I thought I would start a thread explicitly welcoming any players who are either totally new to the Sims 2 online community, or who have come back after a longer absence because of the Legacy Collection. Welcome!! Or Welcome back! Pull up a chair! Help yourselves to drinks! Feel free to add a little intro here if you wish to, and ask questions relating to the differences between TS2 and TS3/4, what mods/CC people are using these days, and anything else you can think of!



Don't forget to check out the subforums - look at the top of this forum page to see titles. Contests - there is a current building contest looking for applicants. All skill levels are welcome! Don't be intimidated by some of the very detailed entries so far. Contests can be a fantastic, fun way to learn and improve. Pictures - always fun to share pictures from your game, or see what other people have posted. WCIF - for any mod and CC hunting. Help - to figure out glitches or issues!

Here's a suggested intro template, but you don't need to use it. Let us get to know you

Intro:

Welcome (back) to the sims 2! Have you played the sims 2 or any other sims games before?
What do you think of the Legacy Collection so far?
Has anything surprised you about it?
What's your favourite thing you've done in the game so far?
Any plans for future gameplay?
Anything else you'd like to add about yourself?

BellaDovah creates mod highlights videos. I linked the video in which the best mods of 2024 are recommended for players to have in their games. I think that the new players are going to like videos from BellaDovah.

Don't miss out on all the custom neighborhoods!!

Neighborhoods

Any new players (or returning players), please enter our building contest! All good fun, no-one will be rude or scary to you, and you don't need special talent to enter (I entered, and all I can build is boxes). You can build with or without custom content. You just need to have at least Open for Business and Nightlife (which you do if you are playing Legacy). We will help you with your entry also, so please don't be afraid to join in.
https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=689383

You already won the contest with your unusually creative Fallout building.

Don't worry. Us die hard old-timers don't bite. XD

Idk. We'll see. I do like that entry, but the other ones are also good too!

For all new players, I highly recommend downloading mods and custom content, once you become comfortable with the basics of the game.

If you love drama and babies, download a mod called ACR. It will fill in your thirst for babies and endless fighting.

The first year I played Sims 2 I played without mods.

The next 4 years I played I had well over 10Gb worth of mods including ACR.

Now for the last about 14-15 years my mod folder is about 325Mb of mods and most of those are the fixing mods and default adult skins of about 90Mb worth.

New players will overload there game with all kinds of great mods but sooner or later players realize that with fewer mods faster load time.
With only 325Mb of mods I am in game and in the house I want to play in under 20 sec.
With 10Gb it took 15-20 min. to load up a house.

^ I use a modded/heavy-CC game for storytelling, but recently I've had some fun going back to almost basics, with just mods + my small collection of defaults. It takes my "Story!!! Photos!!!" mind off that train for a bit, and just lets me play (been a while since I did that in TS2). It loads quick, so I can play a relaxing game without thinking about a mountain of setup for a project.

It really helps to get to know the game "vanilla-style", at least in the beginning. Get the recommended bug-reducing mods, and just play the game. After a while you start seeing where you want to add something. Maybe you get tired of the CAS selection, or find you want some new furniture, or see the need for some annoyance-fixing mods.

Throwing in a ton of CC and mods at once can make you see yourself blind on what's already in the game. Depending on how much you throw in at once and how messy things get the first time around, chances for creating a big mess you can't fix is quite large, too (make sure to start out by properly sorting your mods/CC, and don't just throw everything into the same folder. Make sure to read about the items, especially mods).

Not at all, the others are looking really good! Besides, if the judges have an aversion to grunge, they may hate it!

I also have a habit of taking risks in contests (bending the rules) so there's always a chance that I may get disqualified.

I've got my core of mods more or less set now. I've taken out some, but not replaced them.

It's more the 'prettifying' stuff that I usually put in-but I've been slowing down on doing that too.

I haven't added anything to my medieval game in literal years-mostly because not many creators do that style of CC and there's not much to be improved on anyway.

But people keep making new shiny stuff! XD



Nothing from Plumbob Keep lately?

Yes, yes they do but its hard to try things out once you tried over 10Gb worth and the load times.
More power to those who love all the CC they can download, I will stick to my less than 20 sec. load time.

ADD: I have now taken out mods I no longer use and have gotten my Downloads folder to 232Mb in size so even faster load times.

