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Posted: 4/2/2005 8:11 AM
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Viewer
Joined: 6/4/2004
Posts: 284
You can't bulldoze flames, but you can bulldoze the area around the flames, so they have no place to spread to. You can no doubt control a plane crash using careful slowdown and moving the map, even when you have no airport.
Posted: 2/15/2009 1:23 AM
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Burning_Death
Former player
Joined: 7/16/2004
Posts: 108
Location: Germany, Bremen
Recently a debug menu code was published for Sim City where you could rise the land value to max or reclaim all the water:
Debug Menu Load or start a new city, then choose END from the Save/Load menu. When the "See you soon!" screen appears, press the following on controller 2: Left, A, Right, Y, Up, B, Down, X, Select, Start, Start, Select, R, R, L, L. Press Up or Down to scroll through the options, and press Left or Right to toggle them on or off. To activate the selected features, change MEMORY to SET and reset the SNES (they will remain active even if you power off). To deactivate everything, go back into the menu, change MEMORY to CLR, and press B.
Would this be allowed for a TAS? Otherwise I also got a layout to reach a population just over 600,000 on map 061 without zone stacking or gifts (thanks to Gothic_Sara) so it _should_ be possible to built it right after entering the money trick!
.:| www.superplayers.de |:.
Posted: 2/15/2009 4:26 AM
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Rick
Former player
Joined: 6/25/2004
Posts: 607
Location: Maine
Probably not, because it falls under the category of "cheats", more than likely. I throw my vote in too for a run of this game, but I'm not really sure what would be the most interesting way of doing it.
http://wiki.rustedlogic.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor The Cutting Room Floor wiki.
Posted: 2/15/2009 9:42 AM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
So, in-game cheats are generally not allowed for a TAS... We can still hit 600k without the debug mode, anyway. I saw the simple layout that hits the high population. It was made to be simple. It doesn't take advantage of the fact that industrial zones only needs a single rail to work. Along with commercial zones, police departments, and fire departments, but that's less important when there aren't as many of those around in the layout. But it is still a simple layout, the simplest possible that still meets the goal of 600k+ sims. As a test, I built the layout myself. Here's the history: 
1900 JAN:New mayor elected
1900 FEB:Became town
1900 JUN:Became city
1901 FEB:Became capital
1901 MAR:Became metropolis
1901 AUG:A plane crashed!   (Happened right by the Your House...)
1902 MAY:Became megalopolis
1903 JUL:Population came to 600,000
That was an unassisted run by emulation, but we can already freeze time anyway. Money glitch was used, of course! Your transportation can be broken up in lengths of 1 to 3 tiles, and still cover all transit-related demands. Residential zones are the only ones that need to go someplace (any building that isn't R-zone or nuclear power plant), requiring at least 2 tiles, but everything else is perfectly fine with a single tile of rail leading nowhere. Crime can run rampant in the city, as it only affects land value upon hitting a certain value. Sims can complain like crazy how you're doing a bad job, yet they come flooding your place anyway. Screw sensible planning! Then again, a lot of it will be waiting and doing nothing. Setting up the whole thing might actually be more entertaining than the actual passing of time for them to grow. I say the priority should be to make the most senseless-looking arrangement and still get a 600k+ megalopolis freaking fast.
Posted: 2/15/2009 6:19 PM
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Rick
Former player
Joined: 6/25/2004
Posts: 607
Location: Maine
I actually like that idea a lot. Perhaps also, since it's really like, an "unlimited time" run, we should set a limit to where the actual run ends, such as "Biggest population attainable in five years." This is just an example, since I know the variables in the time in stuff in terms of changing game speed.
http://wiki.rustedlogic.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor The Cutting Room Floor wiki.
Posted: 2/15/2009 7:05 PM
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Saturn
Player (206)
Joined: 2/18/2005
Posts: 1451
Burning Death wrote:
Recently a debug menu code was published for Sim City where you could rise the land value to max or reclaim all the water:
Wow, it doesn't happen often that you see a new trick/cheat for a game that you know pretty well for more than 15 years. Awesome information, BD! Though I agree that it shouldn't be used in a potential TAS, as it would be kind of cheating, much more so than the money glitch that I think should be allowed to speed up the run and make it more entertaining. I would be interested to see a 600000 population layout on a regular map though. Are you guys willing to show one if you have it? My best was ~540000 on map 061 (which I think is the best one to get max population), so it would be great to see how the last 60k can be pushed in with optimal planning. Also FatRatKnight, did you record a movie of your unassisted 600k run? If so, do you mind posting it? It looks very impressive the way you described it, so I would definitely check it out.
