More Awesome Than You!

http://snootysims.com/hunter-mail2.php

*sniffles*Now I know that the modding community came out with these ideas a good long while ago but I can't help but get a little warm fuzzy that Maxis finally decided to include these options as defaults. My architect self just says JOY! The split level feature is looking especially nice. No more gapping holes for certain leveled stair cases. Oh yes.

Next expansion.. Spiral Stairs! Woo!

Thanks for the link. This looks good. I am actually praying for some descent clothing meshes. I know- silly me!

The bay window in the roofs-examples house looks cool.

I'm psyched about the split levels too...now I can finally have a proper raised dance floor! I love the bay window too, I'm very excited about that.

I have seen a few new clothing meshes, and some are very nice! There's a knee-length dress I'm really excited about especially.

Might be able to delete some less than desirable downloads at last.   ;D

Thanks for that link.

Maybe a few Buckmeister Fuller domes will pop up in my 'hood.  Wonder if there will be triangular windows....

Well judging from the few examples shown, I wouldn't hold my breath  :-\
I did like however the new objects , roofs and split level plans, plus that wallpaper looks nice( from the bedroom picture)

I seem to be missing something in regards to the clothing that comes with the expansions, as to me it generally seems to be well-designed and well-skinned (although I could have lived without those two really uninspired fanmade outfits that came with NL). It's not all stuff I would personally wear but then, I don't make all of my sims little clones of myself. The clothing all seems appropriate for the expansion packs - all of the wannabe hippie stuff for Uni students looked right on from what I've seen on college campuses, and raver and pop-music-inspired clothes for Nightlife are right on from what I've seen in clubs.

I do have to admit I'd be a lot happier if they'd include more long skirts for females of all ages, though. I wonder if any of the expansions will have bohemian-inspired clothes...

This is pretty exciting news.  I've been meaning to recreate my split level RL house for a while, but it's really impossible to do perfectly.  You always get gaping holes .  I can't wait for this expansion.

Are they usually on schedule with them?

I've been building with the new split level in my head: stairs in a corner. The tool looks like it will allow for one landing four steps up--same height as the foundation tool is now. So to go circular: do you think the level tool will allow multiple levels on itself? You know two levels for the next four steps in a circular style stair case, then three for the next set to the next landing and then up to the second floor?

Oh, the EP will be out on the release date, even if it's a bugtastic mess!  I've not seen them delay one yet.

I was wondering that myself, MutantBunny.  Two of those on top of each other make an exact half-landing height

Yes, it'd be nice if Maxis thinks aobut that.

Or maybe the level tool will allow us to assign height?

Well designed??? 90% of Maxis clothes look like they came out of the clothing bin at the salvation army. Or from the street. Whichever place has uglier clothes. I mean, *this* : http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2006/023/reviews/929998_20060124_screen007.jpg , is their idea of a presentable outfit!!!

These screens I'm seeing though, those interiors - they're, dare I say it?, rather well-designed. Maybe they got someone w/ at least an iota of taste this time.

... Your point? The pants are a little too baggy, but that's how many, many girls and women in Scandinavia dress. I know it is popular to look down one's nose at the tunic/dress over pants in the States, but it's cold enough here it is a perfectly sensible fashion option. Even with the sandals and sleeveless top, I see girls and women dress like that in late spring or early summer.

It must be one of the nerdy game developers dressing her, though, because no woman in her right mind would wear a baseball cap with nice clothes like those.  :D

I thought it looked alright, but the lace on top should be cream or something, not pink- it clashes...

It's not the tunic over pants thing that's the problem here. Heck, that was even a hot trend for a while. No, it's the way that Maxis utterly butchers each and every trend that they dump in the game. Tunic over pants were actually even quite popular w/ custom creators, but in their hands, the stuff actually looks *presentable*.

I always get really annoyed w/ each ugly outfit that Maxis throws out, b/c w/ their huge development budget, you'd think they could hire someone with some shred of fashion sense. And on top of that, w/ each new EP, you merely add to a ton of crap that you'd never put on your sims that's filling up your game, and there's no way to delete it.

