I was toying with the idea of making a replacement of Oasis Landing that looked more like the 1950s using Roaring Heights stuff, so you journey to the past.. I think that can be done.
Not really easy to make a past and future world usable in the same game, is it? That would be epic.

Woah. Woah. Amazing idea. How the hell haven't I thought of this? I don't understand how this has happened.

In all seriosity though, I don't think it's like any other vacation world. I have a whole bunch of experience with saves that are set in the past, and I can tell you that getting rid of all blatant enough anachronisms is a total pain in the ass. You're going to find people in ugly, baggy, indecent 2000s (or futuristic!) clothing, you're going to find modern taxis, you're going to find people taking selfies and chances are Sims will bust out a digital keyboard in the town square and start playing on it. And trust me, if I have my doubt about whether said keyboard looks old enough for 1988, it's not going to be believable in 1958.

So is it doable? Yeah. Is it easy? Nope. That world is going to have to come with a bunch of tuning mods and since you're in the 50s, you're going to have to rely on the Store's many beautiful mid-century sets as well. The good news is that the Store has a whole bunch of sets for the 50s. I wish I had them all, honestly. And I sure as hell don't have that luxury with the '80s theme. I have to get real creative sometimes.

But the potential for a 1950s, Pleasantville-style Americana is huge. The whole wholesome, family-friendly, all-American I Love Lucy style can be kind of magical. Just make sure that the radios play Mr. Sandman on occasion.

Traveler, and add new option to the 'Time portal' object. I also never knew traveler actually had a cruise world. That mod is one of my favourites.

Who would make such world tho?

Maybe just redo SV or some other hood with a 50s look as at least there you would not have all the ITF vehicles and so on? As said, no matter what, the sims will do modern things there. Maybe treat it more like an amusement park in that theme and today's sims travel there with the Traveler mod?

If just a vacation/tourist destination you will not need many RH lots. And you can use rugs to make in 50s style as you want for the needed ones, and have less 20s as is Roaring Heights?

Best option, do a tiny/small destination world in CAW so you can do just as wanted. Or use someone else's and build as needed?

The question though is whether the game will comply with your wish and also change the future world's behaviour to be more in line with a past world.

My guess is that the future world has its own tag in the respective file like city worlds and the three vacation locations. If it has, then, no matter how your future world looks like, service Sims will automatically appear as robots, Sims will automatically use the future cars and taxis and all game-generated Sims will wear ITF clothing.

On the other hand, if you could find some vintage replacement for the hover train, this would be the world where any old-style tram system would work.

I don't think a 50s world should have a tram. You know, with the ongoing streetcar conspiracy and everything......

Yes that's absolutely true, but in a 50s suburban Americana world, there's no place for a tram. It's incompatible with the entire spirit of said cultural phenomenon, which is a heavily car-centric culture. It's just as out of place as having speakeasies in there. Or a shuttleport for traffic to and from Earth's orbit.

Now should this be a middle-sized city, one with an urban core, then there's a chance they might have one. You could pass that off as being realistic. Get one of those streamlined mid-century numbers in there. That could definitely work.

Down this way we take our old railroad cars and tailgate in them. (The "Cockabooses" of the University of South Carolina.)

We call it "railgating."

New Orleans still has the tram that runs from downtown through the Garden District to whatever the end of the line is called. Fun ride.

The duck boats sound cool.

And I had to look it up. :D

https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/s...eday-tradition/

I don't understand vintage trams. We have them here too, you see them riding around sometimes. At least they're a novelty thing here - in the States some of them are actually being run as a service. Why would anyone want to have to rely on such an antiquated vehicle? We have some trams from the 80s here and they already feel ancient and gross. They're noisy, they're poorly lit, and the seats are uncomfortable. I can imagine getting on some 70 year old thing is fun for nostalgia, but to have to rely on it as a service?

