The roof looks a lot better than I normally achieve, even with the extra tools I understand the windows and the price thing, it is very hard for me to build houses for 20 000 Simoleons or less!

Flower beds - I actually don't think you need to extend it, but maybe take some out and just put some ground - it is a very strict line. Or change the pink shrub with one of the flowers. I am not that good a builder but I really like the landscaping part and I think that might be my strong point. It does not look bad, it is quite acceptable, but I think it can look a little prettier.

I had a closer look at the roof. You have 3 separate roofs and it's the middle one causing the blemish. If you remove the middle and front roof and use a gable roof from the front going back inside the end roof, this should fix it if you also make your diagonal wall straight. Maxis really mucked up on diagonals so if you want diagonals they give issues.

To keep the diagonal wall you can do another roof overlapping the diagonal. With two pieces of roof you remove the blemish but then you might not like the overhang it causes. Without being able to alter roof pitch you are stuck either with overhang or blemish. As far as I can tell anyway. Someone who is more clever at roofing might have some other trick that I don't know about.

You might want a column or a wall there.

By tweaking the roof slightly I haven't eliminated the blemish but I have made it much smaller. At a glance it now just looks like a broken tile, a "blemish" which you can certainly find on the roofs of real houses!

(I extended the front gable section of the roof by 1 time backwards, and manually redid the middle section covering the diagonal wall. I had to use the Lot Adjuster to temporarily make the lot bigger to make this change, but it wasn't hard.)

I don't have Seasons so I don't know if the house is weatherproof, but, if it does let the rain in, we can blame the broken tile! You can't say that doesn't happen in Real Life!!

I am tempted to try submitting the lot in its present form and see what happens. Otherwise I feel I might go on making tiny changes for months. Collectively we have given quite a bit of thought to this house -- a lot more than I often give to the houses I move my Sims into!

I'll post large format pictures of it here before I actually submit it. Thanks for all your help and suggestions.

Good job Andrew.

These are the pictures I intend to use for the upload. They were taken with FRAPS using that red-pause-lines remover mod that KarenLorraine linked to. They are all 1024 x 768. Should these be acceptable for the main pictures? I might add Sim eye view pictures of the interior.

I might use ordinary in-game pictures for in-line pictures. I was thinking of including a couple: one showing the house in the middle of a row of similar houses to show why there are so few windows on the side walls, and one showing how a love tub can be fitted into the upstairs balcony area (with a caveat that the love tub isn't included!).

I'll check the guidelines for pictures again before I actually submit.

The two floorplan images need to be zoomed in a bit more please (we don't need to see the surroundings just the building). We need a front view image of the house, preferably taken straight on from a sim's eye view, the screenshot you have above doesn't show enough of the front of the house. It also needs to be zoomed in a bit more. The back roof is a little pointy are you able to reduce the pitch of it?

KarenLorraine, if I add these pictures, will that do? I'd like to leave the whole lot plans in, because gummilutt said in a recent post that she liked plans that showed the whole lot. Would you also like the front three quarters view zoomed in a bit? I think that would probably be the main picture for the download.

I'm thinking too that I might include a couple of Sim's eye view interior pictures, though I don't think I need one for every room in such a simply furnished lot.

I'm afraid I don't think there's much I can do about the "pointiness" of the roof at the back. I'm making the lot in a base game environment, and the roofslopeangle cheat only comes with Nightlife. I think the lot would lose some of its usefulness if I made Nightlife a requirement.

Those images meet the Creator Guidelines, thank you And yes you can leave the other images in too. Sorry, I couldn't see where you'd specified that the lot was BG, of course you can't do anything about the roof.

Thanks everyone! I think I'll make a start on uploading it. It seems to be possible to pause and save the Upload Wizard at most stages, so it will likely take me a few days. It also seems possible to go back and change most things up to actually submitting. May I also just check how many images I can submit? The FAQ says up to 12, but I've heard that it's recently been increased to 100. I won't be submitting a hundred (!), but I might go over 12.

If I get stuck on anything, I'll come back here and ask.

