Dealing with 'weedy' lots

[Flann 1,709]

While I have used JBSimio's SHUR Brownstone set (https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1270) to great effect, I have found that they tend to out-compete other lots and buildings and will overrun a neighborhood if left unchecked.  This is especially true of R$$ areas.  In particular, I found myself getting very frustrated when I tried to create a neighborhood comprised of mostly spa's Halifax Box and Church Street Apartments, but found that unless I relentlessly demolished and marked historical, it would eventually become filled with SHUR Brownstones.

I suspect that in later stages of development, the brownstones dominate because they're a higher stage or have higher capacity or something.  This is annoying because I often develop cities in a piecemeal fashion and might want to create a relatively lower density area in a city that already has a high population.  This is something that can be worked around.

Perhaps the bigger issue is that these will redevelop over other rowhouse type lots that I want to keep and I really don't want to have to make everything historical.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to manage this?  I suspect it may be possible to tweak these so that they are more in line with other similar mods, but I'm not sure I want to delve into it that much and might just remove all of the 1x2 versions of this mod and only leave the 1x3s so that I have a bit more control over where they appear.  Unfortunately that means that my neighborhoods above are going to be destroyed

[11241036 5,100]

Well, if you can use the Reader and can live with a rather complicated solution: To a certain degree, it is possible to control what grows in your city. I wrote a tutorial on how to use and create building blockers to have more control over growable buildings. (If you don't want to revamp your entire Plugins folder: For this particular situation, it might be sufficient to just create a blocker for these brownstones.)

 

[Flann 1,709]

5 minutes ago, 11241036 said:

Well, if you can use the Reader and can live with a rather complicated solution: To a certain degree, it is possible to control what grows in your city. I wrote a tutorial on how to use and create building blockers to have more control over growable buildings. (If you don't want to revamp your entire Plugins folder: For this particular situation, it might be sufficient to just create a blocker for these brownstones.)

 

This is definitely an approach I am interested in!  Would you care to share how you've organized your plugin files?  I've generally followed the convention of lumping files together by creator, and not doing much beyond that.

[Edvarz 1,984]

I´ve had this exact problem with stage 6 lots outdeveloping stage 5's. Almost always, when I zone low density, the game will stop developing at stage 4 and I have to zone medium density to start getting stage 5's and higher, this also means that those stage 5 buildings get overtaken pretty quickly with bigger stage 6's, the game seems to prefer these for medium density zones. This is the way the game was designed, so the best course of action is manage your plugins with tricks like blockers or even tilesets.

9 minutes ago, 11241036 said:

Well, if you can use the Reader and can live with a rather complicated solution: To a certain degree, it is possible to control what grows in your city. I wrote a tutorial on how to use and create building blockers to have more control over growable buildings. (If you don't want to revamp your entire Plugins folder: For this particular situation, it might be sufficient to just create a blocker for these brownstones.)

This solution is definitely a good one if you want to stop a particular set from developing (like those brownstones). One solution I use is to edit the tilesets of certain building sets, so in this case, you can set the Halifax houses to grow only in the Chicago tileset and the brownstones to grow only in the New York tileset. There is no going around the tedious part of making everything historical, though, bc when you switch to New York, the brownstones may take over, same thing when you remove the blocker file.

You could also alter the growth stages, I would bet the Halifax houses are a lower one compared to the brownstones, if you match the growth stages in both sets' lot files, the Halifax houses cannot be overtaken by the brownstones, but both could be then replaced by buildings that are higher stage than them.

To make these changes you could use the Reader, PIM-X (my preferred choice, personally), or SC4Tool, it's just a matter of ticking a few boxes! though it may get tedious

[11241036 5,100]

10 hours ago, Flann said:

This is definitely an approach I am interested in!  Would you care to share how you've organized your plugin files?  I've generally followed the convention of lumping files together by creator, and not doing much beyond that.

I'm usually splitting resource and lot files and putting them into two separate subfolders. Then I'm sorting ploppable lots by menu position and then by other categories, like what I'm using them for. Growables are being sorted by type, wealth, and then zone density. I usually don't sort by creator, but I've left the creator's name at the beginning of the item name, if there is one (with the most common ones, such as Mattb325 or SimGoober). Blocker files come last because they need to load last in order to work.

[Lucario Boricua 7,029]

I find the problem with weedy lots tends to be that they have unnaturally high occupancies for the building's footprint and height. Has anyone ever tried to lower the occupancy values of these to be more in line with the Maxis and other lotters' content?

[Flann 1,709]

17 hours ago, Lucario Boricua said:

I find the problem with weedy lots tends to be that they have unnaturally high occupancies for the building's footprint and height. Has anyone ever tried to lower the occupancy values of these to be more in line with the Maxis and other lotters' content?

I think I might try this, though I'm not sure yet if its more to do with stage versus occupancy.

[Edvarz 1,984]

7 hours ago, Flann said:

I think I might try this, though I'm not sure yet if its more to do with stage versus occupancy.

