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

Started by daeley, November 12, 2007, 02:28:25 PM

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Andreas

Quote from: Jonathan on August 31, 2009, 01:47:01 PM
Well is there away to make the DAMN appear in the My sims news?

Interesting idea - finally something that actually could make me use the MySims button (apart from disabling the UDI icons in a new city ;) ).
Andreas

z

You've definitely got some interesting ideas there, Jonathan - well worth following up on.  As for that post on SimForum.de, it seems to me that we have a few German speakers around here somewhere.  I even sense one right above this post...  ;D

Oh, and thanks for those IDs.  :thumbsup:

Jonathan

The My sims thing failed: You had to plop a sim first, and it would sometimes freeze and then delete the sim.
Also I couldn't move the My Sim news panel to the main UI.

But I figured out something else but can't explain at the moment, because it still needs to be done.

EDIT: I hope Daeley doesn't mind this hijacking?
EDIT2: z, when you use the damn menu in the news box with dialog pop ups off and you click on menus does it open them twice?

Also how do you make the news items that are just one line which can't be expanded? They are mostly jokes by Maxis like" 7% of sims think 0 is nothing".

Also would it be a problem for users if say the city planning and financial advisors were combined?
Jonathan

Andreas

Quote from: z on August 31, 2009, 02:15:33 PM
You've definitely got some interesting ideas there, Jonathan - well worth following up on.  As for that post on SimForum.de, it seems to me that we have a few German speakers around here somewhere.  I even sense one right above this post...  ;D

Well, GoaSkin mentioned that GZWinHTML thingy, but there's no further discussion about it. The rest of the postings are talking about the HTML links in reward messages, which is something daeley already has used for the DAMN.
Andreas

z

Quote from: Jonathan on August 31, 2009, 02:58:10 PM
z, when you use the damn menu in the news box with dialog pop ups off and you click on menus does it open them twice?

No, not even when they're nice.  ::)

Do you see this happening?  Could you show a picture?

Quote
Also how do you make the news items that are just one line which can't be expanded? They are mostly jokes by Maxis like" 7% of sims think 0 is nothing".

If you look at the news items, you'll see that they begin with a call to create_advice_safety(), create_advice_transportation(), or advice creation for one of the other standard advisors.  Then there's create_advice_fluff(), named after Fluffy the Wonder Cat.  You can find a lot of these in the environment advice LUA.

Quote
Also would it be a problem for users if say the city planning and financial advisors were combined?

I wouldn't do something as drastic as that.  Aside from the amount of work involved, various people's plugins may depend on the current scheme.  Parts of it may also be hardwired in the executable, and you don't want to find out about those too late.  I sort of see where you're going with this, but could you spell it out a bit more?

BTW, if the Urgent Advice Dialogs are turned off and you use just the News window for the DAMN menus, having them grayed out and then clicking on "Open Additional Submenus" takes no more steps then the standard DAMN menus, since the popup box disappears when you select an item to be plopped.  To get it to reappear, you have to click the same "Open Additional Submenus" line.

daeley

excellent development guys :) I'm glad to see this is finally picking up some speed.

as for a couple of questions: It's great to see the news box resized, but you have to keep in mind there might be people playing on lower resolutions or in windowed mode with a smaller Simcity box. Secondly, the box shouldn't become too big, because some people (including me) actually still like normal popups, especially for rewards. I think it's nice to have reminders, but that's just my playstyle.

I'm not sure if using the mysim news would work. In the past I've tried similar things (also tried using the green "mission" screen) but that never seemed to work as intended.

as Steve mentioned, the news lines with no story, only a title, are "fluff" news lines.

Quote from: Jonathan on August 31, 2009, 02:58:10 PM
Also would it be a problem for users if say the city planning and financial advisors were combined?

why would you want to do this? you can actually create additional advisors :) I've done this before with the money transfer lot I made.

about the GZWinHTML, I think I have tried the GZWinCustom or something and that didn't work. If you really want to dig a bit deeper: in the tutorials, the tutorial messages are created with HTML markup. With some tinkering you can even point these buttons to custom LUA functions. I've never gotten this to work on non-tutorial UI's though, so if you're up for a challenge...
1. Install SC4+RH
2. Install LEX (CD&DVD helps) and latest NAM + updates
3. Play the game
4. ? ? ? ?
5. Profit!

Jonathan

Is there a way to get Fluff news to appear in the advisor panels?
If you create an aditional advisor can you create the matching UI?
Your right, The My Sim news didn't work, it deleted the sim quite often after freezing.

