More Awesome Than You!

As anyone who has tried to edit their apartments in TS3: LN knows, the pesky "homeowners association" won't let you make any changes outside of your apartment. You can't edit hidden rooms, you can't even see inside them!

You can toggle this annoyance by using the "restrictbuildbuyinbuildings off/on" cheat. Now you can see the hidden room and skip level markers, remove them, edit the apartment to take over the whole floor, destroy things, and generally run amok.  

You may need to use "testingcheatsenabled true" before using the restrictbuildbuyinbuildings cheat. I almost always have that cheat enabled.

This is basically the "Building your own apartments" thread but with less information.

And you wonder why you're in the TARDERDOME? HUR DUR.

Hmm, funny, I couldn't find any mention of the actual cheat to use anywhere in the building your own apartments thread. Only claims of once a hidden room marker is placed there is no way to remove it, and this is useful on all lots with a hidden room or skip level marker, not just apartments.

The apartment topic mentions "RBBB Off", which is the same cheat, but I suppose that isn't exactly obvious.

But the first response in the topic? It *was* a post by me, explaining that RBBB Off doesn't work for everyone, and to use RestrictBuildBuyInBuildings False, which is in fact the same exact cheat.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,19289.msg556594.html#msg556594

So there actually is mention of the cheat, just a different version of it (though you cant be blamed for not knowing it's the same one), and there was mention of the cheat you posted here, but someone found it unhelpful and removed it. Isn't that fun?

I'm not faulting you or trying to be a smartass or anything, don't get me wrong. I just think it's funny.

Well my game doesn't even agknowledge the cheat rbbb off.
And restrictbuildbuyinbuildings off doesn't get rid of the homeowners association bug.

I believe the actual cheat is "restrictbuildbuyinbuildings true/false" not "on/off."

My game accepts both. Nevertheless, the off version allows me to delete floor tiles in highrises, so it certainly does something.

I'm not faulting you or calling you a dumbass or anything, but a lot of people don't trust you as a source of information. See also: ZephyrZodiac. I don't think this is funny. Wait, yes I do.

This topic will be more searchable now by people who don't know the cheat code, and do know jessllama as a credible source, which is useful. And more people have come in with additional information. WHY, it's a discussion topic now.

The ex-computer-nerd in me wonders if on/off and true/false are interchangeable. In theory they should be, since on/true and off/false are synonyms and both of them denote binary status, but on/off may be easier for non-computer nerds to remember and understand (for once I'm not trying to insult the computer illiterate). 

I also wonder if turning on testingcheatsenabled first is necessary or not. I should do more testing. :D

testingcheats is necessary for the long version, not sure about RBBB since that one does not work for me.

Further testing on my game has revealed the following:

testingcheatsenabled does need to be set to true/on before using restrictbuildbuyinbuildings.

True/on and false/off are equivalent. This means that either version will be accepted by your game. Use whatever is easiest to remember for you.

rbbb is only an abbreviation of restrictbuildbuyinbuildings, used by that person on the BBS, probably only as shorthand. AFAIK there is no such actual cheat, and should be considered the same as saying "boolprop" when referring to "boolprop testingcheatdenabled true" or whatever the heck it was in TS2. Sorry, you've got to actually type and spell it correctly. Please feel free to prove me wrong by looking through the code. I lack that skill, and don't give a shit about learning it either.

rbbb [on|off] shows up in the readme.txt file but the thing is, it doesn't work in my game. I don't know about others' games, though.

FYI, rbbb on/off works great on my Vista system.

It also works for me on XP.

Is editing "hidden" rooms only available when apartments are not occupied?  I am able to edit, using "testingcheatsenabled true" with "restrictbuildbuyinbuildings off", but when I try to get back to "live" mode, I get the unending circle of pending... without ever getting to the live mode.

As an aside to shouty ones, THIS is the information for which I am seeking, not information about building my own apartment.  I want information on editing an existing apartment; different concepts with similar information, but different none-the-less.

Deleting NPC doors causes that issue. Just move them off to the side instead.

Versus, thanks a lot for the insight!  Moving the doors instead of deleting them worked.  Who'd a'thunk?

I ran into an odd situation where I could not even reach the hidden floors of an existing apartment to edit them. It was the white Maloney building, which has a small apartment in the basement and the three top floors have Skip Floor markers only.

Yes, I had activated the appropriate cheat commands, but not matter what I did, I could never see inside the shell to reach the upper floors. It just skipped from the lobby to the roof, the behavior one would expect while in Live mode, not Build mode. By chance, I pulled out another shell from the BuyDebug group but cancelled before placing it. After that, I could see the three upper floors of the Maloney building just fine. Very odd.
 
I tried to duplicate the bug in a fresh game of Bridgeport and from a previous save point, but it never happened again.
 
Only thing I can think of is that before that bug appeared, I was hopping from building to building with "Build On This Lot" to see how they were put together. After 10 buildings or so, perhaps some memory leak or something led to the problem. Or am I missing something obvious?