Desirability Dataview Ideas

[StarlitBeach 160]

Lately I've been playing around with the dataviews, and I think at least one of my experiments might be useful to others so I'm hoping to get some feedback and ideas for improvement here. I use the Less Abandonment mod and find that it improves the game a lot for such a simple idea. Not because it reduces abandonment (which is mostly caused by mismatches between supply and demand of jobs in my experience), but because it gives you more control over where and when $$$ lots will develop. It does this by raising the desirability thresholds above which different wealth levels can grow. I thought it would be useful to be able to see these thresholds in the desirability dataview. Here's an example showing I-HT desirability (the colours are a slightly adapted version of the colour ramp from Cori's Parks Aura dataview):

 

The important threshold here is 90 - the dark blue/purple area is where I-HT can grow. Another important threshold is 50, below which buildings start to become distressed, shown by the sharp boundary between green and white/light red.

I have found this to be useful when play testing - I was able to control the pace and extent of R$$$ development by careful placement of parks and rewards, using Cori's Parks Aura and these dataviews. It was also useful to be able to see which areas were almost good enough for CO$$$, so that I knew where to put plazas to encourage them. The Less Abandonment threshold for R$$$ and CO$$$ is 120, and I found that they developed as soon as I started seeing areas of magenta on the dataview (and never before that) so I'm confident it's showing that threshold properly. High tech was developing just before I started seeing areas go blue, so that needs more testing in case it isn't calibrated properly.

A couple of the desirability views are more or less useless. The C$ one is especially so because it typically shows desirability off the scale almost everywhere. The I-D one is also useless because it is usually very similar to the I-M view. R$ is another not very useful one, though I do look at it on occasion. I was thinking about other possible ways of displaying desirability data to replace these useless dataviews, and did come up with one idea. What if you could see which residential lots the CO$$$ developers would like to get their hands on? Here's an example:

 

I've replaced the C$ dataview with a second view of the CO$$$ desirability data, but showing only residential lots where desirability is 90 or above. The small magenta blocks are where CO$$$ could develop right now if you zoned for them. The rest (blue/purple) have potential but are not quite there yet.

Here's another using the same concept for I-HT (replacing the I-D view):

 

In this case, because the growth threshold is 90, I-HT could grow in any of the highlighted lots if you zoned for it.

Any comments on how useful this is? Any ways it could be improved? And if anyone has any other ideas for new ways to display desirability data, I'd be very happy to try them out. Data can be broken down in this way by any combination of lot type (R, C, I, or non-RCI) and density, but unfortunately not by wealth level as far as I know.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I really like where you are going with this.   I almost never use the Desirability views since the Maxis versions seem almost, but not quite, completely useless.

 

21 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

What if you could see which residential lots the CO$$$ developers would like to get their hands on?

Excellent idea. This would be especially useful in city tiles where all the land has some growth and so it would simulate the greedy commercial corporations desire to obtain the best locations and they know they can bribe the Mayor to get the needed re-zoning permits.

 

36 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

any other ideas for new ways to display desirability data

More of an aside type of research if you can make heads or tails of what some other options actually show. Like "Occupancy" could be something cool. I did a quick test here, but never came up with anything I felt made for a good replacement view.

That image there is shown with DataView: Demand type property 0x4a0b47ed set to 5. (I forget what I set the thresholds at for that particular test.) Also, type 2 (supply), 4 (growth), and 6 (something) could be interesting.

 

44 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

Data can be broken down in this way by any combination of lot type (R, C, I, or non-RCI) and density, but unfortunately not by wealth level as far as I know.

That's the same conclusion I arrived at after extensive testing. Parsing out by Wealth would be extremely useful and I never did find a way to show that.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

Looks very promising indeed. I think the advantage of seeing what existing zones are more likely to be redeveloped could prove very useful to see. It would help for city planning to know what to zone nearby, as with city services to think ahead to new developments.

Given this seems very promising for further modding potential, we've added the Featured star  to your topic.

(This gives greater visibility in the main index and feeds.)

Keep up the great work!

[StarlitBeach 160]

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I really like where you are going with this.   I almost never use the Desirability views since the Maxis versions seem almost, but not quite, completely useless.

I have tended to look at them quite a lot, at least while learning how things work. I enjoy influencing development through desirability, using parks, rewards, civic buildings, etc. I agree that there are only a couple that really matter - R$$$ and CO$$$, and maybe I-HT, because those are the ones with the strictest desirability requirements in each category. I think of residential desirability as really meaning R$$$ desirability, because the lower wealth residentials are easy to satisfy.

 

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Excellent idea. This would be especially useful in city tiles where all the land has some growth and so it would simulate the greedy commercial corporations desire to obtain the best locations and they know they can bribe the Mayor to get the needed re-zoning permits.

