New To Sim City 4? Join the Academy!

[fantozzi]

The Sim City 4 Academy

founded in 2019 by our beloved leader, Major Maximus Fantozzi, guardian of the hundred regions, ruler of cities, raiser of monuments of endless beauty



Not only for beginners but for everybody who wants to become a professional newbie.

INSCRIPTION FOR STUDENTS
There are two main reason to make a science from something – a) something is confusing or b) something is so old no one remembers clearly. Gladly Sim City 4 is something of both.

One can't expect to become a computer scientist, a linguist or a lawyer in a couple of days but instead – and no matter how sorry we may feel about this – one will have to study hard on old and confusing things.
.
You probably will start reading some generic books like "The History of Language" or "The meaning of Law".

But unfortunately there aren't such books regarding Sim City 4. Books like "Introduction in Simcityfourology" or "How to become a Simmer" and if you ask in public most of the times you'll attract some highly skilled geeks soon fighting on their theories and to confuse you even more.

Learning a science at the university is completely different than listening to opinion leaders in public. Lessons will offer you a structured access. First you learn the basic, then you learn about the inventory then about certain historic milestones and the way of posing a problem and then you learn to pose your own questions and doing research and find a solution on your own. And finally you graduate. It's not asking for help on a current problem and getting a quick solution and so always remaining a user. Well, it's study. Learning, becoming a chief, a master, a geek yourself.

Disillusioning, but Sim City 4 misses this characteristics of a field of study. There is no propaedeutics, no learning methods and proven way of approach. Instead of being a discipline it's cult and scatterbrained rites and chaos and not a few players get lost in darkest realms, where they are haunted by ugly big brown box-creatures.

That's where the Sim City 4 Academy comes into use.

On Sim City 4, which was released first in 2003, today 80 percent of the fun is formed by custom content. Undomesticated, vastly unexplored, wild and agressive content. Content, that has to be explored, classified and organized by you. To make it your little pet. It's estimated that all around the world and through time there were more than 60.000 packages with maybe 30 GB or more of custom content available for download.

The Sim City 4 Academy is nothing else than a systematics, a methodical aproach to the complex world of modded Sim City 4. A "getting yourself into game" It's a guide but no reference work. It is only a roadmap so still you have to travel to get somewhere.

It's an academy you can join and take daily lessons and those lesson consists of tasks and short instructions and links to materials to work with. You get some navigation aid, a methodical approach from the basic to the more advanced stuff. So it's up to you where to jump on or of this train.

You can join the Sim City 4 Academy at any time and you can leave at any time. As we're talking about games never forget the most important thing is for you to have fun.

And of course to obey Major Fantozzi, which only hurts the first times but then feels like a game too.

[fantozzi]

Day ZERO

That's right, let's start before you even think of playing the game. Befor you buy it! What was the version of the latest offical release? Which version number my vendor is selling? Which free addons and tools and patches Maxis did release and where can I find them?. Is the version I'm going to buy patchable? Essential mods like NAM and CAM require this. Will DRM block third party patches? What are commonly reported problems regarding my operating system, regarding my graphics card and SC4?

In great parts Sim City 4 is no 3d game but a 2D game. So there are few objects but many graphics. The game isn't much demanding on rendering and so on graphic cards power. But instead on data throughput. Therefore a fast hard drive, a SSD or a HAL 9000 is recommended when you want to use custom content.

[fantozzi]

Day 1

Install the game but please install no custom content today. Check if version number is correct. Otherwise patch. Install the separately available maxis lot editor too and see if the lot editor will start.

If you want you can gather some information about the limitations of old 32bit programs that have to work with a limited adress space. Pay attention that some custom content may touch the limits of this adress space. There is a so called 4GB patch that adds a little more headroom. For now you may read about it. But later we will install the NAM which has this patch as a hard requirement and we cover it in detail.

If you don't know yet find information about the "command line" and how to access and edit this command line for executables.

See here for a list of possible commands you can add to Sim City 4 executable. Optional: give Catty a 'thumbs up'.