It's always good to take a picture of the whole lot, but that doesn't count as an overhead floor plan even though it is an overhead floor plan. Think of that one as the lot overhead and then take your overhead floor plans as close as you can.

Yes, you can have up to a 100 images

One last question (I hope it's the last!) before I start seriously on the upload. The FAQ says you can save the upload wizard at various places along the way. Now, mainly to test how this works, I tried to save it at the end of stage 2 (Select Area). It says it will show up in my User Control Panel. Now I probably messed up the save, but I just can't see it. Where should it show up in the User Control Panel?

In a sense this doesn't matter at all, as at stage 2, all I've done is say I'm going to upload something for The Sims 2, and that it will be a residential lot. It will take me about 30 seconds to do that again. But obviously I'd be a lot more upset if I lost the upload at a later stage, especially after I'd written the Description. Which is why I wanted to practice saving and retrieving the upload at an early stage.
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I can't blame you for that. When I started this thread I was using my normal game, the roof had a 20º slope and it would have needed Nightlife, OFB, and possibly the Celebration! Stuff Pack too. But when I had to start the house over again to get the price down, I thought I might as well get AGS and make it base-game compatible. It was only then that I discovered that the RoofSlopeAngle cheat isn't available in base game.

I don't know where you find the saves for the upload wizard but I always write my descriptions and sort my CC list in Word so that I can copy and paste it all across

@AndrewGloria

Are you still working on this? It would be a nice 1st upload.
I don't see anything that needs to be changed. Therefore, I think it's ready to be uploaded to the queue.

Good luck!

I think I've finished building work on the house. Now I'm just play-testing and writing the description. I've had 3 Romance Sims living in it for 4 days in my island 'hood, with only one minor routing problem. I've also got two different families testing it in a base game 'hood. (One family with a toddler and one with an older child and a teen.) I also want one more picture (the rear bedroom) so Sims thinking of moving in can see what they'll get. I've got interior pictures of all the other rooms.

I've got a bit of Real Life work to do, but hopefully I'll get the house uploaded in the next week or so. Thanks for asking!

I found the save I made for Polgannon like this:

How is this going Andrew? In the queue yet?

Thanks PlatinumPlumbbob, but I think I'll try uploading the house the way it is. Remember this is a house for 6 or 7 Sims. They need a bit of space to move around. The furniture provided is enough to get started, but I'm sure the Sims living in it, will soon want to personalise it and add more furniture, as they start to earn. The boys living in this house in my island 'hood have already added a big 3-seater sofa downstairs, and end tables beside some of the beds. After Sims have been living here for a while, the house could soon start to look quite cluttered. At least that's what tends to happen in my game.

You may have a point about the walls, but again I feel it's possibly better to let the Sims who live there personalise the house in their own way. A picture or two on the walls could make all the difference, but I wouldn't presume to choose pictures for all the different Sims who might choose to live in this house. And, at this price, you really can't expect such luxuries to be included. The interior décor of the house is unashamedly Maxis Match. In fact I think, given the same remit (a sub-20K base game house for a large family on a 1x2 lot), the Maxis designers might have come up with something very similar. The painted walls are bland, but very similar to what you find in a Maxis house. I feel they're appropriate for a starter house, and are unlikely to give offence. Sims who want something brighter can redecorate as soon as they've saved a little cash. There is enough in this house to get them started. The Sims play testing the house are finding it satisfactory.

By the way it wasn't me who clicked Disagree and Unhelpful.

Jo, I hope to have the house in the queue within the week, I'm working on the description at present, and trying to remember that it's not a book I'm writing!

Something sweet and short Andrew. You can also put your description up here if you want.

I feel I'm nearly ready to submit this house to the upload queue. Below is my proposed main text for the upload. What do you all think of it? Proof reading is not my strong point and I often have dreadful typos in my posts here. Please be ruthless and tell me about them now before I upload it to the queue.

The in-line pictures look enormous on my 1024 x 768 screen, and I wonder if I should replace them with smaller pictures like the ones from the in-game camera. However I know most people will be viewing them on bigger screens. Do they look OK to you?

Also, is there anything else I should hide behind spoiler or info buttons?

