Improving chance for a custom BAT to grow

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

Hi All,

I've been wondering if... making a duplicate folder with any given BAT, can increase a chance for this BAT to appear more often during gameplay...? 

If not, whether you are familiar with any "civilized" way to achieve such effect.

[rsc204 21,866]

When SC4 first loads it scans your Plugins folder and makes an Index of all the data inside it, this process cares not one bit about file names/folders used, with the exception of Load Order. Rather than using the file names, it only looks at the internal TGI addresses, should it find two identical items,such as in your example, it will ignore all but the last of them it sees. So in essence all you will do by duplicating files is make the game take a bit longer to load all that data because it now needs to process more copies.

The best way to get things to grow more equally is to have a suite full of similarly modded content, in terms of the values of occupancy in relation to growth stages. In other words, if all your custom content is modded in harmony, then what gets picked in a given situation will be random and therefore each item that fits the specific demands at that moment has an equal chance of being selected. This tends to work less well when a given item is not 'competing' with otherwise similar items, for example if you had two stage 4 R$ lots of the same size but one had vastly more residents/jobs, then usually the one with the higher value will be selected much more often. The problem here is that it may not be the Djohaal Building that is the problem, it could be that it has been modded with less occupancy than it should have, but equally it could be that you've other content that's been modded with higher occupancy than it should have. The only way to make everything in your Plugins suite play nicely together is if they are modded to the same standardised set of rules. This is a problem if you just download a bunch of files, because it's always been a matter of different modders doing things differently, for the longest time there wasn't a lot of consistency. One of the things PIM-X was designed to do was to ensure provided the correct building size (Occupant Size) was used, in conjunction with the Filling Degree property, that the resulting Growth Stage and other stats would always be consistent with a single set of rules. From a user/player standpoint, if you want to harmonise all your custom content, you can run it through PIM-X and 'Recompute Properties' of each, but if you've a large suite this may be a big job.

On the other hand, it might be possible to increase the odds of a building appearing over others to have a true duplicate of it, but a true duplicate isn't a copy of the file, rather a copy with a unique ID. But, this has it's limitations, because whilst having two such Buildings Exemplars present would double the chance of that item being selected if the conditions were right for it. It won't make up for situations where the building you want doesn't get considered in the first place because the stats themselves are out of whack with everything else. In short, there may not be an easy fix for this.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

Yep, thanks for the answer, I suspected that making a copy is just not enough. The reason I asked is that in some other games I have seen mods in which repeating certain arguments in the script has indeed been increasing the amount of certain items / instances appearing in-game. I thought that it may perhaps be similar.

12 hours ago, rsc204 said:

The problem here is that it may not be the Djohaal Building that is the problem

Indeed it isn't. It's just a screenshot to illustrate my reasoning. Djohaal Building as such is just perfect.

12 hours ago, rsc204 said:

The only way to make everything in your Plugins suite play nicely together is if they are modded to the same standardised set of rules. This is a problem if you just download a bunch of files, because it's always been a matter of different modders doing things differently, for the longest time there wasn't a lot of consistency.

This is something I can and want to do - not many BATs in my archives so far. But most of it is also new stuff from renowned BATters, so I think I don't even need to review at least 1/3 of my files.

12 hours ago, rsc204 said:

One of the things PIM-X was designed to do was to ensure provided the correct building size (Occupant Size) was used, in conjunction with the Filling Degree property, that the resulting Growth Stage and other stats would always be consistent with a single set of rules. From a user/player standpoint, if you want to harmonise all your custom content, you can run it through PIM-X and 'Recompute Properties' of each, but if you've a large suite this may be a big job.

That would be great if I could run PIM-X in the first place... I could never launch this program successfully, even after installing and downloading all the silly patches, .dlls, fixes and whatnot. It just won't work for me so...

I believe this can be done in iLives as well, isn't it? I feel more comfortable using it and all of the properties for BATs are listed there anyway?

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

It looks like I just successfully launched PIM-X after all... 

[rsc204 21,866]

I have to say I hear people bemoaning PIM-X as not working a lot. But the frank reality is it does work, it takes a little effort to get it going, but it is very much worth it.

It was designed during the XP era, plus the source code was lost as a result of the developer’s laptop getting stolen. This means the small patch for Win Vista onwards needs to be added manually, plus an update for improved stats (a simple file overwrite) is also needed.

After that it needs ‘dependencies’, in this case .DLL files. Blame Microsoft for that mess, they wanted to monetise developers at the cost of providing a better user experience. In fact they have since learned this was a mistake, but a legacy of problems has been left behind. In short, to include those DLLs required a per-user licence fee for each, something no hobbiest developer can realistically do. In reality it’s no harder than putting three files easily found on the internet in the right folder. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ll spend ages bitching about this, but won’t give an hour of their time to go through the process slowly following the multitude of posts/step by step instructions for doing so.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

Well in my case I believe it was purely coincidental that I finally managed to run it. Or perhaps I simply did something differently. Hard to tell, the important thing is it seems to work.

So what do I do now that PIM-X is operational? I found the "Recompute properties" command but upon running it, it prompted me to enter the "filling degree" value. I was somewhat surprised because I thought this will be one of the values returned...

