Interestingly, it looks like I was partially right. EA put out one more EP (Mansion & Garden Stuff), but they called it a Stuff Pack in some (but not all) places.

Proof: Usually with Stuff Packs, you run the EXE from the most recent EP. With MGS, you use the EXE from MGS.

More Proof: The MGS EXE is named Sims2EP9. NOT Sims2SP9.

Ea. Dodgy as always!

I confirm this. Not only M&G requires its own disc to run (unlike all the other SPs), but also for the objects, M&G definitely works as an EP: the objects.package from M&G contains all the objects and semiglobals already existing in the AL version; plus, it adds one more Semiglobal group (for the ceiling fans).

I was curious about the lot structure: can a lot created with M&G be installed safely in an AL game? I don't think it would work in older game, anyway, because - as said - M&G is basically identical to AL, and AL uses its own format for the lots, right?

I haven't got M&G installed yet. Hopefully today. (I had a very busy week last week and it's not over yet.) Then, it will take a while to check the lot package structure to see whether it is backwards compatible with AL. I'll let you know here (this thread) as soon as I find out.

You are correct that AL has it's own format for the neighborhood and lot packages, and is therefore is not backwards compatible with any previous EP.

The LTXTs were opening ok for me.

I assume you mean that SimPE was able to parse the LTXTs well enough to avoid crashing?

That's certainly a good sign for the neighborhood packages. However, there are a lot of other records inside of the lot package which have been modified in the past to produce crashes. Hopefully, none were necessary for this release.

Finally got Mansion & Garden installed and I haven't found any differences in the neighborhood or lot packages, other than the updated version information and, of course, the new objects.

This means that a lot created using Mansion & Garden might be compatible with Apartment Life, as long as it doesn't use any of the items from M&G. If you're going to try this, I would suggest that you backup first and use the Clean Installer to install the lot, since this will remove the version information from the lot package.

I should have an updated version of the LotAdjuster available soon.

ETA: new version available now.

This version includes the (requested) Lot Class Value changes. Check the checkbox to type in an override value; uncheck the checkbox to clear the override flag. If the Class Value option doesn't display, then the lot version is too old: run Apartment Life or Mansion and Gardens and make a build change to the lot to update the version.

Sigh. Just found more proof that EA doesn't know how to write code.

The Lot Class Value is being displayed as a signed value in the range -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. However, it is being treated as an unsigned value in the range 0 to 4,294,967,295.

What does this mean? If your lot class becomes really low (the worst place in the worst part of town), then the game considers it to be the nicest house in the neighborhood. So nice, in fact, that it could significantly improve the class of all surrounding lots!

I have two questions regarding portals -- perhaps someone here can enlighten me?

1. What exactly determines where mailmen, papergirls, and NL gypsies will materialise on a lot with no portals? Are there any other NPC types that appear somewhere other than via the pedestrian/car portals?

I'm asking because I made a lot on an island, with uneven edges and no road, from which I deliberately removed all portals (2x Pedestrian, 2x Car, 2x Car/Service) after having shrunk/resized/moved the lot to its final location. During playtesting, the mailman, paperboy, and NL gypsy all showed up and did their job (they appeared from thin air and vanished again) – I didn't really expect that, thinking they all use the same pedestrian portal as everyone else .. but apparently they don't. For this particular lot, it all works out nicely – the spot they have chosen for their business is very convenient, on the beach right at the corner of the house – but I'd like to understand the logic behind it, so that I won't accidentially end up with other lots where they all appear underwater or underneath a rock.

The only clue I can find: their point of arrival seems to be approximately where the curbside used to be when the lot was first created. Would that make sense? How/where does the game save this information? Is it possible to manipulate it?

(With "portals", above, I mean the ones that appear as yellow boxes when Inge's portal revealer is active .. I'm not sure if technichally the mailbox is also a portal of some kind? Also, the lot in question still has the original mailbox and trashcan, but moved to a different location -- it dosn't seem to matter where I move it though, the paperboy always materialises in the same spot.)

(Oh, and a related question: what determines the elevation of portals on an uneven lot (with uneven road as well)? On the lot in question, I had to dig *really* deep until I finally found them ..


2. Which portal/s does the BV "Walk To" function use? Will it still work when the pedestrian portals are removed from a lot, or will it be nonfunctional, or will things explode when someone attempts to "Walk To" and the pedestrian portal isn't there? (I don't have BV, so I can't test this .. I'm asking because I'd like to redistribute a portal-less lot but I don't want to destroy people's games of course)

Pedestrian and car portals are only dumb objects that serve as a suggested starting point for sims to start and end their visit at. The visitor etc controllers start off by looking for a portal to make the visiting sim or car start at, but if they fail to find one, they simply go on to make the sim appear at a default location on the lot. I think for pedestrians this is half way along and 10 tiles back, which roughly coincides with where a mailbox normally is.

