Mini Meta: On Simford complete with building pics.
Progress on the next chapter has been virtually non-existent this week, mainly because I've felt exhausted every evening, and my brain doesn't want to give me words that make sense. In fact this post probably won't make sense in places, so sorry about that. Anyway, even though I'm struggling with writing the next chapter, I have been working on things for the neighbourhood, which will eventually show up in the story, as evidenced by my last post. For the past goodness knows how many months, I've been thinking about Simford, and been working on the first community lot there.
For the longest time, I was adamant that I wasn't going to build Simford because I knew it would be a lot of work. I built Beth's Books in Bluewater (a subhood I'd added because I needed another place to put lots other than Regalton or Simdon), and used Bluewater for the location of Joe's original house, the warehouse where William was duped by Bear and the park where Eddie encountered the ignorant couple. Simford was mentioned but never seen. However, several things cropped up which made me realise that when I rebuilt the hood, I would have to add Simford to it. First and foremost was the fact that as I started wanting to make my game and story as accurate as possible, Bluewater no longer cut it as a subhood. For a start, the terrain itself, although lovely, is not at all right for a landlocked English county. Secondly, I'd have to rebuild or scrap all the lots in it, and if I was going to do that, I might as well start a completely new subhood. Thirdly I really did need to have a subhood for cousins who moved away from Regalton but not to Simdon, so it's not like I could fudge the second point. And fourthly, although Regalton is situated a bit more than an hour's journey from Simdon, it doesn't make sense to have my simmies travel to Simdon to do all their shopping if they want something they can't get from the village shops, or to go to a restaurant. Especially when the county town is only about 5 miles away and they have to travel there to get the train to Simdon anyway. So before the rebuild, I started looking for terrains. I found one I quite liked and this is where I first built Sir Horace's house, but once I started playing it, I realised that it still didn't do what I wanted. Luckily, I managed to get SimCity 4 installed on this machine (it wouldn't install at all when I tried when I first got this machine) and so I made a terrain which works well for Simford.
I've made it clear from the start that my legacy and story take place in a simmified version of Victorian Britain, and in particular a simmified version of Hertfordshire, but at the same time I'm not basing my neighbourhood or subhoods on real places by recreating them. Instead I'm aiming to capture something of the tone. A lot of this is because I would go insane (well more insane than I already am) by trying to recreate London, Cambridge or a real Herts village in the Sims. I've tried hard to do this with Simdon, and I think I've succeeded. I've also tried to do it with Regalton, and again to me, even though it is still more of a hamlet than a village, it does remind me of a place I might encounter in East Herts. I decided that I really wanted to do that with Simford too, by trying to capture some of what makes Hertford, Hertford without making all the buildings and road layout exactly as they were. I have a bit of a leg up here, since I've worked in Hertford for ten years and so I know the centre pretty well. I also have a couple of lovely books with old photographs of Hertford in them. The second one especially has a lot of Victorian photographs in it, so I can use those, along with my knowledge of how the buildings look now to capture the feel of Hertford in the sims.
So, this is the terrain I came up with, with the lots I've completed or am working on added.
The centre of the town, with the board school to the bottom left and Sir Horace's house way over on the right.
Off to the left here, you can see Sophia's and Lauren's childhood home. In canon, this actually isn't in Simford, or even Simfordshire, but I'm not adding another subhood at the moment, so it'll be hidden off to the side here.
And this is Simmingfordbury off to the south. (Yes I was looking at the terrain upside down when I took the pictures. Whoops.) The occupied house is Lauren's and Joe lives in one of the cottages to the left of the screen in the story.
The first new lot for the centre of Simford that I decided to work on, is something that Hertford actually didn't have in the 1880s: a market square. Hertford is a market town, but the market was held in Market Place, an L-shaped road behind the county court, rather than in a square. However, a market square is something most market towns have, and so I decided to fudge it a little for my Simford.
I've gone for a bit of a mix for the stalls, with household goods and food. It works for the market and I like it.
And from above:
I need to do a bit of work on the awning still to resize it and make the seam between two less obvious, but overall I think the stalls look really good.
Onto the buildings now. I'm going to go anti-clockwise from the building to the bottom right of the above picture.
This is my tearoom (note the dormer windows. You'll be seeing quite a few of them, since misalinged and mismatched dormer windows are a feature of the buildings in Hertford, whether they are medieval or later).
This is actually a restaurant, not a coffee shop, since i didn't want to put in the espresso machine; it looks far too modern and I've not seen a redone version of it. i do however wish you can set the menu for non owned restaurants. i'd love to have this place serve desserts and custom pattiserie and nothing else.
I'm really pleased with how this looks: I'd have tea here.
The next building is a greengrocers. Before the modern era, bricks for building were typically made using the local clays, leading to various locales having specfic colour bricks associated with them. In Hertford, there are a lot of buff brick buildings. Since the Victorian's liked to ornament everything, they would often add details using a contrasting colour, such as red brick with buff, or blue brick with red. The red brick patterns on these walls are based on two buildings in Hertford, and I will be making more in the future.
