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- Felicity Island Reimagined
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- Felicity Island Reimagined
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Around August, I started working on an exact copy of Felicity Island in The Sims 2, but I scrapped that project quickly after. It turns out that the geometry of lot terrain is something that I just couldn't handle, and the gigantic sizes of everything (lots, neighborhoods) in TSCS made it look really bad when they were "shrinked to fit" templates that TS2 can read.
So, for the past month, I gave it another shot. This time, I tried to build Felicity Island the way I imagined it. My version has quite a bit of villages out there: Highlands, Grasslands, Valley Village, Outlands and Friendly Village South. All of those names are actually found in Wanmami and Felicity neighborhood .package files. It was supposed to be an even greater island with many villages and ten times more huts, compared to what shipped with the game. (Six inhabited res lots only, really EA?)
I am sooo tempted to write all I can write about all of the above villages, but alas, I won't. Reasons to that are that this is a picture thread, and none of those villages have been built yet.
However, Friendly Village South is around 3/4 finished. There was this thread on the Discussion board about planning neighborhoods, where I posted about this project. Later in the thread, Prah said he'd like to see some of the pictures, and a few people gave their votes on the post. So, here's what it is:
These are the aerial shots of Friendly Village South (I still haven't come up with a name good enough, so this one does it):
And these are a couple of shots of the Village Residence. (As you can tell by the pictures, I really miss the beaches from Castaway Stories.)
For the village, those "darkened rectangles" are blank lots. Most of those will be residental. And after building those, I'll add a few of those decorative nhood deco huts around, and a bunch of trees to emphasise that it's been built at the edge of a big jungle.
That's it for now. If I find more time, perhaps I'll snap pictures of few other lots, I believe there's now around nine of them. (I did! Look for posts below.)
Thanks for stopping by.
Links to other pictures in this thread:
Village Harbor, Village Market and Hullaba Luau
Friendly Village South, completed
The Temple of Tuzu
The Hot Springs
Common Grounds of the Highlands
Swaying Palms Luau
Saltwater Pools
The Jungle Quart
Sunny Residence
(Exotic Destination)
Lucky Tides Resort
Aerial Shots of the Voyage Version
Swaying Palms & Sunset Shallows
Swaying Palms Resort
It's also available for download, both the neighborhood and vacation destination version, in case you reeeally like the island.
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Short answer: I didn't. Those lots were placed on a terrain with roads. I used special programs to replace the terrain with roadless one, and then used another program to remove the roads from the lot.
Looong answer:
This neighborhood template that I built in SimCity 4 actually has a copy. That copy has roads. Roads I put into the "sister" terrain don't look pretty - the roads are purely of functional purpose: so that lots could snap to them.
I started the hood by selecting the "road" terrain. Once it loaded, I used in-game tools for placing lots (Lots & Houses > Empty Lots). Both beach and regular lots work with this method.
After placing around 60 lots, I loaded each and every one of them. This is crucial because of how the game interprets loaded and never-loaded lots (difference can be seen in the lot file size in Neighborhoods folder; non-loaded lots are 1 KB, while empty loaded lots are ~160 KB in size).
Once I loaded every lot (enter, save, exit), I quit the game and ran Mootilda's HoodReplace. Using the program, I switched neighborhood terrain to the roadless one. I loaded the game once more just to be sure that there won't be any issues later on, because LotAdjuster causes quite a few (temporary!) ones.
Next up, I loaded LotAdjuster and was faced with a challenge: there are two methods that I will be doing. The first one is easy, where only a single lot is snapped to one part of the road. The second method was used for lots that used shared roads, i.e.:
--------------------
[lot1]
===V/\=== (road)
[lot2]
--------------------
V & /\ represent that arrow symbol game uses when you move a lot around the nhood. (Where the game "snaps" the lot to the road.)
