More Awesome Than You!

It only took me an hour to get CAW to crash out of frustration. Go me!

So far I have a few tips:

• The autopaint feature is crap. Do not touch it or the "Clear" button next to it, ever.
• Press < or > to rotate the world. That little world rotate button at the top menu bar does nothing.
• If you go too close to the edge of your designated space, terrain paint and editing tools will disappear. It takes a lot of finangling to get the perfect zoom and angle at times.
• Figure out your road grid first! It can be hard to tell scale, so you don't want to work yourself into a corner your sims will have no way of plopping a house in.

There seems to be a possibility of doing the same thing you could with SC4 regions: making an image file from which the tool can create an elevation map. I haven't figured it out exactly yet, but darker areas are water and the lighter the pixels, the higher the elevation.

Any thoughts?

Road tools are a horrible mess, especially when you're trying to line up bridge sections on watery maps.  I also haven't figured out a way to delete a road once it has been laid down.  Pretty much everything else works as well as I expected, though it looks about 30-40 hours of work to get a nice and good-sized playable world.

Yes, roads are a bit of a bitch until you figure them out. First of all, you have to use the crosswalk section if you want them to split at all, and you can't just slap it in the middle of an already made road. Most of your road manipulating is going to be done by pressing that move objects button in the upper left; roads count as objects, and you can delete them by selecting them first with the pointer. Also using the object mover, you can manipulate laid roads, making them longer or shorter, curving them, and snapping them into place into crosswalks (the game will snap them in when you get close enough).

Basically, just use the move objects tool to mess with roads, and you'll figure it out pretty fast.

It has taken me about 50 minutes to get this done:
(http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/7205/terrain.th.jpg) (http://img109.imageshack.us/i/terrain.jpg/)
Meh.

The road tool is evil. DigiGekko has already outlined how to manipulate them. You can also delete them by going to the select tool (fat arrow with select sign) and hitting the DEL key. I haven't done bridges yet.

Tried to edit in-game and game loaded and then stalled at a full bar. All my mods and downloads were stripped out before I patched.

I will be relying on this thread to figure out how to use the tool, I have never used SC4 or any of that type of program. I will be figuring and playing around with it so I might take days or weeks to get it.  ::)

Thanks for what has been posted so far and I will be keeping an eye on this.

 Right-click WORLD in the 1. World Layers window and then choose ADD LAYER. (from the user guide)

I exported my world.  Now how do I get it into my game as a hood?

From the help.pdf:

From MTS discussion board (I think):

Now I can't give icon image to the world I created. "a .png file that is 256x256"? I created a 256x256 .png in paint, but then the world builder says "Selected file is not a 24-bit color PNG image". I tried to get some from google image, but none of them is 24-bit either. Help!

Zazazu I really like the layout of your world. The beachfront and the elevated plateau is wonderful and the small hidden beach looks great. Could you keep adding piccys as you develop it further, I am very curious about the outcome (perhaps not in this thread but in Pudding Factory if you would be inclined). So far I have mostly seen really shitty landscaping, but perhaps the really good ones need more time to develop before the sharing starts.

It looks small or are the roads just very large?

@Lion: You probably have to use GIMP or photoshop to save your .png file.

@Zazazu: Were you able to successfully use your hood with sims yet?

Roads were an annoyance until I started to plan by intersections.

If you drop the intersections down first, you save yourself some headaches later. Just string sections of roads in between the intersections and don't worry about connecting them.

After you have the pieces on the map you can use the move object tool to drag the ends of the roads to the edge of the intersection. They have to meet more or less square on, and if they are too far out of alignment, they won't snap together.

You can then use the move object tools to pick up an intersection and drag any attached roads around from that point.

I'd like to try bridges in my beach world, but for some reason, the base game doesn't provide bridge objects in CAW, not even the basic non-WA bridge from Riverview.

Hmm, I can't seem to be able to place a cross-section of road. I'll select it and only a regular road appears. Ugh. And are terrain paints *supposed* to look so choppy? Can't seem to figure out how to soften the edges.

     And is it just me, or is CAW running slow or taking a toll on anyone else's CPUs? Seriously, my computer has been able to handle most everything so far, but I load up the create-a-world tool, and the thing starts humming as loudly as can be. Not to mention switching between tools or windows in CAW seems to take forever, gives the appearance of freezing for 15 seconds or so. Surely that program can't require higher specs than TS3 itself....!

If you set the fall-off or whatever it is, the edges of the brush fade out, making it less choppy.

And yeah, when I played with CAW, my laptop practically set on fire... and it's not a shitty laptop, I can easily play TS3 with max settings on everything without lag.

It's small. It's using a small size map, plus I have a good amount of negative space with the ocean and what I'm calling the Tail of the Dragon - that bunch of mountains off to the left. I'm building it to be a very tight, urban sort of neighborhood with a lot of very small lots.

No. Not even close to that point yet.

What I've found was a good idea was to plop down a rough road plan, then place lots. Then delete roads and replace them precisely. What I thought looked like a bunch of very useable road ended up being a hot mess when I started placing lots.

Definitely need more terrain paints. I ended up going with volcanic mountains since there aren't any good deep brown tones.

Finally IrfanView converted it for me.

Now that I exported and installed it, yes, I can play sims in it. I also managed to put down some dirt road. But it does not look very good.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/Screenshot2.jpg)
(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/Screenshot-2b.jpg)

Zazazu - When I had a play... before I uninstalled everything, I only saw 4 terrain paints, where on earth was the volanic paint?!

Thank you, shadow  :)

Is it possible to use a different texture for the sidewalk in CAW? If so, maybe a sparse grass would look better than dirt and resemble a banked shoulder. I really wish there was a way to take out the sidewalk for period hoods or country hoods. I rarely see sidewalks out in the country here.

I wonder if its possible to make an entire hood without roads but just using walkways? I read the CAW beta manual and it says that you need roads to have cars, bikes and scooters. But if we don't want those, such as in a medieval hood, a sidewalk/walkway with a new texture might work instead.

Did you re-texture the road in your world within CAW or did you do that in an outside program? The manual is vague on that.

Thanks!

Yes, you can customize your road. I'm experimenting on them right now. You do "Create Custom Road" under "Road Tool". I don't fully understand all those parts, but by switching a few main ones I'm getting some nice results. May show them here soon.

I plan to only put down road very sparsely. And the rest just use sidewalks, so I can see my sims walk/run all day.  ;D

Thanks for the information! I haven't installed it yet because I have a work project to finish and am procrastinating enough without CAW. But when I do, I am going to make a test hood without roads to see what will happen. I have this theory that if we put schools and rabbitholes (using the modded ones so we can have custom rabbitholes) close enough to the residential areas, people will just walk to work/school. I am eager to see if it works. If so, this might be the best gift to themed hoods ever!

I actually like that road, Lion.  If you can manage to make a world with that I would definately download it.  After trying for a frustrated two hours to figure out that CAW tool, I have realized it's not something I can do.  It's more complicated than my pea brain can understand (perhaps later after I have read more I will try again).
I will definately be on the look out for worlds people have created though!

Do you know how to use the "clone lots"? I can clone alright, but then how do you "paste"?

     When I clone lots, after selecting the tool, I just click on the lot I want to clone and drag the square over,to where I want the copy to be. and it should be able to stick once I click on that spot. as long as the square outline is blue. If that was any help.

Also wow this road stuff has gotten easier to understand.  Once the intersections are snapped in, you can click and drag those to make your roads stretch or line up however you want! It moves the roads with them.  I was frusterated at first, as Moving the roads alone just messed everything up.  I used the Grid placement option, and by moving the intersections alone, and rotating them only, I was able to get the roads pretty straight where I wanted them to be.

     And by the way, with the grid turned on in CAW, can anyone tell me how close that grid follows the one in-game? Or how one might be able to depict lot size in CAW? (I.e. 20x30/40x40 etc)  I'm having a hard time figuring this out, and need to know just how big to plan lots for rabbitholes and such.

Thanks for the tip.

I have yet to find out how to snap roads together, especially if they come from different angles.

A 10x10 spot is the equivalent of a 1x1 lot in TS3. You need to get fairly close in to make sure you are seeing the individual grid squares, as it will compress them on zoom out.

If you hadn't noticed it, the lot size appears in the lower right corner of the program window as you make the lot. Stupidly, I don't think there's a way to edit lot size after one has been built.

Nope I hadn't noticed it a bit! Thanks for that. Also now that you've pointed that out, and I've had something to go by, I also see it shows up when selecting a lot under the "Placement" box on the left.

Also thanks Zazazu for that bit of info, thanks to you both. Got it figured out now. Last but not least. When placing a lot, does it have to be right up against the road? Or will it work 1 square off?

With how easily roads and things become crooked, It's hard to have things lined up exactly, and there have been a few times a lot might overlap a road if it was too close. So I started placing them one square away, could this be a bad idea? Is it safe to assume it will snap in place while playing?

@Zazazu - I see what you mean now. I neglected to check the snap to grid, so it took some re-laying of roads to get the lots to meet the road properly to avoid gaps.

About cloning -

I was doing an edit in game and my world came to a crashing halt when I tried to select a lot.  When I went back into CAW, I realized that the clone tool duplicates the lot name also. I think it may have been causing issues when I was trying to do things to one of the clones or its original.

I went back and re-named all the cloned lots to something unique and the problem hasn't re-occurred.

You're still one step ahead of me. I can't edit in game. Everything is patched up, including World Adventures. Awesomemod is the only cc I have in and it has been updated. I can get in the game and in Sunset Valley. I cannot, however, edit in game via CAW. I skate through the initial loading screen, but on the world loader (the one with a tips window and a blurry background) it gets to about 5% and then stalls for three or four minutes, eventually crashing to CAW with no error shown.

Which program did you end up using to create the 24 bit color png image? My photoshop doesnt seem to carry the 24 bit option, just 8, 16 or 32.

Didn't you say in the other thread you weren't able to get Riverview to install with the other CC? Correct me if I'm mistaken! But this happened to me, when I tried to edit in the game, while still having the problem Riverview file in my mods folder. After I took out all of my store content (Since I didnt know which files contained riverview) It solved the crashing problem. Not sure if thats the reason, just thought I'd throw it out there just in case.



      I've been experimenting with this a bit myself. I didn't like the line of grass between the dirt road and sidewalk, but found out if  for the opacity layer on the sidewalks, if I use the dirt_intersection_crosswalk.dds instead it makes it solid, so its possible to actually have the dirt sidewalk look like part of the road.  Also there is a medium grass texture included to use for the sidewalk, to hide it as well. Though it looks slightly off.
   

IrfanView

It is a little tricky at start, but it is growing on me. Here is a pic on what I am working on:
(http://simverses.net/blog/Lists/Pictures/caw1.jpg)

That is an island which, with time, will be my new Old Town in Windle.

Now, if I could figure out how to get custom paints and other textures in there, preferrably stuff I already have in game. :D

Were you able to connect road-ways to bridges? Still trying that one. Took me awhile to get my roads to connect.

Thank you. Seems like I am having a hard time with this program as well, could you possible inform me of the steps you took? Thank you again in advance!

They look connected. Need to test though.

I didn't say that. I tried removing all references to Riverview in My Documents. All my other CC had been stripped out earlier. I'm still having the same problem. My next thought is to try uninstalling and reinstalling, but I'm too upset at it right now.

well i would imagine if they actually connected it would snap like road segments do.. once you get them lined up right the 2 touching ancor points (the blue ones) merge.. i noticed that bridge also has these same styled anchor points, though i havent been able to get them snap like the roads do..

EDIT: Right after I posted that I got the road to snap to the bridge.. so.. fucking awesome..

File -> Batch conversion/rename -> Output format: png -> advanced -> change color depth: 16.7 million color
Then pick your output directory, add your files.

I'd like to add that the standard, comes-with-Windows-7, version of Microsoft Paint saved .PNG in 24 bit by default. That's what I used to make a thumbnail anyway. I don't know if this is true in XP or Vista though.

Well, after fussing with my starter world, I finally exported it just to see what I'd be dealing with in-game with the camera masking and so on.

You can totally blow off doing an Edit in Game in CAW of many things, and complete them after export. I left all the community lots blank and was able to fill them in in Edit Town mode. The catch is, of course, that you aren't then exporting a completed world to share... just a fixer upper.  

The Edit in Game feature is a resource hog - My system gnashed it's teeth over the whole process, though running just CAW by itself was not a problem.

After doing an uninstall and reinstall of the base and WA, I still was having crashing on edit-in-game (or loading the exported map) with my map only. I then tried cleaning up my road bits and making sure that I had no dark blue connections. Saved and tried to edit in game again. Golden. Now I can move on to placing trees and such with the knowledge that all my work will not be in vain.

EDIT: Done.
(http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/5450/dragoncayover.th.jpg) (http://img189.imageshack.us/i/dragoncayover.jpg/)    (http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/4599/dragoncayroadlots.th.jpg) (http://img694.imageshack.us/i/dragoncayroadlots.jpg/)    (http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/4654/dragoncaylotwidgets.th.jpg) (http://img63.imageshack.us/i/dragoncaylotwidgets.jpg/)


You can download here (http://www.4shared.com/file/176098644/5a3bf41/Dragon_Cay.html). It is called Dragon Cay. There is a dragon, and the cay looks like its tail.

Remember, lots are basically blank and none of the functional rabbitholes have been placed. Should work in just basegame, but I'd be interested in knowing if some of the objects (mainly the dragon head) show without WA. Also remember, I like tiny lots. Most of the lots are at least 14x14, but I do have a 10x10 and a few 11x25s. There are very few "large" residentials over 20x20, but a few of the designated community lots should hold multiple rabbithole buildings. Loads if you use the compact ones found in the Pudding Factory.

EDIT: Fixed file with lot addresses, sim routing boundaries, and less funky road syndrome.

Ah, thats very useful info Zazazu. The hood looks amazing.
I also found out how to get more options for terrain paint: "add layer" in the window for paint options means that you can pick more options from the textures for roads ect. They are dds-files. You can also browse to any location on your computer to get other textures - saved in the right format (obviously .tga ord .dds) and they must be max 1024x1024 pixels.

