Not sure about changing people to ghost using SimPE. You may also have to add a death token. Why not play the neighborhood and kill the sim? As long as you don't delete the tombstone, it should be fine, and safer than fooling around in SimPE.

To make a sim pregnant, I believe that you'd have to add a pregnancy controller with a valid father ID; take a look at Brandi's pregnancy controller to see how it's set up. A safer method might be to play the neighborhood and use the tombstone of life and death (?) to impregnate the sim with simsself.

Right - I'm back now and I had a think about things on holiday and I have started to shape some ideas. This is going to take me some time and I have no idea whether it will be any good or whether I'll actually finish it. I'm not going to do it specifically for others or to be popular or anything but I'm going to try it just because I want to give it a go. The idea of creating a story neighbourhood just interests me. However, I am going to need some help if others are willing.

I have a clear idea for the topography of a new neighbourhood but have run into some problems already - the first of which is I can't locate my copy of Sim City 4 dammit. I've found Rush Hour but no original game. It must be here somewhere. <mutter mutter>

Anyway, once I find the blasted thing, the first thing I'll need is for someone to test the new terrain in game to make sure it's centering properly in neighbourhood view. I have the camera mod installed and this means I can see all the map. I need to make sure people DL the map without the mod can see the neighbourhood properly and all the lots. The next thing is to see whether the new lots transfer properly and so on.

So it seems to me that I'll need a space where I can upload files and have people download and test them for me and a place to write comments and feedback. How do people usually do this? And does anyone have any suggestions? I can see that the files (large in the end) will perhaps be best put on a file storage site but what about a thread for conversation, feedback and testing?

Any helpful comments are welcome.

You don't really need anyone to test your map. When I was testing Brainania, I just took out the camera mod to test the views. However, if you want someone to test maps and / or lots, I'd be happy to help.

Take a look at the populated neighborhoods in the wiki. You'll see that most people create a separate website or blog for documentation and discussion. Another option would be to create a social group here at MTS for your neighborhood, or perhaps a more general social group for sharing neighborhoods. Depends upon whether you think that we need one thread per neighborhood, or multiple threads per neighborhood.

For file sharing, I use MegaUpload. I have a free membership which gives me a 200G storage space. The nice thing is that I've never had an upload deleted. Some sites will give you more space, but will delete uploads with "too few" downloads. Things that you want to consider: Maximum file size. Total storage space. Is there a limit on downloads? Will they delete your uploads? Do downloaders have to wait for the download?

I am really wanting to download a neighborhood that has already been set up with occupied lots and a storyline etc.
are any of you in the process of doing so (following all these guidelines) ?

Don't we all?

Possess your soul in patience. The thread's less than a month old, and it takes awhile for even the most enthusiastic builders to put together something this complex.

In the meantime, why not start one of your own?

Yes, and then they get distracted remembering how cool the SC4 drive it missions were.

What?

Boiling Oil has some interesting mods which could be useful. Rather than using the BatBox to remove trash and gossip, this mod stops the memories from being generated in the first place:
http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthread.php?tid=2396

This one also gets rid of some useless stuff. No Sim Loaded:
http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthread.php?tid=1665

No need to be nasty about it, I was just sharing.

That was "sharing"? Sounded more like a question to me, and a bit of a nagging one at that.

And if Peni's response qualifies as "nasty" in your book... just wow.

Haunt the thread. If this can be done, it WILL be, and I'm sure these kind and talented folks will share the results of their labor with you when they can.

Agreed - and don't expect anything too soon either. It's a big job (I'm realising).

Having created one unpopulated neighborhood, I want to click the Agree button about 100 times.

The options right now are to:
1) Create your own (and hopefully share it)
or
2) Download one of the neighborhoods from the wiki. Before downloading, you can check out my journal to see whether I tested the neighborhood and found problems. After downloading, you can use the HoodChecker to try to find out just how corrupt the neighborhood is, and to fix some of the problems. Even a corrupt neighborhood can be fun to play for a while; you just shouldn't get too attached.

In fact, I'm convinced that many of the neighborhoods in the wiki are corrupted because making a neighborhood is such a huge task. This encourages people to share the load by having everyone create occupied lots and then installing those lots into the shared neighborhood. It also encourages people to take shortcuts, which can lead to corruption.

Neighborhoods for later EPs should be less corrupt than those for earlier EPs, because people better understood the ramifications of those shortcuts, but I didn't test too many of those because of my hatred of the Pets EP, so you'll have to rely on the HoodChecker and your own investigations.

At some point, I'm hoping to see some clean populated neighborhoods available for download, but I don't expect to see anything for some time.

Nobody ever knows how much work something like this is until they do it themselves. I never tell anybody who doesn't do similar stuff that I've started a project till I'm about finished with it; because otherwise it becomes a conversational hook: "So, have you finished that book yet?" "Um - I started researching it last week..." Or if someone wants to use it when finished: "Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you done yet?" And since it's all unpaid avocational labor, it's subject to long stoppages as burnout sets in, real life intrudes, or a Better Idea comes along.

I could spin ideas for a shareable hood all day long. Making one - maybe when I'm living in that castle in Scotland, I can do it between exercising the unicorn and reading Beowulf in the original.

Darby, I meant I was 'sharing' my want (like most of you's) to be able to download a fully functioning neighbourhood.
I don't see how it was a nagging question. It was just an innocent question asking if any of you guys and girls where in the process of making a neighbourhood or weather you were just simply making a set of rules/guidelines.
I know how hard it is. I have tried time after time to create a maxis like neighbourhood and that is quite tough to make it good, especially when you would need to be extra careful if it wasn't for personal use and was to be shared, you would have to be extra careful you ddin't corrupt someone elses game.

