More Awesome Than You!

Poncy Promenade

I really hated the small apartments that came with the Apartment Life EP. So I set out to make some rentable homes. Being me, I ended up with four large homes on one ginormous lot.

There are a lot of communal activities as well as the large family homes. Each home has four double bedrooms, three bathrooms and one bonus room that could become a bedroom.

I have provided two downloads, one is still categorised as residential and one has been changed into an apartment lot. Some people have experienced borked apartment lots after download, so if that happens, you could download the residential and do your own conversion.

The residential lot costs §691,174. The houses rent out at §6671 - §7193.

Overview
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/4Houses/4Houses_130908002.jpg)

Underground car parking - two cars per house. I've used the floor dividers to define the area that belongs to each house. I've tested with a trial family and they were able to purchase cars, place them and use them. You will have to lock the gates at the bottom of the stairs just for family, otherwise everysim will wander into the houses. If you wanted, you could expand the area covered by the floor dividers to create extra downstairs storage room.

The basement has a break in the wall/foundation on each of the four walls to provide light. The downside is that the gym etc think they're outdoors, so it's up to you whether you put in a wall or not. There are plenty of lights. You will need to replace the walls if you want to change the floors above.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/4Houses/4Houses_130908005.jpg)


Gym
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/4Houses/4Houses_130908006.jpg)


I've tried to do a different style in each house. Each house also has one large bonus spare room plus a small enclosed verandah.
House 1 downstairs.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/4Houses/4Houses_130908008.jpg)


House 1 upstairs
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/4Houses/4Houses_130908009.jpg)


Central community area including a view of the lifts from the basement
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/4Houses/4Houses_130908016.jpg)

There are pictures of the inside of the other three houses on Laverwinkle (http://laverwinklesims.com/index.php?topic=801.msg8391). Also pics of the music room, the movie room and more of the communal areas on the ground floor.


Download residential lot (http://www.box.net/shared/2yyelkut3b)

Download apartment lot (http://www.box.net/shared/oqqsg06mj9)

16/09/08: Apologies, I found some freeloaders in the files, good old phone line controller, no humble computer and a couple of Lord Darcy's armoire type mods. My apologies. All I can say is I was finally uploading at about 3am and forgot to check.

20/9/08:
Finally found time to do spacecadet's list.
- Walls in basement have no breaks, the lights can be turned on.
- TV room is all on ground level, so it will work.
- Walled off music room.
- Took lights off dining table and replaced with overhead light.
- Changed downstairs bathroom round so shower works.
- Moved the dresser blocking the bed.

I've had a few problems with the driveways, but if I click cancel it seems to be fine. Once all houses are rented, I don't get the error messages. The driveways work as planned. No-one else has mentioned getting errors, so I dunno.

I DLed the residential version, as I fail at building basements. This looks like a fun lot to play, and may well keep some of my legacy spares very happy. It looks like you have thought of everything, so I hope I remember to cheat to rent the apartments furnished.

Incredible, witch! I'm looking forward to getting this into my game.

*Reminds self to download when self gets home.

Very smart!  It reminds me of the posh part of Brighton Marina :)

Beautiful. Will snaffle this as soon as I get to the bottom of why PCs in apts have no FT related functionality.

Thanks for the comments.  :)


Brightom must have changed an awful lot then since I was a child visiting there 42 years ago. I remember a somewhat grimy, seedy sort of a look.

You can see why I'm keen on non-playable sims being able to use all the equipment, as per my request in your new hack thread.  :D

Very, VERY nice witch! I love the community garden.

Witch I have a feeling you're going to have to use visitor-enabled objects.   The "visitors" tickbox if it's not on means only persontype0 can select the option.   To check this, make a tenant neighbor selectable using my updated cat teleporter.  See if you can direct your neighbor to use the gym object.  If not, then that means you have to use a visitor enabled object.  NB making them selectable by other means won't work for this test.

OK. Will test that when I get a chance to play, probably not for a day or two. Ta.

same idea I had :D I was looking for houses to rent, not just apartments for single sims...these will be nice.

My next effort will be four grunge houses on a small lot. Promise!

(As opposed to another ginormous lot).

This is super.  And with rental prices above 6000, it's great for those people who complain that their sims always have too much money.

Drain those bank accounts!  ;D

Very nice!
I like playing with apartments because the neighbors make the game more interesting, but there isn't enough space in an apartment for all skill objects, career rewards and so on. This is great and is very nicely decorated!

Great set of house thank you Most  places around us here are rented house and not apartments.

