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Tutorial: Fixing Exploded Lot Imposters

Published: 8-25-2024 | Updated: N/A SUMMARY Using dozens of the same object on a lot—such as a window on a skyscraper, or lots of the same tree/hedge on a large park lot—may cause “exploded” lot imposters. The lot imposter is the version of a lot seen in neighborhood view or from adjacent lots during gameplay. The error often appears in the form of warped or smeared objects – as if someone wiped part of the screen with a wet cloth. In other cases, the mesh looks like broken shards and/or pokes through other parts of the lot. Meanwhile, everything looks fine when you enter it. This error seems rare, having only occurred about 4-5 times over two decades, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. Don’t panic! The object itself is likely not broken (although double-checking wouldn’t hurt) but the error happens as your game tries to render the same object/textures multiple times. In my testing, the culprit was usually a single object and one of its recolorable subsets. SOLUTION I used to delete the blown-up lot and rebuild it until the problem went away. Yet, a much easier solution exists – recolors! Apply 1 or more recolors across copies of object and that should fix the warped/exploded object on the lot imposter. In most cases, this should take care of the problem. In this example, the windows “exploded” in hood view. After applying plain glass recolors from THIS (Simmons, 2023) set, the problem didn’t go away. The true culprit was the metal detail on the glass – for which I had no recolors for. I made some (HERE), using similar colors which looked the same from a distance, and that solved the problem.

Simmers who use lots of greenery in their landscaping might encounter an exploded lot imposter. Keep similar recolors in your arsenol…just in case. During gameplay, this happened when I used a ton of custom hedges repo’d to the default one (“boxy lady”).  This has also happened with the default birch tree in-game, so I recommend keeping something like Gwenke33’s recolors (2011) handy. DOWNLOAD THIS TUTORIAL (PDF) (choose one) from SFS | from MEGA CREDITS Thanks: William, Gina, Catherine and others on discord who helped me think through solutions years ago.