#hoodreplace

IF MEDIEVAL NONSENSE BE SOMETHING YOU WISH... HEEKELVUARA or "the struggle of making a custom hood in the Sims 2, achieving game stability and personal musings and W's and L's of a lifelong simmer". ᛭᛭᛭

Initially I started this ongoing yuge scale project last September as a companion activity for my second full novel-length manuscript that's set in similar era and setting. Well. They both sorta blew up, as these things tend to.

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The neighborhood is called Heekelvuara, located somewhere in the Karelian region. It is set in an ambiguous time period, somewhere in the medieval era.

Why call it Heekelvuara? See, at the time, I was listening to a great audiobook monolith, an interesting albeit very frustrating topic of interpreting G.W.F. Hegel. What a head scratcher, that fella. So, naturally, after being personally attacked by him and having been spiritually assaulted by German philosophy... I turned that enigma of a man and book experience into a regional dialect, not dialectics, and made the 'hood appropriately called "the danger of Hegel".

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After spending a week downloading almost 15GB of themed CC, scourging the great wide webs for this...

First hood attempt was a no-go. No terrain matched exactly what I wanted, and what I wanted, was mountainous AND watery both. So I found a Hawaiian template (not pictured), and built the hood on top of it. The roads and topography were too simple for my uses, though, so rigorous Googling ensued. "How edit roads in game". "How edit neighborhood terrain in game".

The map had sharp spikes all over, almost like the Apartment Life duality subhood. Yet I persisted. I masked the simple roads with a buncha CC.

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Soon came a grim day and even more grim realization. I had moved my Downloads-folder to another drive, so the dang hood loaded empty. SHIT. All deco gone in an instant.

Off to rebuilding it was, or scrapping the project completely.

The roads and the layout of the altered Hawaiian map bugged me still, and while I don't intend to recreate any historical maps 1=1, I wanted the new hood I were to make to reflect the class struggle a bit. Yeomen and peasantry would need an inhabitable disctict, the churches would be in an elevated region, as would the castles.

The not-so-fortunate in my silly lil' hood needed to experience that rigorous Sunday walk uphill to the damn church, I decided.

So I fired up SimCity4, having never played that. Learnt the damn ancient thing just well enough. In approximately another week or so, I had a map, custom-made Heekelvuara 1.0, rather than the altered Hawaiian map.

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After that, I had to make it playable on my machine: the game itself. If anyone is interested exactly what I did to achieve relative stability on my setup (GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super + 13th Gen Intel Core i7 13650HX) w/ heavy cc, I kept notes and can answer later on.

I own both the Legacy collection and Ultimate Collection. I spent around a month on-off debugging various crap and testing the stability of the engine, having applied all the recommended patches and community fixes. CTD's and fatal errors were constant still. No wonder with by then 22+ GB of CC and hacks, many from 2005-2009 golden era. (Thank gosh jeepers for the Internet Archive.) This I didn't accept, as back in the day, I got a ton of CC as well and remember gaming long sessions no trouble.

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What actually mattered aka stability TLDR; I forced Vulkan, use the Ultimate Collection for stability + RPC by the amazing LazyDuchess, single core launch, and a ton of third party tools by legends like Mootilda for hack conflict detection and stuff like that.

Also, eliminating pink soup, which was a problem initially, was made possible by the TS2 MemCapRemover.

I also use a custom PowerShell neighborhood autosave-backup-script that I launch manually every time I do edits. It creates a copy of the neighborhood folder on a ten minute interval. (There's a reason it got created... more on that a bit later.)

Also my PC's got a huge pagefile set for other nerd purposes.

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My own custom-made Heekelvuara 1.0 lived, yet it did not stay for long. I took a half a year break in between the rebuilding + stability chaos and the another revival of this cursed thing, the 2.0 edition I'm currently at.

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I discovered some stupid seeds of corruption from the PleasantView townies through the HoodChecker by Mootilda. I hadn't installed the clean templates. I did exactly so.

Using HoodReplace by Mootilda again, I replaced the hood, now empty of Goopy GilsCarbos and Benjamin Longs, and started importing the lots and the sims from 1.0 to 2.0 via SimPe and BodyShop.

This required creating a custom .bat, that randomizes Finnish-Swedish-Karelian-Russian names, appropriate for that era. It works pretty great.

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Currently, I'm working on creating lots and new families and the populace, right now the monastery.

Any Q's, I'll try my best to answer, if this post reaches anyone. Anyway, here are some screenshots!

How do I use your Strangetown maps in my game?

How do I put a custom terrain in a hood I already started playing?

Let me show you. :)

I’ve lived in and driven through many a place that was truly a widespot in the road and I wanted my Widespot to have that feel. I had already moved the houses closer in to make the town walkable and created a backstory for the founding of the little town, but those extra roads in the Maxis Sedona terrain kinda bugged me.

A good friend in my Facebook Sims group (Yay, DAVO!) modified the terrain for me, and here it is! I love it, and he’s willing to share. I asked him to remove the extra roads I didn’t want and add a road on the other side of the mountain for my itinerant carny camp. He also made the mountains cradle the town a bit more to give it more reason for only being a widespot in the road. Did I mention I love it?

If you’d like to use this terrain (back up your Widespot, first), make a new empty hood with it, then use HoodReplace to replace your Widespot’s road, terrain, and bridges, and consider keeping your deco and trees. I had to experiment a little, but only ended up moving trees around a bit. There’s only one lush png for this terrain as I only intended to use it with HoodReplace.

I couldn’t really find a tutorial, so I made a sort of tutorial for you, with pictures.  I hope it’ll help!