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Original Poster
#1 Old 21st May 2008 at 6:06 AM
Default I need dirt roads and paved roads
I am creating the neighborhood where I live. It's out in the country the smallest lots are 3/4 of an acre. My property is an acre and 1/4.
I have used Mootilda's Lot Adjuster (great program you can find it here: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=282409)
to move 6 lots together and overlap them so they look like one big lot. My problem is I need dirt roads and paved roads. Is there any way to do that? Or am I just banging my head on the wall for nothing? Attached is a screen shot. The paved roads with the trees in the middle of them are dirt in lot view and I want them dirt in neighborhood view too.
Thank you for your time.
Screenshots

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
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Knitting fiend
retired moderator
#2 Old 21st May 2008 at 7:49 AM
I don't know if it's possible or not, but if anyone has seen something like what you're looking for it'll be someone at the WCIF forum linked in my signature.

"Evil genius is still genius." Asura NPC GW2
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Original Poster
#3 Old 21st May 2008 at 5:26 PM
Default dirt and paved roads
Quote: Originally posted by JLonier
I don't know if it's possible or not, but if anyone has seen something like what you're looking for it'll be someone at the WCIF forum linked in my signature.


Thanks

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Site Helper
#4 Old 22nd May 2008 at 3:18 AM
The neighborhood road information is stored in the NHTR record in the neighborhood package:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=NHTR

If the type of road is stored in this record, it would likely be in the 11 unknown bytes at the end of each road entry. I suppose that you could try modding these 11 bytes, to see whether you can figure out what they mean...
Mad Poster
#6 Old 10th Jul 2008 at 4:17 AM
i suppose someone could make a neighborhood decorative item that is a dirt road that overlays the regular road, but to my knowledge it hasn't been done yet.

"When life gives you lemons, see the lemons, feels the lemons, BE THE LEMONS!"

Take a look-see, hmm...? Go on, click them:
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#7 Old 10th Jul 2008 at 2:36 PM
It's been done for EPs up to Seasons, and the technique is documented in the following post:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=292381

Unfortunately, EA changed something in Seasons and the technique no longer works. Winterhart is trying to find a new technique now.
Mad Poster
#8 Old 10th Jul 2008 at 9:59 PM
oh. It's probably because Maxis needed to make the roads snowy in winter and had to change some linking for newer textures.

"When life gives you lemons, see the lemons, feels the lemons, BE THE LEMONS!"

Take a look-see, hmm...? Go on, click them:
The Super Mario Project, Nintendorks Island-Celebrating 2 Years Online!
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Original Poster
#9 Old 11th Jul 2008 at 12:55 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Rapsheba555
oh. It's probably because Maxis needed to make the roads snowy in winter and had to change some linking for newer textures.


That makes sense. Thank you.

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Mad Poster
#10 Old 11th Jul 2008 at 10:13 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Rapsheba555
oh. It's probably because Maxis needed to make the roads snowy in winter and had to change some linking for newer textures.


the neighbourhood snowing is at least by part normally done by the neighbourhood shader and others. The snows on objects are done by additional texture maps. I need a re-check by at least a volunteer to confirm if road tile textures are responsible to the snowy look for road tiles. (I'm renovating my HDs and so all of my non-base game copies are gone.)

it makes sense that the neighbourhood textures were made to lay over the lot layer for variable or temporary graphical presentations for "seasons".

But if there's no road tiles for the snowy scene, it may mean EAxis team simply made the lot layer lower than the neighbourhood road layer instead of raising the layer for the snow. And that in turns resulted in what we've seen here.

But, I'm unsure which way they altered such setting.
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Original Poster
#11 Old 11th Jul 2008 at 6:55 PM
Default Volunteer
Quote: Originally posted by niol
the neighbourhood snowing is at least by part normally done by the neighbourhood shader and others. The snows on objects are done by additional texture maps. I need a re-check by at least a volunteer to confirm if road tile textures are responsible to the snowy look for road tiles. (I'm renovating my HDs and so all of my non-base game copies are gone.)


I'll try to it if you can tell me step by step what I need to do.

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Mad Poster
#12 Old 11th Jul 2008 at 8:38 PM
1. browse to the 3D folder of the Seasons' programme folder,
2. open the packages one by one with SimPE to track out which ones are for txtr files.
3. browse around what textures are there apparently related to the road tiles.

and/or use search/find in simpe...
search string as file names
the 2 key strings:
1. road
2. snow
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Original Poster
#13 Old 12th Jul 2008 at 5:18 AM
Default Found way too many
Quote: Originally posted by niol
1. browse to the 3D folder of the Seasons' programme folder,
2. open the packages one by one with SimPE to track out which ones are for txtr files.
3. browse around what textures are there apparently related to the road tiles.

and/or use search/find in simpe...
search string as file names
the 2 key strings:
1. road
2. snow


I opened the Textures package in the 3D folder of Seasons. I found the following files.

