Creating "Click-To-Copy" lots

[daeley]

It has come to my attention that Simcity Societies has a so-called an "eye" tool. This tool lets you select a building and will then turn into the plop cursor for that building. It would be nice to have something like this in simcity - at least for certain types of lots. While we can't make additional cursors, with a few simple modification to a lot's UI, you can use the query tool for this purpose. After these modifications, whenever the modified lot is queried, the query tool will change into the plop tool for that lot (the query will still open though).

If the lot in question has a unique UI, skip step 1.

1) Find the UI file used for this lot and copy to the lot file. Change the IID of the copy and change the "Query Exemplar Guid" propertry in the building exemplar accordingly.

2) add a new LTEXT file to your lot. fill this one with

#game.tool_plop_building(hex2dec("735af215"))#

where the hex number between quotes should be the IID of the lot exemplar (not the building exemplar - these may differ).

3) add a new line of text to the UI file - the easiest way to do this is to switch to text view and copy an existing line of text. Set the "winflag_visble" property to "no" and set the captionres property to point to the LTEXT file created in step 2.

There, just that simple. Whenever you click the lot, the cursor will change into the plop cursor for this lot. Interestingly, this should even work for growables (if for some reason you would want that).


Note: the shortcut key for the query tool is "/". This should make things even easier for those that want a little mouse movement as possible.