Custom Queries for Custom Buildings

[Null 45 3,114]

6 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

And is there a reason you didn't select that one to begin with? (I must be missing something)

The Maxis 0x0000106c value does exactly that, adding up the cost of all items in the Budget Item: Cost property. As I mentioned above, that scheme doesn't work for mods that have a mix of income and expense properties.

6 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

Moreover, given that your other Budget DLL mod allows you to create new purpose types, it seems that I can't make a universal query that's future-proof because in the future, if someone creates a new budget type for a series of new Reward buildings like "Airport Expenses" then that won't be picked up at all.  The purpose type suffix would be new and there's no way it'd be accounted for.  

Currently the Custom Budget Departments DLL doesn't allow creating new purpose types, it just defines two of its own for income and expense properties. It works like the Parks budget department, where each line item in a budget department is a building. I had considered adding the ability for Lua code to create line items that are separate from the plopped buildings, similar to what some of the Maxis budget departments do for thing like maintenance. But I was never able to figure out a way to make that work.

Of course, other DLLs are also free to define their own purpose types for any budget departments they create.

7 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

So at best, I can account for Landmark costs, Park costs, and Business Deal Income types.

Yes.

7 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

So technically you could create a building that falls into the Landmark cost, as well as Police and Park costs, and each with different values.  Who'd have thought that the actual budget gimmicks of real Mayors would actually extend to a simulation!  But is there a practical reason why that'd be desired for any building?  

I don't know if Maxis intended for multiple budget items to be used that way, but as you mentioned it adds a little more realism to the game. 

The only thing I can think of would be some kind of national park that would be both a park and a landmark. But I have no idea if something like that exists, or if it is practical from a game play standpoint.

[Kel9509 1,480]

Here's a preliminary test version of the Query using a Test Resort Hotel I made in PIM-X to have some big #s in its exemplar properties.

The query is the same width as the standard vertical RCI DLL query that I made previously.  You'll notice the big issue immediately is that the pollution amounts are very large and almost take up the entire width of the query.  I'm considering slightly extending the width of the query to accommodate it, but visually it looks as if it'll always be a big dividing line in the middle there.  I welcome suggestions on UI enhancements from those with experience ( @hugues aroux and anyone else).  

The Cap Relief item I'll probably build out like the building styles list, with the title on top and the amounts on the bottom so they can take up the entire width of the query.  Also, I might make a list-style tooltip similar to the building style tooltips, since that is also supported by the DLL.

Two issues with the DLL so far though.  The Power and Water amounts do not show up.  #power_consumed# and #water_consumed# seem to always report back zero (I've got them in parenthesis next to each of the standard Maxis yes/no items), despite what the exemplar properties show.  

 

[Null 45 3,114]

5 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

The Power and Water amounts do not show up.  #power_consumed# and #water_consumed# seem to always report back zero (I've got them in parenthesis next to each of the standard Maxis yes/no items), despite what the exemplar properties show.

I had another report of that on the SC4E Discord. What does the Reader show for those properties?

My suspicion is that the properties have a rep count of 1 instead of 0. The game considers a rep count of zero to be a single item, and a rep count of 1 to be an array that contains one item.
While they look like the same thing they are not interchangeable, the game uses different functions for reading single items and arrays.

[Kel9509 1,480]

6 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

What does the Reader show for those properties?

Here's a snap of the building in Reader:

[Null 45 3,114]

6 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

Here's a snap of the building in Reader:

Could you share the building or override plugin? I will have to take a look in the debugger to try and see what is going on.

Edit: The issue was a typo that I overlooked when reviewing the code, fixed in version 2.6.1.

[Kel9509 1,480]

23 hours ago, Null 45 said:

The issue was a typo that I overlooked when reviewing the code, fixed in version 2.6.1.

The power and water entries are now working with the new version of the DLL.  And I've revised the query to provide more space for the pollution numbers and cap relief amounts.  It is now a horizontal query, but not as big as my others:

Thoughts?  If this is ok I plan on using this as a template to replace all of the Maxis landmark/reward queries.  I also will use this as a base for the Park/Stadium queries - but those might not need some entries like Pollution (unless anyone knows of any crazy Park lot that generates pollution?  Maybe?).  