15 road textures
5 new road textures
51 lotskirtroad textures

Every one of them has snow in the file name.

Can you tell specifically what you are looking for? If so I can do printscreens and upload them.

I also opened the same file in Night Life.

5 road textures
10 lotskirtroad textures

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Mad Poster
#14 Old 12th Jul 2008 at 7:25 AM
Winterhart,

This is already sufficient for our purposes. but it's good to show a snowed road tile in the post for a solid proof.

It seems reasonably EAxis used those snowed road tiles for a snowy neighbourhood and so such a change became necessary. That means the neighbourhood road tile has to lay over the lot road tiles in that game engine without more expensive alterations like adding alpha-transparency on the neighbourhood road tile layer and use transparent snowed tiles over any textures of lower layer order.

I know the ground was not designed to be transparent, but they could have used transparent texture layers to lay over any lower layers including the ground and road tiles.

Anyway, they only do exactly what some simmers requested or they only do what are simplified out of the requests? This has been happening from the start.
Too many details were skipped. lost in extraction ...
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Original Poster
#15 Old 12th Jul 2008 at 6:02 PM Last edited by Winterhart : 12th Jul 2008 at 6:27 PM. Reason: adding screenshots
Default what now?
Quote: Originally posted by niol
Winterhart,

This is already sufficient for our purposes. but it's good to show a snowed road tile in the post for a solid proof.

It seems reasonably EAxis used those snowed road tiles for a snowy neighbourhood and so such a change became necessary. That means the neighbourhood road tile has to lay over the lot road tiles in that game engine without more expensive alterations like adding alpha-transparency on the neighbourhood road tile layer and use transparent snowed tiles over any textures of lower layer order.

I know the ground was not designed to be transparent, but they could have used transparent texture layers to lay over any lower layers including the ground and road tiles.

Anyway, they only do exactly what some simmers requested or they only do what are simplified out of the requests? This has been happening from the start.
Too many details were skipped. lost in extraction ...


Niol,
Maybe I am not understanding or I did not communicate clearly. There is no snow on the road tiles. What I meant to communicate is that the textures each have "snow" in the texture name. See screenshot.

So what if anything can we do now? I thought about replacing the texture file is Seasons with the one in NightLife. I would also have to modify the CarryForward.sgfiles.file so that Bon Voyage would run the way I want. Does that sound like something that could work? I am not very familiar with SimPE I have managed to do recolors with step by step tutorial. And I was able to follow Phaenoh's instructions to modify the catalog sorts. Beyond that I have no clue but I would like to learn more.

Thank you all for your help.
Screenshots

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Mad Poster
#16 Old 12th Jul 2008 at 8:54 PM
Compare them with the non-snowy ones, and may realise the white boundary between the pedestrian an the road is white and the normal colour is greenish or others.
lol, that's how EAxis made road "snowy" ...

Snow on road tiles or objects are regarded as stationary snows, and so they need only a texture maps like txtr and/or lifo files.

Should you see some whitish dots on them, that should be done by the shaders for the dynamic shading of snowing.

The thing is the whole set of road tile will be automatically switched to the snowy set when the neighbourhood has "winter" and "snow".
The same for the desert, european road, concrete, and so forth.

Replacing the txtr files won't get the custom lot road to show up in the neighbourhood after EP5 or later is installed.

I don't know where the setting for this switching as well as such layer definition(s) be at. but, I asume it may be in the exe which we can't legally alter.
But, I'm unsure if it can happen in some shaders like the neighbourhood shader.
It takes some more effort to track if they have those definitions and if they're sufficient for any alteration related to this quest.

if the lot road layer is higher than the neighbourhood road layer, then the road will have what you paint on your lot even in the snowy sims time..., but is that what you really want ultimately if your quest be accomplishable?
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Original Poster
#17 Old 13th Jul 2008 at 3:32 AM Last edited by Winterhart : 13th Jul 2008 at 3:34 AM. Reason: edit text
Quote: Originally posted by niol
if the lot road layer is higher than the neighbourhood road layer, then the road will have what you paint on your lot even in the snowy sims time..., but is that what you really want ultimately if your quest be accomplishable?


Anything that gets me my custom dirt roads. I bought Seasons specifically to use some custom plants that only work with that EP. I do not care about snow. If I could have altered the the custom content I would have, however that is not allowed by it's creator. Plus I would have no clue how to do it.

Could we make custom lots in SimPE with the road layer higher, or maybe the whole lot?
I do not know what is possible and what is not.

Thank you for your time.

