Submenus DLL

[Wiimeiser 444]

20 minutes ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

That sounds like a very good idea. I like to give the ability to change menu color in the various sub menus

 

I was thinking the same thing because we should create a common point of agreement so that we have standardized sub menus. 

Currently I am excluding the transportation menu as it is a NAM thing same thing for Seaport and Airport Menu.

Currently I am working for CAM 2.5 sub menus and this is the organization I was giving also considering the possibility of modification of PIM-X

Power Menu

• Coal Power Plant
• Oil Power Plant
• Gas Power Plant
• Solar Power Plant
• Nuclear Fission Power Plant
• Nuclear Fusion Power Plant
• Microwave Power Plant
• Geothermal Power Plant
• Hydroelectric Power plant
• Tide & Wave Power Plant
• Substation & Power Grid
• Eye Candy

Water Menu

• Aquifer
• Fresh Water
• Salt Water
• Sewage purifier

Garbage Menu

• Recycling center
• Waste-to-energy Power Plant

Police Menu:

• Small
• Medium
• Large

Fire Menu:

• Small
• Medium
• Large

Education Menu:

• Elementary Schools
• High Schools
• College and Universities 
• Libraries
• Museums

Health Menu:

• Small
• Medium
• Large

Park Menu

The current submenus included in the mod are fine although we can expand for other submenus but requires manual editing instead from PIM-X. 

 In addition, PIM-X can be modified to include Police-Fire Station sections. Small - Medium - Large but requires extra work but honestly the situation for police and fire station is a complete disaster that I had to enter a null value to make manual sub menu changes

 

To add to this, I'll throw in the Landmarks menu categories:

 

Landmarks Menu:

• Real Life Landmarks
• Fictional Landmarks
• Other(?)

I'll also throw in an idea for the Transit Menus while we're here:

Rail Menu:

• Puzzle Pieces(?)
• Passenger Stations
• Freight Stations
• Hybrid Stations
• RHSR Stations
• Yards and Sidings (TE lots that don't function as stations, like the SM2 Roundhouse)
• Eyecandy

Misc Menu:

• Puzzle Pieces(?)
• El-Rail/GLR Stations
• Subway Stations
• Bus Stops
• Modular Network Sets (SPAR, Logging Roads, ETC)
• Eyecandy

Airport Menu:

• Single Airports
• Modular Airports

Seaport Menu:

• Seaports
• Ferries
• Seawalls
• Canals
• Other(?)

This is just what I thought of. I don't know if this would even work...

[Membrillo 56]

Can MMP menu have submenus?

If yes, then maybe it could be organized in Seasonal and Evergreen. Then each of this could have a second layer of Conifers, Deciduous, Bushes and Flowers.

Besides Seasonal and Evergreen, other main submenus could include Coastal, Rocks and other crap, sorry, props.

[Panda 209]

7 hours ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

That sounds like a very good idea. I like to give the ability to change menu color in the various sub menus

 

I was thinking the same thing because we should create a common point of agreement so that we have standardized sub menus. 

Currently I am excluding the transportation menu as it is a NAM thing same thing for Seaport and Airport Menu.

Currently I am working for CAM 2.5 sub menus and this is the organization I was giving also considering the possibility of modification of PIM-X

Zone Tools Menu

• Residential
  • (No additions since to my knowledge ploppable residential is still not possible, maybe this could change in the future...)
• Commercial
  • Commercial Office Buildings (ploppable)
  • Commercial Service Buildings (ploppable)
• Industrial
  • Farms and Agriculture
  • Dirty Industry
  • Manufacturing
  • High Tech Industry
  • Filler Lots (IRM Filler Lots)

Power Menu

• Coal Power Plant
• Oil Power Plant
• Gas Power Plant
• Solar Power Plant
• Nuclear Fission Power Plant
• Nuclear Fusion Power Plant
• Microwave Power Plant
• Geothermal Power Plant
• Hydroelectric Power plant
• Tide & Wave Power Plant
  (This seems like a lot of sub-menus. Granted, I know there are a lot of power plant options and the AMPS project is developing quite a lot of complexity so this would be appropriate for something on that scale. However, I wonder if some categories would end up empty or only having one or two items for players without as many power plants installed. Could the submenus perhaps be modular or semi-modular? So instead of a single .dat file with all the power plant submenus combined, there are separate submenu files for each type. If you haven't downloaded any Microwave or Hydroelectric plants, you don't install those submenus dat files and keep them out of your power menu. The issue there is it's another dependency people would have to track...)
• Substation & Power Grid
• Eye Candy perhaps something like: "Decorative Items", "Cosmetic Items", "Power Accessories", or "Auxiliary Lots"

Water Menu

• Aquifer
• Fresh Water
• Salt Water
• Sewage purifier Sewage Treatment or Wastewater Treatment

Garbage Menu

• Recycling center
• Waste-to-energy Power Plant
• "Cosmetic Items" or "Landfill Accessories" or similar for items like FANTA1990's Lifelike Landfills

Police Menu:

• Small
• Medium
• Large

Fire Menu:

• Small
• Medium
• Large

Education Menu:

• Elementary Schools
• High Schools
• College and Universities 
• Libraries
• Museums

Health Menu:

• Small
• Medium
• Large

Park Menu

• Plazas (Current)
• Sports Grounds (Current)
• Green Spaces (Current)
• "Ponds and Streams" or similar, I suppose this could go under the water menu, but that menu seems more for functional water supply and utility items instead of decorative, park-like features.
• Paths
• Filler Lots
• Lighting (For lights from MandelSoft's Light Replacement Mod (LRM) or similar ploppable streetlights)

The current submenus included in the mod are fine although we can expand for other submenus but requires manual editing instead from PIM-X. 

