This mod will change the age of elder NPCs, the nanny, repairmen, and all the others, to adults.  The Butler and Headmaster that could be elder or adult will only be adult.

By itself, all the NPCs effected will wear casual clothing.  I've created default replacements for the nanny, both elder and adult (tweed jacket and slacks), the repairman for elder and adult (actually the elders red flannel shirt and jeans flagged for adults), and the maid (uses housekeeping uniforms from Bon Voyage).

Download at Simbology.  Registration not required.  Be sure to check out BoilingOil's mods, in addition to TwoJeff's work.

Apartment Life came with a full sized Murphy Bed, but for some of the smaller apartments a single sized Murphy Bed would really be useful.  Does anyone know where one can be found?

From my post on Simbology:

Requires Windows, any variation.

This utility is designed to make it easy for you to play different themes in The Sims 2.  It requires you to have at least two separate The Sims 2 folders, one for your normal game, and one named The Sims 2.<theme> for your themed game.  The same with any script files for modular stairs or fireplaces or anything else in the Script folder that you want to separated by theme.  If your themed games aren't in separate folders now, the most time consuming part of using this will be to set up your themed folders with the appropriate custom content.

Why should you use this?  By using themed folders, you can reduce the amount of CC in your Downloads folder.  That custom car is out of place in your Victorian themed neighborhood, just as the carriage is out of place in the modern neighborhood.  Themed folders will make sure you don't have any incongruities like this.  You'll find your themed custom clothes and hairstyles much faster not having to wade through all the other themes you have.

Why not just have separate Downloads folders to separate the themes?  Swapping Downloads folders in and out will increase the chances of corrupting the group.cache.  We all know how easy it is to delete that when we have problems.  You end up with all of your themed collection files in every game.  I don't know what would happen if you use one for a theme that you aren't playing.  I don't want to find out.  I don't care to find out what happens in the Thumbnails either.  There's also custom Paintings and SavedSims and PackagedLots.  Basically every folder could have things you want for a particular theme.

OK, so how do you use this thing I say you can't live without?  After setting up your folders and a couple of things I give you step by step instructions to do, all you do is click on an icon, type "play <theme>" and your Victorian themed game starts up.  Or your Medieval game.  Or your Fantasy game.  <theme> is whatever stylized game you play.

The folders would be something like this:

EA Games/The Sims 2  This one is the plain ordinary, no themed set
EA Games/The Sims 2.victorian  This one is, duh, the Victorian themed set.

Run my program "play victorian" and the game starts:
EA Games/The Sims 2.original  This one is the plain ordinary, no themed set
EA Games/The Sims 2  This one is the Victorian themed set.

You quit the game:
EA Games/The Sims 2  This one is the plain ordinary, no themed set
EA Games/The Sims 2.victorian  This one is, duh, the Victorian themed set.

One of the things I like about Freetime is the hobbies.  One of the things I hate about the hobbies are the neon colors for the completed car.  The white, silver, and black colors are okay.  The yellow is great.  I remember growing up seeing plenty of yellow muscle cars with black pin or racing stripes.  I could have lived with the orange.  But the blue and green neon-like colors had to go.


Recolors now available at Ancient Castaways

Before Walt came along and turned over the apple cart, I had a thread advertising my website and updates I've been making.  Some items, mainly updated versions of other peoples mods, were posted here also.  With the coming of Walt, I deleted all my downloads here, but I thought I left site advertising thread up.  Is it okay if I start a thread again, or would that be a no-no for me?

Monique's original clock updated for Apartment Life.  Should work fine with previous versions also, but untested.

From Monique's thread on MTS2:
Download available on my site.

Just a few possible things to add...

1.  A teen attending college from home may be awarded a number of scholarships before starting college, but when college starts, none of those scholarships are added to household funds.  There's enough money cheats out there to manually add them, but it would be nice to have it automatic.

2.  After the YA finishes college, since he or she is already in a valid neighborhood, cancel out the taxi coming and putting the new adult in the sim bin.

3.  With the YA attending college from home, there is no way now to get to campus community lots and meet other YAs.  True, the YA walkby mod helps, but if you are at home, you're probably doing other things than watching for the YA shuffle on sims walking by.  And if you have TJ's mod to get rid of it, you take your chances trying to find a dormie.  

