Submenus DLL

[Vanasonic 49]

You should probably consider buying a new mouse or cleaning the scroll wheel if you have the technical know-how.

[Kel9509 1,363]

On 6/2/2024 at 3:00 PM, memo said:

I've just uploaded version 1.1.3 of the DLL including the following changes:

• added 3 new submenus: Government, Churches & Cemeteries, Entertainment
• improved categorization of hospital and police submenus (in particular, any hospital with a capacity larger than 20k is now in the large category)
• moved transit submenus to the top (above NAM items)
• The Reward menu now restores the scroll position when the menu is re-opened.

This mod just keeps getting better and better!  Thanks for the unexpected improvements!  

The new submenus work great.  I was surprised to see the Radio station in the entertainment menu, but it makes sense.  I also noticed that SimGoober's Dave & Busters showed up there, which was interesting.  I didn't expect that at all, even after looking at its building exemplar properties.

The health submenus are working perfectly, based on the right sizes now.

I was looking at the code to see what information was there that separated out the new submenus, but it was a bit hard to tell.  Some buildings ended up in the Church submenu which didn't seem like they belonged there, like the World Trade Center complex and the Maxis Rockefeller Center complex (with jobs mod).  The readme doesn't really tell modders what code would tell them which submenu a lot will go into.

Here's hoping for future improvements, like Small, Medium and Large Fire Stations.  Also, I noticed that some of the parks submenus are actually underneath some parks I have.  I guess those parks are programmed to be first in line somehow, I'll need to fix them I guess.

And I'll need to edit Mattb325's parking garages or use an exemplar patch to get them into the Parking submenu, since the readme says that is not an implicit submenu selection.

[Max4k 721]

18 hours ago, Vanasonic said:

You should probably consider buying a new mouse or cleaning the scroll wheel if you have the technical know-how.

 

Im going to buy a new mouse, the one I have is a Logitech KYB/Mouse combo wireless for under $25. 

 

I can't believe Windows 11 has 2 different Control Panel settings for the mouse.  I tried all that, adjusting settings

[Null 45 3,041]

37 minutes ago, Max4k said:

I can't believe Windows 11 has 2 different Control Panel settings for the mouse.  I tried all that, adjusting settings

That is typical of Microsoft, add a new UI but leave the old one in place for backwards compatibility.

[Max4k 721]

The worst problem I have with Windows 11 is with ACDSee photo viewer. I'm using Pro 8 64-bit version, has great support to view Adobe Photoshop RAW, and Psd files, as well as webP, but something with the mouse scroll.  Using mouse wheel 1 click at a time skips photos in directory.  I think it's just Windows 11 and this mouse, and never had any issues with Windows 7 all these years.

I had a huge collection in Parks for BSC  RPK (River Park Kit), also the BLS Cottage collections all in parks, which is now in Water Transportation menu under #2 Sub-menu which is hella cool.  I used to scroll forever under Parks menu to get to this.  About 2 years ago, I spent over 2 months re-categorizing the ID # for Parks and Landmarks to sort things up better.

I wonder if there a way in future to create PEG and BSC Sub-menus in the Park menu.  That huge Parks kit "The Thing" by @pgxpgx would be a blessing.

This is mind blowing the save position for Reward Menu remembers position. 

 

[Max4k 721]

Hopefully Dirk comes out of retirement and personally gives you awards for this ground breaking changes to the game

 

I seem to be missing Old Weather station in my Landmarks.  This works with CAM farms and can't find it.  I noticed some landmarks like Lucky's and other Maxis landmarks got shifted into Cemeteries and Church Sub-Menu but can't find Old Weather station, unless I remove Landmark.dat file

[memo 1,444]

On 6/2/2024 at 10:16 PM, Max4k said:

Is there a maximum for how many Subfolders can fit in parks ?

No, there's no limit.

On 6/4/2024 at 2:58 AM, Kel9509 said:

I also noticed that SimGoober's Dave & Busters showed up there, which was interesting.

The submenu takes into account two custom BSC occupant groups ("SG: Entertainment" and "BTE: Comm. Entertainment"), besides several vanilla occupant groups for specific building types. So far, I didn't know whether any of SimGoober's buildings actually make use of that "SG: Entertainment" occupant group.

On 6/4/2024 at 2:58 AM, Kel9509 said:

Some buildings ended up in the Church submenu which didn't seem like they belonged there, like the World Trade Center complex and the Maxis Rockefeller Center complex (with jobs mod).