And @memo, I'm perfectly willing to make an abbreviated version of these without the "cheat" items.  Maybe I can cut off everything below Pollution?  Or should I cut that off too?  Let me know your thoughts.  Thanks to all who privately messaged me with thoughts and ideas, you were helpful in pushing me along to find a reasonable way forward. 

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

31 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Thoughts?

I like it. It's looking good.  

[Null 45 3,114]

2 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

unless anyone knows of any crazy Park lot that generates pollution?  Maybe?

Many of the Maxis parks remove air pollution while generating water pollution.

[Tyberius06 12,267]

7 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

I also will use this as a base for the Park/Stadium queries - but those might not need some entries like Pollution (unless anyone knows of any crazy Park lot that generates pollution?  Maybe?).

By default PIM-X doesn't give pollution decreasing stats to parks IIRC (that's something that might worth a check @Ulisse Wolf to change). It would generate water pollution and garbage for sure if one doesn't change it manually, but that is usually happens with parks with visible objects, where the object is the base model for the building exemplar. Based on your and @Null 45's work I started experimenting to revisit the BSC Parks UI, which had all sort of baked in static values, but they can be replaced now by these new codes. Here is a proof of concept:

The BSC and SimGoober UIs are full of with text files with static values, that can be replaced by these codes. I am attempting to come up with a series of new LTEXT that automate these values using the new codes and update many/most of the UIs in the BSC Essentials, BSC Parks and Canals etc... The fact is that in recent years I managed to quite overblown the BSC Essentials with additional UIs, but now I am about to trim down a bit by removing unnecessary duplications of UI PNGs and Wealth PNGs and tons of repeating text files with static values. Many/more unique UI files (from the Simgoober sets) and their "description" text files will rather go into the respective model packs, rather than taking up space in the BSC Essentials, while the generic background PNGs and wealth PNGs and text files will stay in the BSC Essentials.

[Kel9509 1,480]

4 hours ago, Tyberius06 said:

Based on your and @Null 45's work I started experimenting to revisit the BSC Parks UI, which had all sort of baked in static values, but they can be replaced now by these new codes. Here is a proof of concept:

Great minds think alike!  The inspiration for my Landmarks/Rewards/Parks query override was the BSC parks.  I had edited the BSC Parks Playground properties to align them with the Maxis playground Demand Cap relief (I think the Maxis playground provides R$ of 1000, but the BSC only had 500... not entirely sure but they didn't match) - and then I manually edited the static entries in the query (which apply to a TON of lots) to display the correct demand cap amounts.  But then I thought that it was a shame since several larger parks used one of the standard BSC Parks Queries but had significantly higher Cap Relief of 9000 across the board but the query displayed the smaller amounts and the only solution at the time would be to create a new query for those to use new static entries.  

You are a one-man army right now @Tyberius06, so if you need any help on this let me know and I'll  be glad to help.  I was also planning on overriding some other basic BSC queries that are 99% similar to the standard Maxis query but for their logo.  I wonder if updating SimGoober's custom queries are really necessary since the actual info wouldn't change (unless you add more details) since his were pretty well done.  

[Tyberius06 12,267]

5 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

I wonder if updating SimGoober's custom queries are really necessary since the actual info wouldn't change (unless you add more details) since his were pretty well done.  

Well, the thing is that the actual info is/has been changed. Many of those contents with this unique values were made by Maxis PIM and then tweaked manually and many of them was not PIM-X'd later. But I've run through all of SimGoober's contents on PIM-X, which actually changed the values and now they are not matching with the UI. Otherwise I would not bother updating the queries at all. But for example many of the commercial Lots are running with a UI which counts the bulldoze cost and the Power/Water consumption and these values were baked in per UI, but they were reflecting to the values of the STEX (pre-PIMx) versions instead of the LEX versions. And SimGoober's contents (the 2006-2008 ones) are particularly interesting in that way, that they were modded with an earlier (still under development) version of the PIM-X and many calculation have been changed by the time they released the then final version of the PIM-X in 2010. And these lots were never re-done based on the new calculations of the PIM-X. This is what I was doing in the past 2 years on and off with all the SG contents. But that meant that some of the specific custom UIs now showing different values than the actual is. 

