Medieval stuff I want to make

[eefje00704]

I'm just making a little list of all the stuff suitable for medieval games that I want to make. I've been collecting suggestions over at GoS, but I'm putting it up here so that I have it all in one place and feel more obligated to actually finish them.

Hat's Saints (you'll see what I mean by that)
+ worshipable altar?

Animals:

Owls (+ maybe as a parrot pet variant)
Foxes
Wolves
Dogs
Rats
Cats
Goats
Squirrels
Does (maybe)
Chickens
Cows
Geese
Ducks
Donkeys
Sheep, because Sunni wants to be able to sheer her sheep and Blacky's don't come with that option :P
Pheasants
Pigeons?
Vultures?
Falcons
Bats
Peafowl
Dragons
Unicorns
More bears

Profession clutter:

Blacksmith
Butcher --> meat
Weaver --> loom, spinning wheel, baskets of wool, carding combs, spindles, baskets of thread, rolled or folded cloth,
Cobbler --> shoes, tools
Bakery --> oven, bread (single, on boards, in baskets), cakes, gingerbread, sacks of flour, salt, yeast, kneaded dough, rising dough, rolling pins 
Farmer --> plow, feed and water troughs, haystack, scarecrow,
Alchemist

Other random ideas:

Deco roofs
Water well
Chalices/goblets
Helmets/hats
Hourglass (as alarm)
Church bells
Filled or empty baskets
Kitchen clutter
Bows
Knives
Books
Place settings
Chairs and benches
Statues
Fountains
Tents
Peddler's carts
Quills + pen replacement




Presently too difficult:

Glassless windows

If you play a medieval game and have more suggestions, feel free to post them.

Comments

[oph3lia]

Chalices/Goblets

Helmet clutter: knight's helmets, viking hats.

[eefje00704]

Added to the list.

[hat_plays_sims]

Okay okay okay.

I know you said you weren't sure about doing shoes without a source, but FantasyRogue did an absofrickinlutely fabulous pair of leggings that has a wonderful pair of turnshoes; those would make great clutter. (And I love her for making those leggings; hose and tunics as separates is a long-ignored idea for Medieval menswear.) Likewise, you could lop the shoes off of Aligeth's Robin Hood tunic or the poulaines off of this getup by Helena, although those are a little bit outsized. Amaryll's flats are also good useful shoes, but I think Pinketamine might be planning on making those into clutter. Where Are The Elves? talks about how Medieval shoes were made, which means he talks about the tools cobblers would've needed, as well as the shoes themselves.

Farm stuff... A plow that fits Dragonslave's horses would be awesome. I don't know if there's a difference (beyond the obvious) in how cows, oxen, and bulls are shaped, but that might be something to check for. (I use the cows, pigs, and chickens from Sims My Farm, so my critters mostly move around.) Feed and water troughs would be handy, and I have never found a good haystack. Ever. Four squares, a little bit alpha-shaggy, Wood for Sims' big barn set has some good hay textures to steal... I've seen haystacks that look like a half-chewed gumdrop with hay-printed wrapping paper draped over, but nothing that looks like a haystack. (Likewise, rushes for the floor, probably best as alpha-editable rugs or something.) Are you thinking of doing shearable sheep, or just sheared sheep to coordinate with Blacky's sheep? Does the Seasons scarecrow count as clutter? I never use him, but I would if he didn't have meshed-on overalls and men's dress shoes. I do know there are ducks and swans (Simslice, they move), pigeons (Wideopeneyes, they don't move and are frickin' huge), and chickens (Tarox, deco, Rebecah, moving, and Sims My Farm, fully functional) out there, although I haven't seen a good rooster.

Not only does a weaver need a loom (and I like the working one from MTS, but it produces cash, not cloth), he-or-she needs a spinning wheel (there are three readily available, but the only one without a foot pedal (Gara's) isn't all that round), baskets of wool, carding combs, spindles, baskets of thread, lengths of rolled or folded cloth... Let me send you to Haandkraft to see thread reels, thread for sale, and for the heck of it, meat pies.

