Walls and Floors

Walls, floors and terrains have to be usable in the game. Try to make something that your sims will want to decorate their house with and that you would see in a real life house.

Remember that if you're using a photo for your texture, you need to think about how zoomed-in the original photo is. If you take a photo of one square inch of a surface, and use it as a whole floor tile, it's going to look wrong, even if the photo is of a high enough resolution that the texture doesn't end up being blurry. This is particularly important for textures such as stone and concrete, where it's not always obvious by looking how big the area shown in a photo is.

If you want to upload a mural, it's usually better to do so as an object - a large, flat painting which can therefore match multiple wall styles.

Your screenshots are the basis on which people download your work. After working for hours on a wall set, take care to present it in a nice way, as well. Do not take screen shots from HomeCrafter. These give very little information to your downloaders and if the grid's still in place, it hides seams.

Make sure you take some good in game shots of your downloads spread across several tiles. People will want to see what the download looks like if they decorate a room with it and so that users can see how it looks when it's tiled. Terrain paint should be applied to several tiles as well. Add some plants or furniture as well, so downloaders can see the scale.

It's a good idea to include pictures of your content in a room or on a house/in a garden, since this helps sell your work to downloaders. However, make sure that you don't use so much furniture/windows/shrubbery that your content is obscured.

As a rule of thumb, your screenshots should include every wall spread over at least three continuous tiles, or 2x2 for floors, without any furniture obstructing that section of wall/floor. For terrain paints, the appropriate size of uninterrupted paint depends on the scale of your terrain paint.

• It is not mandatory that the whole object be in the thumbnail, but the thumbnail recolors should show a clear view of the recolors textures.

• Minimum Size: 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall is a good size for the smallest pic you would want to upload. You may have smaller pics for thumbnails and the like, but for your required screenshots, please go as big as you can!

• Maximum Size: MTS allows pictures up to 1280 pixels wide by 1024 pixels tall, and a file size limit of 250 kbs - so you can have nice, big, pretty pics. You may have to resize your pictures or apply compression to get them to fit within that limit.

Please don't just take a small pic and size it up in your graphics program to get bigger pics - this only makes the dimensions larger but doesn't add any detail and just gives you a blurry, pixellated larger pic, not a nice clear one.

At the same time, make sure you don't use too much light: if you put light-coloured item under a bright light, it can wash out and lose a lot of the detail of what you've made.

• Inline screenshots are images that appear in the text of the upload that load for the viewer along with the rest of the text. Inline screenshots can either be linked from the attached screenshots, or from an external hosting site like Tinypic, Photobucket, or Flickr.
• Attached screenshots are screenshots that have been attached to the upload using the "manage attachments" feature on MTS. They display as small thumbnails until clicked on.

Please do not post more than 4 inline screenshots. Having a lot of images that have to load on the thread makes browsing downloads very slow and can make the thread jump around as they keep loading.

You may host your inline screenshots elsewhere like Photobucket, Tinypic, or Flickr - however, these screenshots hosted elsewhere must be additional "bonus" screenshots. All of the screenshots we actually require for your upload need to be attached to the thread itself. If your Photobucket account runs out of bandwidth or you delete the pics, people still need to be able to get the required screenshots on your thread.

You can attach up to 12 screenshots to the thread itself, with the 4 additional inline screenshots hosted elsewhere for a total of 16 possible screenshots. This should be plenty to show what you've made, even for fairly large sets. Remember, you can always collage several different images together into one image if you have a bunch of stuff to show off, or want to show multiple angles of an item.

Take some time to just play around with the camera. It can take a while to get used to the camera controls, and even once you are experienced in their use, it may be challenging to get the shot you want with the constraints on the controls.

If you haven't taken many sim pictures before, here is a list of camera controls:

• TAB : Puts the game into Cameraman mode, allowing better and more control of the camera, and removing the blue user interface. Make sure you are in live mode before going into Cameraman mode or you will see grid lines on the ground and floating where floor tiles may be placed. TS3 Note: You will only be able to go into cameraman mode once per load if you are in buy/build mode (without a family moved in). You can either exit to the neighborhood and return to take more pictures, or instead just move a family in for taking your pics.

