Here's my current to-do list. Feel free to comment on these ideas, or make suggestions of your own.

Current To-Do List for HoodReplace:

My first priority is to fix problems which prevent people from using HoodReplace. Bugs which have a workaround will be fixed as time permits.

New Functionality:

- Add a new "Replace Lots" option, which will move all families to sim bin, remove all existing lots, and replace with lots from the "From" hood.

- Add an option to skip specifying the "From" neighborhood. This will disable the first column of checkmarks ("Replace"). Useful when people are just trying to fix or delete elements from their neighborhood.

- Roads should always be flat from side to side. Intersections should always be flat. Adjust hood terrain after flattening.

- Fix lot elevation before anything else; this will make some of the following suggestions easier.

- When fixing the elevation of a lot, choose the elevation based on the local hood terrain for the road, rather than for an arbitrary location on the lot. This should minimize the breakage of hood terrain by lots.

- After fixing the elevation of a lot, might want to replace the local hood terrain with the lot terrain. Note that this will change the new hood terrain; so make this an option.

- If the elevation of the road is to be fixed, then after fixing the elevation of a lot, choose the elevation of the road based on the lot elevation and terrain. Specifically, the road should probably be flat in front of all lots. Perhaps the hood terrain in the Lot Description can be used for this, instead of opening the lot package. Again, this will change the new hood terrain; so make this an option. Probably should only be done in conjunction with changes to local hood terrain.

- Allow grid adjustment of neighborhood terrain, esp. flatten an area.

- Option to allow things to move underwater. Right now, elevations are changed to avoid underwater roads, trees, deco, and lots.

- Allow the user to add and remove roads in an existing neighborhood directly, without using SimCity 4 to edit the terrain.

- Add an option to move the entire terrain up or down. I believe that lowering the terrain will flood low-lying areas. Alternatively, it may be possible to raise or lower the water level within a neighborhood, but this is probably a less-optimal option.

- Add an option to scale the entire terrain. The code to do this is already in the program, since we needed scaling for Castaway Stories and SimCity 4.

- Adjust height of roads so that they match the current terrain. [Done]

- Adjust height of bridges so that they match the current terrain.

- Change roads to bridges if new terrain is water. Note that the new logic (in testing) makes "road bridges" (ie, roads which float on the water) in this situation, which may be good enough. [Note: not "good enough", since placing a lot may drop the road below the water. Also, the cars don't recognize such a road as a bridge and so will drive underwater.]

- Change bridges to roads if new terrain is land. Note that some people may want land bridges, so make this an option.

- Allow people to specifically adjust heights of deco and trees... the Castaway Stories neighborhoods show how this can be quite effective.

- When copying from Castaway Stories to The Sims 2, copy only the appropriate selection of roads, bridges, trees, and decorations (since TS2 neighborhoods are only 1/4 of the CS neighborhood size).

- Extract SimCity 4 files from an existing TS2 neighborhood, including roads (at least).

- Allow user to specify terrain type. Fix terrain type in NBGH record and all lots.

Hmm, would this be a suitable tool for including the ability to adjust the edges of one [sub]hood to match the edges of another [sub]hood? I see that SC4 has a similar function. Why not Sims2?

Yes, more generally I wondered whether there would be any use for grid adjustment of the neighborhood terrain?

Hmm, you mean like FreeTime is supposed to do? [I don`t have FreeTime installed yet, so I don`t know how the tools work there.] This could be useful for those who don`t have FreeTime, nyet? ...or for those who don`t have SC4, si? Especially for those who have neither.

I believe that I found the problem with fixing the elevation of roads... it wasn't a problem with my algorithm, but just a stupid coding error. Roads now appear to be disconnect-free.

Needs more testing before release.

That just leaves bridge elevations...

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I also just used grid adjustment of my neighborhood to flatten out some areas where I was having problems placing lots close enough together. So, I think that there might be some use for grid adjustment of the hood terrain, especially with associated fixes to the elevation of roads, trees, deco and lots.

The main problem with this idea is how to determine where to adjust. Unlike lots, the hood grid isn't visible and there's no obvious direction to the hood. This makes it difficult to know how to specify a range for adjustment.

Updated To Do list with ideas for new features.

Updated To Do list again.

Yay!