How to change plugins - keep those I want and get rid of those I don't

[ROB EIS 34]

Okay, here I go again.  (Sorry, I feel like I'm constantly starting new topics.  )

I'm doing something wrong, but I don't know what it is.  I have a ton of plugins I have decided I no longer want.  So naturally I've gone throughout my entire plugins folder (no small feat) and removed the ones I don't want.  If there are some I want to keep, I've kept them.  Now here's where it get's weird (at least to me it's weird):  I've removed a ton of walls and paths and canal stuff that I know I'm never going to use, and I've kept some parks and buildings - and even some paths that I know I will use.  But after I got done with the tedious chore (which I now feel was a total waste of my time), I opened my game, then loaded my city ... and all the stuff I removed was still in my menus.   Now unless some voodoo magic has taken place while the game wasn't running, I have no clue what's going on.  Why would the stuff I removed still show up?

Not only that, there was stuff I wanted to keep that is now missing.  For instance, I wanted to plop Cincinnati's Great American Tower....and I know I kept the plugin for it....but I can't find it in my menus to save my life.  None of the Civic Menus has it.  So someone PLEASE tell me what I've done wrong.

Thanks.

[rsc204 21,869]

19 hours ago, ROB EIS said:

Why would the stuff I removed still show up?

The simple fact of the matter is that it wouldn't, logically then, you can't have removed it. Of course there is a possibility you had more than one copy of the same items and removed only one, but that should be obvious with a little digging, were it the case.

What this question really highlights is the importance of organising your Plugins into a system that enables you to modify it later. It's far to easy to install a ton of content without thinking, but it can lead to these sorts of conundrums. My first proper set of mods became such a mess, I eventually just started over, it was the only way to regain clarity. It's important to know a little about the basic file types used by SC4 here too.

• .SC4Lot
  Lot files with either contain Growable or Ploppable lots, which may or may not contain the Buildings Exemplar that's related.
• .SC4Model
  Model files are literally models created for use with SC4, rarely if ever, do these contain anything else.
• .SC4Desc
  Desc or Descriptor files, are intended for storing game data, such as Prop, Building or other Exemplars.
• .DAT
  DAT files can and often do contain multiple types of SC4 files.

Complicating matters somewhat, SC4 doesn't care what file extension is used, it will read anything and everything in Plugins. It checks each file and if they contain data in the DBPF format (a special format used by Maxis/EA), then it tries to load it's entire contents. This means whilst for the sake of sanity, hopefully the files you have would correspond to the above types, there is no guarantee this will be so.

A more practical example in respect of your problem, let's say you've a mod which contains a growable building. Most typically, you'd have the .SC4Model file which contained the 3D model, an .SC4Lot file containing the Lot and where the Buildings Exemplar (which makes the Icon/Entry visible in-game), is not merged into the SC4Lot file, an additional SC4Desc file with this data.

So you remove the .SC4Model file, the model isn't there so if you place the lot, likely you're gonna see a big brown box, but provided the Buildings Exemplar exists, you'll have a menu entry for Ploppable lots. This may even still be there if you removed the SC4Lot, but a Buildings Exemplar exists in another file. Likewise, if a Lot used a mega-pack or .DAT dependency, removing just this DAT, will not remove the entries for content that was using it.

Sometimes the filenames of multiple files that together create an item as logical and together, other times they are not. So if you split the content into different folders when installing it, or otherwise it's just not grouped together, you may have parts you missed left behind. One of the beauties of DAT files, as a modder, I can put everything into one single file, if that's installed, you'll have all you need, if it's not, you've removed everything. You might think that sounds perfect, if only things were this way? But, as is common place with SC4, if you just wanted the Model for use with other content, it's hard for many to remove the other parts in the DAT file. Therefore it's common practise to keep each individual lot as a separate file, potentially every model too. Other than give you this general information, there is no magic solution here, you just need to track through your Plugins folder until you've removed all the redundant files.

If you use a well-organised folder structure, for example if you put all Canals in one folder, with subfolders by Canal type, it's really easy later to remove one or all canal sets. But it really depends on how you set your own Plugins folder up as to how easy/hard it is to understand and work with.

 

[twalsh102 1,601]

@ROB EIS,

Simple practical experiment: for the stuff you think you removed, but still appears in the menu, if you click on one of those items on the menu, what happens?  If it you are given something to plop, you didn't remove it (or not completely).  See @rsc204's post above

For your example of the Great American Tower, what results do you get if you search your Plugins folder for Great American Tower?  If you don't get any results, then you obviously did remove it, even if you didn't mean to. 

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

On 3/31/2020 at 2:35 PM, ROB EIS said:

after I got done with the tedious chore (which I now feel was a total waste of my time), I opened my game, then loaded my city ... and all the stuff I removed was still in my menus.

But did you reboot? I don't know why, but sometimes exiting the game doesn't kill the process. It's sometimes possible to restart the game and join the orphaned process (with unpredictable results).

To be completely sure that you are starting SC4 fresh, you need to either reboot or use task manager to verify that there are no vestigial incarnations that might be harboring stale data.

[xxdita 1,097]

If you've kept the removed files in a safe place outside of your Plugins, then I would suggest adding them back again, in a single folder, then running DataNode. This way you can find any copies of these files that are still in your Plugins. 

