hat_plays_sims | Loose, No Box Included (Buyable, playable toys)

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Loose, No Box Included (Buyable, playable toys)

Also known as, my GoS 2013 Egg Hunt project!

Do you know what's unfortunate?

It's unfortunate that so many of the absolutely unutterably adorable toys out there for Sim kids are look-at toys, not play-with toys. I don't know about you, but I always had problems with look-at toys-- I tended to climb up to that high shelf, pull them down, and play with them. Sim kids, if you don't have Open For Business, can get a toybox and play with exactly four toys. You can default replace these, but as far as I know nobody's figured out how to add to them yet.

Making them buyable was easy... but a few other things were kind of tricky.

Batteries not included.

So, I snooped around the internet looking for default replacement toy meshes and any other meshes that kinda sorta worked for the very horizontally-oriented play that Sim kids get into. On top of the basegame toys, I found Raynuss's Sims Medieval toys, WatersMoon's Castaway Stories toys, Bienchent's pony, a top from ATS, and an extracted plesiosaur by Psychosim (sometimes known as Pinkosim). And I cloned them after CuriousB told me how to make SimPE work to make them basegame compatible, and I removed the Put Toys Away options from all of them, and then I ran into problems.

The first problem was, I broke the shadows. The second problem was, any toy that was originally decorative kind of floated above the ground. I couldn't figure out how to make anything recolorable. AND it turns out if there was a toybox on the lot, Sims could still put the toys away and they would disappear into the box, never to return, wasting eleven Simoleons and leaving behind a stuck floor tile.

HugeLunatic fixed the shadows, the mesh positions, and made everything recolorable. Gwenke figured out how to fix the Put Toys Away problem, which thrilled and delighted me because otherwise, this made for pretty broken content.

So here's what you get:

Basegame Boat: 247 polys
Basegame Car: 356 polys
Basegame Pony: 301 polys
Basegame Rocket: 182 polys

Also with recolors! Boat and Car, (Bumblebee, KITT, and Red cars, and Generic Decepticon and Police Boat; catch a closeup of the non-transforming Transformers here) and Pony and Rocket (No Spots, Spots No Saddle, and No Spots With Saddle ponies, and Sterile White, Blue Check, and Alien Green rockets).

Castaway Canoe: 118 polys
Castaway Jaguar: 230 polys
Castaway Speedboat: 344 polys
Castaway Turtle: 228 polys

And of course, recolors: Bright and Worn. These came with Castaway Stories, but were either unused or used in some way regular Sims can't manage.

Sims Medieval Dragon: 296 polys
Sims Medieval Horse: 386 polys
Sims Medieval Ship: 156 polys
Sims Medieval Unicorn: 293 polys

And the recolors: Dragon, Unicorn, and Horse (black and green dragons, black and pink unicorns, oak and whitewashed horses) and Ship (only one recolor on this one, but I wanted my Pirate Ghost Ship).

And finally, the custom toys!

ATS Top: 362 polys
Bienchen/Sim2Me Pony: 861 polys
Psychosim's Plesiosaur: 498 polys

Recolors: Bienchen Pony and ATS Top (white and black ponies, wooden and classic red spiral tops) and Plesiosaurs (in Psychosims original Purple-Blue, Grey, Brown, Red, Grey-Dark, and Green-Red).

That's all my pictures, let's move on to some babble and then the download link.

First of all, if you downloaded my toys at Garden of Shadows as part of the treasure hunt prior to April 18, 2013, PLEASE RE-DOWNLOAD. The Put Toys Away issue has been FIXED thanks to Gwenke.

All the toys are priced at §11 and are available in Buy/General/Kids. There are no default replacements in this upload. Everything should be Basegame compatible; if it turns out they aren't, please let me know as this means I screwed up somehwere in the cloning process. Everything has been compressorized, so be sure to clear your cache files before loading your game. The poly counts are all, I think, reasonable enough that you could fill an OFB toy shop without your graphics card grinding to a halt.

I have to thank HugeLunatic and Gwenke for fixes and expertise, Psychosim/Pinkosim, Sandy at ATS, and Bienchen at Sim2Me for the meshes I shamelessly burgled (and Psychosim again for all the Nessie textures), Raynuss and WatersMoon for extracting TSM and Castaway meshes, Google for the butcher block cutting board I photoskinned onto that wooden top, and Wayward Martian for the tiny little Autobot and Decepticon sigils that... okay, they really didn't map too well, but kids need Transformers. I also have to thank Theraven and CuriousB for testing and advice, Lyn for making sure I had a working copy of Photoshop and for putting up with me while I bitched about Maxis mapping, Em for similar patience and chanting DOOO EEET on applying Transformers sigils to Sim toys, Quaxi for SimPE, and Nymphy for running the big event that gave me an excuse to finally get this project finished.

