Renaming plopped lots - Question?

[FrankU]

Dear friends, this question is about something that is less urgent than world peace or solving the Euro crisis. Anyway, please read:

I make a lot of new lots. And I have a question about the name that you see when you query the plopped lot in game.
If you click the lot a query appears. The name of the lot that is shown can be changed. That all looks normal. But yesterday I found out that if I plop a lot several times all instances of this lot are automatically renamed! That is not what I want.
I know that when I plop the Maxis schools several times that I can give every instance of the school its own name. Now I want that with my self made lots too. Waht should I do?

Let me explain what I do:
In SC4_PIM I take a model, drag it to the desired building type and create a building.
Then I select the option "make a ploppable lot out of this building".
Then I lot until I am happy.
Save.
Exit.
Play the game, plop the lot several times.
I query one of the lots. Let's say it is called "Dutch Windmill 3". I rename this lot to "De Drie Vissen". Now all plopped instances of this lot are renamed into "De Drie Vissen".

It is not a great problem. Probably everyone could live with this, but it makes ne curious what I need to do to make it possible that every instance can have its own name in game.

Please help?

[Andreas]

There are two ways to attach a name to a building, either by using a "User Visible Name Key" property that contains the ID of an LTEXT file, or by using a "Item Name" property that contains the name directly inside the Building Exemplar file. The latter method was introduced by the Maxis Plugin Manager, and it requires the use of unicode if you want to add accented characters (ä, ö, ü, à, etc.), otherwise, the game will freeze as soon as you hover the mouse over the icon (or use the query tool). Now while the second method doesn't need a set of unique IDs for the LTEXT file, it's a bit more resource friendly, but it also causes the problem that you mentioned. If you want to have truly individual building names, you need to add an LTEXT file. This is an easy step in SC4PIM, fortunately, simply right-click on the Item Name property and select "Convert to LTEXT" from the context menu. You can add additional LTEXT files for other languages as well, which is a nice feature for multilingual lots.

[FrankU]

Ah, OK.
I didn't know that SC4PIM could be used for that.
I have tried to add a LTEXT file with LeProp, but it did not do what I wanted. It added a LTEXT file though, but maybe not the right type?

I'll try this out. Thanks.

Edit: I did and it worked. Thanks again. It's the little details that make the work worth it wile.