Date Posted: 19th Mar 2012 at 7:36 PM

First off, I got the pyrimantion to disappear. Now I just need to build more community lots so I can see who my sims need to befriend as far as secret soc. members. THEY MUST, VISIT, THIS BUILDING!

Okay, on subject now ...

It is so odd, I think, that as mcuh as I love the Sims 2 game, there are so many things about it that I'd like to change. For instance, I can't stand to see my male sims in two-piece outfits. The male child thru elder clothes that came with the base game are just hideous! I hope someone has taken the time to replace these; I'm not skilled enough with clothes to do it myself.

Ah, but let us discuss the things I can am replacing myself.

I'm ALMOST done with my face replacement set. :o Its funny how grueling it seemed not too long ago. Now I can follow all of the necessary steps in a flash! I only have three more to replace. (Does a dance.)

Also, I'm still pretty happy with my science (fiction) default name replacement set. Now I've found I have a young adult male named Zero Hertz! Alas, I can only test the pet names with Pescado's nostrayrespawn disabled ... which defeats the purpose it serves. Then again, it might be nice to have animals with the names of my choice ...

Lastly, I would like to know just how safe it is to delete the interactable NPC's such as the mail carrier and the newspaper delivery kid. With new faces and better names, I've become quite bored of the NPC's my main 'hood has now. Renaming them things like Nanny Droid and Hygienic Technician (for the maid) just aren't cutting the mustard anymore.

And that's all I have to say for now!

End.

Date Posted: 16th Mar 2012 at 8:38 PM

I've decided to use my spectacular pyramid mansion as the secret society in Cyberdale's college town. So far it says its for rent ... I'm rather new to University, believe it or not. I'm kind of glad that it didn't work the first time because it wasn't until after that I found out there can only be ONE S.S. per college town and once one is set-up ITS THERE FOREVER. Therefore, I'm on MTS today hoping to find a guideline/tiptoria/suggestions for a good, functional secret soc.

End.

Date Posted: 14th Mar 2012 at 6:36 PM

*quick little dance in front of the computer*

I'm in good spirits today.

I picked up on my old, old birdbath mesh and edited it lodes. Now, thanks to Pixelhate's helpful PDF files on the TXMT(?) files, I've got it to look like there is actual water in the bowl. Now I just need to add scum, poop, and dirt to the basin texture for realism.

Ack, I have so many compressed files in my "older projects" folder. One old project is a candy dish for toddlers that I cloned from a dog bowl. It looked good in-game, but it replaced the fancy pet dish and had some other minor issues. Shoot, I could probably get it working by now. I could even make it look like crystal or glass with what I've just learned. *happy toddler claps*

And what else is in here? "Shopping cart." Ah, yes. A shopping cart prop cloned from a toddler feeding chair. I got held up on the basket part of the mesh there. X( I'll have to rethink that some time. The shopping cart was meant to be pretty handy.

Hm, "modular stairs." "Cloud_mod_stairs.package." Oh, wow, that was a head-turner. I cannot believe that I tried to make cloud-like steps at that stage in my meshing/modding experience. I still don't know how to make clouds. (I have an idea by now, though ...)

"tmplate career.7z" Oh, the comedy career! So much work, but so much fun. The laboriousness of writing descriptions and chance cards is what turned me off from it, but it would be an excellent idea to pick up on this again. I reckon ANY part of creating a career is rough and time-consuming, but I like the idea of this career so much! C'mon, IT'S COMEDY!

And there are many more old, abandoned projects where those came from, but those are the ones that I think I could actually pull off by now.

Not to mention my latest projects, such as the lion dog breed, the sci-fi names list, many sci-fi costumes, the default face replacement project, and what else?!

While I'm doing the faces, I also thought I might try out one-eyed aliens.

End.

