Hi, first time poster long time lurker here,
I did this experience myself and I'll share my notes -
Experiment 1 -Followed the directions SaraMK placed in another post carefully, but I modified them to make Strangetown into Downtown 2 and add Veronaville and Riverblossom as Shopping districts, in addition to Bluewater and the standard downtown. (makes for nice trifecta's on the subhood selection dialogues). Everything went smooth as silk from the modified instructions and the neighborhoods loaded up perfectly. I then backed it up when I exited the game. Then I proceeded to play, made a sim in CAS and played him as legacy, messed around with a few Maxis families, added a university, and patched Seasons later that evening before I went to bed.
When I came home the next evening and loaded up the game, all the families had disappeared from all subhoods, even my legacy guy that was living downtown. Oh well, restore from backup...same deal. I blame the patch personally.
Experiment 2 -Hoping to shortcut the process from the night before, I had sims create all 4 neighborhoods from scratch, didn't load any, and exited the game. I converted all 3 N001, N003, and G001 neighborhoods into B00# templates (starting at B005 to make sure I skip past the borked numbering for OFB) and modified their properties with SimPE appropriately, assigning unique ID 25, 26, 27.
I fired up the game and with the help of the "Bluewater Button Killer" was able to see Pleasantview and Veronaville added to the list. Riverblossom (B007, ID 27) was not on the list. Reasoning 1 - even though the button was killed, the list still filled under Bluewater and there are only spots for 2 more templates, so Riverblossom didn't make it. Veronaville made it in just fine as shopping districts and I added Bluewater for good measure, I didn't add Pleasantview because that was the root neighborhood. Exited the game.
Did the same procedure, but converting N002 (Strangetown) to D004 (unique ID 28). Fired up the game and tried to add it. First off, the "button issue" is the same for nightlife, so a button killer hack for Downtown adding would be nice. No problems though, yet. The first "Downtown" I added was the regular downtown when I pressed the button. The next time I added a hood, the downtown button was still there, but "Strangetown" loaded up instead in sequence. Problem though - Strangetown had no people at all...totally deserted. The problem didn't infect the other hoods though like the last time.
The second wierd issue I noticed was that although I didn't add Riverblossom, every time I switched hoods I got the wait screen "Loading X hood" and THEN "Loading Riverblossom". The end result was that I had 5 copies of the Riverblossom maxis-mades in my sim bin, without ever attaching Riverblossom. Doubleplusungood.
Experiment 3 -I killed the Riverblossom template in the OFB hoods folder and left the other two alongside Bluewater as "known good" templates. I reloaded the defaults again after killing the neighborhoods folder. This time I launched the game and killed all but Riverblossom, and loaded it up as my main hood. I successfully attached Pleasantview, Bluewater, and Veronaville perfectly from the templates I made in the last experiment as Shopping Districts. I then exited the game.
First, I backed up my G001 folder in my Docs, and then went to work in the Nightlife templates folder where I had D001 (Original Downtown) and D004 (Strangetown).
- I put D004 on the desktop, then loaded the game and attached Original downtown and a dummy downtown.
- Closed down the game. Used SimPE to rip out the ID from the dummy and then erased the dummy G001_Downtown_002.package.
- In the same folder, moved Downtown_001.package to the desktop.
- Used SimPE to rip out the ID from the Downtown template, loaded it into the D004 template.
- Took D001 out of the Nightlife templates folder, put in D004.
- Restarted the game, attached downtown (Strangetown), this time the Strangetown folks were all there, poked around the other hoods to make sure everyone else was there, all good.
- Exited, then changed Downtown_001 (Strangetown) to _002, put back in Downtown_001 off the desktop.
- Used SimPE to change the ID of Downtown_002 to the one I ripped out of the dummy.
Everything works now, but only using Riverblossom as the base hood.
End resultRiverblossom Hills as Main Hood
Verona Village, Bluewater Village, Pleasant Village as "Shopping Districts"
Downtown and Strangetown as "Downtowns"
All 3 Universities also attached successfully.
Game plays well after mucking about, reloading, restarting. Zipped backup file size 459MB (without Uni's attached)
Scientifical Conclusions- Downtowns are harder to work with than Suburbs, very finicky with the numbering system. Suburbs are very forgiving with just modifying them with SimPE (start with high unique numbers), no need to copy, add dummies, or rip to convert the anything to a template. Downtowns require the whole "Create dummy-rip out ID-switch templates, load and quit repeatedly" routine.
- Killing the "Big Buttons" doesn't reorder the list of templates, and there's no scroll bar, so only 2 additional templates per type will fit in the badly designed "Add Subhood" dialogue boxes.
- Riverblossom makes for a crappy template no matter what type because of the latest big patch wierdness, suggest patched users use it as their base hood. The patch does some kind of seek and destroy on the original G001 template to fix the Ottomas problem which borks any kind of template conversion to a different type of hood.
- Second suggestion is that patched users simply use the long way of doing things from SaraMK's thread, with or without modified instructions (I'll post these later) if they want to merge all their hoods.
- Seasons installation updates the ID's and "supported versions" of the original template files for Sim2 and OFB hoods/subhoods, but doesn't touch Uni or Nightlife templates...I have a strange feeling this is why they are so sensitive to SimPE fiddling.
Hope this helped somebody in some way - now to finally get started on my default servo replacement experiments.