I wanted to play a little neighbourhood to take me back to the first days of Sims 2- the basegame, before we had any EPs, when the game was simple and there weren't many mods. I have played Pleasantview, Veronaville and Strangetown so many times, I wanted some fresh sims and a fresh town. So I made this one, and since it's basegame only with no CC needed, I thought it might be worth uploading so that others can play it, and change it, and mutilate it to their own desires.
Details-
Any game configuration can play this, it's basegame only (but I patched my basegame).
No CC or mods needed
9 families in their own houses.
No townies (they will be generated by the game as they are needed).
5 Community lots
4 empty houses
Decorated neighbourhood


The pictures I'm showing are just quick snapshots, when I upload to MTS I will take better pictures. For now I just need the hood playtested for bugs.








I would really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, ideas, criticism etc, and of course any problems you find.



Thank you!

OMG, this is absolutely stunning! I love new custom TS2 neighborhoods for download. Can't wait to download this and test it out.

I'll go through all the lots and households, so that I can give further feedback/suggestions for this neighborhood. So far, it already looks very promising, the neighborhood is very well decorated and the sims seem to look unique as well!

I'm intrigued and cannot wait to really play it.  At first glance, did you use stretchSkeleton?  Or is my game behaving badly?  I don't have face sliders, but I don't think that would cause stretched skeletons.

Also, I must now retrieve the lost rock.  And fwiw, it was replaced in EP2 along with textures that are now grey. Voeille has a replacement for the old colors, which I love.

Thanks @Jawusa ! I already uploaded a newer version, plz redownload if you haven't already. I added some diagonal windows which got borked.

@HugeLunatic Yes, several of the sims are height altered, I don't know if it's too exaggerated or not. Hooray if you retrieve that rock, I rather like the texture on that one!

Thanks both for looking at this!

Very very nice job, @simsample! I'll download it whenever I have some spare time. Love all the detailed description you've provided us with; also love that you chose to make a base game-style nhood. I also like a lot the, as you say, simplicity (pun not intended), of the original one.

Thanks @ed95 ! I really love playing basegame alone, there were so many little autonomous actions and interactions that were either dropped or else seldom seen in later EPs.

November 19th- I uploaded a new version of the neighbourhood- if you have downloaded, please redownload and delete the old version, I fixed a few bugs and annoyances.

Thank you!

For a BG only 'hood this looks really good! I like how the houses have that Maxis feel. Definitely going to give this a try.

Edit: Are the neighborhood deco trees on the hill in front of the lot Bambou meant to be floating in the air? I didn't move them, and the DR I have is only textures not meshes.

Thanks @HarVee ! Yes, I see them- they are too high, looks like I modded the terrain without re-seating them. Of course, in basegame there is no lot view so it doesn't show! I will reposition. What do you think about the other trees? The pine trees have no trunks- that's just how they are- but I wanted to use some coniferous trees there, especially around Mab Jenk's house. They don't look too bad from hood view- especially in basegame- but look floaty from lot view. Should I substitute for the trees that do have trunks? Later EPs have some nice conifers, but this is all we get in basegame.

Perhaps I should move them away from the hills?

I would honestly just leave the pine trees where they are since there is really not replacement for them BG-wise. It also isn't too difficult to replace them if the no-trunk is bothersome, and if you have a DR like me, they get replaced with the castaway stories pine tree anyway.

Thanks for the comments HarVee- much appreciated! I'll fix those trees you spotted.

Hi there!

I was a little busy this one last month and couldn't do much testing, but now I could have a more deeper look into the neighborhood and the families.
By the way, for the floating trees, a posible fix could be Mootilda's HoodReplace program? There you have the option to fix the elevation of trees.

I don't remember how accurately it fixes the elevation, but you might want to try that out, I think for very steep areas, you'd still have to place the trees manually, but it'd reduce the amount of work I guess. :p

Thanks @Jawusa ! I will try it out, haven't had much time to work on this in recent weeks but will hopefully be doing so after the holidays. The links in the first post have expired, please redownload so that you have the latest version (but trees not yet fixed! )
Neighbourhood
Storytelling folder
Craptastic spreadsheet showing SimDNA
SC4 file

Thanks for the tip!

I played each family for one day and they're pretty interesting to play! I love the attention to detail in this neighborhood, these height differences are so unique too! What a lovely idea to alter the heights to make them even more unique as they already are, lol.

I only took notes of the following... otherwise, I wouldn't change anything! Seriously, this is such a cute neighborhood for it being BG only.

1) The floating trees didn't really catch my attention? Actually, I thought you fixed them already lol, because I didn't see any of them. Only a few next to shores, but I've even see worse cases where people would try to use "tree groups" near steep areas... so these slightly floating trees thing is literally nothing compared to that, lol.

