Programmatically generating a city: A savegame experiment

[smf_16 1,835]

Recently, in the context of this project, I was playing a bit with LotPlop and BuildingPlop cheats and noticed something strange. Perhaps that this is already a well known fact, but I wanted to share it anyway. There's an interesting difference between LotPlop and BuildingPlop. If you pick a lot with LotPlop, it will always use the same building if the building on the lot comes from a building family. If you use BuildingPlop though, it's the building that you picked that will get plopped on the lot.

So what's the practical implication of this? Well, nothing spectacular.  Just remember that if you often use LotPlop with Maxis content, you're better of using BuildingPlop. The reason why it's important for me is that in my city generation algorithm, I did not have a way for selecting what tilesets I wanted to grow. When trying to address this, I noticed that building families may contain multiple tilesets. Until now, I just picked a random building from the family, but this is no longer possible if I want to filter on tileset.

[twalsh102 1,601]

@smf_16, I suspect that this is probably a well-known phenomena (especially among those that use these "cheats" extensively), but the implication of which has just not been of enough import to comment (much) on, until now.

Another important difference between the two cheats is that if a particular building is used on more than one lot, one must choose which lot to plop when using buildingplop.

Some esoterica that you may or may not be aware of and that may or may not have implications for your city generation algorithm (I'm leaving out info on Industrial building families as they obviously don't have tilesets) (all info on families derived using DataNode):

1. EVERY Maxis RCI building is a member of a family.

2. Some Maxis families (for many CO and CS buildings) may have only a single member.  Others (especially CO and Residential) may have as many as sixteen members. No Residential building family consisted of fewer than four members, and no Residential building family consists of all members from a single tileset. A few CO building families (with no more than 2 members) consist of all members from a single tileset.

3. There are CO and CS building families that consist of members that will grow in any tileset.

4. Most Maxis RCI buildings are used on more than one lot, varying in either (or both) lot size and growth stage. One particular Residential building family I checked out (2000002b - R$$$20x20) has 16 members (4 for each tileset), each of which can grow on 8 different lots.