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Showing results for tags 'savegame'.
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Version 0.8.3
130 Downloads
This is a recompilation of Sawtooth's Region Census. That version was made over two decades ago and still works fine if your region size is not humongous. I found that with the extremely large regions, it would fail to load and generate an image. So, I decompiled the application, made some compatibility changes for Python 2.7 (I suspect the original was 2.3), and verified its functionality with large regions. Other than that, it is faithful to the original application - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Note that this was compiled with 64-bit Python 2.7, and you might need VC++ 2008 Redistributable (64-bit) installed for it to function, try it and see. Tested on Windows 11. -
Hello everyone, In the wake of all the DLL stuff going on and the package manager for SimCity 4 called sc4pac, I've gained new interest in modding SimCity 4. One of the things that always bugged me is that it is not possible to draw a road under a bridge. This is hardcoded in the .exe, so it can't be changed with "normal" mods. Perhaps that a DLL mod could fix this somewhere in the future, but since I discovered that savegames can be edited, I've always wondered whether it would be possible to draw a road under a bridge by modifying the savegame. Hence I decided to go on a new SimCity 4 savegame endeavour that I decided to call the Under the Bridge Project where I will try to figure out if roads (and other network types) under bridges are possible. Now, in contrast to marking buildings as historical via savegame editing, or growifying plopped residentials, this one is a bit different because it is not known if it is even possible at all. For historical buildings and growifying, it was clear that it was possible to achieve it via savegame editing as it's just a matter of modifying the savegame to the correct state. With roads under bridges, we don't know if the game can handle this, so the outcome is at least uncertain. In my opinion, there are three possible outcomes for this project: It turns out that having functional roads under bridges is possible, after which I add a new command to my savegame editing tool to make the functionality available to everyone. This is the ideal scenario. It turns out that the game is unable to handle roads under bridges (things like CTD's etc.), but some minor tweaks with DLL modding might make it possible after all. It turns out that the tweaks needed for the game to handle roads under bridges are way too complex so that even a DLL mod is next to impossible without a complete rewrite of the game. Let's hope for the best, being scenario 1 of course. I will use this topic to document my findings as much as possible so that anyone interested in this topic can use it as a reference. I've used the same approach with my experiment of programmatically generating cities, and it has worked really well there. Allright, let's kick off! Instead of drawing roads out of nowhere, I decided to first try to move an existing road under a bridge. For this, I've created a small test city called "Under the bridge": The Network Subfiles of the savegame are all nicely decoded and I have implemented parsers for them, so I'm able to modify them easily. Let's see what happens if I move the road 8 tiles up north. For this, we have to properly update the coordinates in the Network Subfile, but also update the tile numbers in the Network index Subfile: Phew, no CTD here, that's a good start! The road has been nicely moved under the bridge, though there is clearly something wrong with the textures. Let's try to save the game and see if we experience a CTD. Cool, no CTD either after saving, and as a plus the game has redrawn the textures and now they are properly present. This is in line with what I already knew about textures from my experiments: if you save, the game redraws the textures. I guess that the reason why they weren't showing up right after moving is that there's some z-fighting going on between the road textures and the terrain textures. My guess is that this is somewhere stored in an unknown SimGrid, I'll have to investigate this later on. Let's see what the paths look like if we use the drawpaths cheat. That doesn't look too bad actually! Now let's try to connect a new road to the ends: This is where things start to go wrong. The roads don't connect, but they just seem to overlap. I'm not sure what's happening here, but my guess is that there is some other information present somewhere in the savegame that tells the game what tiles are to be considered as a road. This information was probably not moved correctly along with the road, and so the game just assumes there's no road there yet. Interesting. I assume this is stored somewhere in a SimGrid, but unfortunately not all SimGrids have been decoded yet, so it's something I will have to figure out. Anyway, I think we're off to a good start. The game did not crash, neither when opening the city, neither when saving the city, so that's huge already. Up next I will have to figure out how to make the game recognize that there's a road somewhere. It seems like moving the network tiles only moves the textures and the paths, but does not make the game recognize it as an actual road. Perhaps someone from the NAM team has more information on that. As far as the main question of whether it is even possible: the signs are good, but we're definitely not out of the woods yet. There is still the possibility that if we figure out what makes the game recognize a tile as a road, it turns out that it can't have both a road and a bridge on the same tile. But we'll see what the future brings in the next posts!
