More Awesome Than You!

I have decided to publish this tutorial, because it is not right for someone to have knowledge and not share it.

This method is significantly improved from the one I used to create the merged neighborhood that some of you downloaded. This method is much easier, and probably less likely to have glitches.

This tutorial describes using Downtown as the method of merging the neighborhoods. If you don't have NL, but do have OFB, simply follow the same instructions, but using the Blue Water template instead of the Downtown template. So when you read "attach a Downtown," you will attach Blue Water instead. If you need help making sense of the directions, I would be happy to assist you.

This tutorial assumes that you will use Pleasantview as the "base" neighborhood. You do not have to. You can use any of the three neighborhoods as the base one, and attach the other two as Downtowns.

This tutorial does not help with fixing the DNA and other problems that some Maxis sims have. There are tons of tutorials you can follow for that.

I strongly suggest reading this tutorial at least once before you even begin.

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MERGING THE MAXIS NEIGHBORHOODS

Requirements:

• Ability to create adequate backups.
• Ability to read and follow instructions.
• TS2 plus either NL or OFB. You must have at least one of these EPs, but it does not matter which one.
• SimPE
• A program that can quickly rename files. I recommend the free Bulk Rename Utility from http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk

Recommended but completely optional: I suggest you use my Cleaned Up Templates (or at least the one for Downtown), found here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4306.0

Expected Time To Complete:

About 1 hour if you are good with SimPE, 2-3 hours if you are not so good but can follow instructions well.

SimPE Difficulty Level:

Easy. All that's required of you is to right-click Delete, right-click Extract, and right-click Import. If you know how to do that, you are all set. If you can follow instructions, you'll probably figure it out.

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======== PART 1 ========

In Part 1, we will create and prepare some necessary files.

Step 1: Allow the game to generate a new game set with the three Maxis neighborhoods. Enter Pleasantview and attach THREE Downtowns. It does not matter what terrains you choose or what you name the Downtowns, but the first one should use the default pre-built template. Exit the game.

Step 2: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods and find the N002 and N003 folders. Move them to the Desktop or other safe place. I suggest a folder called "Strangetown and Veronaville"

Step 3: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001 and find the files called N001_Downtown001, N001_Downtown002, and N001_Downtown003. Move all three files to the Desktop or other safe place. I suggest a folder called "The 3 Downtowns"

Step 4: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 and delete the folder called Neighborhoods.

Step 5: Allow the game to re-generate the three Maxis neighborhoods. As soon as you reach the neighborhood selection screen, delete Strangetown and Veronaville.

Step 6: Enter Pleasantview. Attach a Downtown, choosing the pre-built template. Exit the game.

Step 7: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001 and grab the file called N001_Downtown001, and its picture. Put them in a very, very safe place, and do not leave them anywhere in the My Documents\EA Games directory. I suggest a folder called "Finished Work"

======== PART 2 ========

In Part 2, we will make a very important backup. Yes, it's only one step, but it is the most important step in this whole tutorial, so do it right unless you want to spend several hours reinstalling your game from scratch (or at least trying to find the right file on the game CDs).

Step 1: Open C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Nightlife\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate and create a full backup of the folder called D001. Put this in a safe place.

======== PART 3 ========

In Part 3, we will extract some files using SimPE.

Step 1: Open C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Nightlife\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate and open the D001 folder. Locate the file called D001_Neighborhood. Open it in SimPE.

Step 2: On the left-hand side, locate ID Number and select it. On the right-hand side select the entry and right-click on it. From the menu, choose Extract. Save to a folder called Original_Downtown so you will know where it is.

This is an example of what your SimPE screen will look like. This is not exactly what you will see, because this picture is from a different neighborhood.
(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/tutorialhood/extract.jpg)

Step 3: In Part 1/Step 3, you moved three files onto the Desktop or another safe place. Those files were N001_Downtown001, N001_Downtown002, and N001_Downtown003. Find them now. Choose the file called N001_Downtown001. Open it in SimPE.

Step 4: On the left-hand side, locate ID Number and select it. On the right-hand side select the entry and right-click on it. From the menu, choose Extract. Save to a folder called Downtown_ID so you will know where it is.

Step 5: The same as Step 3, only choose the file called N001_Downtown002. Open it in SimPE.

Step 6: On the left-hand side, locate ID Number and select it. On the right-hand side select the entry and right-click on it. From the menu, choose Extract. Save to a folder called Strangetown_ID so you will know where it is.

Step 7: The same as Step 3, except choose the file called N001_Downtown003. Open it in SimPE.

Step 8: On the left-hand side, locate ID Number and select it. On the right-hand side select the entry and right-click on it. From the menu, choose Extract. Save to a folder called Veronaville_ID so you will know where it is.

Step 9: You may now delete the three original files that were created in Part 1/Step 3.

======== PART 4 ========

In Part 4, we will fool the game into thinking that Strangetown is a Downtown template.

Step 1: Open C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Nightlife\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate and open the D001 folder. Delete everything inside it.

Step 2: In Part 1/Step 2, you moved two folders onto the Desktop or another safe place. Those folders were N002 (Strangetown) and N003 (Veronaville). Find them now. Open the N002 folder. Take everything inside and move it to the D001 folder.

Step 3: Inside the D001 folder, locate the file called N002_Neighborhood. Open it in SimPE.

Step 4: On the left-hand side, locate ID Number and select it. On the right-hand side select the entry and right-click on it. From the menu, choose Delete. Save.

Step 5: Right-click anywhere on the right-hand side of the SimPE screen. From the menu, choose Import. Find the folder called Original_Downtown that you created in Part 3/Step 2. Select the file that is inside that folder, and import it. Save and exit SimPE.

Step 6: Use a renaming program to rename all files from N002_ to D001_. By "all files" I mean everything, including the ones in the Characters folder, Lots folder, Thumbnails folder....

Step 7: Start the game. Enter Pleasantview. Click the button to attach a Downtown. At this point, you should have the option to once again attach the template neighborhood. Attach it. When the neighborhood loads, click the button again to enter the new Downtown... which should be Strangetown. Once you've made sure that Strangetown was attached successfully, exit the game.

Step 8: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001 and find the file called N001_Downtown001, and its picture. Rename both the file and the picture to N001_Downtown002. Put them in the same safe place as you put the first one, created in Part 1/Step 7.

======== PART 5 ========

In Part 5, we will fool the game into thinking that Veronaville is a Downtown template.

Step 1: The same as Part 4/Step 1.

Step 2: In Part 1/Step 2, you moved two folders onto the Desktop or another safe place. Those folders were N002 (Strangetown) and N003 (Veronaville). Find them now. Open the N003 folder. Take everything inside and move it to the D001 folder.

Step 3: Inside the D001 folder, locate the file called N003_Neighborhood. Open it in SimPE.

Step 4: The same as Part 4/Step 4.

Step 5: The same as Part 4/Step 5.

Step 6: Use a renaming program to rename all files from N003_ to D001_. By "all files" I mean everything, including the ones in the Characters folder, Lots folder, Thumbnails folder....

Step 7: The same as Part 4/Step 7, except the new Downtown will be Veronaville. Do not follow the last step of Part 4. Just exit the game after Veronaville is successfully attached.

======== PART 6 ========

In Part 6, we will replace the default Downtown neighborhood with our backup.

Step 1: Open C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Nightlife\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate and open the D001 folder. Delete everything inside it.

Step 2: Find your backup of the original Downtown template. You created it in Part 2.

Step 3: Put the backup back where it belongs, in the D001 folder. This will restore the default Downtown template.

======== PART 7 ========

In Part 7, we will move and rename some files.

Step 1: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001 and find the file called N001_Downtown001. Rename the file to N001_Downtown003.

Step 2: Open the safe place where you stored the other Downtown files, created in Part 1/Step 7 and Part 4/Step 8. You should have N001_Downtown001 plus its picture (also named N001_Downtown001) and N001_Downtown002 plus its picture. Take these four files and move them to My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001

Step 3: You should now have the following files inside N001: Characters (folder), Lots (folder), Storytelling (folder), Thumbnails (folder), N001_Neighborhood (file), N001_Neighborhood (picture), N001_Neighborhood.reia (file), N001_Downtown001 (file), N001_Downtown002 (file), N001_Downtown003 (file), N001_Downtown001 (picture), N001_Downtown002 (picture), and N001_Downtown003 (picture).

======== PART 8 ========

In Part 8, we will import some files using SimPE.

Step 1: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001 and find the file called N001_Downtown001. Open it in SimPE.

Step 2: On the left-hand side, locate ID Number and select it. On the right-hand side select the entry and right-click on it. From the menu, choose Delete.

Step 3: Right-click anywhere on the right-hand side of the SimPE screen. From the menu, choose Import. Find the folder called Downtown_ID that you created in Part 3/Step 4. Select the file that is inside that folder, and import it. Save and exit SimPE.

Step 4: Follow Step 1 and Step 2, only for N001_Downtown002.

Step 5: Right-click anywhere on the right-hand side of the SimPE screen. From the menu, choose Import. Find the folder called Strangetown_ID that you created in Part 3/Step 6. Select the file that is inside that folder, and import it. Save and exit SimPE.

Step 6: Follow Step 1 and Step 2, only for N001_Downtown003.

Step 7: Right-click anywhere on the right-hand side of the SimPE screen. From the menu, choose Import. Find the folder called Veronaville_ID that you created in Part 3/Step 8. Select the file that is inside that folder, and import it. Save and exit SimPE.

======== PART 9 ========

In Part 9, we will make a backup of our work, then enter the game and see if everything works.

Step 1: Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\ and make a complete backup of the Neighborhoods folder. This will allow you to restart your merged neighborhood any time you want to!

Step 2: Run the game. Enter Pleasantview. Click the Downtown button.

Step 3: You should be looking at a selection screen with 3 Downtowns to choose from. One should be called Downtown, one should be called Veronaville, and one should be called Strangetown. The pictures should be correct for each.

Step 4: Load each Downtown and make sure everything looks okay. Load at least one lot in each Downtown, to make sure the lots are okay.

======== PART 10 ========

In Part 10 you find out that you should not whine to me if this tutorial is too hard, or if you fail to make a backup and your game blows up as a result. However, I am certainly around to help if something needs clarification or if you need help with some part of this tutorial.

I've been wanting to attempt this tutorial since you first posted it, and just today had the time to try.  Everything turned out perfectly and it didn't take much time at all.  About 1 1/2 hours and that's with a newborn, two year old and five year old running me ragged at the same time. ;)  Thanks for the great info.

It's an amazing tutorial, thank you.
I've tried to merge the neighborhoods with SimPE and I failed :-\. With your tutorial I get my custom build neighborhood merged with the Maxis ones and it works perfect.
May I post a german translation of your tutorial in the SimForum (http://http:/www.simforum.de) and on our website (http://www.sims2beauty.de.vu)?

Regards,
Oliver

Sure, go ahead. :)

OMG,thanks so much for this.  I tried it with new unplayed hoods, and it worked great.  But I've been playing a lot in Pleasantview, and wanted to move Strangetown and Veronaville in to that copy of Pleasantview.  It took a few tries to determine what changes to make to the steps, but in the end it worked!  Thank you, thank you, thank you...

