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Hello everyone! It's December, and the festive season is well upon us, and that means that it's once again time for me to start the gift pile over at Victoria and George! Once again, I'm afraid that my gift has a Victorian slant to it, but I'm sure that there is something for everyone under the cut.
So, I tend to start thinking about what I want for my game, before I settle on an idea for my gift. As some of you may be aware, my game is currently experiencing all sorts of funky weirdness, including the dreaded purple flashing, making it virtually unplayable on large lots, including the main legacy house. I think that part of this is to do with how much CC I have, and so I'm intending to do a huge cull soon. That means that I'm already thinking about what sort of items I need to get rid of, and what I need to replace. That, combined with the fact it's Christmas and Hanukkah brought me round to thinking about children and the presents they receive at this time of year, and so my gift to you this December, is all about sim children and toys!
We'll start with the most boring item first. Decorative wooden toys, separated from the TS3 Midnight Hollow toy shelf. My copy of TS3 stopped working aaaaages ago, and I installed it months ago because of that, but before it gave up the ghost, I did acquire the Midnight Hollow neighbourhood, and managed to have a little play. There were lots of items in it that I put on my "to do" list, but luckily for me, quite a few people got there first, saving me the trouble. However, there was one thing I wanted to do, that no one else had thought of: separate off the wooden toys which looked like they would be at home in Regalton, from the toyshelf they were on. So that is what I have done. You get a yo-yo, spinning top, acrobat toy, cup and ball and paddle and ball, and some recolours of both the wood, and the balls and acrobat. These aren't playable toys due to the fact that the size and shape of most of them wouldn't work with the game's play animations, but it's nice to have things to scatter around a child's bedroom anyway, no?
Something to note with these: because they are TS3 conversions, they are low poly and therefore look a little shit close up, and not as nice as the objects I normally release. Same goes with the textures. Although I did double the resolution to make it look better, the original shading isn't the best.
Credits:
EA for the original meshes.
Sunni for the wood texture.
Pooklet for the colour actions of the wood.
Now, we start to get to the fun stuff! I've been using Decat's default replacement toys using TSM extracted toys for a little while now, and whilst they are great and look a hell of a lot better in my game than the Maxis plastic ones, they weren't quite right. So, for this I decided to have a go at making my own.
The toy boat has been replaced by a tin steam ship. This mesh is decorative ship which came with one of the EPs, which I extracted and altered to fit as a toy better.
The toy pony is now a tin pony. this was made by smooshing together two of Crow Ridge Studios beautiful Victorian toys (no link I'm afraid, because the post seems to have been removed from MTS. I also couldn't find any policy on there either, so I apologise if this is against it).
The toy car is now a tin train. This started off life as the neighbourhood steam train, before I altered it to be less American and more British looking. Two things to note about this: one, it's low poly and the textures aren't great, because it is an altered EA neighbourhood decoration, and two, because of it's length, there is some clipping when toddlers try to chew on it. I may, may revisit this one, if my plan for a new neighbourhood train comes to fruition and doesn't turn out to be too high poly, but for the time being, I think it looks great.
Lastly, the toy rocket is now a green dragon. I really liked the dragon in Decat's original set, but the colour didn't really do it for me, especially knowing how brightly coloured Victorian tin toys were painted. Luckily, Almight Hat had made a green recolour here, so I went and stuck it on the default.
Now normally with defaults, I can work out what files I need to extract from the game on my own, and then do so. However, these toys are more complicated, and so I cracked open Decat's toys to see how they'd made them. I then had a fit, because they were so complicated. So, I ended up cloning Decat's files, and then adding the meshes and textures I wanted. So full credit goes to Decat for the hard groundwork on these. I just got to do the fun bit: messing with meshes and textures.Credits:
General:
Decat for the defaults I cloned to make these.
Dragon:
Decat for the base default.
Almighty Hat for the awesome green recolour.
Train:
EA for the train mesh I altered.
Kativip for the buffers on the train and a tiny bit of train texture.
Boat:
EA for the mesh and texture I altered.
Horse:
Crow Ridge Studios for the two meshes I mashed together.
Default toys are awesome, but you know what's even more awesome? Buyable playable toys! And thanks to Almighty Hat, Huge Lunatic and Gwenke, that is exactly what we can have now. The ship, pony and train from the defaults above, have all been made into buyable toys, and there are also two recolours of the train and ship included.