[EDIT] The inline pictures look OK now that I can see them posted in the thread. MTS (Bootstrap?) has resized them for my screen. In preview mode I was having to scroll around the screen to read my text.

~~~Proposed Main Text for Download~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Originally conceived to meet the needs of some of my own Sims, I realised this house might also fit the bill for a few other players. Space is at a premium in my island 'hood so the house is on a 1x2 lot. My Sims wanted 3 double bedrooms, and they didn't want to spend a lot of money. Ideally it should be under §20K. Well after a few attempts and some excellent suggestions from contributors to my Creator Feedback thread, this is the result.

The house costs §19,768. So what do your Sims get for their money?

• 3 Bedrooms
• 2 Bathrooms
• Nursery with crib and potty
• Balcony area big enough for a hot tub or a telescope
• Fitted cooking/food preparation area with counters, a cooker, a fridge and a sink
• Table
• 4 Dining Chairs
• Smoke Alarm
• Telephone
• Burglar Alarm
• Electric lighting throughout
• 2 Double Beds
• Sofa
• Wardrobe
• Bookcase
• Bathroom Mirror
• Front Garden

The house comes with 2 double beds and a crib. It will comfortably sleep 6 or 7 Sims but, if your family is that big and you only have §20,000, you may have work a day or two or sell something else to get the money to buy beds for all of them.

Typically I see this house being placed in a high-density suburban street with similar houses on either side. This is the reason for the paucity of windows in the side walls; in a typical situation they would just give a view of a blank wall two meters away. Worse still, if the windows matched up with the house next door, your neighbours could be looking straight into your room. I feel that modern planning regulations wouldn't be keen on this. There are a couple of windows in the side walls, but only enough to ensure that every room has some natural light. Most of the windows are at the front and the rear of the house.

The house in a typical suburban setting
If people are interested, I'll try to produce some similar small 2-storey houses to make it easier to make up a convincing looking street.

Part of the original remit for this house was that there must be room for a hot tub or love tub. There are lots of Romance Sims in my island 'hood and they all want a love tub. The picture below shows how one fits comfortably in the balcony area. You have to use the MoveObjects cheat to place the tub, probably because it is so near to the lot edges.

(Love tub and Sims are not included.)



In the captions to the screenshots I have used the usual UK convention of calling the floor you go into through the front door the "ground floor", and you go upstairs to the "1st floor". I believe that Americans call these the "1st floor" and the "2nd floor" respectively. I apologise for any confusion caused.

Quality Control and Neighbourhood Safety
The house was built in a Sim-free building base game hood using Any Game Starter. Copies of it were play-tested by different families both in a base game AGS 'hood and in my normal game (Double Deluxe plus Open for Business), but no Sims have ever lived in the original. It is therefore as safe as I can make it to use in your game.

Your spelling and grammar look fine to me. You've clearly put a lot of thought and attention into this.

Just one thing... I didn't notice if you mentioned CC used in your Main Text. If you did mention it, then totally ignore my short attention span. I'm not a builder by any means, but it seems like a good catch to really emphasize that a lot is CC-free or uses minimal CC. I usually turn away from CC-heavy lots, whereas my interest is piqued when I see those words "No CC".

Anyway, that may just be my preference.

Thanks SleepyTabby!

I hadn't mentioned that it's base game compatible either! Something that's important to me as there's a bit of an assumption these days that everyone is using the UC. I'll add a short sentence to the first paragraph mentioning both. Thanks for spotting my omission.

Looks good to me Andrew - just this bit

I've taken to calling it upper and lower floor with two storey lots. I think that helps. I refuse point blank to call the ground floor the 1st floor.

My uploads are all mixed up on floor levels as I vacillate between saying ground floor on one... but then no you will confuse the Americans; so other times I say upper floor and ground level floor or lower and upper floor and ahhhgg. I also cannot use the word 1st floor for the ground floor because no that just sounds ridiculous.

Andrew I didn't see what you were calling your house, but seeing it's base game and that's a main feature you might want to say something like 'Starter house- base game only' as a title. makes it easy for base game players to see.