Almighty Hat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hat_plays_sims) wrote2010-02-13 12:53 pm
hat_plays_sims) wrote2010-02-13 12:53 pm
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Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
You'd think a default replacement for book covers would be simple, and it kind of is, but I got... a little ambitious with the options. Let's jump right in, shall we?
Open For Business Salable Books
Open for Business added a new wrinkle to bookshelves; put one in an owned shop and Sims would buy one of three unique titled books. For my Medieval neighborhood, I didn't like anything about those books-- covers, titles, or descriptions.
There are five defaults up there (spliced together using the magic of Photoshop), because I started making defaults before I finished searching for book covers.
Download A Tale of Courtly Love | Download on Sims File Share
Download One Lusty May | Download on Sims File Share
These replace the 'Once Upon a Somewhere' book, and the Leisure book cover. Both have unique descriptions, are buyable under Hobbies/Knowledge, and are salable in your OFB shops. However, you can only have one or the other, so choose wisely-- personally I use One Lusty May, because who doesn't like a naked lady?
Download Children's Fables | Download on Sims File Share
There is only one cover design for the children's book, and this is it. Frumpy the Bear is replaced by a nice leather-bound book of fables for your simmy kids... it's a little bit worn around the edges, but what kids' book isn't? Again, buyable under Hobbies/Knowledge.
Download the OLD Book of Common Knowledge | Download on Sims File Share
Download the NEW Book of Common Knowledge | Download on Sims File Share
The Book of Common Knowledge replaces the old green reference book-- the one your Sims use to study assorted skills (and also use as a diary because Sims are not that bright). Again, each book has a unique description, but the Old Book of Common Knowledge is beat all to hell and gone and gilded within an inch of its life. You know. If you're into that kind of thing. You cannot have the Old Book and the New Book in your game at the same time, alas, but you can buy the one you do choose under Hobbies/Knowledge.
Sets
Don't have OFB, or aren't satisfied with just replacing three of your books? Want your novel covers to be pretty, too? Download a full set-- you have four options with minor variations. These sets will replace your Reference, Leisure, and Children's books plus diaries (base-game and up), your Mystery, Drama, Cooking, Romance, and Sci-Fi books, all of your available novel covers, and the cover icons in the novel-plotting panel (Free Time and possibly up).
As with all default replacements and Immortals, there can be only one.
... But before we get to the downloads, some sundry notes.
Yes, these are available in the catalog under Hobbies/Knowledge... mostly. You can buy the Reference, Leisure, and Children's books and the two Diaries as Leatherbound Book recolors, but until your Sims read them they'll stand on their spines. I have no idea how to fix this, and if anyone ELSE does... please tell me! It's a minor thing but it bugs the ever-loving crap out of me.
No, you cannot buy Cooking, Mystery, Drama, Sci-Fi, or Romance books. You have to get those out of a Free-Time-friendly bookshelf. Sorry.
Yes, the unique books from OFB are included, so there's no need to download them separately; if you don't want to use them or don't have OFB, leave out those files (they're titled with the book titles, so you can delete them at will).
Yes, there IS a book cover included for the Education reward bookcase, but for some dopey reason it does not work. They just come out as reference books.
Why, no, there aren't any pictures of inside pages here. Yes, I did do some work to the pages. Yes, some of them are spectacularly illuminated. But they're surprises. (And? Some of them may have weird skewing, but those aren't the fancy illuminated ones. If you find one of those, tell me which one so I can fix it. It took me a while to get the hang of how EA mapped the pages. While I tried to fix as much 'why EA why' skewing as possible, I tested so many books that I cannot actually remember what I fixed and what I didn't. If they weren't vividly illuminated, they started to look the same after a while.)
Yes, these have all been compressorized. (Yes, my game does load a bit faster now that I use the Compressorizer.)
Yes, these will conflict if you try to install two different default versions, but only in the 'last mod loaded wins' way, so if you want the Old Cooking book with the New Reference book, you'll have to use SimPE to do it.
No, you cannot use these with other book default replacements, which means Ye Olde Codex from MTS is right out. (Unless you patch his files together with mine or something.)
If you find these don't work somehow in your game configuration, please let me know and I'll note it here. (And not "The unique books won't work! Do I really need Open for Business?" If none of these even work for base game books, I want to know.)
... Okay, now you can have some more pictures and links. (All these years reading fanfiction have taught me that a vague disclaimer covers no asses.)
Download OLD Books (Courtly) | Download on Sims File Share
Download OLD Books (Lusty) | Download on Sims File Share (shown)
All right, so most of these books aren't that old-- but you get the old Book of Common Knowledge and a Cooking book that actually looks like it might have seen the inside of a kitchen at one point.
Download NEW Books (Courtly) | Download on Sims File Share
Download NEW Books (Lusty) | Download on Sims File Share (shown)
Mostly the same as the old books, with this set you get the new Book of Common Knowledge and a nice new Cooking book. Why? Because both of those options are available as novel covers, and it just seemed silly to have a brand-new grungy-looking novel. ... Well, it seemed silly for my Medieval neighborhood. Possibly a better choice for librarians and habitual novel-writers.
Wait, what are those Lusty and Courtly Options?
Okay, so I couldn't decide which book should be Romance and which one should be Leisure (at first), so I made options for both the old and new sets. If you download a Courtly set, your Leisure novel will be the discreet Tale of Courtly Love while your Romance novel will have the One Lusty May cover; if you download a Lusty set, you get it the other way around.
ONLY the Leisure novel is buyable with a unique title and description (if you have OFB) or as a recolor of the Leatherbound Book you'll find in your catalog (Basegame and up). The Romance novel can be found one of two places; in a Free-Time friendly bookcase OR in the novel-writing panel. Novelist Sims only write Romance novels, because EA was silly and the two originally shared a texture.
Short version:
Lusty set = Naked Lady on the Leisure novel, Swirly Leather on the Romance novel.
Courtly Set = Anonymous leather on the Leisure novel, Naked Lady on the Romance novel.
For the record, I use the New Lusty set.
Okay, I know how I want my steamy books arranged, can we get a closer look at the other Free Time books?
Yes, yes you can. Both of these show the 'Courtly' cover for Romance because my Magisplay trays were NOT cooperating. (If they had been, Cooking would be in the same place in both pics.)
Textures
So your Sims aren't Medieval, or you kinda like your book covers as-is, or you love the textures but want to put them on clutter books, or you want to take this mod apart and rearrange which books get which covers, but you know repeated extraction leads to pixellation, and nobody likes pixellation. No worries! Have my original PSD files. (If you want the cover or novel icon PNGs, let me know and I'll fling them up, too.)
Download PSDs | Download on Sims File Share (24MB file, don't say I didn't warn you.)
Knock yourself out. All images came from Google searches for things like 'Leather Book' and 'leatherbound' and 'Medieval book' (that's the Old book of Common Knowledge) and 'illuminated,' so it's not like I own anything but a couple of days banging my head against Photoshop, SimPE, and EA weirdnesses. Play with the textures, rearrange the covers, make the pages ordinary again, change the descriptions in the catalog, whatever, man.
If you re-upload any of the actual default packages as-is, however, I'd sure like credit. It's my first formal upload.
Hey! How do I know these are working books?
Let Sheila Tester and her battered Cooking book show you how nice they look.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx
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.
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