Submenus DLL

[TogaMasterJohn 705]

My apologies if this has been brought up before; I've read through the entire thread, but it's possible that I may have missed something.

I'm not sure if it is even possible (with or without another DLL mod), but I figured I would mention it just in case.

Should a residential submenu be considered for ploppable residential lots? If not now, perhaps in the future? With the ability to growify residential buildings, if one were to create ploppable residential lots, would it be possible to create a ploppable residential submenu?

[rsc204 21,808]

So far as I understand this is being considered and is seemingly possible. Personally I am not convinced it matters whether such a menu appears under the res zoning menu or as just another submenu, but other obviously feel differently. 

[hugues aroux 3,784]

@memo .. Submenu 1.1.0 with the use of a cohort file seriously changes the situation. I had hoped for it, YOU did it!  I'm a big, huge, lazy person, and now it's going to be a little easier to manage the content of the submenu.
All that remains is to move on to the next step... the little-big () program, with little onions as we say at home, which parses \Plugins and allows us to assign each Lot to a submenu -> Common Base of Submenus level 1 (XML for Update NAM ... others ...), assignment of icons, and personal structuring of levels 2, 3, etc ; and generates the menus examplars and the associated cohort files!
Whaaaaaat ? .. We can dream !?

[memo 1,444]

On 4/6/2024 at 11:58 PM, atsf189 said:

I have several ploppable landmarks with jobs that I have made submenus for categorizing them by type of building. 

I would rather not have these automatically moved to some menu I can not find. If there is a landmarks with jobs menu that is hidden unless used might

be a better way. Then people can decide how they like them categorized.

A building is automatically categorized and moved into a matching submenu only if a custom submenu hasn't already been set in the building's exemplar file. So if you created submenus for some of your buildings, all of them would be unaffected by the auto-categorization.

I have made some progress on the implementation. For example, my commercial menu now contains submenus for functional landmarks with commercial jobs (with placeholder icons, for now). As long as a building was correctly modded with PIM-X, it is moved into the menus automatically. The educational menu now has submenu buttons as well (elementary schools, high schools, higher education, libraries & museums) and all existing educational content should fall into one of those categories, so would appear in one of the submenus instead of the top-level menu.

 

I've also implemented this auto-categorization for the police, health and power menus as well as various transport menus.

For some of the other proposed standard submenus (e.g. canals), the corresponding items do not hold enough relevant data to correctly categorize them automatically, so those items still need to be moved explicitly.

On 4/7/2024 at 1:05 AM, TogaMasterJohn said:

Should a residential submenu be considered for ploppable residential lots? If not now, perhaps in the future? With the ability to growify residential buildings, if one were to create ploppable residential lots, would it be possible to create a ploppable residential submenu?

Do you have examples of ploppable residential landmarks? I'd like to inspect their modding to see if they could be auto-categorized as well.

8 hours ago, hugues aroux said:

All that remains is to move on to the next step... the little-big () program, with little onions as we say at home, which parses \Plugins and allows us to assign each Lot to a submenu -> Common Base of Submenus level 1 (XML for Update NAM ... others ...), assignment of icons, and personal structuring of levels 2, 3, etc ; and generates the menus examplars and the associated cohort files!

Personally, I don't have intentions of creating such a program. I think what we're trying to do here with the standardization of level-1 submenus has the potential for creating a system that mostly works for everyone out of the box (if popular lot sets are updated with level-2 submenus), which should reduce the need for such a program.

[Panda 209]

Just a heads up, I'm pretty busy recently, so I will not be working on the submenu icons for several weeks. I plan to finish them, it just may be in a month or two.

[TogaMasterJohn 705]

2 hours ago, memo said:

Do you have examples of ploppable residential landmarks? I'd like to inspect their modding to see if they could be auto-categorized as well.

Unfortunately, I do not know if any exist at this time. However, if some were to be created in the future, what would be necessary to include in order to have them be auto-categorizable?

[JulioC 2,580]

8 hours ago, memo said:

Do you have examples of ploppable residential landmarks? I'd like to inspect their modding to see if they could be auto-categorized as well.