• W and S : W moves the camera forward. S moves it backward.

• A and D : A moves the camera left. D moves it right.

• Q and E : Q lowers the camera. E raises it.

• + and - : Zooms in and out.

Windowed Mode:

• TS2: In order to take your pictures using the methods described here, you will need your game running in a window, so you can easily switch to other applications without causing major instability and lag. Instructions on setting up Windowed Mode for Sims 2 may be found here: Game Help:Windowed Mode. Windowed mode should be perfectly safe - in fact, some users actually report better game performance when running in a window. Your mileage may vary.

• TS3: In Sims 3, you can use windowed mode by simply choosing it in your game's options. Full instructions can be found in Game Help:TS3 Windowed Mode. Windowed mode will allow you to use Print Screen or FRAPS or whatever screenshotting program you desire, without getting dark pictures. If you choose to NOT use windowed mode for TS3, you must use the C key to take pictures using the in-game camera - taking pictures fullscreened in TS3 without using the C key will result in icky dark screenshots.

C Key vs. Print Screen:

• TS2: In order to take nice big pics, you should not use the game's screenshot system, using the C key or the camera button on the game's controls to take your pictures. Even on the highest picture settings, pictures will still be small, with a very high level of JPEG compression, making them blurry and crunchy. Instead, use Print Screen or a screenshot program.

• TS3: The C key camera is much improved in TS3, making it possible to use to take pictures for upload and still have nice big, pretty pictures. You can still use a screenshot program or print screen if you desire, but you will need to run your game in Windowed Mode (see above) to keep your pictures from getting dark.

Using Print Screen: If you have enough RAM to run Photoshop or another graphics editing program at the same time as TS2/TS3, you may want to take screenshots yourself, without the use of a program to store them for you.

To do that, simply press the Print Screen or PrntScn key on your keyboard - it's usually off toward the right, over the arrow keys, above Insert and Delete. This will copy your current screen to your Windows clipboard, as if you had selected and copied it as an image.

Then open any graphics editing program, create a new document the size of your monitor's resolution, and paste into that document. Your screenshot should appear in the document.

Screenshot Programs:

There are many programs available, free and pay, that will take screenshots for you by using a hotkey, and save them to a folder - just like The Sims 2 with the C key, but with options for much better quality settings.

• Fraps
• Gadwin
• Irfanview

A quick Google search for 'free screenshot program' will also bring up many other options, which may have other features that are of interest to you.

Optimizing, Editing, and Compressing Images:

Many simmers struggle with getting their images to be clear, crisp and under the 250kb file size while keeping the image size larger than 800px by 600px. After getting your images from the in game camera or using a print screen program you will need to resize them and compress them into a jpeg image. Many graphics programs have a built in optimizing feature. Here are a few common ones:

• Photoshop *Pay
• Gimp *Free
• IrfanView *Free
• Paint.net *Free

If you are doing a huge set, you can always break the set up into pieces, posting more screenshots along with the downloads as comments in the thread, as is done here and here. To do that, create a new thread in the Creator Issues Forum and arrange your thread there, using the first post as an introduction, and attach your uploads and images to subsequent posts in the thread. When you're done, PM a moderator to have it moved to the upload queue. For more information, read the message that displays when you go to post in Creator Issues.

If you are uploading a set of different colours or designs, please name the files, and add labels to the screenshots, or otherwise make it clear which file is which. This is especially important if your set is big or contains different designs, as downloaders may not want everything in the set.

Upload .package files - do not make sims2packs. It's not necessary, and creates extra steps for people to install them - it is very easy to go get the package files from your downloads folder. Also please give the filenames recognizable names. (See message #6 in this tutorial for exact instructions)

Let your downloaders know where they can find your new walls and floors. Please give the location of your walls and floors, as well as the price.

For instructions on compressing your files into an archive, please see: Creator Guidelines: Creating Archive Files.

Please do not include multiple archives with the same contents - that is, please don't put your files in both a .zip as well as a .rar because some people only want .zip files - please just choose one.

Also, please do not double-compress your files... a .rar file inside another .rar file (or any other archive inside another) doesn't compress it anymore, and it makes it so we can't see the contents without downloading, and also just makes an extra step for the people downloading.