Auto-place official festival lots in later Store worlds

◀

▶

IMPORTANT NOTE: In order for the mod to work, the following .package files (if the player has them in the first place) must be copied and pasted from “(installation folder)/Game/Bin/Library” to “(installation folder)/The Sims 3 Seasons/GameData/Shared/NonPackaged/Library”:

Code:

Aurora Skies Festival Grounds.package
Dragon Valley Festival Grounds.package
Midnight Hollow Festival Grounds.package
Monte Vista Festival Grounds.package
Roaring Heights Festival Grounds.package

It’s anyone’s guess why Maxis didn’t make the lot package detection system able to detect the regular lot bin.

And even then there’s a certain chance that the mod could have no effect for indeterminate and incomprehensible reasons.

——————————————————————————

All Store worlds had official festival grounds built for them, ones that were clearly intended to be placed on specific addresses/lots at that, but one could tell that while Maxis’ lot builders had a fun time with those grounds, the main devs at Maxis didn’t put their heart into it when working on the last 5 Store worlds: Aurora Skies, Monte Vista, Dragon Valley, Midnight Hollow, and Roaring Heights.

In Monte Vista and Aurora Skies, they seemingly forgot to add the festival among the preplaced lots. From Dragon Valley onwards, they simply didn’t even bother updating “AutoVenuePlacement” in GameplayData.package, leading to no preplaced lots in those worlds, not even stuff like salons or Showtime venues, and also didn’t even feel like giving the festival lots the Festival Grounds assignment, which further complicated my mod testing.

The lots have been lingering in the regular Edit Town lot bin all along, but it sounds possible to me that more than a few long-time players may not have noticed them there. So I made this quick mod while working on other mods, to simplify the process when starting new savefiles in those 5 worlds.

Or, well, quick and quick… it took me a solid 9 hours to get a working setup for the mod (3hrs of which spent on figuring out how to see lot IDs, which could be done with NRaas Debug Enabler), and even then the files in the mod are about as unstable as two boulders tied to a roof with shoelaces (though the game code itself is hardly any more stable). At least there is 0.0% chance of crashes to desktop, however; the worst things that can happen is either that the mod has no effect, or that the world loading screen gets stuck (The latter of which would require post-download mod editing that’d result in syntax errors).

———Added sections (i.e. changes) to “AutoVenuePlacement” in GameplayData.package———

“<” and “>” below were substituted by “(” and “)” respectively due to the codebox not being able to render < tags correctly.

Code:

(MonteVista)
  (Venu_Name)kEP8_Festival(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)644859504566623600(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto(/Lot_Rotation)
  (PackageName)Monte Vista Festival Grounds(/PackageName)
  (ProductVersion)EP8(/ProductVersion)
 (/MonteVista)
(...)
(AuroraSkies)
  (Venu_Name)kEP8_Festival(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)12566732155052951632(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto(/Lot_Rotation)
  (ProductVersion)EP8(/ProductVersion)
  (PackageName)Aurora Skies Festival Grounds(/PackageName)
(!--  (Lot_Address)52 Velkominn Rd.(/Lot_Address) --)
 (/AuroraSkies)
(DragonValley)
  (Venu_Name)(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Address)(/Lot_Address)
  (Lot_Rotation)(/Lot_Rotation)
  (ProductVersion)(/ProductVersion)
  (PackageName)(/PackageName)
 (/DragonValley)
(DragonValley)
  (Venu_Name)CommercialLotSubType(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Address)Just for reference(/Lot_Address)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto,  0, 90, 180, 270(/Lot_Rotation)
  (ProductVersion)EP0(/ProductVersion)
 (/DragonValley)
(DragonValley)
  (Venu_Name)kBigPark(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)2907355390241595520(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto(/Lot_Rotation)
  (PackageName)Dragon Valley Festival Grounds(/PackageName)
  (ProductVersion)EP8(/ProductVersion)
 (/DragonValley)
(MidnightHollow)
  (Venu_Name)(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Address)(/Lot_Address)
  (Lot_Rotation)(/Lot_Rotation)
  (ProductVersion)(/ProductVersion)
  (PackageName)(/PackageName)
 (/MidnightHollow)
(MidnightHollow)
  (Venu_Name)CommercialLotSubType(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Address)Just for reference(/Lot_Address)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto,  0, 90, 180, 270(/Lot_Rotation)
  (ProductVersion)EP0(/ProductVersion)
 (/MidnightHollow)
(MidnightHollow)
  (Venu_Name)kBigPark(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)12566732179513979120(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto(/Lot_Rotation)
  (PackageName)Midnight Hollow Festival Grounds(/PackageName)
  (ProductVersion)EP8(/ProductVersion)
 (/MidnightHollow)
(RoaringHeights)
  (Venu_Name)(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Address)(/Lot_Address)
  (Lot_Rotation)(/Lot_Rotation)
  (ProductVersion)(/ProductVersion)
  (PackageName)(/PackageName)
 (/RoaringHeights)
(RoaringHeights)
  (Venu_Name)CommercialLotSubType(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Address)Just for reference(/Lot_Address)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto,  0, 90, 180, 270(/Lot_Rotation)
  (ProductVersion)EP0(/ProductVersion)
 (/RoaringHeights)
(RoaringHeights)
  (Venu_Name)kBigPark(/Venu_Name)
  (Lot_Id)644859556052352816(/Lot_Id)
  (Lot_Rotation)Auto(/Lot_Rotation)
  (Lot_Address)35 Van Alen Street(/Lot_Address)
  (PackageName)Roaring Heights Festival Grounds(/PackageName)
  (ProductVersion)EP8(/ProductVersion)
 (/RoaringHeights)

———Notes———

• I was not able to figure how to auto-place a festival lot (e.g. Moonlight Falls’ Eerie Park) in Sims University.