Thanks, I fought my way through several tutorial on the exchange and TSR before getting the hang of basement garages, wall heights and how to get CFE to do what I wanted. The house is playtesting nicely so far but I really miss my Holy Simoly and Sims 2 Life custom content.

Just thinking aloud here... 3 destinations = 3 new sub-hoods = triple the NPC/townie spam.

New NPC type(s) will be introduced with borked DNA. Your game will collapse in a BFBVFS if one of your simmies romances one of said NPCs and brings them back to their home hood.

You are forced to play your vacation in its entirety as the save outside your home hood facility will be broken resulting in loss of precious sims.

You leave the rugrats at home in the care of a nanny who promptly disappears as you're not at work. Return home to find nasty note from social worker and no rugrats. Social worker returns an hour later to claim any children that were on vacation with you.

Most vacation activities take place outside, which is likely to prove fatal in combination with Seasons weather. Tents will attract lightning like moths to a flame and will not provide any protection from the elements so expect lots of frozen/overheated sims.

That was hideous! I think one if my biggest problems with lots like that is the creators slap them down, bang in the middle of nice green countryside. It probably wouldn't look quite so bad (from the outside anyway) if it was in some space-age neighbourhood with appropriate terrain paint and decorations. Unfortunately the interior has no redeeming features and I can still feel the after-image burned onto my retinas.

Here is my offering for the contest. I've got all the EPs, FFS and Glamour stuff packs sop it's likely I've used bits of Maxis content from all. Not using CC was so hard it hurt... trying to build something aesthetically pleasing using the stuff that ships with the game is painful. I often play with big families (think mad scientist with little simmie fruit flies) so have evolved building a style of house capable of coping with large numbers of sims (thanks to Jordi's hack).

It's a modern styled, full furnished, 3x3 lot. Cost 155,431

The main entrance is on the front of the building, only a short distance from the pavement. There is also a basement garage with internal access to the ground floor via stairs. Keen gardeners will be pleased to know that situated to the right of the house are a small orchard (1 apple, 1 lemon, 1 orange tree) and a greenhouse with room to grow 11 plants. Behind the greenhouse is a fenced off area with a small fishing pond and access via stairs to a barbecue area.







On the upper floor there is a master bedroom with en-suite bathroom and a twin bedroom. Here we also have an entertainment area (pool table/stereo) which would make a suitable skilling area in the future. A double door leads out a balcony area where your simmies can stargaze in the hope of abduction. The stairs to the upper floor are centrally located for easy access from the ground floor.



The ground floor is where most things happen. The main entrance leads into a large study area (for quick dumping of homework) and there are two bathrooms on the right. Opposite the bathrooms are the two spawn containment chambers, allowing for separation of the just-spawned from their larger brethern. The study leads through a double arch to the lounge area with a plasma screen tv, bookcase and chessboard. From the lounge you can access the garage (via stairs) and the upper floor. There is a door leading to the kitchen, double door to a raised patio/barbecue area and double archway to the pool/sauna room for that all important safe hot tub ACR action when running Seasons. The dining room seats 8 with 2 doors to the kitchen. The kitchen itself comes with top quality appliances and work surfaces.



The basement has a single garage with access via stairs to the lounge on the first (ground) floor. There are also a series of external steps from basement level to the front door.



The decor reflects the architectural style; simple and modern. Wooden floors and natural carpets are used throughout the living areas and bathroom floors are tiled. Wall decoration is simple yet elegant with judicious use of white wall tiles in wet areas (bathroom, kitchen, pool/sauna). A neutral gray flagstone has been employed inside and out. Paintings, wall decorations, rugs and pictures are located around the house. I have used some Maxis curtains (even though I hate them above all other Maxis content) and expect any sensible peeps who install this to replace those ASAP.



Should future expansion require it, you could easily knock off the roof above the study/bathroom/spawn containment areas and gain second floor space for several rooms. Roof angle is set to 25 degrees.

My bribe: I'm happy to offer a lot of your choice and type though I am more experienced at building residential and dorm lots. With this offer I will also include custom floor/wall coverings of your choice.

Pescado's phonehack has very generously added itself to the sims2pack file so please use the Sims2Pack clean installer.

It sounds like you've downloaded an outfit that uses a mesh from Warlokk's Hi-Res female bodyshape set - you can find these on SexySims http://www.sexysims2.com/showthread.php?t=166584. If you want to keep the outfit install the correct mesh - there's a full set of instructions on how to do this. I sort of think of the Warlokk meshes as the female equivalent of CrammyBoys's cock hack in that they have proper nipples etc.

