Guide to Creating Custom Neighbourhoods
Hopefully this is in an appropriate place. If not, could some kind Mod please move it?
Introduction
Evening folks,
I'm not so much a perfectionist, more someone who can't resist the urge to meddle. As a result, when I heard that you could build your own neighbourhoods, even though I didn't exactly need a customised map, I had this strange urge to make some. So I did some research, as you do, and found that a) there weren't many people doing this, and b) there was very little information available on how to do it. So, what did I do? Well, I rummaged around on Gamefaqs and dug up some guides on SimCity 4 itself, which, in passing, mentioned things about terraforming. To be honest, not much in total. The only one which was of any real interest was written by thy451 and, while not going into much detail on the terraforming, did have the interesting bit of information about how to create your own customised region (A region is the map that the neighbourhoods fit into) This interested me greatly, because it was what I had originally wanted to do - i.e. create a number of different neighbourhoods that obviously continued into each other.
So, here's what I've found out so far, hopefully it'll prove useful to other people out there.
The first and most important thing is this: I'm using Windows. If people are using different versions of the games on different Operating Systems, I can't guarantee that these bits of information are still true. They probably are, but I'm not certain.
Starting Out
It is only possible to create a neighbourhood through SimCity 4. If you don't have that, you can't do anything. End of story. It doesn't matter if you have the expansion (Rush Hour) or not, but you
must have the basic. Luckily, it's been out for long enough that you can pick it up very cheaply. I found a copy of the Deluxe Edition (incorporating SimCity 4 and Rush Hour) at budget game price. So, if you want to get a copy, it won't cost you much.
Now, SimCity 4 (SC4) uses different terms to The Sims 2 (S2), so where the former talks about 'cities', the latter talks about 'neighbourhoods'. They're the same thing, but personally, I'm going to call them 'cities', since we're using SC4 here, and it makes it simpler that way.
SC4 has a big map, known as a 'region' which contains the slots for the cities, in a similar way to the way that a neighbourhood in S2, assuming that all the lots are laid out already, can have houses built there. In other words, your 'lots' are already laid out for you, and you can't move them, but you can still go inside and play with them as much as you want.
There are three different city sizes: Small, medium and large. Nice though it would be to have absolutely enormous neighbourhoods, the only size city that S2 recognises is the Small one. Don't worry, it's plenty big enough. If you set things up for as many lot placements as possible, you could get hundred of houses there.
It is certainly possible to create a custom region, which is entirely filled with Small cities, but this comes under Advanced Techniques, and will be dealt with right at the end. Besides, it isn't really very useful, just handy for a few unusual circumstances.
Once you've turned the game on, you should start in the region called 'Timbuktu'. If you're not there, then look at the buttons at the top of the screen, click the leftmost, then on the next menu, click the middle one. Now, navigate to 'Timbuktu' and you'll see a number of cities, each of which contains a tutorial for an aspect of the game. The only one we care about is the 'Terraforming Tutorial' - I highly recommend running through it at least once to get an idea of how to do things.
Three important things and a recommendation before we go any further.
Firstly, the 'Reconcile' tool: When you enter a city which has terrain at a different level to an adjacent city - you know, there's a mountain on one side and nothing on the other, you get the option to reconcile. Don't do it, since it will make the terrain at the edge match the terrain in the adjacent city. If you spent half an hour making a mountain on one edge, then open that city again and reconcile, you'll lose the mountain. Not Good. So, go into the options and turn of 'Auto-Reconcile' - easy, yes? The option to do so is also available in the toolbars, so if you want to do it later, you can always manage to. Why would you want to? Well, it's handy for creating linked cities. More in the Advanced Techniques section later.
Secondly, as with all SimCity games, and unlike the Sims,
there is no Undo button. I cannot stress how important this is. You get used to it and learn to work around this, but to begin with at least, you'll run into problems because of this. The only way to undo mistakes is to redo your work. Alternatively, you can exit without saving, then enter the city again, essentially reloading. But, for this to work, you have to save often. Still, there's nothing like messing up some hard work
again to teach you the importance of saving.
