I had to download it and look LOL. I have plopped it down in the center of Strangerville (its sorta matched the terrian) and and buildin a memorial to it on the surrounding lots.. water towers and cactus.... :D

I don't complete disagree with you - the basic premise is very correct - but even real life is like the Sims in some ways (or is it the other way around..) - what I find function in life might be as different from what you do in a RL home - just like what I find playable you might not.

For example - the first thing I did was stick a small refridge in my bedroom the day after the first kid was born. While I can go from bedroom to refrig to crib (and don't have to carry the kid to the refrig) at 2,3 and 4 AM I wanted to get kid, bottle and back into warn bed as fast a possible ...

And, after a house fire where we lost the whole house the replacement was compartimentalized after the fire investigator pointed out the great open room plan allowed the fire to spread so fast that it was out of controll by the time the FD got there - gutting the whole hose instead of just the kitchen and maybe the hall or part of the dinning room...

And, I also have Sims that react differently to different houses. I have a very active, very grouchy, very serious but not so neat Sim that absolutely had all sorts of issues with one house I moved him into but the next sim that lived there played very well with the house.

But location of furnishings and how rigid sims on with how they use them is, and has to be a real consideration, as you point out. I hate the sim that cooks dinner and insists on going upstairs to serve the dinner on tables up there by passing a very nice dinning table, nook and countertop bar... :o

I just finished a practical 1 bed and 1 bath that is very liveable...tell me what you think.

http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot...&user_id=297599

wait, how did this thread turn into tell me what you think about "my lot" i thought it was about what people should expect from your lots

This is a concern. Maybe a new thread would be possible. But as it is I think that i am going to try these houses out to test them. And another thought for a thread is a horrible house one to see and exemplify the horrid. But I would not want that to turn into a contest to make the worse house unless it showed the builders what was and is not acceptable. I would like feed back on this idea. I thought we were going somewhere with this thread. But if anything it did get some of the stuff off our chests.

I did make one of those horrid lots once.. hmm.. i guess i coulld make another one to show newly builders what to have and what not. If only i didn't have this fever...

I am often disgusted when I go and look at the *rated* lots on the official site. They quite literally make me sick - especially the roofs! Ugh!

I like beauty mixed with usability - because I figure if I am not going to play my sims in it - then why the hell should anyone else :D

Having said that - I see some gorgeous pieces that aren't playable and I still download them and stick them in a neighbourhood I don't play but I can use for ideas.

I will pull out some of my old bad examples for a show. Could be fun, I wish to ask a moderator about this though.

Most of my lots aren't playable anyways. Too much space and too much lack of creativity to dress the house with. That is why i stick with exterior design.. and i still get 4 stars..

Well i am going to see abou the idea and if we can. Then let the horrid mess be shown and then get back to the good descusion we all were having earlier.

lol.. yes.. bwuhaha..

this is a horrible lot

http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot...&asset_type=lot

this one too

http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot...&asset_type=lot

and it still gets 4 stars

http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot...&asset_type=lot

http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot...&asset_type=lot
i dont even need to make horrid lots anymore i can just look at these

Well, it's not really fair to judge the first one as a lot, since it's clearly purely a family without any construction attached, because you can't package a lotless family. The rest are crap.

haha, i guess not, i wouldn't know that because i have never uploaded a family before. And yes the rest a horrible.. greatly horrible

Just to get back to the topic, these 3 are what I consider to be good usuable houses. There were others but they seem to no longer be on the exchange. Note: none of these are mine but I have used all of them several times.

Sims in Paradise 3

I would happily live in this place. It has a great enviro score before you ever put a single object in it.

11 Bluff Place

19 4th St.

The person that designed this one has some very good ideas. I think I have 4-5 of his places in my orginal neighborhood.

But what sets these apart is how liveable they are. No one gets stuck in small rooms or narrow hallways. There's room for furniture and decorations. They can look lived in. After all, that's part of what I look for.. what I would buy if I could.

Talking of liveable houses I have some complaints about some of the houses Maxis included in the game. With bedrooms that aren't big enough for double beds. How do they expect romance sims to be able to live there?

Does anyone here build homes based on floorplans from places like houseplans.com? What scale do you use, that is how many feet/meters does each Sims2 "floor square" equal? Judging from the size of the beds in Sims 2 each square should be 0.66 meters (2'2½"), or 3 squares for 2 meters. But does someone use other scales?

Those are some nice houses, CC. I especially like the last one.

Allan: I don't think Sims 2 is scaled directly to real life. The dressers are huge, for instance.

I usually build homes based on what I can fit into the rooms and how easily Sims can navigate. That doesn't preclude aesthetics, but since I play my own houses, I want them to be both liveable and not outrageously expensive. It takes lots of actually playing the game to learn what does and does not work, and I think some home builders don't do anything but build lots.