Although this is primarily a greengrocers because of a lack of cc to make it a general grocers, I have included other groceries such as the sugar loaves, tea caddies and dairy section.
Beyond the second room, is a store room, and upstairs there's a little bit of storage space too.
Next we come to a row of Medieval buildings. Hertford still has a lot of medieval buildings in its centre, nestled alongside buildings from other eras, many of which have been turned into shops. Most aren't gabled like the ones I've made here, but I liked this look for this row of shops. Others I will be trying to make look more like some of the buildings I know on St Andrew Street and the top of Fore Street.
The first shop is the drapers.
On the first floor of each building I've added a little something to the rooms, just to make it look like they are lived in or are working buildings. This will never really be seen, but it's there to make the place feel more real.
I'm very pleased with the look of the shop. This is also the only place where there is a functional till. All the rest are decorative statues I made to add to the sense that these are real shops, without having the game spawn extra shop assistants I don't need.
This next shop is my favourite on the lot: the milliner.
I am so, so pleased with how the hats on stands turned out. There are also two functional jewellery stands in here: the top hat on the counter and the maroon hat in front of the window. You can tell because they look slightly different - the wooden stand has no shine to it. This is because the decorative hats have two groups, meaning I can have the hats matte, and the stand slightly shiny, but the jewellery stand has only one group. I don't want to try to add another one to the jewellery stand, because it's likely I'll break it. I therefore had to choose between a matte wooden stand, or a shiny hat that looked like it was made of plastic. I went with the matte stand.
The workshop out back:
I really, really love this little room and the cc I made for it.
On now to the last shop in this row, and it's a carpenter's/furniture shop.
This has got offices above it, rather than living quarters.
It was a little difficult to decorate this shop after the previous three, and so it look s a little bare. Really this is a showroom of what the carpenter can do, and my sims would commission pieces of furniture from him, rather than taking away a piece of furniture from the shop.
Adjoining the shop is a little workshop. I'm not quite sure that this is where the carpenter makes the majority of his pieces, but he does work in it to finish some bits off.
The next building looks a litle odd. The idea is that the bottom part was altered but not the rest. I've made it a dyer's workshop to show that industry was happening in the centre of the town as well as commerce.
The final building on this lot is the pub. There are also rooms upstairs, but I've not yet decided if they are guestrooms or staff accommodation.
I was really going for a traditional English pub vibe with this, right down to the dark beams and lincrusta on the ceiling and I think I've succeeded.
Upstairs the rooms are very basic, and like I say, I've not yet decided if this is an inn or a pub.
And there we go. There's a little bit about what I'm aiming for with Simdon, and the lot I've been working on for a bit now. I will probably post more once I've completed another lot or two.
For the longest time, I was adamant that I wasn't going to build Simford because I knew it would be a lot of work. I built Beth's Books in Bluewater (a subhood I'd added because I needed another place to put lots other than Regalton or Simdon), and used Bluewater for the location of Joe's original house, the warehouse where William was duped by Bear and the park where Eddie encountered the ignorant couple. Simford was mentioned but never seen. However, several things cropped up which made me realise that when I rebuilt the hood, I would have to add Simford to it. First and foremost was the fact that as I started wanting to make my game and story as accurate as possible, Bluewater no longer cut it as a subhood. For a start, the terrain itself, although lovely, is not at all right for a landlocked English county. Secondly, I'd have to rebuild or scrap all the lots in it, and if I was going to do that, I might as well start a completely new subhood. Thirdly I really did need to have a subhood for cousins who moved away from Regalton but not to Simdon, so it's not like I could fudge the second point. And fourthly, although Regalton is situated a bit more than an hour's journey from Simdon, it doesn't make sense to have my simmies travel to Simdon to do all their shopping if they want something they can't get from the village shops, or to go to a restaurant. Especially when the county town is only about 5 miles away and they have to travel there to get the train to Simdon anyway. So before the rebuild, I started looking for terrains. I found one I quite liked and this is where I first built Sir Horace's house, but once I started playing it, I realised that it still didn't do what I wanted. Luckily, I managed to get SimCity 4 installed on this machine (it wouldn't install at all when I tried when I first got this machine) and so I made a terrain which works well for Simford.
I've made it clear from the start that my legacy and story take place in a simmified version of Victorian Britain, and in particular a simmified version of Hertfordshire, but at the same time I'm not basing my neighbourhood or subhoods on real places by recreating them. Instead I'm aiming to capture something of the tone. A lot of this is because I would go insane (well more insane than I already am) by trying to recreate London, Cambridge or a real Herts village in the Sims. I've tried hard to do this with Simdon, and I think I've succeeded. I've also tried to do it with Regalton, and again to me, even though it is still more of a hamlet than a village, it does remind me of a place I might encounter in East Herts. I decided that I really wanted to do that with Simford too, by trying to capture some of what makes Hertford, Hertford without making all the buildings and road layout exactly as they were. I have a bit of a leg up here, since I've worked in Hertford for ten years and so I know the centre pretty well. I also have a couple of lovely books with old photographs of Hertford in them. The second one especially has a lot of Victorian photographs in it, so I can use those, along with my knowledge of how the buildings look now to capture the feel of Hertford in the sims.