I stll haven't got the "feel" for snapping roads to intersections and bridges.  What do I do - pull the road nearly to the bridge and then let go and see what happens?  Pull the road to the centre of the bridge?   And what signal do you get that a snap has occurred?   Last time I thought I had snapped the road to the bridge it was actually running underneath it into the river.

The squares must NOT be dark blue. Yeah, it was tricky, but I finally got it to work,

I was going to try it, especially as I'm running the Base game only, but your link's broken.

From the official world help.pdf:
However, it also says:
Roads and sidewalks are world-placed game objects, so what's the best position of lots vs. roads/sidewalks? One tile away or next to it?

Next to. By "objects", they mean crap like rocks, trees, etc.

When I try to 'edit in game' the caw tool crashes, any advice, please? I have read the posts on the page, but nothing helps.
When I opened a small world map and added one plant, I could 'edit in game', but when I then added a road, a couple of spaces for houses and some fish in the sea...................I couldn't 'edit in game'!

Ok, flush to roads. What if my road network consists of mainly sidewalks. Should houses best be placed flush to the sidewalk too? Would sims go nuts routing if they ain't?

Think this is the correct link: http://www.4shared.com/file/175740710/6fb22351/Dragon_Cay.html?s=1
Downloading now, will see if I can get it to work...

Cheers! Off to give it a try.


EDIT: Installed without any problems. As expected, WA-specific decorations do not show up in the base game, so the dragon head isn't there. Another issue is with the road running along the beach near the billboard - it's both partially obscured by a lot and partially buried by land.

(http://i48.tinypic.com/24llvu0.jpg)

Thanks for the link.

Zaza, you need to paint some areas off limits to sims. They just run up the cliff to visit the gym.  :D

Also, none of the community lots have names, but interactions are fine (e.g., visit park). No interaction with the dragon head park.

[Edit] Liking the little fishing pier. Simple and very nice.

[Edit] Some of the roads are not conforming to the terrain. How to fix it? I don't know.

[Edit] If you want to give address to the lots, you can do that in the property browser of the lot.

I don't see anything wrong with that if they can make it that way. The wife does stuff like that all the time. She will run over cars, fences, and even small buildings in her direct-line path to whatever she wants to get to. If an obstacle is shorter than it is wide, she goes over it.

Custom Roads

To use roads other than the default base game one, go to "Road Tool", click on "Create Custom Road". You will then select textures for all the components.

If you don't want sidewalks, like mentioned by KawaiiMiyo, you can either use dirt_intersection_crosswalk.dds for the sidewalk opacity map to eliminate the gap, or use grass_medium_base.dds for the Sidewalk Textures - Base Texture to make it disappear. See below (Intersection on top, Road in the middle, and Sidewalk on the bottom):

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0008.jpg)

On the left, it's a dirt road with no sidewalk (or grass_medium sidewalk). It's thinner but does not look good connecting to intersections. It also has a detail texture that makes it lighter in the middle. On the right, it's a dirt road with solid sidewalk. It's wider and connects well with intersections.

Textures for the left one:
Street Textures:
Base Texture       dirt_light_base.dds
Detail Texture       dirt_street_detail.dds

Sidewalk Textures:
Base Texture       grass_medium_base.dds
Normal Map       dirt_sidewalk_base_n.tga
Opacity Map       dirt_sidewalk_opacity.dds

Intersection Textures:
Corner Texture       dirt_intersection_corner.dds
Corner Normal Map    dirt_intersection_corner_n.tga
Crosswalk Texture    dirt_intersection_crosswalk.dds

Textures for the right one:
Street Textures:
Base Texture       dirt_light_base.dds
Detail Texture       dirt_intersection_crosswalk

Sidewalk Textures:
Base Texture       dirt_light_base.dds
Normal Map       dirt_sidewalk_base_n.tga
Opacity Map       dirt_intersection_crosswalk.dds

Intersection Textures:
Corner Texture       dirt_intersection_corner.dds
Corner Normal Map    dirt_intersection_corner_n.tga
Crosswalk Texture    dirt_intersection_crosswalk.dds

You can also have a thinner windier sidewalk:

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0007.jpg)

Notice it does not connect well with it's own intersection.

Textures for this one:
Street Textures:
Base Texture       dirt_light_base.dds
Detail Texture       dirt_street_detail.dds
         
Sidewalk Textures:
Base Texture       dirt_light_base.dds
Normal Map       dirt_sidewalk_base_n.tga
Opacity Map       dirt_sidewalk_opacity.dds

Intersection Textures:
Corner Texture       dirt_intersection_corner.dds
Corner Normal Map    dirt_intersection_corner_n.tga
Crosswalk Texture    dirt_intersection_crosswalk.dds

You can change the base textures to have different roads. Here are some examples.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0009.jpg)
Using dirt_street_base.dds

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0010.jpg)
Using mulch_pineNeedles.dds

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0002.jpg)
Using paving_flagstoneGray.dds and sand_dark_base.dds

Fixed now.

Perhaps they are starting their workout with a little rock wall climbing.

No, none of them have names. I did set types. Three of the big lots on the plateau are general, but there is a fishing lot and a school area, museum, art gallery, etc. There shouldn't be any interaction with the dragon head because it isn't a lot.

I think I saw something about that. Will look into it.

I need to map it first. This was quick and dirty.

Now a question. I can't find the dds files for the new terrain paints that came with WA in the world tool. Can you?

I just downloaded it and had no trouble with the link, it installed through the launcher just fine, am going in game now to check it out, looks really good!

Usually what I've been doing is zooming in close to the road, and using one of the angle-anchors to make it as straight on to the next piece as possible.. then just dragging the blue anchor over top of the piece you are trying to connect to.. you know it snaps because the blue anchor disappears and the roads become one piece.. It takes a few tries to get it right, but just keep moving it around and releasing until it works.

Edit: Road anchors turn from dark blue to light blue, intersections, i believe, turn to green.

And here are the minimum lot size to fit in community lot rabbitholes

Bistro              : 20 x 20

Bookstore           : 15 x 20

City Hall           : 40 x 40

Corporate tower    : 30 x 30

Criminal           : 30 x 30

Day Spa      : 20 x 20

Diner              : 25 x 15

Graveyard           : 10 x 15

Hospital           : 30 x 40

Military           : 50 x 40

Police Station   : 25 x 30

School      : 30 x 40

Science      : 30 x 40

Supermarket   : 15 x 20

Stadium      : 40 x 50

Theathre           : 25 x 30

this is just for the rabbithole objects, make the lot larger if you want to place in decorations.

Ok here's a stupid question.  Has anyone been able to edit an already running hood?

That's more or less why I came on for my question, as far as I can see, we can only edit Rivervew and Sunset Valley, we use the lite version and that will load without any buildings or sims.  What I want to know is where are the Adventures worlds, can we use them to edit to make regualr towns?  I've tried editing someone else's worlds and I get an error that it can't open packaged files, so a world that has already been uploaded and installed won't work.  I'd love to be able to use the 3 adventure worlds as my regular towns!

I'm sure someone will hack them :)

My file has been mostly fixed. There is still a little bit of road wonkiness on the road that runs along the southern beach, but I've smoothed everything as much as I can without screwing up lots, and have conformed lot edges. You might notice some graphical issues when running quickly over the terrain, but they resolve on stopping. Sims can no longer climb mountains. There is now a clear pathway into the partially hidden beach rich in rare fish.  Lots are named.


Looking at the size constraints above, you'd definitely need the mini rabbit holes from Pudding Factory for my terrain. Works for me since that's what I'd intended to do, but might be a concern for others.

Has anyone tried the "effects" yet?  My sailboats and seagulls show up fine, but I can't get the buoys nor the various types of surf to work at all.

Zazazu had buoys.

Do you all have white boxes in lots when you edit them in game? Those are mainly at the foot of stairs and can't be deleted. I thought the last patch should have fixed it, but I'm still having them.

Where were you having wonkiness on the road? Was it due to the fact that you had hills or something? Just trying to think of things to consider while I'm making my "world." I have a lot of rolling hills, and "interesting" terrain. Currently the roads look fine in the CAW, but I'd be curious to know what it looks like in-game.

Yeah, I still have them.

No. Sidewalks are a purely cosmetic routing device, though. They don't grant any bonus and often cause a speed penalty as sims preferentially use them in preference to straight-line navigation, while granting no intrinsic movement boost like roads do. Sims don't otherwise care all that much about sidewalks, they are unimportant. You can place lots against them or not, it does not matter.

Edit-in-game DOES work, it just loads for a really long time. I left it on overnight, and this morning it was there. It works, but it has one flaw: it seems to load the caches (like all installed windows for example) really slow, and CAST is superlaggy. All custom content seems to have the same laggy effect. At the moment I have only sims3packs in, and all this is on a Windows7 machine. FPS numbers are high. An FPS limiter for CAW and Edit-In-Game, is that possible?

Sweet!


My Edit-in-game works well. It loaded Sunset Valley Lite with a few roads I added in 1 minute and 34 seconds. The CAST is not laggy at all. But I don't have any CC.

Yeah, without CC it was loading in about a minute. With, I don't know, as I haven't tried it. My game itself loads in about 1.5 minutes with a fair amount of CC.
This is most evident in SimEgypt, where it takes a good two hours to get from the pyramids to Al Whatever's Market due to all the crazy windy sidewalks.

I have most of the plateau populated, just having an issue with the mini rabbit holes. I used the normal Business, Athletic, Culinary (diner), and Law Enforcement buildings. My Science, Military, Criminal, and Medical buildings use the mini rabbit holes and I'm having major placement issues. I did find one major benefit of being able to design your own thing: from the plateau, I can see townies walking, jogging, etc. down below, even to the beach. That will probably be a bit more difficult when the area is built up.
(http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/7159/screenshot8j.th.jpg) (http://img96.imageshack.us/i/screenshot8j.jpg/)

This tool is seriously shit!

How lovely. I'm sure we were all waiting with baited breath for jrcaporal to come along and give us their professional opinion. It's alright everyone, you can sleep at night again, jrcaporal thinks the tool is shit.

Is anyone else having their lots vanish?

I've been trying to make a themed world, with a lot of small residential lots to emulate an urban setting.  The map I'm using is 1024x1024, and it has 146 lots total.  Most of these lots are clones; I cloned the empty residential lots in CAW, then dropped in a bunch of identical houses in edit-in-game mode.  The problem is that the blocks of lots I made last night vanished after I saved a a bunch of new lots in edit-in-game today.  The missing lots were still present in the Lots folder, but did not appear on the map in CAW or in edit-in-game, and I could draw new lots on top of them in CAW. 

So I loaded a back-up copy of the world, saved it with a new name, and went back into edit-in-game to drop in the new houses and community locations.  I added in all the new stuff, everything looked fine in edit-in-game, I saved and quit, and when CAW reloaded the map, all of the old lots had vanished again.  They still exist in the Lots folder, but I can't tell which lot is which and am not ready to experiment by swapping random files around.

How can we keep sims from using the sidewalk though? The road I placed on the edge of a cliff is very narrow, I don't want them to use it except by car.

Edit:
I made for the invisible sidewalk, because I could still see a darker overlay with the grass. Also one for street lines. >Check post below fixed zoom black lines, and made only one file.
(http://sadpanda.us/images/79168-6O81QX3.png)

Ok something that is bothering me about CAW is after I am done playing I have to reset my pc's clock back to my time! When CAW load my pc clock goes to EA California time. I live in Pa so I am 3 hours ahead. Why would this program be messing with my pc settings, my pc clock of all things? Has this happened to anyone else or is it just me?

Maybe no lots for a long way to the cliff, so sims will only drive there?

Your transparent_opacity_texture is great, but still need to have grass_medium_base for Corner Texture for the intersection to appear right. If choose transparent_opacity_texture, they are black squares.

I like to have dirt_street_detail for the Detail Texture. See pic below. But the intersection is always solid no matter what I put in for the Intersection Textures. Is there a way to make it continue the two-tone pattern?

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0001.jpg)

Well in my test so far, the crosswalk texture (Sidewalk border) does not have an opacity map nor does the center of the intersection. The square center just takes the base texture set for the street. The crosswalk texture will repeat 4 times across, when a road is conjoined to the intersection. I modified a dirt texture to appear faded as the road, but you can see because of the repeating I couldn't get the desired effect.

(http://sadpanda.us/images/79372-TXW1S9A.png)

I've had this problem in my world as well.  What I did is flatten the terrain lower in the effected area then I smoothed it out. This corrected the cosmetic error.

You can do that, or you can go to the Roads section and choose the Grading Road Tool. You can then smooth through several options. I found that using the flatten option almost never works out if you want to maintain some natural ground sloping. My plateau is completely flat, but most of the lower area is moderately hilly, with a big hill where the cemetary is. This works well for me...I ended up putting the Science building in that huge lot I had designated as a park next to the cemetary and was able to trick it into looking like it grew out of the hillside, plus fit in a swingset and some picnic tables for the growing town. I still had issues with that one section of road (hell, it may have been that I forgot to soften it, but I thought I had everything) in the pic. There were several others that were similarly messed up, but are fixed now.

Remember, if you are going to edit the roads after placing lots in such a manner, that you need to go back to the lots, pick the tool under Lots - Conform Edges, and click on each lot that borders the road. Otherwise, it will look nasty.

Lion, that lack of proper intersections is probably what the EA guide (http://"http://www.simprograms.com/downloads/programs/sims3/Create-A-World%20Walkthrough.pdf") means when he says


(EA CAW Guide)

Surely, though, the issue lies in the textures we have, and we can find a working fix? I don't know. I'm relatively new to this sort of thing.

How do you create crosswalks at intersections?  When I plop down an intersection and connect roads to it I have sidewalks where there should be crosswalk stripes.

If the roads do not connect properly, the crosswalk will not materialize. That is, when the road has connected properly to an intersection, the crosswalk will appear automatically.

