No Auto Deco for New Neighborhoods?

Hello! I'd like to ask if it's possible to make a hack that can turn off the TS2's ability to automatically spawn neighborhood deco on a new terrain? The problem as it stands is that the game thinks every new neighborhood and subhood needs to have a million trees - with BV, tiny tree stumps and with AL, stacked-up ponds, as well - spawned with it. It takes hours to delete all of it one piece at a time, as well as a camera hack to make sure the high-poly deco dumps are removed from corners of the map you can't even see within the normal constraints.

The quickest solution I can see is to prevent the auto-spawn altogether and leave a player to place whatever they want manually. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do that, nor of how deeply ingrained the auto-spawn command might be.

Thank you!

Oh my, that's a big question.... To be honest, I wouldn't know that, either. I believe, though, that these features have been added to the landscapes before those landscapes were imported into the game. What I *do* know, is that certain custom terrains exist (I downloaded one that's named Snowflake from MTS) that contain no trees and no lakes, nor any other features at all... Whenever I create a new hood using that terrain, noneof these thinbgs exist, and none are generated either. So I don't think they're created by the game. However, I can't be absolutely certain about that, so I advise you to go to Simbology and ask there. Perhaps MadCat256, AncientHighway, SleepyCat, ZephyrZodiac or any of the others there, know.

I hadn't realized it was something that involved, and shortly after I'd made the first post, I read a couple of observances from others that suggest it might be rooted in a Vista problem and not directly fixable in the game, itself. Thank you kindly for giving it thought, though!

So far as I know, the only *fix* for this annoyance is to use maps that don't have any deco in place, like BO mentioned. I even ran out & bought myself a copy of SC4 just so I could open up the pre-made Maxis maps & remove all the @#$% neighborhood crud...but of course, I haven't exactly gotten around to that just yet!

Also, this is NOT just a "Vista" thing: it's been a thorn in my side since XP (and still a thorn in W7) which I have complained about before. That's when I was advised to use SC4 to remove the offending foliage/etc so the map(s) in question wouldn't do that stuff.

(In my experience, one of the worst maps for "mass-spawned crap" is the Bluewater Village template! Not the actual 'hood, but the darned map available when creating custom neighborhoods: that thing will spam you with trees like nobody's business!)

Desiderata Valley is best for no trees every time i spawn it ... i get nothing on it

levini that is because the SC4 terrain map for Desiderata Valley does not have any trees on it.

The long and short of how the trees and maps work is this; when someone builds a terrain in SC4(the game) they can if they wish decorate the terrain with trees however way they like. When you place this SC4 terrain in the Sims 2 and create a new Neighbourhood with it, the game is coded to place a tree where there would be a tree on that terrain. And that is why every time you create a new hood with a certain terrain there will always be a tree decoration in the exact same spot every time. I think it was BV when the Sims 2 game code was made to randomly select a tree decoration to fill that spot in order to give variety. And since ponds are located in the neighbourhood tree catalogue, they are up for random selection as well.

So you see it has nothing to do with Vista at all. If the tree thing really bothers you try downloading some terrains that have not had trees put on them, or perhaps put a request somewhere for someone to clean the shipped Sims 2 SC4 terrains of all the trees and upload them for you.

Yeah, and then if you are playing a themed game, IE. Star Trek moon terrain, or Medieval dirt roads, what is annoying is having to hand remove all of the STOP signs. I think SC4, just adds them automatically or TS2. And they are SO tiny, you have to zoom way in to remove them. Bleh.

Actually, I *think* it should be possible to identify the STOP sign accessory, and make it permanently invisible.

O_O.... And here I was just complaining...

I never thought about just making it invisible!