liri-sims

[liri-sims]

Making Less Conflicting Object Defaults

First of all: there’s already a perfectly good tutorial for this by @celebkiriedhel. I’m mostly going to repeat what’s written there.

The reason I’m doing this is that I’ve lately seen a lot of object defaults done with a custom group. When done like that, they unnecessarily conflict with both mods and other defaults.

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*The* 4t2 top knot to have.

This is @platinumaspiration's 4t2 conversion of EP16's TopBun. And it's for m and for f as you can see here.

Aged teen to elder.

Polycount: 2k

Download

[liri-sims]

The main Stone house is now surnamed Murex (for the rock snail that produces the pigment for Tyrian purple) and Amon is absolutely crazy about his little granddaughter. It's adorable.

Bennu, Nekhbet's twin brother, has finally managed to locate another unpartnered gay guy in town and he is not wasting any time. His sister taught him what you do when you want something, or someone. That's Alder Pond, new surname Lacus, who's basically never done anything noteworthy until now.

Amon and Anat's youngest son, Naevius, aged up to teen, making me think maybe I was a little hasty pledging Julia and Claudia to the Vestals, but whatever. And then, in one eventful night, Nekhbet and Bennu aged up to adult...

...Khonsu and Athena's daughter Aurelia aged up to child...

and Athena went into labor.

She safely delivered another baby girl, Secunda:

I leave you for now with the image of Nekhbet headbanging with her pocket lyre, the very first thing she did on reaching adulthood:

[liri-sims]

I did a minor renovation of my Roman baths, which I never really showed off because my building skills are garbage. Inside, you can see the two hot tubs, with massage tables off to one side and bathrooms off to the other. The actual Romans were apparently big fans of communal pooping, but Sims are not, so they get the stalls from Blue Heaven's meadhall set. You can also see the job board up on the back wall.

There are bathtubs and showers behind all the curtains...

And here's the really cool corner where everybody hangs out to socialize and play kicky bag for no clear reason I can see. I removed one of the changing stalls to make more room.

Outside, we have a sports yard - the Castaway version of the military obstacle course, basketball hoop from Blue Heaven, axe-throwing target converted from a Game of Thrones game but I don't remember where I found it - and the swimming pool.

The pool was the biggest change, because I found the Wood For Sims fisherman set and I'm finally free from the modern pool ladders and diving boards! Huzzah! Beyond the pool you can see the children's playground, a skittles lane from Mortia's default replacement, and Nephthys and Nisaba's house of ill repute next door.

This diving board is actually a really cool creation with original animation - rather than bouncing like the fiberglass modern board does, it kind of has a seesaw effect? So glad to have these. Anat and Amon, in particular, are OBSESSED with their home pool and it always made their house feel a bit too modern.

[liri-sims]

No idea why my posts keep getting stuck in Mature Content Jail. Like, did they just add "woohoo" to their content filter?

[liri-sims]

The second Ardeat household, Osanyin and Hestia, is next up, and not just because I did the magazine previews there. Also because Hestia is really itching to get some extramarital woohoo. And because Hestia is the only sim in the household who doesn't flood the bathroom when she showers, I want to give her nice things, like Toutatis.

I'd been thinking that the family's servant, Toutatis, was a romance sim too, but he's actually pleasure, which means he wants dates more than he wants woohoo - and dates are risky because Osanyin is working is Oceanography and comes home from work at 2 pm.

So Toutatis tried dating somebody else.

Berengaria is the neighborhood's delivery lady, and she and Toutatis really hit it off. So much so that he rolled an engagement want. So he's buying his freedom (I'm deducting 10k from their starter-house funds) and moving out to marry her.

Crispinus, Osanyin's son with Demeter, ages up to teen. I think he ended up fortune? Maybe popularity? He also managed to reconnect with Demeter during the party, so that was nice. He's into girls and there are very few girls in his cohort for him to be into, so no developments on that front yet.

Hestia and Olokun turned out to be a bit of a challenge - Hestia seemed to consider Olokun, her sister-in-law, to be family, but Olokun didn't - but two horny romance sims will find a way.

[liri-sims]

Followers gift part 2: Medieval magazines!

So, magazines didn't really exist until the 18th century. But before that, there were cheap, widely available publications - broadsides, chapbooks, pamphlets - that covered a wide range of subjects like news, true crime, political commentary, entertainment (some ballads were literally just existing poems set to music) and news-of-the-weird subjects like witchcraft and prophecies and that woman in England who claimed she kept giving birth to rabbits, and so on. A lot of the same subjects covered by Sims 2 magazines, in other words. They weren't done in periodical form, but neither are Sims 2 magazines, which are the same week after week.

