January 14, 2010- Another Update

See, two updates in a row! I'm catching up!

I've decided to hold off the recreation of Crescent Hills (or more accurately, Crescent Valley) since I'll probably end up having to manually draw out the template for the city. I had a neighborhood in TS2 called Crescent Hills, and it went through a variety of changes including becoming a series of small islands (aka districts like Downtown, OFB, etc.) because I liked my towns a bit more condensed, and it was really hard for me to deal with sparse neighborhoods and limited diversity. Ultimately, Crescent Hills became a rather large neighborhood (template-wise), because I managed to take all the districts and condense them into one neighborhood. That meant that one section of the template had its own name and district, another section had another name and district, which also meant that I had to install some hacks. I got Inge's school hack so that kids could go to school, and I got another hack that allowed universities to be built in base neighborhoods. The other districts (business and nightlife) could have easily been built in a base neighborhood anyway. And then two other districts (that weren't really districts) was Old Town (from TS1's Unleashed) and a farming community (Seasons).

So, the point is, I want to do that again. I want to make a "world" for TS3 that has its own little sections of diversity and life. But, since I have to construct this template myself, I'm going to waste some time building a basic neighborhood so I can get used to CAW. :)

Right now, I've gotten not-so-far, but far enough for it to be a personal achievement. And since I'm excited to show you, here's the progress:


Right now, I've gotten the Business and Police lots down, and the series of blue squares that you see are going to be townhouses. I was thinking about this area being a very "downtown" type of environment. I'm going to see how diverse I can get with just a flat, small surface as a template. If I can get pretty far, I probably won't construct that large of a template. I still want my mountains though for my farmer simmies, lol!

I'm still trying to get the sizes right. The size for the Police Dpt. is too small, and the one for the Doo Peas Corporate Tower is a little large...I think I'll reduce it a bit. Or maybe I'll just wind up using the pre-made rabbit holes in Riverview. The whole sizing process (among other things) is trial-and-error, but here's some handy tips I got off the forum:

Create A World FAQs
Rabbit Hole Buildings
The Way Roads Should Work
Height Maps (help)