEmulateSurface = 0 DdrawLimitDisplayModeCount = 0 DdrawUseNativeResolution = 0 DdrawClippedWidth = 0 DdrawClippedHeight = 0 DdrawOverrideWidth = 0 DdrawOverrideHeight = 0 DdrawOverrideRefreshRate = 0 DdrawIntegerScalingClamp = 0 DdrawMaintainAspectRatio = 0 [d3d9] AntiAliasing = 0 EnableVSync = 0 EnableWindowMode = 0 FullscreenWindowMode = 0 WindowModeBorder = 0 [FullScreen] FullScreen = 0 ForceWindowResize = 0 WaitForWindowChanges = 0 [DSoundCtrl] Num2DBuffers = 0 Num3DBuffers = 0 ForceCertification = 0 ForceExclusiveMode = 0 ForceSoftwareMixing = 0 ForceHardwareMixing = 0 PreventSpeakerSetup = 0 ForceHQ3DSoftMixing = 0 ForceNonStaticBuffers = 0 ForceVoiceManagement = 0 ForcePrimaryBufferFormat = 0 PrimaryBufferBits = 16 PrimaryBufferSamples = 44100 PrimaryBufferChannels = 2 ForceSpeakerConfig = 0 SpeakerConfig = 6- 89 Replies
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