Remember these guys?
Mar. 7th, 2010 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katrisimsSo I've been procastrinating a bit. Downloading some cool stuff and made a new hood, basically just for the fun of it, to get a bit of a break. Some rambles and a few pics under the cut!
See anyone you know here?
Thought so. =)
Yeah, so this time around I went and installed Fraps. To see what kind of pictures I could get if I used that instead of the in-game camera. And the answer was apparently "huge ones".
These are from my freshly made photoshoot neighborhood. Most of today went by learning how to safely make new neighborhoods without adding 2679 townies, downtownie, dormies, vacation townies, NPCs etc. and filling the neighborhood before I have time to make a single sim. Apparently I got it right in the end.
I've been thinking about this stuff some lately, and had a couple of reasons for making a new hood. Firstly, it's been a while since I've played anyone else than those who are in the Alphabetia rotation. These sims are of course still Bookacies, but at least it's a little change.
Secondly, I've been seeing people make pretty portraits for their sim, and judging by the tutorials it wouldn't seem to be very difficult. So I thought I could take some nice shots of those sims who live in the time when I took horrible pictures, and maybe try if I could make a painting or two on my own. Or maybe three.
Thirdly, I am guessing that since I'm doing an alphabet legacy, I might have to do a rebuild at one point or another, especially as I may not have done things in the smartest possible way when I started. No worries, my game seems to be just fine, I'm not seeing any signs of impending doom, and to my own knowledge haven't done any VBTs. It's just that along that many generations there's a lot of time for something to go wrong, and probably the number of sims I'm going to have later on isn't going to help that.
The last time I checked the ACR hood consensus for gender preferences, it said there are over 700 sims in Alphabetia. And out of those, what, like 30, are mine. Of course having a variety for spouses and so is nice, but maybe I wouldn't quite need 700 sims in there. From what I've read, 700 shouldn't be too many for the game to handle, luckily, but in the long run... Also, I am starting to find out that my choice for neighborhood terrain may not have been the smartest one. I basically only took one that looked nice in the preview picture, and I think it'll probably turn out not to be enough to accomodate my sims in a few generations. Alphabetia is pretty hilly, and possibly there aren't enough roads to stick houses next to.
With this in mind, I took the project partly as an excercise in how to build a functioning hood. I even downloaded a couple of new maps, such that they were reasonably flat and had a promising number of roads. The one I picked now seemed quite nice, lots of places for lots. I don't quite understand the logic on which the game decides where you can put a lot and where not, but at least this template seemed to have room quite nicely.
So, even though in an actual rebuild there'd be a lot of stuff I wouldn't know how to do, like setting personalities, relationships and memories and all that, but now I at least seemed to get the clean neighborhoods with a reasonable looking map right. Yay!
So, anyway, I made a photo hood, and the first thing I did there, was naturally...
... remake a couple of old buddies. These guys were mostly in my game when I had practically no cc, so I tried to make it up to them a little this time around. (These pics look a little odd to me, maybe there isn't enough light or something...)
When I popped open the Bookacy lot, the first thing Curty did was this. (And the next thing I did was get a hack that gets rid of the pause lines.) Aww. This version of him is not going to bleh, which is a little sad, but at least he's otherwise adorable.
I did a little bit of shooting around, and got a small bunch of pictures that are pretty similar to each other, but I think nice for a first try.
It's kind of like with people: getting everyone to look at the camera at the same time is practically impossible. The ones with the twins playing cops and robbers are half-accidental - they did that on their own, and all I needed to do was to freeze them and move to their correct places. And Author and Curty looked at them all autonomously too. I also wanted one with Sal, even though naturally that one can't be hanged on the wall as a family portrait. ;)
I don't quite know what to do now that I have a screenshot program installed. It seems to be easy to use and gets nice pictures, but there are a couple of things that make me a bit reserved. Naturally, using Fraps for regular picturetaking in game would mean more work: I'd have to at least resize all pictures since they are too big to be used in chapters as such (luckily the proportions are the same so they don't distort), and also I'd have to edit out stuff that Fraps doesn't know should be left out, like the interaction boxes. Or alternatively, I'd have to do trickery in order not to have them there in the first place. Also, the pictures from Fraps are quite huge - I didn't really realize how huge before I tried uploading a couple into Photobucket. Now that's of course good for quality, and disk space hasn't been an issue for me so far, but I'd kind of like to keep it that way.
My biggest horror scenario with the screenshots is that I do start to use Fraps regularly, and learn to press F12 instead of C. And then I one beautiful day have a huge, fun play session with plenty of happenings, then find out that I don't have any pictures of it because I've forgotten to turn Fraps on before starting to play, and have just been hitting the hotkey with no effect whatsoever.
I'm not decided on what to do yet, but I'm currently leaning towards using the in-game camera for regular gameplay and story pictures. After all, the highest quality seems to well suffice for even fullscreened presentations, and that's what I'm used to using. Plus maybe the camera mod I also got while I was at it will help me get better pictures. So far I'm liking it, it seems to give a lot of freedom to move around. Then for special purposes, like the possible family portraits and maybe banner shots and such I can use Fraps. Something in that vein maybe.
Okay, enough of rambling from me! Maybe now that I've played around a bit, I can find the drive to actually write the next chapter... I'll leave you with a picture of Sal and the same old same old:
"When I met your mother, young mr. Bookacy, it was undeniably love at first sight!"
Sal, you aren't in love with her in this hood!
"But Creator, my memory panel I have fallen in love with a 'mystery sim', and Aadam is clearly our son. Who else could it possibly be?"
See anyone you know here?
