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Welcome to the Sim City 4 thread! Sim City 4 is a City-building simulator published by Maxis in 2003. The fourth in the series, it expands on its predecessors quite a bit both in its scale and complexity: Sim City 4 is capable of simulating not only large cities but entire regions that can span many miles and house millions. It is a deep, powerful and complex sandbox game with a sense of realism unparalleled in its genre. These qualities have earned an enduring following with both goons and non-goons alike. EA's release of a new Sim City title has sparked renewed interest in this game; in addition, a great deal of new modded content has required a new OP. Sim City 4 is relatively easy to learn but quite difficult to master (depending greatly on your definition of mastery.) Hopefully this OP will cover the basics; for the rest, well, that's what this thread is for. But first, check out these pictures: These images show a lot of what you can do in this game, both modded and unmodded. They've been pulled mostly off the web and this thread. There are also a few sprinked throughout the OP to break up this massive wall of text. They are in no particular order.             Running the game Firstly, you'll want either Sim City 4 Deluxe or the base game plus the Rush Hour expansion (included in Deluxe.) It's fairly difficult to buy just the base game these days, so this shouldn't be too much of a concern. But for the sake of information: Sim City 4 shipped before a lot of very basic bugs were really worked out; many of these have been fixed with Rush Hour. Still more have been fixed through mods, but we'll get to that later. Sim City 4 is also a very old game, and newer hardware and software hasn't treated the game well. Still, for most people a little tweaking can make the game quite playable. Here are a few basic things you can do to help Sim City 4 run better. Depending on your operating system, many of them can be essential. Patches Firstly, make sure you're running the latest version. The steam version is up to date, so those of you running it through steam shouldn't have a problem. For others, the original Maxis website is unfortunately no longer available. You can get patches and fixes here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?page=7 or here: http://screwpile.wordpress.com/screw-pile-exchange-spex/maxis-files Multicore This game is unstable on more than CPU: the game will actually run slower on more than one core, and it will crash often. In your launch options, add the following to prevent this: -CPUcount:1 In addition, -CPUpriority:high can help optimize, but only in addition to the first string. Custom Resolutions Running a large or uncommon resolution? Well tough poo poo! Just kidding. Add a variation of this to your launch options: -CustomResolution:enabled -r1366x768x32 -f ( -f is for fullscreen.) Hardware versus Software Sim City 4 is capable of running off either your computer's actual graphics card - hardware mode - and emulating through your gpu - software mode. Software mode is generally considered a bit more stable on modern systems; however, this greatly depends on the user's hardware. In addition, some custom content (anything you see labeled as HD, notably the terrain mods in the Old Fashioned Pack) requires hardware mode in order to run. For some, either mode runs fine. For others? Well, we've got goons for that. hecko posted:For those having troubles using hardware mode , there's a fix to make it run faster and more stable Tired of seeing that same old splash video? Gets a little old, doesn't it. Add this to the launch options: -intro:off I hate sound and I hate music! Please let me roleplay a deaf mayor. The music in this game is awesome! How dare you! The sound on the other hand can be a little lackluster. Modders also put sounds into their building queries which are often completely unnecessary and terrible (and override the in-game sound settings.) Add this string to your launch options to completely remove it: -audio:off If you're still experiencing technical difficulties, there are also a few in-game options you can use to get things running smoother. By default the game is set to render in Hardware mode, but some graphics cards seem to have trouble with this; switching to Software rendering may alleviate some CTD's and stuttering. Shadows (like in many games) can be especially taxing as well, even on modern settings; switching them off can help as well. Please keep in mind that this was an extremely resource-intensive game, and a lot of computers couldn't run it at the time of its release. Even today, you might experience some stuttering when running the sim on higher speeds, and downtime when playing (and especially saving) large cities. Your mileage may vary.    Cheat Codes Directly above this sentence is the link you need. --- Modding and the Goon Packs The modding scene for Sim City 4 is both rewarding and exasperating in equal measure. Over the years modders have not only created impeccable individual buildings but also whole system overhauls that dramatically change how the game plays. However, Because Sim City 4 is such an old game, its early modders worked under the assumption that people would use 56k internet connections and small hard drives. Mods in general are optimized for space at the expense of usability. For example, take these sweet-lookin' buildings: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/27457-contemporary-condominiums You may notice a list at the bottom of additional files: parking lot textures, props like awnings or additional cars. These are called dependencies. In order for the mod (in this case, the building) to work, you'll need all of these. Though documentation is generally pretty good, many mods have been shuffled around over the years and finding the right dependencies can be a nightmare. Fortunately, you don't have to! Over the years goons have worked very hard to thwart this idiocy in the form of large modpacks. The Modpacks Here's what the SA community has cobbled together. These modpacks were all made at different times and with a different focus. Some are more comprehensive and deviate from the base game more extensively than others. All of these packs include NAM and the other basic fixes detailed later in this post: if you want to play and not mess with mods, simply take your pick, unpack it, drop it in your plugins folder and enjoy. We'll get into piecemeal modding a little later, but know that these modpacks all include the common dependency packs, so they are fairly addition-friendly. They all come in .torrent form. The Original Goon Gigapack [I'm keeping this as a placeholder for now, but unfortunately no one seems to have a copy of this around at this time. If you do, please post in the thread and we'll figure out how to upload/host it.] This is the oldest pack we've got, dating back to sometime in 2008. It includes all the normal fixes plus CAM with most of its content. This pack can create giant cities, and includes most of the common dependency packs, so adding to it shouldn't be terribly hard. The individual buildings and mods in this pack have been compressed into several large .dat files, which means it's hard to take buildings out of this pack that annoy you. That said it is a very good pack. The Old-Fashioned Pack Version 2.0: oldfashioned2.0.rar Version 3.0: Oldfashioned3.0.rar This is my total conversion pack, designed to replicate the dense urban cores and rural communities in the Northeastern United States and parts of Europe. Its focus is a bit narrower than the other packs: it offers very little in the way of suburban stripmalls and the like, and has a particular focus in the beautiful older buildings that modders seem to enjoy making lately. It includes CAM but does not include its stock content (frankly, the buildings people are making these days are far better than what's in the CAM starter packs.) This pack also includes most common dependencies so adding to it should be fairly easy; in addition, it has not been DATpacked, so you can remove/change its contents as you see fit. Use it if you would like your cities to look like this:    One thing you should know about this pack: the very beautiful HD terrain mods unfortunately require the game to be run in hardware mode; if hardware mode gives you trouble, delete the folder “terrainmods” and it should run in software with little trouble. And.... There's a new version! 3.0 is a little bigger, which on some systems may require patching the Sim City 4.exe with a 4gb patch so the game can use more RAM; this is basically a three-click operation, and much simpler than it sounds. Revisions in version 3.0: - Added a bunch of new buildings; basically everything good and thematic that's come out on the STEX and LEX since February 11. - Added the new NAM. Please note that this version includes the "Extreme Network Controller" option, which supposedly increases stability. It also enables the top-tier elements in RHW, allowing larger highways. This comes at the cost of greater load times for cities and the transition in and out of subway mode. If you don't like it (completely understandable,) just delete the NAM folder and reinstall your own version; it's entierly self-contained and very easy to do. - Organized a little, deleted a few redundant files. The terrain mods that gave people trouble are all self-contained in the "terrainmods" folder and very easy to delete. The part which includes building/other content is still woefully disorganized and psychotic; I've kept it unpacked for moddability, so you can delete buildings/content you don't like. DATpack at your leisure for greater speed! - Added the HT jobs fix. The pack should now include all standard fixes! I'm still going to consider this a beta release; I haven't tested this one as thoroughly as the previous releases, mostly because none of the additions made were especially involved. That said, these are Sim City 4 mods, so bug paranoia is entirely