I bow to you. I've been wanting to do this since TS2 came out! Works like a charm!

I tried doing this and currently I was on Part 4 step 7 - but when I went into that area they dont have houses. I'm not sure what I did wrong or how to even fix it. I know I did something wrong I just dont know what.  :(

Did you rename ALL files, including those in the Lots folder? That would be the most obvious cause of missing houses, if what you are saying is that you have Strangetown but it has no houses in it.

Pardon my extreme unawesomeness, but wouldn't this create the "Strangetown Bella in Pleasantview" BFBVFS problem? I am just curious, feel free to point at me and laugh, or poke me with a stick. (I prefer pointy sticks).

Stragetown's Bella is just a townie. There is nothing special about her. She has no connection to the Goths in Pleasantview.

So, yes, you'll have two "Bella" sims, but it won't hurt your game.

It might be a change in the newer versions of SimPE, or maybe I made a mistake when typing it up. The option in SimPE 0.58 is EXTRACT, not Export.

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/tutorialhood/extract.jpg)

Thanks for catching that. I'll update it.

I've been playing the game with this setup for a couple of weeks now and loving it.

I've seen a few different things, such as the names of some of the townies, like in Strangetown, Lazlo Curious' girlfriend looks the same, but her name is not Crystal Vu. And Vidcund Curious does not automatically get abducted on the next telescope use. But these things in no way have negatively affected the game.

Combining the neighborhoods in my game is neat, because now Mortimer Goth and Consort Capp are becoming good friends, Ajay Loner and Bianca Monty just had a baby, and I'm getting ready to combine a few more family trees, once I get Dirk Dreamer and Ophelia Nigmos together.

Sometimes it takes a little longer for a community lot to load, but all-in-all it was worth it, and I'd highly recommend this tutorial for anyone who can't decide which neighborhood to play.

Another thing I noticed last night. I sent my Sim to Gothier Green Lawns to fulfill a "See a Ghost want". But oddly enough, there were no tombstones on the lot...

Is the Tricou family still in the Downtown neighborhood, either dead or alive?

I'll check about the Tricou family. The other odd thing I noticed is all the tombstones on the Specter lot are gone now too :(

Weird. Mine were all still in place.

What I suggest you do is download the "Elixir of Resurrection" hack by Christianlov at MTS2, and see if the dead sims are resurrectable using that. If YES, then you might have suffered the vanishing tomstone glitch. If NO, then it could be something in the merging process, in which case I'll try to do some experiments and see where it might be going wrong.

I know it wasn't the merging process, because I've played both the Specter house and the Gothier Green Lawns, tombstones and everything. So it's gotta some tombstone-be-gone glitch...

Well, all I can say is, get Pescado's "nounlinkondelete" hack, because the tombstone glitch is a very nasty glitch that a lot of people seem to be suffering from. At least with the hack you will not lose the character files of dead sims, and you can respawn the tombstones if they vanish.

You know, I really wish this had been around earlier in the year when I did mine. I spent an immense amount of effort visiting lots, using an item-stay object, shifting sims into another lot so that when exported they kept relationships, moving them back again when in a new neighbourhood etc. After importing the saved lots into the right places and decorating the new enighbourhoods of course!
And that's without the heavy editing in SimPE to dump relationships and memories, and to fix cash and ages.
I ended up with a neighbourhood that's got each of the Maxis ones as a sub-neighbourhood, and also all 3 Universities. Works fine - no problems so far, although as part of this, I had to strip out all dead family members, so the trees are a bit shorter.

Sigh. And using this method I could have done most of it in a short afternoon?

Kudos to you.

I'm assuming that the extra sub-neighourhoods don't generate their own share of Townies, since you're tricking the game into thinking that the neighbourhoods were already there. The first draft of my method showed this up, when having three Universities gave me 3 times the number of dormies.

It'd be nice to know what your census figures were at the end of this. Good work.

Thanks for this, worked without any problems as far as I can see. :)

I purged all my neighborhood templates of excess townies and NPCs, so I don't really know how many sims you would get if you worked with completely unedited copies.

Strangetown and Veronaville both have full sets of townies and NPCS. So, if you add those two neighborhoods as Downtowns, those sims will come along.

However, adding Strangetown and Veronaville to Pleasantview did not result in any NEW downtownies being spawned. I assume that by merging the neighborhoods you end up with: 170+179+181+78=608 which is the number of Characters in each of the 4 neighborhoods involved.

Well I finally got around to trying this..and stumbled a little at first.  Around 3 hours(ish) later it's all finished and working as far as I can tell.  That's the first time I've used SimPe, last time it would crash as soon as I opened it, so this is quite a milestone :)  Thanks for taking the time to write this walkthrough, it's much appreciated.

Thank you very much for this tutorial :)
This may be a completely newbish question (though I've played with simpe a bit with meshing and neighborhood alterations), but is it possible to use all custom neighborhoods rather than any of the Maxis ones?  And if so, are there any unique steps to this method? I was assuming that rather than opening the Maxis hoods, I could just open custom hoods in replacement, but then I failed to trust myself in doing so without asking, lol.
Obviously I'd do all of this only after backing up my current hoods...in case you wondered if I even knew that much. ;)
thank you for any advice!

Yes, you can use custom neighborhoods, as long as they don't have attached sub-neighborhoods (I haven't tested what would happen if they did, so I can't say one way or the other what might happen). If one has attached sub-neighborhoods and one does not, you could use the one that does as the "base" neighborhood.

I don't think there would be any extra or different steps. You would just modify the steps slightly, and depending on how many neighborhoods you want to attach, you would need more or fewer steps overall. As far as I can see right now, the biggest difference would be in Part 3, just because your neighborhoods are different.

Without knowing exactly what your custom neighborhoods are like, I can't suggest specific steps to take. Here's one example I can think of:

Custom Nhood #1: Has a University and a Downtown attached
Custom Nhood #2: Does not have anything attached

First, make a complete backup of all the neighborhoods.

If they are both in the same game set (let's say #1 is N001 and #2 is N002) you would need to remove N002 before you begin. Load the game and delete N002, leaving just N001 in the neighborhood selection screen (other custom neighborhoods, if any, do not have to be removed). Now load N001 and attach a second Downtown to it. Your N001 folder will now have the files N001_Downtown001 and N001_Downtown002. Remove both of these files and put them somewhere safe (like the Desktop). You will not be making any changes to Downtown001. Downtown002 is the one you will rip a file out of and then delete (the file you rip out is like the one that would go into a folder called Strangetown_ID according to the tutorial).

Do Part 2 and Part 3 like the tutorial says, but when you do Part 3 you should stop at Step 3. After Step 3 you will need to modify the steps simply because you don't have those neighborhoods. You will need the file extracted from the Downtown template, and you will need the file extracted from your N001_Downtown002 file, so follow the tutorial where it explains how to do that.

Now do the process of fooling the game into thinking that N002 is a Downtown template. Just like the tutorial says in Part 4, except obviously use the files that were created in the modified Part 3.

Once you have attached the custom neighborhood as a Downtown, the rest should be exactly like the tutorial says. I can't think of any other changes you would need to make, other than not doing things that don't pertain to your neighborhoods.


If your neighborhoods all have sub-neighborhoods attached, you could attempt to use them, but I have no idea what the result will be. Remove any files that pertain to the sub-neighborhoods before you begin. That means any files like N002_University001, N002_Downtown001, and so on. Just delete them from the folder. I can't guarantee that this will work, but maybe the game won't choke on the extra files when you try to use that neighborhood as a template. I don't know if there is anything inside the main neighborhood file that would still point to the existance of those sub-neighborhoods... if there is, the game could become screwed up as a result. Also, very likely, the characters that were attached to those sub-neighborhoods (like for Uni it could be professors, dormies, and mascots) may become screwed up in unknown ways. Again, I have never attempted anything like this, so do this at your own risk.

Great, thank you for the info, Sara.  My second neighborhood is actually empty and I wanted to merge it with my populated neighborhood simply because the custom neighborhood I used is way to big (in terms of actual size, not population.)   So, in doing this, I was hoping to eventually be able to move all of my existing sims (or future sims) into a smaller hood that won't drain my cpu like my existing one does.
My populated hood that I'm going to try this with has a downtown, university and shopping district.  If any of that may screw things up, let me know.
I'm going to attempt this within the next couple of days though, and I'll post my results.
Your help is much appreciated!

do you think you could upload the ones you made?

i want to some how make strange town to be anotehr downtown in plleasantview.

If you take a look in Peasantry you'll come across this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4274.0.html) where SaraMK has uploaded the merged neighbourhoods.

I just thought I'd take a moment to emphasize SaraMK's warning in the thread Kyna linked to.  I had deleted the Maxis Downtown shortly after I merged the neighborhoods, then last weekend decided I wanted it back so I could play the Tricou family.  All of a sudden Windows was crashing whenever I tried to exit any downtown lots (both residential and community).  After scouring MATY for similar problems and trying many standard fixes (removing hacks, deleting groups.cache, uninstalling/reinstalling, resetting to a vanilla game, etc.), I finally realized that the game was fine but the neighborhood was simply FUBAR. 

So I deleted it today and came back to this thread, because I love playing the merged neighborhood and wanted another.  That's when I saw the link to the other thread, figured I'd save myself some time and download the merged neighborhood, and saw the warning about attaching additional downtowns.   :'( 

Fortunately I don't mind starting over, and the Tricous are included in the merged neighborhood (thanks, Sara!), but I'm kicking myself for not knowing this before.  I'm just hoping others can learn from my mistake.  :)

It worked great.  I even merged the Tutorial neighborhood, Riverside, and a custom neighborhood I made of a Sims 1 version for Sims 2 neighborhood.  So I have Tutorial Joe and Jane, Claire Charming, Kat, and all the rest in one neighborhood.  Pretty cool!

One thing.  I found that Part 8 wasn't necessary to do. I Skipped that part and it still works fine. 

I don't know if I would recommend this for anyone with a weak computer though.

Unfortunately, that step is necessary if you want the neighborhood to be as safe and glitch-free as possible.

In my testing, not replacing ID Number files from a clean source sometimes caused a glitch where one neighborhood would be transplanted on top of another. You might not notice a problem until adding a new sub-neighborhood... and then... BOOM! You might get lucky and never experience the glitch, but if you do, you would have to delete everything because there is no way to fix it (that I found, anyway).

I've never tried it, but I assume you would use the same method as the tutorial describes.

Create a new neighborhood alongside of Pleasantview, Veronaville, and Strangetown. This will be N004. Rip out its ID Number and put in a safe place. Go to where the Blueweater template is located, make a backup, and then import the ID Number file. Then take the edited Bluewater and rename all files to N001. Then go to where the Pleasantview template  (N001) is located and make a backup. Replace Pleasantview with the edited Bluewater.

Let the game generate a new set of neighborhoods. Instead of Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville you should have Bluewater, Strangetown, and Veronaville. If you don't, then something is wrong with my thinking here, so stop right there because it isn't going to work.

If you do have Bluewater, then simply delete Strangetown and Veronaville from the neighborhood menu, and then follow the tutorial to attach the three neigborhoods as Bluewater's downtowns. It helps if you do Part 1 before anything else, since you will need to have those files ready.

