This is a process where you can flip or rotate a terrain so you can terraform it in the orientation you prefer. No more thinking, hmmmm, if the river curves that way, then my mountain is over here and the canyon is that way or… is it this way or… wait… where am I again?
Good News!
With this, I can create a terrain directly in SC4 and draw it just as I imagine it, then, before I put it in Sims 2, I flip it, so that, when the game flips it, it’s back the way I drew it. This makes it far easier for me to terraform natural looking landscapes that match my imagination. I can also use this to change the terrain’s orientation to the sun and make very narrow, smooth curves for rivers and land forms.
Less Good News 😛
This process will not preserve roads, so I need to add roads after the flip so I still have to look at them backwards. For me personally, that’s not difficult, once the terrain is terraformed, but, I’m a lefty who’s had to flip things around in my head my whole life and I do a lot more terraforming than roads, so YMMV.
The Process
Basically, the process is make a one city region in SimCity4, use another program to export it as a bmp, flip it in a graphics program, then re-import it to continue editing or finish it off for Sims 2.
1) To export and import cities as an image, you need to install NHP SC4 Mapper. I’m using the 2013.5b version. You’ll have to register, but it’s painless.
2) I have only tested this with one-city regions, so I recommend you, either, make a new region in SC4 and load only the terrain you want to flip, then skip to step 4, or, if you already started making a terrain in a region with other cities, back it up, and proceed with a copy to step 3.
3) If you have more than one city in the terrain, load the region in Mapper, edit config, erase cities, save the region as a new name.
4) Load a new region that has just one city into Mapper.
5) Export Region with your one city as bmp.
6) Open the bitmap you just created in an image editing program and flip, rotate, edit as you wish.
Here’s an example of a terrain that I created just randomly in SC4 that was in shadow when I put it in Sims 2.
Here’s how it looks in Sims 2 after rotating the bmp 180 degrees. Very useful!
You can draw directly on the BMP if you like, but it’s only 65×65 pixels. I’ve experimented with drawing one pixel wide rivers and with creating very smooth, one pixel pathways for water.
The process definitely has a lot of potential for Sims 2 terrains beyond just horizontal flipping.
When you’re finished with the image, Save As new name so you can be sure you have the right file in the next steps.
7) To turn your image back into a terrain, in Mapper, Create Region, choose RGB image (bmp), navigate to the new flipped bmp, and Create. You’ll have a one-city-sized region with your new flipped image.
8) Save Region. Whatever name you give this will be the name of the folder where you find the new flipped region/city as an SC4 file in SimCity4.
9) If you want to check the flipped terrain in Sims 2, you can go to that folder and copy the SC4 directly from there to your Sims 2 terrains folder. If you want to edit more in SC4, go into SC4, load the folder as new region and edit as usual.
If you create anything marvelous with all this, please show it off! I’d love to see it!