justified. If you see something, say something in this thread and I'll try and figure it out. Enjoy, folks! [/quote] Tai's Pack https://mega.co.nz/#!u1cknZDY!JVND8NDo20iNQ9ZebIpzf6vU1LSCTDB5GBogT0H5rxI This pack is the pack de jour right now. Made by Tai, it expands enormously on an Old Fashioned 3.0 base, adding loads of new content while also removing duplicate files and DATpacking old content for faster loading and play times. This gives it the added advantage of being quite a bit smaller than OldFashioned, but sacraficing some moddability. It is by all reports quite stable. If you're looking for a powerful pack without any of the out-of-game fuss, this is the one for you. Tai's Pack is save-compatible with OldFashioned, and can be considered an upgrade or expansion pack. You can consider it Oldfashioned 3.5, or if you're feeling really spergy, Pathfinder. Killhour's Spergin' Gigapack [This pack has also been regrettably lost; once again, if someone has a copy, please post in the thread! We'll find a way to host it.] A pack for the inner obsessive lurking within, well, not a whole lot of us, really. This pack is very light on custom buildings, but very heavy on scenic options: highway buffers, retaining walls, rocks, trees, and other goodies. It's meant for people who like the original style of the game but enjoy sprucing up their neighborhoods with natural (and man-made) goodies. It includes NAM, and is the smallest pack we have available. Grand Fromage's Pack (with help from GodlessCommie GrandFromage-Plugins.zip A pack of plugins built by GrandFromage over some months, packaged with NAM and a few other goodies by GodlessCommie. I'll be honest, I don't know a whole lot about what's in here. But, looking at GrandFromage's long-running LP (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3410697) I assume that this pack is a work of love and art. It's GrandFromage. Read the LP and I think you'll find he doesn't gently caress around when it comes to cities. Please note that this modpack is unsupported and unstable; you may or may not have luck running it. It's recommended for advanced users.    Tusen Taak's MacPack v1.0 This amazing mid-weight pack is designed to be mac-friendly! I'm just gonna quote this bad boy here: Tusen Takk posted:Okay guys, here it is: MacPack v1.0 --- DIY: Sliding deeper and deeper into dependency hell Don't want to take our word for it? Want to download mods individually? Think of yourself as one of them advanced users? Go on then. Take my hand, friend, and let's step into the nightmare zone. Don't fear the reaper. Together we ride.  The Must-Haves: There are a handful of mods that are absolutely essential to playing the game. Sim City 4 was rush-released with a number of bugs. Most were fixed in Rush Hour, but not all. Fortunately the community has filled in the gaps with a few basic mods. They are as follows: - The Operahouse fix prevents the operahouse (a late-game reward) from capping growth on your city: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/21342-opera-house-fix/ - The Netword Addon Mod (NAM) completely otherhauls Sims' pathing (getting to and from work) and adds some other useful tiles and interchanges. It is quite essential. If you don't want your city to be a Mad Max gridlock of autocarnage and abandoned neighborhoods, you'll need this: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/26793-network-addon-mod-for-windows-installer NOTE: As of this OP, the NAM version 31 is reportedly buggy. It's recommended to stick to version 30 until the bugs get smoothed out. Also, if you've bought Sim City 4 in the UK or elsewhere outside the US, you may have a left-hand drive copy of the game. In this case, it's best to delete the NAM that comes with our modpacks and reinstall it; NAM can configure left or right-handed driving during the installation. Location probably does not affect the steam version. The space port fix prevents the spaceport from doing the same thing the operahouse does: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/27340-space-port-fix-mod/ - Hole Digging Lots: these can help you make tunnels for some underpasses. http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/3599-hole-digging-lots/ Why, god, why? Hasn't SOMEONE out there packaged all these dependencies together? Once again, gentle and kind-hearted goonkind has come to the rescue. The following pack is a collection of many common dependencies, and should cover your needs for most lots and mods you'll find. This list is, well, extensive; a full documentation is included with the download, which can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?n66339svskduc6k Beyond these, the sky is the limit. There are gigabytes upon gigabytes of content out there waiting for you. Here are some of the major community sites where you can find more buildings, textures and mods for the game: Simtropolis – http://www.simtropolis.com - Simtropolis is the largest community site and probably receives the most modded content. It also has some utter dreck; fortunately content on this site is user-rated, so you can generally avoid the really bad stuff. The search function on this site is a little less than useful, but you can find almost anything on here. The LEX – http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/Default.htm - This site is moderated by BSC, a prominent modding conglomerate. The content on this site is vetted (with varying levels of success) before it is released to the public, which means there's almost nothing on here that will break your game. The LEX and STEX (Simtropolis' mod database) overlap quite a bit. Overall, despite its dated design the LEX is a little easier to use and a little more comprehensive. It houses most of the dependency packs you'll need, and has some high-quality exclusive content as well. Please note that you will have to register and login for download links to show up. The PLEX – http://www.simpeg.com/forum/?action=downloads - This houses all the mods and content created by Pegasus, a prolific modder who is a little less active these days. Most of the content on this site is mirrored on either the STEX or LEX, but there are a handful of exclusives here as well. These are the three big sites; beyond this are individual modders' sites and various smaller international sites (most of which are defunct and mirrored on the LEX or other places.) Using these sites you'll quickly find yourself submerged in an acronym soup. Here's a quick guide of the more common acronyms you'll find: BAT - Building Addon Tool (I think), program used to make models for new buildings BSC – The modding team which runs the LEX. CAM - Colossus Addon Mod. This mod adds several growth stages for all buildings, including farms. It allows much larger cities and buildings, and also rebalances demand to accomate them. It is a fairly intensive mod and can be a little difficult to set up; fortunately most (if not all) of the goon packs include it. CAM content can be found on the LEX, with a scattering on the STEX. One thing CAM can cause is the double-demand bug, which can be fixed using this guide: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=8269.msg303353#msg303353 drat - don't remember what it stands for, but it improves the menus LE - Lot Editor LEX (or BSC LEX) - Lot Exchange NAM - Network Addon Mod, as already covered. All our mod packs should include this. NDEX - a modding team PEG - Pegasus (a modder) PLEX - Pegasus Lot Exchange RAM - Rail Addon Mod RHW - Rural Highways (this comes with the NAM.) An extensive alternate highway system which allows a great deal of freedom in designing interchanges and on/offramps. You will spend hours sperging over a single exit. But the results are marvelous. RTMT - Road Top Mass Transit. This mod features subway and bus stations that are integrated into the road. Useful if you don't feel like plopping those stations and disrupting your beautiful grid, though it takes some of the challenge out of your transit networks. SC4D - SC4 Devotion forums SC4M - SimCity 4 Mapper SC4PIM – this is a tool used by lot creators to generate stats for buildings, like how many people/jobs they hold and how much power they require. I believe it calculates based off volume. You really shouldn't have to use this, but it can be useful if some modder screwed up and a tall building is popping up in a low-density zone. SFBT - a modding team SG - SimGoober (another modder) SPAM - SimPeg Agricultural Mod ST - Simtropolis STEX - Simtropolis Exchange TE - transit enabled (lots that can have traffic go through them like toll booths or NAM puzzle pieces) Now for some tools and utilities you'll probably need: SC4 DatPacker http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=26 Use this to compress your thousand plugins into one gigantic file. This will speed up your loading screens and your game in general, and is especially useful if you're running the game on a lower-end computer. It is a bit finicky. BSC Cleanitol http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=97 Use this to clean up old files when you're replacing them with newer versions. It is also quite finicky, and relies on lists of files that modders publish with their updated versions. Modders on the LEX are particularly good about this; others are not. SC4 Terraformer http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=731 For all your mapping needs. This one is especially tempermental, but also absolutely essential if you want to play on high-quality custom maps. Most maps that modders release are essentially image-based heightmaps with a bit more info. This tool converts those into a playable map. You can modify those maps (including the city sizes – if, like me, you like to play on large tiles) through this program as well. SC4 Mapper http://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2880 If you're simply looking to edit city boundaries or convert a map downloaded from the web, the SC4mapper is probably the better option. You will not actually be able