 In addition, PIM-X can be modified to include Police-Fire Station sections. Small - Medium - Large but requires extra work but honestly the situation for police and fire station is a complete disaster that I had to enter a null value to make manual sub menu changes

 

I've annotated Ulise Wolf's list with some of my thoughts. See my annotations in red in the quoted text. I made a few additions and suggested renaming a couple submenus.

One of my main thoughts is if whether creating menus in the RCI Zoning menus would be preferrable for some items. Specifically, I'm thinking that any ploppable commercial offices or services could have their own submenus in the commercial zoning menu. Similarly Farms, Factories, High Tech Industry, and IRM Filler Lots could all have submenus under the Industryial Zoning menu. I think technically it would be possible as the garbage menu already has a mix of zoning (landfill) and plopable items (recycling center, incinerator, etc.) but I'm not the one writing the DLL and I'm not a programmer, so take my suggestion witha  grain of salt.

For the submenu color, @memo is it possible to create a new parameter and assign a color hex code to each submenu? My intuition is no since so much of the menu is built from png elements, but you'd know better than I would.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,412]

1 hour ago, Panda said:

(This seems like a lot of sub-menus. Granted, I know there are a lot of power plant options and the AMPS project is developing quite a lot of complexity so this would be appropriate for something on that scale. However, I wonder if some categories would end up empty or only having one or two items for players without as many power plants installed. Could the submenus perhaps be modular or semi-modular? So instead of a single .dat file with all the power plant submenus combined, there are separate submenu files for each type. If you haven't downloaded any Microwave or Hydroelectric plants, you don't install those submenus dat files and keep them out of your power menu. The issue there is it's another dependency people would have to track...)

In the original plans for CAM 2.5 there was to be a merger with AMPS but the plans were moved to CAM 3.0 as I had to deal with several unforeseen issues with the various patches. So having a modular submenu at least for the current oragnization of CAM turns out to be impossible. Also there is a discussion to include some lots in CAM to make the new features work and it is also one of the reasons why the development is being delayed

1 hour ago, Panda said:

• Substation & Power Grid
• Eye Candy perhaps something like: "Decorative Items", "Cosmetic Items", "Power Accessories", or "Auxiliary Lots"

According to Maxis nomenclature the Substation & Power Grid would be Auxiliary Lots and produce power while Eye Candy would be the Power Eye Candy and produce nothing. So they are just cosmetic items and therefore the term Eye Candy seems more appropriate although I am open to finding alternative names

 

1 hour ago, Panda said:

"Ponds and Streams" or similar, I suppose this could go under the water menu, but that menu seems more for functional water supply and utility items instead of decorative, park-like features.

This is out of the question as it has already been reiterated in the SC4Evermore Discord Server as it involves editing LEX content and there will only be one version supported 

[atsf189 460]

@memo @rsc204 @Ulisse Wolf

Here is an example of a Button Icon for submenus. You can put your own stuff in the middle of it.

I use Adobe photo to alter the icons.

Menu Icon Template clear background.psd

Save as a .png then import with reader

Below is a blank button .png file

 

 

 

[Panda 209]

20 minutes ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

This is out of the question as it has already been reiterated in the SC4Evermore Discord Server as it involves editing LEX content and there will only be one version supported 

My though for this category would be a place for the multiple ploppable water mods out there or any new water type mods someone in the future may develop. My intention wasn't to limit it to any one file in particular. My understanding is these sub-menus would be more specific than the current situation (dumping everything in parks or landmarks) but still relatively broad categories that could be further broken down by mod authors or development teams like NAM or CAM.

[Kel9509 1,363]

15 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I am getting the feint whiff of Elitism coming off the back of my recent efforts to standardise some basic submenus. I have the feeling when people say, don’t work on this or that, it’s because they think they have the singular perfect solution. When what I was really asking for, was for us (modders) to come together and work together on some useful standards to benefit everyone. With the engagement of the wider community, so we have more data to decide how best to proceed.

I believe everyone is commenting in good faith and hopefully no one thinks that any suggestions or ideas are coming off as elitist.  Frankly, it's the modders who will decide, either as a group or one person who decides to mod their own game to their own liking.  This is probably one of the most important and beneficial mods to change the game for the benefit of everyone, so of course there's going to be a lot of opinions.  The good news is, this mod isn't too hard to learn how to customize and so if someone wants to do something different in their own game from an eventual group consensus, they can do it.

