News / TSR News

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Feb 6, 2012 | 15 comments

We are in the process now of moving the actual website functionality into the cloud. This move means we will shut down all our webservers and close the website temporarily during the transition. We expect the move to take a few hours at the most. If it drags on for a long time we will compensate all subscribers with an additional day on their accounts. Please be aware that the site may be a bit shaky when we re-open in the cloud environment and we ask that you have some patience. In the end this will improve the site stability, speed and uptime for us all so please bear with us.

The move will happen some day this week and you will be greeted with a down for maintenance splash when we have started.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Jan 23, 2012 | 52 comments

We are happy to announce the next round of artists here at TSR. Please welcome the following great talents to our teams:

Sims 3 Featured Artists:

- Pyszny16
- Lulu265
- MaddenPro

Sims 3 Select Artists:

- Easthaven
- Trustime
- Brown Sims
- Jindann
- mrsimulator
- The Jockey
- beo2010

Sims 2 Select Artist:

- txprincessshan

Check out their recent and upcoming creations and give them a warm welcome in their guestbooks!

Author: SteveB | Posted Jan 19, 2012 | 7 comments

Today a lot of work has been done on restructuring our forums. The change to Invision was a bumpy one but is now complete, including all attachments. Many bugs affecting member login have been fixed and all seems to be stable now.

Work has therefore begun on restructuring the forums and removing or merging many old sections to try and make the whole thing easier to navigate. The 'OT and Chit Chat' forum has been removed. We have a chat room, and social networking has come a long way since we started that forum so it’s a bit redundant now. The game help sections have been moved into their game specific forums so that if you are a Sims 3 player you should find everything now under one roof. Mac threads have been merged into General Discussion in all game sections but with shiny new Mac 'Prefixes' on those threads, something you will start to see more of as we continue to develop the forums.

If you consider yourself a power user, don't forget that you can change the skin of the forums from the TSR design to the IP.Board design by changing the theme with the link in the bottom left corner. This also provides a search feature which is still missing from the TSR design.

Further changes will be made over the coming days as we slowly move content out of forums we wish to retire, while maintaining the wealth of knowledge and information these old forums contain. TSR's forums are the oldest existing Sims forums online with history going back 12 years to before The Sims was released!

More details will be posted as we add new features to the forums over the coming weeks. Visit the TSR Forums.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Dec 31, 2011 | 36 comments

It has been a year full of fantastic custom content, the birth of many new talents in our ever evolving community as well as unforseen surprises such as the Pets patch and the following custom content dilemma. A couple of developments worth mentioning:

- We have seen our Facebook page grow from a couple of thousand fans to closing in on 60 000 as the year ends, and growing quickly much thanks to our daily lotteries and many great updates. 

- We have established a new support and submission team that has greatly improved our customer relationships and also made sure all submitted custom content works as expected, much thanks to extensive testing.

- We have begun moving the entire site into the cloud, a move that will be completed by the end of January 2012 and greatly improve site speed and uptime (2011 has been a shaky year!).

- We have moved the entire forum to a hosted solution on a new and modern platform. The forum is also prepared for the release of TSR v8 with a new modern style and the new header and footer.

- The submission pages have been transferred into the cloud and updated to suit the upcoming release of TSR v8 with a new style throughout and the new header and footer.

- We made a big change to our download archives, setting 87 000 Sims 2 files free and over 11 000 Sims 3 files free.

- We now host over 800 000 downloads for Sims 1, Sims 2 and Sims 3. A big majority of those files are free for everyone to download!

- The Pets expansion came out and ruined a lot of custom content. Thankfully our skilled programmers released a tool called Rigfix that helped many thousands of our users fix their downloads.

This is just a summary of noticeable happenings throughout the year. The biggest change is yet to come really soon in the coming year, namely the full release of TSR v8. We have been working diligently behind the scenes redesigning every portion of the site and introducing many modern elements into the site functionality.

