SleepyCat, you rock! I've downloaded as many of your lots as I can and I eagerly look for more in the future.  You build exactly the kinds of terrains and road configurations and beach-able areas I would if I were able to take the time out to learn how to do so.  I definitely visit your site regularly.  I've had so much fun building out and decorating your terrains for my test neighborhoods that I test my prototype skin and sim projects in.  Your terrains go really well with MTS2's Criquette's neighborhood decorations.  Especially the ones that need stretches of flat areas.  Everything is laid out so nicely that it looks so natural and easy and obvious to do things the way you do them.  Yet I am sure it was hard to get to the level you are and to make such nice neighborhoods with so many usable beach lots.  Keep up the good work.  I'm such a fan!  --Summer

Gorgeous! Maxis had some lame options, thanks for saving us from their mediocrity.  I had wondered too why you said to put the hair in the SavedSims folder. Thanks for explaining it.

Aha, love the dogs playing poker.  Such a classic.  We've got one of cats playing bridge.  It's in our basement next to the cat litterbox.

Mwahaha, I'm putting my Paris Hilton sim (one made by Will Stefan) into a trashed house.  She's being sentenced to community service and won't be allowed to leave until she WORKS to earn enough money for a fund to redo the house for a poor family in the neighborhood.   Wish Paris had to do this in real life.  It's actually a good experience for anybody to learn empathy.  When my daughter is a teen I'll be sure to do something similar.  I came up from a shabby neighborhood that my dad has fought to clean up and it was a blessing in disguise as far as instilling values goes.

Man, this trashed series is so nasty.  I couldn't bring myself to download the walls and floors.  I've lived in one handyman special too many and I'd get flashbacks!

Oh I forgot to mention that the appliances here look a LOT like the ones in my last house.  When we moved in we planned to fix up the kitchen and get new appliances.  But after my mother-in-law and I cleaned them all up, they worked so great I kept them.  My "trashed" dishwasher worked a hundred times better than the new one in my current house.  The new one is a prissy piece of computerized crap and chokes on anything but the expensive detergent tabs.  Half the time it decides "Oh, I don't feel like washing any dishes today" and won't dispense detergent anyway.  Once, I dared to run one load of dishes after another and the fancy pants computer in it blew up & we had to get the motherboard replaced.  If I could, I would go back to the old house and pull out that old beat up dishwasher and put it in my new house and throw the new dishwasher in the dump where it belongs!  Pretty is as pretty does.

The best Beyonce I've ever seen!

Clean Installer works with Vista?  I thought it didn't.  Did you have to do anything special to make Clean Installer work under Vista?

Wow, thanks to everyone especially BeosBoxBoy who contributed information and links to this thread.  

My overall impression walking away from what I gleaned from this thread is that the Sims3 is quite a rehash of a lot of elements that already exist in the various Sims console games or via hacks and cheat codes.  Even the whole thing about making fat or thin body shapes--I had a console version of Sims2 for X-box and well, it's been a long time since I played it, as I recall you could do a fat or thin morph and choose to shape legs and arms separately via sliders.  Wa frickin hoo.  I found the actual gameplay itself to be so beastly tedious without cheats or hacks that I soon couldn't give a darn if my character could morph into a perfect miniature of a real person==I wasn't going to waste any more precious minutes of my life endlessly picking up after sloppy roommates when I had to do that in real life anyway.  

And frankly, I don't want my sim to sit there and try to figure out how to make a quiche.  I can't even bring myself to do that in real life.   We have a joke in our family...every time the doorbell rings we say "dinner is served."  Again, as I recall, my console based Simmie made meals in a way similar to what is being promoted in Sims3.  I remember (the sim) having to learn recipes and deciding what went into the meal.  Like choose two meat icons and one veg to make a stew or something like that.  Hardly groundbreaking or exciting.  

I play the game basically to try out different personality types and living lives I'd never want to live out in real life.  I enjoy sending the Sims out to meet people and have social interactions....but not water balloon fights or pillow fights--well, maybe once in a decade...but every five minutes?  Get real...literally!  