Now, with this knowledge, tell your Sim City 4 executable the resolution of your monitor and tell also to use only one core of your CPU. This is necessary. Why? If you're a scientist go out and find yourself.

You did? A real scientist, eh? Why not try some other commands then to make SC4 obey your wishes? But don't tell it to get down on all fours and bark. This isn't scientific. This is silly.

Start Sim City 4 again, look if it loads and resolution did change. Ah  , isn't it a joy when things obey to your commands? Soon you will be a great despot major too. Trust me.

Now quit.

Learn about "Graphics Rules.sgr" and "Video Cards.sgr" and what they can do to make and old game young again. This article may help.

Update your video card list correctly then start SC4 again.

Open the settings for graphics. Don't touch the resolutions as for recent monitors we set them in the command line  already. But we have to switch from software rendering mode to hardware rendering mode. For full mod compatibility this is necessary. Switch to hardware mode.

Got a CTD? So there's a compatibility issue with the graphic driver. Check again all entries you made before please. Search the web if there are reported similar issues with your card, maybe also with other Maxis software. Try to deactivate 3D features of your graphic cards driver for Sim City 4 and if that works (at least SC$ doesn't crash) activate them one by one.

No CTD? Restart the game and begin to play through the tutorials. Experiment with different settings of shadows and clouds etc. See if you notice graphic glitches - blue seams, flickering textures etc. You may need to rework graphic cards settings until you have a good visual experience. Try to get help from community if you encounter graphic cards settings that sound like "tripled laser rotation speed", "lingerie occlusion" or "double cheese beef buffer" or something else you don't understand.

[fantozzi]

Day 2

Play the tutorials and build at least one city up to 100.000 citizens. Try to use every menu button once- seaports, underground, rail, airports. This is important to get known with the base game content.

Check out the God's menu. Do some terraforming and plant some ugly trees (don't worry there's a fix for everything, I'll show you them all) Check out the majors menu.  Try to build every kind of network. Play with busses and bus stations. Check if you get sims to use the bus. Get your first time angry with those stupid little sims.

Check out your sims. Check out the ordinances, raise and lower tax an see what happens. Cut money and let sims go on strike. Now it's a good time to try out all the evil things you may avoid later.

Take u-drive mission. Throw some money out of the windows of the majors car.   

Try to find some keyboard shortcuts usefull for you. Here is a list.

Learn to use [ Ctrl ], [ Shift ] and [ Alt ] keys whilst zoning residentials, commercial and industrial zones with your mouse.

Train this – to become a zoning master.

Note that the saving process in SimCity 4 is quite delicate and becomes sensitive like a mimosa the more informations about placed objects has to be safed with your city. There can be many reasons why saving gets interrupted and stuck. But the main reasons are a fragmented hard drive and to use the save and exit button on the game. It seems the exit command sometimes crashes the saving process.

While hard drives getting better and better the issue regarding the game remains. So please get used to use the save button first and wait until saving is done and then quit the game. Really. Get used to not use the "save and quit feature."


Pay a little attention to the game's music and sounds. Even today it's hard to find a game with better accoustic illustration.

Nice game, eh? But wait until we kiss our sleeping beauty awake.

[fantozzi]

Day 3
Find and open both (!) plugin folders and see if something is in there.

Read some articles about plugin folder organisation and learn the different approaches how players organize custom content. Think of a method you would prefer to organize thousands of different things. Like you are in a kitchen and you have to organize all the tools there are. The many different knifes for bread and meat for peeling potatoes and so on. Do you put all knifes into one drawer or better all different tools you need to prepare potato fritter? Imagine the plugin folder becomes your city builders kitchen now, your work bench and think about how to organize this workbench.

Consider having different workbenches to work on different regions and climatic zones of the world. All this is possible. A plugin folder to play mediterranian regions with palm trees and small "hacienda style" houses and corresponding road testures. North american and canadian regions. With snowy winters. You can play a marsian colony.

All this will be possible and you may dream today about how to organize custom content to achieve this.

Find out, what a "maxis blocker" does and how players use it.

