It's completely typical of a simmer isn't it to be intending to make something else entirely and then end up with a set of street name signs? I was doing some more work on shop signs, following up some ideas I had from doing the Victorian Shop Facade recolours, when I was distracted (sigh) by a sudden idea that I needed road signs for Little Carping. So here they are - I actually made about 40 but I've selected 18 plus a 'Way Out' sign (based on a British Rail Way Out sign because who doesn't want one of those?) for upload.
I made them on AikeaGuinea's height adjustable wall painting which is shiftable so you can have them at a variety of heights on a wall (mesh included though it's a very common and useful piece of CC so you might have it already). They are in simlish but the basic texture is based on a real British street sign. You'd need to use moveobjects on to place it over other things also hung on walls. The picture is found in Decorative>Wall Hangings and costs $45. I also designed the texture so they'd sit on my exterior Victorian Pub Tile walls.
The names are as follows (l-r, top to bottom):
High Street; Station Road; Oak Avenue; Wood Lane; Sparrow Street; Lancaster Gate; School Lane; Market Street; Beech Road; Nonsuch Place (spelt with an 'e' but whatever); Beaumont Square; Church Lane; Richmond Road; Bridge Street; Park Avenue; Lark Rise; Lime Grove; Buckingham Road plus the Way Out there to the right.
The selection I made was based on what I thought the most common or generic-type names were - Little Carping has themes for it's neighbourhood roads including (British) trees, birds and vaguely aristocratic names, hence some of the names. I'm going to add flower names next. Incidentally, I included Sparrow Street because, although it's not common, it's my favourite road name in Little Carping (it's actually in Carping Magna - the shopping district). I could write an entire book about Sparrow Street...
I do sometimes wonder if I'm the only simmer that is bothered by this stuff. I suspect no-one else has missed street name signs.
Posted by: maxon - 31-07-19, 03:42 PM - Forum: CC Fixins
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Vegan-kaktus over at MTS asked about Targas's Transparent Water Fix which had started crashing the game when you tried to select or load the large fish tank (Aquabox 60 gallon) that came with Apartment Life. The mod was made long before that EP appeared and I thought that the internal referencing was possibly not up-to-date but that turned out not to be the problem. In fact, logical when I actually looked at the file and found out that the mod is in reality a simple texture default replacement.
In fact, it was a very, very simple fix - at least as far as I can tell. The problem was that the texture format of the texture causing the issue was misidentified as a Raw24Bit rather than DXT3 so the game was misreading the texture. Literally, a one-click fix in SimPE (well, three if you count the commit and save).
However - caveat:
I was so taken aback by this - it would appear to be a simple mistake by Targas (one we've all made if you've fiddled with textures) - I couldn't quite believe this was correct. I meant to test the hell out of the file but, as usual, I got distracted by something else and it slipped out of sight (to the bottom of my 'Work in Progress' folder in fact). I thought I might have missed something obvious. Also, I can't quite believe the base game texture file which the Aquabox references isn't used elsewhere. It should have caused crashing long before AL if the format was wrong. I dunno.
Anyway, Vegan-kaktus contacted me again on tumblr and asked about progress so I have posted the file here with the caveat that if you do download it and try it, it might cause a crash down the line when the game calls the texture in some other context. If it does, PLEASE let me know either here or over at tumblr. This file is currently regarded as IN TESTING. For anyone reading this who doesn’t know what the mod does, it defaults the water textures so that bath water appears as transparent. It was originally uploaded to MTS’s sister site Sexy Sims 2 - not sure why exactly, perhaps because with it you can see the little sims’ bodies in the bath. Personally, I like it and, if it proves to be a robust fix, I will be pleased with that. I have not changed the file name so if you already have the mod, you can just overwrite (though you might want to back up the original just in case). I also might try some further development of the file since it is somewhat large and contains the LIFOs as well as the main textures. HL informs me on that MTS thread that the LIFOs are not needed so I might try removing them at a later date.