See my perfect 100% movie-walkthroughs of the best RPG games on http://www.freewebs.com/saturnsmovies/index.htm Current TAS project (with new videos): Super Metroid Redesign, any% speedrun
Posted: 2/15/2009 8:05 PM
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Sticky
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
I agree with saturn, post that shizzle! If you didnt record the run, would it be easy enough to replicate? Could you write instructions, or, better yet, just do it again... this time recording?
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Posted: 2/15/2009 8:45 PM
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snorlax
He/Him
Joined: 5/20/2007
Posts: 174
Location: Wisconsin
I'd like to see a run of this, maybe just fastest to megalopolis, but it would probably be kind of lame if the money trick was used.
Posted: 2/15/2009 9:50 PM
(Edited: 2/15/2009 11:12 PM)
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
The layout is nothing real exciting. I didn't record the run. EDIT: Now I recorded something. I recommend use of the turbo key. Lots of use. Edit2: I deviated from the layout in the snapshot in that southeast corner, where all those industrial zones are separated from everywhere else. I wanted to show that the industrial zones work just fine with one rail, and a layout to take advantage of that. The GameFAQs message board has an awful lot of information. It's where we got the layout, and all we needed to do was ask. Why, the person even provided a snapshot of this layout. With the initial 20,000$, I built the biggest city I could with it, following part of the layout while running out of money to begin the money trick. Taxes at 0% to succeed at the trick and to maximize zone demand. Then I just followed the layout in the picture after I got all the money I need, making sure to build a stadium, an airport, and a seaport.
Posted: 2/15/2009 11:12 PM
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Burning_Death
Former player
Joined: 7/16/2004
Posts: 108
Location: Germany, Bremen
Okay, the debug code is forbidden as I though. The goal should be reaching a population of 600k (last congratulation message pops up). Without the money trick it just takes a huge amount more time to build up the exactly same layout, which should be more boring than doing it uber fast with the money trick and non-stop building action ;) . While you're scrolling or holding a button the time stops. With frame advance it should be able to build everything on JAN 1901 without pausing or anything, then stop the movie after the last input and just watch the awesomeness by yourself (if your watching it in SNES9x) :) . This should be the main goal: Reaching 600k in the shortest amount of ingame time (months/years) OVER building 95% of the map and just barely reaching 600k in 10 ingame years or something. What do you guys think? Edit2: Wow, thanks for the recording FatRatKnight! Seems like I just don't have the patience anymore to TAS this game :/ . I hope you or anybody else will give it a try.
.:| www.superplayers.de |:.
Posted: 2/16/2009 12:54 AM
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Sticky
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
That sounds like a legit goal. I would say reach 600K with shortest/least amount of input... otherwise "in game time" would still be the ~10 years or whatever.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Posted: 2/16/2009 1:16 AM
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Saturn
Player (206)
Joined: 2/18/2005
Posts: 1451
Yeah, thanks for the movie and all information, FatRatKnight. Looks like the major key to get the additional population was to avoid almost all commercial zones and substitute them with the industrial ones. This are horrible conditions I thought wouldn't allow the city to grow just fine as well, but it's cool to be proven wrong. It was also a nice surprise to see the message after you reached 600000 population, as I didn't even know it exists. Great stuff!
See my perfect 100% movie-walkthroughs of the best RPG games on http://www.freewebs.com/saturnsmovies/index.htm Current TAS project (with new videos): Super Metroid Redesign, any% speedrun
Posted: 2/16/2009 1:31 AM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Building a small yet functioning city in 6 seconds. I'm just fooling around, seeing what it looks like when we TAS-build a city. The shortest in-game time is definitely less than 4 years. Going for shortest input may extend this time when we prematurely stop short of filling the rest of the map. Additionally, the shortest movie length needs the extra input to click through the crime and pollution troubles messages that will almost certainly show up. While I am interested in trying to build a megalopolis in record time, I seriously don't want to be the one person to try. I have enough other stuff to be doing already. Mainly, I'm just prodding around with tests, like the unassisted run with 0 rerecords and showing proof of concept. I've proven the layout works. I've shown the pace we should build the city at. At this point, that's all I care about doing, though it may change later.
