Installation help

[WouterSchuit]

Dear sir's and madam's,

Here's my story, I downloaded the mod from a torrent file on pirate bay, follow all the installation instructions in BOTH the readme and the manual file, but when I play, the game crashes after about 20 minutes, and all I see ( the new buildings etc ) are just brown boxes,

My installation folder, from what I understood is: C://username/my documents/Simcity4/plugins,

am I doing something wrong, or did I miss something important?

Regards, Wouter

[whatevermind]

am I doing something wrong, or did I miss something important?

Both.  First, the versions floating around on torrents have been known to be buggy, you'll see similar complaints around here if you poke around enough.  You should be getting the official download off the LEX instead (it's free, just click the button at left and register if you haven't already).

The other thing you're missing, is that CAM itself is just a mod, it doesn't include any buildings.  Once you have CAM installed, you can start using CAMeLots (buildings made for CAM), which are downloaded separately.  There are several CAM starter packs on the LEX that contain many buildings to get you started.  These starter packs, however, only contain the Lot files, because they'd be huge downloads otherwise.  So you have to follow this with a third step of making sure you have all the dependencies (which will include the buildings themselves) for whatever Lots you install.

The torrents tend to combine some part of that process into a single step, but as you noticed, they often leave some things out, and the brown boxes are an indication you're missing dependencies - so instead of a building you see a brown box.  If your download has a readme describing the lots it includes, you can search here for the dependencies of those buildings.  Or you can start over using the method above to slowly build up your collection of CAMeLots in a more piecemeal fashion, ensuring you get all the necessary parts.

The game crashing issue could be due to anything from bugs in your download, to something in there conflicting with another plugin you already had, to an overwhelmed computer, or any number of other things.

[jmyers2043]

...  Or you can start over using the method above to slowly build up your collection of CAMeLots in a more ...

the point of the CAM is to have a skyscrapper city that you can grow and not plop. Downloads at other web sites will grow tall, taller, tallest, buildings as a stage 8. The CAM enables 16 growth stages. So you can grow the Empire State building as a stage 15 instead of plopping it.

Wathevermind gives good advice. Add CAM buildings to your plugins at an organized manageable pace. Remove all your other tall buildings because giant buildings all growing at stage 8 defeats the purpose of the CAM. There are starter packs with clean-it-all files that can help you with that task. My method? I got the CAM and installed it. Started the game as usual. I downloaded some stage 9 and 10 buildings when I saw my first stage 8 grow. Downloaded some stage 11 and 12 buildings when I saw the stage 10's grow. etc. . .

As to why your game is crashing? Probably something you got in the torrent is conflicting with something else you already had, or the torrent file has the conflicting files built in. You alone will have to figure that out.

Good Luck

- Jim