A blacksmith needs hammers, tongs, horseshoes, iron nails scattered around or in small barrels, an anvil and forge, high troughs of water to quench with, plenty of wood (lots of woodpiles out there, though) and charcoal...

A baker needs a good big bottle-shaped oven (maybe as a separate deco piece to put over your favorite invisible stove recolor, if making a functional oven doesn't appeal), lots of whole wheat or rye bread on big boards or in baskets or singly to sell-- the edible bread from The Dark Project is a good example, although it's mighty fine and white for peasant bread. Cakes should be more like fruitcake than frosted cake, as sugar was pretty pricey stuff, but gingerbread (which started off as ginger and spices mashed up with stale breadcrumbs, dampened, and pressed into shaped molds) would be easily available. They need sacks of whole wheat or rye flour (although there's a good sack of white flour at I think Sims Design Avenue), salt, jars of brewer's yeast (which is the only yeast there was back then), kneaded dough, rising dough, European-style rolling pins (which is to say, wooden cylinders)...

A butcher mostly just needs meat. Meat, sausage, plucked or unplucked fowl... I remember seeing Kativip's Memories set... Restless Streets, I think. It's got some really good food clutter that could be easily lopped off its fixed shelves.

You've got a ton of animals on your list, and I already mentioned some farm critters... I do know there are ducks and swans (Simslice, they move), pigeons (Wideopeneyes, they don't move and are frickin' huge), and chickens (Tarox, deco, Rebecah, moving, and Sims My Farm, fully functional) out there, although I haven't seen a good rooster. Peafowl would be wicked cool, though. but you might also consider dragons of varying sorts and possibly unicorns. I've got one good dragon from Blacky's that I should recolor, but it's only in one pose, and every unicorn I've ever seen looks like a plastic toy. Heck, a unicorn could be slaved to Dragonslave's horses with a second subset for a horn, and just... made daintier.

Miscellaneous clutter... Hm.

Okay, Sims Design Avenue has an awesome Alchemy set available in The Booty, and it's got some great plops of clutter that would be even better if they were single items instead of great plops of clutter. Likewise Kativip's Legend series rats and crows are all bunched together and would be more versatile clipped apart. I would give my eye teeth for a deco hourglass-- or even better, an hourglass that functioned as an alarm clock, but you said clutter, so, clutter. Church bells. Kitchen clutter, baskets with Stuff in them or maybe with slots so stuff could be put in them. There are never enough weapons-- and there really was a law on the books that said every Englishman had to practice with the longbow for an hour a day, back in the thirteenth century, and even children carried knives (as tools more than weapons). Crockery, turned or carved wooden plates, cups, bowls, spoons... Personally, I can never have enough book clutter, but I kinda love it when the book clutter functions as a bookshelf. I've got a shitload of books that do that, though.

Chargers and/or goblets and/or tankards that work as centerpieces but are laid out as place settings, if that makes sense-- so that when your Sims sit down to eat, there's a charger under their plate, or a tankard at hand. If you did slaved variations with one plate, two plates across from each other, two plates catty-corner with each other, three plates for the end of a long table, and four plates for a single-tile table, you could create whole-banquet settings that don't require any OMSPs and always line up perfectly with where the plates will land.

Do lights count as clutter? There are never enough lights that cast a fire-colored light, at least not that also work with Gunmod's Radiance Lighting. I have Castaway Stories lamps that are obviously fire and yet cast bluish electric light.

If you think you might be into doing seating at all, I found some good references-- and even plans, although I'm not sure how much that helps you-- for simple chairs and benches made of mostly flat planes. It's not exactly all rectangles, but some of it is pretty darned close. Can you sit on the Castaway Stories trunk dresser? Because a dresser you can sit on would make ideal Medieval furniture-- like this settle, which I've liked since I first saw it. There are plenty of other examples of Medieval furniture here, and plenty of chests and benches that are largely made of flat boards and then decorated with carvings-- which can easily be stolen from the University Medieval furniture. This chair could have its more decorative bits nicked from the mesh of that one stained-glass window.