I haven't gotten as far as Zazazu on this, but in reading through the topic, people seem to have been having trouble knowing when and how the road sections snap to the intersections. In fiddling with this I noticed that it doesn't really matter how straight you have to piece to the intersection. What does matter is dragging the handle for the road to the center of the side you want to attach to. It then snaps the curve of the road to the intersection, and locks it. I've brought in pieces at as much as a 30 degree angle and they snapped in place just fine.

In trying to enter Edit in Game mode, I find mine stalls about 2 out of 3 tries. I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but the times it's been successful are the times I have a lot selected (blue lines) when I hit the Edit in Game button.

I really appreciate all the stuff people are posting here as they learn things. I've already gleaned a few helpful ideas, and the list of rabbithole minimum lots will save me a bunch of time.

A trick to make Edit-In-Game load fast, is to temporarily move out the DC Cache folder from Documents/EA/Sims3. Mine loads very fast now. Of course without the CC, but that can always be added in a later stage. It is handy to be able to check some stuff out and do some basic building or lot plopping. (Inge found this :D)

One thing to remember with the minimum lot size for the EA rabbit holes is that it measures the building, not the entrance-only section. The reason I say that is because you can get creative with "moveobjects on". You don't necessarily need a lot as big as the building, but you do need to be mindful of how you can overlap and how you can't.

(http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/8063/screenshot11fi.th.jpg) (http://img682.imageshack.us/i/screenshot11fi.jpg/)
Bookstore, movie theater, grocery store, and spa on the same 29x37 lot (still need to smooth pavement), fully useable by sims.

(http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/476/screenshot3x.th.jpg) (http://img694.imageshack.us/i/screenshot3x.jpg/)
Science building merged into the terrain a bit on a 36x32 lot (I did some more tweaking to make it natural), leaving space on a so that a good portion of the lot could still be used as a park...and evidence that the townies do use it.

(http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/2771/screenshot10d.th.jpg) (http://img691.imageshack.us/i/screenshot10d.jpg/)
Stadium smushed into the mountain a bit off of a 26x26 lot (stadium is 40x50). You can also see the criminal warehouse and hospital are overlapping lot edges but look natural.

(http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/3605/screenshot4h.th.jpg) (http://img682.imageshack.us/i/screenshot4h.jpg/)
Long view of the stadium, hospital, and criminal warehouse, showing how well it can blend.

Zaza, that last picture of yours shows that you do not have an intersection at the end of the road. I remember that the world tool manual says you should have an intersection at the end of every road so the cars can turn around. Or not, I'm not sure if it really matters.

Great tips. Thanks.

I can see you have the same problem: edited textures do no look as nice. They have a "shimmering" effect, instead of more natural matte look that Maxis textures do. For example, a paving_riverRock.dds cut out to be the corner looks ok closeup (first pic), but shimmers when you look from far away (second pic). Maybe the image file is too sharp or something.


(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0001-1.jpg) 


(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0002-1.jpg)

Anyone else having trouble placing game objects that no longer select/move after placed in painted blue non-route areas? My hood keeps having trees become stuck in these areas and delete key doesn't work, the only way I can delete them is using right click on them in the layer menu. Anything stuck also renames to Game_Object#, making it even harder to find. I tried unclustering/clustering trees with no results.
The image I used was the base dirt, not the dirt street by accident, oops! It was a 1024x1024 high detail image when I opened it. I applied a new layer in photoshop for the faded overlay and flattened it. I think if you make a smaller image like 512x512 it could be less shimmery. I'll try editing the street texture to see if it has difference in size, etc.

nanacake, the transparent_opacity_texture becomes black when the camera is pulled far away:

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0003.jpg)
In the world tool.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0004.jpg)
In game.

I tried to make it 512x512 or 256x256, still the same shimmery effect.

Just saw that when I went to edit in game, I think it's because of volume maps are wrong size. I will try to fix it.

Edit: No, I think it's picky about format. Trying RGBA8 now, the default for gimp wasn't it. Also, I realized why it did not work on intersection corners -because they rely on .tga maps. I thought I could make an all in one, but the different street elements rely on different texture formats for rendering at a distance. They didn't really plan custom roads to be easy.

2nd Edit: Fixed street/sidewalk transparent texture. Attached. Please let me know how it goes for you, I zoomed far out and close a lot. :D

They work just fine. I read that, too, after I was all done. I haven't seen any public or townie vehicles get stuck up there. Granted, they spend more time on the low land at the Science building, the square, and the library I just finished. Also granted, I don't have that many townies as I only have four houses finished.

Does Edit-In-Game randomly crash for any of you? It does for me, at the beginning of loading the neighborhood, but it had loaded the neighborhood ages ago, at least according to ProcMon. Then I look and it's overloading FullBuildep1.package, any reason for this? Also, after it overloads the fullbuild file, it crashes.

No, Edit-In-Game never crashed on me. But the world tool occasionally crashed a few times, not very often.

bitter much?

Much bitter better.


I discovered this literally two minutes before I read your post. Great minds, huh.  :D  Now to spread the word...

I even made a special DC Cache with the necessities for building, which I put in when creating worlds (=all the time now, lol) so I can have my special things to play with. I am even thinking of making two different: one with medieval stuff and one with modern. It means a little more time to load, but still acceptable, no need to leave it on over night..
A good thing at least is that hairs (my weakness..) are not at all used for building. This means the CC-folder with packages can be very slim :P

No, I really ment bitter  ::)

girlfromverona was correcting your capitalization, not your choice of words.

Fair enough  :D

How do I fix this?


(http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i205/Rockermonkey/Untitled-2.jpg)

Did you hit the flat lot button? If you edit the land terrain in CAW after placing the lot and then adjust the edge of a lot in-game with the level tool, some graphical glitches occur. So work on terrain first, then place lots. Turn the grid on it's very helpful to make flat land. After placing a lot use conform edges on it (double-click). If it looks bad to you after editing in-game, delete the lot and edit the terrain again. Also, It's possible to save lots when using in-game mode to the lot bin. They can be replaced on any lot that's the same dimensions or larger, but the terrain levels will still apply. So only really useful for flat lots.

Oh okay, thanks. I did the lot flattening and everything but it only got a little bit better. I'll try moving the lot and re-editing the terrain, it only happened on two lots that were next to the hills.

You could also try editing in game, specifically using the soften terrain tool. Put it at about 1/4 strength, medium brush, and soften away.

I'll try to be less obscure next time.  :P


Good idea, although I'm not sure if CC will automatically get packaged with worlds or not (only matters if you're planning on sharing them). Anyone know?

Transparent sidewalks are great. But intersection corners are still a problem. I tried different combinations. Do you get it to work?

The problem with the intersection is the corners are not cut out. The sidewalk corner texture just covers the base street texture. Provided, the nice texture and map for dirt corners that was included does not work. You can see in this picture. It was made to look faded but if a dirt street texture was used for the base, the corner would stay a solid square. If I try to change the .tga map to be transparent (no overlay) the corner becomes dark. It's beyond my control for now. I need to do more experimenting with the .tga mapping.

(http://sadpanda.us/images/80027-X2NWQ3R.png)

I thought I could do it yesterday. Guess I'm imagining things.

Question: Can you connect/snap two bridges together?

It is not recommended that you place a binned lot in a location with larger dimensions than the original, because there are no options to adjust the alignment of the lot, so everything will be placed smack in the center and the paths will no longer be connected to the street, etc. Plus, it's irreversible: Once you do it, the lot is permanently embiggened, and there is no way to move the house onto a smaller lot, even if the edges are unused.

Best off working from a floorplan or making your own floorplan, then. For my terrain, most of the lots are so small that I've been building exactly to the constraints of the lot. For my 9x9 three-bedroom, two-bathroom model, I did a floorplan so that I can use it as a base on other lots. Especially since it seems that somebody's hack is intent on giving me a new family each time I build a lot, so I'm always stuck with one homeless townie family.

I would like to know that too, if I could even find them. I found ones from WA, but I can't find the one I think ingelli used in a screenshot from this thread, was that a bridge from Riverview?

Is this (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,17598.msg508598.html#msg508598) the one you mean? Looks like it might be the bridge from China. The Riverview bridge is reddish brick, IIRC.

I still haven't even been able to get a bridge to connect to a road, let alone connect two bridges together.

So no, two bridges can't be joined.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0003-1.jpg)
Sims can't go through.

I had to build a road section in between to connect them all. Then sims can go through. But it doesn't look pretty, and the terrain forming is a huge pain:
(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0002-2.jpg)

nanacake, this is "large chinese bridge". Type "bridge" in the filter in "Matadata", and you get all the bridges. For the life of me, I can't get Riverview in the tool/game. It will be nice to have one more bridge.

Use advice from this thread. Pull the dark blue square close, sometimes touching sometimes not touching, it depends. when they snap together/connect, dark blue squares turn to light blue or green ones.

Medieval town builders out there, have you used the "Ruined Wall"? The "Short" and "Tower" can be used to make castle walls. I have a question. If you have used them, do you need to paint sim-non routable (blue) under them? The same question for other large world objects, such as the mines, Asian city wall,  pyramid stuffs, etc.

Yeah, I used the Chinese bridge. Someone said the Riverview bridges are not real ones, just roads with some special meshed sidepiece, not yet found in game. I will have a look at those walls, thanks for the tip :D

Big thanks, Zazazu, for the reminder about the moveobjects cheat, though the first world I worked on the issue was more a matter of making the lots way huge, and then having tons of wasted space. I tried again with a tiny world, and I like the results much better. I did encounter one rather strange thing when I put it into the game. I don't know if this happened to any of the rest of you, but when I put the second world I built into the game, the first one I built disappeared. It wasn't a loss this time, as I wasn't very pleased with the results, and hadn't actually started playing it as a neighborhood, but it seems weird to me that the older custom hood would vanish when I added another. Also, I'd reinstalled Riverview before I put my custom hood in, though I hadn't checked to make sure it showed up. But Riverview also was not there.  So, we're only allowed 2 worlds at a time?

Another thing I'm having a small issue with is saving the image for the town as a 24-bit png. Gimp apparently isn't capable. I did manage in Photoshop Elements, but the second time I tried to do it, I couldn't find the website I'd used as a guide the first time, and I couldn't quite remember what I did the first time. Anyone have a reliable link to a guide for this? I managed this time, after more than an hour of frustration.

I use Photoshop (an old version) not Photoshop Elements, but the main idea should be the same. Construct your 256x256 image, then to to File and Save As. Pick .png on the pull-down menu at the bottom. Hit Save/OK. It should bring up a supplimentary window asking if you want to save it as interlaced or non-interlaced. Go ahead and pick non. Should be a 24-bit image. To check, go to open the new file, but right-click and pick Properties. On the second tab, look towards the middle. It should say Bit....24.

Well, it ain't MINE. AwesomeStory never creates new famblies. Ever. There is simply no event that does this. The only reason new famblies would come into being is if a sim requires workmates for some reason, and I've tried to minimize the occurence of even that. You know I hate townie-bloat as much as you do: it detracts from the Puddingland experience to have random characters no one knows clogging the view.

I've just opened Riverview Lite to see if the bridge showed up. And no, it's not there. It looks like you're right about the road and sidepiece. But why the hell couldn't they include that in CAW?

Did anybody set community lot type such as market, Chinese garden, nectary, or tombs in the main hood? Do sims exhibit the corresponding behaviors on those?

In the sense that they exhibit correct behavior on anything, sure. Setting something to "market" is of no real use, since there's no market to in the game. Chinese Garden will grant the appropriate bonus moodlets, and soforth, but aside from Chinese Garden, they don't do much else.

Using this method it saves as a 32 bit image. I tried setting it as an indexed image and saving as .png and it saves as an 8 bit image.

My test neighborhood. Kinda almost done with it.

(http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/289/greenville.th.jpg) (http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/289/greenville.jpg)

:D

Anyone working on making a Pleasantview?  Reading through this confirms my original thoughts.  Too hard for me.  I'll still try, but Sims 4 will probably be out before I get it to work.

It's early on, so I'm sure that is exactly what I'm seeing - work buddies. I only have five townie families. It just always seems to happen that I see a family has spawned, I check "listhomeless" to see how many are in the family and how much money they have, and I build digs for them. The moment Awesomemod places them in their new home (pretty quickly and predictably), a new family is spawned. Soon I'll be getting some spinoffs as one family already was made of romancers from existing households, and I have another couple that Awesomemod keeps sending for nookie in the mausoleum.

I've been doing mine in GIMP 2.6.  You can either type the .png bit in manually or scroll down to it in the extensions drop down.  You'll then get a box asking about the interlacing and stuff.  Just choose the default options and it should work. 

Does anyone know where the save file is after you install it? I wanted to see what my town looked like in game and then edit all the mistakes. I saved it under 2 different names, but apparently that didn't matter. It still says that the world is already installed even though I erased everything I could find that had anything to do with it. Also, even though it says it is already installed, it isn't in the list of worlds on the Main Screen.

To delete installed worlds without going through the launcher, delete the files in the following folders in your My Documents (XP):
- InstalledWorlds
- WorldCaches
- DCCache (Edit: Have to delete even if there is no CC)

To save a new version of your world, you have to change the name in the "Add/Edit Description".

Is there other way to quickly zoom in and out rather than rolling my mousewheel for thousands of time?

The +/- keys also zoom.

Is anyone else having a problem with putting rocks in their worlds? Every time I select different types of rocks they appear in the middle of the ocean instead of where my mouse is. I don't understand why. At first I thought they weren't appearing but they appeared as placed in my layer panel, so I clicked one and clicked "Find in Rendering Pane", and there were about 10 rocks. =/

I randomly placed a few rocks, they work fine for me, appearing where the mouse is.

You have to press Esc to prevent objects on your mouse tip from being added to the world.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0006.jpg)

Why doesn't water/river appear? The elevation of the bridge (to indicate how high the land is) PositionY is 43.


Also, if you press Shift when you zoom/move, it goes faster.

I've been using 2.6 for a considerable time. No, it doesn't save it in 24 bit format. It saves as 32 bit. After considerable search on Google, I reluctantly concluded that Gimp won't save as 24 bit png. Yes, I know how to type . p n g manually, or to choose it from the dropdown menu.

