I know I'm behind the times, but I only recently installed the Sims 3 Starter Pack (with the base game and Late Night). Sunset Valley doesn't catch enough of my interest to bother with (yet), but Bridgeport is full of interesting problems, that I'll enjoy fixing -- provided, of course, that they turn out to be fixABLE, but I'm hoping you guys can help me with that.

A few preliminary questions for now:

How safe is it to rename premade objects and layers in CAW? For instance, the "Subdivision" layer really ought to be "Lots_Subdivision" to match the other lot layers, and "RES_Floodgate_Apts" would be a more useful name than "RES_BB_starterapartment". But I don't know if there are hidden references to these things that will get messed up if I rename them.

What about moving things from one layer to another? Such as moving all the spawners into the empty "Spawners" layer. *shakes head* How can I tell how much of this organizational chaos is just stupidity that can be cleaned up and how much of it has links or reasons that I don't know about?

Also, I don't see any way to duplicate or re-order layers, but it seems unlikely that such a way doesn't exist.

Also also, I'm seeing a lot of places in Bridgeport that you'd expect to be parks, but they're just on the world lot, with no zoning, so no one goes there. Like the downtown central plaza with the statue or the fishing lakes. What's the point of this? Is there any reason I shouldn't make them into proper lots?

Finally (for now), every once in a while -- usually by asking it to find distant terrain in the render pane -- my CAW camera gets turned upside down, so that I'm viewing things from beneath the ground. This is momentarily amusing (I saw an airplane that way that I'd never seen in game) but ultimately not helpful, and I can't figure out how to get turned back around. I'm still having difficulty tilting the camera vertically in Live mode, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to do it in CAW. The only way I've found to get right-side up again is to close the file and re-open it. ???

Thanks for any suggestions. I'm trying to read as much of the tutorials/old info as I can find, but I have limited Internet access. Much of what's out there is buried in multipage threads or the "tutorial" turns out to be just a paragraph with a bunch of links to other pages, so when I'm trying to save as many pages down as I can to read offline later, I frequently to get home to find that what I downloaded is very incomplete, and it might be weeks before I get a chance to follow those links. So you'll have to forgive me if some of this is already answered elsewhere!

For the layers- they are purely for organization for the creator's benefit, and have no impact on the playable world. So you can create new layers, rename them, drag items from one layer to another etc, whatever you'd like to do. It doesn't matter whether objects are in a layer with others of their type or not. The exception to this is- trees; these are grouped together by chunks which makes rendering performance better (CAW does this automatically for you when you save)- but the trees in a chunk MUST be on the same layer for this to happen. So, you might find it easiest to put all the trees on one layer. The way EA has done their worlds is by region/ neighbourhood; I think they must have had a different team work on each area, and then they spliced the layers onto one file (we did some playing around with trying that here.) By chunk I mean the terrain chunks; outlined in blue or red if you show chunk boundaries. One chunk at a time is rendered in high res in-game, so the amount of objects you have on a chunk will have an impact on performance and rendering (hence why the trees are grouped).

For the parks- EA did this most likely to make the game perform better; remember they were building the game to be playable by the lowest common denominator (so people with celeron laptops). You could make lots on these areas, but if you want to share with people you should always take into account the playability and performance of the world. If just building for your own use, then make it to suit your own hardware. Too many lots close together can be taxing with rendering, but will look great if your hardware can handle it.

For the last question about the camera- I'm not sure, as I haven't had CAW installed for a while- maybe someone else will know? Usually it's click on the middle button/ scroll wheel to change camera pitch.

Ah, I'm really a Mac person and have only used Windows on laptops with trackpads, so this whole "middle mouse button" concept is something I've never quite grokked. :-) On a third re-reading of the manual, I noticed the Q/F keystrokes, but haven't had time to test them yet.

Thanks for the reassurance on the layers. That all seemed like I ought to be able to take it for granted, but Sims 1 taught me not to associate "EA" with "common sense", so I didn't want to risk it without asking first. Does the same apply to renaming lots? I'd worried in case they were references.

I doubt that this late in the game (literally!) I could make anything worth sharing that others haven't bettered already, but since I'm usually running on a low-end laptop myself, I tend to assume that if my machine can handle it, so can others. So far it's running great -- but so far I only have the one expansion. *shrug*

My chunks are all white boundaries for now, but they do vanish most annoyingly every time I try to adjust the camera to see an area in better context. I assume there's no way to make them permanently visible? Also, do they have IDs of some sort that we can find/identify? If the ID is a jumble or a hassle to identify, I won't bother with it, but if I'm reorganizing layers anyway, it might make sense to make one layer per chunk, and if the chunk has an simple ID (like #32 or E2F4 or whatnot), I might as well include that in the layer name. (As you might guess, I'm rather anal about organization.) I did notice that Floodgate is built smack across a chunk boundary, which seems like it might be rather bad practice, but I'm too attached to the location to try to move it now.