 

I remember years ago in a very old plugins folder I had that doesnt exist anymore I had maxis RCI buildings in the landmark menu, including residentials

I think it was this mod

Even if its not, I'm sure it existed a RCI maxis ploppable buildings mod that showed then in the landmarks menu

[memo 1,444]

1 hour ago, JulioC said:

I remember years ago in a very old plugins folder I had that doesnt exist anymore I had maxis RCI buildings in the landmark menu, including residentials

I think it was this mod

Thanks. It looks like they are modded in the same way functional landmarks with jobs are modded. They also work with the growify cheat and will now appear in the residential menu as well:

7 hours ago, TogaMasterJohn said:

However, if some were to be created in the future, what would be necessary to include in order to have them be auto-categorizable?

It's based on the PIM-X categories. For, say, an R$$$ building to appear in the residential submenu, you're going to need two occupant groups (Building: Landmark, Building: R$$$) as well as the Capacity Satisfied property.

Of course, for anything created in the future, you could just include the corresponding Building Submenus property explicitly. These are going to be their IDs:

• Ploppable R$ (0x93DADFE9)
• Ploppable R$$ (0x984E5034)
• Ploppable R$$$ (0x9F83F133)

[memo 1,444]

I've uploaded a new prerelease, version 1.1.1 of the DLL. This includes many of the planned submenus with icons created by @Panda (many thanks). Some of the menus still use placeholder icons.

The included submenus are listed in the Readme file. Not covered so far are the Flora, Water, Garbage, Fire and Landmark menus as I'm still a bit undecided about them.

This version of the DLL also includes the auto-categorization feature I mentioned earlier. The categorization might not always be perfect. If you find items appearing in unexpected menus, let me know.

  

[Wiimeiser 444]

I think we might need to sort the Parks Menu by not just type, but also park/canal/etc set... I just recorded a seven minute video of nothing but scrolling down.

[Kel9509 1,363]

On 4/19/2024 at 2:02 PM, memo said:

I've uploaded a new prerelease, version 1.1.1 of the DLL. This includes many of the planned submenus with icons created by @Panda (many thanks). Some of the menus still use placeholder icons.

Did you intend to only upload this on Github, or here as well?  Right now the version hosted here is the older version.

[memo 1,444]

On 4/23/2024 at 5:14 AM, Kel9509 said:

Did you intend to only upload this on Github, or here as well?  Right now the version hosted here is the older version.

Yes. This version is not final yet due to lack of some menus and icons, but releasing it like this allows to get some feedback from you all, so that potential problems can be fixed. If it turns out to be stable or you want to link to it as a dependency for your own mods, I can upload it to the STEX as well.

On 4/22/2024 at 2:57 PM, Wiimeiser said:

I think we might need to sort the Parks Menu by not just type, but also park/canal/etc set...

I think we are all in agreement that it would be nice to have 2nd-level submenus for lot sets such as those. This just requires collecting the IDs of the buildings and creating an icon for each set. If anyone wants to help here, that would be a big favor for the community. I don't know how to handle the logistics of it, but such submenus could be added to the files of the original upload or can be collected in an external mod of community-created submenus.

[Wiimeiser 444]

For the feedback, I'm liking what's been done so far. That said, the Healthcare menu needs a bit of cleanup, due to people starting to use it once the Parks menu got too full.

For the Parks Submenus, I thought of that because there was an absolute ton of stuff in my parks menu, enough that it would take 8 minutes of nonstop scrolling to see it all. So all the bigger menus definitely need to be sorted. Off the top of my head, there's:

Parks Menu:
SimGoober Canals*
CallaGrafx Canals
SG-Cal Canals
ACS*
Oppie Canals*
Moonlight JPN Canals
RPK*
Diggis Ponds
PEG Ponds
PEG Canals*
BSC Parks*
WMP Alotments
Dutch Parks
Royal Park Set
Park Collection (Monkeywater, Dinky, Etc)
Paeng Memorial Paths
Paeng's Urban Gardens
Paeng White Sand Paths^
Big Paeng Theory
Low Wealth Parks Set
Medium Wealth Parks Set*
High Wealth Parks Set
PEG Pine Trails*
PEG Narrow Trails
BSC Narrow Trails
BSC Rural Set
SFBT Sand Paths
SFBT Parks (w/ Roadside Garage)
Copacabana*
Some guy's new bike paths*(?)