So, this is the terrain I came up with, with the lots I've completed or am working on added.
The centre of the town, with the board school to the bottom left and Sir Horace's house way over on the right.
Off to the left here, you can see Sophia's and Lauren's childhood home. In canon, this actually isn't in Simford, or even Simfordshire, but I'm not adding another subhood at the moment, so it'll be hidden off to the side here.
And this is Simmingfordbury off to the south. (Yes I was looking at the terrain upside down when I took the pictures. Whoops.) The occupied house is Lauren's and Joe lives in one of the cottages to the left of the screen in the story.
The first new lot for the centre of Simford that I decided to work on, is something that Hertford actually didn't have in the 1880s: a market square. Hertford is a market town, but the market was held in Market Place, an L-shaped road behind the county court, rather than in a square. However, a market square is something most market towns have, and so I decided to fudge it a little for my Simford.
I've gone for a bit of a mix for the stalls, with household goods and food. It works for the market and I like it.
And from above:
I need to do a bit of work on the awning still to resize it and make the seam between two less obvious, but overall I think the stalls look really good.
Onto the buildings now. I'm going to go anti-clockwise from the building to the bottom right of the above picture.
This is my tearoom (note the dormer windows. You'll be seeing quite a few of them, since misalinged and mismatched dormer windows are a feature of the buildings in Hertford, whether they are medieval or later).
This is actually a restaurant, not a coffee shop, since i didn't want to put in the espresso machine; it looks far too modern and I've not seen a redone version of it. i do however wish you can set the menu for non owned restaurants. i'd love to have this place serve desserts and custom pattiserie and nothing else.
I'm really pleased with how this looks: I'd have tea here.
The next building is a greengrocers. Before the modern era, bricks for building were typically made using the local clays, leading to various locales having specfic colour bricks associated with them. In Hertford, there are a lot of buff brick buildings. Since the Victorian's liked to ornament everything, they would often add details using a contrasting colour, such as red brick with buff, or blue brick with red. The red brick patterns on these walls are based on two buildings in Hertford, and I will be making more in the future.
Although this is primarily a greengrocers because of a lack of cc to make it a general grocers, I have included other groceries such as the sugar loaves, tea caddies and dairy section.
Beyond the second room, is a store room, and upstairs there's a little bit of storage space too.
Next we come to a row of Medieval buildings. Hertford still has a lot of medieval buildings in its centre, nestled alongside buildings from other eras, many of which have been turned into shops. Most aren't gabled like the ones I've made here, but I liked this look for this row of shops. Others I will be trying to make look more like some of the buildings I know on St Andrew Street and the top of Fore Street.
The first shop is the drapers.
On the first floor of each building I've added a little something to the rooms, just to make it look like they are lived in or are working buildings. This will never really be seen, but it's there to make the place feel more real.
I'm very pleased with the look of the shop. This is also the only place where there is a functional till. All the rest are decorative statues I made to add to the sense that these are real shops, without having the game spawn extra shop assistants I don't need.
This next shop is my favourite on the lot: the milliner.
I am so, so pleased with how the hats on stands turned out. There are also two functional jewellery stands in here: the top hat on the counter and the maroon hat in front of the window. You can tell because they look slightly different - the wooden stand has no shine to it. This is because the decorative hats have two groups, meaning I can have the hats matte, and the stand slightly shiny, but the jewellery stand has only one group. I don't want to try to add another one to the jewellery stand, because it's likely I'll break it. I therefore had to choose between a matte wooden stand, or a shiny hat that looked like it was made of plastic. I went with the matte stand.
The workshop out back:
I really, really love this little room and the cc I made for it.
On now to the last shop in this row, and it's a carpenter's/furniture shop.
This has got offices above it, rather than living quarters.
It was a little difficult to decorate this shop after the previous three, and so it look s a little bare. Really this is a showroom of what the carpenter can do, and my sims would commission pieces of furniture from him, rather than taking away a piece of furniture from the shop.
Adjoining the shop is a little workshop. I'm not quite sure that this is where the carpenter makes the majority of his pieces, but he does work in it to finish some bits off.
The next building looks a litle odd. The idea is that the bottom part was altered but not the rest. I've made it a dyer's workshop to show that industry was happening in the centre of the town as well as commerce.
The final building on this lot is the pub. There are also rooms upstairs, but I've not yet decided if they are guestrooms or staff accommodation.
I was really going for a traditional English pub vibe with this, right down to the dark beams and lincrusta on the ceiling and I think I've succeeded.
Upstairs the rooms are very basic, and like I say, I've not yet decided if this is an inn or a pub.
And there we go. There's a little bit about what I'm aiming for with Simdon, and the lot I've been working on for a bit now. I will probably post more once I've completed another lot or two.