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- savegame
- experiment
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I just recently now saved my game by accident, by pressing ctrl + S thinking I would plop up a school (realized the next second that it was ctrl + K). As soon as I pressed S, a small window in the middle of the screen came up saying "game has been saved", giving me no choice in the matter as to be sure I wanted to save it. I haven't played SC for a long time (played frequently during 2020/early 2021), and I was just trying a few new mods on a default in-game city (in the region Berlin to be exact), so fortunately, nothing severe happen. But this means that I spent all this time on a serious project, not knowing I could've completely ruined it any given second, just by pressing S instead of K or any other letter. I often fast-forwarded a few years planning ahead, only to go back to the last stop now knowing what to do next. I find this unacceptable. I thought ctrl + S only applied for Microsoft Word, Excel and other similar programs. I have no memory of it ever applying to a game. Anyway, it totally should not be there, period. I find it utterly threatening to serious projects. Perhaps there's a mod fixing it, much like the mod warning me about saving the game right at the same time as leaving it (that one's been very useful).
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.NET library for reading and loading data from SimCity 4 savegames
Killeroo posted a topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
TLDR; I created an open source .NET library that you can use to easily load data and subfiles from SimCity 4 games. It's called SC4Parser, you can find the source code, documentation (with examples) and the pre-built library over on GitHub. Hi, for the past few months I have been working a tool that creates pictures of maps from SimCity 4 save games. As part of the project I needed a way to load and read data and some subfiles from the SimCity 4 savegames. Unfortunately, dispite the format of SimCity 4 savegames being well documented, I could not find any libraries that did what I wanted and would work with C#. Additionally, most code that I did find also relied the same old C source file to decompress items within the save games, which was a pain to get working with .NET. So in the end I decided to use the excellent research and information on the SC4 Wikipedia to build a parsing library of my own, which may save some people some pain and time. It has the following features: Find and load data/files from save game using TypeID or TypeGroupInstance (TGI) Methods to load common subfiles from a save game (Zone, Building, Transport and Terrain files) Automatic QFS decompression As mentioned above, the library contains a few implementations of common subfiles found in SimCity 4 savegames, some of these implementations are fully complete and others are partially completed but can still be used: Buildings Subfile (Fully Implemented) - Contains a list of all buildings in a city TerrainMap Subfile (Fully Implemented) - Height map for a city Network Subfile 1 (Fully Implemented) - Contains all ground level network tiles (roads, rail, streets etc) Network Subfile 2 (Fully Implemented) - Contains all underground network tiles (subways etc) Bridge Network Subfile (Partially Implemented) - Contains all bridge tiles in the game (decoded during development) Lots Subfile (Partially Implemented) - Contains a list of zones in a city RegionView Subfile (Partially Implemented) - Contains general city information If you are interested, you can find more info about what is implemented, along with documentation and prebuilt versions of the libary as well as the source code over on GitHub. I hope that this provides a useful framework for others to build small tools, scripts and other programs using data found in SimCity 4 savegames and even if you don't use C# I hope that you find the code useful for working out how SimCity 4 save games are put together. Pull requests, issues and features are always welcome. Enjoy. -
Missing textures and objects after saving
tomek4zielinski posted a topic in SC4 Bugs & Technical Issues
