The Ultimate Road Default Replacement (No Overlay Needed)
Yes, you read that right: it’s a default replacement which not only replaces roads in neighborhood view but also ALL THE ROAD TILES in lot view! Yay!
It is a huge hi-res replacement that will liberate you from putting road overlays on all lots in your neighborhoods.
Technical stuff:
(Below are the things that were a revelation to me personally. If you already knew that - that’s great!)
To avoid placing of overlays this replacement had to be extremely maxis match. This means that the terrain part must be visible on all roads and that only short dashes or full lines could be created in the middle of the road.
As you might probably know, the road in lot view is composed of multiple floor tiles. The cental “dash” tiles are floors with the dashes drawn all the way to the edge of the tile, it’s not centered. In neighborhood view however, road pieces are much bigger and allow centering of the middle dashes as they are painted over. Because of this they would never align with lot edge.
What Maxis did to resolve this is that they centered the dashes on neighborhood roads and then slightly shifted them for tiles seen from lot view (these are lot skirt roads and they do not share textures). The problem with that is neighborhood roads or lot skirt roads can be flipped 180 degrees by the game and in this case the dashes will never align.
Yes, Maxis dashes are wonky :
So I had to choose: either I accept no alignment on nh road pieces (between the junction of different pieces like straight and angle, straight and end etc.) or no strict alignement between lot and nh edge.
I chose the second. So there will always be a slight shift of alignment for middle dashes on the edge of a lot. It doesn’t bother me that much, this is just the kind of compromise you have to make in this game.
Turned out it was not the only weird thing Maxis did to their roads. They also edited the color of lot skirt roads to make it warmer and made them more narrow (you can also see the shift in middle dashes I’ve talked about previously):
In my opinion they did this to compensate the difference in lighting between neighborhood and lot without modifying the TXMTs of road floor tiles. This is the reason why there is always a difference between NH and lot view roads, sometimes even with overlays.
So I had to do some more Photoshop witchcraft to make it work the right way colorwise.
Some screenshots (no editing except cropping, Maxis lighting):
Lot edge under different Maxis seasonal lighting:
What to download:
This replacement comes in two parts - lot road replacement (which replaces all 30 (yes yes) road tiles for lot view roads) and neighborhood road replacement (which replaces nh view roads and lot skirt roads). You must download both parts!
Lot road replacement also includes a new sidewalk with paws, a sidewalk with puddles/splashes and an asphalt driveway to match the rest (all three are default replacements):
Downloads (everything is compressorized and clearly labelled):
Step 1. Download lot road replacement (SFS)
Step 2. Download the files below that correspond to your current lush, desert, dirt and concrete terrain replacements (SFS):
Lush:
- Zeussims - Sims 3 Lush (original terrain)
- Criquette - Rural Charm (original terrain)
- CuriousB - Lush (original terrain)
- Siletkasims - CuriousB lush edited (original terrain)
- iCad - Lush (original terrain)
- Peppermint and Ginger - Lush (original terrain)
- Peppermint and Ginger - Lush V2 (original terrain)
- Suratan Zir - Lush (original terrain)
Desert:
- CuriousB - Desert (original terrain)
- iCad - CuriousB desert edited (original terrain)
- Peppermint and Ginger - Desert (original terrain)
Dirt:
- CuriousB - Dirt (original terrain)
- iCad - Dirt (original terrain)
- Peppermint and Ginger - Dirt (original terrain)
Concrete:
- CuriousB - Concrete (original terrain)
- Peppermint and Ginger - Concrete (original terrain)
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Maxis terrains
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PNG templates to make roads match terrain of your choice (creator’s resource)
Credit for all these beautiful terrains goes to @zeussims @criquette-was-here @curiousb @siletkasims @dramallamadingdang @peppermint-ginger and @suratan-zir.
@criquette-was-here originally made a nh bridge road replacement to fit their rural charm roads here so I thought it would be a good addition to this replacement. And then I also did a stone bridge nh deco replacement (the one that can be seen in Veronaville):
Download nh big and stone bridges replacement (SFS)
Textures for this road replacement were extracted from the Sims 3 by auntielynds and shared in this thread on MTS, I used the sidewalk and asphalt textures.
Special thanks go to @hypersaline who once told me about the way roads can be replaced in lot view which led to this whole replacement idea.
In case you would like to have access to all road floor tiles I replaced (for exemple, for building purposes) in build mode, I suggest following this tutorial to unlock them. They won’t show up in catalog but if you use the eyedropper tool anywhere on lot road, you’ll see all of them.
If you are using your own terrain replacement not shared anywhere and would like to use my roads - feel free to ask and I will send you the PNG files I made. And if you use a replacement that I didn’t include in the list - just tell me and I will try to add it.
UPDATE:
Fixed some lot skirt road pieces reverting back to default in light and heavy snow. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, please redownload your neighborhood road replacements!
Also added a new lush terrain road to fit the replacement by Suratan Zir.
UPDATE 2:
Following Anon’s request, added road replacements to fit Maxis’ original terrains. And I also managed to get it to work with no quality loss for roads so yay for that!
UPDATE 3:
Added a missed puddle/splatter floor replacement to match the sidewalk. Please redownload lot road replacement if you want it to show up.
UPDATE 4:
Added a nh bridge road replacement.
UPDATE 5:
Added a stone nh deco bridge replacement.
UPDATE 6:
Replaced stone nh deco bridge
