Desirability Dataview Ideas

[StarlitBeach 160]

14 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Excellent. That's very encouraging what you've created. From there it could then optionally be a dedicated Abandoned view by setting everything below 160 to transparent.

If you're happy for me to do it, I could include the combined view as an optional replacement for the Fire Hazard view in its original position; and both the combined view and the 'just abandonment' version as optional replacements for where the Radiation view usually goes. (I wouldn't make it part of the 'default' full installation because of potential conflicts with fire mods.) I'd credit you with the idea of using flammability like this, of course.

This is how it looks with the rest of the colour scale transparent:

(I could change the colour to red or black so it stands out even better.)

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

If you're happy for me to do it, I could include the combined view as an optional replacement for the Fire Hazard view in its original position; and both the combined view and the 'just abandonment' version as optional replacements for where the Radiation view usually goes. (I wouldn't make it part of the 'default' full installation because of potential conflicts with fire mods.) I'd credit you with the idea of using flammability like this, of course.

Sure, I'm happy for you to do it. You are on a roll with creating useful dataviews we've never had until now so this can be another for you to post. I do agree it should not be a default install, but one that can be recommended as needed.

Now, as my own preference for my most current local version, I also turn off the trees and highlight transit stations (0x09 iirc). I'm not sure if those changes are in my old posted one or not.

 

7 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

(I could change the colour to red or black so it stands out even better.)

(I'd favour red for the 160+.)

[StarlitBeach 160]

30 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Sure, I'm happy for you to do it. You are on a roll with creating useful dataviews we've never had until now so this can be another for you to post.

Thanks!

 

30 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Now, as my own preference for my most current local version, I also turn off the trees and highlight transit stations (0x09 iirc). I'm not sure if those changes are in my old posted one or not.

Those changes are in the version I downloaded to have a look at (v 0.46). I do want to look into whether it is worth hiding some things (like trees) in these dataviews. And I think I will change the highlight mode for the version that shows just abandonment, because it doesn't make sense to highlight all the fire stations in that case, so could change it to highlight transit stations instead.

 

30 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

(I'd favour red for the 160+.)

Yes, I think that would be best for the just abandonment version. The combined view will either keep it as yellow, or change it to black (and shift the colour scale to use lighter reds so that there's no confusion between black and dark red).

[StarlitBeach 160]

Here's the latest version of the Abandonment view with all of those changes:

 

And a comparison between the combined Fire Hazard and Abandonment view and @CorinaMarie's original in the same test run:

 

I couldn't find any buildings in this test that were highlighted by one but not the other. I'm guessing that the number of potential false negatives is quite small, but I'll try to get one to build (probably in another city) to see what happens.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

9 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

Here's the latest version of the Abandonment view with all of those changes:

That's excellent! I can use yours as a direct replacement for the one I have now.

(Another ideal test would be an area with some abandoned low density R$$$ mansions.)

[StarlitBeach 160]

I've been working on a colour scale that is hopefully easier to read for people with red-green colour blindness. Here are the views I've recoloured so far - I used Coblis to simulate what they would look like for people with deuteranopia (green-blindness):

 

R$$$ Desirability

 

R$$$ - Deuteranopia

 

CO$$$ Desirability

 

CO$$$ Desirability - Deuteranopia

 

IHT Desirability

 

IHT Desirability - Deuteranopia

 

These colours seem (to me) to work well for the desirability views - all the important thresholds that I wanted to show for use with the Less Abandonment mod are easy to see in the deuteranopia simulation (white/grey at 50; light grey/blue at 90; dark blue/bright blue at 120). I'm hoping that at least one colour-blind person will read this and let me know whether they really do work.

Everything else is done - once I've made recoloured versions of all the dataviews and done a bit of testing it'll be ready.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

8 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

I'm hoping that at least one colour-blind person will read this and let me know whether they really do work.

We can beep @Noobville Mayor and hope they might get notified via an email, but they were last seen here in March, 2019. They were the one who was so helpful when CB and I created our Deut dataviews.

It worked out back then that what the color blind simulator program showed was good for them in reality so yours will likely be fine.

[nos.17 5,120]

Super impressed with the progress!

I don't have any comments on the technical side, but if you're looking for a tool to make stepped color gradients, I have found the chroma.js color palette helper to be extremely helpful (plus color blindness simulations are included).

[StarlitBeach 160]

2 hours ago, nos.17 said:

Super impressed with the progress!

I don't have any comments on the technical side, but if you're looking for a tool to make stepped color gradients, I have found the chroma.js color palette helper to be extremely helpful (plus color blindness simulations are included).

Thanks, that's a very useful tool! Trying to get the lightness gradient right in my colourblind-safe palette has been tricky so I'll definitely see if that helps to improve it.

[StarlitBeach 160]

I wonder if anyone knows of a way to change the colour used for highlighting buildings on the main map? It defaults to bright green, which is problematic... Here is the Water Pollution view in my alternative colour scale:

 

Normal Colour Vision

 

Deuteranopia

 

I changed the highlight colour to blue so that the buildings stand out better on the mini map, but it doesn't change the colour on the main map, so in the deuteranopia simulation the water treatment plant appears highlighted in bright yellow on a dark yellow background. You can still see it, but it isn't ideal, and it would be much harder to see if it was a little bit further south.

I haven't yet found a property that would allow me to change this, but I'm hoping there's something I've missed.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

24 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

I wonder if anyone knows of a way to change the colour used for highlighting buildings on the main map?

I don't know, but I wonder if maybe it's set in 6534284a-690f693f-4a639ef2 somehow?

