Yes, it's pretty cool and so easy to do.


This brings up an interesting issue: Andi's code only expects to see the standard 6 portals. However, if the portals are tied are tied to the mailbox (and the phone booth?), then it's possible that we'll be seeing lots with more than 6 portals. Do you find pedestrians coming onto your 2-sided lot from both the front and the back?

Hmm I am having trouble carrying out the instructions for the road addition and removal. My SimCity game refuses to offer me the sc4 file for importing. I have tried renaming it to look like all the others it allows me to import, and putting it in downloads and some of the other regions, but it just doesn't list it for me.

Excellent! I'm so glad that this worked. This indicates that the code needs to look at both Orientation and U11.


Agreed! I've put this on the to-do list. As I said before, I believe that this was Andi's intention, but the code just wasn't sufficient.

Thanks for checking this out.

Is there anything else you would like me to be trying out or testing at this time? Anything you are trying to find out?

Yes, I was thinking about this last night. Perhaps I should start a new thread for each of my "tutorials". I can see both good and bad points for this...

Good:
- Comments on each technique would be separate, so it would be easier to follow and find things.

Bad:
- More posts means more complexity for me, since I'd have to keep track of them all... Although I could put links to them in this thread.

Hmmm... sounds like the good outweighs the bad. If no one else has any negatives to add to this, I think that I'll try moving some of these posts to new threads tomorrow.

Does anyone know where posts about neighborhoods and lots should go?

I am inclined to agree that it would be troublesome to have everything spread out over too many threads. I only suggested the split in the first place so that you would get control over the first post so you can update it with the most important information about releases.

Unfortunately, I don't have SimCity 4 installed right now... here's what I think that I did:

Run SimCity 4. Create a new region called TheSims2. Exit the game.

In \My Documents\SimCity 4\Regions\TheSims2, edit the config.bmp and change it to a 1x1 (pixel) BMP. Change the color of the pixel to red (Red=255, Green=0, Blue=0).

Copy the terrain .SC4 file into the Downloads directory. I usually try to keep this directory pretty empty, so that it's easy to find the SC4 that I want. I don't remember having to change the filename.

Run the game again. The TheSims2 region will have only one small city in it and the downloads directory only has 1 small city in it, so it's easy to find.

The first time that I did this, I didn't have SimCity 4 Rush Hour installed. Turns out that Strangetown was created with Rush Hour, so it wouldn't import.

If this doesn't help, let me know and I'll install SimCity and see whether I can give you better instructions.

That's my answer anyway - the one I am trying to open was made by me in RushHour, which I uninstalled. When I reinstalled today I only installed the basegame

BTW I have been making small regions using greyscale heightmaps to create my sloping lots. If anyone would like a region made to a particular spec to test anything, let me know.

Feel free to take a look at the my to-do list... I've been trying to keep it up-to-date. The funny thing is: the more stuff that I fix, the larger my to-do list seems to become.

I'm hoping that niol will be able to quickly answer my question about having more than 6 portals on a lot, since he has a two-sided lot already made. It also looks like he might be trying to figure out the U0, U1 and U4 values for lots in the neighborhood package.

And aelflaed has been making good progress on getting a South-facing 1x1 lot, generating a lot of interesting information about the portals.

Since you've been looking at the Bon Voyage beach lots, you might be interested in seeing whether there's some way to make alternate sizes for them. I haven't looked at the internals of these lots, but there must be something which tells the game where the swimmable water starts. This must mean that there's a minimum size. I wonder whether it's possible to make a 1x3 beach lot (1 for the road, 1 for the building, 1 for the water)? At some point, we need to understand the beach lots better if we want to be able to expand them... I noticed that when a beach lot is expanded, the water in the expanded area looks odd.

And, of course, any help with making the tutorials more understandable - screenshots, wording, additional information - would be greatly appreciated.

Finally, it would be really helpful if someone could look over the old posts, looking for lost chunks of wisdom that might be worked into a tutorial, or lost bug reports that should be entered into the to-do list, or even lost ideas and suggestions.

Does any of that sound interesting to you?

Oh, I almost forgot. Did you want me to disable the size checks in the LotExpander, so that you can try making a really long pier? Another interesting area for exploration.

