By Travis

Something I find quite disappointing in the SimCity community is when someone puts in a great effort, producing a beautiful, near-flawless model, only to have its modding and lotting done simply as an afterthought. Many BATters simply didn’t want to deal with the hassle of proper modding. Fortunately, out came a tool that makes this final stage of the content creation process a lot easier- PIM-X.*

*also known as X-Tool or SC4PIM

PIM-X is basically a replacement for the Maxis

PIM, in which you would place your model into

a category which determined the building’s

properties. However, PIM-X has the ability to

do more advanced functions, with more

accurate properties, in a more efficient manner.

PIM-X also has a Lot Editing component,

known as LE-X. We’ll cover this in a later

section.

In the following section, we’ll cover taking a

basic model into PIM-X, and modding it

appropriately.

Loading screen:

Here’s where you select which Plugins folders (there

are more than one!) and which folders in the plugins

to load in PIM-X. (Note: it is recommended to only

select and load the folders you need, to prevent PIM-

X from lagging)

Main Screen:

This is where why dive in. On the right, you’ll see a

tree of categories, which we’ll investigate shortly. The

first one we shall concern ourselves with, however, is

“Standard Models”

After selecting “standard models” a list will

appear of models that were loaded into PIM-X.

Select your preferred model, then its time to

decide what category it should fit.

Our next step is to, after our model is selected,

drag it from the models window into the

category you want. I selected “Landmark -

Eye-Candy” because the model I’m using I

don’t want to have any game effects, nor to

require road access.

After we drag & drop the model into the desired

category, a small window appears:

In this window, we type what we want the

building to be named in-game. By default, what

you named the BAT will appear.

Click ok, and voila! A descriptor is created.

Well, if you created a landmark, you’ll notice

some properties highlighted in red. We need to

create a lot to fix these:

Right-click and select “create ploppable lot using this

building”.

Now, you can select the size of your lot. Note

that you can only create a lot larger than the

default, not smaller.

And up pops the Lot Exemplar tab- but we’ll

come back to this, so for now, click back to the

building exemplar tab:

Now, notice the red boxes are gone! But, we’ve

still got some business to attend to before we

are done with the Building Exemplar. First and

foremost, we need to change the “Filling

Degree”, which is arguable the most important

property you will edit. This property controls

most of the others, and the degree to which the

building has effects in-game. So, right-click on

the exemplar, and select “recompute properties

as -------”

Now, we determine the filling degree by

estimating how much of the yellow box (on the

bottom left) the building takes up.

In this case, we’ll estimate it at 0.30% (this will

differ on the building you’ve selected to use)

Input the number into the box:

Now, before we finish up in the building desc.,

we need to add in the Menu Name (if it’s a

growable, you’ll only need to add an Item

Name Ltext)

Now, right click again, and select “Convert Item

Name/Exemplar Name to LTEXT – Multilingual”

and type in the name of the building that you

wish to see ingame. Right click once more, and

select “Convert Item Description to LTEXT –

Multilingual”

This is the description you will see in the menu.

Well, that about wraps up the Modding

seminar- you can proceed to edit the lot in

either regular LE or LE-X, but that’s beyond our

scope. ;)

Thank you all for taking the time to listen in-

perhaps someday, we’ll do a lotting seminar as

well. Have a good day, folks! If you need further

help, PM me here or at SC4D, or refer to the

PIM-X userguide, found here on the LEX:

PIM-X User Guide