Let's write our own SC4 Building Styles

[Ulisse Wolf 4,461]

 Let's write our own SC4 Building Styles

With the unlocking of the Master IID for building styles we have 12 free community styles that we can use to create generic styles. 

Currently we have 4 styles which are the original styles developed by Maxis (Chicago 1890 - New York 1940 - Houston 1990 - European Contemporary) and 12 free styles 

Now as an initial proposal I was thinking about this organization

0x00002000 - Commercial (Chicago 1890)

0x00002001 - Art Deco (New York 1940)

0x00002002 - Postmodern (Houston 1990)

0x00002003 - Contemporary (Euro-Contemporany)

0x00002004 - Mediterranean

0x00002005 - Japanese

0x00002006 - Cyberpunk

0x00002007 - Soviet

0x00002008 - Latin America

0x00002009 - European W2W

0x0000200A - American W2W

0x0000200B - Middle East

0x0000200C - Art Nouveau

0x0000200D - Hong Kong

0x0000200E - Tropical

0x0000200F - North Europa

This list is a draft to create community styles that are generic without going into too much detail but still implies that we need to find common ground. 

[Kel9509 1,483]

Just to clarify, you're open to the idea of over 4 thousand possible building styles?  I guess that means that they're basically being treated like building family ranges?

Even though I made a proof of concept showing multiple styles, I'm not sure how anyone would manage more than 20 or 100, let alone thousands:

Did I let the cat out of the bag?

[Ulisse Wolf 4,461]

3 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

Just to clarify, you're open to the idea of over 4 thousand possible building styles?  I guess that means that they're basically being treated like building family ranges?

Even though I made a proof of concept showing multiple styles, I'm not sure how anyone would manage more than 20 or 100, let alone thousands:

Did I let the cat out of the bag?

Yes. Currently we only have the range 0x00002000 - 0x00002FFF which gives us modularity in installing styles according to people's needs. For this reason that styles can be treated as if they were building family ranges.  

Obviously the range 0x00002000 - 0x00002FFF should be enough to satisfy all needs but in the eventuality one can extend the range with another empty range

In ideal cases people will use a maximum of 48 styles up to 80 styles (In extreme cases it goes up to 2088 styles),  but in reality we anticipate that people will use between 20 and 30 styles because of the modoluarity of the mod. The only drawback would be the editing of the UI but it can be circumvented if a tool is developed that facilitates the editing of the UI or the patience to edit the UI code

 

[Wiimeiser 452]

SNM should definitely be given its own range somewhere, though that would likely be in the scope of the mod itself, assuming there's still someone around to update it. I assume MTP and Utopia (if the latter even has anything) would likewise be the same.

[Gemeentekaart 72]

Idk how it works, but here is the list I proposed after I read yours:

2004 - Eastern Asian/ Oriental (JP, HK, CN, KR)

2005 - Tropical (South Asia, SEA, etc)

2006 - Middle East

2007 - Mediterranean

2008 - Carribean

2009 - Latinas

200A - WW2

200B - 200F TBA

 

I do think we need to be more effetive on the Building Style, as the vanilla were simply not a good example. The vanilla has 4 styles, 3 America and 1 EU, which clearly said it was only 2 styles. So, IMO we dont need to add more American and EU to the upcoming list.

[Simizen 1,100]

Absolutely in favor of the Japanese, Hong Kong, and Art Nouveau styles. And I do like the idea of a Cyberpunk style as I feel that'd be fun to have in the game.

And, for sure, something we should do, is have more European styles, cause the default options in the game are simply 3 American styles, and 1 conglomerate Euro style. That said, I know Art Nouveau was a more European style than it ever was American, so that could help to balance things out a little bit, as Art Deco kicked off at almost the same time, which would be a lovely balance of the two imo. After that, I feel that the Euro-Contemporary style could be split into multiple types (if possible) to help give us more Euro styles as needed.

However, not entirely sure about the W2W styles. Like, those seem like they would just work better under previous styles. That said, I just had an idea for W2W stuff that I'll have to post elsewhere which might help to mitigate the need for them having their own building style slots.

But, maybe, we could have the following for Europe:
- Euro-Contemporary (possibly altered)
- Art Nouveau
- Mediterranean

And then of course just the others:
- Japanese
- Hong Kong
- Cyberpunk

Though, Cyberpunk wouldn't be an Oriental style like the other 2 are, lol

[permanate 5]

I like the proposed list, except I would prefer a general Futuristic style, rather than the more specific Cyberpunk style.