[StarlitBeach 160]

14 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I don't know, but I wonder if maybe it's set in 6534284a-690f693f-4a639ef2 somehow?

That does seem the most likely place, if it is even possible - I still haven't found anything else. Problem is, I can't make head nor tail of what that exemplar is doing...

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

3 minutes ago, StarlitBeach said:

Problem is, I can't make head nor tail of what that exemplar is doing...

I've extracted it and played around and I'm just as confuzzled.

I have my full text output of every exemplar and property in SC_1.dat and nothing else with the word "highlight" nor "color" seems remotely related.

[StarlitBeach 160]

I found something interesting while looking for a way to change the building highlights. Not sure if this has been done before, but in case it hasn't I thought some people might find it useful (or at least fun to play with).

Here's a tile with quite a lot of height variation:

 

And here it is again, with a recoloured mini map:

 

It's more difficult to see the height variation with neutral colours like that - the hillshading helps to some extent, in that it tells us where the hills are, but it also confuses things because there is no straightforward relationship between height and lightness. But these colours could have their uses. For example, here is my NAM Traffic Volume dataview, which I recoloured a while ago to use the same colours as all my other dataviews:

 

Turns out that green wasn't a good choice to go on the mini map , but I liked how it looked on the main map.

Here it is with the neutral mini map colours:

 

Now the least busy roads don't show up so well, but most of the busier ones stand out much better. With some tweaking of the colour scale, the whole network could be shown quite nicely on the mini map, without the distraction of a coloured background. It might also help to make the mini maps more readable for colourblind people, because some colours could be difficult to distinguish against a green background.

An alternative use of this could be to get the mini map colours to match better with terrain colours.

The relevant properties are MiniMap: Water ramp and MiniMap: Terrain ramp in the Mini map exemplar (6534284a; 690f693f; 8a356fc2). I've only tried changing the terrain ramp so far, so I'm not sure how the terrain and water ramps interact. The terrain ramp defines the relationship between height (0-255) and colour.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

9 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

I found something interesting while looking for a way to change the building highlights. Not sure if this has been done before, but in case it hasn't I thought some people might find it useful (or at least fun to play with).

Cool investigation. I was aware of that exemplar, but I don't recall ever testing any changes in it. (I was already used to the default colors and hadn't considered any tweaking for myself.)

You make a very good point that changes for color blindness could be very helpful. It never occurred to us when making the deut views for @Noobville Mayor that those could be made better.

 

9 hours ago, StarlitBeach said:

I'm not sure how the terrain and water ramps interact.

Looking at them I get the impression that the water ramp is based on the the depth below sea level so the lighter blue #6DACC4 with zero opacity starts at 250 meters (as set in the Terrain Properties exemplar) and then transitions to the full opacity darker blue #3D66B4 at 32 meters and greater depth beyond that continues at the full darker blue. So, basically, it appears it'd for be the water shading around the coastlines with the rest a simple solid color.

I bet tweaking with more breakpoints would then show the underwater terrain better. You could do a quick test setting the 0x00000020 water breakpoint to 0x0000007F (or such) and see how it changes the appearance.

Then the terrain, as you found, has the breakpoints as meters above sea level.

Edit: Here it is with my suggested 0x7F water test:

So, obviously, we'd not want the first breakpoint more than their 32 meters since that's blending the sand with the water, but you can see how adding more breakpoints and color shades might be cool.

Edit Too: After some cogitation, I wonder if rather than the breakpoints being meters they are the hex version of percentages from sea level to maximum depth for the water and maximum height for the terrain.

[StarlitBeach 160]

I've done more testing on it, and I'm reasonably sure this is how it works:

1. Sea level is at 0x40 (64) in the terrain ramp, and 0x00 in the water ramp.
2. The terrain ramp represents elevation in 5 m increments - so 68 represents 20 m above sea level, 44 is 100 m below sea level, etc.
3. The water ramp represents depth below sea level in 1 m increments.

Here is one test I did:

 

The magenta starts at 0xA6 (166), which represents a height of (166-64)*5 = 510 m above sea level. Using the terrain query I found that the heights in that area were above 760 m (510 m above sea level) and below 763 m. When the magenta is set to start at 167 instead, it disappears because nothing is as high as 765 m.

As an experiment, I tried setting up the terrain ramp to show contours every 100 m above sea level, and it sort of worked...

[Null 45 3,041]

On 5/24/2022 at 6:12 PM, CorinaMarie said:

I don't know, but I wonder if maybe it's set in 6534284a-690f693f-4a639ef2 somehow?

It is. Those values are array of 4 floats in RGBA order. It appears that the values are applied as a tint mask/overlay that can change the color/transparency of the models they are applied to. That behavior would make sense as some of those values appear to be used for the semi-transparent green/red lot placement overlays.

It looks like setting the RGB values to 0.0 or 1.0 disables the color effect. Here is a screenshot of the Landmark Aura with the General OK (0xea639fb2) property changed to solid blue (RGBA 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0).

I found that the color mixing was not behaving as I expected, setting red and blue to 1.0 produces an alternating mix of those colors instead of yellow. That behavior needs more testing.

[Propfam 2,288]

1 hour ago, Null 45 said:

I found that the color mixing was not behaving as I expected, setting red and blue to 1.0 produces an alternating mix of those colors instead of yellow. That behavior needs more testing.

It seems like acting like layers in Photoshop in normal mode iirc. And actually this is pretty normal in many apps. Great example is blurring. In many apps, we don't get gamma-adjusted blur. It's just the laziest thing they can come up with. I think AsapScience has made a video on YouTube a couple years ago.