More Awesome Than You!

Here's how to replace a neighborhood's terrain with a new custom terrain without losing your families. You will, however, lose all of your neighborhood decorational objects. No biggie, you were going to replace the terrain anyway, right?

You will need:
SimPE, as of this writing, 0.42, although older versions will work fine.
At least half a brain.

1. Backup your neighborhood, if you haven't already.
2. Create a new temp neighborhood, using your intended custom terrain. Don't put anything in it. Quit.
3. Open up temp neighborhood in SimPE.
4. Extract and save the following resources: 2D Array (0xABCB5DA4), TATT/UNK (0x54415454), UNK (0x2C310F46), UNK (0xABD0DC63), UNK (0xCC2A6A34), UNK (0xEC44BDDC).
5. Close and open up the neighborhood you wanted to change.
6. Replace the corresponding versions of the extracted resources with your extracted resources.
7. Start TS2 and open up your modified neighborhood. Rearrange all of the houses so they once again are on proper roads.
8. Delete your temp neighborhood.
9. Reinstall any neighborhood deco you wanted.

WARNING:
Side effects include dry mouth, nausea, vomiting, water retention, painful rectal itch, hallucinations, dementia, psychosis, coma, death, and halitosis. Terrain replacement is not for everyone. Consult your doctor before use.

Well, that doesn't sound as bad (or difficult) as I thought it would be. I might even manage that with only a few tries. But I better copy and paste this into word and print it. I don't even want to take chances of me writing something down wrong.

G.

Have to try it when I have a lot of time on my hands work usally interferes with me playing a lot of sims.

Reggikko thanks J. M. Pescado for this useful post.  :-*

<HAR-DE-HAR>

I may have to try this.

mmmm on second thought, maybe go see doctor first...side affects are a little scary :)

Bloody brilliant. This works.

7. Start TS2 and open up your modified neighborhood. Rearrange all of the houses so they once again are on proper roads.

Are all these houses in the Lot Bin?  If so, if they were occupied, will this muck up the families/memories that you are so adamant in not doing (i.e. moving occupied houses to the Lot Bin)?

No, the lots will still be on your neighborhood screen, but since you changed all of the roads, they will no longer be situated properly on roads, instead being haphazardly scattered about. Pick them up with the hand(or is it the 4-arrow) tool and move them back to appropriate roads. Do not put them in the lot bin.

This is very useful. Thank you.  8)

Oh yeah, this ROCKS!
Will experiment ASAP. :)

Very nice, I always wanted to change the extremely hilly terrain that was torturing my building skills.
Muchas gracias.

I didn't know you could even move the houses... heh.  :-[

You can put new lots on quite hilly terrain too. Someone called 'boatnana' worked out how to change the 'max slope value'. The game default is about 15 degrees. If you search modthesims2 for the keywords you might find out how. I can't remember, I think I downloaded a file.

Why did you have to post this the day after I moved an entire neighborhood?   >:(

Thanks so much for this. Pleasantville is now a large volcanic island!
It was kind of funny seeing many of my lots floating out in the ocean at first.

There's an idea for an expansion: The Sims At Sea: Pirates! meets TS2.

There you go! The next logical ep after Nightlife. Can you imagine the possible bugs with that? Or "too many iterations" errors caused by parrots.

That'd be funny: Give the people the pets they want in the pirate expansion pack, as parrots.

And have those same people ask for the mods to get the parrots to shut up. I wonder if sim-parrots would speak in simlish. I wonder if real parrots could speak in simlish. Okay, I'm out to lunch, mentally.

Well, if you really want to baffle and confuse people, try holding an entire conversation with a fellow simmer...entirely in Simlish, while people watch.

I wish you took a screenshot of this!

If anyone would like to try a new custom designed n'hood, I have one available for download from here:
http://www.variousimmers.net/vsimforum/showthread.php?t=1726

Sorry about the large size of the image, it's sitting on my homepage directory and I can't change it from work.

