Andreas Roth

You're definitely right about that "rabbit hole", and I'm well aware that it's a daunting task, esp. since there are so many lots that needs some work. An updated version of PIM-X that is being able to handle all this sounds very exciting, maybe this could ease some of the work that needs to be done along with the SC4 Command Line tool that also allows batch-editing for submenues and stuff. I'm glad that there are some people with programming experience which are able to create such invaluable tools for the community, otherwise, all that custom content wouldn't have been possible. As for reviving the good old SimForum BAT Team, I doubt that's possible, since most members have gone MIA ages ago. But at least @N1_2888 is still holding the flag up, presenting one or another Christmas present from his personal collection.

Seeing Simtropolis disappearing and then reading the news about the server being wiped surely was a blow, so I'm very happy to see it back online. I'm pretty amazed about this community still going strong after so many years, and while I've been out of the loop for so long, SC4 still has a place in my heart, and I will return every now and then and check out what's new. Hopefully, most of the stuff that was lost will be recovered, and while I sent all SFBT content to @Tyberius06 recently, I wonder how feasible it is to update everything to the current standards (such as the Submenu DLL feature etc.) and release it properly at the STEX. I just checked my profile, and it says that I signed up here almost 23 years ago, which means this is basically about one half of my entire life, since I happen to celebrate my 50th birthday today, so seeing it up and running is a nice birthday present alright. I'd like to thank everyone who is supporting the community and helping to restore this place. There have been way too many losses over the past few years due to unexpected errors, deprecated software and even tragic losses like the unexpected and way too early death of our good friend Matthias "Spocky" Ludwig about three years ago, who ran the German SimCityKurier. Also, thanks for Dirk for an in-depth explanation about the recent ST billing issue. Sometimes you're just out of luck and miss a deadline by one day, and according to Murphy's Law, things are bound to get messed up the worst possible way. But it's not the end of the world, and I'm positive that most things can be recovered one or another way. Only time will tell if this place will celebrate a 50th birthday some day, too, but I'd say it's not impossible.

It's been ages since I last looked into this kind of stuff, but basically, that's the "secret" behind all those "BSC Tracking Enabled" lots. The BSC had some internal "0xB5C..." occupant group list, and the script in the BSC Essentials (which are one of the most common dependencies, I guess) allows to track pretty much everything that has an occupant group within this ID range. It was heavily used to unlock reward buildings based on a certain number of BSC or other special types of buildings in the city (SimGoober attached his OG to pretty much any of his releases and used the script in several rewards).

Well, since the discussion about the custom buiding styles never really managed to come to a mutual agreement, I figure that custom building styles might end up depending on the personal preference of the user. Some people would probably want to pick from an extensive list of styles, while others prefer a small list with well-chosen styles that match their playing preference. Hence it might come in handy if the selection of styles would be user-configurable, and a checkbox-driven selection would be much easier to use than entering IDs manually. Of course, it would be nice if it can do both, similar to any e-mail client, where you can type in e-mail addresses manually, or pick one or more from your address book. So my idea was to have said button that opens a window with a selection of styles to pick from, and when you click "OK", the IDs will show up in the text box, separated by commas, or semicolons, or whatever is allowed to use as separator. I see what you mean with "the text box matched the behavior of the console app", but the entire reason about using a GUI is that you don't need to type in commands or other data that you probably can't or don't want to memorize (or because you're just lazy).

I'm happy to see the GUI version, since I'm not that fond of using command lines. The GUI looks nice and clean, and it seems that it found my installation and plugins folder automatically when I clicked on the "Options..." button (maybe it should be named "Settings" instead?). I didn't have time for a proper text, so I only had a very quick look, so I experienced the same as @Kel9509 while I randomly picked stuff in the GUI, and when I clicked the W2W option, it looked like the program apparenly locked up (a red "x" appeared on top of the checkbox), so I had to kill it in the task manager. Another idea: instead of entering the building styles manually (there is no indicator about the proper format, too), maybe you could configure the styles in the settings.xml once and then have a button "Select styles..." which opens a small window with checkmarks for every style, which adds the selected IDs to the list without the need to type something.