I haven't tried the tutorial, but I did download the merged neighborhood. Everything seemed fine at first, but when I went to Veronaville and Strangetown in Pleasantview's downtown, I had no families there. Did I do something wrong?

Do you have all the expansion packs that are required by the merged neighborhood?

You are EXCELLENT. I attached the three base neighborhoods to a custom neighborhood, purged the unused townies, made a few minor tweaks that make my gameplaying experience better... and now I have Teh Bests Neighborhood Evar!!!1~!  ;D ;D ;D Thanks a million.

This may be the wrong place to ask, but it takes a bit of courage to ask anything here. So, from the depths of un-awesomeness:
Is it possible to take an existing custom uni and use it with a different base 'hood? I am quite happy for it to be unpopulated, but would like to be able to avoid setting it all up again. OR, would it be easier to just put it all back together as the faster, less likely to go disastrously wrong and set fire to the neighbour's cat option?

If I had found this tutorial about five months ago, my legacy neighborhood would not be the fireball it is today.

I just went through the tutorial, and everything is working perfectly. The game's even running faster! What the heck? Well, it's a perk, and I won't knock it. Anyhow, as others have said before me, I've been wanting all of the Maxis folk in one neighborhood since I first got the game, too. I've been due for a restart, anyway, and this is the best way (and excuse) for doing it I can think of. Do I kiss your feet here, or is there a line to join? Thank you!

Using your New And Improved Method, Sara, is it now possible to attach additional downtowns without problems?  Or should we still avoid that?

Make a backup of your neighborhood before attaching another downtown. Then, if anything goes wrong (you would see immediately if something goes wrong), you can just replace the backup.

Just to be deterrent - attaching another downtown afterwards didn't work for me. Both existing downtowns were either wiped clean of houses or some houses missing, the others strangely placed.

Of course there was no backup. A good inspiration to start over with just two hoods... and they are running fine now. :)

That's the one over the other bug. *sigh*

It's a very sucky bug.

My Mergeville is still working fine, but I have a question before I do something I oughtn't:

I see that any more Downtowns should not be added (thankfully, I like the default DT terrain, especially with camera hacks that let you see all of it,) but can a Business District be added safely? I've added one University campus, and haven't encounted any problems - it is correct to assume one BD would be just as seamless?

In case anyone asks.  I was able to successfully attach Riverblossom Hills to my existing merged neighborhood using SaraMK's method.  Only I used an OFB shopping village instead of a downtown.   I am spoiled on using a merged neighborhood and wouldn't want to play the game any other way now that I've started this.  I had gotten pretty far with my current merged neighborhood and hated the thought of having to start all over because of Seasons and at the same time I wanted to play the new Riverblossom Hills.  So I made a copy of my back up and experimented to see if I could attach Riverblossom Hills and it worked!  Pleasantview now has another suburb. ;D

Attaching other sub-hoods is fine.



If you want to attach Riverblossom tro the merged 'hood, you might want to read this: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4274.msg207964.html

OK, this is probably the simplest dumb question but starting at step 1 of the tutorial you say "Allow the game to generate a new game set with the three Maxis neighborhoods"....

How do you do this? 

Rename the EA Games folder in My Documents. When you next run TS2, a new EA Games folder will be generated, but your old one will still be intact at whatever you renamed it to.

OK now at the end I assume you can just put your original Pleasantview files (characters and lots) back into your N001 folder in order to get your existing families back?  From backup I mean?

No, you can't.

And I think you had better step away from this tutorial, before you blow up your entire game. Sorry, but judging from your questions, you have no business messing with the game files. Even the smallest screw up while working with the stuff in C:\Program Files\EA Games will cause you to have to reinstall the entire game from scratch.

Go download my ready-made neighborhood (http://www.fileplanet.com/173169/170000/fileinfo/MERGED-Pleasantview,-Strangetown,-Veronaville) if you really want a merged neighborhood.

Uh, no. That is not how it works at all. If you had a modified version of original PV, I suggest you reload the backup from before you broke it, because you normally cannot fuse neighborhood files together like that except in very specific, experts-only cases. The thing I think you're proposing is most assuredly not one of those cases.

Oh, OK. So you really need to merge your neighborhoods BEFORE you start playing and creating families and lots.  Thanks.
God, I love the concept. But I'm not sure I want to wipe out all three years of playing Sims 2 now.  Damn
I did try that pre-merged neighborhood and it looked like it worked fine.
I still want to add Riverblossom Hills as a sub-hood.  But your note states you can't add another Downtown with that setup so I assume I could add Riverbloosom Hills as an additional Shopping District?

You could use your existing neighborhood as the "base" neighborhood, but obviously some of the steps would be different.

You can add Riverblossom... I had a tutorial in another thread, I think maybe it was the thread that has my downloadable neighborhood, or maybe it was Jordi's Custom Neighborhood thread. The Search on this site isn't working at all for me right now, so I can't look it up.

Yeah, that's what I'd LIKE to do.  Keep my existing Pleasantview setup but have Strangetown and Veronaville merged as Downtowns and Riverblossom merged as a Shopping District.

Sorry if I seem like a complete spud head with these questions but before I go back and restore my game from my backup and attempt again I might as well ask first.

If I set it back to normal and then install your pre-made merged neighborhood (which seems like it would be the fastest least painful way) if you could please tell me what additional step would be required to import the existing Pleasantview data in.

I don't think there is any way to do that. There is no safe way to get sims out of one neighborhood and into another.


If you want to try to use your existing Pleasantview as the base, I suppose I could tell you how to do it, but it is more complicated than the tutorial in this thread. These instructions are for adding Stragetown, Veronaville, and Riverblossom as Downtowns.

You need to make TWO copies of your Neighborhoods folder (yes, the whole thing). One copy you will be working with, while the other is a backup. Put both of these copies on the Desktop. The original is, I assume, still in My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\ at this point.

Run the game and attach THREE additional Downtowns to your Pleasantview (it does not matter if you already have one or more attached). Exit the game. Open each of the Downtown files (N00#_Downtown00#.package) in SimPE. Extract ID Number from each of them and save them to folders called 1, 2, and 3 on the Desktop.

DELETE the Neighborhoods folder.

Install one of the copies of the Neighborhoods folder that are on the Desktop. Open the N00# folder that represents your Pleasantview (probably N001). Temporarily remove all the sub-hood files, so that the only files left in the N00# folder are N00#_Neighborhood.package and its picture.

Now proceed to follow the tutorial from PART 2, and skip PART 3 from Step 3 onward.

When you get to PART 8 you will be importing the files from those folders 1, 2, and 3 that you created earlier.



Really, I'm just afraid you're going to screw up your game. Your questions suggest that you don't know the "basics" that you need to know before you can mess with these files without total disaster. At least try not to forget to make a backup and keep it in a safe place.

Actually I think I am following your instructions. I'm just not saying it in the correct way.  I definitely have been methodical about backing up my game.  I'm blown it up enough times in the past to learn that lesson. 

I don't want to move sims from one neighborhood to another if that's what it sounded like I was implying.
Nope. I just want to use my existing Pleasantview as my base neighborhood so I should be able to follow your instructions.

Thanks for all the help

Okay, well, then the instructions I posted should work. Good luck. :)

OK, just for clarification.

When you say 

>>>Now proceed to follow the tutorial from PART 2, and skip PART 3 from Step 3 onward.

Are you saying that I do PART 2 and then do Steps 1 and 2 of PART 3 but skip the rest of the Steps of PART 3 but then continue with the rest of the PARTS?

Yes, that's right.

ok, i am good on all parts, except the part about using the batch renaming thing.
how do i use it to rename all files?

OK, using my existing Pleasantview as my base neighborhood I was successful in attaching Strangetown as a Downtown and I also had my existing Downtown attached as my first Downtown as well.

Now here is where things came to a screeching (and puzzling halt). After successfully attaching Strangetown I exited the game per the instructions. Then I went back to repeat the process with Veronaville and that's when I noticed I now had only one Downtown attached to my Pleasantview (the Strangetown one) and the default template option was no longer there.

What the heck did I do to cause this?

Could it have something to do with the Neighborhood.reia file in the Veronaville folder (when I'm replacing those files into the D001 folder)? I noticed I had to leave that file out when I was successful getting the Strangetown folder to work. I'm going to try that now.

Did you remove the file representing the new Downtown (which is Strangetown)? You need to remove it (temporarily... put it on the Desktop) before you will be able to attach another template.

Neighborhood.reia is just the neighborhood fly-over movie that plays when you first load a neighborhood. It can be safely deleted if you don't want the silly movie anymore. It does not do anything else.


simfan, you can use any program that allows you to rename files based on conditions you set out (such as "replace all instances of N00 with D00"). There are many programs that do this, and I even gave you a link to one that I use myself. You might want to looks at any Help files that come with whatever program you choose to use.

Do you mean delete the neighborhood from the Downtown screen (drag it into the little trashcan)?  I mean when you see the screen that would have the Strangetown icon screen and then the blue screen with the Plus Sign for adding new neighborhoods?  Or do you mean go into the Neighborhoods folder and delete the Downtown001 file?

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N00# (whatever # your neighborhood is) and TEMPORARILY remove any files other than N00#_Neighborhood.package and its picture. That means you need to remove all the files like N00#_Downtown00#. You DO NOT want to delete them. Keep them safe, because at the end you will need to put them back in.

If you are using the OFB template instead of Downtown, you would need to be careful and NOT remove the N00#_Suburb00# files that represent the two additions made by Pets and Seasons, but DO remove the one that represents the sub-neighborhood you added (which will be the file with the highest # at the end). Since you are using Downtown, this is not a problem for you, I'm just adding this in case someone else is going to be following this thread trying to do the same thing.

Sara,

First, I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the templates and tutorials you've done on merging the neighborhoods  ;D.  I've decided that I'm much better at downloading then modding, so...let me take this moment to get down on my knees and ask you to Please, Please, Please create a merged cleaned up Pleasantview which includes Riverblossom.  I'm not in any hurry - I just wanted you to know that there is still someone out here who needs your cleaned up neighborhoods.  :)

Thanks for listening  ;)
Gail

Well, the problem with a merged AnyNeighborhood(s) + Riverblossom is this:

A merged Pleasantview + Strangetown + Veronaville can be created using only the base game + NL. This makes it compatible for a lot of people, since only the NL EP is required. That's why my downloadable merged neighborhood only requires NL.

However, there is currently no way to run base game + NL + Seasons, since the only options on the Base Game Starter program are to run any ONE pack or UP TO a particular pack. Unless I were to uninstall some of my EP's, which I am not interested in doing, this means that a merged neighborhood that includes Riverblossom would require ALL EP's, and thus will only be compatible for the lucky few who have all the EP's installed.

So, I am looking into the possibility of merging Riverblossom using only base game + NL. Although it would still require Seasons so that the game does not barf when you attempt to load Riverblossom, in theory  this has a chance of working, which means the end result will require only the NL and Seasons EP's, rather than every EP. On the other hand... chances are high that the game will barf when trying to attach Riverblossom, due to the extra Seasons code, and that will be the end of it.

It will probably be a while before I get around to this (big) project, since there are several other things I've been meaning to do. Working with stuff that "should work... in theory" is pretty time-consuming.