Winning a round does not mean winning a contest!
That is why there are 4 rounds.
While I am fortunately not a judge, I believe there is serious competition in the first round too Outstanding entries, I believe all of them will easily pass MTS upload criteria as well.
(Have ended stone last in a round or 2 myself in the past and still worked myself up to a final 4th, 3rd and even 2nd place during various contests),

I couldn't go back to vanilla. XD Either without annoyance fixing or gameplay adding mods or with the Maxis clothes and hairs.

Do you have an SSD or HDD? I use a M.2 SSD, and I find even with my 2 and a half GB of CC I still can load into the game and a lot within 45 seconds. It might be longer if I didn't have merged files though.

I just checked mine, which I will probably restart soon, and it has 9.54 GB. I would say that it takes between 1-3 minutes to load, although I haven't played in a while and I only build in my other configuration without cc, and I couldn't say, but it is true that it is quite at the limit and it would not be advisable for me to add more things. xD I dont usually have pink soup, but when i play with this cc and big hoods, is more probable to appear. Luckily i never have crashes and can play normally with a lot of cc.

There's a bit of a difference between 2GB and 12GB LOL.

Yes, that's true, 10GBs extra surely adds up. But there are ways to reduce load time even with 12GB. Compression and merging go a long way. One can, depending on their hardware setup, reduce load times by a couple of minutes just by merging and compressing things as it reduces the need for the drive to file fetch and makes caching quicker. It's a common technique that game devs in general use. That's why when you look at the file directory for TS2 all the objects are combined into a single file...

I advocate for merged and compressed files as it will improve overall performance. If someone insists that they actually need 12GB of CC, then definitely it is worth looking into as TS2, much like the Windows OS, prefers to read one big file instead of 20,000 small ones.

Well, one of the reasons why my game loads fast with cc is because most of the things are clothes and hairstyles of deedee with the age states referenced, so it reduces the loading a lot. The rest are 4t2 object conversions of this page, and then an occasional object or some random recolors or set. The rest are anti-corruption mods or script mods. I did find that compressing cc it actually reduced the lag a lot in the Sims 3, so I will probably try the compression in the Sims 2 when I return to playing more seriously.

My computer has a HDD as the main drive (which annoys me, because it did also come with a SSD, but somehow the drives were swapped by whichever moron set the computer up, who decided to make the HDD the main drive with the Windows install, and I didn't notice until much later - when everything was installed, I had files everywhere, and just couldn't bother reinstalling everything...)

Anyway, I've done some test driving with the HDD, and it is slower with the loading than I'd imagine a SSD is, but it is also a bit faster than my old computer was. I'm used to slow loading times (10-12 GB on my ancient laptop took 3+ hours... Chew on that one. My 30-35 GB folder took about an hour on my old gaming computer). On my new one it takes +/- 5 minutes from game startup to lot with 0.5-4 GB, maybe around 20-25 minutes with 10 GB (just organized buy/build + mods/defaults), and with the full deal of 30 GB it took a bit less than 1 hour (before I'd organized, mind - now it's fewer folders, shorter paths, and I think I'm down to around 25 GB now. Haven't tested the full deal after organizing, because I still have a bit left to do).

I've started merging some of my own (build/buy) recolors. I don't like merging them with the meshes or merging with other files, because if anything needs fixing it's a pain to figure out what's what. Putting a bunch of recolors into one file isn't much of an issue, and they're a bit easier to keep track of.

Wow, I'm just realising how much 35 GB of downloads really is. I'm at 12 GB and while loading times are not a problem (love having a whole shiny gaming laptop only to mostly game a twenty year old sims game) I just really don't see the point of downloading more CAS or buy mode stuff. I have more than I will ever use, all of my houses have different kitchen setups, everyone has completely different hairstyles and clothes for every occassion etc, so I never think to look for more. Some of you really must have fancy pretty games!

I think most of us with larger download folders are downloading items for community lots. For example you want to build a hospital, you would want specific items, not the items you would use in a house. You want a fire station? Again more specific items. I would have to prune off CC I wanted for all my community lots at 12 gigs.
I don't need 35 but I do need at least 16-18 to be happy in all situations.

Yep have a SSD that allows me to be in game in under 20 sec. (I could probably cut that down to under 15 if I took out the EA logo scene at the start.)

When I had a HDD I was in game around 1 min time.

When I play games now I like them to be as close to original as possible, I use Maxis match skins to keep the original look of the game.