DAMN Development Thread (formerly known as "Custom Submenus")

[Jack_wilds]

Hello Daeley, Jack wilds here...

This rather project, however a over educated civil/design engineer tech is having troubles making heads/tails in making the menus -even with the DTK.  therefor I am requesting a 'damn for dummies' and one for the SSPTool by Stefan79. 

I think I'm making this harder than needed.    Its just that I'm having troubles just to get SSPTool complete107 installed.  So is there a painfully obvious detailed instruction booklet on getting it all installed and running -Thank-you. 

I have latest java,  is the SSSPTool complete107 to be placed in the 'program files'... do I add plug-ins zipped or unzipped...and then the file paths set do I save the config...when the damn tab is pressed then install... its here it stops it says that the permits needed to checked and that it could install...

aside from this its beautiful cold day here in the northwoods of WInterwonderland 

Jack 

[JoeST]

if you have the complete version, all the plugins are already there

[buddybud]

I've not read the whole thread but surely this little but wonderful bug has come up.



While multi clicking on the news box i was able to have the  menu open directly in the box. This left me free to scroll....however once alot was picked you could not choose anymore lots. Could something like this be done on purpose. Sacrifice the news feed for a direct link to your icons. And make it so you don't have to reload the feed to change sets or lots??? Presently it is only fully functional until you pick a lot. I did nothing at all by the way except click a lot. 

Anyways just wanted to point that out!.

Bud

[Jonathan]

I have got something like that before, except it always went grey before I click on anything.

Also if it was accessed only through the advisor/news panel, then we could turn those pop ups off.
One thing I don't if is possible but to have in the News/advisor panels a button to give you the last plopped item, this would help loads.

Jonathan

[Breeze1965]

I installed this and the menu will appear but none of the sets do including the sets that came with it? additionally the lots can still appear in the my docs plugin folder?
where sets have to be in game folder?

[joeltp85]

I don't know if this has bene discussed in the thread already, but just to let you know.
I was having problems with the indexing script. I'm running Vista 32-bit, UAC turned on. Naturally, it bounced with an 'access denied' when trying to run it, so I ran it with admin privileges.
It didn't work either, it got stuck in a loop of 'specified folder not found'.
I edited the script and removed the loop, and found that Windows was beginning from C:\Windows\system32, so it was impossible for the script to find the folders it was looking for, so I had to edit the script again and hardcode the Simcty 4 installation route, and now it works just fine.

Luckily I had some knowledge of how Windows scripts work, but what if a common user that doesn't know about this stuff encounters this?

I've run into the same problem. I've re-installed the DAMN numerous times already in both the primary maxis/sim city 4 deluxe/plugins folder as well as the My Documents plugins folder, and I've done so both with and without UAC enabled. Yet every time I run the indexer script I get "Access is Denied" messages. And I just so happen to be one of those "common users" who doesn't know much (anything) about Windows scripts, so I'm at a loss as to how to fix this problem.

Would really appreciate if anybody is willing to help, though I realize this thread isn't very active anymore...

[daeley]

you could try Stefan87's SSPTool. It is mainly designed to create new DAMN plugins, but has a function to recreate the index as well. This is java-based rather then a shell script, so it might work in your case.

[Rady]

Daeley,

I just created some menus for you DAMN tool. Can you tell me - is there a possibility to disable the corresponding menu entries in the "standard" sc4 menue?

[z]

From Diggis:

You need to make a copy of each of the building exemplars from the lots and save them into a new DAT to preserve the original, then remove from each exemplar the lot resource key.  This will leave the lots fully functional and available to plop through DAMN but remove them from your maxis menu.

[Rady]

I've not read the whole thread but surely this little but wonderful bug has come up.



While multi clicking on the news box i was able to have the  menu open directly in the box. This left me free to scroll....however once alot was picked you could not choose anymore lots. Could something like this be done on purpose. Sacrifice the news feed for a direct link to your icons. And make it so you don't have to reload the feed to change sets or lots??? Presently it is only fully functional until you pick a lot. I did nothing at all by the way except click a lot. 

Anyways just wanted to point that out!.

Bud

Daelye,

I just run into the same problem that Buddybud mentioned some months ago. Do you have any information on that problem?

thx

rady

[Diggis]

It's not really a problem, it's just the way the new popup works.  You closed it without selecting a lot, meaning it remains active in the other window.  So instead of clicking a lot in the popup window you click int here.