to modify terrain with this, but for everything else it is probably the easier and more useful tool. While I've been able to get terraformer to work on vista and win7, SC4mapper officially supports newer operating systems. This program can also be used to make big region screenshots. Oh god just give me a pretty map to use If you don't feel like wrestling with the mapmaker, a generous goon has created rendered and hosted this map. It is compatible with the Old-Fashioned pack due to the trees; your mileage may vary with other packs. It is around 10x10 large tiles, and is very pretty:  http://www.dieanothertry.de/files/Fhuzo.zip Courtesy of the same noble goon, an unmodded, empty version for those of you running the stock game! Schorsch posted:Turns out, I had a backup. A little more on Regions and City Tiles The stock regions that ship with the game come with small, medium, and large tiles. Often the smaller tiles can seem quite limiting (a critique shared with Sim City 5.) However, unlike SC5, these tiles are readily modifiable. Here's a little more information to help you get the most out of your map. They are 3 sizes of cities: Small =64 cells x 64 cells = 1 km x 1km = .63 miles x .63 miles Medium = 128 cells x 128 cells = 2 km x 2 km= 1.27 miles x 1.27 miles Large city tile =256 cells x 256 cells = 4 km x 4 km= 2.54 miles x 2.54 miles In your SimCity folder on your My Documents there is a file called config. Tip: Don't do that while that region is in play, just change to another region while you change the config or exit the game. Config it's a .png file that you can modify in MS Paint, each pixel is a square km. You'll see that it has different color: Red: It's one one square and it represents a small city. Green: 2 x 2 squares, and each one is a medium city. Blue: 4 x 4 squares, and it represents a big city. Tip: If you use MS Paint you can turn on the gridlines, that help a lot. In this example I want to make a 3 x 3 medium city, so it will be a square of 6 pixels.  After loading the region this is our result:  You can see the change in tiles and size of the region. If you want to read more go to : http://www.simcitycentral.net/knowledge/simcity4/regional-customization-part-1-city-plot-layout/   Playing the Game Finally. Here's where the fun begins. Sim City 4 is a relatively simple game to play: quirky, a counter-intuitive at times, but straightforward once you understand what's going on. Here are a few basic tips for creating a successful city and region: - Start small. It may seem tempting with the amount of money you start with, but there's little sense in zoning huge swathes of land for one purpose or another. Doing this results in boring cities, but moreover mirrors a lot of the problems that come with uncontrolled growth in real life: traffic jams, forgotten blocks, long commutes, a lack of essential infastructure and eventual urban blight. I'm showing a little personal bias here – I like to build cities more like New York and Boston than Los Angeles and Houston – but there is good reason to back this assertion up. Try it and you'll see. - Don't build things until you need to build them. If you're building a simple farming town, there's probably little need for a full water grid or school system. When you're plopping down government services, keep a keen eye on how much they cost and if you need to expand more before you can build them. The services your government provides should grow with your city, not the other way around. - On this note, building services is important, but that doesn't mean you need to fund them fully all the time. Almost all services have a slider that sets how much money they spend and how much of the population they can serve. Adjust these to what you need. In addition, many of the modpacks (especially OldFashioned) have service buildings which are smaller but have a wider coverage radius; don't hesitate to use these if you're building a rural area. - Play as a region. If you're trying to build a city filled with shiny skyscrapers and upscale coffee shops, you can put all the dirty heavy industry in a neighboring suburb and not have the pollution bleed into your downtown. Sims will commute from one city to another for work, if they need to. There are even neighbor deals, so if you build a massive power plant in one city you can sell the surplus power to another. Don't feel you have to squeeze everything into one tile; there's an entire region out there to explore! - High-wealth zones, like Hi-tech industrial or commercial office spaces, often have a pretty high population and education requirement before they start to grow. You might have to build a factory town or two before a region will support this kind of development. - There is a particularly nasty bug called the infinite transit loop. If you're running into a lot of abandoned neighborhoods and sims complaining of impossible commutes, check that you haven't created a highway system that loops around “four corners” - rapidly making four right (or left) turns through four different cities. Sims will get on the highway to look for a job, not find one, go to the next city for work, not find it, go to the next city, and, well, you get the point. This is a pretty easy problem to solve: just make sure to break up this circle somehow by rerouting or closing part of the highway. Avoiding this bug can lead to some more interesting transit systems, anyway; perhaps it's a blessing in disguise. - As the last thread title said, the diagonal is a lie. You may notice that a diagonal road doesn't simply take up one diagonal line of tiles like a bishop in chess – it takes up two. When sims appear to travel along diagonal lines, they actually zigzag neatly along that illusory diagonal: up and across, up and across, like a staircase. This means taxicab math is in full effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry. This shouldn't discourage you from creating diagonal transit options; they are a great way to spice up your city and break out of that boring orthogonal grid. Just be aware that the diagonal “shortcut” you just made might not be such a shortcut after all. - The two most boring systems in the game are water and garbage. For water: once your city gets to the size when you can afford it, just zone out the whole water grid at once and build pumps as needed; this way you'll never have to deal with it again. I recommend picking up a few “cheater” mods to deal with garbage: landfills are buggy and if you're not careful they can be really expensive. Here are a couple mods so you never have to deal with garbage again: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/3143-geoignic-ingestor http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/4569-peg-garbage-chute - Industrial Areas: You've probably noticed through playing the game that industrial areas work a little differently than the other zones. GrandFromage discovered something rather interesting in his LP: all industrial buildings within a particular zone will route traffic through one road-connected building, so only one building in a given zone has to have road access. The building everything routes through is called an "anchor building." This gives you more leeway zoning-wise: there's no need for a grid. However, all the buildings which sprout off the "anchor building" will be of the same type (dirty, manufacturing, or HT;) so it's a little limiting that way, but also nice in terms of controlling what grows. A nice little trick if you're looking to build pristine hi-tech office parks. Charts and Graphs General advice is one thing, but if you're a spreadsheet fiend these will hopefully prove quite informative: - Staging: Building density is divided into various stages, which are unlocked with greater population in your city and region. Here's a brief guide for all the thresholds in the base game. CAM, which you'll find in the modpacks, adds several stages to each zoning type (15 stages for residential/commercial, 10 for industral, 6 for farming;) these add on to the original stages and have higher requirements.  (This section will be expanded later.)  For Advanced Players Hopefully with these tips you'll be able to avoid the various pitfalls this game can offer and get some healthy cities on their feet. Once you've done this the fun really begins. Sim City 4 is a neat game because of its potential for realism and its ability to simulate a lot of the same successes and problems cities have in real life. It can give you a great appreciation for urban planning and the challenges modern cities face. Grand Fromage's LP is masterful at this, and is a great example to follow; there are also many “city journals” on the various fan sites which help illuminate as well. Here are a few tips for more advanced players. Hopefully they'll inspire you to build better and, after you've figured that out, to build in new and interesting ways. - It's often helpful to plan out where the major urban centers and larger transportation networks (like highways and rail) will be in advance. Think of the land and how people use it: where mining towns and farming communities might be most successful; where different transportation networks merge and spawn an interstate town; or where rivers meet the sea and make room for a bustling port city. Older European and Eastern US cities often rest on the banks of major navigable rivers because the easiest way to transport goods and people before the railroad was by boat. Some cities in the Western US sprang up because of valuable mining prospects or fertile land (Telluride, Boise, Fresno;) others for leisure or due to the growth of a specific industry (Aspen, Palo Alto.) Still other cities have been fabricated entirely from scratch for a specific need (Washington DC, Canberra – some extreme examples include California City and China's unused metropolises.) Figure out the story of how and why your city came to be, and build it! - There are a lot of really great mods for dressing up semi-rural and rural areas. The various mod packs include a bunch of these, but there are plenty out there for you to find. It's remarkable how a stand of trees in a farmfield or a few boulders on a cliff can really spruce things up and bring your little area to life. Get your Bob Ross on! - Google Earth is your friend. Look at the way various cities have solved problems of space and traffic flow in the bast – be they the massive highway systems of Dallas and Houston or Boston's eternal big dig. A lot of cities started with a fairly basic grid which has slowly been morphed to accommodate new services and more people. For instance, there are a few European cities which consist of a tangle of confusing roads surrounding a small gridded inner core. That grid is the remnant of a Roman fort built two millenia ago that slowly expanded outward. Other cities have been limited by external forces: Boston's back bay is built on fill, which makes it unstable ground for the massive skyscrapers you'll find downtown. Again, the fun here is in making the story of how a great metropolis came to be. - Urban Planning is an academic field in its own right. If you find yourself really interested in how cities work and the thought that goes into them, there's a great deal of literature out there for you. Here are some links to get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/11/evolution-urban-planning-10-diagrams/3851 http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X http://www.ted.com/talks/tags/urban%20planning http://www.sfgov3.