I have an idea! Maybe you may take some placeholder pictures in your game and use an image editor to copy and paste your old pictures onto the new pictures, if this troubleshotting still persists.

It's worth a try.

If the problem's only with my particular game, it's an annoyance, not a problem, since I can (laboriously) browse the pictures with the Storyteller I use to edit stories outside the game and insert them in the right places. Much simpler to do that than to figure out what on earth you just suggested - my image editor skills are sketchy at best.

Well, I meant to say that you could take 10 pictures, for example, and leave that in your storytelling folder. Then, open up MS Paint or some other image editor and open one of your valid storytelling pictures and one of your storytelling pictures that doesn't show up in the game. Copy the picture that doesn't work in your game onto your clipboard, and paste it onto the picture file that does work in your game. Save the game. Now, you have the old picture on a valid picture file. Now, you may delete the pictures that don't work in your game, and keep the pictures that do work in your game. Go inside the game and insert the pictures in your storytelling folder.

I think it's easier to show it to you than describe. Pictures can speak a thousand words.

Not to me.

It would be easiest to copy the originals of these pictures, which are still in AnyGameStarter, over to my Storytelling folder. I do not need advice on how to fix this for myself; I need to make sure that it's only my problem and not one that arises for other users of the neighborhood. If you can't help me there, don't worry about it.

In my full game of Widespot, Skye has met Dora Ottomas. She sat down to play chess with him at the General Store and told him he was cute. When he got up to leave he checked her out. Two bolts!

Good for Dora!
Played the Harts, and they got to playtest a hotel downtown I built. Candy and Valentine were most obliging, as were Rich Mann and Heather Huffington, their respective dates. (It works, but the downtownies don't show up.)
Everyone's sleeping with everyone still. Candy tried flirting with Hamilton in front of Daytona, he declined. In spite of her romance perks, they have negative chemistry. Oh, well. Candy is very non-discriminatory about who she romances. Goldie spent most of the time she wasn't at school throwing up, in fact, she lost her homework getting off the bus because she was in such a hurry to bolt for the toilet. Darla, Penny and Rhett's daughter, grew up, she's a Gemeni, with 2/9/8/4/3, which means she is one point meaner than Venice Beach. I suspect the half-sisters will be either best buds or worst enemies. She looks like Rhett in the extreme, no doubt about who her daddy is. She has black hair and I think green eyes. Rich, Candy's son by Junior, also grew up. He looks a lot like Darla, but is a blond. I think he also has green eyes. I took pics but still can't tell. I never can tell except maybe brown/not brown. He's a Cancer, 5/5/7/5/7. Somehow I think he's not going to have an easy time getting along with Cousins Venice and Darla. Maybe Aunt Grace or Uncle Gwynn Donald (Mary's twins) will be a nice child, otherwise, elementary school will be miserable for him. Candy hasn't realized it yet, but Big Rich left her an extra little present after their date: Little Rich is going to get to be a big brother and an uncle in a few days.
Goldie never got any scholarships, but she's made it to the age of college, so she gave Scot a goodbye kiss and joined Ginny in the student bin to wait for the end of the rotation.
I've put in some shops downtown, and Junior, I guess, will get to be the proud owner of a boutique (I think it's by Phaenoh).

Rich III is blond?!? Do you have changed genetic values in your game, Sunbee? The Hart kids all have green eye recessives, but they should have black genes in both hair slots.

Yes, I do. TheSilverLining and Mootilda's mods to make hair and eyes respectively of equal genetic values are must-haves for me. I played an Apocalypse once, 7 generations, started with a black haired founder, every spouse was blond or red-haired, and every single kid had black hair. I don't know why it is, but it seems like I inevitably end up with all-black-haired-blue-eyed sims without hacks, even though brown is supposed to be equal. Just one of those things.

Peni, congratulations for releasing your hood! Sadly I don't have time to play nowadays, otherwise I'd check it out. Maybe someday

I've been working on another hood, but then I got the urge to play Widespot.
I'm currently on my 2nd rotation. Candy, like Mary, is having a rough pregnancy. I spent the whole day waiting for the baby to born, but I guess it'll happen the next time I play at the Manns. I like Candy very much. She fears having a baby and Junior wants one, so hopefully his want will be fufilled when she gives birth. I'd die if the kid is Rich's. Lana wants a grandchild. I can picture her being a wonderful grandmother.

Why would you delete Widespot, especially after going through all that trouble to give them makeovers?

Guess what I'm downloading, guys.

I've been pretty tame with my hoods lately, so nothing that bad should happen.

Why doesn't Woody Weiss have eyes?

What? My Woody has eyes. He has eyes for anyone female, teen or older.

More seriously, do you have the teen alien eye fix? I want to say it's included in Pescado's creaturefixes . . . not entirely sure. I know I got a bad cc default alien eye replacement recently (an old one) that didn't include a teen eye, so that could be it, too, if you're using a default alien eye replacement. If he's got brown eyes then one or the other's your most likely problem.

Looking forward to hearing what you make of it all.

