Modifying city/building art -- not possible?

I've read through the forums and done some testing, and am ready to conclude that altering the appearance of city/building/wonder art with a mod is not possible. Being told something's impossible just makes me want to do it more, so I wanted to see if anyone here has some new insight.

Here is what appears to be the situation:
- we CAN access and extract 3D models from city/building/wonder art (even the ones with multiple models in a file) using the brilliant Nexus Buddy 2, and we CAN turn these into improvements (tutorial link)
- formerly, we could do local edits to art through Resources/Common/Civ5ArtDefines.XML files -- however, while we could override these files in a mod for units, we were never able to put them in a mod for city art as it appears all the art parameters are loaded prior to selecting a mod, and we had no way of reloading them (we can reload the unit and landmarks through checkboxes in modbuddy)
- as of a certain patch, civ v no longer reads changes to the XML files in the Resources/Common folder, so the above no longer does anything anyways (I tested this and confirmed)
- civ v DOES read some changes to the following files: Civ5ArtDefines_Inherited_Expansion2_Wonders.xml and Civ5ArtDefines_Expansion2_Wonders.xml in Assets\DLC\Expansion2\Buildings\Wonders. While editing size/granny of wonders such as Al Hambra, CN Tower, Great Mosque does not seem to effect any change, changing (for example) these parameters in Statue of Zeus, Red Fort, Borobudur DOES have an effect in-game.

- this again only works with hardcoded local edits. Overriding the files with a mod (VFS=true) has no effect, presumably because there is no way to reload the city art system.
- the debug panel does have a button to reload city art, but this does not load these XML edits
- adding a lua function containing Events.BuildingLibrarySwap( g_iAssetCulture, g_iAssetEra ) (this is what the debug panel calls when you press the reload city art button) to a mod's lua does not make XML file overrides appear
- I glanced through the lua and DLL sourcecode and cannot find a function that loads art parameters (except the debug panel's function above) or draws in-game art (this is where I wonder if someone more experienced than I may have found something, especially in the DLL?)

Any thoughts?

hazel16 said:

- as of a certain patch, civ v no longer reads changes to the XML files in the Resources/Common folder, so the above no longer does anything anyways (I tested this and confirmed)

Click to expand...

You should be able to set LooseFilesOverridePAK = 1 in your config.ini, then put the file anywhere within the Assets folder. Or make a fake DLC.

Thanks Nutty! This solution may not be ideal for what I'm working on right now, but good to know there may be a way to do it...