Help Cleaning Out Old Ploppable Residentials

[Mawgojzeta]

Hi!  I quite playing SC4 for quite awhile ago (two years or more) and recently started playing again.  I had, way back then, downloaded ploppable residential buildings that went into the Landmarks section.  They never seemed to work and I meant to remove them, but then had quite playing.  Now, I am trying to dig them out and get rid of them, but cannot seem to find them (!!!).

The names (of a few of them) are Posh Villa, Stone Chateau, Victorian Mansion, Pleasant Brick, Small Estate, and others with starting names of DeVries, Bella Ella, Periana, White, Oooh La La, and Modern.  I have a bunch of apartments and high rises, too.  Does anyone remember who made these way back then?  Or the zip file names (I think I saved all my zip files)? Or any other information?

I used Datpacker before I realized I still had these in and I wonder if that is why I cannot find them now....

[SC4BOY]

Ploppable residentials don't work.. either use landmarks or go for custom growables.

DatPacker doesn't remove your files from plugins.. they simply compress them into a folder called "Plugins_compressed".. your original files are still in the plugins unless you removed them yourself

[Mawgojzeta]

I understand now that they don't work; that is why I want to get rid of them.     Thank you, though.

I simply cannot find them.  Even used the "Search" function in Windows to go through my computer and could not find them using the names I had from the game.  Just hoping someone remembered who made them or some other clue.

[Andreas]

Well, if you used DatPacker and deleted the original files, there's basically no way to ever find them again, since there are most likely hundreds or even thousands of lots condensed in your DatPacked DATs. In case you still have the original (not DatPacked) plugins folder, use the universal °50% method": Split your plugins folder into two halves, remove one half, start the game and check if those residentials are still there. If they aren't, try the other half of your files - now they should show up. If you found the half, split it yet again into two halves and repeat the whole process, until you found the culprit.

[SC4BOY]

Another way to find them would be to use the "extracheats.dll" and use the "ploplots" option in a sandbox citytile to plop along until you find those you're interested in... You will plop them under the filename of the custom lot.. that should allow you to find the key. Does your search engine look into zip files (mine does, but perhaps not all do).. after you locate the files, use a search that will look inside zips and find them.

[RippleJet]

You will plop them under the filename of the custom lot.. that should allow you to find the key.

If the filename was changed after the lot was made, you won't find the file this way.
The name displayed in the ExtraCheats is the lotconfig exemplar name, not the filename.

[Mawgojzeta]

Andreas:  That is what I thought.  I had a whole bunch of "loose" files just sitting in my plugins folder when I used Datpacker and I think that did get combined (or maybe always were???). Thank you for the tactical advise.  I discovered by doing some more investigation online that the buildings were made using the buildings from the Houston tileset (and some others).  I finally found the files sitting in "plugins compressed" after that looking for the word "Houston" and removed it and 3 others with similar names.  Seems to have gotten them all!

SC4BOY and RippleJet:  Thank you.  I will probably need this tactic if there are any other of these undesirable residential files in Landmarks.   Also: my computer will find .zip files. I thought I saved all of them, but maybe some of these older zips were deleted years ago.