So that was my initial model. I started out with monochrome woodcut prints from 15th- and 16th-century books and broadsheets, but my early attempt at defaulting the magazines made me think that color might be advisable to make the images easier to recognize at tiny sizes. That led me down a rabbit hole of medieval manuscript art, with the end result that some of the magazines are using art that is far, far too lavish for a mass publication. But it's aesthetically pleasing!

All the magazines have unique interiors, unlike the originals. Most of the text is just Lorem Ipsum (I did include a bit of Chicken Little/Henny Penny in the children's magazine, because one of the illustrations cried out for it) so you're not missing anything by not being able to read it. I used Simlish TrueBadoor for all the text, titles and articles alike.

Man, that floor is pixelated. Hestia and Osanyin need to remodel their foyer. Above you see the entertainment/fashion/sports magazine, with a focus on music. That cover, like many of the others, dates to just a bit before 1500; that was my target zone, though I wasn't super-strict about it. I may well do another default later, with earlier artwork - the Codex Manesse has a lot of good candidates - but I'm a little burnt out right now, which is why I haven't followed through with the hobby magazines.

I replaced the catalog descriptions and titles in the UI, too. Mostly not very period-accurate, except for the judgmental tone towards frivolity and avarice, though I did sometimes use period titles complete with the spelling of the time.

You can see one cover for "All That Glittereth" up above, but it will display a different one when you bring the magazine home; this is normal, if annoying. Maxis for some reason included two money-themed publications and then mixed them up. The UI in use shows a sim buying the magazine in an OFB owned business, but it should look a lot the same in an unowned, NPC-run lot.

And as you can see from the image at the top of the post, I also did a recolor - two recolors, in fact - of this default replacement magazine rack by Motherof70, with my magazine covers. The rack has nine magazines on display and there are only six interest magazines, so I included the alternate cover for Rat Race and two of the hobby magazine covers (or at least early versions of them. I change my mind a lot.)

All the textures are 512 x 512, except for the magazine rack itself, which is 1024 x 1024.

Acknowledgements: These were all built on the template of Lolabythebay's 1920s magazine defaults, and some parts - the page edges and spines - are used barely altered. I adjusted the colors on the spines but kept recycling the underlying graphic. I would never have made sense of the Maxis mapping, let alone been able to increase the resolution of the texture file, without her hard work.

If not for Xia's hobby magazine defaults, I'd have had no idea where to start on looking for the catalog descriptions to replace them.

And I probably wouldn't have thought of doing the magazines at all if not for the default rack.

As for art credit: I've been painstakingly bookmarking all the images used and would be delighted to do a link post, but I don't know how many people would be interested, and this is already getting long.

Magazine replacements: SFS or Box.

Magazine rack recolors: SFS or Box.

Everything is compressorized and seems to work fine for me. Let me know if there are any problems!

[liri-sims]

Followers gift part 1, Test of Time specific - more Roman NPCs! As before, these use the Roman tunics by @sychik, except for the animal control officer, who uses the Spartan outfit converted by @mdpthatsme.

Masseuses, shown here in the public baths in my Rome (with massage table recolors by Sunni.) There are four recolors of the masseuse/masseur outfits, all of which I defaulted; I'm reasonably sure that three of those are linked to vacation destinations, while the fourth shows in the home neighborhood and its domestic suburbs, but I wasn't sure which, and it was easier to do them all than to check. Maybe your Roman hood has Three Lakes as Hibernia or something and you'll have a use for the other colors.

My hood's preternaturally pale vigile (why did I geneticize a skin this light?) and his mysterious magic chariot from the future. He's delivering a puppy, which is all cops do in my neighborhood because my sims are all too nocturnal for burglars to risk robbing them.

The man-maid my hood generated...

And Kaylynn Langerak in actual Pleasantview, because my game was refusing to generate a woman-maid in Rome or in my test hood and I got fed up. All these defaults are for both male and female, but I'd screwed up the female maid dress at first and wanted confirmation it was working.

There's a default for gardeners, too - using a kind of khaki green - but Rome is still in the middle of winter and so I don't have a shot of one in action.

All are compressorized, and they're in individual packages so you only have to keep the ones you want.

Download: SFS or Box.

[liri-sims]

Didn't really save any screencaps from a very boring round at Olokun's house. She wrote novels, Hephaestus did chores, little Maia aged up to child and teen daughter Calypso spent her teen years befriending the neighborhood.

Calypso will have an arranged marriage to Neper Stone in the spring or summer - she actually originally rolled lesbian, and my plan is for her to have a child or two with Neper, then divorce him and exclusively date women.

Olokun, after a period of cheerful domesticity with Hephaestus, rolled a "woohoo with 10 sims" want (I think public woohoo triggered it) and that's 3 more sims than Hephaestus is, so I think she's going to give him his freedom and a pension and start sleeping around again. Hestia is also bisexual and pining for some extramarital action...

