I was wondering if it's possible to create your own towns, in the game.

I just read something about that this morning, and the answer was No.

EAxis promised us a neighbourhood creation tool within weeks of the launch.

Even though the game itself has barely changed from december to june, there is no trace or mention of a neighbourhood creation tool as of late, so I'm guessing they're working to crank out a must-have expansion pack in time for christmas...

yeah so far the only thing you can do is copy towns. I can't even seem to have more than one playable family per game. I had a guy sim, then I saved it, I made two girls, and save them but they aren't in the same town. HUH? In Sims 2 they were neighbors and here they are existing in two SEPARATE worlds?

did you create a whole different slot when you created the second family?
because i'm pretty sure when i made two different sims in cas,
they were in the same town.

Same here. I made 4 families out of the gate and they're all in the same neighborhood. In fact I had one visit the other. Sounds like they were saved in different save slots

Apparently it is very complex

The game is set up in such a way as to really discourage you from playing more than one family in a given 'save' slot, I'm guessing we will see many posts like this from people who are used to the old multi-family-friendly system.

The new "system" is no system at all. It's anarchy. The whole way that it's set up reeks of an imminent console release...

Can anybody explain to me what slots are? Does it mean that you can play in the same neighrborhood, just that you have 4 different "worlds"? I'm confused... (i have not yet played sims 3 =( )

That's pretty much it in a nutshell, separate worlds.It's actually pretty useful with the story progression apparently not working. I have my own seperate save slot so my Sims aren't doing their own stuff when my son is playing his family, because his family is in a seperate save slot

You can have unlimited neighbourhoods which appear in slots, like they did in Sims 2. By save slot people basically mean that the savegame functions like most static-state world games do by saving all the content in one file.

EDIT: And yeah, every world you create is identical with the exception of your household(s). I put the plural of household in paranthesis because it doesn't work in practice.

Slots are basically just files. You have the same starting town "Sunset Valley", although the name doesn't really matter much anymore. You can name it anything you want. You can save it as many times as you want (it'll just change the filename). Where it gets complicated and confusing is that each 'save'/slot has ONE active family at a time. It is very non-intuitive to switch families ("Edit town"), I think because that is not how they wanted people to play.

So you make Family Smith. They are the active family in Sunset Valley. You can save Sunset Valley onto as many save files as you want. You can rename it to Sunrise Valley, whatever.

You can, with some twiddling, create Family Jones and switch them to being the Active family for Sunset Valley. But because the UI is so unintuitive I think a lot of people will instead end up creating a whole new Sunset Valley bubbleverse when they try to create Family Jones, and Family Smith won't be there. Because they'll be back in the OTHER Sunset Valley.

Sigh.

So, if I make a family, and play for it for a LONG time, until all the original maxis sims have grown old... I can simply open a new slot to start over, so I can play on the maxis families?

Yes you got it Ingeborgsk

I have a question regarding custom towns. If you go on deleting all eaxis made families, and then delete all houses, does it mean no townies will be able to move into your town? or are there still townies who have no fixed living space that roam the streets?

I did it yesterday.
If you keep empty houses, the game will put townies into them.
If you delete all the houses, the game will merge townies into your families when your are not playing them (house mates, adopted babies).

The game will do its best to maintain the town's ecosystem. Too much toddlers, not enough teens, the game will move out families with toddlers and move in families with teens. 4 dead sims, 3 babies will randomly pop in the neighborhood, etc...

Albiel: Thank you for the info, even thou it was so not the answer I was hoping to hear

It sounds nice in theory, but the implementaiton is really crap, because the game also goes on a deletion spree of NPCs which includes your other families you are not currently playing. The story progression reeeeeally needs a fix ASAP.

Ahh, well this is good to hear. I want my custom Sims to be as far away from the Maxis-creations as possible. I don't want the hideous Maxis Sims polluting my gene pool!!

You would think, but I fear this is another one of those things they may go back on at any time... I'm crossing my fingers, but I'm prepared that they might have bullshitted us again :\