Understand how load order works - what will be loaded first from both of the plugin folders and what will be loaded last when you fire up Sim City 4. Learn about how the order windows shows to you not necessarily has to be the order Sim City 4 follows when reading this content.

What is the meaning of overrides? Try to find an example of wanted overrides, which aren't result of a conflict but add a modified function to the game.

Browse custom content – don't download it yet – and think in which drawer (folder) you will put it when downloaded. Look for some regions maps and terrain mods. Visit Cori's Terrain Shoppe, Cori's Rock Shoppe and Cori's Water Shoppe and try to imagine what would be a cool combination of map, terrain, rock and water.

Make this your golden rule: never ever download the mingle-mangle of beautiful things that you see while browsing. When browsing through custom content always sort this mingle-mangle in your mind. Sort it under this two assumptions: in which of my folders (drawers) does it fit and how will I make use of it.

Major Fantozzi discovered long time ago, the Colosseum of Rome., the Tour Eiffel of Paris, they are excellent models. Perfectly done. But with the colosseum the only city you can build is Rome. With the Tour Eiffel only city you can build is Paris. This isn't really versatile content. 

We will start with the generic content first and try to get a sense for generic stuff.

Make sure you basically understand the meaning and differences of the following technical terms:
- bat
- lot
- prop
- R
- CO, CS
- IA, I-D, I-M, I-HT,
- automata
- major mode ploppable (mostly: MMP)
- terrain mod
- hd and sd
- ploppable, growable
- puzzle pieces
- civics
- W2W
- dependency
- maxis night vs dark night


If you are a real hardcore scientist you may want to dig for more. You may ask: is there a science about how to sort things, a science about how to give structure to a mess of any kind?

The appallingly truth: yes there is. The science (method) was founded by old greek philosopher Aristotle and it is called "genealogy" adopted later by biology. Biologic genealogy is nothing else than practiced philosophical genealogy. I found this funny video explaining the basics of genealogy (in the philosophical sense) with a rich bouquet of totally confusing examples about horses, men, dinosaurs, beetles, dogs and mushrooms. After watching this video you don't want to ask anymore questions but only play the game and obey Major Fantozzi.

Still – before we start to download custom content make sure we have a plan how to organize this on our hard drive. If you wish to do it without the help of Aristotle and chiefinspector Sadler, well, maybe Major Fantozzi can turn a blind eye to it. Instead you may want to read through the thread Indiana Joe and the Quest for the Ultimate Plugins Folder to see how many thoughts and how much time players spend on plugin organisation.

[fantozzi]

Day 4

So today we'll do some very basic installations learn about helpfull witchery and fool around with regions.

First to make our game more flexible, less error-prone and to fix a great amount of smaller and bigger bugs we download and mount the following:

Maxis Prop Names an Query Fix by T Wrecks. (we may create a folder named "z___fixes" in our plugin folder and put it there)
SC4Fix Third Party Patches by Simmaster07 (Goes into the plugin root folder and we give Simmmster07 a big thumbs up)
Extra Cheats Plugin by Buggi (this goes into the root of the plugin folder too, we'll cover this plugin later)
Opera House Fix by Toroca (goes in the folder "z___fixes")
First City Hall Fix by Andreas (goes in the folder "z___fixes")
Second City Hall Fix by mgb205 (goes in the folder "z___fixes", must be placed after the first fix by Andreas)

Now it's a good time to visit this page again. This time we have a look on the left column and see a linklist to some additional landmarks by maxis not included in the main DLC (rush hour). Major Fantozzi personally thinks not all of them have good quality but some, like the Adler Planetarium, the San Francisco City Hall and the Globe Arena are quite nice. Mayor Fantozzi puts Maxis stuff into a folder named maxis to keep his plugin folder organized.

Visit the Sim City 4 Building Index another fine fan project that has pictures for every original building of the game. Browse and find at least 3 interesting looking lots and note their name.

Now start the game and reset the tutorials.

Close the game again. We remember what we learned on day 2, that sometimes saves get corrupted. So we learn how to make regular copies of our regions. So why not start now and make a copy of our whole Regions folder in its virgin state? So look for the folder named "Regions" and copy this folder to a super secure place. Now you will always be able to restore them if you break them.

