Hey guys!

As an enthusiastic "builder" of Sims 3 houses, I spend a lot of time "conceptualizing" houses for construction in the Sims 3.

So far, probably my largest project (which is currently dormant, because it is trapped within the hard drive of a not-working computer) is a large Gothic/Tudor revival-looking mansion.

From that idea, with the Late Night thing about vampires, I decided to call it as some kind of "vampire castle".

Now as my ideas raged on, I thought of putting some kind of backstory to it; the Castle (of which two pictures can be found in another thread I posted here back then) stands near the pond in the "rich mountain" in Bridgeport (where the..,err...what do you call it again? The resort thingy beside the pond), its vast figure looming over the lower island for centuries.

It was once occupied by a dynasty of warlords, culminating in the legendary story of a Baron who fiercely defended his lands from an invading power...only to be defeated by their superior technology and armies.

Enraged and desperate at the situation, the Baron decided to find a solution...perhaps a mysterious one...perhaps even a demonic one...transform into an evil creature...a VAMPIRE!

With the enemy thinking they conquered his land, they occupied the Castle and made it their headquarters.

But with the help of a dark sorcerer, the Baron sought revenge and slew all the occupying inhabitants. But his new dark supernatural powers turned him into something evil...a creature with a severe thirst for power, domination, and hatred...he transformed his Castle into a center for the occult, and underneath the Castle he built a basement even beneath the dungeons wherein lies a maze that, in the center, houses a chamber that holds the altar with which he must lie on to regenerate his powers (the Vampire altar thing).

Or so the legend goes...that was centuries ago...

Now, the Castle is merely known as a long dormant mansion with many, many opulent rooms. It has not been in use for almost a century.

Etc. etc. etc.

Well, that was the "backstory"...forgive me for its length...let me get to the point...

When I built that "Castle" I had limited knowledge of how real-world Castles were like. The Castle I made resembles something more like a Gothic or Tudor-Revival mansion rather than a true medieval castle. The problem is that true castles were more like fortresses than giant houses (called mansions or manor houses), with most of its space consisting of solid stone, towers, and guard rooms, etc. such that it doesn't seem very comfortable to live in.

And here is the main problem: based on my research, they say that castle walls were about 7-20 feet thick!

Of course Sims 3 walls are nowhere near that thick, but maybe we can give that effect by placing a 3-Sim-square wide rectangular "room" (assuming 1 Sim-square = 3 feet, which seems to be the case, then that's a 9-foot thick "wall").

But where should I place the windows? Is it supposed to be at the "outer edge" of the 9-foot wall, or "buried" within the wall...sort of like within a "hole" in the extremely thick wall?

How were real castle windows like? Were they placed in the "outside" of the wall, or within some kind of "hole" in the wall...if you know what I'm trying to describe?

Thank you very much and I shall await your replies!

Regards,
Lonious

Doing a little picture research it seems like the wall had a "hole" carved were the windows are placed. I've added some links that shows how deep the window is set into the wall. Since older castles didn't have that many windows, and had main focus on a protecting wall I assume it's because building a window would simply do that... make the wall thinner and less robust.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...s_window_01.JPG
http://pre07.deviantart.net/d29d/th...ane-d4qhm04.jpg
http://img09.deviantart.net/9a83/i/...ickixstockx.jpg

Shouldn't this be in the Sims 3 section?

Yes, it should.

Moved

Windows in a castle are there to serve a purpose; usually that of giving defenders a place to stand behind the wall and shoot arrows or drop nasty things onto attackers while giving the attackers a much harder arrow shot to hit your defender. Sims 3 doesn't have good arrow slits, but it does have tall, narrow windows. It's likely that a vampire would probably have bricked up any window whose sole purpose was to let a little sunlight in. If you use the narrow windows and give the interior walls a slight angle, you could have something that looks somewhat like an arrow slit. (And a vampire would probably have arrow slits modified to look less like a cross, anyway.)

In an effort to use the keyboard to illustrate what I mean:


/-#-\ where # is the window. (And MTS isn't terribly good for keyboard imagery.)
|.......|

Edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrowslit