On Constructing SimFloors

Making floors is probably the easiest item to make for the Sims.....so easy you'll spit.

Step 1: Heat up your drawing program. Create a new image. The tech specs for a floor image is 64x64 pixels...you can actually work in any size you want, HomeCrafter will fix it later, but it's probably going to help to work in actual size so you'll have a better idea of what the end product will look like. As far as I've been able to find on the many unhelpful sites out there, the default image is also 72ppi...not 100% sure about that but it seems to be about right. I personally work in 75ppi, again, it doesn't matter, HomeCrafter will take care of it.

Step 2: Draw yer floor. Make it simple, make it complex, make it stupid, make it sane...doesn't matter. Italian hand-crafted ceramic tiles, or your favorite image of Vanilla Ice....its completely up to you. Here's mine:


Woohoo!!! Lookout!! I'm goin' all nutso on the goofballs!!! Yeah baby!!!
Anyway....like I said, anything your little heart desires. At this point you should probably have some idea what your looking for. And here would be a good time to make a quick comment about tiling...if you've ever worked with tiled images before, you know that when you put a bunch of them together any inheirent patterns start to show. This is fine if what you're doing is making, say, some kitchen tiles, but if you're trying to pull off some carpet, or swirly oo-gobs, things can get a little tougher. If you don't want the texture to look tiled, than you're going to need to put in a little work on making sure the edges will match up with each other, and that they'll blend well. I don't really have any worthwhile advice on how to pull this off, just gotta work on it.

Step 3: Ok, here's where your real mad graphics skillz come in. Make your floor look like a floor. Most floors exist in the third dimension and are affected by room lighting, your floor isn't. Its really just a picture painted on the floor. So you gotta fake people out as best you can. In my example, I've decided to make it into a sort of semi-gloss tile:


To make it "tile-ish" I used my darken tool to give it some edges. To make it sort of "glossy" I used the lighten tool which I then smudged in to make it look like it was catching some light reflections (its a little hard to see in this gif image, but you get the idea). This is the stage when you should really do the most fussing with your image. Don't over do it, but do your best to make it look like anything other than just a 2d swatch of color. Got it? Good.

Step 4: This step might actually be optional...HomeCrafter seems to be bit weird on this case. All images in the Sims operate on a 256 color palatte. You might need to save your bmp down to 256 colors...but you might not and HC will just take care of it for ya. One of the problems with Micrografx is that it really sucks on handling palattes properly, so HomeCrafter actually won't take any of my 256 palattized images, but it does take 16 million colors...whatever. Paint Shop seems to handle it all fine, like I said just fool around with it, HC will probably take your image as is anyway, so you probably don't need to worry.

Step 5: Ok, save your image one way or another...the general naming standard is xyz_Floor.bmp, but call it whatever you want. Heat up HomeCrafter and this is what you'll see:


First thing is to make sure that the "floor" button is pressed (as opposed to the "wall" button) so HomeCrafter knows what's coming its way,

Hit the import button and open up your bitmap.

Your bitmap should show up in the little window....now cover the sample house with your new floor and see how it looks...

If its not looking the way you want, just go back and edit the image in your paint program, and re-import it. Once you have your floor looking how you want it to. Then give it a name, price, and description by pressing the bar at the bottom of the screen.

You can assign a price anywhere from 1-99 simoleans. Generally floors tend to run around 5-15, but its entirely up to you. One note: do ol' QE a favor and PLEASE don't skip this step. I've run across a ton of really great floor files, imported them into the game, only to find that they had no descriptions, names and a price of $1. The philosophy being that anyone can drag them into HomeCrafter and assign the price and stuph themselves. Frankly, after downloading about 15 or more tiles, last thing I want to do is drag each one through HomeCrafter. A lot of people aren't going to have HomeCrafter installed anyway. Give your public a finished product and don't be so fucking lazy. I really don't care how cool your floor looks, if you haven't touched it off with the details than its just crap. Ok.....rant mode off.

There's also one other detail that goes along with floors. You can assign the sound that sims make when walking over the floor. Below the preview box there's 3 "floor" buttons that will assign sounds from load to soft (pressing the button will give you a preview). Obviously the general idea is that tile or wood is probably going to have a harder sound while rug has a softer sound, but make it whatever you want.


Our final step is to convert the floor into a .flr file. Simple stuph. Just hit the "export image" button:


Again, the general naming convention is "xyz_Floor.flr", but if you want to go for something different its your call. As long as installation went ok, HomeCrafter will default to saving the file in your "the Sims/Game Data/Floors" directory....you can save it there or anywhere you want, but its gonna have to be in that directory for it to work in the game.

Very last step, make a gif image of the floor, and load it and the flr file up on the web and share it with all your friends. Let them marvel at what a soopah genius you are at home decorating, and they will regail you with endless stories of how their Sims sure do like walking on your floors more than anyone else's!

Enjoy!!







Any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me here.

Queen Elvis v3.12