I've also gone and made Crow Ridge Studio's decorative elephant and lamb playable. Now, these two meshes are quite a bit smaller than the originals, so you will be able to tell the difference easily. I also want to note, that because they are thinner than the Maxis toys, your children won't quite grip them properly, but as you can see from the above pictures, it all depends on the angle how bad that looks, and I think having playable toys far outweighs it anyway.
There is one known issue with these. Although I cloned the fixed versions that Hat posted to make these, my 8 neat-point tester child did still try to put these away in a toy box, resulting in an error message and the toy disappearing forever. I therefore suggest, that you don't have a toy box on the lot if you want to use these.
Credits:
General:
Almighty Hat, Huge Lunatic and Gwenke for the original buyable toys I cloned to make these.
Ship:
EA for the mesh and textures I altered.
Horse:
Crow Ridge Studios for the two meshes I mashed together.
Crow Ridge Studios elephant and lamb:
Crow Ridge Studios for the orginal meshes and textures.
Tin Train:
EA for the train mesh I altered.
Kativip for the buffers on the train and a tiny bit of train texture.
Now we get to something I've been working on for months and can't wait to play with in game. I've always been sad that my sims can't have teddy bears because, despite the annoying fact that adults want to constantly talk through them, I like how they are something else for sim children to play with. Because of that, I've been wanting to have dolls for my sims for years. I've been eyeing up Rebecca's dolls ever since she posted them, but they just weren't quite a fit for my neighbourhood, and any attempt I made to recolour the face to look more like bisque, ended in failure. EA came to my rescue with Midnight Hollow. I found the creepy clown doll in that, and was struck at how perfect the face was for a Victorian bisque doll if I inverted the eyes so they didn't follow you everywhere, so I extracted it and filed it in my "to do" folder. I've finally got round to doing it, and ended up with not one, but four base doll meshes.
Doll 1 using Myos's lovely curly hair mesh and an EA dress (this is the original dress Rebecca used for her dolls).
Doll 2 has the same dress as doll 1, but has the BG barrette hair.
Doll 3 has the same Myos curly hair mesh as doll 1, but is wearing a coat and hat by Vitasims 2, with the skirt from the above dolls.
Lastly, doll 4 has the BG barrette hair mesh and the Vitasims 2 coat mesh.
I have made a TON of recolours for these. There are three skintones (the original porcelain, a medium and a dark. No tan unfortunately, because I just couldn't get it to look nice, which made me very sad, but there you go. I may have another try at a later date). Four hair colours (Pooklet's Depth Charge, Incendiary, Pyrotechnic and Dynamite), which are retextures originally made by Almighty Hat, and four eye colours (blue, grey, green and brown). That's a total of 48 recolours for each doll's face.
For the clothing, the dress has four colour skirts, which come in a plain, and two patterned versions. The top comes in the same colour as the skirt, black and white, for a total of 36 recolours. The coat has two different base patterns by AAS, each pattern having 10 recolours, for a total of 20 recolours. I'm going to go and make respositoried versions of these for my own use, because there are so many recolours, and I will post the new versions here too.
But all of those recolours are worth it, because seriously. Just look. My Victorian girls can finally play with dolls. I will say that there are a few times where the play animations don't line up completely with the mesh (throwing the doll around on the ground for instance looks a little weird, because the sim grabs where the teddy's ears are), but I can't do anything about that.
Credits:
Rebecca for the base doll and all the work she put in to making a playable doll.
EA for the face and arm meshes and texture, plus the dress mesh.
Regacylady for the black and white textures of the dress I used as a base for the colours.
Shadowfell for the natural dye colour actions.
Myos for the curly hair mesh.
EA for the barrette hair mesh.
Almighty Hat, for the textures for the hair of the dolls.
Pooklet for the hair colours.
Trapping for the skin colours I messed about with to make the medium and dark colours.
AAS for the coat textures.
Vitasims 2 for the coat and hat mesh.
All of the above toys are designed to keep your sim children indoors, but let's finish with something for outside. This is a mesh I finished over a year ago, but never got round to actually uploading. It may look like the slide which came with one of the EPs, but it's not. You see, that mesh is mapped HORRIBLY, and so when I tried to make these recolours on it, I had to give up. However, the TS3 slide is mapped completely differently, and so I extracted that, mashed it together with the steps of the TS2 slide, and ta-da! One new slide which can be recoloured to have wooden sides.
Now it's not exactly accurate to the era, since it should really be a straight slide, and not a curved one, but you have to work with what the game gives you, and I'm sure you'll agree, that this looks a lot better than the fiberglass slide that EA made.
This comes in I think all of Pooklet's naturals, and the wood texture is by Sunni.
Credits:
EA for the TS2 and TS3 meshes I slapped together.
