The Sims Through the Ages
A Work-in-Progress Custom World for The Sims 3
Progress
Click on the area's name to view detailed screenshots, lot galleries and more, or scroll down to read about the project.
Bird’s eye view of the work-in-progress world.
Ready for Testing:
In progress:
The Sims 2: Desiderata Valley coming soon
About the Project
While I've played with the Create A World tool on and off for a long time, this is the first time I'm sharing my creations. Feedback and comments are always welcome on the forums thread!
While many have recreated neighbourhoods from The Sims 1 & 2, I found many were left unfinished, inaccurate, or only included one small section of what the original games offered. I also couldn't find any worlds that combined TS1 and TS2 neighbourhoods. However, as you may know, street names were shared between different neighbourhoods in the two games.
The Process
I began trying to puzzle out how they could fit together. I found/took screenshots of each of the four main neighbourhoods I wanted to work with: TS1's Old Town and Downtown, and TS2's Pleasantview and Downtown. Then I outlined and labelled the lots, colour-coded by type; identified named and unnamed roads (e.g. streets with no addresses/properties facing them); and tried to make them line up. With a little maneuvering, they fit into a "T" shape, with Pleasantview - Downtown (TS1) - Old Town (and Neighborhood 1) across the top and Downtown (TS2) attaching below TS1's.
The T-shape meant I had some extra room, so I started looking at what other neighbourhoods might logically be located in close proximity to the other four. Belladonna Cove and Desiderata Valley seemed the most promising, and I decided on the latter since Belladonna Cove's real estate is more expensive than most neighbourhoods and Desiderata Valley has a better ratio of residential to community lots for the world as a whole. As a bonus, Desiderata Valley has a road coming from a mountain tunnel and Old Town has one leaving it.
Next, I made a custom height map as a starting point to help keep my scale accurate and the topography as close to the original neighbourhoods as possible. This allowed me to place all the roads and lots right away and make broad topography adjustments as needed before I started working on individual lots and recreating the neighbourhood details. The detailed sculpting and landscaping is of course still a work-in-progress.
Finally I got to the more fun part - recreating lots from the first two games in the series. I also took some creative liberties in adding lot types from The Sims 3 to make it a fully-functioning TS3 world. The final product will have all of the community lot types from TS3 and its expansions except for those from Supernatural and Into the Future. I'm trying to only use content from expansions and free Store content for the world, although I will be sharing lots and/or a world download using additional store items that make it a closer adaptation of the original neighbourhoods. (For example, some of the Old Town lots work best with content from the Stone's Throw Greenhouse, several TS1 Downtown lots have ice cream machines or could function as a restaurant with the Business as Usual Bistro content.)
You can follow all my progress on this site or over on The Sims Forums!