I've always liked Shakeshaft's Victorian Shop Facade for making old-fashioned shopping streets in Little Carping (you know, like those tourist-trap places we have in cities like York and Chester, selling the romance of a Victorian Christmas card image - most British shopping streets look nothing like that. But still...). It's an older set of meshes but I still like them very much and do use them fairly often on community lots especially to make PUBS! There are a lot of pubs in Little Carping (and surrounds). They also work great for making pokey little shops: Victorian survivors in Sirencester's modern shopping streets. But there were two things I wanted to do with the set.
First of all, colours. The original meshes came in green and I have not found any other recolours (though there may well be some). However, I made, quite a while ago now, a set of Victorian pub tile walls (they're here) in six very Victorian colours: Laurel; Honey; Burgundy; Cobalt; Chestnut and Buttermilk (a sort of palish green). So I made a set of matching recolours of the meshes in this set. These recolours came out pretty well I think (for the most part - not so sure about Chestnut) and do match my walls. Now I can make pubs with appropriate walls AND matching facades! Hurrah! There are five recolours - I did make a Laurel recolour but it's so close to the original colour, I've not included it. The colours are Honey; Burgundy; Cobalt; Chestnut and Buttermilk. Here they are matched up with my walls. It's a slaved set, so there are only four recolour files of each colour IYSWIM - that's because there are four master objects and only they get recoloured. There are, therefore, 20 files.
Secondly, shop names - the original set has a set of 'recolours' with shop names but they're in English. I, personally, prefer Simlish in my game so I made a set of Simlish shop names too. There are 17 of them (pick and choose I'd say) including a much-needed blank 'recolour'. These are for the second colour channel of the 'Shop Sign' meshes - i.e. those boards that make up the top part of the facade (i.e. the bits with writing on them in the pictures). The names are: Antiques; Bakery; Bookshop; Butchers; Confectioners; Delicatessen; Draper; Fishmonger; Florist; Greengrocer; Grocer; Ironmonger; Pharmacy; Tea Rooms; Tobacconist and Toy Shop.
With these, because all the shop sign boards are slaved to the 8-tile version, the width of the letters is compressed to varying degrees in all the smaller signs. I still think they look fine - here's a comparison picture of the 8-tile sign board with smallest 2-tile sign board. There's nothing to be done about it anyway since it's a slave set and they all use the same texture.
You will need to get the original meshes from T$R (hissssss - sorry) if you don't already have them: here
BTW, I've put these in the Build Mode section because they include recolours for doors and windows and, even so, the buy mode objects (the signs and awnings) are used when you're building anyway (I think).
Finally, there's a bit more to come for this set - so watch this space.
So, I've been away from TS2 for a bit dealing with RL (marking - ugh!) and now have a bit of time and I'M BACK!! I made these a couple of weeks ago as a bit of light relief from work and thought I'd upload them but naturally there's a bit of a story with them.
I'm not normally much of a skinner but I liked these two dress meshes from Amaryll. I must have downloaded the original files months ago because I CANNOT find the original download threads to link to which is annoying as hell. That's something I very much like to do - probably a hold over from my time at MTS. However, Amaryll I know posts at GoS and has a Livejournal (under the name Withered Lilies). If anyone knows where I got the mesh files from originally, please let me know.
I did some plain recolours for both meshes. I realise there are probably several plain recolours of both already available (if I could find them to look at, I could tell!) so this might be a bit of a repetition of something already out there but my thinking here goes something like this: I have this habit when making stuff (usually objects) to always want a recolour in all the primary colours - or a version thereof - a red, a yellow, a blue, a green and sometimes light and dark versions and then secondary colours too; every time I make something, I'm forever reinventing the colours I'm using to suit whatever it is I'm making; I have made recolours of objects in quite a large variety of blues (and greens and reds and yellows) by now; I'm kind of getting irritated by that; I have come to realise I like strong jewel-like tones, i.e. well-saturated - I've found over the years that I tend to dislike and, therefore, habitually delete recolours of stuff which are discreet, tasteful and desaturated (looking at you BB - like the meshes, textures not so much) - I have no taste. And I don't care.
