trains coming out of my ears!

Welcome to the great train station and bus stop extravaganza! (Now with parking lots too!)

Okay, is that dramatic enough? Because I kind of went a little overboard here. Seriously, if I see another train in the next six months, I might go insane!

I'll go ahead and share these links at the start - Criquette's neighborhood deco building sets, and Sunni's deco cars - both of which were used extensively in this project.

And it all started with this, the LCMTA Rail Map.

build week #3.5: what not to do with the lot adjuster

Experiments and failures on placing lots "off-grid"

So I had this grand idea that I'd take some houses, and place them along a fake street, to use up some of that pesky middle space in one of my city blocks. So that street in the middle of the picture is completely decorative, and the homes there are placed "off-grid", meaning they're not attached to any actual road.

These houses I used are by Maisie by the way.

And for the most part, it worked. But I did run into a few deal-breaking (in my book, anyway) problems.

build week #3: fun with the lot adjuster

Did anyone ever try this before?

This is my campus pub, a 3x1 lot, overlapping my new campus parking lot, which is a 5x4 lot. Both lots are fully functional where they stand, and don't conflict with the other.

build week #2: it's almost a medical center!

Just a little, tiny, sneak peak ;)

I'm super-excited about my medical center! In fact, even though I downloaded a big hornking hospital for my city, I might not even use it much in the end. Most of the scenes I tend to use for this story are more outpatient kind of situations - like a therapy session, or pregnancy checkup. Those wouldn't likely happen at a hospital at all, but would probably happen in a smaller suburban medical plaza like this! :)

build week #1: moving mountains

First, welcome to build week! Or weeks, I guess, since it ends up taking about a month, lol!

You can expect fluffy building posts, some storytelling discussion, and lots of picspam! If you're not interested in the building and remodeling stuff, and would like to skip ahead to the start of the next story season, go here: winter 2083/84: still hear you.

I have a list of the projects I intend to work on in the "coming soon..." box, though I don't expect I'll have enough time to finish all of them. I hope to at least make some progress on each of them. And I'll share pics as I go along.

My first project was learning to use the neighborhood terrain editing cheat. It's kind of an essential cheat to laying down rail track, so I dug into it. And I practiced by moving a mountain, lol!

Before...

And after! :)

take it down, extras

*warning: this is ridiculously long! No joke! *

Extras, outtakes, and misfits from the "take it down" season...

(I think I'll call them seasons now, rather than chapters. Does that make more sense? I mean, each entry is big enough to be its own chapter, right? Why didn't anyone ever tell me that made no freaking sense? lol! So since the collection usually spans about a season, it seems only logical. Season?)

Anyway, whatever we call it, this collection of stories was the longest EVER, and gave us a crapload of extras!!! These stories took me 8 months to write, covered five major story progressions and many independent pieces and mini-updates, and added up to a whopping 50,881 words!

(If I ever want to know why my novel isn't finished yet, I think I have my answer!)

Let us begin? ;)

one day, Carly gets a little spend-happy...

One day, Carly Cook gets a little spend happy. This is her shitting-a-brick face, because she just got the invoice for the reconstruction of the roof on her new boutique. "I didn't know a roof could cost $15,000," she says.

"Sure," I tell her. "That roof can. You want me to send it back?"

"Well, no," she says. "It's cute. Can we charge it?"

And so it begins...

You guys still have a story update coming this weekend, but Carly's boutique will be featured in one of the scenes, and I thought you might like a better look at it than just story shots. Carly's gone a little bit spend-happy in here, but you know, it was cute.

come undone, extras

Psst, Lara... that's not your husband...

After what was the longest "chapter" I've ever written for this story (totally got carried away there, lol!), I've decided to start doing these extras by chapter from now on, instead of by year.

Okay, so let's see what other extras, misfits, and outcasts we might have from the spring/summer 2083, "come undone" chapter...

Lakeside Heights, street view

(a bus stop and depot in the Lakeside Heights city center.)

In honor of this week's craziness, not only Thanksgiving, but my hubby's birthday too, I'll offer you something quick and relatively painless (for me).