Them calling that raised level thing "split-level" irks me for some reason.  It's not like it puts it on another level or makes it compatible to put on a hill or something.  It's interesting, but calling it "split-level" seems kind of wrong to me, since I have lived in at least 3 houses that ARE split level and that usually means there's a stairway in the front of the house that divides the house into a lower region and an upper region.  I really don't see how raised floors have much to do with that.

About the Maxian clothing, I think it's much better than most of the crap the community makes.  I think people hold that grudge just because TS1 clothes suck, so they don't think TS2 clothes are any better.  I personally would rather have the Maxian Clothing than Custom Clothing, because it probably won't make my game explode.

Also, you know those screenshots are doctored and they have godly cards running it right?  They probably won't look that nice when you get the game if you don't have the best hardware.

I don't know -- I love being able to make my sims dress as poorly as possible. Then I can laugh at them.

I have to disagree on the rage against Maxis' fashion sense. The name of the game is custom content for a lot of people. It doesnt matter if Maxis provides the best textures, and in a way, its better if they dont, as it only encourages the custom content creating community (say that three times fast) to come up with much better textures for the same mesh, rather than having to make whole new meshes with new textures. Its pretty obvious that Maxis has scouts checking out the custom content and new meshes that enter the community, they in turn use those same concepts to provide same or similar ideas in the next pack as part of the core game. Meshes that are part and programmed in the core game are likely to load a lot faster than meshes that are made by the community as add ons. At least in my experience and opinion.

Truthfully, I really dont like any of the textures that Maxis uses for much of anything, but I do like the meshes and that is the important part, the hard part. The fun is getting to recolor them and add my own sense of style or enjoy the style of others who have all the time in the world to make really great recolors. In that way, the sims has something for everyone, you can play house or color, or you can build stuff, or invent stuff. Its all good....except for the bugs, but then that gives people like Pescado something to do as well - for the programmer types...as well as the super creators who do it all i.e. new meshes with new textures, functions, and anims etc. And of course everyone then has to upgrade their computer etc so that industry wins as well lol. Its quite the mixed bag of tricks.

Just my unsolicited opinion.

I ALWAYS wish I could delete Maxis stuff -- there are tons of walls, floors, and clothes that I will NEVER use and it makes me crazy just to look at them! Like, I understand that they're there because people want "realistic" sorts of things and lots of options, but it's useless for me personally because I like everything to be slick and pretty and kind of cartoonish. Oh well. I've learned to live with it, but it's frustrating.

Same here: I'd love to be able to dump a lot of the maxis shit--I'd start with the bad hats and then the wall papers and floors.

It drives me nuts they put in new wall papers and floors in each EP! At least the new clothing adds more meshes to work with. But the w and f only add what maxis thinks the w and f should be--and that is bad!

I must have shite taste in clothes then, cause I like that outfit. I think it's pretty.

*shrug*

The bad hats, yeah. I have a grand total of three sims with hats, and they all are wearing variations on this hat (http://www.davidchess.com/pictures/sims2_a/Joans_hat.jpg).

What really drives me crazy with the walls is how it's like, here's a wall, here's a wall with a thing at the bottom, here's another color of thing, here's that same wall with a thing at the top, and another color of thing, here's that wall again with a thing at the bottom AND the top, and another color of those things as well. I'm like, jesus, the only one I use is the one with the thing at the bottom AND at the top, so why do I even have the rest of them?

I wish we had the option to delete certain Maxis stuff too. The first items on my dumping list would be those silly toddler tuxedos. >:(  If they had to exist, why not make them a certain formalwear item for weddings/celebrations? I hate it when my babies spin into a toddler wearing one of those tacky outfits. I want my toddlers wear realistic toddler clothing.

I'm missing something, I think. What's so bad about their meshes/textures?  I still don't see anything wrong with that screenshot, and other than the cap it's something I'd wear, pinstripes and all.


They aren't wrong by calling it a split-level, though, because the term definitely applies to what they've put into OFB.


Okay, that's a new one. Since when does clothing make a game explode?  :D It seems to be the most benign type of custom content!