(http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~witch3/variousimmers/TrebleCone.png)

Did you make this witch? I know you are a prolific builder, so I'm guessing yes. I've SimCity (I don't offhand know what edition) somewhere around here, but I don't know whether you need a specific edition to try and make terrain.

Very nice, I'm getting tired of the standart templates. I'll go and try yours.

G.

That looks rather like how I create terrains as well, except mine are somewhat less pretty and more about random orbital bombardment around the edges. That particular terrain looks a little un-uniform in the building surfaces.

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?  ::) ;D

I do, too, now that I think about it...I mean, the Goths were out to sea!

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.  :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y62/Brynne14/Pleasantvilleatseacropped.jpg)

Oh!  I like it!

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




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.

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.

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. :P

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.

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.   

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

This what you're looking for?

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

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

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.

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.

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?  :)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sorry to laugh at this post Ancient Sim, but I thought that was so funny.  The road turns into nowhere are reveals the blue stuff underneath.  Sounds like my neighborhood...

Okay ... this looks like something that even I can do  ;D
But you say don´t move the houses to the bin. Why ? ... I mean, it it b/c of the families loosing their relationships or has it something to do with changing the hood ...
I have grown really tired of my hood and houses but not of my sims, so if I move out the sims into the bin and delete the houses ... would that cause any problems ?

Thanks for putting up the tutorial :)

Rose

Edit ... hmmm ... it didn´t work ... or I did actually edit the terrain, but the old neighborhood decor was still there and the old roads was there too, but the new roads was missing. I think it´s b/c I only had 2 UNK to replace and 4 was mentioned ... or maybe it was someting else  ???

Im having the same problem, running simpe 0.58, i've replaced a neighborhood before and that was working fine. But now i only have 2 UNK's to replace (0xCC2A6A34 and 0xEC44BDDC). The new terrain shows up with the rivers and stuff but the old roads remain and no new roads show up. I've also tried deleting the remaining UNK that i couldnt replace but that didnt help anything. Please help, would really like to replace my old hood.



Edit: Found it, extracting and replacing Neighborhood Terrain did the trick..who would have thought a thing with that name would solve it. ::)

Please explain ... pleeease  :)

Rose

Ok, heres for hoping my explaination will be somewhat understandable, its not my strong point.

Follow all the steps explained by JM but instead of extracting (from the new hood) the UNK's (0x2C310F46) and UNK (0xABD0DC63), you extract Neighborhood Terrain to a new folder. Then after jumping back to the neighborhood you wanted changed you replace that neighborhood terrain with the one you saved.

In total the things i extracted and replaced were: 2d array, tatt, neighborhood terrain, Unk (0xCC2A6A34) and Unk (0xEC44BDDC).

Hope this helps :).

i was wondering if this could be done. sounds good. i'll give it a go later. thx.

this worked perfectly for me, thanks J.M & Leeahna ! 

is it possible to change the menu neighborhood video/animation for pleasantview so it shows the new terrain ? i poked around all my game folders but can't find anything that seems related that i could fiddle with... 

The neighborhood "flyby" is not actually a part of your neighborhood file, but is some kind of "reia" file. It is actually static and pre-filmed, so unless  you have some idea what the hell a reia is and how to film a flyover, it ain't happening.

Are you sure about that ... don´t it show new buildings and other changes  ??? ... I´m not sure, but I think it does ... haven´t played Pleasantview in ages

Someone, somewhere, wrote that it was a code for different cameraangles ... or something like that ... but it only works with the Maxis hoods ... have already tested it  ;D

Rose

Not that I know about. It's definitely a static flyby, though, because you can transplant the REIA into another neighborhood, and it will still display the original flyby.

gah.  the difference between the flyby and the actual terrain of my neighborhood will slowly drive me batshitinsane. no mismatched wire hangers dammit !

Well, if it were up to me, my neighborhood flyby would involve the camera angle jerking crazily about before nosediving rapidly and plowing straight into the dirt.