Date Posted: 5th Mar 2012 at 5:58 PM

So much complaining last entry ... Positive time! After all, the life of a simmer is merry and free! (Or it is for me. :p)

I am amused to some extent that I slaved so hard to salvage a neighborhood that was in fairly good working order after all. I'll just delete that Paradise Falls place. Quite tragic, but at least I got to enjoy some new names and faces what with the NPC's. (Sighs.) Haro X ... Francis Francium ...

But yeah, Cyberdale seems to be okay. My game hasn't mysteriously crashed for some time now. I have, however, encountered a problem with Robert Kim's file suddenly messing up in JUST THE SAME WAY as his counterpart in Paradise Falls. 0_0 I still have no idea what causes this or how to handle it, so I've just tried to remedy the problem by killing him. I know, its probably a terrible way to deal with it, but death is all I could think of. (At least Robert is elderly by now anyway.) So I tried killing him with one of vimto666's death objects, but all that did was make him disappear--no Reaper, no urn-stone, no memories of his death, no inheritance. I was able to conger a stone for him with mike_1102's spawner, at least. Until I understand more about this, I'm just going to keep shooting for a proper death for this poor patriarch. I'm thinking the motherlode cheat, a to call Reapy, then Blackswan's sunflower of age? If that fails, I could try to have him commit suicide with JohnBrehaut1's warrior sword. If that fails, well, I'll just be very sad.

On another note, I must submit my shishi dog breed to the critique forum soon. If I think my screenshots are good enough, I'll try to get them up today.

On another note, I've discovered J.M. Pescado's "bat box" and have deleted many unwanted townies, strays, and downtownies from Cyberdale. I hope I'm not hurting anything, but it makes me so happy to see my sims' real NEIGHBORS walking around instead of the annoying game-made creatures. I also prefer that my sims bring home real sims from work/school than useless dummies. Really, how's a teen supposed to secure a mate for their adult life when they only know the townie kids who never age? Boring!

Last random note: I have a game-generated cow mascot named Titania Moon. ^o^ Weird how I ended up with a female mascot (or so I've heard), but this is very cool in a couple of ways. First, if you grew up on the same treasured English nursery rhymes I did, you know of the classic link between a cow and the moon. Also, Titania is the largest moon of Uranus! Wheee!

End. (And I'm tired of proof reading this by now, so deal with it. )

EDIT: On March 9, 2012, I finally got poor Robert Kim to die a proper death. Old age wasn't working, so I had no choice but to tell him to commit suicide with JohnBrehaut1's warrior sword. Justin and Cynthia are taking it very hard. Hopefully, this won't affect the Kim's middle child Forster while she's away at college. As for the youngest Kim, Io just didn't seem to care when his father died .

Date Posted: 15th Feb 2012 at 4:48 AM

(Note: I don't want to spend time proof-reading this while entry right now. Please bear with me.)

I am bouncing off the walls with joy right now. =)

Why, why, why?

I'm not wholly sure, but it has a lot to do with that new science (fiction) names list I'm testing right now.

Anyway, I just made a new, clean (as in starting out with zero NPC's, townies, etc.) neighborhood the other day. Today, I added sims and community lots, which meant the game started generating NPC's, yes? So, I took my sim to a lot with a DJ booth, and
look what name the DJ ended up with!

Francis Francium! 8D

I love it!

E-hem. I suppose it would be constructive to post some of the other combinations that came up today.

Let's see, there was:

- Haro X, waitress
- Beta Doi, hostess
- Galatea Messier, chef
- Arena Frost, female bar tender
- Gregor Darmstadt, café barista
- Ludwig Stront, waiter
- Rhonda Jussieu, female cashier
- Dmitri Tsubo, male cashier
- Quetzel Doi, mailman
- Sol Biela, call-in-sick lady
- Zeta Technut, newspaper-delivery girl
- Trofim Volta, male driver
- Giant, leader of the pack (appropriate name, eh?)
- Nimo, leader of the pack
- Echo, female wolf

Quite a few of the NPC's came with my custom faces, too. Arena had a face I actually considered revising, but seeing it on her made me change my mind. Less work, yay!

