These are all great! I especially love the salon and the greenhouse.

Ack, sorry, I forgot that for this board you don't need to put the link in quotes. Try it now.

Here's my attempt... I didn't move any of the trees. It's wanded to $58,049 and houses a family of four. I have all EPs & SPs. I actually added decorative items to the inside of the house this time, amazingly. It's not fully awesomespec, but you CAN lock both the kitchen and stairs to prevent visitors from wandering.

Exterior:





First floor:



Second floor:



Living room:



Kitchen (lockable!):



Upstairs main room:





Download HERE (right-click save-as).

I started building without moving the trees and it seems to me that might be TOO limiting because there are only a few places you can actually put walls there on the first floor without running into either a tree or a lot edge, so it seems like there's a more likely chance of everyone doing the same thing (at least on that floor). But of course since I said this I'll probably just end up eating my words when everyone does insanely different things.

I do also like the keeping-the-roof rule, IF you have to keep A roof there but not necessarily THAT roof.

But not both rules at the same time, of course. Unless you just want to torture yourself for fun.

I think that miserable little cabin should be done. The way it is, you can't even let ONE sim live there without problems. It's a completely ridiculous house.

Just imagine if the floor started convulsing from ticklishness while you walked across it!


Well, it wasn't bad compared to the NPC slowdown bug... at least I could still PLAY while this was happening.


Skin themselves to make horrifying floor coverings and then cover their pancakes in snow? Perhaps he wants to be sent to the asylum challenge lot. He would deserve the miserable death he would get there, too.


Hahaha, yes, parts of mine are covered in books too. I acquire them much faster than I can reasonably expand shelf space.


Sims 3 is likely to be so borked we will need to come up with a stronger word to describe the borkitude.


If that's directed at me, I don't pay for my downloads. Why are we talking about this?

This just happened to me around ten minutes ago, so I took some pictures and thought I'd share. For some unknown (to me) reason, the textures of everything in the house swapped around. Fun stuff like my sim's pajamas now as the kitchen floor, etc. It looked pretty ridiculous. I took lots of pictures.

So, first, here is how everything is SUPPOSED to look:







Then I switched floors, and when I came back, it had ALL gotten effed up:



It looks like he's covered in wires.



And when you zoom in, it looks totally different, and you can see that his pajamas and TORSO are on the floor.



And there are strange shadows on the wall... and what really bothers me is that they don't tile properly.



The entryway now appears to be carpeted in the front porch, complete with newspaper.



Meanwhile, the living room now is covered in his head. It's kind of creepy.



The education bookshelf of glory is now covered in the kitchen wallpaper + some stripes.



While the book textures have migrated themselves to the nursery floor.



And perhaps the back porch, though I can't really tell because of the snow.



Windows are totally fucked up too, look:



All in all, an utter disaster.



Fortunately the batbox fixed it. (You can see it there in that last picture, covered in snow and just waiting to be used.)

Alright, here's my entry. I have all the EPs and all the SPs except M&G. $48,796, depreciated with the magic wand.

I somewhat idiotically accidentally included some flowers by HystericalParoxysm, but those can be gutted with the clean installer (though it WILL make the house less pretty). Later I'll try to come back and post a clean version. Loosely conforms to awesomespec (well, not quite, but it's close) and there's room for expansion upwards. It can easily fit up to six sims, but you'll have to start building if you want more.



I suck at landscaping, sorry.









The offending flowers:





You can easily wall off the refrigerator area of the kitchen to create a separate kitchen and nursery or to allow only Cooking Sim access to the kitchen.



Download here! (right-click, save-as)

I can't stand stealth stairs but I also can't stand the normal stairs... I just use Targa's elevators. Cheaty, but I don't want to have to either wait forty minutes for my sims to walk up and down huge effing staircases that block my view OR do complicated buildy things in order for them to be able to get from level to level easily.

Up until very recently I had a Nvidia Geforce 5500 which was, despite all expectations, working quite well for me. About a week ago, parts of it went splodey. I mean, some of the little black plastic rectangle things were blown almost off and some of the cylindrical things had burst open. Obvs, it does not work.

