Making a holiday template

[Inge]

I have just made a really good vacation town, which is a mountain zone as I didn't want the locals wearing grass skirts.  It's attached to Pleasantview right now, but I would like to save it so I can attach it to other hoods later.  Any tutorials?

[Inge]

Heh - forget it - no vacation hood to save any more.  That will serve me right for not doing enough backups.

I was experimenting with putting it into a test hood from a template of it I was trying to make.  Because the game didn't like the template version I made, and it wouldn't open it properly in my test hood, it had a hissy and zapped its counterpart in my main hood too!  I have no idea by what mechanism it decides to do that.  It should not even have known it was the same hood.

Moral of the story is don't rely on test hoods to test stuff - make a test windows login ID and a *completely seperate game*

[Inge]

I managed to fix it, and at least that showed me how to reuse the vacation hood with other hoods - but not as a template.

You have to do it as soon as you make the new hood, before you have used any of the same numbers for your lots.
Just copy the N00?_Vacation00?.package and .png into the new hood folder, and then copy the lots over (just the ones from the vacation hood).  You have to edit the filenames to fit the hood they are in.   Then in SimPE open the N00?_Vacation00?.package and edit the IDNO resource to show the correct parent hood, and do the make unique button.

That's all.

[Mootilda]

I'll have to find the link, but Pescado expressed concerns about duplicate GUIDs, even in different neighborhoods.  Seems like that would apply in this case.

[Update:] Here's the conversation:
Topic: Is Cloning a Neighbourhood a VBT?
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,13364.0.html

[Inge]

Yes that makes sense.  But to be honest, since each hood is meant to be a different savedgame, I think it is poor practice of EA to touch the files in another hood at all during a play session in one hood.  Yet there are always several files across the whole hoods folder updated each session.

[Mootilda]

I think it is poor practice of EA to touch the files in another hood at all during a play session in one hood.

I couldn't agree more.  I hate to see such sloppy design / programming.

[SaraMK]

The only way to make a valid template is to use Base Game Starter to create a base game neighborhood, then swap in some stuff from inside the real template, and switch the two templates whenever you want to use your own instead of the Maxis. I do this for my custom Uni. Unfortunately the template has to remain somewhat unfinished, lacking certain functions, sims, lots, and objects, since they aren't available in the base game. It's still better than building one from scratch every time, of course.

[Inge]

So far it's suiting my purposes just dumping the stuff into a new hood by hand and renumbering it.  But Peter pointed out that I could run into problems when I start making lots in the base hood of the new neighborhood, as there is a field holding a value for last lot number, and it might start giving lots the same number as my holiday lots unless I reset that too, to start above the highest lot number of the ones I copied in.

[J. M. Pescado]

as there is a field holding a value for last lot number

Where is this field? I have this suspicion that it serves as the lot-creation analogue to the SCID and the fact that it continually increases is what causes "holes" much like how the SCID will cause "holes" in NID instances if not reset.

[Inge]

He says now he might have been thinking of the last-generated NID field instead.

[lechapeau]

 Would the brains in this thread have any advice for me then please?

I've been putting together a template for BV, it's taken me a few months of work on and off, with me reading anything looking relevant and trying things one by one to get it to ‘act properly'.
Using cwykes tutorial for making a downtown/OfB district, my first attempts gave completely empty lots with no buildings.  Then after I read and tried other things I got the lots to show up, but sims were unable to use the 'walk to' option and were stuck at their hotel. After that and with more fiddling I could later take them from their hotel to a community lot, but these lots were only accessible if I clicked on somewhere I wanted them to visit. I had an empty menu, this didn't bode well for sharing and I wasn't sure how stable it would be.
Eventually I came across a post by SaraMK (I think in answer to Marvin Kosh) referring to her/your Merging Maxis neighborhoods thread, so following the instructions there, I extracted the ID Number of the original T001 and replaced the one in my template with that and it worked perfectly. My only problem was the secret lot needed an error forced on the NPC to make him work, so any secret lot would be a separate sims2packfile.

But my question now is whether this is all still safe to do, meaning I can go ahead with my current project. I'm unsure which part you're saying is wrong, it appears SaraMK you are saying some that I've done might be okay, but on a personal level and not for sharing?
I was also planning on adding a few locals and one or two tourists.
It would be good to know if it's worth continuing, I've extracted the original ID Number and replaced it as I've said, and I've made the UID unique as Inge has said, but I've then renumbered it to T002 as well because I was worried about them being exactly the same. But now it's ‘as well as', and not a replacement for the Maxis ‘hoods, and it can be in a game possibly alongside an original Twikkii (or whichever area was wanted).
Because it's using the same extracted code...is that a bad thing?
 
I have the tutorial; if it's okay and would be at all useful you can have it, but you could probably find everything yourself as I'd think you'd know more than I do anyway! I'm expecting to find I have inadvertently messed up, rather than to have discovered anything useful here! But it's made up with a little bit from my findings, then bits from SaraMK, Zazazu, Argon and anything from anyone else that made sense or looked useful. And it's long, because I need it to make sense to me as I read it back...

[J. M. Pescado]

He says now he might have been thinking of the last-generated NID field instead.

The SCID doesn't cause problems like that, no. Template hoods, when imported into a neighborhood (even EAxis templates, ESPECIALLY EAxis templates), leave a whole bunch of junk in the subhood, though. I've been pondering writing a cleaner-program to automatically erase all the junk entries.

[Inge]

I have looked in the SCID and I can't find data that appears relevant to either the highest generated NID nor the highest generated LotID.  I have no idea where if anywhere they are stored.  Maybe the game checks highest dynamically.

[J. M. Pescado]

The next NID start is in an int16 at the very end of the SCID, 2 bytes. The meaning of the rest of it is unknown, but I can't find anything equivalent to the Sim Creation Index in there. So if your highest NID was 0x21D, SCID should hold an 0x021E, assuming no holes. It is unclear why it is necessary to record this, as if you reset it to 0x0001, it will simply dynamically pick the next open NID, something it SHOULD be doing anyway, rather than leaving holes and wasting limited NIDs.