Just how the hell many pictures do you have to acquire on vacay...
sloppyhousewife:
Quote from: Gwill on 2007 December 07, 09:52:27
You can fulfill the memory with just one photo, but then it will be delivered as just one framed photo. If you have two pictures you get an album of sorts.
IIRC, you have to explicitely send pictures to the "album bar" on the right to get an album. I've never tried to order more than one framed photo at a time, though.
Do you really get the memory with just a photo?
cwykes:
Does this give us a way to organise photo's in game or can you only use it for holiday snaps?
Some of my albums are huge and it would be nice to divide into sub-albums in game rather than messing around with dummy houses to store earlier chapters of a story.
doren:
Quote from: cwykes on 2007 December 07, 11:30:31
Does this give us a way to organise photo's in game or can you only use it for holiday snaps?
Some of my albums are huge and it would be nice to divide into sub-albums in game rather than messing around with dummy houses to store earlier chapters of a story.
No, it does not really work for sub-albums. I am using the Album Editor ("Sim Album", I can't look up the proper name because I am at work) from MTS to edit and store stories. It is a very handy program if you are writing a lot and want to make the stories available to friends without putting them on a homepage or the official sims site.
I had the same problem with some of the stories being 60 pages long (html with 6 pictures on each page). All you have to do is to store the previous .xml in another folder and then replace the one in the game with an (empty or almost empty) backup copy if available. Otherwise you have to delete the pictures from the story one by one. You can always edit the previous stories with SimAlbum even if you don't have them in the game anymore. It is more cumbersome, but it works.
Zazazu:
Quote from: cwykes on 2007 December 07, 11:30:31
Some of my albums are huge and it would be nice to divide into sub-albums in game rather than messing around with dummy houses to store earlier chapters of a story.
Quoting myself, from BoolProp. This is how I organize things, and it works really, really well for my story telling style.
Quote from: Zazazu
Well, what I do may be a bit too technical and it takes a bit more prepwork, but I like it better than having a dummy sim. Let's see if I can post clearly.
First off, you need two programs. One is SimPE. If you have BV, you'll need the QA version as it's not updated yet. This is available at MATY until the official is out. As always with SimPE, be careful what you change and follow directions closely. You'll also need the Storybook Viewer, which really is an essential for storywriting anyways.
Now the nitty-gritty. Whenever you move a sim over to college or out on their own for a bit, your game considers this a new household and generates a weblog (story file) for that household. If you send an heir to college the first generation, you already have an unused story file floating about in the ether, lonely and unused. Why not give it a purpose? Open up the Storybook Viewer, then click on the open folder icon to open a file. You'll need to bring up your MyDocuments/EA Games/Sims2/Neighborhood00X/Storytelling folder (Neighborhood00X is a wildcard for whichever 'hood number the 'hood you are playing in is). Now you'll see a whole bunch of garbled number-string file names starting with "weblog". Open one. Is it blank? Lovely. Write down the name of this file on your handy-dandy notepad. If the first one wasn't blank, keep opening weblogs until you find a blank one.
Now close the Storybook Viewer. Open up SimPE. On the top menu bar, on the far right, you'll see an icon that shows a bunch of little figures and says "Neighborhood Browser" on mouse-over. Click it. Pick your 'hood, then "Load" (or Start, I'm away from my game computer). Wait 10 years. Once it's done loading, look on the right side below the menu bars. There's a whole bunch of sorts listed for each file type in your 'hood. Click on the "Family Information" file tab. You'll see a list of your families come up on the left. Click on the last name of the family you are wanting to change the album for. (Note: If I'm recalling incorrectly, it may be in the Lot Info file section instead.) Verify that you have the right family by looking over the individual sim names listed. You should see a field called "Album" that lists a string of numbers very much like what you just saw. Change that to the number of the new blank weblog, entering just the portion you see shown (it's like x9F295G9). Save on the left side above the pane, save on the top right corner.
Shut down SimPE. Go into your game. Load the family. Fresh new album right there on the lot you are playing, and you don't have to go in and out of the lot/game to write your story. All the pictures you take in the lot will be right there organized in reverse order as per usual. The original album is still in your files, just floating in the ether. Your old photos are still available for use by clicking on the + icon. You can link the old album back the same way you just changed everything above if you ever need to.
