Tutorials:Creating A World That Doesn't Suck - BuildingsRoadLayout

Road Layout

Roads are very essential to your sims. They ensure that routing works properly as well as providing a faster way to travel around your world. Although you can make a world without roads (medieval, deserted island, etc), it is easier to include them. If you are doing medieval/deserted island worlds, you might even consider using dirt roads. This can be easily achieved by adding a custom road via the Road Tool in CAW.

Things to Remember

• USE THE GRID - I can't express in words how important this is. Every road that you place should be placed with the grid ON. If you do not do this, when it comes to placing lots you will have unbelievable amounts of troubles. Not only are little gaps between the road and lots annoying, they affect routing.
• If you're having trouble fitting all of your lots into your design, you should place the lots and the roads together. Build the road layout around your lot sizes. This is what I've always done and apparently a lot of other creators do this too.
• Try not to split up your main town area. IE, If you're making a giant world, don't split up your office tower from your school/town hall/police station/hospital/etc. It makes it difficult to play the world, as well as a lot less practical for the player, having to go to two completely different sides of the world to access something that in real life would be in the main town with the rest of the buildings. (This tip does not go for worlds that have a smaller town and a larger town on the same map. You would obviously have certain lots only once in the world in that case.)
• You need to make your roads interesting. This means you need to have different levels. IE, you want roads on different heights of terrain, which ensures you have some hills and slopes and valleys in your road layout. This makes it much more interesting and a hell of a lot more fun for sims to explore.

Analyzing Sunset Valley's Road Layout

For this section, I have organised each screenshot into it's own row of a table. You will notice there are numbers on the screenshots of Sunset Valley. These correspond to the dot-points that are on the left of each screenshot.

Main Town Area 1 As marked in the screenshot, 1 shows the town square. I have marked this because if you look at all the buildings surrounding this lot you will notice that they are all facing it. This helps to portray the importance of that particular block of lots within the world. You will also notice that they have used paths within the central park to draw attention to all around it and to kind of portray that these lots surrounding it are just as important as the central park. 2 As noted by the red 2 in the screenshot, these beach lots are of significance. You will notice that the main town area is higher than the beach. This helps to add to aesthetics of the world, as well as making it a lot more interesting to explore and navigate. If you place certain things on different heights of terrain, it helps separate them and differentiate their purposes from other areas.	Sunset Valley's central town area (click for full size).
Beach/Cliff Lots 1 This road along here has lots that slope downwards slightly, toward the beach. This allows for more interesting building techniques to be used. You will also notice that this road along here is completely straight, at least where the lots are. This is because it was placed while the Grid was on. 2 These lots are perhaps some of the most challenging to build on in Sunset Valley, and let me tell you, experienced builders love challenges. You should consider doing some cliff lots in your world, if not for builders, then at least for completeness' sake. 3 This is another view of the sloped roads that lead toward the beach from the screenshot in the previous section. Although a bit steep for my taste, you can see that it all flows rather well and that it helps to combine areas 1 and 2 as marked in the screenshot.	Sunset Valley's beach and cliff lots (click for full size).
Richer Area 1 There are only 4 lots up in this area. All of them are 60x60. All 3 residential lots surround a road, which surrounds a park. This is another way to illustrate the elite-ness of the area without painting a huge sign on the grass reading "go away poor people" (In other words, its a lot more subtle). 2 This is really an interesting design choice by EA. It helps to divide the rest of the lots in the world from this 'pristigous' area. The perfectly manacured trees located all along either side of the roads leading up towards the houses also helps to illustrate that this area is only for the rich sims.	Sunset Valley's richer area (click for full size).