Well, those two are closely related. And you can actually modify both at the same time with PIM-X, so you could give it a try

[Flann 1,709]

Alright strap in, this is going to be a long one.  So I've taken screenshots of all the buildings that i consider to be in the same cohort of 1x2 medium density residentials.  I'm going to compare their capacity, growth stage and tileset to see what modifications might be necessary to achieve the desired effect.

9-10 Warwick Square

R$$$, 33, 6, (Chicago, New York)

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/30880-warwick-square/

Notes: 6 stories

30-48 30th Street06

R$$, 127, 5, (New York)

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/28818-nybt-32-48-30th-street/

Notes: 4 stories

mod contains R$ and R$$ versions

246 Cypress Avenue

R$, 155, 5, New York

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/26685-nybt-mott-haven-corner/

Notes: 5 stories

1x2 and 2x1 lot configurations

382 Fulton Street

R$, 88, 5, New York

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2278

Notes:  3 stories

Capacity seems low compared to similar lots at R$, maybe because one side is vacant?

1882 Burdett Avenue

R$, 166, 5, New York

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1940

Notes: 4 stories

2400 Fulton Avenue

R$$, 52, 5, Chicago

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1936

Notes: 2 stories, does not appear often in my experience

Brick Walkup Apartments

R$, 43, 5, New York

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/17345-low-wealth-rowhomes/

Notes: 3 stories, capacity seems low.  Seems to be replaced quickly

Brown Church Street Apartment

R$$, 33, 4, (Chicago, New York)

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/24766-church-street-apartments/

Notes: Occupancy low but comparable to some of the lesser capacity rowhouses.  Hard to grow in a developed city.

C88-Rowhouse_3

R$, 138, 6, New York

https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/29534-c88-row-house-set/

Notes: 4 stories, growth stage is 6 but it has a lower capacity than 1882 Burdett, which is growth stage 5.

CP_VictSt6Tenement$_Chi

R$, 81, ?, Chicago

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1277

Notes:  Can't find the right lot to get growth stage, but supposedly it is 4-6 according to the dl page

 

to be continued....

 

[Flann 1,709]

Alright folks, buckle up.  I am going to take a deep dive into row houses to try and solve this problem that has plagued my SC4 experience for years and years.  How can we make all the various custom buildings play nicely with each other and with the maxis buildings?

What did Maxis intend for row houses?

It's worth noting at this point that row houses in the vanilla game are pretty much a medium wealth feature.  With the exception of the 'Brick Walkups' and 'Apartments' in the Chicago tileset, there aren't really buildings in the row house style for R$ sims, which is an interesting choice.  This means that there won't be much to compare to in the vanilla game for R$ rowhouses.  But let's take a look at what is there:

Maxis R$$ Row houses

Stats:

Things to note:

1.) The R$$ occupancy ranges from 30 - 56

2.) These are all stage 4 1x2 lots, but the ones with 1x1 lots have both stage 4 and 5 variants.

3.) The ratio of R$ to R$$ is most commonly 1.8, but can also be ~ 1.3.  This seems to correspond only with the number in the naming of the building exemplar and not the growth stage.

4.) The ratio of the bounding box volume to the R$ occupancy ranges somewhat randomly from 82 - 91.

Incongruities of the maxis files aside, I can already see that the numbers here are much much lower for occupancy than the typical custom content row house.  In my next post I'll take a look at some of those.

[Flann 1,709]

and now for ...

Custom Row Houses

 

Stats

 

With these particular stats, I have tried to identify which buildings are not properly balanced.  While I am no expert on how occupancy numbers are calculated, I do know that it is a function of the size of the model bounding box.  Further, some buildings have a 'filling degree' which estimates how much of the bounding box is actually building, versus void space.  A building that is a perfect cuboid would have a filling degree of 1.00.  Unfortunately, some of the building exemplars do not have a filling degree, and for these I have assumed the value to be 1, but I could be off here.  I could not find a filling degree for any of the maxis buildings either.

When analyzing how buildings will compete with each other, we have to consider raw occupancy as well as stage.  Most of these buildings are stage 5 and thus compete directly with each other.  If I want a good variety of buildings and not one dominant one, they should have roughly similar occupancy numbers.  As we can see, this is not the case.  However, what is the 'right' number for each building?

To answer that, I am looking at the 'Vol / R$' statistic which is essentially the amount of space in the bounding box allotted to one R$ sim.  We know from the prior post that the maxis buildings ranged from 82 - 91.  Our custom content is running from anywhere from 52 to 226.  Clearly we have some buildings that have too low or too high of occupancy.  They will either dominate or hardly grow.

However, due to the 'filling degree' concept, this is not quite the whole story.  Instead, we should consider 'Adj Vol / R$', which is the same statistic except using the bounding box volume * filling degree.  Since we don't have filling degrees for the maxis lots, we can't compare.  However, we can still see a great deal of variance in these numbers.  It's clear to me that some of these buildings need to have their occupancy adjusted up or down.

 

[Propfam 2,289]

You can read this reference: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2308.0. It describes the formula for capacity calculations, especially for CAM.

Hope it helps. Thanks.

[Flann 1,709]

14 hours ago, chfzdn said:

You can read this reference: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2308.0. It describes the formula for capacity calculations, especially for CAM.

Hope it helps. Thanks.