Edit: Just remembered the conspiracy is also a large part of the premise of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It's somewhat of an urban legend, but the fact is that in the United States alone, several dozen tramways were broken up and replaced by buses, in the ongoing effort to get everyone into cars and buses. Calling it a conspiracy is a bit overkill, but it fits the definition of the word. It's a real shame, because the automotive industry indirectly vandalized a whole bunch of cities in those years. I've read about how in the middle of the century, American city planners laid highways so that they would A) plow straight through slums with a high black population and B) would serve as a barrier between communities of varying wealth. Real classy stuff, basically.

Create Oasis Landing as the present world but with modified version that has 1950s theme and vibe going, so leave the future destination world has it is.

I don't think you can modify OL enough to make it look 50s.....it's a thoroughly futuristic map with many features that do not make sense in the current time, let alone the past.

It's whole terrain is futuristic. Most you could do is make out a Fallout pre-apocalypse vibe from it.

The whole idea of Oasis Landing is that it's a planned community that was built as a home in a post-climate change wasteland. Unlike most other worlds, it has no roads leading in or out of it and there's no terrain features to make that practical, either. So I think the idea is that it's a self-sustaining colony. I've always thought it's a missed opportunity that there's no visible aircraft or spacecraft anywhere to be found. The big dam would be a perfect place to plonk down some shuttlecraft landing pads. If you look at the distant terrain texture in the game files, you can actually see there's identical-looking cities on the very far end of both sides of the map. I don't think that's some sort of lazy texture work, I think that's genuinely part of the design.

In terms of layout, something that has a rural medium-small town vibe would probably work best. Sunset Valley has some layer of idealized mid-century Americana to it. So I'd say, think Sunset Valley but in an Appaloosa sort of climate.

There were still plenty of trains in the US in the 50s, btw. My parents always rode the train to college and then to grad school. (For example, my mother would take the train from Newark to Iowa City, and change in Chicago, not fly in an airplane, which would have been a prohibitive cost.)

I know, but there's a considerable difference between there being trains around for those who need them, and trains being a popular and societally relevant means of transport. It'd be a bit like if I gave all my Bridgeport'88 Sims cell phones - sure, cell phones were around back then, they existed, but they were enormous, enormously expensive, and they couldn't do a whole lot. And thus, they existed but did not flourish. And thus, my Sims do not have cell phones.

I don't think we're going to let this one go, Grijze. I live in a huge US city. Sometimes I have to travel to another huge or medium sized US city a few hundred miles away in the same general part of the country. Sure I could spend 1-2 hours getting to the airport, be there 2 hours early for security, take a 40-90 minute flight, and then have to travel from wherever the destination airport is to downtown or wherever I really need to be (airports are almost never in the "right" place). Judging from the number of people saying the heck with that waste of time and taking the train instead alongside of me whether we can afford to fly or not, together with so many destinations in this huge sprawled out country of ours not really being reachable by air or at least not practically so, I don't see how train travel can be deemed societally irrelevant. It's a huge part of our history and still of our everyday lives for many of us today as it was in the 50s.

It's even in our music. Everybody Loves the Sound of a Train in the Distance.

The prevalence of streetcars/trolleys on tracks in urban areas is different and varies by location.

I could have sworn I saw a tutorial here on how to make a different travel world. I know (okay, I know where to look up how to) install revised University and WA worlds... I figured that the same might be true of the future world. I'm concerned about placing the time event markers.
Okay, the OL trackless tram system has to go. I'm not smart enough to make it look like the Disney Land 1971 monorail. I always hated that thing anyway because it takes to long to move about the town. You're better off with the sloppy jalopy.

My father took the train to and from work every day in the 50s. And in parts of the US such as New England, NYC, etc, many, many people still commute by train every day. Or use them to travel between cites as was said before. Systems such as BART in the bay area and DC are in effect more modern versions of trains. And the subways in NYC are quite old and used as much as before. SF still has streetcars and the cable cars and there are people who use them for work commutes. And there still is/was the train from the peninsula into the city. We have Amtrak here that is used also. We have a light rail in the city where I live.

And I have taken trains every time I have been in Europe.

These are all still very relevant, used forms of transportation.

As for where highways are/were built, they always will be built through areas with the lowest land acquisition values as much as possible. Pick Beverly Hills or a lower rent district, it will always be the lower one to minimize costs and there will be less resistance.

