es-sims

[es-sims]

[es-sims]

Thank you to @frauhupfner for letting me know that the wrong mesh had been shared for Stealthic Erratic. I have updated it to use the correct CM-EM mesh, sorry for that.

Happy Christmas in July/August! This is my first time participating in this sort of event, so please enjoy some Poppet V2 recolors! They have all been separated into their own folders and come with all the necessary meshes.

Raon71 has 3.8K polys and uses a 512x512 texture.

Kijiko Somali has 9K polys, uses a 1024x1024 texture. The UF/UM meshes are combined into one file.

Peggy100109 has 9.7K polys and uses a 512x512 texture.

NewSea Dracarys has 11.5K polys and uses Keoni's Poppet V2 texture, shrunk to 1024x512.

Skysims 047 has 12.3K polys and uses JellyBeanery's Poppet V2 1024x1024 textures.

Stealthic Erratic has 14.7K polys and also uses Jellybeanery's Poppet V2 1024x1024 textures.

Download: Simfile

Credits: Poppet, Kijiko, Newsea, Raon, Peggy, Frauhupfner, Keoni, RentedSpace, Trapping, Puccamichi, MartiniMYB

[es-sims]

Sim Goals for 2025

The past few months have been quiet for me, the holidays took a lot of my time away from the computer to spend with family and friends. But being away from the computer also gives me time to reflect about what I have done and what I would like for the future. So, I want to share a little about what I hope to do in the coming year.

Defaults:

I will keep working on defaults; especially on defaulting objects and UI elements. I have quite a few projects that are in various states of finish and I would like to get them done before I get into the more complicated projects I have brewing.

My hope is that I can make some defaults for lights/lamps for sims who don't use electricity.

Custom Content:

Another big goal is to expand my skill set for creating custom content. I have slowed down on it for a while because I got focused on defaulting for Kynsbern, but my list of ideas has slowly been building on ideas that I would love to figure out.

I also want to do a lot more hair retextures; specifically in PMG V4 and my amphitrite genetic hairs. I especially want to do the PMG hairs since I use them for Kynsbern and my current hair selection pool feels limited.

Gameplay:

I will continue to update Kynsbern, hopefully on a much better schedule. I really love my medieval-fantasy hood and look forward to sharing more of it.

I also want to restore Briar Glen to playable form. I already have ideas about ways to improve it such as adding baby faces and new traits/mods.

[es-sims]

Floating OMSP (animated)

plus standard floating and sea-level omsp

Download (SFS)

*decor objects in the previews have been placed on SilentLucidity's *90 degrees OMSP, which was then placed on animated omsp.

Tip: outside OMSP by Julsfels is useful for moving the objects outside of the swimming area.

Enjoy!

*This is for The Sims 2

OMSP = one more slot please ;)

Shiftable OMSPs are enough if you want to place decor objects above the pond... Most of the time. But it seems nobody ever shared an omsp that can be placed on pond water surface (??) Weird.. So I made one, but then I thought it would be cool if it was really floating.

I used Echo's skeleton tutorial to add a rotating joint and edit CRES hierarchy to attach placement slot to it. I expected it to be difficult, but it wasn't.

Animation runs automatically in live mode so I recommend you let it play for a few seconds before adding another animated omsp to the lot. That will prevent these from moving in a synchronized way. That's not possible on public lots unfortunately. I hope to improve this object at some point, maybe add a few different animations or add a random few seconds pause before animation starts playing.

[es-sims]

Thank you for sharing! This is very useful!

Fully Underwater Lot Tutorial

@creida-sims @kitkat99

Some warnings and disclaimers

1. This is not a beginner tutorial. I have tried to explain with as much detail as I can, but still, if you just started playing The Sims 2 I recommend trying out other building tutorials first.

2. I have tested it but there's always a possibility that some new problems will come up. Follow at your own risk. Backup your neighborhoods before trying this. Test it first in a new empty neighborhood.

3. These lots are roadless, so they require specific gameplay conditions to avoid breaking immersion (pun intended).

4. They will behave like normal lots in the sense that sims can walk around and do anything as if they were on land. There's one big problem to consider: when sims go fully underwater, their hair and some parts of their clothing might disappear visually.

So this is more useful for structures that sit above the water, shallow water that doesn't reach a sim's head or, with some modifications, small islands surrounded by water. So unless you want bald mermaids, I don't recommend this for sims that live underwater.

5. If you use Voeille's hood water mod, reflections will look glitchy in lot view, because this is technically not a beach lot. The only solution I found is enabling "Lot view ocean reflections" in RPC Launcher. Otherwise you'll have to deal with glitchy reflections.

