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How to create Puzzle Pieces Part 1

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 01:57:50 +0000

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How to create Puzzle Pieces?
A basic tutorial about making Puzzle Pieces in SimCity 4

Original written by Joris (jmvl), NAM member
Edited and translated by Maarten (mrtnrln), NAM member

1st edition (Dutch): August 2009
1st edition (English): August 2010

Contents

1. Introduction
2. What's a Puzzle Piece?
3. Requirements
- 3.1. What does SimCity 4 need?
- 3.2. What do I need?
- 3.3. Reserving ID's
4. Creating textures
- 4.1. Creating PNG files for your textures
- 4.1.1. Transparency
- 4.1.2. Cut you texture down to size
- 4.2. Convert PNG to FSH
5. Fill up the DAT-files
- 5.1. General
- 5.2. Empty tiles
6. Creating paths
- 6.1. Where are paths saved
- 6.2. The structure of a SimCity 4 Path File.
- 6.2.1. General
- 6.2.2. Header
- 6.2.3. Paths
- 6.2.4. Stoppoints
- 6.2.5. Other important notices
- 6.3. Pieces without paths
- 6.4. The SC4 Path Creator
- 6.4.1. Introduction
- 6.4.2. Single Frame View & Multi Frame View
- 6.4.3. The "Path View"
- 6.4.4. Saving path files
7. The RUL 0x10000000 file
- 7.1. What is the RUL 0x10000000 file
- 7.2. Where can I find the RUL 0x10000000 file
- 7.3. Editing the RUL 0x10000000 file
- 7.3.1. Important notice before editing the RUL0x10000000 file
- 7.4. The structure of the RUL 0x10000000 file
- 7.4.1. Introduction
- 7.4.2. The TAB-Ring section
- 7.4.3. The "IntersectionInfo" section
- 7.4.3.1. The Header
- 7.4.3.2. The Layout section
- 7.4.3.3. The Defenitions section
- 7.4.3.4. Rotating/Mirroring your Puzzle Piece
- 7.5 Defining rotated/mirrored versions of your Puzzle Piece
- 7.5.1. The Basics
- 7.5.2. Be creative!
8. Mirroring Puzzle Pieces Horizontally
9. Creating New Menu Buttons
10. Q&A
- Pathing problems
- RUL 0x10000000 problems
- Other problems
11. Further details

1. Introduction

This tutorial mainly handles the technical aspect of "flat" puzzle pieces. "Flat" pieces are two-dimenstional objects, for example the RHW ramp interfaces, the NWM transistion pieces and the Smooth Curves. "Non-flat" pieces are for example the elevated networks and the Maxis Highways. The only difference between the two is creating models for the pieces. "Flat" pieces are far more easier to create than "non-flat" pieces.

Why did we write this tutorial? Joris (jmvl): "When I was learning how to make puzzle pieces in SimCity 4 back in March 2009, I discovered that the available information about this subject was scatterd and not clear enough at some places. Therefore, I wrote some notes about creating puzzle pieces back then. However, I learned more about puzzle pieces and applied my knowledge immediatly, I had no time and motivation to keep up my notes. Therefore I decided to write a document for myself (and maybe for others too) in May 2009. However, I didn't write a thing until june 2009, when Maarten (mrtnrln) asked me by PM at SC4 Devotion what technical aspects there where for creating puzzle pieces. I said to myself: 'It's now or never!' Then I wrote this document about how to create puzzle pieces for Maarten, for others and for myself. Thanks to this manual we shall never forget the procedures for creating puzzle pieces."

Maarten (mrtnrln): "This tutorial was really helpful to me at the time. Back then I made a few puzzle pieces for the RHW v4.0, like the B-style RHW Splitters and the Cosmetic Pieces, that are now used a lot by people. In June 2010 people ask how to create puzzle pieces. I have this tutorial around on my harddisk for months, but it's in Dutch, so the majority of the community isn't able to read it. Therefore, I translated the whole document and posted the translation at SC4 Devotion, so anyone can read it. We'll never have enough tutorials, and never enough custom content creators either."
I hope you find this tutorial usefull. If the document contains any mistakes, unclear or missing information, please send me an PM. I will correct these issues as soon as possible. You can also contact me for any questions or suggestions.

Notice about the Y and Z co-ordinates
In this tutorial, the Y-axis or Y-co-ordinates are always used as the height-axis of an object. This is because in the Reader, the Y-axis is also the height-axis. However, in gMax and the SC4 Model Tweaker, the Z-axis is the height axis. See table below:

Reader axis:gMax axis:XXYZZY2. What's a Puzzle Piece?

A puzzle piece is a ploppalbe (placed manually) transit object. It's fully fuctional for traffic and UDI vehicles. Because puzzle pieces have their own paths, you can determine how traffic is going to move over these pieces. Sometimes, a more technical term for puzzle pieces is used: "Interchange-base Related Item" (IRI). Puzzle pieces often used for objects you can't just simply drag some sort network to create it. Puzzle pieces can be placed in TAB-rings, which contain rotation rings. Thanks to TAB-rings, more than one puzzle piece can be accessed by one menu button. Technical speaking, all puzzle pieces are 3D-models; each section of a puzzle piece is one S3D model. The puzzle pieces and their location in TAB-rings can be determined by codes in the RUL 0x10000000 file.

Puzzle pieces should not be confused with Transit Enabled LOTs (TE-LOTs). Both have their own paths, and both pieces can be accessed by traffic. However, there's a big difference between a TE-LOT and a puzzle piece. Puzzle pieces are ploppable sections of transport networks, whereas TE-LOTs are LOT-based. TE-LOTs are ment to look like transport networks, but in fact they aren't transport networks at all. TE-LOTs are often used for toll boths and "Transit Switches" (like stations). In the Zones View, TE-LOTs are invisible, whereas the puzzle pieces are completely visible.

3. Requirements

3.1. What does SimCity 4 need?
In order to make a puzzle piece working in SimCity 4, the following is required:
- New codes in the RUL 0x10000000 file.
- One S3D model for every tile of the puzzle piece.
- One S3D model for the preview model of the puzzle piece, containing all models from every tile.
- One path file for every tile of the puzzle piece.
- One EffDir file for the preview of the puzzle piece.
- One LTEXT file for the description (shown in-game) of the puzzle piece.
- FSH-files for textures. (Without textures, you would barely notice the puzzle piece. That would be a waste )

3.2. What do I need?
In this section, you can find software and web applications you can use to create your SimCity 4 puzzle pieces. Some programs (marked in bold text) are essential, others are mere tools that make creation of puzzle pieces easier. All of the following applications are used in this tutorial. There's a difference between software and web applications. Software requires to be installed on your computer, whereas webapplications can be used by a webbrowser (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc.)

Software:
- SimCity 4 + Rush Hour or SimCity 4 Deluxe. Without this program, creating puzzle piece has no use.
- iLive's Reader 0.93 (or higher)
- SC4 Path Creator 1.60 (or higher)
- Batch PNG to FSH Tool
NOTE: After installing the PNG to FSH tool, open the directory where you installed the tool and open groupid.txt. Replace the entire content of the file by 1ABE787D and save the file.
- A text editor, like Notebook.

Web applications:
- JMVL SimCity 4 Online Transit Modding Tools

3.3. Reserving ID's
To prevent any conflict with other pieces and NAM plugins, you require to reserve unique ID's for each puzzle piece you make. We always reserved our ID's for the RHW Mod by contacting Alex (Tarkus). In fact, it's quite unclear in the NAM Team who can be contacted for reserving unique ID's. The best place you can request for free ID's is at the corresponing topic in the NAM Creations section. The ID's you have the reserve are Instance IDs (IIDs) and HighwayIntersectionInfoID (HIIID or H3ID).

IIDs are used for identifying the files packed in DAT files. IIDs have to be unique, because otherwise they overwrite eachother. You'll need a whole range of IID's, because your puzzle piece contains more than one model or texure. It's important that you reserve a start-IID and a end-IID. Every puzzle piece has a AutoTileBase IID. This is the first IID from the tile in the upper left corner of your puzzle piece. The size of the IID range depends on the size of your puzzle piece. You can easily dertermine your IID by using the IID Grid Table Maker. You simply fill in the AutoTileBase IID, the width and the heigth of your puzzle piece and after clicking "Show IID Grid Table", a table appears on the screen.

H3IDs are used in the RUL 0x1000000 file. These IDs are required for linking the technical layout of the puzzle piece to the models, paths, etc. and for placing puzzle piece in different rotations (and mirrored versions). Usually 4 H3ID's are required (one for each rotation), but when puzzle pieces can be mirrored, you require 8 H3IDS, and ever 16 H3ID's when one way traffic is involved. Please check first how much H3ID's you actually require before reserving them.

Most of the times, the IDs are assigned projectwise. All NAM features and related mods have an IID that start with a 5, since this whole IID range isn't used by Maxis plugins. Each project has their own IID range. The RHW Project for instance has an IID of 5C###### to 5E######. The H3IDs are also assigned projectwise in a simillar way. Also, before reserving IDs, it's wise to say what you're creating. Maybe someone else is making something simmilar and we can try to fit the piece into the existing IID scheme.

A third thing that has to be unique is the name of the Effect Dir (EffDir). This links the correct preview model to the RUL 0x1000000 code. In theory, this name ought to be reserved, but in reality this is not the case. There's a huge combinations of names that can be used, and the chance that someone uses your EffDir name is very small. One syntax you can use for your EffDir name is:
preview[puzzle piece name or filename without extension][left or right]
Some examples:

EffDir Name:Puzzle Piece Name:preview_rhw4misrampsstyleaxdlRHW-4 to RHW-6C with 2 MIS sections leftpreview_rhw4misrampsstyleaxdrRHW-4 to RHW-6C with 2 MIS sections rightpreview_rhw2_to_2misRHW-2 to 2 MIS sections
As you can see, there's a logical connection between the EffDir and the puzzle piece name

4. Creating Textures

4.1. Creating PNG files for your textures
A puzzle piece is nothing without textures. It's quite important to create the textures before starting to make the rest of your puzzle pieces.

After you have reserved IDs you can start making textures. You can use any advanced image editing program (not MS Paint, but PhotoShop or the GIMP) to create textures. It's also wise to make a dedicated directory where you can save your textures. Then you can easily find them. All textures should be eventually saved in PNG-format (you may want to keep an multi-layered PSD-file or something similar for later texture editing). Depending on the quality of the texture, one tile has the following size in pixels:

Quality:Size (in pixels):SD128 x 128HD256 x 256
Usually, SD textures are used, due to smaller filesize. Also, the difference between end results of HD and SD textures is not that big.

4.1.1. Transparency
FSH-files are the texture files of SimCity 4. FSH-files contain two layers: the colored texture layer and the black-and-white transparency layer. White parts of the transparency layer show the color image of the texture in SimCity 4, while the black parts are invisible. Technically speaking, you need two images of your puzzle piece for your textures. However, PNG-files can contain transparent pixels. If you want to have transparent parts in your PNG-image, do the following:
1. Open your texture with an Image editing program.
2. Fill in the transparent surface with a color that's unique in the image (only the transparent surface has this color). Try to make it similar to the puzzle piece, so any errors later are less visible.
3. Check the RGB value of the background color and note it somewhere. If you can find a hexadecimal code (a numbering system that goes from 0-9-A-F), skip the following two steps.
4. Open the Windows Calculator and enable the Scientific Mode (View/Scientific),
5. Fill in every value separately in decimal mode (Dec) and convert it into a hexadecimal value by selecting "Hex". Note the values down.
6. Open the Alpha/Color Blender from your web browser.
7. Click on "Browse" button next to "Alpha/Color Blended image file" and select your puzzle piece PNG file.
8. Open the "Advanced settings" tab and change both hexadecimal values to the Hex values you noted down.
9. Click on "Get Color PNG" and overwrite the puzzle piece PNG file you just edited.
10. Presto! You now have a PNG file with an transparent background.