Thought so. =)
Yeah, so this time around I went and installed Fraps. To see what kind of pictures I could get if I used that instead of the in-game camera. And the answer was apparently "huge ones".
These are from my freshly made photoshoot neighborhood. Most of today went by learning how to safely make new neighborhoods without adding 2679 townies, downtownie, dormies, vacation townies, NPCs etc. and filling the neighborhood before I have time to make a single sim. Apparently I got it right in the end.
I've been thinking about this stuff some lately, and had a couple of reasons for making a new hood. Firstly, it's been a while since I've played anyone else than those who are in the Alphabetia rotation. These sims are of course still Bookacies, but at least it's a little change.
Secondly, I've been seeing people make pretty portraits for their sim, and judging by the tutorials it wouldn't seem to be very difficult. So I thought I could take some nice shots of those sims who live in the time when I took horrible pictures, and maybe try if I could make a painting or two on my own. Or maybe three.
Thirdly, I am guessing that since I'm doing an alphabet legacy, I might have to do a rebuild at one point or another, especially as I may not have done things in the smartest possible way when I started. No worries, my game seems to be just fine, I'm not seeing any signs of impending doom, and to my own knowledge haven't done any VBTs. It's just that along that many generations there's a lot of time for something to go wrong, and probably the number of sims I'm going to have later on isn't going to help that.
The last time I checked the ACR hood consensus for gender preferences, it said there are over 700 sims in Alphabetia. And out of those, what, like 30, are mine. Of course having a variety for spouses and so is nice, but maybe I wouldn't quite need 700 sims in there. From what I've read, 700 shouldn't be too many for the game to handle, luckily, but in the long run... Also, I am starting to find out that my choice for neighborhood terrain may not have been the smartest one. I basically only took one that looked nice in the preview picture, and I think it'll probably turn out not to be enough to accomodate my sims in a few generations. Alphabetia is pretty hilly, and possibly there aren't enough roads to stick houses next to.
With this in mind, I took the project partly as an excercise in how to build a functioning hood. I even downloaded a couple of new maps, such that they were reasonably flat and had a promising number of roads. The one I picked now seemed quite nice, lots of places for lots. I don't quite understand the logic on which the game decides where you can put a lot and where not, but at least this template seemed to have room quite nicely.
So, even though in an actual rebuild there'd be a lot of stuff I wouldn't know how to do, like setting personalities, relationships and memories and all that, but now I at least seemed to get the clean neighborhoods with a reasonable looking map right. Yay!
So, anyway, I made a photo hood, and the first thing I did there, was naturally...
... remake a couple of old buddies. These guys were mostly in my game when I had practically no cc, so I tried to make it up to them a little this time around. (These pics look a little odd to me, maybe there isn't enough light or something...)
When I popped open the Bookacy lot, the first thing Curty did was this. (And the next thing I did was get a hack that gets rid of the pause lines.) Aww. This version of him is not going to bleh, which is a little sad, but at least he's otherwise adorable.
I did a little bit of shooting around, and got a small bunch of pictures that are pretty similar to each other, but I think nice for a first try.
It's kind of like with people: getting everyone to look at the camera at the same time is practically impossible. The ones with the twins playing cops and robbers are half-accidental - they did that on their own, and all I needed to do was to freeze them and move to their correct places. And Author and Curty looked at them all autonomously too. I also wanted one with Sal, even though naturally that one can't be hanged on the wall as a family portrait. ;)
I don't quite know what to do now that I have a screenshot program installed. It seems to be easy to use and gets nice pictures, but there are a couple of things that make me a bit reserved. Naturally, using Fraps for regular picturetaking in game would mean more work: I'd have to at least resize all pictures since they are too big to be used in chapters as such (luckily the proportions are the same so they don't distort), and also I'd have to edit out stuff that Fraps doesn't know should be left out, like the interaction boxes. Or alternatively, I'd have to do trickery in order not to have them there in the first place. Also, the pictures from Fraps are quite huge - I didn't really realize how huge before I tried uploading a couple into Photobucket. Now that's of course good for quality, and disk space hasn't been an issue for me so far, but I'd kind of like to keep it that way.
My biggest horror scenario with the screenshots is that I do start to use Fraps regularly, and learn to press F12 instead of C. And then I one beautiful day have a huge, fun play session with plenty of happenings, then find out that I don't have any pictures of it because I've forgotten to turn Fraps on before starting to play, and have just been hitting the hotkey with no effect whatsoever.
I'm not decided on what to do yet, but I'm currently leaning towards using the in-game camera for regular gameplay and story pictures. After all, the highest quality seems to well suffice for even fullscreened presentations, and that's what I'm used to using. Plus maybe the camera mod I also got while I was at it will help me get better pictures. So far I'm liking it, it seems to give a lot of freedom to move around. Then for special purposes, like the possible family portraits and maybe banner shots and such I can use Fraps. Something in that vein maybe.
Okay, enough of rambling from me! Maybe now that I've played around a bit, I can find the drive to actually write the next chapter... I'll leave you with a picture of Sal and the same old same old:
"When I met your mother, young mr. Bookacy, it was undeniably love at first sight!"
Sal, you aren't in love with her in this hood!
"But Creator, my memory panel I have fallen in love with a 'mystery sim', and Aadam is clearly our son. Who else could it possibly be?"
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no subject
Date: Mar. 7th, 2010 09:35 pm (UTC)Glad you figured out how to have clean neighborhoods! It's nice not to have things totally clogged up from the minute you start.
no subject
Date: Mar. 7th, 2010 09:47 pm (UTC)I'm pretty proud to have figured it out. =) It's a definite plus to be able to control the amounts of characters running around in a hood.