What I'm wondering, and am planning on trying on my test account, is if you can't just wipe the album reference in SimPE and the game will create a new one.
Anyways, with Building Merivale Ridge, Chapter 3, I'm doing sub-albums because I'm running a prosperity/legacy thing. I have all the spare houses set to reference the same album so that I can take pics and write on the lot. Otherwise I get behind, get annoyed with writing, don't do it, then lose interest in the family because I don't feel like I have a goal. And with Dark Side of the Moon...it's an apocalypse. There aren't any other homes and I don't want any other homes because the zombie/sim ratio needs to be kept high.
doren:
Quote from: Zazazu on 2007 December 07, 16:25:47
Quote from: cwykes on 2007 December 07, 11:30:31
Some of my albums are huge and it would be nice to divide into sub-albums in game rather than messing around with dummy houses to store earlier chapters of a story.
Quoting myself, from BoolProp. This is how I organize things, and it works really, really well for my story telling style.
Quote from: Zazazu
Well, what I do may be a bit too technical and it takes a bit more prepwork, but I like it better than having a dummy sim. Let's see if I can post clearly.
First off, you need two programs. One is SimPE. If you have BV, you'll need the QA version as it's not updated yet. This is available at MATY until the official is out. As always with SimPE, be careful what you change and follow directions closely. You'll also need the Storybook Viewer, which really is an essential for storywriting anyways.
Now the nitty-gritty. Whenever you move a sim over to college or out on their own for a bit, your game considers this a new household and generates a weblog (story file) for that household. If you send an heir to college the first generation, you already have an unused story file floating about in the ether, lonely and unused. Why not give it a purpose? Open up the Storybook Viewer, then click on the open folder icon to open a file. You'll need to bring up your MyDocuments/EA Games/Sims2/Neighborhood00X/Storytelling folder (Neighborhood00X is a wildcard for whichever 'hood number the 'hood you are playing in is). Now you'll see a whole bunch of garbled number-string file names starting with "weblog". Open one. Is it blank? Lovely. Write down the name of this file on your handy-dandy notepad. If the first one wasn't blank, keep opening weblogs until you find a blank one.
Now close the Storybook Viewer. Open up SimPE. On the top menu bar, on the far right, you'll see an icon that shows a bunch of little figures and says "Neighborhood Browser" on mouse-over. Click it. Pick your 'hood, then "Load" (or Start, I'm away from my game computer). Wait 10 years. Once it's done loading, look on the right side below the menu bars. There's a whole bunch of sorts listed for each file type in your 'hood. Click on the "Family Information" file tab. You'll see a list of your families come up on the left. Click on the last name of the family you are wanting to change the album for. (Note: If I'm recalling incorrectly, it may be in the Lot Info file section instead.) Verify that you have the right family by looking over the individual sim names listed. You should see a field called "Album" that lists a string of numbers very much like what you just saw. Change that to the number of the new blank weblog, entering just the portion you see shown (it's like x9F295G9). Save on the left side above the pane, save on the top right corner.
Shut down SimPE. Go into your game. Load the family. Fresh new album right there on the lot you are playing, and you don't have to go in and out of the lot/game to write your story. All the pictures you take in the lot will be right there organized in reverse order as per usual. The original album is still in your files, just floating in the ether. Your old photos are still available for use by clicking on the + icon. You can link the old album back the same way you just changed everything above if you ever need to.
What I'm wondering, and am planning on trying on my test account, is if you can't just wipe the album reference in SimPE and the game will create a new one.
Storybook Viewer. That's the one I meant, but the Transamerican link does not work anymore, so the program is only available at MTS.
What you do with SimPE sounds unnecessary complicated to me (and I am also using the story files from college). What is the advantage? You can not edit the original/first album in-game anymore, so why not simply overwrite it (after saving a copy of it in a different folder)? Overwriting the .xml file does not result in loss of the pictures, so I don't understand what you are gaining with this method.
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