Thank you! In other words, I can't prevent the paperboy etc from coming (not by fiddling with portals at least), and putting a portal where I would like him to show up (on the beach as opposed to underwater) would be the simplest? most reasonable? only? way to direct him to the right spot. Since all the portal does is change the default location. Did I get that right?

Do walkbys and mailboys have different controllers then, or do the controllers behave differently with them? I didn't have any walkbys, garden club folks, or a welcome wagon on that portal-less lot -- only the news and mail delivery, and the gypsy. I'm wondering what the difference is in how they are choreographed, because if I understood the above correctly, putting a pedestrian portal where I want the mailman to be would also lead to all the walkbys showing up again (which is not what I want in this case) ..

They don't all have the same controller, but I am not sure exactly how the responsibility is divided up. Maybe the mailbox controls the postman? But it's a long time since I looked.

The reason some of them turn up and others don't when you don't have a portal would be down to whatever controller spawns them, and presumably which EA operative wrote the code for it. In some cases it might decide to fail when it can't find a portal to locate them at ready for their fade-in.

I wanted to jot down some of my thinking on fixing the elevation of roads in a neighborhood, similar to what HoodReplace is currently doing with lots, trees, and decorations. These notes might also be useful for a utility to add roads to an existing neighborhood (without the need for SC4).

I believe that there are a couple of rules which need to be followed, when placing roads onto a neighborhood terrain:

1) roads must be level from one side of the road to the other
2) roads can be slanted in the direction of travel, to match the general slope of the terrain
3) roads should probably not follow the terrain when covered by water
4) intersections and curves must be flat (a corollary of rule 1)

When fixing existing roads, it's easy to tell whether a section of road is an intersection, because intersections actually have a different texture id inside the NHTR record. But, there is no indication on a straight piece of road which tells whether it is traveling north / south or east / west:

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

When adding new roads to a neighborhood, there is obviously a need to know both the direction of travel and whether a road is a straight piece, an end piece, a curve, a T-intersection or a cross-intersection. As well, it's not clear how the rotation data is stored, although there is some unknown data in the roads array within NHTR which may contain the rotation.

In order to level roads appropriately, I believe that HoodReplace should create an array of all of the roads (including bridges) within the neighborhood. Then, it would be fairly easy to check whether there is another road in any direction.

After placing roads so that they follow the basic contours of the terrain, the neighborhood terrain must be modified to match the actual elevation of the roads. Specifically, the terrain may need to be leveled at the location of the roads. The goal is to avoid a mismatch between the elevation of the road and the elevation of the terrain.

Since leveling a road means that another section of the terrain may become steeper, HoodReplace may also need to take the maximum terrain slope into consideration. Changes to the slope of the road should radiate out from the road until all terrain is again within specifications. However, this logic could be added at later time, or done using the in-game terrain editing tools.

Then, there's the question of bridges. When changing the terrain of a neighborhood, water may not be in the same location. Bridges which were necessary with the old terrain may need to be changed to roads; roads which cross a new body of water should be changed to bridges. Because there are different kinds of bridges, this requires some additional thought. Perhaps again this logic could be put off for another day, especially if there is some way for people to remove existing roads and bridges.

That's all that I can think of for now. Doesn't sound too bad if the issues of maximum slope and bridges are put off for another day.

I also wanted to document some of my thoughts about WallStyle, the program which will change one type of wall to another. Most of this has already been discussed, but I thought that it would be useful to have everything together in one post.

I can think of 3 possible uses for this program:

1) Make modern homes more affordable by allowing "foundation roofs". With some additional work, it may even be possible to create foundation roofs which can be removed using the normal wall tool, rather than the foundation tool.

2) Get past the wall limit by changing all normal walls to a new style, freeing up the ability to add new normal walls.
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?...Help:Wall_Limit

If we're lucky, this solution may not even require a change to walls.txt, since all necessary information may already be contained in the WGRA record.

I believe that this should work, but I can't find any indication that niol ever had a chance to test it.

3) Remove the need for changes to walls.txt by changing special walls used during the building phase, like numenor's unleveled walls, to standard walls. I verified that this works with the current version. However, WallStyle could be enhanced by having it display a list of every wall style currently used on the lot, including custom walls.