Wow, that looks super clean and tidy, I like it a lot! It might be even more logical to switch the middle colums, so highway, bridges and road stats are closer together on the left, but I can already see your hands grabbing my throat because of all the nitpicking. But jokes aside, this really came together nicely. I was a bit worried that the huge amount of data would be overkill, but all the extra effort with the grouping and the nice color coding really paid off, and provides usefull stats that can be accessed conveniently. Even the tongue-in-cheek intro text doesn't really apply anymore. Oh, and if you like, I can provide a German translation once everything is done.

Great finding! As for the grouping, maybe Roads, Highways, Bridges and Busses could be together in one column. Subway would fit better with the Rail stuff, but it's probably ok to put it below all the Commute and Neighbor Connection figures. Whatever you decide, it's quite a bit of work, naturally, but looking at what you achieved so far, it might be worth to go the extra mile.

Yeah, I meant those. I don't know how Maxis did it, but I would have assumed it's some simple PNG graphics. Anyway, it's just an idea that came to my mind, if you think it's not worth the effort, then the current setup works as well. Regarding the lenght of the columns, I agree, but then again, one of them in the current setup is one line longer than the others, too. With "Busses" moved into the place where "Highways" is located right now, it would have the same height as the "Rail" column at least. Maybe you can move your logo to the right, so it's located centered instead of aligned to the left?

I'd say this is quite an improvement alright! Grouping all the rail stuff together makes sense, this would have been my suggestion as well. The "Busses" information looks a bit lost between "Neighborhood Connections" and "Commute Time" (I'd put those two closer together), alas, maybe it could be placed somewhere near the subway stats? For the rightmost column, an alternative to the colored numbers could be some colored bar under "Pedestrian", "Car" etc. (like the bars in the traffic overlay legend) while keeping the actual values in the default dark blue text color. This might look even more consistent with the rest of the UI.

Hey, I was using your tool already as well last winter, when I was tinkering with the submenues, and thought it was very useful (great idea to use an online translator). I had some issues with saving the file properly, but right now I can't remember what exactly it was (and unfortunately, I don't really have time for SC4 at the moment, maybe next winter again...). Otherwise, it was quite some help for adding a German translation to the original English files. Sure, you can do it with other tools, such as PIM-X, as well, but the workflow was more straightforward.

Exemplar patches are just patching the desired features into the original files "on the fly", so yes, you have to keep those. That's the whole idea about the patches, you can leave the original files like they are, and add them to submenus (or do other things) with the separate patch file.

The game only supports PNG files. XCF is the native file format of the free image-editing program GIMP, so you can modify the template to your likings easily. As for making unique IDs, I suggest to use the internal routines of the modding tools. IIRC, these IDs are based on some algorithm that takes the actual time and date into account, so it shouldn't be possible to create the same ID at another time. Doing this manually isn't really possible, since nobody would be able to check all IDs that are around. For creating textures, buidling families and stuff, there are lists with ID ranges that are given out, which makes it relatively save that every ID is unique, but naturally, there is a slight chance that some of those IDs might be used in the game already, or someone else who isn't aware of those lists picks the very same ID by chance. The human brain prefers "readable" patterns like 0x12345678, which is of course not random at all, and there might be a higher chance that somebody else might pick the very same ID. You don't really have to pick "unique" IDs for the submenus manually, though. The SC4 Commandline Tool makes creating submenus and adding lots to them pretty straightforward, and even though it's name "Commandline", you don't have to type commands yourself, but select menu options that are displayed as text with the cursor keys rather than using a mouse-driven GUI. If you want to move around stuff to another submenu manually, you don't need to create new IDs anyway, but rather pick those of the submenu in question (check "Item Submenu Parent ID", as mentioned above).

Thanks for pointing out that there's a list in the Readme file. Looking at the IDs, I see that I made a slight mistake above, I looked up the IDs of random submenus that I've created myself and saw that I mentioned the ID of the "Paths and Modular Park sets" submenu (0xDEFFD960) instead of the actual Park menu (0x3, which is the same as 0x00000003, I think).

From what I can see, you have to edit the "Item Submenu Parent ID". To move a submenu from "Parks" to "Landmarks", change the ID from 0xDEFFD960 to 0x09930709, at least that's what seems to be different when I compare submenus in those menus. Try to open the DAT files in the "submenus" folder in your game's Plugins folder (where the DLL is installed) with the Reader and look up the "Item Submenu Parent ID" of those.

Thanks for these, working with the source files is definitely better than me fiddling with the pixels. I hope you'll find some time for checking the icons for the R/C/I ploppables, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the set, so the default submenus are complete.