dylansan's Data Views - Education Quotient

[dylansan 65]

I've been working on some Data View mods, mostly for my own sake while I mess with some balance stuff, but I figured the clearer information could be useful for anyone, so I want to share them.

The Education Data View is the most usable of them at the moment, but before I upload it to the STEX, I wanted to get some feedback to make it as usable as possible.

Education Data View

The goal here is to visually differentiate the four EQ ranges that sims can have, which are used by the game to determine what kinds of jobs they will demand. For example, EQ1 R$$ sims demand Dirty and Manufacturing Industry, while EQ4 R$$ sims demand High Tech. It's important to be aware of these effects, as educating your sims can completely change the demand for jobs. It can be useful to strategically avoid educating areas of sims so that they will continue to work in the existing industries and businesses.

Color scheme:

• Red/Orange: EQ1
• Yellow: EQ2
• Green: EQ3
• Blue: EQ4
• Purple: Maximum Education (200)

Colors are inspired/borrowed from Cori's Parks Aura, for the sake of consistency.

Here's a sample screenshot.

And here's the .dat:

dylansan_DataView_EQ_0.1.dat

dylansan_DataView_EQ_0.2.dat

Feel free to try it out and share your thoughts and feedback. I expect to tweak the colors a bit to make the boundaries more obvious. A colorblind-accessible version is theoretically possible but I'm not sure how well I could create four distinct color gradients that don't overlap at all.

[CorinaMarie 29,884]

4 hours ago, dylansan said:

The goal here is to visually differentiate the four EQ ranges that sims can have, which are used by the game to determine what kinds of jobs they will demand.

Excellent idea. This will make the represented data much more useful. I've downloaded your 2nd version and I'll take a gander at it when I get a chance.

 

4 hours ago, dylansan said:

Colors are inspired/borrowed from Cori's Parks Aura, for the sake of consistency.

Oh, wow. Lovely!

[CorinaMarie 29,884]

This is wonderful! I really, really (,really) like how it groups the education into their respective categories.

This tile has a museum, a large high school, and two large elementary schools:

 

And this one is using my special technique of good health, one museum, almost perfectly stable population, and time:

^ Ofc, it'll need even more time running to get the dark blue and purple.

[Kloudkicker 4,565]

Very nice work you are doing @dylansan. I shall test this out when I have a moment. Looks very interesting, I like this kind of stuff.

[CorinaMarie 29,884]

Here's the same city tile a couple dozen years later:

^ Ofc this method is more dependent on the Sim's actual health as they only increase overall EQ from the hand-me-down education of the previous generation.

@dylansan: Your mod is ideal to illustrate the above principle!

[dylansan 65]

Thanks @CorinaMarie for the kind words and the excellent example images. 

I wanted to ask you, now that I think of it: when I created the mod, I copied Ltext files from your mod and used "generate new instance" in iReader on all of them. I would think with how few Data View Mods there are using the same Type and Group, it's unlikely there would be any conflict with anything, but I'm curious if I should pick specific Instance ids that I know are unused to avoid any future issues. I'm not sure how iReader generates things but I can't imagine it knows what values have already been used not only in SC4 but in other mods as well.

Also, with the amount of high EQ residents you have, do you ever run into issues with Agriculture demand being too low to expand your farmland? From what I understand, only EQ1 Sims of R$ or R$$ wealth generate any demand for farms, at least in the vanilla game (according to the Prima Guide).

I've reduced the effect of education buildings in my game for that among other reasons. That way it requires a lot more effort to get fully educated Sims, and hopefully there will be more variety of EQ levels across cities/regions.

[CorinaMarie 29,884]

5 hours ago, dylansan said:

I copied Ltext files from your mod and used "generate new instance" in iReader on all of them.

This is the accepted method. Since an 8 digit hex number has something like 4,294,967,296 possible values, the odds of conflict are very, very slim. You are correct that Reader has no idea which values have been used before. It simply picks random ones based on some internal formula. I seem to remember reading somewhere that part of the seed numbers is your country code and CPU serial number or other things to make it more random.

 

5 hours ago, dylansan said:

Also, with the amount of high EQ residents you have, do you ever run into issues with Agriculture demand being too low to expand your farmland?

I do grow all the farms I'm going to have in a city tile before expanding to larger towns and/or cities within and I do this before I add any educational facilities. Also, I almost always give them full health coverage from the start so they can be getting their average age up during the early years.