No one else has commented on the "only two worlds" issue I'm having. Thanks for the tip about renaming instead of trying to overwrite files I've made changes to, and the locations for deleting references to worlds I don't want installed any more. I was finding it frustrating to figure out where all to look. It seems I need to be moar 'puter savvy. <- dumdum dum...

Go to Terrain > Change Sea Level, then click a spot on a valley where you want the water level to snap to.

Gimp can make 24-bit .png's from deleting its alpha channel.

I had that issue to, and I just kept messing with it until I found a solution.

Actually, it's not even a meshed sidepiece, and those bridges are easy to create.

Build a road that goes directly through your river to the other side.  Then, click the Grading Road Tool button, click the Flatten Road button on the right side, then click on the road that runs through your river.  Be sure to click on a part of the road that is on the bank of the river and not underwater, as it will flatten the piece of road to the elevation you clicked on.

Then, you'll have a stretch of land that connects both sides of the river, with the road on it.  Use the terrain paint tool to paint that stretch of land rocky or dark sand or whatever to provide the texture of the "bridge."

The good thing about these bridges is that they don't require any snapping or precise terraforming.  Just build a road, flatten it, and paint under it.  These "bridges" can be as long or as short as you need them to be, with no pieces or game objects required.

You can also use this technique to build curved bridges (just remember to lay out your road underwater exactly how you want it before you flatten it to avoid unnecessary terraform detailing later).

No, there's definitely a meshed sidepiece.

I spoke before I looked.  I stand corrected.

But, it's still a good way to build semi-realistic looking bridges with ease and flexibility.

More of a causeway than a bridge. Though I suppose they would have their place.

I've been playing around with bridges to see how they fare when it's not just a gap of water our puddings must cross.

(http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/8603/screenshot9w.th.jpg) (http://img94.imageshack.us/i/screenshot9w.jpg/)

Of course, something with this much potential to be awesome can't possibly work out well under EA, although I had suspicions for what comes next as soon as I came up with the initial idea.

(http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/9517/screenshot12x.th.jpg) (http://img191.imageshack.us/i/screenshot12x.jpg/)

Sims and Cars drive OVER bridges just fine, but like the in-game camera, there is no concept of going UNDER or THROUGH something.

(http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/2056/screenshot16d.th.jpg) (http://img191.imageshack.us/i/screenshot16d.jpg/)

It doesn't seem to impede travel to a Sim's destination in anyway, but unless you're fine with flying cars and floating pudding, bridges must remain as routes over the impassible only. I don't expect that messing with passability or routing data will change this because the means to do so seems very limited, but regardless I doubt it's in the game's capacity to allow for different altitude layered pathways.

For 24-bit png conversions, you can use paint.net, it's free: http://www.getpaint.net/

It's less intimidating than gimp IMO.

No. I'm able to install three worlds at the same time at least. They show up in the drop-down menu in addition to Sunset Valley.

I like the copy-lot function i CAW, but you have to beware that not everything copies - stuff in basements seems to be deleted, and some doors/windows and special edits like windows on pool walls. What I do is that I copy the lot - its handy to see how it looks in new location. Then I replace it with a proper copy of the lot in EIG. Its also good that you can move the lots around when placed, rotate them and what not.

On my last EIG save something strange happened. It just said "Error" and that the save didn't complete. Tried to save again, took a very long time. The map fades to black as it saves each lot continuously -Is that normal behavior? This second time follow up message stated it saved successfully.  Then, I noticed a hole appeared in the center of a mountain, but quitting back to CAW it's nowhere to be seen. I smoothed out the terrain just in case.  I wonder if it's only graphical glitches in raised terrain. Hood is about done, so I will export it and test now.

Edit/Update: Another question: Did anyone who exported their world use the launcher successfully to install it? I tried to use the launcher but then it still wasn't showing up in the menu. So, I moved the .world file the launcher placed in Installed Worlds to the same place I had to put Riverview in C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/Gamedata/Shared/NonPackaged/Worlds and it worked. The mountain still has a hole in it. I think I can't fix it unless I remove the lots on top of the mountain then redo.

Yes, I used the Launcher to install mine. I didn't have any problems.

I didn't truly use Edit-in-Game, since I was leaving the lots blank. I was just using it to be able to scan the terrain in ways that the CAW editor doesn't allow. I have another terrain I've been screwing around with at off-moments and will be pre-building it for my established town option (in TS2, I always liked having one town that I built slowly and one that started off heavily populated). So we'll see if Edit-in-Game wants to be a bitch here as well.

The more lots, the longer the saving in EIG takes. I have had errors, because of corrupted lots. In some cases it was just a question of replacing the errored lot with a fresh copy - I always save a copy of all new built lots to library, just to be safe. But in one case that didnt help, and I deleted the lot and rebuilt it. Then the world saved ok.

Yes, it had taken a long time for saving EIG when I had finally completed adding buildings to all but two of the around 25+ lots on the map.  I don't understand why in CAW it shows one thing for terrain and in game another, still. When I flattened the top terrain of the mountain (To make a plateau for lots) a side effect occurs with jagged lines forming on the slope edges below. I used decorative rocks (Beach/Landscaping) to cover up some other mountain cliffs to mask the edges I couldn't smooth because the terrain was too steep- also too close to the world map's edge which might have also been why.

A note for anyone who is also making urban areas/small lots-

Sidewalks: They're detrimental to proper routing. Found placing half of a sidewalk on the edge of two lots without using proper grid spacing is a bad idea. I did not place an entire tile of sidewalk space away from the adjacent lot. Sims will run half on the sidewalk, half their body on the lot edge with head bobbing through any lot edge's fencing. It's better to use a pavement terrain paint to give a merged pavement effect for such closely placed lots. A properly spaced sidewalk alleyway works well though Sims will take this route more than road transportation if there is alleyways all the way from start point to destination. If you want sims to drive or bike to work place your residential farthest as possible from the commercial district farther and place no *real* alleyway leading there for a few hundred squares in each direction.

I don't personally mind them walking to the neighboring homes, but no one is using the road at all to get around because they really like sidewalks more.

I only have sidewalks in the community lot areas, which are three distinctive sections. However, I find that townies generally walk or run around town except when going home in the evening...then they cab it. I'm not following exactly what you did, though, Nanacake. Are you saying you only placed a sidewalk 1 tile wide? I didn't think that was possible. All of mine are the default 2 tile sidewalks with sidewalk intersections wherever they made sense. No weird half-on-half-off issues here.

(http://sadpanda.us/images/82481-BFDHYQW.png)

The limit for making lots this close is about half of a square using the CAW grid for a precise guideline. I placed the sidewalks after the lots to fill in the grass gaps. This turned out to be a bad idea. The reason I did this is because I wanted the pavement to continue seamlessly between the lots. I was hoping sims would walk back there but not all the time to get everywhere. They prefer the sidewalk to the road if you add single pathways. If you've made a custom ground paint texture, you'll notice it's enlarged, so I couldn't get the sidewalk texture to match up if it's ground paint.  I will have to use plain asphalt texture from the street.

(http://sadpanda.us/images/82483-07OYP6Q.png)
Ideally, I want the sims to use the properly placed sidewalk at the top of the image to get to the park and walk around the front of the houses. After I remove some of the fence around the playground, hopefully if sims do decide to route through this short open space it won't look so bad.

Ah, I see. I hadn't known that was possible. It makes sense that sims would be walking half-on, half-off your mini sidewalks since on the normal ones they walk at the midpoint. Love the sidewalk texture you used. The walled off pathways are definitely a cute effect, but would look just as good with the proper spacing. Honestly, as a sim, a one-tile walkway would be uncomfortably claustrophobic.

I am considering uploading a set of custom road textures when I finish. Yeah, it was pretty claustrophobic :D. The last tiles bordering inside of a lot are to be considered too in small space. Not being able to build walls on the edge of lots, I tried to leave at least two tiles around. Most of the houses there is a place to plant a row of vegetable garden plants and walk to the back.

Nice, it looks great. CC definitely works in CAW. AwesomeMod even popped up with the outdated message in EIG once :D. When I tried to install with the launcher it did extract it to the right spot. It just wouldn't show up in game. I think the patch broke the launcher for some. Moving any .world files to the folder location I posted a page or so back in this thread will register the new world in the drop down menu for sure.

We both like the tiny. I started in the tightest area of my neighborhood, so most of the homes there only have a one-square buffer on all sides but the road, which is two or three spaces. Then only one space between lots. With an itty bit of landscaping, only one lot in the first built block actually has space for a tiny garden, and that because I built the house around a gem spawn spot.

(http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/3027/screenshot31t.th.jpg) (http://img97.imageshack.us/i/screenshot31t.jpg/)
Fun cramped real estate. Looks are deceiving...most are two or three bedroom homes with at least two bathrooms.

(http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/6083/screenshot28re.th.jpg) (http://img96.imageshack.us/i/screenshot28re.jpg/)
Only house on the block with garden space. I didn't have a good photo...I shot this one to show Reid Powers, the 'hood manwhore, visiting two of his paramours after his wife went to work. The glass-walled hallway has a door in back that opens onto a 4x4 area with a gem spawn point.

(http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/2766/screenshot34v.th.jpg) (http://img41.imageshack.us/i/screenshot34v.jpg/)
More spaced-out homes on larger lots. The area on the right is a fake abandoned, overgrown warehouse where I've planted a lot of harvestables.

I hope you plan on uploading the final version of your world Zazazu. I downloaded the empty one, and liked the layout a lot, but I'm not the world's greatest builder.

I hadn't. It's a gradual grower, so it will be a few months before it is complete. Plus, it's ridiculous with CC. My second, loosely called Windabout, I plan on sharing a built-up version of.

Like a couple of other posters here, what I'm really interested in is editing the official towns, not recreating them from scratch from the "lite" versions. If someone works out how to do that, they will be my new best friend (what an incentive huh?)

If sunset valley could be halved and have lots added/expanded to make up for the halving I'd be happy. =P

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "limit for making lots this close"; could you elaborate on this? It sounds a bit as if it weren't possible to put lots right next to each other (with no space in between) .. is that so? Or did you deliberately leave a little space in between because you wanted sims to be able to walk between the lots?

(Reason I ask is that for me it would be quite a bit of hassle to install CAW and test it myself - I'd have to set up a dual boot machine, buy Windows, install Windows, reinstall the game, and install CAW - but if I can't place lots next to each other the whole thing would be useless for me. So I'd be really grateful if someone could enlighten me on that .. thanks in advance =).

You can place lots next to each other. Only be careful if one lot is all surrounded by other lots and the door of the house is close to the outer border, things can then block the door, or the lot can level just a little with lots moving around and THAT can block the door. This is only a problem if you work with small lots placed close together, but done with precaution and testing it is possible.

Thanks ingeli!

Just to make sure we're really really talking about the same thing (I've had misunderstandings with others about this in the past, probably a language issue): with "next to" I mean immediately adjacent, two lots sharing one border, like so:

|  Lot1  |   Lot2   |

and not:

|  Lot1  ||   Lot2   |

.. that would work, yes?

I guess I can deal with the other issues you mentioned .. it's not like this ever worked flawlessly in TS2 either (so I'm used to having to twiddle), but thanks for the heads-up.

You can't do this, no. Create-a-crap will not let you place lots closer than one tile (of the in-game build grid equivalent) from each other.

This works without issues, yes.

Just to confirm, there need to be one tile in between all lots, yes. Roads/paths can be adjacent though (thats what was discusses by other posters). Apparently routing on a lot and routing in the world around is separated. But, don't despair, the versatility of the lot sizes (total, from 1-64 tiles) makes up for this. Do try it, I think you will like it.

Yeah, once you see any (or all) sides your new lot edges turn red, that lot is unusable/invalid and will have to be deleted.

Like Pescado said, you can NOT place lots right next to each other with no space in between. There has to be at least one tile of space in between. What I do is paint the terrain with paving_slateSquare or paving_riverRock (my choice for the town center) for the whole area, and leave it as grass for the suburbs.

In addition to that, since you can't build wall at the edge of the lot, the gap between two townhouse type of buildings is minimum of 3 in-game tiles.

To me it doesn't. I've built enough lots and neighbourhoods to be 100% certain about what features I need, and the ability to place lots wherever the fuck I want is one of them. If that's not an option, I can just uninstall the entire game now.

Thanks JMP for the info - you just saved me a bunch of §§, plenty of HD space and lots of wasted time =).

I'm guessing you just really, really, really love nailing lots right smack up against each other to the point of obsessiveness. Usually, though, such a thing is accomplished by building the thing you're trying to build on a single plot. The ability to subdivide a lot into multiple residences is presently being researched, but it's very possible to do such a thing in a mod. It may also be possible that these limitations are things artificially imposed by create-a-crap, and can possibly be bypassed with sufficient armtwisting.

This is Plasticbox. He loves the party wall.

I know it's not what we can get with TS2 and LotAdjuster, but the three tile gap is still a big improvement on a four tile gap default with TS2. And since you are pretty much stuck seeing neighboring lots, with only a three tile gap it can be difficult to find a good viewpoint. Plus, you're hearing bits and pieces from the neighbor lots...doorbells ringing, snippets of conversation and flirting, toddler babble. The urban feel is definitely there in my 'hood, and I'd argue that Nanacake's has more of it in the look even though her lots seem to be bigger.

IIRC, TS2 reacted to various attempts to commit such atrocities by crashing if you built walls right up against the very border of the lot.

Yup. No walls along the edge, but you could keep the effect through the use of a faux party wall, a wall segment that ran perpendicular to the edge on both sides of the house.

 :o Really?! "very possible" sounds really promising. DO WANT!

pbox, don't leave :'(.  I love your lots, and am looking forward to more of them and worlds from you.

Latest AM makes the option for lockable doors (I think? It just started to appear?), with a few more mods making townhouses as apartments on one very long lot is possible. I have an idea pbox -if you used a new recolorable fence mesh the size and shape of a normal wall, then placed the fence on the lot edges, it could look pretty good I think. I understand your frustration though, they would still be faux walls.