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/shapeupsf/research_data/built_env_perception_safety.pdf http://www.asla.org/ContentDetail.aspx?id=23720 http://books.google.com/books?id=9HQrahmGeYoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (It's worth noting that urban planning is intrisically tied to politics both local and national; it's an interesting lens through which to view current affairs. By its very nature, Sim City 4 is also in a way political: Will Wright, the original creator, is apparently a libertarian. The infinite growth, flat taxes, and instant social mobility the sims experience reflect this. These qualities also make it a fun game. Don't take it too seriously. That said, urban planning threads seem to pop up over in D&D on a semi-regular basis; check them out if you're interested. The real world, as you might guess, works far differently.) Feel free to post urban planning-related stuff throughout the thread; it's all inspiration to build more interesting cities. Ultimately, play the game however you want, and make what stimulates you. Sim City 4 can be very educational, but more importantly it's very relaxing and a lot of fun. Remember to enjoy yourself! Also, people seem to periodically make great effortposts in this thread. I'm going to reserve a space below this post for those; if you see something really informative and extraordinary, PM me and I'll add it in. Credits As far as the modpacks go, we owe an enormous debt to the SC4 community, which represent both the best and the worst that the internet has to offer. I haven't actually created any content for this game; as far as I know none of the other pack creators have either. They aren't huge fans of modpacks on other sites (drama and tears have blown up in the past – though fortunately not with us) so please don't share them elsewhere on the internet. You can thank them for the individual buildings though – they've earned it despite themselves. Bits and pieces of this OP have been taken from posts throughout past threads. Furthermore, almost all the knowledge I have about this game comes from goons and this forum. Thanks so much to the SA community: you've made this game playable not only for me but many others! This OP is a work in progress. I'm going to spruce it up and add more content over the next few days; with a game as old as this, there's a lot to cover. Please let me know about any particularly glaring oversights. For the sake of history, here is a link to the old thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2783218 *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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I'll update the OP tonight with the content people have posted sofar. Looks like we might need that reserved post! In the meantime I'll try and answer some questions.Terrorist Fistbump posted:Nice OP, OP. It's got me ready to dive back into the modpacks and create a fresh metropolis. Goodbye weekend... It includes NAM 30 and all the fixes except the one for hi-tech industry; that's an oversight on my part and will be corrected in the next version. quote:Combining the gigapacks is probably not doable without serious tinkering. They all have untold hundreds if not thousands of lots, plus varying versions of the essentials, all organized differently. Putting it all together without extensive pruning will cause the game to function poorly, if at all. Better to start off with just one. This is quite true. Old Fashioned alone has 6,637 individual files. The original goon pack has also been DATpacked, so it's non-configurable, and has an older version of NAM, which promises all kinds of messy errors. Honestly, all the packs save Spergin' have PLENTY of content for you. The only major things Old Fashioned is missing are the CAM starter packs, which I didn't include because they are non-configurable and a lot of the custom content out there has eclipsed them in quality. If you want these, the pack does include all the requisite dependencies; getting them should be as simple as downloading, dragging and dropping. You can find them on the LEX. quote:What amount of RAM would you guys say the sweet spot for this game is? Thinking of building a Win7 VM just to run this (and only this). Would I be better off with x64 or x32? I couldn't tell you what the sweet spot is, but this game cares a lot more about CPU than RAM. 2 gigs should be more than fine. I run Win7x64 and it doesn't crash basically ever, though your mileage may vary. quote:I would suggest that instead of relying on the NAM included in the various packs offered here you just get the newest version, a while back I started a fresh game with a pack I got from here but unfortunately it caused some bizarre rail/road problems (couldn't have rail going over roads or the trains would stop running, so basically no rail). I wish I could be more specific about which pack I got but I don't remember which one it was. I'd recommend getting NAM 30 for now (included in Oldfashioned, probably in Spergin' as well, possibly in GrandFromage's given the date though I'm not certain.) NAM 31 includes a lot of cool new features, but apparently comes with many bugs as well. I'm going to wait until they stabilize it before I start playing around. quote:My fiance actually just bought this for me, but accidentally got the base game. Is it possible to find just RH by itself or would I have to end up buying the deluxe version? Heh, didn't know anyone still sold just the base game. I'm sure it's possible, but you'll have patching to do. Deluxe with all the patches is $20 on steam, if you've got the cash to spare it'll save you a lot of trouble. quote:There is a problem building ON the mountains, but what you need to understand is that the Fhuzo map is HUGE. Seriously. My little stab at the region is the second screenshot in the OP; I'm working in the far west and I've only developed five large city tiles. You will be more than fine, and it's worth it not to deal with the terraformer.
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Mar 8, 2013 18:17
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:My biggest problem with this game is making a city interesting. It's not terribly hard actually; you don't have to build services just because your advisors and sims demand them. The only thing you really have to build are fire departments, and I just say that because constant fires get annoying. It takes all the services (especially education) to unlock wealthier and higher-density buildings, but with a higher region population demand will start to snowball and skyscrapers on-demand become more and more feasible. Also, keep in mind almost all infastructure is scaleable to your population demands. While some buildings are much more expensive than others, it's not impossible to have a lightly-settled area that still has infastructure in all the important areas. The modpacks (especially OldFashioned) have some smaller buildings with large coverage radii that can help do this as well. I'd recommend playing on large tiles. A large, flat tile is surprisingly difficult to fill up, even if you're just plotting out boring grids. A lot of the time I'll plan out an urban core to be off-center relative to the particular tile; that way I can get a large suburb to pay for developing my city center (or sometimes the other way around.) It's also a lot of fun to plot out subdivisions and imagine how this rural-to-urban transition was developed over time. More pragmatically, it's also easier to handle region connections when you have less of them. Region play can be really useful because you can put a lot of high-pollution industry in one tile and not have it bleed over to the others; but with large tiles, this doesn't matter so much. A river or decently-sized greenbelt can halt pollution and keep land values high on the other side. This is also very true to life: really good examples include Boston and Ottowa, Canada. There is no mod like you describe, unfortunately. Though, frankly, I'd love to see the computer that could run such a thing.
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Mar 8, 2013 23:55
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Frosted Flake posted:Two questions: Is there any support for Intel Macs and, how would one go about adding those plugins on a Mac? I think everything is Mac compatible other than mod installers; the mods themselves should be fine, so the packs should work. I am not certain. If you feel up to it, play around, and let us know what happens.