Very very nice. Any sim would be lucky to live there. I love the concept of several houses together so families can really get to know the aunts, cousins etc. Unfortunately my machine struggled with it so my guys will have to make do with something less. Machine upgrades on hold until TS3 spec's come out.
I did move Lazlo Curious in. As it was so beautifully furnished he didn't bring anything from home. Mistake, as all the furniture disappeared. (That's an AL feature?) He certainly enjoyed the games room though, all the stuff in the community areas stayed.

Annette, turn debug mode on before you move a sim in, then shift-click on the apartment door, you can choose to rent it furnished that way.

I suspect I'm not the only person doing separate houses, I'm sure there will be more reasonably sized ones coming out that your machine won't complain about.  :D

BTW I didn't magic wand the lot, I was over it by the time I finally furnished the 4th house, so if you needed to drop the rent, magic wanding would work.

I wonder if rent goes down over time as the furnishings deplete in value naturally? Not for the sim that's currently living there, but maybe for the next sim that moves in?

I am playing this lot with four playable families to test it, and it is working very well. I had all four families rent their house furnished with no problems.

The stage foundation under the TV in the basement prevents Sims from using the TV though. Also, they cannot watch TV from the chairs on the stage foundation. I deleted the foundations, except for the squares under the flowerpots.

In the front house to the right as you enter the lot from the road, I had to remove the lights from the dinner table as Sims were not using the table when the lights were on it. Also I swopped the downstairs shower and basin around as the shower was not usable in the corner. The back left house has a bedroom dresser that needs to be moved 90 degrees as it is blocking access to one side of the bed, I only noticed this one when a Sim complained at me of course.

Most of the neighbours seem to spend hours rollerskating or using the DJ booth. The playground is very popular with the 6s and the 12s, they often use it autonomously.

I also closed in all the basement walls so the whole basement counts as inside, and put a wall around the music room. This was mainly to prevent complaints when sims with low creative skill decide to practise.

Now one of my stupid butlers, who seems to have zero cooking skills, often cooks two meals at a time (to cater for guests I suppose) and persists in placing the extra plates of burnt food down on the basement bar counters, where they exude green smoke until the next day when the landlord comes.

I love the decor themes and the interesting little touches. My PC runs rather slowly on this lot too but quite honestly it is worth it because this is definitely the best apartment lot that I have downloaded so far.

Well I tried playing your lot, it runs okay but I have a high spec PC.  The house however is a bit broken and needs some attention, also I am not sure if you listed all EP's and SP's needed and I dont actually play every EP.  Not that I cant, because the game is fast enough and my downloads folder is limited to under 4000.  I never let it get over that.

So before I moved simmies in, I changed it to Residential and then furnished, took me hours but when I changed it to apartments, now the sims are happy. 

Great apartments, nice space, lotsa room.   ;)   :)

I've only had time to put one family in and I only just moved them in, so I haven't noticed the problems you mention. Bummer about the big screen TV!
Thanks for your feedback, it is much appreciated. I only tested for the garages working.
Cool! I was hoping the kids would be autonomous with the playground. Do sims use the gym? I plan to put families with kids in all four houses too. Doubt I'm going to get to play tonight though. :(

It runs a bit slow on my machine too!  :D I did try to have a different theme for each house so as to avoid the cookie cutter look.

The lot came furnished. Took me days, not hours. There was a residential lot for download as well, BTW. Please tell me how the house is broken, if you have noticed some issues that tngrspacecadet has not listed.

The music room is more popular than the gym, but I put a ballet barre in and of course they use that autonomously.

I am quite happy with sims not using gym equipment autonomously because one home business venue lot I played ended up with a bunch of Townie ghosts from obsessive treadmill use.

Good grief!  :D

ETA: I'm having some problems with driveway extensions going missing/throwing errors on lot load. This happens even with a new instance of the lot and the same family moved in as prior. I removed all downloads including hacks before testing the new lot. I have the lot binned as residential and only convert it to apartments after it is placed.

[attachment deleted by admin]

Sorry to double post but I wanted to bring this thread to the attention of anyone that has downloaded this lot so far.

Nothing major, but I found a couple of freeloading files in the lot, the phone line controller, no humble computer and a couple of armoire type mods.

My apologies, it was late at night when I was uploading. The downloads are now clean with lot segment only.

What a brilliant setup. It never occurred to me that you could create a little housing estate with AL.  I have two brothers, married with kids, that I can move in to this. At the moment the kids can only play together if we invite them over, or take them on holiday. This way the kids can play together whenever they want. If I move the grandparents into one of the other houses, that's babysitting on tap as well - a free creche!

I feel a legacy coming on.

Incidentally, magic wanding appears to have little or no effect on apartment rental prices, which are based apparently entirely on area rented. The furnishings do not add to the cost at all.