You can do whatever you want with these toys! While I appreciate a credit for myself and maybe a link back, I'd rather you credit HugeLunatic for the fixes, and if you use them, Sandy, Psychosim, and/or Bienchen for their meshes.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE feel free to recolor these or clone these with new meshes! And throw me a link if you do. I want more toys for my kids.

NO PAYSITES on this one (not even if you offer me a cut). There are too many cooks involved in this particular soup.

And if you've stuck with me that long, then you deserve to

DOWNLOAD ALL THE TOYS
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share

Wanna help me feed my cats?

In case you feel like dropping me a buck or two, should you have a buck or two to spare. Donors get two things at the moment: a) a link to the Super Secret Cat Gallery, full of pictures of the cats you'll be feeding, updated sporadically when the cats do something photogenic and I'm fast enough on the trigger to catch it, and b) a link to the list of content I have done-but-not-screencapped, nearly done, partly done, or in the planning stages, and the option to suggest what ought to be in the next batch of things I focus on.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Ah, yes, I loved these! Baby Percival already has a BV shelf full of them in his room. I can't wait until he gets old enough to play with them!

And now I don't have to hunt through the Gwynedd Keep to make sure that there isn't a toybox hidden somewhere on that lot. Yay!

Thanks, Hat! :D

I always get so disappointed when I download a great looking toy that my Simlets would love to play with - and then it turns out it isn't for playing at all, but is just decorative. So this makes me (and my Simlets, who don't like toys that are just for looking, either) very, very happy! :D Thank you!

These are fabulous! I admit to totally stalking your thread on GoS for the progress on these, and I'm super happy everyone was able to get them to work. I'm especially in love with the TSM toys, they're so nice, aaaah.

(unrelated, and i hope you don't find the question too request-like of me, do you think at some point you could make a mini-reference post with regards to dye colors for clothing and classes? i've been digging around but all i can really find is 'earthy colors for peasants' and 'tyrian for royalty'. even just a quick breakdown of what colors (or color actions, ahaha) would work for which classes would be highly appreciated. i'm having an awful time clothing my classes because i have no real idea of what i'm doing!)

Of course he has a shelf full of toys already, he's adorable! *grins* I'm glad you like them.

I know, it's hideously disappointing. I don't even download deco toys anymore (but the mesh tweaks to turn deco toys into functional toys are pretty much 'scale properly' and 'align properly,' so maybe we'll start to see more playable toys? I hope?). Thank you and you're welcome!

I'm glad you like them! And I'm so grateful to everyone who threw advice and ideas and fixes at me, you have no idea.

... Okay, no, I CAN do quick dye breakdowns! Maybe quick.

First things first, remember it's a spectrum, not three categories (peasant, middle class, nobility); without sumptuary laws, a rich merchant's wife could dress better than the countess of a war-torn county.

Everybody could wear any brown. Just across the board. Brown was easy and durable and while it wasn't what you might call formal, sometimes a redhead just looks spectacular in a certain shade of brown.

Reds varied; tyrian purple is more like what we'd think of as burgundy or wine-purple, and was wicked expensive. Kermes red is that true gorgeous lipstick red... and was likewise wicked expensive, being made from the shells of tiny insects. Madder red is softer, not as true a red, sometimes more like a really dark pink (made from mushrooms), and that was was more readily available to all classes. (Pink is was also available to everybody, from madder or berries that don't quite stain things red.)

True saffron yellow was expensive, because saffron was-- and is!-- the most expensive dye and spice in the world (made from the pollen of saffron flowers, individually harvested by hand, even today). However, greeny-yellows were readily available from plant matter, and were regularly worn.

Green was expensive, because it was hard to really manage. Robin Hood is traditionally pictured in a color called Lincoln Green not because it was good camouflage but because it was a fairly famous dye from Lincolnshire-- quintessentially English. You could get greens y over-dyeing your yellows with woad, but it would be kind of a muddier green, not a bright true green.

Blue was available to most folk in different concentrations; you got it from woad (local in Europe) or indigo (imported from Asia, but stronger)-- both plants have the same pigment. And it is PERMANENT.

Purple is tricky; like I said, tyrian purple is actually more of a winey-reddish-purple, but a grape purple was also available from things like blueberries or over-dyeing madder with woad. It would be available to everybody, though.