That was pretty much my thinking too. I wonder if a CO$$ version would be useful at earlier stages of development? Maybe not quite so much. In the past I've always used the traffic volume dataview to decide where to rezone for commercial in earlier stages, and that seemed to work well enough.

 

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

More of an aside type of research if you can make heads or tails of what some other options actually show. Like "Occupancy" could be something cool. I did a quick test here, but never came up with anything I felt made for a good replacement view.

That image there is shown with DataView: Demand type property 0x4a0b47ed set to 5. (I forget what I set the thresholds at for that particular test.) Also, type 2 (supply), 4 (growth), and 6 (something) could be interesting.

I did have a look at those a while back and thought I was onto something with one or two of them, but then decided I didn't really understand what they were showing. I just had another look, and thought I might have figured out what Supply (Demand type 2) means, but it's a bit odd. I used the R$$ view to test it, and came up with this:

 

This seems to be showing the capacity of R$$ buildings, but averaged in some way rather than per lot. The low density zones are mostly red (< 96 on the colour scale). White is 96; green is 128; cyan is 160; blue is 192; purple is 224; magenta is 255, and I set the Maximum scale property to 255. Most of the higher density buildings are Roberts Apartments (capacity: 176), but there is one Manning Condos (capacity: 246) pushing up the average. Strangely, the highest value is not where that Manning Condos is. There are also a few patches of almost white nowhere near the medium density zones which I can't explain. So maybe it isn't really showing capacity, but it seems to be related to capacity in some way.

Growth (Demand type 4) seemed to be strongly correlated with desirability. Here it is in the R$$$ view:

 

I left the colour scale exactly the same as for desirability, and it shows a very similar pattern (that hill to the west is the most desirable part of the city), so I don't think it will be any more useful than desirability.

Occupancy (Demand type 5) is a strange one. Again, it seems to be averaged, possibly by tract, and is probably a percentage (as you also suspected). I tried to make the colour scale bring out small differences at the top end, but ended up with this (for R$):

 

All the R$ are shown in magenta (which should be 100), with other colours over adjacent zones - probably as a result of averaging. It doesn't show the difference between a building that is 90% occupied and another which is 100% - maybe because of the averaging, though that wouldn't make it a uniform colour everywhere, At the moment it's really only showing where there are occupied R$ buildings. I do want to play around a bit more with this one though - it's possible I have the colour scale wrong.

Demand type 6 caused my game to freeze as soon as I tried to open the desirability dataview, and eventually crash, so I don't think it's safe to use.

 

4 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Looks very promising indeed. I think the advantage of seeing what existing zones are more likely to be redeveloped could prove very useful to see. It would help for city planning to know what to zone nearby, as with city services to think ahead to new developments.

Given this seems very promising for further modding potential, we've added the Featured star  to your topic.

(This gives greater visibility in the main index and feeds.)

Keep up the great work!

Thanks! I did also wonder about flipping it around and showing non-residential zones where R$$$ might like to live, to have a complete set of views that show possible rezoning opportunities. In my opinion that's probably somewhat less useful than the ones I've already done, but I'll probably give it a try anyway, just to see.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

7 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

I set the Maximum scale property to 255.

I believe that then maps the hidden data as a 1 to 1 relationship. For instance, the Air Pollution uses a maximum scale of 1024 (0x400) so I presume that then means if said pollution in a tract is 512 it'd correlate to 127 in the color ramp property.

Perhaps it might be worth setting the maximum scale to match the highest capacity of a building in the Data source you are testing?

My idea is if it adds up all of the actual occupants and then assigns that a corresponding number in the 0 to 255 range then compares that to the total capacity which gets assigned to a (presumably) higher number in the same 0 to 255 range.

But if that's the case, the maximum scale would need to handle the most capacity a tract could have. Then again if quantized to buildings it might be ok.

Another idea is setting the maximum scale to 100 if it is simply a percentage so then a 127 color ramp value correlates to 50%.

Ofc, this is just me guessing. YMMV

[StarlitBeach 160]

15 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I believe that then maps the hidden data as a 1 to 1 relationship. For instance, the Air Pollution uses a maximum scale of 1024 (0x400) so I presume that then means if said pollution in a tract is 512 it'd correlate to 127 in the color ramp property.