Fortunately, if I don't want to attend to tedious needs fulfillment, I can use the cheat code to max everything and make a night on the town last as long as I want.  So...again, Sims3 isn't bringing anything really groundbreaking to the table in that regard...instead--it sounds like more control over the sim is being taken away from, not added to, the user experience

The Sims3 built in "modding tools" don't sound like a boon to me...more like one of those retractable leashes some people put on dogs to make the dog think--oh boy oh boy oh boy I'm running free...when at any time at a click of the switch the dog can find out exactly how not free it really is.  

Sure on the surface it sounds cool that even the most novice of novices can at long last feel the happy surge of power that comes from making a sim look exactly like Paris Hilton, to be set out into a pool for the ladder to be mysteriously removed later.  But...the flipside... simplifying the tools so everyone can use them, while it sounds upbeat and all-inclusive, is going to hamstring the more able modders who are able to do so much more than any novice could hope to even envision.  I mean part of the fun of Sims is to look at what people have learned to do and think "Oh my gosh, I didn't think a Sim or item could turn out so cool!"  Or "wow..he hacked THAT to do WHAT"  Me personally...I can edit skintones and some alphas and that's about it.  So I'm not affected at all by Sims3 changes.  But I'm going to be really ticked if my favorite meshers and object makers and modders find all they can give us are slight variation on the Maxis stuff instead their own unique style & skill we've gotten spoiled on.  Drag and drop just sounds ominous to me.  

What I'd rather see is a far smoother way to integrate the creating tools--be it something akin to BodyShop or whatever 3-D tools the mesh/object creators use...into a testing or preview environment that better displays your content the way you would actually see it in the game.  I think anyone who has ever proudly imported what they thought was their final draft of a project into the game only to see some hideous problems reveal themselves will agree with me on that.  

Honestly, all I want out of Simming is to take the beauty we can have access to now in Sims2, iron out all the freakish bugs and have the option to bypass glaringly immature and unrealistic behavior out of the social interactions that currently require hacks and mods to remove...that would be so excellent.  

I guess what I'm saying is that what I want out of Simming, you all have already given me.  Now I just want EA to do their part and make it all work together consistently, reliably, and without making people knock themselves out to ensure everything works with every conceivable combination of base game and ep.

p.s....the Sims3 sims remind me a little bit of bobble-heads for some reason.

Thanks.  Yes I have been reading about the new Imacs, too.  My husband is considering getting one.  

Video cards and Vista and Sims2 --was an absolute horror.  But I am using a HP Slimline so my choices in graphics cards were severly limited due to the compact tower size. There's also a problem with the fan so I was able to find only one off-brand graphics card that will run, and even then only if the tower is put on its side, and only after I went back to XP.

EDIT Update:  Well I ended up getting another HP, full size this time.  My husband needs to update and get a full desktop Mac rig more than I do--- for his job as well as for hobbies (the Macbook Air is technically property of his company and narrowly purposed).  So in the interest of continuing to be able to eat and keep a roof over our heads we gave up on idea of the more expensive Macs of any kind for me.  But thanks to all who helped me on this topic.  I hope it helps somebody able to get a Mac and is transitioning out of Windows.  Now I have to cope with Vista all over again.  Sigh...but if it doesn't work out again I can go back to XP.  I'm hoping since I last tried Vista that the updates make this ride smoother.  Well I can't complain too much...my new computer is well regarded and powerful and wasn't cheap exactly.  Just not pricewise in the same league as Macs.

Yes, I own XP and put it back on my new PC that had come with Vista.   Thanks for the reply.   I so very much don't understand what the new Intel Macs can and can't do in regard to playing the PC version of Sims2.  I'd only heard of things like BootCamp being used to run PC based programs.  So I went to their site and tried to find out if it could run Sims but Sims2 was never mentioned among the games discussed.    