Also coming back next year is our large collaborative themes, this time taken to a new level. Our first theme will be an entirely new world complete with custom content, stories, scenery, movies and tales to draw you right in and give you an opportunity to experience it all yourself thanks to extensive installation instructions.

And as usual we will continue to expand our artist teams and introduce new talents to the world of custom content. We have many great artists who are blooming under the supervision and guidance from our fantastic Featured Artist team in our popular Skype discussion groups.

We look forward to another successful year with you and wish you all a Happy New Year!

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Dec 26, 2011 | 23 comments

Here is our official Christmas Toast video created by Minraed and Gissence, with custom content from our amazing artists and a speach by yours truly :) Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_180901&src_vid=tYdfxFs8isY&feature=iv&v=XfsqU2hoaFs to watch the video. Enjoy!

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Dec 24, 2011 | 25 comments

We wish evereyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! We have an exciting year ahead and you have probably already seen a glimpse of it with the newly redesigned submission system. Version 8 of TSR is just around the corner and we can't wait to unveil it to you all :)

In the meantime, enjoy all downloads we will provide throughout your holidays!

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Dec 8, 2011 | 21 comments

Ooops! Looks like we did it again! Our Christmas spirit is high and we continue with our massive giveaways. Today we have set no less then 11,000 Sims 3 downloads free, both new and old content from all our artists. You'll find everything from hair by Newsea to sets from all our object and clothing artists as well as lots from our well known builders. Take a dive into our massive archives and get yourself an early christmas gift from us here at TSR!

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Dec 8, 2011

As we move towards more free content we have also changed the way our downloads pages work for non-subscribers. In order to download a creation you will need to visit the details page and download from there. Only subscribers are able to download from the browse pages from now on. This is also in preparation for our upcoming version 8 release of The Sims Resource which works the same way.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Dec 6, 2011 | 16 comments

Ti's the season of giving and here at TSR we are in the mood for sharing something with all our Sims fans! To celebrate this christmas season we have set no less then 65% of all our Sims 2 subscriber content free. That's a total of 87,000 files! You will find great free content from all our well known superstars such as Windkeeper, Murano, Cashcraft, Cyclonesue, Ulker, Liana, Shakeshaft, Xandher, Shino&kcr, Angela, Mutske, Sims2sisters, AnoeskaB and many more!

Take a look in our huge Sims 2 downloads database and enjoy the free downloads. This change is permanent, so tell all your sims 2 loving friends all about it as well!

We have more surprises coming up in December so stay tuned!

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Dec 4, 2011 | 35 comments

It is with great pleasure we welcome our new resident hair artist, none other then the well known Cazy. Cazy and our sweet Ulker will provide you with all hairstyles you desire. Check out the first release from Cazy here and be sure to keep an eye out for many more to come!

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Nov 28, 2011 | 47 comments

It's been quite some time, but we are happy to announce a slew of new artists!

Sims 3 Featured Artists:

- fredbrenny
- lillka

Sims 3 Select Artists:

- Severinka_
- Minicart
- Punisa
- Demented_Designs
- Canelline
- DarkNighTt
- Philo
- Screaming_Mustard

Sims 2 Select Artists:

- Djeranotjuh
- Maximalistka
- Sinful_aussie

Welcome them all in their guestbooks and check out their recent and upcoming creations!

Author: SteveB | Posted Nov 20, 2011 | 16 comments

OK, so it took about 3 months longer than it should have, but we are making progress! The TSR forums have now completed the merge from our own hosted vBulletin forums which were very old and out of date and running on our own hardware. The content has been merged into a hosted solution with Invision Powerboard, a different forum platform that many of you will no doubt already be familiar with. This will allow us to reduce our costs in the long term and remove some of the technical load on our team now that our staff numbers have reduced.

So what's new? Well, at the time of writing this, not much, but I'm working on it! You should now be able to visit the new forums from the links at the top of the site (under Community), or if not, they are here. I am in the process of clearing out some of the old, unused forums, reorganizing the ones we are keeping and setting up user groups to give you all access to the same content that you had before. This will take a few days, so don’t panic just yet if you were a higher access level than you are right now (Artists for example), I'll get to it.