Close lots are not very good for a slow computer (low RAM) though.  I had high lot detail set to 1, but since the lots are all within camera range the game seems to have trouble deciding which one to focus. This results in lots consistently loading. So I have to keep it on at least 3 high detail lots.

I actually wasn't asking so much because of party walls (it would certainly be great to be able to build them, but I already got used to the thought that it's not), more because I indeed "really, really, really love nailing lots right smack up against each other" =P. To me it's just normal to divide land like pizza, not with funny unuseable spaces everywhere, and this worked just fine in TS2 ever since the base game so I really don't see why I should have to bend over backwards now, just so that a crippled broken game will be happy.

I dunno, maybe it would work to close the gaps between lots with fences in "world space" rather than "lot space", but from what people said about routing on and off lots, I don't expect the EA routing to be able to deal with that. Seamless my ass. 

I have been slowly figuring out CAW thanks to posts here and elsewhere, but am having a problem. I haven't seen this reported anywhere - if it is, please let me know and feel free to delete this thread. :)

I have a large triangular shaped artifact that I cannot get out of my world. It appears in CAW and in Edit in Game. I had a couple others that I managed to get rid of by deleting misplaced rapids or distant terrains, but I can't seem to find what is causing this one. Any ideas?

(look in the upper left corner of the world.)
(http://i779.photobucket.com/albums/yy71/robindw/glitch2.png)
(http://i779.photobucket.com/albums/yy71/robindw/glitch1-1.png)

Try sanding down the affected areas with the smooth and flatten tools. It should go away once you remove any jagged undersea ridges or shoreline jaggies.

Nanacake, lockable doors came in with WA, just like I predicted.

Thanks Pescado - as a tip to anyone else with this problem, fiddle with anything within sight range of the artifact. The shoreline causing the problem was further down the triangle than is visible. Turn on the "View wireframe" option and trace the triangle to its base, then just mess with sloping, flattening, etc. until the artifact disappears. It was very finicky and came down to less than 5 squares that needed adjustment. There were no visible glitches, so it's trial and error to locate the offending land mass.

I seem to remember sims can now fish from a deck. But do they?

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/Screenshot-13.jpg)
Fishing from land.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/Screenshot-12.jpg)
Can't fish from deck.

And they took away the deck on stilts? Why?  >:(

Is the water inside of the lot where the deck resides? I've had fish successfully from the foundation before.

No, it's the "body of water" of the world. The lot is "drawn" into the ocean.

HEADS UP

The "Working Bulletin Board" from MTS (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=381598) numericalizes trees's names in World Tool:

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0008-2.jpg)

Does anyone have a terrain paint they've been using to mimic sidewalk? I'm trying to work on this new world, but having issues with blending certain areas.

Sorry, double post due to it being two days and having something majorly useful.

My not-so-secret Sims community builder crush, Flabaliki, has released a two-part tutorial for CAW. It has some useful tricks not mentioned here, such as changing time of day in order to better see your sculpting. The first section is here:

http://thesimsupply.com/thread-18-create-a-world.html

You can get to the second from there.

That's a good tip.

I have yet to find a way to make good-looking mountains like those in the EAxis height maps.

(http://i598.photobucket.com/albums/tt61/dragonarts06/highlandsheightmapscreenie.jpg)

I've been trying to use a custom height map for a world, and it's squishing it to half dimensions one way and duplicating it. That is not what I had in mind. Does Anyone know what I'm doing wrong, and how I can fix it?

Dragonarts, what is the highest altitude on your height map? If it is over 300, it will be reduced in size. When you open the height map, it will ask you to choose a height in CAW and the highest is 300 so your height map will be scaled to whatever number you choose for the CAW map.  I had the same issue when importing but once I starting selecting 300, it was much higher. Now..I haven't tried to import a height map with a low altitude, but if you do CAW might scale it depending on what number you choose for maximum height. I would try the different scales in CAW to see which one looks good. 

It's not the height, LauraW, it's the  forward to rear dimension on the photo. The height on that is actually set to 300, because I wasn't sure how much room it needed. If you look at the picture, you'll see that the terrain is repeated. It's also distorted from the original. It's as if my 256 x 256 map is being read as 256 x 128.

It doesn't seem to matter how I import the map into CAW. I've tried saving it to the desktop, and selecting it when I create the new world. I've tried saving it directly into the Heightmaps folder, and I've tried creating the world with a flat map and then importing the terrain map via the button in the Terrain tab. If it makes a difference, I use the Gimp.

You need to convert your map to 16-bit grayscale, which GIMP currently doesn't support. In this thread (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=382629) Misty_2004 found a program to convert them with.

I'm pretty sure that ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php) is also capable of converting them, but it has a command-line interface and may take som getting used to.

Thank you, Goggalor. It figures it would be something like that. I have Photoshop Elements. I think I'll just check and see if that will do the job for me before I download yet another Image program.

ETA: Elements says, "16-bit Grayscale

A high-bit image mode that can contain thousands of shades of gray. Photoshop Elements supports only 8-bit grayscale, an image mode that can contain hundreds of shades of gray."

So, off to download RawTherapee I go. Thanks for the info.

For people with lag in the "edit in game" function:

I noticed it was only lagging while browsing categories with non-store launcher content, so I renamed the DCCache folder before opening world tool to temporarily disable the dbc files. This completely got rid of the lag for me. (I had copies of the dbc files both in mods/packages and DCCache since this was the only way to have both kinds of content available. for god knows whatever stupid reason.)

Ack! You are right. I didn't notice the repeated pattern..Not sure how I missed it since it is so obvious. Glad you figured it out.

My Sims fish from their deck.  It may have to do with where the fish are located.  The fish look like they are too close to the deck.
Edited to answer Lion's question below.  Yes, I used spawners.

Actually I didn't put in any fish spawner.  They can just fish if it's a body of water in the world. Do you have lake or pond (created by the water tool) inside your lot?

I had the same results as Lion. Could only fish from a deck in ponds and not in the world water. Also found that my sim wouldn't fish in the world water inside the lot boundaries even from the ground, the action would just drop. It was fine to stand on the lot ground and fish in the ocean outside it.

ETA: This happened both with spawners placed in the world and in the lot with debugmode.

Does anyone else get my problem, where the brush for sculpting/painting randomly disappears and I basically have to wait until I'm allowed to continue?

Yes, especially if the camera is off the world. If the camera is absolutely in the world, then for me, it's just slow going, stuck and go. Maybe it's my machine.

Another problem. I wanted to create a small mainland town surrounded by mountains with some islands in the bay. Unfortunately, no matter how mush I use the No-Camera-Routing tool and raise the mountains, I can't seem to make it impossible to see over the mountains to the infinite see behind it.

This picture is a little out of date;

(http://i47.tinypic.com/1zpl5j9.png)

I think you'll need to use a larger map with much taller mountains. That map looks small or tiny, am I right? Use medium or large, and route a lot of the terrain inaccessible. With work, that should do it.

Well you need to use the distant terrain and the largest map.  The medium and small terrains are really only good for islands.

Ugh. That's what I was afraid of.

I already started remaking the neighborhood on a bigger terrain, and after sculpting the coastlines I found out the whole thing was facing the wrong direction. D:

Isn't the Distant Terrain tailored specifically to fit only Sunset, though?

I don't know, I haven't used it.

I don't plan to either, Riverview does fine with just a mile of no camera routing on all sides.

Not having these problems.


Double click any of the bridges in the "MetaData" to place.

It's normal. The bridges will "land" on the ground height, not the water height. You will have to "raise" it. "Move" it along Y axis with "snap to grid" off. Roads do connect/snap to bridges if you carefully drag the road to the edge of the bridge, not through it.

I have a quick question. I've been creating a world for a while, I like small lots and have them setup city style. I haven't done any modding in the game, though. Today I fired it up for the first time and I have maptag overkill (and I mean I see nothing but blue dots). Is there any way around this or am I stuck with the only option of deleting and spacing the lots out?

Those only show up when you are editing the town. The maptag spam disappears in normal gameplay.

Has anyone else been having trouble with uninstalling old test neighborhoods from the game? I used the launcher to do this, which predictably failed to work. Is there another method for burninating/uninstalling a world for those of us who want to replace them after fixing old errors?

ETA: I managed to fix the problem I was having, but the question still stands because the launcher is stupid and sucks.

To burninate, delete:
DCCache
InstalledWorlds
WorldCaches

in My Documents (XP).

Now a question. Can you get rid of the red spots when you paint the terrain? It's automatically generated if the terrain is steep. I can't erase it or disable it. It's blocking the view to paint the terrain.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0001-4.jpg)

In ‘Sculpt' mode to get rid of the red, you deselect the ‘Show Unroutable Terrain' box. 

In ‘Paint mode to get rid of the red, push the ‘Routing Opacity' down as low as you need in order to see, or all the way down to nothing if you like. 

In paint mode, ‘Routing Opacity' is down to nothing. Reds persist.

(http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj244/Lioness_018/0001-5.jpg)

I seem to have a vague recollection of this annoying me when I first started using the tool.  It has not happened to me in so long, I'm not sure when or why it stopped happening.  I do know that after I have turned on the routing to check to make sure all my spawners are accessible, sometimes the red stays up after I turn it back off, but right clicking on the world and/or zooming in and out causes it to go away.  Is this a new occurrence for you?  I know you have been working with the tool for awhile now and I'm wondering if this is the first time you have gone to paint a world, or if it just suddenly began to happen.  My only other suggestion is to exit and restart.  That or try kicking the darn thing.


edit/added: I have the perfect pair of shoes to do it with.  Do you want to borrow them?  

The red isn't really there, it's just an informative overlay.

I have had this from the beginning. It's not new. I always tried to turn it off but can't find a way no matter what I try.


Yeah, informative, but useless and obstructive.

Does anyone know how to edit the worlds that you can travel to on vacation? I wanted to edit China, but when I try to open it from the File>Open... menu, it says that it cannot load a packed file into the CaW. Is there anyway to "unpack" it? It would be really cool if my sims could vacation to a custom world. (I also tried putting a custom world into the Worlds folder in the WA files, but that didn't work heh heh...  ;D)

I'm having trouble placing a city hall on a 64X64 lot. It claims that the object is going out of bounds, which it isn't.
(http://www3.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/a96c76e0e9909a8a35f86243bd5697613g.jpg) (http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=oyzgnyjehj5&thumb=4)
The lot is totally flat. Should I use MoveObjects? Will that create any problems?

Edit: Thanks, all. I used moveobjects. Haven't tested with sims yet; I'll edit back if I have a problem with their accessing it.

Using moveobjects is fine. Just make sure that the area in front of the entrance is clear and flat.

I've been able to place the city hall on a lot that is smaller than that using moveObjects, and had it go past the lot boundary a bit. I'm not sure the sims can use the object, though.

City Hall did that to me too.  It was the only rabbit hole that I had to use the moveObjects cheat on.

The reason the community rabbitholes cannot be placed. It's because the terrain is not flat. However once the lot is placed on uneven ground, flattening the lot will not correct it.

Moveobjects is the easiest way to do it, but in my experience, putting a rabbithole on a foundation with a uneven lot will make the rabbithole load longer and be invisible during town view.

My solution to this problem is to remove the lot in CAW, flatten it then make a new blank lot. Repeat until the rabbithole can be successfully placed without having the moveobjects enabled.

I'm sure there might be an easier way but so far only this has worked for me.

Uh, no. For one...it's flat. For two, rabbithole lots can be placed on uneven lots/terrain quite well. I do it all the time. I stick them into hills and such. The important thing is to make sure that the approach to the entrance is flat. Otherwise, you get random sims melding into the sidewalk.

I've never had any longer load times on my 'hoods (in fact, they seem to load faster than Riverview and Sunset Valley). I've never had display problems in town view.

Noted. Will re-evaluate a previous save. Thanks.

Yeah, Zazazu is right, the lot was flat. I flattened the ground before placing it. I eventually put down a level of foundation before placing the lot, so that's flat too. I placed the lot on the foundation using moveobjects, so once I've playtested I'll edit back and report on how it's behaving in game.

I'm finding Riverview rabbit holes don't show up in CAW after being placed on a lot.

I just want to know if this is normal.

This has been covered before quite a bit, but yes, it's normal. They appear in Edit In Game, only basegame/EP content will appear in CAS itself.

Thank you, that's a relief.

By the way, here is my town I'm working on, Avian Valley:

(http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/3605/cawavianvalley.jpg)

(http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/6646/cawavianvalley2.jpg)

(http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/5302/cawavianvalley3.jpg)

Finally: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=392122

I have some problems with the Edit in Game that I heard many others have too.

(If this has been covered somewhere here,  please provide me with a link. TY - I couldn't find it on my own ;))

I can't use EIG unless I move the DCCache folder away from C:\Documents \Electronic Arts\The Sims 3

But that leaves me with very limited possibilities in the buy and build mode

Not only third hand CC disappears - so does all Store items


And the things you use to decorate your houses disappear if you put down a lot you made in another world in your new CAW project


It is so frustrating.  >:(

You will only be able to upload a world with base game items in buildings
You can't use  all the houses you have spend time decorating

- I can understand it because that way you would give away Store items for free. - And EA would of course not allow that

But I only wish they where there to see if people who downloaded your world possessed them - like in TS2

Any ideas or comments on that?

They shouldn't  be disappearing completely.  They will not show up in CAW; I'm not sure why but CC does not show in CAW.  The stuff is still there.   When you deploy the world they should be there.   The only things I have come across that CAW can't retain upon deployment are the ghosts and planted vegetables (Vegetables from BuyDeBug work fine but are of normal quality).  Try deploying the world and see if the stuff is there. 

No they won't disappearing completely. They are still in the catalog in my game :)
But I can't use them in "Edit in Game"
and if I put down a lot from my bin in EIG only basegame-stuff will show - also after deploying the world...

Edit-In-Game does not like massive DBC DCCaches for some reason. It is not known why this is the case, but if you have 800 megs of crap in there, it will not be happy. There's a way around this, which involves temporarily reverting to the old DBC-dropped-in-packages-tree method, and I have a widget that performs this conversion automatically, but it is not for stupids.

