MsBarrows / Blog

Author: MsBarrows | Posted Aug 26, 2008 | 0 comments

Today is the third year since I started my Soup Legacy, a 26-generation long alphabetized story about a family of sims. I'd hoped to wrap it up by today with the birth of the Z-gen heir, but real life and some distractions from TS2 things has said otherwise!

Still, it's a pretty special day for me - when I first started the Soups, I didn't think I'd stick with writing the story more then a few weeks at most, and here it is three years later and I'm still at it. I like to think my writing has improved at least a little in all the time spent writing some 2 million or so words worth of text about the Soups :)

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted Aug 16, 2008 | 0 comments

Just caught up in trying to finish off my Soup Legacy in time for it's third anniversay later this month, and being distracted by my other addiction, Everquest. Never fear, there will be more objects, I've got a couple of things I've started work on but progress is currently at a crawl.

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted Jun 8, 2008 | 2 comments

I had a request a while back to make versions of the two cribs and change table from Free Time that would use the original crib's bedding for their bedding and ruffle textures. It's taken me a while to get around to it, but finally they're done, and due out on Monday. Unfortunately I neglected to note down who made the request, so I can't tell you who to blame... errr, thank... for this particular set of objects.

The one oddity with this set is that, since it uses the standing padding from the Kinder Kontainer to texture the hanging ruffles, the texture on those parts is basically upside down. Sorry, there was no easy fix for that short of completely rebuilding the ruffles (and thereby tripling the poly counts of them) so that I could map it differently. And I'm not that much of a perfectionist! I also recently went rooting through some old work of mine from a while back - from 2004, pre-TS2 - to see if any of the odds and ends I'd been meshing back then was worth trying to salvage as a TS2 mesh. And promptly stumbled over this fence I'd made to use in an Unreal level: I had to completely rebuild the vines from scratch for it to work well in the Sims, but the resulting set of fences will be out this coming Wednesday. They co-ordinated reasonably well with the "Perfectly Square" gate that came with the base game; an entirely serendipitous result that I didn't plan for, but noticed once I was trying them out in-game.

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted Jun 3, 2008 | 0 comments

Thanks to Hweia for pointing out a slight problem with my Matrix archways. They were making the original "Mauretania" door that I'd cloned them from have a couple of flashing-blue recolours. The culprit was some material overrides in my "Straight" and "Straight No Transom" packages that I'd somehow missed removing. The two files have now been fixed and reposted.

Direct links to the dastardly duo here and here.

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted May 25, 2008 | 1 comments

A conversation in chat on Saturday reminded me about something I've long meant to make. If you have the Pets EP, toddlers will eat out of pet food bowls. This can be useful trivia if you find yourself with more toddlers on hand then your sim family can easily handle! Especially in combination with Atavera's toddler blanket, which allows them to put themselves to bed as well.

Of course, seeing a toddler playing with and eating pet kibble can be a little disturbing. So... I've remeshed a pet dish and created a cereal bowl instead!

It's only toddler-usable, so you won't have to worry about the household pets gobbling up the food meant for the kiddies, and it's filled with cereal instead of kibble. It will, unfortunately, still look like kibble when the toddlers play with or eat it... there doesn't appear to be any way of editing the special effects, at least not that I could find.

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted May 21, 2008 | 2 comments

Inspired by my Victorian Porch Railing set, I've made my first-ever set of windows and doors. These are based on the mesh of the 'Symmetrical Poly-Molecular Matrix Window' from the base game, with changes, and use its textures. The stained glass textures are recolours of the standard height straight mesh in the set, and are shared by all the other meshes. The first set of doors and windows is due out tomorrow, and contains only single-tile meshes. It has three sizes of windows in both open and closed positions, as well as glass doors, solid doors, and archways both with and without transoms.

I'm currently working on a second set of meshes that will consist of 2-tile doors and windows. I also have plans to make more recolours of the porch railing and matching fence, and some additional matching items in co-ordinating styles.

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted May 13, 2008 | 0 comments

Okay, getting bored of that poll now too!

And the results are *drum roll*:

What would you like to see more of?
Random sets of furniture, I suppose. 46.99% (125)
Fill in holes in existing furniture sets. 46.62% (124)
Clutter! Because sims' homes are never messy enough. 40.98% (109)
Furniture for less priviledged sims. 33.46% (89)
More recolors for older stuff. 19.17% (51)
Even more meshes using the photo frame textures. 13.16% (35)
OMG! Like, more eyes! 9.02% (24)
Tiling textures! Ugly ones! Yay! 9.02% (24)

What kind of Maxis-match stuff would you most like to see...?
Surprise me :) 56.39% (150)
More completer sets for couchs and armchairs. 40.98% (109)
Double beds to match singles, and vice versa. 33.08% (88)
Counter-matching tables and chairs, and lots of them! 31.58% (84)
Anything bedding-match! 26.32% (70)

Which of the following would you be more intrigued by...
Windows and doors 48.12% (128)
Fences and gates 28.57% (76)
Clothing recolours 21.05% (56)

Hrmm... now what could I make that's surprising? More surprising then oddities like the OFB "Sir Bricks-A-Lot" fencing, for example! I wonder if I'll ever regret putting that down as an option...

