Saturday 24 March 2007

While looking for Irish castle plans (Murchad is going to be needing a castle, if you must know) I stumbled across an excellent resource for Sims castle builders. This site showcases castles built using Legos, and the builder also includes plans for each of the 114(!) castles he has built. He has not only the plans of the actual castles, with all their curves and awkward angles, but also the plans he drew for his Lego castles. These are doubly interesting to us since he is forced to build on a grid of squares just as we are.

He even built Warkworth Castle, which was the inspiration for Egelric’s castle! I wish I had found his site when I was working on it.

As I mentioned in that post, the meager plans I used for Egelric’s castle are included on this site, which consists of scans from an old book about the growth of the English country house. But this gentleman has really done his research, including leaving his computer and going to an actual physical library. Thereby saving me the trip!

Wednesday 21 March 2007

Although it was one of the most recent castles to be built in Lothere, Egelric’s castle will be the first of the castle tours, partly because Devin asked for it, and partly because it is my favorite.

Monday 19 March 2007

When writing about Kiv’s cave I thought an explanation of how I build my campfires might be useful as well. I have tried a few objects cloned from fireplaces, but they have tended to be buggy and difficult to install. My campfire is only an illusion so you don’t get any of the fireplace-​related animations, but I think it looks nice in the story.

Monday 19 March 2007

Tiana gets a second request granted right away, but since she is starting a new story that may involve caves I wanted to help her out by showing how I built Kiv’s cave. (A story about cave-​dwelling dwarves?) Hopefully it will interest some of the rest of you.

Unlike most of my lots, Kiv’s cave really is something of a “set” in the Hollywood sense. It is not set up to be a realistic cave (or even a playable lot), but only with story-​telling in mind. My castles look like real castles, as we shall soon see with Egelric’s, but one can only go so far with cave-​building in The Sims without resorting to cheats and tricky camera angles.

Sunday 18 March 2007

Tiana recently asked whether anyone had used dwarves in their Sim stories. The idea intrigued me, so I decided to do a few experiments to see how well it would work.

Friday 16 March 2007

Let’s use this post to tell me if there’s something you want me to write about or otherwise to see on this site. Or in Lothere—why not? Entering a comment in the form at the bottom of the page will allow everyone else to see and second your wonderful idea, but if you prefer to contact me privately, you can use the form below to send me an email.

Friday 16 March 2007

As promised, here is the blog behind the blog. There are a few things I want to write here to start with, but I’ve been lagging on the story a bit getting this ready. %#&@ stylesheets! (If the layout is looking wonky for anyone please leave a comment. That blue sidebar has a tendency to wander.)

A number of people have expressed an interest in seeing what goes on behind the scenes, and I personally have a few things I’ve been wanting to say about the story for a while. We’ll see what develops from there.

The title of this post, if you’re wondering, refers to the header image at the top. There are actually five separate images up there that should rotate on a daily basis and on a different rotation schedule so we might get some interesting combinations. Five in a row of the same character means we win a jackpot or something. To increase the hilarity I included a photo of myself in one of the slots, so if you stop by often you might see as much of my face as I care to show to the Internet.