Allow More Building Styles - DLL Plugin

[nos.17 5,120]

On 10/7/2024 at 11:24 AM, CorinaMarie said:

Same as before: The UI has the English text built-in. The language file is included for peeps wishing to make translations using Ron's LTexter program. (This creates the proper increments to the GID of the LText entries so they can be separate standalone files and no need to edit the attached file itself.)

A bit of self-promotion, but it may help you out - have you seen my newer LTEXTT tool?

[Null 45 3,041]

10 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

I didn't realize it would take so much work, though!

Adding a new GZCOM class to the building style DLL is more work upfront, but it makes things easier in the long run.

The query DLL's building style feature initially used a copy of the code from the building style DLL, but the two version got out of sync and it caused issues with the query DLL. My fix was to have the building style DLL provide a way for other DLLs to ask it for the style information. For example, if new W2W styles get defined at some point in the future, I would only have to update the list in the building style DLL. The query DLL would then pick up that info automatically when the user updates the building style DLL.

[Null 45 3,041]

Release version 2.4.0, which adds a GZCOM class to provide information on the wall-to-wall occupant groups.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

14 hours ago, nos.17 said:

A bit of self-promotion, but it may help you out - have you seen my newer LTEXTT tool?

Excellent idea for self-promotion as I had not seen your tool. (Looks like you posted it while I was still buried under two year's worth of posts to catch up on.)

I've grabbed a copy of it and I'll play around with it when Null says the DLL is likely finished. (I do have that expanded UI version if we need it, but if we can stay fitting in the v0.42b beta UI then that'll be ideal.)

[Null 45 3,041]

5 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I've grabbed a copy of it and I'll play around with it when Null says the DLL is likely finished. (I do have that expanded UI version if we need it, but if we can stay fitting in the v0.42b beta UI then that'll be ideal.)

I think the UI side of the DLL is finished. As I mentioned previously, all of the UI changes were based on features that users requested, and there haven't been any more of those.

[Null 45 3,041]

@CorinaMarie One new feature I just thought of is a NKO check box. I am not sure how SC4 would react sure to toggling the NKO value while the simulation is running, but it shouldn't break anything. I also don't know if there is enough demand for such a feature to make it worth the required UI redesign. But it is something to think about.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

10 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

One new feature I just thought of is a NKO check box.

Some peeps might like that. (I wouldn't as I never ever change it since I'm a control freak in my game. )

 

13 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

I also don't know if there is enough demand for such a feature to make it worth the required UI redesign.

That part is covered already. I spent about three hours the other day making a v0.42c version in anticipation of other features you might add.

Here's a pic in a spoiler (since it's scrolled away on the prior page)...

Spoiler

 

So we could add the NKO toggle in the Reserved Control 01 slot. And maybe just release it with the other 7 saying they are reserved? That way we could make the full set of LText now which could be modified later if needed.

Then also later all it would need is a real Hex ID for the check boxes rather than the bogus ones I coded in. Or, could you reserve 7 more Hex IDs right now that you would later use for only this project? If so the UI could have them built-in now and only need the type of box changed.

[Kel9509 1,363]

11 hours ago, Null 45 said:

Release version 2.4.0, which adds a GZCOM class to provide information on the wall-to-wall occupant groups.

Thanks!  I'll start work on a new version of the UI Query Mod to incorporate, along with the Industrial Building Styles as well.  Does anyone have a preference where the W2W Query is listed?  Since it's either a "Yes" or "No", perhaps it should be listed near the top next to "Powered" and "Watered" since those are also Yes/No queries?  Or I maybe could just put it at the bottom underneath the new Building Lot Growth Stage indicator?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

15 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Does anyone have a preference where the W2W Query is listed? 

Here perhaps?

Or even centered there?

[Simizen 1,098]

I think directly under the Building Lot Growth Stage would be best, simply cause I think it'll be something that'll be checked fairly regularly. There's going to be players who are wondering what is/isn't W2W for various things. And, while we'll have plenty of info scattered around online, and in the game to some extent (along with just generally viewing the lot in-game), there's going to be instances of lots that people won't immediately know/understand to be W2W. And with the game developed the way it was, I won't doubt that there's a possibility of some lots being considered W2W when they don't look it, and some that aren't W2W even though they clearly should be. Though, thankfully, with the current mod styles going around, we'll have people properly flagging lots for W2W or non-W2W.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, Ryuu Tenno said:

I think directly under the Building Lot Growth Stage would be best,...

I have no objection to this (even tho I suggested elsewhere). This location makes sense too.

