Hi! Can you explain how you made it so your Feverfew Christmas lights only show up when there's deep snow?
Hey there! I just made them season enabled like many hood deco flora out there. But instead of having a set of meshes+materials for every season and winter stage, the lights only have that heavy snow set of resources, the others are empty ones.
Hi Criquette! Iam curious about your rural charm road pieces hood deco. During the winter the deco roads doesnt get covered by snow looking as a white square like others hood decos does. The question is, how can you make some hood deco doesnt get affected by snow at winter? Iam pretty sure its a simPE value I didnt figure out yet... :D
Hello there anon! Oh, this is pure Maxis genius stuff here. You probably notice, that the shadow material (you know, the permanent shadows under the trees and some other high quality hood decorations) is never affected by any in-game generated snow overlay. So, I've discovered, that the only thing that makes the shadow material snowproof is.. a word 'shadow' in the material name. So if you open any decorative road tile or sidewalk piece in SImPE and look at the materials, you'll see that every material name has this 'shadow' part in their names. It doesn't turn them into shadows, but it prevents them from being covered by in-game snow :D
Hi Criquette! I’m sorry if this has been answered already, but would you happen to know the reason why your festive neighborhood lights doesn’t show up when I myself put them down? The ones you have put to Feverfew shows up fine, but when I try to put more, they won’t show? 🤔The neighborhood is having heavy snow so that is not the case. Thank you in advance!
Hey @toolicious! That's really weird. Are the strings not showing up even during the day or they're not lit-up at night?
This process is actually a whole lot easier than deleting road tiles, but I figured the previous post was long enough already.
Yes, and this part of the editing is as much important as deleting a road tile. Gosh, If only I had this at the early Feverfew creation stages!
@criquette-was-here discovered how to move individual road tiles using SimPe. SimPE’s editor unfortunately doesn’t allow individual road tiles to be added or deleted. However, it is possible to do this with SimPE plus a hex editor. It’s not very user friendly, so I’m working on a program to automate the process, and I’d strongly recommend you practice a few times on a throwaway neighborhood first. But if you want to delete a road tile, here’s how it goes:
That is amazing @hypersaline! I should update my 'Field Notes' with that tutorial right away. I always hated the fact that there's no way in SimPE to just choose the unwanted road tile and simply remove it. Thank you for this. I'll definitely going to use it in the future neighborhood project I have in mind.
Hey criquette! I have an ask:
What do you think would happen if I placed car protals on community lot on 45 degree angle? Would it spawn cars or would crash the lot is car tried to show up. Have you ever tried it?
Hey @sim-corner! I never tried to edit portals, if I'm honest (I have so many things to discover yet, lol!). But it would be really interesting to see how this would affect the appearance of cars.
Hello Criquette, Thanks to you post where your teach us how to move the roads tiles in the neighborhood using simPE, I have a few doubts about it. Doyou know the right values of each textures of the roads in simPE(T cross, X cross, etc)? And 2 more questions: Does exist a texture value to make individual road tiles invisible, instead to replace all the roads in the hood for an invisible one? It is possible to delete individual road tiles in simPE?
Hello anon! Sorry for the delay on this. Yes, if you open any road DR, there should be values for each texture type (if i remember it correctly). Or, if not, you'll have to use texture names from road DR of choice to search for the corresponding TXMTs which should have the values. I don't think there is a Maxis made empty/invisible texture for the road tile, but @hypersaline proved that custom assigned road textures are real, therefore making a transparent or terrain matching texture for temporary hiding some road tiles wouldn't be a problem.
I hope it’s OK if I jump in here, but it’s possible to add or delete individual road tiles using SimPE plus a hex editor. I can write up a quickie tutorial on that.
That would be amazing! Because I never thought of deleting any unnecessary road tiles myself (i thought it would break something in the neighborhood files) that's why I've just moved all the spare road tiles to some distant places and hid them underneath the trees ^___^'
Thank you for your quick reply! What tool have you used to create that Feverview map? And is fiddling with LotAdjuster and accepting weird portals also the trick to place a row of narrow lots (10 lot tiles/1 hood tile wide) on a curvy road? Also, do you have a picture of a "naked" Feverview map without the roads deco, so I can see how you've connected the lots with each other?
Hello @daydreamingdrawerette! Well, this one took quite a while, isn't it. The Feverfew map was made in illustrator + Photoshop for print distortion imitation and paper texture. As for the 'naked' Feverfew picture. I though I had it somewhere earlier, but now I can't find it, so once I'll be able to make an in-game screenshot, i'll reblog this ask with one. Regarding placing narrow lots on a curvy road and editing portals and their placement so that they coincide with the road curve, well, that could, sort of, work but the main downside is that the cars arriving and departing in strict orthogonal manner, so there will be some unavoidable wonky bloopers anyway.
is it possiblle to build walls on the edge of lots? Any mod that make that happen?
