#ts2 tip

[theageofsims]

These questions were asked by @memoirsofasim -- Thanks for asking me these questions/giving me these suggestions.

Originally I asked about what kind of videos I could maybe make on my Sims YouTube Channel, but I couldn't really wrap my mind around it in a way that the video wouldn't become confusing or drag on. So I decided to make a post about it instead. Anyway, here goes...

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Note: I just wanted to mention these two things below for anyone who might worry about starting to write/story-tell, before I answered the questions. And also, this goes for any Sims Game not just the Sims 4.

Write Without Fear

Remember to "Write Without Fear". What I mean by that is to develop a story based off of an idea that is your own. You can for sure look for inspiration (more on what will follow in this post), but the point is to not feel as if you have to tell a story someone else is already telling or you have to tell the story in the same way someone else is telling -- or that you must modify what you're writing in order to please someone else in fear of judgement.

Write For Yourself

Remember to always "Write For Yourself" because at the end of the day, even if someone isn't reading along to your story, you're creating something that is satisfying some part of you. It could easily be something that you wish to read yourself, but can not find it in any medium (even outside of the Sims community) and so there's no where else to turn… except to yourself.

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Question: How do I find plots for my stories?

Reality / Dreams

Reality: Everyone has access to this. Whether it's lively, depressing, or somewhere between -- reality is reality.

Dreams: Sometimes you just remember your dreams and even if you can't remember the entire thing, there's something that sticks out to you that makes you remember it long after the dream. It could be something about their physical features, something you might have remembered they said, or even the colors within your dreams.

Sims Jobs / Hobbies

Are your sims working a job that aligns with their greatest passions/hobbies or are they just working to pay their bills? It doesn't matter either way, but sometimes just knowing this small thing is enough to get you to think of what they would do in their spare time and who they would do them with. Would they become members in a club? Would they share their hobbies with their family members? Would they have any enemies that could possibly lead to competition?

Spend Time With Your Sims

I don't mean in CAS. I mean literally turn your game on and put them on Free Will -- and watch them. See what object they interact with first or which Sim in their household they interact with first. See how they respond to Sims that randomly knock on their door (welcome wagon and all that jazz). Notice their experiences -- what makes them happy, what bothers them, what makes them angry. Also take notice to their speech bubbles.

Send them out into the world. Have them interact with other Sims or just place them on a public/community lot and see who they start talking to first. From there -- take notice to the speech bubbles from both your Sim and the Sim they're talking to. Take notice to your Sims mood while in conversation (or even while they're alone).

Movies and TV -- Or Books

This one hits extremely close to my longest and on-going story because that's exactly where the main character came from -- a movie.

So much of my stories stem from some favorite character of mine or some favorite actor/actress of mine that play such and such a character in something from a million years ago or to the present day -- and everything literally in-between.

My thought when leaving them behind at the movies or after watching them in a movie at home is… how can I flesh this character out? How can I give them a better personality or extend their personality? How can I imagine what their lives are like outside of the worlds they were created in?

And there is how the story builds. One thing literally leads to another.

Consistency

If you write somewhere in a chapter that your Sim is crazy about grilled cheese sandwiches -- then that Sim is crazy about grilled cheese sandwiches. The only way they'll stop being in love with grilled cheese sandwiches is if they suddenly had something happen in their lives to make them change their opinions about it. Like they've aged up and gained the lactose intolerant trait. Now -- dairy will make your Sim terribly sick.

Remembering these little things makes your Sims differ from one another, but also allows you to flesh out their personalities and with doing that will open more opportunities.

This Sim may have loved cheese and not all dairy, but guess what? They can't have any dairy anymore. How are they going to survive? Well -- they'll have to change their lifestyle as far as what they choose to eat and with that will come the mental torment that they can't just go and eat cheese like they once used to be able to so now they're in a bad mood and they're terribly jealous of every Sim that can freely eat cheese as well as all the dairy they want…

And so they begin writing in their free time, to get all of their angry and saddened emotions down -- because it helps them with all of the mental stress.

And then they decide to publish their writings and suddenly -- the grill cheese loving Sim who wanted to open a Grill Cheese Shop is now an Award Winning Novelist instead.

Who will they meet along the way? Well -- they may very well fall in love with another Sim that may or may not be lactose intolerant. If they are they have a common ground and if they don't… there's going to be a lot of differences in food options between the two which will turn into food outings needing to be a place where there's both non-dairy and dairy items on the menu.

Make it make sense -- you know what I mean?

Consider Occult Plotlines/Characters

When it's occult stories the themes usually deal with magic and fantasy and what not so I literally just make up things out of nowhere and make them make sense because it's so easy to explain something in the name of magic or fantasy. I can add whatever I want to their lives and their houses and come up with reasons for it which then lead into storylines.