You know how I feel about statuary. There's never enough stuff with plumb bobs on. There are never enough fountains. ... Decorative tents? Maybe peddler's carts with slots for selling some of those shoes and hourglasses and tchotchkes?

[eefje00704]

Yikes! Ok:

Shoes: good idea with the outfits, I can definitely try chopping the shoes off those.

Rushes: this would be some kind of straw-like rug, is that right?

Just sheared sheep, or maybe even just a sheared recolour of Blacky's sheep.

What should a scarecrow look like then? Is Kativip's not ok?

I'd already thought of the oven, but I think an animated oven/stove is way too difficult right now, since I don't know how to do animations.

Rolling pin: without the handles then?

Wouldn't dragons and unicorns be just a tad unrealistic? ;)

A charger is just a big flat plate?

I don't know how to do lights yet, or how to change what light they cast, unfortunately.

[hat_plays_sims]

When you ask me for ideas, ideas you get! (Granted, I seem to have done it like a Secret Santa post-- 'all these things would be awesome maybe a couple will inspire you.')

There's a shoes-as-clutter tutorial at Garden of Shadows, even. Heck, for the knightly clutter Oph3lia suggested, you could cut the OFB knight costume into pieces.

Rushes are indeed a straw-like rug. Or grass-like, but I think that's just when they're fresh. (Source, with plenty of intriguing pictures, including a garderobe and a close-stool.)

Kativip's scarecrow is in fact pretty darn good! I hadn't remembered him. The only reason I've been idly wishing for a Seasons scarecrow clone is this nonsense. Although if that's over the top, I totally get it-- I realize he's got a bunch of joints and such nonsense.

I know right where you could burgle some nice meshes for deco bottle ovens. Although they're not quite accurate-- Joe Pastry built a brick oven in his backyard, and while the material isn't exactly Medieval Europe, the flat area for baking is. Cyclonesue's fireplaces are all so low that you'd drop your bread if you tried to use 'em for baking (but the inglenook is fantastic).

Yup, an early (or French, or eastern) rolling pin was pretty much just a wooden cylinder without the handles-- example here and here (though it's called a noodle pin) I think here, and by the way, googling Medieval Pie gets you some strange results.

Aliens (and/or fairies), zombies, vampires, robots (or golems), plantsims (dryads?), bigfoot, genies, and witches are a little unrealistic, too, but they're still fun to play with. Medieval people generally believed that dragons, unicorns, basilisks, and a whole mess of other monsters were quite real. And it's been, what, six, seven years now since Sims 2 was released and, while I know of three good dragons (two of which are free on TSR and I dun wanna join), there are NO good unicorns? That's not fair at all.

Chargers are in fact great big plates. These days they're decorative and sit under your china plates, but back in the day they were functional, and kept your trencher (a 'plate' of slow-baked AND stale hard, hard bread, kind of like the world's densest, blandest crouton, which everybody, rich and poor, used for any meal that wasn't eaten in a bowl) from leaking onto your table-linens. When the original Brothers Grimm Sleeping Beauty talks about only having twelve golden plates but thirteen fairies who'll expect an invitation to the princess's christening, they're talking about chargers.

Someday I'll have to learn to about lighting myself, or dig around in my lighting mod and try to convince all the lamps to be fire (except the fun colored special effects ones. You never know when you're going to need an eerie blue glow.)

[eefje00704]

I was kidding about the dragons and unicorns, hence the wink. Humour doesn't transfer well when typed. As you may have noticed, I'd already added them to the animal list :)

And I definitely appreciate your ideas, I was just a tad overwhelmed at first. You've suggested things I didn't even know existed, like the rushes and the chargers. Good to know I had to google medieval charger plates, 'cause medieval charger was giving me lots of pictures of horses and armors.