4.1.2. Cut you texture down to size
Puzzle pieces can be no bigger than 16 x 16 tiles due to the limitations of SimCity 4. Also, a puzzle piece texture must be 1 x 1 tile big. Fortunately, the Image Cutter can do the job for you:
1. Click on "Browse" button next to "Image" and select your puzzle piece PNG file
2. Fill in the AutoTileBase IID
3. Fill in the resultion in "Maximum height per image" "Maximum width per image" (default settings: 128 x 128)
4. Click on "Get Cut Images" and save the ZIP-file.
5. Unpack the ZIP-file, and there you have it: Your puzzle piece cut into pieces with a size of one SC4-tile.

4.2. Convert PNG to FSH
PNG files can't be used for textures in SimCity 4. Therefore, these files should be converted into FSH files. The
Batch PNG to FSH Tool converts PNGs to FSH textures and saves them into DAT-files. The Batch PNG to FSH Tool recognises transparancy in PNG images and uses them to build the transparency layer of the FSH file. Let's create some textures:
1. Open the Batch PNG to FSH Tool
2. Click on "Add" and select the textures you want to convert:

3. Check if your PNGs are really transparent. If you see this, your image is really transparent:

4. Fill in the corresponding Instance IDs and set the End format to A-E. This prevents the "Sidewalk Bug" to occur.
5. When you are finished, select "Save dat" to save your DAT-file. IMPORTANT NOTE: create a dummy DAT-file where you save your new textures (give it a name like "Textures_Add.dat" or something simmilar). Otherwise the Batch PNG to FSH Tool overrides the complete contents of the file.
6. Copy your textures into the DAT-file where you save your final puzzle pieces somewhere in the NAM folder.
7. Save the file and you're done!

5. Fill up the DAT-Files

5.1. General
Now our DAT-file only contains FSH-files. But there are more things required to make a puzzle piece working in-game. We are going to generate some S3D, EffDir, Exemplar, LTEXT and some dummy-SC4Path files (we are going to define the paths in the SC4Path-files in the next chapter).

The Puzzle Piece Maker generates all the files you need for "flat" puzzle pieces. The Puzzle Piece Maker currently has no support for "non-flat" puzzle pieces. The only thing you can do when creating these pieces, is copy the models from another file, re-index it and edit it manually in the Reader, but this method is not recommended for beginners. We simply start with creating a "flat" puzzle piece with the Puzzle Piece Maker:
1. Fill in the AutoTileBase IID in the "AutoTileBase IID"-field
2. When the textures have another AutoTileBase IID (which is often the case for mirrored pieces), fill in the AutoTileBase IID from textures in the "AutoTileBase IID textures "-field.
3. Fill in the width and the height (in tiles) of your puzzle piece in the "Width"- and "Height"-field.'
4. In case you make a mirrored version of your puzzle piece, check the "Mirrored version"-checkbox
5. Select "A-E" at "End Format IID"
6. Choose 0 or 3 at "Resource Key Type". RKT 0 uses one model for all zoom levels, while RKT 0 uses a different model for each zoom level.
7. Fill in the text that's shown in-game (when placing the puzzle piece) in the "Description (LTEXT)"-field.
8. Fill in the EffDir name in the "Effect Dir name"-field. This must be an unique name. You'll need this name later when creating the RUL 0x10000000 code for your puzzle piece. If you forgot the name of your EffDir, you can find it in the EffDir file under Section 13.
9. Fill in the Exemplar name (the name each exemplar of your puzzle piece gets) in the "Exemplar Name"-field. You can use the EffDir name for this (without "preview_")
10. Make sure that "Use 'default' SC4Paths" is selected in the "SC4Paths"-section.
11. Make sure every file type is selected.
12. Fill in the download location in the "Download Location"-field. This is the location where your ZIP-file is saved.
13. Click on "Build DAT Entries". A ZIP-file is now generated.
14. Extract the ZIP-file. Make sure it's extracted in a directory with the same name as the ZIP-file.
15. Open the Reader and open the DAT-file where you saved your textures.
16. Select "Edit/Insert (Batch Method)". A new screen appears
17. Click on "Browse" and go to the location where you extracted your ZIP-file and select "batch.txt"
18. Click on "Insert." You get a message all files where succesfully imported.
19. Don't forget to save the DAT-file!

5.2. Empty tiles?
Often you don't want a square puzzle pieces. Some tiles of your puzzle piece may be empty. If they are, please follow these steps:
1. Find the S3D files you don't want to use and note down their IIDs
2. Now also select the SC4Path and Exemplar files.
3. Right-click on the selection and select "Delete Entries."

6. Creating paths

Finally we have our DAT-file filled with the required files. But it's not finished yet; The SC4Path-files should be defined, as said before in chapter 5. Since we've selected "Use 'default' SC4Paths" in the Puzzle Piece Maker, all path-files have dummy paths. In this chapter we're going to change that.

6.1. Where are paths saved?
Paths are defined per tile, just like the S3D-models of the puzzle piece. Paths are saved in ASCII text in SC4Path-files. The IID of these files correspond with the S3D-model with the same IID (these two are linked together). With the IID Grid Table Maker you can make a table with all the IID's of your puzzle piece, which may help you to find the right IID for your SC4Path files.

6.2. The structure of a SimCity 4 Path File

6.2.1. General
A SC4Path-file has in general the following structure:
- Header
- Path 1, path 2, path 3, etc.
- Stoppoint 1, stoppoint 2, stoppoint 3, etc.
SimCity 4 always reads the SC4Path-file one line at the time. Commentaries always start with "--". This line will be skipped by Simcity 4.

6.2.2. Header
The header defines properties that will have effect for the whole SC4Path-file. The header is the only section in the SC4Path-file that should not contain commentaries. Only in this tutorial, I'll ignore this rule just to explain what everything does. The structure of the header of a SC4Path-file looks like this:
Code: (SC4Path-file Header)


SC4Paths           	-- Introduction line. All SC4Path-files start with this line.
1.2                    -- Version number of the SC4Path-file (1.0, 1.1 or 1.2)
1                      -- Number of paths in this SC4Path-file.
0                      -- Number of stoppoints this SC4Path-file contains.
1                      -- The "3D-Key" (0 or 1)

Notes:
- SC4Path version 1.0 and 1.1 don't give as much support as version 1.2 does. Also, the structure of version 1.0 and 1.1 is different compared to version 1.2. It's recommended to use version 1.2 for your path files to prevent any confusion.
- The "3D-Key""defines if you can choose your own path in the U-Drive-It mode. "0" enables this option, while "1" disables this option. It's advised to use "1". Technically speaking, "1" stands for 3D network pieces and "0" for draggable network pieces.

6.2.3. Paths
Depending on the number of paths, the SC4Path-file has a seperate section for each path. The paths define how people and vehicles move on a puzzle piece. The structure of one path section looks like this:
Code: (SC4Path-file Path Section)


-- car_1_2_a           	-- This comment is used for the name of the path by several modding programs
1                          -- "Transportation Type Identifier"
1                          -- Path ID. This must be unique!
1                          -- Entering wind direction
3                          -- Leaving wind direction
0                          -- "Junction key (0 or 1)
2                          -- Number of path co-ordinates.
2.5,8,0                    -- Path co-ordinates no.1 (x,z,y)
4,-8,0                 	-- Path co-ordinates no.2 (x,z,y)

Notes:
- The path name has the following structure: -- [vehicle name]_[entering wind direction]_[leaving wind direction]_[identification letter (this should be unique)]. You can leave the path name out of your path-files, but it's advised to use them anyway, because you can easily have an overview of your path files.
- The "Transportation Type Identifier" tells SimCity 4 which vehicle will be using this path. There are six known "Transportation Type Identifiers":
- 1. "car" (all road-based traffic, except for pedestrians and GLR)
- 2. "sim" (pedestrians)
- 3. "rail" (heavy rail vehicles)
- 4. "subway"
- 6. "el-rail" (elevated rail and GLR)
- 7. "mono" (monorail and (G)HSR)
- The Entering and Leaving Wind Direction tells SimCity which direction a vehicle enters the tile and which direction it leaves. The wind directions are:
- 0. West
- 1. North
- 2. East
- 3. South
- 255. Special (Neighbour connections, dead ends, etc.)
Fortunately, the SimCity 4 Path Creator has these wind direction IDs on the sides of the screen, so you can easily what the Entering and Leaving Wind Direction of a path is. For instance, the red path in the image below enters the tile at the south (3) and leaves the tile at the north (1).

- The "Junction Key" determines if a switch appears for this path in the UDI mode (1) or not (0). Although this feature is only used for rail networks, it should always be present in the SC4Path-file!
- Every path should start and end at the edge of the tile, except if the Entering and/or Leaving Wind Direction is 255. Otherwise, this path will not appear in SimCity 4.

6.2.4. Stop points
Depending on the number of stop points, the SC4Path-file has a seperate section for each stop points. The paths define where vehicles stop to prevent colisions. It's very important that the stop points are defined after all paths. Otherwise SimCity will crash. The structure of one stop section looks like this:
Code: (SC4Path-file Path Section)


-- stop_car_1_2_a 	-- This comment is used to recognise the stop points for users.
1                 	-- Left Hand Drive (2) or Right Hand Drive (1)
1                 	-- "Transportation Type Identifier"
1                 	-- Stop point ID. This must be unique!
1                 	-- Entering wind direction
255               	-- Leaving wind direction
3,6,0             	-- Stop point co-ordinates (x,z,y). There's always one stop point co-ordinate!

Notes:
- The path name has the following structure: -- stop_["UK_" in case of left hand drive paths][vehicle name]_[entering wind direction]_[leaving wind direction]_[identification letter (this should be unique)]. You can leave this note out of your path-files, but it's advised to use them anyway, because you can easily have an overview of your path files.
- Stop points also determine which vehicles give way to other vehicles and controls which traffic flows may go at stoplight intersections.

6.2.5. Other important notices
- Paths that contain errors don't show up or are red flashing when using the "ShowPaths"-cheat from ExtraCheats.dll.
- The Path and Stop Point IDs are 1 or higher.
- The Path IDs and Stop Points IDs don't depend on each other. That means you can use an ID twice: one for a path and one for a stop point. They both will have an unique ID.

6.3. Unpathed pieces/Dummy Paths

Sometimes there's no need for a puzzle piece tile to have paths. Unfortunatly, when a tile has no SC4Path-file, SimCity4 will be laggy during the construction of the puzzle piece. To prevent this from happening, you can make a Pathfile only containing a header and a dummy path. Fortunately, the Puzzle Piece Maker makes these dummy path files, so you don't have to edit the SC4Path-files for the tiles you don't want to contain paths.

6.4. SC4Path Creator

6.4.1. Introduction
In the early days of SimCity 4 Transit Modding, we didn't have any visual application for editing path files. Fortunately, one of our members, Daeley, has created a Java-application for this job, the SC4Path Creator. This tool significantly simplifies the creation of paths. The program also contains some very useful functions, such as flipping and mirroring paths, the ability to see multiple SC4Path-files at once and using a texture as background, which makes the creation of paths even easier.

6.4.2. The Single Frame View and the Multi Frame View
The Single Frame View contists out of a Path Editor, which I'll explain in detail in the next section. The Multi Path View is ment for puzzle pieces that contain more than one tile. When your piece only constists out of only one tile, you can skip the next paragraph.

In the Multi Frame View, you can see all the path files at once. You first have to define the size of the grid to the size of your puzzle piece. It's advised to use '128' as rect size instead of the standard value '150', so you have the right scale. Every tile opens a new Single Frame View window when you click on it, so you can edit the paths.
NOTE: When you open a Single Frame View window of a tile and then return to the Multi Frame View, you can add or delete pathing co-ordinates by simply clicking on the tile.

