I love that fountain. My dorms tend to be palatial, and generally feature at least one. Sometimes inside in the foyer. Prettttty...

I used to do a lot of split levels and basements before we got the inside stage (Pets?). I don't like how high the stage tool makes the raised area as everything looks scrunched, and doing it the old fashioned way with liberal use of the constrain cheat generally looks better, but lighting can be a problem. Basements....eh. When I first got the game almost every lot had a basement because I'm from the midwest and the thought of a house without a basement is just...weird. However, camera angles can be difficult with basements unless you design it so that the basement can be a walk-out and then basically sit the camera in one direction. Personal taste, I guess, but I use the foundation for hiding cheat objects like the debugger, sim modder baby, and pet baby-maker (pre Lonny Lon, the neighborhood mime who lives in a telephone booth and seems oddly linked to the growing grilled cheese zombie epidemic).

Again, maybe it's a midwestern thing, but people hanging out on their front porch looks trashy to me. Front porches are used only for design, and generally are only about 2 squares deep and hold no objects.

Generally I do a revised carport as they take less room and look more modern. They are mostly covered and form a C around the driveway. But then usually my simmies don't get a car. If I can't have one, neither can they.

Same here. I'm tending towards single-level adobes

and multi-level Californian type homes.

 Mostly flat roofs, sometimes multi-level decorative flat roofing, or at the most I'll do a 25 degree roof. My college (University Land) is kind of a weird traditional-modern hybrid (I'm not sure of the actual style name) like this:

Sheesh, I adore that dorm.

Actually, growing up, we always had our treadmill in the livingroom. 

As my spin on my current near-endless challenge has me building a new home, community lot, and college lot (dorm, townhouse, or fake class building) every generation, I've had tons and tons of building experience lately. I absolutely love it, and it's been forcing me out of the rut of having every house be basically the same set up. My current home (a behemoth and quite pricey due to the need to spend the family's accumulating cash) has a library downstairs complete with the One Desk (I normally make them go deskless), a grand piano, and a fireside nook for reading. The kitchen is actually upstairs and is accessible by stairs outside the home and an internal set in the hall. There's also a wrap-around upper deck that goes around approximately half the house, and the necessary hidden garbage can that can still be used but no knocked down.

Huge pools are a staple in my dorms. I love seeing simmies run around screaming in their swimsuits during a fire:

A few new townie/NPC spawn from the templates:

The middle one is actually Dorothy, part of my Alphabet Challenge, and the accidentally-adopted-by-the-neighborhood-mime-instead-of-a-poodle girl. Unfortunately her first baby got great-grampa's eyes.

On my old laptop, load time for the game was at least a half hour. I had no custom content whatsoever. It wasn't until I got this computer that I learned that those pretty cinematics shown in the credits actually existed in-game, and that mirrors could show reflections.

Yeah, I use Enayla defaults posted by MissSimGameFan at MTS2 and the other geneticized skin tones of hers that are here posted by dewshine.

As for linuslover, it was Magnus that the template apparently looks like. It should be noted that linuslover contacted me first, we talked, and he didn't feel the template was stolen. I offered to change it out with another and he said not to bother. What's even more funny is that I double-checked through my sim files....template #2 is actually Christopher Test, child of Chuck & Saish, my traditional sim "first family".

Some of them, yes. As a general rule, I prefer Grilled Cheese Zombification for any Romance sims who defy the Oversoul by becoming romantic interests of my playables. For sims who have more children than decreed, random death methods are used but any deaths from the sky are preferrable. Drowning and starving takes too long. Weird-ass furniture and elevators are my tool for psychosis-creation.

These files were originally posted on MTS2. However, I was accused of sim theft for template #2, despite the fact that I had never downloaded the sim in question. As such, they were removed and I will no longer be uploading anything there. (Bitter? Me? Never! I love spending three days of effort just to be accused of theft!)

With Enayla's skintones:

Without Enayla's skintones:

Faces available at 4shared.com: http://www.4shared.com/dir/2710440/c8824f7a/sharing.html

This is a complete set of CAS face replacements which consists of all 27 templates for all ages. All templates have been tested in-game and are ensured to look consistent between genders and age groups. Template set can be used as a whole or you can choose single replacements if you like. The picture above is the templates shown in numerical order (so 1-9 on row 1, 10-18 on row 2, 19-27 on row 3).

I prefer larger eyes in my sims, so you will notice that most of these templates have larger eyes than the norm. None of these faces were based in any way on the Maxis defaults. Instead, the vast majority are my born-in-game sims from the past two years and a few completely new constructs. I have tried to ensure a great deal of variety while keeping your townies from looking ugly.

To install:
- Download both .rar files for the complete set.
- Extract them into your Downloads folder. These faces are in subfolders for easier use. However, any players with just the base game or base + Uni will need to manually remove the files from the subfolders and put into the Download folder willy-nilly. Blame Maxis.
- Delete these three files:  My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/cigen.package ,  My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Thumbnails/CASThumbnails.package  and  My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/groups.cache  to ensure that the new faces' thumbnails will display in Bodyshop and CAS.
- Any new townies generated in-game will use the new templates (existing sims will stay the same). You will also be able to use them in CAS/Bodyshop. Hooray!

