I am pretty sure that the moderators at MTS really do not look very closely at most of the submissions.  This becomes apparent every so often when a creator announces that they mistakenly uploaded the wrong item.  I mean, how could someone's mistaken upload make it past a moderator's all seeing eye if the moderator actually installed the item in the game to see how it works?

I also have found homes with chairs flying in the air outside of the home, trees in toilets, and double beds placed in bedrooms three squares wide, leving a half square on each side of the bed.  It's pretty clear that not only have these uploads not been playtested, but they have not even been looked at.

You gotta love the creator feedback forum where people grovel for feedback on rejected items, and receive all sorts of worthless advice.  It's worthless in the sense that if one follows the advice, it really does not seem to significantly improve the odds of having the creation approved.  On the other hand, perhaps it is unrealistic to expect a moderator to devote a lot of time to each upload.

As for poses, makeup, houses, worlds, etc., etc., there is a tremendous lack of creativity and originality in the sims creative community.  This is not a problem unique to the sims.  I call it the coffeeshop syndrome.  I live in a small town, where one day, someone decided to open a coffeeshop.  The next thing you know, there are a half dozen coffeeshops in town.  That is five copycats thought opening a coffesshop was a good idea for a business.  They could not think of something original.  Next thing you know, all six coffeeshops are going out of business because the town simply cannot support six coffeeshops.  No one is making any money.

I think this same phenomenon explains why we have countless poses no one wants, all sorts of makeup which cannot be seen in game. a gazillion set of jeans, a half million lots, and thousands of worlds.  Everything pretty much looks alike.  And when something truly exceptional is made, it gets lost in a sea of crap.

I had a strange problem.  I don't know if it was caused by Awesome mod or a combination of Awesome mod and something else.  That something else most likely would be one of Twallan's mods, since I have them all installed.

My family consists of a second generation sim and her Invisible Friend who was turned into a visible friend using a potion.  They have two cats.  They also have twin daughters.  The daughters aged up from toddlers to children.  However, the next day, the kids were not going off to school.  I clicked on the button to send them to school and got a message there were no schools in town.  I was using a pretty straight Apaloosa Springs.  The only changes to the town were my McDonald's restaurant (a rabbithole), and a house I built for another family.

When I removed Awesomemod, the problem went away, and the kids went to school.  Since it solved the problem, I did not experiment further.

My suggestion would be to do something which has not been done to death before.  There are a billion and one Sunset Valley, Riverview and Bridgeport clones out there.  If you are going to do another Sunset Valley, at least make it better than the original.

Most world builders are really crappy lot builders.  Maybe its because they put all of their time into making a world, that they really cannot be bothered to make good lots.  Many people download worlds but want to use their own lots.  Make it easy for them.  Personally, when confronted with a world with lots of unroutable terrain and twisty roads, I tend to toss it pretty fast.  This means flat lots, straight roads and a sparing use of non-routable terrain.  Hands off the non-routable terrain unless there is a damn good reason for it.

Some people think they can stick 300 lots in a world and NOT have problems. Most of the EA worlds have under 100 lots.  If you want the feel of a larger neighborhood, you need to come up with another solution.  Mine is to use deco buildings which I can pump out in an hour or two.  If I spend a day or two on it, I can make a deco home which is almost indistinguishable from an in game home.

A number of sub neighborhoods is good.  But don't overdo it.  Look at real life cities.  They have their residential, commercial and industrial zones.  But unless a subdivision has strong covenants or built by a single builder, you can find a mix of expensive and inexpensive homes.

And yes, a lot of starter homes is a good idea.  And I don't mean one of those faux 100,000 simoleon "starter" homes.  I mean a home for under 16,000 simoleons.  I have a ticky tacky starter home which gets plastered in all of my cheap subdivisions. There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one, and they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
 

Well, at least I am making something!  And with over 100,000 downloads, some people actually want my stuff in their games.

What have you offered to the community lately?

This thread is wrong on so many levels, it is difficult to know where to begin.

Suffice it to say that there are simmers who create stuff, and there are simmers who create nothing but make life difficult for those who do.