What's bothering me about the stove is that it just seems silly to make a deco one instead of a functional one. So I want to make a functional one, but I don't see a solution for 2 problems: sims stoves are for baking AND cooking, so how do I make it so that they don't try to cook on top of it? And if I manage that, the section for baking in one of those medieval bottle ovens is quite a lot higher than it is on the sims stoves, so how would I fix that?

And if you ever do figure out that lighting stuff, do let me know please!

[hat_plays_sims]

Well, hey, it fits into the game-- I got that you were being silly, and I kinda was too. At least I didn't suggest anything like... a kelpie or something?

Shoot, I was expecting to get images of horses wearing plate armor-- synonymous words are difficult to google, they really are. I suspected I was going overboard, but what I wanted to give was new ideas, things that hadn't been done before, hadn't been done WELL before (unicorns), or can't ever be done often enough. Hence rushes, chargers (place settings in general, honestly), bottle ovens, haystacks...

I sort of have an idea about the oven. Here is Joe Pastry's backyard brick oven. He uses it for pizza and for when he wants to make really rustic bread. All the heat and food goes in the top section there, and the bottom section is for wood storage, but for Simming purposes, a second opening could serve as an oven vs a stovetop, right? A little like Jeka's Russian Stove. Sure, your Sims might clip the upper curve of the bottle as they stir the soup, but if I'm willing to believe you can pull a cake out of a cauldron...

[eefje00704]

Oh dang. See, humour REALLY doesn't transfer well in typing. I didn't even know what a kelpie was ... pretty cool though :p

Yes, two openings, that could work. But then your bread oven would still be way too low, and you would drop your bread :P Maybe I should make a smaller one like that, which then would be functional, and a deco larger one, where the opening is higher. That way, we could have bakeries with two ovens, that look somewhat authentic because of the big one, and are also functional because of the small one.

[oph3lia]

http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=tower+of+london+horse+armour&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1440&bih=740

I think that's horse plate armour, right?

[hat_plays_sims]

I think I've got the lighting mod thing figured out. I won't swear to it but I think I've got it. There are two lines per light that you have to change in the Radiance mod; one for the light that hits Sims and objects and one for the light that hits walls and floors. I've got the lights hitting Sims right, and I've just gone through and fiddled with the lights hitting walls and floors-- if it works, I'll let you know.

[eefje00704]

That's amazing! So would it only change maxis lights then, or custom ones too?

[hat_plays_sims]

Maxis and custom, because of how the Radiance mod works.

Okay, so the thing about the Radiance system is that it changes all the lights, Maxis and custom, by overriding most customization folk have done to their custom lights and replacing it with the original lighting from whatever the custom light was cloned from. Which sucks, although it's probably necessary for the whole 'radiance' thing, because although some people manage to make custom lights with candle flames, I couldn't figure out how to do it after the fact. It made me a sad panda, because it meant that I had a lot of flame-y Castaway lights that glowed bright white.

So first I broke the lighting mod. Then I really looked hard at the lighting mod. Then I fixed the lighting mod. Then I fiddled around with all the base game lights, plus the couple of other lights I tend to use most (that Seasons swinging light, for one).

Now I have Radiance lighting AND fire!

Think I oughta share it? (The secret is replacing things that say SoftWhite or Amber or household with candleflame.) I've done every base game light except the really colorful ones, because you never know when you're gonna need an eerie green glow. I also did the Sims 2 Store Castle Set lights, but those had to be tweaked in their built-in .nlo.

[eefje00704]

*think* you oughta share?! Of course you should share, because now I totally want it!

[hat_plays_sims]

I'm trying to make a couple of streetlights work sensibly, but once I do the whole pictures thing...

[hat_plays_sims]

Pssst!

[eefje00704]

Haha, that's a lot of lamps! A soft, warm light. I like it! No more TL lighting for our medieval simmies.