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.Â
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 & Nicoleâs descendants being played rotationally, as well as a number of other families connected to the Hunts.
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Hi! I am enjoying your fights can kill mod, but I fear my sims may be a bit TOO eager to fight...I saw your additional mod, but sims acting out of character for their personality is at this point a core part of my save, so I was wondering if you'd be willing to make the part that prevents repeated fights separate? Thank you, and no worries if you don't want to!
Sure!
Less Fist Fighting
Sims won't attack each other if they have a recent memory of losing or winning a fight with the same sim. They can still slap and poke đ
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Included in Act To Your Personality, use only one of them at a time
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 TS2VisibleHoodFXâ˘, 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.
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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).
The visible hood fx mod has received an update to fix perhaps its most annoying flaw - decals appearing on top of roads instead of underneath them.
Before:
After:
As suspected, this required making some small changes to the lot skirt shaders. I've included two versions of these shader edits in the mod - one for those using dreadpirate's shader fixes, and the other for those using the regular old Maxis shaders.
I deliberately haven't made a version for Christaskyy's Improved Lot Skirt Shaders, as he will be providing his own fixes in an upcoming update :)
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Some of my other mods have been updated recently too, which I'll briefly mention here because it seems pointless to create separate post for them:
TS2 Beta Floors
Made some incredibly minor improvements to the plugin that literally no one will notice in gameplay.
Fixed missing texture scaling parameters for a number of floors which caused their textures to be much smaller than intended.
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TS2 Mini Mods
May/may not have fixed the rare bug caused by TS2CineDrawDistance where Sim thumbnails could disappear after a cinematic had ended - let me know if this actually works because I have several other implementations prepared in case it doesn't!
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P.S. Don't worry, I have read all of the requests and asks you guys have been sending me. I've got a bit of a backlog at the moment and I'm quite busy irl, so it might take me a while to get round to them. Apologies!
Hi! On your fight can kill mod you mention you have a mod that reduces fighting. Which mod is that? Thank you!
Hi,
Yeah, sorry, I was going to post it sooner, but I usually don't love writing posts for my mods, I wish I could post a link and people just knew what the file did and what to do with it đĽşđ Straight from my brain
It's this beast that modifies about 60 social and self interactions
Act To Your Personality
is how I called it, and it was originally suggested by @daydreamingdrawerette (I think that was the name)
Basically, it restricts interactions by personality. For example, if a sim is very serious, they don't autonomously perform playful actions, and user directed playful actions are moved under "Out Of Character" sub-menu (this way the action is still available, but reminds me that this sim isn't the type to do it)
This is how I grouped the actions:
Mean, fighting, and attacking may be the most detailed. The mod takes into account sim's niceness points, if they are furious at the target sim, and if they have learned anger management. Additional condition specifically for attacking (dust cloud fight): sims don't autonomously start it if they have a recent memory of winning or losing a fight with the same sim. How recent is recent? About 3 days, may be less if they spend time on community lots. (Technically, all memories have "strength" value that goes down to zero with time. The "stronger" the memory, the longer it takes to decay. If the mod detects a fight memory with non-zero strength, it's a no go)
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It probably has a gazillion conflicts with other autonomy mods for the same interactions. I don't even wanna know đ This is the type of mod where load order shines, just have the preferred mod load last
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A member of my Discord (ZeroPointLibra) was after some help figuring out why the find-a-mate crystal ball wasn't properly excluding AL socialite townies when townies were supposed to not be included, I tried but missed the crux of the issue - and then they ended up using what they'd learned in modding class to figure it out themselves!
They don't have a Tumblr so asked me to share.
This is an edit of @kaluxsims's edit, but only the "find a sim" text string version.
Next on the list of "Stuff to Clear Out From My Share & Upload Folder" is a mod that I have been working on for WAY too long - a version 2 of my "Money switch" (or keys, if you're a medieval player).
