Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR

INTRODUCTION 2

WHAT YOU WILL NEED… 3

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS… 3

TIPS FOR BUILDING A LOT FOR UPLOADING 4

TESTING YOUR LOT’S PLAYABILITY 5

PACKAGING YOUR LOT 6

CLEANING YOUR LOT WITH SIMS 2 CLEAN PACK INSTALLER 8

TEST HOW YOUR CLEANED LOT INSTALLS 11

SUBMITTING YOUR LOT AT THE SIMS RESOURCE 13

SUBMITTING YOUR WORK ELSEWHERE 22

WHEN A MESH NEEDS ANOTHER MESH 23

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Introduction If you are new to sharing your lots with others, this tutorial will take you step by step through creating, testing packaging and submitting a clean lot containing custom content to www.thesimsresource.com (TSR). If you are familiar with lot packaging, then this tutorial will explain about those items that will need to be installed by downloaders of your lot and how to add these as ‘links’ in the TSR lot submission form.

What you will need… Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer version 1.5.1.4 This is a free program you can download from http://sims2pack.modthesims2.com/

The program is a great tool with many uses. Not only will it help us clean our lots ready for submission, but will also check your downloads folder for duplicate and hacked creations, and will also allow you to check the contents of any lots you download before you install them. Finally, Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer makes a much better job of installing lots than the Maxis installer because it will install custom content properly as you’ll learn later.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Frequently Asked Questions… What is custom content? Custom content is anything you can use in a lot that wasn’t made by Maxis. Floors, walls, terrain paints and object meshes and recolours are all items of custom content. What is the difference between a mesh and a recolour? A mesh is the object itself. For example: a chair. The chair is a mesh. If the chair comes in a variety of colours, these colours are ‘recolours’. Both Maxis meshes and custom meshes usually come with recolours. Whose custom content can I use in a submitted lot? If you plan to submit your lot to The Sims Resource (TSR), you can use any creations you have made, the creations of any artist belonging to the TSR Artists Alliance (TSRAA: a group of artists who have explicitly marked their creations for free use at TSR) and the creations of anyone else who has given you permission. However, it is worth remembering that it isn’t possible to add links to people’s work outside TSR for lot submissions, so only use creations from other sites if you know they package correctly with lots. If you plan to submit your lot at any other site, You can again use your own creations and the creations of anyone else who has given permission. Not all TSRAA artists will grant permission for sites other than TSR (therefore, you need to check that they don’t mind). It’s also a TSR rule that anything made by any TSR Featured Artist cannot be used anywhere other than at TSR. Is there anything I can’t include? Yes. Don’t include any of the following in your lot: • Sim families • Items left behind by any Sims (newspapers etc) • Hacked objects such as Merola’s Mirror or any part of the InSIMinator if you use this • Creations you don’t have permission to use.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Frequently Asked Questions… Cont. Why do I need to use Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer? When you package a lot into a file ready for submission, the lot package picks up ALL custom recolours of any object you’ve used – whether these recolours are of Maxis meshes or custom meshes. By using Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer, you can remove all recolours that you haven’t used. If you fail to do this, it’s not unusual to end up with a lot package that’s some 30-60Mb in size – far too large to be submitted!

Will everything work correctly in my lot when it is downloaded by people? Not everything, no. But, if you’re submitting your lot to TSR, the submission form will help ensure that downloaders acquire everything they need in order to install your lot successfully, as you’ll learn with this tutorial.

Tips for building a lot for uploading Don’t build with a Sim family in situ! Not only can they leave behind things that can meddle with lot functionality later (old newspapers, bills, coffee cups), they will also take everything with them when they move out! Build a lot with no Sims in it whatsoever, and don’t ever move any Sims into it. If you want to create a lot that others will want to enjoy playing (rather than a decorative or specialist style of lot), remember that people like to play The Sims in many different ways, and so you need to allow plenty of room for expansion of the lot if possible. Also avoid too much use of the ‘constrainfloorelevation’ cheat for walls and custom roofs because players will find it very difficult indeed to modify these things.