[carlosmarcelo 975]

9 hours ago, Null 45 said:

One new feature I just thought of is a NKO check box.

Yes, I liked it! 

I percepted that when all (or most part) residencial spaces are full with R$, the growing of populaton of the city almost stop because there isn't new spaces and R$$ and R$$$ can't kickout R$ (or R$$).

I did test with and witout NKO plugin and the population reached was greater in 'no kickout = false". If we can do it in game time, we continuos to have control, but a few automatized, usefull to big cities.

[Null 45 3,041]

11 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Or, could you reserve 7 more Hex IDs right now that you would later use for only this project? If so the UI could have them built-in now and only need the type of box changed.

I reserved the 0x100-0x10F range for those controls, that leaves room for 16 items. I went up to 256 to leave the door open for expanding the BuildingStyle.ini range up to 255 from 127. But I doubt anyone would bother making a UI with 256 styles.

[Kel9509 1,363]

I've worked on the new Queries have added the W2W status below the building stage indicator, as shown in the picture below. 

I also incorporated industrial building styles.  However, if you don't have industrial building styles enabled (as I do not), but use a Query that assumes they exist, then the query will show the LUA code that I used to define that part of the query.  "Building Style ID" is the caption I use in the LUA code to create the place where that code exists in the query.  It normally would say "Building style: New York 1940", etc. 

Industrial building styles are tricky, because it's either on or off.  And to turn it on, you need a lot of lots that have defined styles.  Since right now there are no buildings/lots with the styles, it makes no sense to "enable" industrial building styles for now.  Eventually I assume that the IRM and other industrial mods might incorporate such styles.  But I don't want a query that has LUA code showing unnecessarily until industrial building styles are created.  So it makes sense that instead of one single industrial query that looks ugly for now until building styles are created, instead I will create two industrial queries - one that incorporates the styles, and one that does not.  Unless there's a way to hide that LUA code in the query until it's used?  But I don't think that can be done.

[Null 45 3,041]

8 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Unless there's a way to hide that LUA code in the query until it's used?

I don't think there is from the Lua side, the UI files are static.

[Simizen 1,098]

1 hour ago, Kel9509 said:

I've worked on the new Queries have added the W2W status below the building stage indicator, as shown in the picture below. 

I also incorporated industrial building styles.  However, if you don't have industrial building styles enabled (as I do not), but use a Query that assumes they exist, then the query will show the LUA code that I used to define that part of the query.  "Building Style ID" is the caption I use in the LUA code to create the place where that code exists in the query.  It normally would say "Building style: New York 1940", etc. 

Industrial building styles are tricky, because it's either on or off.  And to turn it on, you need a lot of lots that have defined styles.  Since right now there are no buildings/lots with the styles, it makes no sense to "enable" industrial building styles for now.  Eventually I assume that the IRM and other industrial mods might incorporate such styles.  But I don't want a query that has LUA code showing unnecessarily until industrial building styles are created.  So it makes sense that instead of one single industrial query that looks ugly for now until building styles are created, instead I will create two industrial queries - one that incorporates the styles, and one that does not.  Unless there's a way to hide that LUA code in the query until it's used?  But I don't think that can be done.

This is great!

But, honestly, I think just leaving it up there will be fine. It might seem pointless for now, but someone's bound to begin updating the older industrial lots/mods. And there's always the chance that newer industrial lots will pop up that might need to have this flag as well. I'd rather have it primed and ready so that we can utilize, even if it's slow to start, rather than try to figure out how to go back and turn it on once more files have it (or, more likely, try and remember who set it up so we can remind them to reactivate it as necessary).

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

10 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

Unless there's a way to hide that LUA code in the query until it's used?

That will depend on how the value is made available.

For instance, game.g and game.ga variables can be evaluated in Lua code. Others are seen as type:userdata and while they will display alright in the UI, they cannot be used as part of if/then/else logic in raw Lua and yet some will work in advisor trigger evaluations. For example: mysim.age (even when there is a My Sim in the game) cannot be used in a Lua function, but can be displayed in a UI just fine.

If you haven't seen it, maybe look at our UI and Lua code in our City Halls mod. We do some fancy things so we can display negative numbers in red and positive in green. And I recall the Garbage Code took me a couple or six hours to finally get right as it had to handle like 4 possible scenarios.

The same sort of logic could possibly allow you to display "n/a" or the data. It'll all depend on if Lua is allowed to truly see the value/content of the variable you are working with.

Edit: I've now installed both updated DLLs so if you want to send me a sample of your UI and Lua, I can take a gander and see if there's any magic I can perform.