Thank you.  This link was helpful.  I have updated my chart to include calculated or implied filling degree for each building based on the formula in that post.

 

What is notable to me is that the Maxis ones are pretty uniform at 0.40 to 0.44, and the custom content ones vary from 0.16 to 0.70.  Furthermore, the calculated filling degree doesn't match for all but one of the custom buildings.

When looking at the models of the Maxis rowhomes, a filling degree of 0.4 or even 0.44 seems a bit low.  Conversely, the SHUR Brownstone seems like 0.7 is too high.

[Membrillo 56]

This discussion was very interesting. Did you achieve any conclusions, @Flann?

[Flann 1,709]

15 hours ago, Membrillo said:

This discussion was very interesting. Did you achieve any conclusions, @Flann?

Basically My conclusion was that some of the downloadable row houses have occupancies that are too far outside of the 'normal' maxis range and therefore either grow too often and out compete others, or rarely grow, or grow only briefly under specific circumstances.  If I had more patience I would carefully re-mod all of them such that they had a filling degree of about 0.45 and depending on the size of the building, I might fudge the growth stage up or down depending on if I wanted them to grow more or less often.  

[Membrillo 56]

I agree. I am compiling a similar Excel file so I can start balancing the custom content. I might someday block Maxis buildings, but for the time being I want the custom content to play relatively nice with the in-game buildings, and between other custom content too.

The problem is that my Excel skills are limited and my math is beyond rusty. I hit a wall with the Biased Volume formula and I cannot find a way to calculate the "virtual" Filling Degree of a building that doesn't have one. My formulas work well with buildings 18200 m3 or higher, but the filling degree is way off for the smaller buildings. Right now I can just trial and error with different filling degree values until I find the one that gives me the correct capacity, but it would be nice if I can calculate it directly.

@Flann, did you found a way to calculate this "virtual" filling degree directly? This is the formula PIMX uses (as pointed by igizeh in the link):

Capacity =  round( 3 + BiasedVol/(3*floorage_req))
where BiasedVol is Volume*min(1,0.51+(Volume/26000.0)**2)

I don't know how the directly find the X (Filling degree) from the capacity and volume (W x D x H x filling degree) with that function MIN(1;0.51) around.

[Flann 1,709]

1 hour ago, Membrillo said:

I agree. I am compiling a similar Excel file so I can start balancing the custom content. I might someday block Maxis buildings, but for the time being I want the custom content to play relatively nice with the in-game buildings, and between other custom content too.

The problem is that my Excel skills are limited and my math is beyond rusty. I hit a wall with the Biased Volume formula and I cannot find a way to calculate the "virtual" Filling Degree of a building that doesn't have one. My formulas work well with buildings 18200 m3 or higher, but the filling degree is way off for the smaller buildings. Right now I can just trial and error with different filling degree values until I find the one that gives me the correct capacity, but it would be nice if I can calculate it directly.

@Flann, did you found a way to calculate this "virtual" filling degree directly? This is the formula PIMX uses (as pointed by igizeh in the link):

Capacity =  round( 3 + BiasedVol/(3*floorage_req))
where BiasedVol is Volume*min(1,0.51+(Volume/26000.0)**2)

I don't know how the directly find the X (Filling degree) from the capacity and volume (W x D x H x filling degree) with that function MIN(1;0.51) around.

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the spreadsheet.  I believe the method I used was to divide the actual R$ capacity by the estimated R$ capacity.  I calculated the estimated R$ capacity using the formula in the first post in that thread, so 3 + (volume / (3 * 12.42)).  If you want to use the second calculation, just replace the volume with the biased volume calculation, maybe that is more correct, I am not sure. Any way, just use volume * MIN(1,0.51+POWER((volume/26000),2)).  Neither calculation seems to match the actual filling degree for the lots I tested.  If the goal is balance, it probably doesn't matter too much, just pick one and try to match them.
 

[Membrillo 56]

5 hours ago, Flann said:

Neither calculation seems to match the actual filling degree for the lots I tested.

Some buildings seem to have a capacity calculated without the Biased Volume. I don't know if it is because they were calculated with a previous PIMX version, or they are done in Reader. For example, this Mattb325's house (Mattb325_Charmed):

It has a Filling Degree of 0.3 with Capacities of R$55 and R$$31. These capacities are what you would get with a full volume.

 

But, after recomputing it (keeping the exact same Filling Degree) the capacities go down to R$30 and R$$18:

These are the capacities that you would get following the '=MIN(1;0.51+(AK233/26000)^2)' formula. In this case, 0.515 times the volume.

So, it looks like some downloaded buildings with Filling Degree doesn't actually follow PIMX values. Maybe is this why your formulas weren't delivering what you expected?

[rsc204 21,815]

one thing to bear in mind here, you can set PIM-X’s filling degree to values the property can’t or won’t display. So for example .25 might show as 3 (it’s rounded to one decimal point), but would provide different values for the properties, even though both would show .3 as the filling degree. 

[Membrillo 56]

Yes, I noticed that it just shows one decimal, clicking on it shows more, if any. For the time being, I stopped messing around until CAM2.5 (and updated PIM-X values?) are available.