Perhaps the warm-up interaction is relationship based and has minimum daily/lifetime requirements. Maxis EA seem to favour applying that sort of logic to other interactions. I suppose it could also conceivably be based on personality, perhaps there is a 'good samaritan' personality that is more likely to whip out a hairdrier for the benefit of strangers.

That haystack bed looks like some unholy hybrid of Weetabix and a Shredded Wheat that's been left to moulder in a cereal bowl. Bleh! I think I'll stick to toast tomorrow morning.

Witch: I had to direct the friend to warm the frozen sim up... the option appears when you click on the frozen sim. He got sent to bed with a warming hot chocolate after he woke, despite being near death and wanting to do some other outdoor activity. Sometimes I think they crossed humans with lemmings to get sims.

Mine seem to like stargazing in the nude, usually straight after having a shower, but no lightning strikes yet. One of them froze solid last night for the first time which was amusing for all of seconds before I realised his needs were dropping almost as fast as sim on fire. Fortunately a friend was on hand with a hairdrier.
In a similar attack of sadorandomness I've never managed to turn anyone into a plantsim yet, despite many gold gardening talent badges and lots of bug spraying by the sims.

The clip distance will be the furthest distance that anything is drawn, at the far limits this is likely to only be terrain. It sounds like EA have (sensibly) categorised neighbourhood decorations by type, the expectation being that there will be far fewer 'unique' items like you mentioned so the game can afford to render them further in the distance. The great temptation with trees is for designers to chuck as many of them on a terrain as possible as they look pretty, however this can easily cripple frame rate. As we now have weather/seasons in the Seasons neighbourhood view I'd guess that EA made a performance trade-off between the amount of trees they draw on screen and having pretty weather effects. As it appears that trees are categorised separately I'd do some searching for command line options along those lines, maybe look on some of the SC4 boards (assuming the two games share more than just the terrain file format).

JM: I'll take a look at Authorized Personnel - I should have known that you would have done something along these lines already. I suppose the mini-sims will then bleat about not being able to get to it.

Emma: It's more the belching and irritating giggling that annoys. For me the ka-ching isn't too bad, at least they're earning money while being annoying.

I suppose it does cheer them up enough to do their homework and as long as I don't have to be in the same room as them I can live with it. I haven't bothered to check but does the 'adult annoyed with child' interaction impact on the adult-child daily relationship in any way?

In some ways an addition to the door locking system to include age filtering would be nice then you could bar toddlers, kids or even teens from certain rooms (like the one with the teleprompter in) on a you have to have reached a certain age group to be admitted basis.

I have TwoJeff's TeleprompterNoAutoplay hack as the combination of sim kids and the teleprompter is too much to bear. I've looked and can't find an equivalent for the Law career reward. Have I just missed it through stupidity/blindness? Or do I have to look elsewhere to find one? The TeleprompterNoAutoplay hack is dated 12/02/2005 so is fairly old.

assuming you want to multiply 2 euler rotation values a, b and return a new value c
assume typedef euler (float x; float y; float z; float w)

float t0 = (a->z - a->y) * (b->y - b->z)
float t1 = (a->w + a->x) * (b->w + b->x)
float t2 = (a->w - a->x) * (b->y + b->z)
float t3 = (a->z + a->y) * (b->w - b->x)
float t4 = (a->z - a->x) * (b->x - b->y)
float t5 = (a->z + a->x) * (b->x + b->y)
float t6 = (a->w + a->y) * (b->w - b->z)
float t7 = (a->w - a->y) * (b->w + b->z)
float t8 = t5 + t6 + t7
float t9 = (t4 + t8) * 0.5

c->w = t0 + t9 - t5
c->x = t1 + t9 - t8
c->y = t2 + t9 - t7
c->z = t3 + t9 - t6

My guess is that you have to know the parent joint hierarchy and apply the default position parent joint(s) rotation(s) in order for every child joint. I don't know the exact joint naming conventions for sims2 but for example to set an ankle rotation you would have to first apply a waist->hip->knee resting rotation first and in that order.

There's a simpler explanation than time paradox... the whole mesh has been created as a single group and tagged as alpha which means that the polys are not distance sorted w.r.t. each other when rendered in game. End result is that bits of the shape can and will be drawn in the wrong order and this will change dynamically with the camera viewing position. The creator should have created the mesh with 2 groups, one for the curtains tagged as alpha and the rest of the bed (base, covers, frame) in the other group which would only need on/off transparency at most.

