I read somewhere that within 2 weeks of Sims 3 being released they were going to release a Neighborhood Mod Tool. I worry because my biggest joy in the Sims 2 was creating the neighborhoods and I have heard in the Sims 3 we won't be able to edit the neighborhoods in game.

Do you guys think EA will live up to this promise?

I hope so....

You can edit the neighborhood in game, I don't know how much further you could go with this, but I know you can still add and remove houses. From the looks of it though, it doesn't look like you can create a whole new neighborhood from scratch. I could be wrong though, that's probably what the 'Neighborhood Mod Tool' might be.

Well I read that you couldn't add lots, you could add houses to empty lots already placed throughout the neighborhood but not add empty lots or houses to empty neighborhood spaces. Nor do I think you can place neighborhood decoration objects.

But yes, I thought they were going to release a tool that allowed you to create a brand new neighborhood, but I don't remember where I saw it.

Within 2 weeks of release? I thought they said within a few months. Hopefully we can make neighborhoods as good as Sunset Valley and Riverview once it does come out. I think it will come out eventually.

One person made a completely empty neighborhood if that's what you're talking about. That's probably just an empty Sunset Valley though.

In Sims 3 "edit town" mode, you can delete (move etc) the contents of lots, including rabbit hole buildings, but you can't do anything to the lots themselves.

If by making a new neighborhood you mean all fresh sims and fresh buildings, you can do that already.

If you mean new terrain, nope. And that's a pretty complex task for our mod community to take on without a tool from EA... a sims 3 hood is a lot more complex than a sims 2 hood. From the technical side, you have hand-painted terrain, curved roads, and (apparently) hand-placed collectible spawn points. Plus there are certain features that you would need to make sure you had a playable hood: all the rabbit hole buildings have to be there, for instance. I think the same may be true of the collectible spawn points: there are game-related goals tied to particular collectibles, which have to be placed. Plus every lot has to be connected by roads or school buses and taxis won't work. In other words, I think it would be like building apartments -- very easy to make a buggy or unplayable hood if you didn't know what you were doing.

Something I'm more concerned about is that it would seem that certain OPEN community lots are required, since they have special map tags, and I've seen examples posted of wishes like "go to the gym" and "go to the library". That means the lots are somehow tied to the wish code. They may have hard-coded the relationship between wishes etc and particular lots, which might make making a town editor difficult or impossible... if EA got lazy about how this stuff is implemented.

From the artistic side, since you have sims wandering everywhere including in off-lot areas, you have to landscape the whole thing as closely as you would landscape a backyard. Lotta work

Anyway, I hope EA releases the tool too... but I'm not holding my breath :/