These sections give you a short overview on where to find the tools and how to use them. There will be more details on them later.
Paths and folders
There are three locations that you will need to know about when working with CAW.
- The Sims 3 Create A World folder under My documents: it contains Source texture folder and World folder.
- The Sims 3 folder under My documents: CAW uses certain folders of your Sims game user folder: Library, Export, DCBackup and DCCache, and for its Edit in Game mode the World Cache folder. So if you make changes to these folders it will affect CAW. Also the other way round, your exports and saved lots will be found here (in library and export folder) instead of in the CAW user folder.
- The Sims 3 Create A World installation path: If you want to use CC you will need to set up a mods framework similar to the one in your Sims 3 folder in My Documents. You can find a tutorial on this here: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:CAW_Framework
The Grid
Use the grid when you place lots and roads. It helps to align lots properly to roads or to connect roads to intersections.
Objects will snap to the grid, which is very helpful if you want to arrange decor objects in a symmetrical way.
When the grid is activated, the snap to grid window will appear at the bottom of your screen. The grid can be rotated by entering values 0 (default) to 90 into the number box in that window.
Just keep in mind that terrain textures only have one orientation, they won’t rotate with the grid! You’ll notice this especially with tiled textures.
Switch the grid off after placing bridges to adjust their proper location. The grid will always push them back on the surface once you move them. You also won’t need it for placing plants and trees as they would snap to the grid on placement, too, which would look a bit too orderly.
Road Tool
For roads, there are two tools. The first will handle the placement and look of the road:
The second one will allow you to refine placed roads:
Lot Tool
This tool allows you to place empty lots. Mind, you can edit a lot (building on it) only in EIG, not in CAW itself. You can also only place built lots from the bin in EIG. If you delete a built lot in CAW, you will have to place it again in EIG! The undo button will bring the lot itself back, but it will be empty.
You place a lot by clicking on the Add New Lot button and then clicking on your map. You will first draw one side of the lot, click again when it has the desired length, then drag the mouse until the lot has the final size.
While placing a lot, you might want to pay attention to the very bottom right of your CAW window:
It shows you the exact world coordinates of the lot (starting point) but more important, the lot size while you draw. So you can place exactly the lot size you want.
Terrain Painting Tools
To paint, click on a texture in the layers window, set the brush parameters and you are ready to go.
Terrain Sculpting Tools
CAW offers basically four options for terrain sculpting: Raising, lowering, flattening, or smoothing. The “gentle” versions of the tools do the same, just not as strongly and with softer edges.
Chunks
You can activate the chunk grid from the view menu. There are several reasons why chunks are important:
- The game clusters plants and trees by chunk and layer. This is one of the major factors for performance. Too many trees hit on performance, especially if they cannot be clustered by the game because they sit on different layers per chunk. I usually have all plants on one layer.
- The game renders the world by chunks. You see it very clearly in CAW, only the chunk you are looking at is sharp. Chunks further away are blurry. This holds true to a lesser extent in game. Light often stops at chunk borders. Terrain may be rendered a bit less crisp on the next chunk. So if you plan on lovely views, make sure things you want to focus on are on the same chunk.
- The grid changes from light blue to red if you used more than 8 terrain textures in one chunk.
Edit in Game (EIG)
Hitting this button will start the Edit in Game mode, a slimmed version of the game:
It will open in a new window and load your town as it would in a new game. But keep in mind that it is NOT the full game engine so some things just won’t work. But you will find that you have much more freedom for the camera than in game.
Once your world is loaded, switch to Edit Town immediately. Don’t do anything else. There are no sims, no CAS, no households. So even if you start on a home lot you shouldn’t do anything there. From Edit Town you can enter lots just like in game and build and buy on them.
Don’t spend hours in build mode there though, you may run into memory issues. After you worked on a lot and went back to Edit Town, save the lot to the bin. Do that with every lot you work on. So even if EIG crashes on you will still have your work saved.
This is also where you can place lots from your bin. In CAW you can only add empty lots, here you can add all lots in your bin. In general I would like to recommend to keeping building in EIG to a minimum and rather build in a full game as it is more stable.
When you are done with your lots, save. The EIG window will now go black with only the map tags visible and flicker – that’s absolutely normal! In fact, CAW is saving each lot now to your world. Depending on the amount and complexity of your lots this can take quite a while. Don’t interrupt.
After CAW is done saving, you will receive a pop up message telling you that it saved successfully. The more lots you have in your world the longer it will be. Just close that window by clicking on the red X button in the top right corner. Now you can quit EIG. You will be redirected to your CAW window again.
You can shut down CAW in the background if your computer is having troubles. It will reopen once you quit EIG. I would also recommend to quit EIG each time after you saved to keep the load on your computer as low as possible. If you have trouble running EIG at all, maybe try Zaide_Chris’ batch file from MTS: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=453161 Just drop your CAW world file on it but make sure to backup your world file first.