6. Before following this tutorial, make sure you know the basics of creating, editing, importing and exporting SimCity 4 terrains. Written tutorial by SimEchoes here, video tutorial by loonaplum here.

Software and mods used

The Sims 2 FreeTime expansion pack (required for the modifyNeighborhoodTerrain cheat)

SimCity 4 (required) Hood Replace by Mootilda (required)

Lot Adjuster by Mootilda (required)

Portal revealer by Inge Jones (required)

Voeille's pond and sea water overhaul and RPC Launcher (optional, see disclaimers)

The Sims 2 Apartment Life and Bon Voyage expansion packs (optional, for "walk to lot/work/school" options)

Cheat codes used

moveObjects on/off

modifyNeighborhoodTerrain on/off

1. Creating/editing a terrain in SimCity 4

1.1. You can edit an already existing terrain or create your own from scratch. In both cases, you need to keep two things in mind: If you want the usable area of the lot to be underwater, such as making houses for mermaids or a coral reef, make sure the water is shallow. No more than a few short clicks with the terraforming tools in SimCity 4. This is because The Sims 2 live mode camera won't go underwater, so making the water too deep might make it uncomfortable to build or play the lot.

If you goal is to build a structure mostly above water, like a ship or an oil rig, you can get away with making the water a bit deeper, but not too much. I've noticed that sometimes the lot terrain tools stop working correctly if there a hill that's too steep.

1.2. Once you've created the terrain, you will need to add a small island on the area where your lot will be. I know it seems contradictory, but trust me, it will make sense. Create and name your city. Use the terraforming tools in city mode to make a tiny island of about 6x2 squares.

1.3. On the island, use the road tool to place a straight road that takes up 4 squares. Then, using the street tool (the last option), place two short streets at each end of the road.

Streets will disappear in TS2, only roads translate to roads in ts2, so why do we place them? Well, placing a street at the end of a road will get rid of the rounded end bit in TS2, which can't be used to place lots. This will be important for the placement of the lot and to make sure the edges of the lot are underwater. If this doesn't make sense yet, don't worry, it might make sense later.

1.4. Save the terrain. Don't exit SimCity 4. Copy your new/edited sc4 terrain from your SimCity 4 folder to your SC4Terrains folder in your Sims 2 documents directory. It is usually

"C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection\SC4Terrains"

1.5. Back in SimCity 4, we're going to make a second version of this terrain. Remove the roads and streets you made before, with the bulldozer tool. With the level terrain tool in Mayor mode, carefully remove the island, so it's on the same level as the bottom of the ocean/lake. Don't change anything else. Save, exit and copy this second terrain to your Sims 2 SC4Terrains folder. Make sure you rename the file to something different from the first one, like adding "no roads" to the filename. You should have two terrains by the end of this step. One with the small island and one without it.

2. Editing the terrain in The Sims 2

2.1. Open The Sims 2 and create a new neighborhood using your new terrain. Something to keep in mind: if you want the terrain to be a subhood of another neighborhood, make it a subhood from the start. You will not be able to move the lot once it's finished, since it will be roadless. I don't recommend decorating the neighborhood for now. Leave it empty until the end of this tutorial.

2.2. Place the smallest empty lot (3x1) on the island.

2.3. In neighborhood view, open the cheat console by pressing Control + Shift + C, and type

modifyNeighborhoodTerrain on

To quote The Sims Wiki:

"This allows you to alter the neighborhood terrain by raising or lowering it. To use this cheat, be in the neighborhood view, then enter the cheat "modifyNeighborhoodTerrain on" (without the quotation marks), and click over the area you would like to change. To select a larger area, click and drag the cursor to highlight the desired area. Press [ or ] to raise or lower the terrain by one click, press \ to level the terrain, and press P to flatten terrain. When you're finished, type “modifyNeighborhoodTerrain off” in the cheat box (again, without the quotations)."

If you use an English keyboard, these instructions will probably be enough for you. If you don't, I recommend first testing the cheat, because the keys for using this cheat are different in other languages. For example, in my spanish keyboard, the question marks are used to raise and lower the terrain and the º/ª key flattens it.

Another aside: When you select an area using this cheat, a green overlay is supposed to show up. Some lighting mods make this green overlay invisible, like the one I use. If that's your case, you kind of have to eyeball it. Remember that one neighborhood grid square in TS2 is equivalent to 10 lot tiles, or the width of a road. I recommend getting a mod that allows you to tilt the neighborhood camera on the Y axis, which will allow you to have a bird eye's view of the terrain.