Since those two lots share one piece of road, only removing roads using LA wouldn't be enough, because the lots would then overlap. Therefore, it's necessary to either shrink lot1 for 1 neighborhood tile (completely remove the road part), or leave it the same size, but shift it back 1 neighborhood tile, so that it would look like this:
a) shrinking lot1
--------------------
V (lot1, now only 1 tile deep)
/\
[lot2]
--------------------
or
b) moving lot1 further north
--------------------
[lot1]
V
/\
[lot2]
--------------------
Of course, one would always prefer to choose a line with less resistance, in this case b). However, when it comes to densely placed lots, such as the example in my first post - Friendly Village South - where each lot has at least 1 neighboring lot, it almost always came down to me shrinking lots instead of shifting them.
After I went through every 60 or so lots with LA, I loaded the game and entered every lot, made a structural change (move the mailbox, delete the phone booth...) and saved. Doing so made the neighborhood terrain geometry go back to normal, since removing roads caused bunch of holes in the terrain to appear (that's the temporary LA issue).
(Slight issues do arise after, examples are portals. Unless you want no service vehicles, carpools, taxis, etc. (not recommended at all), you'd need to put at least 3x3 or similar flat surface on your lot reserved for car portals. Pedestrian portals, however, can be placed on any 1x1 (flat) accessible area of the lot.)
------------
... and that's how I "put down" roadless lots. This method comes best in handy with special neighborhoods such as medieval, island or tropical themed ones, where it is all started out by planning neighborhood terrain etc. I don't think it's worth all the struggle to put a roadless lot in a regular neighborhood, though, for example, because you'd have to edit the nhood terrain to add a piece of road, use HR, place the lot, load the lot, use HR again, use LA and then finally re-load the lot.
PS Thanks so much to all of you who hit the love button on my first post.
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Another shot of the same lot, this time with camera moved a bit more in-land:
Just next to the Harbor there's the Village Market. It's quite a big lot, and I somehow lost the pictures of it and was too lazy to re-take them, so here's the only picture I managed to preserve/not delete on accident: the bridge stretching across the deep dead river bed, featuring public kitchen & food stands.
And, a photo of the limbo pole at the Hullaba Luau. The lot usually gets very crowded during the Volcano Festival, when Sims from neighboring villages come around and party all night at the luau (and sleep all day at their relatives' huts).
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It ought to be base game compatible and it wouldn't require any CCs.
Look at this post and this post for pictures.
But it's GONE now!
I'm glad someone's recreating Felicity Island now. Keep up the good work and make back-ups regularily. Don't make the same mistake I made some time ago.
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So sorry to hear that, Jawusa. I have yet to decide whether I'll be sharing this neighborhood, and if so, whether I'll be including Sims with it. From the looks of it, if I decide to include Sims, those will be extracted clones from TSCS. I won't be including any custom Sims; I have this story going on here, but it's too personal/requires a lot of redoing before posting.
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I have yet to decide whether I'll be sharing this neighborhood, and if so, whether I'll be including Sims with it. |
I would love to have this neighbourhood in my game, especially without any sims. It looks amazing! :-)
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Nobody alive has ever entered this temple. It is guarded by tall doors that have been thought to be impossible to break down. The key to the temple is nowhere to be found, but the adventurous locals surmise that it might be hidden in one of the baskets of the deceased villagers at the Forbidden Village. (As much as they'd like to enter the temple, they do not dare to mess around with the dead.)
Assumptions on what's hidden in the temple have been passed down through generations: some say there's a big golden chalice holding a juice that is able to bring back youth to the oldest of men; others say that it rains from the ceiling but the ground never gets wet, while certain rejoice thinking about all the treasures that must be hidden in there.
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Hot Springs are just a few hours' walk down the shore or through the woods from Friendly Village South. It's a lovely place with numerous springs, a few saunas, a couple of massage tables and tubs for mud baths. (Mud baths won't be included in the bundle, use your imagination.)
And, if you climb up to the neighboring hill/mountain, before you reach the Highlands, you can get a beautiful vista of the ocean, the skyline, and the South Village huts peeking through the thick jungle trees.
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It's a central lot of the village situated between four larger, high-capacity huts (which I haven't built yet, except for the northern one). Instead of finding a park on one lot, a place to stay the night on other lot, and a market to buy food on the other side of the village, the Highlands combine all these services and areas into a single lot. And it's got a sweet small makeshift fountain right at the center.
