Costum roads for CaW / TS3

[deidre]

Hi everybody,

during creating my world, I had to realize EA patterns for roads / streets aren't fitting my plans. Searching mts I found a few nice alternatives: Darkshadows American road, Mistys European streets and Kolipokis rural street replacement. The last one seemed the most fitting. Downloaded the file, placed Kolis package into my "EA/TS3/Mods/Overrides"-folder and enjoyed the look in-game. No problem there. But how do I get these into my CAW? And is there a way to replace all the roads I had already drawn with the new colors instead of reworking everything?

Time to find a solution. First of all there's a tutorial at mts:

Simsample Wrote:To make the default override, you need to export the following resources: [...] As you can see these are the road texture, sidewalk texture, sidewalk corner texture, crosswalk texture and road detail texture. Those are all found in the basegame FullBuild0.package ([Game Install Location] \Electronic Arts \The Sims 3 \GameData \Shared \Packages). You can then recolour these, and then import those to your CAW World file (to be found in Documents \Electronic Arts \The Sims 3 Create A World Tool \UserToolData \Worlds.

The highlight quote says "you can recolour these", but: I can't. Package files. To edit these I'd prolly need to install SimPE. Last time I worked with SimPE was with TS2 - and I still have nightmares about it. So I continued searching for a simple solution.

Simsample Wrote:Alternatively, if you already have a set of CAW road textures that you want to use, just make a copy of the textures and rename them to the same names as the basegame textures, as listed above. Then import those files to your world.

Sounds so much easier. All I need to do for now is finding satisfying textures (and a tut explaining how to deal with them.) Hours later I stumbled across this textures tutorial from official site. It contained so much info, it made my head hurt. Started to work through the big list in there. Nice textures for landscaping 1, 2 , but no help on my street-issue. Half a day later I was thankful for finding lots of different streettiles by ashillion.

What I ended up with:


For building my world I will prolly need at least 2 different sets of streets: One with crosswalks at corners, one without. NOW it won't be a problem anymore. :D

[Ghost]

It's not SimPE that works with sims 3 packages. You use s3oc and s3pe. (Or the Texture Tweaker for retexturing objects.)

(s30c and s3pe will probably scare you again, but the TT is fun and easy.)

(I thought TSRW could work with a package, too... I guess that shows how long it's been since I've used it!)

[Regina]

Hi, Deirdre! You just reminded me I do need to get just the images from my Euro-type default replacements uploaded and totally forgot about that! (I'm Misty_2004 on MTS, registered there with that name WAY back in the day.)

When I'm wanting to get textures out of a package file just for the sake of using them in CAW or some such I use Okeanos' Package Explorer. For some reason it's easier for me to use this than S3PE. I do use S3PE for creating default replacements and the like since the package explorer won't export the image with its full name intact and S3PE will, and the game needs the image to have the full name in order to know what it's for.

When you open a .package file you'll see anywhere from several to a massive number of resources within that .package. What you look for are DDS files as .dds is the image format TS3 uses, I believe the type for them is _IMG although I may be misremembering. If you know anything about editing images it's also a fairly easy process to tweak the images to suit your taste. You'll need an editor that can support .dds files. Paint.net does and I'm pretty sure Gimp does as well. I use Paint Shop Pro (by now am up to X4) which doesn't natively support .dds but does use a PhotoShop plug-in to read them.

At any rate, your roads are looking good!

I also moved this thread to the CAW section since it's more relevant to that than anything else. :)

[deidre]

Thanks for the very detailed explanation Regina.

I might need to check out the various mentioned proggies one day, but so far trying to avoid them still. Currently am very happy with the new textures from ash! I just had to load my CaW file, modify my costum road to the new textures - and everything changed magically. No reworking all these streets -so relieved.

Oh and thanks for moving this. Looks like I oversaw the whole category. Hopefully someone else finds it useful aswell. :)

[Regina]

Yes, I just love that you can replace the images on the custom roads and *boom* everything is updated (at least as long as the images have a different name--if they have the same name you'll need to reload after they're switched out to see the difference)! I just wish the same could be done with the default road texture.

The various programs are much scarier sounding than the reality, although admittedly those .package files that are in the game are absolutely huge and trying to find textures in them can take quite some time. Of course we tend to use copies of those files rather than the originals just in case we do something we shouldn't. :P

The funny thing is, those Euro-inspired street textures aren't as Euro-specific as some people think they are. I made those after someone was looking for that kind of thing but it was something I wanted as well. I'm not sure where sidewalks are yellow (our concrete is certainly gray) and roads come in many different colors depending on where they are. In Western Oregon, for example, you'll see red highways because they're topped with red lava. Here the highways are usually topped with gravel so they're a lighter gray. Years ago the highways here were all very dark, almost black, because at that time they didn't have the extra gravel top on them--that was something started later when it was realized the gravel provides more traction on slick roads. The middle lines were all originally white until probably thirty years ago when someone in the transportation division of the government decided to paint them school bus yellow for two-way roads/streets and leave them white for one-way roads/streets. Before that yellow lines were used only for no-passing zones. I much prefer the white but I have to admit using the different colors is a great visual aid.