If you have other thoughts about uses for this program, please let me know.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Since the initial alpha release of WallStyle:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...170#post2006170

I found that WGRA Instance 5 does not contain all walls on the following lot:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=298030

I'm not sure how this lot is different than all of the lots which I created to test this program, but it's clear that I need a wider test suite of lots.

niol suggested that the entire set of walls may be contained in instance 5 and 0x18, but I haven't had a chance to verify this.

I would like to research the meaning of the various WGRA instances. As well, there are two versions of WGRA: version 2 has a height and width which are twice the number of tile on the lot; version 3 has a height and width which are the number of vertices on the lot (number of tiles + 1); I'd like to understand how the version affects the information within the WGRA.
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=WGRA

There is one other thing that I'd like to research in the WGRA, even though it is not applicable to WallStyle: I believe that the second array contains a list of Room IDs, but I've been stumped as to how to verify or disprove this theory.

Since CompatiLot is also stalled on the wall structures, understanding the WLL and WGRA records may also help with CompatiLot.

I realized the other day that I had forgotten a major piece of work associated with writing a program which would rotate a house on a lot (change the sun direction on an existing lot).

As previously discussed, all location-based arrays would have to be rotated and all coordinates translated. This is a fair amount of work; but the work is well-understood.

I realized that there's also a need to rotate all objects to match the new rotation of the lot. Inge did some excellent work on the quaternions used in the OBJT record:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...161#post1833161
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=FA1C39F7

However, there is currently no processing of these quaternions. Instead, the LotAdjuster just sets the rotation of portals, mailboxes, etc. to one of 4 predefined quaternions, based on the U11 value.

With any luck, we could find and use some standard open-source code to process the quaternions. However, at the current time, this is an unknown quantity of work. This means that rotating a house on a lot is even more work that I initially thought.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
While writing this, I realized that there is some work that needs to be done on the wiki:

1) Create OBJT and associate with FA1C39F7

2) Document what we know about the OBJT record; the information in the wiki is pretty incomplete, especially for cObject

There are two good references for this record: the LotAdjuster source code and Igne's document.

Mootilda. I was meaning to ask something...I have my custom hood on a custom terrain, but it's one I didn't make. I wanted to alter it with Hoodreplace and SC4, but can't load it - I think it must have been created with the Societies add-on or something. Is there a way around this? Can I substitute the map completely without losing my hood?

Please try to explain exactly how this occurred. What's the Societies add-on? When you say "can't load it", who can't load what? Is it HoodReplace, SimCity 4, or TS2 which can't load the neighborhood package? Or perhaps it's the SC4 file which can't be loaded?

Sorry, I'm just having problem understanding what's happening.

If you attach all relevant files and a better explanation, I'll see if I can figure out what the problem is.

Sorry, couldn't get in here ever since posting above.

The SC4 file I am using for my hood will not load in SC4. The map is Incy Isle by Loverat. (http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?t=116853) For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to import that file into SC4. I eventually tried a different file, which worked.

I have the original version of SC4, and there is an EP which I don't own. In the end I decided this map must have been created with the EP, which would certainly affect things in Sims2.

I have used SC4 and Hoodreplace before, so I just expected it to work. When it didn't I searched all over for instructions, thinking I must have just forgotten how to do it. I'vee been meaning to ask you for a while.

I'll have to give it another try in case it suddenly works now (which would leave me with a red face, wouldn't it!), but I came to believe the SC4 EP must be the reason.

Okay, I tried again. I followed the instructions from your tutorial, just to be sure. That map doesn't appear, but another one does. Posting an image for confirmation.

I notice your tutorial states:


That note must be what gave me the EP idea, when I first struck the problem with this file.

So, is there a way around this? I don't think the odds are very good of me being able to re-create that terrain from scratch. I wanted to alter the edges of the map so it isn't an island, and possibly smooth /lower the bay to make beaches possible. The main part of the map is okay.

Maybe I just have to bite the bullet - either let it be as it is, or do something similar from scratch and hope it's close enough when HoodReplaced. Urgh.

If you don't have Rush Hour or Deluxe, that may very well be your problem. Why don't I see whether I can load it on my machine? If the changes aren't too difficult, I can try to make them on my machine... could you just draw on a snapshot of the terrain to indicate what you want done? Alternatively, SC4 Deluxe is pretty cheap in stores right now, it might be worth upgrading. But first, let me verify that this is really your problem.

[Update:]

Verified that this SC4 file opens fine with SC4 Deluxe (i.e. with the Rush Hour expansion pack). So, how would you like to proceed? I'm not great with terrain editing, but I'm willing to try, if you'd like.

[Another Update:]

I had another thought...