So far, all the proposed lists seem pretty reasonable to me.  

[rsc204 21,808]

As I dig deeper into this process, one thing becomes clear, what we need is a consistent set of Menus, just like the ones Maxis gave us. Specifically, the same ID, so if we decide there will be a special menu for Canals, one I think we could all agree upon, everyone uses the same ID for this menu.

Icons are complicated, I'm sure everyone will have different ideas on what's best and that's not really an issue. Provided we are all sticking to the same IDs, anyone can alter any of the following as they like without messing with functionality:

• Icons
• The Menu where the SubMenu is located
• The position (order) within that menu
• Item Name / Description text (by altering the LTEXTs)

But here is the problem, I see a number of different modders all rushing off to start creating, which is great, only it's not. Because if I use an ID for Canals, but another modder uses a different one, now things are fragmented for end users. Even if we eventually combine our efforts, that means all but one modder has to re-ID everything up until this point to synchronise things.

Now at the same time, I too am keen to make quick progress and bring this new function to life in a vastly more usable form. In fact, I think I could knock this out on the weekend frankly. But what I don't want to do is then re-ID everything later, that's a lot of wasted effort. I can generate and list hundreds of random IDs very quickly for use with such a task.

For example, in the Water Transportation Menu I am using the following IDs (for development use):

0x03C6629C - Canals
0x07047B22 - Seaports
0x0D96DA3F - Marinas
0x1CD18678 - Seawalls

If we can agree on categories, then assign IDs to them for everyone to use, it won't matter in which ways things differ, provided ID wise we all on the same page. The longer we take to do that, assuming folks are working behind the scenes, the more additional work it is going to take to make it right later.

I think the most ideal solution would be to provide this basic pack, maybe even with the .DLL mod. As mentioned before, beyond the basics everyone will need, there is ample room for anyone to do whatever they want, but the basics should all be from the same source.

Each new SubMenu would be in a singular DAT file, so users can install only those menus they want/need. Then either they can wait for content to be updated so they are present in these menus, or they can add the necessary Property to do this themselves. In this regard I envisage offering a second set of files, containing just one Exemplar like so:

One file for each SubMenu again, the principle is the same. Open this file, copy the Property Building Submenus (as shown). Then in turn Paste it into the Building Exemplar for every Lot you wanted to be in that menu. For now that's as easy as we can make it I think, open to ideas?

The plan from my side was to write-up a tutorial and additionally make a video to show how to find Buildings Exemplars and go through this process.

[atsf189 460]

300 people downloaded this so far. What have they used so far for IDs? How many conflicts do we have now?

I have redone my Landmarks menu because of all the plopables I like to use.

I randomly generated these IDs all under landmarks

Gas Stations 26A5EB4D

Hotels AF1388B9 

Restaurants FCFA5044

Sub within Restaurants Fast Food 111F7A65

Sub within Restaurants Pizza 460FDCFD

For Subs within a sub should we go one number up or generate a whole new ID like I did?

Why wouldn't you standardize the Icon for a submenu? All the original game Icons are standardized.

[Wiimeiser 444]

23 minutes ago, atsf189 said:

Why wouldn't you standardize the Icon for a submenu? All the original game Icons are standardized.

Does anyone think a round icon would work for the standard submenu icon? Lots are rounded squares and menus are ovals...

[Panda 209]

21 hours ago, atsf189 said:

@memo @rsc204 @Ulisse Wolf

Here is an example of a Button Icon for submenus. You can put your own stuff in the middle of it.

I use Adobe photo to alter the icons.

Menu Icon Template clear background.psd

Save as a .png then import with reader

Below is a blank button .png file

 

 

 

Great work, I like the idea for a round button. It is distinct enough from the lot buttons to help differentiate it as a submenu. The buttons could even have different rims depending on the main menu category: orange for all the civic items (landmarks, parks, police, fire, etc.), yellow for power and utility, purple for transit networks, green for flora and MMP. (Basically match the existing menu colors.)

I would suggest shrinking the button slightly so that the shadow can be completely included in the png image. Right now it is getting clipped on the bottom and right side.  It might look strange to have the button justified in the top left in order to fully fit in the shadow, so I suppose the best would be to center the button and reduce the size of both the button and shadow slightly to get rid of the clipping.

[memo 1,445]

My general recommendation for a standardization of submenus would be to choose broad categories that aren't too fine-grained and to keep in mind that many players might have very few plugins that fit into some of those categories. If, for example, you have have 10 power plants spread evenly over a dozen submenus, it makes it unnecessarily cumbersome to browse your menus. The categories should also be chosen in a way that makes it very clear to a player what to expect in them, and the contents of a submenu should be cohesive to avoid the need for browsing multiple menus for a specific task.

So for the power menu for instance, one might simply choose:

• Fossil
• Renewable
• Accessories

For the other menus, rsc204's proposal in post #41 seems quite reasonable to me.

