Mod The Sims - Some Concerns about Making a World

Marky Boy

13th Apr 2012, 12:03 AM

Hey guys! I am planning to make a world with CAW, and I already know the theme that I want - A British-style town or village, located in the South of England.

However, I have some concerns with doing this:
- Is it possible to get sims to drive on the left hand side of the road?
- If I make custom road signs not accessible in the actual game, specific to this world, do I still have to upload them separately if I want to upload this world to MTS?

And my major concerns:
- Which distant terrain is the most suitable for this? I'm leaning towards the Riverview one.
- Is there a way to sculpt realistic terrain in Photoshop (I'm talking about heightmaps, etc.)?
- Assuming there is a way, how can I make a heightmap that matches with the distant terrain?

I know that it takes a lot of effort and a lot of work... If I start now, I'd have a timescale of 6 months to get this finished ;)

I gladly appreciate any answers. Thank you :giggler:

simsample

13th Apr 2012, 01:24 AM

- Is it possible to get sims to drive on the left hand side of the road?
That would take some serious modding, no-one has done that yet to my knowledge.

- If I make custom road signs not accessible in the actual game, specific to this world, do I still have to upload them separately if I want to upload this world to MTS?
If you make completely new signs, yes. But not if you make them as recolours. Any texture in a world can be overridden (default replacement) with another texture. So in a world I made, I did custom billboard textures, custom litter bins, custom rabbitholes etc. All of these textures were imported directly to the world file itself, so that the user did not need to download or install anything but the world.

Details of this can be found here:
http://ts3cc.forumotion.ca/t337-recoloring-meta-data-imagestrees-plants-objects-rabbitholes
http://ts3cc.forumotion.ca/t282-recolouring-rabbitholes-by-piddlesam

You can download some I did for my world to see them here:
http://www.modthesims.info/d/464250
(scroll to the bottom, to where it says 'Resources for Jericho')

There are several overrides available in our resources section, including moon overrides and recolours for trees:
http://www.modthesims.info/forumdisplay.php?f=625

So you could quite easily make recolours of the existing road signs for your world.

- Which distant terrain is the most suitable for this? I'm leaning towards the Riverview one.
The distant terrains can be recoloured in the same way as the road signs. Don't forget that if you use the Riverview DT it will have to also be downloaded by the people who play your world.

- Is there a way to sculpt realistic terrain in Photoshop (I'm talking about heightmaps, etc.)?
Yes- you can make a height map from real world DEM data:
http://ts3cc.forumotion.ca/t275-tutorial-how-to-create-a-world-using-real-world-height-data-by-napalm_vfr
Or we have many terrain sculpting tutorials here:
http://www.modthesims.info/fd.php?f=619&threadcategory=Create+A+World

- Assuming there is a way, how can I make a heightmap that matches with the distant terrain?
Best way is to just choose the DT that best matches your world shape and tweak the terrain to match, unless you want to try making a custom DT. You would need to learn to mesh to do that. There is a thread about this in the tutorials section (linked previously). Other options are to download a custom DT, such as this one:
http://tjstreaksnotsonaughtysims.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/basic-large-flat-distant-terrain-mk-1.html
Which can be customised by adding other items:
http://tjstreaksnotsonaughtysims.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2010-12-31T23:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2011-11-02T18:50:00-06:00&max-results=50&start=21&by-date=false

Good luck, it sounds interesting! :)