To remove:
- Delete included files in your Downloads folder (if you had to dump them willy-nilly, it may be easier to search for file names containing  facefile ).
- Delete these three files:  My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/cigen.package ,  My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Thumbnails/CASThumbnails.package  and  My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/groups.cache  to ensure that the old faces' thumbnails will display in Bodyshop and CAS.
- Congratulations. Goopy and Brandon Lillard-clones will now be created again.

Credits:
AlienABQ for his helpful base templates
Motoki over at More Awesome than You for the tutorial

Other sets:
AllenABQ's faces
AmberDiceless' faces
DocDoofus' faces
Nailati's faces
Oepu's faces
Sarakadie's faces
Selzi's faces
Terrakosmos' faces

One nasty-looking toddler was created during the creation of these templates:

She has been released into the wild.

Copy policy:
Don't. Use 'em wherever you want, and feel free to make sims for download from them (except for #2...while I did not steal this sim, it apparently is very close to one by linuslover and you would be best not publicising a sim based on the template to avoid your own set of accusations), just don't package as a face replacement and say you made them. Easy, right?

I have the Enayla default replacements for the base four, then most of the "normal" additional geneticized skintones by her from the thread here in Peasantry. A couple of those "normal" ones have an odd tint to me, so I trashed them, but I have sixteen being used. Plus, I have a default replacement for plantsims even though I don't have any plantsims. I also have default replacement eyes. I couldn't find a default replacement vampire/werewolf eye I liked, so I have a contact set instead for that.

Maxis crap is blah, that's why I couldn't ever share any of my lots as-is unless I could find a site that would let me say "except for the wall placement, none of it is mine. Enjoy."

I don't really do fantasy sims that much. I have one very small family where the elf gene rears it's head whenever a child is born with the founder's lavender eyes, and of course one mentally unstable sim who thinks she's a fairy princess.

Celebrations?

I have all the jerked-over LS stuff and I don't have that table.

The Gilscarbo chick could also just be a randomly generated townie, unless you downloaded Jordi's name hack (can't give enough thanks for that one). The game only uses a limited number of weird first & last names.

I have that toilet! I don't use it much because the profile is too low and...well...it's odd. Only fits in a few houses.

You swallowed the entire Director's Cut? Really? Huh.

Other than that, sounds good. I would have replaced all Maxis neighborhoods with SaraMK's super neighborhood (Pleasantville with Veronaville & Strangetown as downtowns) but that's personal preference.

Mine did that too (stating the files got bigger). One went from 24 to 1700 kb. I chalk it up to the program getting confused, because the file definitely shrank afterwards.  As for re-compressing, it's fine. I did that by accident on a couple folders and it just ran through them again and didn't make a change to them.

Your scenario makes sense, of course. However, these were different gardens with one sprinkler only. One garden had the smallest and was a three-plotter. The other had the largest and was a nine-plotter.

All of them? You'll have an objects package for the base game, plus one for each EP. Bloat.

Used the tool today and cut my Downloads from 2.68 gigs to 1.33 gigs. I compressed all but my hacks and face templates. Have entered and played three different lots and have had no issues whatsoever. Game load time is down slightly, from approximately 6-7 minutes to about 5.

A few Maxis sims and a bunch of badly designed Maxis lots. Any suburbs past one university and one downtown are superflous. If you need more game-generated townies for a challenge, adding a Uni works. Other than that, the only purpose for an additional Uni or downtown or any shopping district is to have extra room for more lots. Home businesses and playable-owned community lots can be present in both the main neighborhood and downtown.

All of my sim-painted custom paintings are in-game images. Sometimes I tweak them a bit. As for bedding, unfortunately most of mine is from TSR. (gag)

Ah, original included no quotes, hence EALink got a little action from me last night, though I did do the whole cracked .exe thing again. I only would "acquire" a SP, and so far none have had any actual content to make me even want to do that.

Yup. Even when you give the ingrates a free pass.

I suspect that the largest sprinkler (360) breaks down a lot less than the smaller ones. I kept thinking that I was having less sprinkler repairs on my nine-plotter than my initial three-plotter back when I was doing gardens, but I haven't done a garden recently and haven't taken good notes on them. I suppose the repair rate is in the programming of the item, but SimPE and I are barely on speaking terms at the moment due to the fact that it didn't know how to compensate for my own idiocy during face template creation.

That doesn't make sense. The hood can't exist without the terrain file, I believe. Can you list which files you see?

*resolves to acquire Life Stories soon*

My one hottub death was one of two possible husbands for a sim I was playing at the time. He was fried and she successfully pleaded for his life. However, I had her marry the other option since Shock Boy was apparently dumber than the average sim. That's bad.