That is my understanding of how it works as well. Data types that cannot have negative values map a value of 0 to 0 in the colour ramp, and if you set the maximum scale to 255 it seems to be a one to one relationship. I always use a multiple of 255 in this case. Data that can go negative (like desirability) maps a value of 0 to 0x80 (128) in the colour ramp. If you set the maximum scale to 127, then it maps each value to 128+value in the colour ramp. At least I'm fairly certain it works that way - it certainly seems right for desirability data. I mentioned in my first post that I wasn't sure I had calibrated the 90 threshold correctly, and it turns out that I had set the Maximum scale property to 0xF7 in all of the dataviews except I-HT, where I had it at 0x80. I think I was using 128 for a while and then changed them all... except one. That may be the reason for the minor discrepancies I was seeing because i was using the I-HT view to test that threshold...

Pollution is a strange one though - theoretically it can have negative values, so it only uses half the scale with 0 at 0x80.

[StarlitBeach 160]

I've been playing around some more with those other demand types (Supply and Occupancy) today. I haven't had much luck getting Occupancy to do anything useful, but I think I have figured out how Supply works and have made some interesting dataviews with it.

I eventually figured it out (I think) by removing the Quantize lots property and setting Interpolate data to False, to make it display the data on a per tract basis:

 

It seems to be reporting the sum total of capacity in each tract - when I added the capacities of all the buildings in a tract, the result always matched the colour being shown for that tract. I haven't tested more carefully yet (by changing the colour scale to highlight tracts with a specific total capacity for example), but I'm fairly certain that's what it does. I found that R$$ buildings that had downgraded to R$ were included in R$ capacity, as you might expect.

When the data is interpolated, it looks like this:

 

R$

 

R$$

 

R$$$

 

Cs$$

 

Cs$$$

 

Co$$

 

Co$$$

 

I-D

 

I-M

 

I-HT

 

Sorry about the image overload, but I think it's really cool to be able to see an overview of what's going on in each part of a city like this.

Interpolating the data makes it easier on the eye, but complicates the interpretation of it in a way - I guess the colour of each cell represents a weighted average of the tract capacities in a particular neighbourhood around it. Without knowing the interpolation method it's impossible to be more precise.

I tried to make the colour scale useful at a reasonably wide range of capacities. If the maximum is increased too much, then the lowest density areas start to become transparent. Industrial uses the same scale for ease of comparison, even though industrial zones would have a lower maximum capacity. That does mean that it would still work well with doubler or quadrupler mods though.

I do plan to upload these at some point (once I've done a little bit more testing) in case people want to try them out. I think they look really good, but are they actually useful?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

8 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

Sorry about the image overload,

No worries at all. I've posted over 100 images in some posts.

 

8 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

I do plan to upload these at some point (once I've done a little bit more testing) in case people want to try them out. I think they look really good, but are they actually useful?

Yes, indeed. I believe these could well serve as a population density overview which is something I've wanted for a very long time.

Brilliant work you've done yet again!

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

That looks excellent and highly useful. To visually view which areas of a city hold the most population per developer type, that really will come in extremely handy for city planning purposes. Thinking about traffic flow especially, because it saves the need to query individual buildings or networks. It would become a bit like a Zones view, but the key difference to see the quantities of occupancy represented within each zone. So certainly this will be another superb mayoral tool you've developed.

Looking forward to the beta release!

[StarlitBeach 160]

Thanks @CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom The more I think of it, the more I think I'll use these myself. As you say, the ability to see at a glance the density of different types of development could be very useful for 'big picture' planning, and especially for road capacity upgrades and transit systems.

What I'm planning to do at the moment is release the capacity and desirability dataviews as one download, offering at least a couple of different options to install the ones you want:

Option 1 - replacement desirability views showing the growth thresholds for Less Abandonment, either with (1a) or without (1b) the 'rezoning targets' views for CO and IHT.

Option 2 - capacity dataviews to replace desirability, with optional extra files replacing water, power and radiation with CO$$$, IHT and R$$$ desirability (This is what I plan to use myself.)

Those optional replacements will conflict with other replacements for water, power and radiation though - I know @CorinaMarie has made replacements for at least a couple of them. The only other ones I would consider replacing would be mayor rating and maybe fire hazard. And although I like it, I guess a lot of people would be happy to lose land value as well?

There is also the option of switching between the capacity and improved desirability views as needed, by exiting the city and swapping plugins around.

As it will probably take a few days to finish testing and pull everything together, I'll attach a beta version of the capacity dataviews here for people to try out:

RCI Capacity DataViews (Low).dat

RCI Capacity DataViews (Medium).dat

RCI Capacity DataViews (High).dat

The Medium version is the one I took screenshots from and is probably the most widely useful. It can show capacities up to 2500 before getting saturated, but is still capable of showing low densities. The Low version goes up to 500, and can show subtler variations in low density communities. The High version is designed for cities with skyscrapers - it goes up to 10000, but does not show low density areas at all. I think I'll package them so that people can mix and match different densities for R, CS, CO, I, and Ag if they want.

