Mootilda and Phae's 'For Sale' Sign

Back in August of '12, I started a project trying to make Inge's Stay Things Shrub only keep bathroom and kitchen objects. With Echo's help I was able to poke it into only keeping toilets, and then I forgot about it till December. It was around that time Mootilda uploaded her Fix Lot Value After Using the Stay Things Shrub and I sent her a PM about my project. We took it from there and had the object mostly working, then forgot about it again after the new year.

A month ago, we lost Mootilda. It is very hard to lose someone so kind and brilliant, and the community was shaken from her loss. I pmed Quatchi, her husband, and he was able to find and send me the latest version she had been working on those years ago. As I had guessed, she did have a more completed version than I did (she was doing the programming/coding, and I was doing meshing/texturing/interactions). I was able to take what she had created, finish off most of the things we had wanted to include, and now I am uploading it for you from the both of us.


For Sale Mooving Sign
$15 under Misc > Misc


The idea here is that when you move out of a house, you don't take everything including the kitchen sink. Some things naturally stay, like the cabinets in your kitchen and your bathroom tub and toilet. Additionaly, overhead and wall lights would stay. Unfortunately due to how things are categorized, the floor lamps are staying too, likewise with anything left on a counter.

Now, this in itself is pretty great, but I love to include bits of 'life' into my objects and when Mootilda suggested putting the Kick interaction back in, I knew I had to do that, and include in other reactions a sim might have to selling their house. Kick, Cheer, Cry, and Wave are the options and they are both directable and autonomous. Additionally, the sign is recolorable with two subsets - the wood and the sign.

There is a ton of behind the scenes coding here that Mootilda did, that frankly, I don't understand a good portion of it. She would have been able to explain to you all what she did, but all I can tell you is that it's awesome and it works. The main thing she was working on was to ensure that the family wouldn't lose money when they moved out. Some of you may have noticed that if you put the Stay Things Shrub in your lot and move your family out, they suddenly don't have enough money to buy back their house. That issue is mostly fixed with our sign. Something is still sorta janky with the lot value, but only initially. If you go back into the lot (without a family) and save it, then all the values get reset properly. If you don't do that, from what I've seen, the house is initially undervalued.

Dustin and Angela Broke have outgrown their mobile home. With triplet girls about to grow up, they just won't fit anymore! Angie is thrilled to finally move back to a real house, but Dustin isn't too happy to have to sell his family's property. After moving the Brokes to the Family bin, their house is left with only what is nailed down


Times and tough and Cassandra and Darren Dreamer are forced to sell their mansion. Cassandra is distraught over the thought of being sent to 'the poor house' while Darren knows that this isn't the end of the world. The girls aren't taking it too well either, but the boys are too young to understand what is going on. Their mansion is still dead expensive even without all their belongings.


Additionally, part of my larger project was to make these awesome moving boxes that you could actually put stuff in, but after further reflection, it became clear that plan was too much effort for too little gain, so you can have these now too. It is just 1 mesh, with 12 recolors of the labels. The first subset is the room sort icons and the second one is the function sort icons so you can effectively 'label' your things. In my picture I have a box of 'bedroom lamps', another of 'kids games', 'kitchen gadgets',... You'll find these under 'Shelves'.


Enjoy!
- Phae (& Mootilda)

P.S. I wasn't able to finish off the pie menu interactions, but I left them in there under the Debug menu if someone wants to take a look at where I left off. The idea was that the user could choose between keeping just the fixtures or keeping everything. I know that both of those 'keep' options work, but just not as a user directed pie menu interaction.

Polycounts:
For Sale Sign: 36 polys
Moving Box: 156 polys

Additional Credits:
Big thank you to Quatchi for brainstorming with us with the original mod work. He came up with the great idea to add the value of the items into the sign to keep the lot price consistent. I can't thank him enough for digging the files out of storage when I asked about them, as well.

Credit, of course, to Inge for her original Stay Things Shrub. It is only by standing on the shoulders of giants...

Also thanks to KiaraRawks for her Lawn Signs. Seeing that upload around the same time I was thinking about the Stay Things Shrub was what inspired the project in the first place.

My continuing undying thank yous to Echo for fixing my first experiment in this oh so long ago. She also mentioned the hooks we ended up using to run the code.