TSR is not the average person.  They are a business, and specifically a business which sells custom content.  That it is a commercial enterprise, as opposed to a hobbyist, makes all of the difference in the world.

Say you buy a DVD on E-Bay.  When you receive it, you discover that it is a homemade copy.  In fact, the seller did nothing more than download a torrent with the movie on it, an burned it on the DVD.  You have been defrauded.  You thought you were buying a legitimate copy of the DVD, and you rightfully assumed that the seller had the rights to sell you what he was selling you.  This is little different from a grocer who puts his thumb on the scale, a pawnshop which sells stolen goods, or a financial institution which sells fraudulent securities.

And while TSR's conduct may not be malicious, it is knowing.  Everything which is uploaded to the site is reviewed.  Now obviously, they are looking for things like stray boobies, because they will not allow a stray boobie or a naughty word, like "bitch."  However, they clearly are indifferent as to whether someone is uploading stolen property.  Clearly, they are sanctioning the illegal use of other people's intellectual property.  They know what they are doing, so while their conduct may not be malicious in the sense that they are trying to hurt artists, it is deliberate and intentional.

In fact, everthing that TSR sells is violative of EA's copyrights because EA limits the use of its intellectual property for non-commercial uses only.  While a hobbyist can use EA's software, meshes and the like, another business cannot.  TSR's whole business model is a criminal enterprise.

Now, perhap Disney is not particularly sympathetic because they are a big nasty corporation.  But they are also a big nasty corporation which could do nasty things to TSR.  If TSR thumbs their nose at a badass like Disney, how do you think they would treat some poor schmuck who cannot fight with them.  It's clear that they are not following the rules of acceptable behavior for a business.

We also know they have abused the copyright laws in efforts to shut down other sites, like Garden of Shadows.  They claim copyrights to materials which they know they do not have a copyright on, and then they send take down notices to the ISPs of these sites, knowing that their copyright claims are bogus.

This conduct is indisputable.  And what is the real gist of the original post?  That TSR has hacked into someone's account, or that TSR is a disreputable business which engages in dishonest business practices and sells stolen property, and that it does not let the norms of acceptable behavior restrain them in the quest for money?

Given this, do you think they would hesitate to engage in other illegal conduct?

Proving anything can be difficult.  However, in a murder case, you don't always need a body.  In a robbery, you don't always need to find the stolen goods.

What you can look at is past conduct and current practices.  You can look at things like means and motive.  And you can draw inferences from behavior.

One thing we know for certain is that TSR is not an honest business.  Take for example, their use of other's intellectual property.  TSR pilfers the work of other artists on almost a daily basis.  I am not talking about sims artists, but artist artists.  You see items containing Disney's copyrighted material all the time.  At one point, I did a cursory search and found over 50 items which used material copyrighted by Disney.  However, they also host artwork from professional artists who are not even aware that their artwork has been taken, converted into sims custom content and is sold.  Just log in, and you will find page after page of paintings and similar artwork containing the copyrighted material of other artists.

How does an honest business act?  Well, just compare TSR's conduct to EA.  Yes, we all love to hate EA, but it is a professional operation.  EA is very careful about infringing on other's copyrights.  Branded material is identified and the rights to use that material are secured before those items are published.

Now, this does not prove that TSR has hacked into other accounts, but it tells you something about TSR's mindset.  They are neither a professional nor an honest business.

It's about time!

Contrary to popular belief, there actually is some good stuff on the Exchange.  The problem is that it gets buried in all of the crap.

The basic idea of the layout does not bother me.  It looks like many towns in the western United States (i.e. west of the Mississippi and east of California).  Most of these towns were laid out by the railroads when they came through (and a few by the Army), meaning that they are all built along a grid.  It reminds me a lot of a town I might see in Nebraska (Kansas is too flat.)  It's too lush for Wyoming or Montana or the Dakotas.  (Of course, east of the Mississippi, is very heavily forested comparatively speaking - so this could work for many places in Illinois, Indiana, and perhaps Ohio)

It does seem that a lot of the lots do not have a road next to them.  Years ago I had to deal with a subdivision designed by an incompetent developer who set it up so that some of the lots in the subdivision were not next to a road.  We had to replat the entire subdivision -- a major pain.  (The neighbors were not happy upon discoverying that there was an easement by necessity across their property!)