What about adding the University neighborhoods and communilty lots to the Go Somewhere option with the taxi, owned cars, etc?  (Give me the BHAV and I'll do it instead.  I can't find it.  lol)

4.  It would really be nice if at the end of the sophomore semester, students have the option to move on to campus.  It would fit right in with the community college theme that many have commented on.  It could also make the university community lot visitations less important

Pushes the size of families beyond the 8 sim or 6 pet or 10 combined sims and pet limit.  The only limit will be your nerves   .

Even if the 8 sim, 6 pet, or 10 combined limit will be exceeded:

• Move In is enabled
• Marriage is enabled
• Pregnancy is enabled
• Adoption is enabled
• Pet adoption is enabled

For both Move In and Marriage, the pop up will still appear saying you can't exceed the limit, then the game continues and the family has a new member!

This mod will conflict with twojeffs Preg For All Genders as he originally wrote it. With Jeff's permission I made a small change to his mod to allow it to work with my Lot Full Of Sims mod. Preg For ALL Genders needs to load after Lot Full Of Sims. The way I've got them named, if they are in the same folder this will happen automatically.

Developed for AL.  Confirmed use in SSNS, BV and FT.  May even be suitable for earlier EPs.

Edit 10/10/08

Merge large families from the neighborhood screen

Many thanks to Azureale for digging into this.

Download removed.  Visit my site for download.

Simmodder posted these mods on MTS2 in May and then hadn't been back there since. I've updated these for Apartment Life.

His cd_jobs mod was actually working fine in Free Time and probably does in Apartment Life, but it was based on Bon Voyage code and missed the updates in the later EPs. I've updated it to use the Apartment Life code.

The introduction of apartments broke cd_higher_bills. I've fixed that, and also increased the bills for residential lots. Even with his higher bills my sims were accumulating too much cash too fast. I've set the bill rate to 30% the lot value plus 15% of the objects or furnishings value. Simmodder had this set at 15% + 15%, game default is 1% + 1%. This can be adjusted by editing the BCON. The various BCON entries are labeled so you can find it easy if you with to change it for your play style.

I used cd_business_levels for a while but took it out because I felt while the lower 5 levels were a little harder, the upper 5 levels became way too easy. Anyone I had open a business quickly became so flush in money I couldn't spend it fast enough. So while updating the other two, I finally dug into this one to see what I could do with it. I've set all of the requirements for increasing business rank to 1.5 times the EA values. I also decreased the cash value of the business awards to 10% of what EA had. First level is an award of 100 simoleans and the top is now 5,000 simoleans. Again, these values are labeled and editable via the BCON.

Downloads available on my site.

EA provided us with 2 cheats to use dealing with those apartment lots of EP8.  Unfortunately, they didn't bother to provide documentation for them.  So after playing the game for a while not knowing why one worked when another didn't, I stumbled over the answer.

In an earlier post, I parrotted a post I read on another site saying that aptBaseSpecificToolsDisabled was use in the main neighborhood, and aptSublotSpecificToolsDisabled was used in the suburban neighborhoods.  That was completely wrong.  My bad for not testing those statements first.

It appears aptBaseSpecificToolsDisabled can only be used on unoccupied apartment lots.  Anything you do with this cheat will be a permanent change to the lot and will effect all apartment units.

aptSublotSpecificToolsDisabled is used on occupied apartments lots.  Changes are maintained only for the household that was in play when the cheat was used. When the family moves out, the changes are lost.

I was playing a CAS sim, Hugh, in the trailor park after installing Gunmod's lighting mod.  Night came upon my sim while he was outside smoozing with Jessica Peterson, and it was completely pitch black.  EA built the lot with no external lighting at all.  So I use the Sublot cheat and place some street lights along the street and the back of the lot.  I moved the bathroom furnishings around in Hugh's trailor also to make it easier for gameplay with the view I like to play from.

Later I played Jessica.  The very first thing I noticed was the lights I'd just placed were missing.  I exited and went back to Hugh and saw the lights were still there.  That's when I realized the meanings.

