GoS is back online.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Last night, gelydh was telling me about something odd she noticed with some t-shirts she'd downloaded from another creator. They were really cute, and she was really looking forward to using them, only... they didn't show up quite how she was expecting.

She uses my default replacement shirts, which have a slightly better shaped mesh and different textures, along with a change bumpmap to allow for more variation in styles. The shirts she downloaded were showing up with what appeared to be the original EAxis mesh and textures, which was momentarily confusing. The creator had used the TSR Workshop to create these shirts, so I decided to do a bit of poking around in the file to see what I could find out.

Turns out TSRW likes to include a whole buttload of uneccessary bits and pieces in the files, bloating them, and subsequently bloating your downloads folder.

( I decided to put together a comparison package using TSRW just to illustrate the difference, and this is what I found. )

I'm sure the TSRW is great for some things -- people seem to be able to make nice enough objects with it, I suppose -- but I'm not sure it's such a good idea to make simple clothing recolors with it. How many multitudes of the same mesh do you want to have floating around your downloads folder? The CTU isn't perfect, but for something simple like a graphic shirt I believe it's the better program of the two to use.

While I'm biased against TSR for unrelated reasons, my purpose for posting this information is simply to keep you, the downloader and creator, informed.

Holy shit! We've reached our goal for our donation drive!

THANK YOU to each and every one of you who donated; I cannot express how grateful I am for everyone's generosity. It means so much to both of us. ♥

*deep breath*

Ok. We hate to do this, but it's that time of year again. Our webhost will soon be asking us for a large sum of money, and we'd really appreciate it if anyone who can spare anything would chip in a bit to help us out.

As we said last year around this time, we had no trouble paying for our hosting out of our own pockets back when we first opened the site, but unfortunately (?) we got too popular or something. We go through a lot of bandwidth each month which is why it isn't cheap anymore.

Every little bit helps! Thanks in advance! And please don't feel bad if you can't donate. Also, we're not holding any downloads hostage or anything, either. I'll let everyone know how much we've recieved, and once we've hit our goal just to keep this as transparent as possible.

Goal: $250
Total to Date: $250
To Goal: $0

Eeewww... this post is all sticky.

( General Terms of Use: )

( TS3-specific TOU: )

( FAQ: )

( Contact Information: )

Want to link to us? gelydh made us a new itty bitty linky banner dealie:



Please reupload to your own host, and point your links to http://club-crimsyn.dreamwidth.org. :D

So... this isn't an update. I've been quite lazy lately, as far as sims-related things go, doing my best to force all my productivity into school. I'm succeeding in doing so, which is a good thing, but obviously my creating has been slack.

However!

I wanted to post a link to The Sims Emporium, who've converted a few of my female TS2 outfits to TS3! It's very, very impressive work, particularly if you have an understanding as to how different TS2 UV maps are compared to TS3 ones.

So go check them out!

This is an update of sorts on our Terms of Use, specifically in regards to conversions of our TS2 creations to TS3.

If you'd like to convert something of ours from TS2 to TS3, we now ask that you please contact us and ask before you do. It's best to either PM me here on Dream Width or GoS. gelydh can be reached via PM here on DreamWidth or GoS. We're horrible at checking our site email, so PM is definitely the way to go.

By contacting us to get the go-ahead on a conversion, we can let you know if it was something we'd already planned on converting ourselves. Furthermore, we have a lot of on-going projects at any given time which may or may not get previewed, so it's possible we've already started work on something anyway.

Secondly, if you're given the clear to convert, we ask that you clearly give us credit for the original creation on the same page as your TS3 download. I know conversions aren't exactly easy, but a lot of work went into making the original TS2 item as well. We're not asking for our names surrounded by blinking lights or an opera written about how fantastic we are, just something as simple as 'originally by aikea/gelydh/club crimsyn' would be great.

We don't want people to not convert our stuff, we'd just like to streamline things a little. We've always kept our TOU very open, so we hope that you'll do us the favor of respecting these changes. Also, this obviously doesn't affect those of you who are creating for TS2.

Later today we'll be rewriting and moving our TOU over here. There won't be any major changes, we just want things cleaned up a bit. ^_^

Today we're planning on moving all of our TS3 items from our site to DreamWidth, since updating a blog suits our lazy nature far better than updating a site.

If you've got us on your reading page you may get a little spammed, but hopefully not too badly as we didn't really end up putting much on the site in general.

Lastly, gelydh is currently trying to find us another new layout, so try to avoid stepping on any nails and watch for falling hammers.

So I've been working on this really pointless side project (a ts3 video of all things), and I needed to do a remake of the Rock Band 2 sweater vest top I did for TS2. Unfortunatly, TS3 seems to have this thing against meshes that make sense, and I'm not really feeling up to making a totally new mesh right now (and all the morphs it would require). I ended up making this as a compromise:

( I've lost the previews down the back of the couch again... )

I know it's sort of a niche type item, but does anyone else want it?

I also made those windows! Windows are strange things indeed, and I broke those. They still look kinda neat, and really make me want to experiment with windows more.

A couple of things today, first being the male version of the female boots I released yesterday. They're available for Young Adults through Elders, and I would like to eventually get both genders done for teens as well. (It's amazing how actually playing the game has had an effect on the custom content I create...)

Like the female boots, these have three recolorable channels.

( Unfiltered previews hidden in the crawlspace below the house... )

Do whatever you want with these, just keep them off paysites (including TSR). When machines in your room can't survive and all your devices stand by, you'll never know why.

+ DOWNLOAD +

++++

Next up concerns a shine issue with quite a few of the hair meshes I've released. Unfortunately, I didn't even realize this was an issue until this morning -- partly because it's almost unnoticeable on paler sims, and even on darker sims isn't very apparent in-game. Still, it annoys me to no end to release something that isn't as good as I can make it, so I'll be going back and attempting to fix the hairs that are messed up.

I've been able to fix it on the Sussi conversion I posted yesterday, but I have no idea what exactly it was that went wrong. I ended up having to completely rebuild the package in order to get rid of the face shine, so if you downloaded and installed the Emilie Autumn sim, you'll have to manually change her hair over in order to get it to show up.

Download Fixed Sussi 1600

Speaking of the Emilie Autumn sim, I've uploaded a sims3pack of her, as per my SS's request. If anyone would rather download and install that version of her, snag it here.

Which leads me to something else I wanted to bring up, but kept forgetting to. I've noticed quite a few CC creators making their items available in both .package and .sims3pack versions, and I'd like to state right now that neither myself nor gelydh have any plans to do the same. Sims3packs aren't any more immune to causing the dreaded game lag than package files are, so it seems like a tremendous waste of time for us take on a project like that. As far as we know, none of the items we've made cause lag. (And of course, if anyone found anything of ours that did, we'd want to know about it right away!) If you're one of the people whose game doesn't seem to like .package files any more, I suggest you head over to MTS or MATY to see if there's a fix for your problem. (Sorry if this comes across as a bit harsh.)