Do I need to close the game to change plugins?

[ROB EIS 34]

A quick simple question:

If I want to swap out a slope mod (or add/remove any other plugin) do I have to quit the game, do my thing, then restart it in order for the plugin to become active?

Thanks.

[rivit 3,402]

yes - the game needs to reload everything to get the new setup. When testing it often helps to have really small plugins folder so you don't OD on coffee while waiting.

[ROB EIS 34]

21 minutes ago, rivit said:

yes - the game needs to reload everything to get the new setup. When testing it often helps to have really small plugins folder so you don't OD on coffee while waiting.

lol.    Yeah, that's kinda what I thought but I wanted to double check.  Thx.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Try an experiment where you only close a city (going to region-view) before swapping slope mods. Then load a city and see if it behaves differently. If not, then you know to quit back to your OS.

[ROB EIS 34]

2 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

Try an experiment where you only close a city (going to region-view) before swapping slope mods. Then load a city and see if it behaves differently. If not, then you know to quit back to your OS.

Interesting idea.  I already swapped out the mod and restarted my game, but that's definitely something I'll try if/when I swap out again.  Thanks.

[xxdita 1,097]

This greatly depends on which OS you're using. The original Aspyr version did reportedly allow for hotswapping. I have no idea if this has been attempted with the 64bit version. 

[ROB EIS 34]

On 3/28/2020 at 10:56 PM, xxdita said:

This greatly depends on which OS you're using. The original Aspyr version did reportedly allow for hotswapping. I have no idea if this has been attempted with the 64bit version. 

Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit.  I haven't tried it yet, but I can a little later with something I'm not particularly concerned about.  I did close out and swap slope mods, and now I've totally screwed up my ability to build roads on even the smoothest of slopes.  I've tried all the slope mods I have (pretty much all of them), from Extreme Mount to Extreme Smooth...and nothing fixes it.  I even took out the slope mod completely, and nothing has fixed my problem.  Hopefully I'll find a way of building my mountain communities.

[rsc204 21,866]

20 hours ago, ROB EIS said:

I've totally screwed up my ability to build roads on even the smoothest of slopes.  I've tried all the slope mods I have (pretty much all of them), from Extreme Mount to Extreme Smooth...and nothing fixes it.  I even took out the slope mod completely, and nothing has fixed my problem.  Hopefully I'll find a way of building my mountain communities.

The vanilla game allows for ridiculous slopes in favour of a less tedious building experience for the average player. So if that's no longer the case for you, it's because there is still a Slope Mod or set of custom Slope Settings inside your Plugins folder preventing the default settings from returning.

 

[ROB EIS 34]

On 4/1/2020 at 1:24 PM, rsc204 said:

The vanilla game allows for ridiculous slopes in favour of a less tedious building experience for the average player. So if that's no longer the case for you, it's because there is still a Slope Mod or set of custom Slope Settings inside your Plugins folder preventing the default settings from returning.

 

I'll double check for other slope mods, but I'm pretty sure I only had one.  Could a terrain mod have anything to do with it?

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

On 3/31/2020 at 2:21 PM, ROB EIS said:

I've tried all the slope mods

You should open up a comprehensive slope mod in iLives and then edit the heck out of it. Make it your own and then save it to a zz folder to override any other mod that might touch those exemplars (one exemplar per network). The parameters in a slope mod are just so many preferences. They're so personal -- aesthetic, ease of use, economic balance etc -- that everyone should have his/her own.

If there are settings in there that you don't understand, then get into a sandbox region and play around with them. I promise that between smoothing steps (more is better, and modern CPUs can handle it) and smoothing reach (ditto), there's a combo for each network that will give you easy placement and good appearance at the same time (though you may need to relax some other limits so the smoothing can do its magic). Since none of the early slope mods seems to have fiddled with the smoothing settings, nothing off-the-shelf will help you. You need to dive in and do it yourself.

[rsc204 21,866]

20 hours ago, ROB EIS said:

I'll double check for other slope mods, but I'm pretty sure I only had one.  Could a terrain mod have anything to do with it?

Here is a problem where terminology can quickly get confuse the issue. A slope mod is simply altering a bunch of Exemplar files, which contain these properties. However, the actual Exemplars being altered are the Network Placement Tuning Parameters. The properties within handle everything from which slopes can be drawn, to the cost of construction and settings for tunnel placement. So whilst I can't state it's a Slope or Terrain mod, something simply must be there to override the vanilla settings. To sum up, different mods use different sets of Exemplars, a tunnel mod's properties would for example conflict with a slope mod, because you can only have one such Exemplar for each network.

An easy test here is to temporarily move the entire contents of your Plugins folder somewhere else. Start the game, ideally in a blank/test city, but whatever you do, do NOT save at any point. See if everything is back to normal, if it is, you can be certain my hypothesis is correct.

Finding the offending file though, especially if you don't know where it is or what the file is called, may require use of the binary search method outlined here.

[ROB EIS 34]

44 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

Here is a problem where terminology can quickly get confuse the issue. A slope mod is simply altering a bunch of Exemplar files, which contain these properties. However, the actual Exemplars being altered are the Network Placement Tuning Parameters. The properties within handle everything from which slopes can be drawn, to the cost of construction and settings for tunnel placement. So whilst I can't state it's a Slope or Terrain mod, something simply must be there to override the vanilla settings. To sum up, different mods use different sets of Exemplars, a tunnel mod's properties would for example conflict with a slope mod, because you can only have one such Exemplar for each network.

An easy test here is to temporarily move the entire contents of your Plugins folder somewhere else. Start the game, ideally in a blank/test city, but whatever you do, do NOT save at any point. See if everything is back to normal, if it is, you can be certain my hypothesis is correct.

Finding the offending file though, especially if you don't know where it is or what the file is called, may require use of the binary search method outlined here.

I'd read that link a number of years back, and totally forgot about it.  Thanks for directing me to that post.  I wonder, do you think it would work with my other problem here ?