Going back I re-read some of the comments, and realised that Peni's comment wasn't really Nasty, I had just read it in a negative view.
Though I am dissapointed with the latter comments, some of them were down right patronising and kind of rude, but I should have expected it, it isn;t often you find the best manners on the internet.

On another note if you packaged a neighbourhood and someone was to download it, would all the Maxis Townies go with it? would that be a problem?

As was said upthread, if we are creating a neighbourhood, the idea is to create an empty one without the townies - only the character sims.

Thanks for that. I did read that but didn't understand wether it was the creators responsibility to actually remove them or weather it happened automatically

Yes, all of your townies would be packaged with the neighborhood. It's not a problem, per se, but there are problems when people have "too many" sims in their neighborhoods, so it's best for creators to minimize the number in a hood. People can always allow the game to generate excess townies, but removing them is hard. In addition, a neighborhood with less sims will be smaller and easier to share.

It's the creator's responsibility to decide on each sim in the neighborhood, including the townies. Unfortunately, EA defaults to including tons of redundant townies, so the creator needs to be careful to avoid generation of unnecessary sims, at every stage of the creation process.

Once a sim is in your neighborhood, whether that sim is a playable, townie, service sim or other, it is very difficult to cleanly remove them. You have to remove each sim by hand using a specific process, and there's no automated way to remove them in bunches. It's safer and easier to avoid generating them in the first place.

Thanks

No, you weren't really nagging, and I apologize for saying that. Mostly, I had a knee-jerk response to your response to Peni. It happens, but it's to your credit that you didn't just slink away from the thread entirely, muttering epithets, when called on it. Thank you.

Yeah, at the time I did get the wrong impression from Peni's message.
Well I didn't see the point in making a mountain out of a mole hill, and I still want to lend a hand where I can.

I am nearly there with testing the neighbourhood map. It centres properly - a feature of AGS (which I've not used before) is that you get a complete vanilla game set up so I didn't even have to remove the camera mod - and I have nearly got the map evened out enough that it will accept the lot placements WITHOUT having to fiddle. Making a terrain in SC4 is a right PITA.

Anyway, Mootilda, I wanted to know whether you have any idea about an issue I've spotted. While testing, I've been creating new neighbourhoods over and over. I have the empty templates in and the neighbourhoods are creating properly with no character files and not much else either. They're coming up clean in your neighbourhood checker (so far so good). However, I have noticed that there are two instances of SimDNA created every time. I seem to remember these with Little Carping too. I can see them in SimPE. Do you have any idea what these might be and whether I can delete them? I can't think what sim they might be attached to since there are no sims (apart from the universals, of course). I have been creating hoods the normal way but I will try the AGS way also (the one you discussed on your clean sub-hood thread) and see if that makes a difference.

I'd have to look into it. However, my understanding is that you should never remove SimDNA.

I agree about SimCity 4. It's a terrible program for terraforming. EA obviously decided to use it just to boost their SC4 sales.

There are other programs available which allow you greater control over SC4 files. For editing an existing SC4, I tend to use the SC4 Terraformer. Be sure to read the help, because it's not an intuitive program. However, it's great for setting an area to a specific elevation. This is the program that I used to modify the Brainania terrain.
http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_f....php?lotGET=731

For generating new random terrains, I tend to use the Height Map Generator, although I seem to have a different version than this link:
http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Height_Map_Generator

[Update:]

I don't see any SimDNA in my new empty neighborhoods. Which EPs and SPs are you using?

This looks great only it's for WinXP only apparently.


I'm using BG, Uni, NL, OFB, Seasons and BV. I'm going to try it again the AGS way in a mo - I've just had another go at the terrain in SC4.


Edit - interesting. When I create the AGS game and neighbourhood the way suggested in your thread (without any EAxis content), no simDNA. I wonder where that's coming from. I thought it might be the empty templates I'm using but it doesn't look like it. BTW no universals show up this time so there is no SDSC section showing in SimPE (and no simDNA either).

Anyway, I think I have the terrain as I envisaged it though you might not like it. This is the layout with a rough layout of where the lots will go - there are two other lots not shown here (actually, I'm tempted to do another one - a farm with a Seth sim but I must resist the lure of Cold Comfort Farm, this is supposed to be an Agatha Christie-esque type of arrangement and there's no place (currently) for Seth in the story). It's meant to be a Cornish coastal village (hence the valley).

Oh, sorry. I'll see whether I can find anything else with similar functionality.

That sounds like what I usually see: no SDSC and no SDNA. It has to be your empty templates or mods; there's nowhere else for it to come from.

Me personally? Can't imagine why that would matter.

The nice thing about creating a full neighborhood or subhood, rather than sharing individual lots, is that the lot edges don't have to be flat. Look at Elsewhere by plasticbox. It's a wonderful neighborhood with a bunch of lots that can't easily be moved. My Brainania took advantage of that in a different way. Because the lots were keyed to their location, I was able to add things in the space between the sidewalk and road, and to run the river under the road. You can't do that if you share the lots separately.

When I created the neighbourhoods the old-fashioned way (i.e. let the game do it), I got the simDNA but when I created it using AGS no SimDNA but surely that method still uses the empty templates? As I understood it from your thread:

1. AGS creates a game environment from the relevant game engines for whatever EPs you use.

2. The neighbourhood is then created within that environment but will still copy (if it can) the relevant files from the C drive (C:\program files\EA Games\The Sims 2 ******* and so on)

It's those files you alter when you put the empty templates in - or is that not how it's done? Your comment seems to indicate not so? (Thanks for your help BTW)