Sunni for the wood texture.
Pooklet for the wood colours.
And that my dears, is the end of the preview of everything you're getting in your gift this year. To see what all the recolours actually look like, you're going to have to download it and open it. As a general note, as always, everything has been compressorised, clearly labelled and subfoldered so you can delete whatever you don't want. If you notice any faults, please let me know so I can see if I have done something silly and can fix it.
We'll start with the most boring item first. Decorative wooden toys, separated from the TS3 Midnight Hollow toy shelf. My copy of TS3 stopped working aaaaages ago, and I installed it months ago because of that, but before it gave up the ghost, I did acquire the Midnight Hollow neighbourhood, and managed to have a little play. There were lots of items in it that I put on my "to do" list, but luckily for me, quite a few people got there first, saving me the trouble. However, there was one thing I wanted to do, that no one else had thought of: separate off the wooden toys which looked like they would be at home in Regalton, from the toyshelf they were on. So that is what I have done. You get a yo-yo, spinning top, acrobat toy, cup and ball and paddle and ball, and some recolours of both the wood, and the balls and acrobat. These aren't playable toys due to the fact that the size and shape of most of them wouldn't work with the game's play animations, but it's nice to have things to scatter around a child's bedroom anyway, no?
Something to note with these: because they are TS3 conversions, they are low poly and therefore look a little shit close up, and not as nice as the objects I normally release. Same goes with the textures. Although I did double the resolution to make it look better, the original shading isn't the best.
Credits:
EA for the original meshes.
Sunni for the wood texture.
Pooklet for the colour actions of the wood.
Now, we start to get to the fun stuff! I've been using Decat's default replacement toys using TSM extracted toys for a little while now, and whilst they are great and look a hell of a lot better in my game than the Maxis plastic ones, they weren't quite right. So, for this I decided to have a go at making my own.
The toy boat has been replaced by a tin steam ship. This mesh is decorative ship which came with one of the EPs, which I extracted and altered to fit as a toy better.
The toy pony is now a tin pony. this was made by smooshing together two of Crow Ridge Studios beautiful Victorian toys (no link I'm afraid, because the post seems to have been removed from MTS. I also couldn't find any policy on there either, so I apologise if this is against it).
The toy car is now a tin train. This started off life as the neighbourhood steam train, before I altered it to be less American and more British looking. Two things to note about this: one, it's low poly and the textures aren't great, because it is an altered EA neighbourhood decoration, and two, because of it's length, there is some clipping when toddlers try to chew on it. I may, may revisit this one, if my plan for a new neighbourhood train comes to fruition and doesn't turn out to be too high poly, but for the time being, I think it looks great.
Lastly, the toy rocket is now a green dragon. I really liked the dragon in Decat's original set, but the colour didn't really do it for me, especially knowing how brightly coloured Victorian tin toys were painted. Luckily, Almight Hat had made a green recolour here, so I went and stuck it on the default.
Now normally with defaults, I can work out what files I need to extract from the game on my own, and then do so. However, these toys are more complicated, and so I cracked open Decat's toys to see how they'd made them. I then had a fit, because they were so complicated. So, I ended up cloning Decat's files, and then adding the meshes and textures I wanted. So full credit goes to Decat for the hard groundwork on these. I just got to do the fun bit: messing with meshes and textures.Credits:
General:
Decat for the defaults I cloned to make these.
Dragon:
Decat for the base default.
Almighty Hat for the awesome green recolour.
Train:
EA for the train mesh I altered.
Kativip for the buffers on the train and a tiny bit of train texture.
Boat:
EA for the mesh and texture I altered.
Horse:
Crow Ridge Studios for the two meshes I mashed together.
Default toys are awesome, but you know what's even more awesome? Buyable playable toys! And thanks to Almighty Hat, Huge Lunatic and Gwenke, that is exactly what we can have now. The ship, pony and train from the defaults above, have all been made into buyable toys, and there are also two recolours of the train and ship included.
I've also gone and made Crow Ridge Studio's decorative elephant and lamb playable. Now, these two meshes are quite a bit smaller than the originals, so you will be able to tell the difference easily. I also want to note, that because they are thinner than the Maxis toys, your children won't quite grip them properly, but as you can see from the above pictures, it all depends on the angle how bad that looks, and I think having playable toys far outweighs it anyway.
There is one known issue with these. Although I cloned the fixed versions that Hat posted to make these, my 8 neat-point tester child did still try to put these away in a toy box, resulting in an error message and the toy disappearing forever. I therefore suggest, that you don't have a toy box on the lot if you want to use these.
