Uploading Lots: Upload the Lot Segment Only

[Greg]

A question in a private message brought up a very important point:

HI!
I hope you don't mind me sending you this pm. But I was wandering if I could use your walls and floors you created: http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=32071 in a house I want to upload to Modthesims2 and insimenator and if I can include them with the upload? With credit of course.

Thanks for asking!

In general, there are many reasons why you want to include only the lot segment when you upload a lot:

1. It prevents the game from including hordes of custom content that has never even been in the house.
2. It reduces the size of the file by tens of megabytes; sometimes even hundreds of megabytes.
3. It eliminates out-of-date game hacks from messing up other people's games.
4. Letting the game include custom content results in scads of unintelligible alphabet-soup filenames in the users' downloads directory.
5. It prevents users from ending up with multiple copies of the cc in their download directories.
6. When users download things, they can save the zip or rar files as a backup against the possbility that the game will go haywire and they'll lose all their custom content.
7. It assures that you won't accidentally distribute something you don't have permission to distribute.
8. It's courteous to the webmasters of the places where you got the stuff to provide a link to their sites when people can get the custom goodies.

To Get the Lot Segment Only

1. Let Clean Installer open the .sims2pack file.
   (You might want to take a screen shot of the list of custom content while you're here.)
2. Click on the box at the top right that says "Lot Segment Only"
3. Save the lot file (with a different file name).
4. Zip up the file you just saved. That's the one you want to upload.

This particular case calls for a bit more thought because the walls and floors in question are the solid black-and-white ones that I made.


Anne Seladdams Lives in a Colorful World of Black and White
Click on the image to go to the download topic on Insimenator.net.


Yeah, it's a good idea even for tiny trivial things.

My first thought was that the walls and floors in question were so incredibly tiny (only 6.6 KB) that the file size issues won't matter and so fantastically easy to make that I really can't think of them as a great creative work that I should be jealous of; but there is still the problem with those bally alphabet-soup filenames.

Those awful filenames are one of my pet peeves so I would still recommend linking to them instead of including them in the download. (MTS2 filenames are great! They're completely traceable back to the source and the artist. Gotta love it!)

So... if there is a compelling reason to bundle instead of to link, go ahead, but I would quite strongly recommend keeping the cc separate.

You could alternatively just include the little pswalls_solidblackandwhite.zip file in the same download topic to assure that folks can get them easily. (Explicitly: You have my permission to do that and you can link to this message to prove it. In this specific case, these things are tiny and trivial and I really don't care.) Credit is nice. I'd appreciate a link to Sun Sims because this is my home site.


Parting thought about PM's: I don't know why this needed to be a private message. In general, I would prefer that folks ask questions in the open forum unless it really needs to be a private matter. If the answer turns out to be something that ought to be a PM even though the question is not, I can always answer privately.

[Miros1]

CleanInstaller does a pretty good job of keeping the filenames intact (only Maxis -- put the file names in the Sims2Pack and ignore them while unpacking).

The only time I've had a file install with an alphabet soup filename is when the creator of the house had acquired the custom content before they got Clean Installer!

[Greg]

Yeah, it might be that I noticed the alphabet-soup phenomenon before I got Clean Installer.