We also plan to turn on some of the bells and whistles that you aren't used to from our old forums, like Topic Rating and Reputation Points, Member Ranks etc. Some people love them, some people hate them. Me? I haven't decided yet! The Live Chat will also be enabled and will replace our old, cranky IRC server.

One thing you will immediately notice is that the forums have been styled around the new, upcoming version of TSR (Version 8), with its large, bold header and footer and new navigation. Right now we are aware of some design issues around the forum and header/footer including some broken links, missing ads, images vertical instead of horizontal... but it's being worked on... honest! It's easier to start working towards Version 8 than reusing the old v7 code.

I have lots to do to polish the forums (replacing old Smilies and adding some new ones for example), and some of the layout will likely change (forum listing) but as you are all eager to get back in, we are opening the forums for you now. Have fun with them, and feel free to post your feedback and experiences here, or call in to the Live Chat and say 'ahoy hoy'.

One important note: Your old PM's have not been copied over, so if you have anything important you want to pull from there you need to visit our old forums here. They will remain online until we switch the server off in a couple of weeks.

Lastly, attachments (uploaded files) have just started converting to our cloud host. These were part of the delay as we had planned to remove the facility due to the quantity and file of attachments we have built up over 11 years. You, our community, were quite vocal about keeping them, so we looked at alternate methods of hosting. With tens of thousands of files totalling some 20 Gb they are copying over at the rate of 10 per cycle. It's going to take some time, but attachments will be turning up slowly. In the meantime it will mean missing file links. Again, anything critical, grab it now from the old forums.

Visit the new forums now!

/Steve

Author: | Posted Nov 14, 2011 | 57 comments

As some of you might have noticed there is a problem with our sims2packs at the moment, they can no longer be installed. This is due to a bug in the program we used to create the sims2pack before they got uploaded to the cloud.

As a result we have disabled the option to download as sims2pack for the time being, if you are used to download in that format you have to get used to download as zip until we have sorted it out, instructions for that can be found here:

http://www.thesimsresource.com/resources/view/category/downloads-sims2/id/171/

We have also decided it is time to retire the old download wizard (used for Sims 2) as we are no longer able to maintain it and fix bugs.

For those of you that are affected by this we are sorry for the inconvenience this might cause.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Nov 1, 2011 | 39 comments

We've now finished patching our Sims 3 downloads to ensure they're fully Pets-compatible. This means, from this moment on, your game must be FULLY PATCHED and up to date in order for our downloads to work in your game. It took us longer than expected due to the sheer volume of content, but thanks for bearing with us.

You've probably already noticed the growing list of "Updates" to your past downloads. You will only need to redownload the automated fixes (labelled "pets fix" in the update reason) if you did not fix your game content with our RigFix tool. If you've already fixed your own content, there is now a "Dismiss All Pet Fixes" button so you can remove the automatic update notifications and be left with updates made manually by creators.

There is unfortunately some content we have not been able to fix automatically. This mainly affects beds and bathtubs. If you experience problems with these, please contact the creator direct or use the REPORT button.

Finally, now that our content is patched, we will no longer be accepting any creations made with earlier Workshop versions than 2.0.28. If you haven't done so already, please download the latest Workshop from our Workshop page.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Oct 31, 2011 | 27 comments

Due to the problems introduced wiht the Pets patch we will in a very near future no longer be able to accept submissions of items created with TSR Workshop below version 2.0.28. We are converting everything that has been submitted so far and will do so for some time still but we want to put all of this to rest at some point :)

If you have items created with an older version of TSR Workshop that you want to submit after we have stopped accepting those you can run "Rig fixer" on it, after that you will be able to submit it.

