More Awesome Than You!

I have BV. But I'm tired of going to vacations, their load times are slowing my comp down to a crawl.

So I wonder if it's possible to install a beach lot in Pleasantview, so that my sims could go there like to any normal community lot, without bothering to go on vacation and having to live in another place. I'd like to install or create a beach lot with all vacation functions enabled, like swimming in sea, combing sand for shells, building sand castles, etc.

Placing empty beach lots doesn't work in Plesantview, though, I figure they can only be placed in a vacation subhood :(

Is it possible to overcome this limitation?

The roads in PV are too far from the beach for beach lots.  You could try some neighbourhood terrain surgery (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,151.0.html), and replace the PV terrain with a terrain that allows beach lots.

Hm okay... Now I'll ask the stupid question. If I place a beach lot, how do I make sure that all functions like sand combing are enabled? Or does it happen automatically?

Another tactic, assuming you have Nightlife or OFB, would to be to attach a downtown/shopping district to Pleasantview that has terrain compatible with beach lots. Bluewater Village does, for instance. However, I advise you to NOT try lot-binning Bon Voyage lots and placing them in other subneighborhoods unless you like hearing your computer make a pretty musical "Glonk" and then crashing to your desktop. New from-scratch beach lots should work fine and I'm pretty sure beach lots in non-vacation neighborhoods support all beach activities. You can build regular full-time residential houses on beach lots that way too.

You can try building a neighbourhood with a beach terrain.  Search MATY on "flat beach terrain" or something.  Sleepycat did a number of nice ones.  If you place your beach lot, all beach functions should be available normally.  Remember, beach lots are just above the water table, so if your house has a basement, it will be full of water.

Also, if you place a normal lot on a beach, it will not automatically turn into a beach lot.  For beach use to be part of the lot, it has to be built as a beach lot.

yup, I have around 40 terrains and most of them have beaches (flat beaches).
http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?showforum=89

If you have FT, you can always use the terrain cheat to edit PV. I did and even uploaded the hood for others.
http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?showtopic=691

I harassed the creator of FLAT!hoods for this one: Strangel Can Be Flat (http://yellowsnowproductions.freeforums.org/strangel-can-be-flat-by-request-t4.html)
I needed a hood terrain that could have flat beach space AND cliffsides for basement type lots.

Strangel, I love that terrain!

Me, too! xD It's the main for all my hoods.

Yeah, I have to start a new neighbourhood now-I think I'm going to call it Strangel Beach :D

It's working, thank you guys! I installed some beach lots in Bluewater Village and added a new downtown designed for beach lots. They're huge, though :)

If anybody knows how to get smaller ones, it would be great! Those in the game are too all exceptionally big, I never use such big lots.

I think you get a choice of sizes don't you?  Anyhow, a lot of the space on a beach lot is, well, the beach, which you can't actually build anything on, so the actual buildable area is smaller than the full lot size.

You can use the LotAdjuster at MTS2 to shrink the beach lots.  Be aware, though, that there really is a minimum depth to the lots.  If I remember correctly, if you remove the first 2 tiles (closest to the road) then the game believes that the entire neighborhood is a beach (in the lot view).  If you remove the first 3 tiles, you are left with an unbuildable lot.  If you remove the last tile (furthest from the road), then you lose the water; 2 tiles and you lose the beach activities and water.

IE, a beach lot consists of 2 buildable tiles, 1 buildable beach tile, 1 unbuildable beach tile with beach activites, and 1 water tile with ocean swimming.

So, I believe that the minimum beach lot is 1 tile wide and 3 deep... 4 deep if you want your neighborhood to look normal from the lot.

Alternatively, you could use Inge's beach portals for non-beach lots to create a non-beach lot which is partly under water and which allows swimming.  You'd lose the beach activities, such as building sandcastles, but you could have a tiny pseudo-beach lot.  There are tutorials around which explain how to get water to flood part of your non-beach lot.

There is a Smaller Beach Lots thread in the Peasantry, with a link to where you can download smaller beach lots made by MutantBunny. I use them without problems.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10456.0.html