I'm fooling around with curbside parking on residential lots, which as it turns out is pretty simple - using the moveobjects code, you just put a piece of driveway down wherever you want the car to park, and it will park there. If you have the "entrance" piece of the driveway, the car will do the usual animation where it turns in, so if you place it correctly, it can look like the car is coming around the corner to park at the curb.

The only problem is that, although curbs exist on the road in the base game and automatically appear at the sides of the roadway, they don't appear in the catalog for you to place them elsewhere. In the screenshot, I have placed the driveway piece, and will cover the area with asphalt (tarmac, for non-Americans), before giving the driveway an invisible recolor. I want to make the curb look like it's back further on the lot (basically giving the illusion of a wider roadway, with a parking lane). I can easily cover the existing curb tiles with plain asphalt from the flooring>misc. catalog (green outline). But there is no corresponding curbed asphalt tile (yellow outline) in the catalog. So... has anyone made one of these? I have some curbed stone road tiles in my catalog, from PlumbBobKeep, which I use in oldy-timey neighborhoods. But I haven't come across the curbed asphalt/tarmac thing. Aside from "sideways" community-lot-style parking on resi lots, such curb tiles would also be useful for larger lots with multiple dwellings, where I wish to, say, put driveways down the middle, and give the illusion of a street going through the middle of the lot.

I'm fairly sure someone has to have made these, but my searches so far have not turned up any.

You need to edit your game script files to have these show up.

Go to [install location]\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Scripts and backup the floorPatterns.txt file.

Then open the floorPatterns.txt file and scroll down to where it says ######## Floor patterns for roads.

You'll see a bunch of entries like:



All you need to do is to hash out the lines that say 'notInCatalog'. Just add a # symbol at the beginning of the line! So now it says:



Do this for each of the road patterns (there are around 20 of them to reveal the asphalt, kerbs, white lines etc.).

Then save the file and close, and boot the game. Enter "moveobjects on" cheat so that you can edit road tiles. Then if you look in build mode> floors> ∞ You will see the road tiles revealed to you.


(I'm not sure of the exact path for you on your Mac- maybe someone can help with that? It's a long time since I played Sims 2 on Mac! )

Okay, great! I'll give it a whirl.

Tadaaa! Thanks so much for the tutorial! It'd be nice to get yellow kerbs too, for fire hydrant zones (I think they use red in California)... but I guess I can just use yellow striped pavement or something in such locations. Anyhow, I appreciate it. Curbside parallel parking, woo hoo! Now I can build more urban-looking lots, too, to re-build my neighborhoods from Hill Street Blues and The Wire. Super excited!

I suppose I'll need a more modern-looking stop sign, though



P.S. - To get the car to park right alongside the curb, you do have to place the driveway with one row of squares overlapping the new "edge of the road"... driveways are five squares wide, but most vehicles are only three.

Brilliant, looks great!