I think there's a cheat--haven't tried it myself but I've noticed that the Downtown houses have low roofs. Go to the cheats window with ctrl-shift-c and type help. You should get a list of the cheats. I think one of them is for setting the roof angle. Actually, Jake, I was here assuming that you had Nightlife. I don't think I saw that cheat before I installed the Nightlife expansion pack.
I played a little with the cheat last night in my marathon house building. The cheat is = roofslopeangle (25-75) 25 is almost totally flat and looks suitable for a moblie home (Yay! Glad I found that!) and 75 is a very high-pitch. I settled on 45 and got a semi-sloped, medium looking height for my little starter home. And yes, you must have Nightlife installed for it to work.
You can actually use from 15 to 75 degrees. 45 degrees is what it is normally. I've used the roof slope a lot, but mostly to flatten or shorten roofs. If you try to put a gable roof on a large house, it just gets so tall that it looks silly. I'd save that for chalet types of houses. Now if they'd just let us use a combination of 15 (for a porch roof in the shed style) and 45 (for a narrow gable), it would be lovely. For one thing, then you could finally do a gambrel (barn style) roof, which has the 45 for part of the gable part of the roof but a steeper part on the sides. That way we could do Dutch Colonial style houses and some of the "farm" style houses that need that gambrel roof style. And I wish we could change the dormers so that they would work when your roof is shorter.
I wish. That's why I can't reproduce my own house. It has one of those Dutch Colonial roofs. I've been thinking I might just shingle the second floor of a house to sort of suggest that style but I suspect it would look bad. Maybe with the next EP ...
Lynet, I have NL, I just didnt know that you could see all the cheats by typing help. Knew about the motherlode and aging on/off. Thanks though
Ditto on combining multiple roof slopes... and I have another roof gripe. We can do so many things on the diagonal now... diagonal foundations, doors and windows on diagnonal walls, and rotating objects 45 degrees... but no diagnonal roofs! What I mean is, you build a diagonal section on a house, or even build a whole house diagonally on a street corner, and you can't make the roof go in the same direction as the house. Instead you have to stick sections of straight roof on it, and it ends up looking really bad. Maxis, what's up with this major oversight?!
I doubt it was by oversight. Most likely it's because roofs are a pain to program, so they didn't add that ("this time".) I too hope that someday we'll be able to have diagonal roofs. But then I also want curved walls and roofs someday too. And bay windows (like we had in TS1!)
I, too, would like to be able to use multiple pitches on the one house. My other gripe with that particular cheat is that when you use it, the roof just looks squashed or stretched, you know? Quite similar to how the stretch skeleton cheat makes sims look all out of proportion, rather than actually taller or shorter.