I'd love to see how they look in other peoples' cities, especially in high density or farming communities, which I haven't tested them on yet.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I love these new views! Simply being able to see where each type and wealth are is already something wonderful. Then adding in the color coding for capacity and that's icing on the cake.

I tested Medium first and I'm well satisfied to use that as the version. I'll not label the pics since you can tell from each s/s what they are. Then I've included a few pics from Low.

Medium:

 

Low:

[StarlitBeach 160]

Thanks for sharing those pics @CorinaMarie . I think Medium is going to be the best version for most cities, while still working well at low density, but Low does look nicer on the farms.

BTW I love that water texture. I haven't really looked at getting better textures for the game yet, but I'll have to get that.

[Iodyne 36]

1 hour ago, StarlitBeach said:

What I'm planning to do at the moment is release the capacity and desirability dataviews as one download, offering at least a couple of different options to install the ones you want:

Option 1 - replacement desirability views showing the growth thresholds for Less Abandonment, either with (1a) or without (1b) the 'rezoning targets' views for CO and IHT.

Option 2 - capacity dataviews to replace desirability, with optional extra files replacing water, power and radiation with CO$$$, IHT and R$$$ desirability (This is what I plan to use myself.)

Those optional replacements will conflict with other replacements for water, power and radiation though - I know @CorinaMarie has made replacements for at least a couple of them. The only other ones I would consider replacing would be mayor rating and maybe fire hazard. And although I like it, I guess a lot of people would be happy to lose land value as well?

There is also the option of switching between the capacity and improved desirability views as needed, by exiting the city and swapping plugins around.

Amazing work! I'll download the beta right now and try it out! I shall await the final release. Also kudos on the Industry Slope Fix.

Personally, I would love to be able to run both option 1 and 2, replacing Desirability with (1) and probably.. Land Value with (2). Unless I'm missing something nuanced with land value it seems a bit redundant. Also Power is pretty useless. I wonder if Water and Water Pollution could be combined in some way... like a select overlay of the pollution over the watered buildings and terrainwater

Is adding new dataviews instead of replacing not doable? I know Tropod was able to add some graphs in his GraphModd; is it different for dataviews?

Also with the desirability one, I agree seeing the residential lots commerical want to replace and vice-versa would be better than the low $ views. You could replace both of the lower wealth types from each category with the highest wealth want-to-replace of the other categories. i.e. R$ with C$$$ replacement, R$$ with IHT replacement, C$ with R$$$ replacement, C$$ with IHT replacement, and so on. 

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

@StarlitBeach

I just noticed your edit here:

42 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

BTW I love that water texture. I haven't really looked at getting better textures for the game yet, but I'll have to get that.

Cori is having her meal right now, so I'll just answer this...

I like that water mod too. It happens to be the Grey1.dat from this set.

(Also you might find Cori's Water Shoppe and Cori's Side Water Shoppe useful for complete indexes of these types of mods.)

Now back to your topic...

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

12 minutes ago, Iodyne said:

I wonder if Water and Water Pollution could be combined in some way... like a select overlay of the pollution over the watered buildings and terrainwater

I'm fairly certain the answer is "No" because 0x0A for the Data source is Water Supply and 0x18 is Water Pollution. The game does not allow more than one data source (and from a programming perspective, that makes perfect sense).

 

14 minutes ago, Iodyne said:

Is adding new dataviews instead of replacing not doable? I know Tropod was able to add some graphs in his GraphModd; is it different for dataviews?

As best as I've been able to figure out, each dataview IID is hardcoded so we cannot add any thru normal means. That's not to say a DLL couldn't, but that's way out of all but one person's league. New graphs, however, seems like we can add more of those until the cows come home (tho I've only done replacements myself).

 

3 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

I know @CorinaMarie has made replacements for at least a couple of them.

I forgot I was going to comment on this. Yes, I've made the Moisture Data view to replace Radiation, but it's more of a curiosity thing or to use temporarily if following BT's guide. Then, too, my Abandoned Buildings view is also a replacement for Radiation and while CB and I use it a lot, it never gained any traction in the development thread. The Non-RCI Lots one was a special request by someone and prolly not widely used by anyone. The key one that seems rather popular is the Parks Aura replacing the Garbage view. There might be others I've made, but I don't recall offhand.

For which views to replace with the specialty Option 2 views I'd vote for these with the top being the least used for me:

• Radiation
• Mayor Rating
• Fire Hazard
• Power
• Land Value

[StarlitBeach 160]

Power and Mayor Rating are conveniently next to each other, so I could use them for the CO$$$ desirability and 'rezoning targets' views (CO is probably the most useful of those). I wanted to replace Radiation with R$$$ Desirability because that puts it next to Parks Aura. I-HT Desirability could then replace Fire Hazard. That makes the most sense to me, anyway.

