In addition to the notoriously long-running debate about sharing plugins folders, there’s another related discussion that occasionally pops up from time to time, including very recently over on /r/simcity4: that of pre-rendered and pre-built regions and cities.
If you’ve browsed the exchanges at Simtropolis, SC4 Devotion, and various other sites, you’ve likely noticed that there are maps/regions available in abundance. However, rather than already being city and region files that you can just stick in your Regions folder and fire up the game, they’re generally in one of two intermediary formats:
- an 8-bit grayscale JPEG, supplemented with a config.bmp file to define where the various sizes of city tiles fit within it, for use with the game’s default terrain importer (accessed via Ctrl-Alt-Shift-R in Region View). These are most common for maps from 2006 and earlier.
- a .SC4M file, designed for use with the SC4Mapper or SC4Terraformer programs by tool-maker extraordinaire wouanagaine, which embeds the config.bmp and also provides higher-resolution (16-bit) terrain data. These are most common for maps from 2007 onward, including pretty much everything by prolific mappers such as drunkapple/dobdriver and the various members of the former New Horizons Productions (NHP) team.
Occasionally, though, players have asked, why not simply allow the actual .sc4 city files and regions onto the exchange, whether they be blank maps, or perhaps even cities that have already been built? There are a few reasons for this, but one of the main ones is a logistical one: file size.
To illustrate this, I’ll use one of my main regions from Tarkusian Cities, Chemeketa, which uses the NHP Salem, Oregon map, released by blade2k5 and papab2000 back in 2009. The region consists of a total of 30 large city tiles (5 wide by 6 high), so by most modern map standards, it’s a relatively compact one. Just to give you all some idea as to how built-up it currently is, here’s the data and a thumbnail of the region from sawtooth‘s Region Census tool:
By most standards, it’s a pretty modestly built-up region, with a population just north of one million within its 30 large tiles. But rendered regions, and especially built regions (even relatively modest ones) represent a huge gain in terms of file size over the intermediary formats typically used on the exchanges.
The NHP Salem, Oregon map is a .SC4M file, which is just a tick over 1.4MB in size.
If imported and rendered in game, even without population or any trees or other flora planted, the resultant region folder balloons nearly sixteen-fold, up to 22.4MB on disk. Even compressed into a .zip file with the standard Windows 10 compression tool, it still runs 18.2MB.
The individual city files, for reference, all run somewhere between 663KB and 895KB, depending on the complexity of their underlying terrain–two of them would exceed the size of the .SC4M source file.
Now, when considering a populated/built region, it kicks up the file size several orders of magnitude–all the way up to 290MB–more than 204 times the file size of the .SC4M. Even zipped up, it still sits at 176MB. Several of the individual cities exceed the file size of the entire pre-rendered empty region’s 22.4MB size, and all exceed the source .SC4M file.
To put this in perspective in terms of files available on the SC4 Devotion LEX, if the 176MB zipped version of Chemeketa were to be uploaded to the LEX, it would rank as the second-largest file on the entire exchange, below only the Network Addon Mod (the most recent version, NAM 43, sits just shy of 1GB), and greatly dwarfing the third-largest file, mgb204‘s Terrain Grass NAM (TGN) for TSC/Orange Pyrenean texture mod, which is just north of 60MB.
One of the largest maps available on any of the exchanges is The Big Kahuna! Hawai’i by drunkapple, which is a map of the “Big Island” of Hawai’i, which runs a total of 701 large city tiles, and requires that the user run the 4GB Patch over the game and SC4Mapper in order to be able to run it. The map is offered in .SC4M format, running just below 34MB. If we were to extrapolate from the figures for Salem/Chemeketa up to this scale, we’d get the following figures:
- Fully-rendered, empty region: 536.34MB
- Fully-rendered, empty region (zipped): 435.77MB
- Fully-rendered, populated to Chemeketa density: 6.94GB
- Fully-rendered, populated to Chemeketa density (zipped): 4.21GB
Now, this is, of course, an extreme example, but suffice to say, aside from perhaps the tiniest regions out there, fully-rendered regions, populated or not, would quickly fill up the disk space on the exchanges. And those smaller regions would likely be a couple hundred kilobytes at the most if stored as .SC4M files.
Due to the long-history of tight file size limits on SC4 exchanges–as low as 10MB on the STEX until 2009 (unless you got Dirk, the site owner, to personally FTP the file onto the server)–the number of files exceeding even a mere 20MB is extremely small, and most of them are from the past 10 years. Much of the reason for these restrictions (and the way files are packaged in general) has to do with the state of the internet from the mid-00s–many users still had dial-up internet, and webhosts put tight caps on disk space and bandwidth consumption, often with steep overage charges for the latter. In 2007, SC4 Devotion actually had to shut down the LEX for about 2 weeks to avoid overages, and was eventually forced to upgrade to a dedicated server package due to bandwidth and traffic load.
(To those who wonder, “it’s 2022, why do we still have these small files?”, many of the creators of these files are no longer active, and the matter of permissions is still a hotly-contested one. SC4 Devotion’s “Project ZIP” installer removal package has, however, begun hitting the LEX as of Christmas Day 2021, and coupled with the LEX’s Dependency Tracker Bulk Downloader system, offers a solution for on-site files, and has allowed us to streamline substantial plugin sets, like the LEX Superior Collections, curated by my SC4D colleague xxdita.)
Beyond this, with regards to regions that are populated, or have trees/flora already placed, if custom content was used, instead of just Maxis content, the region also then requires dependencies in order to avoid issues with brown boxes and missing content, as distribution of full plugins folders has generally not been allowed, due largely to community standard practice with permissions (a prohibition that I’ve discussed here at SimTarkus, and which has been the subject of intense debate and controversy over the years).
I will note, however, there have been some limited situations in which pre-rendered regions have been allowed onto the exchanges–the most notable example being the two regions that my NAM Team colleague Indiana Joe uploaded to both the STEX and ModDB, The Bay and Humacao, which have some pre-built transit networks, and require the NAM as a dependency.
While the distribution of pre-rendered/pre-built regions has generally been frowned upon on the major exchanges, there isn’t necessarily a permissions restriction regime in place as there is with plugins and plugins folders. If one were to host such a region on their own file hosting, or via a site such as ModDB (as long as they were otherwise not violating content distribution permission rules, by also including plugins, or by simply offering a “low effort” fully-rendered, empty version of someone else’s map from the STEX or LEX) it’s very unlikely they’d face any serious consequences.
Additionally, the matter of “multiplayer regions”–in which several players cooperatively build a region, often using a service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or the Poppy Multiplayer Regions system, operate as a well-accepted “loophole” to both the distribution restrictions on pre-built regions and full plugins folders, since having a common plugin set is ultimately necessary for such a region project to be feasible.
In short, unless your pre-rendered/pre-built region offers something special (like Indiana Joe’s uploads), it’s unlikely to find a welcoming home on the main file exchanges, in large part due to the outsized resource consumption it would entail. However, provided you otherwise follow standard protocol with regards to permissions, distributing it elsewhere, or starting a multiplayer region with like-minded players, is generally acceptable.
-Tarkus (wishing you all a fantastic 2022!)
Correction (12 Jan 2022): Further research has turned up that drunkapple’s “The Big Kahuna! Hawai’i” is actually only the second-largest map available. The actual largest is another drunkapple map, The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and then some, which, as the name indicates, includes the entirety of the small European nation of Luxembourg. It is a fully-occupied rectangular region of 26 large tiles by 38 large tiles, resulting in a grand total of 988 large tiles, and its .SC4M file is 47.72MB.