Here Is a Link to the older thread http://modthesims.info/t/398295

first, I have not attended in a vary long while but I came up with this solution but I think I am a bit late on the draw board. I browsed the internet for this and found one thread that contained download links but this process is without no hacks or mods involved. ALWAYS BACK UP HOODS


To Start what I discovered all on my own today was this.


FIRST THING
1: close all screens, then goto control panel if using windows XP, or windows 7 for example. By clicking windows logo,in the bottom left of the screen once inside control panel goto to top and click view then large icons if you need to.

2: goto folder options
once the folder options screens comes up click view and uncheck "Hide Extensions For Known File Types" once this is de-checked your good to go in these instructions

3: Take A Photo In The Sims 2 Game Or Neighborhood screen.

4: Exit Game

5: : Open Up My Documents

6:goto "EA Games\The Sims 2\Storytelling"

7: move Screenshot or Snapshop. bmp image file into your custom neighborhood folder ["N004 for example"]

8: right click on file, then select copy, right click again in, white area then click paste from the menu.


9: find the photo file Screenshot or Snapshot file.
[the file you just copied and pasted into the "N004 Folder"


10: delete the original photo called "N004_Neighborhood.png" and make the new photo the same name as the old neighborhood photo.
"N004_Neighborhood.png"

11: rename the new photo you've just took for your new neighborhood to this. Including the period, but not the quotes.

12: then after you change its name, then copy it again and

13: then paste it to the Neighborhoods main "EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods"
folder and then rename the photo file to this without quotes.
"N004_Neighborhood.reia"


and you should get a message saying are you sure and click yes

14: if your updating a maxis neighborhoods then delete the N001_Neighborhood.reia inside the "N001" folder (example)


This worked for me and I have detected no issues.

that's it for this tutorial and if your followed these instructions carefully you should be able to do your own file hack for the picture to show up on screen.
I wanted to do this for the videos but found out this instead. without no mod or additional Custom Content.

(edit)
Don't ever delete neighborhood manager or you could delete all your neighborhood's thumbnails and I just remembered this from a long time ago leave it set aside the reia files

It is safe to leave that file alone at all times, the reia file works with all the image files and the neighborhood manager file I think that is how it is programmed, not sure
to reset your all your neighborhoods just delete the EA Games folder inside "My Documents" only then start your sims 2 game. hope I helped

there is also this way to change the photo but I am not sure if it works: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/...01235722AAuaTFr

How about converting .gif files to .reia files? Then it would be an animated preview picture of the neighborhood -- like the ones made by EA!
Thanks for the helpful research!

I already tried to convert the video files recorded in the sims 2 game to the reia files just like in the Maxis neighborhoods but I got a blank white screen instead of a moving picture. so I decided to go try converting the second image file to a .reia file and placed the file right in the main neighborhood's folder and I managed to get my new photo for my custom neighborhood. That is how I discovered this. I also tried to have 2 reia files both in and out of the neighborhood N004 folder and I still got a blank white screen when trying to do a workaround of the moving picture.

@Aspersim
It's unnecessary to replace the .reia file with a .png file- just delete the .reia file altogether.

The .reia file is actually a RIFF file which contains video. Not much seems to be known about how to replace these files, although I've spent a lot of time over the years trying! This about sums it up:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...p?topic=1655.20

One of the odd things about the animated flyovers is that if you name your custom neighbourhood say Pleasantview, you get the flyover for Pleasantview when you enter the hood. There are several names that do this including Sedona though I can't remember the rest. There's a list somewhere.

Some that work:

To be clear though, the neighbourhood flyover is linked to the neighbourhood name, and has nothing to do with the .reia file.

I believe that the "Neighborhood manager" file is linked to the videos, and all the photos so I just made an edit so that everyone leaves it alone
my guess is to somehow decode the "neighborhood manager" file but I don't know how to do that

Wait the flyover happens when you name your 'hood one of those? Not the actual land itself?

Yes, that's right. Doesn't usually fit your new neighbourhood though. Sedona works best for Little Carping but that's because of its layout. I changed it back because I couldn't bear to have the neighbourhood called Sedona in the menu.

I don't think we ever worked out how to do the reia files though.

if your considering a moving gif file then probably so, but I can't see how a straight image converting into a moving picture. but maybe a hacked .gif file/video but I am not an expert on files as I've only done surface programming and nothing that deep. I don't know hashes.