2.4. Flatten the terrain around the lot so it's at water level. This cheat won't allow you to edit the terrain inside the lot, so you have to edit the terrain around the lot. Make sure there is plenty of flat underwater space around the island. You should end up with something like the picture above. The water will have some holes, but don't worry, those get filled with water the next time you load the neighborhood.

2.5. Enter the lot and place any object on it. Save the lot and exit the game. This is so LotAdjuster recognizes the lot in the next step.

3. Expanding the lot with Lot Adjuster

3.1. Open Lot Adjuster and select your neighborhood and lot.

3.2. Click "Advanced…". Check "Over the road (only enlarge front yard)". Use the arrows to add 20 tiles to the front yard. Click "Finish" and "Restart".

3.3. Select the same lot again. This time, check "Add and remove roads". Uncheck the road checkbox for the front yard. Add 20 Tiles to the back yard, 20 tiles to the left side and 10 tiles to the right side. Check "Place portals manually". You should end up with a 60x60 lot, which is the biggest size. You might want a smaller lot, but unless you know what you are doing, I recommend starting with this size. You can shrink it later. The goal of making the lot this big is making sure the edges of the lot are underwater. Click "Finish" and exit.

4. Moving portals and flattening the lot

4.1. Make sure you have the portal revealer by Inge installed in your Downloads folder before the next step. Open your game and load your neighborhood. The lot should look something like the picture above.

4.2. Load the lot. Delete the object you placed before. Place the portal revealer on the lot near the mailbox/phone booth and trashcan. It looks like a yellow flamingo and you can find it in Build Mode/Doors and Windows/Multi-Story Windows catalogue. You will notice that when you select the object from the catalogue, some yellow cubes appear on the lot, and when you place the object, the cubes disappear. After placing the portal revealer, pick it up and place it again. This will make the yellow boxes visible again.

So what are those yellow boxes? They are portals. They determine where sims and cars arrive and leave the lot. The ones on both ends of the sidewalk are called pedestrian portals, and in the street, one lane has portals for service vehicles (maids, gardeners, etc.) and the opposite is for owned cars and carpools. You can see the portal's names if you pick them up. Make sure not to delete any of them.

Now, since this is going to be a roadless lot, ideally there won't be vehicles in it. This means that the lot would ideally be accessed through walking only. In community lots, this would not be an issue if you have the Bon Voyage expansion pack, which allows sims to walk to lots.

In residential lots, you might run into some problems. Service NPCs always arrive on vehicles, and unless your sim owns a vehicle, the carpool and school bus will always come to pick sims up for work/school. It might break your immersion to have a vehicle show up underwater or on a ship. There are many options to avoid this: having sims work on an owned business instead of a regular job, not having kids on the lot, making the kids homeschooled, avoiding calling service NPCs… it depends on how you want to play the lot. For example, my icebreaker is a residential lot, only adults live there, some sims live in it temporarily and none of them have a regular job.

All of this is relevant because we're going to move the portals. Where you move the portals depends on you. Think about how you're going to use the lot. In my icebreaker, I placed the car portals (which won't be used) underwater, on a corner of the lot. I placed the pedestrian portals on the ship, to pretend that the walkbys are part of the crew or passengers. But for now, just move the portals, mailbox/phone booth and trashcan to a corner of the lot. To be able to pick up the mailbox/phone booth and trashcan, use the cheat moveObjects on. Delete the street and sidewalk tiles using the floor tool (Control + click and hold left mouse button + drag).

4.3. Flatten the island with the level terrain tool. Save the lot. Almost done! Don't mind the hole in the water, this will be fixed. You will notice that in neighborhood view, the island is still there. This is because the neighborhood terrain under the lot hasn't updated. I don't know why this happens, but it does. Normally, moving the lot would fix it, but we can't move this lot using the game's tools. Instead, we are going to fix the terrain with Hood Replace. Don't exit the game yet.

5. Updating the terrain with Hood Replace

5.1. Create a new neighborhood using the new roadless terrain. Make sure it has the same type of terrain (lush, desert, etc.) as the first one. Again, name it "NO ROADS" or something similar. Exit the game.

5.2. Open HoodReplace. On the left column you will select your "NO ROADS" neighborhood. In the right column, select the neighborhood that has the underwater lot. Check these settings: Replace terrain, replace road, and versioned backups. Leave everything else unchecked. Click Copy.