I, um, got something bad in the elder tops, darn it. Lana was looking for a nice new outfit and boom! This application has crashed. Grrr. It's probably the one I put in just for Lana, knowing my luck. She needs something in cashmere for winter, you know?
Edit: Nothing wrong with the elder tops. Just some idiot forgot her new computer has the fan vent on top and put papers there, then put in a bunch of cc that the poor video card had to generate icons for, and apparently the poor thing overheated.

Woody should have all black alien eyes, and nobody reported a problem in play test, so it is likely to be something connected with the teen alien eye and your particular configuration.

You're going to go out of your way to clean up the mess I made just to screw with my head, aren't you? Good luck with that...Bwee-heee-hee.

Oh, I hope the problem isn't her cashmere top, Sunbee! It's so hard to find nice things for elders, and there's no reason Lana should have to settle for less than the best.

And I found out I misunderstood something in the submission procedures again, but I'm working on it. I really do suck at queries and proposals.

Oh, only some of the messes. Like Sandy's pregnancy with Rhett's kid? Took care of that, mostly out of need rather than desire. There's five families in this entire town, and I'd like to have a little genetic variation in the future. Just a little. Though I haven't done much else, yet. Mostly I've been just doing cosmetic stuff (not changing the facial structure, of course. Just hair and things like that).

For instance, Penny Weiss.



Don't know why I gave her that makeup. I thought it looked strangely cute on her. If her kid is a girl, I think I'll call her Edel. Yeah.

So you changed it so Hamilton is the father? Well, that makes Sandy's choices simpler. On the upside, if Hamilton catches her it'll make his choices harder. Yeah, the rising generation of Widespot is a bit of a genetic bottleneck, but I figured people were mostly going to add CAS sims, townies, or family bin families to fix that. If I can make a subhood version it won't be an issue at all (really need to learn to understand the pregnancy controller and start experimenting with that). All the teachers in the Widespot Conformist School District are going to hate me for the wave of droopy-nosed troutmouthed kids they're about to have trouble telling apart, though.

That makeup is one way to make her a noseless alien, I reckon. I could have kept rolling the pacifier in CAS till I got a noseless one, but I loved Penny and Woody as soon as I saw them.

No, I just nuked the pregnancy altogether. I might add some CAS. Family Bin sims are a no-go, since I made the stealth hoods empty. Townies are slowly spawning. I'll probably add on a University, as well.

Junior Mann got his store, and aside from the Witch Doctor showing up, he and his folks had a good time running it. Except most of the new downtownies aren't sure they actually like Rich, for some strange reason. He really wanted to do sales, but kept getting negative reactions.
Junior, back home, ran off to work and got demoted, walked back to work and got promoted back. (Twice, because of the crash, and I even picked the other answer on the chance card the second time!) Boy has no luck. Lana got her new duds and made over Daytona and Candy, and dated Rich. Candy studiously ignored Rich, preferring instead to scope out the Mann house. I was very proud of her for not blowing up Rich and Lana's marriage. I suppose with Junior's son and Rich's kid on the way she's hoping to move in some day. Junior and Mary finally got chimes after four tries, with some help from a hack. Well, the Manns can afford fertility treatments, but you know by this point Lana and Rich are seriously unhappy with Junior's choice of Mary over Candy. Or at least Lana is--Rich is just unhappy with Mary, but Candy would've been awkward. Mary is furious with Skye, but wanted to study Anger Management and Parenting, she learned the former and has the latter locked. She fears being caught cheating.
The Land house seems pretty empty. Little Delta wants to grow up. She look so lonely in that big room all by herself. Mary came by and raked the yard. Lana came by and kicked the bin over. Scot spent his last day as a teen autonomously putting compost in the new bin. River got a job in business, just like Beulah, and came home with a promotion and a want to throw a party, so he invited Rocky. Very small party. Delta was delighted to see Rocky and spent the rest of the day rolling Rocky wants. River wants a girlfriend now, but there's a distinct lack of unrelated girls older than toddler in town right now. Beulah and Homer both got promotions, so the Lands actually have about $4000 in funds--not quite enough for re-roofing, but getting close to considering it. Scot left to join the girls in the college bin. I'm sure he's going to want to marry Goldie before the baby's born. Delta and River both have rooms to themselves for the first time in their lives, and they really don't like it: they want people over, please! I'm thinking about letting the Lands adopt another kid or two--Delta brought a cute little red-head s4 BV townie home with her from school, and I do hate to leave the townie kids as townies.

I added a CAS family to Widespot, and also La Fiesta Tech.

The Leap family consists of Leviathan Leap, his wife Last Leap, and his mooch of a brother Lazarus Leap. They partially came to raise a family, but also to find a reason to kick Lazarus off their property, since he's been living with them for free for five years. Lazarus remains clueless about this fact.

They're all almost too pretty for Widespot. I don't suppose you made them Pleasure, to fill out the aspiration household roster? The Harts would particularly like that...

I think I've done the submission right this time. I don't know why I have such a hard time following directions on this site.

