The other day, I became interested in how hoods and subhoods worked, and was surprised by how easy it was to change the stealth hoods into OFB hoods even after they have been added to a neighborhood. Then I realized that they were automatically added regardless of their type which led me to the flags field.

Since this field is shown as "Flags" in SimPE, somebody already determined that it is a bit flag. But from what I can tell there are only 5 hoods in all of Sims 2, including the Stories games, which have any flags set, namely the Stealth hoods:
Magic and Pets have 0b0100 (4)
Hobbies and Weather have 0b1100 (0xC, 0d12)
Exotic Destinations has 0b1110 (0xE, 0d14)

Clearly, they all have the 4-bit in common, and indeed I found that by turning it off they were no longer automatically added to new hoods (Did have some trouble with Hobbies, but it seems to have been a file system issue).

But beyond that, I have no idea how to find out what the other flags do.

What do the other 3 hoods have in common that is determined by the 8-bit? If it does nothing, why was it used up until Apartment Life? What differentiates Exotic Destinations that it needs its 2-bit set?

If anybody has suggestions for what I can test, feel free to chip in.

The wiki has some info:
AC8A7A2E^wiki

And some bits and pieces from Chris Hatch:
https://modthesims.info/showthread....783#post5410783

Not sure if you'd seen those or not.

No, I googled Neighborhood Flags IDNO stuff and searched here on the forums. But of course, search engines aren't what they used to be.

But at least it seems like I have found something undocumented, even if I can't get any further. In summary my tests indicate that flag 0x0010 is used by the game to determine whether the subhood should be added automatically to neighborhoods, and that the DWORD before the flags (which is written as the "Affiliated EP" in the SimPE plugin) must be 0x03 (Open For Business) for the hood to show up in the "Shopping Districts" menu.

It makes sense that it is like this given that all subhoods are in the NeighborhoodTemplate folder. But I have only tested this on the Ultimate Collection. Are there other tests I should run if I want to update the wiki?

Very cool, I tested on my disc install (all EPs and SPs) and got the same result.



0c 00 00 00 seems to make the subhood add automatically; changing it to something else breaks this. I'll do some more playing with this, good find! I used G002 to mess around with (weather subhood) but didn't test with anything else yet.

Thanks, that means a lot.

I did a bit more testing to ensure that the bit flag assumption was correct. If the flags field is set to 0xFFFFFFFF, which would mean all possible flags active, the subhood is still added automatically, and if I then retract 4 so it becomes 0xFFFFFFFB, it is not added automatically.


However, earlier I made the assumption that this worked for all neigborhood types, but this was incorrect, it does not work for Universities or Tropics, probably only Suburbs.

Since I am here, I might as well add that neighborhoods handle multiple Hobby and Magic subhoods (Suburbs associated with Freetime and Apartment Life respectively) perfectly fine.

Once a sim has a hobby or becomes a witch, all the neighborhoods of the required type will show up, and all the community lots in those neighborhoods will also be available. But most of that is probably BHAV-determined rather than hardcoded like the neighborhood flag stuff. Still neat, though.

Not sure if this is big enough to demand its own thread, so I am going to play it safe and post here. Alternatively, I could post it on C.Sydes thread on the similar issue?

I became curious about unlocked Story Rewards in Life Stories and tracked them down to the Sim Information (SIMI) file on the main character's lots. Since SimPE contains info on the Stories games but does not parse this info, I reasoned that this is not documented information.

Here is the end of the file for 10 Hyacinth Circle (Riley's lot) after playing enough to unlock Vincent's story and then unlocking most of Vincent's rewards:

And here it is before it is first played:

Replacing the SIMI file of 1 JCN Circle (Vincent's lot) with this one unlocked the same rewards, even when at the very beginning of the story.

Notice how the data is appended unto the file, rather than a flag being set.

I have unlocked 14 objects and the data is 56 words long, and since a GUID is 4 words and 56=4*14, it is therefore very likely that the appended data is GUIDs of some kind. They do not (seem to) match the guids of the reward objects in C.Syde's Mod. (The reward objects do not seem to be located in objects.package, so I cannot find them in my own game)

This seems like an odd way to do it, is this how family inventory works too? You lose access to the rewards when you finish a story and enter free-play mode, and they aren't unlocked for other households either.
We can then also reason that when rewards are unlocked in one story, the save games of BOTH are updated. Wild.

I would have preferred it to work like the unlockable Pet coat textures in Pets, which were unlocked globally. But with this info at hand, one could just transplant the rewards to other households with SimPE. Or, you know, download a mod that lets you use them in normal Sims 2...

EDIT: Alright, can confirm that in Sims Pet Stories, the SIMI file is unchanged while additional data has been appended to the Game Wide Inventory (GINV) in the Neighborhood Manager. This fits with what people are saying in C.Syde's thread about Castaway stories.

Further testing shows that this also works if Hobby or Magic is the primary Neighborhood.
I was going to test if it was also the case if Hobby or Magic were colleges, downtowns or vacation spots, but somehow my game has gotten borked and won't add them or recognize them anymore :/
(EDIT: Reinstalling fixed the issue)
I also tested how much can be deleted from the Main Neighborhood where the player can still go directly to Subhoods from the main menu with no problems. The files CAMS, NHTR, NHTG, TATT, VERS and WTHR, as well as the SWAF files associated with global NPCs can be deleted with no issues, which can bring the filesize of the main neighborhood .package file down to just 2.77 KB before adding Sims. Of course, if you then try to enter the main neighborhood itself, the game will crash.

EDIT: I can now confirm that changing the Hobby neighborhood into a University, the hobby lots are properly accessible by sims, and the university is also accessible as a regular university. So the important part for determining if a hood is a hobby hood is just the affiliated EP, and I imagine the same goes for the Magic hood.)

EDIT: Non-standard lot types like secret Vacation, Hobby and Witch lots can be added to the neighborhood Lots menu by putting the package files in TSData\Res\LotTemplates, and adding "_Permanent" to the end of the filename (but before the prefix) They will show up in the special lots menu similar to Dorms, Secret Societies, Hotels and Apartments, BUT only when in a COLLEGE neighborhood. Unlike Secret Society lots, you can place as many as you want in the same neighborhood, but all the "secret" lots are hidden after being placed, just like Secret Society lots.

EDIT: If the main neighborhood is any other TYPE (i.e. college or travel) then it won't show up next time you load the game. So the main neighborhood can be witch or hobby, but not one of the specific types. Personally, I would go for Main Neighborhood hosting the witches, and the college for hobbies.