Okay ... I haven´t paied much attention to it, so I believe you  ;)
You can always remove the .reia file from the Nxxx folder.

Rose

Some of the UNKs are now labelled. I think you now need the three Neighborhood resrources, the TATT, and the remaining UNK.

Err, yeah. Didn't mean you should pick that one… should probably have been more clear.

I just did some terrain surgery using SimPE version 0.60b, and I discovered that the resource formerly known as unk 0xCC2A6A34 is now known as Sim Creation Index.  As Jordi has already mentioned, 2d Array is now known as Neighbourhood Terrain Geometry.

To summarise, the five resources I extracted and replaced were:

- Neighbourhood Terrain Geometry (formerly known as 2d Array)
- Neighbourhood Terrain
- Tatt
- Sim Creation Index (formerly known as 0xCC2A6A34).  Not sure why this was needed, but this is one of the resources originally mentioned by Pescado
- unk 0xEC44BDDC

The Sim Creation Index may not need copying, but the tutorial was written before its purpose was identified. It appears to be an unnecessary step.

Is there any way to avoid this?

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v487/Lerf1950/Screenshot.jpg)

The ugly, unremoveable tall bumps are where the houses were when I opened the new neighborhood.  I could live with the ones in the water, but I can't find any way to get rid of the one on the terrain.  I've tried lowering it by putting a lot on it, but even with the 90 degree angle hack in the game won't let me place a lot on it.

I've solved that problem applying the surgery twice, the second time after house re-placement.

"Holes" can be fixed by placing a 1x1 lot at the edges and slowly working in, so I'd assume you could do that with these "spires," too. 

However, I suspect you were trying something like that, since the screen shots seem to show a large lot in the process of being placed.

Terrain may be mutilated as a result of the originally highly incompatible mapping. You can reach a more compatible state by, as Marhis stated, repeating the surgery procedure after the houses have been moved to more conformant positions in the new terrain.

Thanks!

Actually I figured out about re-replacing the terrain about 4AM....

Neighborhood looks MUCH better now.

If it's been crossed out, ignore it. :P

It may have been renamed. SimPE has renamed a lot of things.

This post on the previous page refers to 0xABD0DC63.  You will note that Pescado states it is not necessary to update 0xCC2A6A34, so don't bother updating it.

The last time I did terrain surgery, I combed through the entire thread to note what had changed, as SimPE does rename unknowns once it is known what they are.

Yes, I'm a sinner that liikes to commit necromancy... :P

A unawesome question, but I need it comfirmed that Terrain Surgery can be performed on subhoods? Yes?

Yes; it can be performed on any hood or subhood.

SimCity is Special like that, You need to put it in the right place so it will be found. This is kinda long, but this is me trying to be clear, Sims have never been logical, ever.

1 ). Take the SC4 file you wish to modify (or mutilate in my case). Rename it something obvious or funny, makes the little bugger much easier to find in a minute.

2 ). Copy that to "My Documents\SimCity 4\Regions\Downloads\"

3 ). Boot up Sim City, select whichever region you want to use. Make sure you know what region you are in. (Sounds funny but it isn't later when you can't find the file.)

4 ). Select one of the smallest "boxes" in the region. That is the smallest sized city.

5 ). In the box that appears asking what you want to do with the city there is a computer with an arrow going into the monitor. Click it.

6 ). A box comes up asking which city you would like to import. It should have several folders with names in a list. Select Downloads.

7 ). Under downloads there should be listed all of the cities in your downloads folder, find the one you renamed earlier. This is where the renaming coming in handy, if you have 50 cities there "greenview" may not stand out. "Vlad's Vampire Ville" has a better chance of being spotted.

8 ). Select OK. It will take a few minutes to import it, you may have to select it again to open it. Can't remember, it's the middle of the night as I am writing this.