6.4.3. The Path Editor

With the Path Editor you can edit any path in any desired tile. Each path has it's own color, so they can easily be recognised. In the menu "Path Options\Select Texture", you can select a texture image as background, to simplify the path creation. Most other functions are speaking for themselves. Still I want to bring some other things to notice:
- When you have more than 6 paths at one tile, some paths will appear in the same color.
- When you flip or mirror a path, the Entering and Leaving Wind Direction aren't changed automaticly. You need to edit those manually.
- When you create a new path, the Path ID is set to 0 of that path. You need to set this ID manually to an unique number.
- When you add some pathing code into the Code Editor, check the header if it's set to the right number of paths. If not, the path you just added will be deleted when clicking on the "update"-button.
- When you've added some code and clicked on "update"-button and you see no change, then there is a bug in your code.
- Although SC4Path files can contain notes, the SC4Path Creator only allows it at the first line of a new path. When you make notes at any other place, you'll see no change when you hit the "update"-button.
- The SC4Path Creator 1.60 doesn't support stoppoints. Any stoppoints made will be deleted. It's advised to make the stoppoints at the end.
- The SC4Path Creator 1.60 unfortunatly has no save function. When you shut down the SC4Path Creator and didn't save the code anywhere else, you can start all over agian.

6.4.4. Saving path files
Of course, you'll need to save your paths somewhere! When you finished creating paths with the SC4Path Creator, you can save them with the Reader in a DAT-file by following these steps:
- Select the text from the Code Editor in the SC4Path Creator. You can use CTRL+A (Select All) to be sure everything is selected.
- Copy the code (CTRL+C).
- Select the corresponding SC4Path-file in the Reader.
- Click on "Edit".
- Select the code that's already in the SC4Path-file to override it (NOTE: CTRL+A doesn't work in the Reader).
- Paste the new code (CTRL+V).
- Hit "Apply"
- Save the DAT-file when you're done.

How to Change the SC4 Loading Screen

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:17:42 +0000

Please PM SWAT-MEDIC if you have any questions about this article.

To begin, create a PNG image with a size of 768 pixels wide, by 600 pixels tall, using Paint.net, Microsoft Paint or your favorite image editing program. If you already have an image, resize it to the above stated dimensions. This is the optimal size you'll want for your new graphic.. if your image is too small, it will begin to repeat and if it is too large it will end up being cut off. Give the file this name: file00000002.png

To insert the picture into your mod, open up Ilives Reader, which can be found on the Modds section of Simtropolis, and open the Intro.dat in your simcity4 disk 2. Press Fill the List button to the right. Notice the PNG already in the file, this is a default PNG and will not be used.
Now that you are in the .dat file, copy the two MAD files and create a new, blank .dat file. Paste the two MAD files into the new .dat. Now, right click in the open white area below your two MAD files, and find "Insert File and Compress". Find your PNG file, and open it. It is now in the .dat file. Save your file as whatever you like, and move it to your plugins folder. When you enter the game, you will now have a loading screen that is custom, and even more fun to wait for your game to start.

Here is an example:
(Click for full resolution)

^{Note: Not an actual mod.}

And you should now have a new, custom loading image! If you have any questions, feel free to PM me, I would be glad to answer them.

Modding: Basic And Advanced Tutorials

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:43:14 +0000

Please PM STomnibus if you have any questions about this article.

Introduction

I don't really have much to introduce. Basically this guide is all my own work it relates to the editing (modding) of the Maxis/EA game christened SimCity 4. Modding is basically a way of editing the current parameters of the game to something more unbalanced. (For example: a building can hold 500 people by default we can edit it to hold 5000 people.) The guide was inspired by the work of the Modd squad on the simtropolis site and contains details of how to copy some of their earliest modds. A key tool needed is the Ilive reader, which can be found in the modding section. Well that's enough information for just now have fun modding.

Beginner Lessons

Lesson 0 - How to back up simcity_1.dat
Lesson 1 - Creating odinances that bring in 5000 per resident
Lesson 2 - Here I present Fire/police station mods
Lesson 3 - The modding of traffic system
Lesson 4 - Water purification edits
Lesson 5 - Landmark mods
Lesson 6 - Park (open grass used as example) mod
Lesson 7 - The airport modifications
Lesson 8 - The school/Clinic mods
Lesson 9 - Editing low wealth building numbers
Lesson 10 - Modding the rest of the residential, commercial and industrial buildings.

Advanced Lessons

Modd tutorial advanced appendix A "An ordinance for unbalancing everything"
Modd tutorial advanced appendix B "A copy of buggies old Modd (demand editing)"
RalphaelNinja's Tutorial on Lot Descriptions and Lot Naming
How to Change the Lot Name
Finding an Unknown Property
Finding Modd Inspiration and Planning a Modd
Hexadecimal Lesson, oh joy
How To Test
Closing Statements

Let's Start Modding

Foreword: All these were created on the simtropolis web site as a means of adding new variety to the SimCity 4-computer game for the P.C. As yet they have not been tested on a Mac. I must stress now that all modding as done at your own risk and I am not held liable for any damages caused to your P.C., the game or your general will to live resulting from your usage of this guide. Good luck with the modding. - Funforfree99

Lesson 0. First Thing's First: How to back up simcity_1.dat

Find it in your program files and then maxis then simcity 4.

copy the file to your desktop and leave it there.

If anything goes wrong simply replace this file.

Lesson 1. Creating ordinances that bring in 5000 per resident.

Open your ilive reader and load simcity_1.dat

Open the analyser click tree then search

Find the plus sign beside ordinances and open it

Search for the ordinance named smoke detectors

Click it and in the data that appears on the left choose cost per resident double click this info line and edit the value that can be edited. ( a negative number means you are losing money for purpose of this lesson change it to 50000)

While we are here lets also change the flamability rating. Find the line named % effect on flamabillity and change it. (1 = normal flamability 0= no flamability 100000=super flamability)

Close analyser and save

Test out the patch.

Lesson 2. Here I present Fire/Police Station modds

As detailed above get to examplar trees.

Find the plus sign beside civic buildings and enter it.

Find large fire (or large police) station and double click it

Let's start with radius. Double click radius of effect and edit the value to 11111. clack apply and lets make this a strong radius.

You should be able to find two other radius values (center and outer strength) simply edit these two to be equal (using of course your center valueas both)

Now to add more trucks Be Warned This Could Crash Your Game If You Go Overboard With The Numbers!

ind fire: trucks and change its value to 0x00000099

Find no to dispatch and change its value to 0x99

Apply all changes and save your file.

Lesson 3. The modding of traffic systems.

Usual start up. Get to the exemplar tree.

Open the plus sign named simulator.

Open exemplar traffic simulator (hard that).

Considering that we have only worked with one value so far think of this as the next stage. Find the value named walk speed (road,rail etc)

Open this and Take a guess at a good speed for people to walk at. repeat through all values.
(Leave all values that are set at 0 to 0.)

Move on to the next line car speed and repeat 5. Continue this for bus, truck, frieght pass rail and subway

One more value to edit and that is capacity. Change these to adequat figures once again leaving 0's at 0

Apply, save and test.

Congrats another home made mod to go into your collection.

Lesson 4. Water Purification edits.

Get to examplar tree and find water.

Choose water TREATMENT (not prurification) plant

I think someone asked for how to remove the water it uses. So find water consumed and double click it and edit it to 0x00000000

Apply and either save or edit water produced from 0x00000000 to 0x00004E20 to get 20000 units of water. (maybe)

If you want to change price edit plop cost to 0x00000000000001F4 (price of wind plant)

Quit and save then test

Lesson 5 Landmark mods

Get to examplar tree and find landmarks

Find the empire state building and open it's details.

Choose plop cost and edit it's value to 0x0000000000000096 ( thats §150) I would have to leave you to discover other values although 0x0000000000000001 MAY give it to you for §1.

I'd also like to introduce at this point SFX sounds. Find sfx, query sound and edit the value so far I have found the following sounds

0x2A8C9F38 american anthem (white house)
0x4A55BA9D school sound
0x6A62C900 fire sound
0x8A4C6575 army base
0x2A55BC25 movie sound

There are many more these are simply examples.

now find examplar Lm8x4_empirestatebld

Here we should be able to find lot config property sizes and these can be edited to 0x01 and 0x01 (a 1 by 1 building)

Apply, save, close and test the new mods.

Warning: Don't try and put 1 by 1 buildings leaning over the edge of the map, the screen will just crash!
As for the park (grass mod) to §2 this just gives locations and edits

Lesson 6. Park (open grass used as example) mod

examplar tree

find park

open grass area

plop cost

Edit to 0x0000000000000000 (free) (Why should you pay for grass?)

save and test

Not a particularly full tutorial but I was basically repeating myself. Have fun dudes and Ilive thanks for the compliment!

Lesson 7. The airport modifications

Get to examplar tree

Find in park the value named airport international 1

Go to the very bottom of this set and edit the value named lotconfigdoconstruction change the value from 0x01 to 0x00 (stops need for construction) This can be reversed in buildings that do not need construction i.e. The empire state building.

This next stage I will need help with. In my original post I produced instructions to edit capacity however this just changes what we are told is the capacity when creating an airport. Any one going to tell me where I can find true info on this.

Save close and test.

Lesson 8. The school/Clinic mods

From examplar tree we want to get to civic buildings

Find large medical centre and find the value named capacity, user visible text.

Open it and put in 0x00009999 repeat this for the other value that begins with patient cap.

For any inquisitive types there is a radius to be increased (see above) and a new value named HQ boost (EQ if school building) This can be edited as high as you want health to go. Also find sfx, plop cost, and power and water consumed values both of which can be changed to 0x00000000.

Save, quit and test

Lesson 9. Editing low wealth building numbers.

Get an examplar tree open

Find residential §

Within this find cute house

In the values find residence or jobs a building ...

Edit the second value to 0x00000099 (this gives around 143 people)

Apply and save then test

You will find my lessons beginning to thin slightly I expect you to know what am talking about now and so it is less necesary to go into detail. This mod only shows its true effect on new buildings.

Lesson 10. Modding the rest of the residential, commercial and industrial buildings.

Get to the examplar tree and find residential §§

You should be able to find any house and then its number of residence (see other tutorial) there should be 4 values. We are only interested in the second from the top and the bottom values. The first value we are looking for (second from the top) gives the number of low wealth residents that live in the house. the other value (bottom) is how many medium wealth live in the building.

Now we will move on to high wealth residential. As above find a house and then find the residence value. There will be 6 values once again we are only interested in the second, forth and sixth values. In the same order as above the second is low wealth residents, forth is medium and the final value is high wealth.

All these ideas remain throughout commercial and industrial.

Save all the changes, take a deep breath that you have finished the course, test, then wait for any extra tutorials that will appear here.

Modding advanced appendices.

This was my idea to have some fun after teaching all the skills in previous tutorials. They serve no use other than to give those who feel the need to work to higher skill levels something to do. They involve the adding of examplar and sometimes some general messing up of the code. Once again it isn't my fault if you badly screw up your computer or game with these. Good luck.

Modd tutorial advanced appendix A "An ordinance for unbalancing everything"

Get to the examplar tree and find an ordinance to edit. I am starting with clean air act.

Edit the two existing properties (% on air pollution and % effect on ID demand) to 0 each

Now to add more values if you right click in the value box you should see "add property" this is what we want so click on it and an editor window will appear. Simply choose the appropriate value in the top box for example find % effect on crime. And choose it. For this example just put in float as its type and click on the edit box. Enter 0. Click accept.

Repeat the step above for any other values you feel necessary and use previous knowledge to edit its cost.

Save close cross your fingers close your eyes and test.

Modd tutorial advanced appendix B "A copy of buggies old Modd (demand editing)"

Get to the examplar tree and find a civic building to become your modifier.

Open its properties and add something like %effect on cs§§§

Edit this to as many times as you want it multiplied by.

Save test and leave comments for me.

RalphaelNinja's Tutorial on Lot Descriptions and Lot Naming

You will need ilive's Reader program (available from the Mods Download Section at Simtropolis).

Create a txt file using notepad (don't use wordpad or word as it creates weird chars) and type in your description. save.

Start up the reader program

Click on Open and navigate to the My DocumentsSimcity 4Plugins directory

Changes "files of type" to "All Files (*.*) You should be able to see .SC4Lot file.

