Hi everyone, first time posting here ! Modthesims lover for a long time but with nothing to upload or to say (or maybe too shy, I don't know. Also not english native here so please be kind)

So, maybe this subject has been discussed before, and maybe I'm messing with nothing new. But I searched here and found nothing about, so, I'm sharing my discoveries and questions.

Okay, let's start : I love big lots, big castles, and to fulfill my dreams, so sometimes TS1 is bit frustrating because default residential lots are small (and I want to keep the park where it is). But some month ago, I discovered a patch for the exe that enables debug cheats on the game. One of these debug cheats is lot_size, which as you guess can change lot size. Not the grid like map_edit but the entire boundaries of the visible terrain.



As you can see, the result is kinda glitchy but you can fix the problem using terrain tools, offset_world, and map_edit. Except that when you change lot grid size, it causes pretty nasty clipping in neighborhood view. Very frustrating. BUT. When looking at a neighborhood folder, some files with very interesting names are present, especially : "lotlocations.iff". I decided to install iffpencil to look into that and the title is pretty clear, you can change position of every single lot in the neighborhood view and even better, this file is specific at every single neighborhood.


Messing with lot coordinates

Pretty neat. With this, I can adjust lot position in neighborhood. Lots of big lots. Yay.

But now, I'm looking at the other files. Another file is dedicated to street names, as its name points to, and I started to looking into Neighboorhood.iff and Options.iff but not deep enough to find something interesting. Lotzoning.iff is confusing because it considers downtown lots as residential lots so I'm not sure if I can do anything with it. So I'm asking myself : as some things seems to be not THAT hardcoded into the game, could we maybe add lots, to have a bigger neighborhood ? Change lot scale, as its not the same between old town, downtown, vacation island, etc ? I don't know if all of this is leading me somewhere to be honest, but if someone knows better than me I'm eager to be guided.

Thanks for having read all of this

It is amazing what you have been able to do. Kudos!

I don't know if it would be helpful to you, but just in case, here is a link for some Big Lots (shared years ago by Blue Sage at Simblesse Oblige from Darkeyes at The Sims' Notebook) and also Houses 00 and 11 by Rougue from Sims Fanatics if you want to check them out. I have used house 00 three times myself in different neighborhoods and have had no problems. It is HUGE! I haven't tried the others because, until now, I'd forgotten I had them.

http://www.simfileshare.net/download/5061030/

This is really cool! I never knew how to do that. I was just playing with map_edit the other day to make some seamless lots.