Inge, do you have a pointer on how this is done? I faintly recall that it was possible somehow .. but I've no idea where to look for info (not a big SC4 fan).

So many thanks to you all for your research on the row house thing =) I can't even keep up with reading all of this, let alone try out a few things, but it looks like a lot of progress is happening now all at once! If it became possible to build real city lots, that would be like five new EPs to me :lovestruc

I would love you to disable the limits on the tool, yes please Perhaps there should be an "advanced" tickbox though so that casual users don't get caught out!

The beach lots - yes there are portal objects on it which I have identified. But what I don't know yet is whether they are *required* to be in an exact spot. I was wondering whether to try and give the portal objects a model each, with a controller that can show and hide them. I did something like this with Sims 1 - the show/hide I mean, cos they did already have graphics associated with them. The Sims 2 portals do not at this time.

Let me know if you have any further problems with this technique. If I remember correctly, it's important to do the terrain geometry before the terrain.


Actually, I'd love to have a terrain made. However, I'm not sure about the specs. Here's what I'm trying to do:

I'm looking into changing the LotExpander so that it gets the terrain of the expanded land directly from the neighborhood terrain, rather than just expanding the existing lot terrain out. What I need is a neighborhood which would allow me to test terrain with roads near water and hills.

I suppose that the bumpier, the better (up to a point). Right now, the LotExpander expands the land in up to 8 sections: front, back, left and right, plus the 4 corners. So, lots with terrain changes in each of those 8 sections would make for particularly good tests.

I haven't finished the code changes yet, so there's no hurry. But, eventually I'll want to test this pretty thoroughly before releasing it to the general public, since this is a major code change.

1. Make a file called config.bmp 1 pixel in size and colour it pure red. Save as a 24bit bmp
2. Make a greyscale .bmp file called anything you like, sized 65x65. Colour it white for the highest bits through to black for the lowest. Sea level is about 83,83,83
3. Create a new region in SC4. Exit the region and go into a different one while you copy the config.bmp you made over the config.bmp the game made in the new region.
4. Go back into your new region and now it should be only one small city in total size.
5. Press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R and you will be able to navigate to your grayscale heightmap. After choosing it, your terrain will be shaped like your heightmap.
6. Create a city with roads on this small region. Save and exit the game.
7. Just move the City - Whatevername.sc4 into your Sims2 SC4Terrains folder

If you had any notes about beach portal names and IDs, locations in the lot file, etc. - that would be really helpful information.


This sounds excellent. It would be a great step towards allowing people to fix "broken" portals.

I'm considering replacing Andi's portal logic completely and just moving the portals to a specific location on the lot, based on the size and rotation of the lot and the location of the road. I'd really like to add the beach portals to this.

OK. I attached the zip file here. I have no idea what will happen. Please let me know.

WARNING to everyone:

This is an UNSUPPORTED test version of the LotExpander, with the size checks disabled. Use at your own risk.

Here is a link to the current supported version of this tool: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1747180


If you find that this works well with the size checks disabled, then I'll consider making it an "advanced" feature.

[Update:]
Test version deleted. Didn't work.

Each beach portal consists of 6 tiles (plus their out of world master, making 7 OBJDs) which are arranged in a strip. I believe the strip runs from road to sea orientation rather than side to side, because the tiles do not all have the same functions. Only the two ends perform portal functions. The four middle tiles have a function that is something to do with "slope" so I assume that is the place where the sim goes down that steep slope just before actually breaking out into a swim.
If I am correct that means there should be as many beach portals on a beach as its width in tiles.

The GUIDs of the portal tiles are as follows:
0x132F810B
0xB32F810C
0x332F8108
0x932F937E
0x332F9387
0x532F9398
The master GUID is 0xF32F8109 but that may not appear in the file (or not in a contiguous location) as it is out of world

Names: "Beach - Portal", "Beach - Portal - 0, 1" etc

In the lot I examined, the beach portal tiles began at instance 0xD8 in the OBJT resources (but I had all sorts of custom schools first, so this will vary between users). Then I noticed that there were also animation effect holders for the waves, so they have to be taken into account, too.

