Is it possible? I've been incredibly annoyed about how the water lots in the reservoir are not actually houseboats, and i would absolutely love to do something to make them functional.
I've heard that houseboats only work on ocean water, but since sims can swim in lakes and the reservoir counts as such iirc, routing should be alright, and what else is there?

How could i go about this?
Including extracting the EA neighborhood file. Some people clearly have done this, but i haven't succeeded last time i tried.
And including setting it up as a default replacement. Which i don't even know if it is possible.
Or could i just edit saves individually to point to a different neighborhood?

Also if anyone has made something like this already that would of course also be a solution.

Doesn't anyone have an idea about this?

I do not think is possible but was waiting for someone else to post who may know more. I took Oasis into CAW to redo as wanted the monorail, but was not a project I wanted to continue so dropped it.

Why are houseboat lots only possible on oceans?
I mean if you can make SIMS swim in land (often without even wanting them to lol) then why not boats?

The port they need are very big and lakes is very different. Lakes might just be surfaces, while oceans is easier that way. They are big bodies of volume within a defined space ... I think. If lakes can use houseboats depends on the size of the lake and what they used to create that surface when making the world.

I never liked Oasis Landing, I prefer more realistic environments similar to where I'm from. I see from pictures the front edge is rounded, that might indicate it's a surface perhaps, I'm just theorizing. I'm thinking a volume wouldn't end in a wall like that. You could try building a port lot of course, much depends on whether you can even make the port lot work.

Yes @Volvenom it's a water plane.
https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=425205
I think this is to do with routing- the water planes don't support routing in the same way that the sea does with Island Paradise. Water planes are routable in two dimensions whereas the sea with Island Paradise is routable beneath the surface too.
You'd have to make a version of Oasis Landing that uses the sea instead of water planes, and that would mean submerging the surrounding areas as you cannot clip the sea like you can a water plane.

We have mods that put to shame all sorts of scripts EA has for populating and managing neighborhoods and whatnot, but none where the sea can be cut?
I mean we already know that the routing can be cut by the sea encountering land, so maybe the whole 3d model could be cut in a similar way..
And like... houseboats generally only require routing in 2d.
It's not like they go diving with the sims.
So it should absolutely be possible to enable the very much 2d houseboat routing for a shaped surface that isn't the ocean.

Man i wish i could code well enough to implement this.

No, the sea isn't a plane- the wire mesh (plane surface) of the terrain can intersect it, but not clip it.


That's true, but the houseboats came with the same EP as the diving, so the fundamental structure/ routing of the sea water was changed in that pack.


Good luck with that!

Yes well, thinking about it and reading Simsample, it's probably a relationship between the ocean and the terrain below the ocean. That's how it is in Unreal Engine. If someone could code in a similar relationship with the waterplane and fix the port lot to work with it, that might be doable. In Oasis landing the reservoir is probably flat on the bottom and has sharp edges though, but does it have space for the port lot to function? That's what I wonder about.

I remember that the ocean also has to be quite deep to support houseboats (and dive lots), so that's also a factor. Oasis Landing has a really unique look to it, would be very cool if someone could make it work. Otherwise, the only thing I can think of to do is to make some fake houseboats, like they did with Lucky Palms.

I'm confused. I thought Oasis Landing was the future world from "Into the Future"? Does the world have both? Isn't that a different world?

Oh yes, I see that Oasis Landing does have the fake houseboats like Lucky Palms does; disregard my previous post suggesting that, then!
https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=610549
Here you can see that the waterplane is clipped to the bank (which is disguised by the curved wall pieces).
I remember someone putting a copy of this world up so I could take a look at it, but I don't remember whether there is any accessible sea shoreline.

But it does already clip the swimming and snorkeling pathfinding (since we're talking about IP routing) Meaning that you can already limit the PATHFINDING, so why not the surface?

The Oasis Landing reservoir is absolutely massive.
It's easy to overlook, because it's totally useless, but those small dockside lots dotting it are actually 40x40 lots, and the dam has a height of a downtown Bridgeport building.
Additionally, the whole area is literallly surrounded by land, since the dam does have routable terrain on top.
So everything the sea has in IP is also present in that reservoir, except that it's a different type of surface.

Oasis Landing is miles above sea level apparently.
If anything happens in this regard it would have to be enabling "sea-routing" for planes that aren't the sea, or clipping the sea-surface
Because clearly the sea routing can be walled in. You can have a closed in section of sea and the routing will work in that "lake" made of sea.
But the sea-surface can not be cut unfortunately, and other planes that can be cut do not have that sort of routing enabled.

Not sure what you mean here, could you clarify? If you are meaning that the dive lots are in the sea then yes they are; but lots are completely separate from the surrounding terrain/ocean as regards routing. World routing is stored in the world file itself, whereas lot routing is calculated on the fly as the sim moves around the lot. So the lot is not truly a bisection of the world but rather a container within it. Here's what a lot looks like in CAW:

And wireframe:



The sea layer isn't defined by whether it is surrounded by land- in Sims 3 the worlds are actually a sea layer which is defined by a height only, and a single terrain plane that may bisect the sea in any number of points. The terrain layer has routing data, the sea routing is determined by the terrain routing and the sea level. You can see this in CAW; in this image the terrain is covered completely by a shallow sea:


Looking at the wireframe, the sea doesn't exist- because it is not an object with a mesh, or surface.