Posted: 2/16/2009 2:00 AM
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dave_dfwm
Active player (253)
Joined: 7/30/2006
Posts: 208
Location: Alefgard, USA
Wonderful job with the 600,000 population! I noticed you didn't build any parks in your town. Don't parks reduce the pollution in the city? Maybe if you build some parks in the unused squares, you could reduce the number of annoying "pollution warning" screens that show up.
Posted: 2/16/2009 2:16 AM
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Ver_Greeneyes
Joined: 4/2/2008
Posts: 103
Location: The Netherlands
FatRatKnight wrote:
The shortest in-game time is definitely less than 4 years. Going for shortest input may extend this time when we prematurely stop short of filling the rest of the map. Additionally, the shortest movie length needs the extra input to click through the crime and pollution troubles messages that will almost certainly show up.
That's a good point. I'd say go for shortest ingame time to 600.000, with the sub-goal of shortest input time / least amount of polution and crime warnings. (can you luck-manipulate these at all? what about natural disasters? although I don't know how frequently these happen, it's been ages since I last played this game)
Posted: 2/16/2009 4:56 AM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
dave_dfwm wrote:
Wonderful job with the 600,000 population!
Technically, all I'm doing is using a layout proposed by someone else. That someone else (Gothic_Sara) should take the credit.
dave_dfwm wrote:
Don't parks reduce the pollution in the city?
They do not appear to. The only thing they seem to do is raise the land value, which is still a good thing for C-zones and R-zones. In fact, one way to reduce the pollution complaint is to actually build more industrial zones in the areas with no pollution. For some reason, the game uses the average of all tiles with pollution when figuring out if there's a pollution problem. The completely unpolluted areas are never added to this average. One can have a single airport in the corner of a map, no industrial, no seaport, no coal power, and in fact have all residents miles away from the airport, yet the pollution message still shows up as though it's a big problem. In the tiles where there are pollution, there's a high density of it. Zero density tiles aren't counted towards this average, so all the squeeky clean places that didn't have the airport in the example don't count. So taking care of the pollution warning messages would involve destroying a number of industrial zones to turn most of that red pollution into green and building a few I-zones with the residential zones. Needless to say, this strategy isn't the brightest one out there when it comes to quick, high population. As for crime, police departments galore. But since the central residential block is already doing well enough without any, and the fact industrial zones tolerate just about everything, this would only serve to reduce the max potential population, as police departments themselves don't contribute to the number of sims.
Posted: 2/16/2009 5:01 AM
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dave_dfwm
Active player (253)
Joined: 7/30/2006
Posts: 208
Location: Alefgard, USA
Also, if you turbo past all of your disasters, your population drops down to about 30,000 after your entire town burns!!!
Posted: 2/19/2009 10:23 AM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
More out of curiosity's sake, could someone make a lua script that gives the exact land value of each square? I dug around for some memory addresses which I think are needed for this. 
0x7E01BD,2s   Screen X position (by tile, not by pixel)
0x7E01BF,2s   Screen Y position
0x7F6B00,1u   Begin Land Value array
A square is 2x2 tiles in size. The first element in the Land Value array points to the upper-left corner of the whole map. Add 0x0001 (1) for each square east, and add 0x003C (60) for each square south. The last square in the array should be at 0x7F76B7. As far as I know, it's just reading up those memory addresses, some calculations involving screen positions, then drawing boxes and showing a number in each one. But I don't know the second thing about lua. The reason why land value might be important to know is because the R-zones need at least a certain value in order to grow and maintain their size. The C-zones need quite a bit to reach a high potential, but can maintain their size even with no land value. They both need a lot to hit TOP. I-zones don't care about it at all. While making a layout, it would be useful to know when the land value starts to drop off, so we can know much quicker where I-zones will be preferred. Besides, I'm sure any serious SimCity player would appreciate an on-screen Land Value-O-Meter.
Posted: 2/20/2009 8:11 PM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
I made a different layout. It reaches capital before I do the money trick, and 600k population by 1902 NOV. This one is pretty close to being perfect. I'm not sure if it's possible to manipulate the warnings into never appearing. Pollution and crime will always be present, but even though they are running rampant in the megalopolis...
