Help Making Farms

[wouanagaine]

I have not tested plopable farms myself
however here is my rambling :

Plopable industries suffer the 'long' freight time, same kind of bug as plopable residential, no one ( sims or freight ) can escape the lot, resulting in the long time. However Industries lots are much more tolerants than residential in regards to the long time vs dilapidation ratio - an industrial lot can easily 'survive' with a long freight time
I'm assuming as farming lots have freight time, that they'll get the same problem
Only plopables with CO/CS jobs are fully ok as they don't need anything to go out ( like any civics lot )

The X_Tool allows the making of I-R plops and if you have a look at Kwakelaar's Palais Kolkhof plop you will see it has I-R jobs. Unfortunately you will still have to wait on wouanagaine to finish the program before you can use it.

I should 

[cogeo]

@Barby: Thanks for the quick reply. I have just checked Kwakellar's lot and compared to what I proposed above, the only difference I can find is that it uses the Industry:Out Occupant Group. Is this really needed? What does this do exactly?

@wouanagaine: Thanks! You mean I have to consider making it a CS instead? One of reasons I chose I-R is the "farmsfields" and the dirt roads. The ploppable "farmfields" (actually modded as "normal" I-R ploppables) will be 3x2 large. As these are "lots" (not "real" farmfields) they need road access, and I thought that a dirt road/street between every two "farmfields would look OK. Making the lots/buildings I-R would cause the dirt roads/streets to appear instead of the paved ones. Any suggestion?

[wouanagaine]

@Barby: Thanks for the quick reply. I have just checked Kwakellar's lot and compared to what I proposed above, the only difference I can find is that it uses the Industry:Out Occupant Group. Is this really needed? What does this do exactly?

Industry OG are split in 3 groups ( besides ID IM & IHT ), you have
Industry:Anchor => main building, requires to be build with road access
Industry:Out & Industry:Mechanical => satellite buildings, they do not need road access, but they only build near ( ie touching ) an anchor building
I used to know the exact difference between Out and Mechanical but I forgot, I'm sure Ripplejet or BarbyW will make a definite call on that matter.

@wouanagaine: Thanks! You mean I have to consider making it a CS instead? One of reasons I chose I-R is the "farmsfields" and the dirt roads. The ploppable "farmfields" (actually modded as "normal" I-R ploppables) will be 3x2 large. As these are "lots" (not "real" farmfields) they need road access, and I thought that a dirt road/street between every two "farmfields would look OK. Making the lots/buildings I-R would cause the dirt roads/streets to appear instead of the paved ones. Any suggestion?

From the top of my head, I think the dirt road/street will appear if the LotConfigPropertyWealthTypes & LotConfigPropertyPurposeTypes  are set to IR-$.
Now there are chances that making them IR ( building wise ) will produce early dilapidation, but this will need testing

[RippleJet]

What exactly Industry:Out and Building:Farmland mean?

Just as Wouanagaine said:
Industrial buildings can be either Anchor, Mechanical or Out.
Anchor buildings are those that grow first and require road access.

Mechanical and Out are filler lots that need an Anchor nearby to grow, but no road.
If you route query a Mechanical or an Out lot, you will see that all workers are coming to and all freight is going from the nearby Anchor.

Mechanical are usually buildings that represent power stations, generators, and such.
Out are buildings that represent sheds, storage facilities, etc.

Mechanical and Out each have a 50% chance of growing.

For some reason all farm buildings are Out though...
And these Out buildings do require road access.

Building: IA (0x14100) is only used for MySim Balloons, but as a rule it is set to all custom farm buildings as well.

[cogeo]

@wouanagaine and @RippleJet: Thanks! I have seen those OGs many times, but never knew what they are exactly.
Setting the LotConfigPropertyPurposeTypes property has no effect on displaying farm roads. These were I-R$ from the start. Setting LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes has no effect either. There is only one workaround, zoning IR at the opposite side of the road/street turns the farm roads/strrets on.

Experimented a little more with ploppable farms, but setting those OGs in ploppable farms appears to have no noticable effect (at least they don't solve the no freight/no workers problem). Maybe it would be meaningful to set them for conformity and/or statistics, though the a setting of Building:Landmark, Building:IA alone appears to work the same. What should I do?