Thirdly, whatever you do in SC4 is mirrored in S2 - i.e. North is North and East is West. Don't ask me why, because I have no idea whatsoever. It just does that. Really, it's not anything important, just a surprise when you open it in S2 and go "Hang on..." The only times it matters are when you're either recreating another map, or perhaps if you're trying to write something. Otherwise, it doesn't make any real difference.
Lastly, if you've got a custom neighbourhood, it's certainly nice to be able to see it all, rather than just the small section in the middle that S2 allows. Consequently, it's a good idea to get hold of Snappledude's neighbourhood camera mod at
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=30492. I also advise that you include this recommendation when you post your neighbourhoods, for exactly the same reason.
With those out of the way, we move onto the next part - actually getting the chance to play around with the terrain itself.
Create a new region, calling it whatever you like and open one of the Small cities. Let's go!
God Mode
God Mode is the leftmost of the control toolbars. Don't play around with the second one yet, because that activates Mayor Mode, and you lose access to God Mode (temporarily, anyway).
So, what can you do here? Well, if it involves terrain in any way, you can do it here. You also have the option to do a few cosmetic alterations, such as planting trees and having herds of wild animals running around the place, but the animals only exist in God Mode, probably to make the terrain more interesting to stare at, and the trees are a pain.
Personally, I hate them. I can't really explain why, but even though they look nice in SC4, when you open the city in S2, you just end up with clumps of 10 - 20 trees, forming a small thicket that takes a lot of work to rearrange or delete. Doesn't look particularly good either. Consequently, I advise against placing them, except for in the wilderness areas, because players are only going to get annoyed when they have to shift them. Besides, if they want neighbourhood decorations, they can easily do it themselves - it's the underlying ground that can't be altered. Anyway, palm trees don't carry over, although the others should be fine.
Now, with the terraforming options, there are quite a few things you can do. Really though, the best thing to do is to have a throwaway city that you just play around in until you get a good idea of what the tools do. They can be broken down into groups, which are be found under the various buttons. Basically, you've got:
Different ways of raising the land - including hills, sharp mountains, mesas, cliffs etc.
Different ways of lowering the land - including shallow through steep sided valleys, canyons and craters.
Different ways of levelling the land - plateaus, plains, softened edges etc.
There's also a few others, which are all essentially cosmetic effects. Handy, but not as significant.
Between them, these allow you incredible control over what you want to do. Just remember, it isn't very precise control, so you need to be slow and careful. Of all the tools, I found the most useful to be the 'Quick Level Brush' which is found under the Levelling menu. This allows you to flatten the terrain to the level of the original mouse click - which is exactly what you want if you intend to put houses there later.
In order to alter the size of the area that you're affecting, hold down 'Shift' and one of the number keys.
Remember, if you're happy with what you've just done, why not save it? Think of the trouble you'll save yourself if things go wrong later.
It isn't possible to place roads at this point, just to modify the terrain. However, you should keep in mind the reason that you're doing this, which means setting space aside for roads to pass through and flattening areas for lots to be placed on.
While playing around, you'll notice that the ground is covered with a grid pattern - this helps to keep your work lined up, but is more important in the next section, when you place your roads and bridges. Just remember two things. 1) roads are one square thick, so if you want to place anything alongside a road, factor that into it. 2) while you can certainly lay diagonal roads in SC4, S2 doesn't recognise them, basically because you can't place diagonal lots. So if you leave space for roads, make sure that it follows the grid patterns.
There's another thing that you can do, although I recommend saving before touching it, because it has no precision at all. There's a Disaster menu available, and it can be a lot of fun to play around with. However, bear in mind that only two of them have any real effect on the terrain - since you don't have a city, the others are just fun to watch. The useful ones are 'Volcano' which pretty much creates a mountain, and 'Meteor' which allows you to bombard the terrain with meteors, leaving moderate sized craters. As I said: fun, but save first, just in case you don't like the results.
Anyway, moving on.
Mayor Mode
Once you click on the Mayor Mode button, a little panel pops up with a few options. I highly recommend choosing the easy difficulty, because this gives you more money to play around with. You'll need this money for building roads and bridges, and also for terraforming.
Remember when I said that you lost access to God Mode? Well, it isn't entirely true - you still have access to a few of the tools - but they're far cruder than the ones you've just been playing with, and they cost money too. So, do all the terraforming you can in God Mode, then switch to Mayor Mode for fine tuning and placing roads and bridges.
