So apparently you can place windows and doors on the edges of the pool with the moveobjects on cheat. I thought this was pretty cool. I've been trying to make it so that you can have a sunken room next to the pool edge with windows, but I'm having a lot of trouble with it. I think it would be really cool if this is possible and would definitely make building houses more unique and fun However, so far it doesn't seem possible to make sunken rooms without altering the floor level of the pool. Any suggestions?

Try this tutorial:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=346732

o yea i saw that tutorial, but i encounter some problems when i use that method. I guess what I'm really asking is, is it possible to make true sunken rooms in the sims 3? Because if it is the whole being able to put windows and doors on the edges of pools might let you do something cool in the game like have your sim swim into the pool and walk through a door in it into a sunken room. It sounds too complicated, its probably not possible , but it would be amazing

what? you dont sound very clear

play with the terrain tool after you a general location of your outer walls.

you can lower the "pool area" room and have a sloped floor that the sim can walk down into the pool area. arched doorways? the sunker floor concept still requires a change in elevation. in a house you have a step that you go up or down. so, a ramp (elevation slope, smooth elevation) could act as a lowering point to the other room)

ill have to see if i can do this.

I just thought it might be possible to make real sunken rooms because you can level underground when you use the leveling tool through the windows in the pool. I have been playing around with this, but so far I can't make real sunken rooms

You can make real sunken rooms out of pools... But so far as I've seen, you can't put any rooms on top of them.

1) Use 4 stairs to drop the ground down one level, and flat out an area, flatten out a smaller area in it with 4 more drops.
2) Build a small room there, then a roof of floor tiles above it.



3) Delete the walls, turn on constrainfloorelevation false. Make sure you are on the floor view that you can see the tiles, level the whole 8 click down area to 4 clicks down. The tiles should disappear.



4) Throw down a pool in the area that the tiles should be. Bam, they appear.

5) Flatten the ground up to normal height. Paint the pool walls.



Voila, a sunken room that you can't built over, or change levels, or refloor, because if you do, the room gets pushed up a level. :p

Ohhh... this gives me an idea. What if you make a pool and play around with it with CFE etc and screw it up big time, untill it doesn't work anymore... maybe it becomes a real sunken basement then?

o wow how did you figure that out!?! thats really cool . I played around with your method to creating sunken rooms, except I didn't build a pool over the tile just to see what would happen. So I built a pool next to the hidden tile and put windows in the pool and i saw the tile and the couch I put on the tile level with the floor of the pool! just what I wanted, however, like you said the tile floated up after I clicked on sim mode.

hmm i'm intrigued.

theorectically couldnt you lower the terrain level to the "sunken floor room" and the pool above would still be functional?

*edit*
how about you clear the terrain on the sunken room area and then have terrain level on three sides around the pool area. one side would be the "access" point to go into the sunken room?


im not following your pool not having water. you could build above and around it right?

i think the terrain tools are limited. if you make a deck starting below ground and opening up to the level ground and then delete portions of the deck in the middle at sunken floor level and raise the terrain from the back area not part of the "sunken room" you still might have a sunken room thas functional.

im going to print this out and see if i can tweak with this concept a little tonight.

It doesn't have water because the water is underneath the floor. If you build walls over it, or try to refloor it, the floor and water both get pushed up a full level though, ruining it.

If anyone can find a way to make that NOT happen, that would be how to make a true sunken basement.

I also discovered today that the game does support the possibility of truly vertical borders between tiles... Now to figure out how to force the game to do that anywhere...

i got a picture of what I managed to make before the tile when up.

That's awesome, how'd you build outside of the pool?

Also, I think you can keep the floors down longer by turning CFE back on after raising the walls.

i just followed the steps you described, but i didn't put a pool over the tile. Then i just put the couches on the floating tile and then buried the tile. After that, i just just put a pool next to the buried tile and used windows in the pool to see the room. I don't know the tile doesn't stay down though whether the CFE is on or not but the couches stay down still which is weird.

Wait... so that room is underground? :O

yep, but I have no clue how to access it

If TS3 is anything like TS2, creating a room at level = -1 is the easy part... we never were able to figure out how to access the room in-game.

It's technically at level = 2, but underground.

Similar to the no-slope basements for TS2? Is the room completely accessible?

Not really, and I haven't tried building one like that, but it isn't accessible for long, and after a while, the game will shoot the floor up to where it should be if it was the second level, but the objects will stay underground.

here is my little ditty. i had another tutorial that i wanted to finish so lack of a second or third try. i wasnt able to get the stairs to ground level though. maybe ill try again later.
















[IMG]


dont ask me how it happened i just started clicking watching the terrain editor do something.

Ok, I was able to get a fully functional sunken room, with furniture, stairs, no water popping up here and there. However water does come back if you place another pool. Anyways here's what I've managed to do:



But I've found when you install it in your game, all the furniture pops back up, rendering this useless, so I don't think as of yet there is any use to this.

Well are you going to give us a tutorial on how you did it?!

There isn't much point, because if you package the lot, or move a sim out it destroys it. I'm not sure about saving and quiting the game though. If you guys want to know I can write a tutorial so you can play around with it?

I really, really want to know.

yes me too! how did you do that??