I have found a sort of workaround though:



The farm lot at the front (6x4) is a "normal" growable farm (without farm-fields though). The smaller (3x2) lots at the back are ploppable farms (setting Industry:Out or not appears to have no effect). This way those "virtual" farm-fields appear to somehow "attach" to the growable farm at the front. They do not require road access, looks like they are served by the lot at the front. They do require water though and if they are not watered they dilapidate and get abandoned; setting Water Consumed to 0, or removing this property completely does not solve this.

Some questions:
- Does anybody know what affects the number of freight trucks reported in the traffic simulator?
- The dirt roads shown here are standard SC4 base textures (range 0x261#####). There is no "crossroad-near-the-corner" texture in this set, there is crossroad-in-the-middle one, but what you see here is a T-junction-near-the-corner one, hence the glitch. It would be quite easy to make a complatible texture, but is there a ready-made one?
- I wish to make them behave better on slopes, but there is a little problem: if you make the model (tub) the main building this causes a building foundation to be displayed. It's OK, but this allows only two models to be displayed (switched by using a Resource Key Type 4 property and appropriate time properties). If you want more than two models that change with time you can use timed props, but this causes a different problem: the building foundation is displayed normally (the building displays no model) but the props (sized and placed exactly on the building rectangle) may be displayed at a wrong height; while the leveled surface is at the highest point of the building rectangle (and the building would go there too), props are rather placed at the average height, ie partly under ground, causing a visual glitch. Any idea on how to fix this?
- And finally a question about CAM. What do I need to make these "CAMelots". Is setting the appropriate number of jobs and the additional Occupant Groups enough? These are stage-3 anyway.

Thank you all for your comments and your help.

[Diggis]

I have not tested plopable farms myself
however here is my rambling :

Plopable industries suffer the 'long' freight time, same kind of bug as plopable residential, no one ( sims or freight ) can escape the lot, resulting in the long time. However Industries lots are much more tolerants than residential in regards to the long time vs dilapidation ratio - an industrial lot can easily 'survive' with a long freight time
I'm assuming as farming lots have freight time, that they'll get the same problem
Only plopables with CO/CS jobs are fully ok as they don't need anything to go out ( like any civics lot )

I should 

On this, I have seen somewhere, I think from Peg but not 100% sure, that Com lots do suffer from a similar problem.  They will not recognise traffic on the road outside and will always show Low on their stats.

[RippleJet]

Experimented a little more with ploppable farms, but setting those OGs in ploppable farms appears to have no noticable effect (at least they don't solve the no freight/no workers problem). Maybe it would be meaningful to set them for conformity and/or statistics, though the a setting of Building:Landmark, Building:IA alone appears to work the same. What should I do?

The occupant groups for Industrial Subtypes (Anchor, Mechanical and Out) only have relevance for growable industry.
It's a factor taken into account when the developer chooses which building to grow on a tract.

Building:Landmark is the only required one, but I would also include Building:IA.
Mainly because we can never be sure in what context the game uses that.
Building:Out isn't needed for ploppable farms.

This way those "virtual" farm-fields appear to somehow "attach" to the growable farm at the front. They do not require road access, looks like they are served by the lot at the front.

Have you tried to route query those "farm fields" (I suppose they are farm lots, not fields that are sized 1x1 and only can appear next to growable farms)?
Those ploppable "farm fields" probably have a growth stage of 0xFF (255). Since the water cap for farms is set at 3 (both for RH and CAM), every farm of stage 4 and above would require water. Could you test by setting the growth stage in the LotConfig exemplar to 3 or lower?

They do require water though and if they are not watered they dilapidate and get abandoned; setting Water Consumed to 0, or removing this property completely does not solve this.

Those ploppable "farm fields" probably have a growth stage of 0xFF (255). Since the water cap for farms is set at 3 (both for RH and CAM), every farm of stage 4 and above would require water. Could you test by setting the growth stage in the LotConfig exemplar to 3 or lower?

Some questions:
- Does anybody know what affects the number of freight trucks reported in the traffic simulator?

I am not sure how the number of trucks is calculated.
I would suspect the desirability of the tract is an important factor though.

- The dirt roads shown here are standard SC4 base textures (range 0x261#####). There is no "crossroad-near-the-corner" texture in this set, there is crossroad-in-the-middle one, but what you see here is a T-junction-near-the-corner one, hence the glitch. It would be quite easy to make a complatible texture, but is there a ready-made one?