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Mar 9, 2013 00:57
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odiv posted:Hm... I had the Network Addon Mod in the actual Program Files directory in Plugins. I deleted that and extracted the Old Fashioned pack into Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins and am just getting a black screen now instead of a game launch. Give it a minute or two. OldFashioned has 6700 files the game needs to load; the screen will be black while they're loading. It's annoying, I know! I'm contemplating DATpacking the next version to prevent this, though people seem to enjoy the moddability. For the record, I'm going to release the next one when a new stable NAM release is out - with any luck, NAM 32. TomWaitsForNoMan posted:If I take the Original Gigapack and just replace its version of NAM with the most recent one (well, 30 anyway) will that work ok or is it likely to break everything? Are there any other included mods that desperately need updating? If the NAM is its own separate package, it should be fine. There's a lot of old content in that gigapack, but none of it should be gamebreaking as far as I know. The CAM version is the same one that's out now, and it doesn't include any farm addons, so I don't believe there's anything else in there that actually affects core gameplay. You should be fine, but again, try it and let us know!
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Mar 9, 2013 04:22
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Hahaha which pack is that? I've got beef with SimGoober because he makes ugly stuff that's requisite for a lot of other stuff, but most of BSC is pretty allright (other than being gigantic neckbeards.) You've tried rendering in software, right? You could also try using this: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/28544-sc4-launcher It looks like it gives you more options. Are you using an ATI card out of curiosity? Reading the notes for that launcher, I get the impression SC4 doesn't play nicely on them. quote:I can just go ahead and DATpack it myself, I'm guessing. You absolutely can. There may be a few .png and .jpeg files in there to remove; the pack is still in beta, so the filing isn't as neat as it should be. Frankly, I'm not looking forward to doing it. The game will load faster the second or third time around, though. *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Mar 9, 2013 |
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Mar 9, 2013 06:17
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Drone posted:I'm having the most annoying problem. I was having some performance issues after installing the Old-Fashioned Pack, so at the advice of MikeJF from this very thread, I switched to using Software rendering, since apparently Hardware rendering in game is terribly broken. Since switching, the game itself loads fine and I get to the region view as normal. But when I click on one of my cities, the loading screen appears (Reticulating Splines, etc) and eventually the game just crashes to desktop. Because the terrain mods are HD (greater resolution than the base game technically supports,) they are unfortunately incompatible with software mode. Delete the terrainmods folder and you should be good to go. I am mad about this, but sadly there's very little I can do. The next best set are probably the Meadowwood or Columbus terrain mods, which can be found on the LEX. The original goon pack uses them, and they are also very pretty. quote:Bus stop stuff NAM greatly increases the distance pedestrians are willing to walk. I usually place them ever other block and my sims ride the bus just fine. Keep in mind that wealthy sims are scared of the bus and less likely to take it. quote:Farming in an already-built city Buildings in the standard and CAM demand model actually reduce the cap for farming demand. What this means is that even though farming is probably in high demand, having a lot of buildings artificially prevents farms from growing. The fortunate part is, actual demand (which you can't see) is most likely quite high. In the rewards menu you'll find a building called the "Census Repository Facility" which, to counter this, artificially raises the demand cap by 30,000. This stacks. Plop down a handful of them and it should allow the farms to grow. Do keep in mind, though: farms are allergic to pollution and traffic. Given the screenshot, you'll probably want to make a green belt of trees between those farm zones and the highway. There are also two buildings in the parks section which will clean the air and drastically reduce pollution, though they have a pretty high monthly cost. edit: someone snuck a post in on me. OldFashioned comes with SPAM, but because CAM is loading last it's overwriting the SPAM demand model. Since SPAM is farming-specific, I'll fool around with the load order a little tonight and see what happens. This is something that's been frustrating for me too; while I'm willing to deal with it in my own cities, I'd like to get it right for everyone else. If you want to fool around, SC4 loads plugins alphabetically. Rename the SPAM folder to something like ZZZZZ_SPAM and try your luck. As of this post, I have no idea what will happen. quote:Do I need to manually install NAM? Old Fashioned comes with NAM 30. Enjoy! *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Mar 9, 2013 |
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Mar 9, 2013 22:07
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Giggily posted:I don't have any neighboring cities. Just farms and like a 8x8 blob of factories. It sounds like you've hit a demand cap. I'll write something coherent about these for the OP because they're a pretty annoying game mechanic, but in the meantime: Every city has a certain base capacity for growth. Go beyond these and you'll start hitting these caps, which are entirely artificial. Try placing some reward buildings; the minor and major stadiums are particularly good cap busters. Other things you can do are neighbor connections, like previously mentioned. All of these things help increase the capacity for industry on a given tile, or to look at things the other way around, the bust the cap. For the record, OldFashioned has a LOT of reward buildings so you've got a little more choice in how you want to bust through these caps. edit: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/SimCity_4/Zoning_and_Demand This guide will tell you a bit more. Apparently the deal with industrial demand is allowing your freight to leave the city; if you do this, demand should be self-sustaining. The more you know! *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Mar 10, 2013 |
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Mar 10, 2013 23:46
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Check the version linked on page 5; the one in the OP has custom trees that only work with the old fashioned pack. I'll add the other version to the OP here in a sec. (Sorry for being a little AWOL, real life is once again encroaching on my game time.) edit: also, there's a new tree controller out on the LEX. It looks really, really pretty. I'm going to try it out and see how it looks for the next version of the pack. For those who want to as well, it's here: http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2959 For the record, I can add this controller without removing support for the old trees (tree controllers just affect what gets planted in God Mode,) so if it makes it into the pack, it won't retroactively gently caress up your cities or whatever. Dependencies are in the readme; the list is quite long. *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Mar 13, 2013 |
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Mar 13, 2013 01:18
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null_pointer posted:Hey, how are you guys setting up your industrial areas? I've got a good setup for my residential and commercial areas (http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/inpr/su/sucopl/fugr/index.cfm) and farms are reasonably easy to setup, but my industrial parks are just so ... boring. Does anyone have a setup that doesn't suck, from an aesthetic standpoint? Ugh, gently caress these guys. They're still thinking solely in terms of optimization. There are a couple of problems with this design. First, it separates commercial business from the parkland too greatly, making it so that residents have to choose one or the other for their destination rather than be able to enjoy a little of each. In addition, the park spaces they've plotted are too small to be considered "destinations" and too small to provide the air and space that a real park can provide. I'd imagine these narrow parks would become under-utilized and end up a lot like the "parks" between the gigantic LeCorbusier-inspired projects in New York and other places around the US: creepy no man's lands. The scale given is small enough that it might work (and to be fair, they're not dealing with the height and resulting shadows that the projects do) but they're still going to end up with a variation on the same suburban soullessness they're trying to dodge. Then again, I'm a crazy Jane Jacobs acolyte, and none of this has to do with Sim City. There are quite a few things you can do. GrandFromage discovered something rather interesting in his LP: all industrial buildings within a particular zone will route traffic through one road-connected building, so only one building in a given zone has to have road access. The building everything routes through is called an "anchor building." This gives you more leeway zoning-wise: there's no need for a grid. However, all the buildings which sprout off the "anchor building" will be of the same type (dirty, manufacturing, or HT;) so it's a little limiting that way, but also nice in terms of controlling what grows. A nice little twist if you're looking to build pristine hi-tech office parks. I like to snake loads of rail through my industrial areas along with the occasional greenbelt or park to break up the tedium. Modders have also made huge industrial mega-lots with a ton of jobs, like this: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/25332-bsp-fisher-body-plant-21-maxis-night. You can plop some of these and build around them to spice things up. A whole bunch come in OldFashioned as both ploppable and growable (I picked anything that looked decent and had a growable option;) whether you're using the modpack or not, you'll find them in the landmarks tab. Honestly though - ever been to northern New Jersey? A lot of industrial areas in real life tend to be pretty monotonous and awful, especially more modern developments. The exceptions to the rule tend to be company towns set up to revolve around a specific industry. One of the earliest examples of this (and a particularly good one) is Lowell, Massachusetts. There are some decent aerial shots in the wikipedia article to give to some idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell,_Massachusetts. To simulate this sort of thing, you're going to need some megalots. Here are a couple for ya: http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=138 http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=24 http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=62 http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1059 http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1291 http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2925 Here's one you can build a whole town around: http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2578 Welcome to dependency hell.  There's a pack someone mande of all the dependencies in the OP, if you want to get into this it will save you a LOT of trouble.(For the record, I've been adding to the OP sporadically as people post good stuff. If there's anything anyone feels should be in there, just suggest it and I'll add it in.) edit: It's nice to be beaten by a really good post! *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Mar 24, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 05:17
