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#1 Old 12th Oct 2024 at 5:32 PM
Default Switching the lot terrain colours
Hi all. This might be another difficult one. I was wondering if this is possible and if anyone has found out how/where the lot terrain colours are set in the game files.
I'm talking about e.g. in Magic Town the autumnal and dark grass types, or in Vacation the snow and sand grounds.
I'm basically just wanting to switch out one of the magic town residential lots to have the autumnal terrain colour instead of all being dark grass. I cannot find where this is set anywhere so I'm suspecting it's deep in the game files and may or may not be possible to change, but, no harm in trying, right?
Any ideas? Thank you.
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#2 Old 18th Oct 2024 at 4:17 AM
Hi ! Actually, the only way I can possibly know is to mess with lot files, in Userdataxx/houses folder. Copy a lot of the color that you want, and rename it to replace the other lot. BUT : I never tried this myself, it may appear glitchy on neighborhood view, and I don't know how lot zoning is hardcoded in the game files, considering all lots with autumnal and snowy grounds are community and you wanna replace a residential, so maybe you'll just end up with a corrupted crashing game. And of course you'll need to build the house from scratch. So please make a backup of everything.

All the lot numbers are listed here. The magic town houses are missing but they correspond to 90, 91, and 92.

But please be very careful, backups are lifesaving when messing with gamefiles !!
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#3 Old 18th Oct 2024 at 10:51 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Shloupi
Hi ! Actually, the only way I can possibly know is to mess with lot files, in Userdataxx/houses folder. Copy a lot of the color that you want, and rename it to replace the other lot. BUT : I never tried this myself, it may appear glitchy on neighborhood view, and I don't know how lot zoning is hardcoded in the game files, considering all lots with autumnal and snowy grounds are community and you wanna replace a residential, so maybe you'll just end up with a corrupted crashing game. And of course you'll need to build the house from scratch. So please make a backup of everything.

All the lot numbers are listed here. The magic town houses are missing but they correspond to 90, 91, and 92.

But please be very careful, backups are lifesaving when messing with gamefiles !!



Hi! Thanks for the reply! This was actually one of the first things I tried. Unfortunately when you do that it doesn't keep the terrain colour, it just switches it to whatever terrain the lot number is assigned, which is why I'm trying to find where the colour info is stored as it's apparently not with the lots themselves!

I've also done the commercial/residential lot switch as a trick to get items which aren't in the catalogue due to the zoning. For most items it works, but certain special items disappear as soon as you load it up (like the mailbox or phone booths).
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#4 Old 19th Oct 2024 at 12:16 PM
Oh, now, that's interesting ! So that means that the terrain color information is not in the lot file itself. As I'm messing myself with neighborhood files, I'm gonna search if there is anything that could be find in there. No promises, as I'm not programming expert, but it intrigues me.

What have you tried otherwise ?
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#5 Old 21st Oct 2024 at 12:03 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Shloupi
Oh, now, that's interesting ! So that means that the terrain color information is not in the lot file itself. As I'm messing myself with neighborhood files, I'm gonna search if there is anything that could be find in there. No promises, as I'm not programming expert, but it intrigues me.

What have you tried otherwise ?


Right! This is why I'm thinking it has to be deep in the game files somewhere.
So I've looked all over the game data, the closest I've gotten was by unpacking the expansion files - in the vacation one, the rental shack object tests if you're on a snowy or beach lot, so as to show the sandcastle/snowman options. But, I'm not advanced enough yet to trace where it's actually coming from, or see how/if it's linked to the terrain colour.
I didn't find anything similar for makin magic, as I don't think the terrain colour affects any of the game objects.

Thank you for looking, let me know if you get anywhere with the neighbourhood stuff!
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