 ;D
Just wanted to tell you how great your tutorial is. And thanks for answering all my questions. I'm sure it must have seemed like I was asking the same thing over and over.

It took me about two days but I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. Duh!  Now it seems so obvious. Can't believe it took me so long to grasp something so simple.
Anyway, I wondered why I saw 3 Suburb package files but I reasoned I should use the last one when I imported the ID information into the game from my existing backup. Anyway, it all seems to work fine now.  Pleasantview merged with Strangetown, Veronaville and Riverblossom Hills and of course Sim State University and BlueWater Hills. 

My only "problem" now is I have so many families to choose from I don't know which one to start with.  LOL

Thanks a million again

Take your time, sweetie. Having played your combined neighborhood, I have every reason to know that you will get it done as soon and as well as is humanly possible.

I am so helpless, can someone please take a pic of the batch rename thing so i can now how to use it?
I am sorry.

Thanks

If you're having trouble with that, I really don't see how you're going to do the SimPE part.

The program I suggested works like this:

Right click on a folder that has the files you want to rename. Click Bulk Rename.

(http://i10.tinypic.com/2cz6974.jpg)

Select the files. Put the text you want to replace. Click the big button.

(http://i5.tinypic.com/2qw1zyv.jpg)

thank you Sara, you are a life savor. I am fine with the simpe part, i have been using it since it came out.

Hi, Sara,
Thank you so much for this tutorial, I never used simPE in this capacity before, and love to learn stuff like this!
I did get lost, tho, on when to use the cleaned up neighborhoods you have for download, and in renaming stuff: it would stop and say it couldn't rename something because it already existed.  So because of time,  ;DI did end up downloading your merged N'hoods from fileplanet, and I am just loving it! ;D

I was thinking that I would attach Riverblossom hills as a second shopping district, tho, since your merged hoods say NOT to attach any more downtowns, but your post above that you don't know if it will work is a yellow flag.  I guess I don't see why it should be any different that adding another n'hood to an existing one...would you recommend waiting till the new simPE is out, it doesn't seem like it would matter just to change the ID? ???

Again, thank you for all this! I was getting soo tired of having all the repeated families and repeated Bluewaters in every neighborhood!

There is a tutorial for adding Riverblossom (as either OFB or another Downtown) in post #59 of this thread: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4274.msg216423

There is no reason that I know of to wait until the new SimPE, since you are not really editing anything in the neighborhood in SimPE. Just loading it for the purpose of swapping the Number ID shouldn't mess anything up. I have tested attaching Riverblossom to a neighborhood, I just haven't tested adding it to an already-merged Pleasantview/Strangetown/Veronaville. I would say everything should work fine there, too.

Wow! That was fast!  Thank you!

SarahMK: In the thread where you posted an already merged neighborhood, you mention that you resurrected the tricou family because of corrupt death tokens.  Should the tricou family be resurrected when creating your own merged neighborhood?

Are you saying that any "dead" sims will be now alive when you merge the neighborhoods because I noticed none of my previously dead sims in the cemetery are there anymore so I'm wondering just where they are?

Is there something you have to edit in their files in SimPE to make them dead again or is it not that simple?

If it's too messy then don't bother because I can just kill some existing sims or let them die of old age and then put them in the cemetery but I just wondered if it was something that everyone encountered or just something unique to me?

You don't need to resurrect them if you don't want them alive. However, if you ever decide to resurrect them, remember that they have corrupt tokens that need to be deleted in SimPE.

I resurrected them because a lot of people do  want them alive, and it's much easier to kill sims than to resurrect them, if they have problems like corrupt tokens or wrong memories or whatever.




No, if you merge the neighborhoods yourself, all sims that are dead should stay dead. I haven't noticed any vanished tombstones, but that's a common glitch. You need to get Pescado's hacks: nounlinkondelete and lot debugger.

In the already-merged neighborhood that's up for download, it's just the Tricou family in the Downtown (who are the only dead sims in the cemetary) that's alive. Everyone from the main three neighborhoods should still be dead.

EDIT: Oops, correction, everyone except Bella Goth. But she wasn't truly dead.

If I understand this all correctly then,  the corrupt tokens only cause a problem if you resurrect them through normal methods. IE. Using one of the downtownie teens with a tricou as a father, sending them to college, a job in the paranormal career, and using the Grim Reaper phone. I'm guessing the phone doesn't clear the death tokens properly?

Thanks for your last reply and for the tutorial. I now have the ultimate sims neighborhood.  A custom hood with both Sims Lifestories hoods attached, a Sims 1 remake hood, Strangetown, Riverblossom, and Veronaville. Plus the original Downtown and Bluewater village.

Actually, the problem occurs no matter how you resurrect them. The tokens MUST be deleted before you make any attempt to resurrect any of them. Otherwise, the damage gets done and you have to clean up a lot of junk in SimPE. Since SimPE's memory editor isn't very good, this is very undesirable.

OK, I used the Tombstone of L&D to Spawn some of the missing ghosts from my merged neighborhood and they would appear and then disappear and the dialogue box pops up saying "Such and such has died on another lot" and I figured their ghost or tombstone would now be back on the lot where they had died previously.

So I went and looked on the other lot where I knew they had originally died in my game and nope, there was no ghost or urn or tombstone there.

Doesn't the ghost have to exist on a given lot before you can regenerate their missing tombstone?  So unless you can get their ghost back I guess you can't recreate their tombstones?

I know this is a dead thred, but i'm not gonna let that stop me from resurecting it to ask a non-awesome question.

I attached Strangetown as a Downtown and Veronaville as a Shopping District, but when i entered pleasentview, the oringal, already-attached Downtown and blue water are gone! Help!

Also ST and VV have swopped albums, as in, ST album has some stuff about the montys and capps, and VV album is about aliens! I don't really care, but, it's something i found out.

What did you do with the Downtown00# and Suburb00# that belonged to Downtown and Blue Water? If you were following my tutorial, you needed to put them back in at the end of it. Not putting them back in would obviously make them not appear.

Also, did you take any shortcuts when it came to swapping Number IDs? Having Downtown and Strangetown share a Number ID would certainly make one not show up.

No idea on the photo albums. I haven't seen them switch places like that, but it's normal for albums to be lost during the whole merging process, so you'll have to redo them, I guess.

Just wanted to say thanks for this Sara. Downloaded your merged hood and against all odds managed to add Riverblossom Hills as a shopping district. So now my hood is complete!

M'kay, I get that Necromancy is bad, but this is a Tutorial Thread, so doesn't that counter out some of the badness? I also get that this is my second post here, but I've been silently reading on and off for a while now, so please don't just write me off as a n00b, GTFO. I'm a creator over at MTS2 and I know my way around SimPE well enough, but all the sneaky technical stuff that MATY has is very appealing. Recently I just went through and fixed all the genetics of Strangetown and Veronaville, and I'd been renaming all the Townies I have because I can. It has only recently come to my attention that deleting characters from the SimBin is bad and I've been working on Deleted 2 cleaning up the mess.

I'm still playing on the very first copies of the original neighborhoods my game shipped with and I've sheltered those neighborhoods through a MAC to PC transplant and a few hardrive reformats, my sims are a hardy bunch, and I'll fight to keep them. I have all the EPs and currently my game holds Pleasantview, with one Uni, a never played Downtown, and a custom suburb, and I also have some foundling sim stories in Strangetown (has a never-been-played Uni attached), Veronaville (also with a never-played Uni), and only one family really worth keeping in Riverblossom (has a never-played Uni and Bluewater attached as well). I know you that you can't move partial neighborhoods but I'm not sure if that one family is worth taking the rest of the neighborhood with it. Also, I'm pretty sure they all had the Default Downtown attached at some point, but they have been since removed, Pleasantview also had a Bluewater and all three Vacation spots. Not sure about the repercussions of that action, especially considering I've never used empty templates or notownieregen type mods.

I'd like to end up with two main neighborhoods in the end. I want Pleasantview to have 2 Uni's, a Downtown, and Strangetown and my custom hood as Subs. Veronaville will be my second with 1 or 2 Uni's, Downtown, and Riverblossom and Bluewater as Subs. From reading your tutorial, and between the lines of it and every other MATY thread on merged hoods I could find, my plan is, make backups like mad, clear out any satellite hoods (possible VBT) from the 2 that will be moving, and use my them as the new templates, this should transfer my simmies, their land, their memories, their photo albums, their pets and townies, and any VBTs that happen to be lurking in my neighborhood that I have yet to discover. But in theory, it should work.

I have a few questions about it all though.
1. Is my plan possible? Assuming I'm the most techno-savy person on the planet (which I'm not), somethings are just flat out impossible. I hate running into those things farther down the line so I've been learning to ask this question first.
2 .About my deleted subhoods, how bad, and do I fix?
3. Previously deleted sims (they were all sims that never met anyone: testers or duplicate maxis binnies), I need to locate and destroy their SWAFs, DNA, Relationships, and their character package. Are these the only (and correct) files I need to nuke?
4. I'm going to end up with two sets of townies by doing this, since they already exist in both hoods. Would it be better to cleanse my hoods of them by just using SimPe like I will be doing for my previously deleted ones, or would it be better to follow the standard Deleted 2 method?
5. How safe/unsafe will it be to add more OFB hoods later? Each of them now will have 2, a few posts suggested that EAxis got a bit smarter with the ofb subhood ID number creation than it was with NL.

Thanks for helping me piece my neighborhoods together, they always felt like they were incomplete and missing what the other had. Any help/suggestions/criticism appreciated.

The Free Time neighbourhood (even without simpe updated) works fine added as an alternate 'shopping' district. I have it like that... downtown, strange town, and veronaville are my downtowns, bluewater, riverblossom, and free time neighbourhood are my shopping districts.

Simpe didn't want to extract the id from the FT hood for me, which is rather annoying.  :-\

When the neighbourhoods were merged... a problem occured that I just found out.

All BV lots act as regular lots in regular hoods. Only the tour guide shows up and the pickpocket in appropiate clothing. The rest are just townies/downtownies/playable sims. No locals or tourists.

The locals show up in regular lots on regular hoods/downtown...

Once a new SimPE is made, I'll probably be able to do it properly. Must have been the FT stuff that borked it all.

Gawd, it's time to jump thru these hoops again?    :-\
I'm kind of glad Maxis is ending Sims 2 with Free Time.  I'm tempted just to leave the FT neighborhood separate but I did have a question about my Bluewater Village.
It's working fine with all my other neighborhoods so probably I should just leave well enough alone.  Alas....

I did not merge any new shopping districts when I merged my neighborhoods (I put Veronaville, Strangetown and Riverblossom Hills as alternate Downtowns and they worked fine).

My question is that I noticed my Bluewater Village is listed as Suburb03 and I have a Suburb01 and Suburb02 (neither of these have pictures with them).  Suburb03 is the one with the picture so that's how I know that's my active shopping district.
OK, why would my game list my active Bluewater Village as number 3?  Shouldn't it have been #1?
When I was thinking about merging the FT neighborhood as a second Shopping District I went and created an empty neighborhood there in the shopping districts and checked and saw the game called that one Suburb05 (?)  with its appropriate picture but it also threw in a Suburb04 (with no picture).