I suppose that this could be a starting point, based on simsample's thread here.

Yeahhh, I grew up in the outside suburbs of Chicago and even in tiny towns the train runs through and is a major portion of the work commute and has been for a long time. Chicago and the surrounding suburbs- which include a lot of ridiculously small farm towns that only joined the twentieth century in the last twenty years or so- has had commuter train service to and from the suburbs since the mid 1800s... Metra website. It's pretty well accepted that if you work in the city you might as well just take Metra and skip the traffic, especially if the weather's bad.

I think the funny thing about the US is a lot of it is very subjective and very area-specific. No one place is going to be representative of the whole country, which can make it really difficult to establish any kind of a baseline, both for historic periods and modern day. For that matter I think it's probably why the game has such a bland, stereotypical suburban America image. It seems kind of like they mixed up a bunch of the idealized tv show notions about the suburbs, stirred until frothy, and added a dash or two of genuine weirdness because it's the sims and why not?

Well, yeah, it's important to note that that singular country is bigger than all of Europe put together. And there's at least a dozen distinct cultures to be found in Europe. But if you can imagine a genericized European culture, you can very well imagine an American one, too. It just happens to be that my perception of what that generic America is comes from a variety of old movies. As a kid, I once saw an episode of Knight Rider where he goes to a city, and at the time I could've sworn the guy drove straight into the 22nd century. These huge, enormous buildings, these wide open roads, all this artificial-looking green space and those mean-looking cars everywhere. Something tells me it was the city of Atlanta, but I can't be sure.

But I personally have very specific ideas of what both America and Europe look like, despite not having seen large parts of both. America is green and forested; Europe is open but swampy. American cities are dense and gritty; European cities are modern but bland. The soundtrack to Europe is either ultra-trendy or beautifully melancholic, while America's is 100% a Guns 'n' Roses song.

Lol... movie's reproduction of reality is obviously extremely misrepresentative.
Europe, at least eastern, where I live, has qute a huge amount of forests. Whole Europe probably has same density of forests America does (not amount since US is way expansive than Europe). I don't see where swamps come in? Maybe cause of lot of rivers? Europe is a diverse place, with south part extremely mediterranean (sometimes even a bit tropic), and north part extremely mountanious while the middle is mildly temperate.
Cities here are not at all modern. Have you seen Sims 4 Windenburg? It's actually more accurate to how cities look in Germany, and even where I live. France also has old-style big cities. That's because europeans like preserving their cultural streets and traditional/historical look... a lot. Also, european cities are definitelly not bland. And believe me, european cities can be dense as heck. But it's true... U.S. cities are way more dense, that I don't see who would live in those.

I just don't see how can you imagine genericized European culture since there's a lot of them, distinct and strictly separated (this gets a bit questionable in 21st century). America is definitelly easier to be imagined as a genericized culture since it actually is a big blur of different cultures co-existing together and usually mixing over some period of time. But it's also a big place with even more cultures than Europe (way more) so generalizing those while trying to preserve some accuracy would just be pointless endeavour. Especially because time periods also define different cultures (or different cultures define them, whichever notion you like). With this globalisation set in motion, you get the notion of how one big, generic, global culture is like. I guess sims is going for that recently. But I expect that to change as well eventually.

What were we talking about? 50s? How to make some kind of viable portrayal of US 50s generic city look and feel in Sims 3 to be used as a 'Past' location?

How to turn Sunset Valley into Pleasantville or 50s-era Hill Valley, basically. With a diner, a drive-in cinema, a whole load of churches and cul-de-sacs and, if you're as big on realism as I am, a bunch of "no coloreds allowed" signs to keep us grounded in the reality of the day.

I'm not sure how I feel about Windenburg, by the way. It's a very Americanized version of a European city, I feel. Too many antique buildings, too many cobblestone streets and inns and taverns....I mean sure there's a few ultramodern buildings and they look reasonably European, but the bigger picture I'm getting is that of a theme park, not a city. It doesn't rhyme with the places I go and live in, and I live in a medieval city. Of course, it's probably different in other countries.