Then it's probably not for me.... ;D
But thanks anyway.

The biggest problem for me is that my buildings will look so bad when I upload them if I am not very careful not to use anything else but basegame stuff

You could leave those lots empty and have people download the finished lots separately.  They can put them in place themselves and choose what CC to download.

Wanted to share something hilarious that just happened. The "Import Height Map", or maybe both it and the "Export Height Map" tools are very, very borked. I was working on another neighborhood for use when the next L&P drops. Of course, once I started plopping down lots I started getting road triangling even though the ground underneath appeared flat. Same old same old. So I tried exporting the map and making sure that the problem areas were the same exact gray tone. This is what I started with:
(http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/2637/abels.jpg) (http://img534.imageshack.us/i/abels.jpg/)

And this is what the result of the reimported, slightly modified height map was:
(http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/1267/abelouch.jpg) (http://img682.imageshack.us/i/abelouch.jpg/)

Wow, those look a bit like my mountains started out looking like.  LOL

Yikes!  I've imported some maps I made a few times and they've never been that spiky.  Could it have been the format you saved in?  I could sorta see this happening if it became pixelated due to the quality being reduced.  On second thought, seeing as how none of the original elevation was retained, maybe not.  That's really bizarre.

I think it was more about the exportation process. When I opened the exported file, the many hills were like pure black and white swirls. It looked quite odd to me at the time. There should have been more of a gradation.

EDIT: Bugs in the creation aside, the finished product is beautiful and, so far, bug-free. I sincerely doubt I'll be sharing a built-up version as I'm being liberal with the cc.

(http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/594/screenshot62t.th.jpg) (http://img696.imageshack.us/i/screenshot62t.jpg/)    (http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/198/screenshot60m.th.jpg) (http://img215.imageshack.us/i/screenshot60m.jpg/)    (http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/807/screenshot64.th.jpg) (http://img146.imageshack.us/i/screenshot64.jpg/)

Cute house.  It looks like a mobile home.

I found a solution to the "Selected file is not a 24-bit color png image" error when adding a thumbnail for your world.

Normally, .png images are in 32-bit (at least in GIMP). However, .jpeg images are in 24-bit.
So what I did was save my image as a .jpeg. Then I opened the .jpeg file and saved it as a .png file.

And BINGO! It works!

And also, your image must be 256px by 256px.

So you're saying the solution to getting an error when using the wrong type of file is to use the right type of file. BRILLIANT.

Actually, what he's proposing is an extremely awkward, convoluted, and quality-destroying method of removing the alpha channel from a PNG to make it 24-bit RGB instead of 32-bit RGBA, not that he was stupidly attempting to feed in a JPEG where a PNG was expected.

Anyone else having trouble loading a saved custom world more than once? I have completed the world, gone into the game proper and set out lots, saved and exited the game, only to find when I go back I cannot load the saved game. It tells me I cannot load that saved game because it appears to use expansion data no longer available... I have no expansions... >.<

I'm having an issue with CAW since I updated it. I haven't really used it for a while and when I tried to start editing terrain, nothing happens. It says the terrain editor is active, select a brush. I select a brush, but I can't do anything with it. Any advice or maybe I just need a re-education on using this. I can do everything except edit terrain.

I haven't noticed anything different with the terrain tools.  Make sure you have a mode (flatten, hill, valley…) selected.  It should appear highlighted in blue when you do; then it turns grey as you start to use it. 
I did notice that sometimes when I select to move an object, I am unable to move it.  Going back and forth from move to rotate sometimes fixes it, but sometimes I need to find the object in the ‘World Layers' game objects list and choose "Find in reader panel" before I can get the object to move.
All-in-all there weren't many changes with the update.  You can now see Riverview objects in CAW.

I ran into the same issue just this morning. I found out that it was because I was either zooming out too far or moving the camera too far to the side. Basically, I found that the camera needs to be located over the map or the terrain tool stops working. I hope that makes sense.

I'm completely new to using the program so I haven't quite gotten the hang of using the camera yet.

That solved the problem for me. I hope it helps you.

CAW works in optimized "cells" meaning that only a small square of the map will visually change at a time depending on where the camera is. if the camera is too far you won't see any visual change. Try taking the texture brush and painting as far to all the edges as you possibly can, you'll notice it "stops" in a striaght line. Then stop painting and nudge the camera- it will show that it did indeed paint everywhere you sprayed. It simply didn't update outside that currently used cell.

I'm finding that 'edit in game' is running very slow. To the point it took me about 7 minutes to place a couple of tables and chairs in the non-rabbithole portion of my diner.  I haven't used CAW in a while, and am just getting back to creating Avian Valley, but I don't remember it being so slow before the patch.

It has always been slow as molasses.  The more your world grows and the more detail you add to it; the slower it gets.  One of the things I do to work around this is to create all lots in the actual game, rather than CAW's game mode.   Then I package them up and I only have to go into CAW game mode long enough to set the lot down.  If you are working with custom shapes, creating a tiny world with no detail, just a few lots that match your needs would be helpful just for building purposes.   If the custom shape also includes odd terrain shape, (like on a cliff) this method won't work as it will cause problems to set a flat lot onto a cliff.

Ok, so I tried placing some of the pre-made lots in edit in game mode, only to find at least one white box on each lot.  I figured it was something non problematic, so I placed one, but when I went to delete the box, it was labeled "Should not appear in game" and wouldn't let me delete it.  Needless to say, I quit without saving.  Also, now that I think about it, they only seemed to appear in front of staircases.

Does anyone have any idea what these boxes are?

I answered this one over here.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,17804.msg520027.html#msg520027

Deleting, and replacing them worked!  Thank you.  Here is an update on Avian Valley:

(http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/8128/cawavianvalley4.jpg)

One thing to note about my neighborhood, is that most rabbit holes will have an accessible extension! (Usually, but not always a basement.)  For example the mausoleum will have a tomb underneath.  The diner, a WA style restaurant.  The bookstore, an actual WA bookstore underneath, etc.

When you visit lots sticking into the water, their textures DO fix themselves in map view, but they will always look terrible in sim view. You should make sure no lots are sticking into the water the way yours are.

Cute, but you are going to have problems with the lots that go into the water.  The sims will not fish there.  I've tried it and it was a funny failure.  Here is another problem I had.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,18037.msg520252.html#msg520252

I kept a lot or 2 with just a corner in the water, but pulled all the others out.

PS.  Those lots that are outlined in orange/red; they need to be removed and remade.  The red means that they have been damaged or are otherwise unusable.  Try placing them with snap to grid on.  If the grid is not at the right angle for them to line up with the road, you can change the angle of the grid itself using the degree indicator at the bottom of the screen.   

Ok, what does the yellow mean?

Yellow means community lot.   

It's too bad about the water thing, because not only do I have to redo all those lots, but I also have to scrap my idea to make a pier.

Speaking of non-fishable water sims can enter...

That is caused by...well, it just being water. In CAW, when you lower the land, it doesnt FILL with water- it's just going through the water. The water is just one big flat square of moving transparent texture.

So a lot going into it is just a lot that clips through that texture. Similarly, if you have a lot close to the water (very close, and very low) and you lower the land, you'll get water. But since you aren't using the pond tool, it's not defined as water- it's just a hole.

Therefore, sims can walk into it and it doesnt count as fishable water. I exploit this a lot in my Paradise world, which has beach lots that have water mere inches beneath their sand.

Does it matter if I have about half a tile submerged underwater? The visual effect seems negligible, plus it will appear that sims can wade their feet in.

I have a few with just a corner of the lot in the water and it does not have seem to have any adverse effect.  They just won't be able to fish in that spot.  It is a good idea to keep that in mind when placing spawners.   

Has anybody investigated the world files for info on the cinematics that launch with EA worlds the first time they load? It would be quite nice to add them to custom worlds.

I had planned on looking into that to add to my Fargo update.  Until EA fixes CAW I can't poke around and see if there is an option that allows for it.  The guide doesn't have anything about it.
http://www.thesims3.com/content/en_US/promo/gamepages/worldtool/help.pdf

It's basically data incompatibility. Some data format changed between Pudding editions, and as a result, Create-A-Crap barfs reading the deltapacks. Reverting the deltapacks results in a hardcoded game lock against running with different installed version.

There's definitely not an option *within* CAW. I was wondering if users like Claeric remembered seeing anything when poking around in the world data, it probably needs adding using tricks and magic, but it seems to draw off of the basic EA camera mode by the looks of it, so there's a chance it's not too hard to understand and edit in. It's just the .world files remain ruddy great mysteries in a lot of ways.

Claeric, what was the info you found about facial data and clothing restricts for the WA worlds (but have never been able to find it again, despite searching for it)? I remember you mentioning it back on MTS.

The facial data and clothing restricts basically adds a "theme" to the world, like, say, China, where the sims have facialblends and colorations set to make them look more "Chinese" and dress in a "Chinese" way, while Egyptians look, ostensibly, sim-Egyptian. You could use such a rulesheet to create, say, a vacationland populated by elves or moar Rhaydens.

Could this potentially ever be carried over into non-vacation worlds? Or is data kept quite separate from the .world file? I actually had a number of requests from players who wanted to investigate restricting the Sims that could generate in Niua Simoa.

Yeah, a fly through camera can be added with two simple ini files to the world. I got it working with simply extracting them from the Egypt world and adding to my own. One file (tgi 1F886EAD:00000000:7886A7F59355762F) contains the camera path definition and an explanation how to generate the numbers for your own path.  It says something about entering "camera debug UI panel", which I haven't been able to from within the game. Could be a CAW or EIG thing, but I can't test that now. The format is pretty simple though, with what should be xyz coordinates, camera rotation and FOV.
When I tested the Egypt camera it followed my terrain height automatically, it didn't cut through hills although I didn't change any values.

The other file (tgi 1F886EAD:00000000:3EC0CF0CC4A6540F) just says which one of the paths to use from the other file. This one can also have world specific settings for other things, like "color of wall tops".

Attached both ini files from the Egypt world as text files.

Excellent! Thanks Goggalor. Exactly what I was after for the cinematics.

Edit: Control over the world top color, as you pointed out! Bonus! Yes, thanks again.

If anyone interested I made a post ages ago about how to add the heat wave effect from Egypt appear on any hood with a importable .ini file here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=386817 (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=386817)

Control over the color of wall tops? That's an interesting one.

I didn't see the question about clothing/hair restrictions, sorry. I don't really remember a thing about it, but it mentioned specific sets of clothing and hair- I guess the clothes must have some sort of data in them that defines them as a certain type (chinese, french, egyptian). I really have no idea, and am totally shooting in the dark, but if you can figure out how the clothes identify themselves, I imagine you could very easily make custom clothes with a custom identification, and then use that identification in your own world.

Apart from the clothes being defined as a certain "type", it's all apparently a matter of ini files. ini files all over the place seem to change anything and everything.

Someone on this forum (witch, I think) made a world called Idle Haven for TS2 that I loved, so I am trying to create my own world similar to it.  Below is a picture of what I have so far.  I'm wondering if anyone has any "rules of thumb" for how many of each type of spawner I should put down and how many trees are needed.  Also, is there any way to get water, like ponds, on places that are above sea level without doing in out the lot?

(http://i27.tinypic.com/23r9t3m_th.png) (http://i27.tinypic.com/23r9t3m.png)

Many of your lots are visibly warped. This is bad! Flat-edges only!

Would anyone happen to have a handy list of what size lots (minimum) are needed for various rabbithole objects? I'd like to give creating my own world a try but I don't want to accidentally create too little space for important rabbitholes.

There's no need. Someone made custom rabbithole rugs you can place in any building. http://www.customsims3.com/smf/index.php?topic=1931.0

The latest on the rabbit hole rugs from Jynx:

"There are problem with the last patch which hs messed up many objects, this includes changes to the rugs that may cause problems
for some people. I'm looking at alternatives."

The people who picked those colors have NO sense of tradition. Clearly, the community lots should be BLUE and the Residential lots should be GREEN. Everyone here should know why! The color scheme dates as far back as RCI.

All flattened, except for beach lots.  I'll probably clean up some of the edges where I carved into the hills, but I'll wait until I finish testing it to see what else needs cleaning up.

(http://i28.tinypic.com/2dsr9me_th.png) (http://i28.tinypic.com/2dsr9me.png)

I knew there was a reason I always got confused in CAW. You have made it clear- I think blue = shopping.

Blue = Residential

Kinda slow on the uptake there, eh? The discussion was that EA made the colors wrong. Residential is green, Commercial is Blue, and it has been that way forever, but ea made Residential blue and Community yellow.

RCI. Residential, Commercial, Industrial. The little meter on all the SimCity games. Those colors are the colors used for the meter and for zoning areas.

I'm not slow on the uptake, your joke will cause confusion to the noobs.  I'm simply doing my part to keep them from crying.

Actually, in the original simcity, residential was red, and I'm not even joking!

True, but I think every one after the original went with green-residential, yellow-rural/industrial, blue-commercial. There's one of the Sim City games that I missed, plus the suckitude that was Societies.
Far be it for me to defend the Shoaty Vole, but there was no joke. It was quite clear that Pescado and Vole were referring to how the RCI was set up in Sim City.

Also, we don't care about noob confusion. If they are too stupid to use the power of Google, then they deserve the poking they get.


You all are going to make me break out the SC4 disks again and find all my old mods.

Ah, you're right. I remember SimCity on the SNES, Residential were red. But I was only thinking of zoning. I know that is zoning, but I'm thinking more drag-and-drop zoning. So I didn't even think of that.

Sooner or later surely someone has to find out how we can use our own meshes as hood ploppables...

There is no need. Make the smallest lot possible and use moveobjects.

Can't put a lot in water. Plus, sometimes you get wonky edges.

Sorry to revive a dead topic, but I didn't want to make a new one and this seemed like a fitting place for it.

I've made a world with CAW.. I was basically looking just to make a hood with wide open space and room to grow with future expansions, similar to the old TS2 maps. It's just one big flat grid.  Well,.. Medium sized grid.  Anyway I exported the Sunset Valley sims, because they were always my favorite... and since CAW doesn't allow us to place npcs yet, my world is basically a bunch of empty lots to fit them into once I got ingame.  
After I started a new game and placed all the families though, I seem to get massive lag spikes.  It will run for about 5 seconds, then freeze for 10 on an endless loop, making the game unplayable.  

