Sorry if this seems high-maintenance... I've just spent the better part of an hour looking for tutorials on this obscure topic. This is one of the problems with a game that's twenty years old... many of the tutorials are on defunct websites. Even some here on MTS are really just links to now deceased pages. One that seemed to fit my needs, by "mikeinside", had me lowering the floor inside the building, putting in the CFE code, leveling the floor again, and presto, the "roof" was supposed to have the inverse profile that I had made on the floor. It didn't. The author's admonishment was "don't tell me this doesn't work; if it doesn't, you must've mis-typed the code!" But... you CAN'T mis-type codes; you'll get a syntax error.

Another heap of tutorials - which looked promising - turned out to be located on the Exchange, so... I guess I could try the wayback machine, but I'm not holding my breath, either.

Anyway, what's the favorite domed-roof tutorial out there? I'm making smallish buildings, so those super-fancy kinds with foundations and curved "rafters" aren't what I'm aiming for. Don't read too much into my screenshot - I don't need sloping walls, just a simple domed roof. My dwellings would be small, but not quite as small as in the photo.

This is the correct method to make a flat roof into a domed roof; I wonder if you did something wrong? I use this method often, perhaps if you show some pictures of what happened when you followed the Mike Inside tutorial, we might be able to help. I always find that I misinterpret what tutorials are trying to tell me so things take a bit of messing with!

Will do. When I first got the Sims 2, I used to play in a window, which made it easier to toggle back and forth between tutorials. I seem to have forgotten how to get the windowed play, so I end up looking on my phone for tutorials, which isn't that great.

How do I put spoilers in a post? It might be desirable if I'm going to post a bunch of screenshots of my failed efforts.


Well, hell. Now the dang game won't even open. As in at all - I get the Mac beach ball of doom. Maybe I've finally broken the thing with too much CC. However, I just threw out a bunch of stuff last week, and it was working fine yesterday. Grrrrr. Guess it's time to re-install?

Never mind; I trashed the cache files and it worked. Never did that before. Haha, maybe that will solve some of my problems… Okay, stay tuned for roof-building goofiness…

This shows how to do spoilers:
https://modthesims.info/misc.php?do=bbcode#spoiler

Sorry, I guess I'd need more hand-holding if I want to use spoilers; the instructions made no sense to me, so I went with thumbnails instead. Note that the arrow on the elevation tool is pointing UP in the screenshot... that's due to the keys I had to press to take the picture.

The CFE trick worked this time; not sure what I did wrong before - probably got a step out of sequence. However, I made the "inverse dome" a little too shallow, and when I tried to correct it afterwards, things got all screwy, and I ended up with floor tiles floating in the air with no way to delete them, so I had to close the lot and start over. My second attempt was successful, as you can see. However...

On the squares butting up to the inside of the diagonal wall segments, I couldn't lower the terrain: "attached to wall", so they stayed flat.

As a result, when the dome was completed, there was this weird "hip" around the corners.

True, it would be less noticeable on a bigger building, but there it is. These dwellings are sort of the Native equivalent of the camping tent: sleeps three, with a small fireplace in the middle. If I were to make them bigger, it wouldn't be very much bigger, certainly not enough to distract the eye from that hip.

This is my family's lodge, that we take to living history events. It, too, has a sort of oddly lumped dome, but that's due to not having quite enough cattail mats to cover the lodge all the way over the top. Some day, if we can accrue enough mats to cover the whole thing, we won't need the canvas cover, and the thing will actually be as intended, totally waterproof and well insulated. Back in the day, mat construction was an ongoing activity, and you'd replace the old, tattered mats with new ones every year; it's hard to find enough good cattails anymore nowadays. Anyway... ideally, I'd like my Sim lodges to look more like this... using the bamboo patterned wall and floor from Parsimonious gives a good cattail mat impression... it's just the shape that needs a little more work... so if anyone has a bright idea in that direction, I'd be happy to try it out. Perhaps there's a trick involving a double wall that would let the dome come all the way to the edge of the roof? IDK; I tried wrapping my brain around that concept, and came up with nothing.


There will be a string of these along the streambank, allowing several families to move onto the lot for the winter hunting season, so the question is: make fewer, larger ones to hide the hip, or stay with the smaller model?