Winterhart

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Site Helper
#18 Old 13th Jul 2008 at 6:03 AM Last edited by Mootilda : 13th Jul 2008 at 11:57 PM. Reason: Oops. Said "tile" when I meant "vertex". Fixed.
The neighborhood terrain is stored in a 2D array in the neighborhood package; in ABCB5DA4 / NHTG / Neighborhood terrain geometry:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=NHTG
One floating point number for the elevation of each neighborhood vertex.

The roads themselves are stored in the "roads" list in the neighborhood package; in ABD0DC63 / NHTR / Neighborhood terrain:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=NHTR

There is an elevation (Z) value in each road entry, but I have personally had some difficulties with roads where I modified this value. See my work with HoodReplace:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...508#post1924508

The lot terrain is stored in the lot package; in one layer of 2A51171B /3ARY / 3D Array Instance 1:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=3D_Array
Again, one floating point number for the elevation of each vertex on the lot.

To determine which layer of the 3D Array contains the ground level (and thus the road), you need to look at the minimum level stored in 0A284D0B / WGRA / Wall graph:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=WGRA

When changing elevations on a lot, I found that it's important to be sure to change the water level stored in 6B943B43 / 2DARY / 2D Array:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=2ARY
This will help to avoid flooded roads. Again, one floating point number for the elevation of the water for each vertex on the lot.

Unfortunately, the game will change the level of the neighborhood terrain to match the lot terrain the first time that you save your lot, so this may only be a temporary solution.

Possible workarounds:
1) Have the road on the lot "hover" above the ground level, so that the road on the lot is always higher than the road in the neighborhood (which is always at ground level).

You might be able to achieve this by putting the pseudo-road tiles on the level above ground level, and then adjusting that level down as far as possible. I've seen a tutorial for setting the difference between two levels at 1 click, which should be sufficient. If you can get the "hover" level low enough, it may not even affect the vehicle animations too badly.

2) Set the elevation of the road at every major vertex of the lot to 0, set the elevation of the rest of the road vertices to something > 0. This might fool the neighborhood into thinking that the road on the lot is at a relative elevation of 0, while keeping the majority of the road tiles higher than that.

Have you tried my suggested workaround of changing the lot so that the lot and neighborhood roads never overlap? I continue to hold out hope for this relatively simple solution.
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Original Poster
#19 Old 13th Jul 2008 at 6:12 AM
Just a thought

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Mad Poster
#20 Old 13th Jul 2008 at 6:30 PM
OK, after my fixing my neighbourhood shader mods, I'll check if there're settings in it and the lotskirt shader since they're kinda file-related.
Site Helper
#21 Old 14th Jul 2008 at 12:58 AM Last edited by Mootilda : 14th Jul 2008 at 1:37 AM.
I tried the following test:

1) Create a lot
2) Place a pseudo-road using dirt floor tiles and a concrete sidewalk on the left side of the lot
3) Place a pseudo-road using dirt ground cover and a concrete sidewalk on the right side of the lot
4) Save the lot and exit to the neighborhood.

Both sides of the lot look like dirt roads with sidewalks to me. Checked neighborhood view in base game and with all EPs. For non-corner lots, you'd probably want to remove the paved road using the LotAdjuster. To make the pseudo-roads work correctly, you'd need to use the Portal Revealer.

I believe that this might be a simple solution to your request.

I was going to try the following test:
1) Create a lot
2) Place pseudo-road on 2nd floor
3) Change elevation of pseudo-road to 1 (road is usually at ground level elevation of 0).

But I can't see anything obviously wrong with the other technique, so I'll wait to hear feedback instead.
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Original Poster
#22 Old 15th Jul 2008 at 1:28 AM
Default Tests
Quote: Originally posted by Mootilda
I tried the following test:

1) Create a lot
2) Place a pseudo-road using dirt floor tiles and a concrete sidewalk on the left side of the lot
3) Place a pseudo-road using dirt ground cover and a concrete sidewalk on the right side of the lot
4) Save the lot and exit to the neighborhood.

Both sides of the lot look like dirt roads with sidewalks to me. Checked neighborhood view in base game and with all EPs. For non-corner lots, you'd probably want to remove the paved road using the LotAdjuster. To make the pseudo-roads work correctly, you'd need to use the Portal Revealer.

I believe that this might be a simple solution to your request.

I was going to try the following test:
1) Create a lot
2) Place pseudo-road on 2nd floor
3) Change elevation of pseudo-road to 1 (road is usually at ground level elevation of 0).

But I can't see anything obviously wrong with the other technique, so I'll wait to hear feedback instead.


Thank you.

I tried the first solution in the base game. I'll take your word that it works in the EP's. It does work but things look a little fuzzy in neighborhood view.
I not sure how to do the second one. This is what I did so far.

1) Created a lot

2) Put up a small rectangle of walls. (that's the only way to get to 2nd floor) I don't know if this is what you meant.

3) Put down pseudo-road I don't know how to change the elevation of the road.


Thank you again.

