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Making a Region Transport View mod?

Started by Wiimeiser, January 29, 2011, 11:32:37 PM

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Wiimeiser

How would I change the colours? I've got the reader, but I don't see anything about colours...
Pink horse, pink horse, she rides across the nation...

cammo2003

Ah, something I might be able to help with! I'm working on one myself at the moment...

The easiest way to start is to grab an existing mod to see how it works (it also gives you something to start with rather than having to delve through the simcity_x.dat files).

There's two main aspects to most region transport mods: the UI (which is the little box that tells you what's what, and the actual dataview itself.

Before you start, work out what your existing colours are from the mod. (the PNG files contained within are what shows on the Region Legend). This will be important when you finish. Export them, and  NOTE which PNG you exported for each export. Take and save screenshots if you must.

Use a paint program, or an online hex colour finder, to work out the colours you want to use, edit the images in your favourite image editing software (even Paint will probably work for these; they're not complex images), and import them back in, making sure to recopy them over the correct images! It's very easy to get confused if you don't.

To change the colours, you'll want to modify the property listed as DV/RegionalTransport: Color Table. It'll be within one of the Exemplar files (some such mods contain more than one, just look in them all and you'll find it eventually.

Each of those 0x hexadecimal values in this property represents a colour value in the form

0xHHHHHHHH

The First two Hex numbers represent the level of transparency (FF is very strongly visible, 00 is completely invisible; personally, I find the latter rather useless). The other two represent how strong that colour is (Red for red in the above, Green for Green, Blue for Blue (again, FF for a full portion of this colour, 00 for none of it).

As an example, 0xFFFFFFFF would produce a very bright white colour. 0xFF000000 would produce solid black.

The panel at the bottom shows you the order of the values for this property (which network they belong to.The order goes down the list, with street being the first value, rail being the next, right through to default zone.

I was quite familiar with the hex value colour system because I had some rudimentary exposure to writing HTML; It's essentially an extended version of the same format.

If all this flies over your head, put the reader down, and do some reading about how the reader works, what properties are, what exemplars are. It all takes a bit of getting used to if you're not accustomed to it.

I hope this is able to help. Which version of the reader are you using? The newer versions have a different interface although the actual technique doesn't change (I've used 0.9.3 and the current verison, 1.4, which is much improved).

I'll try and update this with screenshots tomorrow. It's about 10:30pm here, and I'm dog tired.