More Awesome Than You!

Okay my knowledge of SimsPE is limited to easy stuff spelled out in big bold letter, preferably with a crayon.   So laugh and point at me if what I am asking is utterly ridiculous.

I was wondering if a person could possibly replace not only the terrain in your 'hood, but all the houses as well.  Let's say I have a custom empty neighbourhood with all the decor and the houses lined up pretty as you please.  Let's also say that I have an existing game filled with sims.  Could I replace all of the existing houses with the ones from the custom neighbourhood?  I know it would require some SimPE magic, but I have no clue how complicated that would be, or even if this possible.

Any thoughts?

It might be easier to move your sims to the sim bin, bulldoze the houses you don't want anymore, and replace them with houses from your custom 'hood, and then move your sims back into the new houses.

Well yes, I thought of that.  But the hood I have in mind has something like 60 lots and it would mean exporting every single one and re-importing them into my hood.  That seems like a lot of work, and might not be worth it.  Before I do that, I'll attach the hood as a downtown using SaraK's technique. 



Hold the presses.  I have found a tutorial written in the aforementioned big bold letters.  It's not quite what I had in mind, but I'll see if i can adapt.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=2132613&postcount=2192

Well that was surprisingly easy.

I started with booting my sims to the bin in preparation.  Then I used hoodreplace to copy over the terrain and associated elements.  Then I exported all the lots from SimPE from the hood I wanted.  I opened the file for my current hood and imported all the lots, after deleting my current ones.  I deleted the lots in the lots folder and copied over the lots files.   Logged in the game and voila!.  Extreme Terrain makeover.

So it appears to work.  I'm not sure what it will do to the game.  I'm worried about that mysterious number that Pescado often mentions, that lot index or something that creeps ever upward.  Or maybe some other mysterious number that will blow my game up.

Oh well, as an experiment so far it works.

Here's a somehwat more detailed howto: http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?p=2128586#post2128586

This is specifically for the case where both source and target nhoods already have lots in them. If you look further downthreads (around post #150 I believe), a few people have done it along these lines as well. 

As for the sims, the most sensible thing to do is indeed moving them out like you did, changing the hood + lots, and then moving them in again.