catandsusim

[catandsusim]

SimPE for Mac, Progress Report

A few weeks ago Anthropic reduced their usage limits for my paid Claude AI plan. The result is that I can do 1 to 1.5 hours of actual file translation, followed by 3.5 to 4 hours of waiting for my usage to reset. Progress has become much slower. At least the translations seems to be much better using Objective C, so not as many compiler errors to fix. I am getting maybe 3 hours a day of work on the project done, due to the reduced usage.

On the bright side, I am getting a lot done in World of Warcraft in those 3 hours I can't work on SimPE.

I have got the CSoil2 library integrated, to replace the Nvidia DDS utilities. I have the folders Packages, Helper, Interfaces, Resource Controls, Name Provider, and Generic Handlers completely translated. Good inroads on Scenegraph, Rcol, 3IDR, and Workspace Helper. And so it goes.

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Hi, does the ikea stuff fix still work? Just wanted to make sure before proceeding with the process :)

Yes, it still works. It doesn’t change the game at all, other than you manually adding the SP8 folder. It just changes the Windows Registry entries for the game to include the Ikea Stuff Pack as installed.

[catandsusim]

Blue Plaid Ektorp Sofa

I took some time off from working on SimPE for Mac and did a quick recolor of the Ektorp sofa. Works on a Mac if you have Huge Lunatic's extracted SP content. It is a very 1960s colonial style look!

Download here.

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How well I remember the paysite wars! I and my free website were threatened by hacker paysite operators for our staunch support of all free content. Well said, Pooklet, well said.

A quick-ish guide to the culture of The Sims 2 modding community.

Are you new to The Sims 2 community? Are you coming from more modern games, either in The Sims franchise itself or other contemporary games? Are you excited to start your #brand and become a #simfluencer and post your #earlyaccesscontent to support your #sidehustle?

Have a seat, then! Let's chat.

Hello, friend! My name's Pooklet. I've been playing since 2004 and creating since 2007. I'm by no means an expert in most forms of content creation itself, but I've been around since the heyday of The Sims 2, I've watched how community opinions have shifted (or not) since practically the beginning, and I'm hoping to give you a basic outline of the community culture that you can expect to encounter as a newcomer.

A very brief history of Sims 2 content monetization:

People have been trying to monetize content since there has been content to monetize, all the way back in the days of The Sims 1. We tend to call them "pay creators" and their websites "paysites." Some big names in this arena include The Sims Resource (their free-with-ads model is a relatively recent development, which is why you will find people to this day calling them T$R), PeggySims, Newsea, and many others that you can find on this handy website:

Paysites Must Be Destroyed

Now, if you have a glance at that website, you might be saying to yourself:

"But, that's illegal! I own the copyright to my custom content!"

Alas, no! Due to the wording of the End User License Agreement for The Sims 2, no custom content creator owns their creations for this game (or The Sims 1, or 3, or 4, for that matter, but we're talking about 2 right now). It all belongs to EA at the end of the day, and by installing and playing the game, you have agreed to these terms. Which means you have no individual, protected copyright, and it is perfectly legal for someone to download your paywalled content and then reupload it for free for others to enjoy. And they will!

Furthermore,

You are not making anything alone.

Everything from modding resources, to tutorials, to the mods required to fix disastrous glitches in the game code and make it playable at all, to the third party programs used to make any and all custom content, such as SimPE—all of these have been provided to you for free by other creators, many of whom have a usage policy that asks that people not use their freely-provided tools to make a profit. Although no one can be forced to follow a creator's policy, it is generally considered good manners to not try to make a profit off of someone else's free work. And if you are using these tools to make paywalled content, that's exactly what you're doing.

Pay creators have been ignoring these policies since the beginning of time, and so free creators likewise ignore their policies against sharing their paywalled content. Pay creators have also tried lots of different ways to keep their content exclusive, everything from trying to track leaks with slightly altered files to actively filling their content with malicious code. It has never worked.

Free creators have always found a way around these barriers. In fact, it's taken as something of a challenge to undermine monetization efforts. As you can see from Paysites Must Be Destroyed, there are entire teams of players devoted to reuploading paywalled content for free.

A culture of sharing.

