There are a lot of sidewalks mods out there and wouldn't you want JRJ street tree mod here and BLAM sidewalk there and the white sidewalk here. It's weird if you don't have freedom to do your own sidewalk. I mean in the normal maxis sidewalk, don't you get frustrated to see sidewalks change color and it makes the roads not uniform. I think JRJ has this thing too. Then again, when everything is uniform, you get bored. Sometimes the a BLAM sidewalk is inappropriate for low-wealth places since the sidewalk makes the neighborhood fancy even if it's not. I think SAM lets you choose you're own sidewalk and even the color of the street but I think there should be an similar mod for roads. A SAM that focuses on the sidewalk of roads :).
Quote from: frdrcklim on April 23, 2008, 08:36:53 AM
I think SAM lets you choose you're own sidewalk and even the color of the street but I think there should be an similar mod for roads. A SAM that focuses on the sidewalk of roads :).
SAM only allows you to choose the look of the Street Surface. It does not involve the sidewalks.
Unfortunately, what you request is not really feasible... Well, there is a way around it but it is not a good practice and is much more work than you'd expect and has quite a few limitations that would make it less appealing.
Here is how sidewalks are "made" in-game. For networks, there is a set of 4... if I recall correctly 4... "base" textures. These base textures are the texture used on the network for the sidewalks, and they show up depending on the wealth of the neighboring lot. There are 4 different wealths for these lots:
Agriculture
Low-wealth
Medium-wealth
High-wealth
No-wealth (has not texture)
These are the only 4 textures the game allows us to change for sidewalks and is very, very limited in how we use them.
A way to get around this would be to included the sidewalk as part of the road surface texture... This would give us more flexibility in the way we used it... But every texture in the game that uses the sidewalks will end up needing to be recreated with each optional sidewalk you are making a variation for. This means if you want 5 variations for the sidewalks that there will be 5 times the textures for each SAM set (currently 77 textures per set) meaning there will be more than 6500 textures before wealth (times 4) and zoom (time 5)... Overall 120000+ textures just for SAM with varying sidewalks. Beyond that there are not enough Starter Puzzle Pieces available to be made that will allow us to make such a mod for SAM. But remember thats, just for SAM, remember there are other networks too and they will all have to be redone too... The limitation of this, is there will be so many RULs being used that it could possibly start slowing down your game beyond anything you'd expect. The Plugin for this addition would be so monsterously large that it would dwarf the 21mb of the current SAM mod and could easily be bigger than the game itself. And most importantly, these will never be able to intersect with each other because they are different variations of the same texture, meaning that they will fight for dominance and you will never be able to get the look you want if they are to intersect with each other... A limitation we live with with SAM already.
Whoops. Not my smartest post yet :-[