TUTORIAL: Neighborhood Terrain Surgery

[Zilla]

Yes, I'm a sinner that liikes to commit necromancy...

A unawesome question, but I need it comfirmed that Terrain Surgery can be performed on subhoods? Yes?

[jsalemi]

Yes; it can be performed on any hood or subhood.

[cassandra]

Is there a way to get a Sims 2 neighborhood terrain into Sim City 4 so that you can edit it?  Or is it a one-way street?

SimCity is Special like that, You need to put it in the right place so it will be found. This is kinda long, but this is me trying to be clear, Sims have never been logical, ever.

1 ). Take the SC4 file you wish to modify (or mutilate in my case). Rename it something obvious or funny, makes the little bugger much easier to find in a minute.

2 ). Copy that to "My Documents\SimCity 4\Regions\Downloads\"

3 ). Boot up Sim City, select whichever region you want to use. Make sure you know what region you are in. (Sounds funny but it isn't later when you can't find the file.)

4 ). Select one of the smallest "boxes" in the region. That is the smallest sized city.

5 ). In the box that appears asking what you want to do with the city there is a computer with an arrow going into the monitor. Click it.

6 ). A box comes up asking which city you would like to import. It should have several folders with names in a list. Select Downloads.

7 ). Under downloads there should be listed all of the cities in your downloads folder, find the one you renamed earlier. This is where the renaming coming in handy, if you have 50 cities there "greenview" may not stand out. "Vlad's Vampire Ville" has a better chance of being spotted.

8 ). Select OK. It will take a few minutes to import it, you may have to select it again to open it. Can't remember, it's the middle of the night as I am writing this.

9 ). DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCIMSTANCES say yes to "reconcile edges" the game will sometimes do a pop-up box offering to do so. This will make things nice and even with the surrounding cities. The game looks at the landscape on each of the borders finds any places that do not meet up and changes the terrain of the currently selected city to match up all pretty. (This can be useful when making a group of cities that connect.) This process tends to destroy roads, landscapes, families and sometimes causes birth defects.

10 ). Do whatever surgery you like to said city. In SC4 everything is a mirrior image of what it will be in TS2. This is a real PITA, at least for me, once you get everyting built to your liking in SC4, in TS2 it looks wrong. I guess Maxis never made anything that acted quite the way it should (without lots of help from Inge, C&C, JMP, & Quaxi).

[cassandra]

Also if you don't play SC4 much or need more small cities,you can modify the "config" file which dictate how many smalll/large cities are in each region. The more red in the config the more small cities, more green more bigger ones. They are placed inside the region folder, the one inside "London" dictates how the layout of the cites for that region. It's a small BMP take it into paint, paint it red. Now you have all small cities to work with.

[witch]

Now that's useful information. I wanted to create a region with a lot of large cities once and never got a satisfactory one. Cheers for that Cassandra. Modern-day Cassandra brings good news. 

[cassandra]

Now that's useful information. I wanted to create a region with a lot of large cities once and never got a satisfactory one. Cheers for that Cassandra. Modern-day Cassandra brings good news. 

See I'm not gloom and doom, we are on the edge of apocalypse all the time. My sims on the other hand..........

[Mootilda]

Is there a way to get a Sims 2 neighborhood terrain into Sim City 4 so that you can edit it?  Or is it a one-way street?

SimCity is Special like that, You need to put it in the right place so it will be found. This is kinda long, but this is me trying to be clear, Sims have never been logical, ever.

Good information, but I don't believe that it answers the question.  Your answer assumes that the original SC4 file for the neighborhood exists.  Maxis often ships SC4 files which don't actually match the final shipped neighborhood terrains - even the Pleasantview SC4 doesn't match the Pleasantview terrain.  The question is: how can I create an SC4 file from information extracted from a Sims 2 neighborhood package, so that I can edit the SC4 file using SimCity 4?

[cassandra]

Good information, but I don't believe that it answers the question.  Your answer assumes that the original SC4 file for the neighborhood exists.  Maxis often ships SC4 files which don't actually match the final shipped neighborhood terrains - even the Pleasantview SC4 doesn't match the Pleasantview terrain.  The question is: how can I create an SC4 file from information extracted from a Sims 2 neighborhood package, so that I can edit the SC4 file using SimCity 4?

First thing, what do you mean by: "even the Pleasantview SC4 doesn't match the Pleasantview terrain". What are the differences, there are a few things that can be done in TS2 that modify the terrain slightly. They are quite minor, most someone may flatten it a bit.