This mod was originally bundled in with Pay 2 Play so I'm not even sure how many people saw it in the first place, but essentially, this object is a fancy "Room Controller" with some cool and fun features, all bundled into a cute little switch!
Like who woulda thought a wee light switch could hold so much power?
Read on below the cut!
This mod was inspired by Inge Jones's "Pay Doors" and the Maxis Bandatron ticket machine. When you place it inside of a room, that room becomes locked and you can set it up in 2 ways:
A room that sims have to pay money to walk into, or
A "function room" that sims have to pay money to rent.
Included in the download is a "readme" file that goes through all of the details, but I'll repeat the basics here:
The "pay to enter" mode can be used for a variety of purposes. You can hold little paid concerts, have paid kareoke rooms, you can make sims pay money to enter into a bedroom for some special sims time, you can make them pay to use a public toilet, or you can fake hotel rooms or BnB rooms by using "pay once per day".
On a business lot, the business owner will receive the money automatically. You can also set someone else to receive the money if you want to. On a residential lot with no business, the mod will find a family member to pay money to. On a community lot with no business, the sim will just pay money to the ether unless a recipient is set.
You can grant free entry to any sim on the lot, and turn it on and off at will.
The "cost to enter" setting goes up and down in $5 increments via a "fridge menu":
And on an un-owned community lot, all settings are stored so they won't be "forgotten" next time the lot loads.
The all-new-in-2.0 "function room" mode is designed for renting out rooms for functions such as a wedding, funeral, party of any kind, meeting, you name it.
Functions can be given either "private" or "public" access, and can be assigned different costs to rent. The scale for this costing mode goes in $50 increments.
If you'd like to hold something exclusive, rent the room in "private access" mode and only sims who you've invited will be able to come in. You can even ban staff from coming into the room if you like.
You can kick people out if they're being rude, and make everyone selectable or un-selectable at the click of a button. If sims are made selectable, they are also marked as a "family member" which means they will not just bugger off and leave in the middle of your wedding, which always annoys me when I'm playing community lot parties.
You can easily invite many different kinds of sims to your function. If they aren't on the lot, they'll be summoned in.
If your sim is in a "group" when they rent the function space, all group members will immediately receive invites and access to a private function.
If you get the "party guests addon", you can do the following:
1. Rent a function room
2. Start a party
3. Enjoy as your party guests are all added automatically to the function list. You do have to start the function first for it to be automatic, otherwise you can just "invite sims on lot" afterwards.
There's some BCON tuning available (details in the readme) and so many options for gameplay possibilities!
My number #1 supporter on this mod during development has been the wonderful @kashmiresims who has devoted SO much time and energy to testing, and giving ideas and feedback. She and I came up with the following list of gameplay possibilities:
Career Promotion Party
Retirement Party
Golden Anniversary
Bachelor/Bachelorette Party
Wedding/Wedding Reception
Engagement Party
Baby Shower
Bridal Shower
Therapy Session
Private Business Opening (Gallery, Exhibitions, etc)
VIP entertainment
Recording Studio/Practice Music Studio
Brunch Events with the girlies
Sports Room/Viewing Party
Wake/Funeral
Work Function/Social Function
Club Gathering
Lock In Charity/Fundraiser Function
Family Reunion
Bed n Breakfast / Fake âhotelâ
TED Talk
High Tea rooms
Birthdays (age up when they get home)
Concerts
Karaoke Rooms
Private Lounges
Political Campaign fundraiser
Private Poker Club
And, she sent me some glorious screenshots of her Kashmire sims enjoying their new function spaces, which you can see some of in the readme! Here's my favourite, which the "High Tea room" she put together:
IMPORTANT STUFF:
Required:
- My door locking overhaul (included in case you haven't got that yet, and with updated files so overwrite if you have already got it)... I should probably move that mod out of BETA, I think it's done?
- William's Money Globals - also recently updated so make sure you get a fresh copy if you haven't yet.
