MTS2:Creator Guidelines/Neighborhood Maps/Sandbox

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Sims 2 Neighborhood Maps Upload Guidelines

When uploading a neighborhood map for The Sims 2 to Mod The Sims, we have some basic requirements to ensure that your upload is good, shown well, and has the correct info and files needed for people to use it in their games. This allows both moderators to check your uploads for quality, and for downloaders to see if your item is something they want to add to their games.


Quality

  • Unique: No matter what style or design you choose, your neighborhood should be unique and different. We already have plenty of perfectly flat grid neighborhoods available, so try to do something interesting that other people haven't already done before.
  • Playable: A neighborhood that's lumpy all over with few, if any, flat, buildable areas, and very few roads is really not going to be very useful for anyone. Remember, you're creating something that people are going to actually use in their game, so it should be as useable as possible


Screenshots

Screenshots
A good overview shot. Example is Enchanted Cove by enchantedw0lf.
You will need to include at least one overview shot of your neighborhood that shows the whole terrain. You can, of course, include multiple pictures of your neighborhood if you like, showing different aspects of it, but you do need to include at least the one whole pic.


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.

Files

  • Neighborhood.sc4 file: This is your terrain from Sim City.
  • Neighborhood.png: This is the default neighborhood picture for your neighborhood.
  • Neighborhood_lush.png, Neighborhood_dirt.png, Neighborhood_concrete.png and Neighborhood_desert.png: For your neighborhood to work properly with different terrain types, you will need to include all of these images taken from in game.


Note: Your new terrain should and will be called something other than "Neighborhood".'


Zip, Rar, or 7z
To upload your file(s) to MTS, you will need to compress them into an archive file, which makes them smaller and allows you to include many files in one download. The archive file formats we currently accept are .zip, .rar, and .7z.

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.
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