It looks like it's been observed before that the Maxis Rockefeller Center includes the Worship occupant group. I may try to exclude it from the submenu, but it's probably not fixable for all the custom buildings that are based on copies of the Rockefeller Center and thus include the Worship occupant group even though they should not. (Conversely, quite a number of custom churches do not include this occupant group and therefore don't show up in the Church menu.) This can only be fixed by updating the affected mods and assigning proper occupant groups or explicit submenus.

I'm not sure which WTC plugin you're referring to. The one I checked did not appear in the Church menu.

On 6/4/2024 at 2:58 AM, Kel9509 said:

The readme doesn't really tell modders what code would tell them which submenu a lot will go into.

This is mostly based on occupant groups. For example, the Church menu uses the Worship and Cemetery occupant groups. If a building is modded for a specific building type with PIM-X, this should usually put a building into the correct submenu if there is one. The exact semantics are sometimes a bit complex internally, as the main goal is that the outcome is as good as possible, so I didn't document these in detail. It's also always possible to just explicitly assign a submenu ID to a building.

23 hours ago, Max4k said:

I seem to be missing Old Weather station in my Landmarks.  This works with CAM farms and can't find it.  I noticed some landmarks like Lucky's and other Maxis landmarks got shifted into Cemeteries and Church Sub-Menu but can't find Old Weather station, unless I remove Landmark.dat file

If it reappears if you remove the Landmark submenus, then it's in one of those submenus.

In general, it would help to be more specific about which plugins are miscategorized, as I can only really look into it if I know what to download.

[Kel9509 1,363]

4 hours ago, memo said:

It looks like it's been observed before that the Maxis Rockefeller Center includes the Worship occupant group. I may try to exclude it from the submenu, but it's probably not fixable for all the custom buildings that are based on copies of the Rockefeller Center and thus include the Worship occupant group even though they should not. (Conversely, quite a number of custom churches do not include this occupant group and therefore don't show up in the Church menu.) This can only be fixed by updating the affected mods and assigning proper occupant groups or explicit submenus.

I'm not sure which WTC plugin you're referring to. The one I checked did not appear in the Church menu.

Thanks for the info.  I ended up modding the Rockefeller Center to remove the Worship Category.  It makes no sense and is clearly an error.  The same thing affects Shorty Burger, Lucky's Hang Ten and Sobchak Lanes.  I just fixed them all directly, although I wonder if it's possible for an exemplar patch to fix them as well.

You're right that there are MANY churches out there that are just plain landmark eyecandys.  Part of the reason I'm glad you made a Church submenu is because I've modded so many to make them have the Worship occupant group so they all appeared in the Rewards menu along with the other churches.  

The WTC Towers that appeared there were by @rubik3 and upon looking at them, appeared to have the Worship occupant group too.  I ended up fixing those as well.

[Wiimeiser 444]

5 hours ago, memo said:

In general, it would help to be more specific about which plugins are miscategorized, as I can only really look into it if I know what to download.

I know PEG Utopian Canals (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) are appearing in the Commercial Lots instead of the Canals submenu, and that there are some parts of the SG Brick Canals (mainly TE bridges) and some French-named canals (possibly this set, I'll have to investigate further on that front) are also missing from the menu while others from the same sets are present. And large portions of the OWW are missing from the Waterfronts menu, including basically all of the OWW1 (1) and OWWr2/OWWx, despite most of the OWW2 being present.  I know I have category cities for these categories specifically, so I'll have to go over them again.

 

2 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Thanks for the info.  I ended up modding the Rockefeller Center to remove the Worship Category.  It makes no sense and is clearly an error.  The same thing affects Shorty Burger, Lucky's Hang Ten and Sobchak Lanes.  I just fixed them all directly, although I wonder if it's possible for an exemplar patch to fix them as well.

You're right that there are MANY churches out there that are just plain landmark eyecandys.  Part of the reason I'm glad you made a Church submenu is because I've modded so many to make them have the Worship occupant group so they all appeared in the Rewards menu along with the other churches.  

The WTC Towers that appeared there were by @rubik3 and upon looking at them, appeared to have the Worship occupant group too.  I ended up fixing those as well.

Does it happen that a certain 742 Evergreen Terrace gets placed in the Worship submenu as well? I assume this happens because the church was used as a template when creating those lots (it's obvious with the house since it doesn't have a custom query sound and just uses the church bells)

[Max4k 721]

5 hours ago, memo said:

No, there's no limit.