I am getting a new graphics card tomorrow. It will be going into a five year old computer but I'll be building a new one around Christmas, so I was hoping to have one I could use for both. Will this make a difference in what I'm looking for? Regardless, does anyone have advice on what to get?

You know, at first I thought this post would be talking about how toddler sims will eat the food from the pet food bowl if they aren't properly locked away. I didn't realize this until recently when I had a toddler that was kept in the main room (to be fair, these sims were so poor that there was no room BUT the main room*, with sleeping areas separated by those floor divider things) who kept crawling over and eating all the dog food. It got so annoying that I had them sell half their furniture so they could afford some walls and a door to lock the kid away until it grew up. 

*Okay, and bathroom.

So it's not even that each birth has a 50% chance of being male and a 50% chance of being female? That would seem to be the logical way to do it. Maxis must have been overthinking and trying to figure out how to balance out a profusion of CAS sims of a single gender, or something, to make the game more "real," which ironically resulted in less realness. Typical.

This makes me wonder if KnightSkyeKyte uses the pregnancy-for-all mod and if all her sims' spawn are female.

So, wait, if I'm reading this correctly, merely the act of exiting and re-entering a lot, even if you have not rolled the lot debugger or random sims in CAS, is enough to cause the number generator to skip minimally ahead in its sadorandomistic sequence? How would exiting and re-entering multiple times be preferable to lot debuggery or rolling with the CAS homies?

And is in fact beneficial if your sim kid didn't maximize charisma as a toddler, right?

Mine are definitely NOT sorted by price... that's how it was in Sims 1, but I've never had that in Sims 2. I wish they were, though. It'd be handy so I didn't pick out $15 walls for my poor sims...

My walls and floors don't seem to be sorted in any intelligible manner. And it changes every time I install an EP or Stuff pack, so by the time I've gotten used to one non-order the game invents a new one. I think it hates me. 

 

That's a LOT of eyes. I have 19, and I find them to be too many!

Stuff face/food prep congestion is why you lock your kitchen to all sims except Cooking Sim. OFB's lockable doors or APO are best for this, but University's Myne doors will work in a pinch. I'm not sure if they can quickly be reassigned to another sim though, which could be dangerous if Cooking Sim is off lot when someone's hunger drops to near-starvation levels. However, if you have progressed past the first generation, there is probably no need for Cooking Sim to hold a job and thus no need for Cooking Sim to be off lot, which is, in point of fact, why Cooking Sim IS Cooking Sim. Locking the kitchen has other benefits too, such as fewer fires and, if you don't use the hack that makes them stop eating when they're full, fewer fat sims.

I have no idea what's up with the sims standing by their food to wait. This never happens in my game. Usually one sim has blasted halfway through his meal before another even approaches the food, which is sad because I like for them to talk as they eat. It also seems to me that my sims no longer will continue sitting and chatting until everyone is done (which they used to do as long as there weren't any actions waiting in the queue) and instead will leap up to wash their dish immediately, even if they're still needing comfort or social points.

I like that it has the word "comfort" in the title. Exactly what your sims will NOT be getting. Still, it looks nice.

Do Inge's reservable easels count as Awesome?

Oh my god... Those jagged walls. Think how long it must have taken to make those!

I don't like to use a lot of custom meshes because I feel like it slows down the loading of my game and it's annoying to have seventy katrillion meshes of almost the same thing... so I mainly stick to Maxis meshes. It's somewhat difficult for me to find good clothes that use the Maxis meshes, though. My main source is Hairfish's Mermaid Cove. I can't seem to find any more sites that have good recolors/re-textures of the maxis meshes, so I was wondering if anyone knew of other sites with a decent selection.

This may be a stupid question, but ...

I know the lots aren't backwards-compatible, ie a lot made in Seasons will not work in the base/Uni/NL/OFB/Pets, but are they, uh, forward-compatible? If I have all the expansion packs, will a house packaged in just the base game (or the base game + any number of expansions that does not include the latest one) work? I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that this was not the case. Can someone clarify?

Oh, wow, I didn't know that's what "walla" was supposed to mean. I just thought it was some strange redneck thing I wasn't familiar with. Huh. Good to know, I suppose.

So if you have just one sim, you have -1 bathrooms? This is not logical.