5 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

I had edited the BSC Parks Playground properties to align them with the Maxis playground Demand Cap relief (I think the Maxis playground provides R$ of 1000, but the BSC only had 500... not entirely sure but they didn't match) - and then I manually edited the static entries in the query (which apply to a TON of lots) to display the correct demand cap amounts. 

I am guessing, but that was intentional, that some of these values are lower than the Maxis ones, as the maxis parks are mostly standalone stuff, while the BSC Parks are a semi-complex system. But yeah I wanted to do more accurate calculations for larger parks, but that would have broken the values in the UI even more. So I actually left them most as they were, because I did not want to deal with painstickingly modifying those sets then the UIs etc... And now the DLL+adjusted UIs can automate the values, which is actually quite brilliant.

[memo 1,473]

On 1/25/2026 at 8:53 PM, Kel9509 said:

Do you prefer a version with the "top half" of my draft that shows just the jobs, water, fire, pollution, etc?

On 1/30/2026 at 6:37 AM, Kel9509 said:

And @memo, I'm perfectly willing to make an abbreviated version of these without the "cheat" items.  Maybe I can cut off everything below Pollution?  Or should I cut that off too?  Let me know your thoughts.

Not exactly. What I was trying to suggest is to approach this more from a gameplay perspective, not from a modder's perspective. For example: "Flammability 39, Max Fire Stage 3" – these are raw simulation parameters that aren't really approachable for players. Instead, it would be more helpful if it said "Flammability: high, medium or low", as that's what a player would try to infer. Same for some of the other stats.

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

4 hours ago, memo said:

Instead, it would be more helpful if it said "Flammability: high, medium or low", as that's what a player would try to infer.

And for me, I'd want all the exact numbers. That'd be the whole reason for me using Kel's advanced queries.  

[Kel9509 1,480]

12 hours ago, memo said:

Instead, it would be more helpful if it said "Flammability: high, medium or low", as that's what a player would try to infer. Same for some of the other stats.

Some might find it annoying but I'll be adding tooltips to each piece of information to assist players in understanding these numbers.  I'm hopeful that will help.  Of course if it's all too overwhelming a person doesn't have to install this in their game.  It's just an option.

8 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

And for me, I'd want all the exact numbers. That'd be the whole reason for me using Kel's advanced queries.

Same with me.  In fact, for the RCI query which shows only a yes/no answer for Powered and Watered, I plan on adding the raw #s in parenthesis next to those so there'll be an additional detail for people like you and me who want to see all that stuff.

@Tyberius06, I didn't realize you were editing SimGoober's civic lots.  I thought you were only doing his RCI lots.  But I'm glad that this entire thing might make things easier for you.  Of course now you may have to tweak some of the UIs a bit but hopefully overall it won't slow you down.  By the way, would you mind if I made some default overrides for some plain BSC Uis that merely show their logo (which I will continue to show)?  

As for me, I've been a bit delayed with some real life things but I'm hoping to continue work on these soon, starting with the Parks.

[Tyberius06 12,267]

Hi everybody!

On 1/30/2026 at 5:37 AM, Kel9509 said:

@Kel9509: what are the codes (from the variable list), that you used for the Civic Jobs ("jobs_wealth" or "travel_jobs_wealth")?

11 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

By the way, would you mind if I made some default overrides for some plain BSC Uis that merely show their logo (which I will continue to show)? 

No, absolutely not. Do as you wish.

Partially the reason, why I was waiting with the restoration of the SG contents for so long because I knew I would not be able to hold myself back and I would start cleaning up the UI files, which I did not feel the motivation. The next "big" thing will be the BSC Farms... Again something which already gives me itches... 

[Kel9509 1,480]

1 hour ago, Tyberius06 said:

what are the codes (from the variable list), that you used for the Civic Jobs ("jobs_wealth" or "travel_jobs_wealth")?