9 ). DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCIMSTANCES say yes to "reconcile edges" the game will sometimes do a pop-up box offering to do so. This will make things nice and even with the surrounding cities. The game looks at the landscape on each of the borders finds any places that do not meet up and changes the terrain of the currently selected city to match up all pretty. (This can be useful when making a group of cities that connect.) This process tends to destroy roads, landscapes, families and sometimes causes birth defects.

10 ). Do whatever surgery you like to said city. In SC4 everything is a mirrior image of what it will be in TS2. This is a real PITA, at least for me, once you get everyting built to your liking in SC4, in TS2 it looks wrong. I guess Maxis never made anything that acted quite the way it should (without lots of help from Inge, C&C, JMP, & Quaxi).

Also if you don't play SC4 much or need more small cities,you can modify the "config" file which dictate how many smalll/large cities are in each region. The more red in the config the more small cities, more green more bigger ones. They are placed inside the region folder, the one inside "London" dictates how the layout of the cites for that region. It's a small BMP take it into paint, paint it red. Now you have all small cities to work with.

Now that's useful information. I wanted to create a region with a lot of large cities once and never got a satisfactory one. Cheers for that Cassandra. Modern-day Cassandra brings good news.  :D

See I'm not gloom and doom, we are on the edge of apocalypse all the time. My sims on the other hand..........

Good information, but I don't believe that it answers the question.  Your answer assumes that the original SC4 file for the neighborhood exists.  Maxis often ships SC4 files which don't actually match the final shipped neighborhood terrains - even the Pleasantview SC4 doesn't match the Pleasantview terrain.  The question is: how can I create an SC4 file from information extracted from a Sims 2 neighborhood package, so that I can edit the SC4 file using SimCity 4?

First thing, what do you mean by: "even the Pleasantview SC4 doesn't match the Pleasantview terrain". What are the differences, there are a few things that can be done in TS2 that modify the terrain slightly. They are quite minor, most someone may flatten it a bit.

Second, I don't think that there is anything to extract from the Neighborhood file, it points to what SC4 file to use to create the neighborhood. The SC4 file should come very close to matching, except for things like decorations. Those  are controlled by TS2. If you import a file into SC4, tinker it with a bit, then copy it back into TS2 there will probably be changes in the trees, due to SC4 re-rendering them. Also, if you don't like the way TS2 places trees one time when creating a new neighborhood, try making another one. Since there is a bit of difference between the scale of the games, there is a bit of "artistic interpretation" on TS2's part every time you create a new neighborhood. This should be less than modifying in SC4. Doing one of these is much easier than placing single trees.

I don't know anywhere that another terrain could be hiding.

The roads in Pleasantview are in a different location in the SC4 and in the neighborhood package.  Life Stories doesn't even have the SC4 file for one of the neighborhoods.  And Castaway Stories doesn't include any SC4 files at all.  I think that there are other examples, but I can't remember them at the moment...

Anyway, I thought that I'd put the question out, in case anyone has any ideas of how to extract the terrain from the Sims 2 package and create an SC4 file for editing.

Now I am detirmed to figure this out. If EA is using some other way to creat Neighborhoods, or edit them, I want it.

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.

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......

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.

Me too.  I wish that they'd give us all of their internal sim / lot / neighborhood / etc. package creation tools...


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?


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.


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?

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.

OK, here's what I did.  Regenerate a brand new Pleasantview (never touched):

(http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/8/9/2/5/2/MTS2_Mootilda_727196_Original.JPG)

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:

(http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/8/9/2/5/2/MTS2_Mootilda_727197_SC4.JPG)

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?

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!  ::)

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.

FYI, I got way too reliant on the Lot Expander. I started always doing my builds on a gridded 5x5 I had saved and then shrinking afterwards. I now can't shrink a lot that should be a 3x3 down since I forgot that -duh- it wouldn't work with FreeTime until there was an update! So now the lot is sitting there, the edges camouflaged by a bunch of trees.

