SC4-ModernCamera

SC4-ModernCamera is a DLL plugin for SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition. It completely changes the SC4 Camera into a more modern City Builder style Mouse-Controlled camera.

Requirements

• Windows version of SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition (Rush Hour)
• Game version 641, used by the Steam, GOG, and EA App digital releases

Disc and retail builds are not supported.

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Installation

1. Download the release package from the releases page.

2. Copy SC4-ModernCamera.dll and SC4-ModernCamera.dat to your SimCity 4 Plugins folder, usually:

   %USERPROFILE%\Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins\
   

3. Start the game and load a city.

Controls

• WASD Movement: Pans the camera in Modern camera mode. This can be disabled in-game.
• Shift + WASD/Arrows: Pans faster. Only in Modern Mode.
• M3 + horizontal drag: Rotates the camera.
• M3 + vertical drag: Adjusts the camera pitch.
• ALT: While in Modern Cam, snaps to the nearest Classic Cam angle (remains moveable).
• Invert Vertical: In-game option for vertical M3 pitch controls.
• Mouse wheel: New smooth zoom experience.
• Ctrl+Alt+F8: Dumps the current camera and renderer state to Plugins\SC4-ModernCamera\SC4-ModernCamera.log for debugging.

Camera options are available in-game through the floating camera settings button in the upper-right corner of the screen.

The settings window can switch between Modern and Classic camera mode in real time, reset the camera location, show the changelog, and open Advanced Settings for redraw aggression and diagnostics logging.

Debug Logging

The plugin writes debug logs to Plugins\SC4-ModernCamera\:

• SC4-ModernCamera.log
• SC4-ModernCamera.last

These files can be safely ignored or deleted.

Technical Documentation

• SimCity 4 default camera behavior records native zoom, pitch, yaw, and rotation behavior.
• Region preview save fix documents the save lifecycle integration, rejected hook approaches, and normalization design.
• Settings window workflow documents in-game settings behavior, Classic/Modern mode rules, WASD capture, redraw options, logging, and child-window z-order workflow.
• Camera zoom and rotation design documents zoom, pitch, yaw, rotation, WASD movement, and map-boundary behavior.
• SimCity 4 native UI research records control recipes, message IDs, scrolling behavior, ABI constraints, and companion-DAT workflow.

Building

Open SC4-ModernCamera.slnx in Visual Studio and build the SC4-ModernCamera project for Win32.

The project is configured as a DLL plugin and includes the required GZCOM source files and headers under Dev/src and Dev/vendor/gzcom.

Release builds statically link the MSVC runtime so released binaries do not normally require users to install a separate Visual C++ Redistributable.

Acknowledgements

This project builds on work from all around the SimCity 4 DLL modding community.

• gzcom-dll provides the SimCity 4 GZCOM plugin SDK classes used by this DLL.
• 3D Camera DLL for SimCity 4 demonstrated the camera pitch/yaw memory tables and cheat-code driven camera overrides that made this project possible.
• sc4-render-services, especially the camera-view-input sample, informed the reconstructed camera-control layout and cleaner camera update flow used here.
• sc4-dll-utilities and SC4Fix document the game-version detection fallback pattern used by this plugin.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3.0. See LICENSE for more information.

Bundled gzcom-dll code is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 or later.