Select your lot and click on Open

Click on the "Fill the list" and the left panel will show the files that are part of this lot file.

On a blank area on the left panel, right click and select insert file

Find the text file that you wish to insert, you can use my xa.txt as an example.

Once you have selected a text file, it will prompt you for file type. Select XA file and click OK

If prompted, No entry selected. Append to end? answer yes

Highlight the new unknown XA file and on the menu bar on top you can find "File". Click on "File" and a panel called "File Info" will pop up showing Entry ID (mem) of 20269608 00000000 00000000.

Click Edit and follow the instruction below.

Type
Group so ABCDEF01 is valid
Instance so ABCDEF01 is valid
Write down all three numbers as you will need them for your description key

Click okay

Select an exemplar file (there are usually two of them) and look for "Exemplar Name" on the right panel.

Find description key and double click on it

Enter the same address as you created above in the same order. Type, Group and Instance. Click Apply once you are done.

Now Click on save. then click on [x] to get out of the reader program.

How to Change the Lot Name

You will need ilive's Reader program (available from the Mods Download Section at Simtropolis).

Start up the Reader program

Click on Open and navigate to the My DocumentsSimcity 4Plugins directory

Changes "files of type" to "All Files (*.*) You should be able to see .SC4Lot file.

Select your lot and click on Open

Click on the "Fill the list" and the left panel will show the files that are part of this lot file.

Select an exemplar file (there are usually two of them) and look for "Exemplar Name" on the right panel. If you are using the Blank Lot, you should also see "" in the Exemplar Name field. If you cannot find Exemplar Name (3rd line from the top), check the other exemplar file.

Using Reader 5.4 or higher, you should be able to double click on the Exemplar Name (right panel) which pops up Property:

Click once on the text string under Values to overtype the string (it should be highlighted). If you begin typing now, the name will be overwritten with whatever you type. If you click on the field again, it should prompt you with a cursor allowing you to edit the name string. Type in your new Lot name.

Click Apply

If you are not using the blank lot, you will need to zero out one more value in your lot in order to make the name appear in SC4. Look for the name "User Visible Name Key" and double click. There are 3 fields in here. Simply click on each one and type 0. What you are doing is actually cancelling out the pointer to a name string text file. Click Apply.

Now Click on save. then click on [x] to get out of the reader program.

Finding an Unknown Property.

Load up your reader and go to the exemplar analyser, look through a header you are interested in, for exmaple civic buildings. look through the propertys for one named unknown.

Try to see if you can notice the value as a feature in game (write down this value at this point)

Edit it dramatically (easier to see a change), and save as a patch (.dat format) for ease of removal if there is a problem with the game.

Load up your game and test the feature you think you have edited.

If you were correct (the feature was changed) repeat steps 3 and 4 for other values, checking them all then goto 5. If you were wrong return to step 2 and try again.

Step 5, post the new propertys number (found underneath property name) on the all the exemplar propertys the reader knows

I guess I should add something here. You should really add a step in here somewhere somehow. I say this because a number of properties exist in more than one exemplar file, and it is for this reason that when looking at an Unknown property, one must also be aware of any other Exemplar files that contain this unknown property.

So if you wanted to know what (other) Exemplar file(s) contained an Unknown property: (in the Exemplar Analyser window) copy the Property value down (this will be the hex value in the "Name Value" column). Then press the Left Prop button and select the ##Unknown## item near the top of the drop down menu; and then enter the Property value in the value box, and click find and it will bring up all the Exemplar files containing this same property, and show the properties' associated value. You can also edit any of these file(s) properties in this (Left) Prop window.

Thanks to Tropod for adding this!

Finding Modd Inspiration and Planning a Modd.

Think of the type of modd you are trying to create, for example; bug fix, unrealistic (cheat), balance modd, llama division style modd (my division, for fun, unnessacary modds), or lot modd

Think of what you are wanting this modd to do, what features it needs, what it should do in game, what features it has/will have, what values will need to be changed.

Begin looking through threads for any help, or previously created modds you can look through in order to help you along.

Sit down and prepare top create your modds, keep your plan nearby and try to keep to it.

Create and test your modds, then you can make your own thread, if you are changing multiple values (like in the venice modd) test 1 edit before you sift through 100 to find a problem.

Remember modding should be fun!

Hexadecimal Lesson, oh joy

Hexadecimal is a form of counting that uses base 16 (we use decimal (a base ten system), from decem latin word for ten (although number systems also have routes in greek)anyway back to topic...) base ten uses ten symbols as numbers

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (the numbers from 0-9)

base 16 uses 16 symbols

0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F (base 16 counting from 0-15)

in base 16:

A is equal to 10
B, 11
C, 12
D, 13
E, 14
F, 15
10 is 16
15, 21
20, 32

to work a number out in hexadecimal:

(from hex to decimal) go to collums as so:

-->( /16) -->(/16) --> (/16)
4096's 256's 16's units
(*16)<-- (*16)<-- (*16)<--

(In above diagram: to calculate you collum header take the previous one and multiply by 16)

If in hexadecimal you have the number FF you have F 16's and F units (for FFFF F 4096's F 256's F 16's and F units)

Start by multiplying your 16's collum by the number in it (F translates to 15) 16 * 15 = 240

Then add your units (F units(F = 15) 240 + 15 = 255

FF = 255

for FFFF:

4096 * 15 = 61440
256 * 15 = 3840
16 * 15 = 240
1 * 15 = 15
______
total = 65535

Now did that make any sense? here is a list of numbers in base 16 up to 20

0=0, 1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=4, 5=5, 6=6, 7=7, 8=8, 9=9, A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15, 10=16, 11=17, 12=18 13=19, 14=20

This is my longest and most comprehensive lesson so far, be sure to PM me with any mistakes you find so that I may correct this work. Thankyou. Also for those not interested inb this theory stuff there are quick ways like using windows calculator

How To Test

This I feel is necessary as I am constantly asking for people to test the mods that they have created. I would ask you to create a simple test city (small size) with nothing more than a few blocks of residential connected by a long road to a few blocks of industrial. These can be powered by wind power plants. Save this city just the once and be prepared to keep adding to it.

When actually adding features keep them close to both areas and query them to test capacity. If they provide additional features (like dispatch) test these.

Quit without saving and make any changes you feel necessary. Repeat whenever you have changed something in the game

Closing statement

Feel free to distribute this throughout any sites as long as it contains the following statement:

" This guide is not endorsed or franchised by Maxis E/A or any affiliates of the company. The guide is all the work of funforfree99 and originated at www.simtropolis.com Ilive reader was created by Ilive."

Thank you and goodbye.

Funforfree99
Modd tutorial guides writer.

Please PM STomnibus if you have any questions about this article.

Increase The Number Of Fireplanes On A Landing Strip

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:42:52 +0000

Welcome to my first tutorial. I was messing around with bumping up the numbers on the total number of fire trucks per station and decided the fire landing strip (FLS) could use some updating. For this tutorial you only need the Lot Editor (LE) and Reader programs. First I opened the original FLS file in LE and as you can see below I did some personal modifications but the most important is to duplicate the prop "0x2c5a0000 Tag 1x1x3 Fireplane Gnome" which will put a second plane prop on the FLS. You can find it easily by hovering the mouse over the original prop on the tarmac.

Once the lot is set up to how you like (with the extra plane prop of course) save the file and exit the LE program. From this point you will need the Reader program.

Open your SimCity Deluxe file in the Maxis folder and open the SimCity_1 dat file. Make sure you are looking in the C: Program Files/SimCity 4 folder. Depending on your computer speed it may take a few moments for Reader to open the dat file, but when it does it will look ver similiar to this. (Keep in mind this dat file is critical to proper operation of the game, if you are going to proceed then make a copy at this point. This way, if you make any serious mistakes to the file you will not have to reinstall the game.)

From the top bar click Analyser which will open a new window. In this new window click Search located in the top left. When the program is done loading click the Tree button, if you have done it correctly your screen will look like this.

Scroll down to Civic buildings and click on it, then click on the building drop down menu. From this list you will find the "Fire Department Landing Strip" like below,

I like to maximize this window for ease of use. On the right side of the screen click on the "Fire Station Total Plane Dispatches" this will open the property screen for this function of the lot. At the bottom of the screen under "Values as text" change the value 0x00000001 to 0x00000002. Click "apply" to the right THEN click "Apply" at the bottom. Like so

Close the property window and then close the analyser window. At this point you must click "Save" at the top left of the window. You may then close Reader.

As you can see below the modification in LE and Reader worked.

In the event of a fire during the game you can go ahead and click the fire plane dispatch paddle and see you have 2 available. Sometimes dispatching both at the same time will work but not always. In the event u dispatch both but only one takes off, when the first plane is in the air the UDI Mission Indicator will pop up over the second plane on the ground, click it and accept and now you have control over the second plane and the first will respond to where ever you have placed the dispatch paddle. Or open the UDI menu for fixed wing aircraft and accept the mission and you will have control of the plane still on the ground. There are times when the second plane will not respond at all and that is just a tweek of the game being modified I suppose. But for the most part as you see below, it works. Enjoy!

Please PM STomnibus if you have any questions about this article.

Tutorial For Creating And Customizing Queries In Sc4

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:41:28 +0000
Thanks to Simtropolis member Daeley, who was of invaluable assistance in learning to make my own UI files.

This document was intended for a person with minimal to no experience in using the ilive Reader utility. If you have any suggestions as to how I could make it better or easier to understand, you can contact me via email or IM (my email is the same as my MSN address):

MSN Messenger: equinox.nls@gmail.com - AIM: Snivets1337

In order to follow this tutorial, you need to have two tools downloaded, setup properly, and configured: the ilive UI Editor/Viewer and ilive's 'Reader'. This guide will walk you through using them. DatGen4 also works; however, editing the UI files is not quite as easy as the program's current build does not have a UI viewer, nor editor.

Index to the Tutorial. Click on a link to head to that section.

• Part I: Using the UI 'Editor' to Extract the Query Template

• Part II: First-Step Editing in the Reader

• Part III: Editing the UI File

• Part IV: Basic Image Stuff

• Part V: Adding Some Numbers...

• Part VI: Query Backgrounds

• Part VII: Custom Query Backgrounds

• Part VIII: Current City Statistics

Part I: Using the UI 'Editor' to Extract the Query Template

First off, open up the UI Editor. The only thing we are going to be using this tool for is quick and easy extraction of the UI file we want to use as a template. As an editor goes, it is not nearly complete enough to be used on its own. It is good for first-time coordinate configuration, though (like if you can't get something aligned right and you're not used to the coordinate system the UIs use). Other than that, I'd recommend sticking to the basic Reader for editing and previewing of your queries.

That having been said, go to the File menu and choose "Import". Click on the top UI file and scroll through them until you find the one you want. In this tutorial, we will be altering a simple parks and recreation query, adding a goofy stat, text, and an image. Scroll through the Import menu's list of UIs until you find the one shown in the picture below:

Press "OK" and you should see your basic Parks and Recreation query in the middle of the window. Go to the File menu and this time choose "Save As". Pick a location (doesn't matter where), and type a filename, and save the file. Exit the UI editor. Now, on to the Reader!

Part II: First-Step Editing in the Reader

(Generating unique IIDs and linking them to your lots.)

Now, open up the Reader and under the File menu, pick "New". First thing we need to do is insert the query we exported previously with the Editor. Right-click somewhere in the left-side white pane and select "Insert File". Locate your UI file and hit "OK". Now you will most likely get a dialogbox asking what type of file you'd like to insert it as. Choose "Not Defined" at the top of the list (the game and the Reader both can figure it out themselves based on the code) and hit OK. A dialogbox most likely will pop up (unless you are working on a DAT file with other files already inserted) asking about you not having selected an entry and prompting whether or not to "append to end?" Choose yes. You should now see "UI file" in the left-hand pane. At this point, go up to the program's Options menu, and choose the "Options" command. Make sure "UI preview" is UNCHECKED. I will explain the reasons for this later, when we add images.