I'll skip that one and hope someone else would answer...

- I wish to make them behave better on slopes, but there is a little problem: if you make the model (tub) the main building this causes a building foundation to be displayed. It's OK, but this allows only two models to be displayed (switched by using a Resource Key Type 4 property and appropriate time properties). If you want more than two models that change with time you can use timed props, but this causes a different problem: the building foundation is displayed normally (the building displays no model) but the props (sized and placed exactly on the building rectangle) may be displayed at a wrong height; while the leveled surface is at the highest point of the building rectangle (and the building would go there too), props are rather placed at the average height, ie partly under ground, causing a visual glitch. Any idea on how to fix this?

The size of the building foundation is set by the width and depth in the property Occupant Size.
That also sets the size of the scaffolding for building that construct.
You should be able to reduce the width and depth to 0 to virtually remove the building foundation.

The zero level for props is always the average height of the area the prop covers.
You can of course raise the prop in LE, but that would probably look stupid on flat ground instead...
The only solution would of course be to lower the value for the property LotConfigPropertyMaxSlopeAllowed.

- And finally a question about CAM. What do I need to make these "CAMelots". Is setting the appropriate number of jobs and the additional Occupant Groups enough? These are stage-3 anyway.

Now we're talking growable, not ploppable, right?
If the growth stage will remain as 3, then we're not talking about making a CAMeLot.
In that case we're talking about CAMpatible property values.

The occupant groups are only required if the growth stage is 4 or higher.

There are several properties that depend on the correct occupancy though, such as pollution, consumption, etc.
For farms these values are seldom screwed if made by Maxis PIM, in the same way as certain CS buildings would be.

If you want true CAMpatible farms, send me a PM and we'll take it from there!

[cogeo]

Building:Landmark is the only required one, but I would also include Building:IA.
Mainly because we can never be sure in what context the game uses that.
Building:Out isn't needed for ploppable farms.

Indeed, the OGs for all these ploppables are Building:Landmark, Building:IA. Just asked if I need to include also Building:Out (you verified that I don't).

Have you tried to route query those "farm fields" (I suppose they are farm lots, not fields that are sized 1x1 and only can appear next to growable farms)?

Yes, and this is what I mean they "attach" to the growable one. When I query them the traffic paths of the growable are displayed instead, just like with I mechanical and out, ie they appear to be somehow grouped. As you can see, the ones in the pic do not display no access zots, and there is a second row of them, adjacent to the first row, not the growable! If I plop one of these w/o road access and not adjacent to another lot, it will display the zot. And of course, yes, these are ploppable farms, not real farmfields.

Those ploppable "farm fields" probably have a growth stage of 0xFF (255). Since the water cap for farms is set at 3 (both for RH and CAM), every farm of stage 4 and above would require water. Could you test by setting the growth stage in the LotConfig exemplar to 3 or lower?

Didn't know this, but if I set the stage to 3, then how would I prevent them from growing? Just by setting the LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes to 0x0F alone (or removing all values)? Is this enough?

The size of the building foundation is set by the width and depth in the property Occupant Size.
That also sets the size of the scaffolding for building that construct.
You should be able to reduce the width and depth to 0 to virtually remove the building foundation.

The zero level for props is always the average height of the area the prop covers.
You can of course raise the prop in LE, but that would probably look stupid on flat ground instead...
The only solution would of course be to lower the value for the property LotConfigPropertyMaxSlopeAllowed.

Didn't want to keep the building foundation from being displayed, what I want is to have the foundation displayed right under the model and display more than 2 models in the same place (empty, half empty, various phases). This is not possible by setting the buidling properties (this allows up to two models only). So what I did was make a building exemplar sized exactly the same as the (seasonal prop(s). The building exemplar shows no model, it was just needed to be sized correctly so as to cause a correctly sized foundation to be displayed. The props would supposedly be displayed on top of that flattened area, but as said above they are not correctly aligned vertically. Pitty there isn't such a thing as "Prop Foundation". I think the only possible solution would be to limit the max slope allowed and remove the foundation completely, ie simply exhaust the model's tolerances. Making LODs underground doesn't deliver good results in general (glitches when selecting/unselecting the lot/model). The other solution would of course be limit the models to just two, eg an empty and a full tub. I'm not done with BATting yet, the only model I've made so far is the one you see in the pic (this solution would be faster too ).