The submenu takes into account two custom BSC occupant groups ("SG: Entertainment" and "BTE: Comm. Entertainment"), besides several vanilla occupant groups for specific building types. So far, I didn't know whether any of SimGoober's buildings actually make use of that "SG: Entertainment" occupant group.

It looks like it's been observed before that the Maxis Rockefeller Center includes the Worship occupant group. I may try to exclude it from the submenu, but it's probably not fixable for all the custom buildings that are based on copies of the Rockefeller Center and thus include the Worship occupant group even though they should not. (Conversely, quite a number of custom churches do not include this occupant group and therefore don't show up in the Church menu.) This can only be fixed by updating the affected mods and assigning proper occupant groups or explicit submenus.

I'm not sure which WTC plugin you're referring to. The one I checked did not appear in the Church menu.

This is mostly based on occupant groups. For example, the Church menu uses the Worship and Cemetery occupant groups. If a building is modded for a specific building type with PIM-X, this should usually put a building into the correct submenu if there is one. The exact semantics are sometimes a bit complex internally, as the main goal is that the outcome is as good as possible, so I didn't document these in detail. It's also always possible to just explicitly assign a submenu ID to a building.

If it reappears if you remove the Landmark submenus, then it's in one of those submenus.

In general, it would help to be more specific about which plugins are miscategorized, as I can only really look into it if I know what to download.

 

I found it, rather than Landmark menu,  it moved to Industrial > Plopable Farms.  That cool where it is and easy to remember, since It's farm stuff.

I only have a select few Maxis Landmarks, but it seems they went to Church's and Cemeteries -- 

Shorty Burger, Sobchark Lanes, Rockefeller Center, Lucky's Hang 10

 

There is still a bunch of Church's in my Landmarks that did not transfer over to the Submenu.   It includes BLaM, SFBT and bunch of Orthodox/Eastern Europe churchs.  It's about 15+ and will jot them down and post at later time.  It's not a major big deal and have them organized with custom ID#, and groped together already

 

 

 

[Max4k 721]

3 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

Thanks for the info.  I ended up modding the Rockefeller Center to remove the Worship Category.  It makes no sense and is clearly an error.  The same thing affects Shorty Burger, Lucky's Hang Ten and Sobchak Lanes.  I just fixed them all directly, although I wonder if it's possible for an exemplar patch to fix them as well.

You're right that there are MANY churches out there that are just plain landmark eyecandys.  Part of the reason I'm glad you made a Church submenu is because I've modded so many to make them have the Worship occupant group so they all appeared in the Rewards menu along with the other churches.  

The WTC Towers that appeared there were by @rubik3 and upon looking at them, appeared to have the Worship occupant group too.  I ended up fixing those as well.

I did not realize some of the Churches marked wrong and I can adjust.

 

 

[Max4k 721]

I can't seem to find the Maxis ranger station. It's not in the sub menu or parks menu

[Wiimeiser 444]

It appears datpacking may be causing issues, as with the Modular Plaza System when I datpacked it only four lots appeared in the menu at all.

[atsf189 460]

2 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

It appears datpacking may be causing issues

My folder is datpacked and I have no issues. My Menu folder is in the Plugins folder with the datpacked items including datpacked NAM.

The Menu folder is NOT datpacked.

[Wiimeiser 444]

It's specifically the MPS that's having issues when datpacked, regardless of whether or not the submenu is datpacked. The screenshots below show what it looks like. The second is interesting because the four lots that still appear in the menu don't get their base texture overridden, while the ones missing from the menu do. I don't know what could be going on; I was previously missing the Loading Hooks dll which is why the Parks Menu wasn't sorting correctly, but installing it didn't fix the issue. The last screenshot shows what the unpacked MPS file structure looks like, in case it helps any. One thing I did notice is that the second file in that folder has 4 items (the TE lots shown in the first two screenshots) which matches the number of lots that appear in the submenu, making me wonder if JDatpacker is the problem... Is anyone else suffering this exact problem? ...I might need to do more experiments to figure out exactly what's going on, but I can't think of what else to try...