This is what the Options dialog in the Reader should look like.

(your directories may vary, of course)

Before we do any editing, there are two things we need to do. One: assign a unique instance identifyer so the game can link lots to your newly-created query and also give it the proper group identifyer so the game knows it should index this with the other queries in memory. Two: link the query to a test lot.

First off, right-click on your UI file, and select "Generate new Instance". This should give it a unique instance ID (the value in the last column of the left-hand Fileview pane). Now, at the top of the Reader window there is a row of toolbar buttons. Click on the one labelled "File Info". Hit the "Edit" button. You should have the following on-screen:

Make sure the "Group" field boxed in red has the same sequence of numbers as in the screenshot. This helps SimCity know that this is a UI file and it should consider it when a building is queried as a potential result. Copy the string of numbers you see in the Instance box, and close the two mini-windows. Save.

Now, open up the SC4Lot file correlating to the lot you want to be linked to your custom query window. Find the Building Exemplar. Your screen should look like this (values may be different):

As you might have guessed, the only property we need to change to link the query to the lot is the one highlighted in red in the above screenshot. So, double-click on this property and a dialogbox should come up. It should be found in the right-hand pane of the Reader after you click on the correct Exemplar file. In the text field towards the bottom of the dialogbox, type "0x", and then immediately press CTRL + V (the "Paste" command). You should now have the identifyer for your query ... for example, if your custom query's Instance ID was 87654321, you'd enter "0x87654321" in the text field. Then press the "Apply" button immediately to the right of the text field, then press the "Apply" below the text field to make your changes to the exemplar. Now save and close the file (File menu > "Close"), then re-open it via the Recently-Loaded Files section of the File menu. Remember, it never hurts to be safe.

Part III: Editing the UI File

(The basics: text and coordinate layout system)

First off, your Reader should be configured so that clicking once on a UI file in the Reader's file list results in a text view of the UI, NOT a preview image. You can attain this preview still; just right-click on the UI file, and select "Preview". Occasionally when you make changes to images within a file, the Reader can crash while previewing the query, so save before previewing, just in case.

Bring up the text view of your park-style query. First thing you'll notice is that indeed, there is a LOT of text. Second, the header of the file says something like "# Generated by UIEditor - Reader 0.8.9". I recommend changing this so you know what query you're working on even without previewing. This text is displayed in the image below as the text faded with a gradient. Something like "# Query for (lot name)" works well as a header, or your name, etc. Importantly, you must press "Edit" before making any changes to the query! So, press the "Edit" button at the top of the right pane, make your changes, and do not forget to press "Apply" when you are done! I've lost a lot of work simply by not remembering to press "Apply", so don't make that mistake yourself.

A typical UI file looks something like this.

Here, various properties are color-coded and will be explained.

First thing you should understand is how the coordinate system for a UI file works. On almost every line you'll ever alter or write in a UI file, there is the command area=(#,#,#,#) where # is a number, in pixels. The format is as follows: x-value for top-left corner of the area, y-value for the top-left corner of the area, x-value for the lower-right corner of the area, and y-value of the lower-right corner of the area. So a 200-pixel-wide, 50-pixel-tall image (200x50) placed in the top-middle of a query window 300 pixels wide would be defined as:

area=(50,0,250,50)

That's quite basic. The image area coordinate system is the same for text areas (IGZWinText). If you are fiddling through a UI file, and wonder what any of the tags mean that are not covered here (either dynamic [changing] or static [constant] properties), you should check out Karybdis' UI specs summary. It details all the various tags, properties, and useable values that have been decoded for use with SimCity 4's UI format, and also goes over the differences between LUA, XML, and the UI format. In addition, there is an LUA decoding thread at Simtropolis in the R&D forum. It's probably best to save looking into these until you finish up this tutorial, though ... it is a bit complex.

Moving on, another thing to know about IGZWinText lines is that you can alter the text color by altering the forecolor property. Usually, it is towards the end of a IGZWinText line. There are three values, separated by commas. The format is R, G, B, and - like in most image editing programs - values are from 0 (dark) to 255 (white). The code for black is 0,0,0; the code for solid red is 255,0,0; solid green 0,255,0; solid blue 0,0,255; white 255,255,255. You can open up Microsoft Paint and get these values by going to the "Edit Colors" panel and defining your own and just looking at the numbers in the R, G, and B text areas.

Now, if you open up a standard residential, commercial, or industrial query, you'll see IGZWinText lines, some of which have a tag id=0000#### right after the iid tag, where # is a number. Usually the numbers run in the 1000 to 1100 range. The presence of these tags tells you that the text area is a statistic field. It could be anything from the currently-occupied number of jobs in a commercial building, to the number of fire engines in a certain fire station lot. The lines of text without the ID line are simply regular lines of text, that do not change.

You may notice that when previewing queries, no caption shows up for the IGZWinText lines with ID tags. You can fix this by going into text view, and adding the tag caption="(stat)", where you put whatever text you want to see in place of (stat). For example, if you wanted to have the text "power?" show up where a text field is, you would add the tag caption="power?". Make sure you keep the quotes there, though; without them, SC4 can really get messed up in places.

Generally, you can figure out which lines go with what property by the text immediately proceeding it. In most cases, you'll see something like a line of text labelled "Pollution", and then the line right below it will have an ID ... chances are good that is the text area for the pollution variable.

Now, by this point you may have altered some text and tested it out ingame to confirm that indeed, it does not work! This is because almost all text fields in SC4 have a tag called captionres. The format is captionres={#,#}, except with eight-digit numbers in place of the #. This property is merely a group and instance ID of a text file ("LTEXT file" or "Unknown file" in the Reader's file view), which is what shows up in the game. You can have the game display whatever you put in the caption property by deleting the captionres property altogether. However, it is not recommended that you do this, because there are people who may download your lot and its query, and want to translate it into their own language, only to find that the UI files cannot contain accented characters! So, as a general rule, insert a text file just like you inserted the query near the beginning of this tutorial, except in the "Import As" box, specify "XA file". Give it a type ID of "0x2026960B", so the game knows it is a text file, by clicking on the File Info button in the Reader (again, just like you did previously in this tutorial) and pressing Edit. Then right-click on it and generate a new group and instance value (or use your own; it doesn't really matter). You can make any changes you desire to the text file by pressing the "Edit" button in the File View pane (if the file is an "Unknown file"), making your changes, and pressing the "Apply" button; or by simply making your changes and pressing "Apply" (if the file is an "LTEXT file"). Now, go back to your query in the text view, and where the text field you wanted to change is, simply change the captionres property so it is the group and instance ID of your new text file, respectively.

The easiest way to ADD a new line of text to a query is to simply take a line of static text already defined in your query window, and copy-and-paste it, changing the captionres and area properties to suit wherever you want to place it.

Part IV: Basic Image Stuff

(Images: inserting, coding, ImageRect ... )

In this section, we're going to insert a simple image with dimensions of 240 (width) by 240 (height) pixels into our parks and recreation query. Open up Photoshop, or IrfanView, or whatever you use for image editing that can export files as PNGs, and find some sort of image ... it does not matter what it is, but for this tutorial I'm going to use an abstract wallpaper I got from deviantArt. Size the image down to 320 wide by 240 tall, and save it as a PNG file. The filename does not matter.

Back in the Reader now, preview your query. You can see we need to make it bigger vertically. So, enter Text View and look at the first two lines of code (excluding anything at the top proceeded by "#"). You should find a normal area parameter. The one inside the top IGZWinGen code defines the area of the query in an absolute means. Perhaps the best way to explain this is through an example. On your parks and recreation query, you see "area=(246,202,538,322)". This means the upper-left corner of the query begins at an X value of 246 pixels from the left side of the screen, and at a Y value of 202 pixels from the top of the screen. It extends to 538 pixels from the left side of the screen, and to 322 pixels from the top of the screen.

The second IGZWinGen line declares the area of the query from the top-left corner. It always should begin at 0,0 and have dimensions equal to the overall dimensions of your query (or alternatively, the X2 value minus the X1 value from the first line, and the Y2 minus the Y1 also works). Nonetheless, we want to increase the area vertically of our query by about 260 pixels, so our image will fit comfortably. Right now the first area property is set to "(246,202,538,322)". Since we want to make it 260 pixels taller, simply add 260 onto the second Y value. You will get 582, so your new area tag should be "(246,202,538,582)". In the second IGZWinGen line, alter the area command so it reads area=(0,0,292,380). This is the general area of the query window defined starting from 0,0, the top-left corner of the area we already defined as being the query. If you do a preview of your query now, you see that it is the right size, but the "Close" button needs to be moved down. So, in text view again, look at the second-to-bottom line of text, the IGZWinBtn tag. Again, you see an area tag. As you may have guessed, simply add 260 to the second and fourth values, giving you a final area of "(131,339,281,369)". Apply the changes and preview the query. Now, on to adding the bitmap itself ...

Insert the image file you generated for this query in the same manner you inserted the UI file originally. This time, in the "File Type" box, specify PNG image. Give it a unique group and instance ID by right-clicking and selecting "Generate new group and instance". Now, we need to find a UI file with a bitmap image code that we can copy, because we don't really want to type it all out ourselves. Open up the UI Editor again, and find any query with a sort of status icon in it ... examples are the power plant icon, the water pump efficiency icon, the fire station efficiency icon, etc. Open them up and save them. Return to the Reader, and insert the UI file you just saved, and go to "Text View". Now, find the line that is the IGZWinBMP and select the whole thing and copy it. Go to the text view of your own query, and paste it right below the IGZWinText lines. First off, delete the ID tag from the line of text, because this bitmap is not going to be a status icon; rather, just a static image. Change the area property to reflect where you want to place the image ... for this example, we will use the values "(26,70,266,310)". Now, plug in your group and instance IDs into the image property. The last thing we need to change is the property towards the end of the line called imagerect. All this property does is define the area of the image from 0,0, much like the second IGZWinGen line does in the query window's definition. So, as you may have guessed, you should enter the value "(0,0,240,240)". Now, save the file, close it, and re-open it. Sometimes the Reader can crash while previewing queries with images you just inserted, so I find it better to be safe and simply re-open the files each time. Once you've done that, preview the query.

Here's what you should have so far ...

Part V: Adding Some Numbers...

(Playing with the "Goofy Stat Responsive Curve" property and your UI)

Next thing we are going to do is add some numbers, for statistic purposes. Good examples of this in the game by default include the 'Pidgeons Perched' number for the Mayor Statue, and 'Number of Potatoes Peeled' for the Army Base.

To get this property to work, you need to do two things. One is add the exemplar property "Goofy Stat Responsive Curve" to the lot you want to attach it to's Building Exemplar, and two is to add a IGZWinText line into your query with an ID of 0000106b. First, we will go over how to add the exemplar property and what exactly each statistic means.

Open up the Reader, and open your SC4Lot file (if it is a ploppable lot), or the SC4Desc file (if it is a growable lot), and find the building exemplar. Recall that this is the one with the non-LotConfigObjectData properties. Right-click in the right-hand pane of the Reader and select "Add Property". Under the dropdown list, scroll down until you find "Goofy Stat Responsive Curve". Press the "Apply" button at the very bottom of that window, and you should see it added to the list of already-present exemplar properties. Now, double-click on that property and the dialog will popup again. This time, press the "Add" button four times. Proceed to edit the values in normal decimal form (10-digit, non-hexidecimal) according to the following constraints:

The first value controls the deviation of the value below the median (see note below),

the second value controls what the lowest value the statistic can be,

the third value controls the deviation of the value above the median (see note below),

and the fourth controls the highest it can be.

NOTE!

Don't worry too much about the first and third values. I believe they have something to do with the deviation of the value from the midpoint of the two numbers you specified ... thus, if you make the first value (the negative one) farther from 0 than the third (the positive one), I woud guess the value would be weighted more towards the minimum you specified and making the maximum value less likely to be resultant. If you are confused or this method does not work for you, don't get frustrated; move on with the tutorial. This part is not nessecary for basic query-making and is more of just a little extra feature.