 

1 hour ago, Iodyne said:

Unless I'm missing something nuanced with land value it seems a bit redundant.

It is a bit redundant, but not entirely useless IMO. Land value tends to correlate with R$$$ desirability because of the way the land value simulator works. Desirability is a factor in land value, and tends to hugely outweigh the effect of the intrinsic land value of the terrain. I've modded the land value simulator in my game to reduce the effect of desirability, which means it doesn't reach the highest land value so easily, and the dataview shows more variation. Because land value is a minor desirability factor, this should also make it slightly harder to increase $$$ desirability, but I can't say I've noticed that.

The one time the land value dataview might be useful is early in development, when you can more easily see the variations in intrinsic land value. This could be used to help decide where you want high wealth development, because it will be a little bit easier to attract on land with a higher intrinsic value. But the effect of land value is so minor that it may not be noticeable.

 

2 hours ago, Iodyne said:

Also with the desirability one, I agree seeing the residential lots commerical want to replace and vice-versa would be better than the low $ views. You could replace both of the lower wealth types from each category with the highest wealth want-to-replace of the other categories. i.e. R$ with C$$$ replacement, R$$ with IHT replacement, C$ with R$$$ replacement, C$$ with IHT replacement, and so on. 

There's probably no need to do that - they could show which lots of both other types are desired simultaneously. For example, one dataview could show which R and I lots the CO$$$ developers want. My feeling is that in most circumstances, you are more likely to be looking for places to rezone from R to C or I, rather than the other way round, but YMMV. That means only two desirability views need to be replaced, one with CO$$$ and one with I-HT. I do plan to test a R$$$ version though, to see how it looks, so a third one could be replaced with that (I'd be inclined to replace CS$$ if needed).

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

7 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

Power and Mayor Rating are conveniently next to each other, ...

You can rearrange what shows where if that helps everything make sense.

Here's a quick example swapping the positions of Fire Hazard and Crime.

First I check the ID for the view choices in the bottom of the Data View UI. It's the middle column:

^ Notice there are two per item. One is for the actual radio button and the other is for a hidden rectangle so in the game you can also click on the name without having to precisely get inside the radio button circle.

 

There are 3 separate UI's which need changed. Here we are going to edit in Text View. This is before making any changes and I've scrolled down so I see the id= lines with the numbers that correspond to the first pic above.

 

For editing, I've scrolled it over a bit.

I've changed the original first Fire Hazard entry to be Crime by changing the original id=0x00005002 to id=0x00005003, then the caption="Fire Hazard" to caption="Crime", and the captionres={6a231eaa,4a551bfe} to captionres={6a231eaa,aa551c03}. The caption = doesn't actually matter because the LText reference overrides, but I change those too just so it's easier to tell what is what when viewing in Reader.

Here are all 4 lines I changed:

 

And now in the game, you can see they swapped positions:

^ ( My Fire Hazard is very low because of a separate Fire Suppression ordinance I made for easier mod testing of other things. )

The only tricky part when rearranging is how some have more room for LText than others. Notice how the column with Fire, Water, Traffic, and Zones is narrow. Even that can be changed, but it's way more complicated.

Again, when making changes to the lower part, it needs to be edited in all three UIs. I'll attach this quick test version so you can easily see the UIs without having to hunt thru SimCity_1.dat.

z UIs - Data Views - Swap Location Fire Hazard and Crime.dat

[StarlitBeach 160]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

You can rearrange what shows where if that helps everything make sense.

Here's a quick example swapping the positions of Fire Hazard and Crime.

I didn't think of trying to do it that way. TYVM for explaining how to do it, and putting the UI elements I need into one file - should save me quite a bit of time!

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@StarlitBeach

You prolly already know this, but if you do rearrange them, be sure to mention it will fight with any Re-Color the UI type mod (and there are a small handful of those).

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

@StarlitBeach

You may already know this, but I'll mention for anyone else who's getting into this kind of modding for the first time...

A crucial step when editing the UI via the source mode (or the graphical editor, which I'll touch on below), is to hit the Apply button. Otherwise changes are lost which loses one's progress. I've done this before in the past and it's not a fun moment to say the least. (Of course, logically this follows clicking Edit to, well, edit!)

Another thing is Reader 1.5.4 has the aforementioned graphical editor (Cori's 1st pic above). This makes UI editing more straightforward, especially for positional aspects. However a word of caution is it can be very finicky. That version of Reader has a save bug too, where if saving more than once with the program still open, it can cause file corruption. This isn't an issue in Reader 0.9.3 (as Cori showed in her pics other above). So if using that version, we recommend saving and closing to re-open.