Anyone remember Peg's Utopian set? Arcologies from SC2k? Stuff like that.

[matias93 7,535]

There's a very cognizant omnibus article by @Morgan R from 2019 about this same topic, and even with the caveat that it is written with the restriction of only 4 sets in mind, it gives a great conceptual basis to define other sets using the same method.

Said that, my opinion is that maybe we shouldn't use all sets, and yet tweak the existing ones somewhat, to make the adaptation from their current usage as frictionless as possible, while also improving gameplay control.

A first thing to consider is that, increasingly since the 15th century and decidedly since the mid-19th century, formal architectural styles around the world became mostly international, so the need for regional style sets, in a simulation that usually represents cities not much older than that, would be quite narrow. Instead of devoting whole sets to specific places, I would follow Morgan R, and Maxis for what is worth, and mostly operate on a temporal basis, with the tilesets representing broad periods that can be selected sequentially to simulate the slow progression of architectural trends on a city.

Another thing to consider is that, even with the number of custom buildings the community has created in these two decades, there's still not enough diversity to even produce functional tilesets for some styles, this is, having at least 3 or 4 different buildings per each combination of zone, wealth level, density and growth stage. According to the Building Index, Maxis included something close to 100 different buildings for each of its sets, even if, admittedly, some of them are repeated, for example, using the same model for a commercial office and a commercial service.

I don't think we have enough buildings to make many of the proposed tilesets functional: for example, how many BATs of suburban Middle Eastern houses have you seen, or of low density and high wealth Latin American commercial services? We probably would have a good coverage of skyscrapers for most sets to be sure, but cities are mostly small-scale buildings, not CBDs, and while it would be perfectly acceptable to reuse some of the buildings and lots of the other sets, this approach also has its limits.

What I would propose instead is to use the existing tilesets as a rough architectural periodisation scheme, and then evaluate how much of them can be disaggregated to justify adding extra tilesets. Following Morgan R, I would propose using Chicago as the Neoclassical tileset, New York as the Noveau/Deco tileset , Houston as the Modern/International one, and Europe as the Postmodern one.

Aside from those four, other sets could be constructed as deliberately incomplete and intended to be used only in addition to one or more of the full ones, given their historical specificity. For example, an early Baroque set (including Mediterranean and colonial-styled Latin American buildings) could be constructed so as to be capped and not include high rises in the higher growth stages, but only increasingly dense low-rise buildings. Then, to simulate the advancement from there to the big-scale architecture of the 20th century, the player would need to activate another tileset, and its buildings, with bigger occupancy numbers, would naturally replace the existing ones. This approach, which, in my opinion, would be the best suited for very local tilesets or historical or fantasy sets, would also be flexible enough to allow for the posterior inclusion of high-rise buildings on the tileset, if some BATter were so inclined.

Subject to the availability of buildings, I would also back making a second set of period-based tilesets, for example, some sort of Pan-Asian alternate series, but again, I'm not sure of how much distinctive it would end being in the later periods, or if things like the huge Hongkongese condo complexes should just be considered as high density and max growth stage Postmodern residential buildings, that would naturally don't grow on a less dense city, built according to European or North American standards.

[TheTimvh1 939]

Where can I purchase the digital version?

[Null 45 3,117]

29 minutes ago, TheTimvh1 said:

Where can I purchase the digital version?

Steam or GOG.

[Simizen 1,100]

that sounds really interesting, and seems like it would have some interesting effects with the gameplay, especially regarding the locking of the taller office buildings behind certain tilesets. Certainly not against this idea, for sure, and would love to see how this develops.

Curious though, would the other sets strictly have those taller buildings, or would we have to say, activate like the Chicago set, alongside one of the others, such as the Mediterranean? Cause I feel like that could cause problems with mixing styles if that happened.

[Homgr 5]

dumb question : How to make USSR style or any file can easily get it.

[Kel9509 1,483]

I like Ulisse Wolf's list.  It looks very familiar!  Heh.  

Some are obvious:  I think Paris has enough unique buildings that it deserves its own set.  I think it'd be nice to have a style for Hong Kong.  If you look in the Building Sets section of STEX, you'll see a lot of Amsterdam, Dutch or Hamburg-named buildings.  I don't know if those should be one set or not.  And the Building Sets section has a lot of W2W American-style buildings that are clearly designed for places like a modern New York City, but aren't Art Deco.  Same for a lot of W2W European sets.  Those as distinct building styles might not seem obvious at first, until you realize that there's a great many of them out there.  

