This is in progress, but requires changes to the Loading Screen Mod more than BOB.

Both great mods, and thanks for that airports fix for loading screen mod. Another idea I had was to intergrate some of the features from the new Bob compatible prop anarchy mod, prop resizing, and prop painting, but guess that could be a nightmare to code.

Originally posted by algernon:

This is in progress, but requires changes to the Loading Screen Mod more than BOB.

That is great to hear, would be a true gamechanger. Would give possibility to unsubscribe from many props/tress that I don't want to use and have only as dependencies. And @Gimpanzee - great idea for solution of the problem (blank props/trees pointers to be replaced by BOB - I think that is a neat idea).
@algernon - could you share some details on working on this? Are you taking over LSM from thale and working on this feature in there? Can we expect something soon or would it require some more time? Is your concept of solving this similar to @Gimpanzee?

Still working on it, albeit slowly. I'm working (also slowly) on a next-gen LSM replacement (since Thale's moved on), one that can also be more readily community maintained, which will enable (amongst other things) the prop auto-replace.

Not sure of timing yet, at least a month, I'd say.

Wow great stuff, thanks for quick response and good luck with your development. Thanks for all your enormous contribution to improve this great, yet often flawed game. Your mods make it far better.

Dude! Prop replacement at loading time would be a massive game-changer. That would let us theme the entire map by deciding what trees and bushes were available for use rather than having a hodge-podge of plants based on what various asset creators wanted. I currently have 292 missing assets in my LSM report because I'm not subbing to palm trees, HVAC systems, or contemporary car props that don't fit with all the antique American iron I have roaming my streets.

If you could somehow make it compatible with Building Themes, that would be beyond epic. Imagine being able to have different plants in different districts. I'm sure that would take work on that mod as well, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'compatible with Building Themes', sorry - could you elaborate?

Coordinate between the two so that replacements made via LSM could be changed on a per theme basis. So a building that was missing bush A might get bush B downtown but bush C in the tourist district. I don't know if that's even possible, no idea if themes get loaded early enough. But now I need to go to that mod page and bring up the idea of adding plants to themes.

Themes? No, they don't load early enough, and anyway, why would you need Building Themes to do that? Building Themes doesn't do anything about modifying buildings and has no awareness of props (if it did, then it and BOB would be incompatible anyway). If you're talking about adding plants via Building Themes, then I really don't think you understand what that does - all it does is control what buildings are allowed to spawn in which locations. It doesn't do, and can't do, anything else.

I was only talking about using Building Themes to manage the plants, not to modify them. But I thought it might not load early enough. My thinking is that it would be another layer of control for us. If we wanted one district to have cherry tress lining the streets and another district to have junipers we could simply tick different boxes in the options and it would be handled automatically. Of course, having an "all similar assets in district" option in BOB would be cool as well.

Okay, I'm totally confused here. How can you 'manage' plant props without modifying them? Why would Building Themes need to be completely rewritten to modify prefabs when BOB already does so?

Building Themes doesn't plop buildings, just determines what buildings are allowed to plop in a given area. Similarly, it wouldn't need to change props, just provide a list of available props for BOB to use in a given district. I don't understand the confusion. If I can go into BOB and say "replace all examples of this tree with this other tree" why couldn't I define a list ahead of time to handle the task? And if I can define a list, why couldn't that list vary by district? I definitely understand if the mods can't communicate with each other and that loading time matters. I'm just talking generally. I haven't done any coding since BASIC back in the late '80s, so I'm not pretending to know what's feasible. Just tossing out an idea and failing miserably at getting it across clearly.

The BOB part's a given, but I still don't get why you're trying to bring Building Themes into this? Also, Building Themes isn't about plopping, it's about spawniing. Maybe you don't understand what Building Themes does and that's causing the confusion?

To make it claer, Building Themes doesn't, and can't, and won't, have anything to do to with props or trees or any other data structure contained within prefabs. Building Themes is irrelevant to anything BOB does, and vice-versa.

Unless I misunderstood and you want Building Themes to be rebuilt to replace BOB? In which case you're better off posting over on Building Themes' page instead. Or are you asking for the reverse, for Building Themes to be incorporated into BOB?

I'm not wanting anything to replace anything. I'm wanting to filter props on a per-district basis. Filtering assets by district is exactly what BT does. I don't want it to modify anything, just to control what options are available for modifications. That is literally exactly what it does already with buildings. BT doesn't spawn the buildings, it just tells the game what buildings are allowed to spawn. Just like AVO tells the game what vehicles are allowed to spawn or Service Vehicle Selector tells buildings what vehicles they're allowed to spawn. All of these mods are just filters, they don't do the actual work. That's what I'd like to be able to do with props, filter them so that certain ones appear in certain areas. If that could be done as an option within BOB, great. Like I said earlier, a simple "all similar props in this district" button in the replacement menu would be cool.

Okay. So, just to make sure I understand:
1. You just want random props by district.
2. The whole Building Themes was confusion on your part and was just a 'because it does things by district' (because you don't undertand that selection filtering via BuildingManger.GetRandomBuildingInfo patching has nothing to do with prop/trees and cannot be made to do so) - so I can ignore all that.

Correct?