Huntsville is a neighbourhood I played from 2007 to 2015, which I recovered from an old computer in 2021 and revived for your enjoyment.
If you want to read it all, you can read the posts in chronological order.
As there are a lot of posts, I will also use this post to give an overview, to link to recaps & character introductions and to make sure new readers can get excited about the neighbourhood without having to read too many past posts.
Thank you for reading, for your comments and for being part of the Sims 2 community.
Huntsville Revived - an overview of the neighbourhood
Huntsville is an island with few homes. Most of the land is designated as a protected nature reserve. There is a small town centre, and a few farms as well.
The nearby town of Nickelton is far more populous, with a number of businesses owned by local residents, as well as the recently established Alien Community.
Ashford City is the closest city. While Huntsville, Nickelton and Ashford City are all part of the same municipality, few from Huntsville or Nickelton wish to make the bustling city their home.
Recently, Ashford City University has opened, providing the locals a closer institute of high learning to attend than Desert Tech.
Huntsville Revived - an overview of gameplay
Huntsville started with two sims: Matt & Nicole Hunt. It has grown a lot since then. We are solidly in the 4th and 5th generation, with all of Matt & Nicole’s descendants being played rotationally, as well as a number of other families connected to the Hunts.
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hoodie jeans outfits for littles on this shoe swapped mesh by @kaluxsims
quite a lot of editing done to make graphics work due to mapping :D but worth.
credits for additional textures:
from TSR: shirobya, lilika, InfinitePlumbobs, Remaron
from tumblr: iheartpudding, Prismaie, standardheld
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Ever wondered why all the power plants you decorate your neighbourhoods with suddenly shut down whenever you enter a lot? Do the workers organise a mass strike during each loading screen? And who's the joker who keeps stealing all my farm fields???
With TS2VisibleHoodFX™, you can bust those pesky power plant unions and have your Sims marvel at the wonders of the industrial revolution from the comfort of their homes, as toxic pollutants pour into the atmosphere day and night! Mmm... Fossil fuels...
Complete global saturation.
Desiderata Valley - note the wild flowers, farm fields, train, and blinking water tower light.
Because neighbourhood effects were never designed to be seen in lot view, there are a few minor issues you should be aware of. I'll have to get into some technical details, so I'm leaving all the nerd stuff below the cut.
As always, you'll need either the Ultimate Collection or the disc version with all EPs and SPs to use this mod.
DOWNLOAD
README
Issues
Maxis gimped the lot skirt's functionality when compared to the neighbourhood terrain and lot terrain. The most obvious example of this is the lot skirt looking like absolute ass, while the neighbourhood terrain has detailed cliffs etc. - both the neighbourhood terrain and lot terrain support multiple paint layers and alpha maps, whereas the lot skirt is just one, boring texture.
Unfortunately, these limitations cause some semi-annoying problems when forcing hood effects to show up in lot view.
Certain effects have bugged positioning
When you download the mod, you'll notice that along with the usual plugin, there's a config file included too. This config file is important, as it allows you to blacklist neighbourhood effects to prevent them showing up in lot view.
Why might you want to blacklist effects? Well, several effects appear to require something called an 'effect map' to be positioned correctly in the world (don't ask, I don't know what an effect map is either).
The neighbourhood terrain and lot terrain both have an effect map, but importantly, the lot skirt does not. This means that the effects that rely on an effect map for their positioning (mainly those that are placed on water) will appear way up in the sky when you load in to a lot:
If you want to know why they get placed in the sky, it's related to a peculiar bug(?) I discovered while trying to figure out why decal effects (e.g. farm fields and wild flowers) weren't appearing in lot view, even though I could clearly see the game creating and processing them in the debugger.
Basically, things like decals and shadows need to be assigned to an overlay manager which... manages overlays. For whatever reason, when you load a lot from the neighbourhood, rather than assigning these to the lot terrain or lot skirt overlay managers like the game logically should, it instead assigns them to the neighbourhood terrain overlay manager. The same thing happens with the effect maps - the neighbourhood effect map is used, not the lot terrain one.
The neighbourhood terrain coordinates aren't actually 1:1 with the lot skirt. The game generates the lot skirt below the neighbourhood terrain during the loading screen, and translates the position of each object downwards. Couple this with the neighbourhood effect map being used, and you get boats sailing around in the sky.
