View Single Post in: Discussion: Lot Size, Orientation, Rotation, etc.

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#12 Old 25th Sep 2007 at 10:20 PM
Default Moving the Road and the Front of a Lot
How to Rotate a House on a Lot:

While thinking about adding and removing roads from a lot (see post above), I realized that this technique will also work for changing the orientation of a house on a lot. There are several Strangetown lots which annoy me because the front door faces the side yard.

I used the following technique to rotate 57 Road to Nowhere in Strangetown by removing the existing road, adding a new road near the front door, and then changing the orientation of the lot and rotating it in the neighborhood.

In other words, we don't actually rotate the house on the lot. Instead, we move the road and change the orientation of the lot in the neighborhood. Because of this, the direction of the sun in relationship to the house will not change.

First, read this post to understand the U10 and U11 fields in the neighborhood package:

http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...32&postcount=10


Instructions for rotating a lot:

1) Backup your neighborhood before trying this technique.

2) Ensure that your lot has enough room for the new road: one additional square in the neighborhood view, or ten additional tiles in the lot view.

3) Open the neighborhood in SimPE.

4) Determine the current location of the road (U10) and the current orientation of the lot (U11).

5) Determine where you want the new road, based on the current orientation of the lot and the current road location. Remember, the house will remain in the same place on the lot, but we will move the road and the orientation of the lot.

Here's a trick that I use to get the values right:

First, draw a very rough sketch of your house and the current road, viewed from above, on a piece of paper.

Then, rotate the piece of paper so that the road is at the left, right, top or bottom of the page, depending upon the old U10 and U11 values.

Now, keeping the paper in the same position, mark where you want the new road and front of house to go. This new road will either be at the left, right, top or bottom of the page. From this, we can determine the new U10 and U11 values:

U10 = 1 & U11 = 0 House faces left, road on left
U10 = 2 & U11 = 1 House faces top, road on top
U10 = 4 & U11 = 2 House faces right, road on right
U10 = 8 & U11 = 3 House faces bottom, road on bottom

6) Change the values of both U10 and U11 as discussed above. It is important that the U10 and U11 fields match: for example, if we are going to move the road to the left side, then we need to change the orientation of the house to left as well. SimPE works best if you leave the existing "0x0" prefix and just change the last hex number for both of these fields.

7) Commit the change, save the neighborhood file and exit SimPE.

8) Open the lot file in SimPE and change the portals.

See my post on moving portals:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1778523

You can also check out Andi's original post on creating a 1x1 lot for information about changing the portals:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1376196

9) Start the game and go into the neighborhood.

10) Use the "Move or Rotate Lot" tool in the "Lots and Houses - F2" menu to move the lot so that it "snaps" to the appropriate road. A portion of the lot may appear to be bright blue... don't worry, this is completely normal and will be fixed in the next step.

11) Go into the lot. You will need to delete the old road (just treat it as a set of floor tiles) and move the mailbox and garbage can. To do this, you will probably need to turn moveobjects on temporarily. Then, save the lot and return to the neighborhood view to ensure that everything looks right.

12) Run a quick test to ensure that the portals have moved correctly. You want to check that each of the following groups enter and leave the lot at the expected point:
- Pedestrians
- Transportation like cars, carpools, buses and taxis.
- Service vehicles like maids, gardeners and handypeople.