That'd be an interesting experiment! .

"buyable cars" or some in-game items by means of modded collection files seemed to have be disabled by newer EPs...

But, the others, i've no idea.

I was looking over some of the new lots in the download area and noticed a comment in one thread that the basement was flooded. Sounds like this is a common problem when placing basement lots in some neighborhoods, such as Veronaville.

However, I was unable to reproduce the problem and I no longer have the link for the thread.

Does anyone know anything about this issue? It sounds like something that would be very easy to fix... a small program based on the LotAdjuster 2D Array handling logic.

More generally, I would be happy to entertain requests for small programs which solve problems like this one. For example, HoodReplace took me very little time to make since it only had to modify two record types and they were both fairly well documented. I suspect that there are other small programs which might be helpful.

Update:
Found some additional information:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?...ter_in_Basement

Suggests that problem often occurs in Riverblossom Hills, so maybe I'll try to reproduce the problem with that neighborhood. The solution seems pretty simple: just move the water level of the lot down, so that it's under the ground again.

Mootilda,

sorry for my late response.
I lost internet connexion for the past 2 weeks.

the "flood in the basement" phenomenon has 2 types of cases:

1. pre-EP2 NL, in which the swimpool surface was left after improper deletion due to some defects in the swim-pool tool at the time. but, that could be exploited for other decorative causes like pool-surface-based beach or lake or aerial fake-pool surfaces. Since EP2 NL, that was "fixed" and so the decorative causes were lost at the same time.

2. post-EP2 NL, in which it is due to the neighbourhood water layer coded in neighbourhood shader but not the normal 2D array 0x3B76 water layer related to the water tool @ build mode. I've not read anything listing out where the setting of this neighbourhood water layer, nor have I dug into it before.

PS:
but as the water level relies on the neighbourhood water layer... The shader codes suggest the in-lot view of the neighbourhood water is just a magnified presentation of the neighbourhood view with some individually specified lines and values.

Thanks, niol. I've only been trying to reproduce this problem in the base game, which is probably why I couldn't do it.

Just for old times' sake...I've been making a new hood, with a handsome 'High Street' full of terraced shrunk lots. It looks great, and would not have been possible without all our hard work.

I've also been using HoodReplace to tweak the map - this being the first hood I have mapped myself, it needed some adjustment once I started placing lots. Also, I got BV soon after starting, and wanted to be able to add beach lots. Can't say i'm impressed with the hood view of them - all square and artificial-looking. However, I do enjoy walking instead of endlessly waiting for a taxi, and it's nice to have the waves.

I'm so pleased to see people using these programs. It was a long haul, but the finished product seems to be working well.

The Bon Voyage beach lots are really quite disappointing. I really wish that EA would implement the Castaway Stories beach lots instead; they are *wonderful* and work just as beach lots *should* work. Any shape, any size, water on any or all sides of the lot. I simply love them, but would prefer to play the Sims 2 (with EP/SPs) than to play a crippled Stories version of the game.

The whole "stories" concept seems flawed to me - no one actually wants to play a crippled game, especially one where you can't even create new lots to house your families!

Can't you? How silly. Building is my main enjoyment. I can't resist - tried to make a basic camping lot yesterday for a vacation, and really can't stand it - will have to go and build a little house. (Assisted by the fact that the whole time I played yesterday, there were violent thunderstorms. My sims even got hit by lightning. Hope the weather isn't always that extreme in Takemizu village.)

You know, people have extracted some of the Stories objects and made them work in Sims 2. Wouldn't it be nice if the beach lot setup could also be extracted!

Not being able to create new lots is a *major* flaw. That's why I wrote the tutorial for copying existing lots... it's not perfect, but it's much better than nothing.

I believe that EA painted themselves into a corner with the roadless lots in Castaway Stories, since placement of lots in a Sims 2 neighborhood relies on snapping the lot to a road. Instead of doing some major design and programming work to get roadless lots working, they just disabled the ability to create and move lots. Ouch!

Can a lot of 6x6 or less be imported into TS2 though?

maybe by means of switching the lot files and modding the neighbourhood file esp. the lot description file to recognise such lot?

I'd assume BV is a prerequisite for it at least. And, CS objects used in such lot may have to be cloned as custom contents in TS2. or, editing the object-related data is necessary. if those formats an structures are already well undertood, I guess batch-renaming or deletion in a reasonably useful HEX editor may help.

From some screen shots, I assume CS uses the caustic shader to render the underwater ground, or at least they reused the texture.

Actually, one may be able to extract the caustic textures as well as the ground covering/terrain paints out for their own TS2 game usages.


