That's a real pain, the water objects in CAW look HORRIFYING.

I think I just had a breakthrough, or a slap in the forehead moment. I kept getting the packed file error HP was getting. I closed the world file in S3PE and it opened. I feel dumb for that. I had the file open in S3PE at the same time I tried to open it in CAW. Once I closed s3pe, it opened with no problem. Now trying to figure out which water level I want and where I want my downtown to go. I am posting this in case anyone else overlooked this simple step.

Brady

I was thinking if there isn't a way to transform original water layer (default) in something like terrain, or better, distant terrain... Even it was always flat! Our creations would have a different taste than islands... Maybe green flat champs in the horizon together with little water layers inside our map.

Hi everyone, first, thanks for this I was thrilled to see it, and find many uses in my world. But now I'm having a problem and not shore why. I had no problem importing it in game on large flat new maps. Problem is after some sculpting around edges, water plate dissapear. I repeated 2 times whole proces - clear saves, backups, cache, create new flat large map, import water plate, save, sculpt around (mountains, hills, waterfall, etc) save again and water dissapear. Any help would be very appretiated. Thanks in advance!

Anushka, this may be due to CAW discarding certain non-standard resources. If you import an ini file or texture files for example, CAW seems to lose these when the world is saved.

What you would need to do is to reimport the water levels each time if you wish to work on the terrain in CAW. Then, when your world is finished, import the resources into your CAW files again, then open CAW (but do NOT open the world) and select the world for import. That way CAW will safely package the water levels with the world into the Sims3Pack, so that the water should show up correctly when you install and play the world.

Just a question since it wasn't clear to me from the discussion - I understand that the corner coordinates of the vector planes are stored in hex form in the individual water plane resources (the ones that begin with 0x70), but that simply editing those coordinates creates a hole in the world. My question is: What's in the other resource - the one that starts with 0x90? (I'm not really good at coding, so I have no idea what I'm looking at!) Is it possible that there's additional code in the 0x90 water resource that also has to be edited in order to get it to recognize the new coordinates in the 0x70 resources? (For example, if the 0x70 resource defines the plane, maybe the 0x90 resource tells the game how to map the water onto the plane, so you can't change one without changing the other?)

As I said, it wasn't clear (to me!) from the discussion if people had been editing both resources or just the 0x70 resources, so maybe someone's already looked at the 0x90 resource and didn't find anything useful. Still, it never hurts to ask just in case. I'm in the middle of building a custom world (if I can ever get the #@$%&# Bridgeport Distant Terrain to line up properly!) and I'm currently using the Twinbrook water plane for raised rivers, but it would still be nice if we could figure out how to edit the water planes without creating holes!

Actually, I don't know why EA doesn't just include a "Draw Water" tool - similar to the Draw Lot tool - in CAW. If they'd simply add that feature, then all we'd have to do would be to click and drag to create our own water planes. I suppose that would be too much to expect, though. Can't make things too easy for the worldbuilders...

buxcosim, pretty much what I've looked at I documented here, so thanks for volunteering to take a look at the other resource for us.

If you can make sense of it then you'll be doing better then me, I didn't even make the connection between the co-ordinates and the code until Delphy pointed it out.

Well, as I mentioned, I'm no good at coding, so I have no idea what I'm looking for; sadly, I don't speak hex!

What I got from the discussion was that you'd edited the one resource and that caused the water to disappear, so - knowing how EA likes to make things needlessly complicated - I thought that maybe there might be something in the other resource that also needed to be edited before the water would be recognized. As for me finding it...well, that might take a bit; I've only recently figured out how to import resources in S3PE (I know, a little behind the times...) and I'm slowly teaching myself C# so that I can try my hand at some scripting mods, but at the rate I'm going, we'll be celebrating the release of The Sims V before I get anywhere close!

Fortunately, the Twinbrook water plane is working out well for my world (now that I finally got the Bridgewater DT to line up); I'm still holding out for the "Draw Water" tool though!

