TUTORIAL: Neighborhood Terrain Surgery
Mootilda:
Quote from: cassandra on 2008 March 07, 23:47:14
Now I am detirmed to figure this out. If EA is using some other way to creat Neighborhoods, or edit them, I want it.
Me too. I wish that they'd give us all of their internal sim / lot / neighborhood / etc. package creation tools...
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1). For Castaway Stories, EA used some other method to create the "hood," if you can call it that, it did not appear to have any roads.
You can manually place a lot anywhere in a neighborhood by just setting its Top, Left, and Z values in the Lot Description. A lot doesn't have to be next to a road. I've added that feature to a new (unreleased) version of the LotExpander. I think that the Castaway Stories neighborhoods are just standard neighborhoods where the lots were placed manually; it's easy to create a roadless neighborhood in SimCity 4.
Of course, the lots are all roadless as well, but that's easy - just set the U10 value to 0. Now that people can walk to community lots, roadless neighborhoods might even work in the Sims 2. This might be an interesting experiment... I wonder whether kids would be able to walk to school? I wonder whether the maid / repairperson / gardener can walk to your sim's house?
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2). For Pet Stories was there more than four neighborhoods? Four were posted on-line extracted from the game. Not so in Life Stories? Why would EA do it different, oh never mind......
I'm afraid that it's been a while so my memory is a bit hazy, but when I was porting the Life Stories and Pet Stories neighborhoods to Sims 2, I remember that I was frustrated and amused when I realized that the shipped SC4 files didn't actually match the shipped neighborhoods. In Castaway Stories, they didn't even bother to ship SC4s.
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3). For Pleasentview would you mid posting a few pictures? I can't seem to get my brain around this. If I can comprehend this maybe we can find a fix, or figure out wth EA was smoking. Btw, in SC4, everything always looks screwy since the scale is different, and backwards.
I'll see whether I kept my experiments with this. If not, I'll just import the shipped Pleasantview.SC4 into the existing Pleasantview neighborhood package. It will just take me some time.
I suppose what I really need is to find someone who knows something about the SimCity 4 package file formats. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just export the Neighborhood Terrain / Geometry from Sims 2 and import into an existing small city SC4 and everything would come out right?
cassandra:
Quote from: Mootilda on 2008 March 08, 02:00:28
I suppose what I really need is to find someone who knows something about the SimCity 4 package file formats. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just export the Neighborhood Terrain / Geometry from Sims 2 and import into an existing small city SC4 and everything would come out right?
I know a bit, the largest problem in the rendering. Your city will not look anywhere near the same as it does in TS2. This causes some problems, it is really difficult for me (maybe not someone like sleepycat who is a wizard with it...) to change things in SC4 to the way I want them to be in TS2. I think this may be some of the reason that the roads and other landmarks of the city look "off" to you. Changing the way TS2 and SC4 interpret files, that is nearly impossible. SC4 forums have been trying for years, no dice.
Mootilda:
OK, here's what I did. Regenerate a brand new Pleasantview (never touched):
Create a new neighborhood using the shipped Pleasantview SC4 file. Use the instructions in this thread to replace the Pleasantview neighborhood terrain with the one generated from the SC4 file. Otherwise the terrain is not touched. In particular, the SC4 file is not edited using SimCity 4 - this is the shipped file:
Both pictures of the Pleasantview neighborhood are taken from within Sims 2 Deluxe. I disabled neighborhood drift, so they should be identical positions. As you can see, the roads are not in the expected locations. Also, note the additional road near 10 Oak.
If it's helpful, I can do similar comparisons for other neighborhoods. I know that the Strangetown SC4 is basically correct, and that the Stories SC4 files tend to be wrong.
One other thing: I have been doing this replacement of terrain for some time, as a way of adding roads to an existing terrain, without knowing about this thread. However, I usually just replace the Neighborhood Terrain and Neighborhood Terrain Geometry. I did all four mentioned above this time, just to ensure that my technique wasn't at fault. Can anyone explain why the other two exports are required?
cassandra:
It appears that it is almost perfectly flipped, but the proportions are off. Sections of road seem to have wandered from their original positions? That is really weird. With a few more pictures, I could certainly make a new hood... Is their water anywhere on the original pleasantview template (the neighborhood that came installed)?
It's officia,l EA programmers and testers take breaks to smoke crack... Hey, it explains the screwy code! ::)
Mootilda:
Quote from: cassandra on 2008 March 10, 03:47:20
It appears that it is almost perfectly flipped, but the proportions are off. Sections of road seem to have wandered from their original positions? That is really weird. With a few more pictures, I could certainly make a new hood... Is their water anywhere on the original pleasantview template (the neighborhood that came installed)?
The water and hills are exactly where they should be, so nothing is flipped. You can see the shadow from the hill behind the Lothario house is in exactly the same place (with respect to the houses). It's just the roads which are in the wrong place. My assumption is that EA shipped an SC4 file which was not actually used to generate the Pleasantview neighborhood and which has the roads in the wrong place.
Let me try to get you a larger picture which shows the water and hills. I may not get to this right away because someone just reported a bug in the LotExpander (always my highest priority)... if you want to try replacing the terrain yourself, you'll see what I'm talking about.
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