MsBarrows's Blog

A Fisher's Tale Stories:

A Fisher's Tale - Catla's Story - AFT Family Tree (incomplete)

Soup Stories:

Legacy A-R and family trees A-J, J-R, and Watson Clan - Melody's Memories - Rock Soup - Legacy R-Z and family tree R-Z

 One Man, Seven Children

 

Other Stories:

Strange Happenings - Conjoined Hoods (Uncompleted)

A Wreck Of A Life

 

Today I posted the final entry in my Soup Legacy. After three-plus years of playing them and writing about them, it's time to (finally) move on. Though I'll be easing myself into it - I'll be writing a few short stories to tie up some loose ends of the non-heir sim storylines.

And I'll be starting work on building my new play 'hood. I'm getting ambitious with it - I want to build a complete (though small!) city and associated ruralized areas for my sims to live in, and then use it as a setting for a Legacy as well as several challenges and site stories. We'll see how far I get before I decide I've bit off more then I can chew!

This also means I'll finally get back into heavy-duty creating after my more-or-less hiatus of the last few months, since for some of the things I have planned to build, I'll need to build some build-mode and furnishing sets first.

Easy answer: I'm gearing up to rebuild my play/storytelling 'hood from scratch (the Soup Legacy being in its final days). A big chunk of it will be a rather run down inner city sort of area, and I want a larger variety of nasty, dilapidated textures for that.

Plus, cyclonesue likes the crumbling set :D

Expect to see a whole pile of old, worn, ugly build mode items, new meshes, and recolours of existing meshes as a result of this project!

I'll likely publish some of the lots as well, depending on a) my mood and b) how much CC they require.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.