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Longbaugh01 posted:So I guess we're all familiar with the Fused Grid? I was going to make a little post eventually about how I tried a proof-of-concept, entirely FG city, and it's turned out really well so far, but I'm not sure it's worth it now. We're probably not as a whole, and it'd be cool to have more urban planning talk. There really should be another proper urban planning D&D thread - the subject tends to become very political very quickly. I'm a little effort-ed out from this OP and, to be honest, I read a lot but I'm by no means educated or an expert on the subject. In regards to fused grid itself, it works beautifully in SC4! Unbelievably well! But in real life I'm a fan of more traditional small-block grids with an "overlay" of major traffic arteries (and, of course, green spaces that break these patterns up.) It would seem to me that fixed-grid is excellent at minimaxing all types of traffic and utility concerns like water drainage and land usage. But it completely fails to account for the people and businesses actually occupying that space. I guess the crux of my argument is a little existential: a traditional grid system is far more flexible at adapting to change than a fixed grid system, because a traditional grid is simply a framework which can be easily modified to suit the needs that a modern city requires. In real life, demographics and land usage in cities changes constantly: for instance, the recent wave of gentrification in Brooklyn has created new economic centers in surprising places (I have extremely mixed feelings about this, but this isn't the thread for that.) There's been a ton of new construction, and a lot of areas have been significantly changed to accommodate this: huge apartment complexes, additional commercial space, and the infrastructure which comes with these things. The same can be seen in other cities around the United States. With fixed-grid, all the avenues, thoroughfares, and places of business have been pre-defined (a lot like sim city, really.) This is hard to manage when a neighborhood's usage changes. For instance, a residential area transitioning into a commercial center is going to require easier and more thorough road access, both for customers and freight, increased security, new parking complexes, and all the additional infrastructure which comes with these things. Modifying a fixed-grid system to accommodate this will destroy a lot of its original benefits. So in my mind, fixed-grid fails for the same reasons LeCorbusier and a lot of other over-ambitious planners have failed: it tries to anticipate and engineer human behavior. We know more about ourselves than ever before - enough now to be humbled by our own unpredictability. Fixed-grid is nowhere near as heavy-handed as LeCorbusier was, of course. But I think it has the potential to be a pitfall: some kind of weird cross between deadening suburbia and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe - which, again, might work pretty well in Sim City. Longbaugh01 posted:Holy. poo poo. ... Yeah, I'll add that to the OP. Edit: For those interested in architecture/urban planning philosophizing, here's a really interesting artistic argument: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/downloads/awards/Sylvie_Taher_DennisSharpAwardPaper.pdf It's a bit shoddy, only because it requires a lot of background knowledge to be intelligible. You'll need to know about Rem Koolhaas's 1972 thesis: http://socks-studio.com/2011/03/19/exodus-or-the-voluntary-prisoners-of-architecture/ and LeCorbusier's thoroughly psychotic visions of urban renewal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier#Forays_into_urbanism This outta calibrate the upper limit of your pretentio-meter pretty easily. VVVVVV To me, that SC3k project echoes a lot of LeCorbusier's nuttier (and definitely Orwellian) plots. More green space in his renderings, maybe, but the ideas are pretty much dead-on. *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Mar 24, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 08:13
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jadebullet posted:So I may have to remove the high def textures and run in software mode. That being said, what specifically do I have to delete from my plugin folder to do that if I am running Old Fashioned? Go into the Terrain stuff folder, then delete everything in the terrainmods folder except PNW_treecontroller.dat. Delete zzz_terrain as well. Then, go into the "everything else" section and delete another folder also called terrainmods (if memory serves - it might be something different.) I screwed up and they're duplicate. You should be fine after that, I believe. I love to build how you're describing, but I don't in practice. It's a combination of laziness and running out of money when highway planning. quote:Joking aside, the article on Lowell, MA was very interesting. There's an overhead map of their canals and river-side industrial districts that is strikingly reminiscent of so many New England towns I know of. What's crazier about Lowell is that the original workers were mostly farmer's daughters, who came of their own volition. The owners of these early mills and factories had sort of a "benevolent tyrant" thing going on: they built public education facilities and rotated lecturers in and out, even though it affected their bottom line (this came more or less out of a puritan interpretation of enlightenment thinking.) So a lot of the farmer's daughters came to work because it was their only opportunity at the time to gain an education. A lot of the groundwork for the women's suffrage and labor rights movements in the United States was paved in the early days of the 19th century at this mill towns. Here's a little more reading on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_Girls. History is cool.  Anyhow, my latest region is a little shoddy; I've mostly been focused on testing to make sure OldFashioned doesn't explode somehow. I'll post some pics when I've got something pretty going. *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Mar 25, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 18:50
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Inverness posted:As someone new to SC4, what size cities (by population) should I aim for when starting a new region? The objective in Sim City 4 is to collect all the sims. That's part of why Sim City 5 is such a major departure from the series.
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Mar 26, 2013 02:00
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Use this: http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1831 Specifically the squat 2x2 building. It will increase the cap for agriculture by 30,000. You may have to plop more than one of them if your population is big. This is also in Oldfashioned and the original goon gigapack; I don't know about the other two packs.
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Mar 27, 2013 01:08
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Andrigaar posted:Oh man this game is weird sometimes. The garbage system is easily the worst/dumbest system in the game. I also don't understand what's going on under the hood, but I can explain some of the strange behavior. If you've got a backlog of garbage (meaning it's on the streets and such,) it charges money per amount of garbage moved/dealt with. It could be that it recalculated some numbers when you reloaded the region and ended up with some kind of a super-heavy month. I'm not sure I get your meaning with the graph inverting (were you getting negative values? huh?) But the garbage system is screwy and crazy. I usually procrastinate and use cheater lots for garbage (there are two in the OP.) If I've got a major city running and plop down a lot, even though the lot itself doesn't charge me money I'll loose maybe $20,000/mo until the trash is picked up. Then, things go back to normal and I barely pay anything. Go figure.
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Apr 13, 2013 15:55
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I'm considering uninstalling that until I start an entirely new region. Though this could be interesting as well as a sign I gotta nuke it all and start over.
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Andrigaar posted:Terrible Garbage Ah, gotcha. I figured you did something to that effect - suddenly dealing with garbage can really destabilize things. I tend to save a bunch as my cities grow (building utilities like health/education late especially) so that when garbage starts to affect demand I can afford to run a huge deficit. If given infinite capacity (which is what the garbage cheater lots do,) all garbage will be cleared within one month. So it's actually a pretty easy debacle to handle; you just have to know what you're doing and anticipate a pretty major loss. I've been experimenting with sequester cuts in my cities lately. It's really not going well at all.
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Apr 14, 2013 01:16
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Saddamnit posted:I believe I can eventually achieve a population of 4 million in this city. If you wanna do it, cut the power lines. I'm serious. Bulldoze the power plant, do what you have to do - evacuate the entire city until population is zero. Wait a month or three. Then, turn it back on. Poor, low-educated sims will start to move into all those abandoned buildings, packing them densely into higher-wealth buildings; the same will be true of the office towers. Population will spike rapidly, then settle into a plateau that's still far higher than the original number. I've doubled populations by doing this. Note that this might not work well without a large region (and large regional demand) to support the rehab until it becomes self-sustaining. Also, I've only done this in one go and without saving so that regional demand remained static; saving, exiting to region, and returning might do something wildly different (and possibly gently caress up all your other cities.) The highest I've gotten personally is something like 2.4 million, but I've never tried very hard.
