Tag: ask

Hello! Maybe you can help me: how do you get your sims to smile when you want to take a portrait of them? Mine seems to always be grumpy x)

Hello hello! It’s a combination of face overlays/animation boxes! The one I use most of the time is Ndainye’s Smile for the Camera box. It contains loading screen and other various camera poses, and your Sims will always smile and look directly at the camera. 🙂 This is by far the easiest to use, and I love how natural the poses look.

To use other poses, I use face overlays (such as “smile”) from Decorgal’s Modeling Poses. After the face overlay is applied, I pick the pose or animation. I also recently found out that using a custom pose and then using one of Ndainye’s loading screen animations will keep the Sim in the original pose, but still allow them to smile and look at the camera. Useful for making sure all your Sims are looking in the same direction!

And of course, I can’t forget Jaydee’s animation boxes – play around with different animations and try pausing your Sim at different times to capture dynamic and natural-looking pictures!

As far as posing proficiency goes, I am almost as n00bish as you can be, but I can definitely say it gets easier the more you do it. 🙂 Hope this helps!

hey, what would you say is the best way of getting into your sycamore cove gameplay? i tried adding /chrono the end of the tag, but i’m worried i’m missing character introductions or something?? i hope this makes sense! anyway love your blog, and you seem like the biggest sweetheart

Awww, thank you so much! ❤ It means a lot to me that you want to get into Sycamore Cove from the very beginning. 😀 Unfortunately, it’s never been the most structured of neighborhoods (especially in the beginning), a decision I regret. In retrospect, I wish I made it more of a BaCC, with actual rules and better record-keeping. :3

I don’t have any character introductions posted, although it’s something I’ve been meaning to do! (At this rate, it’ll be a miracle if they’re done before the founders age up and die. :P) The neighborhood kind of just… starts. XD Honestly, using /chrono after the tag is the best way to do it, but I’m warning you ahead of time that the beginning is poorly documented. X) 

I basically just threw Sheila into the university I built for my last hood and never used, and made her a witch because I never play them, and then promptly neglected her witchiness as soon as the neighborhood gets underway. 😀 That should bring you more or less up to speed! 

ohhhhhhh looking through the Sheila tag reminds me that I was only tagging the early rounds as “windham university” and not including the “sycamore cove” tag D’OH. stay tuned, will fix~!

To make a backup of a neighborhood, which files do you need to save? Just the ones in Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 or also those in Program Files? Thanks for your help!

Hello! This ask has been here for a really long time (I’m sorry!), and you most likely figured it out by now. But just in case, you only need to save the Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 folder to backup the neighborhood (or Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection, in my case). The Program Files folder shouldn’t ever really be touched and contains the core game files. All your user files/neighborhood-specific files will be in the Documents folder. 🙂

Feel free to send another message if you have any other questions!

I love your blog. Do u know or have some texture mod? Can u share|wcif ?

Thank you! ❤ I don’t use or know of any texture mod for TS2. Most of my screenshot quality can be attributed to photoshop. 😀 I use this .psd to brighten my screenshots and bring out the colors, but it doesn’t affect the look of the game itself.

I do use a lighting mod, though, which can be found here. Again, it doesn’t affect textures, but it adjusts the lighting during different times of the day and different seasons. 🙂

How do you get your sims 2 photos to be such good quality?

Well, for starters, I’m able to run my game on the highest settings. But mostly it’s just Photoshop magic. 😉 I’m pretty Photoshop illiterate, which is why I rely on the skills of others – namely, I use .psd’s to help brighten my photos and enhance the saturation/vibrancy. 🙂 I’ve been using snapdragoned’s .psd for as long as I can remember (with various adjustments depending on the screenshot I’m editing). I’d like to give mir-sims’ recently-uploaded .psd a shot, too!

Edited to add: You should use a screenshot program, such as Fraps, to take pictures of your game! The in-game camera takes terribly low-quality pictures. 🙂