More Awesome Than You!

Can anyone give me a list of which terrain each neighborhood uses?
"Pleasantview," "Bluewater," and the other self-titled terrains are easy, but I don't know which one the default Downtown uses for example, and I'd like to cull a few of the Maxis terrains that I never choose anymore.  That way I don't have to keep skipping over them when I want a downloaded terrain - I just don't want to delete a terrain I may already be using.

The names of the terrains are listed in the SC4Terrains folder, and considering that the ones used for the default towns have the same name as the towns they were used for, they shouldn't be too hard to find. Also, you can make a new neighbourhood in the game and take a look at the terrains to figure out which ones belong to them, jot down their names, and then remove them.

I don't think the college and downtown templates are actually available...

Do you mean they may be hidden templates?

No, that's not what it means.

Sometimes, EA doesn't bother to give us the SC4 files for various neighborhoods.  Sometimes, they ship an SC4 which doesn't actually match the neighborhood.  The correct SC4 files are not hidden, they're missing.

I seem to remember that it's possible to extract the terrain itself from your TS2 neighborhood and import it into an SC4 city, but I don't know of any way to extract the roads or neighborhood decorations.

Alternatively, there are ways to extract the terrain from one TS2 neighborhood, including roads and neighborhood decorations, and create a new TS2 neighborhood.

If you're interested, I can try to find you a link.

Sure.  I may not take advantage of it now, but I might want to try later.

Is the neighborhood terrain file a live neighborhood is based upon like face templates?  [As in, once it's referenced it's not needed anymore.]  Because if Downtown is a terrain that we do not have, and it runs fine, does that mean that I can delete Pleasantview's SC4 terrain for example, and not have the live neighborhood freak out on me?

The neighborhood terrain SC4s are not related to the in-game neighborhood at all. Deleting them has no effect. For instance, the Pleasantview SC4 is not actually the same as the actual in-game Pleasantview, and is actually an older version that is different in subtle ways, called Riverwater or something. If you want to reuse the terrain, you are better off lifting the terrain from the actual PV using Terrain Surgery.

OK, the easy ones first:

Tool to copy terrain from one TS2 neighborhood to another:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=279992

Tutorial on copying TS2 neighborhood terrain manually:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,151.0.html

It looks like I was wrong about extracting the terrain from TS2 and importing into SC4; I haven't been able to find anything on this.  If I remember correctly, the problem was that we can't write out the SC4 file because SimPE doesn't correctly handle SC4 headers.  I believe that it could be done, but it would take a while to work out the technique.

Thank you everyone, you really are more awesome than me!