Good morning, I need an advice because I can't deal with a serious error. It's like that: I have a big region with over a dozen cities making one big metropolis together. I use plenty of mods (over 400) including NAM, extra textures, props and many buildings with it's dependencies. So far it all used to go well and I couldn't find a single error anywhere. But yesterday after loading one major city I've noticed many objects missing, they are just empty flat surface. University, objects in residences, avenue bushes and so on. I used a backup file I'd made few days earlier, loaded it up and it was all ok. After doing some minor work I saved again, but then after reloading - once more, missing objects and flat surface instead of buildings. I suspected this exception to be some kind of error while saving or loading process. I tried to investigate this theory and I came back again to backup savegame, and overwrote it to check if the error reappears. I tried it over 5 times in a row with failure, but once city loaded succesfully. I hoped I have overrun the error and made a savegame. I quitted to region, did a prayer and then loaded it again - sadly, flat textures again. I can't edit and overwrite this city any more, because every time i do that, this flat texture error appears and I can't go any further with this city. It's pretty exceptional, because: - All other cities are healthy, even those with more data in it (modded buildings, higher population), and also remain fine after overwriting - There's no mod in this city which isn't already used in other, fine working cities - Once the city loaded successfully, so it must depend on something I have also noticed this city loads up and saves longer than others. - My PC never had any problems with graphic settings, game was always running fine (once a day the game quits itself to the desktop without warning, but I heard it's a common thing - i had this error with every version of SC4 on every computer since 2003) What can it be? Is there any way to fix it, has anyone ever faced with it? Please don't tell me I have to do the city all over again. This vision makes me suicidal, I have put a lot of effort in building it. Help guys, please! I'll be glad for any of your effort. -
Hi all, I made a 3D viewer which now can open whole SimCity4 regions in addition to SimCity2000 cities. Of course it's an MVP/WIP, to prove it can be done, and doesn't look very good and many things are missing from the import. I've opened this topic in modders because I think at this stage it is only technically relevant. Some things require more research. To my knowledge, no one has decoded the network subfile 1 or how bridges or highways are saved (at least I didn't find it). This tool, when developed further, could also be used for inspecting lots or savegame editing. I'd be interested to discuss possibilities or how to go on and cooperation. What's more or less working: - terrain height - roads, streets, rail, avenue - lots (most of the buildings are the same as in Sc2K due to convenience) - agriculture (terrain layer is used) - flora subfile What's missing: - bridges, tunnels, highway (somehow not in the network subfile 1?) - diagonal road and rail slopes (display of these is buggy, not decoded how they are saved) - stations of any kind, civic buildings - props (meaning any detail of terrain, vegetation, custom mods etc) - non-standard region sizes (only 1024x1024 are tested) - popular mods (NAM, RHW, SAM etc) How to use (Windows only): - download zip file from my website, unzip and run TiledCityViewer.exe (app is made with Unity) - press import region and select any city in the region folder Youtube video of perspective, train ride and night mode here Thanks to: - Simtropolis - Sc4Reader by Tropod - Sc4save by wouanagaine - iLive Reader Legal: TiledCityViewer is not supported, endorsed or authorized by Electronic Arts or Maxis. There is no intended SimCity-like functionality and experience. See older thread for SimCity2000 import. Screenshots:
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Programmatically generating a city: A savegame experiment
smf_16 posted a topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
Hello everyone, In the wake of the discovery that savegames can be edited - see this thread for more general info - I decided to set myself a goal. I want to write a program that is able to plop an entire city - or at least the lots in that city. I have actually been playing with this idea for a few years, the main reason being that I always struggle with creating nice transitions between the CBD and the suburbs. The game only gives us the possibility of zoning either Low, Medium or High, but this just doesn't do the trick. You'll always be able to see very clearly what the Low, Medium & High zones are. One of the first achievements after the savegame discovery was the ability to turn plopped residentials into functional residentials. While this certainly helps because we are now able to build whatever we want instead of waiting for it to be grown, humans are actually pretty bad in "creating randomness". I've experimented a bit with the plopped residentials and it is really hard to create something that doesn't look too repetetive - unless that's exactly what you're aiming for of course, repetition has its beauty as well. I figured that if I was able to programatically plop any available lot, I could also write a program that generates an entire neighbourhood in a semi-random way based on a arbitrary function. For example, we could set the "maximum height" per tile and then have the program build something by selecting an eligible lot (from