Long story short:

Lately I've been interested in trying to play the game with apartments/rental houses, but am disappointed by the crappy functionality of the apartments that EA built in. Here's why:

Method 1 : Play a regular lot and activate the "enable roommates" function from the phone. You can use hidden & public area markers to make some rooms "dark" which you could also then make the door an NPC door and NPC sims will "live" there. Problem is, you have to "own" the lot - this method works if you're interested in playing "Landlord" but not if you just want one sim to live in an apartment. The roommates that are generated by the roommate services on the phone will pay you rent.

Method 2 : Use the "Apartment" lot type. This method charges the base player rent to begin with, but then adds RANDOM PC roommates to your household to fill it up to 4 PC sims - then adds NPCs to make there be 8 people living on the lot. I find this stupid - I don't want random people I don't care about being added to my game.

The model I wanted was that of what happens at University - you are charged rent for the lot, and your roommates (if you have any) that you enable from the telephone pay you rent. But none are randomly generated.

So, after reading various threads on the Internet about using CAW and S3PE to create worlds and tag them as certain types (city, vacation, university, suburb), what I did was take a custom world I downloaded, find the file in the package that identifies the type of world, and change it to the flag of what a University has - except that I did NOT call it a University so that it would show up in the world list when creating a new game.

It had some interesting results. On first look, it seemed normal - I added a family and started playing them like usual. They purchased a house like normal, this lot was a regular residential lot. At around 9 AM NPC roommates were created and they moved in. I'm not sure if they would have paid rent, did not play it that long. However, the "glitch" was that I was unable to use the phone or computer to do anything - so something was clearly broken.

On an "apartment" lot, the sims I moved in did not purchase the property, and I presume would also have paid rent once a week. Again, NPC roommates were generated to fill up the house to 8 Sims, but I still could not use a phone or computer.

Everything else about the world "Acted" like a University - sims on the relationship panel had the "university" icon over the their picture, everyone appeared to travel with bikes, etc. In Edit Town mode, I was able to change the active household, unlike a University, but I noticed that I could NOT choose to edit the University in that world.

So, my question is, has anyone figured out EXACTLY what the individual sections of the "UNKN 0x296A6258" mean? I know that Bit 06 tells the game what type of world it is. A University is: 01 00 54 C9 41 0E 03 00 00 00. "03" means University, "02" means City, "01" means Vacation in the 7th group of numbers there. "00" means Suburb, which is a normal world, so I changed the "03" to "00" so mine looked like: 01 00 54 C9 41 0E 00 00 00 00

Other threads here about creating other types of worlds have determined that the 2nd-6th slots also identify the world as something. Someone was able to create a "city" with an Egyptian theme by putting different values in there. So, I managed to create a University-themed world, with some glitches.

If we could figure out exactly what each slot meant, perhaps one of them would indicate the roommate/rental property thing and we could some how change that???

Or, better yet, find out what part of the game controls the University "rental house" feature and perhaps make a mod that allows you to change individual lots to that type somehow - maybe perhaps by cloning a random object and adding it to a certain lot? Something inconspicuous like a door or a lamp or something.

Anyone have any thoughts??

I didn't have any of the University buildings there, so I'm not sure how that would have worked. I thought it was really strange that I couldn't use any phone or computer.

I totally didn't think about the SP aspect of it. I wonder if that's true! I didn't play it for that long to notice those types of things.

Yeah, the only thing I don't like about LN style apartments is that you have to BUY them. Yeah, I guess that's realistic for being in the city, but it's not when you are anywhere else. Renting them makes more sense to me, especially for a Sim who just moves out from the parent's house and doesn't have much money.

You can't choose the dorm lot type on a regular world.

Yeah, they say that, but I think it's a bug that that actually happens. I do have MasterController, didn't think about making them unselectable - I wonder if they would add to my household funds when they come home from work?

I built a building with 2 furnished apartments and 4 NPC doors and put the hidden markers in each of the 4 units, and a public marker outside (you have to get these from BuyDebug mode), and tried it as "apartment." 3 PC Sims showed up, then a variety of NPC's showed up. Right now I have it a regular residential lot and did the "enable roommates" from the phone, but again, I had to purcahse this lot and not rent it.

I never actually played Apartment Life, but I wish I would have! Ani has an apartment mod on here, but I had issues with it when money was supposed to be added to the household funds.

Yeah, the apartment mod does that, and it actually works very nicely (although you have to manually change "families" by clicking on a cloned NL intercom), and especially nice because the non-active family runs by SP. The problem I had was that when the inactive family would earn money, it would add it to the active family. So, I would see them coming home from work, but they would not get that money!

I tried the "apartment above the store" idea, briefly, but it did seem to work. There's a laundromat in Twinbrook with an empty 2nd floor. I had to use MC, but you can add a Sim to any lot, including a community lot, and they then become selectable like an active household. The only thing is ... you are limited in the objects you can buy because it still thinks it's a commercial lot. You can sort of hack around it using MC and TCE to get items like ovens by purchasing a blank residential lot, switching to that lot to purchase the item, then put it in your household inventory and place it in the commercial lot. I might experiment some more with that.

There's GOT to be some way to access the roommates/rental code, I guess the hard thing is finding where! I'd love to try but don't know where to start.

Thinking of this while trying to sleep ... I think you maybe be on to something about making them unselectable. Since you are able to do that with testing cheats enabled, there must be a way to make a mod have that automatically apply when a roommate is spawned.

yeah, a glitch that they never fixed, and somewhere someone found them saying they (obviously) never had any interest to!

I'm currently downloading Visual Studio - the 10 GB will take hours with my 3 Mbps DSL connection! - and I think I will at least look at Ani's Apartments mod and see if I can at least figure out where everything came from. I did take 1 semester of programming in college, so we'll see what I can decipher...

...and now I have absolutely NO idea what to do! #Moddingn00b

Okay, so I dove into the coding and found the part of the code that (I think) controls the University rentals (it's called "PlayFlowUniversityRentPanel"), so it IS its own separate thing. So...that might be a key to it!

So I made a mod that lets you disable the roommate services from the phone from an apartment lot (you usually can't select that), but...it doesn't work. The roommates still show up. So, I'm thinking there must be some way to get a lot to be "rentable" somehow.