I didn't know you could run Windows XP natively on the Mac.  I don't really want to have XP be my OS all the time.  I like the Mac OS that I've seen on and tried on the Macbook Air.  Plus the XP web experience is excruciating now because the anti-virus programs needed to protect a Microsoft pc really introduce all sorts of annoyances.  

The Mac I've been looking at has been the MacBook Pro, with the 15 inch screen.  

I don't know anything at all about the graphics card in the Mac laptops.  I have gone through so many trials with video cards in my current desktop PC that I have a decent feel for what the desktop video cards can do.  I don't know about this mobile version the Mac is running.  

Oh well I am Googling as much info as I can.  I've found some Mac forums where I'm slowly starting to find the info I need.  But I'd still appreciate hearing from anyone here who has already done what I'm contemplating doing.

Edit update:  I found a forum thread on a Mac Forum for newbies that explains how it all works, and the information about the different ways to run PC stuff on a Mac.  Looks very promising that I can make the switch pretty painlessly.  Now I just have to decide exactly which Mac to get.  Maybe the laptop is not the best choice.  I'm reading about the various issues like overheating and such--which is true on even my desktop.  Small form factor means cooling problems.  Blech.

I am interested in this topic as well.  After absolute disgust with Vista issues and other stuff my husband is considering switching us over to new Macs.  He got a Macbook Air for work and loves it.   Now he's looking to get Macs for our home offices that run XP in addition to Leopard or whatever the latest OS for Mac is called (sorry I'm pretty computer illiterate don't know all the names for Mac stuff especially, yet).  

Since I have considerable investment in all the PC versions of Sims program as well as the customization tools like SimPE and Clean Installer, I don't really and can't really afford to buy it all over again in Mac.  Can I run Sims2 pretty smoothly in the XP emulator on a Mac?  I'm sorry I don't know which Mac my husband is thinking of switching us to.  I will have to ask him and get back with that information.  Depending on what kind of insight I can get into taking Simming from PC to Mac, I may or may not change platforms.  I had gotten a new HP pc for my birthday last summer and it's been nothing but headaches ever since.  So even though it means we have to put off replacing our old worn out furniture, we may be ready to go Mac all the way.

Oh my gosh, you're the best!  I feel like it is Christmas all over again.  Thanks so much for uploading this.  I did notice the model that originally had the eyes I had asked about had now been redone with a transparency type of thing I had never run across before.  Very interesting but I am still wanting the eyes and now I have them!  These other colors are just as intense and a bit "rebellious" as the first blue ones I had fallen in love with.  Even the darkest brown hasn't lost that trait. (Sometimes the darkest browns in the intense eye sets still end up looking kind of soft Bambi).  My own eyes are dark brown and anything but Bambi-like so I appreciate how you preserved the intensity for this darkest brown eye.  

I'm also amazed you made three different styles.  You clearly have put a lot of thought into how the eyes should look and work in the game.  And you have the skill to make it happen--this is something I lack--I know what I want but have no idea in regards to eye creation on how to make it happen.  I am envious and appreciative!

I had uploaded the original one and she was very unique and striking.  But I have since had to reformat and now redownload all my previous favorites again....what a nice surprise to see this exciting character updated! I like the new version very much, the changes fit the personality she seems to project.  I had noticed before that her eyes were made by you.  They were incredible eyes.  Did you ever make a set of this style of eye? I love this eye and would love to see other colors of it.

Edited: I just noticed the new version has a different kind of eye--transparent.  Neat! Never saw that before.

I am not familiar with this lady, but looking at the pictures I would have to say that the Sim is even more beautiful and charming than the real model.  Regina, another masterpiece!

I had no interest in that mesh at all until I saw what you created here.  Amazing. Wish I could get my own hair colored like one of these styles.  But, been there, done that 20 years ago and my husband still won't let me live it down.  Sigh...

Oh she is beautiful.  I can't wait to see the gowns.  Jen's style is always interesting.