[deezedgod 177]

2 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Well in my case I believe it was purely coincidental that I finally managed to run it. Or perhaps I simply did something differently. Hard to tell, the important thing is it seems to work.

So what do I do now that PIM-X is operational? I found the "Recompute properties" command but upon running it, it prompted me to enter the "filling degree" value. I was somewhat surprised because I thought this will be one of the values returned...

I'd highly recommend downloading the PIM User Guide and browsing through it. _{Unfortunately the LEX is down now but it should be back later...} The manual should answer just about any question you have, and it's much easier than trying to find decades-old tutorials with broken images. (Trust me, I've been there.)

But to answer your question, the "filling degree" is what percentage of the yellow bounding box (cube) the building takes up. So if you have a building that takes up roughly half of the yellow box, that would be a 0.5 filling degree. With some weirdly-shaped buildings it can be a little difficult to guess, but that's what your spatial reasoning skills are for. Doesn't have to be perfect, but try to wager a good estimate.

Once you give the filling degree, it should automatically compute all the other stats for you. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that PIM-X was designed with CAM in mind, so for some larger buildings it might compute a stage higher than 8 (or 3 for industrial), which won't grow without the CAM. It might also give your building a crazy-high capacity in the tens of thousands which also won't grow. In these cases I go into iLive's Reader and manually set these values back to non-CAM levels (stage 8 for buildings and around 7,500 for capacity).

[rsc204 21,866]

2 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Well in my case I believe it was purely coincidental that I finally managed to run it.

I am sorry, but that statement is completely at odds with the way that computers work. Nothing in the world of code just 'happens', code does exactly what you tell it to. There is an interesting adage, if you tell a robot to keep an eye on the oven, that's exactly what it will do, sit there and watch everything burn. It's this kind of human-based logic that computers are woefully unable to comprehend, but coders don't always foresee every potential outcome or consider them, which is where the problems come from.

So whatever has changed, something must have been behind the problem. Do you want to spend hours picking that apart?, probably not, so just be happy it's working now I suppose. 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

1 hour ago, deezedgod said:

I'd highly recommend downloading the PIM User Guide and browsing through it.

Thanks for the link @deezedgod!  I'm certain it will turn out very useful indeed. Yeah, I've been trying to access LEX since morning with no luck. I'd also like to make sure that I indeed have all fixes for PIM-X but can't access the download page where all instructions were listed. I think this might, in fact, be available in the readme though...

1 hour ago, deezedgod said:

But to answer your question, the "filling degree" is what percentage of the yellow bounding box (cube) the building takes up. So if you have a building that takes up roughly half of the yellow box, that would be a 0.5 filling degree.

Thanks for confirming this. It seems that my guess has been correct then that this property is all about "how much building in a BB" is there.

As far as the rest of the issue is concerned, I guess I will now indeed run my BATs through PIM-X to make sure they are well balanced. Numbers of occupants is what interests me the most. If these turn out to be bigger (or lesser) by 15% of what the original author suggests, I think I won't be making a change for the given BAT.

[rsc204 21,866]

I'm temporarily uploading the PIM-X user manual whilst there are problems on the LEX:

SC4PIM User Guide v1.pdf

3 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

I'd also like to make sure that I indeed have all fixes for PIM-X but can't access the download page where all instructions were listed. I think this might, in fact, be available in the readme though...

Instructions for that are not in the User Guide, since it was written before these updates existed, find those on the official support page. Although I hasten to add, if you'd read the download description when you downloaded PIM-X, this information is very clearly stated there. So perhaps consider taking a moment to read things before you rush to download them in future? You know, like how for example I already went through exactly what was needed not 8 hours ago:

8 hours ago, rsc204 said:

This means the small patch for Win Vista onwards needs to be added manually, plus an update for improved stats (a simple file overwrite) is also needed.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

47 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

Although I hasten to add, if you'd read the download description when you downloaded PIM-X, this information is very clearly stated there. So perhaps consider taking a moment to read things before you rush to download them in future?

I read "things" the first time I downloaded this tool. However, haven't given PIM-X a try for two months or so and as such I believe it's no wonder that I'd like to recall a thing or two. Is there anything wrong with that...? Show me a single user who remembers such things...

52 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

You know, like how for example I already went through exactly what was needed not 8 hours ago

Since you only named the resource but did not provide a direct link to it like most people (including myself) do when inquired, you can't possibly blame me for bitching remaining confused about what is needed and where to find it. This is precisely why I needed to access the download page. Still, I appreciate uploading the manual - thanks. 

[rsc204 21,866]

20 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

This is precisely why I needed to access the download page.

Case in point...

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

Instructions for that are not in the User Guide, since it was written before these updates existed, find those on the official support page.

So am I really being such an arsehole, or are you continually asking me to repeat things, which makes me feel like you aren't really giving any value to my time? Yet I'm still pointing you in the right direction despite this, if you'd rather I'm happy to stop answering your questions, but I'm not sorry if you don't like me pointing out uncomfortable truths along the way.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

I'm done here. 

The problem is not about what you say but how you say it.