As Malcolm Landgraab was eating the chef salad he'd just made (see this post), I could hear Andrew hanging out with Marion Hutchins in the garden outside, and I realised that I really like the sound of Andrew's voice. I suppose I've known him, and regarded him as a friend for well over eleven years now, and I find his voice reassuring and mellifluous. Maybe this is one reason why I keep him as a teen. It's a pity that I can't understand a word he says, but I am thankful for the speech bubbles.

For those who cannot think of names for towns in the game:

(Yes, this is a real map of Tasmania)

I was thinking about downloading a ReShade cause I love how it looks in other games but turns out I love the original Sims 2 shading way too much, though the custom ones are great for pictures. Sims 3 shading is way too dark while Sims 4 is way too saturated, and Sims 2 is something in between with saturation and bright enough not to look like a horror movie setting. Gunmod's light mod is enough.

We Finnish people also had humor naming our places
I made a Finnish family before, I should reconsider where to move them

Do you decorate your hood per season? I have an urge to go on an autumn colors downloading spree.

The issue with a wants-based playstyle... either you end up with a bunch of easy-to-fulfill wants and quickly get up to an almost permanent platinum, or they roll stupid impossible big wants that are impossible to fulfill and eventually slip to red...

Some weird time-turner magic nonsense going on with the sequence of dates for my Hogwarts downloads towards the end of August...

It's probably the result of a spell cast by a young wizard who's still learning his trade.

What is the problem?

Look at the blue line just after 26 August.

Ah, thanks! I totally failed to notice that. So someone undownloaded the lot lol.

I wonder if that's a result of the hard drive crashes; @Tashiketh had to move things to a new server. So I'm guessing something got date scrambled or otherwise confused, so that the graph went back in time when things (caches?) caught up!

I just hit the 30-first-date-mark with my 50-first-date-lifetime-want-sim. I feel exhausted.

They need to practice more before casting anything again lol... it's getting worse!

I was thinking something like that, or timezone discrepancies that occurred due to the restoration.

Actually haven't moved anything just yet. Took ages to copy everything so right now it's running on the old server but will probably move this week.

The "red" games are more fun imo. The challenge of balancing needs when your Sim is in a state of despair... impeccable.

So this sim went into lifetime platinum mood without having achieved the lifetime want (some of my sims have done that lately). I don't know if I'm gonna follow through and go on more dates, none seems to have any chemistry or want to date him anyway. (Maybe they are scared of being caught up in a scandal, considering that he is the mayor.)
I'm thinking of letting him fall in love (again) with one of his old flames, paint some cheesy art and open a grilled cheese restaurant (some of you have mentioned this, somewhere here, but I can't remember who or where. Sorry and thank you for this great idea!)

It's interesting how late into the game's life that 'Maxis Match' CC became a thing. I guess as the game aged more people became aware of how out-of-place "realistic" CC looked with TS2 graphics.

Seeing screenshots with the shiny photorealistic skins always makes me feel a bit weird.

Yes, but there still aren't many Sims 2 style hairstyles, I need more! XD

I've been around from almost the start of TS2, and I'm reasonably sure "maxis match" was a thing quite early on. Not sure it was always called "maxis match", but it it definitely was a style meant to match with the game. People made stuff that was maxis-match all the time back then (just have a look back in the download archive here at MTS, around 2004-2006), with meshes, recoloring, styles, hairs, extractions, age conversions, and so forth. It probably caught on more as the whole "standarized swatch" became a thing, with swatches matching ingame colors and such, and people realizing a lot of the ingame resources were fairly usable with a slight touch-up. Plus, there's always people who want something that's the opposite to a realistic style.

I don't know about TS1 - never used CC with that one. For TS2, MM seemed to always be around - maybe not popular all the time, but sticking around. I think it was just carried over as a concept with TS3 and TS4 (but matching those games rather than TS2, of course).

To me, MM is simply using colors, styles, patterns, meshes (and so forth) that blends with the ingame style, to the point where (unless you're very familiar with the game) you're meant to be a little bit unsure if it's from the actual game or CC (unlike a hyper-realistic piece of CC, or an extreme neon color palette, or anything like that would tend to do in an otherwise no-CC environment). It's also not a rigid system, so one person could think a color palette or mesh would fit perfectly in a MM environment, while another disagrees (like 3t2/4t2 items, for instance - technically MM when converted, but people tend to disagree whether they match with the TS2 style).