Regarding the technical aspects, I'd like to emphasize that whether a building is moved to a submenu or not is goverend by the presence of the DLL file, and not by the presence of the corresponding submenu button exemplar. If the DLL is loaded and you haven't installed the dat file containing a particular submenu button exemplar, the buildings of that submenu don't show up anywhere in your menus. So, while it's technically possible to make individual submenus optional by creating multiple dat files, it puts quite a lot of burden on the user to make sure they have the necessary dat files installed. You can only skip installing such a submenu if you know for sure it's empty.

As for distribution of standardized submenus, indeed it could make sense to include them with the DLL. There are some technical challenges if we want to move Maxis buildings into submenus as well, but maybe let's first agree on a standard before dealing with those matters.
 

On 2/29/2024 at 2:46 PM, Membrillo said:

Can MMP menu have submenus?

Yes, definitely.

23 hours ago, Panda said:

One of my main thoughts is if whether creating menus in the RCI Zoning menus would be preferrable for some items. Specifically, I'm thinking that any ploppable commercial offices or services could have their own submenus in the commercial zoning menu. Similarly Farms, Factories, High Tech Industry, and IRM Filler Lots could all have submenus under the Industryial Zoning menu. I think technically it would be possible as the garbage menu already has a mix of zoning (landfill) and plopable items (recycling center, incinerator, etc.) but I'm not the one writing the DLL and I'm not a programmer, so take my suggestion witha  grain of salt.

Currently, the zoning menus don't support submenus.

23 hours ago, Panda said:

For the submenu color, @memo is it possible to create a new parameter and assign a color hex code to each submenu? My intuition is no since so much of the menu is built from png elements, but you'd know better than I would.

Currently, that's not easily doable.

[Panda 209]

@memo Thanks for the response. Well so much for those ideas, although I'm not too surprised. With the way the UI is made out of png files, that makes sense that changing the color would be difficult to impossible to do on the fly.

[atsf189 460]

4 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

Lots are rounded squares and menus are ovals

I ended up with round because I used the games larger oval and it was to big for the ping size for a menu Icon.

After fitting it in the ping it ended up round. I tried to make it as big as possible so you could put something in the middle.

I have noticed that most of the plobable buildings have been setup for the landmark menu. That is why I thought of categorizing it as type business.

I am going to add a retail button next

[memo 1,445]

1 hour ago, Panda said:

@memo Thanks for the response. Well so much for those ideas, although I'm not too surprised. With the way the UI is made out of png files, that makes sense that changing the color would be difficult to impossible to do on the fly.

What I could do is include a new set of PNG files that are used for the submenus UI. I'm thinking of a darker shade of the original colors. The (minor) drawbacks are that installing the included dat file then becomes absolutely mandatory and that UI replacement mods may need an update for the new PNG files. The relevant IIDs are 0x14215ed0 to 0x14215ed4.

[hugues aroux 3,784]

@memo @Panda

Having recreated a game interface twice, and created hundreds of Lot icons (not just snapshots of the Lot)... I would highly recommend not involving color, or anything else, upstream of construction of Examplars submenus. Everyone (modder / user) can imply what they want IN the icon (the PNG), which is made up of 4 states: inactive, neutral, selected and hovered over. Imposing a colored box, in addition, is one more manipulation to do, to delete it, correct it, or adapt it, according to the user's graphic choices. I sincerely think that PNG is sufficient in itself. It is more than likely that I would offer, to the community, Sets of PNGs for submenu, like other players obviously.. ;-) .. and the fact that it is enough to replace a few PNGs is the ideal.

[Flann 1,709]

I agree with the idea of creating a standardized set of basic submenus.  Clearly, there will be varying opinions on the optimal set of menus.  My suggestion is to collect proposals of sets of submenus for each menu, then create a poll and allow the community to vote on the sets in order to establish consensus.

[atsf189 460]

I changed my mind and decided on these Icons.

They look more like original game Icons.

If anybody wants to use them I can post a file with them.

[Propfam 2,288]

32 minutes ago, atsf189 said:

I changed my mind and decided on these Icons.

They look more like original game Icons.

If anybody wants to use them I can post a file with them.

There are lil shadow artifacts on the corner. Maybe, downsizing the icon a lil bit so the shadow can be properly shown? Just my 2 cents.

[Panda 209]

I've been working on refining a button template based on @atsf189's circle button. I shrunk the button slightly so it should fit on the menu without clipping the shadow. I made several versions of the ring with colors to match the existing mayor mode main menus (say that five times fast!) The Photoshop file includes an overlay group with five layers, each a different color. Pick one to use and hide the rest. I've also included a masked group for whatever icon or image will be shown on the button. Finally, there is an optional background layer that matches the color of the in-game menu buttons.

Menu Icon Circle Template_Panda.psd

Here are the colored overlays as png files:

And the background:

I've made a few preliminary buttons to test things out and I think they look pretty good. I still need to test them in-game to double check that there is no clipping, but I probably won't get to that until tomorrow.