The Sims 2 is something of a time capsule. At 20 years old, it predates a lot of the hyper-capitalist hustle culture that has infested every creative hobby. It is from a time when monetization was an outlier rather than the norm, and a much maligned outlier at that. This attitude has persisted for 20 years. Believe me when I say, you won't be the combo breaker. Especially now, given that The Sims 2 is not the most contemporary in the series and the community has shrunk considerably, down to the people who have either been here for a very long time, or newcomers that understand the community culture.

Also, it's just kind of not a great idea in general to try to make money off of a 20-year-old game with a pretty small community?

Like, I get that The Sims 4 is really saturated with pay creators and it's hard to get a foot in the door. I get that you might look at The Sims 2 and think that the small pond will give you room to be a big fish. It won't. You might get a handful of people willing to pay for your content, but at least one of those people will be resharing it for free.

Paywalls vs. optional donations.

Okay, so hopefully you now understand why people don't like it when you put content behind a paywall. But what about those Ko-fi and Paypal donation links you sometimes see at the bottom of people's downloads? Why is that okay, but a locked Patreon tier isn't? Well, because they're voluntary. No one is obligated to pay for that content to be able to download and use it. It's just a way for someone who does have a little extra cash to basically "tip" a creator whose content they like. You have no way of knowing whether the person who posts those links is actually receiving any donations. And that's kind of the point. Whether or not they receive any donations, they are still sharing their content, because they enjoy the hobby of making and sharing content.

"I can't make a living off of that!"

No, you can't. Because that's not what we do here. That is not part of our community culture for all the above reasons. If you want to make a reliable income off of your hobby, you're going to need to get a different hobby. Try Second Life! That is a community that actively encourages monetization. The Sims 4 allows for "early access" monetization. There's options out there for you, if what you want is to make a profit off of your creations for a game.

"Fine, what about monetized link forwarding services?"

Link forwarding services historically have malicious trackers or viruses embedded. People will also strip those and provide direct links to each other. Or they just won't download your content.

"What if I want to make YouTube videos of someone else's written tutorials and I enable ad revenue on them?"

Personally, I still think that's a dick move. I love video tutorials, I'm a very visual learner myself, and although you might feel entitled to compensation for reciting the steps of someone else's tutorial into a microphone and then editing and uploading the video, you're still monetizing someone else's freely-provided content. I would consider this an 'ask permission' scenario, one in which you tell the person, explicitly, that you will be making ad revenue off their work. If they're fine with that, then you're good! (For the record, I'm not fine with that.)

edit: more of of my thoughts on monetized youtube videos over here.

"What if—"

Look, no one can stop you from trying to monetize your content, or worse, someone else's content. But you will have the exact same arc as every pay creator who came before you: your efforts will be undermined at every turn, your reception in the greater community will be chilly at best, and it will become a battle between you and the folks resharing free reuploads of your content until any fun you initially had making content is gone.

"The steady erosion of every known social safety net beneath the crippling weight of end-stage, line-goes-up capitalism and the yawning abyss of poverty over which I am dangling has imbued me with such anxiety that I cannot engage with a hobby that precludes monetization. I am exhausted. I know no other way."

I get it, friend! I have lived in poverty all my life. I do not begrudge the impulse to find a way to make passive income off of your every waking moment. Increasingly, it seems like that is the only way to survive! Unfortunately, you will not be able to do that with this specific community. We know that we have something special here, having resisted monetization's encroach for so long, which makes us fight all the more viciously to maintain it. You are entitled to try to find ways to supplement your income, just not here. Personally, I consider that a feature, not a bug.

Bonus Round: Remember, That's Not Just Yours!

I said it earlier, but I want to reiterate: you are not making any TS2 CC alone. You are making it with tools, resources, knowledge and code that people have provided on the condition that they not be used for pay content.

To use myself as an example, "my" hair textures are a blend of resources provided by other creators. Namely, Nouk's original hair texture was edited by Vintage D, which I then further edited over the years, using parts by the creators Ephemera and Helga. It would be extremely shit of me to say "well, I think that the time that I put into my edit is worth money, so I'm charging for it" when the edits that I made would not exist without the work of those people. And it continues on down the line with edits that other people have made of my texture blends and color actions, and the content they make with them.

(If you see someone charging for these, btw, lemme know. I'd love to have a talk with them.)

