Developing this site has taken a great portion of my mental real-estate lately. Fortunately, aesthetics have been settled upon at this stage, so I'm not still flipping back and forth through CSS guides on MDN Web Docs. Honestly, very little CSS is being used. I decided what I do on this site is just fine for my purposes: except for the homepage framework (which breaks completely for some reason whenever I try to change this), I'm using per-page CSS formatting in the page code, rather than referring to an all-encompassing stylesheet like a reasonable person would. In order to make it easier to change the aesthetic design of the site at some point in the future, the site content itself is served in an inline frame. Also, that way, I can have an omnipresent navigation bar and Anti-genAI statement.
While I was originally planning to render the whole website in Comic Sans MS (TS1's in-game font), I found this was hard to work with, since I tend to do a lot of formatting like this, and Comic Sans doesn't have a native bold or oblique variant (at least not the Windows 7 version, which is where I'm doing all the initial development). Also, it's Comic Sans. Everyone hates Comic Sans. Well, instead, I'm going to use GNU FreeFont Sans-Serif, which is based on Helvetica, The Sims 2's in-game font. That one at least doesn't need any coaxing to work on Linux Mint, since FreeSans comes with it. Of course, if you have name brand Helvetica Neue, you can use that too.
Enough about formatting. You came here to know what I plan to put onto the website! Like I'd mentioned on my microblog, I'm going to use this site as a release venue for my Sunshine Acres stories. I'm using a combination of in-game screenshots, SimPose, and Simshow to make the pictures, so there's a LOT of storyboarding involved. Some of these pics can be achieved using the game only, but like. My outlines describe some really complicated scenes. The game can't do a lot of that on its own. Still, I'm making progress on the Besties household's story. I can't promise it'll be done by launch, but it'll be something, anyway.
Next, we have households in FAM format, just like the Hatfield, Maximus, Snooty, Jones, and Valentino families of ould. I'm still convinced that installing the Maximus house was what caused Goureaud shading to shit itself. One clue was how the hidden carpool spawner object seemed to be missing from that lot. The Sims is a combinatorics nightmare to begin with, so I guess it had more than 2 problems. Anyway, having nothing to do with that, we've already got 4 households: Wellerman, Silverman, Patala, and Johns. There's some lots I made for an earlier attempt to make a TS1 fansite that aren't really good enough to release on their own, but I'm going to re-use them for pre-made households. The idea here is to fill up the entire old neighbourhood and a lot of Old Town with pre-defined households, so you can either piecemeal it out or download the entire neighbourhood.
We've also got tutorials on how to mod the game, how to run a no-CD crack of The Sims Complete Collection (all told, a much better UX than Legacy Edition), how to build nice-looking houses, stuff like that. Vis-à-vis no-CD cracks, there's a tool called SafeDiscLoader that acts as a sort of... I don't know, emulator? For the Safedisc copy protection scheme. It doesn't work with SecuROM so far as I know, but The Sims Complete Collection uses the same version of Safedisc that The Sims 2's core game does. The only thing I need to do is give this tool a field test. I'm hoping Riza will let me test this out on their Win10 live session so I can write a guide for the site. Because, right now, all I've got to go on is the rather shorthand-y README file.
And, of course, what Sims 1 fansite would be complete without downloads? I'm putting as much of my old CC as I want others to see onto this site, as well as some new stuff. I got Body Warp working last night, which means I can edit body meshes again. I used this tool in middle school to make non-buffed versions of some of the default male meshes, in amongst various other things. To test the tool out again, I made a 13-year-old girl mesh out of B200FAFit_BWar. Like I say on the site's About Me page: 6th-8th grades are a really strange time in the "physical development" sense, because you can have classrooms full of boys with broad shoulders and thick necks, and girls with big boobs and round hips, who all still have their childlike faces. You can't make any of that from a stock install, neither can you trust the judgement of horny boys who discovered how to use The Sims as a spank bank and uploaded their idealised "girlfriend" meshes to The Sims Resource (real thing that happened btw). I also made a pregnant mesh out of B014FAFat_01 (goes with the "delo" skin, the light pink sweater with the khaki pants). A thing that always bothered me about people's pregnant body meshes was how inaccurate they were. All they tended to do was distend the abdomen a bit and stop there. It's like they'd never seen a pregnant person before. When you get pregnant, your abdomen distends, sure; but also your hips get wider, your thighs get thicker, your back arches forward more, and your boobs get bigger. Also, there are 2 bone groups that need editing to make a convincing pregnancy mesh: SPINE, which is where the abdomen is; but also PELVIS, which is where the vagina is! You need to extend PELVIS out the same distance as SPINE because, as the uterus pushes out, it distends that area too. The other thing is, you have to edit a suitable mesh to get a convincing effect. trying to change B002FAFit_01 (the "mom" skins; the white or purple tucked shirt with high-waisted jeans) will not work for this. I might have given my mum-to-be a comically-large bum, but that's easy to fix without spoiling the effect. ANyway, I also made a new skin for it. I'll let you wait until launch to know what it looks like, though.
Finally, I'm also planning on a couple of premium pieces for Ko-fi subscribers. The site will have 0 advertising, of course; and the CC on it will always be completely free. But at the same time, I feel like it's nice to have a little bonus for subscribing to the site. Something that makes you go "dang, I wish I could have that." Something that makes you want to give me a small amount of money on a monthly basis 😊 I'm thinking maybe the same formula that EASD used to use for Stuff Packs: 1 each of adult and child male and female skins, an object or 2, some flooring, some wallpaper, and a house; come up with some box art in Powerpoint. Yeah! That sounds like a great idea, actually! 🤓
So, yeah. Barring any unforeseen delays, I should be able to launch by Friday, 24th April. I'll announce it on my microblog and Neocities profile when it's up. It's not going to be complete, mind you, but it'll be in a good enough condition to launch. I'll carry on adding stuff to it whenever I make it.