Hi spockthewok, first of all, I'm a huge fan of your incredible work and was wondering if you could help me and @yolkema out in creating neighborhoods based on medium-sized SC4 maps like in Sims Castaway Stories (and possibly even completely new large-sized SC4 maps) ?
Basically, these are our main findings so far:
The game cannot create neighborhoods based on medium-sized/large-sized SC4 maps on its own. This pop-up appears:
So, basically we tried the following: copy/pasting one of the default small-sized SC4 maps and renaming it to match with the name of the medium-/large-sized SC4 map and create the neighborhood as usual... but right after the game entered loading screen, we minimized the game and swapped the small-sized SC4 map with the medium-/large-sized one. It did work and didn't crash the game!
But after creation, the game couldn't display the textures properly... it created a glitchy terrain texture but the terrain is there, you can at least place decorations on it...
For medium-sized maps you can use Mootilda's HoodReplace to fix the glitchy terrain, it will look somewhat OK without the roads but some texture mismatch (in terrain and sky) is visible
But if you try to place down roads using newest version of SimPE and all, it creates weird shadows... but at least you can change the terrain too and this should allow us to create custom maps
The game is OK with using Sims Castaway stories' hood maps but custom medium/large SC4 maps don't work... it will keep creating the glitchy terrain, even if it was perfectly fine before (see screenshot below which happened after importing from SC4 map using HoodReplace)
So, if you "fix" the map using HoodReplace by copying the Sims Castaway map over and later try to use HoodReplace again to import from .sc4 map in order to create your custom town with different terrain and roads and all, it will break the terrain texture again... so this does not come from the somewhat controversial creation process (mind you, if you use the exact same method and swap a small-sized SC4 map with another small-sized one, it will create the neighborhood just fine without any terrain texture issues)
If you try to change the terrain type to something other than lush, it doesn't work great for desert and dirt terrain types... weird black squares appear but the concrete terrain seems to be somewhat OK
(These are all medium-sized maps btww.. and also nevermind the first one since I didn't know how to use the road tool properly, so that's why the roads are all weird in that one).
One good thing though, even if the neighborhood terrain is broken in neighborhood view, in lot view it works just fine and you can see the entire neighborhood in lot view if you increase the lot skirt.
If you're interested and want to have a look into this, here's the folder including all the experimental maps above (+ a mini tutorial on how to create neighborhoods based on medium-sized/larged-sized SC4 maps) : Download!
Basically we have:
N001 is the medium-sized lush map after it was fixed using Hood Replace using Sims Castaway map (it's technically the same map as in Sims CS lol)
N002 is a medium-sized concrete map after it was fixed using Hood Replace and modified in SimPE using the built-in terrain sculpting and road rool
N003 is the unfixed medium-sized desert map (with the glitchy terrain still intact)
N004 is the unfixed large-sized lush map (also with the glitchy terrain since we don't have any pre-made large-sized neighborhoods to copy from)
Again, we'd greatly appreciate your efforts if you ever decide to have a look into this and can possibly come up with a solution. But either way, just know you're amazing and your contributions to the sims community are already incredible and greatly appreciated! <3
Hello jawusa!
I have literally never tried to import SC4 maps into TS2, so I didn't know this restriction existed.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a function called IsSmallCity() which needs to return true for a map to be considered valid to import:
If we look at the same function from Castaway Stories, we can see that this check was completely removed:
Patching this check out in TS2 allows for medium/large maps to be imported without the game complaining, but it creates the glitchy terrain you and yolkema observed. Presumably, the code that reads the terrain data from the maps only processes things up to the maximum bounds of a small map, leaving everything else uninitialised.
It will be interesting to see what changes Aspyr made to allow Castaway Stories to support these maps - as long as they didn't add a load of new functionality, it should be feasible to backport this to TS2.
I've had several other requests that I need to finish off first, but I've added this to my list of things to look at in the future :)