[Null 45 3,041]

8 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Edit: I've now installed both updated DLLs so if you want to send me a sample of your UI and Lua, I can take a gander and see if there's any magic I can perform.

From the version on the STEX, the building style LTEXT is: Building Style: #building_styles#

The #building_styles# variable is a custom token that the DLL handles, similar to how SC4 processes the #advisor# token. I think the issue is how the query DLL handles errors when retrieving the data, it currently tells SC4 'token not supported' in that case instead of doing something like returning an empty string. SC4 surfaces the 'token not supported' error by showing the hard-coded label in the UI file.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

41 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

The #building_styles# variable is a custom token that the DLL handles,...

Ah. So there's no actual Lua Coding associated with it.

I misunderstood. There's prolly nothing I can do to help unless your DLL can make the info available to Lua in the same way that the Maxis game.g and game.ga ones are.

[Null 45 3,041]

21 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

There's prolly nothing I can do to help unless your DLL can make the info available to Lua in the same way that the Maxis game.g and game.ga ones are.

The building styles and related data are not part of the game. variables because they are specific to the occupant that is being queried instead of city-wide.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

14 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

The building styles and related data are not part of the game. variables because they are specific to the occupant that is being queried instead of city-wide.

Yep. That makes sense. I was simply clarifying what we can do and use and read and manipulate in Lua code.

[Kel9509 1,363]

I apologize for not being clear.  I used  the term LUA code but it is just a variable from LTEXT that @Null 45 made.  The only equivalent is the Mysim name from the Residential query, which does not show unless there's a Sim moved in.  But I see that the Query DLL has been updated to display an empty string now anyway, fixing the issue.  I wonder if that's the same fix that was done for the MySim item.  In any event, this is a great result and now I can go with one Industrial Query, whether or not someone has industrial building styles turned on or off.

21 hours ago, Ryuu Tenno said:

It might seem pointless for now, but someone's bound to begin updating the older industrial lots/mods.

That is exactly what needs to be done.  An exemplar patch needs to be made for all of the Vanilla Maxis industrial lots in order for them to be given all of the native Maxis building styles.  There also needs to be a way so that a particular building can be edited to have additional styles.  I'm sure it can be done somehow, once I learn how to use the patch feature of Reader. 

Industrial building lot styles are a good idea for custom downloads that are a certain style, for sure.  But the problem is that using it at ALL prevents all industrial lots from growing unless they all have building styles added as well.  Maybe that's good for certain people who only want custom lots of a certain style.  But if I were to use a particular industrial building style, like say I wanted to create an industrial neighborhood that was in a pre-modern style or something, I wouldn't want the rest of my industrial lots to be unable to grow once I'm done with that neighborhood.  Turning the mod "on" or "off" outside the game is probably the only way to manage it at this point until a patch for vanilla lots can be made.

[Null 45 3,041]

37 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

An exemplar patch needs to be made for all of the Vanilla Maxis industrial lots in order for them to be given all of the native Maxis building styles.

I was just thinking about a way around that. I was thinking of modifying the building style algorithm to special-case industrial lots, any industrial lot without building styles would be treated as compatible with the 4 Maxis default styles. It would require an additional style check for those lots to determine if building styles are present, but I don't expect a major performance hit from that.

[memo 1,444]

On the topic of backward compatibility and exemplar patching: Instead of defining the previously proposed not-Maxis building style OGs, another idea would be to define a completely separate property "Building Styles" from which the DLL would read the building styles (instead of the occupant groups property) if the property is present. From a modding perspective, this would allow to create exemplars that can be used with and without the DLL installed. If exemplar patching is used, this would have the advantage that you just patch in a new property, which would avoid any potential conflicts caused by overwriting unrelated occupant groups. For industrial buildings without the new property, the DLL could default to the vanilla behavior.

The Submenus DLL does something similar. Originally, the submenu for a building was defined as an occupant group, but it's since been moved to a new "Building Submenus" property.

[Null 45 3,041]

23 minutes ago, memo said:

Instead of defining the previously proposed not-Maxis building style OGs, another idea would be to define a completely separate property "Building Styles" from which the DLL would read the building styles (instead of the occupant groups property) if the property is present.

I am not sure that is feasible. SC4 has a hard coded restriction that the OGs contain the building styles, which are used to eliminate lots from consideration. It specifically copies the building's occupant groups over to the cISC4LotConfiguration item for use in the building style checks.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

12 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

An exemplar patch needs to be made for all of the Vanilla Maxis industrial lots in order for them to be given all of the native Maxis building styles.