I just found out today that their are more then just straight image gif files sorry for the late response @Jawusa

Yes, that's what I meant. Animated .gif pictures.
If we manage to convert such an image file into a .reia file, maybe it will work.

based on that info, i would take a guess that it's actually video stream (no audio). the filesize itself seems to corrobate - the only gifs ive seen that filesize are either high rseslution or long in length, or both. meanwhile, a small, co mpressed viddoe file can easily be 5 mb

sorry abot the sudden typing crap my arthritis flared up on me

Yes, it is video but I don't know of anyone who's managed to decode it yet. I've spent a long time on this myself in the past, experimenting with adding file headers to various format video files, without any success.

i cracked it open in a hex editor, no readable text aside from 'reiahead' at the beginning, granted i didnt expect anything but sometimes yo can glean a bit of info from that

i ran it through https://www.toolsley.com/file.html and it came up as RIFF (little-endian) data

there has got to be a way by editing the neighborhood manager file, but you never know it could either take one person or a whole army to add the code into neighborhood manager. I have a good feeling we are all on to something special.

I am no expert programmer but I do know that when the Neighborhood manager file is missing, all the thumbnails are missing. So somehow we must figure out a way to input the data probally threw notepad or some type of hacking program or open the Neighborhood manager in SimPE. Hmmm

but with coding one mistake can cause things to mess up but I still think we are all getting warmmer

Ok I'm back I tried to do this myself and be the hero and failed, I just don't know enough about inner coding of the sims 2, but I know it is possible, ok so we already got tutorial for a custom photo thanks what I discovered earlier now all we need is someone with more knowledge of the both the game and SimPE if you want to give this a shot yourself and try to get a video to display in the main menu here is the link to download SimPE

Sorry for necroing but I've started research on this. From what I've seen data is structured by frames and is awfully similar to Dxa video format, which is generally used for video game cutscenes and uses zlib compression. However it seems to have some form of EA compression on top of it which will really make it hard to extract any data. I'm working and experimenting right now and will update you if there's any progress but I doubt it.

Another thing, I've noticed a pattern in the header of the video file (not reia or RIFF header but the actual video header) and if I manage to find a video format that has a matching header I'll probably be lucky. But there's a high chance all of this is EA proprietary. For all we know it might also be that .mov format thing that they use for game intro... this actually also gives me the idea to compare it to that!

@mixa97sr - If you've not seen it, here might be a place to start: https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/DXA

I've seen it, but thanks :D. Header is different to what DXA file is, but maybe it's under some sort of compression, EA side or other? Anyways, I'll keep looking into it, for now I've seen differences from EP and Base game nhood flybys, while first 12 bytes of header are always the same for all flybys and last 4 are always different for every flyby. Middle 8 bytes are different for base game and EPs... it's quite interesting. Still haven't snooped around .mov file. Will update on this tomorrow.

EDIT: I somewhat CRACKED the header. It's structure goes like this:

- most likely version of the file format, always '1'
- Width of the video, 128px
- Height of the video, 128px
- Some form of flag? for EP's it's 1000000, for base game it's 10
- Another form of flag? for EP's it's 33333, for base game it's 1
- Number of frames of the video

Each of these is 4 bytes long. I hope this helps in search of what video format this is, unless it's a proprietary one which then makes this info, well... useless.

EDIT, EDIT:
It turns out that the two values I did not know what they were are framerate numerator and denominator (in that order). EP's have 1000000/33333 = 30 FPS while base game only has 10/1 = 10 FPS

At this point I'll accept that it's just an EA proprietary file ONLY used for sims 2 main menu video thumbnail... It's header is so special and there's 0 documentation about it, even among all the EA video formats.

I will try few more things but most likely this is... the end of the road with reia files.

The loading screen background videos (i.e. Neighborhood/Lot/CAS) also use this format. These are available at [base game]\TSData\Res\UI\ui.package, with type ID (0x00000000), under group ID (0x499DB772) and are incorrectly tagged as UI data.

Anything new guys?

Sorry to necro an ancient thread but I've been getting into reverse engineering sims2 a bit and managed to figure out the format.

The above post by mixa97sr was on the right track. The header contains the width, height and framerate information. The actual data of the video file is a custom run-length encoding scheme.

The scheme has single one-byte where negative numbers indicate repeated pixel values. There's also some stuff in there to avoid re-encoding repeated parts of the video by storing them in blocks of 32x32 pixels.

I posted the full details on the format here https://github.com/ammaraskar/SimsR...#format-details (along with a Python library to parse them). There's also a user-friendly tool in there to convert videos to .reia or extract frames from .reia files that I'm uploading as a tool here pending moderation.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc

I do not have words to tell you how grateful I am for this work, I've been wanting this since 2004! Thank you!

This means that ordinary Simmers like myself, who haven't got a doctorate in advanced video file design and coding, will be able to make .reia flyover videos for our custom 'hoods ???? !!!!!!!! :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc

Is that what it means?? If so it's absolutely wonderful news!!!