Please do. I've been hoping that people would post tutorials. I'll gladly put a link to your tutorial in the main post.

Hi Mootilda,

I love the new toy!! I can finally make a piece of property that will look like where I live. I have found a couple of things that may need fixing if I am doing things right. First, I'll tell you what I did and show you the screen shots. What I was trying for was removing the road from the 6 lots that make up my property. The add and remove roads option did not seem to do anything at all. So I went with expanding each lot over the road by 1 and removing the road tiles. As you can see from the third screen shot cars still drive where the road used to be. Also if you are looking at the lot next door you still see the road. I also packaged the two lots for you. I don't know if this helps or not.

I have a question that has nothing to do with LotAdjuster, but I don't know where to post it. I have had a problem once in awhile with one of my lots turning blue and totally useless. I can't enter it, I can't bulldoze it, I can't do anything with it. In order to get rid of it I have to delete the neighborhood. I have made it a practice to packages of my lots. Have you ever heard of this? Attached is a screen shot.

Winterhart, you will have to manually remove the road tiles from the lots. LA deletes nothing.

Within the lot, if there is no road, there should be no car portals and therefore no cars coming or going. (Edit - LA will not delete the portals - do that manually if you want it. Thanks Mootilda.) You can check portals with Inge's portal revealer.

If you are looking at the neighbourhood screen, the game will believe the roads to be there, and let neighbourhood cars drive accordingly. Neighbourhood roads are not altered by the LA.

If you want no road at all for your property, maybe you'd be better to move your lots away from the road edge with the LA, and go from there.

Hope this helps! Correct me if I'm getting something wrong, Mootilda.

I get the portal thing and the neighborhood thing. What is supposed to happen when you check the box for "add and remove roads". I can remove the road tiles if I am expanding the lot but not if all I want to do is remove the road tiles. I'm confused.

If you just want the tiles removed, that is done with Moveobjects. Then you can lay terrain paints or other tiles for a custom road it you like. Nothing to do with the LA.

After checking the box on the advanced panel for releasing the roads, you will be able to use the checkboxes on the first half of the screen. If you want to remove the original road, untick that box. Add a tick where you want a new road (or not).NOTE - The game will be really unhappy if you have a road on the lot, without having one at the front. The next release will prevent this scenario, but for now, don't do it. It's okay to have no roads at all.)

Let the LA finish. It will give you a message that the grid has been unlocked until the lot is re-placed in the hood.

In-game, the lot should have a set of road tiles where the original road was. You can remove them, using Moveobjects where necessary. If you use Inge's portal revealer, you will see the portals still in line with the original road. Shift them or delete as necessary.

If you added another road, make sure you have made a structural change (removing the old road tiles should do it, or build a piece of wall and then delete it again). Save and exit the lot, pick it up and re-place in the neighbourhood as usual. It should 'snap' to the road on its new side. When you re-enter the lot, everything should look normal.

If you have removed all the roads, you cannot move the lot within the neighbourhood any more.

(EDIT) I'm going to post the above in case it is helpful, but I've struck a problem while getting screenshots for you. Mootilda will have to check what's happening - I got a BIG hole in my hood when I snapped the new road.

Mootilda, I just made this new 3x3 lot. I added road to the left and removed it from the front, no other changes. In-lot, the new road didn't appear. Pics attached show what happened when I did the str. ch. and re-place routine. The hole is very deep - cars disappear into it and come out a loooong time later. I don't see any way of selecting or retrieving the lot, so I can't give it to you. I do have a copy of the original.

I'm off to try another lot and see what happens to that one.

Edit - Nope, same thing. This is a community 6x1, sun front right. Removed front road, added left road as before. No other changes. This time, both roads (old and new) were visible in-lot. Removed most of the old road tiles. Portals and trash aligned with old road. Packaged this stage. (Phew!) TRried to re-place in hood - another deep hole. Both holes are now filled with water.

Looks like I'll need an new neighbourhood! Reminder to everyone to back-up your games.

May open the Lot description (LD) file of that lot from the neighbourhood package file in simpe, get the "z" value from other surrounding lot and use it to replace the one in the LD file of the lot in question.
Hopefully this works for you too.

it sounds like a mismatched issue between U10 and U11.

The water is the neighbourhood water. That's a cool way to make in-land lake lot! :D

Yes, I know - but sadly not usable. I'll try SimPE to retrieve the lots. Thanks Niol.

