Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines

Prop Painter: Revisited 1.3
 This topic has been pinned, so it's probably important
Quistar  [developer] Dec 24, 2021 @ 5:40am
What's wrong with original Prop Painter
I'm writing this so modders (as well as players) in our wonderful community may be aware of some issues we have to deal with, and try to prevent it in the future.

The crash in original Prop Painter is completely silent, which is why its so hard to debug. Players are completely unaware that it crashed, although some symptoms pop up here and there, e.g. why is the color panel stuck and visible all the time, or why is Move It not functioning correctly, or why is some mod not working with original Prop Painter.

The reasons why the original Prop Painter is not working:
  • The biggest issue is because Move It codes have changed, and original Prop Painter is still trying to access the non-existent codes. The primary methods that original Prop Painter uses is MoveIt::SelectAction::Add and MoveIt::CloneAction::Do, but MoveIt codes have changed those and now MoveIt::SelectAction::Add does nothing, and MoveIt::CloneAction::Do doesn't exist anymore. The result is the mod crashing as it cannot patch those methods, and also causes a chain reaction of crashes to other mods that also try to patch MoveIt
  • Usually when we use Harmony, it will generate an exception error that is glaringly obvious its easy for us to find the issue and fix it, but the original Prop Painter uses Harmony version 1.2 that is already 2 years old, and it doesn't generate these exception errors. So patching fails silently, which misleads all of us into thinking it still works, and the problem must be some other new mod.
  • The case with Tree Anarchy and the original Prop Painter is unique. Tree Anarchy uses Harmony 2.0 while original Prop Painter uses Harmony 1.2. Bofomer has done a great job keeping Harmony backward compatible, but a failure in a patch in Harmony 1.2 will cause a chain-reaction of failures in Harmony 2.0 patches. Thus is why Tree Anarchy would crash when the original Prop Painter is also installed

The point here is that all modders should try and use one version of Harmony (The latest version), so we can all save time and find issues easily, instead of what I had to do to find out that Prop Painter was causing issue. I installed 200 mods, and uninstalled them one by one, and restarted the game each time (Luckily I found it on my 20th try). It's best we all stick to Bofomer's Harmony 2.0
Last edited by Quistar; Dec 24, 2021 @ 5:48am