Hehe, I don't speak hex too well either, binary is more my forte as you don't have to count so high!

Looking at this in detail is one of the things on my long list of things to do, so hopefully someone else might have some ideas on this in the mean time.

The last time I did any actual programming, the computer language of choice was BASIC, so that tells you something about how long it's been since I last tried my hand at code!

Actually, I take that back: I did some coding mods for The Sims - the original - but that was all in the SimAntics script, which was pretty much just a way of entering a flowchart into a program that would convert the flowchart into code for you, so I don't really count it as "coding" per se; it was more like developing a website using a WYSIWYG editor.

Yeah, that's why I posted my idea here - just in case anyone who knows the code better than I do hadn't checked for matching code in the other resource yet. I would be great if the solution were that simple, but I'm not holding my breath!

In the meantime, you did a great job unlocking the existing water planes - my world looks so much better with a raised river! - so we'll just keep our fingers crossed that the mystery will soon be solved!

Okay, no I didn't miss something...

So I imported Twinbrook's water plane into my world. At first, it showed up with the standard Twinbrook shape - two rivers flowing into a lake with islands. I saved the world, closed it, reopened it and got the square water plane, so I did some basic terrain editing to get the layout of my raised rivers. All well and good.

Once I had the basic shape and terrain levels in place, I was able to start fine tuning the sculpting over a period of a couple of days. I understood that CAW would lose the data everytime I closed it if I'd done any terrain editing, so I'd have to reimport the resources any time I wanted to edit the rivers. All well and good. Except...

Now the Twinbrook shape won't go away! I've tried reimporting the resources, opening the world in CAW, saving it, closing it, and then reopening it, but it refuses to change back to a flat square plane! It even stays that way in EIG (screencaps below).

Any ideas?

On a side note, is it possible that the mask for the Twinbrook shape is stored in that other resource, the 0x90 one? Maybe that could be causing the disappearing water when the coordinates in the 0x70 resource get edited.

Hey! Thaaanks soooo much for this thing, I searched for this solution for a long, long time.

no I got the problem not to find it in my CAW

I put it in Create a world\Packages
what did I do wrong?

and where do I find it to place it into my world?

buxcosim- try deleting your CAW caches, as well as your game caches. That could affect how the water plane appears in your world.
Game Help:TS3 GCCTSU 1 Refresh cache^wiki
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=441595

Vany89, you have to actually import the resource into your world using S3Pe. It's not an object that you put into your game like other custom content.

I tried that first (I deleted my first post on the subject after I remembered to delete both sets of caches, not just the CAW ones), but for whatever reason, it's still in Twinbrook mode. Bother.

At any rate, it's a moot point now, because after my last post, I also discovered that the sun was rising in the wrong place - despite having triple-checked where east and west were when I was lining up the distant terrain. As a result of realigning everything so that my coastline is back on the east where it belongs, the Twinbrook water plane no longer lines up with what I needed it to line up with, so I can't use it after all. Grrr...

I guess now I have to learn hex so I can crack this thing, and then teach myself some advanced C# coding so I can create a "Draw Water" plug-in for CAW (like the one EA should have provided starting with Ambitions). Double grrr...

Nothing like a case of 'I need' to spur discovery!

Are you using the latest (Gen) version of CAW? If so then maybe they have changed something, I'm still running ye olde CAW with 1.19, and the water level redrawing works fine on mine.

Well, they say "necessity is the mother of invention," although in my particular case, I'd say it's more a combination of anger, frustration, and confusion.

Yeah, I have the newest CAW so maybe that could be part of it (although other people are reporting success, so maybe it's something with my setup; I did update my drivers and everything for Gen). What's weird - well, weirder than normal - is that it worked as expected the first time (so I know I was doing it right!), but then it just refused to go back to a flat plane after I reimported the resources to do some more work on the rivers. I made sure to be CC-free (although I hadn't used EIG at that point), I'd opened the world, saved, closed it, cleared my caches (although the first time I forgot about the game caches because I hadn't been in EIG), and then it still came up as Twinbrook. Repeatedly. I take that as a personal insult.