That witch down the street decided she didn't want to work a real job, so she used magic to make her dream house.

Seems like a quick-telling story, but if you start to think on it more you'll think about how she's maintaining her dream home. Clearly -- she's probably an entitled personality type and even lazy, but is she someone who wants to live alone in her dream house? Will she marry? Will she have caretakers to do the gardening and the cleaning… or will she just use magic to handle all of that because she rather be left all alone?

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Question: How do you screencap for your story?

I usually know the plot before I take the screencaps, but sometimes I don't. Usually when I don't I end up taking a lot of screencaps that end up going nowhere but being deleted or they end up just as quick edits that I randomly post on my blog because the moment where I had a storyline or a new chapter I let completely pass me by (or it came out of nowhere because I turned my game on to just gameplay and suddenly everything started unfolding whether a Sim prompted me to create more chapters or because I just had something rush to me out of a moment of total imagination).

Still -- I try to remember that I have the ability to use words to continue the story just because I may not have a screencap available -- and that's okay, too.

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Mods:

This will help if you start paying more attention to the speech bubbles I mentioned above and would like more of a variety.

Diverse Speech/Thought Bubbles: here (CurseForge | modder: Sims 4 Me/bienchen)

[emperorofthedark]

The weather system is functional... I think. I want to include heat risks (sunburn) and storm risks (struck by lightning), but I haven't done that yet. I did figure out how to link temperatures and weather conditions to the different seasons, so it won't be cold or snowing in June. I haven't tested it extensively because there really isn't anything there yet, but I hope it's all good. Working on the river crossing system now. I think the frozen in winter bit works (it seems to reliably freeze when the temperature is under 32 degrees), and it would appear that the river conditions (safe, moderate, risky, deadly) work with a 20% chance of someone drowning in risky conditions and 40% chance in deadly conditions, and drowned party members are successfully removed from the roster.

Excited to move on to injuries and deaths.

Disclaimer: This is very basic placeholder shit ripped directly from Oregon Trail II, so that I can test codes. And of course there will be pictures, but I have to do some major CC shopping and decorating, so I don't have any taken just yet. I just wanted to share what I have done so far.

[moocha-muses]

[violamonty]

she walks the lonely street, stares at herself and thinks: “this is someone i don't want to know.”

[daman19942]

Quick SimPE Trick - Disable Reputation Wants

I finally got sick of the "Have a Good/Bad Reputation" wants and was curious if I could disable them. Turns out I can! All credit to @midgethetree for this handy guide and this stackoverflow tip of searching through all the wanttrees at once (don't right click open them all like I did. Just go to "Search > Find in Files" and type "Reputation" - this will work for any phrase or word you want to search for).

Open SimPE and WantTrees.package. The want you are looking for is 0x1561C3A4.

There are three paired instances of the Good/Bad Reputation wants you'll want to disable. This is a huge want tree and they are about 30%, 60%, and 90% down the tree (good follows bad each time). If you want to disable the wants fully, rename any value that is "True" to "False" and hit Commit/Save. Again, much smarter people than myself figured this out first (like @lamare-sims' guide here). I'm just repeating what they've shared.

There are some Reputation mods floating around but nothing that disabled them, and I wanted to do this for three reasons: 1. the Good Reputation want is way overvalued at 5,000 Aspiration points, 2. it keeps rolling even after you've fulfilled it, and 3. reputation is not something I actively pursue in my gameplay (if it happens, it happens).

Hope this helps! Let me know if I broke anything!

[lraerosesims]

How I draw: Silver Metallic Buttons for Sims 2 Textures

As we all know, Sims 2 doesn't really appreciate large file sizes/dimensions for it's textures, so sometimes you have work very closely with the individual pixels. Here is how I draw buttons. Video is sped up so don't feel like you need to draw as fast as me!

Side note: this tutorial is created on the basis that you already know how to use the basic functions of Sims BodyShop to extract the texture file. There's plenty of tutorials out there explaining that so please don't ask me to clarify on that part. Anyway, on to the buttons...↓↓↓

What you need:

A PC

Digital Drawing app (like Photoshop, Krita etc)

A Graphics Tablet with pen - you could try this with a mouse but I wouldn't recommend!

And obviously Sims 2/Sims 2 BodyShop

First off, create a new layer - we don't want this button permanently stuck to our base texture. Then I get a standard hard edge brush (I use Krita as my drawing software, so just use whatever hard brush is available in your preferred software/app). Because I'm making relatively small buttons, I make my brush 7.09px in size. Select a mid to light grey colour as the base. Make a single circle.

