Andreas Roth

Imagine I would have got just 1 cent when I joined back in 2003, then I'd earn a whopping $83,886.08 this year...

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.

If you only play SC4 and no modern game, you don't need a dedicated graphics card at all. I've been using AMD CPUs with integrated graphics since, I dunno, about 20 years now, and they always served me well for anything office/internet/multimedia/image editing related, and all of them were running SC4 just fine. Too bad the water cooling in your system started leaking, liquids and electricity don't mix all too well alright. But 14 years is a rather amazing time for a computer life, so I bet it's nice to get something new after all. Good luck with finding and assembling a new rig, and I hope the SSD with all the data is still fine! I did try Win11 recently, and was not amused at all, so I'm pondering how to stick around with Win10, but a computer that is connected to the internet all the time without regular updates is a bit of a security risk alright...

The SC4 CLI (commandline) Tool has two different steps for creating submenus. When organizing your lots, you have to decide if you want to move them to one of the predefined submenus that come with the submenu DLL download (i. e. there's a submenu for parks, plazas and sports facilities in the Park Menu), or if you want to create your own new submenu. When using an extended set of lots, I guess you might want to create your own submenu for them (or even a submenu that contains more submenus) most likely, so you have to do both of the following steps (creating the submenu and then assigning the lots to them, so you need to do the second process that I mentioned first). Let's stick to the basics for a moment, though: moving an existing lot (or several lots that are placed in a subfolder) to one of the predefined submenus. When you go through the process of adding a file (or several files in a folder) to a submenu, the tool will create a file called "submenu_patch.dat". Try to open this file with the Reader, then you'll see that it only contains one Cohort file. This is basically the "patch" that tells the game to move the lot(s) that you picked to a certain submenu. There are two properties, "Exemplar Patch Targets", which is a list of all TGI values of the Exemplar files of the lot(s) in question), and a "Building Submenus" property that contains the ID of the submenu where the lot(s) should show up. By default, the file is saved in the same folder where the original lot(s) reside. The icons of the lots are not touched in any way, so if you want to change these, you'll have to edit the lot files and put your custom icons into those (the easiest way is using LEProp, I think). The next level is creating your own submenu. For this, you might want to have a custom submenu icon ready, but you can also use any icon you want (such as an icon from the original lot file that represents the set of lots nicely) and use the built-in template in order to create a nice-looking icon for the new submenu. When running the SC4 CLI Tool, it allows you to create a new submenu and asks where this menu should be placed. You can add a name and a description text, and pick an icon for the submenu. It creates a file named "submenu_[name].dat" which is saved in the root of your plugins folder. When you open this file with the Reader, you'll see an Exemplar file that tells the game to create a menu button for the submenu, and there's two LTEXT files with the name and the description of your submenu. There's also the PNG file with the icon that you picked in the process. As mentioned before, this only creates the submenu itself, so you have have to do the steps described in the paragraph above in order to add lots to the new submenu. As far as I can tell, the loading order for this submenu DAT file doesn't matter, the game will simply read it during startup and create the menu button. For convenience, you can put all submenu DATs into a subfolder of your plugins, or you can put them into the folder with the lots that should be contained in this submenu. The submenu patch file that I mentioned above should be kept with the files that it modifies, and I think it might be necessary that it loads after the file that it affects (but I'm not entirely sure how the game handles Cohort files, maybe it's not that critical). As mentioned above, any custom icons that you created for the lots themselves must be either replaced in the original files, or you must create a DAT file that contains a copy of the original icons (same TGI values), but with the new icon graphics, and this must be loaded after the original lots, so they serve as an override. As I mentioned before, DatPacker might have picked the original icons instead of the new ones, depending how you stored them in the first place.

You should make yourself familiar about SC4's loading order. Whenever you create a file that replaces other content, you need to make sure it loads later than the original file. This is also true for the submenu patches. When you datpack stuff, it might merge files in a way that not the replacement files get merged, but the original ones. It doesn't really make sense to datpack files that were meant as an override, though. If you want datpacked files, you'll better edit the original files themselves, such as inserting your new icons in riiga's asphalt set first. Ideally, the submenu patch should go into the same folder as the lot files, maybe with a "z_" prefix, so it loads last (though I cannot tell if the DatPacker picks that up properly everytime). Using @Null 45's Startup Performance Optimization DLL should make datpacking superfluous in most cases anyway.

It could be possible that this is an ID conflict. PEG made those lots in the very early days, when there wasn't a proper texture index yet, so maybe it overlaps with the NAM somehow. The cardboard box usually is a sign that some model is missing, though, so you better make sure it's really the NAM (remove the NAM folder from your plugins temporarily and check if the PEG stuff works again).

Thanks for all the work, even including multiple styles! I guess everyone will find a version that suits best for the specific needs.

I appreciate that you're trying to put even more work in the formatting, but I think that all the different fonts and additional symbols aren't really an improvement after all. I would assume that Maxis used a PNG file for the § in the "wealth" row because the default symbol looked so puny, and if that's the case, then go ahead and just keep the $ sign, even though that's not really correct. Just the space between it and the values should improve the readability enough, I think (and if not, try a colon here instead). Using different fonts, even though they look similar, but not the same, is triggering my OCD, though.

Since all the values in the left column don't have a colon, I'd say remove it in the right column, too. I'd keep it with "Building Style", since the list might get a bit longer, so it makes more sense there. But it's a matter of taste after all. As Jidan mentioned, using a bold fold for "Building Style" would be nice, if possible. The wealth level at the top looks a bit lost, so it might benefit from a bold typesetting, too.

I kinda got lost when you start listing up all the values those EQ... values in the hover query, but I agree that this could be used for a specialized query UI somewhere else. I do like the general explanation, even though it's just some basic information from the Prima guide. Since those hover queries only show up when you enabled them in the settings, it's fine for novice or casual players, the diehard fans have switchend them off anyway, most likely. Anyway, it looks like you're having fun to make the most out of your query window, so please go ahead!