Changing A Growable Lot into a Landmark Lot

[sithlrd98]

                                 How to change a Growable lot into a Landmark lot

                                                                       
                                                                         *Please bear with me as this is my first tutorial*
                                 

This is a tutorial on how to change a Growable lot into a basic Landmark lot. This should not be confused with Simgoobers tutorial or the one by Andreas as this just fills in the gaps.
                 
 Have you ever found a residential building that you can't wait to see in your city? Well you can use the Building plop cheat , but as we all know plopping residential buildings only works for so long until it delapitates. Well, here is a relatively easy way to change that growable lot into a Landmark lot.
                                                         Here I will show a lot I just downloaded ,Heblems LBT Mendoza1826.
                         
  As you can see , this is the lot in-game with the aforementioned cheat activated.



Are we ready?
First , find the model of the building you want to change and make sure it is in your My Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins folder (without being inside of another folder inside of the plugins folder). (As this is a basic tutorial , I'm only covering an individual building and not a family , of course it is basically the same , as there generally is just a color difference. Just find the one you want.) Next fire up the Plugin Manager (PIM for short)



Good , we see our model!
Now we want to drag the model over to the left side to the Landmark icon.
We should see a screen like this.


Woah , that's a lot of info...Lets concentrate on the basics. Now , this is what I do ( Note...These values are set up this way for a reason. I only change these values for my tasting .I am not implying that what I do is 100% what you should do! ) First , I change the first 2  values to zero as well as the Flammability . For the Exemplar I generally put LM either before or after the name , and then just copy/paste the whole name for the Item description and Item name.
I change the Plop cost , water  & power to zero. I haven't experienced any problems with changing the wealth , so I usually pick Medium wealth.

Now save it and you will have a new .desc in your Plugins folder.



Still with me? Great , now lets open up Lot Editor. (LE for short) Lets look at the original lot to get a feel of the layout.



(Notice that the lot says 4x4 ...ignore that as we can see it's actually 3x4)
Alright , lets start making our lot. Find a Landmark lot that you want to change.



Remove all of the props and textures , then click the Building tab and look for our Landmark building.



Found it! Now change the original for ours. At this point , it's not exactly 100% important that you get the rotation or placement perfect as we will be checking our lot later. Now , add a base texture , it doesn't matter what you choose cause we won't be using it , but LE makes us do it.
Save the lot , I would recommend using the same name as the original , just add a LM to it so you can find it later. Now , we get down to the nitty gritty, we are going to use one of the most important tools we have...Reader.
Once you start Reader , select the original lot and then our LM lot.



Come back , don't run away! It's not as complicated as it looks....this time. *cue evil laugh*
First , open the LM lot. Now , sometimes the model is not the first Lot object , but today we are in luck . ( Because we did the building first in LE)
We know this is the model because it ends with 0 on the first section. Props end with 01 and textures end with 02.We want the props and textures and their locations on the lot from the original , but not the building because it is pointing to a residential .desc , so what you want to do is remove the textures and everything under the LotConfigPropertyLotobject (Building in this case ) by right clicking to select and then left clicking your mouse and deleting said properties. Now lets open the original lot and select all of the properties under  the LotConfigPropertyLotobject , but this time we are going to copy them and paste them to our lot. Now , here is the most important step...We have to  Re-index the lot so that everything is in its place. Now save the lot.



Lets see it in LE shall we?



Sometimes , you will have to line the building up ,(There is another way , but for simplicity's sake we'll just move it) but hey it's worth it ...right? Lets see it in-game!



Now,that wasn't too hard was it? Now you can delete the LM .desc we created earlier as that info is stored in our LM lot.
Have fun Plopping away!!!!

Jayson

[RippleJet]

Thanks Jayson for posting this!
Better than the corresponding one posted by Equinox long ago, which didn't have any pictures!

EDIT:
Since this is mostly concerns lot tweaking, even if it includes the use of Reader,
I've moved it from Other Tutorials to Lot Tweaking Tutorials.

[sithlrd98]

Thanks Jayson for posting this!
Better than the corresponding one posted by Equinox long ago, which didn't have any pictures!

I never saw the one by Equinox...(I wish I had awhile back)

EDIT:
Since this is mostly concerns lot tweaking, even if it includes the use of Reader,
I've moved it from Other Tutorials to Lot Tweaking Tutorials.

Thats cool...I wasn't sure where to put it and figured if it was in the wrong place , someone would put it where it belonged! 

Jayson

[RippleJet]

I never saw the one by Equinox...(I wish I had awhile back)

Copying Lot Config Properties (another way to convert between lot types)