Soooooo, what I did a while back was develop a palette for myself to save some time working out what colours to use and also that I might have a slightly more harmoniously coloured game with textures at least able to blend with each other and not be decorating with 56 types of blue (or green, red or yellow or whatever). So when I came across these dress meshes, I used them as a recolour test for my new palette (I can do colour swaps ok). I was fairly happy with the results. I haven't provided a complete palette for both dresses but have made a selection for each one. This is because, depending on the original texture, some colours from the palette come out very similar (blond and chartreuse can behave very similarly on a fairly dark gray original for example) and some I thought were not particularly successful. For my use, that's completely fine. I want stuff that I feel works. It sounds a bit pretentious for me to have my own palette but it's already saving me a lot of time and fiddling about.
Anyway, hope you like these. The colours are as follows:
For the Papillon dress I used (l-r, top-bottom): cherry; sandstone; turquoise; coffee; blond; aegean; aubergine; crocodile
For the Snuggly dress I used (l-r, top-bottom): peacock; garnet; aubergine; spice; chartreuse; coffee
I responded to frenchyxo22's WCIF over at MTS. She wanted walls for trailers or caravans (as we call them here in the UK) in vintage colours and styles. I made some years ago which have been sitting on my Yahoo group and offered them up. That was ok but then I started to think (fatal). I didn't like some of the details I had on the original walls so I changed them and separated out the walls (which you can find here) from the added features such as grills, hatches and rear/tail lights. I put these last as overlays on Pixelhate's Recolourable Full Poster Wall Overlay though the recolours were actually made with Boiling Oil's revision of the mesh where he changed some of the parameters (to make more sense). That version of the mesh can be found here which, if you don't have it already is the version I advise using.
There are nine recolours in total. Two sets of rear lights, a hazard triangle symbol, a number plate (in Simlish), a speed limit indicator, three hatches and an external grill to let air out of the interior of the van. Images came off the internet (mostly caravanning sites) except the grill which I made from scratch. You can place copies of the wall overlay on one tile multiple times. This means you can layer the items here - so you can have the speed limit indicator sitting under the number plate if you like - as can be seen in the main picture above.
These walls were originally uploaded to MTS - and, actually, a million years ago on my Yahoo group (now defunct), at least the original three walls.
I responded to a WCIF by frenchyxo22's over at MTS. She wanted walls for trailers or caravans (as we call them here in the UK) in vintage colours and styles. I made some years ago which have been sitting on my Yahoo group and offered them up. That was ok but then I started to think about them again (fatal). I didn't like some of the details so I changed them and separated out the walls themselves from the added features such as grills, hatches and rear/tail lights (you can find those here).
This is a set of six walls designed for trailers. They are stripey!! The originals were the green, mustard yellow and turquoise walls. I adjusted them slightly and added the pink, candy apple red and blue. There are two 'floors' as well which make matching roofing. I'm going to have to rebuild my caravan and trailer parks now. Mama Hick will have to move out for the duration. She does not thank you frenchyxo22!
So I got the urge to mess around again with colours and patterns and this is the result - pale pastel polkadot patterned wallpapers.
I started with a bright yellow polka dot pattern I made and ended up with a more toned-down and paler seven colours: blue, fawn, green, orange, pink, purple and yellow. I did one plain paper with neat skirting and fancy crown and then added another variant with a wainscot (taken from the wainscot I made for my ice cream parlor walls). I think they would work very well for a baby's room or could be used in a country cottage for kitchen or dining room or even a drawing room (lounge). The crown is set far enough down the wall to sit under the ceiling in-game (and therefore look correct in pictures).
I don't know why I seem to produce so many pretty feminine wallpapers - I'm not remotely girly.
Anyway, I thought, once I'd finished, that some slightly darker toned carpets were needed so I produced seven carpets which tone with the walls. I used the in-game Overwear carpet texture as a base.
The walls are in the wallpaper section and are $6, the floors are in the carpets section and are $4.
Maybe now I can get on with something more ambitious...
Here are four pattern sets for walls (three papers and one paint). I got the pattern textures from the home retailer John Lewis, a long-time favourite of mine (see my Lewis's rugs). I set them with crowns, skirting and a dado rail (for the Quilt set). I think they came out nicely.