Basically, any large group of existing buildings that doesn't easily fit into any of the current sets probably would need to have its own, like Paris, or any of the various Japanese or Asian-derived buildings (Hong Kong might be distinct enough from a Japanese set), etc.

If you are creating a city and want to build a little Chinatown neighborhood, then it'd be so easy to just click off all the other sets and click on an Asian themed set, and there it goes.  

The only problem with building sets is managing the historical setting, to ensure that a particular set isn't replaced with another one after it grows.  Simtropolis probably should consider hosting the AutoHistorical DLL mod as well, as it was only posted on the SC4 Devotion forums.

[kbieniu7 266]

Wow, even more possibilities arises to this 20-year old game. Marvelous!

3 hours ago, matias93 said:

What I would propose instead is to use the existing tilesets as a rough architectural periodisation scheme, and then evaluate how much of them can be disaggregated to justify adding extra tilesets. Following Morgan R, I would propose using Chicago as the Neoclassical tileset, New York as the Noveau/Deco tileset , Houston as the Modern/International one, and Europe as the Postmodern one.

Aside from those four, other sets could be constructed as deliberately incomplete and intended to be used only in addition to one or more of the full ones, given their historical specificity. For example, an early Baroque set (including Mediterranean and colonial-styled Latin American buildings) could be constructed so as to be capped and not include high rises in the higher growth stages, but only increasingly dense low-rise buildings. Then, to simulate the advancement from there to the big-scale architecture of the 20th century, the player would need to activate another tileset, and its buildings, with bigger occupancy numbers, would naturally replace the existing ones. This approach, which, in my opinion, would be the best suited for very local tilesets or historical or fantasy sets, would also be flexible enough to allow for the posterior inclusion of high-rise buildings on the tileset, if some BATter were so inclined.

That sounds good, I would agree with this attitude. Time periods would be as useful as geographical location.

And yeah, the Maxis "European contemporary" fits perfectly for the postmodernism. Especially that the "contemporary" for SC4 release was quite matching this style then

6 hours ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

0x00002007 - Soviet

Just a small note: as I guess, such would mean for pre-fabs and other post-war architecture of the Eastern Block (adding Poland, Czechia, Hungary, East Germany, etc.)? If such, I would not use the name "soviet" there, as it actually narrows the location to the former USSR. Instead I would just use "Eastern European".

But for sure, would also like to see a W2W sets as well, as it would be a useful too.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,109]

By no means do I wish to spoil the fun for you, but I intend to use additional building styles in a completely different fashion. Bear with me while I explain my own workflow with the downloads...

I have several regions that I play with and each has a distinct geographical location. Because of this, each region has its own BAT folder which represents distinct architecture for this or that particular region. What I do is simply switch these BAT folders on and off depending "where" I play.

Of course, this has certain drawbacks which come from the way the game manages growables. If, for example, I have two buildings which have similar stats (for instance, both are level 5 and both have 245 occupants) the game will select only one of these two for construction most of the time, while the other will be virtually absent.

And this is actually where I can see the biggest benefit that comes from additional building styles. Now, one can put these two similar buildings into two or more different building styles... This way, they no longer block or compete with each other and can coexist under different labels!

Anyway, the bottom line is that I plan to continue using old-fashioned plugin BAT folders to designate regional building sets. At the same time, I intend to use "additional building styles" as an alternative to "building families" that improves variety of growables that turn up in a city.

So personally, I don't care what building styles will be created, because I plan to use this excellent feature only as a tool.

 

[TheTimvh1 939]

I'd suggest Coruscant style, but judging from prior attempts at such buildings (i.e. those from Yuhisa), something tells me their byte sizes would be WAY TOO BIG to be feasable in the long run.

How about sci-fi in general tho?