We are going to make our statistic report the "Visitors Per Month". Of course, this is not reflective of anything occurring in your city, but instead is a randomly-generated number that fits the constraints you set in the "Goofy Stat Responsive Curve" property. For our purposes, the average number of visitors per month will be around 320,000, so we will use a minimum value of about 250,000 and a maximum of 480,000. We want the value to be above the median of the two numbers most of the time, so we will set the first value to "-80000", and the third to "100000". Your values should be, in order, -80000,250000,100000,480000. Now press "Apply" at the bottom of the dialogbox, and save your lot file. Close it, and re-open the query.

Back in text view, we know we need to now make the value whose parameters we just set appear in our query. This is quite easy; in fact, it functions exactly the same as the other properties we have dealt with with id tags. Simply take the line of text that correlates to the park's monthly cost, copy it, and paste it right below your code for the PNG image. Change the id tag from "0x00001010" to "0x0000106b". Change the area parameter by moving it down twenty pixels. As you know, this means adding twenty to the second and fourth values. You are also going to want to move your image down 20 pixels so you have room for the text to fit comfortably. The area tag for the IGZWinBMP should now be (26,90,266,330), and the tag for the IGZWinText should be (196,64,278,82). If you add the caption property, you can preview your query to make sure everything looks good so far.

Now, all you need to do is copy the IGZWinText line without the id property, and paste it below the one you just edited, and again increase both Y values by 20. Change the caption property to be "Visitors this Month", or whatever you would like. Finally, either set the captionres property to null by using 0,0, or using the group and instance IDs of a text file, inserted as was mentioned earlier in this tutorial. Now, go ingame, and everything should work A-OK.

Part VI: Query Backgrounds

(Changing between park, R/C/I, utility, etc. appearing query windows)

Right now, your query looks like somebody took the default parks and recreation query and altered it, which is exactly what you did. However, if you want to make your query appear to be a different style, you can change the background image. For parks and recreation, it is a nice green tone. For utilities, it is yellow. For residential, it is green again; for commercial, blue; for industrial, yellow, and so on. Changing between these appearances is extremely easy, if you know the right values to plug in. All you need to do is to alter the image property in BOTH IGZWinGen lines to point to a new image. Right now, both of yours should be set to "1ABE787D,14416224". Below is a small table of values you can use for changing background images (and yes, you can make your own, that is the next section of this tutorial ... you can skip ahead if that is what you are interested in doing):

Parks and Recreation (1ABE787D,14416224)

Landmarks and Rewards (46A006B0,14416225)

Utilities (46A006B0,1441622A)

Fire Department (46A006B0,14416223)

Police Department (46A006B0,14416227)

Industrial Building (46A006B0,14416226)

Commercial Building (46A006B0,14416222)

Mass Transit (46A006B0,14416229)

Garbage Disposal (1ABE787D,14416220)

(hospital query is the same image as the landmarks')

(residential query is the same image as the parks')

(education query is the same image as the landmarks')

Part VII: Custom Query Backgrounds

(Creating your own unique query backgrounds)

This is a very easy process if you understand the basic concept of how SimCity 4 takes a 129 by 129 pixel image and turns it into a query window almost 300 pixels wide by a couple hundered tall without obvious distortion. The way it works is remarkably simple ... first, the game divides the image into nine equally-sized pieces, like this:

From there, it takes the query and looks at the location of the upper-left corner of the area, and it places the portion of the diagram labelled "1" there. Then, it finds the upper-right corner of the area, places the "3" portion of the diagram there. It does the same for the lower corners, placing the "7" in the lower-left, and "9" in the lower-right. At this point we have something that looks roughly like this:

From there, the game fills in the top with section 2, tiled as many times as it takes to fill up the gap. Then it fills the bottom with section 8, again, tiled as many times as it takes to fill in the gap. It does the same for the left and right sides (sections 4 and 6, respectively). Same thing goes for the middle section, except it gets tiled horizontally AND vertically.

Based on the way queries work in SC4, you probably have realized you can't make anything really fancy serve as the background image while keeping the image only 129 by 129 pixels. However, whereas it is possible to use images greater than 129 by 129, it is not recommended, even if the size of the image you make matches the size of the query window exactly. Oftentimes, even when the two match, the game will attempt to stretch the image anyways, for reasons I don't know. As a result, you get a nice big stripe running down the middle of your otherwise-perfect query about 80 to 90% of the time. You can always try counteracting this by making either the imagerect property one pixel higher in each direction, or by making the area property one pixel smaller than the actual image ...

Here are some examples of query windows that would look pretty good stretched up to size:

Thanks to Tragicomicus2004 for the designs.

If you want to see some excellent custom queries (and excellent BATs!), check out Cerulean's stuff. Almost all of his stuff (the non-BSC stuff anyways; not sure about those) have custom queries! Also, custom queries can be found in every one of the NDEX series of BATs and lots. (UPDATE: this is no longer true; those queries caused crashes and have mostly been replaced by a standard NDEX query used for all lots of the same type - one for commercial and one for residential.)

Part VIII: Current City Statistics

(Adding information about the current city's status)

This is perhaps the most useful part of being able to make custom queries. Using LUA scripting commands pre-programmed into the game's engine by Maxis, you can call up all sorts of statistics about the city you're playing when you query a lot. For example, look at this screenshot of a modified commercial query (from the RCI query upgrade mod) ...

The way to add these items to your queries is remarkably simple. There are two things you must do: one, insert a text file in the XA format (so it shows up as an "Unknown file" in the Reader's file list). Then proceed to edit it and type what you want to see in the query window, with one special change. Where you want the statistic to be, you place one of the many many many values the Maxis programmers allocated to be useable for retreiving statistics ... a few of them are listed below.

#game.g_power_plant_count#

Total number of power plants in the active city

#game.g_power_pole_count#

Number of power poles constructed citywide

#game.g_unpowered_building_count#

Number of unpowered buildings

#game.g_water_source_count#

Number of water-generating/pumping facilities

#game.g_water_pipe_count#

Pipe segments constructed

#game.g_water_unwatered_building_count#

Number of unwatered buildings

#game.g_landfill_capacity#

Capacity of garbage (in tons) that can be handled

#game.g_pothole_count#

Low-funding-induced potholes in the road infrastructure

#game.g_city_tile_size#

Total tiles in the city (4096, 16384, or 65536)

#game.g_[value]_tile_count#

Number of various types of tiles in the city

values: road, rail, subway, highway, street, groundhighway, elevated_rail, monorail, bridge, water, avenue, dirtroad

#game.g_city_[V1]_population#

Total values reflecting the current city only...

#game.g_region_[V2]_population#

Total values reflecting the entire region...

[V1] - this can be replaced by several values.

They are: rci (total residential, commercial, and industrial), r (residential only), c (commercial only), i (industrial only), r1 (R§), r2 (R§§), r3 (R§§§), ir (agricultural), id (dirty industry), im (manufacturing industry), iht (high-tech industry), co2 (CO§§), co3 (CO§§§), cs1 (CS§), cs2 (CS§§), cs3 (CS§§§), workforce (employed citizens)

[V2] - this can be replaced by several values.

They are: rci (total residential, commercial, and industrial), r (residential only), c (commercial only), i (industrial only), workforce (employed citizens)

#game.g_day#, #game.g_month#, #game.g_year# (measured from 2000), #game.g_year_count# (from 0)

#game.g_(value)_tile_count#

Tiles of the specified type in the current city

game.g_current_id_cap

game.g_current_im_cap

game.g_current_iht_cap

game.g_current_co2_cap

game.g_current_co3_cap

game.g_current_r1_cap

game.g_current_r2_cap

game.g_current_r3_cap

game.g_tax_rate_neutral

game.g_num_rzone_ld_tiles

game.g_num_rzone_md_tiles

game.g_num_rzone_hd_tiles

game.g_num_czone_ld_tiles

game.g_num_czone_md_tiles

game.g_num_czone_hd_tiles

game.g_num_izone_r_tiles

game.g_num_izone_l_tiles

game.g_num_izone_h_tiles

Note that values with a "g" after the game. are 'global' values, meaning they are applicable to the whole city. Values with an "a" after the game. are averages.

You can also mix these values with a string of regular text. The # symbols signify the beginning (and end) of the variables, so as long as you don't use them outside of the variables, it should work fine. For example, here is a line of code from the NDEX queries depicting the cap status of the current city, for CO§§ and CO§§§, all in one line:

CO§§/§§§ Caps: #game.g_current_co2_cap#%/#game.g_current_co3_cap#%

Ingame, you get something that looks like this: "CO§§/§§§ Caps: 76%/82%". Pretty simple, eh? It's just a matter of knowing all the various LUA constants! I've listed most of the useful ones here, but in the future I will update this file with more details and more values. This is just intended as a start. If you would like to know some more, and are not intimidated by Maxis' LUA code, then check out the main LUA constant script (51 KB, extracted from SC_1.dat).

This is still a work in progress! Please see my thread on Simtropolis for feedback and requests, both for new tutorials and revisions on old ones. The clearer I can make these tutorials, the better they will be, and I appreciate any input you provide. Feel free to suggest areas where I can improve on my explanations OR areas I could add altogether.

Bullet Train FAQ

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:40:04 +0000

There are 5 BTM files in total:

-BTM version 1 and 2. Install one of these mods. (Required)

-BTM train textures 500în and 800în. Install one of these mods to replace the default monorail train with a custom bullet train. (Suggested)

-BTM HSR patch. Only install this if you want to use the BTM with the HSR mod. (Optional)

Screenshots of the BTM shown with other networks:

Version 1 with the 800în train

Version 2 with the 500în train

BTM used with HSR with and without the BTM HSR patch

(Version 1 on the left, version 2 on the right)



Table Of Contents:

1. What is it?

2. So if APTX created the BTM then why did you upload it?

3. Why are there two versions?

4. Why are there no stations included?

5. Why did my monorail network turn into the BTM? Can I still use the monorail with the BTM installed?

6. Why are monorail textures sometimes appearing along my bullet train tracks?

7. Can I use HSR with the BTM installed?

8. This "bullet train" mod doesn't seem any faster than my monorail network. What gives?

9. Why can't I drag the BTM over hilly terrain?

10. Who can I thank for uploading this mod?

11. What does the future of the BTM hold?

What is it?

[top]

The Bullet Train Mod (BTM), also known as the Shinkansen Mod, is a modification to the monorail network created by APTX. The Bullet Train mod completely replaces the monorail network in SC4, unlike the High Speed Rail (HSR) mod.

So if APTX created the BTM then why did you upload it?

[top]

The mod has been unavailable for download because APTX's site has been down for some time. It was later re-released on another site, but this mod is no longer available for download there either. I tried to reach APTX to ask him about uploading it to the STEX but I never received a reply. I then contacted ST about the possibility of uploading it to the STEX and Dirk and the STEX Staff were nice enough to give me the green light to upload the BTM to the STEX as long as credit was given to APTX. I'd like to thank them for the opportunity to host one of the most popular hard-to-find mods on this exchange.

Why are there two versions?

[top]

There are two versions of the mod to let you, the user, use the texture you like. The first version has a thinner track and a more basic appearance, whereas the second version has a thicker, bulkier appearence.

Why are there no stations included?

[top]

Think of it like this, did you get any stations included when you downloaded the NAM? We all like to use different stations so the option of what to use is up to you. While there are not many BTM stations in the SC4 community, the BTM is fully compatible with monorail and HSR stations. Perhaps now that this mod is hosted on the STEX more stations will be made.

Here are some links to a few known true BTM stations:

Bullet Train Mod Station

Tokyo Station (Also connects to El-rail)

Sjinuya Station (Make sure you download both links, Westside and Eastside)

Why did my monorail network turn into the BTM? Can I still use the monorail with the BTM installed?

[top]

The Bullet Train Mod completely replaces the monorail network in SC4, unlike the High Speed Rail (HSR) mod. If you are going to use the BTM, then you will have to sacrifice your monorail network. If you had monorails before downloading this mod, they will automatically change into the BTM.