[rsc204 21,808]

On 06/06/2024 at 2:17 AM, Wiimeiser said:

I know PEG Utopian Canals (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) are appearing in the Commercial Lots instead of the Canals submenu, and that there are some parts of the SG Brick Canals (mainly TE bridges) and some French-named canals (possibly this set, I'll have to investigate further on that front) are also missing from the menu while others from the same sets are present. And large portions of the OWW are missing from the Waterfronts menu, including basically all of the OWW1 (1) and OWWr2/OWWx, despite most of the OWW2 being present.  I know I have category cities for these categories specifically, so I'll have to go over them again.

I'll eventually be looking at anything as part of the PEG Collections that might need updating to incorporate the SubMenu functionality. Where necessary I will either update Occ Groups or add explicit Properties to place them in menus. However, I do not intend to simply use the default ones, since we're talking about organising large sets, there will be some trial and error in organising them as I feel is best.

[AsimPika3172 1,136]

PEG Geothermal Power Plant under power group --- something was gone after install submenus dll....

Before added submenus dll = the buiding was appear!

After added submenus dll = the building was GONE? You can see them by typing LOTPLOP from ctrl X menu.

[Wiimeiser 444]

8 minutes ago, AsimPika3172 said:

PEG Geothermal Power Plant under power group --- something was gone after install submenus dll....

Before added submenus dll = the buiding was appear!

After added submenus dll = the building was GONE? You can see them by typing LOTPLOP from ctrl X menu.

It might be under a different submenu, but I'm not certain.

 

As for my experiments:

No datpack, no submenus- All MPS items appear in the Parks Menu, below Kelongs
Datpack, no submenus- All MPS items appear in the Parks Menu, below Kelongs
No datpack, submenus- All MPS items appear as intended
Datpack, submenus- Only the plaza advertising column, phone booths, toilets, and vending machines appear in the menu. Other items are absent from the submenu and appear in the base Parks Menu, below Kelongs. dll logfile reports that all the other submenus are blank, so it's not realizing the lots are there.

Quote

9:06:32 PM Installed the Duplicate/Missing Menu Icons fix.
9:06:32 PM Installed the Submenus patch.
9:06:33 PM Installed the Exemplar Patching feature.
9:08:08 PM Loaded 11 Exemplar patches targeting, in total, 97 Exemplar files.
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0x984E5034: submenu-plop-R$$
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xB2437007: b2437007_MPS_Flowerbeds
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xBB531946: submenu-embankment
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xB2437006: b2437006_MPS_Trees
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xF034265C: submenu-fillers
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xDEFFD960: submenu-modular-parks
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0x8BA49621: submenu-military
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xB2437008: b2437008_MPS_Seawalls
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0x9F83F133: submenu-plop-R$$$
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0x93DADFE9: submenu-plop-R$
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0x1CD18678: submenu-seawall
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xB2437004: b2437004_MPS_Plazas
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xB2437005: b2437005_MPS_Statues
9:08:39 PM Hiding empty submenu with Button ID 0xB2437009: b2437009_MPS_Market Stalls
9:08:39 PM Initialized 63 submenus (14 empty, 0 not reachable).
9:20:19 PM Property 0x2A499F85 requires type Uint32Array or Uint32.

The MPS has two dat files, so what could potentially be happening is that in the process of datpacking, the number in the second file, which is the connections, is overriding the number in the first file, so the submenus think that there's only 4 items to load and thinks the remaining submenus are empty since it's only counting 4 items or something like that. The order of the files doesn't seem to matter, though; in fact, deleting the seawalls file didn't fix the problem either.

Is anyone else (memo in particular) able to reproduce this bug on their end? The affected download is the Modular Plaza System.

[AsimPika3172 1,136]

OK! Another one problems! Some buildings for TRASH category was moved into POWER category...

[Wiimeiser 444]

4 minutes ago, AsimPika3172 said:

OK! Another one problems! Some buildings for TRASH category was moved into POWER category...

Those ones are most likely waste-to-power lots. I guess it depends on the exemplar.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,412]

I remind you that almost 90% (If we want to exaggerate) of the mods on STEX and LEX (Excluding SC4E where there are the correct mods) were made with old modding methods and consequently may have problems with submenus.  We already know about the problem and the interventions to be done but you have to be patient

[11241036 5,097]

Since I heard that one of my own uploads, the MPS, is causing trouble for you, I figured I might read this thread further in order to help find out why.

