I love the look of neighbourhood deco curved paths (such as Criquette's) and how much life and variety they breathe into the very angular Sims 2 hoods... so I wanted to see if I could achieve something similar without CC haha

This is using terrain paint across a series of different lots to look like one continuous path. I really like how it's turned out! Of course you can see the seams at the edges of the lots if you look closely, but nothing in TS2 is perfectly seamless anyway.

Here's a breakdown of how the lots interact (placed off-road with the Lot Adjuster):

The blue lots are community lots and the green lots are (or will be) residential lots. The yellow is where residential lots overlap and the white outline is the "road" section from the big blue park lot. Technically all of these lots have their roads overlapping with another lot (perfectly fine for gameplay but can look funny visually); the only relevance here is that you can't see terrain paint placed on roads from neighbourhood view/other lots, which is just an extra consideration to make when joining the paths.

Here's how the path looks from lot-view:

You can see the gaps between the edges of lots (the "seams") in the second picture. Here's a breakdown of how they can look:

As most of us know, because of how terrain paint for lot imposters are generated, terrain paint of neighbouring lots never ends flush with the edge of the lot and always has this annoying gap. This is especially obvious when two lot imposters are next to each other.

Normally if you have two lots overlapping, their combined terrain paints will cause Z-fighting (annoying visual glitch whenever the screen moves). However, because you cannot see road tiles from the neighbourhood/another lot, you don't get Z-fighting on those tiles and can make the terrain paint look seamless between lots where one lot's "road" overlaps with another lot. This effect only hides seams from view within those specific lots though (so not from the neighbourhood or from other lots) and so has limited practicality, but it could be cool to try surrounding a park lot with overlapping "roads" using the LotAdjuster.

This was just a quick proof of concept test; my graphics are turned down so my terrain paint looks splotchy, I haven't added any other paint for depth and obviously the park needs actual landscaping. But it's pretty cool! I like how it makes my hood feel connected and walkable.

Started to describe this house I'm building as "three bedrooms and a study" because I didn't consider the study big enough to be a bedroom, then thought that was kind of a funny distinction when two of the "bedrooms" were so tiny and narrow they were only two tiles bigger than the "study" so now I'm curious:

Ranger's cabin 🏕️

I have looked so so so many times and I've always come up empty-handed. But is there a tutorial out there for how to make your own CEP-extra for a Maxis object that doesn't already have one

I do love that post about the TS2 modding community and how everything we built is on the bones of resources and knowledge that was shared with us freely and should be shared freely in return.

But

Lately I've been using floor tiles to put little graphics on top of lots with flat roofs so that they're visible from 'hood view. You don't really look at them during normal gameplay, so it doesn't break my immersion, and not only does it make the neighbourhood look cuter but it makes it easier to tell which lot is which at a glance.

It started with the smiley face on top of the mall, kind of inspired by Google Earth rooftop vandalism. Then sometimes shells are shaped like things, like La Rose de la Riviere, which highlights the cupid heart. There's a little fish on top of the aquarium, and two queens duking it out on top of my games store; Taro Card Boba has the bubble tea, and in addition to the sushi statues out the front, the sushi train has train tracks on the roof.

Sometimes stuff is only visible in lot view, as a little easter egg. This gym is supposed to be a llama; And the shape of the shell for Harestone Chateau reminded me of the Freezer Bunny, so there's some secret pixel art under the roof. (That's why it's called Harestone...)

It reminds me of playing games like Neopets or even Sim Town, where buildings were big and colourful and in wacky shapes, but without totally breaking my suspension of disbelief. Give it a try if you're sick of looking at flat boring roofs like I was!