I believe that there is a program which will split a package file into its component parts, and then combine them again. Sort of a very simple version of SimPE without plugins.

Perhaps we could split the SC4 Rush Hour file and a generic SC4 base game file, then swap the terrain records and recombine the SC4 base game file with the new terrain. You would lose the roads, but the file might be editable in your SC4 base game. Of course, we could try the same thing with the roads record, but that record is more likely to be incompatible, because of all the new roads and bridges which were shipped with Rush Hour.

Let me play with this for a while and see whether I can get something for you to try. Unfortunately, I don't think that I have SC4 base game installed anywhere, but I could test the concept with my Deluxe. If it works, then you could try it in the base game.

1) Determine whether such a program exists.

OK, found it. DZUtils, available here:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,6992.0.html

Relevant commands:
extract: dump all or portions of a package to .dat files
create: create a new (blank) package file
append: add a .dat file's data to a package

2) See whether the program works with SC4 and SC4 Rush Hour files.

Apparently not. Exacted all records from Pleasantview.SC4, created a new SC4 with header version = 1, then appended all extracted records. Resulting SC4 file is not recognized by SimCity 4.

3) See whether replacing the terrain record works.

Irrelevant, since I can't get the records recombined correctly.

Note to self: even though this didn't work, it might be helpful to look at the source code, since it seems to have some concept of header version number. Perhaps this would provide enough information for Peter Jones to be able to create a valid SC4 file from SimPE.

[Yet Another Update:]

Since DZUtils didn't work, we should try the same thing with DatGen, which is a SimPE-like program for manipulating SC4 files.

Wow! Thanks for all that experimentation.

I haven't seen Deluxe or Rush Hour available here recently, although I'm sure one would appear sooner or later. I had trouble finding SC4 at all, it appears to be rather rare these days. (I suspect simmers keep buying whatever stocks are sent out.)

I can draw the changes if you like, but it's a lot of work for you to do, completely for my benefit rather than yours. Might be better for me to rebuild if I want it so badly.

I'll see what I can find out about Datagen, I don't know it at all.

EDIT: I got DatGen and installed it, but it looks too technical for me. I'll check back later and see if you have anything to add. Good luck!

Perhaps EA decided to remove SimCity 4 Deluxe from the shelves when they put out SimCity Societies. I've noticed that they have a new box which has SimCity 4 Deluxe, SimCity Societies, and several other old Sim games (SimCopter? SimThemePark? ...).

Having me fix your SC4 file wouldn't be so bad if the terrain editing in SC4 wasn't so horrible. SC2000 and SC3000 were a breeze, but SC4 seems to have the tools set far too large... sort of like painting a flower on a teacup with a paintbrush designed to paint the outside of a house.

However, don't do anything drastic yet. My work with DatGen is encouraging. I may have a test city for you very soon. Note that I misspelled it the first time... it's DatGen, not DataGen.

Here's the link to DatGen:

http://www.simtropolis.com/modding/...details&id=334#

Yes, I found it. Thankyou. I'm glad you are having better luck with DatGen. I looked at some tutorials but it's all rather beyond me.

I can certainly get Deluxe online if I like, but it is by no means cheap. There are pirate versions too (Google finds all sorts!), but I wouldn't know where to start with that anyway.

You can change the brush size for terrain editing, in case you don't know that. Might be Ctrl-Shift-(desired number)? I can find the proper key control if you don't know about it.

EDIT: proper control for brush size is

"to alter the size of the area that you're affecting, hold down 'Shift' and one of the number keys."

Unfortunately, it looks like the DatGen program that I downloaded isn't complete. I can extract terrain record instance 1, but it won't let me import that record into another SC4 file. Sigh. I thought that this might be straightforward. Since I've never used DatGen before, I'm just treating it like SimPE... open the SC4 file, select the record that I want, right-click, Export..., open the new SC4 file, select the terrain records, right-click, Import... Failure!

Thanks for the info about brush size. I knew about holding the shift and control keys to change the brush size, but not the number keys.

What record do we want? I can try with my copy.

Are you opening the SC4 file from SC4, or from Sims2?

Oh, I see now - Terrain record instance 1. I don't expect it will be different for me, but I'll see what happens.

EDIT: I can open the file, but I don't know what to choose - presumably not trees which is the first thing listed. Would it be Terrain Arrays or Elevation map? Or neither, of course.

If this program is anything like SimPE, I'm probably in the wrong place entirely. Pic attached.

It won't let me extract a selected file, but if I 'mark' it I can extract both .tmap and .tarr from those two I mentioned above. Don't know if that helps of course. Stumbling in the dark!