I also think some people confuse the whole "I don't like realistic CC" with "I don't like badly made photoskinned CC". There used to be a lot of the badly photoskinned CC going on back in the days. It's not the same as well-made realistic-looking CC.

Personally, I've been more the "thriving in the middle" kind of player. I like some elements that go toward semi-realistic (mostly CAS), but I also prefer other elements that veer a bit more toward MM (furniture), but if I want it in my game, the style isn't all that important, as long as it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. For me, 4t2 items (converted from the game, or MM CC) is in the "sticks out like a sore thumb" category. I've found some that doesn't look too bad, but I'm kinda picky on it - some can look fine in a preview, but just doesn't look right ingame. 3t2 is a bit hit-and-miss - hairs are generally fine, and some furniture as long as it has nice textures, but clothes (both 3t2/4t2 in this case) have a tendency to look plasticy and have an "off" shape compared to TS2. There are exceptions, of course. It does seem the 4t2 style is one of those you have to fully embrace for it to look decent in TS2 (some people manage it), and I'm not there...

I'm a fan of 3t2 MM, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say 4t2 is really MM. Sure while made by Maxis originally and converted over, TS4 content tends to be lower-poly than 3 and 2 meshes, and the texturing on 4 content seems to favor an exaggerated cartoon style. Sure, TS2 has a cartoon style, but is a bit more nuanced in that regard. Only way you'd get me to really us 4t2 content is if the textures were made using TS2 MM color palletes/styles.

All in all, it still surprised me that it was around circa '06 though.

Everything about deedee suits sims 2 well, but in my opinion it is more aesthetic to differentiate pure sims 2 hairstyles, 3t2 or detailed alphas, or 4t2. I am in favor of using only one style of the 3 options. (The three options because I think that 3t2 is a hybrid of realistic with something simplistic, so it depends on what textures it can fit into various styles.) Although everyone has their own taste.

Regarding clothing, I like to use 4t2 and 3t2 because I feel like the shapes are not very different and they fit together very well, but it slows down the game a lot to have a lot of recolors. Although I stopped using meshes with no relief 2007 style a long time ago I do use them for my custom neighborhoods as a tribute and because I feel it fits.

^ Some creators pay more attention to details - shape, colors, etc. It's fully possible to tone down the rubbery textures or "weirdly shaped in the wrong places" meshes, for instance. I've got a few favorite 3t2/4t2 creators myself (Deedee being one of them).

The main differences between original TS2 and TS3 hairs is the textures (TS2 being fully colored, TS3 using color maps for CASt) and how the hairs are layered (TS2 hairs generally have multiple layers, TS3 usually have one for the hair itself but rarely more than 3-4 with accesories and such). Both use alphas, and sometimes a blend of fully meshed parts + alpha details.

TS4 is the only one that doesn't have alpha-enabled hairs (even if, technically they do have alphas, they just don't utilize them, or let alpha-enabled CC hairs use the materials properly).

I'm not sure about TS3 (never dabbled much in CC-making, only extracting), but out of the three, it does seem like TS2 was quite well fitted out for alpha-enabled hairs. It even has a separate material spesifically for hair, accessories, and alpha-enabled clothing parts.

As for textures/colors, pretty much none of the MM colors/styles/textures/swatches that's in common use is really a perfect match for actual MM hair. Hairs using Remi or Simgaroop or someone else's MM style is just that - a style. They've made their own textures, usually with less shine than for instance Pooklet's textures, and then color-matched them to something that matches maxis hair colors. The ingame textures look different.

4t2 from game resources is in some ways technically MM since it's a direct conversion, but (in my opinion, as said above) not fully MM compared to TS2. The style of TS4 is just on the verge of being too cartoony, and there's something about the meshes and textures - and style - that feels out of place. The reverse is also true (tried converting my set of deco babies to TS4 a while back - they just look completely out of place. It also made me really grateful for TS2's much better handling of recolorable subsets, and alpha textures that actually behave the way you want them to... Making anything with alphas in TS4 is a nightmare, let alone having to edit multiple swatches when you find that one mistake all the swatches have - made me sincerely miss SimPE...).