Hiyas!

Okay, this might sound a little confusing but here's the deal:

I created several road networks for my current projects, then decided I wanted to have different looking streets in a certain part of town that currently uses the base game roads. Now, since I've spent a considerable amount of time to get the angles just right I dread deleting those roads. However, I also don't want to replace the base game road preset itself, I just want to update the streets in a certain part of town.

Possible? *sigh* Why is CAW so stupid? It really should allow you to pick a new preset for existing roads. But I guess that's why it's in beta stage forever .... because no one really improves anything. :P

I don't think you can edit the base game road. And no, as far as I know, there is no way to replace the sections you want to change that you've already laid down. You'll have to delete, and put them down again.

I don't use the base game road style anymore. First thing I do is add a custom made road when I start a world. Sometimes, I've made more than one, so I can quickly change out the road texture if I want to use something else. I keep the sidewalks the same for continuity.

Actually that's not completely true. Making a new world, I place a 64x64 lot as reference of scale, and without the grid on plop down temporary default roads to work out the network. I delete the 64x64 lot then and do my scuplting accordingly. I turn the grid on, and add the roads I want to use, sometimes adding lots when I need an exact size. I almost always keep my angles at increments of 15 [0, 15, 30, 45, 60, 75], so when I put in all the lots, I only have to go through six options to line things up with the road. Since that makes my new roads not completely where the planning roads were, I delete the lots and re-sculpt a bit if necessary.

I realize that is not useful for you now, but maybe it provides an idea or two for the future. And others reading this thread might take something away as well.

I've included a picture of me halfway through the placing of final roads with the grid, in case I wasn't completely clear.

:D

You could possibly make a default replacement for the basegame road textures, and then import them to your world file. I've not tried this myself, but this is the method for making an override for object textures for in CAW (for example, making a rabbithole a different colour) and that does work.

However there are a lot of resources involved in defining the roads in CAW, so I'm not sure it would work. It would be worth testing, though.

This reply has been almost two weeks since you originally posted your inquiry. But hopefully, you will find this suggestion useful.

As roads will "snap" to pre-existing road pieces, here's a thought. For a section of road, try deleting every other piece of road, say every second piece of road or so. Then place the custom road pieces (not the regular base game road).

After that, delete the remaining base game road pieces, replacing those with more bits of custom road. I hope this is of help to you. That's what I did, when I once decided I wanted a certain area to have a different type or style of road.

Do we have any detail/list of the involved files yet as I am looking into this soon and it would save me some time if something is already known. Searching for any info only seems to lead to info on textures.

On topic, if it was me I would have done what BenCo suggested.

I tested this today, to see if it would work. This is what I found, copied from my notes:
Note- this is experimental, please backup any files before you change anything and please report back to let me know whether this works for you, or not.



If anyone is brave enough to test this, I'd be interested to know if it works. I only had time to test on a few small worlds, so I'd like to know if it is effective on more complex worlds.

I'm especially curious about regeneration the Low detail textures- do they all regenerate correctly if you just alter one little piece of road? Or, do you have to change a road on each chunk to regenerate them all? If they don't regenerate you'll get a flat brown texture smeared all over your terrain, so you'll soon know!

I tried it on a medium world with lots of roads (Fargo by Goddess at MATY), and it worked like a charm! It was a bit tedious scrolling through the IMG files for the distant views of roads, but it was far easier and less time consuming than replacing the roads would be. There is no comparison. Thanks so much Simsample!!!!

Thanks for the feedback, trystiane- and well done for making this work!

I'm glad it was useful to you.

I am attempting to do this and, for some reason, I cannot find those dern dds files. I know where they are in the source data folder but cannot find them, for the life of me in that fullbuild0.package. I just want to replace the textures with some from Appaloosa Plains. Silly me used default roads a long time ago (and of course didn't use the grid) so it would take longer to try to replace them one by one.

Try opening the Appaloosa Plains .world file in S3PE and looking in there?

You can Download them here: http://www.mediafire.com/?y90e9u8ju225xmp

Nah, I found them. Apparently, my brain was having a der moment. Now I am just checking to make sure I followed the rest of the steps correctly. Thanks for the help.

EDIT: OMG. It worked, it worked, it worked! Persistence once again pays off!

Last edited by heaven : 26th Oct 2011 at 11:05 PM.

Well done heaven, I'm glad it worked!

Yes, my brain finally cooperated. Anyway, I did this on my large, Riverview remake and it worked just fine. Even zoomed out, everything looked correct so I didn't have to confuzzle myself more, today at least.

I started to build my world with non-default roads (after reading a tutorial which basically said "always costumize your roads") - how will it affect the steps mentioned above?

Found some nice roads made by Kolipoki, would be lovely to use them in future and replace the already existing ones. Can I just copy and past Kolis files somewhere and it'll work - or is it more complicated? I do not own SimPE atm, do I need it to replace them - or is there an else solution?

I ask, because I don't think I understood the above mentioned tutorial a 100%. Guess that's due to being a foreign speaker. Anyone able to explain this in a bullet-proof way? ^^

Edit: Found some costum .dds, will use these instead. Cba messing with SimPE atm.

Last edited by kathascha2 : 15th Dec 2011 at 11:05 PM.

Hey kathascha2, if you already started out with custom roads then you do not need to use this method, as you can easily edit the custom road you are using to change the textures.

However, Kolipoki's road appears to be a default replacement (which will override the standard basegame road) so you will need to open those files and extract the textures, so that you can replace your custom road textures with them.

I just found this today and this was really helpful. You guys are life-savers. Thanks, this still works well with latest CAW and patch .

Thank you Demoness, well done for getting it to work, and thanks for the info!

I don't bother with the default road. What I do is make my own roads, then if I don't like them I go into edit road and change the textures to what I want. When you do this though you have to be aware that all your roads of that texture will change. The thing is you don't have to delete and relay roads this way.

For example say I want a base road, a blacktop road, and a dirt road in my world. Then after I lay them down if I don't like how the blacktop road looks I just edit the blacktop road and change the texture, and all the blacktop roads change into the new texture.

For the world I'm making I have planned a trail that leads to a campground. At present the trail is a sidewalk, however, after my world is nearly complete I'm going to change the sidewalk and make it invisible so that all you see is the dirt path I've already laid under it. It will still be a sidewalk to the sims, but it will look like a dirt path.

Yes, we know you can change custom road textures. But this solution was devised by me specifically for someone who used the default texture and then wished that they had not.