Black has an awkward history. There were ways to achieve black-ish clothes; the Vikings made a sort of navy by over-dyeing black wool with woad, but most other places, iron and walnut were used when black fabric was wanted. However, that resulted in a garment that fell apart after a few years because the iron sped up the decay of the wool or silk fibers. After the discover of the New World, Spain got all up into Mexico and found a way to use mesquite as a dyestuff... resulting in a colorfast black dye that didn't degrade protein fibers. At that point black went from being a peasant color to being a rich color used by the nobility.

I don't know about orange.

And in general, the brighter the dye, the more expensive the fabric. More muted colors are very peasant-appropriate, but that's not to say some fine lady couldn't decide she likes how she looks in dove gray.

I hope that helps!

Oh man, this is super useful, thank you so much! While not totally historically accurate my neighborhood's universe is very set in color themes (there's an entire caste system built around where you fall on the spectrum, etc and it gets ridiculous) so I would be kicking myself if I didn't pay attention to what colors I was putting on people. Again, this is going to be most useful, so thank you very much!! :D

Yay! What a fun download. My kids will finally have COOL toys to play with! Many thanks.

Also, thanks for the brief rundown on historical dyes. I'm working on a color action set specifically for medieval simmers and although I've found lots of information on the web, it's always nice to have more. Not to take over your thread specifically, but I'd be interested in what you think of what I've done so far, if you're interested and have the time. I consider you one of the experts on this sort of subject. :)

Here's a couple links to the earliest test runs of two different dyes:
http://shadowfell-sims.dreamwidth.org/8792.html
http://shadowfell-sims.dreamwidth.org/9188.html

You're welcome! You might also want to check out Wikipedia-- the re-enactment blogs I watch now and then have plenty of good information, but Wiki actually has sections just about dye, it's fascinating.

And different kids can have different toys! I don't know about anyone else, but in my family I got most of the dolls, my sister got most of the Stuffed Things, and my brother got most of the cars and things. (Everybody got dinosaurs in equal measure.) It wasn't that we were only allowed to play with our own toys, but if we wanted to play with something else, we had to play together.

That's an interesting idea! I'm totally not an expert, though, I just occasionally go to look up one little thing and the next thing you know, I've been reading about the history of teal...

I like the idea of being able to 'overdye' something simply, using an action. I think people who are strict about their color themes would get a lot of mileage out of it, as well as people who don't want to sift through dozens of 'I did the whole set!' recolors to find the five things they're really after.

Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to download any more color actions. I use 68 of the 82 color actions I make for clothing sets (I always cull Mauve, Mango, Gypsy Rose, Bluebell, Emerald, Teal, Royal Blue, and Purple Haze for being either impossible or colors I don't like. After that, it varies, depending on what browns or blacks turned out a little blotchy or aren't distinct enough from the other browns and blacks, and whether or not colors like Kingfisher and Magenta turned out looking plausible), and I sort of figure that's enough variety for my own game. Now that I have a version of Photoshop that can run all the actions, it's ridiculously tempting to... well, run all the actions. If I don't stick to my 82/68, my downloads folder will explode.

I know how that is with actions. I have my chunk of recolor actions pretty much specifically for Sims stuff, and then I have the other 900 ones for my photography. The folder goes pretty deep.

Decat here! (I don't have dreamwidth account)

These are great! I already downloaded these from GOS, but I'll get them again here for the fix.

I've been making the TS3 toys I extracted playable, by cloning yours and replacing the mesh. I can post them for download on my blog if you don't mind. (with proper credit, of course) There are 12 toys that I extracted, and 5 more extracted by Delonariel.

However, some of the meshes are vertical, though they were on their side in TS3. they would look weird on a self when horizontal, but when vertical the kids hands would go through them... I'm not sure what to do with those ones!

the deco version of the TS3 toys are here: http://decatsims2.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/ts3-conversions-toys.html
and Delonariel's are here: http://delonariel.livejournal.com/10155.html

That is EXACTLY what I was hoping would happen-- people who have the ability to resize and rotate meshes would make MOAR TOYS. Yay toys!

Credit and a link back would rock, and I'm not sure what to do about the more vertical toys, looking at the pics. With the yeti, you might be able to arrange it so it looks like the kids are grabbing him by his head, but I think the robot, freezer bunny, and bear thingy would be more problematic.

... Although if you have OFB, you could clone the toy robot for the robot, and the pet rock for the freezer bunny and the bear.

