How many square feet is a grid?

[sleazy]

Just curious to know. On The Sims 1 it showed how big a house was and I'm bored and measuring houses.
Just got finished watching HGTV. lol

[JennyJenny]

 I believe they are between 3 and 4 square feet.

[wes_h]

Uh, how many square feet in one square meter?
The tiles are one meter on a side.

[ScoobyDoo]

1' = 0.3048 meter

[notovny]

I believe they are between 3 and 4 square feet.

A square that's 3 square feet in area has sides measuring just over  1.73 feet.

When building from floor plans, I've  typically gone with the tiles being three feet on a side (9 square feet in area() I 've seen people build at a scale of 2-foot squares (4 square feet in area.)  to avoid routing problems, but I've always felt that made the houses enourmous.

[Theo]

Sooner or later you will stop using those obsolete units. Resistance is futile. You will be metricated.

[Hecubus]

Hey, President Carter tried. I recall spending most of the late 70s diligently larning metric, because we were absolutely planning to join the rest of the world. Alas, bureaucracy will out, and all that's left are two-liter bottles of Coke. Oh yeah, and science uses metrics.


As far as the grid size goes, I tend to equate one grid to 9 square feet (or 1 square meter when I'm feeling British). It tends to provide sufficient space for movement, and as Notovny pointed out, it keeps buildings from getting too large. The only drawback, as near as I can tell, is that sims don't like one-tile-wide hallways. Too...crowded, perhaps?

[dizzy]

From what I recall, in Sims 1 each grid is 4' x 4'. I think that's fairly standard for most architectural grids.

[Khan of Wyrms]

Hey, President Carter tried.

It was Ford who tried.  Carter did not take office until 1977.

[Theo]

Metric is only easier to learn mainly because of the powers of ten. The main problem with acceptance comes from tradition: people are still accustomed to the old quantities they use everyday. For example, people in the UK are still nostalgic about their pints of beer, because a half-litre jug will give them less beer per serving.

By the way, here's how a one-tile-widenarrow street looks like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_Street,_Exeter 

[sleazy]

ooh thanks everyone

[Zazazu]

I believe they are between 3 and 4 square feet.

A square that's 3 square feet in area has sides measuring just over  1.73 feet.

When building from floor plans, I've  typically gone with the tiles being three feet on a side (9 square feet in area() I 've seen people build at a scale of 2-foot squares (4 square feet in area.)  to avoid routing problems, but I've always felt that made the houses enourmous.

I quit building from floor plans in the traditional sense. I just build the outside, using window placement as a guide. Kind of hard to explain, but easy to eye-ball. This window looks like a 2-tile window, the spaces here look about the size of a 1-tile, etc. Then I compute total tiles on each outer side and pick the closest lot size. The inside I just do how it makes sense to me...I find that the way the sim world does size ends in enormous homes or tiny unusable rooms, no happy medium. Plus, most of the homes I love from floorplans contain too many bedrooms/bathrooms/bonus rooms. I prefer 2-3 beds, 2- 2 1/2 baths. Although my current legacy family is in a 5 bed, 5 bath colonial. Designed from scratch as part of a set of 4 1-space-from-edge homes specifically to house larger families...'cause it's so time for Free Love to hit Queen's Cove.

[Hecubus]

Hey, President Carter tried.

It was Ford who tried.  Carter did not take office until 1977.

My mistake. Now that I actually read the article I linked <smirk> I see that the Metric Board was established in the Ford administration. I guess I just associate Carter with having pushed it during his administration.

[wes_h]

Tiles are one meter on a side, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

On metrification, almost every metric equivalent to the common measurements is bigger. A meter is longer than a yard. A liter has more volume than a quart. A half-kilo is still heavier than a pound. Every US product that I know of carries the size expressed as common and metric both.

But the size units are in round common units, not even metric ones. With perhaps the exception of medicines (in milligrams) and the previously mentioned 2-liter soda bottles, manufacturers would have to commit to the expense of new packaging and then would have to raise prices because there would be more product using an even metric approximate-equivalent package.

I don't know of any marketing people that would like to be the first to unilaterally raise their product price. The soda size change happened as a result of a (successful) promotion to increase market share by giving a little more soda for the same money.

From my rememberance of when the 2 and 3 liter soda bottles began to appear, I don't think anyone would have trouble adjusting to the new size. I just think that too many people would not look at the size or price per unit, just whoever had the larger price sticker would have a sales disadvantage.

[dizzy]

In metric, I tend to think of tiles as 121.92 cm x 121.92 cm. 

[Inge]

Tiles are either 3ft or 1meter - it's hard to tell which.  They are definitely not 4ft or Sims beds would be 10ft long and ceilings would be 12ft high.   A sim lying on the floor is 2 tiles long.

[dizzy]

Well, let's test that. I think they're 4x4.



What do you think? It's not unreasonable for a door to be 8.5 feet (in fact, I seem to recall that's standard).

EDIT: Then again, maybe doors are just a lot smaller than they should be:

[eevilcat]

I went through all this for writing my curtain creation guide on MTS2. Floor tiles are 1 metre square and walls are 3 metres high. If you want to measure stuff in game for the purpose of creating content etc then these will help: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=125750

Some day I will get round to updating the guide with all the window measurements from Pets onwards.

[Inge]

No way are 8ft 5in doors standard!!! Most modern ceilings are not even that high. Dizzy, just whereabouts in the world do you live?

[Hecubus]

Standard doors (in the US) are 6'8" or 2.03 meters high - and 3' or .92 meters wide. It is reasonable, then, to assume Sims ceilings are 8 feet high - and a grid one meter (39.3 inches) wide.

(By the way - I could be wrong, but the door you showed in the example is not a standard height. I believe it's a bit shorter than the justa door, which is the standard size.)

[Inge]

Standard doors (in the US) are 6'8" or 2.03 meters high - and 3' or .92 meters wide.

Sounds like our standard UK doors then.  I look forward to googling for info about Dizzy's interesting country, when he tells us where he lives

[dizzy]

Sorry, you're right. It's 6'8". Of course, this is information I haven't used in over 20 years. 

[nil]

a grid is a x^2 variable, and its size varies dependent on the monitor size one uses and the the max zoom power..

[wes_h]

I base my belief on the fact that the tiles are 1.0 mesh units on a side. My previous estimations of sims height, wall height and so on all point to a meter being the proper equivalent. A yard is close, but except for maybe fabric and carpet, no one uses yards as a regular measurement. So I believe the default mesh scale of 1.0 units/meter is what was used. Something had to be standard, because there is no way a whole fleet of artists got everything the proper relative size by comparing each other's work and eyeballing it.

[nil]

just some old infos

http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=466336&postcount=3
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=466838&postcount=5
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=499973&postcount=8
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=699131&postcount=17
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=56704
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=156955