Update - z value had gone to 0, other lots were 315.1875. Altered the two chasms to match. In-game, islands appeared. Entered the original lot and found it looking fairly normal, with two roads (original one still aligned with portals etc). Removed some road tiles. Re-placed the lot in the hood - down to 0 again. I did manage to get a view down the chasm, using the Tab key. Images posted. Next suggestion?

I've tried a few options to narrow down the problem. Same hood all the time, no point ruining another one until I have to. I'll put the report on the discussion thread to save drama here.

I love this! I hated it when I would have a perfect house, but the property would be too small to do anything outdoors. My only question is, is there or could there be a problem of overlapping properties?

This option enables the road checkboxes, located beside the numeric up-down controls which allow you to change the size of the lot. You need to check or uncheck the road checkboxes for a change to occur.

Can you tell me how this happened?

In general, a blue area like this implies that the neighborhood believes that the lot is larger than the lot actually is. However, your picture looks like the entire lot is missing.

You can check this using SimPE. If you open the neighborhood package and select Lot Description in the left pane, select your lot in the right pane, then select the Plugin View from the tabs at the very bottom, you will see the Width and Height for your lot. This is the neighborhoods view of what's happening.

To open the lot file, you need to know the lot number. You can determine this by converting the lot's hexidecimal Instance number to decimal. See:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...542&postcount=3

The lot file will be in the Lots subdirectory where you find your neighborhood package. If a lot package exists with the decimal number that you calculated above, then there is a possibility that the lot is either corrupt or is a different size than what the neighborhood expects.

Let me know what happens and I'll try to give you further instructions.

The LA will not delete any objects, including portals. You need to remove the vehicle portals yourself.

I do not recommend removing the road at the front if any other road exists on the lot, the game *really* doesn't like it. The LA has the following warning:

"Moving road from front may result in a drastic change in the lot's height above terrain."

I have a limited space for warnings, but if you had better wording, I'd be happy to hear it. How about:

"If there is a road on the lot, you must have a road at the front."

The game is happy to have roadless lots and it is happy to have lots with any number of roads, just so long as there is a road at the front.

I will make sure that this can't happen with the next version of the LA.

Another thing to remember: it's easy to recover from an error if you do it immediately: just restore the automatically generated backup versions (.BAK) of the neighborhood and lot packages. However, if you have used the LA or SimPE again after noticing the problem and before restoring from .BAK, the auto-backups may be destroyed.

Recovering from problems:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...5&postcount=411

Yes, you are correct. There is now a mismatch between U10 (roads) and U11 (lot rotation). The game is now very unhappy. There are two ways to fix such a lot:

1) Fix U10 by adding a road at the front of the lot. You should be able to do this using the LA. However, you will still need to fix the Elevation (Z-Value) using SimPE.

2) Fix U11 to rotate the lot so that the front of the lot is where the new road is. The LA will not rotate lots, so you'll need to use SimPE. Again, you will also need to fix the Elevation.

Here is a tutorial on the U10 and U11 fields:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...32&postcount=10

Here is a tutorial on adding and removing roads using SimPE:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...52&postcount=11

Here is a tutorial on rotating a lot using SimPE:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost...75&postcount=12

I'm not sure what you mean by "problem". The LA will allow you to overlap properties, if that's what you ask it to do. If you don't want the properties to overlap, you have several options:

1) Before doing an expansion, make sure that there is enough space around your lot.
OR...
2) During the expansion, move the lot to the left or right so that it is in an area with enough space.
OR...
3) After doing an expansion, move the lot to an area which has enough space for it. You can either move the lot in-game, or using the LA.

I hope that this answers your question.

I don't know how it happened. I was working on another lot. and when I went back the the neighborhood the lot shown was just blue.
As far as checking it with SimPE I can't. I packaged the remaining lots deleted the neignborhood and started over. The next time it happens I'll try and check it out. Thanks for the information on how to check it. I'm sure it will happen again.

Thanks for all that, Mootlda. I was getting a few things wrong. Hard to keep track of every single feature of this program - it's getting so huge.

I've been using LA for ages, and didn't realise that warning meant I had to keep a road at the front. Do change it for your suggested warning, it's much clearer.

However, there is still something odd - some of the other lots I tried last night had roads at the front as well as others added, and still made a hole. Perhaps this is just because the others have corrupted things.

aelflaed, I'm sorry to hear that this neighborhood is still having problems. It's possible that removing the road at the front makes the game so unhappy that there is no way to recover, short of restoring from your full game backup.