As seen from the picture below, there is a tall building next to the small public kitchen. It's a public bath house, for those who live in a hut without working plumbing (and for those who are staying the night while traveling).
The bath house has three levels, plus the entrance level. Descending from the entrance level one reaches the basement, where one can find a sauna and the shower room.
On the second floor there are "lockers," where Sims can leave their clothes while soaking in the bath tubs in the next room.
Finally, the top level offers Sims a beautiful vista. (It should look better once there are a bit more huts around.)
Another tall building on this lot is the clothing botique slash market. The first floor is where Sims buy food...
... while the rest of the building is the place for Sims to buy clothes - second floor and the deck.
And if you're just another villager looking to meet Sims or hang out with the ones you know, a few park-like areas are scattered around the corners of the lot.
Also, to take care of Sims who happen to be traveling from the Valley Village that's up north to the South Village which is downhill (and, you know, back), villagers of Highlands have built a cozy inn, featuring rooms with up to four beds! And if you choose the right room, it might also have night stands and closets for... err... putting your Sims' luggage away. But fret not, because even if you do end up in the low-end room, the comfy bed and the warm atmosphere will still manage to lure you to rest.
The manager should be here, but I guess he took a break. Maybe this strange looking modern device on the desk scared him away. (I still can't find the hotel desk without the phone.)
I also liked the way this picture of the inn hallway turned out but I ran out of fancy things to say.
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I will. The only things worth mentioning are that the BV version will have hotel rooms instead of apartment suites; and in case tour guides/vacation mechanism doesn't work without phone booths, those will be added to the lots too. (Along with dirt roads for vacation shuttles, though I'd still recommend the "walk to lot" instead of taking a taxi to travel to a lot on the island.)
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BTW, I am barfing rainbows right now. Using our late Mootilda's Lot Adjuster, I managed to build a functioning deck over the beach area at the Village Harbor. Tutorial on how to do it can be found here.
*insert a its so beautiful gif here*
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Oh, and which sky replacement did you use in the background?
By the way, the sea (or ocean?) looks great! It reminds me of the beautiful water in CS. You managed to get it as beautiful as in CS.
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Sky "replacement" I used is the neighborhood object I found here (#8 Summer Morning). I edited the texture to remove horizons from the sphere.
xxxxxxx
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As for your ocean floor issue, I've posted a solution in your other thread.
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I think it's pretty reasonable if we stick to the 65 Sims from Felicity Island, then. The hood is pretty big with many residental lots, but I think importing over a hundred Sims is a tad bit too much, especially with no particular story for anyone (except for Heimata, Manave, and few other families).
(It's going to take me a bit longer to finish the unhabited version first, though.)
The thing that's preventing me to turn all the lots into beaches is that while the ocean doesn't get added to the lot, the beach does:
The small, small portion of the lot on the right of the stone tiles is the area able to be built on. The left part is the beach area which, according to the EA laws of architecture, cannot be built on (and some objects even require the moveObjects code enabled to be placed there). The house you see built over the beach area had been built before the lot got converted into a beach lot; but now, even placing down furniture on the part of the house that's on the "beach" requires MO code.
This is just as a small notice, for people who download this neighborhood that would wish to get the appropriate scenery on their lots. The process of converting is quite simple, as it's just a matter of loading your lot in Lot Adjuster and ticking "Beach lot" under advanced options. (I cannot share this neighborhood with all the lots turned into beach lots because players wouldn't be able to suit the neighborhood/lots to their needs; and it is pretty limiting to have a roadless neighborhood in the first place.)
[2017 DJ. says: Hey you, if you want the pretty ocean water in the distance, download Voeille's mod. It rocks. And the above fuss becomes redundant.]
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Island lots!
With the method I used for creating island lots, it's also possible to create a lot very similar to the Castaway Stories Village Residence.
Makeshift lot I made in The Sims 2:
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Catalogue of Custom Neighborhoods for TS2
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