StarlitBeach

I've done more testing on it, and I'm reasonably sure this is how it works: Sea level is at 0x40 (64) in the terrain ramp, and 0x00 in the water ramp. The terrain ramp represents elevation in 5 m increments - so 68 represents 20 m above sea level, 44 is 100 m below sea level, etc. The water ramp represents depth below sea level in 1 m increments. Here is one test I did: The magenta starts at 0xA6 (166), which represents a height of (166-64)*5 = 510 m above sea level. Using the terrain query I found that the heights in that area were above 760 m (510 m above sea level) and below 763 m. When the magenta is set to start at 167 instead, it disappears because nothing is as high as 765 m. As an experiment, I tried setting up the terrain ramp to show contours every 100 m above sea level, and it sort of worked...

I found something interesting while looking for a way to change the building highlights. Not sure if this has been done before, but in case it hasn't I thought some people might find it useful (or at least fun to play with). Here's a tile with quite a lot of height variation: And here it is again, with a recoloured mini map: It's more difficult to see the height variation with neutral colours like that - the hillshading helps to some extent, in that it tells us where the hills are, but it also confuses things because there is no straightforward relationship between height and lightness. But these colours could have their uses. For example, here is my NAM Traffic Volume dataview, which I recoloured a while ago to use the same colours as all my other dataviews: Turns out that green wasn't a good choice to go on the mini map , but I liked how it looked on the main map. Here it is with the neutral mini map colours: Now the least busy roads don't show up so well, but most of the busier ones stand out much better. With some tweaking of the colour scale, the whole network could be shown quite nicely on the mini map, without the distraction of a coloured background. It might also help to make the mini maps more readable for colourblind people, because some colours could be difficult to distinguish against a green background. An alternative use of this could be to get the mini map colours to match better with terrain colours. The relevant properties are MiniMap: Water ramp and MiniMap: Terrain ramp in the Mini map exemplar (6534284a; 690f693f; 8a356fc2). I've only tried changing the terrain ramp so far, so I'm not sure how the terrain and water ramps interact. The terrain ramp defines the relationship between height (0-255) and colour.

That does seem the most likely place, if it is even possible - I still haven't found anything else. Problem is, I can't make head nor tail of what that exemplar is doing...

I wonder if anyone knows of a way to change the colour used for highlighting buildings on the main map? It defaults to bright green, which is problematic... Here is the Water Pollution view in my alternative colour scale: Normal Colour Vision Deuteranopia I changed the highlight colour to blue so that the buildings stand out better on the mini map, but it doesn't change the colour on the main map, so in the deuteranopia simulation the water treatment plant appears highlighted in bright yellow on a dark yellow background. You can still see it, but it isn't ideal, and it would be much harder to see if it was a little bit further south. I haven't yet found a property that would allow me to change this, but I'm hoping there's something I've missed.

Thanks, that's a very useful tool! Trying to get the lightness gradient right in my colourblind-safe palette has been tricky so I'll definitely see if that helps to improve it.

I've been working on a colour scale that is hopefully easier to read for people with red-green colour blindness. Here are the views I've recoloured so far - I used Coblis to simulate what they would look like for people with deuteranopia (green-blindness): R$$$ Desirability R$$$ - Deuteranopia CO$$$ Desirability CO$$$ Desirability - Deuteranopia IHT Desirability IHT Desirability - Deuteranopia These colours seem (to me) to work well for the desirability views - all the important thresholds that I wanted to show for use with the Less Abandonment mod are easy to see in the deuteranopia simulation (white/grey at 50; light grey/blue at 90; dark blue/bright blue at 120). I'm hoping that at least one colour-blind person will read this and let me know whether they really do work. Everything else is done - once I've made recoloured versions of all the dataviews and done a bit of testing it'll be ready.

Here's the latest version of the Abandonment view with all of those changes: And a comparison between the combined Fire Hazard and Abandonment view and @CorinaMarie's original in the same test run: I couldn't find any buildings in this test that were highlighted by one but not the other. I'm guessing that the number of potential false negatives is quite small, but I'll try to get one to build (probably in another city) to see what happens.

Thanks! Those changes are in the version I downloaded to have a look at (v 0.46). I do want to look into whether it is worth hiding some things (like trees) in these dataviews. And I think I will change the highlight mode for the version that shows just abandonment, because it doesn't make sense to highlight all the fire stations in that case, so could change it to highlight transit stations instead. Yes, I think that would be best for the just abandonment version. The combined view will either keep it as yellow, or change it to black (and shift the colour scale to use lighter reds so that there's no confusion between black and dark red).

If you're happy for me to do it, I could include the combined view as an optional replacement for the Fire Hazard view in its original position; and both the combined view and the 'just abandonment' version as optional replacements for where the Radiation view usually goes. (I wouldn't make it part of the 'default' full installation because of potential conflicts with fire mods.) I'd credit you with the idea of using flammability like this, of course. This is how it looks with the rest of the colour scale transparent: (I could change the colour to red or black so it stands out even better.)