a predefined set of lots) that does satisfy the height restriction. As such we could create "skyline functions" and generate a city accordingly. Another reason that I'm starting this project is that it will a good exercise to learn what is and what isn't possible when editing savegames. I will post my findings, struggles, remarks, discoveries, ... here so that this thread can serve as a reference for other people experimenting with the savegames. Moreover I obiously don't understand completely how the game works and how all file types are related, so I will definitely need some help on the road. With this thread I also hope to find the required and much appreciated help as such. So... Let's kick off! As I've already mentioned above, the process to programatically generate cities is actually two-fold: First we have to be able to plop any lot we want, wherever we want. Once that is done, we have to write an algorithm that decides what lot should be plopped where. The second part is pretty much agnostic of the game's inner workings, so I guess the hardest part will be part 1. If I understand correctly, if a lot is plopped in the game, the game does something like this: Look at the lot exemplar and figure out what building, props & flora are on the lot. I found that these things are stored in the LotConfigPropertyLotObject property of a lot exemplar. Modify the terrain underneath the lot according to what is stored about slope conformity in the lot exemplar. Put the building, the props and the flora in their respective subfiles in the savegame. This also means that - if I understand correctly - when a lot is plopped (or grown) it's "exploded", meaning that the building, props & flora are no longer tied to the lot itself. Hence if you edit the building, props or flora of the lot in the LE, the existing lot in game will not change. As far as I know this is not the case though for textures, they seem to be "Hot Reloaded" (but correct me if I'm wrong). So if we want to programmatically plop a lot, we'll have to do something similar. Of course we will need to edit the Building Subfile, the Prop Subfile and the Flora Subfile here, but these are all nicely decoded according to the wiki, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. As a first step I think we could ignore the props & flora and just try to plop a lot with only the building and its textures. According to this list 0x0: Building: Defines position, and IID reference of building exemplar. 0x1: Prop: Defines position, and IID reference of a prop exemplar. 0x2: Texture: Defines position and IID reference of a base or overlay texture. 0x3: Fence: Not implemented currently. 0x4: Flora: Defines position, and IID reference of a flora/growable tree exemplar. 0x5: Water Constraint Tile 0x6: Land Constraint Tile 0x7: Network Node: Defines transit connections and automata paths the building is stored in the LotConfigPropertyLotObject where the first entry is 0x0. The structure furthermore looks like this: Rep # | Value | Description ----------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 0x0-0x7 | Type descriptor. See above. 2 | 0xAB | Level of detail modifier (See Table 3 below) 3 | 0x0-0x3 | Orientation. 0=South, 1=West, 2=North, 3=East 4 | * | X Location Position. 0x00000000-0xFFFFFFFF 5 | * | Z Location Position. 0x00000000-0xFFFFFFFF 6 | * | Y Location Position. 0x00000000-0xFFFFFFFF 7 | ''' | X1 Size Position. bounding box 8 | ''' | Y1 Size Position. bounding box 9 | ''' | X2 Size Position. bounding box 10 | ''' | Y2 Size Position. bounding box 11 | 0x00000000 | Usage (optional/mandatory) Flag. Unused. 12 | 0xABBBBCCC | ObjectID (See Table 2 below) * These values define position. VERY large numbers. ''' These values define bounding box size. VERY large numbers. and for buildings Rep #13 is added which looks like ---0x0 (Building) Type--- 13 | IID/ID | For Ploppable buildings, this is the IID of an exemplar/S3D pair. | For Special Buildings (tollbooth, etc.) IID of exemplar for data. | For Growables, the ID of the lots compatible building family. That seems fine so far. If we have the Lot Exemplar that contains the LotConfigPropertyLotObject entries, we should be able to find the building easily based on its IID stored in Rep #13. However, this is where I hit my head against the wall for the first time. I opened an example lot in the reader (I chose Simmer2's Easy Money here) and looked at the LotConfigPropertyLotObject entries. It looks like this: So I though I should be looking for a building with IID 0x79536AF6 here. Just to confirm, I've checked this in SC4 by using BuildingPlop and I noticed that the building I needed indeed had this id: What I noticed as well though is that the corresponding lot also had the same IID. I guess that was on purpose by Simmer2 because the building only appears on one lot. However, I looked for this number 0x79536af6 in the .SC4Desc file, but I was unable to