Explain Apartments to me

[Eric Wake]

So I kinda wanna play Bridgeport. But on looking at the map... it's really tiny and I would like to add a lot more lots to it, but there really isn't much room (or interesting lots from the looks of em).

But that's not my problem. I want to know how apartment buildings work. Cuz from the looks of it, I'm really disappointed by how bare bones apartments seem to be.

In Sims 2 there were multiple apartments per building. Heck, you could even view the entire building even though an active household could only claim one unit.

In S3 when viewing residential lots to purchase, there is only ever one apartment shown per building. And there are only two floors in any high rise I've seen, the ground floor and the top floor. The floors in all of the high rise lots I've visited in the game are also really incomplete, with vast empty spaces and entirely empty rooms.

Are there really only two floors in every high rise?

Is there really only one apartment available in every building?

Is it possible to custom make your own high rises with multiple floors and multiple apartments per floor?

kthnx

[Valden21]

1) No, there are multiple floors in each high rise; we just don't see them from inside the building. If you look at the building from outside, you can quite clearly see other floors. The household controlled by the player usually lives in the penthouse apartment, and switching levels just takes you between the ground floor, the penthouse, and the roof.

2)There are multiple apartments within an apartment building. But the vast majority of them are built with the "Hidden" room marker, so members of player sims can't visit them; the most you can do is to ask the residents to come out of their apartments by using the callbox or knocking on the door. Room markers are something from Late Night, and they control what kind of room any given room happens to be.

[NetPCDoc]

The Sims 3 has various types of lots that are what is referred to as 'rabbit holes'; basically just the basic frame work is there in "build mode". When you switch to playing a family the game expands the 'frame work' to provide a more realistic (although, imo, still somewhat childish) experience.

There are some special rules for how to "build" 'rabbit hole' buildings; that I forgot a long time back. ... only certain things allowed on ground and top floors, and a way to specify how many floors there should be between these (that will inherit their characteristics from either the ground floor or the top floor).

I had some success with placing certain types of doors that allowed the family that I was playing to rent out parts of their home.

[Nahui Ollin]

You can make your own apartments with debug commands to open the developer editor.

Its just tricky compared to making a regular house. There are guides to do this tho.

[Eric Wake]

Thanks. That all explains a bit.

I guess apartments in Sims 3 just aren't very versatile. That's a shame. There's so much more they could have done with them.

[Yxklyx]

There's a really nice spacious walk-up building near the water but it's not purchasable unless you edit town. I got into it by befriending a townie. It has 3 units.