It isn't until you travel to a community lot or switch to another playable household while in lot view that the game starts using the relevant lot effect map and overlay managers. For example, if you load the Goth household from the Pleasantview neighbourhood screen, then click on the Pleasant's house to switch to them, boats will suddenly start sailing around in their garden as the lot terrain effect map is now in use:
I have no idea whether this quirk has any noticeable effect on gameplay, outside of when trying to get neighbourhood effects to appear in lot view. I've already patched the decals so they correctly get assigned to the lot skirt overlay manager when loading from the neighbourhood, but I'd be interested to know if there are any instances of lot effects not appearing until switching lots due to the incorrect effect map usage!
The config file is preconfigured to blacklist any problematic vanilla effects, so you don't need to worry about adding these yourself - it's mainly there in case you run into any custom hood effects with bugged positioning that you'd want to prevent appearing in lot view.
Decals appear on top of roads
Decal effects will draw over roads in lot view, instead of drawing underneath them like in hood view, as they should do. I can't say for certain why this happens, but I'm pretty sure it's due to differences between the neighbourhood road materials and the lot skirt ones.
If we patch the code that creates the lot skirt roads to simply use the name of the neighbourhood roads instead, we can see that although the roads no longer match the surrounding terrain and have huge holes in them, the decals do correctly draw below them. Weird, right?
Either way, you should probably move any farm fields and wild flowers away from the roads to avoid this happening.
Decals that overlap the current lot's bounds get cut off
This is due to the lot skirt and lot terrain being two separate entities, each with their own overlay managers. Decals can only be assigned to one of these managers, so are unable to be drawn by both.
The lot skirt also does some maths to mask out the lot bounds, which prevents it from drawing its overlays over the lot terrain. You can patch out this mask and allow decals to overlap the lot, but it causes all of the decals and shadows on the lot to flicker like crazy, as both the lot skirt and lot terrain are fighting to draw their overlays on top of the other (aka z-fighting).
I can finally show this cc to everyone now, woohoo~
A cute pink treadmill/walking pad for my cats. Now, besides the spring toy, my girls have a new toy to play with :D.
This machine has two modes: Run and Walk with corresponding animations. The Fun bar will increase when the cats use it. You can manually cancel the action, or the cat will automatically stop when the Fun bar is full. Huge thanks to @jacky93sims for helping me fix this bug and for fixing the BHAV file for me <3~
I hope you all like this CC, and I hope there will be more custom objects for Pets in the future :D
This is such a good suit, first from Amaryll with the original Velvet Suit (Velvetsuit?) and then with Trapping's conversions for every non-toddler age and gender combo from child through elder... except for teen boys. Apparently Pinketamine made that version, but after searching high and low and asking around without finding it, I decided to make my own. All original recolors, repo'd to the AM files.
Download
While I was at it, I fixed some normals and added a pregnant morph to the adult male mesh as well. Have this replace Amaryll's original.
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Hi! So for the long time I've been using veronavillequiltingbee's Personal Wants Tree mod and I've pondered "could I ever make a Wants Tree of my own - without breaking them?" I've never actually tried too much because I wasn't too much tech savvy to mess with that kind of files, but then I saw Riftwalker's Wants Trees and saw a commenter want to combine that mod with Fewer Hobby Wants, so I said "why not?" and got to work reading tutorials and the like. Gladly, I ended up with a Wants Tree that I loved and also learnt a thing or two in the process!
This Want Tree file includes the following:
Riftwalker's Wants Tree
Go Steady Want for Adults and Elders*
Fixed Break Up Want for Teens, Adults and Elders; both for Steady and Marriage
New Family Member Want for Teens and Children of All Aspirations
University related Wants enabled for All Aspirations
Engagement Want and Left at Altar Fear enabled for All Aspirations
*You need another mod to enable those interactions. Mine only enables the want.
Note: I disabled Teen Woohoo wants for the most part. I still have the file without that feature as a backup so I can upload it if requested. Uploaded.
Lamare's Wants Tree
University Career Wants Enabled
Careers now roll based on Interests rather than Aspirations (Adults Only)
You may want to get Lamare's getUniCareerWithoutEducation from the original post. Or not.
SnorkackSearcher's Wants Tree
No Talk or Blog About Hobby Wants
Hobby Wants are Restricted by Personality
BellaDovah's Wants Tree (from her Discord server)
Adjusted Hustle Pool Want
midgethetree's Wants Tree
Anti-Vampirism Potion Want Disabled
Werewolf Howl Fear Disabled
daman19942's Wants Tree (not exactly a wants tree but a tutorial instead...?)
Reputation Wants Disabled
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
1. Backup your original WantTrees.package. This package is located at:
For the old-school version: EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Mansion and Garden Stuff\TSData\Res\Wants
For the new-school UC version: Origin Games\The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection\Fun with Pets\SP9\TSData\Res\Wants
2. Rename matti_WantTrees.package to just WantTrees.package.
3. Replace WantTrees.package in the game installation folder with the one you downloaded (not your Downloads folder).
KNOWN ISSUES
Engagement and Steady wants may roll at the same time.
