Absolutely it would be much better visually as well as much easier to use. I don't think the road will flicker when the lot is the right size. Actually if you look carefully under some circumstances the lot edge flickers anyway, it's just that it's such a thin line of flicker it isn't obstrusive. Yes I put the lot in the bin and then could place it as much as I liked.

I really was very careless in my editing and I didn't do all the 2D array stuff at all once I saw how it hurt my eyes to try and edit the hex. Perhaps if I had done every bit according to instructions there would be no flicker at all.

Another problem with overlapping lots is the sims from the current house walk through the next door house walls. They can't do that if the lot is the size of their home only.

Actually, I can't think why EA made it impossible to build walls at the edge in any case.

Lol, Inge
That's really eye-opening...

Now, I'm wondering the largest lot ever 64x64 and the daring size larger than 64!
What willl that be even if it may mess up. :D

I guess the graphical flickerings is due to 2 sets of graphical presentations just happening to compete with each other to get presented on the monitor. If the graphical presentation of one of the overlapping lot can be graphically silenced, probably trying some floor tiles of layers lower than "0" can help hide a side of a connecting lot ...

added some feedbacks... :D

This is really excellent information, Inge. Thanks so much for looking into this.

I'm sorry that it will take a while to actually implement this in the program.

On a separate issue, I have just tried using the expander to try to extend a lot under the sea surface. I started off with a 3x1 lot, created on a steep slope and then placed by the sea so that it dipped the land and became flooded. So far so good. Then I wanted to extend the lot out further to see, with the plan of building a pier.

Unfortunately the instructions to pick up the lot and align it to the road spoilt my plans, since the game did not allow me to put it back down as it was now encroaching onto the sea area.

Is there a way I could have done this and not need to pick the lot up after expanding? Should I have expanded the front instead of the back or something?

oh, just 1 tip for those who still don't know this,

whenever a lot can't be placed back, it may be good to just quit the game and refine the alterations again.


I kinda thought the pick-and-dump action is for lot with updated road side only. I don't know.

I haven't fooled around with beach lots before. However, you shouldn't have to move the lot within the neighborhood to regenerate the road. This is especially true if you don't expand the lot width (that is, the measurement of the lot along the road... also called the lot "frontage"). Note that a lot created like this may not be sharable...

Do you have Bon Voyage? Have you tried using the new beach lots?

Oh yes I have used beach lots, they are great! But I was just using the normal lot with the old method of flooding for this purpose. I chose to expand the back of the lot, but it seemed to grow forwards, meaning it went across the road it had been placed on, and the road was over the road, if you see what I mean. The instructions tell you that you have to pick the lot up and line it up with the road, but obviously you can't do that if you're hoping to have it overlapping the water.

I can't use a beach lot for making a pier because you can't build past where the beach starts. And anyway they are already full length.

lol Inge,

probably forgot about this.
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=250533

May make it optional for users who want more...
Thanks regardless of your decision...

I think that this has to do with the orientation of the lot in the neighborhood. When the LotExpander expands a lot, it has this logic:I haven't really looked at this code and the meaning of the "Orientation" field, but I suspect that this is what's causing your lot to move forward after expansion. I believe that the code is trying to ensure that the lot remains in the correct location, but it's not succeeding in your case. Can you tell me what the "Orientation" of your lot is? SimPE displays the field as Below, Left, Above, or Right... As well, can you tell me the U10 and U11 values for your lot?

I didn't forget about it. I gave it a jolly good go this afternoon, but no amount of move_objectsing or constraining boolprops would let me use build objects within those sacred reserved beach tiles! Was it really a beach lot, or just a lot by the sea?

Yes, I think that the LotExpander should try to expand lots in-place. That is, the road that's in front of the lot should remain in the same place in the neighborhood. The only exception would be if the lot is expanded in front. Then, I'd like to see the LotExpander move the lot back from the road an appropriate amount (that is, unless the user checks "Over the road").

I believe that this was Andi's intention with the code above, but it's clearly not sufficient.

In other words, I think that this is another bug which needs to be fixed. I have added this to the "to do" list.

I have no idea whether this will work, but you might want to give it a try:

First, back up. (I probably don't need to tell you this, but I've seen too many corrupt lots...)

Create a true "Bon Voyage" beach lot.