Wow, these are great! Thanks for sharing.

You're welcome! I hope you enjoy them.

Decat here!

the TS3 toys, plus a few rextras, are up on blog: http://decatsims2.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/ts3-toys-made-playable-extras.html

Oh, awesome! *downloads all the things* Thank you for letting me know!

Also, which version of the toys did you clone? The post-April-18 version (in the post and in the treasure hunt NOW) has the toybox glitch fixed, so there are no worries there.

Decat here!

I'm sure I cloned the fixed ones, but they still get put in the toybox...

Hey hat, first let me thank you for all the hard work you've done! I just recently got back to the Sims 2 after a really long break and I've been spending most of my time redownloading medieval content. Your site has been a huge help. :}

Second, I can't seem to find any info on what are the gorgeous skins your sims use (like in the screenshots of http://hat-plays-sims.dreamwidth.org/32792.html - Front-Laced Lady). I'd like to use them. I've been busting my butt off trying to google "almighty hat skins" and all sorts of variations but my work has been fruitless. An answer to this mystery would make my day. Thanks and sorry for bothering you, I hope this isn't information listed in a FAQ or something, haha.

Oh gosh, my skins.

First of all, I've never MADE any skins, not really-- I did some hue/sat fiddling to Mouseyblue skins for my alien-fairies, slapped some ball-joints on some wood for my Servos, and erased a lot of someone else's hard work for my Plantsims, but that's it. My skins are all by other people... and I kind of have about 200 of them.

Running through my folder, I have Alfred Askew's Reconstruction, Aquilegia's Food of the Gods and Penny series, Astiees Naturally Idealized, a few things by Astromeso, Bloom's Bigger Rounder Pregnancy Belly Dark (for a LONG while, the darkest skin I'd ever seen), Cutthroat Dollie's Geek On Prom Night, something called Ephemera Fixed, FantasyRogue's Canvas, Jessi's A Mixed-Up Memory, Jour's Love Affair, some JWilson Lous Edits for the Xhires default shapes, Medinaquirin's Apprentice Seductress, Needlecream's Asian blends, Lemon Tree, and Oepu blends, Ninika's Lovesong skins, Pooklet's Compulsion, Down Boy, Kids in Technicolor Less Pop Concert More Butchery, My Poor Lover, and Project Goose Rehash, plus Pinketamine's add-ons for Down Boy, Pyxis's Venice, Rensim's Peau, Summerdream's Paper Doll, TeruK's Asia Style, and finally Trapping's December, Freckly, July Secret Santa, and Medianquirin recolors.

You should be able to find most of them on GoS, a few on Mod The Sims, and everything else on LJ and Dreamwidth-- if you check my memories here (there's a link at the top of the page) and on LJ, you should find a section called Genetics Skintones that ought to have everything I've downloaded from other people (provided it's still available).

Sorry to be so late getting back to you, May completely got away from me.

I need to fire up my game to double-check things again, obviously, but in my clean tester game, changing the BHAV Expression My Category to Unknown fixed it... but I have hiders in my tester game (cos I started it to test the hiders), so I was only able to check it against the Apartment Life toybox. Who's been putting things in the toybox, and they're basegame toyboxes, right? No adult or child in my tester house was able to put toys away, but I didn't think to check NPCs or Servos.

Eeek, I missed this! As in, I downloaded it in a busy time and forgot about it. I love this so much! :D I have thought about and tried to default toys before, but now as independent objects, yay, the endless possibilities! 8D Thank you for your perseverance! I remember I once made toy scale versions of the Maxis hot rod, that would be perfect for this.

That is an excellent idea! Actually, pretty much anything is an excellent idea, Sim kids need more things to play with. I'm glad you like them and I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Okay, I FINALLY had a chance to sit and prod them in-game, and while the adults in my household can't seem to put them away, Servos running the Do Chores program can. The maid hasn't turned up so I don't know if she can or not. Who did you notice putting toys away?

Thank you, Hat! You always come up with the most useful, thoughtful downloads--even for someone who doesn't play a medieval game! These are such a great idea and look like so much fun. :D

Thank you, and I'm glad you like them! It didn't make sense to only do the toys that would work in Medieval-or-later games when there were perfectly cromulent meshes sitting right there in the base game files.

And now to make those Victorian toys that I've always wanted playable, playable! Thank you so much for all of the work put into this gem, Hat!

*finally logs back into Sim DW* Yay more toys! More toys are always awesome. Just be sure to hide them from the Servos.

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Loose, No Box Included (Buyable, playable toys)

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