Long, long ago I did The 505 Year Education Experiment and later in that thread @Fantozzi asked very similar questions about EQ and where my Sims work. Keep in mind in that thread, the EQ overlay is the old Maxis colors. (I'm going to read the thread and replies again now, but I'm fairly certain my conclusion was that Sims will continue at the same job without regard to their EQ level.)

[rsc204 21,866]

Just wanted to say thanks for this wonderful little mod. I only recently started with Corina's Parks Aura mod, but I like the colour scheme used by both, it feels a bit more modern like the overlays you get in SimCity (2013) or Cities Skylines. Mostly though, it's great just to be able to more clearly see which sims are in which EQ class, this snippet of extra data is extremely helpful to have at a glance. In fact, I'm kinda thinking something similar for the Health Quotient would be nice too.

19 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

This is the accepted method. Since an 8 digit hex number has something like 4,294,967,296 possible values, the odds of conflict are very, very slim. You are correct that Reader has no idea which values have been used before.

Just bear in mind too that mathematically speaking, the odds of a conflict with a randomly assigned ID is very slim. Humans though, unconsciously tend to like patterns and order, such that using manual IDs makes it vastly more likely a conflict could occur. It's also worth noting, a lot of data/file types you see in Reader, do not need a specific GID, specifically you can also generate a new Group ID so the number of values just went up to a number I can't be bothered to post, but it's 4,294,967,296 to the power of 8. Most Exemplar types similarly do not rely on a specific GID, only the Type ID defines what object it is.

Quote

It simply picks random ones based on some internal formula. I seem to remember reading somewhere that part of the seed numbers is your country code and CPU serial number or other things to make it more random.

I have read that it was based on the time/date of your PC's internal clock. It goes down to an incredibly specific fraction of seconds, meaning the odds of two users making something needing an ID at the exact same moment are incredibly small. There should be enough IDs for something like 10 years plus worth of IDs too, I think we'd be on the second "cycle" now, but even so conflicts are very rare. Of course, the 3rd party tools may not be calculating things using the same method as Maxis.

[City_Slider 2,716]

Hello @dylansan ,

very cool, good Job on it... im going to test out it over the coming Weekend. We will have s little Snowstorm, so i´ll be at Home ;-)

Regards, Oliver

[RoddyUK 22]

These are my very humble observations:

Most of this is in the Prima Guide. But one thing I have noticed is that even though I can educate  all of my sims to maximum there will always be a steady number of R$ sims.

The one thing they really hate, however, is commuter time. They are quite happy to go and clean offices or work in ID, provided it's within their distance.

Otherwise you seem to get huge cases of abandonment, because they simply won't travel far for jobs. Like, almost nowhere fast. Even with direct access to transport.

In my efforts to build regionally, I find that (educated) R$ sims are happy to use buses, subways, pedmals (and relatively short railway trips) for a small distance but don't like driving cars and for some reason (cost?) will not use monorail.

They also don't seem to like crossing from one city to another, although I have no idea why.

(R$$ and R$$$ have no problems with that.)

However, I don't there is a necessary reason to not educating sims, not providing them with fire, health or police cover etc. The major problems with R$ sims is they won't leave their city and don't like travelling very far. 

They quickly cause abandonment (although R$$ sims are also bit tetchy on that as well - no matter how much transport you give them, or how much work you offer them, they still complain about commutimg time).

I think Cori wrote a mod or two about this: no R$ kickout (if I remember correctly?) and a mod to stop mansion pox.

 

Anyway, to stress, these are only opinions, having built six cities in a region - many of which are presenting numerous problems, mostly to do with the "three" rule of neighbourhood connections (that I never knew) and that the populations of my cities are getting ridiculously big, which makes the whole game run slower than a one-legged duck in a farmyard. 

[CorinaMarie 29,884]

18 hours ago, RoddyUK said:

I think Cori wrote a mod or two about this: no R$ kickout (if I remember correctly?) and a mod to stop mansion pox.

They are one and the same: Cori's No Kickout Lower Wealth Mod.

This is a mod someone else discovered a couple of decades ago, but it never caught on as something peeps would use. Then I personally experimented with it for a few years and found it was an absolute game changer in the amount of control it gives us. CB and I decided it was fine to call it mine since I started out as its greatest proponent.

I believe it's better to use @Null 45's DLL version now-a-days.

[RoddyUK 22]

Thanks! And a thousand apologies for getting your name wrong :-(

[CorinaMarie 29,884]

You're welcome and no worries. I edited my quote of you to match your edit so now no one will know.