TUTORIAL: Neighborhood Terrain Surgery

[Ardin Topani]

Veilchen, yes I made it. I think you would need simcity4 to make the terrains in this way. I thought the default terrains were quite ugly so I made one I liked. The square on the right was to be the commercial district, though I've ended up not playing community lots at all since JM's clothing outfitter.

JM, yes some of the surfaces are a little uneven, I like that for landscaping ideas. Not many areas are more than a 15 degree slope, I alter max slope value so I can build there anyway. I quite like sloping sections for basements with windows along one side and so on.
"and more about random orbital bombardment around the edges" ? You make it look like your n'hoods have been bombarded? 

Very cool! I tried making my own neighborhood maps (as I have Sims City 4), but I had mucho problems doing it. Apparently, Sim City 4 insisted on corrupting mt DirectX drivers every time it started up, so I would have to reinstall them. Then it would crash after 20 minutes. Then Sims 2 started going wonky after installing Sim City 4, so decided Sim City could go away since I always sucked at playing it anyway.

So thank you for the awesome new neighborhood. This was the type of thing I was looking to make for myself. 

[veilchen]

Witch, I've tried the terrain and it's very nice. This is the first time I downloaded terrain that properly displayed in the template chooser, all the others had the grid thing going. I just deleted them, perhaps unecessarily, but I am a little edgy as far as my computer is concerned. It is, after all, over 7 years old, but it tries very hard :D

The terrain surgery is wonderful, its about the first thing I was actually able to get accomplished after only two tries (the first time around my computer got stuck in mid-surgery).

Ardin, I've found my SimCity, it was #4 and my computer flipped its lid too *sigh*. So I guess I have to wait for witch to come up with more goodies. Love the winery, unfortunately my game can't handle large lots.

JM, one of these days you have to treat us to a peak at your favorite neighborhood. I have a few castles, but no fortresses :D

G.

[J. M. Pescado]

My neighborhood is sadly rather boring. I haven't actually built all that many fortress-like buildings, instead going for the relatively low-profile approach. The sims themselves are far more interesting than their dwellings.

[Ancient Sim]

Tried this and it worked, although at first I thought it hadn't as there were no houses to be seen anywhere.  Wandered around with my mouse and the hand kept appearing - they were all invisible.  Maybe it was because I couldn't replace the first UNK number as it didn't exist in either the original neighbourhood or my new one.

[SimsHost]

Is there a way to get a Sims 2 neighborhood terrain into Sim City 4 so that you can edit it?  Or is it a one-way street?

[Renatus]

Is there a way to get a Sims 2 neighborhood terrain into Sim City 4 so that you can edit it?  Or is it a one-way street?

Since the terrains are the same file format as SimCity4 uses, they should be compatible... Question is what region it will end up in. Hm, I'm all curious now... I think I'll check.


... Nope, dead wrong. Just copying over a terrain to a region folder didn't work, and neither did replacing an existing terrain with a Sims2 one - the original terrain still shows up when I load it.

[Brynne]

Tried this and it worked, although at first I thought it hadn't as there were no houses to be seen anywhere.  Wandered around with my mouse and the hand kept appearing - they were all invisible.  Maybe it was because I couldn't replace the first UNK number as it didn't exist in either the original neighbourhood or my new one.

Since I switched to a more mountainous terrain, some of my houses were embedded in the mountains. I only discovered them when I moused over the area looking for a place to move in a family and the lot would show up red (as in "your sims can't afford to live here"). I royally screwed up when I moved the lot, which was actually a house, to the bin. It was occupied! I had no idea until I got it into the lots and houses bin. It would have been nice if, instead of the "are you sure you want to move 'Modern Villa' to the lots and houses bin" message, it had said "Are you sure you want to move 'Modern villa' and the 'x family"! Now I am faced with the fun task of removing extra copies of many of my characters in simpe. This game is pissing me off today.

[Brynne]

Okay, you guys. Had to go to a backup copy of my neighborhood, so I took the opportunity to take a screenshot of my houses at sea.

[SimsHost]

Oh!  I like it!

"A life on the ocean wave!  A home on the rolling deep..."

... Nope, dead wrong. Just copying over a terrain to a region folder didn't work, and neither did replacing an existing terrain with a Sims2 one - the original terrain still shows up when I load it.

Aw darn. 

Oh well, after thinking about it, I realized that the neighborhoods I play in 95% of the time are on terrains that I created in SC4, so there's still the option to rework the terrains again in SC4 to make a new one.

[veilchen]

Val, that picture is priceless. Keep it, it might yet serve you well some time in the future. (goes off to ponder some truly wicked ideas).

G.

[Brynne]

I dug up 8 or 9 houses from underneath a mountain located just above where that picture was taken. I wanted to take a picture of that, too, but didn't know how.

[J. M. Pescado]

If you're planning to create a large, useless mountain, you might want to move the houses that might end up potentially buried there out of the way prior to swapping the terrain.

[Brynne]

I know that for "next time". I actually didn't create this one. I got it off MTS2. It's much, much larger than the original Pleasantville, anyway, so I wouldn't have known where the houses would have shown up on the new terrain.   