The cadet branches of the Imperial family have the surname Ardeat, so that extends both to Osanyin's family and Olokun's.

[liri-sims]

Last day of the rotation for the Imperial family, and it's time for ANOTHER double birthday, this time for twins Drusus and Maxima.

I think Anat's impressed with the magic harp.

I don't know why I bother to take the cake shots when I never do the post-cake part because they've aged up into Castaway outfits... and I'm filled with regret that I missed screencapping Maxima's final noogie of her teen years. It was inflicted on Adonis, her intended, of course. She's going to miss noogie-ing so much. I wonder if anyone's enabled it for adults?

Maxima and Drusus will both marry once their partners have finished out the round and aged up - Adonis will move out (and get a political job) so he and Max can start their own household, and Nekhbet will move into the palace.

[liri-sims]

Wow, the cab replacement was a big hit! Welcome to all the new followers - I'm over 50 followers now, so I'm working on getting a followers gift ready.

Also on the to-do list is replacing my current icon/header, Elder Bella Goth getting abducted while thinking "not agaaaaaiiiinnn," with something more reflective of my current gameplay.

[liri-sims]

Don't get me wrong - this isn't a default replacement for the cab itself. This is a replacement for the stupid little thumbnail of the cab that appears on every comm lot entry in hood view...

...and for the larger thumbnail of the cab that appears when you go to the lot by taxi. I rarely do, but not everyone has the option to walk to lots, so.

Yes, it may look a little weird because the image is flat but the loading screen is angled - some images it's worse than others - but I don't feel like trying to warp the images.

Most of these started out on a light-colored background and will probably look weird on dark UI replacements. Wherever possible I've used artwork from the period, or reproductions of that artwork. Of course, some of these periods covered many years, but this is just a start.

I've included many options. There are a couple of prehistoric choices, an Egyptian boat, a Greek chariot, a Roman sedan chair and three Roman carriages, half a dozen medieval choices - carts, carriages, and people on horseback - a couple of 17th-century choices, and a handful for the Regency era, one late-18th century and a couple early -19th. Gaps include more Renaissance styles, Baroque/Rococo, and anything post-Regency-England, but I plan to address those in later versions; I was trying to cover eras that seemed popular first.

I fully intend to do additional versions of this, and carry on through additional eras - I have plenty saved for the rest of the 19th century, and a lot of medieval equestrians waiting to be converted.

I've tested most of these but not all, so if any of them don't behave as expected, or have weird marks/artifacts that don't seem intentional, let me know!

Download: SFS or Box.

[liri-sims]

I have no idea what the draw is, but every single time I go to the baths, every sim on the lot who's not in the hot tubs goes here, to hang out by the changing booths and a bath nook. It's just a really happening spot, I guess?

[liri-sims]

Our first Roman snowfall.

[liri-sims]

I'd almost forgotten Oko had those tattoos. I don't pay a lot of attention to him, honestly.

He's still spry enough to teach little Augustus how to walk.

But he might be a little too gullible for politics. This was like the third or fourth time Maxima cheated, and the only time he caught her.

[liri-sims]

The round starts, as always, with the Imperial family (new surname: Ambustis) where eldest son Drusus demonstrates the common touch (and also that he's not over Andarta) by swiftly befriending the family's new servant, Andarta's little sister Sulis. These two only have two bolts, and Sulis is a family sim, so maybe they can behave themselves.

I spent the next two days catching Drusus wandering off to slap Imhotep whenever he wasn't busy. I managed to distract him and his fury has worn off, but I swear...

It was also time for a joint birthday party! Emperor Oko is an elder now, and daughter Claudia becomes a teen.

Claudia is one of the clone triplets, with elder sister Julia and younger sister Arrecina. (Maybe I should have named her something else. Flavia. Tiberia.) Unfortunately, the personality they all got is pretty boring. They're also awkwardly placed in the birth order; of the high-born young men they could try to marry, most are pre-puberty - which would mean clone-sisters hanging around the house being underfoot while they wait to get married - and one is gay.

So I'm borrowing an idea from @sychik and starting a Vestal Virgins household, which at the moment is going to be a storage space for Julia and Claudia, but other young women from the royal and patrician families will join over time. They'll move there once this round is done.

[liri-sims]

Between rounds, I like to hop around the neighborhood marrying couples off. The Emperor's eldest daughter Terentia goes first, marrying Memnon Saxum (formerly Stone) in front of their family and friends, some more appropriately dressed than others. Terentia's technically still a teen here, but she ended up aging up while the party was still going on, because I spaced out and forgot I could just wait till 6.

Nanaya and Belus, well... she's in crush with him now, anyway. Maybe it's just as well Dumuzid skipped the ceremony.

Other freshly-married couples I didn't get screencaps of: Hecate and Asterion, my faelien couple; Serapis and Andarta; and Dionysus and Cybele.