My Valentine is making Rhett get a job so he can pay child support, and anted up enough for Rhett to give Penny a solar panel to help with the bills, but as far as he's concerned, if Hamilton wants to pretend that's Sandy's nose on her baby, let him! Rhett doesn't seem to feel the same - he keeps dropping in on the Beeches, and he turns around and comes back as often as Hamilton kicks him out. My full game's Hamilton seems to have a lot more on the ball than some people's, but he's also pretty controlling. Valentine gave Mary a solar panel, too (it took their bills down to only $9!) but though she invited him over every day he steadfastly refused to look at Rhein - till her first action as a toddler was to crawl right up to him and ask for attention. At which point it became clear that he was resisting paying attention to her because he knew he'd melt as soon as he did, and that makes it a lot harder not to marry Mary. Dixie went to college and Mary immediately rolled a want for another baby, while Homer and Beulah rolled wants for new grandbabies. Engagement wants were conspicuous by their absence. Hmmm...

I'm bad at making ugly sims. Every time I try to make them odd looking they come out ruggishly attractive. Except for Last. She's supposed to look pretty. She's also supposed to be boring. Yes, Lazarus is a Pleasure sim. I made him to balance the averageness of his brothers. His beard hides some more of his odder facial features.

Oh, it probably isn't you not following directions right! It's just the mods! Have you seen the crap they allow pass through and the good stuff they prevent? People have to convince them to allow good stuff through!

No, it's definitely me not doing the submission right previous times! I've had assurances on that point that satisfy me, and if I'm satisfied, who has any business to be dissatisfied?

As for what's good and what's crap - that's all subjective and I think you're not quite getting the mission statement. As I read the submission protocols, they're designed to keep MTS from hosting things that are illegal (using misappropriated work etc.), duplicated on the site, half-finished, etc. The submission process not only is intended to make it as simple as possible for the mods to make judgements on these issues - they should not have to open every recolor up and look at it individually to see that it works - but to weed out a class of creators who are more likely to do those things and save themselves time and effort.

This is a tactic I'm familiar with professionally. If your submission guidelines clearly state that you want manuscripts in standard MS format, 12 point Times New Roman, you don't have to do a thing in the world with the ones that come in single-spaced with half-inch margins and 10-point Bodoni, you don't have to do a single thing with it except slap it back into the SASE and shove the boilerplate rejection notice on top of it. It could be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, but you've got manuscripts stacked on your windowsills and colonizing the floor plus an e-mail box overflowing with new submissions, all of which will have to be read on the subway or in bed at night because there isn't any time to read at the office, and you don't have the time to deal with anyone who can't be bothered to follow directions. And the mods aren't even underpaid to do this, like editors are.

From my standpoint, having to slow down and take all those pictures (many of them several times over, and I'm still second-guessing myself on some of them) and make sure I had everything (or everything I understood) done as right as I could do it gave me time to fix the genetics and smooth out this or that other little thing. Widespot is better now than it was in December when I first thought I was done.

As far as I'm concerned, it's their download section - the mods can host whatever they want to and require whatever procedures work for them and it's not my business. I sure don't want to be the one doing this! I'd like to be hosted here, because who knows me anywhere else in the Sims2 community? (I'm not getting an LJ, that's for sure!) But if ultimately they decide not to, or request revisions I think would be wrong for the product, well, that's their call. It doesn't mean the neighborhood isn't good. It doesn't necessarily mean that the mods didn't like it. It just means (in the words of the universal rejection letter, which is still better than "if we don't answer we aren't taking it") that it is not suitable for this place at this time. If I can accept that at work (and boy howdy do I!), I can accept it at play, too.

It does no good whatsoever to involve the ego in this process or to second-guess the judges.

Especially since they now have a checklist that helps them be as close to objective as possible.

They only have a certain amount of bandwidth, and they offer this site for our use for free. All modding for Sims 2 -- all of it -- originated here. Nearly everyone who's been in the community a long time has had some run-ins with other people who have been in this community for a long time; that's the nature of online communities. And there are some other sites out there that are also great (all free). But MTS keeps chugging along, offering content that will not f* up your game, and it has the greatest variety of downloads of any site. Any time I think, "hm, I'd like X in my game", I check here first.

MTS is not perfect, and the mods are not perfect, as they are human. But overall, they do a damned good job.

WOOHOO, Widespot finally got approved for upload! Congrats, Peni! :D

Yes, I just got my internet back after a storm and saw the notification e-mail. I got 172 out of 180 stars.

My favorite comment is next to my three stars for lots, of which I got three: "You have made a nice lot." I wonder which one it is? Probably the Mannsion - I used a houseplan photocopied out of a book about Sears mail-order houses from the early 20th century. They had some surprisingly nice prefab houses.

Part of the credit for getting the submission right, finally, must go to HugeLunatic, who kindly held my hand when I was confused. Which I'm afraid I was, a lot. Now I know how people who don't know what "standard manuscript format" is feel when they read magazine submission guides...

But of course the people I have to thank most are all those who playtested it for me and kept me believing it was worth the hassle.

Now, to see if anybody ever downloads it!
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=497926

When I first looked, less than an hour ago, it had one download. I then redownloaded it myself, because I think you've made a few tweaks since my copy, which I haven't played much yet anyway. And now it's up to five! I thinks it's going to do quite well.

Are you actively working toward making a sub-hood version, or is that just an idea for later, maybe?