I downloaded the Money transfer lot, and took a look in the LUA files (most of it I didn't understand, I got the general idea though)

When you created the news for the new advisor, each one started with: a = create_advice_cityplanning
why isn't that something like  a = create_advice_newadvisor ?

Or does that just provide defaults for any thing not set below it? In which case changing the a.type is effectively the same?

Here's where I'm trying to go:
The advisors panel in the only thing on the UI that seems to like HTML, so a dedicated advisor panel to DAMN, and the DAMN is constantly open by making the title the same as the message.

One other question (sorry for so many) how is it the "open Additional Submenus" never gets grayed out, even after you've click the link? Where as if you open a menu inthe DAMN it greays out?

Jonathan

z

Quote from: daeley on September 01, 2009, 12:58:11 AM
as for a couple of questions: It's great to see the news box resized, but you have to keep in mind there might be people playing on lower resolutions or in windowed mode with a smaller Simcity box. Secondly, the box shouldn't become too big, because some people (including me) actually still like normal popups, especially for rewards. I think it's nice to have reminders, but that's just my playstyle.

I agree; that's why I was thinking of increasing it from 450x450 to a maximum of 450x600, which would give just a little more elbow room for the menus (especially when submenus are present).  I know that for RTMT this would definitely help with the usability factor.  And a height of 600 is required for any monitor where you want to play SC4.  So how do those dimensions sound?  If they look reasonable to you, you might want to make them standard.  But I definitely agree that we don't want to wreck the look of the game for people who use popups.

Quote from: Jonathan on September 01, 2009, 01:33:22 AM
One other question (sorry for so many) how is it the "open Additional Submenus" never gets grayed out, even after you've click the link? Where as if you open a menu inthe DAMN it greays out?

It's just like standard news entries, which don't gray out just because you click on them.

Diggis

Could you not force the change on people please?  Make it an option as I like it the way it is. ;)

Jonathan

Definately optional,

The reason I made the dialog so big was to make it obvious that it was bigger :) So any size is possible, or give the user an option of say 3 sizes.


superhands

QuoteAlso would it be a problem for users if say the city planning and financial advisors were combined?
Jonathan

or you could get rid of them all :D

daeley

Quote from: Jonathan on September 01, 2009, 01:33:22 AM
I_advice_cityplanning
why isn't that something like  a = create_advice_newadvisor ?

Or does that just provide defaults for any thing not set below it? In which case changing the a.type is effectively the same?

yup, that's the idea. the create_advice_cityplanning sets a bunch of defaults and then I just switch the advisor.

Quote
Here's where I'm trying to go:
The advisors panel in the only thing on the UI that seems to like HTML, so a dedicated advisor panel to DAMN, and the DAMN is constantly open by making the title the same as the message.

I don't think that will work... as far as I know, all the news messages use the same news UI, regardless of the advisor. Maybe you could try to find the TGI (or only IID) of the UI's somewhere in the LUA's that define resources for the advisors, but I doubt it will be possible to change UI depending on the advisor or news type.

Quote
One other question (sorry for so many) how is it the "open Additional Submenus" never gets grayed out, even after you've click the link? Where as if you open a menu inthe DAMN it greays out?

that's because each time you click a link, the news message is triggered again, but with updated content. That's why you can sometimes see "DAMN garbage links", i.e. old links to submenus you've just visited that are grayed out but not yet removed.
1. Install SC4+RH
2. Install LEX (CD&DVD helps) and latest NAM + updates
3. Play the game
4. ? ? ? ?
5. Profit!

Jonathan

:D

About the resizing of the dialog, it's possible to make the window resizeable in game, but the controls inside it don't move or change size which is dumb, there must be some sort of anchor property, but I can't find one in the Specs for UI
If someone finds it, then the user can make the window how much bigger they like  when using DAMN and keep it normal for other news

In the LUA file with an IID of FF048A3E. I thought if I changed the advice_types.CITY_PLANNER = 23 to 26 (26 is the FA's ID, and is also what the advice_types.FINANCIAL is) then it would make all the city planning news stories go to the Financial Advisor.
Because all news stories with a type of Financial (which I guess is just a more user friendly way of writing 26) go to the FA.