I'm not sure what's causing this.. I thought it might be the game not recognizing my cloned sims as population, and therefor trying to overstuff the neighborhood with NPCs when the town is already full,.. but even with only a few families placed it seemed to work for about an hour before the spikes started again.

Anyone else having this issue? Or know what might be causing it?


ETA: I also sent my map and savegame to some friends, and they had the same issue. So it's definately the map, and not my comp.

There are a couple of possible causes I know of. For one, have you checked to see if sims are getting stuck anywhere? Especially if you've placed rabbit holes close to the edges of lots, or on uneven ground, you can have sims get stuck and this will cause lag spikes and skips.

Do you have Late Night? I don't, but I'd heard that people have had issues with lag spikes as the game is trying to assign celebrity sims but not doing so successfully.

Make absolutely sure that you "rebuild routing data" before testing, too. Even a tiny change can cause a big routing issue if you don't make sure to do it.

All the rabbit holes are in the middle of town, and there's no slopes in the map at all except for 1 hill and the edges, it's definately slopes.  I do have late night, and the only Celebrities are the goths, so that might be it.  Does Late Night have a celebrity quota I need to fill? It doesn't make much sense though since maps like sunset valley and twinbrook still operate just fine without celebrities.  

I didn't even notice the rebuild routing data option until just now... so I'll give that a try too.

ETA: Well I went over my map with a fine tooth comb, and I may have found the culprit.  I turned on the view routing data tool and found 1 discrepancy where the sea level was a little too high and "invisible water" was blocking the way for any sims to get to the beach.  I'm hoping by squishing this I'll have a working map. 

Thank you both! ^_^

After some annoying attempts to save different versions of the same world for export (for example different versions with stuff from only base game/expansions ect) I figured out how to do it. As this was not easy obtained info anywhere I am posting it here: Save a copy of the world in caw, name it anything, lets say Riverview-Redux. Close the world. Open with s3pe. Delete resource called WPID. Save, close. Open again with CAW, save again - of course with name, description and pic for the export. Close file. Export. Install. Rinse and repeat for as many copies of the world as you want.

CAW... Okay, so I finally finished building my world and saved it. But then it would not export, so I created another save with a different name and saved that, and it still would not export. I keep getting the dialog box "world failed to export" or whatever. So I copied my files to another location and re-installed CAW. Then when I restored my old files to CAW it would not work AT ALL, I get the Could Not Load File Error.... If anyone has any light to shed on this, it would be very, very appreciated.  ???

PS: We all know that CAW crashes constantly, even more often with Late Night, so I'm not sure if any of my saved files got corrupted, but I have several different save versions, and none of them work, so just thought I'd mention that.

PS2: I was browsing\googling around and found someone else with the exact same problem as me (hopeless carrot) none of the responses solved the problem, So that's a little more info. http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=422463 (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=422463)

Did you use things from Riverview or for example store stuff without having it installed? That can make it unable to open. I have very few problems with CAW now, compared to earlier versions, and EIG works very smooth. CAW crashes sometimes when searching for stuff, but not worse than you can save without corruption, and reopen the file.
Did you try and open an earlier backup-copy of this world? Maybe you can narrow down what you changed or added before it became corrupt.

A PS2 is a games console. A P.P.S is a post post scriptum. Thank you, come again.

Isn't this already possible using the same principal as with these: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=427515

(Edit: He says replying to a post from July as if it's current... :/)

I tried to dl the 1.6 patch for CAW, and had all sorts of problems. So I uninstalled CAW and down loaded it again, and the patch doesn't come up in the launcher. Before I invest a lot of time in building a world, would someone please clarify for me: did I down a version that is somehow already patched? And if not, what do I do now?

Tell me if I'm wrong but, if I understand you correctly, you first downloaded a '1.6 patch' for CAW? There was once a patch for CAW, released ~ between WA and Ambition. But this patch was intended for a previous release of CAW, so there is no need to use it anymore. With Ambition EP/game patches, CAW was unusable for several weeks. EA released a new version of CAW (a complete new CAW, not just a patch) to make it usable again. We had to uninstall the previous one and install the new one.

I think that's the method they have used ever since: release of new software vs patch.
So, to be able to use CAW today, you should just: 1/ check you are up to date with all the latest patches of the game+ the EP/SP you own, 2/ download the last available release of CAW and install it. CAW should work just fine then.

As a tip, world building being so long indeed, keep back up's of your saves/files in CAW, frequent saves and back up's. There is always a chance that a new patch makes CAW unusable again for a while. Moreover, there is also a chance that a new version of CAW is not compatible anymore with previous saves.

I appreciate any help I can gain from anyone regarding the following issue I am having.

The issue I am having is that I am trying to work out a way to create a river leading off into a waterfall which lands into the ocean.
This is a screenshot of what I am aiming at:

(http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c155/Rubyelf/problem.jpg)

The problem is that I cannot get water where the "River" is as CAW does not allow me to place any more water there, unless I am missing something. I tried to Edit in Game and create a lot over the "River" to be able to create the river, but it didn't like that and ended up looking too broken, or it would automatically lower the water level (stupid EA).

Any ideas or tips on how I can accomplish this would be lovely.

Check out this thread at MTS. (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=425205)  You may be able to use the existing river pieces in the same fashion, if you place one as described in post 26.

Yeah I found that Rosess, and tried to place them to see if it worked on my existing world, unfortunately it ruined it and made it look rather crazy. I've already done all the main sculpting/roads and buildings. It wasn't until just recently I decided I wanted a lake with a river leading into a waterfall to the sea.

Edit: I ended up giving up, as I can't add those layers after already doing so much. I used the "River" object and just moved it around to cover that spot and added in the rapid effects, looks rather nice.

Would it be too much to ask you to post some pictures to show what you're talking about? I was rather curious how this would turn out.

Sure:
(http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c155/Rubyelf/sims3.jpg)

That there is the end result of it after I've placed everything else down, it looks pretty nice in game. The only problem I found was, that while editing, I had to move it off map so I could target anything else as it was huge, and no amount of searching found a way to decrease its size.

(http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c155/Rubyelf/sims32.png)
As you can see from the above image the target box for it is HUGE. My city is almost complete, I'm currently working on placing in all the houses. It has 2 parts, a surbia part, and a city part, the one shown is the city part.

That's been my experience. Especially since my worlds are almost always on the tiny maps, the river bits are too large to be practical. They also just don't look right, somehow. Perhaps it's just how CAW renders the object.

Well I'm now officially pissed. I spent the last 3 weeks working on my neighbourhood, I finally completed it last night. Well I installed it, it took about 1 hour or so for it to actually LOAD into the neighbourhood when it was generating everything. The biggest issue though, is that the game is incredibly laggy, it takes about 5 minutes or more for it to load items in the catalog. Scrolling and general movement is incredibly laggy too. I read somewhere that it had to do with using lots in EIG, but I am not entirely convinced. Any ideas?

Welcome to the happy CAW-users fellowship!

There might be several reasons to such huge lags. My usual bet is routing, although in your case, the slowness seems to be more general.
A few ideas to check:

• Your computer specs. Is it 'beefy' enough to handle your world, depending on how large and how crowded (= how many objects/lots)  this one is?
• Any potentially borked piece of CC?
• Potentially conflicting mods?

Besides this, I come back to my little personal obsession, routing. Be sure you ask CAW to regenerate routing before you save and export your world. Well, sorry to point to the obvious, but I know that I can be a bit absent-minded sometimes and forget to do it :-)

What do you mean by 'using lots in EIG'?
Is it adding new lots in game, with the feature that came with Ambitions? If it is, then yes, I believe too that this can cause lagginess. I haven't made any extensive test, so it's just a mere belief so far. But I don't think the routing is properly updated in game, at least not in the same way that what the 'regenerate routing' command does in CAW. So, it's better to place all the lots in CAW, not in game.
If it relates to the use of the EIG feature in CAW, then it depends what you did. Just plopping buildings on lots or building there *shouldn't* cause any trouble. Again, when you come back in CAW, regenerate routing before saving & exporting. Did you try to pre-populate? I think you have to reset your sims before exiting EIG, to send them all home. Otherwise they can generate some mess. Pre-populating is not something I have tried myself, so it's just based on my readings.

What have you already done to try to resolve the problem?  You've probably already taken these steps, but maybe something will spark a solution.

The long loading time suggests it may be a CC issue, not a CAW issue.  Is there any CC in this world that hasn't been checked by running Process Monitor during startup?  I've yet to have an problem with loading times that wasn't a bad package spinning its wheels.  Also, if you had CC in the CAW framework, make sure those items are available to the game when it loads the completed world.

To check for a routing issue, I'd look for holes in the unroutable areas (huge cause of lag), view and check routing around the cliffs and trees, and mark the whole forest off-limits (for testing, if not permanently).  Make sure trees are clustered, and that the narrow region between road and unroutable cliff is well defined with no overlap.  If you route-painted the cliffs after adding the roads, it might be worth moving the road segments to make sure no routing paint snuck under there, and make sure the bridges are clear.  Be sure to rebuild routing right before exporting the world.

For what it's worth, I've added, deleted and moved lots in both CAW and EIG with no issues.  The city I'm working on now is huge and offers plenty of opportunity for problems to surface.  I export the world a few times along the way and play it, making and changing lots in a game save and then inserting them into the next CAW-EIG session.  Adding lots in the actual game might be an issue post-export, but pre-export, rebuilding routing in CAW should do the trick.

By the way, are you making a pre-populated world, or starting empty?  It could be relevant to the lag issues, but mainly I'm curious.

Thanks for the tips, I'll look into this when I get home from Uni this evening. My world isn't pre-populated, I was planning on using AM's "spawnmoreoverlords" cheat to gain that, bad idea I suppose? I needed to finish things in game first, I have removed a number of CC items that I no longer use, plus one that I noticed wasn't even showing up in game which could have been the problem. Re-routing I did yes, however I did not block the forest area, thank you for pointing that out. My PC is actually very high end, i7 etc, its a custom built gamers PC. Hopefully I can figure out the problem here, thanks again for all the tips.

I noticed I am having an issue with duplicate copies of some of the Riverview custom content, which I know would not help. The biggest issue though is that I am unable to delete them in game (the bin is greyed out and disabled for all my custom content), and I am unsure which ones are which in the launcher.

That's how I generally do it and I've never had a problem. Of course, I build gradually so when I spawn I'm usually getting no more than 50 sims.

From what I've heard, the game will simply not utilize over a certain amount of RAM, regardless of how high end your PC is. Your hood is quite large with an astronomical number of trees and deco. Make sure basics are covered like Rosess suggested, and further make sure all those trees are on the same layer before clustering. I know that sometimes, especially at the end stages of creation, I get a bit sloppy and don't change layers as I should, or completely forget fishing spawners like I did in my current 'hood (not a big deal as I just designated a fishery in one of my caste parks).

Has anyone been able to narrow down why some saves just spontaneously corrupt? The most recent two saves are both not loading; basically if I go back to the last working save I've lost about 15 hours of work. I get the corrupted memory error. Last time it happened it ate every save in the folder. I make new saves each day to try an avoid this but I would like to work out a way to protect my progress should I restart this hood.
Any suggestions?
 

Huzzah!  It was a CC issue, apparently something I had downloaded recently did not approve of the game, so I removed pretty much all CC I no longer used, and went through removing CC bit by bit until I found the cause (some mirror floor rugs from ModTheSims). I took Rosess advice and played around with my routing. As soon as I have finished play testing this hood, I am going to upload it. Yes it has a lot of trees, I am maybe thinking I went a little overboard with the trees around the suburbs, the forest doesn't count!

Anyway I have to head to Uni now, knowing me I'll be pondering this and wont be able to concentrate (always the way, damn addicting game). Hopefully I can play test it more tonight.

Update:

Okay so the game is running perfectly now :) no lag, no issues, took less then 5minutes to load the hood initially, and less than 2 after that. No routing problems it seems too, my test sim was able to run/drive around everywhere without any hassle.

Question:

Can anyone tell me how a suburb or city "world" is determined? Also how about the cars that randomly drive about, for some reason I don't have any, and on top of that my sims...walk everywhere (the random sims that is).

Nice to see you solved your problem.

Simsample sarted a thread on this topic at MTS: link here (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=424374). The whole thing is still in testing, so no easy way to easily flag your world a city yet, but full of promises.

Gah thanks, issue though is that all the pictures that actually show you where to look, have exceeded bandwidth usage. One other problem I've ran into is that I have no mixologists or bartenders turning up to my clubs etc.

I'm told that the answer to that one is to delete the bar and replace it (unless you created the bars yourself and are as blond as I am - in which case, make sure you used one of the two professional bars or you'll never get mixologists).

Yup, all my bars are custom made, and I have used the professional bars only, however whenever my sims go there it says "No bartender on duty".

In which case try the delete and replace method. It is the one widely recommended for this bug. Some people say to do it while your Sim is at the lot and then leave and return for the mixologist to appear, others say that you can just do it from edithood.

Ahhh!! It's still not working :( Only one of my places is spawning a bartender and bouncer, and that's the upstairs part of one of the nightclubs I built (it has 2 parts, downstairs entry which is set to regular etc so then anyone can get in, and an upstairs private lounge part).

Something that I found out, if your layers in CAW have special characters in the names it will result in an error when saving.

I have a problem with CAW's latest version. When I try to save a world in the edit in game mode, I get this error message:

(http://i51.tinypic.com/24qq2h2.jpg)

I get a similar message even if I try to save a world without lots.
Any idea what the problem could be?

Edit: problem solved!

Hi,

Will installing this overwrite my saved files? Or is it a patch?

Thanks.

Never mind. Figured it out on my ownsome.

Thanks for the link.

Now see if your "ownsome" can figure out how to edit posts instead of double posting.