Conflicts:
- The parties addon conflicts with Simler90's extra party types mod so I did compatibility patches for that (included)
- The Door Locking Overhaul conflicts with some other door locking mods, most notably Cyjon's "Lockable Garage Doors". I did NOT make those mods compatible because the code defeated me, but I did make a mod called "only vehicles thru garage doors" which for me, is a fair alternative.
- It's also going to conflict with an upcoming mod overhaul by Siknoy and myself but don't worry, I've already comp patched that - you'll just have to wait and see what we have in store there đđ
Again, please see the included readme for more details on how the mod works.
Troubleshooting:
This mod almost defeated me with the bugs it threw up in my face again and again. I tried to squash them all, but as always, if something doesn't work properly, send me an ask or a DM and I apologise in advance.
(There is a reason I've been sitting on this mod for like 6 months just going, "I dont wannaaaaaa!!!" đ)
Download Here!
Credits:
@lordcrumps for the switch mesh and an included bonus gift đ
@fracturedmoonlight the medieval keyring mesh I tweaked a bit and used
@picknmixsims for Money Globals, Log Watcher, and BHAV finder which honestly saved my ass when I came back to this project after 6 months away going, "now where the hell was I??" and ended up re-writing 85% of the code
@kashmiresims for being an awesome human being.
Aww yeaaahhhh the party and business scene in Kashmire busted wide open. Thank you eternally for making this mod. It's probably my top mod of 2026. Unless we count Pink Flashing Disappearance Miracle as a mod, but that is in my Program Files, not my downloads.
Darker Black Swatch Recolors for @platinumaspiration's Ultimate 4t2 Hair Default Replacement Collection
The amount of work platinumaspiration put into converting this, wow! With animations, so many hats, age & gender conversions, all NPC hairs, repo'd, etc., etc. All my thanks for making a cohesive clay hair-ified TS2 a breeze to set up, and for allowing recolors.
I was glad to see she used the TS4 swatches that are also my faves, though Maxis's black swatches aren't as consistent as I like. There's some that are jet black, some that are gray (like the previews), contrast varies widely, etc. I prefer jet black, which loses some details in the texture but looks the best with all skintones IMO. I used dbasiasimbr's PS action to batch recolor, her Black-Dark Brown Override is one of my TS4 must-haves. Thanks also to all her work! And thanks to @lordcrumps for hosting the previews with sortable filters, made keeping track much easier.
I also recolored some of the pale blond swatches for toddlers to match the dirty blond swatch the other hairs use. All in all, I edited 333 files, so I uploaded each folder separately on SFS (file size limit) or you can download the single .zip from Patreon, for free. Please let me know if I missed a hair or forgot the texture for any accessories/hats!
Default replacements, see LordCrumps' site for previews
Recompressed
Kept the folder structure and file names the same
Installation Instructions:
Download platinumaspiration's full collection first, if you don't have it already. I only included the files I recolored, if you don't have the full collection, there may be missing meshes or textures!
Download my files and allow them to overwrite the original files.
Download: SimFileShare Folder (3 .zips) or Patreon (free, combined .zip)
Here are three more conversions from Journey to Batuu as accessories. All of these work well with Maxis short or bald hair, but Iâve also had some cc hairs fit under them pretty well. The villager wrap and villager desert meshes are for both genders child-elder, and the Mirialan mesh is for girls child-elder. On the villager meshes, I assigned the bones of the head and lower neck separately, so large head movements will make the fabric appear to stretch instead of having the whole mesh unrealistically move as one.
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And now to the ususal hair post! The last one was requested by rm4rqu3s (I canât tag you?)
I almost forgot the first one was requested, and just had a weird deja vu when I was uploading the pictures XD
The last one is an all ages version of this one, so feel free to delete the old one if you download this! (this is a new mesh, so it doesnât work with the previous retexture)
6 natural colors, gray linked to black. Meshes and bodyshop swatches are included (okay I donât have a bodyshop picture of the first hair, because it didnât show up, only in my game, boop)
And now to the ususal hair post! The last one was requested by rm4rqu3s (I canât tag you?)