Why would it do that?  Can I delete Suburbs01, 02 and 04 and rename 03 to 01 and 05 to 02?

I'm having the same problem as koshechka - when I get to the step to attach the Strangetown-as-Downtown, I don't have the option to attach a downtown template at that point, just custom ones.  I have all EPs including Freetime and I was attempting to attach all the Maxis hoods as downtowns... haven't really done anything that deviates from the tutorial at that point besides adding two additional neighborhoods to begin with, and deleting Riverblossom Hills and Desiderata Valley too when you delete Veronaville and Strangetown (basically following the same steps for them).  I'm using the empty templates for those that they were available for...  I'm pretty darn sure I didn't do anything wrong as I read everything quite carefully and followed it as exactly as I possibly could... Any idea where I might have gone wrong, or shall I just start over?

I think the extra suburbs come from the Pets, Seasons and BV stealth neighbourhoods, even if you use clean templates for them.

Most of the tutorials sometimes are entertaining. Why the hell so much troubles and roundabout to save or merge Maxis characters?
All the hood templates contain mistaken characters that enter the game in much worse state than creating new ones in CAS.
Most of the dead Sims never had a life. They were also CAS placed in game and killed. I can also write all those memories in SimPe or just program so that they are included with simple objects.
For my personal use, I created totally new 3 original PleasantView, StrangeTown and Veronaville. All the characters I really wanted I remade self with the look that is really of my taste, instead of reconstructing flat noses Simrurgically.
Played all the characters up to reach the same state and saved the 3 hoods. So, if anything goes wrong I just use my own templates to start all over again. I have also additional hoods with all of the characters placed all together.
It is also possible to make models in BodyShop for all the characters you like. You may even export them from a hood copy and keep them for future use. So all you have to do is to create a downtown lot or OFB or whatever you feel like and just spread your models in it. I have even a BV hood with all my versions of Maxis characters as tourists.

Once again a new EP has given me another hood to attach. Thanks again Sara, Desiderata Valley is looking good as a new shopping district!

koshechka - Hrm, well, that didn't appear to be my problem, but thanks.

I'd started over from the beginning and when I got to that step I was able to add the Strangetown downtown successfully.  But that's when I got a little bit confused.  I tried to continue on but after doing what I thought were the right steps (which I'm pretty sure weren't), I got to the very end and had no Pleasantview anymore.

I may just be a bit dense here and it's possible it's been answered previously, I'm just blind, but... After you get Strangetown attached, I'm a little unclear on what exactly is being done there.  I guess I'm a little scatterbrained, but I find it a lot easier to do tutorial steps when it explains exactly why one does each step and exactly what you're doing, and I've tried to wrap my mind around it, but... I just don't get the purpose of certain things...

Part 4/Step 8:
"Open My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001 and find the file called N001_Downtown001, and its picture. Rename both the file and the picture to N001_Downtown002. Put them in the same safe place as you put the first one, created in Part 1/Step 7."

For that step, I have Downtown001 (default Downtown) and Downtown002 (Strangetown) in N001, as I had created the default downtown as directed in Part 1/Step 6 and it doesn't say to do anything with it between those steps.  Am I copying the default downtown to my Finished Work folder and then renaming it?  If so, why am I doing this now as opposed to when I created it, before making the 002-Strangetown downtown?  Or does Downtown002 (Strangetown) need to be moved somewhere first, so that I can rename the default downtown from 001 to 002 where it is (since there's already a 002 in my N001 folder)?

I guess if I knew exactly why I'm doing Part 4/Step 8 I wouldn't be quite so confused.  :)

When you attach the default Downtown, move it somewhere safe and then begin the whole making Strangetown into a downtown process. Then when you go into the game to attach Strangetown-downtown, there won't be a previous downtown (the default one) there, Strangetown-downtown will be the first downtown that gets attached. And when that's done and you exit the game, remove that one too (rename it first if you put it in the same folder as default Downtown so as to not overwrite) before you repeat with Veronaville. Or, if you don't mind starting with a brand spanking new Pleasantview, just download the one SaraMK has made. That's what I do, and then I've added all the other EAxis hoods as shopping districts.

nerd - Thanks much!  Not sure how I missed that as now that you say it, it makes perfect sense... Trying again for the third time, a little clearer on exactly what I'm doing... we'll see how this works.  :)

I have successfully moved Strangetown, Veronaville and Riverblossom Hills to alternate Downtowns.
Now I just want to move Desiderata Valley to an alternate Downtown also but I'm stumped. I can't figure out which steps I can skip over and nothing is working that I've tried.  Help!

Can you give a simple step-by-step for adding one new section after you already have your Downtowns?  Thanks

Make Desiderata Valley a shopping district. It'll make it working easier. Personally, I have Strangetown and Veronaville (and downtown) as my downtowns. Bluewater, Riverblossom, and Desiderata are my shopping districts. It works out nicely.

Very awesome tutorial SaraMK!
I've been putting off trying this project for some time since my kids won't leave me too much chance to concentrate on projects like this but yesterday I finally got started and it went brilliantly. Great instrcutions. Sure I had a few minor problems to solve, especially when I started adding Desiderata Valley as a Shopping District but pretty soon that worked out too.
So now I have Riverblossom Hills as the base neighbourhood and all the others added to it and I'm very pleased with the end results. Thank you!

FINALLY, after like seven tries to do this... I've gotten Strangetown, Veronaville, Riverblossom Hills, and Desiderata Valley attached as shopping districts (gave up on downtowns).

The problem I was having was... well... weird... I was following the steps just fine but when I would get to the end I invariably had the one-on-top-of-the-other thing.

In making the backup of the D001 folder (or in my tries to do them as shopping districts, B001) I simply copied the folder so I had 'D001' and 'Copy of D001' as folders - so when it would go to generate the IDs it would have 'Copy of D001' in the Subname blank that shows up on the IDs in SimPE.  Why this was, I don't know, but as soon as I put the backup in a RAR file instead of leaving it in a renamed folder, it worked perfectly.

AND I did it (hopefully) fairly cleanly, with the AnyGameStarter, so the combined hood I just made should just require Open for Business, Seasons, and Freetime.  I'm going to do a bit more testing and then maybe look to sharing it so others don't have to go to the trouble.

This would be very helpful for so many others. I suppose I should use the anygamestarter to do this myself.

http://www.demusedsims.com/uploads/N372.rar

Okay, there's the completed version, done as N372 so you can have your regular Pleasantview or whatever else you want and it shouldn't interfere.  Plop in Neighborhoods and begin playing.  As mentioned, all the other Maxis hoods are done as shopping districts of Pleasantview (with one Bluewater Village included as well) so don't add shopping districts, but feel free to add whatever else.

It is, however, 177 mb in size, rarred.

I'm currently uploading a multi-part rar for people on flaky connections, and I will be uploading it to MTS2 as well (with alternate links to Demused Sims for downloading as it tends to have a very nice fast download rate which MTS2, well, doesn't).

All Maxis playables and lots are included - most random townies are not.  I used the Maxis-only original hoods (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg263971.html#msg263971) so you do have the Maxis simbin sims, but a minimum of random garbage townies.  Goopy Gilscarbo and Joe Carr don't seem to be included - yay!  669 characters total which seems about right for everyone and their dog's nephew's cousin from all the hoods.

I've tested a lot in each 'hood and everything seems to be fine but I make no guarantees.  Use at your own risk, your mileage may vary, remove nutmeats from shell before eating, do not insert into anus, etc.

Yay! Whoo! I might just download this.


Aww. But that is the best part of installing a new 'hood.

Seriously though, this is great, thanks. I've always wanted to do this and have never found the time. :)

Figured out what caused my 'non-vacation and non-locals appearing in vacation lots'

A hack.
Which one? Well, for those of you keeping tabs...
youngadultshoppers

One of Squinge's hacks.

Yep, my merged hood would actually work. My multi-merged one. With lots of garbage townies and data. It's 401MB rarred. That also includes ALL the subhoods, and even the evil stealth hoods.

So, if you have the same problem I did, it's Squinge's fault.
Now how did that non-awesome hack make it into my folder?

Hey, HP, did you use the versions with fixed DNA?

Just making sure. Crashies are no fun.

I used the version re-uploaded by Sysa - which I assume is the same as the one SaraMK had linked to, but the link has gone dead.

If you've been playing a hood Celesta made, then you should probably just be grateful all the sims have disappeared.

Is there a problem with Celesta's sims?

No, only with Celesta. I was joking.

Actually, she's not very bright, so chances are good there's something awry. Both Murphy's and Sod's laws also apply.

First of all, let me say, God Bless You. I've wanted to do this sort of thing for forever!

Second of all, I need help! I tried merging Strangetown in with my own custom neighborhood that I've had for a while. Everything worked except the people aren't there. There are no sims in Strangetown. The lots and everything appear just fine, there are just no one living in them. I renamed the characters in the characters folder and everything. I'm very confused and was wondering if anyone else has had this problem. I appreciate any help.

Hello there. I'm a long time lurker, first time poster.

I was experimenting a way to add new suburbs to a neighborhood I already played and even downloaded the "Sedona" pack from one of the awesomes (there's a link on someone's sig). There is a little hack to get rid of the big "Add Blue Water" button... Having this hack, its really easy to add suburbs. (links? I'm new to this thing)

I found out at SimPe that if you edit the neighborhood ID Number for neighborhoods to behave as downtowns or suburbs, then change the "parent Name" to avoid conflicts (D002, i.e.), you can rename the whole folder accordingly to its position (D002, D003 and so on, or B004, B005, and such) and move it to the NeighborhoodTemplate folder for the desired expansion (Open for Business or Nightlife).

There's a catch, though. Since the game is stupid, then if you have Pets, or Seasons, or FT installed; and the neighborhood version says Pets or later (Seasons, FreeTime, etc), then it'll load the files at start and add the sims at the bin, but won't add the neighborhood. The way to get around it is on this very tutorial: when we (paste) add the Bluewater ID Number to a custom neighborhood and trick the game to think that Desiderata Valley(i.e.) is Bluewater it changes the version to "Open for Business". Well, if we change the Neighborhood "parent Name" to anything other than B001, then it won't conflict with Bluewater and they all show up. Its a good idea to change the UID too, but as I'm not awesome, maybe there's no need to it.

The little hack to get rid of the button is needed, or the selection won't show up. Since I only downloaded the Bluewater one, I didn't test it on downtowns, but I don't see why it shouldn't work.

For the original neighborhoods on the basic game (Pleasantview, VeronaVille, Strangetown), just change the Neighborhood Type thing, parent name and rename the folder. They're ready to go.

I am NOT at all familiar with SimPe. So I guess it should be easy for other newbies to get going.

Would this technique also work for converting from one suburb to another?

I'd like to add cwykes' Sedona to my conglomeration of neighbourhoods, but they're all set as shopping districts (I'm using HystericalParoxysm's download). Therefore, the obvious solution - aside from merging them all manually, which I'll do if I have to - is to trick the game into thinking it's a downtown.

That, or back up and try adding it anyway :p Which I'm pretty sure will cause borkage.

