Lucky Palms has always been my favorite Sims 3 world. The red rock and desert landscape always called out to me. It also has one of the most beautiful lighting schemes of any world I've come across. But, it's not perfect. I had an idea shortly after the world came out to attempt a CAW makeover to make it more like Las Vegas.

It started out innocently enough with just trying to replace the dirt roads in dry lake with paved roads. I know it's supposed to be on the other side of the tracks, but even they deserve paved roads. That in place, I started adding some of my favorite community created skyscrapers and lots. Eventually, it became an unplayable mess of bad routing, heavy object use, and more textures than likely exist in the universe and beyond. But, since I'm an idiot, I'm going to try it one last time. Since the world heavily uses items from the TS3 premium world, I'll never be able to release it. But I wanted to get some feedback from folks to make it the best world possible (and, maybe even playable).

Old screenshots from where I left off:

Update 1: Creating a probably totally unusable overpass to connect the Dry Lakes part of town (and, where the airport now is) to downtown:

Overpass


Jesus built my Airport:

I'm also working on opening up the main lake so the water flows to the Dry Lake district. I used the ITF dam to make it seem like the lake is man made, and did some (bad!) terrain work to build a river bed to fill the dry lake area. I'm going to try and relocate tthe dam so the highway goes over it, but that's for later. I also added two additional (bad!) highway intersections, one of which you can see here.

Looks great! Your overpass will, indeed, not work. Cars will drop or jump between the bridge and the roads below. I would suggest taking out the pieces of road below the bridge since you have the excellent circle going around. I don't know what types of trees are appropriate but some of the ones you are using might be out of place. Looking forward to updates!

Thanks. I'll try and put a short road break under the overpass and fill it in with terrain paints.

The trees were (I think) a world object that I just filled in a bit more to hide my terrible terrain sculpting. Since it's the gateway, I might try and build out a palm oasis themed feature around the intersection.



Also, this dude is always there in CAW. He's Waiting. Watching. Judging.

I find the road grading tool very helpful for smoothing lumpy roads or flattening roads. The settings I like are high quality, single segment, road edge parameters width - usually - 3-5 squares out on either side of the road for smoothing, and adjacent terrain sculpting smooth. If you want more of a "shoulder" on either side of the road increase the road edge parameters width to about 7-9. For road flattening - which I don't use as often - I think I use the same settings except I select adjacent terrain sculpting as none. I believe this helps avoid problems if lots are right next to the road. The terrain painting doesn't look bad in the pictures. I rarely go higher than 5-10 for strength/opacity for brush settings for terrain painting and usually set the "falloff" at zero to avoid harsh edges. This way, you can use a bigger brush size. Then, it's lots of blending which can get a bit tedious. Of course, if you are making a pathway or filling in an area with asphalt, gravel, dirt, sand, etc., in between borders of some kind, you might want both settings on 100. I hope these suggestions will help!

Would definitely keep on working on the terrain and try to match the new terrain to the existing terrain (i.e. smooth out the area between the skyscrapers and the hills near the highway in the first image).

Small victories. Bridge is now functional, although now the scale is bothering me a bit. I'm also going to try a bit more terrain painting to the "highway" gap below (and, of course, try and re-sculpt around the bridge).




Also worked on the main block in the former dry lakes district. This is the "nice" part of the neighborhood, with some decor (empty/locked) office buildings, a restaurant and grocery store, A dive bar (read: strip club), pawn shop and liquor store round out the block (along with a cheap apartment complex). I don't want to scare the tourists away. It'll be all trailers and places you don't want to wander after dark from here.

I made one big block with simulated alley ways instead of trying to to add even more intersections. Some terrain painting still to work on, but this is what I've got so far.

Looking good! You might want to flatten the lot and roadway near the grocery store rabbit hole and, maybe, scoot it over some. It looks like it wouldn't be sitting level now.

Small changes as I try and wrap up the bulk of dry lakes. I'm already losing patience with CAW, but at this point I'm at least determined to finish this side of town for now.

Overview:


The goal is to make the side opposite the grocery store a park/recreation area. But not too nice of one.

First up - "fixed" the grocery store lot and corner:

Next up - Built a poor excuse for a run-down motel:


The rest of the motel block. I re-positioned some of the Lucky Palms lots to complete some sort of (bad!) downtown area. I'll likely reconfigure the homes that clearly used to be commercial buildings into some combination of salon/tattoo parlor and probably a laundromat. Lots of @Floraflora2 buildings here from his vintage LA and Sandy Shores series. I'll work on clearing out most of the terrain paint on those so they match the Nevada desert.


If CAW would stop crashing, I hope to finish up the recreation area this weekend. I'm planning on leave the other 50s/60s mid-century houses intact, since I like their placement and they're far enough away from the new downtown strip.