We can make a mountain- it is flat on the top because the world is really a cube, and we have hit the ceiling of the world with the mountain top. Our mountain has intersected the sea layer.




I make a valley in the mountain- there is no water in it because the valley is above our lea level:




So I make a pond, the same as in Oasis Landing, or Bridgeport, or Twinbrook...


In wire frame you can see that it is a new plane, disparate from the terrain wireframe.


The houseboats are a lot container that are able to move around the terrain using the terrain routing data that is stored within the world file. The water planes (or ponds as they are referred to in CAW) are not capable of holding a lot container; if I add a lot to the area where there is a water plane, they are added to the terrain beneath that plane.


Sea level is just a figure that the game uses to determine where the sea actually is, and whether an area is below or above the sea. Houseboats are only able to route on areas below the sea level; sims are only able to route on areas above sea level, unless swimming. They can swim to a dive lot, and once they enter that lot then they can freely move around the lot container by swimming in three dimensions. There's no actual sea routing as such- and the sea cannot be walled in, as it is a layer that exists across the entire surface of the world, whether above or below the wireframe of the terrain. So to enable house boat routing on the Oasis Landing reservoir you'd have to put that area below sea level I think, which would mean submerging the rest of the map.

Edited to add: here's the routing data for the world, as you can see it ends at the level of the sea and the edge of the water plane, and the lot is separate.

Holy moly you made this way more detailed than i expected. xD
It's a great explanation, but i knew most of these things already, i just didn't explain it well enough apparently.
Buuut thanks to the routing i actually discovered that what i'm saying should be possible, so i really really appreciate your effort.
Let me address the points.


That is not what i meant xP
I dunno what was confusing about it, i meant that the sea encountering the terrain mesh already cuts off the swimming routing. You can not route a houseboat or a swimming sim into and below the terrain. So if the "sea surface available for boat routing" is cut off where it encounters terrain, maybe it could also *actually* be cut off, as in the part of the mesh beyond a point would not be drawn.

Is it though?
Because
a) clearly at some point the process does inserts a mesh to put the texture on
b) there is some sort of grey mesh almost invisible in the pic where you wanted to show that no other mesh is there
c) even if there isn't this is precisely what would need to be changed. One could code in a cutoff for the inserted sea mesh, the way the world is cut off at the world border. This was my idea (1). This could be difficult though.

The stuff in between i already knew, and what i said should have made that clear. Apologies if it didn't :\


This is the other option i mentioned. It should be possible to hack something together so that the water planes CAN hold a lot container, and thus have separate routing - the way the sea-surface does. This was my idea (2). This should be easier, i'll elaborate below.


Well if the game itself could be hacked and processes injected in between the ea process calls just to make the game pause on startup, then the same should be possible for CAW. Hijack the routing process and make it check not just if a coordinate on the world mesh is below sea level for whether boat-routing should be calculated on it, but also whether there is a water-surface above it, and if yes treat it the same.
I would absolutely do this myself, but i've never worked with non opensource stuff, and i haven't really gotten the hang of the stuff that was written for the sims 3.
Maybe igazor can help? Or know someone who can? Let's summon him!
The hope that this can be done was reinforced by what you added at the end:

This means that routing is already not just determined by height, because clearly sim walking routing gets disabled if it would go under a water-surface. So it should be possible to have that same check that DISables sims routing under water surfaces also ENable boat routing there. And from that point it's simply a question of switching a variable on what surfaces can hold lot objects.

Well, if you think it's possible then go ahead- I would be interested to see your results!

I dunno who disagrees with what or thinks that what i said is funny, but please elaborate, because i don't understand!


Don't be mean, i just explained i can't
I know what should be done, but i have absolutely no idea how to do it.
Somewhere in the code there has to be a process that checks for whether a given face or vertex is below a lake surface to disable that spot in walking routing calculation.
Then there has to be a process that checks whether a given face or vertex is below the sea level to enable boat routing calculation.
The first process has to be called when the second process is called with an OR between the two.
There also has to be a variable designating the sea-surface as something you can place lots on, and this has to be copied to other water surfaces.
But i have no idea how to achieve this.

You could try the mods forum. World building is such s big area of expertice. He modders probably doesn't visit here very often. On the other hand they might have left this site altogether. You can just summon @igazor like this. Good luck.

Oh I apologise, I wasn't intending to sound mean, I was rather just running out of things to add to this.
I don't think anyone else knows how to do this either. As you seem to have a very clear idea of what you want to do and how to do it, perhaps you could start learning for yourself about making such a mod, after all necessity is the mother of invention. I had absolutely no idea how to do half of the things I did with CAW when I started, but lots of collaborating on here and experimentation got em there in the end. You never know how until you start trying, that's what this site is all about. I was just trying to encourage you, not to be mean!

Hm both interesting ideas.

As an aside i had to download your profile-pic and check it out in an editor, because i was freaking out, because i could've sworn it blinked at me.

It does.

Nah, it doesn't blink- it's your imagination!