I think it's EAxis team who didn't want to rebuild the lot-handling tools in the GUI engine rather than that it couldn't be done, probably due to insufficient budget, time, resources and/or efforts? Remember, "extremely high" efficiency to earn $ is the only major goal of this company. Everything else is in a sub/of lower priority.

As far as I can tell, the Castaway Stories lots are not compatible with TS2... I haven't seen anyone porting them over. With Life Stories and Pet Stories, it's relatively easy to port them to TS2, since the Stories were basically straight ports from TS2.

When CS first came out and I realized that there was no way to add a new lot, I tried copying a completely empty lot from TS2 - it crashed. At that point, I stopped trying to port lots between the two products and wrote the "copying" tutorial instead. I just haven't looked at the issue since.

I suppose that the best test would be to copy a completely empty CS lot, to reduce the likelihood of incompatibilities.

I agree. I'm sure that it's do-able, but it requires a redesign of the lot placement logic and that's a major piece of work. The Stories line is meant to be a quick-and-dirty product line (no patches, no EPs, no support, ...), so they decided that it wasn't worth the effort.

Disclaimer: I'm just guessing about the amount of work and EA's motives... I have no inside info.

Oh well, square beaches it is, then! :-)

maybe, we can start a neighbourhood-modding in a thread... :D

I'm OK either way. Traffic on this thread has really tapered off since LA 1.1 was released, so it doesn't bother me to have the neighborhood modding stuff here. If you think that it would be easier to find / follow, I don't mind having a separate thread.

Most of my original "tutorials" touch both the lot and neighborhood packages... they seem very closely related. Just look at how Winterhart managed to change the texture of some of the neighborhood roads by modding lots using the LotAdjuster...

I think this is a sensible place to have hood-modding discussion, now that we've finished with the LotAdjuster stuff. Assuming there's discussion to be had, that is.

niol and I have been following a lot / neighborhood road modding discussion here:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=292381
and here:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=286308

I suppose that there will always be more things that people want to do.

has anyone tried to trim or alter files in lot package file to make them compaible to lower EPs or even the base game?

My so-far dig is:
1. 3D array Instance 1 switched into a lot in the base game (may call it EP0 for simplicity while TS2 can mean the whole game itself that leads to ambiguity) is OK
2. wall graphs + 3D array Instances existed in EP0 lots switched into a lot in the base game crashed
3. 2D array instance 0x3B76 switched into a lot in EP0 is OK.
4.

Sometimes, I wanna know if the EP roofs e displayed OK in the base game.

I know this can be a tire-some ride over a marsh.

I'm always disappointed when an interesting lot has high EP requirements. Even though I own Pets, Seasons, and FreeTime, I dislike them enough that I prefer not to play with them... they seem more annoying than fun.

I think that this would be a difficult but very interesting project. It would be much easier to do if I had the source code for the original LotExpander... right now the source code changes in the LotExpander can be used to document the changes for the various EPs, at least for the record types which are actually handled by the LE. But, if I remember correctly, I only took over the project for Pets and later.

Anyway, I think that this would be fun to try... and useful for everyone.

You may notice that it's on my to-do list, but I was so busy with the LA that it was pushed off to the side.

More thoughts:
This would be easier if it only worked for unoccupied lots and the program could just delete all of the sim-related records, since the LotExpander doesn't touch these records.

Question:
Someone (Inge?) suggested that MTS2 doesn't support backporting objects to earlier EPs, since it discourages people from buying the later EPs. Does this rule also apply to a program which allows lots to be used with an earlier EP? Since we're not actually adding any functionality to the earlier EPs, I'm guessing that it doesn't apply, but I'd appreciate feedback.

I shouldn't really have spoken for MTS2, if that's what I did. But on the whole it would seem to be against the spirit of the licence to do so.

With lots, I can't see why there should be any moral problem, depending what build/buy objects they contain.

true, that would take some works on analysing several file types and their evolutions through different EP and probably some SPs?


I've tried to convert someone's lots from EPs into a base game lot...
My major goal was to get at least the walls and floor tiles moved. The next want is the terrain paint as well.
As for objects, I doubt I want the EP objects to be in my base game. and that'll take some unnecessary works on adapted cloned EP objects back into my own base game.

But I'm somewhat more confident with floor tiles and wallpapers coz they seem to be easier.