I've changed the LA to give the user a warning message and refuse to continue until the situation is fixed. This will be included in the next release.

Thanks Mootilda. And congrats on being featured - I was wondering why it hadn't happened!

HI,
Well I said I was sure it would happen again and it did. I just spent all afternoon finding the right neighborhood to set up my property. It consists of 6 lots that I moved away from the roads. I had fenced each lot so I could be sure they were lining up right. I removed the fence on all but one side of my main house lot and when I exited to the neighborhood it was black. I noticed that when I rotated the camera it changed to blue. See screen shots. I opened the neighborhood and the lot in SimPE but I have no idea what I am looking at
Here is what I am seeing in plugin view. Picture of lot in upper left corner. To the right of that is:

Version: Business Original
Instance: 0x0000006
Lot type: Residential 0x00

Below and to the left is:

Width: 5 Left: 98 z: 313.3125
Height: 4 Top: 50
Orientation: Right

Across the top is:

u4: 0x0 u0: 0x00000023 u10: 0x08 u5: 0 u11: 0x03 u6: 00000000

I hope this will help us figure out what the problem is. Thank you for your time.

It looks to me like your lot is under the ground level. Can you use a camera mod to look down on the blue space from above?

Winterhart, if you press the Tab key you should be able to manoeuvre to look down there too, that's what I did yesterday. I don't use a camera mod.

While re-reading your post, it occurred to me that you may be interested in another tool.

The LotAdjuster can remove roads from your lot. However, to remove roads from your neighborhood, you need to use HoodReplace:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=279992

To modify the roads in your neighborhood, you need to have SimCity 4. If you are interested in removing all roads from your neighborhood, I can give you instructions which do not require SimCity 4.

[QUOTE=Mootilda]It looks to me like your lot is under the ground level. Can you use a camera mod to look down on the blue space from above?[/QUOTE

aelflaed,
Tab key rocks!!! and to think I was looking at mods to do that. Thanks.

mootilda,
It just looks blue from above. I went back to LotAdjuster and checked out sun placements. I don't know if that could have anything to do with this. In 4 out of the 6 including the corupt one the sun is back right. The other 2 are front right. After looking at niol's response to aelflaed's problem. I went back to SimPE and check the "z" values for all the lots and they are the same. I did think of something else I did. I removed the car portals. But I don't think that could have caused it because the very first time it happened I didn't even know about the portal revealer.

I also have a question about pedestrian portals. Will they let my sims move from lot to lot? Say I have a Echo's Harvestable garden in the next lot over. Can I send my sims there to harvest? If not with the portals, is there any way to do that?

As far as adding and removing roads I am interested in all three options that you mentioned. I have SimCity 4 but have been too focused on Sims2 to check it out. I will check out HoodReplace and I would like to know how to remove all the roads with out SimCity4

Thank you for all your help :D

From the information that you supplied, you have Open for Business. I believe that the ability to walk to a community lot was added with Bon Voyage. Can anyone verify that?.

As far as I know, sims cannot travel to another residential lot with any EP. Again, does anyone know of any way to enable this?

OK, I will work on a quick tutorial for removing all roads, and attach it to the HoodReplace thread when it's available.

You should be aware that roadless neighborhoods can impose a lot of restrictions on what you can do: for example, there will be no way to add a new lot. Well... unless you use HoodReplace to put back the roads, then add the lot, then use HoodReplace to remove all of the roads again.

You should also be aware that roadless lots can impose a lot of restrictions. For example, there may be no way to have service people like the maid, handyman and gardener come to the house. I'm not sure whether your sims can have a job without the ability to carpool or drive to work. Your sim children may be taken away by the social worker because they can't take the bus to school. Then again, it's possible that the social worker won't be able to get to your house, either.

The whole thing is very experimental (but interesting).

As for the corrupt lot, nothing that you've mentioned helps me at the moment. The best thing would be if I could see the entire neighborhood, but I imagine that it's quite large when zipped. Perhaps you could walk me through the process that you were using to create and change the lots. I might be able to reproduce the problem on my machine.

The only way to get your sims to visit another residential lot is to load that residential lot from neighborhood view, invite or teleport the sims you want to visit over, and make them selectable. The ability to walk to a community lot is part of BV and I think FT as well (as you use it to visit hobby lots).