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Apr 19, 2013 04:47
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The Slippery Nipple posted:Does the Old Fashioned pack include the HT-I fix? Or the Space Centre or Opera House fix? It includes the space center and opera house fixes. It doesn't include the HT-I fix because of economic negligence on my part. For the record, I'm working on Old Fashioned 3.0. It will include the HT-I fix along with the new stable NAM and a few buildings. But mostly I'm trying to organize the file system so that it's comprehensible. Brassroots, those screens look really nice!
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May 7, 2013 04:55
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You'll still need NAM. The game is basically unplayable without NAM, but amazing with it. Not even kidding - it's that important.
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Jul 4, 2013 01:58
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Geshtal posted:On a side note: the picture is zoomed out quite a bit so I'm not sure, but it looks like your streets just come up to the avenue but don't intersect it. Stretch them across to both lanes or else the traffic on one side can’t turn down them. This is true, but if he had NAM installed, it's not actually a bad strategy!
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Jul 4, 2013 06:15
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Gaah gently caress, terribly... I burned out on reorganizing the folders, to be quite honest. I know people wanted it to be more modular, but it's really tough making that happen when moving things around tends to cause a bunch of errors for crazy/unknown reasons. I'm not a tech guy, just a fan, and though I've been competent sofar some of the technical stuff is a bit over my head. Like a lot of others, I play this game sort of two months on and then two months off, so that's probably a factor as well. Sorry! I'll be happy to whip up an "unofficial" update in a few days; the only things which really need to be fixed are a bunch of redundancies (already done) and an upgrade to the new NAM (self-contained, really easy.) And there's been enough new thematic content on the STEX/LEX that an update is most certainly justified. At this point, doing updates is pretty easy (especially since the modders making stuff now are a bit more user-friendly,) so it won't be hard. I just can't promise it will be any better organized than the previous versions. My plugins, with the work I started to do, still has 6,954 files.  edit: I should also note that Sim City 4 is one of the deals on the summer steam sale right now. If you're reading this thread and deliberating - do it! Hundreds of hours of fun if you're into sims, and six bucks, yo! *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 04:27
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Yeah, you've gotta be pretty OCD about reading readmes for dependencies, etc. There are only a handful of things that depend on load order, but then again there are quite a few things that depend on installation order. Fortunately all that work has been done for OldFashioned, and again NAM is standalone, so adding things is relatively simple. I've started work and will cull from the STEX/LEX everything that's thematic and looks good made since like January. A whole bunch of new buildings have been released, so I'm kinda excited. Even more flesh to the pack's bones! I also might throw this guy in the power menu: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/28869-future-project-circuitry-relay-tower/. Even though it's not thematic at all, holy crap this might be the best-looking BAT I've ever seen: 
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Jul 23, 2013 07:39
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Looks good man, post it up if you get the chance! Working on v3.0 of OldFashioned and reviewing the NAM installation. There are literally 375 pages of combined manual for this thing...  So with the new NAM come new options. Of note is the "Extreme Network Controller" option which can be toggled during setup. If I'm understanding this correctly, it adds some of the larger-capacity custom highway options (what they call the L3 and L4 options - I believe these are the 6- and 8-lane systems, possibly beyond - I don't really mess with RHW stuff that much personally.) However, it drastically increases the time it takes to load a city, and more obnoxiously the loading time for entering and exiting subway placement mode. The subway quirk is one of my biggest pet peeves. I believe I missed this option when compiling the last pack, or underestimated its importance. I'm going to leave it on because I know people like building huge highway systems, but make a note both here and in the OP: if long loading times piss you off, remove OldFashioned's NAM (\plugins\Network Addon Mod) and reinstall it with a fresh version. Toggle whatever you want EXCEPT for the "Extreme Network Controller." This will speed things up considerably.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:13
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Indeed it will, thanks for reminding me! Really easy one to install actually - just a 1kb file - but peskily forgettable. edit - Gaah, I see your point. Like CAM, it creates a double-demand bug. Unfortunately fixing those are user-end stuff that involves mucking with things outside plugins. It will be included, and if it's not in the OP already I'll do a little tutorial on how to fix these things using DATpacker. It really isn't that hard, but it's a little more involved than dragging and dropping files. I've never cared much about demand curves that much because after a certain critical mass a region tends to experience massive demand by de facto, but I can definitely see how some people might, especially if they're doing some kind of decentralized thing and all their cities aren't connected via transit. As far as I know CAM and the I-HT fix are the only things that do this, since they're the only two things which directly mess with demand. SPAM could, I think, in theory, but the version in the modpack gets overridden by CAM, at least if I'm remembering right. *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 29, 2013 00:33
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Gentlemen... Behold! Download torrent81 (1 file; 1.97 GB) View torrent stats Things should be a little more organized now. This was a pretty easy update and I'm feeling awfully stupid for procrastinating so long. Some notes: - Added a bunch of new buildings; basically everything good and thematic that's come out on the STEX and LEX since February 11. - Added the new NAM. Please note that this version includes the "Extreme Network Controller" option, which supposedly increases stability. It also enables the top-tier elements in RHW, allowing larger highways. This comes at the cost of greater load times for cities and the transition in and out of subway mode. If you don't like it (completely understandable,) just delete the NAM folder and reinstall your own version; it's entierly self-contained and very easy to do. - Organized a little, deleted a few redundant files. The terrain mods that gave people trouble are all self-contained in the "terrainmods" folder and very easy to delete. The part which includes building/other content is still woefully disorganized and psychotic; I've kept it unpacked for moddability, so you can delete buildings/content you don't like. DATpack at your leisure for greater speed! - Added the HT jobs fix. The pack should now include all standard fixes! I'm still going to consider this a beta release; I haven't tested this one as thoroughly as the previous releases, mostly because none of the additions made were especially involved. That said, these are Sim City 4 mods, so bug paranoia is entirely justified. If you see something, say something in this thread and I'll try and figure it out. Enjoy, folks! e: oh yeah, if you use OldFashioned 2.0, you should be able to delete your current \plugins folder, replace it with 3.0, and be perfectly all right. Once again, enjoy! *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Aug 1, 2013 |
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Aug 1, 2013 01:36
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TLDR: It depends on how big your region is, what you're doing, and how much you care. From experience: I played SC4 for years with the last thread's gigapack. Since all its content was DATpacked, there was no means for players to alleviate the double-demand bug. Contrasting this with the variations of OldFashioned (in which you can fix it, if you want - I have,) the most major difference is it was slightly easier to create homogeneous neighborhoods and cities with doubledemand than not, because it was ever-so-slightly easier for bigger buildings to pop up with double demand. This stops mattering much once you've got more than two or three cities. I guestimate the give-a-gently caress line to be around 500,000 sims. Double-demand does exactly what it sounds like: it doubles demand in every single catagory. This means if demand is positive, there will be twice is much in your simulation as what there would be in the stock game; if it's negative, vice versa. So if you're trying to cultivate a specific wealth level or type of industry, the double-demand bug will make this unrealistically easy - that is, assuming the base game is even remotely realistic. It isn't at all. SC4 is a weird game in that it is both incredibly deep and incredibly easy, even in stock versions. Urban blight can be permanently solved through education, parks and traffic control; crime is prevented by having more police stations; the default tax rate is 9-9-9; etc. The only real difficulty in SC4 has been buggy transit, which NAM has fixed for years. Demand is both a function of a city's health and its region's health; as a region grows in population, it affects demand way more than any one city possibly can. In short, demand aggregates across all your cities, and sooner or later will be sky-high except under extraordinary (gamebreaking) circumstances. From my experience, demand curves only matter in the first few cities you connect within a given region; after you've built a real bona-fide city, you'll have plenty of demand for office towers even a tiny farming hamlet. What actually develops is mostly a product of land value, the amenities provided and what's already there, rather than some relationship between supply and demand. If you've read this thread or other guides, you know about demand caps and building stages, both of which are ultimately far more important for building big cities and corralling small ones than "demand" will be. I guess if you want some kind of "authentic SC4 experience," it's worth fixing; but otherwise, ehh. The fun in this game is building beautiful things and imagining the goings-on in them; a bar graph accomplishes neither of those goals.