Yeah, ya think?  :P

Despite all of the desperate raining on of parades, I'm still excited!

Here's my question.."What self respecting guy tucks his T-shirts into his above navel waisted pants"?. ;D

Now THERE is a question! I have an answer to it, too - people in IT with a strong case of DORK. ;D I used to work with a lot of them. Management types seem to be fond of that look, too, and get really bent out of shape at anyone who wears their shirt untucked (i.e. doesn't look like a bunchy old person). I'm not surprised a lot of that got into the base game.  :-X

I think the point of bad taste is that many times bad taste = a damn good laugh. Watching randomtownie5001 walk past the mall in dress shoes, knee high socks, plaid  green shorts, a long sleeve red check button up, and a cowboy hat gives me a good chuckle. Since I'd never download such an esemble myself I thank Maxis for having bad taste.

I'm hoping upon hope of hopes that Maxis will be including the ability to add levels on top of levels.. or at least a cheat for it.

Yeah I've been asking that too - it looks to me though that they've just made the foundation useable upto a wall.  You can't build one foundation on top of another - or at least I've never tried.

What are you talking about? They are SANDALS; there's another question.  Sandals?  At least the women get thongs, much more fashionable.  My male Sims all wear the Uni outfit, you know; the one with the handbag.  Bring in the hippy tunics, niice.

Maxis should contact the dudes from "Queer Eye".  Nah, they're not much better.

That's because release dates are determined arbitrarily, as opposed to by completion of anything.

The loose top over baggy pants, paired with manly sandals, over a washed out pink tank top? There's absolutely nothing redeeming about it. Bad proportion - washes out any semblance of a figure. I'm not advocating skin-tight here, but rather, fitted would have been the way to go. Bad color scheme - washed-out pink over dull black is bad enough, but to add a mess of a print to the mix? Ugh. The bracelet - where does gold come into the color scheme? The color's just all over the place. The sandals - possibly the worst part. It looks like it couldn't decide whether it was a loafer or flip flops. And the screwed up design on the shoe - what were they going for? Jackson Pollock with glitter?

If any celebrity/pseudo-celebrity ever wore this thing, they'd be slapped on worst-dressed lists the world over. But they have stylists for that. All I'm saying is that Maxis should invest in one too.


A guy who doesn't enjoy getting laid.  ;)

I thought they got some designers in that had worked on Toy Story or was it Toy Story 2? scratches head ???

We used to call split level houses "mezzanined".  If you just build the floor a bit higher in one corner it's called a "raised floor"

Split level without cheating! Yay!

Oh... okay, it's High Fashion Crazyland logic. ;D  I won't argue the point any further as I can't take seriously the reasoning of any industry that tells it's budding designers to draw fashion figures 10 heads tall to make the clothes look good*.  Anything after that little leap is so far removed from real human beings it has no relation to me whatsoever.




* Human beings range from 3 heads (dwarfism) to 9 heads (gigantism) tall, with dead average being about 7. In day to day life one is likely to see people from 5 to 8 heads tall.

Yes, exactly. I want more meshes from Maxis and don't care what the textures look like, so I can have more recolors that don't require new meshes. I wanted tea-length dresses, and then the modding world learned to mesh and I got them. But a lot of people each make their own new mesh and now I discover I have a trillion - well ok, more like 6-10 - meshes that are all basically the same. What would be really good is if someone organized meshing the way the color enabler and simPE did for recolors. Put up a mesh archive and when someone needs a different mesh to make new clothes they look there first, and if it's there download the one they need. If it's not, then they make it and put it on the archive. And anyone who needs a mesh goes there and downloads it. That's probably never going to happen - very "community sharing" kind of thing and not "this mesh is copyrighted by me, don't even think about looking at it sideways" (someone is going to fuss at me, I suppose ;) and I'd never get my download fix (and I do appreciate creators, I'm addicted) but it sure would help.