[Girafarig 1,415]

I think a discussion about styles should focus, perhaps, not so much in a particular style that happened during a particular time period and location (or not necessarily -- I know the Maxis styles are at least presented like that), but on different possible styles linked together by specific criteria that makes them blend well. For instance, I would add the following:

• Paris/Second Empire: I know Paris and the Second Empire are literally "a particular time period and location", but also the style itself has been copied in other cities (Buenos Aires has a ton of the same architecture, for instance). It's also a style that 's very easy to recognise: mansard roofs, standardised height and cast iron decoration. Enabling this style would also allow for other buildings that fit some, but not all of the Haussmann-style criteria but still fit in nicely -- just as Paris has some buildings that deviate from the norm, but they still feel like Paris.
• Brutalist/Soviet Union: I mean, yes, we have Euro-Contemporary, but Brutalism is so much more than that. It certainly feels a lot different -- gray, gritty prefabricated buildings versus the sleek, contemporary design of Euro-Cont. Basically, everything that looks dated and futuristic at the same time (?)
• Mediterranean/Middle Eastern: This encompasses a lot of architecture, but there's a common thread that links it all together: it's architecture designed for sunny, relatively dry, warm places. Here's where you'd a lot of white or brightly-coloured buildings, narrow alleyways/irregular design, maybe those cool cooling towers?
• Steampunk/Futurism: I mean, c'mon.

Conversely, I don't actually think Latin America should be a style of its own. While there have been some great Latin American architects, this is a very large continent with lots of very different places. Mexico City does not look anything like Buenos Aires, which in turn looks very little like Valparaíso, which is definitely not similar at all to Brasília. The "Latin American" style is a potpourri of other, vastly different styles: Mediterranean, Modern, even Parisian.

I would also not make a specific Hong Kong style, maybe out of ignorance, but mostly because it feels very similar to modern or something futuristic. Maybe there's an argument for splitting "Euro-Contemporary" into European and Asian contemporary styles? I don't know.

  Edited July 11, 2024 by Girafarig  

[Ulisse Wolf 4,461]

1 hour ago, TheTimvh1 said:

I'd suggest Coruscant style, but judging from prior attempts at such buildings (i.e. those from Yuhisa), something tells me their byte sizes would be WAY TOO BIG to be feasable in the long run.

How about sci-fi in general tho?

Perhaps the post should have been published here?

 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,109]

I have two serious concerns as far as this goes...

On 10.07.2024 at 12:58 PM, Ulisse Wolf said:

So a person can make a personal style and publish it by including his lots and other lots or do a small collaborative project and create a community style

What right do I, or any other person, have to download someone else's building, earmark them with an IID and call it their building style...? 

The second trouble I have is just what @Kel9509 correctly pointed out. I can only understand the 4096 building styles bit as a trivia that says "that many combinations are possible". Certainly not a real number of building styles that will be put up on this page or on anyone's user interface...

 

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

18 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

What right do I, or any other person, have to download someone else's building, earmark them with an IID and call it their building style...? 

I haven't read the main threads on this, but I imagine what you are allowed to do is to duplicate the exemplar to make an override (changing the building style ID) and then list the original building as a dependency.

[EffTheGrid 3,726]

I'm one of the less technically inclined users here.

But I think we're all scratching our heads here, thinking 2 things about this dll:

 "wow, what an endlessly useful thing!"

 "how the heck should we use it?"

My initial thought for 'assigned, publicly available' building styles is to elaborate on the New York style through the years. Starting from 1700s and working up to modern day. So that as you progress through your game, you wind up with a cohesive set of lots growing at different times representing the architectural styles that were in vogue during the period. By having the styles change in accordance to the game's calendar, we could plan regions better and more realistically simulate organic growth with less manual effort.

Imagine starting your game at colonization in the year 1800 with wood shacks, and every 30 years progressing through time and history federalism, the georgian, then victorian era, etc.

1800 - 1830 - 1860 - 1890 - 1920 - Maxis NY 1940s - 1980 - 2010 - 2030 

This would be a useful and realistic scale of time to encompass the major styles presently found in and around Metropolitan NYC

Existing BATs (like the works of cp, justforfun, mattb325, etc) could be relotted and retrofitted as cori described above. 

Of course the amount of styles and time scale between can vary by place and number of years needed (ancient city, vs Houston). But this is my first thought if recategorizing the entire catalogue of existing BATs.

Perhaps a fuller integration this way would be to first assign (100?) major international architectural styles from around the world to choose from and baking that list into an updated version of PIM, or something. Maybe this means 100 of the cities with the most distinct styles, or 50 cities and 50 countries.

Of course I chose 100 out of a hat for simplicity's sake. You guys are working with 2048 possible styles to be assigned, right?

You could bake in options for the entire world, if I'm not mistaken?

Then there are the ramifications of selecting a building style with too few lots to grow anything at a given time, ----e.g. what If I'm using "Krakow - 1930" tileset, and nothing is able to grow because I don't visit SimCityPolska often?

And as a consequence, do we find ourselves downloading buildings with styles we don't often build with?