Take screenshots Before leaving your lot, take a variety of screenshots of inside and out. You’ll need this for the site where you’ll be uploading your lot. If you are submitting your lot to The Sims Resource, you are permitted only two pictures, but you can combine several pictures into a single montage. Taking screenshots is easy: simply click the small ‘camera’ icon in the bottom left of the game screen, or press the ‘C’ key on your keyboard. All pictures can be found in the folder: My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Storytelling

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Testing your lot’s playability Prepare a COPY of your newly built lot Once you’ve built your lot, you need to make a copy of it. If you have Nightlife or Open For Business, this is easy! Simply move your lot to the lot bin using the buttons shown below, and then place a copy back in your neighbourhood. The lot you place is just a COPY. The lot bin keeps hold of a copy of the lot so that you can place as many versions of the lot in your neighbourhood as you like.

If you don’t own Nightlife or Open For Business, copies of lots aren’t kept in the lot bin so you will need to make your own copies to reinstall. Do not test your lot yet. Follow the instructions for packaging and reinstalling your lot. Install a couple of copies so that you have at least one spare. Once you have a couple of copies of the lot in your lot bin, you can place one in your neighbourhood and move in a Sim.

Create a Sim family to test your lot Make yourself a family of Sim adults and at least one child to be your test family. This will give you a choice of Sims to send to different parts of your building, and a child to test placement of homework, testing toys etc. A new family will only have 20,000 simoleons. If your lot is costlier than that, you’ll need to cheat your test family’s funds. Do this in Neighbourhood view by opening the cheat window (press Ctrl-Shift-C all at once to open a white text area at the top of the screen) and type in familyfunds then a space, then the surname of your test family, then a plus + sign and the amount you wish to add to your family’s funds…

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Testing your lot’s playability Cont.

Play-test your lot This tutorial isn’t going to be an exhaustive guide on testing, but some areas you might want to look out for are as follows: • Can your Sims access all levels and all rooms? • Do all doors shut properly (ceiling objects next to doors can prevent this)? • Can NPCs (especially firefighters) access the lot with ease? • Does the car pool work (do school buses, maids and work vehicles turn up)? • Can Sims use anything you’ve placed diagonally? • Are all beds and other furniture items accessible? • If you’ve used the expensive shower, check that it’s usable (it’s easy to misplace this item) • Do your Sims crowd into a room and get stuck?

Packaging your lot After building your lot and testing it, return to your Neighbourhood and place a clean copy of your lot in the neighbourhood (that is: a lot that has never had a Sim family inside it). Select the Lots and Houses button at the bottom of the screen. Select the lot you wish to package, make a note of its price (you’ll need that for the submission form when you upload your lot) and then click the Package button.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Packaging your lot Cont. In the blue box that pops up, select Package Lot to a file and click the tick…

You’ll find your newly packaged lot in the ‘PackagedLots’ folder: My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\PackagedLots

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Cleaning your lot with Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer Open your lot in Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer Open the folder My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\PackagedLots and locate your lot. If you’ve installed Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer (S2CPI), you should be able to open the lot simply by double-clicking the lot package. If for some reason, the lot opens in the Maxis standard installer, return to the PackagedLots folder and click the lot package with your RIGHT mouse button and, in the pop-up menu, choose Open with and then select Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer…

Clean your lot of hacks and unused object recolours Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer (S2CPI) provides a list of all content contained in your lot. By default, every item is ticked and so will be included in your uploaded lot. 1. Remove hacked objects Scroll down the list to ensure that there are no items highlighted in red. If you do find red items, these are hacks and must be unticked. Never include hacked objects with your lot!

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Cleaning your lot Cont. 2. Sort the list into ‘type’ order Click the Type column to sort everything by creation type. Note that Game Object is a mesh; we’re only interested in Object Recolors.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Cleaning your lot Cont. 3. Untick every ‘Object Recolor’ you have not used in your lot You will be surprised by how many recolours have been picked up. As you can see in my screen below, most of those listed I haven’t used in this lot. Only deselect object recolours and hacked objects; do not touch other creation types such as Game Objects (unless hacks), Floors, Walls or Terrain Paints.