Second, I don't think that there is anything to extract from the Neighborhood file, it points to what SC4 file to use to create the neighborhood. The SC4 file should come very close to matching, except for things like decorations. Those  are controlled by TS2. If you import a file into SC4, tinker it with a bit, then copy it back into TS2 there will probably be changes in the trees, due to SC4 re-rendering them. Also, if you don't like the way TS2 places trees one time when creating a new neighborhood, try making another one. Since there is a bit of difference between the scale of the games, there is a bit of "artistic interpretation" on TS2's part every time you create a new neighborhood. This should be less than modifying in SC4. Doing one of these is much easier than placing single trees.

I don't know anywhere that another terrain could be hiding.

[Mootilda]

First thing, what do you mean by: "even the Pleasantview SC4 doesn't match the Pleasantview terrain". What are the differences, there are a few things that can be done in TS2 that modify the terrain slightly. They are quite minor, most someone may flatten it a bit.

Second, I don't think that there is anything to extract from the Neighborhood file, it points to what SC4 file to use to create the neighborhood. The SC4 file should come very close to matching, except for things like decorations. Those  are controlled by TS2.

The roads in Pleasantview are in a different location in the SC4 and in the neighborhood package.  Life Stories doesn't even have the SC4 file for one of the neighborhoods.  And Castaway Stories doesn't include any SC4 files at all.  I think that there are other examples, but I can't remember them at the moment...

Anyway, I thought that I'd put the question out, in case anyone has any ideas of how to extract the terrain from the Sims 2 package and create an SC4 file for editing.

[cassandra]

Now I am detirmed to figure this out. If EA is using some other way to creat Neighborhoods, or edit them, I want it.

1). For Castaway Stories, EA used some other method to create the "hood," if you can call it that, it did not appear to have any roads.

2). For Pet Stories was there more than four neighborhoods? Four were posted on-line extracted from the game. Not so in Life Stories? Why would EA do it different, oh never mind......

3). For Pleasentview would you mid posting a few pictures? I can't seem to get my brain around this. If I can comprehend this maybe we can find a fix, or figure out wth EA was smoking. Btw, in SC4, everything always looks screwy since the scale is different, and backwards.

[Mootilda]

Now I am detirmed to figure this out. If EA is using some other way to creat Neighborhoods, or edit them, I want it.

Me too.  I wish that they'd give us all of their internal sim / lot / neighborhood / etc. package creation tools...

1). For Castaway Stories, EA used some other method to create the "hood," if you can call it that, it did not appear to have any roads.

You can manually place a lot anywhere in a neighborhood by just setting its Top, Left, and Z values in the Lot Description.  A lot doesn't have to be next to a road.  I've added that feature to a new (unreleased) version of the LotExpander.  I think that the Castaway Stories neighborhoods are just standard neighborhoods where the lots were placed manually; it's easy to create a roadless neighborhood in SimCity 4.

Of course, the lots are all roadless as well, but that's easy - just set the U10 value to 0.  Now that people can walk to community lots, roadless neighborhoods might even work in the Sims 2.  This might be an interesting experiment...  I wonder whether kids would be able to walk to school?  I wonder whether the maid / repairperson / gardener can walk to your sim's house?

2). For Pet Stories was there more than four neighborhoods? Four were posted on-line extracted from the game. Not so in Life Stories? Why would EA do it different, oh never mind......

I'm afraid that it's been a while so my memory is a bit hazy, but when I was porting the Life Stories and Pet Stories neighborhoods to Sims 2, I remember that I was frustrated and amused when I realized that the shipped SC4 files didn't actually match the shipped neighborhoods.  In Castaway Stories, they didn't even bother to ship SC4s.

3). For Pleasentview would you mid posting a few pictures? I can't seem to get my brain around this. If I can comprehend this maybe we can find a fix, or figure out wth EA was smoking. Btw, in SC4, everything always looks screwy since the scale is different, and backwards.

I'll see whether I kept my experiments with this.  If not, I'll just import the shipped Pleasantview.SC4 into the existing Pleasantview neighborhood package.  It will just take me some time.

I suppose what I really need is to find someone who knows something about the SimCity 4 package file formats.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could just export the Neighborhood Terrain / Geometry from Sims 2 and import into an existing small city SC4 and everything would come out right?

