Vacation Inspiration

In our Veronaville makeover contest, lipe2k has built a gorgeous beach house for the beachy family. I'm seriously in love with his style and now I want to create a nice South Carolina / East Coast beach vacation spot. In my last vacation post I mentioned not knowing what kind of beach vacation hood to create and now I've got it. Not sure how I managed to forget one of the only 2 types of beach places I've been to. Weird. Anyways, here's his entry in full and his fantastic backyard.

First Round House and Some Rather Morbid Mods

I've finally got my first round house up! I had asked jones for an extension because I recently got a job and moved back to Cinci. This happened during the same week that the house was due. I'm very committed to my sims, but after job searching for over 9 months, I do have my priorities straight.

As part of the contest, jones gave us bios for 4 families, and we are free to pick whichever family we want for each house, but the catch is that we don't know what kind of house will be next and we can't reuse the families. After some figuring, I decided that all 4 families could be related and proceeded to make them in game. I started a generation back so that the future adults will be able to have good skills and such, but it put me a bit behind. At the time of having to turn in my house, I haven't yet gotten the families all aged up and appropriately matched.

The Williams family (empty next of 5 kids) is the main family. Hugh is the oldest, and he has already moved out and settled into the Application house with his bride-to-be, a romance lady who may or may not be having extramarital affairs, and who will die in her third childbirth. (See below about this morbid issue.) The next oldest is Stacie, who is still a teen and just starting her relationship with Brian Johnson. According to jone's bios, they will be having twin girls. After her is a son named Richard, who was added to bring the count up to jone's required 5. I decided he needed to be a boy and in the middle to help explain the age differences between Stacie and the other two moms-to-be. After him is Johanna, and her betrothed is Lowrie. (I really dislike the name Larry, Lowrie isn't much better, but it is better imho.) Johanna just recently grew up to a child, and the toddler of the house is Lora.

I've got a lot to do to get them all grown and fixed up with their partners, who are also at the same ages in their own households. Little Lora and Joshua are going to be my Round 2 house, and they are the furthest from adulthood! I need to step on it. I think this weekend I'm going to start work on the house and get it a fair amount done first just in case I run into trouble meeting the deadline again. I really prefer taking my pictures with the families in the house and in the shots, but I only have so many hours to play now that I have a job. Anyways, here's the house:

Medieval Career Conversions

For the longest time in my medieval hood I've just ignored the Maxis jobs and flat out told my simmies not to want them. Unfortunately, removing the careers seriously strips the game of much of its flavor. I recently stumbled upon a post about people saying they either wanted or made default replacements of the careers to be more in keeping with their game. I was already working on a set of stand-alone medieval careers, but doing them as defaults is a much better idea.

Cycle 2 of ‘Renovating the Base Hoods’ Contest

Jones has posted the second cycle of her Home Makeover Contests. This time we are in Veronaville. Unfortunately, for anyone hearing about this for the first time from me (seriously?), I just barely squeaked in and filled the 20th and last spot in the contest. As some of you may be aware, Veronaville is my medieval hood, so instead of following everyone else and creating lovely contemporary houses like I did in the last cycle, I’ll be doing my best to rework them into lovely little Shakespearean cottages. I’m excited and a little nervous about a few things. The main challenge will be of course to satisfy the families’ requirements that are part of the contest. One family in particular enjoys the beach, I’m not quite sure how to translate that into old-timey decor yet. The second challenge is going to be not reusing all the same CC over and over again. I’ll have to do some more hunting for quality items. The quality with the medieval CC I’ve seen is usually hit or miss. It’s either fantastically well made, or the textures look like something ripped out of a poorly scanned-in magazine page from the 80s. The final bit I’m nervous about is what the judges are going to do with my houses. There are rules about things, and I think not having an indoor bathroom might be something they’d dock points for. If anyone has some links to good medieval CC, put the link in a comment please!

Changes Coming!

So, it's been a while since I posted anything. I've got a few reasons for that. The one that's actually relevant to you is that MTS is revamping our submission system. Delphy has been hard at work coding out the new system and I've been helping him get the user interface just perfect. (I'm an industrial designer, remember? That's something I can do in my sleep!) We are hoping that the new system will feel more positive to the users and be easier to comply with. It will be a much more standardized system and we are also working on updating the Creator Guidelines to reflect these changes. We want it to be easier for everyone to upload, and we want it to be a positive experience, but we also need everyone to follow the guidelines, so this should help everyone out. Here's your spoilers: "stars"