DIY Tropical Paradise- My CAW files for your customizing!

THIS IS NOT A FULL NEIGHBORHOOD READY FOR GAME!

For the person who has CAW but no time or desire to start entirely from scratch, and who wants to create a far more customized neighborhood than a fully finished neighborhood map allows, I present the first of my "DIY Neighborhood Kits"!

These are the CAW files I am using for my Morikipo Island map, now available to you so you can alter roads, change terrain colors, place your own lots, and put all your own trees and CAW landscape objects on. I do not think they require you to have WA, but without WA you won't see all the things I left on the map, and I'd recommend you delete all the plants and check the objects layer for things you're not seeing in render panel or just delete it outright too. Please let me know ASAP if they do NOT work without WA installed and I'll work on the compatibility.

ALSO! Using these files means they keep the ID they originally had when I made them, so if you don't want your world to keep my name and risk it conflicting with anyone else using these files:

Back up your files, then open your CAW world file (from Documents/ Electronic Arts/ The Sims 3 Create A World/ Usertooldata/ Worlds) in S3PE and then delete the WPID resource. Save the file and close S3Pe.

After that, open CAW and open your world. Check that the world has a title, description and thumbnail picture. Then save it as a different file name. Now you should be able to export that world and upload it to the free content site of your choice *coughmodthesimsisgreatcough* successfully.

Future DIY kits likely won't have objects and trees placed, or at least not as many, but since I have it all on this map anyhow, and organized it all by layer so it's easy for people to just rip out, I left them in for the uploaded files. There is ONE layer for the trees and plants on this map, and ONE layer for what objects and effects are now on it. Because I tend to lose track of layers, some objects that are in my own version wound up in lot layers, and those were accidentally removed (like the airport that had been on the north bluff).

Also since I'd been just learning with this map, alas, trees have been unclustered a time or two, so some are in fact just called "Game object" and not their species type. Sorry about that.

To use these CAW files, you must extract them and then place them into the following directory or its equivalent on your machine:

C:/My Documents/Electronic Arts/the Sims 3 Create A World Tool/User Tool Data/Worlds

Do not put them into another folder! The files that have to be gathered into a folder are already in their folder, don't take them out of it, just unpack it as is in the Worlds directory!

Added Edit: Some people are having difficulties with multi-archive uploads I have done here, and FionaSkye's friend has found a quick fix that should work: Rename three of the four files! Keep the first rar .part1, but rename .part2 to ".r00", .part3 to ".r01" and .part4 to ".r02" (Only without the quotation marks.) If this does not fix the problem for you then feel free to grab the file where I have it as one .rar at http://www.bakasims.com but be kind and just do it if necessary as I do not have unlimited bandwidth at the moment ^^;

I made heavy use of the texture packs from Martine when doing terrain painting. If you redo any terrain painting at all you will need to edit the layers and put in the file paths to the textures you wish to use. This means if you want to keep what I used but add any bits or change bits, you will have to get Martine's pack and match the file paths to where you unpack it.

There are two road layers: The "Tropica!" layer was the main paved sidewalks and paved roads, and "Secondary" was my layer for dirt/gravel hiking trails. As with the terrain maps, if you want to change anything about the textures you will have to go into "Edit road layer" and change paths to the files you choose to use as they appear in your machine's directory.


Please note that CAW does not seem to like hilly maps in general, and this is not a completely PERFECTED map since it is one I did the most learning with, and I'm actually having to even 'fix' spots in the version I'm continuing to work on. There may be a spot or two you will want to hit with a road level tool before you place any lots at all, even though I did try smoothing them all myself before packing this up. Also, if you place lots close together, this seems to add to CAW's problem and there may be some 'bumping' of lot edges and road terrain. I do not know why this is so but it seems to be a problem even as I'm still working on my own version.

Since there's not exactly a policy box that I know of on my profile for CAW files/Neighborhoods:

You may alter the everlovin' heck out of this map for your personal use, and may then also share it under the following conditions:

You may NOT upload your altered neighborhood to any pay site or to the Sims 3 Exchange. Any site you upload it to, every single bit of content must be absolutely free, no special prize content for subscribers or donations.

If you upload the altered map anywhere, PLEASE plainly credit me as the originator of the terrain map in both your description in the upload site's text areas and in either the thumbnail image and/or the neighborhood description, with a link back to www.bakasims.com or (PREFERRED!) to my profile here on Mod the Sims.

Have fun! I will be working on my completed version of this island with my own stories and backgrounds for it, but since I somehow got suckered into a third studio art course this spring, my time is going to be very minimal to work on any projects with Sims.

ETA:
I did finish some full world versions of this, sorry it's taken me forever to mention/link. I've not had time to get all ducks in a row to get them here at MTS, but They're available in the downloads section of my little Sims website.

Additional Credits:
Special thanks to the folks on #create for helping me figure out CAW tools beyond the official tutorial and such, and to Joninmobile, Inge, and I forget who else in there who brought up and discussed the idea of releasing CAW file packs.