Ah, Cyjon! I knew I'd read something about attraction somewhere but couldn't for the life of me remember who wrote it. Thanks for the reminder, I'm going to go check it out again.

Link for people not familiar with Cyjon's site:
http://www.cyjon.net/node/86

maybe I'm a bit slow .. or maybe the idea never came up as it wasn't needed previously .. so anyways, I had this ah ha thought and thought I'd share it in case it might be useful to others ..
so I'm recreatin the PV lots .. I'm wantin to put in the items for the main lots - Goth, Dreamer, Caliente, Lothario, Pleasant, and Broke .. most are easy to find and remember the items ... the Goth and Dreamer lots have a bit more stuff in them .. so I found that if I made a collection of the items (used Jawusa's cleaned lots) then I could use that collection to furnish recreation and make sure I had all the right items without guessin :D

I went on a 4 AM run today!! and at that early time of the day, any volume of music feels too loud to play, so I was stuck with my thoughts only. I was thinking about creating a new sims subhood - it does give you a cardio pump, I swear to it - and came to the final conclusion of something that has been following me for years (because that's how long I couldn't decide on my neighbourhood's backstory)

I always disliked the idea of "hood founders" when creating and populating a new world.

Which is okay, my game and my lore, but I could never put my finger on to why exactly it feels off to me. I now built onto the idea that it's because I never see my current sim population, or their lots in hood view, as the neighbourhood in its entirety - so it's hard to even begin thinking of a hard and definite start to a complex, long running town. Despite currently having 12 playable households and only my own handmade townies, no Maxis ones, I still like to think that there is a lot more to the local area that just isn't shown at this time. I always imagine that: my sims have close friends at work and school that don't physically exist in the game; that obviously all the NPCs also have to live somewhere close by, and have to have some kind of relationships with my sims outside of their core game utility; that when a sim reads a book, another says to them "oh, my grandfather wrote that" - even if they are the first generation I made in game; that there are various veronaville-like generational feuds around, despite only playing with the same two generations for the past years, so the conflicts never actually played out in my game, etc... Maybe that's why the sims I created at the age of thirteen are still around; 3/4 of my "playing" is actually just imagining tiny matters of the sims world, and never really opening the game itself.
But the world is now too vast and complex to simply stick its story back to a group of random "founders" who came and built up these various types of time-specific architectures of houses all in one go. It feels like some stories have been building onto each other for centuries. Still, it also means that after all these years, I still can't decide on the right hood backstory, or an accurate overview on it. It's just a world that existed as it does, and one that kind of grows up with me.

Hood backstories aren't necessarily created in an instant-it sometimes take the form of the "What if?" theory.

Arundel, my medieval town, does have 'founders' and is sort of, kind of based on an idea of a community forming after a bout of the plague brought people together.
Thalia-one of my modern towns, has the 'what if' a bunch of old people got conned into moving into some scam and got stuck there.

I think the more complicated the store the more rigid the playing will be.

In Arundel I had planned for certain people to get together (2nd generation) and it has not worked out all that well...it's challenging to play with the idea of arranged marriages when the pixels are not going to get hot and bothered over their intended. Being a softhearted player, I gave up on that idea quickly. Now the younguns' can marry anyone they want but I'm not gonna let some old guy get married to a young girl because he needs a wife and more children.

I have my standards, after all.

And that means backstories can be adapted to be as long or short or even exist in the first place when you design a neighborhood. Some rules are meant to be broken and the rule about having a 'backstory' is an arbitrary one. Even EA would agree with that.

This year has been incredibly difficult for my family and for me, economically mostly. I spent most of the year searching for a new job that paid more, but everything I found was the same or even worse. I really love what I do, and I was beyond happy in my workplace (except for the extended, unpaid workload and the low salray). After finding nothing, I had pretty much accepted I'd spend another year looking (we work in year-cycles and it's difficult to leave in the middle), but last week, with only a few days left of work, I was offered something much better, which offers much more than what I was making before, and a lot more free time as well, so after months of not playing the sims at all, I finally started playing again, and I felt like I could cry!

Congratulations! Send some of that luck my way, will you. My job is going down the toilet.

Sure thing. I'm manifesting great things for you!

I certainly agree, but don't we all have some degree of curiosity about the place we were born in/came from/live in? I only feel like all sims deserve to have one.

Yes we do, but sometimes the pixels have to tell us their backstories before we know them.

so I watched a video of someone play testing sims 2 legacy and.... PINK SOUP is scarier than any flashing blue from missing CC meshes

and I wondered how could this be? UC was working fine? surely... they could just release it like UC back in the day? what went wrong?

Money Money Money....
(I will hang on to the UC as long as I can)

i hope they let us keep UC forever.. i lost all my physical disks

I have all my physical disks - including the broken BG one

You can get replacement discs from ebay (or amazon). There are plenty but it's difficult to find new ones, most are used but look like they're in a good condition.

I will get one if it is ever needed. Having used the UC since 2014, I am quite happy with it - and my laptop does not have a disk drive. Still a pity that I broke one of the BG disks, though - would have been nice to still have them all.

When I purchased my current laptop (no disc drive either), I purchased an external/portable disc drive because back when I was doing my undergrad course, we were required to submit some Uni assessments on discs and it came in handy for TS3 too.

I was rather annoyed that my current desktop didn't come with a CD drive.

Although I could really use an A drive. XD I have all these old disks that I can't look at to see what's on them.

The reality is that most of the newer computers do NOT come with a CD/DVD drive.

My new computer did not and I had to buy an external drive to use with disks.

I still have all my original disks. I only purchased the ones I liked so didn't get Pets, to this day I have never played them. I have a visitor controller that blocks "critters" still doesn't stop them barking.


My current PC didn't come with a CD/DVD drive so I had to purchase an external drive to rip my 450+ DVDs and my CD collection to my phone. Its got a 512GB SD card, soon to be joined by a 512GB tablet. Im assuming TS2 doesn't run on a tablet

If you don't have Pets then you don't need to block 'critters' on the VC. The dog barking has been around since the base game; it's not a Pets feature.

I had a ton of CDs I ripped to my PC too. Then I did all Mum and Dad's ones. Saved a lot of physical space, but suddenly my 931 GB drive is looking a lot fuller. XD

I play using Ultimate Collection, easier than trying load all the disks and trying to get them to run on Windows 10/11. The VC stops stray dogs from coming onto your lot and digging up the ground. Also keeps the skunk and penguin away, although I don't really mind the penguin.

You better not, the penguin is one of the best parts of the game

There's a mod to reduce/remove it here, though I think this one only removes sounds from the Pets EP, and NH view: https://pforestsims.tumblr.com/post...ng-in-hood-view

In lot view, if you don't mind missing out on some of the sounds, you can try to either mute or turning down Ambient sounds so the barking gets less intense.

Finally got the game installed onto my new desktop, though I won't have time to actually play until Thursday. Let's hope the whole thing holds together.