The sets are as follows:
Stem - a wallpaper based on a petal/leaf motif in pretty colours Acorn Spot - a retro design wallpaper in lovely autumnal colours Quilt - a simple diamond pattern wallpaper in soft pastel shades Seraille - painted walls in lovely colours with a fade effect to white at the top of the wall
In the pictures below you can see the swatches for each set (plus a three-tile picture of the walls so you can see the tiling). I used the same names for each wall as they were in the original source (so you can locate any of the patterns yourself should you want to make variants or even go and browse the shop site). The swatches show the names and the files are named the same so you should be able to delete any files you don't want. If you are concerned about doing this, remember that deleting walls in game is easy to do and doesn't cause any problems.
Update: Someone suggested a turquoise recolour of Seraille which I have added along with a yellow, red and orange so that now the Seraille set comes in a complete rainbow. Plus I found a Stem pattern I hadn't originally included (multi). These five extra bonus walls are in the rar called Seraille&StemUpdate. There's a new swatch in the pictures section below too.
Here are four more wallpaper pattern sets for walls. I got the pattern textures from the home retailer John Lewis , a long-time favourite of mine (see also my Lewis's rugs). I set them with crowns and skirting. The crowns are meant and placed to work with the in-game ceilings - and there is a blank strip at the top of the texture which is normally hidden by the ceiling. I think they came out nicely. The sets are as follows:
Bellflower - a graceful colourful paper with a lovely flower motif Bardez Stripes - a modern lively striped wallpaper Cones - a refined delicate paper in subdued tones Petal - a retro pattern paper with strng contrasting colours
In the pictures section you can see the swatches for each set (plus a three-tile picture of the walls so you can see the tiling). I used the same names for each wall as they were in the original source (so you can locate any of the patterns yourself should you want to make variants or even go and browse the shop site). The swatches show the names and the files are named the same so you should be able to delete any files you don't want. If you are concerned about doing this, remember that deleting walls in game is easy to do and doesn't cause any problems.
These were originally posted at MTS. These files are the same as the ones over there. I posted them here because I've also posted some recolours of matching pub stuff: Victorian Shop Facades are here. So, here they are:
In my quest to British-ise my game, I've wanted for a while to create a set of walls for tiling pubs. Tiled pubs are a bit of a thing in England, especially in towns and cities. You can see some examples in this Google search. They've been around for a long time and first appeared in the Victorian era and so typically come in very Victorian colours. This set of tiles is designed to help you recreate that type of pub. This style of tiling was also used in large public buildings in the Victorian period so they have a dual purpose!
So I am now able to build my tiled pubs to my own satisfaction. I am starting to achieve quite a good effect, especially in combination with Sandy's (Around the Sims) Irish Pub Set which I have long loved (and you can see in the screenshots in case you were wondering). Here's a close up of the effect I was trying to create:
This is a set of fourteen floor tiles and 24 wall tiles. The floor tiles are encaustic tiles with the images drawn from the web. The wall tiles are all my own creation except for the Leighton tile inserts, though the colours are drawn from examples I found.
The floors are in five styles: Arts & Crafts; Blenheim; Chatsworth; Arundel; and Bristol. Some have only one colour variety, others more - see the swatch. The Bristol set comes with an edging and so there are seven files for this style - two corners, two outer corners, two edge and a base tile. This is so you can create a room or passage-way with an edging. You will need an EP Pets or above to use the floor-tile rotation feature in order to get all variants needed to make a complete square. If someone asks me nicely, I might be persuaded to make a complete set of these for use with Base Game up to Pets.
The walls come in four varieties: two exterior walls and two interior walls. The exterior walls are fully tiled with a large crown which goes to the full height of the wall. The large crown is intended to provide space for a pub name (an example is shown in the pictures). There are two interior walls which are half-tiled with a smaller crown designed to sit under a ceiling. Both pairs come in a plain version and a version with a Leighton Embossed Tile insert panel. The colours are: Burgundy; Buttermilk; Chestnut; Cobalt; Honey and Laurel. Very Victorian. I'm pleased with those.