EDIT: Okay, I backed up my game and added it as a shopping district. Bizarrely, the game has not immediately exploded, and seems to be jogging along quite well. I can only assume that this is in some way related to my earlier deletion of Veronaville. I'm sceptical of this continuing to be the case, but as long as it is, I'm not complaining. Just backing up frequently and preparing to either revert to a pre-Sedona state, or start again from scratch :P

Yes.

I downloead http://www.demusedsims.com/uploads/N372.rar from HystericalParoxysm. (Thanks  ;D )

I put it in a clean install. (EP, Patch, EP, Patch...)

I was testing a little bit. Family Summerdream in N00? have no empty wishes but in N372 (nice idea using high numbers) one of the Summerdreams have empty wishes. Now my question. Is merging neighborhoods in this way forcing empty wishes? What can I do?

I never had before Empty wishes. Main install in German, N372 was made in  English.

Empty wants are an occupational hazard of this game. Here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,11663.0.html), Pescado says that they should re-roll once you've done something to re-seed the want file.

My Summerdreams had a couple of blanks once they moved to Strangetown, too.

It´s not a real problem than, if I understand you right.
My English is so [censored] that I must explain it in my words.  ;D
Can´t test now, because the only wish is a new house.   If the wish is execute, the others come back. Is this right? :D

Next question, can I upload it on a German faster website without getting trouble from here? I would link here of course too.

It shouldn't be, no.
As I understand it, yes.

Er, do you mean the tutorial, your own merged neighbourhood, or HystericalParoxysm's?

I think you mean HP's merged neighbourhood. That's for her to answer.
And posting the tutorial is for SaraMK to answer.

Thanks for all support, Charamei. I mean @ last point the HystericalParoxysm's neighborhood. So let her answer. :D *pray*

I had been dreaming of having all the neighborhoods merged-I tried HP's download, only to find that it requires all the EP's-it didn't show up in my game at all.
Then I tried SaraMK's download-which works beautifully (I only have NL and Base)-and now am in the process of putting all the members of each town into one huge town, Pleasantview..with a completely changed terrain-thanks to the new program over at MTS, "Terrain Changer", which enables you to completely  change all the terrain of any given neighborhood.
Boy, are there alot of families in Sara's download-but it is workable and great to have a new challenge. Now the Goths can meet the Montys!
Thanks Sara, for the download and all the hard work. I knew I wouldn't be able to do the tutorial without messing my game up big-time, so your merged neighborhood was a god-send!

HP's download requires: Base, Nightlife, Open for Business, Seasons, and Free Time

OK - since this post has been up for a long time, I just want to make sure all the information is current.  I have all EP's and get lost looking at SimPE, so if I download HP's N372.rar (rather than SaraMK's from Fileplanet), it will have all Maxis neighborhoods to date as sub-hoods to Pleasantview?  Then what happens with my (played) Pleasantview, StrangeTown & Veronaville? Do I lose them?  Or are they still in my folder? Lastly, I created a custom hood using SC4 - how do I attach that to HP's?

I have recently downloaded HP's version and am loving it. All the neighborhoods are there as shopping districts. So now Jill Smith  knows Alexander Goth and Jules O'Mckay.
All your previous hoods will still be there, no problem. The only family that did not make it is the Ottomas family. I brought them over from my unplayed Veronaville, and hope that won't blow up my game!

How did you bring them over?

I just moved them into a house, 5 Poet's Place I think it was called and then moved it to the lots and houses bin. Then just put the occupied house in the new Pleasantville.

This is usually considered a very bad thing, I'm not sure of the technical explanation but the opinion around here is don't do it!. It's something to do with all the extra files that come with the sims relating to their memories and friends. Unattatched files get unhappy and mess up your game  ???I'm hoping that as the Ottomas family had met no one, not even Rod Humble or a mail carrier they will be okay. If not, I'll just restart, I do that so often it really won't matter. But if your game is precious to you you might be safer to find the Ottomas family uploaded somewhere, perhaps the exchange?

Necromancy go!

Apartment life's new neighbourhood is an actual neighbourhood. It also adds another stealth hood.

After SimPE is updated, maybe, I'll give a crack at merging the hoods. However, HP's merged is much better than the one I made a while ago.

You need an updated simpe to merge.

I tried without one, and it killed my neighbourhood..

If you use a file rename utility on the new AL hood folder and files to change them to N00x before you try to open the neighborhood package file you can still open it with the old version of SimPE.  Alternatively, you could get a qa version of SimPE.  The qa version hasn't been updated for AL as of this moment, but I am sure it will be rather quickly and well before the next official release.

No, it imports, and I can rename the stuff. It just doesn't WORK when imported.

The apartment lots just don't work properly.

I know that 2 of the lots that should have sims living on them have no sims there anymore. And that some other occupied apartment lots look like they're working fine from the neighbourhood view, and when you hover over them, it looks like it's occupied. But when you click to select that lot, there's nobody there.

That's what I mean by it doesn't work.

I've only tried to import it as a shopping district, not as a downtown lot...

I'm thinking that SimPE cannot detect a difference between apartment lots and regular lots, AT this time. This is why I'm waiting for a new SimPE. Free time gave problems with hobbies before simpe was updated for FT (at least the QA). But then the game still worked even with the imported hood in non-updated SimPE.

I'm not 100% certain that's the reason why, and if somebody CAN import the apartment neighbourhood without the game going all crazy I'd like to know how you did it. Unless it involves a QA of simpe that's updated to work with AL.

However, it doesn't just delete the sim completely. That's where the problem lies. I'm sure you know the problems that can occur if you do 'deleteallcharacters' in an inhabited hood. The characters that DID live there are suddenly unlinked. Surely a prerequisite for ABFBVFS

(EDIT 2: Electric Boogaloo!)
SimPE QA right now is not compatable with AL. Probably the apartments problem.

I know you can do some things with it, but nothing that uses neighbourhoods now, I guess.

I have a merged neighbourhood that I made myself, with Pleasantview as the main and the other basegame 'hoods, DV and Riverblossom as shopping districts (plus Bluewater Village). It also has the default downtown. Once SimPE is updated, would I be able to add Belladonna Cove as either another shopping district (unlikely?) or as a downtown to this existing neighbourhood?

I would use your clean unplayed backup of your megahood to actually add the Belladonna Cove neighbourhood, test a copy of it to make sure it works then copy/paste files from your played neighbourhood over to your new megahood. Don't do it yet though, SimPe will bork it. Anything that requires you to open the neighbourhood browser will not work until it is updated for AL.

Okay, new QA of SimPE. I will report my findings SOON. Like, 30mins.

This time I won't add it to my megahood (since if it doesn't work, it's so much time to extract it and whatnot)
So keep your eyes on this space

So it wasn't 30 minutes.

The QA: upon initial inspection, it: doesn't work properly.

The apartments all say unoccupied.

I'll see later if it works properly. Give me a couple of hours for that. I have things to finish

Now I know why it's not working. On the SimPE forums, it says that sims now have 3 fields. Probably one is 'apartment' and it needs to see if a sim is in a specific lot, and the apartment Of course right now it's only the QA of it, and it's known to have bugs.

Hmm, that's a different approach... Would it matter if I just backed up my played neighbourhood instead (though I do have a clean unplayed backup) and tested directly on it? Also, if I do it in the way you suggested, which neighbourhood files do I move over? Just copy over everything and let it overwrite?

I would do both ways actually-one on your unplayed backup (that way you will have a clean fresh copy everytime you want to start over) and then on your copy of your played hood. You will probably have to rename character files though so they don't overwrite your existing sims. (I think anyway...I haven't had a chance to mess about with it myself) Is SimPe_QA out for AL yet?

No.  The QA isn't ready yet.  It looks like they have a lot of work to do before we'll see a functional QA, but they usually work pretty fast so it shouldn't be too long.  My understanding is the next QA upload is only going to disable the error messages so people can at least get in and begin to fix things.

The most recent QA is 0.71.13. However you cannot merge with this one, most likely because of no new fields to edit. I'm thinking new fields are lot the sim lives in, and what 'apartment' they live in. I know that simpe can read if it's an apartment lot. It just can't read the sims on that lot, YET.

Changes from 0.71.11 to 0.71.13

* Can cope with reading in Apartment Life Sims data (now finds their names for the browser).  No new fields to edit in the plugin yet though.  Could go BFVPS any time, so do not use on your favourite hood or the sims who live in it!
* No Help or Includes in this build.

Well this actually seemed to work! I couldn't find a hood with Riverblossom attached, so I did it myself. I used the maxis cleaned up hood templates, and it works in the vanilla game. Baaa!

See, this is how pants I am. I promised the Riverblossom Hills and Desiderata Valley cleaned templates and I go and install AL. Sorry guys. Have to wait a little longer :D I can gather family info while I wait though.

I was in the process of cleaning them out when you volunteered.  I figured I'd let you do it so you could take the blame if anything went horribly wrong.  But since you're not going to cooperate with my evil plan, I've posted mine in the Clean Templates thread.

Well, this is excellent news! :D I don't feel so guilty now.

I've finished a new Uber-Megahood for Apartment Life that includes all of the Maxis neighborhoods to date and requires OfB, Seasons, Free Time, and Apartment Life.  It will be up on MTS2 as soon as I can get all the files uploaded (god it's gonna take a while)...  It is not perfectly clean as I didn't want to lose any simbin sims like last time, but it is Goopy-free.

If ya want my version now, you can get the whole file at http://www.demusedsims.com/uploads/N373.rar - 284 mb (yes, I know, I am committing atrocities against your hard drive) or you can get the split rars - http://www.demusedsims.com/uploads/N373.part01.rar  ... 01-32 (just change the URL). 

I also kind of rewrote Sara's tutorial as I went along as I had found the initial version terribly confusing.  Maybe it's just me, but I learn complicated things much moar betterer when it's explained why I'm doing each step - especially when I want to do something slightly different than the actual tutorial is showing.  My version is here: http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=Tutorials:Combining_Maxis_Neighborhoods  ... again, thanks to Sara for the original... maybe it's just my stupid but I figure if a different wording can help others, then that's a good thing.

in your tute, do you cover a way to KEEP the townies and downtownies as they are at all? coz the only reason I don't use your merged megahood is because like many people, I like some of the premade townies and missed having them in my game (that and they tended to bork when re-added to the townie pool via simpe or the townie maker).

Just don't use the cleaned/fixed neighborhood templates if you want the premade townies.  It's not required - just recommended in the first part of the tutorial, but it doesn't change the way you do the tutorial at all.  The new Uber-Megahood is, well, much less clean than the Megahood as there were some simbin sims and such missing with the Megahood that I kinda missed a bit myself.  You still don't get Goopy Gilscarbo, Joe Carr, or Meadow Thayer and the like, but for example, in Belladonna Cove, you'll still have folks like Christian Love.

Edit: Thinking more on it...  if you don't use the templates at all, you -might- end up with duplicates of folks like Goopy, I'm thinking... so it might be worth plopping the template for Pleasantview in and letting the game regenerate fresh files right before Part 3, Step 2 where you copy the needed neighborhoods, and then restoring it before Part 5 so your new Pleasantview has Goopy, etc., but all of the sub-hoods you'll be adding won't have copies.