So what's next. Of course! As we are scientist let's go and try to break one of them!

Let's start the game and lets load the New York Region.

Funny. Nothing's there. Not even native Americans living in the swamps of Manhattan Islands. But we ignore this and pick up the big tile instead that could be Queens.

And we found a City there and name it Queens.

Don't zoom in closely instead keep it the way you can see most of the entire tile. Pause the game.

Now press the buttons [STRG] and [X]. An input box will appear in the left upper corner. This is the passage to the dark side (to the plugin we installed before, made available by Buggi) where you can perform certain alchemical rituals. Pose the mouse pointer inside there and press the right mouse button. A list of the available rituals appears.

We choose dark ritual labeled "plop all lots".

And we don't touch anything just wait and see the dark side of the force rising. The ritual will always stop when roundabout three quartes of the tile is filled. So if you have tons of custom content downloaded it may happen not all of it appears. But this is a nice feature to see quickly if there are broken or missing elements. They a) produce empty lots b) lots with big brown boxes or c) a CTD while performing this ritual.

If you ever encounter a CTD when performing "plop all lots" you should use the binary search method as described by A Nonny Moose to find the causative element.

But now you should zoom and scroll and rotate through the flood of buildings.
You remember you've noted 3 buildings from the online building index? Do you find them again?

This is some kind of performance test. You may notice scrolling, zooming and rotating takes some time now as all the images must be reloaded from your hard drive. If you have a conventional hard drive with rotating magnetic discs you may even hear how they shovel all the data you request when zooming in and out the city.

Also you may want to try the evil moolah witchery. So press the buttons [STRG] and [X] again and choose"moolah". Now type "5" behind the spell. Then press enter.

Oh, sorry. This witchery went wrong. Now we reduced your investment fund to five simoleons. Well, Major Fantozzi isn't Harry Potter. Next time try your luck with a bigger number. You may investigate other spells. But be aware, this is the dark side and some spells may open the gates of hell others will make explode a cow somewhere in Norway.

For now save Queens. Wait till save is completed. Then exit the game and some norwegian cow may survive today.

Open the Sim City 4 folder in your documents again go to region and then to New York. See Queens was saved as Queens. And it has alread become fat: 4MB. Note several files were updated and now have the actual date. So you should always do backups of the whole region (folder) not only a single file.

So do this. Make a backup from the folder "NewYork". Now rename this folder, maybe to add the actual date or some hint but make the folders unique to not confuse them with each others.

Now start the game again. Click on the created city and DESTROY QUEENS. Do it now.

So you did?

May I ask why? Do you like it already that much to obey Major Fantozzi?

That's a good moment to watch a short movie about the Milgram Experiment. Be skeptical. Question things. Always.

Okay. So what do we do now as we destroyed half of New York City?

... ...

Let's restore Queens. Exit the game. Take the backup of New York and put a copy right into your region's folder.

Restart the game, click on the city tile and then click the icon to import a city.

Choose Queens and import it. And there it is again as messy as we left it before.

Now open the San Francisco map.

Choose the biggest tile. Again choose import and import Queens.

See how mighty despots we already became? We cut Queens out of New York and put it straight into San Francisco.

But don't forget to remove the second New York folder we used only for recovery from the regions folder again. It's of no use now and with more and more of those copies you have to scroll more and more for nothing.

[fantozzi]

Day 5

Today's challenge: download one, two or maximum three region maps and import them into Sim City 4. Giving it characteristic by adding corresponding terrain and water textures, correct flora and automata reskins.

Think about world regions you like to play and that are different. Use keywords to search them. Please download only few maps you like most, not more. It's not done with downloading and importing a map. A map is like a building shell and you can make an appealing space from it. Instead of playing raw regions it's a much better and more realistic game experience if you shape the regions you imported.

So note maps and regions are different things. What you download are maps, terrain information stored in a grey scale image. And you have to convert them into a playable region.

So first search for tutorials teaching the import process. There are different ways and different tools. Just choose one. Ask for help in the forums if you get stuck.