I've played around a bit more with Occupancy, and I don't think it can be used to show abandoned buildings because: it shows the data in tracts, so it won't highlight a tract containing an abandoned building if the rest of the buildings in it are occupied it uses the same data sources as Desirability and Capacity, so only one developer type can be shown at a time tracts without any buildings of the developer type also show as zero occupancy, and quantizing doesn't help much with the above because you can't quantize by wealth level The combined Fire Hazard and Abandonment view is much more promising though... Two months later, strange symbols started hovering above some buildings. (Flammability has increased citywide, but nobody has abandoned yet.) A few months after that, half of the population mysteriously disappeared. (Lots of buildings have abandoned and are looking distressed, but they haven't fully abandoned yet, so no significant changes in flammability.) Four months later the abandoned buildings looked even more dilapidated and started making ominous creaking sounds. (Fully abandoned buildings now have very high flammability, shown in yellow.) (Three months later, some buildings have reoccupied and flammability is back to normal, except for buildings that are still empty.) It does seem to be able to highlight all buildings that have been abandoned. Here's a close up of some 1x1 sheds and other I-D buildings that needed water: And another showing an abandoned office building on a lot with lower flammability. The parking garage and grounds are either transparent or blue, but the building is yellow: Finally, an abandoned mansion showing the same effect: I didn't spot any abandoned buildings (either looking dliapidated or with No Water zots) that were not highlighted. The abandoned buildings do seem to all have a flammability of 255. I initially set up the colour scale to show only 255 flammability in yellow, and the same buildings were highlighted. But when the buildings were watered again their flammability decreased so they weren't highlighted any more, though they were still empty. At the moment it's set up to highlight flammability above 160, and that seems to work well (160 flammability is the point at which the chance of a fire starting reaches the cap of 50%, and I believe it is much higher than any Maxis building, so there should be no false positives).

What I was thinking of doing for my own setup was to make a combined Fire Hazard and Abandonment dataview. I do sometimes see R$$ abandon because they can't find jobs, if I'm not careful enough about keeping the pace of job creation in line with the pace of R$$ development. It usually happens on a small enough scale that I'll know where the abandoned buildings are, so maybe don't really need a dataview to tell me, but its still more useful than the Mayor Rating view. If I'm right in thinking that the non-quantized version can show the flammability of buildings separately from grounds, it should be easy to get it to show abandoned buildings (in black) because they should all have a flammability of 255 with your mod. I'll test it out a bit later and post the results here. I'll give this a try as well, and test the two approaches (occupancy vs. flammability) side by side.

The Fire Hazard view seems to be potentially a bit more useful when it isn't quantized or interpolated, because it is able to show the flammability of individual cells: Here's a slightly closer look: This shows the effect of trees on flammability: streets have no flammability rating so they are transparent, but street trees do, so the street cells with trees appear in blue the graveyard to the northeast is surrounded by trees, whereas the one to the soutwest has only a few cells with trees around it The graveyards and some of the gardens also show how it is able to distinguish between the parts of a lot that are more flammable (i.e. the buildings) and parts that are less flammable. The gardens which appear in darker blue are those without trees - gardens with trees are more flammable so they don't stand out from the buildings. @CorinaMarie This might be useful for your abandoned buildings dataview? I was rereading the thread where you were testing it yesterday and one of the problems was false negatives caused by flammability being averaged over large lots with small buildings. Turning off quantization might solve that, though I haven't tested it.

I've added a couple more replacement dataviews to the custom installation options: Mayor Rating Fire Hazard The percentages in the Fire Hazard view refer to the chance of a fire starting when ignited, according to the Percent Fire Start vs. Flammability property in the Flame simulator exemplar. One or other of these will also be included in the full installation (where Radiation is) as I've decided to remove the CO$$$ rezoning targets view. At the moment I have Mayor Rating there, but I could change my mind. Which one do people pay more attention to?

I've finished testing - the main thing I was checking was the calibration of the colour scales, and I'm now sure they are correct - so it should be ready to publish soon! It will have the full version, plus custom installation options: the Capacity views by themselves, in separate Low, Medium and High versions for each developer type (R, C, I and Ag), which can be mixed as needed a full set of Desirability views, in case some people don't want the Capacity ones or want to switch between them files to replace the other dataviews in their original locations, to be used with either of the first two options Plus a choice of colour scales for each - the current colours and a version that should be easier for people with red/green colour-blindness. Pulling it all together and testing that the installation options work properly will take a bit of time, but hopefully some time over the weekend it will be ready. I'm thinking of leaving out the CO$$$ rezoning targets view, or maybe including it with the full set of Desirability views (in place of Cs$). After testing it some more I'm not convinced that it works well enough to justify its slot. There are just too many false negatives - here's an example: Those houses in the centre look a promising target for CO$$$, but not quite there yet. If they were coloured magenta then CO$$$ could grow immediately. Maybe if we put one more plaza nearby... Except that the uninterpolated desirability view shows that they are already desirable enough: And when they are rezoned to C, a high wealth office grows immediately: The problem is that quantizing the data to lots automatically interpolates it, even if you set the interpolation property to false. The averaging of nearby tracts that is done by the interpolation causes it to look less desirable than it really is. In fact, I think I will also include a set of uninterpolated dataviews - they are not very pretty, but they are the only truly accurate reflection of the underlying state of the simulation, which I'm sure at least some people would be interested to see. Here's another example of what can happen when data is interpolated or quantized, this time for Average Age: Uninterpolated Interpolated Quantized The quantized view shows average age noticeably lower than it really is in many places, especially along some of the edges. Look at the left hand edge just above the start of the menu in particular - a row of lots that are light red or white in the quantized view, but in a tract that is light green in the uninterpolated view.

Now that you mention it, I have a vague memory of reading that thread - I'll have to see if I can find it. It would be nice if they did have some effect, but it looks to me as if they can't.