I took a couple of these shots when I was putting together my new marina, but then I found I couldn't stop, lol! The camera mods I'm using allow for some very interesting angles and viewpoints. Some of these shots you wouldn't get to see from any of the houses or community lots my Sims frequent. It's been a really fun project, all the in-between places you might see if you were a Sim, walking in Lakeside Heights, from one place to another :)

This also shows you the neighborhood in long-range shots that I can't normally show you because my computer is so old and fickle. I've got it so packed full I can barely take shots on Medium view without my graphics card crashing.

So...

Lakeside Heights:

The marina again. You might have seen this before, but I wanted to have it again in one of my sidebar posts. I took these pictures before I found the new boat recolors! Because yay boats! I might have to add a few more docks to the marina for more boats!!! :)

This is Lakeshore Road, with the Lakeshore Beach boardwalk along the left. On the right are the Deppiesse (Orion) and Riley-Kim families. Cabe Deppiesse's family is a little further down on the left.

These are the arches that mark the entryway to the city center. In the middle of the city is a really cool shopping mall that I built, that you guys never get to see because it's too big for my computer to handle, lol! Ah, well, rest assured, my Sims have a mall.

An overview of the city center. Lakeside Heights, even though it is quite suburban, does actually qualify for city-status because of its population.

Another bus stop, just outside the market square. I still need to add bus stops to Lake City and Bluewater Township. This is a bit of a work in progress. And after seeing Carla's hella cool airport, I think I might need one of those too! :)

These are the apartments where Jodie is currently living. The smallish office building on the right is Berjes's cosmetic surgery office. Next to that, you can see part of the open market square. Most of the buildings in Lakeside Heights I made myself, but the glassy building behind those apartments is the library, which I downloaded ages ago, by phazetex.

This is Brant Street, and the foundation of my most popular neighborhood in Lakeside Heights. On the left are the Thompson and Lind families, and on the right are the Jackson and Roseland families. Just out of sight of this picture are the Phoenix (Hayden), Nova-Day, Buchanan, and Centowski families.

Bluewater Township:

This is Main Street in Bluewater Township - I modeled this town after a lot of the charming little country towns in Michigan, where I grew up, with the one single Main Street strip, a bank, a market, and that's about it, lol!

Summer's Place is there on the left, and Charlotte and Leila's new pie shop at the far end. Chad's Gamer's Den is on the right.

This is the flip side view of Main Street, where you can see Charlotte and Leila's shop better.

I wish you could see the cars driving by from lot view. That's one of the things I look forward to in Sims 3, the feeling that the whole neighborhood is inhabited at once. I'd love to be able to look down Main Street and see people walking up and down, from shop to shop.

Custom neighborhood creation is quite obviously one of the "dealbreaker" things I'm waiting for with Sims 3 ;)

There is a big sprawling residential area in Bluewater Township, rather than any defined neighborhoods like my other towns have. Charlotte and Paul are here on the left, and across the street are the Leila and Matt, and their Watts Family Farm.

A long shot of the road where the McCullough family live, with the Hathe family at the far end. There are only four playable families living in Bluewater Township.

This is "the field" where the kids hang out sometimes. It looks much better from lot view. The church is across the street, and out of view to the right is the Watts Family Farm Market.

And here is the two-building complex that makes up Fort Bluewater. On the hill is an on-base residence, where Alon Hutchins will be living after they return. And below are the recruiting offices and other military resources.

Lake City:

Lake City is really hard to get pictures of, but I managed a couple before my graphics card crashed.

This cross-city shot of Lake City is a complete fluke, and might be the only one you'll ever see, lol! I can't usually point the camera across the city like this without my graphics card freezing up and crashing to hell (as you'll see below), so revel in it, enjoy it while you can. The area towards the bottom of the picture is mostly commercial, while the popular residential areas are toward the top - you can see all the plumbbobs ;)

Long view of Washington Avenue, from the west. (Named Washington Avenue, by the way, because all cities in the Great Lakes area, or maybe even everywhere in the US, have a Washington Avenue in their downtown, lol!)