2) One thing I noticed is that all the community lots were given wrong names... actually, it seems like the game copied the description and replaced it with the lot name. I've seen this occuring in my own neighborhoods, too which I've uploaded. This is really annoying, I know. If you load the neighborhood in other languages, you'll see the same bug. But the fix is simple. Open your neighborhood in SimPE, go to each STR# file for each lot in your neighborhood. In the dropdown list, choose your game language in which you made the neighborhood and make it the default string.

My anygame is in English (US), my main game is in German... and in both cases, this occured. But when I changed it to English (UK), the lot names were all fine. So, it's really about the broken text strings.

3) I noticed that your neighborhood shares the same UID number as Pleasantview... this is not quite ideal, since it'd clash with the neighborhood and might break Pleasantview's scripted events and/or Storytelling album once they are installed at the same time. Even if the downloader doesn't have Pleasantview... it could easily be any other neighborhood, since 1 is well... quite frequent. There's no limit of high this UID number can be. You'd think the limit would be 999 because of EA's N### naming system for neighborhoods, but no. You can even go beyond that! The higher it is, the less probable it is that the downloader would have a neighborhood with the same UID number.

My neighborhoods (which I've uploaded) were always beyond 1000... because well, nobody would think of setting the UID any higher than 999, wouldn't they?

Thank you for your detailed comments, @Jawusa !

HarVee noticed them on that steep slope next to Bambou; I think part of the problem is that the basegame tree models are slightly different, and also of course I have no lot view in basegame. It was apparent once I looked in M&G build, but repositioning the trees in basegame makes no difference, they still look okay there but odd in later EPs! So I think I'll just move those few troublesome trees to the top of the hill. I'll have a look near the shores, I didn't notice those!



Oh rats, I had previously looked at this and thought it would be okay. My game and SimPE are in UK English, but as always when looking in SimPE it seems as though US English is default in the STR#:

And if I choose (UK) English and hit default, it has no effect- the 'commit' button is not available, and if I save, no change has been made.

I know I've come across this before, can't remember what I did! If I copy the default string to all languages, would that make the filesize too large? My goal for this hood was really to have something that would play well on lower end computers. I haven't compressed any lots yet on this hood.


Cool, this one is on my 'to do' list since my conversation with you in the random questions thread:
https://modthesims.info/showthread....755#post5697755
I didn't know you could go that high, thanks for the info! I still can't get my original Pleasantview and Strangetown to stay at the correct UIDs though.

I'll take a look at these changes, thanks again Jawusa, and thanks for the kind comments! I'm glad you like it.

If you fix it now and then later load the neighborhood again, it will break the lot names/descriptions AGAIN. So I'd suggest you to leave it as it is right now and fix it right before uploading the final version of the neighborhood. You'd just have to copy the text strings to all languages. Then, once applied, choose English (US) as the default language and it'll fix the lot names and descriptions for any game setup.

And as for the question about the UID's, I'm sorry I completely lost that, I'm sorry. It's hard to keep track in the Random & Stupid Questions thread. Lol.
But if the game chooses to change the UID, it means that there's another neighborhood either as a subhood (in the NeighborhoodTemplate folder) OR as a primary neighborhood (in the Neighborhoods folder) with the same UID number. Instead of letting the game generate the Pleasantview neighborhood folder for you, try to manually copy the N001 folder into your Neighborhoods folder.

If this still doesn't work, try deleting the NeighborhoodManager.package and load the game again.

Thanks @Jawusa I'll copy to all languages then once I'm ready to go- I'll ping you to test it for me when I've done that if that's okay!

Re:UIDs- Hehe, don't worry, I wasnt expecting you to answer! That thread moves fast. I've tried everything I can think of with my modified Pleasantview- all the things you suggested and more. I can have it at UID 1 when it is alone, and I can have Strangetown at UID 2 when it is alone, but if I put them both in at the same time, Pleasantview gets changed. Which means there is something fundamentally screwy about the laws of UIDs that I don't understand! I changed my Farprork to a higher UID though and so far it's stayed that way!
Happy holidays to you, thanks for all your help!

Happy holidays to you too


BTW, one thing which might cause these UID changes are the stealth hoods/secret subhoods which get added to a neighborhood on the initial load. You can actually disable them completely too. I personally never play with them, lol.

Hello! I sen your hood and wish to test it alltogether with mine that pending costruction. I has already seen before such trick in Babboo starter with walls made of wooden planks. How did you made it?
Regards Vic ^_^

Hi @Victor_tor They are deck walls, I enabled them in the basegame TSData/ Res/ Catalog/ Scripts folder like this:


On the left is the unedited script, on the right is where I enabled it in catalog. It shows up next to the regular walls. To remove the walls you need to set boolprop constrainfloorelevation false and use the foundation tool to overwrite/ delete (or else use the undo tool); you can't ctrl-drag delete, so anyone playing the world needs to know how to get rid of them in an unmodded game! I put a note in the first post under a spoiler but I will put a more detailed bit in when I upload.

Thank you for testing, please let me know if you find any bugs!