Either way, I see myself going forward with the NY tileset in correct chronology because I want it for my own game.

Thanks for entertaining my big dreams.

What a fun time to be alive!

 

[Ulisse Wolf 4,461]

47 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

What right do I, or any other person, have to download someone else's building, earmark them with an IID and call it their building style...? 

Just create a duplicate of the affected building exemplar change the buildings style and you got your patch with the changed building style. 

Obviously before you do these things you have to make sure that the affected lots does not have critical bugs such as Immortal Lot Syndrome so before you create the patch you have to notify the right people for them to be able to fix bugs if you detect it or have serious suspicions

54 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

The second trouble I have is just what @Kel9509 correctly pointed out. I can only understand the 4096 building styles bit as a trivia that says "that many combinations are possible". Certainly not a real number of building styles that will be put up on this page or on anyone's user interface...

As I specified a person should use about 48 or 80 styles in the optimal case (But even less in real cases), and with a modification of the ui by reducing font size of the letters and enlarging the box the desired effect is achieved. But considering the possible developments of mod DLLs and in the extreme case an OpenSC4 comes out then it opens up scenarios where a person can use 2088 styles (4096 are the total styles using the 0x00002000 - 0x00002FFF range but we will never actually get there because of how the styles were partitioned. ). This is a remote case but it is possible so the mod has to respond according to the ongoing changes going on in the community. 

[Kel9509 1,483]

44 minutes ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

As I specified a person should use about 48 or 80 styles in the optimal case (But even less in real cases), and with a modification of the ui by reducing font size of the letters and enlarging the box the desired effect is achieved

There are some practical limits to the UI, even if in theory it can be edited to the extreme.  Since I've done this, I'll note several things about the Building Styles UI:

1. The background box is a PNG image that would need to be manually edited to be made larger.  While this is not too hard, it is impractical to do unless there is a real need for it.  My test mod had approximately 16 building styles (the 4 original plus 12 new ones).  I note that's the same amount, 12, proposed for "community" building styles.  There was no need to manually edit the background box image with only 16 styles, as they all fit using the same large bold style and checkboxes.  All I had to do was remove the existing pictures of the default styles to get the room needed for the added custom styles.

2. With font reduction, maybe 24-30 styles can probably be squeezed into the existing Building Style UI without manually editing the background box PNG.  This is just a guess, though.

3. While I learned how to edit the UI, I suspect it is highly impractical for most people to learn how to do this.  It involves a lot of trial-and-error to get it right, especially if you're going down a more extreme road of editing the background images and making the entire UI larger.  I quickly abandoned that in my test case because it would've been too difficult for now.  So the problem becomes, how to do actually USE a custom style of yours that's been assigned to you?  Does every lot editor now need to learn how to edit the UI?  At a minimal level?  

4. While I could easily post a UI mod to the default game (and maybe some color mods as well) that includes the 4 originals, 12 community styles, and maybe room for 6-12+ "custom" styles, that UI mod would necessarily need to be "incomplete" so that people could edit the UI in Reader to input their own custom styles.  It'd be a new development to post a "template" mod that people need to manually edit in Reader in order to get working.  Would people be ok with that?

5. While I'm sure many know, there are others who aren't aware of how building style control works in Simcity4: It only actually builds ONE style at a time every year.  Even if you have all 4 of the original styles checked off to rotate through them over X years, or select build all styles at once, at best it will only build one style per year (or X years).  This has been extensively tested.  So this inherent limitation hidden behind the UI means that you cannot just select 20 building styles simultaneously and expect to have a lot of new variety.  Simultaneous styles do not happen.  

Given the limits of how building styles are actually used by the game, I view this mod as a "neighborhood controller" in the sense that I can use it to build a Chinatown neighborhood within an existing city (all other buildings being marked historical while this happens, with the AutoHistorical mod) or build a Paris-style city next to my other cities easily enough without having to worry about non-Paris styles cropping up.

And personally, I probably will only use the Community styles, whatever they are.  I've never tried to build the MacVicar building as a neighborhood, or a neighborhood of a certain lots of Rowhouses, etc.  This mod will certainly permit that, although it is odd to have the UI edited to only grow a select handful of buildings.

1 hour ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

But considering the possible developments of mod DLLs and in the extreme case an OpenSC4 comes out then it opens up scenarios where a person can use 2088 styles

Is this wishful thinking or do you know of further developments here?

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

25 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Background box is a PNG image that would need to be manually edited to be made larger.  While this is not too hard, it is impractical to do unless there is a real need for it.

