So I guess I should say a bit about why I disappeared and what’s been happening this year, so here goes.

In the third week in January, my mum found a lump in her neck.  After various tests, she was diagnosed with stage 2 Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.  It was fast growing and aggressive.   She had to have 8 cycles of chemotherapy, starting at the end of March.

Well, she finished her last treatment at the end of August, and on Monday she was given the all clear.  She will have to have checkups every three, then every six months, but for the time being, it looks like she’s kicked it.

It has not been a pleasant time for any of us and her least of all, and I’ve just not felt like simming.  Instead I’ve been playing a lot of games where I don’t have to think. I still don’t feel like simming, but I’m hoping that I will.

Important - broken pics at the Emporium, DW and LJ

So, I woke up to an email from Photobucket stating that after a change to their terms and conditions, they no longer allow you to use their free account for third party hosting (which, really?  What did they think people on the internet used image hosting sites for?), and wanting me to upgrade to a paid account.  This paid account costs $399.99 a year, or roughly £310.  Yeah.  No. Not only do I not have a spare £310, I wouldn't spend it on a hobby I've all but given up anyway.  I probably have backups of some of my newer pictures and my download previews, but I also have some horrible shit happening in my life at the moment, and therefore have neither the time nor the inclination to find them, get a new image hosting account, upload them and redo all of the links, so I'm afraid that for the foreseeable future, all pictures will remain broken. I think that most of my uploads have previews included in the downloads, so there's that. Sorry for any inconvenience caused, but like I say, thanks to Photobucket and their exorbitant pricing for the foreseeable future, the pictures will remain broken.  

It worked!  Thank you so much Holley!

I did have to change the instructions slightly: they said to install everything in WinXP compatibility mode, but that caused the game to crash on trying to load the neighbourhood.  Uninstalling and installing with no compatibility worked perfectly though.  I’ve not done a huge deal of testing, but it all seems to be going well.  The only thing was I couldn’t get my lighting mod to work, and I was so fed up with everything, I had to take a break.  I tried it again this morning, and everything looks to be working.  I’ve still not added all of my cc, nor have I added Regalton to the game, but things are looking up.  :D

First draft of these guys in the game.  Stuart, Bertie and Eddie I’m really pleased with, even if they need to be happier.  I mean come on guys, you never stopped smiling in TS2.  I think the only thing which stops them looking truly like themselves, apart from the lack of smiles, is the different hair.  Sophia’s also pretty good (including her resting bitch face), and I got a good approximation of Sam and Ada when I played with the genetics.  I know I’m never going to get the exact faces the twins had this way, but it’s far easier to do that than try to recreate their parents features and how they meshed together from scratch.  I’m least happiest with Carmen.  Partly because I couldn’t find a good picture of her and partly because she looks too happy.  She can’t be too off though, since playing with genetics gave me this Emmi, and she looks pretty damn near to the TS2 Emmi.  I only had to tweak her a little bit.

Start of a backup plan in case I can’t get the TS2 EPs working on this laptop.  (I tried reinstalling University and it just fell over at the update and uninstalled it completely.  I haven’t got the energy to keep trying today).  I got TS4 in the sale at Xmas because there was no way still I wanted to pay full price for it, but hadn’t installed it until this weekend. 

I know that if I do this, it will involve finding lots of CC, and learning a whole new set of creating skills, but somehow I’m not willing to give up on this family and my dream of a Victorian neighbourhood just yet.

Also, yes I’m making Stuart first because he’s my favourite and always will be.

So all of my celebrating about TS2 being installed on my laptop may have been premature.  I put all of my CC in today, loaded it up to check before installing my neighbourhoods and thought “huh, I don’t seem to have Belladonna Cove or any of the other neighbourhoods that came with the later EPs.  how odd.”  When I went into Pleasantview, sure enough, the game seems to think that I have no EPs installed, even though they are clearly on my disk drive, I use the M&G shortcut to run the game and the loading screen is the M&G one.

I did have an  issue with the updater crashing out when I was installing, but I thought I’d got round it.  Obviously not.  It’s not recognising the EPs or SPs at all.

UPDATE: ok, so it looks like the BG and M&G are recognised, but not the in between ones.  I did run the game when installing the first few EPs and I’m sure the loading screens changed for those, but I didn’t actually try to play the game or check things out, because the graphics were shite since I hadn’t fixed them.

I hate to say it, but if I can’t get this fixed and my desktop does go the way I think it’s headed, this may be the end of me playing TS2. :(

So I guess I still know my characters...

I’m still setting up my laptop for TS2, so today I was installing my lighting mod, getting my spreadsheets on here and finding and downloading all of my fonts.  I was installing one of the fonts, when I looked at it and thought “if I haven’t already assigned Lauren a font for her handwriting, I should make it this one.”  Guess what her font is when I checked on my stat spreadsheet?  The one I was installing.  So I guess, that even though I haven’t thought about my sims as characters for several years now, I do still know them.

I actually ended up having to alter the global settings on the Nvidia control panel to point to the Nvidia GPU, because altering them on just the application settings did not work.  So far, so good, and it doesn’t seem to have affected the non graphics heavy applications such as Firefox either.

So, I am currently a happy bunny.  TS2 is all installed and I’ve finally managed to force it to use the NVidia GPU and not the intel one.  Smooth edges is still greyed out, but I’ve changed the settings in the NVidia control panel so that AA is actually on, so the edges are definitely smooth, no matter what the game thinks.  I’ve not installed any CC or my custom neighbourhoods yet, nor have I played for long, but so far, things are looking very promising.  :D

Thank you for all the good luck wishes yesterday.  I need them.  Holley, I will most definitely be checking out Leefish, because at the moment, despite using the sims graphics rules maker, altering the config files manually and forcing the game to use my super-duper NVidia GPU, it still looks like it’s trying to use the intel one to run the game.  I’ve not finished installing all the EPs yet, so I think I’m going to do that and then spend more time at the weekend trying to get it to run decently.

Installing TS2 on my new laptop.  Wish me luck ...

hersimmyship: :D  It’s been a long time coming.

Annaled: thank you.  :D  I’m glad you like them, and I’m sure that the basket will look great in  your game.

Littleblondesim: You're welcome. :D  I admit, the streetlights having a decent mesh really adds to the look of a neighbourhood.

Squeezleprime: You’re welcome.  It’s something I’ve been wanting to work on for ages now, but only recently got the impetus to actually do.

Katri: Thank you. :D  One of the reasons I wanted to try to make the dorm doors as a standalone object was so that those who play a modern game, could have a choice.  However, they just didn’t work: the game didn’t see them as dorm doors when it came to dormies, even though it did with player characters, so I ended up with empty dorms when I was testing. 

It’s been a long, long time since I shared any CC, but I’ve just posted quite a large dump of mainly default objects, but with a couple of neighbourhood deco objects in there too.  Click the header above to head over there and check them out, see if there’s anything you can use.