1)      Level out terrain if needed.

2)      Place a drive piece, drive extension and door.

 

note: I have placed floor tiles over the entire driveway.  This is to aid in clarity for the screenshots and is not necessary for you to do.

If you want to add a back door to the garage, create a row of floor tiles at the rear of the drive extension as shown in next picture.

 

3)      Invoke cheat mode (Ctrl+Shft+C) and type in ‘boolprop constrainfloorelevation false’, press enter.

4)      Choose one of the floor tiles at the rear of the drive extension;

 

5)      You need to decrease the terrain by 12 clicks. I do it by selecting each corner in turn and decreasing by 4 clicks at a time.  I find this is easier.

  

6)      Once you have gone down 12 clicks, select the terrain levelling tool and drag an area from the lowest point to one row beyond the garage door.

 

7)      Release mouse button and it should look like this (mine looks different as I used floor tiles).

 

note: Do not worry about the ‘floating drive’ area. This will go away.

 

8)      We now need to create a slope.  To aid in this I lower the terrain to the side of the drive.  This is not necessary but it helps to see what your doing.

 

9)      As the deepest part of the garage floor is 12, I tend to change the slope in increments of 2 i.e. click down 10, 8, 6 etc

 

 

10)  This gives a nice gradual decline. Be sure to leave the one row adjacent to the garage door flat.

 

 

 

11)  Once finished it should look something like this.

 

12)  If you created the lowered terrain beside the drive to aid in seeing the slope, you         should now level this back out.

 

note: be careful not to level the drive slope.

 

 

13)  Build a standard wall around the garage extension.

 

14)  Invoke cheat mode and type in ‘boolprop constrainfloorelevation true’

15)  Build a slab of foundations one square away.

 

note: The one square away rule does not always apply.  Sometimes I have managed to place the foundations adjacent to the garage wall, other times it will not work?

 

16)  Place one column of foundations between the garage wall and the foundations you laid in step 15.

 

17)  Viola!!! It works….well it does for me!

 

 

 

18)  Side view. (To get rid of the annoying floating drive, save and exit to neighbourhood. Select lot again and it will be gone).

 

19)  Lay some floor tiles

 

 

 

 

20)  Add walls and decorate.

 

21)  Something I did earlier…not finished yet

 

 

 

 

 

I hope you found this tutorial useful.  The method I employ to create a working sunken garage in ‘Nightlife’ may not be the best method available.  My advice would be to look around to see if any easier ways exist. Working with the boolprop constrain cheat can produce funny results if used incorrectly, patience is a virtue with that one. Just be sure that the initial 12 click depth is accurate otherwise you will have problems.  Take your time.

 

The animation of the car entering/leaving the driveway is strange as it does not have animations to drive on an incline.  I can live with that as I think your houses can be more creative and look better.

 

SteveUK   24^th September 2005