Irishboy

I agree. While I appreciate the expansion work to the core map, I am eager to play new maps.

Thank you, nasKo. I'm happy to hear it's still on the list of things you want to see developed. I'll just keep holding off on map development until the tools are more intuitive. But trust me, when they're done I'd love to create many real-world, non-scale maps as I was doing for the US.

About 3 years ago I figured out how to make a pretty cool map. It took a boatload of work to figure out, but I got it done. Then I realized I'd have to populate the maps with buildings. That's when creative mode was coming. Came and went, unfortunately. Cars became the priority, then animations. All fine, of course, but what I really want to do is create some exciting new maps. It's clear the designers developed some tools that were capable of creating maps super fast, but due to compatibility issues and future dev design it was scrapped. Will this ever come back? Bluntly, I found the mapping tools completely difficult and non-intuitive back in the day. I wouldn't want to revisit them. Indy Stone, please let me know if this is something you plan to bring back and when. I'd love to do some mapping. Thanks, Irishboy

I see we're working on a similar concept! Love it. Look forward to seeing the finished project.

After playing with the building-making tools a bit last night, I've changed my mind. I'm going to go ahead and work on this map over the long weekend after all. Project is on.

You know- I have a long weekend coming up. What I might do is finalize the map without buildings and then release the map. That way, if anyone wanted to add buildings they could. I may also try the tools available to try to create buildings, but honestly... after my last try it was so time-consuming and confusing I was really turned off. I don't know, we'll see... I will, however, try to create some nice, clean vanilla maps.

Having read up a bit on the journey creative went through with an update provided last year, I can see that creative is a feature that will arrive at some future, undetermined point, but don't hold my breath. Shame, I'd like to create new maps. But honestly, there's no sense in struggling with the tools that are out there when videos for creative made it clear that buildings would be a quick and easy process when and if this feature sees daylight. So... this project is suspended until such time as creative releases, if at all.

No, never had any intention of that. Maybe 10 buildings in major cities, 5 buildings in smaller cities, a lot of empty spaces in more wilderness settings. That sort of thing. I put further progress on hold for the building making mod that admins were working on, but then they seemed to put that on hold. So... not sure. Maybe I'll return to this this winter.

Hey, just saying hello since I now read we're at build 35 stage. Fantastic! Would a developer happen to know if the fast map-making project, with the quick building capability, will be making a return? I'd hate to have to make the buildings for this on my own, though I can if that's what it comes to.

Not sure! I created a Sims 3 U.S. map in about a year, but I was just doing that for myself for fun. I never even shared that with the community. This seems like- from the movie- something that can be done very fast. But I suppose the thing to do would be let the auto-generate stuff happen then examine each house individually and adjust as needed. I tend to work fast once I put my mind to something, so I suspect this won't be a very long project, believe it or not.

I'm really not proprietary about the buildings. I don't really even want to design buildings all that bad. But I'm thinking some of the key landmarks that everyone knows in America would be cool. They'd need to be scaled appropriately. I'm thinking Empire State Building, White House... places of that nature. I don't have anything specific in mind. I'll probably add City Lights in San Francisco just because. I'll likely spend some time working through the auto-generated houses and making them look more appropriate to their surroundings; nautical theme for New England, farm houses in the Midwest and Great Plains. Adobe colors in the Southwest. A coffee house in Seattle, of course. I'm presuming the auto-generated buildings can be edited like any of the other buildings we can build on the fly. I do know I'm going to try to put in at least one city for every state. Dover, DE and Burlington, VT may only have a couple buildings, but they'll be there. I intend to position some key buildings in different locations. I'm thinking warehouses, police stations, doctor's offices; these need to be strategically placed to make the map as interesting to play as possible.

If I get REALLY ambitious, I may attempt a mod that assigns rooms regionally-appropriate items. For instance, a Southern kitchen would be more likely to have peaches; a Pacific Northwest kitchen would have apples. Guns would be more common in the South and West than in the Northeast. But we'll see. That's quite possibly more ambition than I actually have.

Hi there! I decided to try the mapping tools the other day and I created a map I thought I might enjoy- the full U.S. Clearly, the scale is utterly unrealistic. A person's neighborhood would be smaller than Seattle, and NYC, due to geography, will only have a tall building on Manhattan if I'm lucky (so obviously I'm going to fill up the tri-state region with buildings to give it a New York City-esque feel). But if the idea is to go from house to house and eventually try your luck in different states, cities, and regions, maybe even trying to go from one side of the map to the other, then I thought this might be fun. Obviously, mountain ranges will have to be represented by different terrain and lots of trees to create barriers. I plan to use the version 33 mapping tools to create houses and cities because honestly, I have no real interest in creating tons of buildings on my own individually. I'll make a few landmarks on my own, though. I intend to place a proportional number of buildings in major cities (including those in Canada and Mexico), so you could get sort of a feeling of hiding out in a barn in Nebraska, holing up in Harvard, or trying your luck on the beaches of Miami. Here's the BMP. It's fairly imperfect. There's a lot of residual unrecongized pixels in it. I'm thinking of recreating it from scratch and seeing if I can do so without quite so many errors. America BMP And here's a nice view of the Pacific Northwest. 0,0 has been cleaned up. If you look at the rivers, you can see what I mean. The issues cropped up on all terrain borders, so I need to either fix or do it all over. Since I created this in a single evening, it wouldn't that big of a deal. Pacific Northwest I may do a Great Britain version in honor of our PZ creators.