#3
10th Dec 2020 at 10:47 PM
Last edited by Jawusa : 10th Jul 2021 at
2:51 PM.
Step 2.1) Create a new empty neighborhood using
Mootilda's method. I'm not going to show how to create an empty neighborhood, as this would just make this tutorial even larger than it is, and Mootilda's explained it quite well, too!
If you can't use
AnyGameStarter, again, Mootilda has an alternative method too. You can also manually disable the NeighborhoodTemplate folders in the Program Files in order to prevent the game from adding sims to your neighborhood. More info on that
here.
Step 2.2) Now, the following steps are pretty much identical to Mootilda's original tutorial, the only difference is that I'll be adding pictures to Mootilda's method.
If you done everything correctly, you should end up with an empty neighborhood without any sims. Quit the game once you've created the neighborhood. Don't worry much about the appearance of the neighborhood, we'll fix that later.
Step 2.3) Now, open up Mootilda's HoodReplace program, choose your occupied neighborhood on the left-hand side and the empty neighborhood on the right-hand side. Untick "Fix Elevation" for lots, since there are none in the neighborhood, and hit "Copy".
If you go check your neighborhood in-game, you should see the exact copy of your original neighborhood BUT without the lots, like this:
Step 2.4) Here, we are slightly going to deviate from Mootilda's method and do an extra step. Yeah, you guessed it right, we are going to clean the sim references now! Yayy, the most exciting part! In the past, it was a tedious process, having to go into each lot file individually and manually delete all the sim references, but today, we've got a fancy tool for that! Which makes it all exciting! :D
Open up Chris Hatch's modified LotCompressor program, choose your neighborhood and you'll see all the lots in your neighborhood in the list. Tick "Remove Weather" and "Remove SimData". Optionally, you can also compress the lots if you want to. I'd recommend you to do so. Who says no to smaller file sizes?
Step 2.5) Here comes the
SimPE part! Yay!! As an reminder, always
backup your neighborhoods first before using SimPE. Just in case something might go wrong. Let's assume you backed everythig up, now open up your old neighborhood in
SimPE and extract all Text List (STR) files with instance numbers of 0x8000 or larger. You may have to sort by instance first if it's all mixed up. The other text list files refer to the families and are not needed.
Step 2.6) Optional, you may skip this step if you want to...
By the default, the game will swipe out all the furnitures once a sim moves out of their lots and a new sim moves in. However, if you wish to KEEP the original furnitures of the lots in the neighborhood, one single change can make the furnitures stay in your neighborhood!
Go to Lot Description (LTXT) files and look for the U0 field. There, you'll see a
hexdecimal number (recognizable by the 0x suffix). Subtract 8 from there and hit commit.
If you don't quite understand, which number you should type in, use
this website to convert decimal numbers into hexdecimals (and vice-versa). In our example, we have the value 0x0000002B. If we convert "2B" into decimals according to the website, we get 43. Now we can subtract 8 as usual and get 35. Let's plug that new number into the website and it'll throw a "23" back to us.
How crazy is that? Ever thought 35 = 23 is a correct equation?
Anyway, let's just... accept that and type in 0x00000023 into the U0 field and hit commit.
Step 2.7) Repeat 2.6 for all the other lots you have in your neighborhood. Usually, it shouldn't differ much from the other lots and you should just be able to copy/past the same value into U0 all over again.
Step 2.8) Once you're done, select all Lot Description (LTXT) files and extract just like you did with the Text List files.
Step 2.9) Open up your new neighborhood, right click and choose "Add" to add the extracted text list files (STR) which you've hopefully saved into a folder in the previous steps. Once imported, save the file.
Note: If you did everything right, your new neighborhood should not include any other Sim Description other than the universal sims (such as the Grim Reaper, etc.)
Step 2.10) Repeat the same step but with the Lot Description files. Save the neigborhood once you're done.
Phew! Now, all the
SimPE part is done and you may close
SimPE now. The rest of the tutorial is pretty much done within minutes, trust me!