Pay attention for your region has a reasonable mix of big, medium and maybe small tiles. You probably want to have the big city tiles where it makes urbanistic sense.

If you have finished importing let's go ahead.

Do you remember the lessons on Day 3, when we payed a visit to the different Catalogues created by Corina Marie? If you did this lession well you already should have some ideas in mind what kind of combination of water, rocks and terrain you want to have in your new region.

So inside your plugin folder create folders like for example Z_Terrainmod_forX. Z_Terrainmod_forY. Where X and Y stands for the different maps you converted. So let's put into this folder everything we need to create a realistc enivronment, an ambience for our upcoming cities.

But be aware we can only play one of those folders at a time and so we have to exchange those folders every time we want to play with a different environment. And the same now, as we are testing our new regions.

So next step is to download and try different terrain, rock and water mods until you're fine with a combination. Not every combination will work seamlessly. Also never ever combine HD and SD terrain mods. You will understand what I mean if you learned well on Day 3.

If you found an appealing combination put the used data files into the respective Z_Terrainmod folder.

Next learn about what Tree Controllers do and how they work. Like a conductor conducts an orchestra they conduct the flora of a region. So you will still need the musicians to play, the different trees and bushes. So those trees and bushes are dependencies to the tree controller. Right? No? If in doubt please step back to Day 3.

Learn about Tree replacement mods like this one by T Wrecks.

Understand the difference between a tree controller mod and a tree replacement mod.

For your region you have to decide if a) the original God mode flora is fine, b) you want to replace the original trees c) you want to replace them and have a different tree-management too.

Pay attention as you can't exchange the conductor during a concert. If you replace a tree controller you have to restart your region anew. So this is a basic descission you have to make and you should experiment NOW with different controllers not later when you are proud major of millions of sims.

If you made that decission download everything, including the dependencies, so building up general fauna for each region. Put all the needed files together into the particular Z_terrainmod folder you created.

Wow. This is our happy little workbench for landscape painting.

By now you should also know about automata – what they are. Police cars, ambulances and fire fighters and trains all around the world have their unique look while the automata in SC4 always looks the same. No matter in which part of the world you rise your city - there are always north american police cars patroling the streets. As we want to buld up authentic ambience we want to change that too and will be surprised how man reskins there were made. This pack here, just for example, contains different police vehicles from the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Poland, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, London, Morocco, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden and Turkey.

Reskins are overrides, they override existing data so they should load last (after the original file). Also every data can be overwritten only once on purpose. If a data is overridden and later overriden a second time it's a conflict.

This means for

- police cars
- fire fighters
- ambulance
- passenger train
- cargo train
- mono rail

you can only use one reskin/repaint at a time. It's of no sense to install more than one ambulance car reskin. Only the last one loaded by the game will show up.

So this is the next task today: find exactly one reskin for each of those 6 different automata types (instances) named above that fit in the new regions you just imported. Put them also into the respective Z_Terrainmod folder.

If you download a package like the one mentioned above you have to extract it first and to select the single reskin you want to use. But don't delete the others. Just keep them at a safe place, you might need them some other day. If you have trouble to find what you need you may ask in the forums.

Finally put the reskins you have choosen together with the trees and the environment textures in the corresponding Z_Terrainmod folder. So finally you haven't an individalized but a regionalized game. But keep on studying and one day you can do police cars with the skin of your own private kingdom. Yes! Major Fantozzi loves this!

Now launch the game and load one of your new regions. It is totally naked and in regional view even a strange texture is shown. You have to load each tile first to get it updated with you new landscape colours. But don't start any city jet. Use only God mode.You may have to level borders, do some finetuning and you have to plant some happy little trees.

Your new regions and so this lession will not be complete until you have made a good looking and satisfying landscape from the map.

And when you finally have an idyll with sheeps and shepherds and the deers dancing on the clearings and peaceful waters flow and I don't know what else, something looking like this:

you may do the most important thing. Go to your regions folder and make a backup of the entire folder of your newly created ground.