I'm not excited about the "split levels". I expect they'll be about like the halfwalls (which are really just indoor fences) - ok, but they don't fix anything so you still need the cheats and the complicated way to make it look like you want. Hopefully it'll work for circular stairs though, as I keep forgetting to put the stairs in *before* I build the rest of the house and you can't add them later. Maybe they'll be better than I think and in any case, nice for bandstands and the like.

I expect this is true, because how in the world are they supposed to anticipate everything that we might imagine to build?  It will be another tool for the toolbox (hopefully).  I'm looking forward to those octogon and conical roofs; I want to build attached towers that aren't too much taller than the house and there is just no clean way to bend floors for those.  No overhang looks terrible, a full tile of overhang is too much, angled walls on the towers run into all kinds of problems...

I know what you mean but the problem would be with people who upload houses to the exchange.  What if you deleted some of the content they are uploading? So they probably went with undeletable content for that reason.  In any case, since most custom content gets placed first in the inventory, you rarely have to look at the Maxis stuff.

The main problem with Maxis furniture is that nothing matches, so it's hard to build a pulled together decor.  IT always ends up looking vaguely tacky, like a second rate vegas casino or hotel.  (or what I imagine one to be, if such was to exist)

I think it's the weirdest thing that all the custom floors are placed at the front of the catalogue, except for carpets, which is at the back.   ???

You know which building feature I can't wait to get my hands on ?  New roofs!  Right now I am favoring victorian style houses, which often require a round or hexagonal roof.  That's just not really possible at the moment. 

I agree about the roofs. You can do it by bending floors as Jack Spratt mentioned above, but I never have been able to get that to work worth a darn (I'm not much of a builder or an anything else-r as verified by my lack of available custom design :) so I do hope it really works.

Just... I was all looking forward to half walls. I use them a lot. And then just kinda disappointed with the way they work - more like fences - so I still need to do halfwalls the way MikeInside shows. Which I think is complicated. So I'm not getting my hopes up about split levels. I don't want to be crushed, even if the tumble is only half a level ;)

The split level tool will bring me slightly closer to being able to replicate my favourite pub- it's two stories but the first floor has four levels- you go up from the foyer four steps into the actual bar area and past the bar you can go down eight steps into one dining area or up eight steps  to another dining area (which is not the second floor- that would be three inches above your head  ;)).   

About every house I make could use the split level tool to add dynamics.  Even my own house, which is resolutely monoleveled, has a small raised area for the woodstove that I can't really replicate right now.  I don't like making sunken rooms because it's difficult to manuever the camera around in there. 

N00b question - what's the difference between the Maxis half walls and MikeInside ones? I never did anything with half walls before they were available in game, so I never bothered to look at the "cheat" way to do them since I thought it was the same.

MikeInside teaches you how to make half walls which are just squished walls. Its a normal wall that uses the elevation cheat to squish  it into a half wall or any other height you deem.

Mikinside is hosted by MTS2 so you can find links to his tutorials over there. So they are not his walls, just a technique for making them look like that, that he decided to share with the masses. Its not like he invented it or anything.

Now Fatd on the other hand at MTS2 did invent half walls, sorta. You start with a full wall and place his half wall invention on it like a window and it turns into a half wall. (in appearance) Its very similar to the Numenor window wall technique, Fatd took a lot of cues from Numenors creation.

So there you have it. Using elevation cheats is fairly simple, you just shouldnt over use them because you can easily get lost in the maze of elevations, especially if you are new to it. I use modified walls to make attached garages. By modifying the wall code to not require a flat bottom, you can use it next to foundations and all kinds of other areas that normally a regular wall wouldnt go. This also greatly helps in making split staircases and multi level rooms.

I guess I have used "Mike's" half walls  ;) when I've done split levels and attaching garages to homes with foundations. The little light bulb went on - I think the difference is that with the half wall made using the constrainfloorelevation cheat, you can build wall on top of "half" walls whereas the Maxis half walls can't be built upon.