Credits:
General:
Almighty Hat, Huge Lunatic and Gwenke for the original buyable toys I cloned to make these.
Ship:
EA for the mesh and textures I altered.
Horse:
Crow Ridge Studios for the two meshes I mashed together.
Crow Ridge Studios elephant and lamb:
Crow Ridge Studios for the orginal meshes and textures.
Tin Train:
EA for the train mesh I altered.
Kativip for the buffers on the train and a tiny bit of train texture.
Now we get to something I've been working on for months and can't wait to play with in game. I've always been sad that my sims can't have teddy bears because, despite the annoying fact that adults want to constantly talk through them, I like how they are something else for sim children to play with. Because of that, I've been wanting to have dolls for my sims for years. I've been eyeing up Rebecca's dolls ever since she posted them, but they just weren't quite a fit for my neighbourhood, and any attempt I made to recolour the face to look more like bisque, ended in failure. EA came to my rescue with Midnight Hollow. I found the creepy clown doll in that, and was struck at how perfect the face was for a Victorian bisque doll if I inverted the eyes so they didn't follow you everywhere, so I extracted it and filed it in my "to do" folder. I've finally got round to doing it, and ended up with not one, but four base doll meshes.
Doll 1 using Myos's lovely curly hair mesh and an EA dress (this is the original dress Rebecca used for her dolls).
Doll 2 has the same dress as doll 1, but has the BG barrette hair.
Doll 3 has the same Myos curly hair mesh as doll 1, but is wearing a coat and hat by Vitasims 2, with the skirt from the above dolls.
Lastly, doll 4 has the BG barrette hair mesh and the Vitasims 2 coat mesh.
I have made a TON of recolours for these. There are three skintones (the original porcelain, a medium and a dark. No tan unfortunately, because I just couldn't get it to look nice, which made me very sad, but there you go. I may have another try at a later date). Four hair colours (Pooklet's Depth Charge, Incendiary, Pyrotechnic and Dynamite), which are retextures originally made by Almighty Hat, and four eye colours (blue, grey, green and brown). That's a total of 48 recolours for each doll's face.
For the clothing, the dress has four colour skirts, which come in a plain, and two patterned versions. The top comes in the same colour as the skirt, black and white, for a total of 36 recolours. The coat has two different base patterns by AAS, each pattern having 10 recolours, for a total of 20 recolours. I'm going to go and make respositoried versions of these for my own use, because there are so many recolours, and I will post the new versions here too.
But all of those recolours are worth it, because seriously. Just look. My Victorian girls can finally play with dolls. I will say that there are a few times where the play animations don't line up completely with the mesh (throwing the doll around on the ground for instance looks a little weird, because the sim grabs where the teddy's ears are), but I can't do anything about that.
Credits:
Rebecca for the base doll and all the work she put in to making a playable doll.
EA for the face and arm meshes and texture, plus the dress mesh.
Regacylady for the black and white textures of the dress I used as a base for the colours.
Shadowfell for the natural dye colour actions.
Myos for the curly hair mesh.
EA for the barrette hair mesh.
Almighty Hat, for the textures for the hair of the dolls.
Pooklet for the hair colours.
Trapping for the skin colours I messed about with to make the medium and dark colours.
AAS for the coat textures.
Vitasims 2 for the coat and hat mesh.
All of the above toys are designed to keep your sim children indoors, but let's finish with something for outside. This is a mesh I finished over a year ago, but never got round to actually uploading. It may look like the slide which came with one of the EPs, but it's not. You see, that mesh is mapped HORRIBLY, and so when I tried to make these recolours on it, I had to give up. However, the TS3 slide is mapped completely differently, and so I extracted that, mashed it together with the steps of the TS2 slide, and ta-da! One new slide which can be recoloured to have wooden sides.
Now it's not exactly accurate to the era, since it should really be a straight slide, and not a curved one, but you have to work with what the game gives you, and I'm sure you'll agree, that this looks a lot better than the fiberglass slide that EA made.
This comes in I think all of Pooklet's naturals, and the wood texture is by Sunni.
Credits:
EA for the TS2 and TS3 meshes I slapped together.
Sunni for the wood texture.
Pooklet for the wood colours.
And that my dears, is the end of the preview of everything you're getting in your gift this year. To see what all the recolours actually look like, you're going to have to download it and open it. As a general note, as always, everything has been compressorised, clearly labelled and subfoldered so you can delete whatever you don't want. If you notice any faults, please let me know so I can see if I have done something silly and can fix it.
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