I almost forgot the first one was requested, and just had a weird deja vu when I was uploading the pictures XD
The last one is an all ages version of this one, so feel free to delete the old one if you download this! (this is a new mesh, so it doesnât work with the previous retexture)
6 natural colors, gray linked to black. Meshes and bodyshop swatches are included (okay I donât have a bodyshop picture of the first hair, because it didnât show up, only in my game, boop)
This is kinda embarassing! Back in Sept 2022 I fixed an issue with the 0x0CA4 "Money - Pay Owner" global to make it actually give the money to the business owner and not some random Sim.
Then I completely forgot to update my web site! Ooops! (Proves I am actually a human.)
I thought I hit the jackpot when I realized that a lot of Anto hairs have the same mapping and there's an ombre accessory for them! Unfortunately, I still needed to edit some of the parts depending on the hair... Ah well.
For the Levitating hair, I used Mystic-hysteria's retexture as a base. And Moyo's lower poly version. Everything is teen-adult only.
6 natural colors + natural or unnatural ends. Meshes and bodyshop swatches are included. Enjoy! :)
This is a Crafting Station: The Plant Potting BenchđŞ´
Your sims can pot 25 different maxis plants.
25% profit margin
Builds Gardening Badge
Builds Nature Enthusiasm
Randomly builds Cleaning or Body skill per plant crafted. Using âMake manyâ builds both.
A higher Body Skill will increase the Badge Gain Rate.
Crafting on an owned business lot will pay the owner the "supply costs".
compatible with @gummilutt's toggler object for autonomous crafting.
Needs @picknmixsims money globals!
Traits (Sub-Hobby Gardening and Green Thumb)
Increase the skill bonus by max 25% for building the badge.
Decrease the skill requirement per level. Details under the cut.
đŞ´DownloadđŞ´
Mesh and textures are from @simsinlowspace 4T2 conversion of @myshunosunâs MoonwoodGarden set. The potting bench is repod to pick up the recolours of the set. Go get the recolours HERE!
Deco tip: use shiftable everything by @lamare-sims to decorate the top of the bench.
Credits: as I am humbly standing on the shoulders of giants.
Thank you @yoursingrey for an amazing collaboration, and her magic with meshes, as well as beeing my sounding board for ideas.
@ashtonlc3 for explaining sims autonomy.
The way the bench handles autonomy is highly inspired by @gummiluttâs mod "autonomous crafting for all" and designed to work on the wonderfull lot @joplayingthesims build for that mod. In this case, the Toggler Object will turn off autonomy if present on community lot. Or turn it on if present on a residentual lot.
@fireflowersims and @teaaddictyt public discussions on discord about how to set up a âpay to xâ BHAV code. Really happy that did not disappear in a private conversation.
@picknmixsims for Money Globals. And for DbpfScripter that was used to write the bloody TTAS.
@episims and @nixedsims for their original crafting bench code.
@hexagonal-bipyramid for original traits and @cityof2morrow for sub-hobby traits. Get them to spice up plant potting.
Skill requirements under the cut.
Requirements for Potting:
Level 0 == cleaning 1, body 1
Level 2 == cleaning 2, body 1, Gardening Badge Bronze
Level 4 == cleaning 2, body 2, Gardening Badge Silver
Level 6 == cleaning 2, body 4, Gardening Badge Gold
Level 8 == cleaning 4, body 6, Gardening Badge Gold
Traits Effect:
0x00C7488B (Sub-Hobby Gardening) or 0x0087BB2F (Green Thumb)
Level 0 == body 1
Level 2 == cleaning 1, body 1, Gardening Badge Bronze
Level 4 == cleaning 1, body 1, Gardening Badge Silver
Level 6 == cleaning 1, body 2, Gardening Badge Gold
Level 8 == cleaning 2, body 4, Gardening Badge Gold
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.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
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My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.
Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.