Question: do y'all like packaged homes to be furnished, or not, or only furnished in the bathroom and kitchen like the Maxis homes?

For best results, I usually scale each room around the furniture and approximate. A good place to start is a bathroom, since toilets, tubs, and sinks are all "fixed" sizes, and need to fit in to the bathroom in a way people can use them.

For example, look at this plan: houseplan

The bathroom under the stairs looks exatly like a 2x3 room from the layout of the fixtures (you may need to adjust if Sims can't get in the tub though). From that size, the bathroom right next to it looks to be 3x3, with a 1x2 add-on. The rest of the house can be approximated using those sizes.

If you want, you can print out the plan, and sketch a light grid over each room. However, you should always take into account how fixtures work in the Sims, and make allowances for access and smooth gameplay. You'll probably add a square here and there to get things to fit, since it's not an "exact" CAD design program.

The fun part is getting the exterior painted, landscaped, and shrubbed to look exactly like the plan. You also have to judge how far back you want the house from the street based on the plan, and design of your neighborhood.

It's a fun process though, and takes a couple of tries to get right. The best part is the results are fun to play with! I'm working on making a "signature" neighborhood with a bunch of pre-made houses like this, where people just move in and "live" in them (like real life); without too much of the typical Sims evolving "anthill" box-buildings. It takes work to get a range of affordible houses, but fun as a design and creation challenge.

Bathroom and kitchen only.

Well, a prefurnished home does give the impression that the house has been lived in, which in turn enhances its apparent serviceability, not to mention making it more affordable if it is not only prefurnished, but also USED. A home normally worth about 120K can easily drop into the much more reasonable 90K range after it's been lived in by a family for about a month of gametime, and the value saved can passed onto another family this way. Prefurnished new is really mostly suggestive, though, since you can always strip crap out in preinhabitation build to make ends meet, plus it gives you a better estimate of the true cost of the home.

That's really sad.

*makes a mental note to not download any of your lots if I come across them*

I prefer furnished houses. I want to be able to download and use them right away. I don't see the point of just putting in the bathroom and kitchen stuff. You might as well just leave the house completely unfurnished and let the sims get those extra aspiration points for buying those essentials.

I also agree with J.M., used furniture is even better. If you don't want to play the house then put one sim in them, give him 3 or more logic with SimPE, have him meditate while the game is on fast forward, then go have a cup of coffee or something.

I only have three lots up on the exchange for a lot or the reasons listed here. I will only upload something I would download, which means my lots have to be unique, and fully furnished. I play test a little (probably not for as long as I should) and I don't have any hacks in the game, and never upload hacked objects (unless you count the 'unlocked' objects that don't do anything other than what they were intended for as hacked.)

I build all my lots from existing floor plans and adjust from there for sim-reality. (Extra bathrooms, taking out things like coat closets.) I try to keep as many things 'real homes' have as I can. (Storage closets with 'junk' in them, or an attic full of 'old furniture'.) I play every lot I build and the only problem I found was the attic full of 'old furniture' tends to be an issue if you have appliances up there, or your coffee tables are covered in old magazines and coffee cups. Removing the door or turning things and re-arranging them in such a way as to make them unusable by sims doesn't help either. =(

The biggest problem I think people have with building from actual blueprints is that they don't adjust things. I have to adjust every print I have!

And I Absolutely HATE those ugly mostrosities that fill up the entire floor view screenshot so you can't see the edges of the house. I also dislike with very much the lots that require a sim to walk for six hours to get where he needs to go.

That's so true, I always adjust, some things in the real world just don't have parallels in the Sim world, including:

* closets (I'll put a dresser in place of one though)
* laundry rooms
* storage areas
* garages (although I put my fitness equipment in them)

I prefer playing in plan-built homes, even though they might not be the most "efficient." I like doing my own thing and being creative once and a while, but trying to make a real-life plan "work" (through tweaking the design) is a challenge for me. It also forces me to design something differently, and try different ideas.

It's also easy to fall into a design rut, where your house layouts start being too similar to each other. I had a "efficiency" rut where the living room would be in the front, kitchen in the back, dining room to one side of the house, and bedrooms to the other side (or upstairs). It wasn't until I forced myself to design houses on someone else's plan that I started seeing how I could do things differently, and that opened my eyes to new possibilities, thus making me a better home designer. I guess understanding other people's work is key to making your own work better - like in any art.

Also, can you put a link to your work up on the exchange? I'd like to see what you've done.

haha, but since i have encountered this thread, i have decided to furnish all my new lots. i have already furnished my latest lot. the one called livable..