Screenshot: http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/mergedhood.jpg

More info: http://www.geocities.com/saramkirk/psv.html

This neighborhood was originally created for and tested by the awesome people at MoreAwesomeThanYou.com, a site which also hosts my tutorial for merging neighborhoods, in case you want to try it yourself.

If you have spent any time playing The Sims 2 (PC), you know that Maxis gave players three distinct neighborhoods - Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville. The sims who live in each neighborhood can never meet sims who live in another neighborhood.

From the very beginning, players have been doing some very creative things to "merge" the three neighborhoods so that all the sims could interract with one another. Methods have included yanking families into the lots bin, which fills your game with junk files and can eventually cause massive glitches in the game, stuffing a single lot with every sim in the neighborhood, or cloning sims and then trying to re-create their relationships. It has always been a lot of work, and has never worked particularly well. Sims lose their jobs, relationships become messed up, graves and ghosts are lost, the houses and neighborhoods are lost, and other problems crop up.

I have developed a unique method for merging the neighborhoods. A method that avoids all of these problems! Simply, Pleasantview is used as the "base" neighborhood, and Strangetown and Veronaville are attached as its downtowns. You keep the neighborhoods, decorations, houses... sims stay in their own homes and no relationships are altered! They are all part of the same neighborhood now and can interract with one another, and yet, they all still live in their own separate neighborhoods.

In addition, I have taken the time to fix the many problems that the Maxis-made sims have, such as incomplete, missing, or incorrect DNA, incorrect surnames (for example, the Singles and the Summerdreams), missing memories, and other such problems. There are a few changes that had to be made: The Tricou family had to be resurrected because they contained corrupted death token that would cause such nasty glitches are inheriting money from a living toddler. Because tokens cannot be created, only deleted, the family could not stay dead as Maxis intended for them to be. Secondly, Bella Goth had to be resurrected because otherwise her restored memories would not stick. Lastly, all townies and NPCs have been purged, to keep the number of sims manageable and to let you create better townies and NPCs through default facial template replacements and other such mods.

WARNING: Due to the method of merging the neighborhoods, you must NEVER attempt to attach another downtown to this neighborhood. You may still attach Universities and Blue Water, but not Downtown. Doing so results in a glitch that corrupts the entire neighborhood. For this reason I have included the default Maxis Downtown as part of this neighborhood... hopefully you have no reason to want to add another downtown!

COMPATIBILITY: This neighborhood requires The Sims 2 and the Nightlife expansion pack. It does not require any other expansion packs, but is, of course, compatible with all of them.

INSTALLATION: Remove your current neighborhoods from the My DocumentsEA GamesThe Sims 2 directory. Replace the Neighborhoods folder with the one you downloaded from me. You could also set up a new user account in Windows, and install the merged neighborhood under the new account.

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