UPDATE Sept. 29, 2019: Elaine's Enchanted Picture (Television)

Title: Elaine's Enchanted Picture: The Lady of Shalott

UPDATE September 29th, 2019

1) The "Disenchant" menu option now disables autonomous television viewing, rather than disabling television use completely.

2) Fixed a bug with channel and movie selection.


UPDATE February 8th, 2019

The previous release did not permit movie viewing unless Apartment Life or Mansion & Garden was installed. This minor update allows Sim movies to be viewed if FreeTime or any later EP is available.


UPGRADE January 30th, 2019

1) The Enchanted Picture's screen is now fully recolourable.

2) The object uses more accurate and efficient meshing, with a 15% lower poly count.

3) Texturing is also improved, particularly for the default frame.

4) The Enchanted Picture includes two built-in invisible recolours, allowing it to be placed inside the basegame "SimCity at Night" painting, or other similarly sized artwork.

5) For times when autonomous television use becomes annoying, The Lady of Shalott can be "Disenchanted" to disable autonomy. By default, the Enchanted Picture is "Enchanted", which allows Sims to use the television without being told to do so.

6) While remaining basegame compatible, the Enchanted Picture now supports the television functions of all expansion packs except Pets. (In order to maintain basegame compatibility, pets cannot interact with the Enchanted Picture - but the object is otherwise fully compatible with the Pets EP.)

If you are updating from the original 2007 release, please overwrite your "SDshalott_Lady_Mesh.package" with the file from the new download. The original non-metallic frame recolour, "SDshalott_FrameNR.package", should be deleted and replaced with "sdShalott_frame_OdalisqueGoldNR.package".



The Tale

The mirror having worked its deadly curse on Elaine, "the fairy Lady of Shalott", Morgan Le Fay has repaired the glass and obsured its magic surface with a beautiful painting of the Lady herself. With care, you may again invoke its magic, so that "shadows of the world appear - winding down to Camelot". But beware you look not overly long into the "mirror clear" or you too may find "the mirror crack'd from side to side"...

- Poetic quotations from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1842).


Description

Seemingly a mild mannered painting of The Lady of Shalott by Arthur Hughes (1873), when the proper spells are cast this picture becomes a magical portal onto the world...



...in fact, an expensive wall mounted television set!




The Lady of Shalott is a nineteenth century romantic period oil painting that functions as a high-end wall mounted television. This magical object does not depreciate, it is Apartment Life/M&G height adjustable, and it is also immune to fire, lightning, repossession, snow and theft. A limitation is that when switching off the set, you may momentarily see a blank glass screen, before the picture of Elaine is restored. Apart from being unbreakable and untinkerable, the Enchanted Picture supports all television functions, including operation of the basegame video game machine.

The Lady of Shalott package contains an invisible frame recolour, allowing the screen to be placed within other picture frames, such as the basegame "SimCity at Night" wall decor (and "MoveObjects On" is not required). The package also contains an invisible screen recolour, so that when the television is "Off" it can reveal a different static picture - for example the "SimCity at Night" image.

A set of 15 frame recolours and 12 picture recolours is available here: Recolours of Elaine's Enchanted Picture (Television).

Elaine's Enchanted Picture costs §8050 and can be found in the television section of the catalogue. It has a Fun rating of 10 and a Room (Environment) rating of 10.




Recolouring Hints

The aspect ratio for the Lady of Shalott television screen is 1.80, the same as the basegame "Soma 'Wall-Eye' Large Screen Flat-Panel Television". The default recolour size for the "screen" or picture subset of the Lady of Shalott is 256x512 pixels. When configuring your source texture, I suggest first scaling its width to 512 pixels wide by 284 pixels high. Then scale the height down to 256 pixels, while ensuring that "Maintain Aspect Ratio" option (or equivalent) is disabled. This will ensure that the picture will look undistorted when displayed in The Sims 2.

The frame is also recolourable. The built-in default frame includes metallic reflections, and the included recolour is a non-reflective version of the same frame. This beautiful frame is an authentic 3D conversion of the one containing La Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, currently hanging in the Louvre. For the sides and front edges, the Odalisque frame is supplemented by textures from Young Women of Sparta by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. The back of the picture frame is adapted from the back of the basegame "In the Beginning" painting.



Terms of Use

You may include the items from this project in uploaded lots, whether for free or pay. It is nice but not necessary to provide a credit and link to this page.


Translation Credit

Mihura was kind enough to translate the picture's story and custom menus into French, German, Italian and Spanish.


Texture Credits

- Arthur Hughes artwork is in the public domain, available at the Wikimedia Commons: The Lady of Shalott,

- the textures for the picture frame are also from Wikimedia Commons: a combination of the frames for La Grande Odalisque and the Young Women of Sparta.


Additional Credits

- Jfade's Compressorizer for minimizing file size
- GIMP 2 and Microsoft Paint for graphics editing, file conversion, processing, sizing and titling
- Corel WEB.PhotoPaint, for the initial picture frame colouring
- Milkshape 3D and Ultimate Unwrap3D Pro, for 3D modeling
- Numenor's BaseGameStarter Pro, so handy speeding up the development process
- SimPE and PJSE, which together make it all possible


Polygon Counts:
78 faces, 153 vertices