Now we're talking growable, not ploppable, right?
If the growth stage will remain as 3, then we're not talking about making a CAMeLot.
In that case we're talking about CAMpatible property values.

The occupant groups are only required if the growth stage is 4 or higher.

There are several properties that depend on the correct occupancy though, such as pollution, consumption, etc.
For farms these values are seldom screwed if made by Maxis PIM, in the same way as certain CS buildings would be.

I was just talking about a lot/building that could be used with CAM. My current lots face abandonment issues due to the low number of occupants (14 for the main farm lot, 6 for the 3x2 farmfields) - I do have CAM installed. Pedriana plants employ only 13 sims in SC4/RH, but in CAM this has been raised to 88 with all other parameters (incl the stage) having been left unchanged. So is this the way to go?

[RippleJet]

Didn't know this, but if I set the stage to 3, then how would I prevent them from growing? Just by setting the LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes to 0x0F alone (or removing all values)? Is this enough?

A growable farm (like all growable industries) needs the Occupant Group 0x1002 (Building: Industry).

I was just talking about a lot/building that could be used with CAM. My current lots face abandonment issues due to the low number of occupants (14 for the main farm lot, 6 for the 3x2 farmfields) - I do have CAM installed. Pedriana plants employ only 13 sims in SC4/RH, but in CAM this has been raised to 88 with all other parameters (incl the stage) having been left unchanged. So is this the way to go?

The low number of occupants shouldn't be a reason for abandonment.
The number of occupants would be higher if modded by the "X" Tool though.

All ploppable industries do suffer from reduced desirability dut to long freight trips though.

[cogeo]

Tried setting Growth Stage to 3, and the lot now doesn't need water. Thanks RippleJet!

I'm almost done now, I just need to finish the documentation.

Can someone please answer this: Is the Occupant Types property really needed? Didn't try removing it, but checked the ingame buildings and didn't find a single example of a building using it, directly or through cohorts. It is being used a lot in custom content though (both growables and ploppables). Any clue?

[Swamper77]

It seems to be something that Maxis adds via the PIM, but custom content creators copy it over to their content as well. I'm not sure what it does, but it is probably redundant considering the other properties that are in place for jobs/residents in growables.

-Swamper

[RippleJet]

Evidence for that property not really being needed, are all those landmarks that grow on empty lots if they belong to an in-game growable building family.
None of those landmarks have the Occupant Types property.
Having correct values in the property Capacity Satisfied is enough.

[cogeo]

Thanks again RippleJet!

One final question: is there anything I need to change (apart from the number of jobs) to make "CAMpatible" buildings/lots? I have checked how the ingame stuff (eg Pedriana Plants) has been modded for CAM, and from what I was able to see, only the number of jobs has been changed.

The stats (so far) are listed below:



Anything I need to change?

[RippleJet]

Basically there aren't many properties you must change.
However, I know you want to know exactly how those values would be calculated in PIM-X

So, here goes:

Volume = Filling Degree × Width × Depth × Height
Jobs = 2 + INT (Volume/750) + Number of tiles in the lot
BiasedJobs = INT ( MIN(50,Jobs) × MAX(1,SQRT(Jobs/50)) )
Air Pollution = INT (1+0.125×BiasedJobs)
Water Pollution = INT (1+0.25×BiasedJobs)
Garbage Pollution = INT (1+0.2×BiasedJobs)
Power Consumption = INT (1+0.4×BiasedJobs)
Water Consumption = INT (1+5×BiasedJobs)
Building Value = INT (154.83×BiasedJobs)
Bulldoze Cost = Worth = INT (30+10×Height)
Construction Time = INT (Worth/10)
Plop Cost = 2 × INT (154.83×Worth)

The above formulas based on your main lot, estimating the building size:

LOD Width = 45 m
LOD Depth = 30 m
LOD Height = 6 m
Filling Degree = 0.8
Volume = 0.8×45×30×6 = 6480
Jobs = 2 + 8 + 24 = 34
BiasedJobs = 34
Air Pollution = 5
Water Pollution = 9
Garbage Pollution = 7
Power Consumption = 14
Water Consumption = 171
Building Value = 5264
Bulldoze Cost = Worth = 90
Construction Time = 9
Plop Cost = 27868

[kaos78414]

I'm having a problem relating to this... I am trying to make a custom farm field and farm lot without overwriting maxis' farm fields. This seems impossible with the lot editor and I have absolutely no idea where to start. I did some experimenting with the reader, but to no avail. I only confused myself further and I've been searching on forums for something detailing what I would have to do to create this... but it seems there isn't any tutorials or anything like that explaining it. Could anyone help me out?

