Pbox, where are you? Have you read the small beach lots thread at MATY? Morriganrant mentioned a dip in one of your lots. This happens sometimes on my beach lots too. I'm curious to hear about yours.

Mutantbunny,

I'm out of town at the moment, far away from my windows computer, that's why I didn't participate in the discussion for a while .. also, I don't have BV -- I'm aware of your MATY thread but didn't see anything I could add. I'll hop over there and check what's up with the dip!

Thanks. Read your post over there. Did you see the pic yet?

Happy Holidays!

Mootilda, are you around?

I want to know if you have any qualms about the road-adding feature of Lotexpander. I have a corner lot made as a request, but if you are not happy with that aspect of the program I can rebuild it on a standard lot. Does the current release verison include road-adding? I assume not, since I'm sure it doesn't have road-removing.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas.

Edit - Just mentioning that when I added the extra road to this (Andi) lot, the portals were NOT adjusted - the taxi stops in the intersection, and one pedestrian portal was off the lot.

Good night!

Yes, I'm still here a little bit every day. I expect to be much more available in a week or so. Hopefully, a new, more robust, release will follow shortly.

No qualms. My tutorial is available publicly and I don't forsee any problems with these lots. You can point people at the tutorial near the beginning of this thread, if you like.

Yes, these portals require special handling to avoid the intersections. I'll put this on my to-do list. In the interim, I assume that you used the portal revealer to fix them?

Thanks - just thought I should check. The lot works very well, and looks realistic with the extra corner. It's pretty good to see the sims using the crossing too, although I can't decide whether to make them walk down the side street instead.

I did use the portal revealer, but the taxi still stops in the intersection. Go figure.

I look forward to your next release, whenever it may arrive! Hope you've had a relaxing Christmas.

Hey everyone, anything happening? I just had a nudge from someone, wondering if there was a way yet to build to the edge of lots. It reminded me to come and have a looksee.

Hope everyone is well and (comfortably) busy.

from my so far view point, it seems it takes more modding to manually add or remove wall segments in a lot. but I've yet to see if certain things are really connected.

anyhow,I'm quite busy on my PT exams right now but check on the news as leisures...
I still have to finish my tutorial before any more sims2 modding or building.

My 2 cents:

The beach lots seem to be good. There have been only 3 problems reported (at MATY) but those problems were proven either a simple fix (leveling) or not related to the lots. The lots are hard to place, but then that is the nature of beach lots, and any lot that has been binned/moved/built upon.

I remade one lot in several versions of the LA. All lots made except for with ver. 1.0 had .....'weird artifacts' in the surface I think due to the smoothing fuction added to the later versions--so 1.0 is definitely my choice for what I am doing with it.

At this point, it looks like I may not be able to devote much more time to the LotExpander. I was very fortunate to have a few months where I could devote a lot of time to it and I'm sorry that I wasn't able to accomplish more.

So, I'm considering recompiling what I have with the latest SimPE DLLs and uploading it as is. The primary difference from the latest test version is the logic which attempts to keep objects on the lot.

Several people have also been posting about problems early in the neighborhood selection logic, so I'm going to see what I can do about that problem. Unfortunately, I can't reproduce their problems, which makes it difficult to determine what's wrong.

Mootilda, if there is anything we can do to assist, let us know.

Thanks for all the work you have already done. It would be nice to have safer shrinking technology, but the other things you improved have also been excellent.

I think it's working well enough, and you've done a great job on it, Mootilda! Will you make the final source available too, in case you never have time to carry on with it, and someone else has some ideas to develop?

Yes, I'll post the source code as well. It would be nice if someone else could take up the project, but I don't know whether that's likely. I'll still be around, so I might be able to make small changes... like making it work with the latest EPs... I just won't be able to devote as much time as I have been.

So does that mean the shrinking version will be released properly? Have you become less concerned about it, or just run out of time and energy? Has it got safer?

thanks for everyone's replies, too.

Mootilda,

Thanks for all of your effort, it's been a nice amazing job you did on it...
Many things of it ha s been well improved...

:bow: at you

Thanks... best wishes for you in your RL.

We have no way of knowing yet whether it's safer:
- We don't know what was causing the original problems
- I have managed to implement a possible solution for one suggestion as to what might be causing the problems. However, we have no idea whether this is even a partial solution to the real problem.
- The solution may be incomplete and hasn't been tested

When I stopped working on this in December, I was hoping that I would be able to get back to work on it before this. Given that it's been two months and my life shows no signs of allowing me to work on it, I thought that I should admit that I may not be able to do anything more before it becomes irrelevant.

Fair enough, Mootilda. Real life happens!

That's about where I thought things were, but it was always possible I had missed something that changed.