I sometimes find editing in Source mode very handy for direct edits. The knowing how everything as seen in the raw code is all that there is. That can be reassuring when only needing to tweak an IID value or the positioning as needed for this swapping the order. A little tip which might come in useful for anything more extensive (for instance our City Halls Panel for MZ), is to select all the code (it needs dragging as Ctrl+A annoyingly doesn't work). Then copy and paste into a text editor.

Personally we like Notepad++ as our tool of choice for anything needing to edit in plain text. Then since UI code is in XML form, to select Language --> XML and it then displays in pretty syntax highlighting. There's a myriad of options in N++ for editing text, including the most powerful find and replace. Also hovering over text and it displays other instance. A big thing too is the ability to undo and redo changes, which is something Reader doesn't allow.

Here's a quick preview of it:

Again you probably already know all these things, but just in case and also for anyone else who comes across this topic.

----------

Another thought which Cori suggested I mention...

If keeping the same IID for the LText then any other language will still default to the Maxis text. This is because of how those incremental different ones work based on the info in this topic. There are options to make a dozen others too for each language offset, or change the LText reference and IID to something unique for each version. Last year rivit made a useful tool named LTexter which automates the process (we compiled walkthru steps here if useful).

Changing the LText IID itself and the reference in the UI code is the safer way to always have it show the desired text. The caveat is this would be in English only, although that'd be better than other languages setting it default back to their "Desirability" equivalent translation.

There's no absolute need to delve into this, so it's one of those optional extra things you might consider prior to a full release.

[StarlitBeach 160]

49 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

@StarlitBeach

You prolly already know this, but if you do rearrange them, be sure to mention it will fight with any Re-Color the UI type mod (and there are a small handful of those).

That's a point. The other way of rearranging them is to swap around the instance IDs of the dataview exemplars so they appear in the right place (similar to making a replacement view that has the IID of the one you want to replace). That's how I would do it if I was going to offer a more complete set of new dataviews, which is an option. It could conflict with other replacement dataviews of course, but that might be better (as in simpler to fix) than conflicting with mods that change the UI.

Some dataviews can't be moved without changing the UI files - Crime, Desirability (or RCI Capacity) and Traffic because they are all non-standard in one way or another, and Zones because I wouldn't want to conflict with the NAM replacement for it. I'd also leave Parks Aura where it is because that's a popular one, and Education because there is a good replacement for that by @dylansan. One good way of arranging them within those constraints would be:

 

Average Age     Health     R$$$ Desirability     Air Pollution

Crime           Water      CO$$$ Desirability    Water Pollution

Education       Traffic    CO$$$ Rezone          Parks Aura (or Garbage)

RCI Capacity    Zones      I-HT Desirability     Land Value

 

Italics  represent views that I've moved and/or replaced. The ones in Bold  can't (or shouldn't) be moved without changing the UI files. The ones that have been lost are Mayor Rating, Power, Fire Hazard and Radiation.

I would then need to replace Average Age, Health, Water and Land Value at least. I have already made replacements for my own use (except Water) - most of them just change the colour ramp, which is a big improvement over the Maxis colours IMO, and a couple have a more useful legend. I also made replacements for the Pollution views, and have an idea that might make them a little more useful, so could include them too. A version could also be included for users with red/green colour blindness.

This is what the rest of my replacements look like at the moment:

 

Average Age

This only goes to 80 because I'm testing another mod I made that (amongst other things) reduces the maximum lifespan from 100 to 80.

 

Health

 

Land Value

 

Air Pollution

 

Water Pollution

 

I'd probably change the legend on those last three, in case they aren't quite clear enough to those who don't have English as their first language.

Speaking of which...

43 minutes ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Another thought which Cori suggested I mention...

If keeping the same IID for the LText then any other language will still default to the Maxis text. This is because of how those incremental different ones work based on the info in this topic. There are options to make a dozen others too for each language offset, or change the LText reference and IID to something unique for each version. Last year rivit made a useful tool named LTexter which automates the process (we compiled walkthru steps here if useful).

Changing the LText IID itself and the reference in the UI code is the safer way to always have it show the desired text. The caveat is this would be in English only, although that'd be better than other languages setting it default back to their "Desirability" equivalent translation.

There's no absolute need to delve into this, so it's one of those optional extra things you might consider prior to a full release.

I had wondered about that. I've got into the habit of just copying the original LText and keeping the same IID in most cases, which is fine for my own use but probably not ideal otherwise.

So this is turning into a slightly more complex mod than I had originally intended!  But I do think it might be worth offering a 'Full' version that replaces a lot of them and puts them in a more logical order, plus ways to replace only the ones you want to and keep them in their original order.

