I haz an idea for higher landings...

[Joselle]

Okay, so, I was thinking the other day of how to work around this problem, and so I present what I thought of, to see if y'all would think it would work or not

Would it be even remotely possible to take a column and shrink it to be the height wanted/needed for a higher/lower landing, and still have it be able to hold a walkable tile?

[plasticbox]

Floors are continuous planes in TS2, and every point in a plane can only be at one height at a time. Think of it as sheets of paper – you can bend them, and with some trickery (see the "no-slope basements" sticky) you can make them intersect each other, but you cannot cut holes in them.

You may or may not be able to constuct a column that supports flooring a different height, but all that would acheive would be to pull/push the existing floor higher or lower, just like you can with the cfe cheat. So the end result would be exactly the same as with normal splitlevel stairs, sloped walls and all that.

[Joselle]

well yes, but I was also thinking that this would be good for using instead of having to mess with different wall heights just to create a higher landing.

[Joselle]

First of all, thank you to plasticbox for being so kind and replying to my earlier post; however, I now realize I wasn't being clear as to what I was proposing, so here we go again!

Okay, I was thinking it would be a good idea to use a column to create higher or lower landings. While the cfe cheat is wonderful, the main problem is that when you put the walls down the walls of the landing go down, too, something no one really likes. However, if we could take a column and shrink it (or make it taller, too) and still keep the walkable tiles, then we could create the landings we want, without having to create new stages.

Would anyone be willing to work with me on this?

[plasticbox]

There is no need to make more than one thread about this, so I merged them.

Your first post was perfectly clear; however, the levels/floors in TS2 do not work like you think. The "walkable tiles" on top of a column are not some sort of separate level, they're part of the existing levels which cannot be interrupted. I'd recommend you take a look at the existing level-mangling tools (check the profile of Mootilda and the MooTools group in Social Groups) to learn how levels are defined in TS2.

[Joselle]

I know they're not a separate level; that's not what I was asking.

I was asking if it would be possible to shrink the columns and still have them retain their ability to hold walkable tiles, the point being to create something that wouldn't behave like modified walls and wouldn't require the hassle of the cfe cheat

[Mootilda]

It might be possible to shrink the columns and still have them retain their ability to hold walkable tiles. However, this would automatically warp any surrounding walls, exactly like what happens with the CFE cheat. This is because of the way that levels are defined by the game; this is not moddable. Think of it this way: there is no way to place a floor tile so that it touches the middle of a wall. Floor tiles can only be placed at the top or bottom of a wall.

If you wanted to create something which didn't warp the walls, I believe that you would have to create an entire staircase: something which had pseudo-stairs and a pseudo-landing with pseudo-floortiles built in to the mesh, which means that you would not be able to place actual floor tiles on the landing or use different styles of stairs; you would have to supply all of the recolors yourself. As well, you would have to create animations for sims (including various ages of sims and various sizes of pets) to be able to walk up the stairs, turn on the landing, and then walk up the remaining stairs.

This would also mean that the object that you create would define exactly what the entire staircase looked like; people would not be able to change where the landing was or to have the staircase turn in the other direction.

I'm pretty sure that I've seen some staircases made in this way, but I don't have a link.

Another option might be to try to mod the stage foundation, but I don't believe that anyone has tried that, or could tell you how to do it.

[Joselle]

thank you Mootilda, that was the kind of information I needed!

This will definitely take more thought--while a more permanent solution (such as modding the stage) still needs to be done, perhaps a shrunken column could still have merit elsewhere...

anyway, thank you both for taking the time to reply to me

[plasticbox]

Inge has made a bunch of custom U- and L-shaped stairs; I believe she also looked into modding stages a couple of years ago but was not successful with that.

Inge's stuff is available at simlogical.com.