Fossil Power Plants:

Renewable Power Plants:

Miscellaneous Power:

[Panda 209]

I actually had a little time to get a quick test button in-game. I think it looks okay, since I reduced the size of the circle to keep the shadow form getting clipped, it does appear a little small, but that might not be a bad thing and might help differentiate it from the rest of the items in the menu.

[atsf189 460]

@Panda They look good.

Now you made more work for me. I wanted orange circles so I will use yours with my Icons.

Thank You for the template.

I think the left circle is supposed all black & White. The maxis buttons are set up that way.

It probably doesn't mater though because the menu is never inactive

[Simizen 1,098]

Yeah, I have to say, in regards to the UI currently, is to make it match seamlessly with the default UI. While many in the community have modded their UIs to their preference, there's still plenty of people who either prefer the default, or are new and haven't gotten into extensive modding as of yet.

And seeing the chatter about the menus list, there's some interesting things going on there.

So, first things first, I think we've unintentionally shot ourselves in the foot here, with posting the DLL for download (or the code or whatever part it is people are accessing). Someone above said that like 300 people already downloaded it, and while that's kind of okay, I think it's showing that we moved a bit too fast with this one. Yeah, 300 people grabbed it, but now we could easily have 300 different versions of things out. Unfortunately though, there's no real way of putting the genie back in the bottle. Hopefully it doesn't create too much trouble while we're sorting everything out. Though, we've at least got an okay measure in place with stuff saying that only an official version will be posted and supported. And I have to say, I'm not entirely sure I can blame y'all for releasing the access to the DLL, simply cause I likely would've done the exact same in that position if it were me.

As for the submenus, I agree, we should definitely work out how to setup the Maxis lots first, so we can establish a decent pattern to follow.

The immediate next thing would be pretty much, everything related to NAM. However, I'd like to make a note here: while the NAM's big, powerful, and wonderful to have, it doesn't actually cover some minor transit related stuff that others have done. So, while I'm content with leaving the NAM team in charge of virtually everything in the Transportation menu, I do think some room should be allowed for these minor extras. One thing that I can think of is the many alleyway mods, though, that's an interesting situation, due to the fact that some are under Transportation, and others are under Parks. Thankfully they're not exactly the highest priority at this time, so that can be worked out as we go along.

Aside from those, I do think we should be working out a solid list in preparation of others using the mod. I do think @rsc204, @Ulisse Wolf, and @Panda seem to have the best ideas for the list, most of which I agree with.

Definitely leaning towards @rsc204's Landmarks submenus, just because that seems to be the most fitting for the ploppable lots. Which, lets face it, those things kinda act like landmarks in their own right anyway, lol.

One thing I'd like to point out, is that while we're looking to avoid adding submenus so that players with fewer options aren't struggling to find everything, we should honestly consider a complete list of submenus, for all non-deprecated mods. While they don't have to be implemented at the start, if we have them planned out ahead of time, then when we get to them, they'll already have a place to be. This would also mean ensuring that all the major mods are covered properly, even if they're not all used at once, due to conflicts (SPAM, CAM, NAM, AMPS).

And I have a thought concerning this mod, regardless of completion level: we should have an installer for it.

Much like NAM, there's tons of options for it, and we haven't even really touched on the submenus, outside of a select few currently, we've already identified that many people aren't going to have a lot of mods for each submenu option that we could add. If we do an installer, we could give players the option to turn on/off different submenus as they see fit. This way, they only activate the ones they absolutely need, and nothing else, and not have to worry about clicking in and out of menus endlessly just to find 1 item. In theory, we could just have switches for everything in a file, but if that fails, it can always be setup to add/remove the necessary files containing the appropriate submenus.

Granted, the installer should probably be made once we've gotten further with the submenu design, so we're not trying to have an installer for only like 3 options, lol. But overall, it should be setup pretty early, so that we can add to it over time as needed. Especially since it's still likely to take a while to not only add the requested submenus, but also for all the mods/lots to catch up. And chances are pretty good, we'll be running into a similar situation to that of NAM, where development for it takes awhile, simply due to the enormity of the mod.

And I saw a couple things concerning how deep the submenus go, while it's great that we can kind of infinitely nest, I do agree that it should be limited to about 2 to 3 layers. Imo it should be: Menu -> Submenu 1 -> Submenu 2. While I'm sure we might be able to benefit from a third submenu, I think this will already be more than enough for most players to contend with that it'll keep us all busy for a while. An addition to this, while it's great that we've got the main button being "back", is there an issue with adding a new button icon to draw when we enter the submenu? I figure a simple back (or left) arrow would do the trick. This way, if you see the arrow, then you know that you need to go back, and if you see the default icon, then you're in the base list. If it needs to be expanded, we could always do an arrow with the number 1 for the first sub layer, and the number 2 for the second sub layer. Though it would probably be best if we were to do say, a hollow arrow for the first layer, and a solid arrow for the second layer, that way we're not trying to read small text on a button, with high res screens.