I did a stupid thing and forgot to clean out the Riverblossom crud before starting my alphabet legacy challenge so I've got the two families in my sim bin. Irritating but not a problem as I was planning on just putting them in a lot and aging them through to old age and visit from grimmie. However, I got distracted by playing with my simmies and forgot all about them until Samantha Ottomas came back from work one day and the ACR controller tells me she's pregnant by one of my replacement pollination technicians. Does that mean she will pop out a couple of half-alien sprogs? If so, I'm kind of tempted to keep her around.

I vote for the big bang, complete with fireworks, and replace it with something new and shiny.

I've never made it beyond a completed 10-generation legacy yet, though I'm now inflicting an alphabet legacy on myself complete with a smattering of MATY townies... as Pescado had a 3-bolt attraction with the legacy founder the place will be overrun with them by the end of it.

I forgot all about the eyes, I've got Alkaloid's geneticised eyes in game, but for default replacements I use Amun-RA's v7.5 eyes from Insim:
http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=21918
I think the alien eyes are the best I've seen.

I use Hairy "Warlokk compatible" Louis skins from Jwilson5 on SexySims2 and SpookyMuffin's default zombie replacement from the same site. Jwilson5 has since added a new default plantsim skin, so I shall be replacing that today. In addition I have the geneticised Enlaya skins courtesy of dewshine (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7230.0.html). I also use replacement pollination technicians and a replacement 'daddy' plantsim from MTS2 to avoid offspring having butt ugly meshes to drape my pretty replacement default skins across.

That's a very loaded question as it's all down to personal taste; I tend to go for modern patterns/designs in bedding and something similar for paintings.

I've got a lot of flipchick74 bedding from MTS2 - looks great and works both on double/single beds. I've also got quite a bit of bedding from TSR, Waverley's bedroom accents coordinating sets are good.

I haven't bothered much with the painting folder as yet as I tend to stick with the buyable paintings in game and sell sim paintings for all those 'Sell a Masterpiece' wants. I tend to use digital images of my own work (painting/photograph) and manipulate them with Photoshop. As an alternative have a look at some of the websites which sell digital prints and save some images from them. Museum/gallery websites are also a good source.

I thought I might as well share what I do use in the way of buyable art as it's taken a long time to find good quality paintings that look right in game.
There are tons of recolours of one of the Mango Sims paintings (http://mangosims2.free.fr/meubles.htm for the mesh) at Bines Sims Revue (http://www.binessimsrevue.de) as well as some good Maxis recolours. To locate the paintings click on Objects under the Sims2 menu section on the left, then click on Bines Recolours then paintings. Sims2Play (http://sims-2.gameslife.ru) are another good source of paintings and Holy Simoly also have a couple (http://www.holysimoly.com).

I've put my hot tub inside a greenhouse on my legacy lot with some paving and vegetables growing around the edges. It looks pretty as well as functional and my sims seem to be safe from lightning so far.

Ah, thanks, that would explain it as the storm lasted for ages (by sim standards) and there was a fair bit of lightning. Are gravestones high up the group of items that lightning can hit? Assuming that it isn't all equal chance. There really isn't anything much else outside on this lot apart from 3 fruit trees and a car. Does that also mean the gravestone can be destroyed, given that lightning can kill sims? If so, I may need to consider mausoleums.

Well not exactly... but the one and only ghost on my nice, new, shiny alphabet legacy lot decided to make an appearance during a heavy rainstorm in the middle of the day in summer. Is this normal ghost behaviour? Or is something borked already? I've only being playing long enough to produce generation 'B', so I'm hoping it's the former.

I tend to go for open plan kitchen-diners with six chairs around the table. If it's a big family type house then I'll use an 8-seater table. In fact I tend to go for a quasi-open plan layout throughout the main living area. Double arches seem to be the best way to enable sims to move around freely. The study has to be close to the main entrance for dropping off homework and I make sure there's plenty space in it for lots of studious offspring. A downstairs toilet is a must as is a nursery and bathroom with bath for bathing toddlers. I never put baths on other floors and tend to favour 2x2 shower/toilet rooms as they're easy to fit in and fulfil the sims basic hygiene requirments. I've started using basement garages on smaller lots; once you get the hang of building them it only takes a couple of minutes. Aspiration rewards usually get put in a 'training room', attics/basements are handy for that. I always use modular stairs so that more than one sim can use them a time.

If you're running ACR without the fancy woohoo camera then you might not be aware of sims woohooing so the post-it note method could potentially miss a few, especially if visitors or uni dorms are involved.