Retuner

You know how to create traditional tuning packages, so what advantage does this mod provide ?

1. A primary benefit is you can tune based on season or hour of the sim-day, something that is unavailable using traditional means.
   • Unless you happen to enjoy exiting the game to switch out tuning packages when the season changes. If so, have at it.
2. A similar advantage is the ability to set tuning on a town-by-town basis
   • You can have different tuning based on the type of town you are playing, or for each vacation world you visit
3. A secondary benefit is that testing compatibility for your changes is trivial.
   • If a tuning field you changed in-game vanishes from the Core game, the mod will simply invalidate your tuning and ignore it.
   • If you are loading tuning from the tuning package, you will receive an error log when you load up informing you of the issue, and the game will continue regardless.
4. You can use this mod to supplement the traditional means.
   • Since the changes applied by this mod are layered over tuning package changes, you can actually use both methods at the same time.

Now the downside:

1. The mod adds overhead to the game, in the form of a hard pause for 10-30 seconds when the world first loads and it changes the tuning, which a tuning package does not.
   • Tuning packages are read, the fields in the Core scripting populated, and the file is then tossed out.
     • This method requires no additional memory or performance overhead after the initial read.
   • This mod is non-Core scripting, and as such uses some of your computer's memory to store its own information for the duration of the game-play session.
     • It must also reprocess the tuning whenever the Seasons change, or when the hour changes (if you are using that functionality) and as such can incur a performance lag during this time.
2. The mod's tuning cannot properly adjust fields which are used prior to the mod loading
   • There are a number of tuning fields that are used early in the game's start up, before the mod has a chance to change the values.
   • These type of fields can only be altered using traditional methods.
3. The mod has limitations regarding what can be tuned.
   • _XML tuning is limited to non-table-based tuning files since by the time table-based tuning is loaded into the game, the structure of the data is no longer generalized enough to easily manipulate.
     • Note that time permitting, the developer can set up specialized options for specific table-based tuning (for instance the "SocialData" table has mod options).
     • Requests will be noted for future consideration.

- twallan's note: Personally I find the advantages to outweigh the increased overhead. I have been tuning my game in this manner for quite a while, in order to avoid having to retest and update tuning mods. (Though obviously I'm a little biased in this regard).