Morning all! This is going to be a long note - sorry.
Just wanted to update you on the world. I spent quite a bit of time this weekend going through the finished sections and double checking them, finessing them, making sure NHood decor was all properly placed, etc. Then I exported the file to test in a real game and most everything worked well. I found a few routing issues though -- so I went to fix them and couldn't find a problem in the actual routing. GRRR. I spent hours trying different things -- I even installed it under a different Windows user profile just in case the problem was that it wasn't overwriting the problem file - even though I had uninstalled, deleted, and than added and installed the new version (I don't trust windows).
And that leads me to a confession ... the original Port La Forks was the first world I worked on and while I started over many times before I finished it -- there are still a lot of rookie mistakes in the CAW files. When I had decided to update the world, I stripped out as many as I could --but one thing I could not change was the height map setting -- see, started the world with the height map set to 100. And last night -- my annoyance with the original height map setting and the limitations finally won --
I started over -- sort of. I took the original height map and tweaked the wazoo out of it and started a new world file and then kept tweaking it. I painted it will all the base paints and then I broke out S3PE.
I had moved a special effect from a EA world for use in PLF (lighthouse FX), so I knew I could move layers from one world to another. So far, I have moved the neighborhood shown in the pictures above and the business around RT101.
Tonight's goal is to
#1 - finish tweaking the height map (add the hills for the park area, etc) and terrain paints.
#2 - get in the No-Camera and No-Sim routing.
#3 - Add in the first layer of trees / foliage
#4 - import downtown Forks areas (except for the routing issue area, that I will do from scratch) including the NHoods closest to downtown.
And now -- a question for anyone who read this far and who has the newer expansion packs -- anything post supernatural --
Is there game play / lots I need to be thinking of while building out the new terrain? I did create a festival park for Seasons -- but I haven't really thought of University (or whatever its name is) and definitely not the newest one --
For all those who have the original -- anything you would really like to see :-) or pet peeves :( you want addressed?