4. Save your cleaned lot Finally, click SAVE AS to save your lot. Save the lot to somewhere you’ll easily find it and don’t use spaces or any special characters (such as apostrophes) in the name because this can sometimes cause problems with the lot saving or installing. NEVER OVERWRITE THE ORIGINAL – always save it under a new name! If you overwrite the original, you’ll be left with an empty file and you’ll have to start all over again.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Test how your cleaned lot installs Install your lot with the MAXIS installer This is arguably THE most important part of preparing a lot for sharing: testing how the lot installs. What you must also do is NOT use Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer! Why? S2CPI makes too good a job at installing your lot and you won’t see any problems. The purpose of this test is to determine what problems your lot might reveal when installed with the Maxis installer. Open your cleaned lot with the MAXIS installer. 1. Find your cleaned lot 2. Click it with your RIGHT mouse button 3. Choose ‘Open With’ from the pop-up menu 4. Choose ‘The Sims 2 Body Shop Package Installer’…

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Testing how your cleaned lot installs (continued) Check your lot for faults Open your cleaned lot with the MAXIS installer and install the lot into a CLEAN GAME as follows…

1. Empty your Downloads folder of everything except the CEP file ‘_enablecoloroptions’ 2. Find your cleaned lot 3. Click it with your RIGHT mouse button 4. Choose ‘Open With’ from the pop-up menu 5. Choose ‘The Sims 2 Body Shop Package Installer’…

If I had installed this lot with Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer, these problems would NOT have shown up! This is why we MUST test with the Maxis installer, because this is what many downloaders of your lot will be using.

Make a note of anything that does not look right. These are the items that downloaders of your lot will need to obtain before they install your lot unless they are going to use Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer to install it.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Before submitting your lot, prepare two screenshots in JPEG picture format. The first should, preferably, be a main view of your lot. The second image can be used either for internal shots or a montage of images that you’ve compiled into a single JPEG image. Also, if you have Winzip installed on your PC, you can zip your lot package to speed up the upload process.

Opening and completing the TSR submission form From the TSR home page, click the Submit button in the top screen menu. Click Submit Sims 2 Creations

From the left hand menu, click Add One Creation…

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont.

The Base Info section This is where you enter then name of your lot and type in a brief description. Use the description to mention anything that may be important to the downloader. For example: I’ve mentioned that the lot uses invisible stairs beneath the ladders, and that downloaders will need to download the gas pump mesh first…

In the Credits box, mention anyone whose work you’ve included. There is also a keywords link. Click this and a new box opens where you can add additional words to improve the chances of your lot being found. There’s no need to repeat any word you’ve already used in the lot name or description as these fields are searched automatically.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont.

Category and Attributes Lots are stored in categories at TSR. This helps downloaders locate lots for particular themes and genres. The categories ‘cascade’. This means that, if you add your lot to Lots\Residential\Rustic\Under $20,000, it will also appear in the parent categories of Lots\Residential\Rustic, Lots\Residential and just plain Lots too! Under the Category and Attributes heading, click the Add to Category link. A selection menu appears. Select lots and choose any sub-categories that apply to your lot. You can add up to THREE categories…

Requirements and Dependencies The next part of the form is where we add links to any meshes that didn’t install properly when you tested your lot. To do this, you must first lookup the TSR ID of each mesh to which you want to link.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont. To look up the TSR ID number of each mesh that didn't install properly in your lot 1. First, find the mesh at TSR You only need to link to the base MESH of the object, not its recolours too. 2. When you’ve found the mesh, click on the ‘More info’ link This will expand to show an ID number for the mesh. Write this down – you’ll need it!

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont.

Adding the mesh IDs to the TSR submission form 1. In the TSR submission form, scroll down until you find the section called Requirements and dependencies. 2. Click the Item References link. 3. Click the Add New link. 4. Enter the ID of your mesh in the Item ID box, and change the Relation drop-down to ‘Required’ Repeat steps 3 and 4 for every mesh link you need to add.

Once you have submitted your lot form, this information will look like this (see the bit highlighted in red)…

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont. Required Expansion Packs There are TWO types of expansion packs available for The Sims: major expansion packs that add new objects, careers , clothing AND new game-play to the game (driveways, businesses etc), and minor (content-only) packs that only add new objects, careers and clothing, but don’t change game behaviours in any way. MAJOR expansion packs include: University Nightlife Open For Business …and the soon to be released Pets expansion pack MINOR expansion packs include: Holiday pack Family Fun Stuff …and the soon to be released Glamour pack For every MAJOR pack you own, you must tick the equivalent on the submission form. Every lot you make will require the same major packs that you have installed – even if you have only used content from the original game! If you own any of the MINOR packs, you only need to tick these if your lot includes any objects specifically from these packs.

If your lot contains recolours of Maxis objects, you might want to tick the CEP box too. If anyone without CEP installs your lot, recolours of many Maxis objects could revert back to their Maxis defaults.