It's possible that they aren't, and those are the pieces for things like your neighborhood trees and accessories. Obviously, if you're doing a TRUE terrain surgery, as opposed to airbrushing, failure to replace them would result in the props of your old neighborhood ending up in the ocean, levitating, or embedded partially or entirely inside hills.

I'm hoping that these new pictures will make things more obvious:

Original Pleasantview neighborhood as shipped:
(http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/8/9/2/5/2/MTS2_Mootilda_730404_Original.JPG)

Pleasantview terrain replaced with shipped SC4 file:
(http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/8/9/2/5/2/MTS2_Mootilda_730405_SC4.JPG)

It's clear that the terrain is identical between the two pictures, but the roads are different.  Which seems to indicate that the shipped Pleasantview.SC4 file was not used to generate the shipped neighborhood terrain.  Note that I just changed NHTG (neighborhood terrain geometry) and NHTR (neighborhood terrain with reload) this time.

Because EA ships so many of the neighborhoods with incorrect or missing SC4 files, it would be really nice to figure out how to create or modify an SC4 file from the information in the neighborhood package.

I noticed a long time ago that Pleasantview and the pleasantview terrain were different, pissed me off at the time because I had no way to fix it back then.

since you have both pictures, you can fix it in SC4, just flip both pictures in your graphics program to use as a guide.

The pleasantview.sc4 terrain that came with sims 2 is in fact the original terrain for Riverside.  That is the neighborhood that Maxis created during development of the Sms 2 base game.  It's the neighborhood you see in the early development videos and trailers for the game.

Some references  :)

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thesims2/images.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=tabs&tag=tabs%3Bimages&page=21
Near the bottom you will see early screenshots of the Riverside neighborhood, dated December 2003.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thesims2/media.html?mode=trailers&page=1
Also from Gamespot. If you watch "The Sims 2 Official Trailer 6" you will see a flyby of the original Riverside. Also dated December 2003.

http://www.freewebs.com/thsms204/index.htm
This person has done a recreation of the original Riverside neighborhood. In the Riverside Information section at this site, he mentions he was surprised to discover that the hood template needed for Riverside was the Pleasantview template included with the game.

I downloaded this neighbourhood earlier today, and I discovered that one of the playable teens knows a whole bunch of teens that don't exist in the neighbourhood - they are not playables, not in the townie family, not in the NPC family, not in the default family, and not in the hobby instructors' family.  They simply don't exist.  The playable teen is also best friends & in love with 2 of these non-existent teens.  My guess is that the creator set up the family's story in another 'hood, packaged the family & lot, and then installed the package in Riverside (including installing the ghost files of these extra sims) - which is an excellent way to corrupt a neighbourhood.  Now I have to decide whether I like the neighbourhood enough to clean these files out, or whether it's going straight to the recycle bin.

I downloaded it myself, but haven't had the time to fully check it out yet.  Hopefully its not too much work to repair. It does look like it could be an interesting neigborhood to play.

Once you repair it, perhaps you could let the creator know what you did.  It would be nice to get a copy of the fixed version.

Kralore, further investigation in SimPE shows that these teens are all seem to have been part of some family called Partygoers (although they are now in the default family).  The default family also has copies of two in the families that exist in the game with slightly different names & appearances, which are probably earlier attempts to make them.  So my guess now is that the creator deleted these families from the sim bin.

I've decided to delete the neighbourhood from my game rather than fix it, as my skills at neighbourhood repair aren't particularly awesome.

Back to the topic of extracting the terrain from the Sims 2 and getting it into an SC4 file so that the roads can be edited using SimCity 4.

I found some information about the file structure of the SC4 file and it's pretty obvious that the terrain is stored quite differently from the Sims 2 neighborhood terrain geometry.  It might be possible to write a tool to convert from the Sims 2 format to the SC4 format; however, it may be easier to just write a tool to add roads to an existing neighborhood.

I suppose that the third alternative is to try to recreate the SC4 file from scratch.  In the case of Pleasantview, that should be relatively easy, since the terrain in the Pleasantview.SC4 file is correct, even if the roads are wrong.  However, it would be much more difficult for something like Castaway Stories, which ships no SC4 file at all.