But instead it copied all the CP's stories to the FA, and then if I moved the FA's id before the city planners:

   advisor_ids.HEALTH_EDUCATION  = 22
   advisor_ids.FINANCES           = 26
   advisor_ids.CITY_PLANNING = 23
   advisor_ids.TRANSPORTATION = 24
   advisor_ids.ENVIRONMENT     = 25
   advisor_ids.SAFETY               = 27
   advisor_ids.FLUFF_NEWS       = 28

It moved the CP's stories to the financial advisor and copied FA's story to the city planner advisor.

I have no idea why it won't just move all the news stories to the FA?
I hope you understand what I'm trying to do as I don't know what the correct terminology is, and im not great at explaining things

z

Quote from: Diggis on September 01, 2009, 01:53:45 AM
Could you not force the change on people please?  Make it an option as I like it the way it is. ;)

I think Jonathan sums up my intention here perfectly:

Quote from: Jonathan on September 01, 2009, 02:05:51 AM
Definately optional,

The reason I made the dialog so big was to make it obvious that it was bigger :) So any size is possible, or give the user an option of say 3 sizes.

And also:

Quote from: Jonathan on September 01, 2009, 02:57:52 AM
About the resizing of the dialog, it's possible to make the window resizeable in game, but the controls inside it don't move or change size which is dumb, there must be some sort of anchor property, but I can't find one in the Specs for UI
If someone finds it, then the user can make the window how much bigger they like  when using DAMN and keep it normal for other news

I've seen some evidence of this myself; a lot of the reward boxes (especially the BSC ones) come with their own custom size.  Maybe looking at them will offer some clues.  I can't get to this right now, though.

Meanwhile, what about the main news box?  I've long thought that it was too small, even just for its primary function.  And it, like everything else, was designed long enough ago that people's monitor sizes tended to be a bit smaller.  I'd love to have a larger news box, at least available as an option.  And if the news box were large enough, having the Urgent Advice Dialogs option turned off would not be a problem for DAMN.

Rady

Sorry if this is a dumb question: I see you guys talking about the damn (sorry - DAMN  ;D) menu opening in a seperate popup box ... with my installation, after clicking on the "open additional submenues" entry in the news popup, i get an additional line that reads "open additional submenues" again. This line then behaves like the normel advisor information (like, "hospital is underfunded"). After clicking it, the whole DAMN menu tree rolls down in the news popup. Then from time to time I encounter the problem that after selecting one icon I cannot select another one, regardeless wheter I placed the first lot or not. I then have to close the "additional submenues" line and open it again as described above.

I run through the posts in this thread but didd'nt get a satisfaying answer to that problem. I tried to follow your conversation (in terms of getting a clue what you're talking about) but ended up somewhat lost.  ()what() So if this project is work under progress right now, just tell me, I' ll gladly wait for the outcome .. :thumbsup:
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.

Visit my BAT thread: Slow BAT steady - Rady's first BAT attemtps

Diggis

I would hazzard a guess you have the advisors set to off.

daeley

Quote from: z on September 01, 2009, 06:48:28 PM
I've seen some evidence of this myself; a lot of the reward boxes (especially the BSC ones) come with their own custom size.  Maybe looking at them will offer some clues.  I can't get to this right now, though.

actually, they don't come with their own box. There is one single UI file for all advisor popups (actually, two, a red and a blue one) which automatically resizes depending on the size of the text. I do not know how this resizing is controlled - my guess is that it is based on programmed behavior, linked to the clsid of the UI window. I have never looked into this resizing behavior in more detail, but it is entirely possible that some of it is controlled by the exe.
1. Install SC4+RH
2. Install LEX (CD&DVD helps) and latest NAM + updates
3. Play the game
4. ? ? ? ?
5. Profit!

Jonathan

I'm not talking about each news one being different, I mean the user drags the window bigger and smaller (resets for each message though, which I have just realised probably won't work for DAMN as it opens a new window for each menu), but still want to know how it works. You can see the problems in the video.

EDIT: Just thought of another thing, what about making all the news messages blue (the advisors will still have red backgrounds) and making the DAMN red (or vice versa)? That way the DAMN Dialog can be be bigger without annoying people with the news messages?

http://www.youtube.com/v/LG_o58jNaNc

Jonathan

PS:Daeley, That Jing thing, do you pay for it? I tried it(free) and it's very jerky and a big filesize.


daeley

can't see the movie... something about it being private...

what do you use for screen captures then?
1. Install SC4+RH
2. Install LEX (CD&DVD helps) and latest NAM + updates
3. Play the game
4. ? ? ? ?
5. Profit!