Creating, discovering, "inventing" a process is every bit as important as creating and producing an object :p

Walls made with Mike's half-wall tutorial perform the same as any other wall in the game - they can be stacked, wallpapered, gates, arches, doors and windows can be added to them, wall lights placed on them, floor put on top of them, roofs on them, etc. The only difference between a cheated halfwall and a regular wall is that it's half-size. Maxis half-walls are like fences - they are the color they are, they don't stack, they won't hold up a floor, you can't put a window (or an iron arch type thing from a partial glass window) in the top of one, etc.

Add 'testing' and 'providing feedback' to that list too :)
'Brainstorming', as well - how many hack ideas have been inspired from MATY threads alone.

<group hug>


The Maxis half-walls are grey, and you can put wallpaper on them.
You can't recolour the wooden bit at the top which is proabably what you were *thinking* when you typed that  ;)

Am I missing something - Are there going to be prebuilt spiral staircases ?

I did manage to make a lot once with modular stairs going up in stages on different levels of foundation.
It worked fine in one house, but in another 4x4 plot the modular stairs became connected somehow.
Sims would walk up the internal stairs, and end up at the top of the ones in the garden.

Now there's a nasty problem.  You probably can't delete some of those steps, either.  If you figure out what caused that, or how to fix it, give a shout.  I haven't been stumped by much in the way of building, but this is one.  And there be a lot of other people interested (I know MikeInside has a house inflicted with this).

Maybe it will function like a split-level, I don't know.  I guess I'll be waiting at least 6-8 weeks to get the game, or waiting until it gets to $20 to find out if it is.  I'll be happy if you can actually make a true split-level with the thing, but with the screenshots they have shown it doesn't seem likely.

Well, I've never actually heard of a case where clothing actually exploded the game but I bet it does cause other problems if you have too much.  Sure, I'd also like to turn off the less desirable Maxian clothing but that doesn't seem likely.

I'm not particularly aiming my statement about the game looking worse at people that already know this, it's more aimed at the people that say "Wow, OFB will really improve the look of my game!"

Yes jack, it sounds the same.

I would try to delete one set of stairs, and another set would be sold.
Then trying to continually delete the same set, would add  '1200' to the funds each time.

I did have partial success by deleting all mention of modular stairs in the lotfile using SimPE.
But I had some off-lot stairs appear over the other side of the road.

Any pointers to a thread where this problem is being (has been) discussed?

Actually although it seems redundant, it's useful to have those variances, if, for example, you have rooms that are two-storys high- you want the baseboard on the bottom one and the crown molding at only the top. Or, if you have used some combination of boolprop constrainfloorelevationin your building so you have these funny bits of wall and you don't want baseboard or crown molding on the in-between walls.

Yeah, those too. <joins hug>


Oops, yeah, thanks :)


I think (but am not sure) the hope is the Maxis split level too will allow us to build spiral stairs similar to the halfwall cheats, by building up different levels. But I haven't experienced the problem you're discussing and if Maxis doesn't know about it, their tool might very well have the same problem. pfui. This is why I don't get my hopes up ;)

I don't know of any left, I did some searching and if there is anything it's deep in the archives somewhere (I was pointed to MikeInside's site from MTS2).  This has been an issue since before I bought TS2, and I wasn't too slow getting it.  Mike said that this happened to him before the cFE cheat was known.  Mike was kind enough to let me download one monster house of his where this happened.  I tore that house down in various size sections and rebuilt it.  I rebuilt sections of it on another lot. I could never get rid of it on his lot, and I could never replicate it on another lot.  Like everyone before me, I gave it up. 

I'll pass along the sum total of my knowledge.  The practical limit on stairways is your computer horsepower.  I had well over 1000 modular stairway sections on a lot (various heights from minimum to 4 story climbs) and that Sim just barely moved on 3x speed.  They could properly negotiate all stairs (albeit very slowly), and all stair behaved normally.  This does, however, seem to be limited to modular stairways.  On Mike's house there were places (next to some messed up stairs) that modular stairways could not be installed but object stairs could, and the object stairs worked fine.  My original suspicion was that the game was confused as to which level was where (it does that on other things when you get to bending a lot of stuff around), but I releveled all levels in the problem areas without any change.  I tore down as much of the house as I could (obviously the problem stairs and their landings remained) and releveled a mostly empty lot and got no change.  This problem has occurred to several people, and I suppose that means on various hardware configurations.  In summary, I know that this is limited to modular stairways, is not a result of too many stairways, does not appear to be connected to leveling issues, and is not related to hardware.  What causes it is beyond me, however.