In BC there appears to be some characters missing. I know there is meant to be a family in Cornerstone Condominiums but when I click on it the four selection boxes show as though a family is in there, (they don't show if the whole place is empty) but instead of displaying the family, it only says:

family name (family size) $10,000

Is that a problem with the download or should I just redownload and install it again?

Edit: Picture and spelling mistake.

(http://i104.photobucket.com/albums/m188/Kirkat2k2/Error.jpg)

Second Edit: The missing ones from the apartments are:

DeBateau
Baldwin
Cleveland
Cho
Riley
Patel
Peterson

In reference to the non-cleaned merged neighbourhoods-I did it myself with Desiderata Valley as the Base Hood and all others as shopping districts. You do still get the Goopy, Amin, Benjamin, etc. townies with no duplicates, but they are not named their original Pleasantview names. For example, my Goopy is 'Phoenix Something' and Joe Carr is 'Ryan Lawson' in my Pleasantview shopping district. I am guessing that it is the same for all townies in the other hoods I placed as shopping districts, but as I didn't play them prior to merging I am unsure of their original names. Nothing has blown up anyway...if anyone wants my HUGE merged hood then I am sure I can upload it somewhere. It is really, really massive though and has loads of NPCs in it :D I am planning on doing the same soon, with all EAxis hoods as shopping districts and a blank base hood template.

Bumblescum.  I'd thought I'd checked that but I guess not... Bah.  Okay, lemme fiddle and see if I can get that fixed.  If EAxis has done it so Belladonna Cove -can't- be combined and keep everyone in their proper apartments, I'm gonna strangle them with my mouse cord.

Maybe it's possible by having Belladonnagrove as main hood and attaching Pleasantville etc. on that, instead of having Pleasantville as main hood?

Yeah, I'm gonna have to do Belladonna as the main 'hood and attach everything to it, I guess - I just tried it again and as soon as you attach Belladonna as a sub-hood, even if it was working fine before attaching, all the apartments go boom.  Grrghfhfhgnnngh.

Hmm. That makes me sad. :( Then I can't update my played MegaHood... Could it be that the QA SimPE just doesn't support it yet?

I don't think it's a SimPE issue because all that's changed is one resource, and the ONLY sims that get borked are the ones in apartments - everyone else in the 'hood is fine.

I'm starting over... AGAIN... with Belladonna as the main 'hood.  I guess it makes some measure of sense for the AL version, and at least that way I hopefully will get less people on MTS2 sobbing about "Why didn't you make it an addon!!!!111" etc.

Edit:  Ugh, well, it does work attaching things to Belladonna, but for some reason now some pretty important characters (like Bella Goth) have the wrong names.  She's called Allyn Kim for some incredibly strange reason.  I'll start over...  yet again, tomorrow.  Ugh.

I would baa in your direction and throw a heap of kittehs your way if you could upload a megahood that keeps the goopy's etc in it :D

I will do that asap...I'll probably have to split it up. It's HUGE! Did I mention that?

You could just fix their names in SimPE. All townies in attached neighbourhoods get their names randomized when you add them. That's why everyone's college students and downtownies have different names, and that's what's happening to Crystal Vu etc in merged hoods, too.

I can understand the townie Bella Goth from ST being renamed (as she's in the townie family and sub-hood townies get renamed in a merged hood), but why would the real Bella Goth from PV be renamed?  She's in the default family, like all the dead sims.  Are the dead sims being renamed too?

You may have to consider reviving PV Bella and adding her to the Goth household to prevent her being renamed.  Then it won't matter if ST townie Bella gets renamed.

ST Bella didn't get renamed the first time I did this so I'm thinking I must be using a different template than I did with the first Megahood (I'd switched after the first stupid try thinking I was using the old one but apparently not).  And I'm -not- willing to go through and note down everyone's names from all of the attached 'hoods and verify that everyone is correct and fix them if they're not.  It'll take ages and drive me absolutely bonkers.  So I'm gonna see if I can switch templates to what I must've been using originally and see if that helps since ST Bella was fine the first time.  Ugh, what a giant pain Apartment Life is turning out to be.

Funny that you post that now, because I JUST got the Uber-Megahood working with proper apartments.  It's a -stupid- workaround but it does work and it's pretty easy.

- Let the game generate a fresh Belladonna Cove (BDC) like you do the rest of the neighborhoods.
- Before removing Belladonna Cove from the Neighborhood folder to attach it as a downtown/shopping district template, go into BDC and move everyone who is currently living in an apartment into the sim bin.
- Attach BDC to your neighborhood as normal.
- Reassemble everything - BDC and whatever other 'hoods you've added with the proper ID numbers and whatnot.
- Go into the freshly-attached BDC and move everyone back into their apartments (see notes below) - make sure to use boolProp testingCheatsEnabled true... walk an adult to the apartment door you want to rent, shift-click the door and choose "Rent Furnished" - all of the furnishings they had before will be there.
- Once everyone's moved in, go back to the neighborhood and use familyFunds (familyname) (amount) to fix everyone's monies (see notes below).

My notes - I made notes on where everyone lives, and which apartments, and how much money:

Cho - 16,221 - Sentinel Apartments, lowest floor
Riley - 32,785 - Sentinel Apartments, apartment above Cho on 1st floor (2nd if you're American)
Patel - 25,976 - Ocean View Apartments, front right apartment on lowest floor (I think there's only one floor anyway)
Peterson - 14,325 - Main Street Mobile Homes, mobile home in the middle with pink walls
Cleveland - 42,768 - Bella Park Condominiums, 1st floor (2nd if you're American), on the right.
DeBateau - 227,933 - Cornerstone Condominiums, top floor
Baldwin - 58,297 - Tech Terrace - 1st floor (2nd if you're American) with balcony out front.


Also, a big note when adding stuff with stealth neighborhoods that is not specific to Apartment Life but all EPs - to prevent duplicate NPCs you need to do a little fancy footwork with empty templates:

- Create a fresh copy of your base neighborhood.  Enter it to let it create the stealth hoods as normal.
- Rename Pleasantview's template in Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData from N001 to N001-bak to prevent it from generating new Pleasantview-template sims.
- Put in empty templates for ALL stealth 'hoods that your game may create (Pets, Weather, Exotic Destinations, Hobbies, and Magic)
- Generate fresh copies of your neighborhoods to attach*
- Attach these fresh copies to your base hood the same way you normally would - they'll just be cleaner and more compact than they would have been otherwise, and you won't end up with duplicate sims you don't want.

* Pretty sure that if you don't need to enter the neighborhood before attaching it (like you do above for BDC to fix the apartment-dwellers) you only need to do N001 - not the stealth hood templates as they won't be generated till you enter the neighborhood.

Edit: New Uber-Megahood, with working apartment-dwellers, is here: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=301194  ... I will cry and have a hissy fit if it's somehow otherwise broken but it seems to be fine.

The reason you gals and guys are having problems with AL is because SimPE does not recognize sims living in Apartment buildings yet.  IAmTheRed mentioned this in an earlier post.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4480.msg368010.html#msg368010


That's too much trouble for me moving them out and in, and people who download your merged neighborhoods usually want the lots untouched and exactly as Maxis made them.  I think I will wait for SimPE to recognize sims that are living in apartment buildings before I undertake this.  I've been checking the SimPE QA forum every day.  They seem to be down for maintenance this morning.

Hellyes - The only real difference between the original BDC apartment-dwellers and the moved-out-and-back-in versions is that they won't be standing exactly where they were originally when you first load the lot.  If you rent furnished and fix their family funds as advised, it works just fine.  They're still the same sims with the same memories, relationships, etc..  I'd call the difference between a sim standing in one place and standing in another pretty minimal.  It's not like anyone was doing anything too amazing that it's a big loss to have them in a different spot the first time you load the lot.

Where am I going wrong? I don't get this.  I don't understand why we can't merge Belladonna Cove like we do all the other Maxis neighborhoods now that we have SimPE version 72?  How is AL different than the other hoods, or is there still something wrong with the latest version of SimPE?  Why is SimPE still not able to keep the sims in their original apartment slots?

When I go to attach Belladonna Cove the apartments are still empty.

(http://i35.tinypic.com/2e4koqp.jpg)

Okay, I may be forced to move them out and in, but I would rather figure out why merging Belldonna Cove isn't working as it always has before with the other hoods.  There has got to be a solution.

So maybe that wasn't why the "gals and guys" were having problems? Intriguing. If you find a cure, do let us know.

I felt surely when SimPE was fully updated that it would correct this problem. That's why I waited.  I think it has something to do with that fact that in the AL folder the hidden Magic neighborhood E002 is in the Neighborhood template folder instead of the main BDC hood, and the main BDC hood is in the Userdata Neighborhoods folder. OFB doesn't have a Userdata Neighborhoods folder.   Some how when we put the BDC files in the OFB neighborhood template folder the apartment dwelling sims get cut off from where they live.  I have some ideas up my sleeve that I am going to try.  I still would like to figure this out.

For today, I did I put it together the way everyone else is.  Although it was a little more time consuming, that worked fine, except I found that the baby furniture was not included in the furnishings in the Cho apartment.  What did everyone else do about that? 

I merged them as well.  When I load houses from  Belladonna Cove or Sea Gull Island the game freezes or all the houses are under a hillside.  When I try to move a family or bulldoze a house from either of those subhoods the game freezes. 

Also with Beacon Falls I can't move any sims.  It says "You must enter the lot and play the family before you move them."  Even after I've played and saved them.  I haven't tried this with other sub-hoods at this time.

So far all my other downtowns are working fine.

Hi together,

it is definitely no SimPE issue with the missing Apartment Sims. With SimPE you fix only the IDs, but the Rebuilding is done by the Sims Game itself, using so called templates...
If you spent some thoughts on the concept, you will realize some facts:

1.) Suburbs (exclude Holiday & University) are supported only by OFB & Downtown. downtowns & business districts are the only type of suburbs you can use.
2.) When the game uses the new added neighbourhoods, the numbers of the Sims & the buildings are rebuild in ascending order - the templates are used as base, but nevertheless the rebuilding process of the game changes a lot of values when you add them as new suburb. And this process is done by The game, NOT by SimPE.

Sims living in Apartments are a complete new concept -  you can take an apartment as a kind of mini-lot. Why should EAxis have taken care on old suburb concepts for this with introducing Apartment life when they don't provide Apartments in suburbs themself ?  - Take all original games and you don't have any apartments in any original template. So this error is only a logical result of an in-game missing concept.....

The only way will be that one to move the Sims out of the Apartment before using BDC as template OR using BDC as Main neighbourhood as described above - with all consequences of possible renamed Sims.
 

Maybe it has to do with the difference between apartment lots and normal lots.  Mootilda has done some great research on this and discovered that the game sort of "clones" an apartment lot.  Each apartment lot gets copied to make the separate sub-lots for each apartment so you can play them separately.  Because they're not handled as normal lots, the attachment process might just go weird with those lots, to use a very technical term...

Which, now that I read it, is basically what sigi said in different words.

The moving out and moving back in is relatively simple, if a bit of a hassle...  I didn't notice any difference between any of the lots before merging and after merging...  But the Cho and Riley lots are known to be kinda weird anyway so if it comes down to a couple missing pieces of furniture, I'd call that overall not a big deal at all to fix.