This is the West Washington neighborhood, and the most popular residential area in Lake City. On the left is where Bella and Cameron live - on the right are the Phoenix (Jack), Nova (Patrick), and Miller families. That row extends around the corner as well, where Amelia lives. The tallest building on the right is the Loft Apartments, where Drew and Corbin are currently living, and the second tallest next to it is the Riley Estates Company building.

Also Washington Avenue, but from the east, on the LCU campus. On the left is the sports facility, the library, and Frosh Hall. On the right is the pub, and the Offices for Study Abroad.

This is a shot from my south end. I love my south end, even though I don't have many Sims bad off enough to live there. Maybe more after the next round of taxes, lol!

I don't know why I love it so much, with its smokestacks and cooling towers, and trashy alleys with busted cars on cinder blocks, it kind of reminds me of Detroit, lol!

Ah, home sweet home :)

*******

So anyway, I may edit this post in the future with any new developments on the "street view" level. I'm looking forward to adding bus stops and depots to Lake City, and an airport is looking likely in the future as well.

Oh, and by the way, Madison wants credit for all these Community Enrichment Projects when you all vote in the coming elections ;)

And photographic evidence that Lake City crashes my graphic card all to hell! Whenever I play Lake City, I can't linger on the neighborhood screen for very long before things start to freeze up. This degree of nonsense only happens when I try to point the camera across the city and move it around though (which I try not to do except for projects like this one), so it's not usually this bad. The grass will all just turn flat green and the buildings get all fuzzy.

(But the Harris and Shaw families can rest assured that their cars still look okay? lol!)

sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g

A guide to different height kissing:

Height differences between lovers can add a lot of realistic value to a story, but the in-game standing kissing animations can get pretty wonky. This is always one of the first complaints people bring up when they consider using different heights in their game, and was also my biggest complaint until I found some work-arounds. In these romantically-inclined stories, you know how we need to get our kiss on around here!

So nobody specifically asked me to do this one, but I've been using different heights in my game for some time now, and discovered a few tricks, so I thought I would share them.

Dallas and Lucy are happy to oblige us in the demonstration of these techniques ;)

graduation, extras

*** graduation extras ***

I think I like posting the outtakes separately when they're as plentiful as this. I wish I'd been doing it all along, so I could have my concise and well-planned story posts, and then my long-winded and rambling gameplay posts... but you know, I didn't. Ah, well ;)

LH sci-fi dork-fest... or the making of a space base

After viewing this video, a tour inside our current ISS, I've had to revise my plans for my happy little space-goers. A free-floating space station wouldn't have as much space or large windows with beautiful views of space like I'd envisioned. And it would not be very aesthetically pleasing at all. It would be cramped and cluttered and every bit of available space would be used.

But they can generate oxygen from their urine! That's hella cool! LOL!

So anyway, if I want to keep this story as realistic as I usually try to, then that means staying true to the kind of possibilities we might see in the next 70 years. So I've changed my original intentions a bit, and I'll now have their "home base" built on the moon rather than a free-floating station in orbit. So from this point forward, that's where they'll be. And I'll try to go back and edit the story to reflect that.

prom 2083, revisited

With four different scenes, and travel time to community lots, that prom update took forever to shoot and produced a lot of fun outtakes. And I was also feeling very particular about the mood of my narrative, so I didn't want to throw a bunch of funny outtakes at the end.

And besides all that, it was plenty long enough on its own.

So to start things off, this is what Melissa thought of my first idea for her prom dress! She says, "My cleavage is showing, I feel so naked!"

while we're on the topic of chemistry...

Aurora says, "Did you ever realize how insanely hot I am?"

Adrian says, "Yes, dear, I think I noticed."

Lakeside Heights, aliens, and the year 2082

Okay, so since there were at least a couple people wondering about this, I figured I'd do a little Q&A/ cheat sheet about the Deppiesse family's alien heritage. I know if there are two people wondering out loud, there must be more not asking questions, and I don't want anyone to be confused since aliens have become a sort of integral part of the storyline. Though, Orion's family was one of the first families I ever wrote about on this blog, so I guess aliens have always been a part of the storyline...