[Wiimeiser 444]

19 hours ago, Ryuu Tenno said:

The immediate next thing would be pretty much, everything related to NAM. However, I'd like to make a note here: while the NAM's big, powerful, and wonderful to have, it doesn't actually cover some minor transit related stuff that others have done. So, while I'm content with leaving the NAM team in charge of virtually everything in the Transportation menu, I do think some room should be allowed for these minor extras. One thing that I can think of is the many alleyway mods, though, that's an interesting situation, due to the fact that some are under Transportation, and others are under Parks. Thankfully they're not exactly the highest priority at this time, so that can be worked out as we go along.

Yeah, there's a lot of inconsistency. Most canals are in the Parks menu, but PEG's canals are in Seaports and Landmarks. The Parks menu is so bloated in fact that some paths are in the health menu explicitly because it's so bloated. At one point I tried to get a catalogue of what was even in my Parks menu, but I gave up. _{Maybe I should try again...}

[Propfam 2,288]

I think mods that do miscellaneous things are underrepresented here. As the creator of the cap lifter, I still need lots of spaces for my mods. And no, @Null 45 said that my mod can't be implemented using other ways. It'd be nice if my mod is in the right submenu.

[Panda 209]

I've continued working on Submenu buttons. Now I realize that there isn't a good consensus on what the specific community driven sub-menu categories will be at the moment. However, I've tried to make the buttons fairly generic so that they will be useful no matter how the final categories get decided.

Education:

   Elementary Schools

   High Schools

   Higher Education (Colleges and University) GO SIMTROPOLIS UNIVERSITY LLAMAS!

   Libraries

   Museums

Garbage:

   Trash

   Recycling

(More to come in this category)

Power:

   I redid the Fossil Fuel Power Plants button to help it read better. The other two buttons I made previously are unchanged.

Water:

   Aquifer

   Fresh Water

   Salt Water

(I'll create a water treatment button)

Let me know what you think of the style. I tried to keep it as close to the original UI as possible so they feel like they belong. Also, let me know if any of the buttons are not reading correctly or are confusing. I'm trying to make them distinct enough from each other that there is no confusion whether you are picking the right menu while all keeping them in the same style.

[Simizen 1,098]

19 minutes ago, Jidan said:

I think mods that do miscellaneous things are underrepresented here. As the creator of the cap lifter, I still need lots of spaces for my mods. And no, @Null 45 said that my mod can't be implemented using other ways. It'd be nice if my mod is in the right submenu.

Yeah, I have to agree with this, those that fall under the "Miscellaneous" category do need to have an appropriate location, even if they don't typically fit within the other categories we could make. If they have to go into a typical category, probably figure out what the closest match is, and put them with that group.

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@Pandathose icons look good! Not too sure about the college/university icon, but I don't think there are that many options for that one. It's certainly not bad otherwise, just feels kind of out of place a bit for what it's supposed to show.

I am curious though, would it be possible to implement a couple of icons that could load over the main menu icons? Like, if it's possible to load icons over it, it'd be neat to get a hollow arrow pointing left, and a solid arrow pointing left, that would take the place of the initial icon. So like, in the case of the Garbage menu, the initial icon for the Garbage utility, could be replaced with an arrow. Not required, just curious as to how that'd look if it's possible to implement.

looking forward to seeing other icons you come up with!

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One thing i'm curious about regarding the mod is, is there (or more like, will there be) a place to give proper suggestions for submenus? This came to mind when I was messing around with some mods to see what I had with some plugins, and found that in one set (I was looking at the various alleyway mods), I had like 8 different groups of lots. Most of these could easily be thrown into a submenu, but I don't want to complicate matters by throwing out suggestions for everything just yet, in case things get shuffled around a bit.

I'm content with the overall lists that we've made, cause these help to establish patterns, but with somethign like this, there's some overlap with different lot types (some are parks, some are transportation), so I don't know how they're going to be properly dealt with till we're further along. That said, I'll keep notes on my end and kinda group things together as I see patterns, but I won't be doing anything like making a mod or edits to the submenu mod. It'll just be a text file and some pictures tracking what mods/lots I believe fit well together for a given category. And honestly, that's probably something everyone should do, cause if nothing else, it'll give us some insight into how people view things. Plus, we might be able to find a significant pattern to utilize to our advantage in regards to sorting everything.

[memo 1,445]

Let's try to move forward with the idea of a standard set of submenus. I've collected the different proposals and combined them into a draft that I added to the first post in order to keep the discussion focused. Let's iterate and refine this. Comments are welcome. @Ulisse Wolf @rsc204 @Panda @Wiimeiser @Ryuu Tenno @atsf189 @Membrillo 
 

 

On 2/25/2024 at 11:27 AM, memo said:

Draft for a standard set of 1st-level submenus:

(Comments welcome.)

Flora:

• Deciduous Trees
• Coniferous Trees
• Palm Trees
• Bushes
• Flowers
• Non-Flora (ploppable water, rocks, people, …)

Rail:

• Passenger Stations
• Freight Stations
• [Sidings and Spurs] (yards, non-functional lots)
• Monorail/HSRP Stations

Misc Transport:

• Bus
• GLR
• El-Rail
• Subway
• Multi-modal Stations (arguably these could be added to all of the above menus instead)
• Parking
• [bikepaths, access roads, alleyways]
• [signs, lighting]

Airport:

• … (the airport menu consists mainly of lot sets that maybe don't need standard menus, but can come with their own submenus(?))

