No cargo on my container ships?

[docj101]

I know this is a bit of a non-issue however this has been driving me crazy and after 3 hours of trying to find the answer I give up and am going to just ask here. 

You see, my seaports in several cities all work well as far as removing freight from my city, but the ships themselves never turn into a cargo filled ship.  The container ships always leave port visually empty.  This is happening at all my ports in all cities. 

Yes i do have plenty of cargo actually arriving at the seaports.  I don't bother counting unused or overcapacity ports when i refer to this problem because of course they are empty.

I'm not sure if the containers are automata or if the ship itself is supposed to change to the "full" ship.  All I do know is for the sake of realism and eye-candy I want my ships to leave port full.

On WinXP: I'm running SC4 Deluxe with patch and the NAM (basic full install) and a few custom mass transit stations.  These are the only plugins I am currently or have ever used since last format of HDD.

I would really love to fix this, can anyone help me?  Can anyone at least explain this to me as being something that others deal with?  If it can't be fixed I would take some solace in knowing I'm not the only one with this trouble.

Thanks Alot!
-Docj

[joshua43214]

I lost all my save games in a hdd crash, and have not yet started a seaport in my new region. However, I seem to remember the Simpeg stuff having alot of activity. I now the cranes and stuff move arround, and freight fills and then empties on the docks. I cant remember though if the ships actualy leave the dock full. His plopable freight ships do have automata though and I seem to remember them appearing with different amounts of frieght.

If you are serious about building a decent seaport, its really hard to not use Simpeg lots, they are some of the best looking in the game. His seaport controller (its imbedded in the lots themselves) is not compatable with any other seaport controller. He has 4 active lots that act as proper freight depot rather than eye candy, if you use these lots, load a region you dont care about, drop every dock and seaport thing you have, exit and reload the region to make sure everything is fine. using incompatable seaport controllers will cause a region to not load, making it dificult to fix the issue.

If you really want interesting seaports, download the BSC seaport set up. The folks here develpoed growable seaports, and they even have growable freight airports to go along with them. You will need to download alot of dependancies, and lots. The system is designed to be used with Cleanitol to get the dependancy list, and many of the dependancies have their own dependancies. Get the BSCDownloader to read the dependancy list and it will make life alot easier...

You will have to dig arround the forums to find the method of "fixing" the Simpeg lots so they work.

GL and have fun

P.S. once you get done with that, get CAM, you will thanks yourself even thoughit will take a few days to download and install everything...

[jdenm8]

but the ships themselves never turn into a cargo filled ship.  The container ships always leave port visually empty.

That would be because there's no containers in the S3D model used for the ship. You can add some manually, but it'd be perpetually loaded then.

[JIYIN]

but the ships themselves never turn into a cargo filled ship.  The container ships always leave port visually empty.

That would be because there's no containers in the S3D model used for the ship. You can add some manually, but it'd be perpetually loaded then.

hi there!

No intention to bump old thread, but i have a great concern about this problem.

short history:

i remember years ago when i was playing SC4 Vanilla, there is animation of the pilling of containers on cargo ship.
i stopped playing until not long ago i started playing SC4 again & spent a few months' time to study almost every aspect of modding that has been achieved up to now.

currently i'm having SC4 Deluxe 1.1.640 and also found this problem of visually empty cargo ship. it happens with empty game plugins. hence i myself as well had been trying to look for a fix but unfortunately there is no solution so far.

interesting experiment:

i've downloaded the "bay area" seaport by a Japanese author. Surprisingly i saw the presence of containers on ships that are traveling to this seaport!

*In fact, there is smoke coming out from the ship's chimney while the one from Maxis seaport is missing.

the ships are the same default Maxis automata. they sometimes have different volume of containers which i believe is part of the game's original design.

so, seemingly it's not about adding containers model into the ship's S3D, right? 

i wonder how is the lots (Maxis seaport vs. "bay area" seaport) affecting the appearance of the effects (containers & chimney's smoke)?

sorry for any inconvenience caused. God bless!