Hey @vackaloka! I'm not aware of such mods. But I'm not a great person to be asked anyway since my lot mode experience is very poor. I know that you can build a lot and then shrink it, but does is allow walls on the edge of lots this way? I can't say, sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hello Criquette, Thanks to you post where your teach us how to move the roads tiles in the neighborhood using simPE, I have a few doubts about it. Doyou know the right values of each textures of the roads in simPE(T cross, X cross, etc)? And 2 more questions: Does exist a texture value to make individual road tiles invisible, instead to replace all the roads in the hood for an invisible one? It is possible to delete individual road tiles in simPE?
Hello anon! Sorry for the delay on this. Yes, if you open any road DR, there should be values for each texture type (if i remember it correctly). Or, if not, you'll have to use texture names from road DR of choice to search for the corresponding TXMTs which should have the values. I don't think there is a Maxis made empty/invisible texture for the road tile, but @hypersaline proved that custom assigned road textures are real, therefore making a transparent or terrain matching texture for temporary hiding some road tiles wouldn't be a problem.
Was your lovely SR Mark L1 ‘Gertrude’ Tank Engine named after Grandpa Pig's toy train?
My last couple of posts have been about neighborhoods with more than one type of (working, real, actual) road in them. It does take a decent amount of SimPE fiddling to get this working correctly, so be warned, but here’s how you can add a second kind of road to a neighborhood.
Hypersaline went really far in making multi-textured roads in same Neighborhood! This is a great result @hypersaline! This is something I was thinking about really long time. My thoughts was about adding new sets of textures via shader, so that they would work with seasons. But what you did is really outstanding! It shows how we can add perestrian crossings, bus stops and so on without any levitation issues that come with hood decoration based approach.
Hello if you get a chance in the future can u make : grass mats, mini garden squares and golf greens deco …?
Well, that was a lovely Sunday. I was redownloading all the hood decos out there.
It was a month ago, when I've created my copy of Astoria Falls. And of course, I've moved it to my "new" old PC. I've opened it last weekend just to recreate myself a bit, I have no certain plans for this terrain. Just some random hood decorating. So I was looking at the 'destroyed' railway bridge and suddenly realized that I can actually edit terrain on the go! So I did. Astoria Falls now sits on a little hill, and the railway branch is elevated so that ships could pass underneath the brand new bridge. There's also a railway station at the top of the hill.
Anonymous said:
Hey, sorry about this ask, but I'm trying to figure out a bug with BetterNightlife. You've said that dawn and dusk being enabled in lighting mods (in this case the original Gunmod's Radiance Lighting) is what causes the night lighting to not properly turn on and off (unless you reload a lot as I've come to learn). But I disabled dawn and dusk in the Radiance lighting txt file, and still have that issue. Am I missing something here?
Hey anon! No reason to be sorry at all. Unfortunately, I have zero experience with Gunmod's Radiance Lighting thus I don't know how this dawn and dusk enabling/disabling works. Probably, there's still dusk and dawn 'stages' in the shader the game refers to and only visual part of it is switched off. Better nightlife isn't great in terms of coding (since I'm no coder, I've just compiled some pieces together and certainly, there are bugs). In some cases, you can force decorative neighborhood lights to lit up by placing and turning on a lamp post at the edge of a lot
@kaylynn-is-typing said:
In your post 158144252756, you also wish that there was a way to lower the hood roads. Have you or anyone else found a way to do so? Thanks in advance, love your content.
Thank you Kaylynn! And no, there's no any progress on this subject. I'm definitely lacking of knowledge here and I'm very looking forward to @lazyduchess further research on lot skirt appearance. May be when the lot skirt terrain will match the neighborhood mode terrain visually, we could change the way the game parses roads in neigborhood mode too!
@vackaloka said:
hi! Do you know how to make a sim immune to death by fright? I want to have many ghosts on my sims house but the whole family (the ones i want alive) are dying by fright
Hello Vackaloka! Oh, I have no idea. My gameplay experience is so poor I never had my sims die from fear, if I'm honest. Well, I can hardly remember when anybody of my sims ever died actually O_O Not because they're immune to death, though. It's just.. I haven't play my game properly yet, lol
@daydreamingdrawerette said:
Hi Criquette, can you share with us tricks for creating functional lots on curved road hood deco?
Hi Aunty SimsGöttin! There's nothing special about it :) The best way to place lots on curved roads is to use lot adjuster. First, you need to move your lot where you want it to be, and then put some decorative roads so that the lot would look connected. I'm not too strict with portals myself because I like the goofiness of sims walking through hedges and drive off into neighboring greenhouses, but there are lots of options to arrange everything the way it would look legit. If you're making a custom neighborhood with your own SC4 map you can try and plan some real road stripes here and there just to be connected with curved pieces together later in TS2. Barger street, Feverfew is a nice little example of such approach: the straight pieces are real and connected together with decorative curved pieces making it look as a nice little winding street. Place some lots on straight pieces and you're sorted!
Someone just PM'd me asking if Feverfew is available for download. To everyone who missed the release: I'm happy to say, that yes. This predecorated neighborhood is totally downloadable.