Seaport:

• Ports and Ferry Terminals
• [Marinas]
• Seawalls
• Canals

Power:

• Fossil/Nuclear
• Renewable
• Substations/Poles/Misc

Water:

• Water Towers
• Water Pumps
• Water Treatment

Garbage:

• … (maybe none?)

Police, Fire, Health:

• Small
• Medium
• Large

Education:

• Elementary Schools
• High Schools (including private schools)
• Higher Education
• Libraries and Museums (to split or not to split(?))

Landmarks:

• Government
• Theaters (Operas, Cinemas)
• Religion (Churches, Cemeteries)
• Ploppable CS (possibly split further into gas stations, hotels, restaurants, …)
• Ploppable CO
• Ploppable Farms
• Ploppable Industry
• …

Parks:

• Green Spaces
• Plazas
• Sports Grounds
• Paths/Modular Parks (these all come in sets and should each get their own sub-submenus)
• Embankments (retaining walls)
• Fillers (IRM Fillers, diagonal fillers, roundabout fillers, etc.)
• …

The categories in brackets might not really be needed or could be reworked to make them more concise.

I'll add that I don't usually have many items in some of the submenus such as in the ploppable categories or the garbage or airport menus, so I'm not sure how to best set those up.
 

@Panda Your icons look excellent. My one recommendation is to make sure that icon states 2 and 3 are easily distinguishable in-game.

[rsc204 21,808]

17 hours ago, Jidan said:

I think mods that do miscellaneous things are underrepresented here. As the creator of the cap lifter, I still need lots of spaces for my mods.

Actually I think things like Cap Lifters are too specific to be included in a General Base set of Menus that everyone using the DLL mod installs. Nothing to stop you from making your own menu for the purpose however.

On 01/03/2024 at 7:35 PM, memo said:

My general recommendation for a standardization of submenus would be to choose broad categories that aren't too fine-grained and to keep in mind that many players might have very few plugins that fit into some of those categories. If, for example, you have have 10 power plants spread evenly over a dozen submenus, it makes it unnecessarily cumbersome to browse your menus. The categories should also be chosen in a way that makes it very clear to a player what to expect in them, and the contents of a submenu should be cohesive to avoid the need for browsing multiple menus for a specific task.

The more I have delved into this process, the more obvious it becomes that what I will eventually do for my own game, doesn't mirror the needs of others. So whilst I'm sure many people will add many other menus for things they deem important, we only need concentrate on getting a basic set done first.

On 01/03/2024 at 3:49 PM, atsf189 said:

I have redone my Landmarks menu because of all the plopables I like to use.

I randomly generated these IDs all under landmarks

Gas Stations 26A5EB4D

Hotels AF1388B9 

Restaurants FCFA5044

Sub within Restaurants Fast Food 111F7A65

Sub within Restaurants Pizza 460FDCFD

So using this as an example, I don't think many players would have a lot of Gas Stations, Hotels or Restaurants, those are too specific. However, that's not to say these aren't valid categories that are used, just that their distribution doesn't make sense with the generic base set. If everyone has suddenly 150 new menus, for a number of players those are just going to get in the way.

However, if we did end up having Landmarks -> Plop CS as a menu, that might be the best place to add the Restaurants menu. Honestly are there so many Pizza restaurants that it needs another menu?, I think that's getting maybe too specific more generally. But the point is, once we've agreed on the ID for Plop CS in the Landmarks menu, there is a standardised home for your customisations for more specific groupings you can use.

On 01/03/2024 at 3:49 PM, atsf189 said:

300 people downloaded this so far. What have they used so far for IDs? How many conflicts do we have now?

For Subs within a sub should we go one number up or generate a whole new ID like I did?

Why wouldn't you standardize the Icon for a submenu? All the original game Icons are standardized.

Just to follow up whilst we're here... If everyone correctly uses random IDs, statistically speaking it would be an amazing coincidence if any IDs conflicted. Always generate a new Random ID for EVERY object you make in SC4, unless it specifically requires using a reserved range, this is ALWAYS best practise.

The style of icons is personal preference, it doesn't matter those can all be customised at will. But again, the ID used for a given menu category, especially in the context of a basic set everyone used, MUST exist only once.

So for example if two different IDs (SubMenus) existed for a generic menu like Plop CS, that would be bad for everyone. Ideally all Plop CS lots made compatible with SubMenus should use the same system. Otherwise from an end user (and perhaps modding) perspective, it would cause problems. I mean you wouldn't want to end up with half your Plop CS lots in one menu, with the other half in another, because two IDs for the same thing were used and no absolute standard existed.

This is really important to understand that whilst I see a more general discussion is going on here with SubMenus. In terms of an official release, we really ought to concentrate and organise around just the real essentials. This will ultimately form the foundations for what modders/users can do from there. A single system that everyone uses for this is very important, but as you get into more specific categories, it's vastly less likely that you'll run into problems of menus being duplicated.