Like I said, now I have to learn hex and advanced C# because I'm not about to admit defeat; I will have my water exactly where I want it, and no amount of confusing EA coding shall stop me! (Famous last words...)

how can I put the fake water im my world since I've already started it????

leo0274, you need to either extract the resources from your Bridgeport and Twinbrook EA worlds, or else download copies of them from the first post in this thread.

Then, backup your world, and then import the resources you want to your world using S3Pe. Twinbrook just has one large area of water, Bridgeport has six (and you can choose which of those you want).

You then need to sculpt your world to suit the water levels, as we haven't yet figured out how to change the size or position of the water.

You need to bear in mind that each time you save your world in CAW, the resources will be lost, so you will need to reimport.

how can I put the fake water in my world?

leo0274, I explained that in my previous post.

This is utterly compelling. Once I get around to advancing my project, I'll definitely need controllable water tables. Have any further advances been made? I took a quick look last night but then this poor old laptop did its overheating thing again and crashed losing some data I collated. I was last looking at the Bridgeport 707's and laid it out like this, in order...

05 00 1A 34 D1 42 8F 05 00 00 84 04 00 00 4F 06 58F=1423 484=1156 64F=1615 524=1316 42D1341A= 1121006618 Y=104.6
00 00 24 05 00 00 00

05 00 D8 7A 01 43 DA 05 00 00 0C 04 00 00 1A 06 5DA=1498 40C=1036 61A=1562 44C=1100 43017AD8= 1124170456 Y=129.5
00 00 4C 04 00 00 00

05 00 29 70 21 42 AF 02 00 00 B4 04 00 00 1F 03 2AF=687 4B4=1204 31F=799 524=1316 42217029= 1109487657 Y=40.4
00 00 24 05 00 00 00

05 00 27 8D 20 42 78 02 00 00 CF 04 00 00 C8 02 278=632 4CF=1231 2C8=712 51F=1311 42208D27= 1109429543 Y=40
00 00 1F 05 00 00 00

05 00 9A 6B 2A 42 E8 01 00 00 BD 02 00 00 88 02 1E8=488 2BD=701 288=648 33D=829 422A6B9A= 1110076314 Y=42.6
00 00 3D 03 00 00 00

05 00 C5 AE DD 42 DC 05 00 00 3C 04 00 00 3C 06 5DC=1500 43C=1084 63C=1596 49C=1180 42DDAEC5= 1121824453 Y=110.8
00 00 9C 04 00 00 00

the Y= values are from further up in this thread. We can see the co-ords that position the regions as stated earlier but what also seems apparent is that the earlier piece of fata is the determinator of the height. The actual conversion is unclear from a cursory glance but clearly it does correlate to your observed altitudes. Later on I'll throw them into an excel chart to see if a formula emerges. Meanwhile if someone has already worked it out please let me know so I don't duplicate the effort.

Another interesting thing...
compare the size of the water table in TB to the sum of the six areas in BP, its around 23:1.
now do the same for file size, its in the same range depending on whether you take the total size or deduct header/closing list.

So the large file size for TB's 707 is because of the large area

Don't know if there's still interest in this but... tried editing what I believed were alts and it seems to be so. Water table #1 was raised and lowered. The one on the left was raised so high I had to zoom out.

Most interesting SandrineD- it sounds like you're really figuring things out! Well done on changing the heights!

That's interesting about the file size, does that imply perhaps that there is data for each chunk (or area of water), so the larger the area the more data? I managed to figure out which bits of code related to the co-ordinates of the water, but when I changed them I made a hole in the terrain, so I was obviously missing something.

I hope you have more patience and understanding of this than I have so far, great work!

Well you can definitely move them...
Circled in red and another circle where it came from.
#1 has moved north to join three others.
it didn't involve the four slots that appear to define the corners but there is more because it renders wrong and disappears if you zoom in too close. So the other numbers must relate to render "windows".