@Cyclone Boom already extended the size of it:

 

And is willing to share that as well as help edit it. Also, it's quite likely the template idea you've mentioned could work well by copying the code as text, doing a search and replace, and then putting it back in Reader. (Or does Reader already have that ability? I've forgotten a lot in the past two years.)

Additionally, we are perfectly willing to share the lots and textures we created.

[Lazarou Monkey Terror 1,838]

On 7/10/2024 at 2:21 AM, permanate said:

I like the proposed list, except I would prefer a general Futuristic style, rather than the more specific Cyberpunk style.

Anyone remember Peg's Utopian set? Arcologies from SC2k? Stuff like that.

The whole Sim Mars project too. Some lovely buildings from that

[Null 45 3,117]

23 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

5. While I'm sure many know, there are others who aren't aware of how building style control works in Simcity4: It only actually builds ONE style at a time every year.  Even if you have all 4 of the original styles checked off to rotate through them over X years, or select build all styles at once, at best it will only build one style per year (or X years).  This has been extensively tested.  So this inherent limitation hidden behind the UI means that you cannot just select 20 building styles simultaneously and expect to have a lot of new variety.  Simultaneous styles do not happen.  

I had looked into this at one point based on this ST thread, and I didn't see anything obviously wrong with the game's code. But I may not have been looking in the right place. Quoting the technical part of my SC4E reply on this topic below:

Quote

The disassembly for the style selection portion of that method appeared to be equivalent to the following pseudo-code:

  Code (Reveal hidden contents)

if (styleCount > 0 && lotPurposeType >= Residence && lotPurposeType <= Office)
{
  if (build all styles at once)
  {
     for each style in selectedStyles
     {
        if (lotConfiguration.IsCompatibleWithStyleType(style))
        {
           canBuildLot = true
        }
     } 
  }
  else
  {
    activeStyle = selectedStyles[current style index]
    if (lotConfiguration.IsCompatibleWithStyleType(activeStyle))
    {
       canBuildLot = true
    }
  }
}

 

 

23 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

Would people be ok with that?

I think that would be extremely useful. It would still require editing the check boxes, but should be much simpler than having to copy and position them.

The 3 check box properties that would need to be edited are Caption, Caption Res and ID. Caption and Caption Res control the name of the check box. ID is the most important property as it control the building style that the check box represents. Both Caption and Caption Res can be edited in the UI file properties pane of Reader 1.5.4, but I didn't see any obvious way to edit the ID from within the Reader interface.

I am currently working on adding support for custom non-style check boxes to the more building styles DLL. This is intended to allow things like an Automatically Mark Lots as Historical check box. When Automatically Mark Lots as Historical is checked the DLL will mark growable lots with the active styles as historical when the game creates them.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,109]

8 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

And is willing to share that as well as help edit it.

Please do.  I'd like to expand my "styles" list (as a tool of the trade, as I already mentioned) but can't find enough time to actually sit down and have a go at UI editor... Having a template like this readily available can save a lot of time for many.

Perhaps only some instructions on how to change the names to something meaningful.

[Null 45 3,117]

26 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Perhaps only some instructions on how to change the names to something meaningful.

As I mentioned above, you would also need to change the check box ID in order for the game to recognize your style range. I have not yet found a way to do that in Reader 1.5.4, but I may be overlooking something.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,461]

There are many ideas here but I think we should start skimming all the ideas to get the 16 basic styles

So I made a second draft based on the geographical location and the history of the architecture

0x00002000 - Neoclassical (Chicago 1890)

0x00002001 - Art Deco (New York 1940)

0x00002002 - Postmodern (Houston 1990)

0x00002003 - European Contemporary (Euro-Contemporany)

0x00002004 - Mediterranean

0x00002005 - Art Nouveau

0x00002006 - Eastern Europe

0x00002007 - North Europe

0x00002008 - Middle East & Africa

0x00002009 - European W2W

0x0000200A - American W2W

0x0000200B - American Contemporany

0x0000200C - Tropical

0x0000200D - East Asia 

0x0000200E - East Asia Contemporary

0x0000200F - Futuristic

[TheMurderousCricket 5,109]

2 hours ago, Null 45 said:

As I mentioned above, you would also need to change the check box ID in order for the game to recognize your style range. I have not yet found a way to do that in Reader 1.5.4, but I may be overlooking something.

Isn't it done through UI editor? I remember making a dirty test with just a single additional style and I'm sure the game read it just fine...?