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Seamans kindergarden

Started by Seaman, February 02, 2017, 07:09:56 AM

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Seaman

hi folks...

After some time I've started to do some lotting and thought, it might be a good idea to start a separate thread for my questions and showcasing (I think we will see mainly the first before we get to the second... ;) ).

To get things started, here are two questions:

A) I've managed to get the PIM-X started and played around. But I've run ashore already with my first training object. In the game the base texture is flipping around quite mysteriously. Changing the zoom level will cause the texture to swap between the airport ramp and the apron. Why? Where's the error?



B) When I first used the Maxis LE, I opened other lots and noted the ID of the base texture for the light airport ramps (0x25901000). With the PIM-X, the IDs are in hex (e.g. b113c3d5 seems like a valid ramp texture). How do I translate the 0x25901000 into proper HEX? 25901000 is 18b37c8, but what about the 0x part? Something is missing since I cannot find any texture named "18b37c8"  ()what()

Krasner

#1
Nice to see a new lotting thread  :thumbsup: About the texture flipping, I already met this issue and it is very simple to avoid it : in fact LotEditor in  PIMX loads with a default maxis base texure under your building, concrete when you make ploppable items and some others when you do growables. To remove it you need to add the maxis .dat files in the folder(s) PIMX asks you to choose when it starts, so it will show in LE. If I'm not mistaken all maxis textures are found in the "SimCity_2.dat" file, which can be found with 4 others which contain all the Maxis original content, at the bottom of the "SimCity 4" folder. If you forget to add this .dat concrete will come out and work perfectly, while not showing at all in LE ! Quite weird but it works this way  ;)

Do not forget to put all the Simcity .dat files you've used in PIMX into their original folder before starting to play  ;)

I can not help you about the other issue, sorry for that.
ANARCHIST !!

Seaman

ah... thank you Krasner. There's the beef! PIM-X automatically made base textures and somehow I've put the ramp-textures on top of them. In result the two textures were flipping around randomly. I've removed the PIM-X auto textures from the lot and now it seems to work fine.

Simmer2

#3
Quote from: Seaman on February 02, 2017, 07:09:56 AM
......
B) When I first used the Maxis LE, I opened other lots and noted the ID of the base texture for the light airport ramps (0x25901000). With the PIM-X, the IDs are in hex (e.g. b113c3d5 seems like a valid ramp texture). How do I translate the 0x25901000 into proper HEX? 25901000 is 18b37c8, but what about the 0x part? Something is missing since I cannot find any texture named "18b37c8"  ()what()


Hello Seaman.

0x25901000 is already in HEX and the 0x precedes all IID's ingame, its just a type of format.
Also, that tile is found in the Maxis base texture folder. Look at the base textures in X-PIM and assuming you left the SC4 directory checked when X-PIM starts up, you will find it there.

I hope that helps.

Simmer2
________________________________________________________________________________

Seaman

#4
ah... that helps. So simple... I'm kind of ashamed  &mmm I havn't found it because I unchecked the Maxis standards...

thx!


PS: congrats, Simmer2. Your answer made me trigger your 500th "like". You sure do some things here :D

vortext

Nice start, always a pleasure to see people pick up new skills!  :thumbsup:
time flies like a bird
fruit flies like a banana

Seaman

Quote from: vortext on February 02, 2017, 12:16:38 PM
Nice start, always a pleasure to see people pick up new skills!  :thumbsup:

Thank you! Let us wait with the laurels until something meaningful comes out of it  :D

anyhow... it's weird to learn something for a game, that's that old. But I can't resist... must be a virus or something ;)

Here are the next questions:

A.1) I am working on a lot, which is supposed to be an airport eye candy lot. For my training model, I've dragged the hangar in the building>ploppable>Park>with visible building category and created the ploppable lot from there. The lot appeared in the parks menue, as expected. In what "category" am I supposed to drag the model in order to create a lot for the airport menu? I tried the subcategories in the building>ploppable>transportation>airport section, but that ended with a error msg thrown at me (see below).
A.2)I've learned, changeing categories of lots afterwards is something I do not want/cannot do, right?

B) What are these categories anyway? In the building>ploppable>transportation section, there is the airport with several subsections but there's also a "air candy" at the same level!? What's that? And for the actual lots: most of the airport related lots are not listed under lots>airport rather than lots>all others but ingame they do appear in the airport menue?




[(u'Jobs1', u'(int((100+20*LotSizeX*LotSizeY+int(Volume/5000))/100.))'), (u'Jobs2', u'(int((100+20*LotSizeX*LotSizeY+int(Volume/10000))/150.))'), (u'Jobs3', u'(int((100+20*LotSizeX*LotSizeY+int(Volume/50000))/300.))'), (u'BCost', u'(int(30+10/3.*CalculatedElevation*3.2)+10*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'PCost', u'(50+40*LotSizeX*LotSizeY)'), (u'MCost', u'(13+5*int(LotSizeX*LotSizeY/5.)+int((10/3.*CalculatedElevation*3.2)/10.))'), (u'ParkAirPollution', u'(1*int((LotSizeX*LotSizeY)/4.))'), (u'ParkWaterPollution', u'(1*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'ParkAirRadius', u'(2*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'ParkWaterRadius', u'(1*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'ParkWaterConsumed', u'(5*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'BaseCapacity', u'(round(3+Volume/(3*15)))'), (u'BiasedBC', u'(int(round(min(500.,BaseCapacity)*max(1.,sqrt(BaseCapacity/500.)))))'), (u'AirPollutionFactor', u'(0.006)'), (u'WaterPollutionFactor', u'(0.004)'), (u'GarbagePollutionFactor', u'(0.003)'), (u'PowerConsumedFactor', u'(0.01)'), (u'WaterConsumedFactor', u'(0.04)'), (u'CalculatedElevation', u'(max(Height,Volume/(Width*Depth)))'), (u'BiasedVol', u'(Volume*min(1,0.51+(Volume/26000.0)**2))')]
ItemOrderForRunway
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "treeDnD.pyo", line 93, in OnData
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 2918, in OnDrop
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 2988, in CreateAnExamplar
  File "<string>", line 0, in ?
NameError: name 'ItemOrderForRunway' is not defined

mgb204

I second Vortext and the other comments here. Welcome to lotting, that's a great entry into the world of SC4 modding. I look forward to seeing your creations.