[cassandra]

I suppose what I really need is to find someone who knows something about the SimCity 4 package file formats.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could just export the Neighborhood Terrain / Geometry from Sims 2 and import into an existing small city SC4 and everything would come out right?

I know a bit, the largest problem in the rendering. Your city will not look anywhere near the same as it does in TS2. This causes some problems, it is really difficult for me (maybe not someone like sleepycat who is a wizard with it...) to change things in SC4 to the way I want them to be in TS2. I think this may be some of the reason that the roads and other landmarks of the city look "off" to you. Changing the way TS2 and SC4 interpret files, that is nearly impossible. SC4 forums have been trying for years, no dice.

[Mootilda]

OK, here's what I did.  Regenerate a brand new Pleasantview (never touched):



Create a new neighborhood using the shipped Pleasantview SC4 file.  Use the instructions in this thread to replace the Pleasantview neighborhood terrain with the one generated from the SC4 file.  Otherwise the terrain is not touched.  In particular, the SC4 file is not edited using SimCity 4 - this is the shipped file:



Both pictures of the Pleasantview neighborhood are taken from within Sims 2 Deluxe.  I disabled neighborhood drift, so they should be identical positions.  As you can see, the roads are not in the expected locations.  Also, note the additional road near 10 Oak.

If it's helpful, I can do similar comparisons for other neighborhoods.  I know that the Strangetown SC4 is basically correct, and that the Stories SC4 files tend to be wrong.

One other thing: I have been doing this replacement of terrain for some time, as a way of adding roads to an existing terrain, without knowing about this thread.  However, I usually just replace the Neighborhood Terrain and Neighborhood Terrain Geometry.  I did all four mentioned above this time, just to ensure that my technique wasn't at fault.  Can anyone explain why the other two exports are required?

[cassandra]

It appears that it is almost perfectly flipped, but the proportions are off. Sections of road seem to have wandered from their original positions? That is really weird. With a few more pictures, I could certainly make a new hood... Is their water anywhere on the original pleasantview template (the neighborhood that came installed)?

It's officia,l EA programmers and testers take breaks to smoke crack... Hey, it explains the screwy code! 

[Mootilda]

It appears that it is almost perfectly flipped, but the proportions are off. Sections of road seem to have wandered from their original positions? That is really weird. With a few more pictures, I could certainly make a new hood... Is their water anywhere on the original pleasantview template (the neighborhood that came installed)?

The water and hills are exactly where they should be, so nothing is flipped.  You can see the shadow from the hill behind the Lothario house is in exactly the same place (with respect to the houses).  It's just the roads which are in the wrong place.  My assumption is that EA shipped an SC4 file which was not actually used to generate the Pleasantview neighborhood and which has the roads in the wrong place.

Let me try to get you a larger picture which shows the water and hills.  I may not get to this right away because someone just reported a bug in the LotExpander (always my highest priority)... if you want to try replacing the terrain yourself, you'll see what I'm talking about.

[Zazazu]

Let me try to get you a larger picture which shows the water and hills.  I may not get to this right away because someone just reported a bug in the LotExpander (always my highest priority)... if you want to try replacing the terrain yourself, you'll see what I'm talking about.

FYI, I got way too reliant on the Lot Expander. I started always doing my builds on a gridded 5x5 I had saved and then shrinking afterwards. I now can't shrink a lot that should be a 3x3 down since I forgot that -duh- it wouldn't work with FreeTime until there was an update! So now the lot is sitting there, the edges camouflaged by a bunch of trees.

[J. M. Pescado]

One other thing: I have been doing this replacement of terrain for some time, as a way of adding roads to an existing terrain, without knowing about this thread.  However, I usually just replace the Neighborhood Terrain and Neighborhood Terrain Geometry.  I did all four mentioned above this time, just to ensure that my technique wasn't at fault.  Can anyone explain why the other two exports are required?

It's possible that they aren't, and those are the pieces for things like your neighborhood trees and accessories. Obviously, if you're doing a TRUE terrain surgery, as opposed to airbrushing, failure to replace them would result in the props of your old neighborhood ending up in the ocean, levitating, or embedded partially or entirely inside hills.

[Mootilda]

It appears that it is almost perfectly flipped, but the proportions are off. Sections of road seem to have wandered from their original positions? That is really weird. With a few more pictures, I could certainly make a new hood... Is their water anywhere on the original pleasantview template (the neighborhood that came installed)?