Run the LotExpander, but don't expand the lot (ie, leave Front, Back, Left and Right as 0 in step 4, then click on Next). You will get a warning message:

"No Value Changed

"You didn't change any of this Lot's Values. So the only effect is unlocking all tiles of the lot. Tiles will only remain unlocked until you replace the lot the next time. Is this your intention?"

Click on the "Yes" button. The LotExpander will unlock all of the tiles on the lot and you should get a final screen to that effect.

Now, try adding your pier.

I suppose that it couldn't hurt to try expanding the lot at the front, rather than at the back... it might be a temporary workaround to the bug which is causing your lot to move "forward" in the neighborhood.

Of course, the correct solution is for me to find and fix this bug, so that there is no requirement for you to move the lot at all.

U10=2
U11=1
Orientation=Above

The problem I can predict with growing the lot from the front is that the lot is road-height at the front. Then it will expand backwards with most of the new part at road height. When I try to sink it to be under the sea, there will be a ridge at both sides. The idea of having the back already beneath sea level and expanding the back was supposed to be that all the newly grown part will be naturally already beneath sea level.

A similar problem would arise from using a beach lot for a pier. When you place a beach lot, it pushes out the land until nearly the bottom of the lot. If you try to dig out afterwards you get the ridges.

I would love to see if we can make the lots go out to sea even further than the largest lot supplied in the game - real piers can be very long. The lot does not have to be very wide, so the total size need not be too large.

Niol,

I looked at your screenshots, but wasn't quite sure how to interpret them.

https://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/...-W2H3L48T78.jpg
The picture above obviously shows how the U11 value affects the rotation of the lot within the lot's allocated space in the neighborhood. I assume that you used the "rotate a lot" technique, but didn't move the lot in the neighborhood to "snap" it to the road. Is there anything else that we should be getting from this picture?

https://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/...976_2-sided.jpg
The picture above looks like a 1x1 lot (really 1x3) which had a second road added in the back yard. I assume that you used the "add a road to a lot" technique to get this. How did you get the second phone booth and garbage can?

https://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/...ting-labelt.jpg
Great picture! Lots of useful stuff there.

https://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/...ngetown-U11.jpg
I'm just not sure how to interpret the picture above.

Maybe we can use these techniques to extend the roads in a hood. If we can construct and position new lots without having to place them in the game, they can have their portals and the road can be created in build mode on the lot. If the lots are placed close together the road will appear and behave exactly as if it was in the hood already - except maybe the little vehicles won't run on those roads in nhood view. But that's ok, they can be for quiet cul-de-sacs.

Thanks. Let me look into this and see whether I can come up with a solution. This is behavior that I'm not familiar with, so it may take a while.


Yes, I understand. OK, bad idea on my part.


I didn't know that the Bon Voyage beach lots did this. OK, another bad idea on my part.


I haven't tried expanding a lot to be more than 6x6... it would be an easy thing to disable that check in the LotExpander, but I can't guarantee what would happen. If we manage to get the piers working with the smaller lots, I'll give you a test version of the LotExpander, so that you can try longer lots. If it works well, perhaps I can add this as an Advanced feature in the LotExpander.

I have one more thought on how to work around this problem:

When you initially created your lot, I assume that you placed an empty lot into the neighborhood facing in the direction that you wanted the lot.

Try adding the empty lot into the neighborhood facing in the opposite direction. Build something on the lot (just one wall is enough), then move the lot to where you want it. This should set the U10 and U11 fields to a "better" choice.

Then, try your initial experiment again (lower land, flood, expand backwards). I think that there is a possibility that this will prevent the LotExpander from moving the lot back from the road while expanding.

Might work. But, I hate having lots that I can't move around.

... OK, I thought about this some more and realized that there is a fundamental problem. In order to place the lot initially, there has to be a road. The game just won't let you place a lot unless there's a road. Of course, I suppose that you could try changing the Lot Top and Left values (and even the Z value - which I assume is the height of the terrain) to move the lot from a location with a road to a location without a road.

I suppose that you haven't seen my "Adding Roads to a Neighborhood Terrain" technique yet?

Give me a few minutes and I'll post it here.

Adding Roads to an Existing Neighborhood:

Update: The following program replaces the need for this tutorial, and will keep your decorations intact:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=279992

------------------------------------------------------
Tutorial (now obsolete):

I managed to add roads to the existing Strangetown neighborhood, without destroying the existing families and their relationships!

