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Can you move a reward lot to another menu, like health or education?

Started by illwaukee, November 22, 2022, 03:36:23 PM

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illwaukee

There are a lot of reward lots I'd like to change to hospitals and education lots, so I can plop them. I was able to get them into the menu's by changing the occupancy, but when I plop them the game crashes. I have been editing several fields in the exemplar menu with no luck. Is there more to this than editing the exemplar menu?

Andreas

Reward lots are a bit tricky to edit, and the Maxis tools don't even allow you to touch them at all, because the proper setup of several things is critial, including a reward script for unlocking the lot when the reward conditions are met. If you want to keep the reward unlocking feature, the lot icon will show up in the reward menu anytime, hence the properties that are tied to this cannot be changed, this explains while you experienced crashes during your experiments.

Naturally, you can have things like a functional lot (police station, hospital etc.) that is unlocked as reward, but then the icon shows up in both menues once the reward got unlocked. If you want to keep the functionality, but get rid of the reward stuff, it might be best to start from scratch. This means, use the building model and create a new lot with PIM-X that has the desired functionality.

If you have certain experience with ilive's Reader, you can copy the lot design of the original lot into the newly created functional lot, there's some tutorials around how to do that. Or use the newly created exemplar file of the functional lot as a template and edit/add/remove all properties of the reward lot accordingly, and keep the original lot design. Any of these require advanced knowledge about the exemplar file properties, though.
Andreas

mgb204

Conversion here is not the way I'd go, but if you are using PIM-X (you should be), it's not too hard to make a new lot that functions how you want, without having to create it from scratch.

Step 1 is to take the main model used on the original lot, drag that in the relevant category under Buildings, for example Police Station to create a new Police Station lot. Then create a new lot for this building, make it identical in size to the reward equivalent you want to copy. The LotConfig Exemplar then shows a number of LotConfigPropertyLotObject lines. Essentially each contains the Hex code used to put an object onto a lot, in the Value column, it will state which items are the Props, Textures or the Building. It looks similar in Reader, but all the data there is in Hex, making it harder to read. But you can copy/paste this data in either App.

When creating a new lot, there should only be a building and some textures to begin with. So before doing anything else, highlight all the lines except for the Building (i.e. the textures), right click and select Delete Properties to remove them. Next, find the old Reward lot in PIM-X, open it's LotConfig as well. This time, highlight everything except the Building entry, right click and select Copy Properties. Return to the new lot you are creating, right click and select Paste Properties. Essentially that will copy/paste all the Props and Textures from the original lot to your new one, so you don't have to worry about recreating it. The one exception is the building on the lot, you may need to manually move/rotate this into place, but otherwise your lot will be identical to the one you copied from.

Having done this, if you want to keep the old rewards as well, then you need do nothing further. If you only want your new lot, then you can remove everything from the original download except the file containing the model used as the Building.

This process is pretty quick if you are familiar with using PIM-X, if not a step-by-step walkthrough on creating lots can be found in the official documentation.