Also the main road though town should exit off of both ends of the map.  Most western towns are sited along major highways.  Those which are not tend to become ghost towns.

A western town is typically divided into blocks which would allow (on the average) four houses in one direction, with two in the other.  The lots tend to be very deep and an alley will run the long way down the block.  This becomes very apparent if you look at the plats for most western towns.  (Or just drive around one.)

I dislike the idea of doing another friggin island neighborhood.  Everyone is doing friggin islands as if most towns are built on islands.  I mean the smart town fathers build their towns on high ground -- not a friggin flood plain!  Islands are for vacations with the understanding that the whole thing will be washed away during the next hurricane.

This really does explain a lot.  Perhaps all of the "buggy" stuff in EA's code simply reflects their goal of having the game run on as many computers as possible.  If you want a different story progression and different features, you have to upgrade to a better and faster system.

Personally, I have a hard time justifying upgrading a computer to run a single game, let alone a single mod of a single game.  I have an older machine (it was a second hand machine which had been used by a community college).  It runs just about everything I want it to run, smoothlly, except for TS3 with Awesomemod.  My primary reason for getting this machine was to run various business software -- mostly specialized database software.  (I have run a couple of businesses.)  So it meets 99% of my needs.

Unfortunately, this means that I run the game without Awesome mod most of the time.  The NRSaa supercomputer and story progression offer comparable features without the same performance hit.  Of course, I have implemented serious population control, limiting the game to about 75 sims.  Honestly, this seems to be more than enough.  The game really becomes really goofy by the time there are 200 plus sims, even without performance slowdowns.  In fact, 75 sims may be far more than what is needed.

Of course, I find all the homes being uploaded to be rather irritating because there is no way that the game can accomodate a lot of homes homes.  With 75 sims, 30 households appear to be the norm.  If I need more baby bombs, an appropriate number of sims can be pollinated until the need passes.

I have had a similar thing happen.  The sim goes to the bookcase, stands around, then drops the books on the floor.  I don't recall whether AM was installed at the time.  I usually run the game without AM because it tends to slow the game down too much.  (Although this problem is not as bad if I keep the population under 75.)

The Viking era, at least in Britain began with the sacking of the Monastery at Lindisfarne.  Charlamagne also had to deal with the Vikings.  As a result, more walls were constructed around monasteries to give them more protection.  Irish monasteries built tall towers to afford some degree of protection.

By the way, for this period, chimneys are anachronistic.  Buildings did not start having chimneys until about the 14th century.  As in our sims games, they have a nasty habit of starting fires.  Typically, having a hole in the roof over the firepit was less likely to result in your building being burnt to the ground.

An interesting Eastern Rite monastery can be found at http://sims.mixei.ru/component/option,com_jdownloads/Itemid,28/task,view.download/cid,480/

It occurred to me that a modern story hook for monasteries can be found in Dan Brown's novels -- particularly the DaVinci Code.  I probably will wait for Worlds of Adventure before doing much with monasteries.  They would be a fine addition to the French segment.

The comments were not really intended as criticism.  However, the actual historical monasteries are far more interesting than anything someone could make up.  Often, truth is stranger than fiction.  But for someone who is content with a dumbed down version of a "monastery" it should do just fine.

An historical monastery also has some great story opportunities.  Think of "The Name of the Rose."  (For those who don't remember or are too young, this was a mystery novel which was made into a very good movie starring Sean Connery.)  Or even the brother Caedfel series.

As a medeivalist, I consider the 800s to be part of the early medieval period, which many refer to as the "Dark Ages."  Pre-Medieval is Roman.  And of course, your had the Carolingian renaissance during this period as well as the Venerable Bede.

