[Proposal] Off-Road Parks Mod

[ReticentDaikaiju 26]

First of all, yes I know about using nlight's ModTools to change m_placementMode to OnGround to get parks that do not have to be placed on roads.  The problem I am having is that these parks still display the missing road connections warning (which is an eyesore) and also cannot get police coverage as shown in the screenshot below.

I haven't seen any building properties that allow you to disable this (although if anyone knows a simple way of doing so please let me know). As far as I can tell, crime rate in the game seems to be based on a counter tied to the number of visitors a building receives. When this reaches a certain number a police car is summoned. I believe health care and hearses also work similarly. The mod I am proposing would therefore do the following:

1. Not display the missing road connection icon for parks if (m_placementMode == OnGround)
2. Automatically fix crime, health, or dead body problems for these parks. Allowing services to use pedestrian paths would be even better, but would probably require rewriting the service AI. (I know Traffic++ zonable pedestrian paths can do this but I hate using them).
3. Add a button in the Park Asset Editor that lets you set the value of m_placementMode. This would just be for convenience and make this option more accessible to the casual player who doesn't want to mess around with the ModTools UI.

I couldn't find any mods that currently offer this functionality, but if anyone knows of one let me know - it would save me a lot of work writing one myself. Looking at the modding API though, it doesn't look like any of what I am proposing would be too difficult. Although I haven't made any scripting mods for CS before, I am familiar with coding in C# and the Unity Engine. I figure this could be a good first project for me to start learning the modding API.

[Avanya 2,605]

If the tourist values are set to 0 the road connection and crime problem disappear. So if you just want them for leasure/decoration it's a good and easy solution.

[ReticentDaikaiju 26]

Thanks for the suggestion. I just tried it and it no longer complains about the road connection, but the crime problem is still there. I even made sure by removing the parks and replacing them in case the crime level stuck around from before I changed the tourist values.

[Avanya 2,605]

Hmm, strange. I have a bunch of them and no issues with crime. You could try and post the other stats here and I'll see if maybe there's another one in play here. I don't have the game on this pc, so I can't check the stats on my parks, but I think I remember most of what I changed if I see them.  

[boformer 3,169]

2 possible solutions:

1. For purely decorational buildings, you can set the building AI to "DummyBuildingAI" or just "BuildingAI". Those buildings have no visitors/workers/crime rate etc.
2. For functional off-road parks, a mod would be needed that modifies the AI or creates a new ParkAI which removes the crime rate.

[GC_Vos 714]

For parks if you set tourism to 0 those flags will disappear

edit: My bad I overread some comments. Still crime shouldn't be a factor without visitors.

[hitzu 139]

1-tile roads would eliminate such problem at all

[Ryno917 102]

Question on the parks with 0 visitors thing - do they still give the 'park effect' or are they 100% aesthetic?

[Avanya 2,605]

They still raise land value and make citizens happy - that's the entertainment value that does that.

[ReticentDaikaiju 26]

I started on a new map and confirmed that the parks with 0 tourism do not generate crime. As Avanya said, the parks still function as normal raising the leisure rating and land value, even though the visitor count remains 0. I'm not exactly sure what the visitor count does for parks, if anything. Cities never seem to gain much from tourism anyway, and since I have heavily used pedestrian paths running through my parks it's not as if the parks ever look empty. I'd say this solves the issue. Thanks for the suggestion, I probably never would have thought of lowering tourism.

[GC_Vos 714]

From what I gathered tourists always come from outside connections, while visitors are inhabitants. With all counts set to 0 those crowd and door marker thingies will not be used.

Btw also make sure garbage is 0, or it may start piling up.

[Turjan 1,048]

When I make buildings freely placeable, I set all values that involve access, like workers, visitors, tourists or garbage, to zero.

[ReticentDaikaiju 26]

45 minutes ago, Turjan said:

When I make buildings freely placeable, I set all values that involve access, like workers, visitors, tourists or garbage, to zero.

I knew about setting the other values to zero, but I had no idea tourism affected crime, road access, etc. Here are all the properties I used for the smallest size filler park to get it to work properly:

And, of course, I used ModTools to set m_placementMode to OnGround.