Yeah, I thought I might start a new hood with this. My CAS sims seem to start with enough for almost four weeks rent, if they haven't got their shit together by then, they deserve to be on the street!

Did you note I'm having some driveway problems? I didn't at first and no-one else has complained, so I'm assuming my lot just suddenly got borked. Back to testing in clean mode for a bit.


I'm glad I didn't sit waving a pretend wand, which looks like a packing case, all over this ginormous lot then!  :D The floor space in each of these "apartments" is what's hiking up the rent then.

Well, waving the magic wand All Over The Lot is not really necessary, the simple act of waving it into the playable area at all performs the task.

Oh Shite!

One of the lots that comes with AL (found in the lot bin) is a pretty nice duplex that looks like it doesn't require much modification to be really useful.

Just posting to say that the lot has been updated. There were several minor glitches tngrspacecadet noticed and I have fixed those and re-uploaded.

I put this in my neighborhood, across the street from two other large houses, and I got this (http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/Sims%20Screenshots/wtf.JPG).  Since I haven't ever seen anything like it before and it seems to extend the length of the apartment lot over the other houses, it looks like apartment is the problem.  Or is there something wrong with my neighborhood?

I've seen a mention of this in the last few days. Do a search, I have a vague idea people have been getting oddities when moving occupied apartments. I don't think it's to do with this lot specifically.

Bummer!

PS. I don't think it's a level problem, just had another look at the pic, because I'm pretty sure I tried to find a level plot for something this large. Though I wonder if it could be the underground garages? I don't have any other lots close to mine, to see.

Ok, I did find that thread but it doesn't really give me a clue as to why this happened.  I didn't move it at all - I just put it in one place and left it there.  I did rezone it to residential (before moving anyone in) because some of the CC doors you put in one of the apartments were not showing up, thus rendering most of the rooms not part of the apartment.  (It didn't reenable build mode stuff though, so eventually I'll have to move everyone out and use the cheats discussed in the War Room, if I can remember to write them down.)  The order of events was basically: 1) moved family in 2) moved family out 3) rezoned to residential 4) exited without saving 5) moved family in.  Would that have maybe messed it up?

You would definitely have needed to save after making it a residential lot. Otherwise the game would have thought it was still an apartment.

I didn't have any CC doors, they must have been from a pack you don't have. (Maybe Glamour Life?) The only stuff in the lot was Maxis stuff.

Try placing the same lot from the bin in a test hood and see what happens.

@rufio: It is a good idea to always first place new lots in a completely flat test/building neighbourhood. I let the Sim Bin characters test the new places out.

Then any structural changes I want to make are saved, and I rename the lot so that I can see it is one that I changed, move the sims out, put the new version into the Bin and lastly delete the original from the Bin.

If it is a nicely furnished lot and there are furnishings that I want to save, like witch's, I test-play, make notes of changes that I want to make and then plonk a fresh version of the same lot down so that I can edit it and save it to the Bin with all the furnishings intact.

Also, use Clean Installer and/or inspect downloads folder after playing each new lot as witch said. There is often gunk that comes along with somebody else's lot.

Also, the game is silly. I had no problems DLing the residential version and converting it to an apartment lot, but for some reason the game thought that the FT teddy bears were custom objects and flashed blue. Possibly because they can be created in-game or bought in Buy Mode.

I really love building and design for sims so test-playing and alterations are a lot of fun for me, so I take a lot of time with them.

They flashed blue for me after I re-installed the lot as well.  :D

No, I wanted it as an apartment; I rezoned to residential in the hope of getting access to the build mode tools, but when that didn't work I exited without saving.


I don't have any SPs, so that's probably what happened.


Ok, will do.  What cheats do I need to put in more doors?  Will the apartment update itself include the new rooms?

To convert a lot, you have to convert, save, then exit. When you re-enter the lot, it is the other type of lot.

To convert a lot to apartments.
Enter lot.
Ctrl Shift C to bring up the command line.
Type: changeLotZoning apartmentbase
Save and exit.

To convert a lot to residential.
Enter lot.
Ctrl Shift C to bring up the command line.
Type: changeLotZoning residential
Save and exit.

Make all your building changes in residential mode.

There have been some issues for people downloading apartment lots, which is why I offered a residential for download as well. I use the residential in my lot bin, then convert once it is placed in the hood. Even so I'm having a random driveway error. If I click 'Cancel', the lot seems to keep its driveways OK.

Ok, thanks.  I'll download your new version as residential, fix the doors and rezone it to apartmentbase, and see if the glitch is still there.  (What's the difference between apartmentbase and apartmentsub, anyway?  I saw both listed in the list of cheats, which was why I exited without saving - I didn't know which I should zone it back to.)

Pescado says 'do not use sublots'.