Make a backup from the corresponding Z_Terrainmod folder too and keep both backups together and you may even add a a screenshot for documentation.

Regard this combination of different environment related plugins and a region as your personal starter pack. With time passing you may add more features to your starter packs, slope mods, mmps - things we will cover later. Also you can create as many different of those setups as you like. Just keep them all in their initial state as a backup in a save place. So you can expand and modify them at any time and play them as often as you like.


So we have completed the scenery. Now let's go and check out the actors.

[fantozzi]

Day 6

Another precious information: clicking on this wonderful portrait of our beloved ruler Major Fantozzi will result in absolutely nothing happening.

Instead clicking on this strange line below will result in an totally unaccetable enlargement of something totally bewildering that makes you scrolling down forever.

But what is this?

Well, no. This isn't the shopping list of the chinese gouvernement. This is where the childrens game ends and true simulation begins. The line that separates the women from the girls and the men from the boys.

Ladies and gentleman, this is the NAM.

A mod released first time on april 2004 and since then making company to the original game, developed by different generations of modders in a team still active and proceeding untill today. This mod is like a backbone holding both together and upright, the rusty old game and the ongoing community. This mod makes the difference.

Not recommended for persons under 12 years. And that's not because of the explict lyrics. The picture above shows: it is complex. As this picture shows nothing else than the custom install options menu of the NAM 36.

For an old smart-arse like our beloved Major the NAM, the Network Addon Mod is no problem. He saw all the features – now making a scroll bar of two kilometers - growing up from early states of development to a full mature network. To him they are like dear family members.

For a beginner those family members may look less inviting.

But doesn't help. Somehow also beginners must get used to the family affairs, to our business, the major and imperator business, making neighborhood deals.

It's no bad idea to read a little bit about the history of the NAM. A sicilian family with it's long tradition is often better understood when you know the story behind their enigmatic behaviors.

That's why it's usefull to know about the technique of network override and why there a limits what can be done with network modding and why the whole construction crumbles always with the last piece you put in it.

Now, let's download the NAM. Always download NAM here. There you get the latest stable version and the original one. Never download the NAM "somewhere". "Somewhere", on the web, can be a dangerous place.

When donwloaded extract the zip to somewhere else outside your plugin folder. Double click on the read-first html file or open it with your browser.

Read and understand at least the chapters "requirements and compatibility", "a note about drive side (RHD vs. LHD)", "a note about the "4GB patch" and maybe the impressive "Credits", a list of true honor.

Launch the Installer. And next keep in mind that the installer will do a check if your games executable has the correct version and if it finds a 64 bit operating system it will aply the 4GB patch to the executable. This means: when you make a backup of your plugin folder and later you use this backup on a fresh installation of the game, this patch will be lost. So everytime you install your game or recover it from the cloud or whatever – you have to apply the 4GB patch again separately. The same is valid for the I-HT bug fix. But we learn about this later.

Only for educational purposes we will not choose standard installation instead we will go the pita way, the custom installation.

That's your task for today and why we need this long picture above. This is, what the custom installation menu of the NAM 36 looks like if fully expanded. No checkmark was touched, so this shows also the difference between the standard installation (checked) and what you won't get if you choose standard installation (unchecked).

But all these will be Potemkin villages as long as you don't understand what all those entries mean. As long you won't be able to decide if you want or need it.

So there is no way around to understand this endless list.

I'll try to assist. I'll give you a couple of catchwords and you try to find what these things are.

With his long history the NAM is an unification and bundling of many funktions and networks all additions to the general theme of transportation.

The NAM contains the following mods:

- A replacement for the Traffic Controller with GUI
- Ground Light Rail (GLR)
- RealHighway Mod (RHW)
- Street Addon Mod (SAM)
- High Speed Rail Project (HSRP)
- RealRailway (RRW)
- Canal Addon Mod (CAN-AM)
- Fractional Angle Networking (at present: FAR {FA-2, FA-3})
- Flexible Underpasses (FLUPs)
- Network Widening Mod (NWM)
- Turning Lane Extension Pieces (TuLEP)
- Diagonal Bridge Enabler (DBE)
- Lots of Stations
- Lots of Bridges
- Digger Lots

So first get and understanding what those main mods are. Maybe you can do a picture search on web.