Misc. Transport Menu:
Modular Parking
SPAR
Logging Roads*

Health Menu:
Multiple path sets

Landmarks Menu:
Industrial Fillers
Castle lots
I can't remember anything else

*IIRC these are missing vital lots (ask me for more info)
^This actually uses your terrain mod's beach sand texture.

[pikachu_SQ 940]

I think Fire - Small, Medium and Large are needed for standard, but not for basic version.

Same to Police(except Jails and Military) and Health.

[Wiimeiser 444]

A bug I noticed before- Original OWW is missing from the Waterfronts Submenu. I believe OWWr2 is as well.

[memo 1,444]

In order to make it more apparent whether a submenu or a top-level menu is open, I've started to explore changing the appearance of the submenu frames. I've assigned a slightly darker color tone to the frame and added a back arrow (which is non-functional however). This is based on copies of the PNG files with IIDs 0x14215ed0 to 0x14215ed4 from SimCity_1.dat.

   

On 4/26/2024 at 5:37 PM, Wiimeiser said:

A bug I noticed before- Original OWW is missing from the Waterfronts Submenu. I believe OWWr2 is as well.

Thanks for the feedback. The Waterfront submenu is filled with buildings containing the "BTE: Waterfront" occupant group 0xB5C00DD6, a custom occupant group introduced by the BSC. I've checked a few of the OWW2 buildings, but they don't use this occupant group or any other property that could be used to identify them as Waterfront building. Those lots would need to be updated for them to appear in the Waterfront submenu.

[Simizen 1,098]

that is wonderful! glad to see a way to show that we're in a sub-level

[Wiimeiser 444]

There's also this way of adding submenus, but I'm not sure of what the consequences of not having every single lot in a given set would be. Only one way to find out, I guess...

[atsf189 460]

13 hours ago, Wiimeiser said:

not sure of what the consequences of not having every single lot

It is my understanding that you will have a blank menu item and then all will be off by one item in that menu

[atsf189 460]

On 4/19/2024 at 11:02 AM, memo said:

auto-categorization feature

Memo

I like all the work that you are doing with submenus. This is one of the best DLLs that have come to sc4.

I would like to have the back arrows but I personally do not like the auto-categorization feature. Can this

be turned off or is it part of the DLL file? In my opinion I think gamers should be able choose where they

 want to put their downloaded items. I do not want a bunch of icons displayed that have empty menus. 

I think this should be an optional feature

 

 

[memo 1,444]

15 hours ago, atsf189 said:

It is my understanding that you will have a blank menu item and then all will be off by one item in that menu

Seeing that you've used Exemplar Patching to assign submenu IDs, I think this would work even if you don't install all of the files. If you experience an off-by-one issue, this sounds like a bug. Please report exact steps to replicate the issue.

9 hours ago, atsf189 said:

Can this

be turned off or is it part of the DLL file? In my opinion I think gamers should be able choose where they

 want to put their downloaded items.

The categorization is hard-coded in the DLL, but it is optional in the sense that you can choose not to install a particular submenu. In that case, all the buildings of that submenu would appear in the default top-level menu as usual. Does that work for you?

Choosing where to put the downloaded items entails assigning a menu ID to each item explicitly, either by doing it oneself or by installing a third-party file that assigns the menu IDs to the items. The DLL doesn't restrict this, as explicitly assigned menu IDs always have priority over the auto-categorization.

9 hours ago, atsf189 said:

I do not want a bunch of icons displayed that have empty menus.

Empty menus aren't displayed at all.

[atsf189 460]

11 hours ago, memo said:

this sounds like a bug

I got brave and pulled one of the lots out and the remaining items worked fine.

I then went a step further and purposely corrupted the file by leaving its menu png out. That makes a blank menu item and then all

remaining were off by one item. This is what the game does also if you forget to assign a png to an item. It didn't crash so that is good.

11 hours ago, memo said:

Does that work for you?

It sounds like it is backwards compatible with previous versions. I can just leave your submenu folder out and put mine in and have things

the way I like them. I think this is important to have that choice so gamers can set things up to their own personal choices and people

that do not want to mess with assigning a menu ID to each item can just use the auto function. Yes this does work for me.