I'm not completely certain of what needs to be done, but back on page 3 of this thread it seems we simply need 0x00002000,0x00002001,0x00002002,0x00002003 added to the OccupantGroups of each Maxis Industrial Building exemplar?

If so: Maxis Industrial Building Exemplars - No Farm Fields - Added 0x2000-2003 OGs.dat

We are lucky inasmuch as all of those are in Group a7bddf17 so it's easy to first sort by that column in SimCity_1.dat then add only those to a patch to make a new dat. After that I removed the Farm Fields since they don't have an OG (and don't need one). Next I used Reader 1.5.4 to do simultaneous property edits to multiple exemplars and so it only took a few minutes as there's only like 10 or 12 unique sets across all 93.

Ofc, if I understand this right, the DBPF INI file still needs edited to change all 4 entries to True.

Edit: I have made said edits to the INI and I'm growing Maxis industrial just like normal. I presume that means all is well.

[Null 45 3,041]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Edit: I have made said edits to the INI and I'm growing Maxis industrial just like normal. I presume that means all is well.

Good to hear.

@memo I looked that the code SC4 uses to populate the lot occupant groups, and I will be able to replace the call it makes to fetch the building's occupant groups. I may merge the BuildingStyles and OccupantGroup properties for lots as I don't know if other parts of SC4's code rely on the fact that the style list contains all of the building occupant groups. Although, looking at the Mac disassembly that doesn't appear to be the case.

I still plan to implement the above mentioned special-case for industrial buildings/lots, as that would eliminate the need for the DBPF INI files and make industrial buildings work with the Maxis building styles by default. One potential issue with this scheme is that if the lot has a unrecognized style type it will be treated as having no building styles, but that is an issue I could solve adding a "BuildingStyle property present" marker in the lot's OG list.

I also don't have exemplar patching code set up in the More Building Styles DLL, but I can document the Submenus DLL as a dependency in that case.

[Kel9509 1,363]

4 hours ago, Null 45 said:

For residential and commercial buildings the Building Styles property is optional, when present only the custom styles listed in that property will be used and the 4 Maxis styles will be ignored. If it is not present, the Maxis and custom styles in the OccupantGroups property will be used.

For industrial buildings the Building Styles property is required to support custom styles, any industrial building without that property will be treated as compatible with the 4 Maxis styles.

In the above image the building will only grow under the 0x2004 style, with the Maxis Chicago style being ignored.

I understand this helps with the Industrial Building Styles, as well as making it easier to mod existing buildings to add new styles.  But I'm concerned that ignoring existing Maxis styles will break a lot of existing buildings.  Essentially, if I want to use the default Maxis styles along with some new ones, will I need to add those Maxis styles back into the Building Styles property?  

[Tyberius06 12,189]

6 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

I understand this helps with the Industrial Building Styles, as well as making it easier to mod existing buildings to add new styles.  But I'm concerned that ignoring existing Maxis styles will break a lot of existing buildings.  Essentially, if I want to use the default Maxis styles along with some new ones, will I need to add those Maxis styles back into the Building Styles property?  

I think, there is a bit of confusion here:

• The default behaviour is that you have the maxis OGs and the additional ones in the Occupant Groups property.
• Additionally you can add whatever building style you want to this new property which will allow only the listed styles with this property.
• You need this extra property for Industrial lots if you want them to grow based on building styles. Bear in mind by default the industrial lots are NOT tied to building styles. 

12 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

But I'm concerned that ignoring existing Maxis styles will break a lot of existing buildings.

This would be only true if you patch existing lots directly and you apply both the extra OGs and the new property together. With existing lots I would rather not add this property directly, but with new lots there isn't such restriction I believe.

[Null 45 3,041]

21 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Essentially, if I want to use the default Maxis styles along with some new ones, will I need to add those Maxis styles back into the Building Styles property?  

No. In that case you would not use the Building Styles property, and instead add the custom building styles to the Occupant Groups property alongside any existing Maxis styles.

Currently the Building Styles property makes a building act as if all of the Maxis styles have been unchecked, but I may change it to allow the Maxis styles to be included in the property. Memo proposed the property as an alternative to having not-Maxis occupant group(s) that remove the Maxis styles from consideration.

31 minutes ago, Tyberius06 said:

With existing lots I would rather not add this property directly, but with new lots there isn't such restriction I believe.

The intended pattern is that existing lots would retain the Maxis styles in the Occupant Groups property for compatibility. But if the DLL is installed and the Building Styles property is present, its custom styles will be used instead of the values in the Occupant Groups property.