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Aug 1, 2013 04:59
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Tindahbawx posted:
Sorry about the super-late reply! Someone put a pack together which is linked in the OP and fortunately still works: quote:Once again, gentle and kind-hearted goonkind has come to the rescue. The following pack is a collection of many common dependencies, and should cover your needs for most lots and mods you'll find. This list is, well, extensive; a full documentation is included with the download, which can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?n66339svskduc6k Hopefully this ought to solve some of your problems. And yeah, moddin' ain't easy; Oldfashioned sits pretty at something like 7000 individual files, with no duplicates. As for the CAM packs... it's a really awesome mod, but to be honest, a lot of its content is pretty old, and hasn't aged well in comparison to newer lots made over the past three years. One of my big motivations for making OldFashioned was to have a pack that had CAM compatibility, but spared the old CAM lot packs in exchange for newer content. The newer CAM lots (and newer stuff in general) tend to need a lot less dependencies, since the community has finally accepted that most of us have moved past owning a Fisher Price router. The dependency stuff is insane because the original modding etiquette was set up in the days of 56k, and also because the community is made of giant spergs who want their name/full credits on every little park bench and euro-set stop sign they model. And there are a lot of different euro stop signs. There are so many different kinds of stop signs, and if you believe the modders, the amazing part is that in Europe they all mean different things. e: also, to those seeding OldFashioned - thanks so much, it's cool to have something be useful for people! But you can probably de-seed version 2 and start seeding version 3. *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Sep 14, 2013 |
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Sep 14, 2013 08:06
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zxqv8 posted:When the hell is Will Wright going to come out of the woodwork and unveil his new city simulation project for crowdfunding? Will Wright is a narcoleptic who sleeps on a pile of money. This makes game development tough. Though that said, if he were to do such a thing I'd be willing to get all creepy and look up his address, if only so I could pull into the driveway and physically throw money at his house. My dream is basically SC4 updated for modern gameplay: gridless, free camera, with advanced terrain tools and the like. Full 3D would be awesome, and I think computers are finally getting to the point where computers can handle that with a good level of detail (so long as the simulation isn't brain-fuckedly resource-intensive like SC5.) I actually think the region system in SC4 is really cool, if poorly executed; in an ideal universe I'd like the tiles to be a bit irregular, like a county map:  As far as the diagonal bridges go, I'll be honest - I looked at that mod, but how it works spooked me. Intuitively it seems like one of the craziest/least stable mods out there, though for a modpack guy I know gently caress-all about this stuff. Wish I could be more help!
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Sep 23, 2013 19:39
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I reject the false choice created by EA's lovely sequel! There are other games which have pulled off non-grid based layouts effectively; it just requires effort, which EA seems to have spent on their awful agent system. I'm not sure how feasible this is, but one way to do it would be by generating generic-ish buildings between major lots. This way you can have your beautiful detailed high rises, and all the less notable lots between them, filling the gaps. I think we're at a point tech wise where this is possible. Alluvion has been finicky lately, I'll see what I can do for mirrors when I get home; I'm not anticipating that'll be much though, sadly.
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Sep 23, 2013 23:17
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I didn't add much to 3.0 other than new buildings, so I'm a little surprised.. The only mechanical change is the replacement of NAM with its newer version. Could you try removing the NAM from 2.0, replacing it with the most current version, and seeing if that replicates the error? There are a few options for NAM which are a little less stable (can't remember off the top of my head, but it'll be evident during the install - mostly larger network options for RHW, and something else.) I stuck with a bunch of pretty intense options for 3.0. I was under the impression that they reconfigured how some of the networks, uh, work, especially the larger RHW systems, and I wanted to make sure the new pack was forward-compatible with whatever everyone had built in 2.0. I'll take a look and see if I can replicate anything. Fortunately I've still got a copy of 2.0. Double-fortunate, because it seems Alluvion is no longer being maintained.  I can put up 3.0 and 2.0 and public trackers, but I don't have any of the other packs. To those reading the thread - if you've got a copy of GrandFromage's, Killhour's, or even the old Gigapack, please put a torrent up or host it somewhere!
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Sep 24, 2013 06:02
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LabDrunk40 posted:This was it. Downloaded the 4gb patch and everything seems to be copacetic now with the Old Fashioned 3.0 pack. Thanks! Awesome! I'll make a note in the OP when we can find somewhere to host the megapacks. Speaking of which, I'm at a bit of a loss as to where to put these things now that Alluvion is down. I'm willing to make OldFashioned public, but I'm at a bit of a loss as to where. I really can't link to major :files: websites on here. Anyone know their way around torrents enough to provide an alternative space?
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Sep 30, 2013 17:25
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Schorsch posted:Uploading done. Holy poo poo, you rule. I'll add these to the OP and remove the old links. Thanks so much!
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Oct 2, 2013 03:30
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Yeah, it's worth it. Wasn't it the case that EA isn't even hosting the various patches anymore? Honestly I've got zero experience with actual standard patches, wish I could be of more help. In other news, I've actually been playing the game! My Fhuzo region is a bit bigger (there are more cities further downriver - I'm working on one now towards its head)  Building an industrial/low-income district:  And using the elevated rail mod for the first time. Though it seems pretty crash-happy, so I might just stick to more conventional stuff. Too bad, as it's really pretty.  All on OldFashioned3.0.
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Oct 4, 2013 06:26
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Make sure you're running in hardware mode... the terrainmods in OldFashioned are HD (meaning, greater texture quality than the game was originally intended to handle,) and won't work in software mode. Also, make sure the game is set to run on just one core. Other than that, it's hard to tell what's wrong without more info. Anything you're doing that's causing a crash other than opening cities? *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Oct 22, 2013 |
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Oct 22, 2013 00:11
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You don't, really; you just need hardware for the terrain mods. Delete the terrainmods folder and it should run just fine in software (though you might not like the look of the stock terrain, especially next to all the custom buildings.)
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Nov 2, 2013 08:30
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Once again, SC4 is 10 bucks off for the next few days on Steam. Get it while it's hot! http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780
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Nov 28, 2013 08:30
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A sidewalk mod will at least tone it down, try picking one of these: http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2850 As for an actual solution - I'm trying to remember, I don't have this problem anymore. I think building cross-streets all the way through your avenue should fix it; cross-roads might do even better. I am wondering if some of the NAM configs fix it though. Sorry I can't be of more help, but again, I haven't had that problem in some time. It was mentioned a while ago in the thread and the idea is brewing - I've got half a mind to do a goofy HK/asian pack. Content would probably be a little spottier than for OldFashioned (there's not nearly as much low-density stuff, mostly,) and frankly I've never even been to Asia, so I don't know enough to get all the little details right - I'm probably not the perfect guy to do it. But it could be pretty fun to play. Is there interest for something like this?
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Dec 23, 2013 23:26
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Download OldFashioned, unzip it, delete its NAM folder and install your own. You should be good then.
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Dec 24, 2013 07:28
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:52 |
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Throw down some water lines and you oughta have some larger buildings start to pop up. That said - those look like stock buildings. Old fashioned has a plugin which blocks the maxis stuff, so maybe that's gone missing somehow?
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Dec 26, 2013 22:25
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