Moving house and storytelling

[cwykes]

When your sims move house, is there any easy way to have them take their photo album with them?  If not, is it hackable? 

If you move them within the neighbourhood, the photos stay with the old house.  You can fish all them out of the massive 'hood folder one by one while playing the new house, but not with text attached. (which baby was that being born?)  If you are foolhardy enough to move them between 'hoods, you can't get to the photo's in game at all.  I was told a way to get them across, but it was really painful!  You had to take lots of photos in the new house, to create the photo numbers and then substitute the real photos on top of these dummies.  Again no text!

 

[BlueSoup]

You know all I know about the storytelling process, and I've not heard of any hacks for it.  You could write the stories before you move, though.

[idtaminger]

You could just print screen everything so you can have a copy of the text. And you can keep the game open in a window so you don't have to minimize all the time.

[jennydeenyc]

Ok, I'll admit I can't recall the finer points of this, but bear with me. There's some  tutorials on the Exchange about making multiple chapter stories, which (in part) involves creating a "dummy" house, then renaming the thumbnail & screenshot files from your original house to correspond to the new one, placing them in it's photo album. There is a portion of all thumbnail & screenshot filenames that matches the number on the XML file for any house's story. The file gets generated in a new house by entering Story mode from that house. Once you determine the numbers belonging to both your original & new houses, it's just a matter of renaming the files to the new lot's number, and that should put them in the photo album for you, I believe. Hope this helps!

[Maria]

I don't suppose there are any programs that convert the in-game or sims2.com pages into a journal that's easily viewable and changeable offline?  It's so nice to be able to look at my old Sims1 journals, and so frustrating to know that the only way I can see the Sims2 journals is to open the game or go online.

[SaraMK]

I don't suppose there are any programs that convert the in-game or sims2.com pages into a journal that's easily viewable and changeable offline?  It's so nice to be able to look at my old Sims1 journals, and so frustrating to know that the only way I can see the Sims2 journals is to open the game or go online.

Get Sims2Blog.

The program will export your photo album into an HTML file. Pictures are in order, and their text is included underneath. If you are forced to re-do an album, at least this lets you copy and paste. But it's most useful for making your albums ready for upload to a website. It can also help if you don't know which photos  out of that huge Storytelling folder you are actually using in an album -- just create the HTML pages and then use Internet Explorer's save function to save the entire page to a new folder, causing the pictures used in the album to be copied over to the new folder.

You can get it from MTS2 under Modding Tools. Make sure you get version 1.1.

[baratron]

cwykes, when I move a whole family, their photos and webentry.xml file go with them. I just moved my Freezepop sims to a bigger house yesterday, and took some photos in the new house - they start snapshot_f063546e_, just as before. Do you mean if you move a sim out of an existing family to set up a new household? 

How I handle multiple chapters of a story is to create subfolders within Storytelling, and move the old photos and webentry.xml file for that family into them. So I have Friends family - Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc, each in a subfolder. You can't access these from within the game, but that doesn't bother me.

You can identify the order of photos using Windows Explorer. Instead of the default View --> Arrange Icons by --> Name (which, even if Sims 2 didn't pick bizarre arbitrary names, wouldn't work anyway because the filenames are too long for Windows to sort them properly), choose View --> Arrange Icons by --> Modified. This sorts the photos according to the date stamp on them.

The only time I get really annoyed is moving sims back from University - because you have to graduate sims one at a time, this destroys the existing household. So you end up with sim family numbers that no longer exist. Those photos remain undeleted in the N00whatever/Storytelling folder, but the game chooses to ignore them. If I still want to write a story using those photos, I, um, open the xml file in Wordpad and hand-hack it. Sorry . 

[Torkle]

The standard windows command prompt will allow you to do some mass file renaming operations, like:

Code:

rename *alpha.jpg *beta.jpg

which would rename 1alpha.jpg, 2alpha.jpg, and 3alpha.jpg to 1beta.jpg, 2beta.jpg, and 3beta.jpg.

Would this trick reduce the tedium of file renaming for you guys?

[Maria]

Thanks for suggesting Sims2Blog, Sara.  It sounds like exactly what I'd been hoping existed somewhere.

[cwykes]

Thanks for all these great suggestions - I have to print them all out, visit MTS2, make a backup and go try them out.

cwykes, when I move a whole family, their photos and webentry.xml file go with them. I just moved my Freezepop sims to a bigger house yesterday, and took some photos in the new house - they start snapshot_f063546e_, just as before. Do you mean if you move a sim out of an existing family to set up a new household? 