Author: SteveB | Posted Oct 20, 2011 | 267 comments

Latest Status: TSR RigFix has been updated to handle memory errors and reported issues
                           Batch conversion of downloads on TSR has not yet started!
                           Workshop updated (update from existing tool, download page will be updated soon)

TSR staff have been working hard to fix the problems caused by the Pets EP and the 1.26 game patch (1.27 for Mac) released by EA. To enable Pets animations, EA have changed the way many objects work. Without boring you with the technical details the result was that most CC fails to work in the game after applying the patch or Pets EP.

Workshop is now fixed and exports objects which work with Pets and the patch. We will run a batch process to fix all of our existing content "server side" which we hope to start on Friday. While this process is running we may suspend Sims 3 downloads so that users don't get a mix of patched and unpatched files. This process will take an estimated 10 hours.

The new tool, TSR Pets CC Bug Fixer (TSR RigFix) is now tested, documented and ready for you to use to fix your Sims 3 Custom Content after installing Pets or patching the game. Go to the Fix Your Game page to get the tool and follow the simple instructions. By including step by step screenshots we seem to have made the process look more complicated than it really is but this should make even the most nervous PC users feel comfortable fixing their content. That said, be sure to back your game files up and use this tool carefuly (and at your own risk).

Unfortunately this tool will not work for Mac users. Fixed sims3packs can be downloaded from the site and these will work on your Mac. You could also copy your Sims3pack files to a PC and fix them all in one batch to drop back onto your Mac, so there are ways to fix your game, but not as quick and easy I'm afraid.

We will try and offer as much support as we can for this tool to our users via the Support System here at the site. Please be aware though, we might get lots of requests and reports about a common bug so generic answers and fixes might mean that you don't get a personal reply. Please check back for updates if you have problems.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Oct 13, 2011 | 43 comments

We have now transferred all Sims 3 downloads over to the cloud and you should notice a big performance increase. If you are a subscriber and receive errors stating that content is subscriber-only, please close ALL your open browser windows, then log back into TSR. This will enable you to download again.

If you experience any problems, please log a support ticket. Our staff are ready to assist you.

This is the first step of many as we roll out our planned redesign of TSR and performance increases overall.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Oct 11, 2011 | 37 comments

*update 2* All Sims 3 downloads are now in the cloud and you will notice MUCH faster loading times for those pages as well. Sims 2 is underway and will be launched soon. Enjoy!

*update* Due to an unforseen bug we need to postpone this rollout a few days - downloads will resume as they were until then. We will update you when we have solved the problems.

In an effort to make TSR better we have made some pretty significant changes under the hood. We are hard at work on the next version of TSR and part of that involves moving our entire site infrastructure, database and file serving into the cloud. We decided that the downloads should be moved into the cloud also for v7 and starting today you will notice much faster download speeds and loading times on the download pages.

In the process we had to get rid of some download options:

• We have removed the .tsr download option for sets as it was no longer fully working.
• The option to download single item sims3pack as Zip files has been removed.

All sims3pack files are transfered in compressed form so there is no gain in keeping them in Zip archives. Sets are still downloaded as Zip archives however.

If you have any problems with our new cloud-based downloading, don't hesitate to contact our support desk.

We hope you enjoy our changes and there are lots more to come!

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Oct 7, 2011 | 49 comments

We have made room for new artists by retiring a handful of inactive Featured and Select Artists from our teams. It is with great pleasure we welcome the following additions:

Sims 3 Featured Artists:

- ILikeMusic640
- murfeel

Sims 3 Select Artists:

- dhylaciouz
- fantasticSims
- Echoehver
- Simphomaniac
- MissDaydreams

Sims 2 Featured Artist:

- Screaming Mustard

Sims 2 Select Artists:

- allison731
- gioiella
- lientebollemeis

If you would like to become a Featured or Select Artist yourself, simply start submitting and we will notice you.

Author: Thomas|TSR | Posted Oct 5, 2011 | 15 comments

Our very own and very gifted clothing artist ekinege has created a new clothing tutorial for all aspiring fashionistas out there. The tutorial comes in PDF format and can be downloaded from here: http://www.thesimsresource.com/resources/view/category/creating-sims3-texturing/id/399/

This is a must read for any aspiring clothing artist out there!