-----------------------------------

I don't know if this is the right place to keep track of glitches in my new neighborhood, but I'm going to start a list anyway before I forget ... Because it's long.

First, I don't know what I did wrong! I thought I did everything stated in the tutorials about safely moving sims from one neighborhood to another. I removed all connections to non-household sims, packaged the families on their home-lots when I was certain that everything was set and ready to go, and i even installed the .sims2packs with the Clean Installer! But I got this:

- Some sims cannot use toilets, showeres, and bathtubs while other sims on the lot can. Thses sims, can, however, use hot tubs. One sim, after hot tubbing for a while, could then use the bath tub to bathe.
- Welcome-wagon visitors and almost all walk-by's cannot be interacted with. It seems that the sims force-error and the greet/ask to leave commands suddenly vanish from my active sim's queue.
- Three moved households had graves on their lots, but only the dead from one particular lot have intact character files. I still have to play the other two lots, but one house with a grave that didn't "survive" the move is EXTREMELY glitchy.
- Seemingly every third customer at the coffee counter actually gets his drink. The rest of the time, the bartender just keeps walking towards the counter, then flicks right back to the point where he started his walk and repeats that again and again. I though he would do that indefinitely, but eventually I'd notice that he was okay again, but with a cut of joe permanently left on the counter.
- My sims on one lot had no luck with their elevator system today. One little girl just reverted to using the stairs in the garrage while her adult sister just kept doing the can't-walk-here frustration animation next to the elevator. Also, when I tried to move the adult sister out, the newspaper vanished each time the elevator failed. You know, she had a paper, then the delivery girl brought another one. Both vanished! I then bought a computer, but as soon as she was done she just snapped from sitting in the desk chair to
standing behind or beside it. The taxi cab did come, but no one could get in it. I'd click "Get In" and the action icon would disappear before it even reached the cue. Worst of all, I could neither save, exit the lot, nor QUITE THE GAME! I had to use the task manager to stop the program from running.
- I also had leftovers go bad while in the fridge. Weird. I think I know what download caused this. I need to report that to the creator. Basically, the food spoiled in the fridge, ergo, my sim couldn't use fridge. I had to virtually climb in and remove the platter myself with move_objects turn on and I am now left with a platter of rotten food that my sim cannot clean up because of another instance of weird force-errors.

I think I just don't know what I'm doing. I was told that my main 'hood was heading towards "a big fiery ball visible from space" or something ... and I ended up creating one in my brand new 'hood. I guess I just have to decide whether I want to keep playing my "doomed" legacy 'hood or try to create a better version of it again. I need help. I'll consult the proper forum here after I do more testing. I still need to assess the full extent of the damage before I can postulate as to what might be going on.

Oh well. I got Francic Francium and Haro X outta this! Boo-yah!

End ... for now.

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Date Posted: 13th Feb 2012 at 12:58 AM

Oh boy! Thanks to AllenABQ, I have yet another project on my to-do list! With his amazing Cas/Body Shop Face Templates, I've been making my own replacements like crazy. =) I've already replaced 5 out of the 21 that I've chosen to ex. It really makes me smile to see all those custom faces I slaved over in Body Shop finally get some decent use. I'll be happy to see them on future game-generated characters, and I'm really glad that they will/should? be there when I start making young adult sims. ^_^ What REALLY makes me happy is I can start to clean-up the clutter in my sim-bin. Yay!!!

I've made leaps and bounds with my foo lion dog breed. I'm just about ready to submit my pictures of it to the Creator Feedback Forum for critique. I hope people like it; I'm not really sure what else I can do with it, but that is the purpose of the feedback forum, is it not?

And that's what I've been up to creative-wise since my last post.

End.

Date Posted: 10th Feb 2012 at 4:43 AM

Huh. It doesn't say anything about me having a journal in my achievements. Oh well.

