I could use some feedback on a few features.

Force Building Level Up and Control Building Level Up will not affect plops currently. Do you guys want compatibility?

Industry specialization needs to be plopped within specialized district to function as of now. Do you guys want to be able to plop processing plants anywhere?

Industrial Extractor needs to be plopped in specialized district and on resource to function as of now. Do you want to be able to plop functioning extractor buildings everywhere, or require them to be on resources to function?

Love the mod and have finally had a chance to play around with it. So far everything seems to work good. :) Figured I'd give some answers here. :)

I don't use Force Building Level Up or Control Building Level Up, so to me it won't be needed. If I was to use those mods it would be to get the look of the building right, and I guess plops don't change appearance as they level, so I'd be back to not needing it. :)

I'd mix growable industry with plops, so for specialized industry I'd need a district anyway. Same goes for being on resources. It makes sense to me to have extractors on the resource for them to work. There's always the mod to paint resources on the ground whereever you need them.

I would like ploppable mixed use (with specialized industry on empty/depleted land) including skyfarms (offices with few workers but produce raw/extracted agriculture resources AKA food crops), recycling centers (incinerators that use (instead of generate) electricity when processing garbage but produce refined mining (scrap metal and aluminum), drilling (plastic), and forestry (paper and engineered wood) products, and (yeast/algae/microbe) food vats (sewage treatment plants that produced refined agricultural products AKA processed food).

Yes, those things are somwhat possible with the mod... ;)

You can use sub-buildings to create mixed use buildings with any combination of service or growable buildings.

The sub-buildings function independantly, but I do have some ideas to wire things together in the future. For example, the mixed use test lot "Coke Ovens" has a ore processing building and a coal power plant. The products from the ore building don't get automaticly sent to the coal plant.

Skyfarms would have extraction type of specialized industry ploppable anywhere. The others would create refined resources from nothing (while disappearing garbage or sewage). Is that possible?

Yea, thats possible. The ploppable extractors as of right now still need to be placed on a resource to produce goods, but the code that handles that check is easy to bypass. I will probably make that a setting that asset makers can change.

I would to know how the plop buildings will interact with population modification mods, like realistic pops tend to increase a lot the usage of regular RCI, currently they are even calculating capacity on the size of the actual model...
Causa if buildings are likely to be balanced with vanilla they might get big discrepancies.

I'm playing with the realistic population and consumption mod. Households and jobs appear to be related to only the RICO XML file. Residential and Offices seem to have the same number of workers as specified in the XML file, while my commercial buildings have as many highly educated workers as specified by the file. Granted, I have only tested level 3 commercial/office, but it seems the worker ratio is 0:0:2:3 for the 4 education levels.

This one?

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=426163185&searchtext=realistic+population

I just figured out how to test if other mods are active, so I can look into this tomorrow. It also looks like that mod stores its settings in a really easy to access place, so hopefully telling the RICO buildings pick up on those settings won't be too hard.

I know the RICO offices worker counts should pick up on the vanilla ratios and amounts, but Im not sure what will happen with the balance mod active.

Thanks for taking time to test and report back on issues.

well before doing anything for compatibility, I'd suggest to talk to the other mod author first,
seem that currently it isn't very stable, going through a lot of changes, with the getting building size from the model stuff,
there is also a legacy* version, which is considerably simpler, (which I'm using)

Why not have the RICO modders make 2 XML files: one for default, one for realistic population and consumption?

the idea is that the Realistic Pop mod calculates the capacity from configurable xml file, for uniformity its best to calculate them all equally, so what actually needs to be done is hook this mod to get the values from the other

Looks like grabing his xml file and reading the values is doable.

However, the settings it puts on the large RICO buildings isn't very accurate. The vanilla game has a more wealth means more density dynamic. So level 5 is always a huge tower, and level 1 is always a small apartment block.

This dymanic can be broken with the RICO mod. For example, Robert Taylor Homes is around 3x the volume of the big level 5 towers. However, its only level 1. I've got it set to 70 households for vanilla balance. The pop balance mod would assign it around 100 homes. It should be at around 200 for realism.

If Robert Taylor Homes is marked level 5, the mod would attempt to assign it around 450 homes. With the vanilla growables, higher levels means more density. However, thats not always the case with the RICO mod.

It may just be best to manualy set a realistic pop number, and have the RICO mod assign that if the WG mod is active.

AJ3D, the point is that the mod is configurable, if you check their stock settings the higher the level the less citizens per space, higher space_pp (space per person) less final citizens,

I personally think this doesn't fit very well with the game dynamic, which is higher level <> more density, so I just configure them to have generally same relative density, based only on building size, specially because most buildings just jump to level 3~4 almost immediately.

Hmmm... ok.

I did have a closer look at the bundled xml files, and yea, there are several different ways it can work. Ill get in touch with him, and see if hes willing to offer advice on how to have the RICO mod to grab its home/worker values from his mod.