Mootilda, if it's just a case of wanting a proper template for pleasantview, I have a template that was made by Melly_Sim over at MTS2 quite along time ago.  She has since pulled all her files from there, but I still have the file if you want a copy of it.

Kyna, I'll take a look at the families etc for that hood, but it sounds like it might be more work then it's worth.

Thanks, I'd appreciate it.

However, I was speaking more generally.  EA has shipped a number of neighborhoods without matching SC4 files, so I just wondered whether anyone had a technique for creating an SC4 file from a Sims 2 package.  This would be especially helpful for adding roads to the existing maxis-made neighborhoods.  It's too bad that EA decided not to include adding roads with their new neighborhood terrain modification tools.

Here is the sc4 file for the Pleasantview template.

http://rapidshare.com/files/100168794/OriginalPleasantview.rar.html

Thanks, it looks great.  Did your friend just edit the incorrect Pleasantview.SC4 to make it right?

I don't know the person, personally. Melly_Sim over at MTS2 did a recreation of all the sims 1 lots for sims 2. He/She also did that template as a request by someone.  I can't point you to the original post because all of Melly_Sim's files have been pulled with no explanation.  I would guess it was probably the pleasantview.sc4 that came with Sims 2 run through SimCity4 to put the roads in the right place.

Question: Is there any way to alter just the roads, while leaving the neighborhood decorations intact?

Update:
I have written a small program to replace the roads in one neighborhood with the roads from a second neighborhood.  It is available at:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=279992

-----------------------------------------------

Thoughts leading up to this utility:

It would seem that the roads and decorations are stored together in the same record, but in different arrays within that record:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=NHTR

SimPE extracts the entire record, so it can't be used to separate the roads from the decorations.  I can think of a couple of things that might work:
1) Use a proper hex editor to add roads to the road array, while leaving the decorations intact.
2) Write a program for the same.  It's probably not too difficult if you know how to program, except for the UI on how to specify where you want the roads.

It's really a shame that EA left out road editing when they added the ability to edit the neighborhood terrain.

Update: I just thought of an easier solution...

Instead of trying to write a program which has a special UI for specifying modifications to the road structure, you could use the existing "adding roads to a neighborhood" technique to add roads using SiimCity 4.  Then, instead of merging the new neighborhood terrain into the old neighborhood using SimPE, it would be fairly simple to write a program which would take the two neighborhood packages (old neighborhood with decorations and new neighborhood with roads) and perform a merge on the individual "roads" array within the NHTR record.

Of course, this still doesn't resolve the problem of how to get the original SC4 file for the neighborhood, if EA didn't ship it with the game.  But, it would work for all neighborhoods with a corresponding SC4 file.

Oh, and the wiki is wrong.  Tree entries are 38 bytes each, not 37.  Road entries are 124 bytes each, instead of 123.  Update: the wiki has been fixed, but I suspect that the other structures may also have incorrect sizes.

Well, that's just brilliant and right on time. I'm off to test it out.

ETA: Works perfectly. I just had to move a few stop signs around.

If you can load the neighborhood, but not the lot, then you could try having other sims in the neighborhood invite them to move in, then move them out on their own.  Of course, that's assuming that you still have some sims in your neighborhood that don't live on the overfull lot.

Build a new lot - don't need to furnish it, just build a "bus stop" and put a new sim on it.  Get the teleporter cat/shrub or some other teleporter/summoner and summon your sims to the new lot.  Insim's "family tree" will allow you to get them to "join household".  You can then move groups of sims out to new lots in the normal manner or townify them.

Oh, good.
I'm bookmarking this.  I've got an old neighborhood that's a lumpy eyesore and in need of replacing.

I just updated the HoodReplace program so that it will adjust the elevation of lots, trees, and decorations; they will now touch the new terrain rather than appearing at their previous elevation.