[Iodyne 36]

1 hour ago, StarlitBeach said:

Some dataviews can't be moved without changing the UI files - Crime, Desirability (or RCI Capacity) and Traffic because they are all non-standard in one way or another, and Zones because I wouldn't want to conflict with the NAM replacement for it. I'd also leave Parks Aura where it is because that's a popular one, and Education because there is a good replacement for that by @dylansan. One good way of arranging them within those constraints would be:

 

Average Age     Health     R$$$ Desirability     Air Pollution

Crime           Water      CO$$$ Desirability    Water Pollution

Education       Traffic    CO$$$ Rezone          Parks Aura (or Garbage)

RCI Capacity    Zones      I-HT Desirability     Land Value

 

Italics  represent views that I've moved and/or replaced. The ones in Bold  can't (or shouldn't) be moved without changing the UI files. The ones that have been lost are Mayor Rating, Power, Fire Hazard and Radiation.

I would then need to replace Average Age, Health, Water and Land Value at least. I have already made replacements for my own use (except Water) - most of them just change the colour ramp, which is a big improvement over the Maxis colours IMO, and a couple have a more useful legend. I also made replacements for the Pollution views, and have an idea that might make them a little more useful, so could include them too. A version could also be included for users with red/green colour blindness.

This is what the rest of my replacements look like at the moment:

These look amazing! A complete dataview overhaul like this is very refreshing, even with just some of the renaming you've done. I'll have to check out dylansan's education replacement.

I think Air Quality would look better more in the style of Maxis original, or at least transparent for pure instead of blue.

Maybe switch IHT desirability and CO rezone?

Also if you get rid of water does it still show in the pipe underground view? If so, then the water view is probably not needed. I'd probably then move Crime to where Water was, and add back in mayor rating where crime is...

 

[StarlitBeach 160]

2 hours ago, Iodyne said:

These look amazing! A complete dataview overhaul like this is very refreshing, even with just some of the renaming you've done.

Thanks @Iodyne !

2 hours ago, Iodyne said:

I think Air Quality would look better more in the style of Maxis original, or at least transparent for pure instead of blue.

I've changed my mind about that a few times... The reason I like the blue is that it helps to bring out variations in the low pollution areas. For example, you can see the higher air pollution around busy roads and the High Tech district to the southwest - showing that I-HT do produce at least some pollution (or possibly that there's a rogue I-M building in there somewhere). Here's the Maxis version in the same city for comparison:

 

I tried increasing the transparency of the blue a bit to create a more subtle version of the same effect, and I like the results:

 

 

2 hours ago, Iodyne said:

Maybe switch IHT desirability and CO rezone?

Yes, I'll probably do that, though I think both ways have their merits.

2 hours ago, Iodyne said:

Also if you get rid of water does it still show in the pipe underground view? If so, then the water view is probably not needed. I'd probably then move Crime to where Water was, and add back in mayor rating where crime is...

I just tried it as I had replaced the Water dataview, and it turns out the underground view is still there when you try to lay a pipe, but when you select the water pump or other buildings it shows the replacement view (CO$$$ Desirability) , so probably best not to replace Water unless that behaviour can be changed somehow.

Edit: I just noticed that the river looks purple in the Water Pollution view. Probably because it's... unwatered?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@StarlitBeach

I really like where you are going with these. Your data views are looking good. I do agree that for pollution of 0x000000 having that be transparent is my preference too. Then starting at 0x00000001 pollution begin the colored color ramp.

Also, by not moving the in game menu locations of where to click, but only changing the names gives the greatest comparability with all other UI coloring mods. (I just felt to mention it's possible if you did want to.)

[StarlitBeach 160]

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

@StarlitBeach

I really like where you are going with these. Your data views are looking good. I do agree that for pollution of 0x000000 having that be transparent is my preference too. Then starting at 0x00000001 pollution begin the colored color ramp.

Thanks!

I would definitely like to make them go transparent at zero pollution if possible, so I spent some time trying out a few ways of doing it. The best option I found was also the simplest - I changed the blue to transparent and kept everything else the same, so that they would just fade out from white:

Air Quality

 

Water Quality

 

They are more aesthetically pleasing for sure, but they do make it slightly harder to see any detail at low pollution levels. Whether it is useful to be able to see that is debatable I guess. But for example, you can see parts of the coverage ring of the water treatment plant if you look closely at this water pollution view, whereas in the blue version it is immediately obvious.

The problem is with the way that they use the colour scale - zero pollution is at 0x80, meaning that only half the scale is useful. To show pollution levels up to 1000, each increment of 1 in the colour scale represents an increment of 8 in pollution, so if it fades to transparent it has to fade very quickly.