Please note that for my personal SC4 playing I'm not at all resorting to the submenus that come with the current version of the Submenus DLL. I've already made my own submenus shortly after it came out, and whenever I'm downloading and installing something new, I'm manually editing the new downloads to make them fit into my own style of sorting my plugins. If that is causing problems, I'll upload a new version and just remove the submenu entries so they won't be causing trouble.

What puzzles me, however, is why exactly the four lots shown above appear in the menu and all others not. Those are the 4 new additions that come with Version 2 of the MPS. I've taken the liberty of looking into the files, trying to find out the difference between them and all other lots. Strangely, the only difference I found was that the Wealth property in the Buildings exemplar files was erroneously set to High, I apparently forgot to correct that. But since it sounds somewhat absurd to me that exactly this property would cause such problems, I'd like to ask someone of you suffering from this problem and who can make minor changes with Reader on their own to just set all entries of the Wealth property in the file MPS Core Files.dat to either High (0x03) or Medium (0x02) and see what happens - I myself am not suffering from any problem at all. If you want to find that out and you cannot make those changes, please  write me a PM and I'll send you a modified file instead.

[Wiimeiser 444]

58 minutes ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

I remind you that almost 90% (If we want to exaggerate) of the mods on STEX and LEX (Excluding SC4E where there are the correct mods) were made with old modding methods and consequently may have problems with submenus.

That's perfectly understandable. Modding techniques tend to change over time, I've noticed. For example, puzzle pieces being replaced with flex pieces. While looking for the Maxis Parks to Bottom mod (which may have been on a different site) I actually came across a thread (that I posted in) from back in 2012 that said submenus are impossible, and yet here we are. Starcraft 1's official editor StarEdit actually got discontinued because the third-party alternatives like SCMDraft were much better. And there's the whole thing in Gmod with LVS superseding LFS.

MPS was first released back in 2016;, back then, submenus were deemed to be impossible. Even I thought such a thing could never happen without a miracle, and even lowkey considered an effort to just organize button order so that sets were properly grouped together.

5 minutes ago, 11241036 said:

What puzzles me, however, is why exactly the four lots shown above appear in the menu and all others not. Those are the 4 new additions that come with Version 2 of the MPS. I've taken the liberty of looking into the files, trying to find out the difference between them and all other lots.

Since it in my experience only happens when the main .dat file is further datpacked using JDatPacker, there must be something going on with the format when .dat files are datpacked further. I originally thought that it was choosing exactly four lots because the connectors file has four lots and there was an override taking place as a result of two files becoming, but in my more recent testing (datpacking just the main and texture override files) that wasn't the case. This revelation shows that there is indeed a pattern to why those four specifically, but beyond that, nothing seems to line up beyond coincidence. This bug is a particularly strange one...

[atsf189 460]

1 hour ago, 11241036 said:

Since I heard that one of my own uploads

Is this possibly a instance ID conflict between the sub menu ID and the file?

[rsc204 21,808]

On 08/06/2024 at 7:05 PM, Max4k said:

I can't seem to find the Maxis ranger station. It's not in the sub menu or parks menu

Works for me with v 1.1.2 - the ranger station won't appear in any submenus though.

On 06/06/2024 at 2:17 AM, Wiimeiser said:

I know PEG Utopian Canals (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) are appearing in the Commercial Lots instead of the Canals submenu

Can't be avoided, since these are Com plops with jobs, if you remove that Occ Group they won't function. However this will be fixed when I use dedicated SubMenus for PEG content.

On 12/06/2024 at 4:31 PM, Wiimeiser said:

It appears datpacking may be causing issues, as with the Modular Plaza System when I datpacked it only four lots appeared in the menu at all.

Yes and no, the problem is slightly more complex and basically comes down to failing to read the instructions of the mod.

Quote

MPS_Submenu Park.dat, MPS_Submenu Plazas.dat (mandatory when using memo‘s Submenus DLL mod): contains the submenu entry files for the MPS lots. Only use one of these two files.

My emphasis.

If you failed to remove one of these and DAT Packed both together, it's going to screw things up (technical, can't be bothered to explain). But essentially this appears to be the root of your problems.

7 minutes ago, atsf189 said:

Is this possibly a instance ID conflict between the sub menu ID and the file?

I can confirm no such conflict exists, see here for instructions of how to use the Plugins Analyser, you can find conflicts (or verify there are none), in seconds with this tool.