Sims may roll Steady wants towards their spouses.
Teens may still get the 20 Woohoo LTW despite the wants being disabled. A workaround is to just reroll the LTW with a mod such as Sim Blender.
DOWNLOAD
SFS | MF
Teen Woohoo Ver.
SFS | MF
Shoutout to ShibaRulata, MandyMatos, aspirationfailure and sky in the Simscord server for giving me feedback when testing!
8 Lunamoth metals and 20 Sugar Rush colors, with a default replacement using the first metal. Plus a mesh edit that removes the little sign (seen in the second two screenshots).
two functional pet beds for your kitties who just can't stand the idea of your clothes going on you without a fine layer of their dander.
original objects are from TS4, cloned from a pet bed for all your feline fiends. Friends.. I meant friends!
basket has twelve colours, with some wicker baskets I've posted before on the actual basket conversion. alongside the original colours and some recolours from Surfkitten at TSR.
clothes pile has six colours. some recolours from largetaytertot's colour override.
both have dirty states and can be found in the usual pet category.
I hope you (and your cats) enjoy! Maybe get some more lint rollers... sigh.
download
🐾 700 Followers Gift : the PETS Replacements Pack 🎉
🦄 As some of you know, to continue with my conversion project, I need to completely rebuild my Downloads folder. I therefore had to dive into the endless choices of default replacements, but I realized I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for. I wanted a range of pet eyes that would be compatible with the human ones 🐱
🐈 Your have options to choose from : the Pet clarity Eyes with or without fur coats replacements. Even though the replacement for the default eyes is included in the default fur textures, I still recommend downloading both files. This is because the default eye replacement file contains a @simnopke's Pet Left Eye Fix, but applying the eye textures to the default fur textures allows the eyes of pre-existing pets to be replaced by default as well 🐕
👀 I recommend you to get, the PET EYE FIX by @kitteninthewindow. It's a fix that allows your puppys and kitten to show your default replacement eyes. Especially if you only want the default eyes, without the furs.
🌈 I made some custom eyes too, like the blind and the alien ones. Their file work for both Cats and Dogs (no pupils). Dogs have additional pink and teal colors, cats have additionnal red, purple, pink and teal colors. Maybe I'll edit some more later, but it's quite enough to work with for now.
🐩 I used @kitteninthewindow's pooklet default replacement fur (from magical_girl_sandbox) as a base for the natural fur replacement's colors. Some colors were left as they were, others were edited to get closer to the Maxis ones. All unaturals Maxis replacement have been completely remade from the Maxis files. The pooklet ones were way to saturated for me, and I prefer keeping them as customs only. I made a list of the pooklet ones I used in the files, if you wanna keep some as customs too 🎨
💾 DOWNLOADS
🟩 DR Maxis Fur & Eyes for CATS : SFS - Mediafire
🟨 DR Maxis Furs & Eyes for DOGS : SFS - Mediafire
🟪 DR+Custom Eyes ONLY for CATS & DOGS : SFS - Mediafire
⚠️ I checked the files but if you notice something wrong, contact me ASAP
🏆 Additionnal Credits :
@pooklet for the color palette
@kitteninthewindow for the pooklet fur coats
magical_girl_sandbox for making pet replacements eyes & furs
@simnopke for the Pet Left Eye Fix (included in Eye DR)
& @tainoodles for the clarity eyes PSD files
☕ All the content on this simblr is FREE but you can also support me on KO-FI
No one is surprised: this was also a fullbody outfit that I made into a top 😂 For teens, adults, and elders, they have the appropriate morphs. I made 6 recolors, but here's the PSD for recoloring purposes. You can choose if you want the other ages repo'd to the AF files, or not. Some patterns I used for my recolors are from Colourlovers :)
Download 3t2 Cowl Necked Top Repo'd - Alternate
Download 3t2 Cowl Necked Top Standalone - Alternate
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
...with no sims, and all of your lots where you left them! This can be very useful for building or just general backup reasons.
(I can't take any credit for this method! This tutorial is based on Mootilda's suggestion on MTS here.)
I had to split this into two parts because of Tumblr's photo limits. Sorry about that!
Just a basic toilet stall in Sugar Rush colors and Lunamoth metals. Also available as a default replacement (as shown in the first screenshot) with remaining colors as recolors.
NOTE: I think ResiStall recolors might require CEP to work properly.