In all of the above views, white is at 0x84 on the colour scale (32 pollution). I also tried putting it at 0x81 (8 pollution):

Air Quality

 

Water Quality

 

Which is a bit ugly, but it does clearly show the boundary between areas with zero (or almost zero) pollution and areas with low pollution.

I also thought of getting them to pick out the level of pollution where the effect on desirability switches from positive to negative. That turned out to be 294 for most developer types that care about pollution, which seems high to me (the exceptions are R$, Cs$ and Co$$, which have it at 500). I'll try a few options for doing that later.

[Iodyne 36]

12 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

I would definitely like to make them go transparent at zero pollution if possible, so I spent some time trying out a few ways of doing it. The best option I found was also the simplest - I changed the blue to transparent and kept everything else the same, so that they would just fade out from white:

I don't overtly mind the water pollution having the blue background, since presumably any spot you plop a well has water in the ground. Reminds me of 2013 overlays. For the air pollution though (or even the water pollution without blue too), I wonder if using a strong yellow from Maxis' original view in place of the white with the 0x84 (or perhaps 0x82) would look better...

[StarlitBeach 160]

5 minutes ago, Iodyne said:

I don't overtly mind the water pollution having the blue background, since presumably any spot you plop a well has water in the ground. Reminds me of 2013 overlays. For the air pollution though (or even the water pollution without blue too), I wonder if using a strong yellow from Maxis' original view in place of the white with the 0x84 (or perhaps 0x82) would look better...

That was one of the things I tried. I think it might work if the transition from red to yellow was gradual as in the Maxis colours (the options I tried all made quite a sharp transition that didn't look good at all). I like them as they are in the version that fades to transparency, and its only a tiny bit of (unimportant) detail that's lost, but I'll definitely keep playing around with them for a little while longer.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

11 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

... zero pollution is at 0x80...

In all of the above views, white is at 0x84 on the colour scale (32 pollution). I also tried putting it at 0x81 (8 pollution):

11 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

I like them as they are in the version that fades to transparency, and its only a tiny bit of (unimportant) detail that's lost, but I'll definitely keep playing around with them for a little while longer.

How about setting 0x80 to transparent, then set 0x81 to white and 0x84 to blue?

No pollution would show transparent, but then from 0x81 (8 pollution) to 0x84 (32 pollution) would fade from blue down to white and only lose the fine detail of the 1 to 7 range. Or is that what you already tried and it's still not what you want?

For the full range, I do personally like pollution going from transparent to a shade of yellow thru orange to red at the extreme.

[StarlitBeach 160]

On 13/05/2022 at 5:51 PM, CorinaMarie said:

How about setting 0x80 to transparent, then set 0x81 to white and 0x84 to blue?

No pollution would show transparent, but then from 0x81 (8 pollution) to 0x84 (32 pollution) would fade from blue down to white and only lose the fine detail of the 1 to 7 range. Or is that what you already tried and it's still not what you want?

That (or a variant of it) was one of the things I tried, and it didn't look right. I ended up concluding that it only made sense to include blue at all if it was at zero.

 

On 13/05/2022 at 5:51 PM, CorinaMarie said:

For the full range, I do personally like pollution going from transparent to a shade of yellow thru orange to red at the extreme.

I now have something that I'm happy with, using yellow in place of white and controlling the transparency at 0x81 through to 0x84. It also has light red representing 296 pollution (just above the threshold where the desirability effect flips between positive and negative) and goes through orange to yellow below that.

 

Air Quality

 

Water Quality

 

It is about as good as the blue version at showing low levels of pollution, but in more appropriate colours for what it's supposed to represent.

I've also moved the Average Age, Health and Land Value dataviews to make space for the Desirability views in the third column. Moving or replacing Water caused the wrong dataview to appear when placing water pumps etc., and I couldn't find a way around that so it has to stay where it is. The changes work in all European languages - I added the LText files for each button label and changed their group and instance IDs so that they appear in the right place and in the right language. Where I've changed the titles or legend text (as in the pollution views), I only changed them for English and English (UK).

Finally, I changed the title and legend of the Health dataview so that it shows life expectancy rather than HQ, because this seemed the most natural way of putting numbers to it.

[Iodyne 36]

12 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

I now have something that I'm happy with...

It is about as good as the blue version at showing low levels of pollution, but in more appropriate colours for what it's supposed to represent.

I've also moved the Average Age, Health and Land Value dataviews to make space for the Desirability views in the third column.

Finally, I changed the title and legend of the Health dataview so that it shows life expectancy rather than HQ, because this seemed the most natural way of putting numbers to it.

Wow. Looks amazing! It seems its really coming along and falling into place. What does the layout look like with the desirability views put in? Also, if you have an updated beta now, I'd be happy to test it! Been using the RCI capacity beta to good use, but I definitely do need desirability views.