Edit: One more wideview after getting some of the "Recreation" lots in place:

I love it so much, I also feel this strong attraction to this "rough americana" look and feel. I also visualize most of my uploads positioned like how you placed them, lots very close to each other, separated only by alleys or parking lots. I'm also interested in the other lots, too, are they downloadable? Your motel is adorably raw and just as it should be, I love especially the entrance roof with the logo tower. I recognize the Angel City apartment buildings, they look so great here, and the airport, wow!

Thanks - I really wanted to capture something with a bit of grime, that had the appeal of a formerly bustling small town. Your Sandy Shores / vintage LA lots really inspired me to pick this back up. The premise for this district is two-fold: the shinier neighbor opened up across the street, and the industries that formerly supported the neighborhoods economy jumped ship.

RE: The Lots. Lots of mixing and matching. In addition to the LP defaults and yours, I'm using two apartments from Angel City, the Forth Smith Office Building, Jenba's Flying V Coffee House (non-rabbit hole), and a coffee house (on the main corner opposite the airport) that I picked up somewhere along the way.

The dive bar (next to the supermarket) and motel were quick creations. I've finished the dive bar, and am going to work on the scale on the hotel in a bit. The entrance sign and roof were the only things I really had in mind when I plopped it down. I let the rectangles do the rest.

Another quick update: I got distracted by the shiny neighbor and moved quite a bit of the lots/streets around as I began to build out more of an entertainment themed city center. This district has leaked over to the lakeside, and up the road towards the housing area. The vintage spanish style homes now find themselves in the shade of some casino or another. I've also added a "North" side of town suburb, complete with a horse racing track (from Dubai), and Ikea (from Barcelona), some outlet shops, and a few new modern housing complexes.



I really had to work off of a few mods and almost zero store content to make EIG work. I have a feeling that, even after I make tag half the lots hidden that this will be an unplayable mess. I'm done placing lots, so I'll work on terrain painting/sculpting before being terribly disappointed when I go to play it.

Note: I also really now kind of hate the dam and how artificial and out of place it looks compared to the old earthen style dam that was there. I'm half tempted to yank it out and bring the terrain back up, but man, it'd be a hell of a lot harder to undo that mess.

Sorry to spam this one, but the Yellow Jacket Inn really ties in nicely in not-so-Dry Lakes. Glimmer of the strip is in in the distance.

It's very easy to recolour world items- you can include the texture file with your packaged world so that the end user doesn't have to install anything.

I felt compelled to add a mid-century styled block school in dry lakes. Uses rabbit hole doors, since the in game RH buildings are a little too shiny.

Some more painting still to do, and I may respaint the school a bit. This is on the recreation block, across from the market.

Not much of an update - I've mostly been tearing stuff down, rebuilding, and tearing stuff down again. In the meantime, I've started building out some of the other sections of Dry Lakes, and re-imagining other parts of town.

The first apartment I ever had was a one bedroom in a dingbat style building in Berkeley. It was always either too hot or too cold, and you could hear everything going on in every other apartment since the walls may have actually been made out of paper mache. But, the rent was cheap and it was all mine.

Since they are/were also very common through CA and Nevada, I thought this town could use some, too.

Hell yes, dingbats! I never heard of the term "dingbat style" until I played GTA V, fell in slow-burn love with the rough side of LA / CA and started to read about the urban history and architecture of the area. Then I realized that these type of buildings are called "dingbats" and although they are undoubtedly ugly and as you say, not a happy thing to live there, they now slowly become historical relics of a bygone period, therefore, protected heritage. I look at them with a kind of respect and cherish.

I guess I should've checked for spawners? Either that, or someone takes their horse training way too seriously.



Also, that reflection is kinda terrifying.

Sorry, I'm so late coming into this... But I was wondering if simb0t ever posted this world for public use. I can't seem to find it anywhere and there are no links in the thread, at least that I can find.

Doubtful! I may fire it up again sometime over the next couple of weeks. I haven't been playing much since CAW shattered my soul. I could probably share the CAW files at some point, but that might violate the MTS terms of service since it's paid EA content.

You can upload lots, worlds sism, et cetera using store content, since it is EA content. I do it all be time. Your problem would just be how many people would have the store content to be able to use it how you intended.

I would genuinely love it if you did release the files for this, even if they are unfinished. I just wanna get a closer look at it, you've done such a nice job! I never got into CAW, in fact, I was looking into it when I saw this and I can tell, it's probably not something I'm going to be able to figure out. Still, it's impressive what you managed to accomplish! Great work.

I wholeheartedly agree! This is a bona fide work of art which deserves preservation for the benefit of the entire Sims 3 community. It reminds me of another Las Vegas world that no one can access, enjoy, or learn from...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjlxGEFtHl8

I'm going to be upgrading my system this week. I'll pull all the CAW files together and whatever else I can find and throw them up on a link at some point soon.

Who knows, maybe I'll fire it back up again once I reinstall.