Posted: 2/21/2009 2:44 AM
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Dammit
Experienced player (590)
Joined: 1/11/2007
Posts: 103
FatRatKnight wrote:
lua script that gives the exact land value of each square
I'll try. I'll edit later with the result. Edit: OK, seems to be working. As usual, I borrowed bits from scripts by Dromecious and others. http://lua.pastey.net/108707 Hold L to see the values and R to see the color grid. The colors match the ones in the in-game land value map, but I had to guess the values where the gradients are. I scaled the values to percent because three digits won't fit in a 16x16 box.
Posted: 2/22/2009 4:43 AM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Dammit wrote:
I'll try. I'll edit later with the result. Edit: OK, seems to be working. [...]
A little more crowded than I imagined, but this allows me to see precisely where the optimal spots for those R-zones begin and end. Should also help anyone else who wants to try TASing this, in case they want to muck about with some layouts before finalizing one. I will simply say thanks. This is pretty much what I hoped for. EDIT: Just re-posting my runs in case you don't want to go hunting them down just to have a pre-built city. (first) (second) Hmm, it would be nice to see the precise number, but the lack of space for three digits does get in the way. Can you recolor the text? Perhaps use three different colors, one each for <100, 100~199, and 200~255. We can still cross-check with the color boxes so we can guess that "02" there is actually somewhere over 100. Mind if I present this to the GameFAQs board? I'm sure there's someone who'd love to see land value actively exposed like this. EDIT: I just realized... By holding down any button, time does not pass. As such, even L or R will halt the flow of time. This becomes quite a problem if I want to watch land value change the moment it happens. I can play a movie in read-only and hold L or R without interfering with it and still see the changes happen, so I suppose it's not that big of a deal.
Posted: 2/22/2009 5:56 AM
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Dammit
Experienced player (590)
Joined: 1/11/2007
Posts: 103
FatRatKnight wrote:
Hmm, it would be nice to see the precise number, but the lack of space for three digits does get in the way. Can you recolor the text? Perhaps use three different colors, one each for <100, 100~199, and 200~255. We can still cross-check with the color boxes so we can guess that "02" there is actually somewhere over 100.
You currently cannot control the text color. Try this one. It prints the unscaled number. 100s digit in the upper left, 10s digit in the lower left, 1s digit in the lower right. (Another way to do it would have been to convert to hex.) I also made it so no number is shown in the case of zero landvalue. http://lua.pastey.net/108744
FatRatKnight wrote:
Mind if I present this to the GameFAQs board? I'm sure there's someone who'd love to see land value actively exposed like this.
I've been following your gamefaqs discussion. The script is published: share it wherever you want.
FatRatKnight wrote:
EDIT: I just realized... By holding down any button, time does not pass. As such, even L or R will halt the flow of time. This becomes quite a problem if I want to watch land value change the moment it happens. I can play a movie in read-only and hold L or R without interfering with it and still see the changes happen, so I suppose it's not that big of a deal.
You can change the controller in line 10 to something else if you don't want to interfere with the time passage. You can also decomment lines 32/33 to show the info at all times. I do hope some kind of TAS is being planned?
Posted: 2/22/2009 2:13 PM
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Highness
Player (71)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
FatRatKnight wrote:
EDIT: I just realized... By holding down any button, time does not pass. As such, even L or R will halt the flow of time. This becomes quite a problem if I want to watch land value change the moment it happens. I can play a movie in read-only and hold L or R without interfering with it and still see the changes happen, so I suppose it's not that big of a deal.
Maby someone should program a toggle function for switching LUA on/off? Like pressing ctrl+L for turning the script on and off, and thus, you don't interfere the game? I'm not a programmer, so I don't know.
Posted: 2/22/2009 3:32 PM
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DemonStrate
Joined: 4/18/2006
Posts: 179
Location: East Petersburg, PA
FatRatKnight wrote:
I made a different layout. It reaches capital before I do the money trick, and 600k population by 1902 NOV. This one is pretty close to being perfect. I'm not sure if it's possible to manipulate the warnings into never appearing. Pollution and crime will always be present, but even though they are running rampant in the megalopolis...
The weird thing I noticed about this, is that if you let the game keep playing after the disasters, it goes down to 28800, and stays there, even though there aren't any buildings with power or nearly any complete squares at all. Why are there still residents?
"I think we can put our differences behind us... for science, you monster."
Posted: 2/22/2009 7:38 PM
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snorlax
He/Him
Joined: 5/20/2007
Posts: 174
Location: Wisconsin
As long as the center tile of a square remains (or the main tile, which you would bulldoze and which flashes the lighning bolt), a developed zone retains its population forever.
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