Shame too, that was a magnificent house Mike built.

Oh that makes sense - it would explain why my big dorm with modular stairs is a bit jerky when similar sized lots and families aren't.  Well, that and the idiot dormies fall asleep on the half landings.  I'm going to have to uninstall Pescado's no dormie invulnerability hack aren't I?  Dammit.  I'm afraid I have a penchant for modular stairs too.

I still think that what Maxis has done with this is made the foundations work up to a wall and we won't be able to build one on top of another to get modular stairs.  I am willing to take bets on this now and when I am proved right I will come here and post this --->  <<<<smug glow>>>>

Can you get a smiley for that?

The slowdown issue is separate from the problem tunaisafish described.  Object stairways may experience a similar slowdown for all I know.  And it took a whole bunch of modular stairway sections (about 500) before I started noticing any lag. That's 125 sets of steps between a first and second floor.  125 objects stairs may be as bad.

So, don't blame the modular stairs; they'll add to the lag, but they'd only be a small part of the problem on a large lot.

Has it been known for this stairs problem to happen to a house before you move in any sims?
I'm just trying to cut down the number of things that may be causing this.
I'm hoping that it can happen.  As then we can rule out interference from a lot of the other buggy objects 'like bookcases' that sometimes screw up unrelated stuff when they are in use.  There's more chance then of finding a buggy bit of code to fix.

Another thing that it would be worth checking to see if this is a common feature.  Did the landing at the top of one stair intersect with the bottom landing of another set?  I recall that my house went bad after replacing a staircase like this with a straight modular stair - And that was the centre of
the house where the teleporting happened.  (That house died with the harddisk it was on)

I can think of some things to try to fix this problem if it has already happened, but you'd need to move some sims into the house to use them.
JMP's invisible object remover.  Or perhaps a new modular stairs zapper function on a debugging object.
It may be necessary to find the cause before using these sort of hacks though as it could call the same functions that are buggy.

I found an old locked thread on MTS2 in the building section about this problem so I'll probably reread that again to see if the my Q's can already be answered.  Oh, one more thing I remember that was also discussed there was not being able to attach a banister to the buggy stairs.  That's something I remember happening on mine, but only on one side.  Perhaps a clue to which end the problem lay.

Someone in that thread said they reported the problem to Maxis.  So if it was some buggy code that caused this in the first place, we need to make sure this problem still happens with later EPs before some poor modder peers into the spaghetti code on a wild goose chase.

I don't know.  I've never had this problem personally. But I suspect it exists before the Sims ever get there, it just gets real noticable then.  And I'm pretty sure buggy objects aren't involved, because I stripped that house of Mike's.  I also worked a lot on it with no Sim in it.


There were a variety of problems on a variety of staircases in his house.  But I don't recall any landings serving 2 stairs being involved, only straight up and down stairs (there were 'spiral' stairs, but I don't remember them being affected).  But you've already reported it happened on yours. 

The delete thing is interesting, Mike's house is a mass of stairways (kind of like "stairways as art"), and there was likely a lot of stairway adds and deletes going on during build.  I know I've deleted stairways in multiple stairway homes, and I've never had a problem; but I wouldn't rule anything out.

Just for interest, some of the problems (and some of these manifested themselves on modular stairs that I added to the house)
- Inability to delete, but money added back (as you mentioned)
- Inability to even select to delete
- Select one set for delete, a different set actually gets deleted (but rebuilds normally, go figure)
- Sims won't use steps at all
- Sims "teleport" at the top of steps (And on some, but not all, if you told the Sims to go to the top of one set of steps, they'd take off for a completely different set and teleport to where you told them to go originally.  Go figure.)

Well, I can dive back into that house tonight.  I'm loathe to, it's weird working with it; Twilight Zone stuff.  But I'm pretty sure if you're still having the problem...