Conclusion:
Apartment Base - the entire apartment lot.
Apartment Sublot - unique view of the apartment lot when playing a given household

So I load up Hugh's possessions and move him out.  Same for Jessica.  Now with the unoccupied apartment lot, I placed the lights as I needed them.  Moved Hugh and Jessica back in to separate trailors.  Hugh went back into the one he had before, and Jessica into a different one with more room. Remember I rearranged Hugh's bathroom?  It was back to the original arrangement.  But the lights were there.  For both playables.

Conclusion:  Changes in Sublot are reset when the family moves out of the lot.

I've seen a whole lot of users asking for help, and as the game of 20 questions is ongoing, the use of SeeThem2 has come out of the closet, so to speak.

SeeThem2 does two things for a player:

• It adds the censor.package to Downloads
• It creates or overwrites Config\userStartup.cheat with the following entries:

• boolprop snapObjectsToGrid false
• boolprop testingCheatsEnabled true
• boolprop allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation true

[/LIST]
What this means to you the player:
1.  Anything you had in your userStartup.cheat file is lost.  Overwritten.  Gone.  Deleted.

2.  snapObjectsToGrid - This is a very useful cheat for decorating houses or setting up photo opportunities.  But when it is set while in Build Mode you cannot place doors or windows.  It will cause problems trying to place the Very Mysterious Shelving from Apartment Life.

3.  testingCheatsEnable - There is no harm at all in leaving this on all the time.  I've got it in my userStartup.cheat file.  I play with mine on all the time.  Many people I know have it on all the time.  

Where it "messes up my game" comes from is it will generate errors IF you have broken mods/hacks.  This is a good thing.  It tells you that you have a mod or hack that does not work right.  You have an opportunity to fix your game.

Why play with it on?  Besides finding broken mods, you can point and click on any motive/need, on skill bars, on personality bars, and on interest bars and drag them to where you want them.  You can do the same with the Short Term and Long Term relationships.

4.  allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation - I've got this on in my userStartup.cheat file also.  There's no harm with this one on all the time in any Mode.  Leave it on, go to place an object, and before the object is placed, use the < or > keys to rotate the object the way you want it.  EDIT:  It's been reported this cheat interferes with the placement or use of the new large aquarium that comes with Apartment Life.

5.  The last thing it does is put the censor.package into your game.  But it's a censor.package created for NL by Quaxi.  Quaxi's since created a version for OFB and for Pets which is compatible with every EP after Pets.  I prefer using the most current version myself.  I mean, if the old version was good, why are there newer versions?  There's a link on the FAQ page at Ambertation to the 3 different versions he wrote, along with a tutorial for SimPE to enable or disable the blur.

It's your decision on whether you use SeeThem2 or not.  Hopefully this has given you a little information that will help you decide if it's right for you or not.

This is a small hack that enables the witch clothing to be worn as formal and outerwear.

Download removed.  Visit my site to the download.

Updated to work with Apartment Life

Moniques orginal mod is on MTS2 and works fine with EPs up to Free Time.  Apartment Life added the new living location, Apartments which needed to be added to this mod.

UPDATED: v3.B
- v3.0 updated for Apartment Life.  v1.0, 2.0, and 3.A are available on MTS2 and have not been converted for AL.

All 3 file in the .rar are needed.

Download available on my site.

Since finding LotAdjustor on MTS2, I've been spending a lot of time building with it to eliminate those annoying 2 square boundaries around the outside of my lots.  Most of what I've done so far has been 1x2 lots, which has been a challenge for lighting (Gunmod's lighting mod is in my game).



These two 2x2 lots are meant to be placed side by side.  While both are pictured with Windkeeper's tall and privacy OpenMe windows (MTS2, TSR), the left unit is packaged with Maxis windows and the right unit has no doors or windows at all for your finishing pleasure :blob6:



The left 4 bedroom unit is priced at 40K and includes a furnished kitchen, dining room and 1 1/2 baths.  The master suite encompasses the entire 3rd floor.

The shell on the right is priced at 17K, but by the time it's made usable, it's out of the start up price range.

Alterations are possible everywhere EXCEPT for the two squares on the side where the building are joined.

CC was limited to a recolor of the Brickfest wall covering (used in the area of the front door) and a mcTrick floor (mcTrick's Place shut down some time ago).



Free Time is required.