Then decrease the brush size to be nice and small. As a comparison to my 7.09px circle, I decrease to 0.01px for this next step. Choose a slightly darker grey colour and lightly sketch in a 'semi-circular line' about 3/4 of the way around just in from the edge of the circle. By lightly sketching - and not pressing down hard, you'll get varying tones on each pixel to represent different reflections on the 'metal'.

Next choose a darker grey again, and lightly sketch around the similar area as the last colour, but don't be too fussy on hitting the same pixels - we want varying tonal values for our shadows.

Then choose white and lightly sketch the 'catch light' part of the button. This doesn't need to be right in the centre, in fact it's better if it's off to the side, or towards the top more. We're not always facing directly towards a light source so this creates a more realistic lighting effect. You'll see me select the same mid to light base grey I used just to lightly dust over the edges of the white area to soften it a tiny bit (only do this if your white edge is a little to crisp).

After that I go back and forth between a few different tones of grey to lightly sketch over the parts we haven't really drawn on yet. This just helps create some gradual shading that enhances the 'roundness' of our very flat, very 2D button texture.

Once you're happy with the shadowing (remember it looks somewhat janky this close up, but you can always zoom out to see if the button looks more smooth when further away), you can then make another layer, and drag it below your newly made button layer in the layer menu. Select a soft edge brush and increase the size to slightly wider than your buttons overall size (I chose 9.14px compared to my 7.09px button)

Choose black from the colour wheel/palette and lightly build up the shadow underneath the button, gradually increasing size and opacity until desired tone. If the colour of the 'garment' in this texture is light then keep the shadow to a minimum, if it's dark then the shadow needs to be deep enough to show up.

Zoom out and inspect how this button looks further out. If you're satisfied, then merge the button and shadow layers together, copy/paste it as many times as needed for the garment you're texturing and Voila! You made buttons for a Sims 2 Texture!!

Feel free to ask any questions below - I'm definitely no professional, especially in creating tutorials so I'm more than happy to clarify if something didn't make sense.

[oopsallsims]

Sims 2 Fewer Hobby Wants Mod

[sissysims]

Looking to customize your Sims 2 gameplay? Discover 10 fantastic sites where you can find the best mods and custom content for The Sims 2 in this guide! From unique gameplay tweaks to stunning custom skins and furniture, these websites offer a treasure trove of options for every player.

[landgraabbed]

[crispsandkerosene]

Hello there, i recently started getting into object making and conversions. But i’m sort of stuck. The object that i am currently working on has various maps, including diffuse, emissive, opacity and specular. I would i be able to add these map into SimPe in order for them to appear on the mesh?

Hey!

By default, TS2 can handle diffuse textures (alpha chanel included), as well as bump/normal and specular maps. However, the results for those last two aren't very fancy.

This guide on MTS covers transparency, normal maps, as well as a bunch of other material parameters.

It doesn't document using specular maps, so I've shared an example here. PForest has another here.

In my shader mod, I added the ability to use an emissive map (here called "additive"). The download includes a PDF explaining the new parameters.

An altenative to using these maps directly in game is to blend or bake them into the diffuse texture. Again, PForest and I have some tips on that here.

[sufficeittosim]

life hack: cc shopping in the defaults database kills two birds with one stone! just download the customs of all the things you don't end up choosing as defaults! everything's in one place! no more yucky maxis eating up your texture memory! much organization, many choice, such amaze!

[andrevasims]

there's a disappointing lack of EAxis hairs that I can easily give frosted tips

[mishas-sims]

Gaining a diploma for Sims who gained their degree via the batbox

1. turn on testingcheats

2. right click on the batbox

3. click the option that says “items”

4. chose the option “re-give diploma”

and boom now you have your sim’s diploma from university in your inventory.

i discovered this because i was updating my spreadsheet for my BaCc and i forgot to write down the degree i gave my sim and when went searching for a solution.

found the information on this LINK on Mod the Sims

[snapdragoned]

It's hectic, but Marina finds a way to balance her 9-5, her hobbies, and her business.

[simlisharchives]

Broken BOX Links FIX:

reminder for myself and maybe can help others

was trying to download some of bunheadsbun's stuff but the download wasnt working. gave this a try and it fixed the link for me!

· ⚘ · ─── · ⚘ · ─── · ⚘ · ─── · ⚘ · ─── · ⚘ · ─── · ⚘ ·

example:

❌ www.box.com/s/5a65567c9ed7605bde84 << download button was endlessly loading for me when clicked

· ─── · · ─── · · ─── · · ─── · · ─── · · ─── ·

🍐 app.box.com/s/5a65567c9ed7605bde84 << seemed to reroute to a page with a new download button that actually works! c:

i'm happy that i can finally download these cute widepants :D

[minty-plumbob]

been playing ts2 with this little guy ^