2 hours ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

I remind you that almost 90% (If we want to exaggerate) of the mods on STEX and LEX (Excluding SC4E where there are the correct mods) were made with old modding methods and consequently may have problems with submenus.  We already know about the problem and the interventions to be done but you have to be patient

Exactly. SubMenus are new functionality and whilst Memo has made great strides in trying to find a way to auto-categorise as much as possible, users/the community are going to have to do some work where this simply isn't possible.

However it doesn't help when we have to go running around looking for problems that aren't really there, because people are just listing problems without bothering to look for items or have failed to follow the installation instructions.

[memo 1,444]

5 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

Since it in my experience only happens when the main .dat file is further datpacked using JDatPacker, there must be something going on with the format when .dat files are datpacked further.

My guess is that you have a copy of the old version of the MPS in your compressed plugins folder. To fix this, delete the compressed plugins folder and regenerate it from scratch using JDatPacker (after removing the old MPS from your uncompressed plugins if still present there).

Generally, JDatPacker preserves loading order, even when duplicate files are merged into a single .dat file. (Only in the presence of file types different from .dat, the loading order is slightly different for technical reasons.)

[Wiimeiser 444]

4 hours ago, memo said:

My guess is that you have a copy of the old version of the MPS in your compressed plugins folder.

It turns out I did indeed have a duplicate under a later folder, specifically "Plaza", while the new version was in "MPS". Removing it did indeed fix the problem, meaning the whole situation was user error. I'd strangely never considered this as a possibility until just now, and I could have sworn that the problem was still happening after removing all packed plugins except the MPS. 

This does explain why the four new lots were specifically what was appearing, and why not datpacking fixed it.

8 hours ago, rsc204 said:

If you failed to remove one of these and DAT Packed both together, it's going to screw things up (technical, can't be bothered to explain). But essentially this appears to be the root of your problems.

I never used more than one at a time, I only used MPS_Submenu Plazas.dat, and moving it out of the MPS folder was actually one of the first things I did in trying to diagnose the issue.

[Kel9509 1,363]

12 hours ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

I remind you that almost 90% (If we want to exaggerate) of the mods on STEX and LEX (Excluding SC4E where there are the correct mods) were made with old modding methods and consequently may have problems with submenus.  We already know about the problem and the interventions to be done but you have to be patient

That is so true.  I've had to fix many older ploppable commercial lots that provide jobs, since they technically provided jobs but seemed to somehow still be coded as Landmark Eyecandys.  And then there's the landmarks that are churches, but not coded as churches (providing no cap relief either).  

Technically, SC4E even has this issue.  For instance, RedDonQuixote's landmark of St Pauls Cathedral, London is eyecandy only and I edited it to be an actual church that provides large cap relief, with the correct occupant group.  

Bottom line is, these are advanced mods and require some learning and tweaking from each user to make right for their own game.

[Wiimeiser 444]

1 hour ago, Kel9509 said:

That is so true.  I've had to fix many older ploppable commercial lots that provide jobs, since they technically provided jobs but seemed to somehow still be coded as Landmark Eyecandys.  And then there's the landmarks that are churches, but not coded as churches (providing no cap relief either).  

I've noticed a lot of lots seem to be coded strangely. For example, the Logging Town corner lots (diner etc) have jobs despite presumably being intended to be inaccessible, though that at least makes some amount of sense. For another, the OWW 1 canal interface lots are apparently government buildings... though I chalk that one up to being a copy of one and Pegasus forgetting to change the necessary exemplars (though granted it didn't matter until recently)

1 hour ago, Kel9509 said:

Bottom line is, these are advanced mods and require some learning and tweaking from each user to make right for their own game.

Advanced is correct, I've barely been able to figure out how some of the stuff even works with the lot editors and such. I know I've tweaked some myself; back when Prop Pox was still a major issue I deleted one of the modified props known to cause it, and more recently I patched the Air Force Base so that it no longer conflicted with Area 5.1. I've also made my own custom loading text mod, though using another one as a base.

[nathkel 31]

I have a feeling this new DLL will soon become an integral mod in the same way NAM has become. And I'm wondering if this would be the best motivation and time to standardize our thousands of user-created Lots so that this and other future DLLs can easily accommodate older lots and ploppables.

What if we started a "task force" to apply standard exemplars to old lots to bring them up to date, as well as provide standardized instructions for modders of new lots to follow so that this and future DLLs can easily include all types of custom material?

If this sounds good in principle, then i suggest we start a new thread to debate what the lot standards should be if the author wants them included 8n the "canon," if you will.