Create-A-World Tips, Tricks, and Annoyances

[Inge]

Nanacake, lockable doors came in with WA, just like I predicted.

[robindw]

Thanks Pescado - as a tip to anyone else with this problem, fiddle with anything within sight range of the artifact. The shoreline causing the problem was further down the triangle than is visible. Turn on the "View wireframe" option and trace the triangle to its base, then just mess with sloping, flattening, etc. until the artifact disappears. It was very finicky and came down to less than 5 squares that needed adjustment. There were no visible glitches, so it's trial and error to locate the offending land mass.

[Lion]

I seem to remember sims can now fish from a deck. But do they?


Fishing from land.


Can't fish from deck.

And they took away the deck on stilts? Why? 

[nanacake]

Is the water inside of the lot where the deck resides? I've had fish successfully from the foundation before.

[Lion]

No, it's the "body of water" of the world. The lot is "drawn" into the ocean.

HEADS UP

The "Working Bulletin Board" from MTS numericalizes trees's names in World Tool:

[Zazazu]

Does anyone have a terrain paint they've been using to mimic sidewalk? I'm trying to work on this new world, but having issues with blending certain areas.

[Zazazu]

Sorry, double post due to it being two days and having something majorly useful.

My not-so-secret Sims community builder crush, Flabaliki, has released a two-part tutorial for CAW. It has some useful tricks not mentioned here, such as changing time of day in order to better see your sculpting. The first section is here:

http://thesimsupply.com/thread-18-create-a-world.html

You can get to the second from there.

[Lion]

such as changing time of day in order to better see your sculpting.

That's a good tip.

I have yet to find a way to make good-looking mountains like those in the EAxis height maps.

[dragonarts]

I've been trying to use a custom height map for a world, and it's squishing it to half dimensions one way and duplicating it. That is not what I had in mind. Does Anyone know what I'm doing wrong, and how I can fix it?

[LauraW]

Dragonarts, what is the highest altitude on your height map? If it is over 300, it will be reduced in size. When you open the height map, it will ask you to choose a height in CAW and the highest is 300 so your height map will be scaled to whatever number you choose for the CAW map.  I had the same issue when importing but once I starting selecting 300, it was much higher. Now..I haven't tried to import a height map with a low altitude, but if you do CAW might scale it depending on what number you choose for maximum height. I would try the different scales in CAW to see which one looks good. 

[dragonarts]

It's not the height, LauraW, it's the  forward to rear dimension on the photo. The height on that is actually set to 300, because I wasn't sure how much room it needed. If you look at the picture, you'll see that the terrain is repeated. It's also distorted from the original. It's as if my 256 x 256 map is being read as 256 x 128.

It doesn't seem to matter how I import the map into CAW. I've tried saving it to the desktop, and selecting it when I create the new world. I've tried saving it directly into the Heightmaps folder, and I've tried creating the world with a flat map and then importing the terrain map via the button in the Terrain tab. If it makes a difference, I use the Gimp.

[Goggalor]

You need to convert your map to 16-bit grayscale, which GIMP currently doesn't support. In this thread Misty_2004 found a program to convert them with.

I'm pretty sure that ImageMagick is also capable of converting them, but it has a command-line interface and may take som getting used to.

[dragonarts]

Thank you, Goggalor. It figures it would be something like that. I have Photoshop Elements. I think I'll just check and see if that will do the job for me before I download yet another Image program.

ETA: Elements says, "16-bit Grayscale

A high-bit image mode that can contain thousands of shades of gray. Photoshop Elements supports only 8-bit grayscale, an image mode that can contain hundreds of shades of gray."

So, off to download RawTherapee I go. Thanks for the info.

[Goggalor]

For people with lag in the "edit in game" function:

I noticed it was only lagging while browsing categories with non-store launcher content, so I renamed the DCCache folder before opening world tool to temporarily disable the dbc files. This completely got rid of the lag for me. (I had copies of the dbc files both in mods/packages and DCCache since this was the only way to have both kinds of content available. for god knows whatever stupid reason.)

[LauraW]

It's not the height, LauraW, it's the  forward to rear dimension on the photo. The height on that is actually set to 300, because I wasn't sure how much room it needed. If you look at the picture, you'll see that the terrain is repeated. It's also distorted from the original. It's as if my 256 x 256 map is being read as 256 x 128.

Ack! You are right. I didn't notice the repeated pattern..Not sure how I missed it since it is so obvious. Glad you figured it out.

[Process Denied]

I seem to remember sims can now fish from a deck. But do they?


Fishing from land.


Can't fish from deck.

And they took away the deck on stilts? Why?  

My Sims fish from their deck.  It may have to do with where the fish are located.  The fish look like they are too close to the deck.
Edited to answer Lion's question below.  Yes, I used spawners.

[Lion]

Actually I didn't put in any fish spawner.  They can just fish if it's a body of water in the world. Do you have lake or pond (created by the water tool) inside your lot?

[Goggalor]

I had the same results as Lion. Could only fish from a deck in ponds and not in the world water. Also found that my sim wouldn't fish in the world water inside the lot boundaries even from the ground, the action would just drop. It was fine to stand on the lot ground and fish in the ocean outside it.

ETA: This happened both with spawners placed in the world and in the lot with debugmode.

[Alwayswatching]

Does anyone else get my problem, where the brush for sculpting/painting randomly disappears and I basically have to wait until I'm allowed to continue?

[Lion]

Yes, especially if the camera is off the world. If the camera is absolutely in the world, then for me, it's just slow going, stuck and go. Maybe it's my machine.

[Alwayswatching]

Another problem. I wanted to create a small mainland town surrounded by mountains with some islands in the bay. Unfortunately, no matter how mush I use the No-Camera-Routing tool and raise the mountains, I can't seem to make it impossible to see over the mountains to the infinite see behind it.

This picture is a little out of date;

[tea_and_blues]

I think you'll need to use a larger map with much taller mountains. That map looks small or tiny, am I right? Use medium or large, and route a lot of the terrain inaccessible. With work, that should do it.

[Inge]

Well you need to use the distant terrain and the largest map.  The medium and small terrains are really only good for islands.

[Alwayswatching]

Ugh. That's what I was afraid of.

I already started remaking the neighborhood on a bigger terrain, and after sculpting the coastlines I found out the whole thing was facing the wrong direction. D:

[J. M. Pescado]

Isn't the Distant Terrain tailored specifically to fit only Sunset, though?