As for me, I will hold out for something a lot closer to the prototype -- or eventually build one myself.  As I posted earlier, I really would like to have something resembling the Book of Skulls, but not immediately recongnizable as such.  And it might be better to wait until we have Egypt or a similar desert to place for a "Book of Skulls" type religious house.

Of course the downside of posting here is that you get more honest comments.  At MTS you get all sorts of accolades and everyone exclaiming "Bravo! Bravo!" no matter what you post.  On the exchange, you get almost nothing.

Interesting.  But I would point out that your monastery has little in common with the layout and design of real medieval monasteries.
Typically, the cloister was the heart of the monastery, and other buildings surrounded the cloister.  Of these buildings, the monastic church was the most important.

And of course, there was no such thing as a pre-medieval monastery.  Monastacism was a distinctly medieval institutuion.

But interesting none-the-less, even if it is not historically accurate.  I have been wanting to include a religious cult somewhere in my world.  This cult grows life fruits and has a pond with death fish, and the monks eat ambrosia.  Needless to say, they are all quite very very old, but do not show their age, and seem to never die.

Sort of inspired by Robert Silverberg's "Book of Skulls."

Do we really need more houses?  I currently have 28 active residences with 90 sims.  The game already is at a crawl.  At one point I had over 200 sims, and the game became totally borked.  I would show up on a community lot, filled with sims, where maybe a half dozen were falling dead and taken away by the Grim Reaper.

If anything there are too many residences.  Even with my 28 active homes, a lot of homes remain empty.  It seems that the only advantage of more homes is more people for your sims to visit.  Other than that, they clutter up the neighborhood.  We actually need more community lots and activities.

Part of the problem is that boards like MTS keep on uploading more and more houses.  The last thing I need is another house.  Stop already!

I have played around with this for a while now.  It does seem to lead to an ever increasing population.  When I had over 200 sims, I had to cull the neighborhood manually, moving out a number of families.  I found at this point, sims would gather in places like the City Hall where the Grim Reaper would have a mass reaping.

This may be due in part to the SLAM lifespan package, which I installed (centi - Real Life).

As a result, I have turned off the automatic feature.  I do pollinate manually.  I check the population on a fairly regular basis and have been trying to maintain it at 90.  (This still may be on the high side, but it is a darn sight better than 200+!)  When the number of sims falls below this number, I manually pollinate a sim.

This might actually be a more simple formula for maintaining a population.  A sim dies -- another sim gets pollinated.  Since sims tend to have a fairly constant life span, it should keep things somewhat in proportion.  However, if one of my played sims gets preggers, I probably would let the system go wild to boost the population of similarly aged sims.  After the infant ages up, I would just let the population decline back to the target number.

I really don't have a problem with a company offerering optional features.  What I object to is the wait if those features actually are available.

I guess EA could have offered the program with all expansions already added in as part of the program.  Of course there would be a lot of bellyaching when they charged $500.00 for the program.  So would you rather pay for the program in bits and pieces choosing what options you really want, or would you rather pay a lot of money upfront and be forced to take options that you really don't want to pay for?

When I buy a car, I can buy the basic model, or I can purchase options like air conditioning, power steering and power brakes, a stereo system and so forth.  Of course, I do not expect to pay the same for a car without air conditioning as I would with a car with it.

So a lot of the whining about EA seems to be coming from people who want something for nothing.  Yes, I know gamers are fucking cheapass tightwads who don't want to pay for anything, and who whine incessantly if they get it for free.

I don't mind paying for it because I get more fun per dollar than just about anything else I do.  But if it is available now, why not let me purchase it now rather than dribbling it out in bits and pieces over the next few years?

Quite frankly, I want EA to make a lot of money off of this.  You see, if they make a lot of money, they will keep on making supplements and improvements to the game.  If they don't make money, the game dies.

So, the solution appears to be to delete all those nifty homes we have been adding to the neighborhood?

I have not tried that yet.  I did remove a lot of the custom hairs and a number of items I never really used.

But, with more homes, that means more sims to gum up the works.

A number of programs, including awesome mod and the NRass supercomputer allow us to nuke the homeless.  So the problem is that we are putting too many homes in our neighborhoods?  Time to call out the bulldozers!

