Is this a Sea Level Fix
Lerf:
I'm asking here because I don't have an affected home to use as a guinea pig.
Over on a non-awesome board someone had downloaded the Curious brothers' house from someplace and put it in a neighborhood. The "sea-level" was so low that the house was underwater and the poster wanted to know if there was away to fix it.
I was wondering if the method of raising the level used for fixing occupied beach apartments--changing the Z value using the SimPe Lot Description Editor--would work? You'd have to get the corrected Z value by putting an empty lot on the location of the lower lot to find out what it should be.
But like I said, I don't have any currently underwater lots to use to test this.
Come to think of it, would it work to fix those annoying cases of houses creating a valley and distorting the road in front of it when a house built at a lower level gets put on a higher street?
Mootilda:
No, I do not believe that the Z-level fix will resolve this problem. Instead, the house in question will end up on top of a hill if you increase the Z-value arbitrarily. Then again, maybe that's what you want...
Neighborhoods have only one terrain record, which contains the elevations of the land. The water level is just a constant for the entire neighborhood. Lots, on the other hand, contain two terrain records: one for the land and a separate one for the water. When a lot is added to a neighborhood, or moved within a neighborhood, I believe that the game is modifying the lot's water elevation array to mimic the neighborhood water level.
In order to test my theory, I'd need a neighborhood package and a lot package (for that neighborhood) which shows this problem. Alternatively, someone could point me to a specific Maxis-made neighborhood / lot combination which produces this effect when the lot is moved to a specific location in the neighborhood. If I can reproduce this problem, I can probably solve it.
My guess is that we need a tool for adjusting the water level array in the lot package. It would be easy for me to write a program which would adjust the water level on a lot to be a fixed amount lower than the corresponding land elevations. The LotAdjuster is already doing this for lot edges and expanded terrain. However, I'm not sure that is what people would actually want. It would remove all water currently on the lot, including rivers and ponds. If that's good enough, just let me know and I'll see what I can do.
Alternatively, I have been working on a program to adjust the terrain elevations for each level on a lot. It should be fairly trivial to add the water elevations to this program.
Quote from: Lerf on 2008 November 18, 18:48:05
Come to think of it, would it work to fix those annoying cases of houses creating a valley and distorting the road in front of it when a house built at a lower level gets put on a higher street?
This might work. If a house is too low in the neighborhood, then adjusting the Z-value will raise the entire lot. The question is: what happens to the neighborhood road?
Lerf:
OK, here's what happened why I tried changing the Z value on a house that was lower than its neighbors. I checked the Z value of the adjacent house, then I loaded the house I wanted to raise and changed it to the Z value of the first house, commited, saved.
When I went into the neighborhood the house was still at the original elevation, but something was changed--the driveway was clearly not connected to the street and the red overlay that shows a houses level when you mouse over it with the grab tool in the houses bin showed that the level was higher than the house currently sat. I picked up the house and put it back down. It was at the old level.
However, I then picked up the house and put it down on another part of the street which was on the same level as the rest of the houses. It didn't drop, and looking at it in SImPe it was still at the new level I'd set it to. The street remained level. The spot where it had been remains lower and the street is still distorted.
So, it can be done if you first place the house somewhere other than where you want it to be, change the elevation and then move it.
Nepheris:
For your distorted road problem: I've fixed a few instances of road distortion by placement of houses by removing said house, and placing an empty lot on the affected area that is larger than the lot that used to occupy that space. This smoothes the area out to the same level as the surrounding terrain.
I know this is probably useless advice if the affected area in your game is too small to put a new lot on it, and I don't know to which extent this works (I've never had drowned houses in my hoods), but might be worth a try at least?
J. M. Pescado:
There is no "Sea level fix", but if a point on the lot is below the "natural" sea level of the neighborhood, the lot will be flooded with neighborhood-water. This is harmless and has no effect on your sims, so you can create your own Atlantis, but you may consider it to be unsightly.
There are additional, associated issues with placing lots which are not "flat" basically anywhere, or placing "flat" lots on non-flat terrain. Doing either will permanently deform the neighborhood terrain where you did it, in many cases irreparably. Don't do it.
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