In a second step have look on those acronyms for the elements of each mod: TLA, OWR, RD-, RHW-6 and so on. And what does the talking about L1, L2 etc. means? What is a FAR, what is a FLUP? How dangerous are they?

Very helpfull to get into this sea auf acronyms is the wiki entry about the NAM. If you scroll down to the end of this article there are links to all of the basic mod and if you follow those links you will find explanations for all the aronyms.

But at the end of day you should be able to decide what you want to try out from the long list above.

See the RRW isn't ticked by default? See you have to chose between different canal systems - or SimGoober or Calligrafix? See all those preselected option?s

Hell, this is like a two hours survey on the phone about the behavior of the average pubescent SC4 player! You want to install one way roads with long snouts or average snouts, you want heavy or decent intercourse? You want voluptous streets with big round curves or you want to have them skinny and straight? You want to use canals ... which flavour?

What to do?

To this question there is only one right answer.

Try it out.

Now is the right time. Try different installation options an see the elements and systems you get.

[fantozzi]

Day 7

Go here, to mgb's video collection, search for NAM Tutorial Part 1 and start with this and watch all 4 following parts and about bridges with high clearence and if you aren't tired yet also those "how-to" clips about the RHW.

So learn about the keyboard keys to choose and rotate puzzle pieces. Learn about starter pieces. Learn about use them.

Try to create something looking similar to this:

then looking similar to this:

and then to this:

and to this:

And don't forget about the "moolah" witchery we learned on Day 4, if you run out of money.

Learn also about two more and very usefull witcheries today. You remember the door to the netherworld? Keyboard keys [STRG] + [X] and then right mouseclick to call the ghosts from out of the innards of the game?

So this time choose the witchery DrawPaths on your created networks and HidePaths to make the witchery go away. But study those paths well that are drawn. They will help you to check if your network really works as you designed it.

So why not creating some totally new interchange and check if they could work in RL by using the witchery codes mentioned above? The NAM will give you the oportunity to invent traffic solutions. Realistic traffic solutions.

NAM adds a completely new challenge to the game. Like in those roller coaster games now it's possible to create great looking interchanges ... that never will work. While in base game everything that was possible to do was working for sure - a childish limitation to the method of planning - with NAM you become a real planner with all the possibilities to fail. To create non working interchanges. But also with the chance to become a genious. That's why Major Fantozzi says with NAM Sim City 4 becomes an adult game. Now your city planning skills really matters. [font]

[fantozzi]

Day 8

Today: a lesson on philosophy. About how to escape the marketing trick of deciding. And there are tricksters everywhere around to dob you into their decission traps! They approach always with a smile and a question always sounding friendly because it offers you an option to choose.

During a flight for example, the stewardess may ask: "Some beverage? Water or Coffee?" Most people, when offered such a "this-or-that" choice will execute this OR like a command. So they will take water or coffee. Only a minority of people will not execute the command immediatly, taking the offered "fake freedom" to chose but analyzing and checking their options to act beyond of the operation "OR". They have an "ELSE?" in mind. Beyond the suggested, the offered freedom, can't there be even more freedom to choose – a hidden, invisible freedom? More options the question only hides on this level of the dialogue? So you only think you have the freedom to choose and instead you just perform a lousy operation, a decission that's more like to obey that OR that was deilvered to your logic apparatus called brain.

But is this OR a correct description of your situation, the conditions, the reality? There is only water and coffee on board of this plane? And those happy few using their brain to get beyond faked limits may ask: and what's about tomato juice? Or maybe a small glas of champagne? And you would be suprised what there is to drink on airliners. They are damn flying cocktail bars!

But the question isn't made to describe the situation, the conditions. It's only made to offer the cheapest drinks first and offer the most expensive as latest as possible. So it's your fault, if you don't extend the system of choices by asking: what else is possible?

