FINALLY finished Veronaville - I think. Testers would be appreciated, especially for the memories - oh god, the memories. Phew.

Download is here.

Took a week's break. Veronaville is a... challenge, to say the least. There's so many complicated memories to fix. I'm done with the Summerdreams and Capps now, though. Only the Montys to go... then I can finally move on to Strangetown.

Okay, I THINK I am finished with all of these now, but I would very much appreciate it if some kind souls would download and test them. :)

Belladonna Cove
Slightly altered since my last upload, but nothing very major. All the work memories have been fixed to link to the correct career, and some other small things have been fixed as well.

Desiderata Valley

Riverblossom Hills

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Note: When merging any subhood or stealth hood into a main hood, all memories end up pointing to the wrong NID for the memory subject, even though they look okay in the memory panel. This means the FFS debugger will see them as corrupt if they point at a NID that doesn't exist, and the 'wipe corrupt' option will remove them. This is a failing of EAxis and the merging process itself. I will fix it in the finished merged hood, but it's just something to be aware of if you test these. :)

Bluewater Village

Downtown

Stealth Hoods

Universities


The three base game hoods will come later, they're not finished yet.

Things to look for:
- Memories! Whether they line up with other sims' memories, are in proper chronological order, that nothing important is missing, negative memories are coloured red, everything points to the correct subject (job memories point to the right career, maxed skill memories point to the correct object, memories of the sim itself having a picture of them and not someone else (ex. A+ memory), etc). Note: NPCs, townies and dead sims (except the Tricous!) have no memories. NPCs and townies because those get wiped anyway when moving them in, and dead sims because I don't imagine many people would be interested in the majority of them, and it's a LOT of work to construct memories, so (they're all boring straight face template sims with no skills anyway). I also want to discourage resurrecting the most commonly resurrected sims in the three base game hoods, because most of them have something wrong with them and are best left alone.
- But just to make it clear: The Tricous DO have memories, and can be resurrected safely. Please do test. :)
- Photo albums - the order was all messed up here for some families, they should all be correct now.
- All family relations and family trees should be correct.
- Except for family trees where it makes sense to keep several members, for example to connect together two families, there is only one level of premade dead sims, no grandparents. This means that instead of having SIX useless dead sims connected to them, the average sim will now instead have two - its parents. Yay!
- Ages have been fiddled with a bit so some sims have a bit longer to go before elderhood, etc. It doesn't make sense to have a sibling who just turned into an adult when you're becoming an elder in three days, either.
- Genetics. There is no one with "impossible" genes anymore, because I've added recessives to all sims where this makes sense. Do some breeding and see that your brown hair + blond hair couple can, indeed, produce a blond haired child like their pre-made one.

There was also a lot of background stuff fixed which isn't really visible when playing. Please just look for anything that looks off, or is missing, or might make the neighbourhood blow up, and maybe look through those memories an extra time or two if you feel up to it.

<3

Veronaville is the worst neighbourhood ever to fix. Specifically, how EVERYONE is interconnected and has memories of EVERYONE, except nearly all of those memories are lacking because EAxis fails at continuity. Ugh. I've got the Summerdreams and adult Capps fixed, but still need to do all the Capp kids and Montys. Thank god there's less Montys than Capps.

In other news, (I think) I fixed Patrizio and Isabella's retirements - they should now both point to the top of the culinary career as they should, and also give the correct pensions instead of those ridiculous ones they had before.

After this, only Strangetown and Pleasantview left, as well as some testing and minor fixes.

Anyone up to playtesting some single hoods before I merge them together?

I'm working on the Pets stealth hood now... I've deleted the NPCs and all the display pets (the ones that show up in the pet boxes in shops, they're not useful for anything else - why do you need 10-15 characters for this??). I'm very torn on all the strays and adoptive pets, though. Part of me wants to keep them, even though that means a lot more character files. What do you think?

Okay, the following is finished (still need more playtesting which may provoke further small fixes, but still, mostly done):
- Belladonna Cove - 61 character files (23 playables, 2 NPCs, 36 dead)
- Desiderata Valley - 43 character files (16 playables, 27 dead)
- AL stealth hood - 11 character files (all playables)
- FT stealth hood - 3 character files (all playables)
- BV stealth hood - 3 character files (all playables)
- SNS stealth hood - 17 character files (8 playables, 9 Garden Club members)

Also, I took a few pictures for Pleasantly Strange last night.

Well, my sim cravings haven't been fulfilled tonight so I'm gonna work on my clean uberhood project instead. Progress report: Desiderata Valley is going to be finished quite soon, and the AL and FT stealth hoods have been cleaned.

I have a couple of questions concerning the other stealth hoods, about what people would prefer:

BV stealth hood - this one has the Travellers and a bunch of tourists. Does anyone actually want the tourists, or are you fine with the game spawning new ones as needed?

Seasons stealth hood - here be Ottomi, Ramaswamis, and the garden club. Same question, should I keep the garden club sims or not? They have kinda unique looking faces and I see them a lot in people's legacies and the like, which is why I ask. There are maybe unnecessarily many of them, but 3-4 will respawn when you play anyway.

And Pets stealth hood - home of Cyd Roseland and Critturs, and obviously, same question again. Keep the strays and adoptives, or no? Personally, the strays make me sad, so I never have any strays and use the nostrayrespawn hack. But people might prefer to have the original group of strays around.