By the way, yes it's possible to return to the full God Mode in all its glory, it just requires you to use a cheat:
Hold down Ctrl + Alt + Shift and click on the God Mode button. This now allows you to use all the terraforming options you know and love.
Now, hopefully you've left some flat areas for your lots to be placed on, if not, go to the level tool and flatten out a few. While you can build lots on ground that isn't entirely flat, it really does help if it isn't too bumpy.
Before you put down the roads, there is one important thing I discovered - the square sizes aren't the same between SC4 and S2. Roughly speaking, one square in SC4 is a 2x2 square in S2. It's not that simple, of course, but that's a decent rule of thumb to follow. Remember that this allies to roads too - i.e. they are thinner.
If you're enclosing areas so that you can have, for example, a square that you can fill perfectly with lots, look at this little list:
SC4 S2
1x1 3x3
1x3 3x7
2x2 5x5
4x4 9x9
As you can see, the quick way of working out how much space will be available is to double each measurement, then add one.
In S2, as of the Nightlife expansion, the smallest lot is 3 squares wide and 1 square deep, while the largest is 6 by 5. In other words, any square on the map that is more than 5 S2 squares away from a road cannot have a house built on it. Feel free to have that part occupied by mountains, water, neighbourhood objects or whatever - it just can't have a house.
So, that tells you how much space you'll be providing in S2, but what can you fill it with in SC4? Very little.
You've got the crippled God Mode terraforming tools and you can plant trees, although in SC4 they're going to be stubby little saplings unless you make them grow by letting time pass.
Of the building tools available, the only one that's worth anything is the road menu, and of that, only the 'Road' option. You can't place highways, railways or even streets, only roads. To place a road, choose the option, then click and drag to the right length. Remember not to use diagonal roads! If you aren't happy, just use the bulldozer icon and try again. Yes, this costs money, but you've got so much that it doesn't matter. Whenever you have an intersection of roads - T-junction or crossroads, you get some ugly traffic lights. Don't worry, they don't carry over into S2.
Now, bridges.
To create a bridge, drag the road over a significant drop in the ground - a canyon or a river. If it can't lay a road, you get the option of a bridge. Now, although there are quite a few different bridge styles, only the 'Level Road' bridge is any use, because it's the only one that transfers over. It looks like a road, raised above ground level, with an arch of girders underneath, and is usually the leftmost or leftmost but one bridge. Which bridges are on offer depend on the length of the bridge, and I believe that this one will only appear if the bridge is at least 10 squares long. It might show up at a shorter length, but I haven't managed to get that yet. An important thing to know is that this bridge raises the terrain at the start and end points, distorting it for about a 2 square radius.
When placing your bridge, stop it as short as you can, because although it starts at one edge, it's perfectly happy to end several squares inland on the far side. As a result, you can built bridges over shorter gaps, but it tends to look silly if it ends in the middle of a field. Your call.
Don't forget that there's a bridge neighbourhood object, but it's only good for small rivers and valleys - just a couple of squares wide.
Testing and tweaking your city
SimCity 4 stores its files in (Windows) "My Documents/SimCity 4/Regions/..." Open up the region that you're using, and then copy them into the Sims 2 folder, located at (Windows) "My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/SC4Terrains"
I also, for simplicity's sake, suggest temporarily moving your Downloads folder to somewhere else, because, if you're like me, you'll find that long loading times will slow things down too much. You can always put the folder back when you want to play properly.
Create a new neighbourhood using your new files and grab pen and paper. I advise drawing a crude sketch of major landmarks and then mark things on this map. You're looking out for edges and corners that look blocky and wrong - things you need to smooth out or alter. You're also looking to see whether you can actually place lots in the places that you thought you could.
Once you've got your notes, you've probably found some things that need tweaking, so exit S2 and load up SC4 again, where you can make the alterations you need.
I've found that, if you want to even out something, it's best to do it with the city rotated so that the bit you want is at the top of the screen.
You can soften edges by using one of the terraforming tools, and having just the edge of the circle overlapping the area you want to affect. Move it around a bit until you get a feel for what you're doing, then reload and do it properly.