The common 3D arrays and 2D arrays appear easier, too.

but terrain paint can be hard coz it involves multiple files and file types probably including some unknown files. but if it's solved, blue flashing (lack of textural reference) lots due to terrain paint may become solvable, too. For those who want to just remove terrain paint, I guess using a plain lot template of the lot terrain file and some unaltered 2D array files may work out.

hopefully, EAxis wouldn't suddenly believe they can benefit from selling hidden meshes from a lot whether it's from anolder or newer EP or the the base game...


oops I forgot to report ...
I've made 10x10 lot with LA in my base game copy.

can't update the road or move it in-game.

In general, I believe that high EP requirements aren't actually necessary for many lots to look right... people just happened to have those EPs installed when they made the lot. Very few lots actually use objects / walls / floors / roofs / etc from every single EP and SP on one lot. Yet, many lots say that they have requirements for every one.

I assume that the EP-reducer would just remove everything on a lot which it knows comes from the EP being removed... mostly, I was thinking about stripping out sections of records which aren't supported, or even entire records where required.

As far as the objects go, does anyone know what will happen if an object from a later EP is loaded with an earlier EP? If the game just removes the object from the lot, then that works well. I could at least start by leaving the objects alone. However, if the EP-reducer has to keep track of which objects came with each EP / SP, so that it can remove the individual objects, then that will be a lot more work.

unfortunately, the game normally crash just like lots with UNI objects in the base game.

I can never understand why they can't simply make those EP objects to have base game fallback GUIDs ???

maybe to track out the known empty lot objects is already a hectic work. unless you run an app to ease the process by automatically listing out all the known empty lot objects for every EP and maybe some SPs? or maybe simply turn any alien GUID into default fallback GUIDs for objects after EP-reducer scan for the game copy's programme files and the custom folder..

Or ask users to make a new lot of the same size and sides. then it can swap only the wanted contents instead.

Too bad about objects from one EP crashing a lot from a previous EP...

niol, I think that I like your piecemeal approach to the problem.

Originally, I was thinking that I would write a program which would remove the requirements for FreeTime. Once that was working, I'd try to remove the requirements for Bon Voyage. Then Seasons. And so on. Unfortunately, it could take a long time before this approach provides much benefit.

However, I think that I like your idea of doing terrain and water first. Once that's working (a breeze), then get EP-reduction for walls working. Then floors. Then roofs. And so on. Even if I can't get every record type working perfectly, at least we'd have the shell of the building available for previous EPs.

OK, folks, time to brainstorm. I need a name. It's silly, but C++ requires a name before you can start working on a project.

EPReducer? LotReduceEPs? LotRemoveEPs? BackPorter? LotPorter? LotDowngrader? ReconcileLotEPs? LotRewinder? LotLessEPs? Sigh.

So far, I like LotRewinder the best. Or maybe: LotRewindEPs? LotTrimEPs? LotPruneEPs? LotSnipEPs? EPSlasher (hmmm, I wonder about the visuals on that one )? LotDeflateEPs?

My random ideas:
LotDejavu, Lots4AnyGame, Lots4BaseGamer, LotRetrospector, Lotkompatibleur (lot compatibler), Locateleporteur (lot teleportor), Casapourore (home for all [games]), Uhkatoo (home for all [games]), etc ... too long to list them all out.

from your list of ideas,
I personally pick BackPorter, LotRewinder, LotDowngrader, EPSlasher.
as for some reorganised ideas of yours: LotDeflateEPs --> Lot-EPsDeflater, LotSnipEPs --> Lot-EPsSnipper

Anyway, those are just my random "rain-storms" .

Lol, Inge, aelflaed, plasticbox, etc... what're your ideas ?

MayB, we cn drag mor peopl hea 2c if day wanna join ...

I like LotRewinder, and I kind of liked LotRetrospector too.

My suggestion - CompatiLot.

I agree, there are many lots posted which shouldn't -have- to require Eps, except that the builder had them installed at the time. That's precisely why I use the BSG, so I can have the minimal EP requirements for what I want to do. (Assuming I know that clearly when I begin - I have had to upgrade a few times during building!) So, being able to build in fullgame, and then downgrade the finished lot to only the necessary EPs, would be nice.

I think walls and roofs would be the first things needed - when I (rarely) download a house, it's usually to check out the building techniques, so I don't care so much about things like terrain paints. The shell would be fine. Oh, of course niol means terrains and water as in the landscape. Yes, that would have to come before walls :-)

Niol, are you suggesting that any EP objects be swapped for basegame equivalents if they can't be transferred? That sounds kinda cool.

What about custom objects? You could have a lot full of custom EP-requiring objects, it'd be hard to check them all with the Compatilot, but the package would still crash someone's basegame.