All the best.

What about our lots? Are we to let them wither here?

I vote our lots should be posted out in public.

Opinions, yeas, nays, other input?

They're hardly going to wither, really, but it would be nice to feel we could release shrunk lots without doing horrible things to people's games.

There's no real responsibility on our side for being careless as long as we've clearly state out the shrinking feature and shrunken lots are for experimental usages with known and unknown potential risks for lot and neighbourhood corruption(s). As a user, never mix shrunken lots into the ordinary sharing pool.

Yet, there're always those who don't know what they're doing. They'll mess up things and share their fruits that in turns mess up others.

After all, we never know if downloaded lots can be corruptive, but the difference is that one is unknown risk(s) while the one for lot shrinking is a known risk..

Let's not talk about the viral types of TS2 sharing! :D
Some can be harmless.
Some can be annoying.
Some can corrupt the custom files.
Some can corrupt the whole game.
etc...

The last 2 possibilities are definitely devastating to a real user.

A golden rule for making a new lot is to start from a new lot template or its fine copy.

*sigh*

Ok then. What is the definition of 'safe enough'for public release?

(growing weary of the same circular argument/reasoning....)

I think just tell folks about all these precautions as our sole responsibilities.

Since there's no safe standard, we can only be honest about potential risks as mentioned before.

But any more to add?
Do we all agree on those listed so far?

Just in case there is any doubt to what I think 'safe' is: I agree with you noil. We each are responsible for our own game and anyone downloading anything should be aware of the potential for ANY file to cause unwanted affects/harm. (is that affects or effects? Never could keep those straight...)

I'm sorry this seems to be circling again. I think we are all trying to find words to express ourselves clearly. It's a question of degrees - we all want the same thing in the end, it's only how much risk we are wanting to bestow upon others in the process.

The reason we were being extra careful was the proven risk on shrunk lots - it's one thing to share stuff in the knowledge that any file _might_ harm your game. It's more of a concern when we share something that we believe is _likely_ to corrupt things.

However, in the end, the sharer has the responsiblily to make their offerings as safe as possible, while alerting downloaders to known risks. The downloader has the final responsibility of choosing what they add to their game, in the knowledge that things may be risky.

I don't know how the moderators here feel about the sharing of shrunk lots now, but if Mootilda is not able to devote any more energy to the project, perhaps it is time to let it go, warts and all. Until she or someone else is able to give the knowledge and time required.

The thing is, even inside this very small circle of us, we've got various degrees of wanting to share the shrinking feature and shrunken lots with known and unknown risks.

We want them to be shared in varied degrees because of different reasons, too.

1. since it's been worked hard, something has to come out. But, is this reason strong enough for us to release something with known risks?

2. theoretically, for every responsible users, one should always alert any potential next-user of known potential risks and refer back here for further references. So, in a well self-responsible and self-conscious manner, simmers can use them properly.
Rebuttal: there're always some users who don't know what they're doing.
Anti-rebuttal: we shouldn't rip the chances off of those who know what they're doing.

3. it can be devastating to the whole TS2 lot sharing scene when someone just did a nasty thing whether that's intentional. The harm can be here once it's made and is unlikely to go away until Maxis make lot scanning utilities for users to try things out again, but how likely is that now with TS3 on its way of emergence the next year?. All the lots one makes from that point can all be corruptive and spread such corruption among those who have downloaded from someone affected. So, it's gonna be more of an epidemic. and most users can have lost all the interests in shared lots. Thus, lot-sharing can become a rare sharing in the end coz we no longer can assume lots downloaded to be presumably safe even though Maxis lots themselves aren't really all the times.

4. the lot-shrinking is still technically problematic and that can cause lot and neighbourhood corruptions and spread trough sharing.

5. etc.. please input yours ...



My Conclusion and suggestions::
we need a balancing means to achieve that "niche" for such possibility (in which users do know what they're doing.) if we want to share them.

1. Over-scary warning may be able to scare off those who read and scary graphical warning can alert those who don't read but just see.
2. We may demand the next-sharers to include a set of both verbal and graphical warnings in both their threads and downloads.
Warnings on both are important coz some people just don't read the thread and download right away and some share the downloads without the infos.
3. It's better to have only one separate download region particularly assigned for them. For those who can access it, they have to pass an essential but simple quiz of certain repeated (at least 3x) essential facts.
- to limit access routine
- to ensure users do know the risks before access
- users can only share the related stuffs in that particular niche (say a name like Shrunken Lot Paradise :D) so, users have to agree on sharing their related stuffs only there.

4. etc.. please input yours ...


It's just about access manipulation.

Any suggestion to give in? I know I can be wrong on something as always or miss something coz I'm just imperfect. imao.. lol