Again, I am trying to keep the character files down to a sane number, and I think getting rid of the tourists and strays/adoption pool is the best thing. I'm kinda torn on the garden club, those are only 8 or so sims and so isn't a big problem, and they're also not straight face templates, which makes them more interesting. What do you guys think (if anyone cares either way :))?

Okay, so I finally went to take pictures for my story and... all the graves in Strangetown are gone. :( Both the ones in Olive's cemetery and the ones I put in the public cemetery. In the belonging shopping district Pleasantview, however, they are all fine! I don't know what happened.

I tried going back to older backups... many different ones, in fact, but they were missing in all of them. If I go back any further I'll be losing too much story progression, so I can't do that.

Does anyone have the faintest idea WHY this might happen, or if there's any simple way of getting them back? I guess I could try teleport cat + FFS debugger... that's just so tedious, though. D: Has this happened to anyone else?

Meh! It's not essential to finishing my story, which I was planning to end in 2-3 more chapters anyway, but it is extremely irritating and means I probably won't keep playing the 'hood after the story is done. Stuff like this just seems very... BFBVFS-y to me. I'm worried I'll get attached and then it'll explode in my face.

I will finish this story, eventually. But right now, tonight, I don't feel like working at it anymore. :(

I've finally finished cleaning up Belladonna Cove. The final character count is 61, which includes the 23 playables, 36 dead relatives and 2 NPCs (head witches).

If anyone's interested in downloading it, it can be found... Edit: Here. I made some small changes to it.

Please report back any bugs you might find. I've tried my best to weed out everything but would be surprised if I hadn't missed at least one thing.

Known issue: Inigo Gere, Chastity Gere's father, has a '...' "more" link in his family tree which leads nowhere. This is because he's linked to his mother's character file which was deleted (by EA, not me). Since SimPE crashes when I try to enter his family tree, I've found no way to fix it yet. I don't think it does any harm, though, it's just a minor annoyance.

Note: I haven't included the .reia file (the little video that plays in the neighbourhood selection screen) in the download, because it's so big. If you want it, you can copy it over from your own The Sims 2 Apartment Life\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods\E001\ folder.

Okay, so I think I'm done with cleaning Belladonna Cove now.

Additional fixes to what was mentioned in the last post:
- All mystery sim memories removed or replaced with playables. I don't like the mystery sim. D:
- Photo albums fixed manually without opening the neighbourhood ingame - in some cases the order was a bit off, and for the Patel family the album was missing entirely.

Also, I found strong evidence for the aspiration being off for some of the sims - traces of a different aspiration in their memories, as well as a LTW from a different aspiration and hints in their descriptions. The changes I made were: Carlos Contender: Popularity -> Romance. Connor Weir: Fortune -> Family. Cordial sisters: Knowledge -> Popularity (like the Pleasant sisters, duh!) Was this a good idea? Or bad? It can easily be changed back, of course.

There is 2 NPCs (head witches), 23 playables and 100(!) dead characters.

I really think I should reduce the number of dead relatives, at least down to only one generation above the playable (unless there are actual graves), otherwise the complete uberhood will be overrun with useless character files of dead people. What do you guys think?

Edit: Cordial sisters changed back to Knowledge, and 64(!) dead character deleted. That leaves a total of 61 characters: 23 alive, 36 dead and the 2 head witches. Everyone just has one level of dead people in their family tree now.

So, I decided to start with the tail end of the neighbourhoods this time, and have spent this week cleaning up Belladonna Cove. It's nearing completion, though I do have a whole page of minor things I have to go through and fix before I consider it finished.

( Changes I've made are as follows... )

There's a headmaster in Belladonna Cove whose name is Nawwaf Leelaporn. Yes, Leelaporn.

Someone over at EA is probably still snickering.

Okay, so, I like fiddling with things and have weird OCD about certain things. Once before I've built my own uberhood from scratch and now I'd like to do so again.

First, though, I want to say that it's not certain I actually will do this, and if I do, I'm not sure what I'll use it for. I make this post to ask for people's input and whether anyone else might be interested in the finished thing.

( More text under cut... )

Pictures set up and uploaded for the next chapter... now I just need to write. Moving forward.

So I'm still having trouble getting the next part for Pleasantly Strange done. It's in my head, but... can't find the inspiration to sit down and work on it. I think once I get this chapter done it'll be easier, I'm all excited about the NEXT part, just... this one is tough. :p Hope someone's still interested in reading in when I finally get it done. ;)

Meanwhile, here's the Ottomases for the latest Maxis Taste dare.



( Pictures under cut... )

More BACC pictures!

Also, I got some playing done in the story neighbourhood yesterday, so I'm slowly making progress on Pleasantly Strange... yay!

( Lots of pics under cut... )

On request from pennysims, we're posting some of our pictures from our BACC... I say "some", because there was over 2000 pictures in that folder, and even with just flitering out the best there's still a lot. :p

These are from the beginning, so there's not so much a "city" yet... more like a big plain open landscape with a single house in it.

'Hood is called 'Simtopia City'. ...We're not terribly creative with neighbourhood names.

( Cut for 39 pictures... )

I'm aware I've been pretty quiet again for a while. Silly me, thought that holidays would mean more time to sim and work on my story. Well... there's been some simming, but the BACC is just so much fun! Other than that, we've been in London for three days and this week we're cat-sitting at my parents' house, so there's little access to sims, unfortunately.

At least I've started to THINK about the story again, so that's an important first step. I haven't forgotten about it and have no intention of abandoning it, so close to its completion, so I just wanted to reassure you about that... in case anyone was worried. :)