It's jobs_low_wealth, jobs_medium_wealth and jobs_high_wealth.  Travel jobs are for industrial lots that describe the collection of lots various neighboring industrial buildings have, being an aggregation of their jobs (affected by demand).  

I used an LTEXT file with the "§" symbol as needed to indicate wealth level.  So it reads like "§=#jobs_low_wealth#, §§=#jobs_medium_wealth#, §§§=#jobs_high_wealth#".

[Kel9509 1,480]

One thing I noticed with these job amounts is that Civic jobs do not seem to be affected by demand.  The jobs are 100% filled all the time.  I'll try testing more by plopping some lots in cities that wouldn't be able to support them (like a lot with more jobs than residents in a very small village-type city, or a lot that offers jobs to 100+ high-wealth individuals when those don't exist).  I'd also like to see if Civic Jobs being 100% filled all the time would actually take away jobs from Commercial and Industrial lots, if that were needed for the Civic lot to actually have the jobs.  

[Kel9509 1,480]

I did some testing with Civic Jobs again today.  I created a small city with 100 low-density low-wealth residents, and then plopped a police station, fire house, elementary school, and the census repository.  The city grew enough to take the small amount of jobs from those places.  Then, I plopped Mattb325's Ikea, which supports hundreds of low, medium, and high-wealth jobs each.  I also zoned some low-density commercial.

Although the size and location and other desirability factors may play a role in these tests, overall after zoning the commercial sector, only 7 buildings grew like Bob's Grease Pit.  The rest of the residents were working in the Ikea, and the low-density housing grew into Medium-Wealth Rowhouses that worked at the Ikea mostly.  I knew they worked at the Ikea, because the Census Repository reported Vacant Jobs of -47 despite having over 80 commercial jobs available.  The negative number meant that they were considered unemployed, and as we all know Civic Jobs count as "unemployed" because they're not Commercial or Industrial jobs.  Some residents might've been working at the commercial jobs but the rest were at the Ikea.

So I demolished the Ikea and grew an adjacent medium-density industrial zone for a small bit of time.  While low-wealth residents took those jobs, all the Medium-Wealth residential lots lost their jobs since there was no Ikea to support them.  So those medium-wealth houses dilapidated and were bulldozed and low-wealth residents once again grew there.  Yet the Commercial and Industrial zones did not develop any further as there was no more demand for either.

I plopped the Ikea once again.  Almost immediately, the residential zones grew into Medium-wealth houses again.  Running time for a year, and the commercial and industrial zones didn't move an inch - no development.  But the residential zones saw 2 mansions grow - working at the Ikea.  Every time my workforce grew and the residential zones developed, they went to work at the Ikea because the Commuters/Vacant Jobs number kept going down getting closer and closer to zero (meaning the civic job "unemployment" was increasing).

Others should be able to recreate this scenario fairly easily.  I think it shows that Civic lots with large jobs can promote residential growth, but those residents do not work at real jobs (obviously) and so they have no impact to Commercial or Industrial Development.  You'd think that'd  be obvious, but the testing bears it out.  So if your commercial or industrial sectors are hurting, adding more civic jobs might hurt them even more.  

[Tyberius06 12,267]

5 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

So if your commercial or industrial sectors are hurting, adding more civic jobs might hurt them even more

That's an interesting thing. Not that I usually interested in this kind of depth of the gameplay (I used to have a very hybrid-style, half natural growth-half plopping and decorating), but for me the civic jobs usually "matters" due to the station lots. Originally Maxis filled the stations (mostly regardless of types) with 95 $ and 5 $$ and 0 $$$ and the Maxis PIM was working with these parameters too. SC4 PIM-X had a smoother calculation which did not seem to make justice either (it was mostly good for smaller simple stations), but at least each bus stops were not offering 100 civic jobs. @z1 and I came up with the idea, that we adopted in the NAM stations, and that I was using outside of NAM too, that we manually calucated the $-$$-$$$ jobs for stations based on their capacity. More or less something like this:
Each 5000 passengers gives 1 $ (low wealth) civic job
Each 50000 passengers gives 1 $$ (medium wealth) civic job
Each 125000 passengers gives 1 $$$ (high wealth) civic job

