Must have mods for Cities XL 09

Hi,

I've been cruising the forums again looking for mods to fix, enhance or add to Cities XL 2009.

As such I've come across a few that in my opinion are 'must have' mods that really add something worthwhile to the game. I'll list them below with a link to where you can get a hold of them, and or attach them to this thread if they are located on web sites that are unstable or no longer available.

If you have any mods that are not listed but you think they are 'must have' mods for CXL09, please list them in this thread for others to better enjoy the game.

1. Performance Tuner - The mod goes by another name, but really what it is, is a performance tuner for the game, allowing you to adjust the different parts of the game to make them come into view sooner or later depending on your zoom level that you are viewing the game at. When I say the 'different parts of the game', what I mean are categories like Traffic density, vehicles, buildings, trees, pedestrians etc. When some of the items are adjusted it produces a dramatic effect both visually and in frames per second, some categories however do not produce dramatic effects that I can notice either visually or performance, and it could be maybe my city has not gotten large enough to show me those dramatic effects that some of the other categories offer. It does however, really raise the visual quality if you set it to do so, when you are zoomed out further, of course at the cost of some performance.

Prior to installing this mod, my FPS were pretty much a constant 60fps no matter what level of zoom I was at, after installing the mod and doing some adjustments to the sliders, my fps dropped to about 24fps, but the visual quality at higher zoom levels was increased tremendously. With enough fiddling with the sliders, it is possible to obtain a comfortable performance as well as an enhanced visual experience in Cities XL 09

Location: http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=24618
I believe you may need to be signed in as a member on Simtropolis to download their files.

2. Camera mod - This mod allows you to change the angle of your viewing the game by about 9 different camera's. By holding down your middle mouse button you can adjust the camera angle. This mod takes a little getting used to as it can be quite fidgity since the original camera in the game is hyper sensitive, so it goes on to the new camera angles being as hypersensitive as the original camera is. Once you get a handle on the original camera sensitivity though, then it should not produce such a fidgity camera with this mod but give you the ability to view the game at almost any angle you can think of.

Location: Attached to this thread (the web site it comes from is having issues, they've got a new domain name and it does not work properly with the old links so I'm adding it to this thread in the attachments below)
Installation: Unzip the mod and you will see a 'patch' file. Simply unzip this file to the 'paks' folder of where you installed Cities XL 09 start up the game and it will be working.

3. Larger Plazas Mod - Sometimes when you attempt to create a decorative plaza, the game will not allow it because the place you are trying to place the decorative plaza is too large, this neccesitates that you add roads to split up the area and place the plazas in the smaller areas, then remove the roads and add the plazas again to the place where the roads were. With this mod you can add decorative plazas to larger areas, thus cutting out the need to add roads to areas to split up the larger areas. There is still a limit on how large of an area can have a plaza but it's greatly enhanced using this mod. If you still can't place a plaza in an area with this mod, then you will need to break up the area with roads as it's just too large.

Location: 2ND file attachment as the website it came from is having issues with their new domain name and old links not being fixed.
Installation: Same as mod listed above.

A Note: Some mods are incapable of working with other mods, they conflict. It is best that after you install a new mod (.patch) file into the paks folder that you start the game and see if everything is working and that the game is not crashing. It is much easier in this way of doing it, than it is to dump 10 or 20 new mods into the pak folder and then try to figure out which mods are conflicting with each other.

There are a couple more 'must have' mods in my opinion but I'll have to add them later. I don't know how many of our members are even playing Cities XL 09, I've actually started to play it again and other than the memory leak finding it a bit enjoyable as it really does make pretty looking cities even if there isn't much to do with them in regards to 'playing' them.

Enjoy and contribute if you know of more must have mods for Cities XL 09