I meant both, but obviously I'm either confused (as usual) or it doesn't work that way without Uni.
Also when you package a file, it would be nice to have the album in or with the package.  Feels odd writing that as mostly we want lot packager to leave things out not add more...!  If you want to transfer a family to another hood and  have to mostly eradicate their memories for safety, taking the album would give a back story.  Like for the new shared Simpotence hood

[cwykes]

Just checking...  please correct me....
In the base game you have 1 storytelling folder for all the hoods, but from Uni - you have 1 in each hood. (Idly wondering how the EP handles the change...)
From Uni, the album goes with the family when they move within a hood, not sure that happened before.
Otherwise you get one album per house and have to cobble things together to get a coherent album.
When you move between hoods, your family gets a new house number so it doesn't relate to the old album.

In the story telling folder are
1. snapshots jpg  - the photo's you take in game
2. thumbnails jpg - another version of the photos -(what are these for?)
3. webentry xml - one for each house (NOT for each family)  containts llinks to photos in the album whichever house they belong to plus text for each photo.

There is a portion of all thumbnail & screenshot filenames that matches the number on the XML file for any house's story.
The file gets generated in a new house by entering Story mode from that house. Once you determine the numbers belonging to both your original & new houses, it's just a matter of renaming the files to the new lot's number, and that should put them in the photo album for you, I believe. Hope this helps!

And use Torkle's tip for the renumbering.  Yup that's clever - Then you add the text as best you can from the old xml file.

Then I started wondering about working with the xml files.  Can you just rename the old xml file to the new house number?  Will it still link to the old unrenumbered photos, but add new ones with the new number?  Apart from moves with lost photo's this would let your newly adult sims take a copy of their family album to the new house and prune it down to their own baby photos and "this is my mum" etc....  It would also let us send an album to the simpotence hood.   Guess I can try it and see.....

Can you combine 2 xml files?  (not sure I want to go there... but if you marry 2 sims with a big album each...)  I guess I'd have to learn to edit xml - it looks logical and I can do Excel VB macros.  If Baratron says you can open it in word pad and hack it, I can give it a go in my "Testing" hood.   

Thanks for telling us about Sims2blog SaraMK  - might be nice to have stories outside the game..  I hope I never need DuhJfed's guide to fixing corrupted numbers!

How does stuff make it into the War room?  This info is good for it surely...  Can we nominate/request? 

Really it ought to be handled better in game - "losing" your album when you grow up or marry and move out aftects every simmer.   Maxis added inventories to NL - maybe portable albums could be next - are maxis taking requests?  Have they any idea how big some of our storytelling folders are?

[baratron]

Just checking...  please correct me....
In the base game you have 1 storytelling folder for all the hoods, but from Uni - you have 1 in each hood. (Idly wondering how the EP handles the change...)
From Uni, the album goes with the family when they move within a hood, not sure that happened before.

Can't answer this - I don't remember. I know it changed again with Nightlife. Now the central Storytelling folder is used only for taking photographs when on Community lots. If you go back to your sims' house properly and save the game, then it is supposed to copy the photos from EA GAMES/Storytelling to EA GAMES/Neighbourhoods/N00whatever/Storytelling - but I've found in practice this only works if you've taken less than ~20 photos. More than that, and they don't copy. You have to copy or move them manually.

Then I started wondering about working with the xml files.  Can you just rename the old xml file to the new house number?  Will it still link to the old unrenumbered photos, but add new ones with the new number?  Apart from moves with lost photo's this would let your newly adult sims take a copy of their family album to the new house and prune it down to their own baby photos and "this is my mum" etc....  It would also let us send an album to the simpotence hood.   Guess I can try it and see.....

Yep . That's how I eventually got the game to deal with my old photos taken at Uni with a family household ID that didn't exist anymore. They still don't show up in the game, but they're present in the album when it's viewed externally.

If the old household does still exist in the game, the photos will even show up in the album.

Can you combine 2 xml files?  (not sure I want to go there... but if you marry 2 sims with a big album each...)  I guess I'd have to learn to edit xml - it looks logical and I can do Excel VB macros.  If Baratron says you can open it in word pad and hack it, I can give it a go in my "Testing" hood.  

XML is just slightly more advanced HTML. As long as you leave the "top" and "tail" of the file intact so it's compatible with the stylesheet, you can add or remove entries at will. The format becomes obvious.

[cwykes]

Thanks, I'll go away and try a few things out.

I got Sims2blog yesterday and it's great by the way!

[RainbowTigress]

It doesn't seem to work with NL though.