[z]

I'm in the process of creating DAMN menus for RTMT, and they're mostly done.  (Using the SSPTool, over 50 stations took only 15 minutes to put into a multi-level setup.)  What would be really nice would be if I could have an RTMT icon placed at the end of each menu, where clicking on the icon would take the player back to the root of the RTMT tree, which is two levels below the main root.  Looking at the LUA scripts, it looks like it should be possible, but I don't know enough about how this works to actually do it.  Could someone please help me out here?

[z]

Still waiting for an answer to my previous post...

In the mean time, is it possible to make the menu popup box bigger, specifically longer?  If so, how?

[Stefan79]

Still waiting for an answer to my previous post...

In the mean time, is it possible to make the menu popup box bigger, specifically longer?  If so, how?

Hi z,
I have tried to make the popup box bigger, but the maximum regular size is 450 x 450 pixel. Think it has to do something with creating these dialogs in SimCity. The only thing you can do, is to make the scrollpane bigger, so more items would be visible, but then, the scrollpane laps over the dialog and you can't select the icon, which is outside the dialog, if its smaller than the scrollpane. These are the things I have found, so there is no option to make the DAMN dialog bigger but I will look at the LUA more closely when I have time.

Stefan

[Jonathan]

You can get bigger dialogs, you have to edit the UI file. The downside is it affects all the news items (well all the positive ones(blue background))
But if the news items can be hidden (z, you said you could do this?)without affect the DAMN. Then it doesn't matter.
Also the scroll bar goes off the dialog but that can be shortened in the LUA script ?

It's fully functional, you click on the icons as usual.



Jonathan

[z]

Excellent!  I was looking at that box and thinking, "That looks like a standard UI box.  It should be possible to resize it."  I wouldn't need it as big as your example; just expanding it to 450x600 would be nice, at least as an option.

Right now there are a number of options that I'm looking at.  It appears that inserting the statement "a.news_only = 1" in an advice piece makes the advice show up in the news flipper, but not as a popup.  This would be the basis for the "No News Is Good News" mod.

But last night I discovered that the DAMN menus work fine with the Urgent Advice Dialogs option turned off - they just show up in the main news box.  But all the features are there and working; some of the selections just show up as new "news items" at the top.  So another alternative is to expand the news box a bit, as it's currently smaller than the menu popups.  Since the news box comes up only by user request, this should be a fairly innocuous thing to do, and it may even eliminate the need for the "No News Is Good News" mod.  I'll have to try a few things out.

[Jonathan]

Is there a way to make it so the news item doesn't get grayed out after selecting a lot?
And I'm guessing there's no way of stopping other news items from appearing in the news box (so they only show in the advisory panel?) without disabling them completley?

Or is there a UI "control" (feature/component) which allows for HTML?
Is there a list UI controls somewhere?

Jonathan

[z]

Is there a way to make it so the news item doesn't get grayed out after selecting a lot?

I don't think so, although you still have the ability of plopping the same lot multiple times.  And clicking on the "Open additional submenus" item at the bottom of the box re-activates the open menus.  This is one place where having a bigger news box would come in handy.

And I'm guessing there's no way of stopping other news items from appearing in the news box (so they only show in the advisory panel?) without disabling them completely?

I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" here.  However, each news item has a frequency (how often it's displayed) and a timeout (how long it persists).  By adjusting these, especially the timeout, you can keep the number of news items in the news box rather small, while still making sure that the items appear in the news flipper.

Or is there a UI "control" (feature/component) which allows for HTML?

To the best of my knowledge, no.

Is there a list UI controls somewhere?

I assume you mean something other than just the controls themselves in SimCity_1.dat.  I don't know of any.  But of course if you click on the "Entry" heading, you get all of the UIs in one place, which is the next best thing.  Unfortunately, there's a very large number of them.  Which brings me to my question:  Do you have the IDs of the news and popup box UIs?  That would save me some time searching through that long list.

[Jonathan]

There is a UI control named "GZWinHTML" The only 2 references to it on the web(google) are on Simtropolis and SimForum.de (and Google translate isn't perfect)
If we could have HTML in a UI file then the news could potentially be bypassed, and the DAMN built straight into the UI.

Jonathan

[Jonathan]

Actually got a better idea. Not many people use the My sim feature right? Almost all players would sacrifice it for DAMN?

Well is there away to make the DAMN appear in the My sims news?

The TGI for the blue dialog which the DAMN uses is : 00000000     96A006B0     4A5A89D5   

Jonathan