find it anywhere: The Exemplar in the .SC4Desc file has TGI 0x6534284a 0x7cc07882 0x28cd5dcb, while I thought that its instance ID here would be 0x79536af6. Probably that's not how the TGI system works I guess, but I don't know where this building id 0x79536af6 can be found then. I tried to do some research on TGI's, but it's all very overwhelming and I have some trouble understanding it. Is there anyone here that can help me out and give a brief explanation - or point me to some resource - of how the TGI system exactly works and where I'm supposed to find the building id 0x79536af6? If I understand correctly, the Type ID is used to designate file types but the Group ID & Instance ID aren't very clear for me. However, I think that a group ID is used to link files of different types together (which you can see in the image above: the exemplar and the xml file have the same Group ID, but the same Instance ID as well). Additionally, I think a lot of the information I need is already well known - for example the PIM X includes a lot editor, so it sure knows where it should look for buildings & props on a lot. In this regard it would be extremely useful if the source code of both PIM X & Savegame explorer are available somewhere, but I didn't manage to find them anywhere yet. Anyone who knows if these are available somewhere? Many thanks and I hope I can bring this project to completion with the help of the community! - Seba -
discovery Modifying .sc4 savegames: It IS possible!
smf_16 posted a topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
Hello SimCity 4 modders, After a hiatus of a year or two, I picked up SimCity again a few weeks ago and decided to start fresh with an entire new region and try to build it as realistic as possible. One thing that always bugged me is that this always involves a lot of clicking "Make Historical". After all, if you've finally managed to grow the building you wanted, you don't want to see it disappear by some R§§§ mansions. Most of the time I spent 15 minutes zoning, and then 3 hours clicking "Make Historical" until I couldn't feel my wrist anymore. Given that I have some programming capabilities, back in the days I've always played with the idea to create a script that would mark all buildings within a city historical. I did some research on this topic, but all resources I could find told me that it was possible to read savegames, but impossible to modify .sc4 savegames. This was due to the CRC checksum that is added in .sc4 files, whose algorithm was apparently unknown. Seems like this discussion was closed. However, by picking SC4 up again I also noticed the work that @simmaster07 did with the Prop Pox fix. Although I never suffered from Prop Pox myself, it is without a doubt one of the most important modding achievements ever. The importance and brilliance of his work cannot be underestimated. Being a programmer myself, I got interested in the technical details behind this masterpiece and I stumbled upon this piece of code. It basically is an override of how entries in the Prop Subfile are saved. I noticed the presence of a function called xcrc32 which carried out the CRC checksum of the entry. I don't know how @simmaster07 did it, but this turned out to be the "missing CRC checksum" algorithm. I immediately hacked some stuff together and noticed that it was indeed this CRC checksum function that was also used in the Lot Subfile. I was shaking. This couldn't mean that it would make modifying savegames possible, right? Well turns out it does! I put some code together and managed to read in an .sc4 savegame, parse all entries of the Lot Subfile and turned on the bit mask that identifies a lot as historical. I saved the file again, re-calculating the CRC checksums for each lot and opened up the file in SC4. I couldn't believe my eyes. I was expecting crashes, but all lots in my entire city were marked as historical and I could continue playing the game as normal. I then did some cycles of growing new lots and running my script aftewards and everything still worked. While having limited my test case to flipping 1 bit per lot subfile, I think this shows that it is possible to modify .sc4 savegames. Another result of @simmaster07's magnificent work. I'm already thinking of what could be possible. I'm thinking for instance of plopping residential lots using the LotPlop extra cheat and then running a script that modifies them as if they were grown so that the pathfinder could work on these lots. This would be a great help for CJ builders! The options are endless, you could basically program your entire city! In order to show that this worked, I've created a small command-line utility that can be used to make all buildings within a city historical. It is available on github here: https://github.com/sebamarynissen/sc4 where I also added installation instructions. It requires some effort to set up, however if you're familiar