I was thinking the same thing... let me try creating an apartment (base) in a subneighborhood and see what happens with the clones (sublots).

Unfortunately, my video card just died, so I need to get a new one before I can try this.

Please point me to your posts about this on the SimPE forum.

I was experimenting with this yesterday, and it is as sigi said.  The instance values for the sims and the lots do change and that is related to it, but that alone isn't the only reason why attaching BDC with apartment lots is a problem.  If it were only that the Instance values change then we would have the same problem loading any of the other neighborhoods via the OFB or Downtown templates as well because those Instance values also change.  Even when you go in and correct the Instance values for the apartment dwelling sims with SimPE, although it almost works, there is still problems and the lots become glitchy.  The problem is centered square on the apartment lot files themselves.  The baselot and sublot files are stagnant and the values do not change at all as long as there is sims living in the lots.  You've probably heard about people saying we also can not seem to move apartment lots around within the neighborhoods or into the lots bin with sims living in them in-game either.  I don't know whether this was intentional by design or a bug, it may be intentional.  There might be too much that goes wrong with these lots, so Maxis designed it this way.  I know that when I attempted to do it by correcting the values with SimPE it glitched up the lots and the graphics on these lots get all wonky.  If it's unintentional, there may be a possibility that this could be fixed when the patch for Apartment Life is released.  I will be looking in the patch notes for this.  But, this is definitely is a problem with the apartment base and sublots in particular and not anything to do with SimPE.  

The fact they could not do it by upgrading the dorm code to allow switching to a different playable sim from another family there bodes ill for Sims 3.   Lately I have been predicting that Sims3 will consist of a copy of the entire hood per playable family, each one with the Sims saved in the middle of completely different situations.

hi everyone - i just started replaying the game - I have: Basic, Nightlife, University, OFB, Pets & Seasons.  Does anyone know where a combined/neighborhood template with the Maxis playables but without townies is located that I can download?  I want Pleasant View, Strangetown, Veronaville, Riverblossom Hills, Downtown, Bluewater Village, and the 3 stock universities all in one neighborhood so they can interact.  I did this once months ago and it took me 12 hours, my comp crashed and I don't have the template I built.  I will pay for a download of this type of combined neighborhood.  Any direction, links would be appreciated.  Thanks all!

Did you try MTS2? They have two flavors of merged neighborhoods.

Has anyone used HystericalParoxysm's Wiki tutuorial on merging hoods recently?  If so, can you tell me if we are still supposed to move out the apartment dwellers in Belladonna Cove before beginning the merge?  Her tutorial says nothing about this, but in this thread she states it needed to be done in order to make them show up properly in the merged hood.  I'm confused and don't really want to do it one way, only to find out I could have/should have done it differently.

You'll have to do it unless you're using Belladonna Cove as the basehood. Otherwise the residents in the apartments will be all messed up.

Oh yuck. I kind of figured as much but was hoping for the other answer.  I tried it awhile back and somehow managed to explode my completed hood.  I'm guessing it had to do with me loading BellaDonna without using empty templates.  The game created all the weather, pets, etc... I continued on, and everything was going perfectly.  I thought.  Added all my subhoods, loaded the finished project, then saw the complete mess I had made.  Anyhoo, is my assumption correct? If I attempt to move out the residents after installing the empty templates will I get the intended result?  Should I just stab myself in the head and be done with this madness? 

What I did was enter my own cleaned up version of Belladonna Cove with clean templates in place, move out all the sims living in apartments (taking note of how much money they had and where they lived), then shut down the game, delete all the subhood files from the stealth neighbourhoods in the 'hood folder, then proceed to merge it as normal. It worked fine. Once the neighbourhood was complete I moved the sims back into their apartments (shift-clicking the door in debug mode or having Pescado's apartment hack in lets you rent the apartment furnished) and gave them their correct amount of money. :)

Okie doke, that's what I thought.  If I remember correctly, I didn't remove those created subhoods and it was all downhill from there.  I am in the middle of trying this again but I somehow didn't replace the E002 file after using the cleaned up templates.  Now I can't restore my Apartment Life files to their original state.  All this hassle better be worth the pain.

All the original hood template folders (http://www.4shared.com/dir/11718673/ddbf9193/Hoods.html) are here.

That list is great, however the file I'm missing is located here: Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Apartment LIfe\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate\E002.  That stupid E002 is the one I'm missing. 

Okay, some beautiful soul uploaded the E002 file for me, but now for some reason the bin families for Belladonna aren't showing up when I make a new copy of the hood.  The Gavian, Goodie and Newson families have gone poof and my head is about to asplode.  Any guesses as to why and where they went?

Those three families belong to the stealth hood (E002, in fact). If you're using a clean template for that (as you should) for Belladonna Cove, then they won't show up.

You should instead let the main base hood load E002 with these families in.

Yep, I totally get that they should be in that file, but for some reason they aren't.  Let's take out the whole merged hood thing here and I'll tell ya what I mean.  When I went to load my game, I let the game install all the maxis hoods fresh, no clean templates at all.  The Strangetown, Verona, Pleasant, Riverblossom, Desiderata bin families are all there.  Go to load my fresh Belladonna and the bin families are gone. Poof. Nowhere to be found.  Enter my confusion.

I'm a little confused... those three families you mentioned aren't belonging to Belladonna Cove, they're bin families that come with AL and will attach themselves to EVERY neighbourhood you load with AL installed, unless you use a clean template for it.

There aren't any of these in the basegame. The first "stealth hood" bin family came with Pets. They are as follows..
Pets: Cyd Roseland + dog, Critturs
Seasons: Ramaswami, Ottomas
Bon Voyage: Traveller
Free Time: Julien Cooke, Picaso
Apartment Life: Gavian, Goodie and Newson

For making a megahood, the trick is to load the main hood (usually Pleasantview) with the stealth hoods in place, so you get all the bin families there. Then, replace all stealth hoods with empty ones, and fix up your Belladonna Cove, delete the subhood files that are generated, and attach all the hoods to the main one as normal.

If you're entirely missing the E002 families, though, it sounds like the one you got ahold of is empty. Open it up in SimPE to confirm this.

My game hates me.  Yes, they are showing up in SimPE but when I load a fresh game, the three bin families still aren't there!  I pretty much gave up and downloaded them from SimEstates. 

As for the merged hood, I did it exactly as you described. The only goofy things I noticed upon completion were the mysterious poofing of the AL families, and the storyline that pops up when you first load Pleasantview has the pictures and captions for Desidarata.  I can live with that after all this craziness.

For your patience I give you a cookie and my gratitude.   

That is odd. Huh. Maybe something's wrong with the stealth hood you got?

Either way, the storyline thing doesn't sound too bad, considering all that can go wrong with this game. :p

Also, no problem. :) Hope you enjoy your megahood. *munches cookie*

O...so now still can't merge Belladonna Cove into suburb?

And also, i cant make turtorial neighbourhood to become a suburb, i already add ID number and Catalog Description, name is not tutorial
but I cannot add it in game

You can, but you have to move out all the families living in apartments first, then move them back in after merging (there's an option to move in with the furniture still there, either using testingcheatsenabled or Pescado's apartment hack).

I dont understand? Why we have to do this?
Because the furniture are still invisible after correct the data?
I try to make all data correct, but I cannot see their furniture, but sims can use it
and goto another apartment (for example family B), can see all of their furniture.
But when I use family B, their furniture invisible now!

Um, I don't really understand what you're talking about here.

In order to MERGE BC as a subhood, you have to move all the sims in apartments out to the sim bin before doing so. This is, as far as I understand, because both OFB and NL came before AL and the downtown/shopping district subhoods don't understand the apartment residencies. I mean, they will once you've installed the 'hood, but what you're doing is tricking the game into thinking a main neighbourhood is a subhood template, and at that point there wasn't supposed to be any apartments. So it screws it up somehow, and the families living in apartments will go missing and the apartments they lived in become unplayable, I think.

The stuff about furniture is just how to get the furniture back when you move them in again afterwards.

I already fix the problem of the missing families in apartment
they are playable, just their apartment furniture become invisible when I play it,
sims can use it, but you cant click it and see it

you can see the furniture of other family if you visit them
but when you play that family, the furniture also become invisible

so now i am trying to fix this problem
just this problem left now

Ah. Sorry, no idea how to help you there. Try moving them out and back in - otherwise, I got nothing.

sigh...I cant not locate where can I edit

I only found the reason why these happened
Although i always edit the apartment lot and family info. to tell the game, this apartmentsublot is belong to that family
Yes...they are in the sublot when game start, but I found they havn't rent it yet!
If they rent the apartment after your enter the lot, all invisible furniture will be gone!
but if you order a sims go out from this lot to load a public lot and then return and rent it
the problem is sorted

but family money is reduced and all action are recorded
But I dont want to do everything on the raw save of the family...

OK...this might be futile but I just bought a brand spankin' new computer with Windows 7 installed.  I want to transfer my Sims 2 setup (i.e., all my merged neighborhood) over but I've noticed Windows 7 has a different file structure than XP so I'm wondering if there's anything I need to alter or can I just move the files and folders I have on my old box directly over?

If you don't have Windows 7 I guess the main difference is there are no "Documents and Settings" folder and I have 3 "Program Files" folders on my machine although the Electronic Arts folders are only in one of these thankfully so that makes it alittle simpler.

See, I figured the best way to go was to clean install my base game and expansions first and then afterwards determine whether I could then just move the merged files and folders over and overwrite the files and folders set up on the new computer?

You will have to reinstall the game itself, but you should be able to copy the save files to the analogous location. Where that is, I do not know.

Yes, this is what I did and of course it isn't working.  It probably is a moot point to try and resurrect the game at this point what with Sims 3 out now but it would be nice.
Even though I've copied my saved files back over into my new system it doesn't seem tlo be "reading" the merged Neighborhoods file so I'm seeing the default neighborhoods screen (the box where you pick where you want to play like Pleasantview, Veronaville, Strangetown, etc.)

I see no Downtown district at all.  In my original setup I had Pleasantview as my main neighborhood and Strangetown, Veronaville, the default Downtown and the Seasons neighborhood as my Downtown districts.

Oddly when I open Pleasantview I see the original families again but if I open up any of the later neighborhoods like the one from FreeTime I see the families as I had most recently played them.

Oh, and I get some kind of error message from Windows 7 about the base game (about a compatibility error) so maybe that has something to do with why it isn't reading the files correctly?

thanks Microsoft.  :-P

This tutorial is now obsolete.

We have a much simpler method for creating megahoods by converting your neighborhoods to subhoods and then using the standard in-game method for attaching subhoods.

Tarlia has already done a lot of the work for you by cleaning, fixing, and converting all of the Maxis neighborhoods to subhoods.  You can download them here:
http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/63030.html

If you have custom neighborhoods which you want to convert to subhoods, here's the tutorial:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=502306

Once you have the subhoods installed, just run your game and attach the subhoods that you want.

Hi
i triesd to do this by myself but i failed to the step 4.
So i decide to stop here. I deleted everithi,g i'v done but now i've a problem.
Zarbville does't appear correctly. When i want to load it i've a error message, the games ended and i saw that create a Neighborhoods D001.
Anyone could help me to fixe this please?

This does not work with the free version released by EA a few years ago :)