File and Images In the box called The File, browse for your CLEANED lot.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont. Did you know? If you have Winzip installed on your PC, you can zip your cleaned lot package. This will make the uploaded file smaller, taking it far less time to upload to the TSR server.

Also browse for your two preview images. These should be in JPEG format. They can be any reasonable size, but don’t make them so big that they won’t be viewable by people with smaller screens!

Adding your Creation We haven’t finished yet (we have price and bedrooms to add yet), but this is all we can do until we’ve uploaded our lot. Read the information and disclaimers and, if you agree to the terms, tick the box and click the Add Your Creation button. Now, sit back and wait. Lot files are large and can take several minutes to upload, so DO be patient…

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont.

More Categories and Attributes! Once your lot is submitted, scroll down the form to return to the Categories and Attributes section and you’ll see that there are some new boxes now. These apply specifically to lots and allow you to specify the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the price of the lot and whether or not it’s furnished and decorated. All these boxes are optional. Note that the price specifies ‘Include the §’ symbol. I simply use Copy and Paste to copy the Simoleon symbol into the price field. If you don’t do this, it won’t matter. It just makes the price look neater on the download page.

Click the Update Creation button at the bottom of the form to save your changes.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Submitting your lot at The Sims Resource Cont.

Finally, test your submitted lot page! At the top of the submission form, there is a tiny link that will open up a pop-up preview window of your creation. Use this to test that any links to meshes you have added work properly.

Submit your uploaded lot for publication Once you’re happy that everything’s correct, select Uploads from the left-hand menu. Your uploaded lot should be listed as waiting for submission. Tick the box for the lot and then click the Submit Selected button to finish.

Your lot will be assessed by TSR staff and, if approved, will appear live on the TSR server in 1-3 days maximum. If for whatever reason your lot is rejected, you will find it listed, with a reason, in the Rejected area of TSR Submissions (also available in the left-hand menu as shown above).

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Submitting your work elsewhere You will still need to provide links to any meshes that are required before your lot is installed. Usually, this will mean typing in the full URL of the mesh in the description text. Some sites might not allow any links, and so these will be of no use to you if your lot DOES require links to some meshes. Alternatively, you can direct people to download and use Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer to install your lot. When S2CPI is used, all meshes install correctly and no links are required. Unless you are a TSR Featured Artist, there is nothing to stop you uploading your work to any number of sites as you wish. Just remember to link to those meshes, though!

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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When a mesh needs ANOTHER mesh…

Masters and slaves Have you noticed that all Maxis beds share one set of bedding recolours, and that, if you download any custom bedding, THAT becomes available for all beds too? What has happened here is that just ONE bed has bedding recolours and that is the Colonial Ironwood Bed.. All the other beds have none of their own, but share the Colonial Ironwood’s bedding.

The Colonial Ironwood bed is being the master (or ‘main’) mesh because it holds all the recolours (including custom recolours made by other people). All the other beds are slaves. The slave beds have no bedding recolours of their own. Therefore, if you want to use custom bedding, you have to include the Colonial Ironwood bed somewhere in your lot so that the lot packager can pick up all custom recolours linked to it.

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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Custom master and slave meshes in your lots

Custom content creators now frequently use the same master/slave technique because it’s much kinder to people’s Downloads folders than including hundreds of recolours for every mesh in the set. When downloading new meshes, identifying meshes that are related to one another is usually simple because the download should be clearly labelled. The dining seat oil drum in the picture below is part of a set of three meshes. It is being described as sharing the same recolours as the table master mesh in the set. Therefore, because this seat has no colours of its own, your lots would also need to include the oil drum table (which would bring with it all the recolours into your lot package).

Packaging and submitting clean lots at TSR By CycloneSue, 16 July 2006

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What if you can’t remember whether your downloaded meshes are independent or related?

Don’t worry: just keep a lookout for any missing files in your packaged lot. You see: if you DON’T use the master mesh in your lot, any recolours of other meshes (the slave meshes) in the set won’t be picked up, as is shown below…

The first lot package is missing two window recolours. This is because I’ve used a SLAVE mesh ‘Frameless Glass Window With Wall Side Panels’, but have forgotten to use the MASTER mesh from the same set somewhere in the lot too. In the second lot package, I’ve used the MASTER mesh (the similarly named but singular ‘Frameless Glass Window With Wall Side Panel’) in my lot. Now that the master mesh has been added to the building, the lot packager spots my recolours and picks them up correctly.