missing agricultural jobs [solved]

[beno1440]

Hi, not sure if anyone has ever had, or even heard of, this issue before - been searching around and not found anything yet so its time to ask the experts. My apologies for the length of post, but I want to start anyone who wants to help with as much relevant info as possible - cheers   

To explain, I've been happily playing away with CAM recently and was getting tired of the now rather out-dated looking CAM farms. So I wanted to try to get the SPAM to work with the CAM, because the farm buildings look much more realistic, you can fill in diagonal fields for good looks and I missed those EIEIOOO tunes and farmyard noise etc from my pre-CAM rural towns! It certainly worked after I re-installed it, as long as it loads after everything else and all that - except that it caused the double workforce bug to reappear, somewhat inevitable perhaps 

So I started messing around by datpacking SPAM&CAM into the SimCity_1.dat file (I grabbed a fresh copy from my backup folder), same way as you would for just the CAM but this time setting up with Simcity_1.dat, z_CAM-1.0.dat then zz_SPAM_mod_main.dat into the datpacker. Gave it a test run on a fresh region and its fine, the double workforce bug is gone... except I noticed the game was not registering ANY regional agricultural jobs. The census repository displays 'in-tile' agri jobs, accurately, as being there and the sims are certainly getting to work, even across city borders, BUT it displays the total regional Industry jobs as 0 (was testing with only light zones, power and resedential with some roads, no medium or high density industries or commerce).

Hmmm, I thought, they're not gonna work together like that then. Back to datpacking the files in a different order, SC1.dat, then SPAM, CAM last. Same problem (no idea on the double workforce bug... wasn't looking for it this time round) Ok, try something else, how about remove the CAM totally from the plugins folder, and try SPAM, alone, to see what that gives me - still no regional agricultural jobs registering - not looking for the double workforce bug either. Ok, remove the SPAM, retest - problem persists, now I'm really freaking out! Finally I removed all plugins except the census repository and replaced SC1.dat with my backup version and any bets for how many regional IR jobs show up..... NONE 

Is it possible that a) I've overwritten the backup Simcity_1.dat at some point, without realizing and I'm using a confused, mash-up of a file, would this even cause this problem?
b)The game is reading some sneaky plugins folder or something that I don't know about with a bad or conflicting set of plugins that don't appear in any game menus (I've cleared everything from both my "-Usedir" folder and the /SC4D/plugins folder)
or c) none of the above and its something else... which I haven't thought of!

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have a steam version of the game, so if I can avoid having to re-download it all just to check that the Simcity_1.dat file isn't buggered then that'd be a real bonus!
thanks in advance
Ben

[elhefebonito]

SPAM and CAM are NOT compatible. http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/42908-spam-simpeg-agricultural-mod/

[beno1440]

Er, not sure how that link backs up you're statement? Paeng even mentions in that thread that there is no reason for them not to work together - only custom growth stage farms above stage 5 (the max in SPAM) will not work properly. By all reports, I have read all the forum posts I can find about it, and looking at my test results, they do work together. That is, as long as you don't mind losing the final 2 or 3 CAM IR growth stages - which are a bit weird anyway - a Stonehenge or Great Pyramids farm... not my cup of tea! Furthermore in my first test run with SPAM/CAM i removed all but one or two CAM farms, the remaining two being stage 3's, one of which grew in the first batch of farms I zoned out. The only issue I came across was the double workforce bug which I solved by datpacking. It was after resolving that issue that I noticed the IR regional capacity issue.

Ultimately the issue is with the fact that the game, completely unmodified - ie NO plugins, neither SPAM nor CAM, isn't working properly, in my case. I listed the process by which I arrived at that conclusion purely because it was (I hope!) working properly before the tests. The suggestion is then that by testing the two together it has in some way corrupted my game files or that I already corrupted the files before adding SPAM into the CAM, or something else has happened that someone may be able to shed light on.

[ScottFTL]

Is it possible that a) I've overwritten the backup Simcity_1.dat at some point, without realizing and I'm using a confused, mash-up of a file, would this even cause this problem?
b)The game is reading some sneaky plugins folder or something that I don't know about with a bad or conflicting set of plugins that don't appear in any game menus (I've cleared everything from both my "-Usedir" folder and the /SC4D/plugins folder)
or c) none of the above and its something else... which I haven't thought of!

Demand is recorded in the save files, so just removing CAM or SPAM won't necessarily return things to normal immediately.  Both mods make significant changes to the way demand works, so you can't just turn them on or off.  Agricultural demand might return in time, or it might be permanently broken for this region.

You should review this message from JMyers about the best way to use CAM and SPAM together.  It's more than just a few missing stages that make them incompatible.

[beno1440]

Yeah, removing a plugin won't instantly update in a city you've already started and probably won't completely fix itself either when you're talking about workforce/demand etc. I know that, as I stated above, I tested using a totally fresh, virgin region with no cities or any developement whatsoever on it, each time round.

My final test of the basic vanilla game, without any plugins, was the same: on a completely new region. The issue isn't the demand but a similar issue to the workforce bug except that in this case the census repository is showing that the IR jobs are not being included when calculating the regional total jobs capacity, or regional total IR capacity.

So, to recap: with a vanilla game with no plugins on a fresh region with no existing or previously demolished cities (basically the region has just gone into the folder from SC4Terraformer) no IR jobs are showing for the region in the census repository. They are showing within each city tile correctly. The game may run fine and sims may commute to a neighbouring town for jobs that I can't see in the repository viewer but it will be impossible to keep track of the actual regional jobs capacity if the IR isn't showing up in the calculations and I have no idea really what effect it will have on the game!

[beno1440]

@ScottFTL: oh yeah and thanks for that last link btw, really useful post that I hadn't managed to find yet! If I can get my game back to a working state then I'm definitely gonna try that out, I only want the SPAM for the nice farms anyway 

[beno1440]

I finally figured it out... its simply the Census Repository! I finally came across an unrelated thread where the creator of the (very useful) repository mentioned that it doesn't register IR jobs in the regional census calculations - D'OH 

How it is that I never noticed that before I have no idea - I've only been playing the game with the repository for, like, 5 years (on and off) and now I feel a little ridiculous