Thank you for all your time and effort with this.

[memo 1,444]

I've just uploaded version 1.1.2 of the DLL to the STEX. Compared to the previous pre-release, this adds

• back-arrows in submenus using custom UI PNG files
• a fix for the game's off-by-one menu rendering issue in case of missing icon PNG files. This now shows a placeholder icon if an icon PNG file does not exist.

All the other features of the previous pre-releases (such as the Exemplar Patching feature) are included in this release as well.

[Null 45 3,041]

1 hour ago, memo said:

All the other features of the previous pre-releases (such as the Exemplar Patching feature) are included in this release as well.

I uploaded the resource loading hooks DLL to the STEX:

That should be easier for users to install from than GitHub.

[atsf189 460]

4 hours ago, memo said:

just uploaded version 1.1.2 of the DLL

This works Great. I added the essentials file and the new .dll file to my existing submenu folder and it works perfect.

I even added the transit and rail Submenus to my folder and they work good too. I like the option of being able to

choose the auto submenus that I want to use. I like to have the Submenu Buttons the first thing in the menu so

I will edit the Item Order property for the auto ones that I want to use.

Thank you for the game's off-by-one menu rendering issue I ran into this when I mistyped an ID for a .png

 

[AsimPika3172 1,136]

Thanks for nice submenus! But.... clicking POLICE button (any one) for submenu, the games becomes SLOOOOWWW.... to loading....

[memo 1,444]

3 hours ago, AsimPika3172 said:

clicking POLICE button (any one) for submenu, the games becomes SLOOOOWWW.... to loading....

Thanks for reporting this problem. Unfortunately, I cannot replicate it. Do you have more details?

Do you have a very large plugins folder? Do you have many custom police stations and which ones? Do you experience the same problem when opening other submenus, such as the ones from the education menu?

Could you try to isolate the problem? Maybe it's a related to a specific plugin file, in which case it would help if you could identify this plugin file by removing everything else from your plugins folder.

[AsimPika3172 1,136]

I got many police (small, large, deluxe) from this website, former sc4devotion, japanese websites, simcityplaza etc... 🤔

 

[Kel9509 1,363]

On 4/13/2024 at 4:27 PM, memo said:

As long as a building was correctly modded with PIM-X, it is moved into the menus automatically. The educational menu now has submenu buttons as well (elementary schools, high schools, higher education, libraries & museums) and all existing educational content should fall into one of those categories, so would appear in one of the submenus instead of the top-level menu.

I am using v1.2 of this mod and while a lot of my buildings were auto-categorized, some were not.  I'll need to fix those.  Can you explain more about the building exemplar properties that the optional submenus refer to (or maybe also the Exemplar Patch feature) when doing the auto-categorization, so I can properly fix the buildings in PIM-X?  It's mostly older Commercial buildings that were made long before PIM-X was created, but there are some odd results (I have a "large" police station inside the "Small" category, and a "large" hospital inside the Medium category).  It'd be helpful to see documentation or information about the optional submenu categories you created.  For instance, what defines a "small" police building vs. a medium or large one?  Same for hospitals, etc.  I think schools are more obvious, but it'd be nice to know the technical distinctions for those as well if possible.

[memo 1,444]

@Kel9509 The categorization mostly follows the same categories that are used by PIM-X, so if PIM-X is used for modding, the categories should fit in most cases. This is mainly based on occupant groups.

For the exact categorization rules used by the DLL, look here at the categorization source code (version 1.1.2), with these occupant group definitions. The occupant groups can also be found in the new_properties.xml.

These rules aren't set in stone. I will tweak them if I learn about miscategorizations that can be fixed. For example, I've just changed the Small Police submenu to exclude items from the larger police submenus. The health menus are a bit of an odd case, as I haven't seen a hospital yet that falls into the Large Hospital category.

If you fix the modding of some of the files, consider getting in touch with the STEX moderators to see if the files of the original upload can be updated with the fix.

5 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

(or maybe also the Exemplar Patch feature)

I use Exemplar Patching whenever correct auto-categorization is not possible for an individual building. It's equivalent to explicitly assigning a Building Submenu ID to an individual building (which has higher priority than the auto-categorization).