I have the same problem.  I take Awesome Mod out and it goes away.

I like many of AM's features, but this bug makes it unusable.

Fortunately, the NRass supercomputer has many of the same features without the lag problem.

What we have is not true capitalism, but best described as Lemon Socialism.  Others might call it Crony Capitalism.

But anyone who thinks that true Capitalism is either possible or desirable is sorely mistaken.  The Efficient Market Theory is just as much an ideology as Marxism, and just as flawed.  After all, both Marxism and Social Darwinism (i.e. capitalism) are both 19th century ideologies.  While the 20th century was not the most pleasant period in human history, we did learn something during the past century.

The Efficient Market Theory, actually has very little empirical evidence to support it and it's conclusion that its results are desirable are based entirely upon questionable value judgments.  Generally, when people don't know how something works or what the results of a policy might be, they fall back on the Efficient Market Theory.

Actually, it's Leninism.  Marx actually calls for the withering away of the state.  But then, few who talk about Marxism have actually read Marx.  Otherwise, they would understand that the term "capitalism" was actually coined by Marx.

You see, according to Marxist theory, places like Russia and China were not suitable for Communism because they economy had not sufficiently developed.  Nations had to go through a capitalist period to develop the economic structures necessary for socialism.  In 1917, Russia was still a feudal society where serfs had (at least legally) just been liberated.  Lenin, and then Stalin, came up with the notion of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat where the government would create the infrastructure needed for Socialism.  Of course, this is diametrically oppposed to Marx's actual teachings, where the development of Socialism is the natural and INEVITABLE result of the historical dialectic.

I guess you have never dealt with corporate America?  Big businesses try to create cookie-cutter jobs so their management can micro-manage everything.  They create policies, procedures and practices which everyone is required to follow.  No one is allowed to exercise any independent judgement.  These policies, procedures and practices are developed by some nameless wonk at a corporate headquarters across the country.

Then they lose money hand over fist and expect the government to bail them out with taxpayer funds because they are "too big to fail." So I guess you have described capitalism as well.  In Capitalism, one man exploits another.  In Communism, it's the other way around.

It's not a big issue.  The NRaas computer confirmed there were no infants or toddlers and about 2 children and 2 teens.  There were about 75 young adults, adults and elders for each gender.  I did my usual, creating a couple of families -- one named Breeders -- with six children each, which solved the immediate problem.  I turned Indiestone back on to let it start repopulating the town, and will give the birth control mirror a try to see how well it pollinates the town.

I just posted this to let Pescado know that there may be one instance, at least, where the story driver may not be working.  Who knows, I may have borked the configuration of the Awesome mod.  After I fix the town, I will give it another go.  I guess that's what one does with betas.

Well, it has not bee working for me.  A quick check of my neighborhood shows no infants, no toddlers, no children and no teens.  I have a lot of oldsters dying off, however.  I became suspicious when on of the children in my family seemed to have no friends, was not going home with anyone and was not inviting any friends over.  This was after I put cribs all over town.

What I want from a story progression mode is a large enough demographic so all my sims have age appropriate sims to associate with.  Babies and toddlers are irrelevant because they are not going to interract with my babies and toddlers.  (Although it would be nice to have a toddler birthday party with other toddlers.)  However, my children should have other children to bring home, visit or go home with.  My teens and young adults  should have enough teens to invite to a party, hang around with and date.  Adults and elders don't seem to be a problem.
There should be a minimum of 6 children, 6 teens and 6 single young adults in the game at any given time.  The the population falls below this, a new family should be moved in, consisting of 2 parents, a baby, a toddler and, perhaps, a child or a teen.  If there is a shortage of young adults, a household of young adults, a la Friends, should be moved in to share a home.
When a teen ages to a young adult, he should be moved out of the home and, if available, to a home of his own.  When young adults age to adults,  they should be matched with and married to another not incompatible adult and be given a baby, a toddler, and perhaps a child.
Without a story progression mod, I do this manually (by adding more sims to the neighborhood) -- I jusit wish we had a real character/family editor