I ran into trouble with the connecting stairs while following the real swimmable lake tutorial, and rather than continue to clutter the tutorial, I decided to start a new thread and move the discussion.

Link to the original tutorial thread: http://www.modthesms2.com/showthrea...=1&page=1&pp=30

Initial post:


Two relevant responses:






And last, the explanation of what I've tried so far (with pictures):

I tried those things and it didn't seem to help- I don't know why I'm having trouble with this lot, the other one seemed to work alright... So, here is what I did for 3 hours.

Screenshots:

1) This is what I tried first- I kept raising the upper platform, hoping that I could find the correct height. In this picture it's leveled at 10 clicks above the diving board, but it was much higher before. I tried leveling the "invisible" foundation underneath, but it wasn't really possible to have nothing deformed... It worked once, when the end of the platform and the stairs were over land, but the lake was lowered. Here I think the error message says: under/lower stair section can't be placed.



2) I wanted a lake house in the corner, so I took patul's advice and measured off the number of clicks it was from the ground against the height of a wall(about 11), and built a platform of the same height. I can use the stairs on the ramp without changing the shape, so I thought it would work for the same distance.


I deleted the swimming area in between and leveling the spaces in the middle. I tried about 4 different heights for the platform, stretching the stairs from different distances and from floor tiles instead of foundation. No Luck.

3)Here you can see some stairs, and why I thought it would work. The message says (I think) "under-stair portion cannot be straightened."


4) I tried to straighten it and I tried moving tiles around. I deleted the stair just in case. You can see how there is no problem connecting to the lake.

Here it says "can't be placed on a wall"-WTF?

5)This shows how I tried different heights for the house. Oh well, it made sense at the time.


6)Same error message again. This time it looked like I almost had it working, but NO.

Thats very strange about the invisible walls in the column deck. If they are always there, why are they a problem now, and not otherwise? How does that work, that it would conflict with the invisible wall?

Ellatrue,

My best guess at the moment is you just can't build the connecting/modular stairs right from a lower level to a higher level even the graphical position of a lower level is higher than that of the higher level. What appeared to me in part 4 is probably that the staire was actually passing through the deck to the ground (just because the ground is the only lower level from the house deck side while the diving deck is actually a level higher than the house side) to try to form the stair, but it's hitting at the invisible wall of the column deck. That's probably why you got that "kann nicht auf Waenden platziert werden" error message. By the way, was it like "can not on walls placed be"? or I've missed or mistaken something?

It's probably "can not be placed against walls," but it's been a few months since I played with the english version, so I don't remember the exact wording.

I will try your suggestions when I get a chance- I just wish I could figure out why the first thing isn't working! It seemed so simple! Perhaps a bug in the no-ep version of the game? I haven't patched it yet...

For the first problem- can it sometimes be impossible to flatten the grid? For that matter, why doesn't the grid seem to extend any further past the edge of the platform? normally I think it is a sign that it is too close to another foundation or something of the wrong height, but what does it mean when it is next to the ground?