I'm hoping that these new pictures will make things more obvious:

Original Pleasantview neighborhood as shipped:


Pleasantview terrain replaced with shipped SC4 file:


It's clear that the terrain is identical between the two pictures, but the roads are different.  Which seems to indicate that the shipped Pleasantview.SC4 file was not used to generate the shipped neighborhood terrain.  Note that I just changed NHTG (neighborhood terrain geometry) and NHTR (neighborhood terrain with reload) this time.

Because EA ships so many of the neighborhoods with incorrect or missing SC4 files, it would be really nice to figure out how to create or modify an SC4 file from the information in the neighborhood package.

[Sleepycat]

I noticed a long time ago that Pleasantview and the pleasantview terrain were different, pissed me off at the time because I had no way to fix it back then.

since you have both pictures, you can fix it in SC4, just flip both pictures in your graphics program to use as a guide.

[Kralore]

The pleasantview.sc4 terrain that came with sims 2 is in fact the original terrain for Riverside.  That is the neighborhood that Maxis created during development of the Sms 2 base game.  It's the neighborhood you see in the early development videos and trailers for the game.

Some references 

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thesims2/images.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=tabs&tag=tabs%3Bimages&page=21
Near the bottom you will see early screenshots of the Riverside neighborhood, dated December 2003.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thesims2/media.html?mode=trailers&page=1
Also from Gamespot. If you watch "The Sims 2 Official Trailer 6" you will see a flyby of the original Riverside. Also dated December 2003.

http://www.freewebs.com/thsms204/index.htm
This person has done a recreation of the original Riverside neighborhood. In the Riverside Information section at this site, he mentions he was surprised to discover that the hood template needed for Riverside was the Pleasantview template included with the game.

[Kyna]

http://www.freewebs.com/thsms204/index.htm
This person has done a recreation of the original Riverside neighborhood. In the Riverside Information section at this site, he mentions he was surprised to discover that the hood template needed for Riverside was the Pleasantview template included with the game.

I downloaded this neighbourhood earlier today, and I discovered that one of the playable teens knows a whole bunch of teens that don't exist in the neighbourhood - they are not playables, not in the townie family, not in the NPC family, not in the default family, and not in the hobby instructors' family.  They simply don't exist.  The playable teen is also best friends & in love with 2 of these non-existent teens.  My guess is that the creator set up the family's story in another 'hood, packaged the family & lot, and then installed the package in Riverside (including installing the ghost files of these extra sims) - which is an excellent way to corrupt a neighbourhood.  Now I have to decide whether I like the neighbourhood enough to clean these files out, or whether it's going straight to the recycle bin.

[Kralore]

I downloaded it myself, but haven't had the time to fully check it out yet.  Hopefully its not too much work to repair. It does look like it could be an interesting neigborhood to play.

[Mootilda]

I downloaded it myself, but haven't had the time to fully check it out yet.  Hopefully its not too much work to repair. It does look like it could be an interesting neigborhood to play.

Once you repair it, perhaps you could let the creator know what you did.  It would be nice to get a copy of the fixed version.

[Kyna]

I downloaded it myself, but haven't had the time to fully check it out yet.  Hopefully its not too much work to repair. It does look like it could be an interesting neigborhood to play.

Kralore, further investigation in SimPE shows that these teens are all seem to have been part of some family called Partygoers (although they are now in the default family).  The default family also has copies of two in the families that exist in the game with slightly different names & appearances, which are probably earlier attempts to make them.  So my guess now is that the creator deleted these families from the sim bin.

I've decided to delete the neighbourhood from my game rather than fix it, as my skills at neighbourhood repair aren't particularly awesome.

[Mootilda]

Back to the topic of extracting the terrain from the Sims 2 and getting it into an SC4 file so that the roads can be edited using SimCity 4.

I found some information about the file structure of the SC4 file and it's pretty obvious that the terrain is stored quite differently from the Sims 2 neighborhood terrain geometry.  It might be possible to write a tool to convert from the Sims 2 format to the SC4 format; however, it may be easier to just write a tool to add roads to an existing neighborhood.

I suppose that the third alternative is to try to recreate the SC4 file from scratch.  In the case of Pleasantview, that should be relatively easy, since the terrain in the Pleasantview.SC4 file is correct, even if the roads are wrong.  However, it would be much more difficult for something like Castaway Stories, which ships no SC4 file at all.