with node.js everything should be quite straightforward. I'm also willing to offer some help with those having troubles to install. Once you've installed the tool, you should be able to run the command sc4 historical path/to/your/city.sc4 from a command prompt. By default this will not override the input city, but create another city named HISTORICAL-[city name].sc4. If you want to override, run sc4 historical --force path/to/your/city.sc4 but MAKE SURE TO ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP. Note that this tool is merely a proof of concept that it is actually possible to modify .sc4 savegames. This tool is not meant for public use, so I can't stress enough TO ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR ENTIRE REGION. I AM NOT LIABLE FOR ANY OF THE CONSEQUENCES IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG. Anyway, it would really help me if some people were able to test this and report any issues if they found one - preferrably in the Github Repository. Let me know what you guys think. I hope that this opens up new possibilities for SimCity 4 and how we can build more amazing cities than ever! - Seba EDIT: I've published a version with prebuilt C++ libraries on npm. You should be able to install it using npm install -g sc4 if you have node 12 or higher without the need to compile the C++ libraries.- 229 Replies
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How to list out assets used in a savegame?
AmiPolizeiFunk posted a topic in Cities: Skylines General Discussion
Is there a way to do this? I'd like to do it for 2 reasons: 1) Make a collection of assets to share a savegame. 2) get rid of assets that I'm not using I find that sharing a savegame with 1000+ assets is so incredibly tedious. I love that people still do it. There have been some epic savegames shares, with accompanying collections of mods and assets. How can we optimize this process so that we can share savegames with each other? -
Savegame: change EU to US buildings?
barthi posted a topic in Cities: Skylines Modding - Open Discussion
Hello, I play a savegame with the european building style. Now, I think that looks not so good. Can I change this savegame in the american style? -
SInce few days i have a bug that cause the overwrite / autosave of savegame files to output a error. If i save a new fresh named new savegame there is no bug. Any idea how to fix this because i like the autosave option to be eneabled again.
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Hey everyone. So I installed a couple iffy beta mods/assets today (Namely, the Network Extensions mod and the two Toll Booth Turnpike assets). I then opened my game to encounter this: After closing the error box, I'm left with a slightly ominous message in the debug log ('32768 broken vehicles detected and removed') and my viewpoint stuck in this spot. I'm not asking anyone to fix or resolve this issue. I'm sure the beta mods caused it by conflicting with something. I can just uninstall the mods and load a not-too-old backup of the city. I am, however, asking, mostly out of curiosity, if this is what a corrupted savegame looks like? If so, could I do anything to rescue this if I hadn't backed it up? Thanks.
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It's a week that I can't play the game, because also if I save the game, I don't see it in the "Load Game" menu. Please tell me how to fix the problem, i really need to play this game, it's amazing... it was. HELP ME
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Version 1.0
34,443 Downloads
Fan of GTA V? Here's the completely built region of South San Andreas including the cities of Los Santos, Palomino, and Sandy Shores. Ever wanted to challenge and continue the vibrant metropolis of Rockstar Games? Now you could! You'll have to deal with multiple problem like employement, ecology, waste disposal, and water gestion. Hope you'll enjoy my creation! EDIT : Added an external link from workshop in order to let you install it manually. Original file is still available here : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=406684124 HOW TO INSTALL : Just put the file on your savegame folder in C:\Users\**Username**\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Saves Mod required to work : 2x4 parking lot which can be found on the link below : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=405879157 Please do not ask me for an external copy of the dependency, I do not own it, and you will to ask the authors of it for any question relating this dependency. Thanks! Also unlimited money because the town is in debt, it was expensive ^^ This content is free, but if you like it and/or want more content this type, feel free to donate at the below link. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=75S6SEPXHVRMS All donations are greatly apreciated!- 23 Comments
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