I have a quick question. I know people have made a few items that can be placed using the in-game world editor, a few of which are the rabbitholes that came with Ambitions. Does anyone have any idea or know if anyone ever made the rest of the rabbitholes available in the world editor? They can be used without having to be on a lot and I am so, so lazy that I'd just like to place them strategically around town.

Yes, I remember seeing them on MTS. Have a hunt around their CAW section. I can't remember if it was a download or an override.

My CAW (latest version) likes to crash with an "attempted to read or write protected memory" error. This usually happens either when I use terrain sculpting for longer than ten seconds, or when I've just returned from EIG. Anyone experienced this?

Have you tried making it Large Address Aware? I had that problem often until I updated the exe. That is providing you have more than 2gb ram in your system to start with.

Thanks, will try that.

I have another question about building in CAW. I want to make a sort of beach ballustrade in my world, to go with the old-fashioned-looking city center. There is an example in Twinbrook next to the "Twinbrook Esplanade" community lot, a stone fence that goes along the river. I haven't found anything like that in CAW game objects though (there are stone post/fence objects but they look too modern and it's hard to line them up properly). Does anyone know of an object I could download that would fit? I'm looking for something similar to this: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumb_407/12442661132mnHBX.jpg

I found lining it up was much easier when I remembered to turn off snap-to-grid mode.

Meanwhile:
(http://i978.photobucket.com/albums/ae266/Skadi_Shroom/Sims%203%20World/shroomisland004.jpg)

I've finally found the courage / gotten bored enough with regular play to try to create my own world. I keep bumping head first into one particular problem, though: After a while the world file refuses to open in Game Edit. The green bar goes all the way to the right except a last millimeter, and then the load screen simply halts there forever. As far as I can tell, the issue is related to having placed houses on empty lots in Game Edit previously, but even if I make sure that there are no such 'clones', it stalls on me eventually. Surely there must be a work-around or fix for this, or at least some sort of indication of what I am doing wrong.

I am using no CC in building my lots, so I highly doubt that this is a case of tight pants. All patches are up to date, and all EPs are installed.

Check the MTS help section for DEP and LAA information, and make sure DEP settings are applied to both the current game executable and CAW.  Saving the CAW file under another name every so often also seems to help things run smoothly.

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit so LAA shouldn't mean anything for me (feel free to correct me if mistaken). DEP does not seem to be the issue but I turned it on just case anyhows. I also checked every bit of road and sidewalk and finally reverted to an older save that did load in EIG. Considering that my world currently consists of four lots and a lot of flat terrain with large amounts of nothing, I am baffled.  Anyhow, thanks for the tip -- it certainly can't -hurt-.

Even with 7x64 you still need to make CAW LAA. I had an issue with the game crashing until I patched CAW.exe. I second the advice to save under a new name every few saves, I number my saves and tend to make a new save number before using Edit In Game mode.

There is definitely something strange happening in your world, placing the same copy of a house shouldn't impact the world at all. I have placed 5 copies of several houses to start filling out the place without issue. However I am only using EPs, no CC or store stuff. Perhaps check you CC folders?

The only other thing I can think of is to use Process Monitor so you can see where it is getting stuck.

Double posting to add:

Over on MTS Kiritra discovered playing with the default.ini will make CAW work instead of giving you a version mismatch warning for no reason.
Thread: http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=450303

This just helped me since CAW refused to open despite my game being properly patched and having the latest version of CAW installed. Don't forget to backup your default.ini otherwise you might get a file error next patch.

Awesome, I've been complaining of this very thing. Have tried a few small 'hoods out there but two have horrible routing issues and one is so full of rocks and trees it Error12's on saving.

I'm having some major crashing issues with generations and EIG now. 

Every time I try to save, it will begin saving, and 30-40 minutes later I will get that lovely "Sims 3 has encountered a problem and must close" error report screen.   What confuses me most is my last world I made pre-generations was over twice the size of the one I'm working on, and very rarely crashed.  Now out of the 5 hours straight I've been redo-ing and attempting to save, it has only actually completed saving one time.

I've tried using task manager to give the exe more memory access, but that doesn't seem to work either.  It also doesn't seem to matter if I add 1 or 20 sims, it's always the same result.  I've followed every MTS post about clearing caches, removing cc, closing CAW in the background while I work.. still no luck. I'm guessing its a new generations memory leak, because it's a windows error screen and not a sims one, although I never alt-tab or defocus the EIG window while working on it.   

Anyone know of any way to fix this?  My world is so close to finished, I'm just on the final steps of using EIG to add the townies.  Would hate to give up now. :/

Did you follow the LAA instructions for the CAW executable?  I have a feeling you may have thought setting priority would do it; not so much.

Also, try leaving EIG open and in focus when saving, if you aren't already.  Alt-tabbing to a browser or such inevitably makes my saves fail.  

Hmm, yea I just set priority... I always keep the window focused, but I didn't do the LAA stuff. I'll try that and see ^^;

ETA:
Well...  I followed all the steps, including the one for 32bit OS (I'm on XP, but have 4 gigs of ram installed).
Using LAA seems to cause CAW to crash before even loading up my world. It gives me this error: "Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt."
Moments later I got a blue screen crash.  Now even though I've reinstalled CAW I'm getting that error, though the blue screen hasn't re-appeared.

My boot.ini looks like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /3GB

I was busy planning my New York/Los Angeles/New Jersey/San Diego/Brooklyn/Beverly Hills uber-city, and I got to a stage where I had to EIG to add some parks, apartments and subways.

I added a few apartments, saved successfully, exited, then when I tried opening the world in CAW, I kept getting "Unable to load file" errors. Then I tried opening the backups. Unable to load file. Then I tried opening my manual backups. Unable to load file. Unable to load file. Unable to load file. Unable to load file. Lost a SHITLOAD of urban planning. I've got the latest version of the game, and I have the Generations version of CAW (It's the only version that doesn't constantly tell me that my game needs to be updated, when it is, whenever I try starting it)

I have a feeling that as soon as I solve this problem somehow it'll come back again because of the sodding shovelware expansions and shitty updates every 5 minutes.

In response to this comment:


In order to get the roads and sidewalks to work well during play of game with lots and letting your Sims get from place to place, first turn on the "Grid" by clicking on the grid icon at the top of CAW. Make sure you place road or sidewalk intersections along the way (more is better, you can always delete them and connect the roads sections later if the intersection is not needed. Doing the opposite way can take more time later). You will need an intersection at every corner, but not on curves where there is no street coming off of it, the road will curve around.

It is important to place the intersections and roads along the grid lines. This way when you place lots you can put them right against the edge so that Sim players can build sidewalks right up to the edge of the road. Failure to do this makes the neighborhood look unrealistic during game play. (If you have to place a lots away from the grid then make sure you put a sidewalk up to the lot so the player can connect to it when they build)

In routing it is very important to make sure all sections of road and sidewalk are connected. Roads will create a double white line crosswalk when connected to an intersection so these are easy to tell. To check sections of road or sidewalk, click the move tool in CAW (it's the crisscross arrow icon at the top left) Click on a section of road you will see light blue lines and a dark square at the end of each section of road or sidewalk. (Intersections have a square in the middle). The light blue line allow you to maneuver the road to curve into another section or intersection. When the DARK blue squares are light blue then they are connected. FAILURE TO DO THIS WILL NOT ALLOW CARS OR SIMS TO ROUTE THROUGH YOUR WORLD!

Hope this spread some light on the subject. Have fun!

Post #222 here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=3672727#post3672727

The method we had to use was the second method, this post:
http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3572593&postcount=3

This worked! I can successfully open the world in CAW.

But when I try to save it, I get an error saying CAW has crashed because it "attempted to read or write protected memory". :\

Create-A-Crap does that a lot, yes. Apparently nobody has thought of the brilliant anti-crash measure of simply pretending the write went through and just ignoring the bad attempts, as Create-A-Crap is horribly buggy.

That's the thing, too. It does create a file before it crashes. But the file says that CAW can't open a packed file! It's the same file I just opened, so it's not protected or packed. So there's no reason for it to return a "packed file" error.

If anyone can get it to work I would really appreciate a functioning, loadable, saveable Appaloosa Plains.

Sorry for the necromancy, but I think this is the most logical place to post this, I'd rather not start a new thread for the same subject. I have searched and read through this thread, and I don't think I saw an answer to this question (but correct me if I'm wrong), so here it goes:

I've made this island, and it looks nice, like this...
(http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/1307/beforeacj.jpg)

But when I zoom out for a bird's eye view, it looks like this...
(http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/9527/afterup.jpg)

What is the cause of this problem, and how can I fix it? I did try and flatten out the sea board surrounding the island, but otherwise to that I'm stumped, and also, it gets worse and more deformed as I soften the edges of the land.

Nothing. It's purely an artifact of Create-A-Crap's rendering cutoff points. This behavior is probably not visible in the actual game since you can never pull that far out.

Okay, well I tested what you said, and uploaded the world to my game. So I went into edit town mode and this is what it looks like...
(http://img857.imageshack.us/img857/842/ingameo.jpg)

Now, this world is very unfinished so there's no camera barriers or anything like that on yet, everything is just open, would that have anything to do with it?

What happens when you zoom in?

(http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2010/3/15/129131635343529609.jpg)

Well I went into the world editor mode and zoomed in one notch, and it snapped back to normal (like below), and if I go down to Sim view it stays good, but as soon as you zoom out it deforms......
(closer)
(http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/930/93565140.jpg)
(Sim view)
(http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/1166/65901687.jpg)

You might have better luck exporting the terrain to a graphics editor and making changes there.  If you copy a slice of the circle that works, you can rotate/paste until the whole circle is uniform and then import the terrain (making a new save first).  Gradients made in Photoshop don't transfer as smooth terrain, but copying a part that you have already smoothed should work better.

I would love to utilize your suggestion, but unfortunately I'm a noob in that department. I don't really understand how to import terrains to a graphic editor, and that whole process you explained. If you can maybe explain it in a bit more detail, I might be able to understand and try that. But anyway, I have uploaded the world for anyone to test out and see if they can get it to work.

http://www.mediafire.com/?7p8464c2cj9z9p9 (http://www.mediafire.com/?7p8464c2cj9z9p9)

You might want to consider taking this over to MTS, there's plenty of tutorials and threads there to help you. They also love to hold hands and walk people through each and every step. Not that you've met the MATY welcoming committee yet, but it's bound to happen sooner or later.

In CAW, look under the Terrain menu tab and choose Export Height Map.  You can edit the height map in the graphics editor and then import it back into the game, preferably into a fresh save in case the new map knocks around items you have already placed.  Bridges may need to be clicked to reconnect them to roads after a new map is imported.

If you're not experienced with a graphics editor, it's worth learning.  Lifehacker has a great Night School series on Photoshop.  For the time being, if you want to post your exported height map, I'll give it a whirl and see if my suggestion actually works.

Hand-holding may not be encouraged here, but it's nice to see signs of life in this thread.  It's disappointing that MATY hasn't shown much interest in CAW as we have a shortage of creatively nefarious worlds.  Not that it matters much for the time being, because Skyrim.

Ah, it finally clicked for me when you explain it that way. I know my way a bit around graphic editors but I just couldn't connect that to CAW, couldn't figure out how to get my world into GIMP or Paint. But I got what you were saying now, and I will try and test that out, but since your more of an expert then me here's the world (updated version) and the height map, you can have a go at it. Thanks.
World: http://www.mediafire.com/?5jjv17uum988cp3 (http://www.mediafire.com/?5jjv17uum988cp3)
Map: http://www.mediafire.com/i/?5pxhx42gs2ep5v8 (http://www.mediafire.com/i/?5pxhx42gs2ep5v8)
Also, I agree on your other point, this thread has been very useful to me in my CAW experience, as there is such a collective of brains here.

Duly noted. And I think I have met the "committee" before... but that's alright, I don't mind the low tolerance attitude, it's MATY's pond, I can't tell them how to swim in it.

Update 12-28-11: Still trying to get this fixed, I know a lot of people might be busy for the holiday's, but anyone check it out yet? I'll probably check it out more thoroughly after the New Years festivities. Happy New Year to all.

Update 1-2-12: Okay! Well I have been testing out all sorts of things and finally got it to work. Here's the process of what I did; I opened up CAW and flattened all of the land that surrounded the area I was working on, except a few mountains, saved, re-loaded, (still the same). Exported the height map, saved, opened it in a graphics editor, did nothing there, saved it there, imported the height map back onto the current world, it messed up the whole land mass, did not save. opened the height map in a new empty map, the whole land mass was mushed together, so saved it under a new name, went back to the old problem world, (still the same). Next, I flattened (again) the entire ground that is under the water shaving off the edges of the land (that was deforming) in the process, until everything on land (except the mountains) and under water, was an even level, saved, reload, re-created the islands and zoomed out, and presto! it no longer deforms.

Some where in the blur of saving and reloading it was fixed, but that was yesterday.... now when I opened CAW it's back to the same thing, I thought that the flattening of the seaboard is what fixed it, but apparently not.

Drawing over the landmass on a graphics editor is a bit much for me, maybe if Rosess is still up for it, he\she can try that.
So still in progress...

BUMP  (sorry in advance for the double post)

Alright, just want to kind of close this off.
So I've found a work around solution to my problem, if any one has the same problem that I had, and can't fix it, here's something that you can do.
So with my current problem world with the deformed land mass, all I did was to open CAW, open the world, save it, then export my height map and close the world. Next open a graphics editor (in this case I'm using http://rawtherapee.com/ (http://rawtherapee.com/)) open my height maps folder (Documents\Electronic Arts\CAW\UserToolData\Height Maps) and open the height map I just exported (make sure the height map is greyscale) and save it as PNG 16 bits. Lastly, open a new world in CAW, browse and find the new height map and open it. The new world should open perfectly with no deformed edges. And if the problem happens to reoccur throughout the process of creating your world, this fix can be repeated endlessly. The only warning is that all objects will be destroyed in the creation of a new map, if you didn't happen to know that. So Pescado was right in the first place, as usual, not that I ever thought he was wrong... Thanks to JMP, and roses for the help.   ...and kissing_toast for sliding me to MTS which did give a lot of help.