The capacity is calculated based on the Transit Switch Entry Costs and Station Capacities tutorial, so for example a station with 55000 passenger capacity would offer $-11 and $$-1 jobs. We considered other factors too as an extension. For example an additional subway station option would give automatically +4 $ and +1 $$ jobs to the station.
(According to z1's idea, one should round down all these numbers, for example 49000 passengers would only offer $-9 and $$-0 based on his version, but I like to deviate from this in these close enough cases and round them up instead: $-10 and $$-1. It's a personal preference.) It's also mostly based on personal preferences how to deal with large multistory, multitile and multipurpose station buildings, where there can be offices and shops etc... in the building. There never used to be a clear tutorial about these so as I said it's mostly based on personal preference. 

Anyhow it just came into my mind, because based on your test a city with extensive mass transportation (each bus and subway stops usually offer 2-3 low wealth jobs) would feel these civic jobs eventually, especially if one would plop huge civic buildings and larger stations.

[Kel9509 1,480]

Does anyone have an opinion on how to structure these overrides?  By that, I mean, should I make each one a separate file?  I really don't want to do that because there's a lot of overlap in the coding.  I was thinking of one DAT file which would include all overrides for Landmarks and Rewards, one DAT file for all Parks & Stadiums, and then one-off overrides for things like some BSC park queries that are entirely like the Maxis query but for their logos.  I could even combine the Parks into the Landmarks & Rewards, but there might be people who use another custom override for the Parks and so I figured I'd keep it separate just in case.

EDIT: Also, the City Hall query should probably be separate if people use the ModPacc Zero City Halls (which I do).  Well if that is separate I should probably make them all separate.  But maybe they can still all use the common elements?  I think that'd be possible.

[Kel9509 1,480]

Working on tooltips now, making sure everything is described accurately.  For the longest time, the Prima Guide described Landmark Effect sometimes as benefiting Industrial High-Tech.  On page 339, it says Landmarks "Increase local Cs, Co, and IHT desirability".  Elsewhere though it only discusses an increase in Commercial desirability.  

After testing certain plopped lots, it's clear that Landmark effect has no impact on I-HT desirability.  

But strangely enough, the Park Effect does!  Here are some before and after images of @CorinaMarie's Park Aura in @Null 45's DataView DLL mod.  I also have the I-HT desirability Dataview by @StarlitBeach to show the effect better.

Here's the original Park Aura prior to plopping:

And here's the original I-HT desirability prior to plopping:

Here's the Park Aura after plopping:

And here's I-HT desirability immediately after plopping:

I-HT desirability has clear improvements.  I'm not entirely sure if it's Park Aura or something else.  It might be indirect (though the lot had no other positive effects like Mayor Effect).  In any event this is interesting.  

[Kel9509 1,480]

I'm working on making all of the various Reward queries now, ensuring that the same wording is used for each Goofy Stat, for instance.

However, I've noticed that the minus signs for negative aspects is very difficult to read.  Here's an example of what I mean.  This is the Query for the Advanced Research Center:

It is very hard to see, but the Landmark Effect is positive, but the Park effect is negative.  The Mayor effect is also negative.  That minus sign is a very, very small detail.  

Aside from possibly changing the font (which I'm considering) is there any way to make that more obvious?

 

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

10 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Aside from possibly changing the font (which I'm considering) is there any way to make that more obvious?

If it's possible to check with a Lua Conditional, you could show negative text in red like we did in the City Halls Panel.  

However, since the info is lot specific, I'm not sure if the data can be evaluated by Lua. (I'm not up to speed on all the latest DLL creations.)

[Kel9509 1,480]

26 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

However, since the info is lot specific, I'm not sure if the data can be evaluated by Lua.

For those items, the data will be one of 3 possibilities:

1. It will report "None" if there is no effect or the property is not there in the building exemplar

2. It will report "Magnitude=X | Radius=Y" with positive numbers.

3. It will report "Magnitude=-X | Radius=Y" with a negative number for the Magnitude.  

I don't think there is a lot that will ever report a negative radius.  So it's one of those possibilities.  Are there conditions for the data to be evaluated by Lua?  