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted May 2, 2008 | 1 comments

Ever wonder what building and playing cheats I like so much that I have them aliased in a userStartup.cheat file? Well, I was talking about that with someone else today, and decided to post mine. Here is what they are; to use them, put them in a text file named "userStartup.cheat" in your My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Config directory.

boolProp testingCheatsEnabled true
boolprop allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation true
boolprop ControlsPets on
boolprop PetActionCancel true

sethighestallowedlevel 8

alias bob "plumbbobtoggle" "Toggle the plumbbob"
alias cfeon "boolprop constrainFloorElevation true" "Turn on floor constraints"
alias cfeoff "boolprop constrainFloorElevation false" "Turn off floor constraints"
alias epson "boolprop ShowCatalogEPFlags true" "Display what EP items came with"
alias epsoff "boolprop ShowCatalogEPFlags false" "Stop displaying what EP items came with"
alias loton "boolprop ShowLotPackageFilename true" "Turn on display of filenames for lots"
alias lotoff "boolprop ShowLotPackageFilename false" "Turn off display of filenames for lots"
alias moveon "moveobjects on" "Move all objects"
alias moveoff "moveobjects off" "Stop moving all objects"
alias petfree "boolprop PetsFreeWill true" "Turns on free will for pets"
alias petstay "boolprop PetsFreeWill false" "Turns off free will for pets"
alias showon "showheadlines on" "Turn on thought bubbles and pop-ups"
alias showoff "showheadlines off" "Turn off thought bubbles and pop-ups"
alias snapon "boolprop snapObjectsToGrid true" "Resume aligning objects to grid"
alias snapoff "boolprop snapObjectsToGrid false" "Stop aligning objects to grid"
alias teston "boolprop testingCheatsEnabled true" "Debug mode on"
alias testoff "boolprop testingCheatsEnabled false" "Debug mode off"
alias toolson "boolprop dormSpecificToolsDisabled false" "Enables Buy/Build tools at dorms and community lots"
alias toolsoff "boolprop dormSpecificToolsDisabled true" "Disables Buy/Build tools at dorms and community lots"

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted Apr 28, 2008 | 0 comments

Feeling a bit frustrated at the moment with my "unframed canvases" version of the photo frames. Sooo many meshes to wrestle with, and trying not to loose the proper aspect ration when resizing them is driving me mental. So I've taken a break this weekend and instead started cleaning up a couple of the prettier recent houses from my Soup Legacy. Specifically (for those of you that follow the story), the houses of Watercress & William Soup, and Wren & Winston Wallace. The first of those is completed and should be released tomorrow. It has had some minor changes to how it appears in-game - the usual "stripping of massive amounts of custom content" plus some minor fixes so that it contains a non-CC staircase, and has a garden made entirely of TSRAA plants.

The second house is almost finished as well - it's a much smaller job to deal with since, unlike the first house, I had remembered to make a packaged backup of it before moving anyone in. I'm mainly just having to redo the landscaping and some internal texturing. That should be out some time later this week or early next week, depending on where in the calendar I decide to plug it once it's good to go. Enjoy!

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Author: MsBarrows | Posted Apr 14, 2008 | 2 comments

A few different things... One is that the frame recolours I did to match Cashcraft's beautiful Victorian furniture have now been released. Enjoy! Lately I've been going through my working directories to sort out a lot of past projects, and delete stuff that I never did get working, or decided I didn't like enough, and so on. In the process I have, naturally, stumbled across a couple of forgotten projects, things I started on and then lost interest in, or things I'd made but never gotten around to actually releasing. I'm trying to get some of these cleaned up enough to actually release :) The first of these, which I'm just some wallshadows away from releasing (gah! wallshadows!) is a pair of art deco style beds. I'd been experimenting a long while back with getting the appearance of flame veneer - that's where you take two sequential slices of veneer and put them together in a mirrored arrangement. It was very easy to recreate the effect on a mesh. Anyway, a few weeks back I noticed the meshes still sitting there, having been ignored for well over a year, and decided they were too pretty not to share. I've made a matching endtable so they're not totally alone, but I'd have to say that at the moment at least, I have no plans to ever build additional completer pieces to go along with them. Who knows - I may be using them myself some time and get irritated at the lack of matching bits and pieces and change my mind. They should be out some time in the next week or two.

There are also some Bentform build items that I've had floating around for ages and not published... a column and a staircase. I also have a meshed-but-never-packaged fence and gate in Bentform style. I'm hoping to get these cleaned up and released as well, though I'm waffling on the fence and gate (grrrrr that fences can't be recolourable nor use the repository technique...) I also finally (finally!) got around to packaging up the Shannanigan-matching toaster oven recolours that I've been neglecting for months. You know, the ones to match her retro kitchen... the ones that are of the only base game small appliance I haven't already released a recolour of. Yeah, those ones. Anyway, those will be out this week. And I'm considering doing another set of recolours, in order to recolour the kettle BBQ to match also. Let's see... what else is pending... more oil painting recolours of my photo frames are queued up, as well as some sets based on the fantastic screen shots of aikea_guinea. You won't find most of these images here on TSR, they're from her galleries elsewhere. Future plans... more recolours. A Poorhouse bedroom set. A Pipe Dream kitchen! Some additional photo frame meshes I've been meaning to make since back when I first started working on the original meshes. Some more clutter! Probably a whole bunch of other stuff as well, whatever catches my attention at any given time. Oh, and a final bit of good news - I just ordered a new PC today! Wheeee! My 6-year old P4 1.7Ghz is looking forward to its quiet retirement as my "surfing/working while playing" machine, and no longer having to deal with loading 30k+ custom content files... poor thing!

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