No, what I mean is that has a bad house been made with the new EPs.
I suspect that once a lot is bad, it doesn't matter which version you use to view it.  The internal data of the stairs is corrupt.
If you do want to mess with that old house, then try using the the 'stuck objects remover' from the Firing Range.
If that works, problem solved.
I don't think anybody will be keen on making a new hack just now when we know OFB will be turning all that code upside down again.

The one I made was with the original TS2.  I've not seen any of my newly created houses have the bugs since then, but that may be because the whole issue has tamed my extravagant buiding tendencies.  The bad lot was on a harddisk that died, so I can't test the SOR on that one.

Well dip me in sh**.  That Stuck Object Remover deletes the undeletable stairs.

There were some remaining problems, I described them over at MikeInside's site,  but since no one here seems to have an immediate issue I won't bother typing it all out here.

But kudos to Pescado for writing that thing, and to tunaisafish for the suggestion of using it on this problem.

There is such a thing as undeletable stairs? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???  Where would you like your sh** delivered. LOL

Oh my!  If I wasn't feeling so rummy I'd be rolling on the floor in hysteria after reading all this!  I was headed to bed a half-hour ago, then decided to check out this thread.  :D

Technically speaking, that is split-level.  However, most of us (in the US at least) have probably been in quite a few split-level homes as someone described above, where the entryway in the front of the house has two half stairways, one going up and the other going down into the basement.  I'd love it if we could build a true split-level home in TS2!

That outfit at the above link is just laughable!  It looks like something my girls would get into when they were playing dress-up as small children!

I agree that a lot of the outfits in the game don't look that great (think Meadow Thayer), but also agree the meshes can sometimes be textured to look absolutely awesome (if you don't believe me, check out some of the clothes available at Mermaid Cove that are made for in-game meshes).  Thankfully, the mesh in that picture looks like it has potential--that is if you could get rid of the stupid-looking tank-top from underneath the spaghetti straps.  I'm thinking possibly more sleeves and better colors and it would make a terrific evening outfit.

At any rate, I took a look at all the screenshots and I can now honestly say I have something about which to be excited about OFB!  My daughter's going to croak when she sees those new roofs--those're just awesome!  And split-level or not, we should now be able to build a proper sunken living room, which is something I'd love to be able to do.

A house where the entry way is split with stairs going up and stairs going down is called a split foyer.  A split level is a house where the levels split within the house, so you actually have three different levels.  I've heard this referred to as a "tri-level" as well.  The house I recently moved from was a split foyer, with 5-6 steps leading up to the front door, then a small entry way where you either had to go upstairs or downstairs.  The house I am living in now with my grandma is considered a split level, with only one step up to the front porch, then a main living area.  There are 5-6 steps going up to the bedrooms and bathrooms, and a longer staircase going to the basement, laundry room, and garage.  The driveway is rather steep and goes downhill so that the garage is on level with the ground at the bottom.

Here is some more information about split level homes if you're interested in the encyclopedia at the free dictionary site:  http://encyclopedia.tfd.com/Split+level+home

Yep, not very common, but they pretty much kill a lot.  It's not the undeletable part, it's the things that go along with it.

Although, if you had Sims you hated, and if you could make this occur on purpose, you could move them into the Twilight Zone and make their life hell...

Actually, I lived in a split level for twenty years when I was growing up.  Walk in the door and go up or down.  At least in the area of the US where I live, that is a split level.  I've never heard the term split-foyer before.

And in the US - when you first walk in the door, you're on the first floor. In the UK, Australia and India (not sure about the Kiwis or Canucks) you have to go up a flight of stairs to be on the first floor since they enter on the ground floor. Just a bit of useless trivia...

Just to make a pointless point about the sandals, good ol Leo Alloto gave me a walkby last night to help out...

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/psheos.png)


Dress shoes.  :P

I don't know what area of the US you live in, but I live in the southeast, and the term is very common.  The entryway is called the foyer, and it is split going up and down.  I think a differentiation needs to be made between houses that split immediately upon entering the house and houses that split inside the house, which giving a livable area on the level in between.