On this note, we should make a rule that if a PreExisting SubMenu has been released on a prominent exchange, that is the one everyone else should use for including content in it. So we don't end up with a load of duplication once the flood gates are opened.

Again, none of this stops end users from customising everything how they choose in any way.

On 02/03/2024 at 2:25 AM, Flann said:

I agree with the idea of creating a standardized set of basic submenus.  Clearly, there will be varying opinions on the optimal set of menus.  My suggestion is to collect proposals of sets of submenus for each menu, then create a poll and allow the community to vote on the sets in order to establish consensus.

In principle I would like to say let's throw it open to a vote, but in practise I wonder if that is really helpful. For example we're looking at at least 14 menus for this, do we really want to create 14 different 'polls'? I think so many might hamper community engagement with such a process, not to mention if we held a poll for 2 weeks, a month, would we see more than 50 'votes', is that really representative of anything?

Honestly, with some consensus there is no reason we can't have the basic functionality ready to use in a short amount of time. The debate will likely continue as to where things go from there, perhaps I'm being impatient but I am ready to go nuts with using this new capability. I've already made it happen for one of my smaller Plugins menus entirely.

I just want to agree on the IDs used for the most generic menus so that I can continue working without having to worry I'll need to change hundreds if not thousands of IDs later, because it took so long to get agreement on something so simple. On a personal note, right now I am highly motivated and working at 100%, but if I have to put this aside for months of debate, I can't see me keeping that up. I pretty much have everything to implement this now, bar some placeholder icons, the worry is how many others (with different IDs) have done much the same?

1 hour ago, memo said:

I'll add that I don't usually have many items in some of the submenus such as in the ploppable categories or the garbage or airport menus, so I'm not sure how to best set those up.

The more I've gotten into SubMenus, the more I find that less is more, moving a bunch of stuff into a more organised folder takes the strain off finding everything else in the root menus.

Considering we are not aiming to cater for the highly modded crowd (at least at this stage), I think that we should try to include the bare minimum of new menus that most people would find useful. There is plenty of scope for more specific menus to be added as 3rd party mods, for example:

1 hour ago, memo said:

• Paths/Modular Parks (these all come in sets and should each get their own sub-submenus)

This is exactly how I would do things, I already put Paeng's 205 Parks into such a system, so for this stage it's important we have consistent (mostly) 1st Level menus, because they will often be used to make further menus that can be nested within them.

As such, I'm almost at the point of thinking we don't need to add any SubMenus (right now) to either the Power, Water, Garbage or Airport menus. For the first three, I just don't see having many power plants, water things or garbage as likely for the bulk of players, especially the last two. Again, there is plenty of room to add new SubMenus here, but maybe it doesn't make sense to include them in a basic set IMO.

Airports I feel should be handled separately too, since most players won't have much in the Airports Menu, this really is something very connected with using the large modular Airport mods. Like you (memo), I too don't have the experience to say what would be useful there. Perhaps this should be handled as part of any Airport Controller updates or repackaging of the Airport mods?. Either way the average player probably won't have more than a handful of additional items here, so it doesn't make sense to me to be catering to that niche right now. Certainly whomever decides on how to set this up should be familiar with the types of content and how best to add SubMenus to balance the number of items per menu.

Flora is another tricky one, since MMP use might vary quite considerably in terms of user needs. Again I'm almost thinking we shouldn't offer more than a few basic categories.

By way of an (opposite) example, the following list is taken from a very organised set of MMPs I have, that include a good proportion of what actually exists, i.e. this would be sufficient for the serious MMP user who accepts a little scrolling is better than a lot of menus:

Spoiler

• Seasonal
  • Trees
  • Flora
  • [Other]
• Non Seasonal
  • Trees
  • Flora
  • [Other]
• People
• Vehicles
• Signs
• Paths
• Walls and Fences
• Terrain Decoration (Sand, Ground Paint etc)
• Rocks etc
• Farming
• Industrial
• Water

Note items in Orange would be a 'second stage' SubMenu, following my less is more thinking, we can probably ditch the Other folders, since those Misc. items can go into the root Seasonal or Non Seasonal menus, which would otherwise be populated with two submenus.

So given that we only want to set up the basics for now, but want to have the basis for future additions covered, I'm thinking we can maybe just add the following for now:

• Seasonal
• Non Seasonal

All the other specifics don't need to be part of this pack, because again it assumes everyone would have a lot of MMPs in need of organising. For example, the first list is how I am going to have my MMP menu organised, so all these options will be available for others to use as I intend to release the 'Serious MMP Menu pack' as a 3rd party mod.

Otherwise your list seems about right, although as a rule of thumb I am personally leaning towards cutting more than adding to the list. 

[Kel9509 1,363]

I might've missed this, but just to confirm, can a single lot be placed in multiple submenus?  Or will the submenu exemplar override a prior one?  

Some of this might be solved if lots could be added to multiple submenus.