[SC4BOY]

Cogeo! Glad to see you applying your curiousity to SC4 again.. these look like they will be great adders..

[cogeo]

@kaos: This does take some steps, the problem is that you cannot "Save As" those Maxis farm-fields. Below is what I did (it's definitely NOT the only way). The idea is to get new IDs for your farm-fields (not conflicting with and/or overwriting the SC4 ones). As posted earlier in this thread, there seems to be a "hardcoded" requirement that for farm-fields both the lot and the building exemplars must have the same instance IDs. This is also the case with ploppables, so you can make use of this feature of LE, just to get new IDs. So:
- Open the LE and select any ploppable lot from the list (a subway station, a small plaza, etc).
- Click "Save As" and give the new lot a different (and final) name, eg FarmFields_Kaos_01.
- Now close the LE and open the new lot (.SC4Lot) file in the Reader. You must see the "classic" entries for a ploppable, ie two exemplars (lot and bldg) two PNGs (preview and buttons) and an LD file.
- Run another instance of the reader and open simcity_1.dat. Use the navigator to find a proper farmfields lot/building pair (you will base your lot on these). Copy the lot and building exemplar and paste them into your .SC4Lot file.
- As you can see these (copied) exemplars have different instance IDs, so you need to change these. If you are familiar with the TGI editor, select the two SC4-copied exemplars and change the instance IDs so that they are the same as yours. Otherwise you can do this using the pop-up menu commands. Highlight the original (subway,plaza,etc) building exemplar, right-click and select "Copy Entry ID". Then go to the copied (farm-field) building exemplar, right-click and select "Paste Entry ID" (highlight another exemplar for the changes to show-up). Repeat the above step for the lot exemplar.
- Now go to the original lot exemplar, open the Exemplar Name property and copy the name. Then go to the copied exemplar and paste the name (it should be FarmFields_Kaos_01). This is necessary in order to keep LE from saving the new Lot under a different filename every time. You can also change the (copied) farm-field Exemplar Name to something different, eg change the original Maxis name (sth like FarmField2_2a6e4309) with sth like FarmField_Bldg_Kaos_01.
- Delete the three unneeded files, ie the two original (subway,plaza,etc) lot and bldg exemplars and the PNG button images (not the preview one).
- Go to the lot exemplar and locate the LotConfig line that contains the building reference (the one and only LotConfig line starting with a 0). Edit this property. The last rep is the building instance ID. Since this was copied from simcity_1.dat it contains the original value. Change this to the instance ID of your building.
- Save the file and exit the reader.
- Backup the modified lot (copy the .SC4Lot file somewhere out of your Plugins folder), so that you can modify/fix it later, should anything go wrong.
- Run the LE and open the (new) farmfield lot. Make sure that it opens correctly, and that when you save it the LE does not create a new file, instead it overwrites the opened one).

At this point you have a farm-field lot/building, identical to Maxis' and editable in the LE. You can add/remove/change textures and props as usual. Unfortunately you cannot "Save As" this lot (even if you set that "Unknown" property in iLive), so the above procedure must be repeated for every new farm-field you make.

Hope this helps.


@SC4BOY: Thanks for the nice comments. They are released now (both on the STEX and LEX).

[BarbyW]

It would be much easier to use one of the BSC farm fields to start with

[cogeo]

Barby, can you give us an example? Can't find a farmfield lot for which I can click "Save As" (it's disabled) and have the LE creating a new lot/building pair with growable farm-fields. From what I have seen, this works either for ploppables, or common growables (in this latter case it will create a .SC4Lot file containing only the lot exemplar, the PNG preview and the LD file - the building exemplar is missing).
Didn't say the way I made this is the only one, nor the easiest one. It would be interesting to see a different way though.

[kaos78414]

Thank you cogeo and Barbyw i really appreciate the help. =]

I'll try this right away.