I expanded the lot to 12 tiles deep, moved a family in and built a long pier. It looked great apart from the lighting not looking quite right on the road area. I could save it with the family on, before building anything, but if I tried to save it after making only the tiniest change in build mode, the application crashed while saving.

Thank you =)

Expanding a beach lot:

I placed a 4 tile wide beach lot. I then expanded it by one tile each side. These are the results.

I've got lost in deleting the infos in 2D and 3D arrays... here
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...6&postcount=106

I've got a "broken" lot acting like a 10x20 lot while graphically like 30x30 lot. :slapface:
In the lot view, half of the grassy terrain are occupied by the unbuildable road rows/columns.

May view the pix according to their filenames in numeric order.

The first pic shows the in-lot view before the neighbourhood relocation.
The second shows that I was trying to build a partition like walls over the road sectors but failed.
The third shows I removed the road tiles with the moveobjects on cheat.

Attached is the exported lot file and the lot file and the N003 neighbourhood file.
Also included is the exported paralellel road-tiled 30x30 lot.
I've already trimmed their useless jpg files to reduce their sizes as suggested by andi's posts.


As for the 30x30 lot screenshots, I guess the pix tell most already.
But note that the bill-collector had passed the road to the edge in the buildable area while wandering, and then it has to move back to about 5 to 6 grids away from that end to get prepared to leave the "world".

It seems the first service vehicle is assignedly placed past the mailbox intentionally for further service vehicles to place after it.


Added after Inge's posts:

Wow, it seems the grassy land has been elongated and pushed the beachline out... Wow... while part of the road is flooded with beach water for the pier lot... a mishap phase for terrain mapping... seemingly?

Yay, Inge, you're amazing, you just made the bit that breaks the limit again... So a lot can be much larger than 64 for a particular side... Ultra Zest!

Seemingly, if the beachlines can be figured out and how it is added from the template for various lot sizes, beach lot be long like the pier lot!

Also, to add an extra mailbox and barbage cans,
may get the collection files here to put >1 in a lot to test... :D
Gonna try so half a day later... I've 2 go 4 now.

I have reconfirmed that trying to save a lot longer than the normal maximum crashes during save if you have made any building alterations. So it may sadly turn out that Maxis only agrees to read in a certain number of bytes or something and gets narky if it hasn't met the end of array in that time.

Jus' a fast Q...

Can a "cap" be added?

Here is another good area for research.

I believe that the Neighborhood Terrain (NHTR = 0xABD0DC63) contains the information about the roads in a neighborhood:

http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=NHTR

If someone were to create a very simple SC4 Terrain (flat terrain with one road strategically placed), it might be very simple to experiment with adding and removing roads from the neighborhood package, and to come up with a simple tutorial. Perhaps this could even be turned into a simple tool.

Yes, this is the problem that I was talking about earlier. The LotExpander is trying to decide how to expand the terrain based on the terrrain at specific points inside the unexpanded lot (I could go into more detail, if anyone is interested). Depending upon the rotation of the lot and what the terrain looks like at specific points along the edges of the lot, this can be disasterous. It works particularly badly for hilly terrain and beach lots.

I could make the logic a bit better by increasing the number of places that the lot terrain is expanded outwards. But, this isn't the "correct" solution.

I am hoping to get the terrain for the expanded areas from the neighborhood terrain directly. This should work perfectly for a lot which is already in the correct location.

For a lot which is expanded at the front, there may still be problems because the lot will have to be moved back from the road. However, I believe that there will be less problems, even with this type of lot.

I agree. My hypothetical, but typical, situation with that beach lot was that when I first placed the lot, it pushed the land out in a way that made look awkward in the coastline. That was due to the sculpting that happens in order to line up the land with the beach portals. My hope when I expanded the lot was that I could use those new parts to soften the edge between the beach lot and the terrain beyond.

The method of sampling extra points on the to-be-expanded lot would *not* work for this, since the expanded bits would be just as incompatible with the surrounding geography as the beach lot was. Using the terrain geography to provide the countours for the expansion would be ideal, because even though it would not line up with the beach countour, at least the awkward join will be within the lot and therefore may be smoothed using the terrain sculpture tools.