Here's how... just make sure to back up your Sims2 directory, in case you have problems:

Make the changes to the Sims2 SC4Terrain Strangetown.SC4 file using SimCity 4 Rush Hour (or Deluxe, I suppose). Then use the changed terrain to generate a new temporary neighborhood.

Using SimPE, export two things from the new neighborhood: Neighborhood Terrain Geometry and Neighborhood Terrain. Then import those files into the real Strangetown, with reload, replacing the existing terrains.

Unfortunately, this will delete the decorations in the neighborhood, but they were very easy to replace... well, all except that one rock in the middle of the road circle near the Specter residence. Don't forget to add smoke to the crashed spaceship.

In addition, I had a couple of pieces of road disappear near the Curious place and near one of the empty houses. However, this was very easy to fix by just going into those houses and making a change to them, such as moving a door temporarily, then saving. The road pieces reappeared.

Also, the landscape is a bit lighter than the original one. I have no idea why this is or how to change it, but it doesn't seem like a big deal.

Finally, don't forget to delete that temporary neighborhood when you're done.

Voila!
------------------------------------------------------
A variation of this technique can be used to fix existing roads in a neighborhood, if you still have the original terrain available, or if you have a backup of the neighborhood package from before the roads were mucked up.

I used this technique on a neighborhood where the roads and landscape had become "stepped" because of changes made when adding and removing lots.
------------------------------------------------------
I also used this technique to "port" the Life Stories neighborhoods to The Sims 2. For some reason, the terrains that EA includes with Life Stories don't actually match any of the neighborhood terrains. Since I wanted exact copies of the neighborhoods, I used this method to replace the terrain of a newly created neighborhood with the Life Stories terrain.

sorry, I was rushing after getting excited with the talk here and that I finally got a parellel 2-sided lots working including its re-importation. I've been wanting 4 that type of lots for a long long time, esp when I can make it manually.
the pix file names also provide the rest of the infos for the conditions.


the 1about the strangetown,
I build 4 30x30 lots in 4 different directions to show U11 and the orientation
A == Above
B == Below
L == Left
R == Right

sorry 4 the shorthands 4 now, I'm soaking a hand.

now, I'm wondering about U0 and U4 and U1
the 4 lots for the U11 demonstration all have
0x00000003 & 0x00 & 0x0006
but, the 2-sided lot has
0x00000001 & 0x01 & 0x0006

as for the phonebooth and the trash bin, they're "eye-dropperrable"with the moveobjects on cheat. :D
but I still personnally prefer to reserve the original pair to replace them with the newly added to avoid if there may be a problem on lot-sharing. surely can go wild in an exp. setting now :D


the SimPE scn-sht is my try to show the known value positions graphically esp 4 those unfamiliar with the hex interface.

I shall shortly go and test some of these ideas. In the meantime Mootilda, now this project is taking off so interestingly, do you think it is a good idea to start your own thread for it? That would mean you can always update the first post to have the latest release and instructions.

You could ask a moderator to split the thread starting at an early post by you, which you could turn into your header post. Then you won't leave all this discussion behind here.

I second Inge's suggestion. I could split the thread starting from Post #364. I could move Posts 1--363 to a new thread, so that who has subscribed to this thread will still come here and find the LotExpander by Mootilda.

Of course, Mootilda should edit her post #364 to include the credits to Andi and a link to the "new" thread where we moved the old posts (I'll provide the link as soon as I split this one).

Mootilda - If you are interested, PM me.

I just want to confirm that creating the lot in a "Below" orientation in the first place does allow it to be extended out to see without having to realign the road. It seems to me however, that if it is possible to code this way, it would be more userfriendly for the Expander to always keep the road anchored in place by default (apart from any fun advanced options you can let us have )



I tend to always build in-situ as I like to make sure the building is sympathetic to the location. So I particularly like building on sloping ground with an interesting view. The trouble with lots for sharing is they tend to have to have fairly flat edges, and you have to make any dips or elevations in the centre of an otherwise flat geography. So I am not bothered by a lot that cannot be moved.

Numenor,

How about separating the infos and the problems posts from the chats or thanks or spams by the way?


Thanks in advance regardless of any decision about this and no need to response to this post.