The same when you're asked: "Do you want to remain a poor stupid cockroach for the rest of your life OR you want to purchase this reindeer leather covered edition of Dante Allighieri's "Divine Comedy"?

So you purchase this book as a young man, you read it and understand absolutely nothing but you study economics become a nice nerd in some office and when you are fifthy years old you begin to ask yourself if you weren't tricked by the bookseller. As you realize if you wouldn't have spend the 100 bucks on this Reindeer-Dante most probably you would have had a lucky life too. At the end the question seemed so urgent and existential in younger days turned out to be a complete hoax when you became older.

The trick is to put pressure on you, not give you enough time to reflect on what your real freedom of choosing amongst many options is. Reducing an open field of acting to a tiny "this-or-that." Sales ends tomorrow, decide quick!

Playing with NAM or not playing with NAM. Instead taking your time browsing through the custom installation routine (see Day 6) you may discover such a "this-or-that" doesn't even exist. You can install 5,4 percent or 12 percent of the NAM, slices in every size. And still we can read those questions almost every day.

Another variation is the "what is best" question. Pracitcally the same, just hiding the "OR". Again the trick is to perform and execute a logic operation instead of thinking about your real freedom in decision-making. What is the best car in the world? Mercedes, Toyota, Chevrolet? Most of the time we will go on manufactures because it's the easiest criteria and so again we will discuss a restricted OR.

But the truth is, there are different cars for different needs. A forest ranger driving around in the mountains won't be happy with a Ferrari.
Instead the fruit farmer maybe will:

So it's first and foremost the need that decides what car is best. And as there are plenty of needs there are plenty of cars they are "best".
And the obvious truth is: the best car is the car that brings you dry to work and back when it is raining outside, the car you can sit in and turn the radio on. It's the car you own. And every car you do not own never can be better than this one. And there are regions in the world a Paco-Paco ist simply the best solution for the circumstances.

But now, why Major Fantozzi makes such a long speech about something else than Sim City 4?

Because that's how despots are. They like it when their people listen and applaude.

But even more Major Fantozzi did this long speech because he really hates those questions growing like weed "which terrain mod should I use, (this or that) which hospital should I download (this or that), which game is better (this or that).

Well, all these things were created for you to have fun. Isn't it so? And with fun it's exactly like with calories. The more icecream the more calories. So why this absurd decissions - should I have this fun or should I have that fun, which fun ist the better fun? To increase fun ... why not take it all? Why spending so much time on that nitpicking "this OR that"?

Why on earth? It was all created for you. You can have the whole cake.

And this is especially true on SLOPE MODS.

Shure, you always can use only one slope mod at the time in your plugin folder. But this doesn't mean you can only use one slope mod to solve all your major's needs. You can exchange the slope mod in your plugin folder for different tasks.

So instead of choosing "the best" ( ) SLOPE MOD ... again it's hundred times better to learn about them, their differences and how to benefit by having a variety of them ( ) to choose from.

As today we want to play with the RHW and learn how to build sunken highways.

We will also use the DIGGER LOTS. Remember the video by mgb about the rail bridge? We want to exercise this technique of leveling streets today.

So if you learned about the DIGGER LOTS and you did your own research about slope mods next try to follow this video tutorial. You also may try different slope mods with different smoothing characteristics.

It's pretty interesting to see that certain interchanges you'll see on video are smoothly to build or almost impossible to build depending on the slope mod you use.

Something to keep in mind and a golden rule Major Fantozzi gives you here: before you go crazy about a messages like "Can't build network here" or "I'm too stupid to connect the last tile of this road" – save, shutdown the game and change the slope mod. Again it is not "jump out of the window OR "shoot your PC." Again there's more to choose from.

You can link your plugin folder directly to your desktop and you can keep different slope mods folders on your desktop, so it's only a few clicks to exchange them.

More or less you should be ready now to watch Haljackey's "How to" video about building a 4-way interchange and to use your skills to create complex interchanges with smooth curves and slopes.

At this point Major Fantozzi will leave you to Master Haljackey for the next couple of days as he can teach you much much more about the art of traffic handling. Use his expertise to expand your skills.