[twink]

Witch-Got the terrrain installed and it looks great.

Isn't there a cheat to show the entire neighborhood? I need it because I have some houses missing in the mountain... haha at least they do not have families just empty houses..

Twink

[Brynne]

This what you're looking for?

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=30492

[daysies]

Even with the lots out at sea, are they still playable or do you have to move them to land?

[Brynne]

I don't know. I wondered that, too, but I didn't try to go into one until I moved it. I was a-scared.

[J. M. Pescado]

Even with the lots out at sea, are they still playable or do you have to move them to land?

I suspect they'd be playable, but you'd potentially get weird artifacts when rendering the surrounding terrain and road.

Alternatively, it would crash outright due to a failed attempt to render the surrounding roadway, as the game clearly is able to perceive the layout of the road in front of the lot, such as whether an intersection is present and what kind.

Neither outcome should cause permanent damage. Should being the operative word here.

[Kristalrose]

This is really interesting!!  I have been playing around with this for the past couple of nights.  I have had problems with moving the lots with the hand tool, though.  When you move the out of water, the land comes up and forms a square island, so your lake/river/ocean is marred.  When you move them out of a hillside, the land caves in and is no longer useful for placing a lot on it. 

So I'm experimenting with making a terrain with SC4 that is comparable to my original terrain in levels, so my lots appear on the same level and do not have to be hauled out of a mountain or the water. 

JMP:  Can I link this thread to Worldsims? 

[Brynne]

If you go back into simpe and re-enter the changes you made (in the tutorial), the terrain will correct itself. Believe me, I know. That was one ugly lake and mountain in my neighborhood after moving all those houses! But it looks like it should, now.

[J. M. Pescado]

This is really interesting!!  I have been playing around with this for the past couple of nights.  I have had problems with moving the lots with the hand tool, though.  When you move the out of water, the land comes up and forms a square island, so your lake/river/ocean is marred.  When you move them out of a hillside, the land caves in and is no longer useful for placing a lot on it. 

So I'm experimenting with making a terrain with SC4 that is comparable to my original terrain in levels, so my lots appear on the same level and do not have to be hauled out of a mountain or the water.

One thing you can do is "iterative improvement". Once you've placed your initial terrain, "unbury" your lots. This will partially mutilate your existing terrain, but try to put them on "valid" ground matching the roads, so that they now sit levelly on clear terrain in your new neighborhood. Some hillsides and lakes may be mutilated as a result. Then REPEAT the terrain replacement procedure using those same extracted files. Now the houses should be sitting on level ground for your "new" terrain, and when you re-replace it, you overwrite the damage inflicted while unwedging lots.

JMP:  Can I link this thread to Worldsims? 

I can't really stop you, so I'm not going to worry about it.

[Kristalrose]

Thanks, JMP.  I just thought I'd do the polite thing and ask 1st. 

[Ancient Sim]

Is there any way this can work with the Downtown neighbourhood?  I put a house on that turned out to be unplayable, so I bulldozed it.  Unfortunately, the house caused the road to rise upwards and it didn't go back down when I removed the house.  I tried putting a larger house on to hopefully level it down, instead it made the road split in half and veer to the side, exposing blue stuff underneath.  It not only looks hideous, now I can't put a house there at all.  I would have thought it would have gone back as it was, but it hasn't.

Will I have to completely replace the main neighbourhood to get the Downtown one back as it should be, or can I do Downtown on its own?  I don't have many Sims living there so it would be no big deal to move them out and back in if I can somehow replace the terrain with the one in the main EA File, which I would have thought was possible but doesn't seem to be.

[Hegelian]

Witch, I've tried the terrain and it's very nice. This is the first time I downloaded terrain that properly displayed in the template chooser, all the others had the grid thing going. I just deleted them, perhaps unecessarily, but I am a little edgy as far as my computer is concerned.

Okay, I know this is an old post, but I thought I'd make this observation since no one else did.

The neighborhood images displayed in the neighborhood chooser are simply 400x300 PNG files that reside in each neighborhood's folder in the Neighborhoods folder in My Documents>. . . . The grid thing is just a placeholder that displays in the absence of a proper image for the neighborhood. If a terrain you download comes with an image file you can use that (use an image-editor to change it to PNG format if necessary) by renaming it N00x_Neighborhood.png, where x is the number of the neigborhood, and moving it into the appropriate Neighborhood folder.

You can use any image you want—an in-game aerial view of the neighborhood, snaps of your sims, whatever. If you're a Photoshop wiz, you could do something with fade effects that shows your sims against a background of the aerial view, or use some other tool to make the motion views that come with the Maxis neighborhoods (I have no idea how to do that). For a static image, just make it 400x300 and you're good to go.

It may be possible to use a BMP or JPG file without converting to PNG, but since the Maxis image files are PNG, I just make the conversion and have never tried using an image in another format.

[blubug]

I was wondering, can we do this to uni and downtown neighborhoods? If so, how, because 'UNK' Files differ in number.