#ivypoasts

[ivycopur]

Here's a shiny new Pleasantview ready to play! ✨ Based on meetmetotheriver's clean template with townies, with all deceased sims restored & fully resurrectable, and infant face genetics for ALL sims. 👶

More info + download @ MTS!

[ivycopur]

I'm not a fan of aspiration calculators. If that's how u like to play then fair enough, but imho it's so boring for every sim to have the same ""optimal"" combinations of aspiration/personality/hobbies/interests. Contradictions make characters interesting! For me, a shy popularity sim or a fortune sim with zero interest in work inspires more creative storytelling than the billionth aquarius family sim.

I prefer the ts2 personality sliders to the ts3/ts4 traits. There may be less variety, but each characteristic manifests very strongly through unique interactions, animations, and gameplay effects, and every possible combination feels unique. Traits on the other hand feel unbalanced and often superficial. Most are communicated entirely through flavor text without much effect on autonomy or unique interactions, and many of the most impactful ones are just versions of the ts2 personality options, but without the differentiation between moderate/extreme on the slider.

I think hair texture systems look kinda weird a lot of the time. I get the appeal of consistency, but stretching the same stock textures over every mesh looks flat and samey, especially when you can see the same lines repeating on different sections of the hair. Hand-painted textures are always more appealing to me, even when they're a bit crunchy/messy/lo-res, because they tend to have more interesting detail and bring out the shape of the mesh with more depth.

post your ACTUAL unpopular Sims opinion. (and no, saying FaceApp. and alpha cc is weird/ugly doesn’t count)

Mine: Sims 2 Premades are way overrated especially the Stragetown ones.

[ivycopur]

putting strangetown under the babyface beam 😈

[ivycopur]

Here's an explanation of the process I've used to add infant genetics to pre-existing sims. Essentially the same process can also be used to make custom face templates that include infant faces.

[ivycopur]

please tell me there's a ts2 conversion of the night beast model 😂 i need her in my hood...

[ivycopur]

intrigued by the idea that "nervous" refers to the type of experiments he was a subject for, not necessarily his disposition 🤔 (or i mean it could be both...)

[ivycopur]

Finally getting around to playing the psp sims 2 and my girlie is really on one

[ivycopur]

My Strangetown with genetic infant faces is now available on ModTheSims!

[ivycopur]

I wanna shout out the best version of Veronaville out there imho - Biara25's Veronaville. Townies/NPCs are included, all the broken faces have been fixed, including ancestral sims using carrit's re-creations, and lots of little tweaks have been made to memories, family ties, and other character data to make everything more consistent. It's on par with with Dorsal Axe's Strangetown in terms of thoroughness - there's a whole 7-page document detailing everything. It's still in the testing subforum and not formally published on MTS which makes it easy to miss, but I've messed around with it for a while and haven't noticed any problems :)

[ivycopur]

[ivycopur]

you know how the method for editing infant faces in bodyshop is modding the game to load the infant face template in place of the toddler one? ever wonder what happens if you do that with an adult instead? Well,

[ivycopur]

i wanted to try dual booting my PC with windows XP to see if ts2 runs better on an older OS (and just for the nostalgia), but it turns out my hardware is too new for XP to even recognize lmao. i did get ts2 to run on an XP virtual machine but it's pretty laggy & glitchy (although useful for testing purposes). so then i started looking into old hardware and found someone on ebay who makes lovely-looking refurbished retro PC gaming builds, but then i saw in all the descriptions:

lmao... could be a skill issue of not knowing all the tricks to get it running, but regardless i think my best option is to do it myself. ive never built a PC before but i think it'll be a fun challenge to figure out the sweet spot for hardware powerful enough to run ts2 well but still old enough to be compatible with windows XP 🤔

[ivycopur]

[ivycopur]

apparently creon nigmos's face isn't fully fixed even in dorsal axe's strangetown 😭😭 he looks ok at first but if u age him down to adult his face explodes...

[ivycopur]

[ivycopur]

Babyfaced Strangetown fix + subhood

It's been brought to my attention that I goofed up Johnny Smith's face in my babyfaced Strangetown. I mixed up the AF face for the AM face in his template, so when you aged him up he would look like this:

Whoops!

I've fixed it and he now has his correct adult face:

The download link in my original post has now been updated with the fixed version. While I was at it, I also made a subhood version of the hood! The link is in the same post.

If you've already been playing this hood and don't want to start over, you can replace Johnny Smith's face data in SimPE with a fixed version:

Johnny Smith fixed (teen) - use this one if you haven't aged him up yet

Johnny Smith fixed (adult) - use this one if you've already aged him up to either young adult or adult. (YA and A use the same face meshes, so it should work for either)

You will need the Alt Sim Surgery plugin if you don't already have it (just drop it in the Plugins folder of your SimPE folder). Open your Strangetown in SimPE, go to Tools -> Neighborhood -> Alt Sim Surgery, select Johnny Smith from the Sim Pool and click "use" under Patient Sim. Check the "Face only" box. Then click "Load..." next to Archetype Sim, find the fixed version you downloaded, click Surgery and save. Like this:

(Basically the same as Step 6 in my infant faces tutorial.)

Sorry about that! And please continue to let me know about any problems found in my hoods.