I've also noticed that my Better Bridgeport has a few hundred more resources than the original, even though I've only made a few minor terrain-paint changes to test what updated when. Where are these extra resources coming from?

Off now to finish reading about populating the world and to see if anyone has already shared a more usable terrain map that I can just import. I love building lots and planning towns, but I neither enjoy nor am any good at terrain sculpting, so if I can avoid re-inventing the wheel in that, I'll definitely do so! For the population, I'm tempted to just bulldoze all the lots and households for now, so CAW has less to juggle while I'm working. Even better would be if I could just identify them in the original resources and never import them in the first place, but I don't know how to identify which resource is which. Is there a guide somewhere for that? Then I could keep my .world file clean for as long as possible, and just add the people and lots later on once I've finished all tweaks to them in game. I do want to keep most of the population -- I wasn't sure at first, but discovering that the Atkins family was modelled on the Powerpuff girls tipped me over the edge!

Thanks for your reply, and so quickly too. Most of the threads turning up in my search results are a decade old or more, so I wasn't sure if anyone would still be reading here regularly.

I don't think the chunks have any sort of designation as far as CAW is concerned- or no way to 'select' or go to them, anyway. The chunk boundaries if I remember correctly fade out as you move the camera away from them, no way to keep them visible at all. I've not noticed any issues with having a lot spanning chunk boundaries at all.

The extra resources you are spotting are probably to do with the terrain paints; if you add a paint and add a paint layer, the resources involved with that terrain map will be added.

For the terrain map, you can export a heightmap, and you can also export terrain paint maps. You can also splice layers into a world (see that thread I linked in my previous post); so you could possibly get all of the objects, effects, terrain paints etc from the original Bridgeport imported into a fresh world, and add the sea/sky parameters to that to make a clean world to build and populate. Depends upon how much you want to fiddle really- might just be easier to delete things from the existing one.

Thanks!

For the chunks, I was able to find the images of each individual chunk in the resources, so at least I can tell where the boundaries are, but I still need to hunt up an app that can open DDS files so I can put the jigsaw together. (Not a serious problem, just something I haven't had Internet time to do yet.)

What I'd really like is to be able to see the entire 2048x2048 map all at once, showing both the chunk boundaries AND the unroutable paint, so I can see what proportion of the existing land is unroutable. Has the fan community come up with a "best practice" in terms of how much distance from the edge of the world you should leave for the unroutable camera? Some of the EA towns have huge amounts, and I find it hard to believe that much is really necessary. But if the usable space is smaller and a huge buffer isn't necessary, wouldn't it have been more efficient to use a smaller map in the first place?

I also noticed that in Bridgeport, they put most of the downtown area -- the busiest, most densely crowded area -- all in one chunk, with only the vampire district in a second. Again, that seems inefficient. If I were designing from scratch, I would have tried to spread the load out over four chunks. But maybe I'm misunderstanding how the chunks work, or overestimating their importance.

There isn't really a 'best practice'- the camera routing is really cosmetic and doesn't affect the functionality of the world. The non-routing paint is also optional- the world will work without it, as steep areas and water are automatically marked unroutable. When you playtest, if you find sims are getting somewhere you'd rather they didn't go, or they are spawning on an inaccessible island for example, that is when you'd use the non-routing paint. In worlds I've built, I let players go right to the edge of the map for sim and camera routing- just painted a narrow band. This is because I like to put rare spawners or little effects in places that aren't frequented a lot, as 'easter eggs' if you will. When the distant terrain overlapped the routable terrain a little I non-routed that area, and also stopped the camera from going too near so that the join wasn't as obvious. So a large buffer isn't necessary, you can do as you will with camera and sim routing, the only test is what works for performance and appearance. I think EA were really trying to make detailed worlds work for the lowest performance computers; so what they made was nicely detailed and would look good to the player, and the unused space was out of bounds. Also the distant terrain wouldn't be obvious if the player couldn't get near it, so giving the illusion of a massive world. But if you are not worried about people who play this world seeing the 'edges' (or indeed, if it's just for your own use) then do as you prefer.

For Bridgeport, yes I can see how it would seem inefficient- but remember they wanted low performance computers to render this world well, so they had as much as possible on a few chunks so that the player's computer wouldn't have to re-render the scene too much.

I think I'm getting a little thrown off on the performance issue because I'm using to playing on low-end computers and so usually take it for granted to build accordingly (if I had money for a gaming computer, I wouldn't be starting Sims 3 a decade late!), BUT my current computer, while still a laptop, was a gift and not a potato when new. And while it is edging on three years old now, it's still considerably younger than Sims 3! So my usual standard of "if it works fine for me, it'll work for anyone" may not apply. :-) We'll have to see if it's still working great after I install a few more expansion packs (hopefully I won't miss the next sale, apparently the last one was happening just as I was installing the base game and not looking at expansions yet).