Why are monorail textures sometimes appearing along my bullet train tracks?

[top]

Like all mods, the BTM is a beta and a work in progress. Some textures may not have been made yet and as a result, the BTM will show monorail textures. However this is rare and usually occurs when trying to make an abnormal junction or overpassing a new network that does not have BTM-compatible textures (such as when a new RHW mod is installed).

Can I use HSR with the BTM installed?

[top]

Yes. However you will need to download a patch made by warrior that will allow both networks to function.

-You may have to redraw your BTM network if you install this patch.

This "bullet train" mod doesn't seem any faster than my monorail network. What gives?

[top]

The BTM originally contained its own traffic simulator, which increased the speed and capacities of the monorail network. This simulator is now outdated and incompatible with the current NAM Simulators. After lengthy discussions, the NAM team suggests that Simulator "Z" is the best simulator to use with this mod, on any level, because it increases the speed and capacity of this network.

Why can't I drag the BTM over hilly terrain?

[top]

A slope mod is included witht the BTM, which will automatically give the mod a realistic slope when dragged over uneven terrain. In the more hilly or mountainous areas, the BTM may not drag because the slope of the terrain is too great for a bullet train network. An easy fix to this is to level out some of the terrain around your bullet train network or make a tunnel. If you drag the BTM from one side of the hilly section to the other, you may get lucky as the mod may automatically cut a properly sloped section through the terrain. The slope has to be smooth, we don't want these bullet trains built on jagged terrain, imagine how bumpy it would be for the passengers!

Who can I thank for uploading this mod?

[top]

APTX: Creator of version 1 and 2 of the BTM, 2 train skins, a custom BTM simulator (increased the speed of the monorail network) and other modifications.

Warrior: Made the mod compatible with the HSR mod and the NAM. He also created several textures, fixes and modifications to the mod, and provided technical assistance with the assembly of the mod uploaded to the STEX.

Haljackey: Included documentation, assembled the mod, provided pictures and this FAQ for the BTM upload. Lobbied to get the mod hosted on a public exchange and make it compatible with the NAM.

Tarkus: Provided technical assistance for the BTM simulator to make it compatible with the NAM simulators and provided various technical support.

Dirk and the STEX staff: For allowing this wonderful mod to be hosted on the STEX.

What does the future of the BTM hold?

[top]

It's uncertain what will become of the BTM down the road. With its release on the STEX, it may become more popular and stations, patches and new versions of the mod may be made. Only time will tell for sure.

If you would like to ask any questions that were not covered in the FAQ, or want to post a comment, please do so Here or send a PM to Haljackey.

This post has been promoted to an article

How to Organize Your In-Game Menus

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:39:26 +0000
Please PM Soldyne if you have any questions about this article.

With all the plugins and BATs and Lots and Mods we shovel into our game our menus are bound to get full with all kinds of nifty little toys. Unfortunately that list can become quite cumbersome rather quickly. The worst part of it is that when we install a package of lots such as a modular park set, it is quite often the case that not all the lots in the set are all nicely bundled in the same area. Whats worse is when you have many lots that you use over a over again but those lots are stretched out over your ever expanding menus and you spend all day just scrolling through your parks so you can plop a single flower garden.

What if you could rearrange your menus? What if you could put all your favorite parks and tranist lots at the top of the menu and all the lesser used pieces at the bottom? well, with a little patience and planning you can.

What you will need is ILive's reader and this guide.

Step 1
Go into your game and really look over your menus. Look at your parks menu, transit menus, land marks and rewards lists. Think to yourself how your game playing experience could be made simpler and more efficient if only things were moved around a little bit. Make a list of exactly what lots you want and in what order you want them.

If you find a park lot that you just dont use, the best thing to do is delete it from your plugins folder. If you dont use it then why spend the time to load it?

Step 2
Once you have the order of each menu established, you must start to assign some numbers to them. The smaller the number the closer it will be to the top of the menu. You can use negative numbers as well. The range of numbers that I have experimented with is -10000000 to 10000000 although you really should not need to use such a wide range. I use -10000 to 10000. Granted, I don't have that big of a parks menu, but I have a personal numbering strategy that works for me and allows for future additions without me needing to renumber things later.

Lots can have the same number assigned to them (you can assign the number 2000 for example to all of your BSC parks). This will ensure that all those lots will remain together in the menu but their individual order may be random.

Please note that the default maxis lots cannot (and should not) be easily altered with this method. Because of that you should assume that all default maxis lots are numbered as 0. Anything with a negative number will be above the default lots in the menu and anything with a positive number will be below. Anything not numbered or numbered as 0 will appear mixed in with the default lots.

Step 3
Quit your game (if it is still running) and make a copy of your plugins folder. For now you can just copy it to your desktop if you like. This is to make sure that if you make any wrong or undesirable changes you wont have to worry.

Step 4
By now you should have downloaded ILive's Reader. Get ILive's Reader from Simtropolis (or anywhere else you can find it). I have tried this method with SC4Tool and other lot manipulation tools but ILive's reader is the easiest one for this purpose. For those that know ILive's reader you probably know where I am going with this, for those that are new to modding lots, this program can seem a little daunting at first. Just pay attention to the steps and all should be fine. As long as you have a backup plugins folder you might want to experiement with this progam, you may find it helpful!

Step 5
Open ILive's Reader and select the "Open" icon from the top left corner. Drill down through the folders until you find the plugins folder you wish to manipulate and select one of the lot files (or a .dat file which contains the lot) you wish to rearrange.

Step 6
Now that the lot is loaded in the Reader, you should see three sections of the program on the screen:
The left column has the file name with an icon.
The middle column has a bunch of cryptic nonsense like LD File, Exemplar File, PNG File.
The right column has even more cryptic nonsense which is different depending on what you select from the middle column.

In the middle column you should find at least 2 lines which start with "Exemplar File". If you selected a file with one lot there will be two of these. If you opened a .dat file with many lots then there will be two of these lines for each lot in the .dat.

Start selecting these "Exemplar File" lines and look at the right hand column. One of these files will produce a large number of "LotConfigPropertyLotObjectData" lines. This is not the correct Exemplar File line. Keep selecting different Exemplar file lines from the middle column until you see things in the right column such as bulldoze cost, park effect, item name, and so forth.

When you have a correct Exemplar file line, look in the right hand column for a line that reads "item order". Chances are it will not be there.

If "item order" IS in the right column, you can simply double click the line and a new window will appear. In the center of this window will be a box that contains the word "value" and beneath it a strange number that looks like "0x##########". For those of you that are not math or computer science majors this is a hexidecimal number. Dont worry about that. Double click on the "0x#####" thing and type in the number you want to give to this lot which you determined in Step 2. You can enter the number in hex (not recommended) or enter it with a regular decimal number (better). Only use whole numbers and do not include commas, decimal points or letters or leading zeros. You can and must include a minus sign at the beginning if you wish to assign a negative number. When you are done entering the number, simply click on the apply button at the bottom until the small window dissapears. This sometimes needs two clicks (there is a reason for this but it is not worth explaining). The program will translate the decimal number you entered into a hex number.

If "item Order" is NOT in the right column, you first need to right click in an empty space of the right column and select "Add Property" from the list. When you do, a window will appear. At the very top of the window will be a box with the label "Name" and a value in the box which reads "!Unknown!". Drop the list down and find the value "item order". The list is very long but is in alphabetical order. Jjust be patient, its there. When "item order" is selected click on the button to the right that says "add" and a box will appear to the left under "value". Enter the number for the lot that you assigned in step 2 above. Use only whole numbers, no commas, no letters, no points, no leading zeros. You must put a minus sign in front of the number if you want a negative number. When the number is entered, hit the apply button at the bottom until the window dissapears.

Step 7
Once the "Item Order" line in the right column has been updated to your satisfaction, click on the icon of your lot in the left column and click the save icon at the top left. If you dont save then all this work will have been for nothing.

Step 8
You can either repeat the above steps to order more lots or close ILive's Reader and open SC4 to check out your menus and make sure things are working as planned. Continue all of these steps until your lots are ordered to your pleasure or until you go mad - whichever comes first.

---------------------------------------

It should be noted that many of the better BATer's and Lotters out there already know how to do this with their lots. So if you have a lot of PEG lots (usually given positive numbers) or any of my Urban Beautification Lots they will already be numbered. I use -6000 to number my lots to ensure they appear at the top of my menu. You may want to put them somewhere else. I say this because you may number a lot with -1000 and expect it to be at the very top. If you use my lots they wont be, so be careful before you think that things are not working right.

When you are playing around in ILive's reader you can mess with the other stats, however, many of the stats for a lot should not be changed. Use your best judgement and remember to have backups!

Good luck and happy gaming.

If you have any questions about this article, please PM Soldyne.

How to Create and Mod Textures

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:36:59 +0000
Authors: Un1 and Deathtopumpkins

If you have any questions about this article, PM Un1 or Deathtopumpkins for more information.

Part 1 - How To Create and Mod Base & Overlay Textures

Before we get started, a common knowledge and the having of the following programs is required.   (Click to go to the download link)

A Photo Editing Program (MS Paint is an example)
SC4 Tool
Lot Editor
IrfanView

Just a note about the lot texture I am using, this texture I am using is just a easy texture I made so I can make invisible base textures.

Step 1,
Make the texture using any photo editing program.
Here is my example, (Read the texture note above for any questions on the texture)

Link to better quality .png.

Step 2,
Resize the texture to 128x128.
Try to use IrfanView for this, it is much more friendly to use.

Step 3,
Save the image as any name you desire, though, I like to save it as a texture code. (It keeps things simple in the long run)

Step 4,
Load SC4Tool and select the Texture Creator.

Step 5,
Select the .dat file you wish to load the texture into.
*Anyone who tries this out after the LAM (Landfill Addon Mod - by un1) is released, please don't put your textures in it*

Step 6,
Then select add texture.

Step 7,
Select the folder that is circled in the next photo and find your texture.

Step 8,
Make sure the circled items below are selected.

Step 9,
Insert the texture IID (Identification hex number) , you can get your own range here. If you do not use your own specific range, duplications can occur and produce unwanted results in the game. To avoid this, please request your own range.

*NOTE: Do not copy the above hex. This is my own and will cause conflicts.

Insert the first texture in your range in the selected area.
I suggest that you don't click on the "next free IID" button. This will require you to re-paste the IID.

Please do not put 0xF45AAA into that area as it is my personal IID. Get your own here

Then click on "OK".

That is all for making the textures, now you want to check the following things to make sure it works right.

Check 1,
Right after you click "OK" you close the add texture box then click on the texture you just added.
If it worked right it should look like this,

Check 2,
Then you open lot editor to see if it got into the list. If it did not make into this list, you either did not insert the correct hex, or something else went wrong. Re-read the above steps and try again.

Check 3,
Now check to see if the texture goes onto the lot the right way.

This concludes part one. Part two covers transit texturing.

Part 2- Transit Textures

Necessary Tools:
-Ilive's Reader
-FiSHman
-photo editing program (MS Paint will suffice)
-SC4Tool

Note: In this article I will be replacing the orthogonal road texture with a slightly modified one to match the SCRT's upcoming Transit Retexturing Project.

STEP 1:
Open the Reader, and select "Texture Viewer" from the Tools menu.

Note: This only works for the Maxis network textures. To get any custom ones, such as for the Rural Highway, you must open the dat and extract the textures, by selecting them all, right clicking, and clicking "Save Decoded File." If you use this method, skip steps 1-3.

STEP 2:
Expand "Street/Road/Rail/Highway" and then "Zoom 5," and click "Road." Don't panic if at first you don't see anything. Even on my high-end PC it takes a minute for them to load.

STEP 3:
Scroll down until you come across the orthogonal road textures. Then right-click on the one entitled "0x00004b14" and click "Save FSH." It then saves the .fsh file for that texture somewhere on your computer, usually in the last folder you had open (i.e. when I just did this it saved it in the folder containing the pictures for this article.