Don't be too embarrassed about the texture issue, it's an all-to-easy trap to fall into. Since it looks like they aren't there. A tip if you find yourself creating a new lot, see no base textures and realise you've forgotten to load the Maxis content. See the main application window, it shows a list of properties, find the items with "Type: Texture" in the name (one for each tile), highlight them all, right click and select "Delete Properties". This removes those you can't see, saving you the trouble of re-starting the application. Of course, if you need Maxis base textures, restarting is probably best.

Re: the lot question, I think Air Candy is what you need, i.e. a non-functioning Airport lot. Making functional airports is super-complex stuff, I don't even know of any tutorial or info on doing that. But any item can be placed in any menu. If you can't do that when creating the lot, no worries, you can change it later. The easy way is with an app called LE Prop, find that here.

Seaman

#8
ok, I infer from that, that the occuring error is not supposed to happen and it's not a misshandling on my side. Maybe I'll have another look on missing .dll ...  ()what()

Quote from: Seaman on February 02, 2017, 01:11:22 PM
error when dragging something on the air candy category:
[(u'Jobs1', u'(int((100+20*LotSizeX*LotSizeY+int(Volume/5000))/100.))'), (u'Jobs2', u'(int((100+20*LotSizeX*LotSizeY+int(Volume/10000))/150.))'), (u'Jobs3', u'(int((100+20*LotSizeX*LotSizeY+int(Volume/50000))/300.))'), (u'BCost', u'(int(30+10/3.*CalculatedElevation*3.2)+10*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'PCost', u'(50+40*LotSizeX*LotSizeY)'), (u'MCost', u'(13+5*int(LotSizeX*LotSizeY/5.)+int((10/3.*CalculatedElevation*3.2)/10.))'), (u'ParkAirPollution', u'(1*int((LotSizeX*LotSizeY)/4.))'), (u'ParkWaterPollution', u'(1*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'ParkAirRadius', u'(2*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'ParkWaterRadius', u'(1*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'ParkWaterConsumed', u'(5*int((LotSizeX+LotSizeY)/2.))'), (u'BaseCapacity', u'(round(3+Volume/(3*15)))'), (u'BiasedBC', u'(int(round(min(500.,BaseCapacity)*max(1.,sqrt(BaseCapacity/500.)))))'), (u'AirPollutionFactor', u'(0.006)'), (u'WaterPollutionFactor', u'(0.004)'), (u'GarbagePollutionFactor', u'(0.003)'), (u'PowerConsumedFactor', u'(0.01)'), (u'WaterConsumedFactor', u'(0.04)'), (u'CalculatedElevation', u'(max(Height,Volume/(Width*Depth)))'), (u'BiasedVol', u'(Volume*min(1,0.51+(Volume/26000.0)**2))')]
ItemOrderForRunway
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "treeDnD.pyo", line 93, in OnData
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 2918, in OnDrop
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 2988, in CreateAnExamplar
  File "<string>", line 0, in ?
NameError: name 'ItemOrderForRunway' is not defined


Edit:

weirdly, my Sim City Aviation Group folder does not want to be opened in PIM-X. Maybe too many assets in there, but I do not really believe that since it works nice with all the others. I am not even sure, wether those two problems are related. Maybe, there are some air-candy assets in the SCAG folder and the same problem which prevents me from loading the folder prevents me from creating air candy lots ?  ()what()

error from loading the SCAG folder

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 3454, in OnClose
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 3457, in ShowMain
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 2883, in __init__
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 3246, in LoadDatas
  File "SC4Data.pyo", line 1322, in Finalize
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 400, in UpdateEntry
  File "SC4DatTools.pyo", line 391, in __init__
  File "SC4DatTools.pyo", line 469, in DecodeBuffer
  File "SC4DatTools.pyo", line 460, in DecodeBinary
  File "SC4DatTools.pyo", line 460, in <lambda>
  File "SC4DatTools.pyo", line 121, in __init__
struct.error: unpack str size does not match format

mgb204

#9
I don't think this is you, I've got exactly the same problem, the error that you should focus on is "NameError: name 'ItemOrderForRunway' is not defined". That's easily fixed, take a look at this recent post for a similar problem.

However in this case I note that the required properties exist. If you click on the various airport choices, note how some have listings in the right window, but others (including all Air Candy items) do not. From some quick tests, I think only those with building properties on the right actually work. Could be some sort of templates required to make these lots doesn't exist. A planned feature that never got added perhaps? But I can make the landing strips for example. Not that it matters, if it's an Eye Candy lot, you can start with a Park Lot and then adjust the settings later if need be.

Seaman

thx mgb, I've just tried LE prop and it's a very neat tool! After realizing, that the "apply" button does not actually alter the file and you're supposed to use the obvious "save" button, it worked perfectly...

thx guys! You're solving my problems faster than I am able to produce them...  :)

Maybe now I can get to the actual lotting itself :D working my todo list.