In closing,

The knowledge base, the resources, the coding required to make any and all working content for The Sims 2 has been compiled for 20 years. Please understand, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's creativity when I say: you cannot bring anything wholly "new" to TS2 CC-making, something that uses no one else's resources or programs, something you can point to and say "no one helped me with that. I did it all on my own. It is my property." Nor should you aspire to! The fun of The Sims 2 community is to share and share alike, to credit each other for our contributions, to hype each other up and iterate on shared works and resources. We've been doing it for 20 years, and hopefully we'll be doing it for many more! Wanting to be a #simfluencer is utterly antithetical to the community culture. No one is influencing anyone else. You need to leave that shit at the door if you want to be invited in.

TL;DR:

Don't show up to the commie circle-jerk trying to charge for handjobs. We're already giving them to each other for free, and nothing about your wrist technique is special enough to justify the cost.

edit: a follow-up for those who are feeling personally attacked by this post.

[catandsusim]

Paysites Must Be Destroyed Archive

Ever wish you had the whole PMBD for Sims 2? Now you can, assuming you have the needed 16.8 gig of space to hold it.

Download your own copy of the Booty today!

EDIT: This archive only goes partway through the s, and not all folder s have all the expected content. We need real humans to finish the job, because the Booty is not eternal. It needs a complete backup somewhere, like on SimsFileShare, organized by folder. I can’t do it, as I am currently porting SimPE to the Mac. All day, every day.

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More SimPE. Input Needed!

So, you knowI have been spending the past several weeks working on a Mac native version of SimPE. Success is not assured! But I am making good progress. I have been building it to run on MacOS12 (Monterey) and later, but it would be much easier for me if I could build it for MacOS14 (Sonoma). There is a difference of 3 or 4 years in the supported computers. I want the Mac community to weigh in and tell me if you are still Simming on the older machines that can't be upgraded to any newer OS than 12. These are the differences:

 macOS Sonoma (14) vs. macOS Monterey (12) Compatibility

macOS Sonoma (14) Compatible Macs:

iMac: 2019 and later.

iMac Pro: 2017.

MacBook Air: 2018 and later.

MacBook Pro: 2018 and later.

Mac Pro: 2019 and later.

Mac Studio: 2022 and later.

Mac mini: 2018 and later. 

macOS Monterey (12) Compatible Macs:

iMac: Late 2015 or later.

iMac Pro: 2017 and later.

MacBook: Early 2016 or later.

MacBook Air: Early 2015 or later.

MacBook Pro: Early 2015 or later.

Mac mini: Late 2014 or later.

Mac Pro: Late 2013 or later.

Mac Studio: 2022.

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SimPE for Mac

Yeah, I have not been posting lately because I am spending 8 to 12 hours a day, every day, working on a Mac version of SimPE. I made Xcode cough up a lung trying to use it on SimPE. SimPE is just too big and too complex. I am now programming on VS Code, which is far more robust, and has a far pickier compiler, so I spent days fixing all of the new compiler errors to get back to a working core. Right now it opens a package file and extracts the contents. It identifies the file types. Thanks, Quaxi, for creating the xml file listing all 145 file types the Sims 2 uses! Next up is getting it to display the actual filenames. My ancient programming skills from 20+ years ago are slowly resurrecting. It is slow going. I will be going at this for months. I may never reach full SimPE functionality, but if I can get recoloring and Sims editing to work it will be better than the nothing that Mac users currently have. The bad news is that I am building for MacOS 12 and later, so older Macs may not run it.

Wish me well in this endeavor!

[catandsusim]

251 Maxis Tiny Tudor Remodel LC

NO CC!!

Download here.

I again added one square across the back, and an overhanging second square for an upstairs bedroom. It is now a very functional 3 bedroom, 2 bath house. Just like in the Victorian Value I remodeled, there is a small area off the living room that can be used for skilling equipment or a hobby. Add your own pictures and bric-a-brac.

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Splendiferous Bedroom

Before there was the Splendiferous Nursery, there was the Splendiferous Bedroom. Maxis has 4 walls with this design, a plain wall, one with white kick molding, one with white kick and crown molding, and one with white beadboard. I made 3 additional walls. One with dark wood kick and crown molding, one with kick, crown, and chair rail with a solid pink lower section, and a solid pink wall with dark wood kick and crown molding. There is matching carpet, drapes, bedding, and a wing chair.