[ROB EIS 34]

On 4/1/2020 at 1:21 PM, rsc204 said:

The simple fact of the matter is that it wouldn't, logically then, you can't have removed it. Of course there is a possibility you had more than one copy of the same items and removed only one, but that should be obvious with a little digging, were it the case.

What this question really highlights is the importance of organising your Plugins into a system that enables you to modify it later. It's far to easy to install a ton of content without thinking, but it can lead to these sorts of conundrums. My first proper set of mods became such a mess, I eventually just started over, it was the only way to regain clarity. It's important to know a little about the basic file types used by SC4 here too.

• .SC4Lot
  Lot files with either contain Growable or Ploppable lots, which may or may not contain the Buildings Exemplar that's related.
• .SC4Model
  Model files are literally models created for use with SC4, rarely if ever, do these contain anything else.
• .SC4Desc
  Desc or Descriptor files, are intended for storing game data, such as Prop, Building or other Exemplars.
• .DAT
  DAT files can and often do contain multiple types of SC4 files.

Complicating matters somewhat, SC4 doesn't care what file extension is used, it will read anything and everything in Plugins. It checks each file and if they contain data in the DBPF format (a special format used by Maxis/EA), then it tries to load it's entire contents. This means whilst for the sake of sanity, hopefully the files you have would correspond to the above types, there is no guarantee this will be so.

A more practical example in respect of your problem, let's say you've a mod which contains a growable building. Most typically, you'd have the .SC4Model file which contained the 3D model, an .SC4Lot file containing the Lot and where the Buildings Exemplar (which makes the Icon/Entry visible in-game), is not merged into the SC4Lot file, an additional SC4Desc file with this data.

So you remove the .SC4Model file, the model isn't there so if you place the lot, likely you're gonna see a big brown box, but provided the Buildings Exemplar exists, you'll have a menu entry for Ploppable lots. This may even still be there if you removed the SC4Lot, but a Buildings Exemplar exists in another file. Likewise, if a Lot used a mega-pack or .DAT dependency, removing just this DAT, will not remove the entries for content that was using it.

Sometimes the filenames of multiple files that together create an item as logical and together, other times they are not. So if you split the content into different folders when installing it, or otherwise it's just not grouped together, you may have parts you missed left behind. One of the beauties of DAT files, as a modder, I can put everything into one single file, if that's installed, you'll have all you need, if it's not, you've removed everything. You might think that sounds perfect, if only things were this way? But, as is common place with SC4, if you just wanted the Model for use with other content, it's hard for many to remove the other parts in the DAT file. Therefore it's common practise to keep each individual lot as a separate file, potentially every model too. Other than give you this general information, there is no magic solution here, you just need to track through your Plugins folder until you've removed all the redundant files.

If you use a well-organised folder structure, for example if you put all Canals in one folder, with subfolders by Canal type, it's really easy later to remove one or all canal sets. But it really depends on how you set your own Plugins folder up as to how easy/hard it is to understand and work with.

 

Unfortunately the only organization I have with my Plugins is that they are in alphabetical order.  When I downloaded most of them (years ago), I didn't foresee the necessity of needing to have them organized.  I was a bit naive and thought they just needed to be "in" the Plugins folder.

I appreciate your post, and will need to digest a lot of what you said before I can respond.

 

On 4/1/2020 at 3:51 PM, twalsh102 said:

@ROB EIS,

Simple practical experiment: for the stuff you think you removed, but still appears in the menu, if you click on one of those items on the menu, what happens?  If it you are given something to plop, you didn't remove it (or not completely).  See @rsc204's post above

For your example of the Great American Tower, what results do you get if you search your Plugins folder for Great American Tower?  If you don't get any results, then you obviously did remove it, even if you didn't mean to. 

When I searched, I specifically found 3 separate files with the name Great American Tower in my Plugins...but the building was not in any of the menus within the game.  So I removed those three files, and then downloaded them again.  I added the 3 exact files again, and now it shows up.  So I don't understand why it didn't show up previously, since the files were exactly the same. At any rate, I have the tower back in my menus, but still need to figure out how to get rid of the menu items I don't want.  I need to re-read and digest what @rsc204 said above to address that problem.

20 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

But did you reboot? I don't know why, but sometimes exiting the game doesn't kill the process. It's sometimes possible to restart the game and join the orphaned process (with unpredictable results).

To be completely sure that you are starting SC4 fresh, you need to either reboot or use task manager to verify that there are no vestigial incarnations that might be harboring stale data.

Yep, I did reboot.  I even double check my task manager to be sure the game process has been terminated.

12 hours ago, xxdita said:

If you've kept the removed files in a safe place outside of your Plugins, then I would suggest adding them back again, in a single folder, then running DataNode. This way you can find any copies of these files that are still in your Plugins. 

Will the actual name of the building/wall/canal/park show up in the Plugins folder?  I did a search for everything named "canal" or "path" or "wall", etc...and moved them out of the folder.  If they're still in there with different file names, then I can understand how I missed them.  But then in that case I'm screwed because I would have no idea what was what, since there are files with names such as "z4_NWM_Euro_TRM_RD-4_SSL_mipmaps.dat - and I have no idea what that is.  Where do I find DataNode, and please tell me I don't have to be an IT tech to understand it.

 

[xxdita 1,097]

DataNode isn't going to really help unless you have duplicate files. It's on the STEX.