Sometimes the Dragon wins and I AM the Dragon!
Site Helper
#23 Old 15th Jul 2008 at 1:52 AM Last edited by Mootilda : 15th Jul 2008 at 7:21 PM. Reason: Pointer to the tutorial
The pseudo-road looks more fuzzy than when you were using the "over the road" technique? How odd... I wonder whether you were actually seeing some portion of the neighborhood road underneath the lot road texture, which might define the edges more clearly? I don't suppose that you have a picture of each technique (from the neighborhood view), so that I can try to figure out what the difference might be?

When you put a pseudo-road on the floor above the real road, can you see the pseudo-road in the neighborhood view in EPs from Seasons on? If not, there's no use in trying to adjust the elevation of the road. If so, I'll try to find that tutorial on getting a 1-click difference between two levels.

Update:
Here it is. A tutorial on how to create walls which are 0 clicks, 1 click, 2 clicks or 3 clicks:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=190663

Of course, you don't actually want walls... you just want to create a level which is 1 click above the road to contain the pseudo-road tiles, so that they will appear to overwrite the default neighborhood road tiles.

More Thoughts:
It probably makes sense to move the pedestrian and vehicle portals to the second (pseudo-road) level. This would avoid the following potential issues:
- the pseudo-road interferring with the use of the primary road
- vehicles and sims "sinking" 1-click deep into the pseudo-road because they are actually using the primary road

You may need to have the pseudo-road level go down to 0 at some point, so that sims can get off of the road; they may not be willing to walk off a 1-click "cliff". Although the space between the road and the sidewalk seems like an obvious place for such a slope, I believe that the game really prefers to have the road and sidewalks at the same level. So, I would suggest that you put the slope on the unbuildable tile on the "house" side of the sidewalk.
Mad Poster
#24 Old 15th Jul 2008 at 7:34 PM Last edited by niol : 15th Jul 2008 at 7:45 PM.
it's already in my signature if you meant the grid point tutorial .

Build: Lot: Wall size control: Grid Point Modding
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=276870


This is for my own convenience, may ignore this little part .
How to create a new lot in Sims Castaway Stories
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=275135



Winterhart,

either using LA to unlock the road or using the cheat "moveobjects on" or the unlocktile cheat, with the raising elevation tool, raisie the road by 1 or 2 clicks.
May download Inge's portal revealer to ensure the portals are not sunken. If so, may just simply pick them up and place them back at the same grids.


I'm unsure this may help coz graphical layer hierarchy is normally more critical than geometric order in the present TS2 graphics. In that rationale, as long as the graphical layer(s) of the neighbourhood road tiles are completely higher than that/those of the lot imposter, even if the lot road is a basin, the neighourhood road can still cover that part up..
May try it though, at least it doesn't harm and may work out.


I'm pulling my hair to fix the shader mods I did coz I couldn't find my template file which has all the visual assistance I made to read the codes (after my clean-up on an annother HD), so it's gonna be another day before I can take a look on the related shaders.
Site Helper
#25 Old 15th Jul 2008 at 8:16 PM Last edited by Mootilda : 15th Jul 2008 at 9:10 PM.
Raising the road will likely *not* produce the correct result, since the game will raise the neighborhood terrain to match the new lot elevation as soon as the lot is saved... which should make the game display the neighborhood road texture again. Of course, it's worth a try just because it's simple. I *prefer* simple solutions... that's why I like the "no overlapping roads" technique above.

For the technique where we are trying to ensure that the lot texture gets preference by having it on a second level above the neighborhood road:

I confirmed that the lot texture will appear to overwrite the default neighborhood road texture in Seasons on, if the pseudo-road is on a level which is 1-click above the real road. As well, I confirmed that you can still see a bit of the real road underneath... you may be able to fix this by removing the real road from the lot.

Note that snow can obscure the pseudo-road in the neighborhood view; this doesn't happen with the real neighborhood roads.

I'm testing the vehicle and pedestrian interactions now.

Update:
This technique definitely has more problems than my "no overlap" technique...

The car can leave the driveway, but the "drive out" animation doesn't happen, probably because the pseudo-road is in the way.

With the portals on the real road, the delivery person doesn't come at all.

With the portals moved up to the pseudo-road, the delivery person seems to be confused about how to get off the pseudo-road because of the 1-click "cliff". I'm putting in a ramp now (set relative elevation to 0) to see whether that resolves the issue...

Another Update:
Nope, the delivery person still seems to be unable to get off the road, even with a ramp.

OK, this technique will not work. Looks like sims need stairs to move from one level to another, even when they are at 0 elevation in relation to each other.

So far, the only working technique is to avoid overlapping the pseudo-road on the lot with the neighborhood road.

However, I haven't tried raising the road by 1-click... I'm wary of this technique, because the game always has the road at a relative elevation of 0. You may find that the lot starts to act oddly if you break this rule.
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