5.3. Open The Sims 2 and load the neighborhood to check if the changes worked. That concludes the tutorial. At this point you can shrink the lot if you don't want it to be so big. Remember to move the portals to their final placement when you're done building the lot. Also keep in mind pedestrians (walkbys) always walk by the mailbox, so keep the mailbox accessible for sims.

If you're going to have multiple underwater lots, I recommend making them first, and decorating the neighborhood after. Doing this in an already existing neighborhood might be more difficult, mainly because, if you made any changes to the terrain using the modifyNeighborhoodTerrain cheat in the past, they might get reset when using Hood Replace.

[es-sims]

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[es-sims]

That would be such a neat idea! Supernatural sims were so limited, being able to choose perks could add some fun and variety.

I would love a mod series that would expand on occult sim powers like how TS4 vampires and spellcasters have perks.

Maybe it uses the business perk menu or the lifetime aspiration menu as a base?

[es-sims]

It is time.

Year 1: Spring is starting for Kynsbern. We begin with Michelle's side of the Volcroft family, updating three times a day.

Year 1: Spring

[es-sims]

Heya! People were wondering about my mod updates from yesterday as it seems like some TS4 modders on MTS got hacked and uploaded shady shit coincidentally at the same time?

They're real, it's okay to download them. I just swapped the ASI loader for one that works better on EA App, that's why I didn't make any announcements.

[es-sims]

What a great resource! Thank you!

EA flower textures

hey maxis match cc people and everyone else too I separated flowers from 140 sims textures and put them all in one image grouped by color (with gaps large enough to rectangle select anything you want)

nothing is resized but tumblr will eat the quality so here's a download link (sfs, in the zip archive there's the whole image as well as every group by itself)

enjoy

kotpicard

[es-sims]

"Are you lost? Do not worry, I'll help you. Take my hand and I will bring you to where you belong,"

[es-sims]

Yay, a cat OSMP! It’s so cute!

One More Cat Slot Please!

Done in collab with @tvickiesims! An OMSP for cats 😺

Based on the invisible counter surface by @lamare-sims, but we made this useless for cooking and more useful for cats. Your sims and deco items will ignore this OMSP, but even cats that have learned to stay away from surfaces will be happy to use it.

By default, the OMSP is on the counter level. Raising the OMSP works nicely and it'll still work if you lower it too, but the jumping animations might get wonky.

The OMSP turns automatically invisible in live mode but there's an invisible recolor for those who prefer to hide it in buy mode as well.

🐈‍⬛ Download (SFS) (alternate)

Apartment Life and Pets are probably required. Located under misc/pets for free, the mesh is 4 polys and doesn't have a texture but the file includes a 40x44px custom icon so that thought bubbles don't appear empty when sims or cats think about the object.

[es-sims]

Long hair for masculine sims! This is Rita's Gdnf hair from RoseSims in Poppet V2, Poppet Unnaturals+Amphitrite and PMG V4. This hair has around 7.2K Polys, a 1024x1024 texture and is for YM-EM.

Amphitrite comes in two flavors: Custom and genetic. You can only pick one and if you choose the genetic version, you will need the Amphitrite Hairtone file from the Amphitrite Starter Kit for it to work.

Download: Simfile

Credits: Original Mesh: RoseSims, Rita Textures: PMG, Poppet

[es-sims]

I will wait and see. Like I said, I don’t really play the Sims 4 and when I do, I find the lack of features and the push to spend money very… obvious. I am concerned how it affects future 4t2 projects and what future games would have.

Like, I would enjoy a second Sims Medieval. But what would it look like in EA’s current strategy? How much would I have to spend to have basic fun in a game? I just need more info and less push to monetize.

(It’s okay. I know I don’t know a lot about AI and language models. I did check a few times to see if I said something really stupid though, lol. It’s all good.)

[es-sims]

So, this was just uploaded an hour ago for the EA Investor Day. It does not fill me with a lot of confidence in the future of the franchise, especially since they are really going into the social media aspect.

[es-sims]

I suppose it depends on what content they train on, since it uses the images to make the content. I wouldn’t want to know for sure they don’t use free custom content for training, I could see that discouraging creators.

I am trying to find more info on what the AI would exactly do, but I am skeptical on how this will work.

[es-sims]

Generating CAS items?! Are you serious, EA? I admit that I don’t know much about how Sims 4 CC downloading works, being a Sims 2/1 player primarily, but this seems like a terrible idea. A lot of my CC shopping has me go through the list to look at texture sizes, poly counts, to see if it has morphs and animations and such. I don’t think I would want EA’s algorithm to decide what would be a quality product for any of my games.