1. Basic Pim-x Modding By Travis

2. Section One: Introduction

3. The BAT is done: now what? 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

4. What exactly is it? 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.

5. Section Two: Now, how do I use it? In the following section, we’ll cover taking a basic model into PIM-X, and modding it appropriately.

6. Basic Interface 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)

7. Basic Interface cont. 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”

9. Basic Interface cont. 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.

11. Creating a Descriptor 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.

12. Creating a Descriptor cont. After we drag & drop the model into the desired category, a small window appears:

13. Creating a Descriptor cont. 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.

15. Creating a Descriptor cont. 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”.

16. Creating a Lot 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:

17. Editing the Building Descriptor 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 -------”

18. Editing the Building Descriptor cont. Now, we determine the filling degree by estimating how much of the yellow box (on the bottom left) the building takes up.

19. Editing the Building Descriptor cont. 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:

20. Editing the Building Descriptor cont. 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.

21. Finalizing 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. ;)

22. Any questions? 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