• In Game Usability: Walls, floors and terrains have to be usable in the game. Try to make something that your sims will want to decorate their house with and that you would see in a real life house.

• Colors: Calling it sci-fi or psychedelic won't fly. If you insist on neon wall paper then decorate an entire house with it and play the house for two whole days. Then come back to us.

• Paintings and Logos: Don't take a pretty picture or a photo of yourself and turn it into a wallpaper. The same goes for anime, comic book pics, random posters of celebrities, etc. Try to make something creative that could realistically go on a wall or floor. Look at home decorating sites for inspiration.

• Murals: If you want to upload a mural, it's usually better to do so as an object - a large, flat painting which can therefore match multiple wall styles.

• Distortion Unfortunately, walls are very prone to distortion. This is because the game squishes wall textures horizontally. You will need to look carefully at your wall texture, and may need to stretch it in your graphics editor, to get it looking right in-game.

• Do not take screen shots from HomeCrafter. These give very little information to your downloaders and if the grid's still in place, it hides seams.

• Take game shots of your downloads spread across several tiles. People will want to see what the download looks like if they decorate a room with it and so that users can see how it looks when it's tiled. Add some furniture as well, so downloaders can see the scale.However, make sure that you don't use so much furniture/windows/shrubbery that your content is obscured.

• Terrain paint should be applied to several tiles, add some plants or garden furniture as well, so downloaders can see the scale. However, make sure that you don't use so much furniture/windows/shrubbery that your content is obscured.

• As a rule of thumb, your screenshots should include every wall spread over at least three continuous tiles, or 2x2 for floors, without any furniture obstructing that section of wall/floor. For terrain paints, the appropriate size of uninterrupted paint depends on the scale of your terrain paint.

Keep the following in mind for your screenshots, especially the required ones:

• Size: 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall is a good size for the smallest pic you would want to upload. Your images can be up to 2560x1440 pixels, and 800 kb, so you have lots of space to work with!
• Lighting: For most things, it's best to take pictures in an interior room with good lighting. For lots, pictures should be taken during a nice sunny day, for floorplans, take the pictures with the lights ON.
• Clarity: Neither blurry, nor pixellated/crunchy. Do not size up small pictures to make a large one as this will blur them, and make sure not to use too much compression/too low quality when saving your images.
• Distance: Take your pictures so that your creation fills the screen without anything cut off at top or bottom - neither zoomed in too close, nor zoomed out too far.
• Distortion: If you resize your images, retain the aspect ratio so they don't get stretched or squashed. Take care when zooming in and out with the camera that you do not create a fisheye effect on your pictures.
• Photoshopping: Do not apply filters like sharpen, contrast, etc. to the required pictures, as downloaders want to see what your creation will look like in their game, not your skills at using Photoshop.
• Attached: All required images must be attached directly to the MTS upload, not just inserted using the img tag, so that even if the pics get deleted from your Photobucket (or other host), the upload on MTS is still complete.
• Show all items: For most areas, if you are uploading a set, you must take all the required pics for each item in the set. If there is an exception, it will be noted.
• Picture limit: You may upload up to 100 pictures for a single upload thread, so feel free to add some additional pictures just to show off your work to its best. Of course, keep it reasonable - nobody needs 50 pics to show off one sim or hair.
• Inline pictures: Inline pictures are those that use the [img] tag to show up in with the description text. So that it doesn't take too long to load, please keep this to no more than 4 pictures done inline, unless you put them inside an [infobutton] tag. To do this, see our guide on post formatting.

If you are doing a huge set, you can always break the set up into pieces, posting more screenshots along with the downloads as comments in the thread, as is done here and here. To do that, create a new thread in the Creator Issues Forum and arrange your thread there, using the first post as an introduction, and attach your uploads and images to subsequent posts in the thread. When you're done, PM a moderator to have it moved to the upload queue. For more information, read the message that displays when you go to post in Creator Issues.

For instructions on compressing your files into an archive, please see: Creator Guidelines: Creating Archive Files.

• Do not include multiple archives with the same contents - that is, please don't put your files in both a .zip as well as a .rar because some people only want .zip files. Choose one format.

• Do not double-compress your files... a .rar file inside another .rar file (or any other archive inside another) doesn't compress it anymore, and it makes it so we can't see the contents without downloading, and also just makes an extra step for the people downloading.

• The file size limit on MTS is 50 mb. If you exceed this limit you will need to split your archives. This should probably never come up except for large worlds for The Sims 3, or huge sets of smaller items.