I was hoping that Null might be able to make the negative sign slightly bigger with a dash mark instead of the "hypen-minus" mark.  Like "U+2013" - the En Dash (if you look at the Windows character map): "–" or even bigger, U+2014, Em Dash: —.

Alternatively, if possible negative numbers could be surrounded by parenthesis.  But I'd honestly prefer a slightly bigger dash, and maybe more space between the equals sign and the dash.  Maybe remove the equals and replace that with a colon ":" because the equals sign right next to the negative sign makes it blend together easily.  You can see with the Park that has a negative Air Pollution effect that it's more obvious when next to a colon (this was a test park query - it won't show Towels Stolen in the final):

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

14 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Are there conditions for the data to be evaluated by Lua?  

In our fancy City Hall Panel, we were working with global variables so we had direct access to them via Lua. As you done before, you can make a Token of a Lua Function so it gets called from LText. What I don't know is if Null's Lua Extensions are able to be accessed the same way or not for non-global data. (RL doesn't let me dig into it right now.)

 

17 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

I was hoping that Null might be able to make the negative sign slightly bigger with a dash mark instead of the "hypen-minus" mark.  Like "U+2013" - the En Dash (if you look at the Windows character map): "–" or even bigger, U+2014, Em Dash: —.

From what I've seen, that seems to be something he can indeed build up to send as part of the data you need. It's like pre-formatted when the UI gets it.  

[Null 45 3,114]

2 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

It is very hard to see, but the Landmark Effect is positive, but the Park effect is negative.  The Mayor effect is also negative.  That minus sign is a very, very small detail.  

Blame Maxis, it is their number formatting and font rendering code. I could remove the equals sign, but that is about all I can do.

[hugues aroux 3,867]

6 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

But I'd honestly prefer a slightly bigger dash

 

3 hours ago, Null 45 said:

I could remove the equals sign

My humble opinion ... Indeed, use an en dash character (& ndash ) is more striking (Don't even talk to me about it, it's my everyday life  Damned Researchers ), But removing the "=" (as long as it's possible in the output string) would be good/better.In the context of a game's "state window", this "=" is irrelevant. We don't expect it to be anything other than: "Magnitude (is worth) xxx"! Replacing the "=" with a non-breaking space (NBSP) isn't crazy!? I would be tempted to say that this is understandable in all languages and cultures!!? No?

[Kel9509 1,480]

14 hours ago, Null 45 said:

Blame Maxis, it is their number formatting and font rendering code. I could remove the equals sign, but that is about all I can do.

I'll take what I can get.  If making the minus into an En Dash is impossible, then try removing the equals sign.  Thanks.

[Kel9509 1,480]

@Ulisse Wolf, with the help of Claude.AI, I managed to write some LUA code that has higher numbers no matter the population.  This is for things like the Army Base or the Federal Prison, which has pretty high goofy stats.  I suppose I could've used the base Maxis goofy stats, but I didn't like how they never changed once the city loaded and they seemed to have a lot of extra zeros in them.  Anyway, the code is 90% yours but with one line changed to make a new mean:

Quote

-- New Goofy Stat Function with mean of 25,000
function game.query_goofy20k()
    local mean = 25000
    local std_dev = mean * 0.25
    local u1 = math.random()
    local u2 = math.random()
    local z = math.sqrt(-2 * math.log(u1)) * math.cos(2 * math.pi * u2)
    local civilian_count = math.floor(math.max(0, z * std_dev + mean) + 0.5)
    return civilian_count
end

-- New Goofy Stat Function with mean of 2.5 million
function game.query_goofy2m()
    local mean = 2500000
    local std_dev = mean * 0.25
    local u1 = math.random()
    local u2 = math.random()
    local z = math.sqrt(-2 * math.log(u1)) * math.cos(2 * math.pi * u2)
    local civilian_count = math.floor(math.max(0, z * std_dev + mean) + 0.5)
    return civilian_count
end

 

[Propfam 2,305]

I can't imagine Claude can help with SC4 codes.