Download here.

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Yellow Splendiferous Nursery

The Maxis Simply Splendiferous wallpaper was one of the ones I really liked, and an existing texture of the right scale is nothing for a CC creator to sneeze at!

I made the wallpaper by changing the pink flowers to yellow, and changing the beadboard wainscoting to solid yellow. Susim created the 4 Peter Rabbit wall hangings, crib, changing table, high chair, toybox, potty chair, and toy oven. You are on your own for a matching carpet.

Download here.

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Yellow Feather Living Room

Forgive the blurry photo. It was taken on my Mac laptop, which doesn't have anywhere near the screen resolution my PC laptop has. But this is the yellow feather print sofa I made on my Mac. It recolors the Durable Sofa Completer set by Ailias.

Download here.

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GirlStripe Nursery and Bedroom

Another creation by my sister, SuSim.

The Girlstripe set has the striped wallpaper, matching carpet in blue and lilac, single and double bedding, a nightstand, crib, changing table, highchair, toybox, and potty chair. Pajamas for girls, too.

There is a Teddy Bear, but it doesn't seem to work in Legacy, and SimPE won't load the textures. Some message about the MMAT being removed in CEP 8. Why was I able to open that same Durably Plush Teddy Bear in the same version of SimPE just a couple weeks ago to fix the Boystripe Teddy Bear? And that one doesn't show up in my Legacy game either. And my UC won't launch now. Ah, well.

Download Bedroom and Nursery here.

Download pajamas here.

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SimPE RUNNING ON MY MAC

See this sofa? Not the prettiest I have ever made, but I MADE IT ON MY MAC. That's right folks. On my Mac. I have SimPE running on my Mac. Proof:

I spent the past 24 hours with ChatGPT, less the 4.5 hours I slept last night, trying to crack this. I will be trying to write a tutorial with the needed files posted for download. Because ChatGPT had me try so very many things I am a bit unsure just how many of them are needed, and how many aren't. I used Crossover, the free 2 week trial, because I am not spending $74 on Crossover if it wasn't going to work. I am particularly proud that the DDS utilities worked to import the new texture.

I have not even attempted to see if the Neighborhood or Sim browsers work yet. Probably will try it tomorrow. What else should I be testing?

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Mellow Yellow Bedroom

A very small bedroom set by Susim. Just the one wallpaper, the bedding, and a lamp. And of course she made a toddler nightgown to match!

Download bedroom.

Download nightgown.

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Boystripe Bedroom

So, I created this stripe pattern. I made wallpaper, both with and without a kick and crown molding in medium wood. I made bedding. I recolored a single bed double bed, dresser, desk, desk chair, end table, Wingback chair, and rug.

Download here.

And then Susim made matching boys' underwear!

Download here!

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241 Suburban Townhouses LC CC

This is a pretty good approximation of where I live. Do I live in the 1 bedroom, the 2 bedroom, or the 3 bedroom unit? Anyway, this is a stereotypical 1970 era condominium, made with fewer units to fit on the lot. The 1 bedroom unit is one floor, while the 2 and 3 bedroom units are 2 floors. The 1 bedroom has only one bathroom, the 2 bedroom has 1.5 bathrooms, and the 3 bedroom has 2 bathrooms.

Download here.

I tried to limit the CC.

The cream siding is by iCad.

The Wachowt windows are by Huge Lunatic.

The cut stump flower fence recolor is by Michelle.

The flowering bushes are all by Reica15.

The Long Island arch, toilet paper rolls, and white looped flower fence are all by Windkeeper.

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Boystripe Nursery

I created this striped pattern, and my sister, SuSim, used it to make this nursery set. Not just a crib and changing table, oh, no. It includes the potty chair, high chair, toybox, toy oven, 2 different tops for an end table plus a recolor of the rest of the end table, and a painting. It used to contain a teddy bear and lamp, but I have not been able to get those recolors to work. They are not included in the set.

EDIT: Now with the adorable Teddy Bear! Download again if you downloaded it before I got the bear working.

I think this was originally uploaded to Sapphire Sims, where she was Sorceress Topaz, and then later to our website, Cat and Susim's.

Download here.