Updates: I got Fluff Daddy to function, but the package was so buggy that I took it out of my downloads folder recently. Eh, it was my first non-sculpture object, what can I say?

In today's news, I've been filled with the need to build lately. Today I made a vocational school using Paladin's vocational set. It looks pretty good. I also made a huge pyramid house with lights going up to the top since I have Seasons and it's exterior is just a basic hoof set on the ground. It looks great!

Other things I've been working on are mostly sci-fi inspired: homes, sim parts, and an extensive default-replacement names list for townies, stray pets, etc. Science is a larger part of the inspiration than fiction, but the sci-fi neighborhood I have in mind is the reason I'm even making it. I've searched in the fields of chemistry, astronomy, physics, and many other subject areas out of desperation for names that appealed to me. I'm mostly happy with the results but some names still don't sound spacey enough. Oh well. Lots of people in sci-fi have normal names ... as well as totally-off-the-wall names! It's all good.

Another thing I've done recently is drastically alter/improve upon an old ef commander uniform. I have three versions now, including the original. Each has its own charm, but I think the most recent version is the best. I think all that's left is to change the color and post it to this one forum on here where people critique the work of others.

Actually, there is something non-sci-related that I've been laboring over. For some reason, I want to make a dog breed that looks like a traditional Chinese guardian lion statue (or shishi, as I've learned). So far, THIS IS REALLY HARD! but at least I've discovered the secret to making things bigger or smaller than CAP normally allows. (Those Prima guides I bought last year have really paid off!)

So ... I'm on the verge of creating a new neighborhood (using all of the things I've learned about "clean" neighborhoods lately) where high-ranking grandmas can hoard their foo-dogs and train them to attack poor mail-carrier Amethyst Eclipse around her pyramidal mansion. Fun.

End Transmission.

Date Posted: 3rd Apr 2011 at 3:53 PM

I've recently started creating objects using SimPE, Wings 3D, and a few other programs that I don't use quite as often (UVMapper, MeshLab (to make compatible .obj's), Balancer Lite (poly reduction).

My first custom mesh was a bird cage. It turned out to be a LOT bigger than I thought it would, but at least I could fit Don Lothario in it! Next, I scaled down the cage and added a cute little canary I call Fluff Daddy. It was meant to be a stereo, but I've yet to get the cage mesh to show up. The stereo does function, however, because Fluff Daddy can sing anything. Currently, I'm saving this project for a later date. I've worked on it for so hard and so long that I'm too tired of it now to want to tackle the mesh problem. I think I'd have to combine the meshes, which means combining the UV maps--quite a hassle.

And now that I have successfully created a couple of objects, I have creator ADHD. I don't know how many objects I've tried to modify in the past week! I have only been able to stick to a couple of them long enough to get anywhere. I tried to make a table lamp, but I kept getting "parsing errors," which meant I couldn't get the textures to show up for the life of me. Again, I'll get back to that project later. It should look very nice if my vision of it eventually becomes a reality.

GOOD NEWS! I finish a new bed last night that has a custom mesh, somewhat working textures, and gets my sims recharged in just an hour! Okay, so the textures look ugly, but I'm still trying to get a hang of this. My sims also go right through the bedding when they lie on it, but I don't know if this is a mesh problem if if Maxis intended for that to happen. I removed the blanket from the bedding mesh so I suspect that Maxis counted on the cover to hide this oddity. Then again, it may be the fact that I'm using a 3D modeling program that does not support bones. I'll have to scan the forums to see if anyone else has reported such an issue.

My Goals:

• 
  Figure out how the make textures that don't look blurry when stretched over an object.
  Make the Sim Recharger bed not resemble a pool of quicksand.
  Learn to make fabulous textures.
  Capture Fluff Daddy and keep him in his cage.
  Recycle.
  Learn to love everyone better than myself.
  See church as important and not a waste of time. (Yes, it's Sunday morning.)
  Breath.
  Come up with more goals.

End.

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