EA-Match Two-Storey Walls

This may be setting some kind of record for ‘longest time taken to make required changes’. I first submitted part of this set in mid-October 2016, when I was very new to wall creation. I’d been working on it for a couple of months and solved a few problems but the walls were still far from seamless. I thought it would probably take longer than a few days to get them to a good enough standard and asked to resubmit them later instead of trying to make the changes right away. I didn’t realise then how much longer it would take . I returned to the project at intervals, trying out different ideas, but without making any real progress. Eventually, I gave up. Then, in August this year, I got back into making walls and started doing some serious experimentation.



The project had started out as a set of upper and lower walls to make two-storey versions of the base-game walls with dentil, egg-and-dart and twisted motif crown mouldings, for use in houses with the grander sort of entrance hall, but now it started to grow. A two-storey version of this wall might be useful. And what about that one? So now there are three sets, with a total of 19 walls. All of them can be found in the catalogue under Wall Sets.

Set 1: the ‘classical’ mouldings

The original set:

• hzl_Wall_Dentil_Upper
• hzl_Wall_Dentil_Lower
• hzl_Wall_EggDart_Upper
• hzl_Wall_EggDart_Lower
• hzl_Wall_TwistMotif_Upper
• hzl_Wall_TwistMotif_Lower

These are all §7, like the original EA single-storey walls. Each has two recolourable channels and a single preset. The top and bottom halves are specific to each wall but could be swapped around, e.g. to go with my modified twisted motif wall, to blend in with different walls on the upper and lower floors or for an entirely two-storey room. You may find you have to adjust the colouring slightly, because the underlying colour of the original walls varies.

Set 2: mostly dadoes



This, on the other hand, was deliberately made as a mix-and-match set, based on the base-game walls with ornate crown moulding. There are two upper and five lower walls, all priced at §6.

• hzl_Wall_Upper_OrnateCrown
• hzl_Wall_Upper_OrnateCrown_Frieze
• hzl_Wall_Lower_Beadboard_Short
• hzl_Wall_Lower_Beadboard_Tall
• hzl_Wall_Lower_PlainDado_Short
• hzl_Wall_Lower_PlainDado_Tall
• hzl_Wall_Lower_Baseboard_Bead

The beadboard walls have a different preset from the ones with a plain dado, so that they’re easier to pick out in the catalogue. The upper walls were going to have two presets each, to go with both types of lower wall, but that turned out to make them glitchy. So now the wall with just the crown moulding matches the plain walls and the one with a frieze matches the beadboard ones. The lower wall with just a baseboard and the upper wall with only the crown moulding have two channels. The others have three.

Set 3: the plainer ones

These are two-storey versions of the base-game walls with a plain baseboard:

• hzl_Wall_Upper_Crown_Plain (price §7, 2 channels)
• hzl_Wall_Upper_Crown_Trim (price §7, 2 channels)
• hzl_Wall_Upper_Crown_TrimmedBorder (price §7, 3 channels)
• hzl_Wall_Lower_Dado_TrimmedBorderMatch (price §6, 3 channels)
• hzl_Wall_Lower_Baseboard_Plain (price §5, 2 channels)
• hzl_Wall_Lower_Baseboard_Plain_Ext (price §5, 2 channels)

I originally made a completely plain wall as part of this set but realised that it was almost indistinguishable from Buckley’s fixed foundation wall. So I left it out and would recommend using Buckley’s mod if you want a matching plain wall.

The upper wall with the trimmed border has had the fixes from my mod applied.

There are, of course, EA walls with just a plain crown moulding or baseboard, so my versions may not be needed, depending on how the walls are being used – the seam between the upper and lower walls may not be obvious in a small hallway.

The upper wall with plain crown moulding, like the EA original, is a lighter colour than the others in the set. I didn’t alter this because the EA wall with plain crown moulding and baseboard matches it exactly. Instead, I adjusted the preset to be slightly darker than the other walls. Similar slight colour changes will be needed if using it in a build with other walls from the set.

The odd one out (with the white-and-grey preset) is another version of the wall with a plain baseboard, with a wider strip of the main wall colour at the bottom. It’s unsuited to internal walls, since part of the strip is visible above the floor, but was created for use on exterior walls, which will generally be seen from a greater distance. When zooming out, it stays seamless for longer than the interior-wall version and there’s only a fine line even with a plain wall and a strongly contrasting baseboard.



Programs used: TSRW, S3PE, S3OC and GIMP.
Thanks to armiel for Builder’s Island, where most of the testing happened.