STEP 4:
Open FiSHman, select Open, and browse for your file. When open, right-click the bitmap icon, and click "Export... Color."

When saving the file, be sure to save it with the same name as the original .fsh file. This is not absolutely necessary, just extremely helpful later on when you go to putting it back in the game. It will always begin with "0x," and in this case it's "0x00004b14." Then in the "Save as type" field, save it as a .png (Portable Network Graphics). For the purposes of this article, it does not matter where the file is saved to.

Once you've saved the color png, do the exact same thing for the alpha, just add something on to the end of the filename to distinguish it. I usually use a lowercase a.

STEP 5:
Close FiSHman and open the .png file in the image editing program of your choice, make your desired changes, and save. When you have all the textures you wish to make a texture mod out of, open SC4Tool.
Here's the texture I'm using:

STEP 6:
Once SC4Tool opens, select the "Create your own textures" button, and wait as the program loads all of the texture files.

When it's done loading, you should be at this screen:

Click the Star to make a new dat file. You should then be at this screen:

Despite what the window's title says, this is in fact the "Save..." window, and is where you will name your dat file you're going to create. The name has no effect on the mod, so it doesn't really matter what you name it.

STEP 7:
Once you click "Open," it returns you to the "Texture Creator" window. From there, click the little picture icon, and it opens this window:

You then need to check the "Disable TGI-checking" box, or you'll get an error when adding textures, and select the "Traffic texture" radio button.

STEP 8:
Click the folder button next to the 128x128 field in the Bitmaps box. In the window that comes up, browse to wherever you saved the .pngs, select 0x00004b14, and click Open.

Then click the camera icon next to the folder icon you clicked on. This tells SC4Tool to automatically copy this texture for all zoom levels. Some people prefer to do a separate texture for each zoom, but that is not necessary, so I don't usually bother.
Then repeat what you just did for the alpha textures, and you should end up with this:

(yes I'm aware that my images are JPEGs, I had to convert them to post on here, and so just used the converted ones for the purpose of this article)

STEP 9:
The last thing you need to fill in for this texture is the IID (Instance ID), which goes in the field in the top left. Remember back when I had you name the .png after the .fsh? That was because the.fsh was named with the IID for that texture, and now, since the .pngs are named with the IID, we can use that as reference for entering the IID. But it's not exactly that simple... The last digit of the IID must be changed to 0 to work, as the last number of the IID stands for the zoom level, and the 0 acts as the overall one.
If your window now looks like this, you're good:

Then just click OK and you're good. A folder will appear in the panel on the left with your textures, and you can keep adding more by repeating the last few steps. Once all of the textures are in there, just close the window, move the dat into your plugins folder, and start the game! It automatically saves every time you add a texture.

Note: It is safe to delete the .sav file accompanying your dat when you are finished.

How To Switch From Right To Left Hand Drive

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:36:42 +0000
There are two major steps.

Part one of two
1. Locate and go to the directory where you have installed SC4, usually it is C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe
2. Within this directory, you will see a folder name English, it should contain a file called SimCityLocale, if it does, you are looking at the correct folder.
3. Now rename this folder from English to UKEnglsh (not a typo!)

Part two of two
4. From your START menu, select Run.
5. Type in regedit into the field and click OK.
6. On the left hand directory tree, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Maxis > SimCity 4 > 1.0
7. Change the Language value by right clicking it and selecting Modify.
8. Leave it as Hexadecimal and enter 13 into the Value Data field. Click OK.

With these two major steps complete, your sims will now start driving on the Left! If you wish to switch from the Left to the Right - rename the folder to English in step 3, and enter 1 into the Value Data field in step 8 instead.

How to Create T21 Exemplars

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:35:45 +0000

If you have any questions about the content of this article, please pm Xyloxadoria

Introduction

This is a tutorial on how to create T21 type exemplars. Before we start, here are a few basics about them:

T21s can be put on any transit network you want.
If you are making your own transit network, you can use T21s to add as much detail as you want to them, T21s don't have the polygon limit that transit models have
After you create a T21, it will always appear on the network
Most transit tiles already have T21s, you will mostly be adding to them.

In order to make them you will have to know how to use reader and Lot editor
Okay lets get started. Today we will be adding highway mast lights to the RHW 6-C Here is a picture of what it will look like when it is competed:

As you can see in the picture, there are the competed lights, and the normal barriers. The normal barriers have already been added using T21s, so we can use that data and add our own.

*You must download Filesfort21examplartutorial.zip in order to have the necessary files for this to work.

Finding The File

In order to get them you will need reader. Go to reader and open the main RHW file.
After it opens, press the exemplar analyser button. A new window will pop up. When it pops up press the search button, then press the filter button. Un-check all on the right side then only leave "21 network lots" checked. Then press refresh. Your screen should then look like this:

Close out of the filters window, and you should now only have T21s listed. Now you need to find the file for the existing RHW 6-C center barrier. Lucky for us, the RHW creators were nice enough to label it for us. Its near the bottom of the list and is called "RHW-6C-Barrier-Center. Selecet that file, and right click on it. After that, select "sync with file ?" and it should go to the file you will need in the RHW DAT. Right click on the file that is now selected , and pick " Copy File(s)" Then, go into the blank.dat on the left, right click in the middle blank area, and pick "Paste File(s)"

You are now done with what getting the file that you will need to change, so now all thats left to do is change it. Keep the new file you made open, you will need it later.

Exemplar Value Information

In the file, you will notice a bunch of values which i will explain here:
LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes defines what zones your props will appear on, make sure to put all the ones you want in the values are as follows:
0x00=None
0x01=Low Density R
0x02=Medium Density R
0x03=High Density R
0x04=Low Density C
0x05=Medium Density C
0x06=High Density C
0x07=Agriculture/Farming
0x08=Medium Density I
0x09=High Density I
0x0A=Military
0x0B=Airport
0x0C=Seaport
0x0D=Spaceport
0x0E=Landfill
0x0F=Civic/Plopped

LotConfigPropertyWealthTypes is for wealth:
0x00=None
0x01=Low
0x02=Medium
0x03=High

Flips Allowed is for mirroring:
0x00= Both
0x01= Mirrored
0x02 = Non Mirrored

The last one that you need to know about is kPropertyID_NetworkPlacementPattern It defines the pattern that the props will appear in. The pattern happens on a 4x4 grid, and each value defines a 1x4 column. Put four of them together to make the full pattern:

Creating a T21

Okay now that you know what everything does, you can start actually making the T21 itself. The first thing you will need is a empty lot to place props on. So go into Lot Editor, find a empty lot and save a copy. I use the open grass area for this. Make sure to remove any props so that you don't confuse existing props with the one that you are going to be adding. The reason for this lot is to help with the placement of props for the T21.
Now you have that lot, you can begin to use it to layout how your lot will be. Go back to reader, and have the Lot file and the T21 file you created open. Go to the T21 file first. There should be a LotConfigPropertyLotObject item there that starts with 0x00000001. That's a prop. copy it and paste it into your lot file. Then right click in a blank area of the Lot file, and pick re-index lot config. After that save the lot, and open it again in Lot Editor,

If everhing above worked, you should now have a single RHW barrier prop on your blank lot that you created earlier. It can help to place the props that you will be replacing. The first thing i did was to replace the normal barrier with the "Boat" barrier. Add a prop type in RHW and it will show up. Use the existing barrier to place the boat barrier, then remove the old one. Now , you have to add the actual lampost prop, the lightcone prop, and the concrete block prop i made (my concrete block prop is optional, it solves a barrier/lampost blending issue, get it in the attachment)
When you are all done, you should have a lot that looks like this:

After you save it, the lot file will now have all the prop placement data you need. All that's left to do is copy the prop placement data into the T21 file.

Now, once again, go into reader and open the lot file and the T21 file. Go to the lot first, and find all four props, they should be a LotConfigPropertyLotObject or a LotConfigPropertyLotObjectData item that starts with 0x00000001
Copy the properties over, and before you paste, delete any prop exemplars that are already there, as this is a total replacement. If you were adding more you would need to keep it.
After pasting the properties into your T21 file, reindex lotconfig and save.

Now you will have to change the placement pattern ID Go into the kPropertyID_NetworkPlacementPattern and change what is there to 0x01,0x02,0x04,0x08. That will make the lights appear every 4 tiles. You can put any value you want here. I just did every 4 becsue i think it looks the nicest. And also if you want to you can change the name of the file by changing the Exemplar Name value, but this wont effect anything.
There is a property in the file called Exemplar ID that defines what ID your file has. You will need to change that number to be one higher., so that your file is unique. Just change 0x5EC4B100 to 0x5EC4B101 then reindex lot config, save the file and you're done!

Replacing existing T21s
There's one more thing that has to be done. Since the T21 on the existing barrier was made to appear on every tile, one more T21 needs to be made to eliminate duplicates on every fourth tile. To do this, go back to the original file and make a second copy of it in the file you created earlier. Keep everything the same, there's just one thing that needs to be changed, and its the network placement pattern. Change it to 0x0E,0x0D,0x0B,0x07. Don't change the exemplar ID so that this will overwrite it. Then re index lot confing, save the file and you will fianally be done. Now, just place the file in your RHW folder, rename it with a zzz_ at the start (so that it loads last) and go to the game and test it.

Other Useful Information and Tips
This section has some extra Information that will help you when creating T21s

Adding on to Existing T21s
If you're going to be adding on to existing T21s to have something that appears every tile, you will need to add your props to the existing T21s and then make additional T21s to go where the old ones don't. Otherwise your props will overwite the old ones completely and only yours will appear.

Using T21s from other files
If you want to copy stuff from other T21s into a existing T21, all you need to copy over are the props

Using Mutiple T21s on the same tile
You can have more than one T21 on the same tile as long as they use a different pattern. If there is the same type of pattern on a tile, one is chosen at random. Creating a T21 to eliminate duplicates like what is mentioned above will eliminate this.

Creating T21s for Lots That Don't have one
To create a T21 for a tile that doesn't have one, first take a existing one that is similar with other properties. You will then need to change the kPropertyID_LotConfigNetworkTileId to be equal to the smallest FSH instance value of the tile you want to add t21s on to. The FSH file is the road texture used on that tile, and the smallest value is typically used for the zoom 1 texture. To find the FSH file for the tile, open the file you think its in, sort by entry in reader, then scroll through the FSH section until you see the texture you want to add to. Look for the smallest instance value to the right and use that.

Sharing Values
As with most other things in the game, each T21 ExemplarID has to be unique. If you are thinking of making your own T21 project, check in the appropriate thread to request a value range and to see if the values you want to use are already being used.

About This Tutorial
This tutorial was created by Xyloxadoria with help from buddybud Tarkus and other NAM Team members

Articles

How to create Puzzle Pieces Part 1

How to Change the SC4 Loading Screen

Modding: Basic And Advanced Tutorials

Increase The Number Of Fireplanes On A Landing Strip

Tutorial For Creating And Customizing Queries In Sc4

Part II: First-Step Editing in the Reader

Part III: Editing the UI File

Part IV: Basic Image Stuff

Part V: Adding Some Numbers...

Part VI: Query Backgrounds

Part VII: Custom Query Backgrounds

Part VIII: Current City Statistics

Bullet Train FAQ

Screenshots of the BTM shown with other networks:

BTM used with HSR with and without the BTM HSR patch

Table Of Contents:

What is it?

So if APTX created the BTM then why did you upload it?

Why are there two versions?

Why are there no stations included?

Why did my monorail network turn into the BTM? Can I still use the monorail with the BTM installed?

Why are monorail textures sometimes appearing along my bullet train tracks?

Can I use HSR with the BTM installed?

This "bullet train" mod doesn't seem any faster than my monorail network. What gives?

Why can't I drag the BTM over hilly terrain?

Who can I thank for uploading this mod?

What does the future of the BTM hold?

How to Organize Your In-Game Menus

How to Create and Mod Textures

How To Switch From Right To Left Hand Drive

How to Create T21 Exemplars

**Part VII: Custom Query Backgrounds**