Once you've made your changes, remember to copy the new ones into the S2 folder again, and to create a new neighbourhood.
Don't forget that, if you have any more exotic changes than just a few little tweaks, you can reaccess God Mode by using this cheat:
Hold down Ctrl + Alt + Shift and click on the God Mode button.
Attaching a picture to your neighbourhood
Once you enter the neighbourhood view, arrange the view so that it looks at its best, then take a snapshot. Pictures will be stored in "My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Neighbourhoods/N***/Storytelling" where N is the number of the neighbourhood. Bear in mind that neighbourhoods are numbered sequentially, so that if you keep the two that came with the game and then create a new one, that's going to be number 4, and so on. However, if you delete one, future neighbourhoods will be numbered to fill the gaps.
You will need to take a number of pictures, with the number depending on which expansion packs (if any) that you have. You can, in-game, switch between neighbourhood terrain types with the following cheat code:
terraintype Desert
Sims 2 came with Desert and Lush terrains (although you'll need to type 'Temperate' for some reason)
And Nightlife introduced 'Dirt' and 'Concrete' Simply replace the word 'Desert' with the appropriate type to take the rest of your pictures.
You don't have to resize them, since the game does it automatically, but you will need to resave them as .png files and rename them as follows:
If we assume that the city map was called "Tester", you should have:
* Tester.png - this is whatever you want the default image to look like, so copy your favourite one and name it this.
* Tester_lush.png
* Tester_desert.png
And if you have Nightlife:
* Tester_dirt.png
* Tester_concrete.png
That should do it - you now have a workable neighbourhood map and the pictures it needs. Make sure that you include the .sc4 file and the 3 (or 5) .png files when you upload your neighbourhood.
Advanced techniques
To be honest, there isn't much here, since it's not that difficult to do the things above. It's hard to do them well, but that comes with practise.
There are only two things, both related to each other really.
Firstly, it's possible to customise the region that you're working on, so that it doesn't have any medium or large cities on it. Which is nice since you don't have most of the map taken up by useless cities. I'm currently waiting on permission to include this information, but it can be found if you visit
http://www.gamefaqs.com, find the SimCity 4 section then the PC section, and open the guide written by "thy451". (Gamefaqs doesn't like direct links) Once you open this guide, search for section "A1.02.2" (or just use the contents section) Unfortunately, while this works, the only place that talks about it is here, and since it's a couple of years old I'm not sure if I'll ever get a reply, but I'm hoping.
Secondly, and this was the reason that I started the whole thing in the first place, you might want to create, for example, a valley that has a variety of terrains in it. Should it be 2x3 cities in size, you can have some with a sea shore, islands and a mainland; you can have valley walls with mountains; and you can have desert islands out to sea. You'll need to have a customised region for this of course, and you'll need to use the dreaded Reconcile tool, but it's worth it, in my opinion. Mostly because you get the feeling that all your neighbourhoods have a real location. It's good to be able to say "Well, my sims live in the open area of the valley, they go to University further up, where some of the campuses are actually on the slopes themselves, and now and again they head down to the beach for recreation. You just need to follow that road there..."
You get the idea, I'm sure.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation is an extremely dangerous tool in the hands of a careless user. What it does is extremely simple: It looks at the terrain in the next cities over - the terrain that's on the relevant edges, and it then makes the terrain on this side match the terrain there. Now, it isn't perfect, but it will make sure that the terrain on the edge itself is exactly the same as the terrain on the other side. The terrain that isn't quite at the edge will be an average of what it was before and what the new terrain is like. If you're continuing the terrain from one to another, it's extremely useful, since it saves you a lot of work trying to get the same general size and shape.
Obviously, you're going to have to work on the rest of the terrain yourself, but this helps.
When a road hits the edge of a city, you're given the option to have it continue in that city. So, if you do so, jump into the other city, and you'll now see the stub of a road in that position - continue from there. Since the regional view of SC4 allows you to see what the terrain and roadsystem of each city is like, in a sort of satellite view, you can have all sorts of patterns if you so desire.
* * *
And, well, that's it. Hopefully this will be useful to someone. If anyone has anything they'd like to add (or contradict) let me know, so that I can make alterations.
Which is True?
The Mask you're Facing,
or the Face I'm Masking?