Aka New Paradigm. Sim 2 is the only game. She/they, queer of some description, Australia, 30+ ..........................................................................
Pleasantview - 18th century Strangetown - 1930s-ish Veronaville - Some kind of punk thing
Shout out to that time Almeric bragged about woohooing the evil mascot at his and Tank's wedding. At least Buzz showed up but he still deserves to hear this.
Some recolours of a dress by God Limping By that can work as simple chemise a la reine dresses for CF in white and cream.
I think the shoes and socks texture is by skell. I can't find the post for the original dress but I (eventually) found the mesh in my downloads folder and it is included. Compressorized. Categorized as everyday and formal.
Download
Swatch:
Jennifer Burb straight up booed her daughter's low skill showing off lol
GOS is back! But I basically just had this to upload to keep everything in the same place, this plus sims that I will upload more sporadically.
Back when I could make painting recolours that actually worked :/
These are 'golden age' illustrations by Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac on Adele's Russian ballet photo mesh (included), and Virginia Sterrett on Pineapple.
Sorry for the old preview pics (and that it still says 'Arabian Nights') the swatches are clearer.
Download The Price of Magic - Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac
Well it wasnāt just me, to be fair. I would have never been able to without @fireflowersims help and HugeLunatics trust in both of us. Thank you to both of them for their work and thank you @teaaddictyt for reaching out and doing the more public communication.
Iām super happy I got the chance to work to fix it. It wasnāt an easy undertaking. It seemed like every little thing would cause more errors, I fixed one and another thing broke. But now it seems stable, finally.
A lot of technical stuff below the cut, beware.
Fixing such an old forum is not easy. Documentation is rather sparse because the framework it runs on is old. There is however a more modern version, but updating is difficult. Here was the issue for the forum - upgrading failed.Ā
A website (usually) consists of two different parts: 1 - The files. They contain the code, scripts, designs, images, attachment, profile pictures etc. 2 - The database. The database connects all the different parts and tells the website where to find something. Everything gets stored in tables, assigned IDs and given values. Everything written, each post and topic is also stored in the database. So without the database the whole page would be useless.
It was clear from the beginning that the database was the culprit for the failed upgrades. I got an earlier backup from HL and started working.
I set up a local environment with two versions of XAMPP. One running on php 7.4 (the last version having compatibility for the forum framework version and the upgrade script to the recent version) and the other on a modern 8.3, which was the same as the version the server @fireflowersims set up for GOS.
I ran the upgrade script (which consists of 4 separate parts) on the old backup and ran into errors right away. The script would just outright crash on me, most often without a log or message. The (local) server would just stop responding. My original plan had been to upgrade to version 2.0 first, then 2.1, since it was the recommended order. However the database backup had already been partly upgraded to 2.1. That was the reason my upgrade script failed. Reversing those changes could have been a possibility but extremely time intensive.
(This is the frontpage of the upgrader. I stared at it so much. Like you can see it has a ton of steps)
Instead I asked for the current database and HL provided it to me. This one was already further along on the upgrade and I could see the error HL had run into before handing over. I had to look at the upgrade scripts and source php files to diagnose what the framework was expecting - and failing - to find in the database.
Thatās where I found the main culprit for *most* of the errors: Time tables. The framework saves every action that a user does in a log, a long table with the action, an id and a date. This was where everything had gotten wrong. The upgrader expected to see one column for the date, named *day*, while the current table had a different column for day, month and year. I tried fixing the table at first but that didnāt seem to work, so I completely deleted the table and created a new empty one myself. (By now I think the issue stems from forgetting to uninstall certain packages before upgrading, more on that later)
That was possible because the log actually doesnāt hold relevant information for the forum to work. It just records each step, probably for moderation purposes. Once I had done that step the upgrade script was finally able to proceed.
There were a few more errors where I had to look at what the script was doing, find the corresponding code in the sources and edit the database myself. Thankfully the code is relatively well commented and named, so I was able to find what I needed.
Finally I got the upgrade script to run to the end and I was actually able to open the forums (local) page. I hadnāt been able to for now so it was a first. But a lot of stuff was still missing, like all the topics. I could see that the posts were back, but not sorted correctly.
The fix was simple but annoying. The forum framework comes with a repair_setting.php file which I had run several times to fix all the paths, but apparently it didnāt fix *all* of them. So back to the database I went, ran some queries and fixed them myself.
Then the forum finally worked again!
(This is what the forum looked like when I first opened it. It ONLY had recent posts)
(The working local forum, no files yet with the default theme. Seems wrong to look at GOS without the dark theme, right?)
There were still a few things I needed to fix but the database seemed to work fine now. I had never done so many queries in my life. I know SQL, and had to fix databases before but not this intensely. So I guessed I learned something new haha.
Next was the exciting step to upload my clean install to the server. @fireflowersims and I had some directory issues, but I was able to fix them manually once again.
Then I had to take a look at the files which mostly consist of avatars and attachments. They didnāt work at all once moved to the clean install. Once again I took a look at the code and realized that the upgrade script would have changed those files as well, but because I ran it on a clean install it didnāt actually do this step.
I didnāt want to run the upgrade script again, worried that it would mess up a now working database. Instead I wrote a script myself that sorted through all the attachments, looked for the IDs of the avatars from the database so it could move and rename them.
Last were the attachments. This was an easier fix. They just had to be given the ending .dat. @fireflowersims ran a command through the console and then the attachments worked too!
We were getting closer!
Next was the theme. The old theme didnāt work on the modern framework anymore so @fireflowersims looked for a new one which I customized with CSS, trying to get it closer to the way the forum looked before. I think it turned out quite alright, hope you guys think so too!
(Trying to find out what CSS class addresses what? Make everything red and green!)
(All the spider webs)
Next was packages, or mods, to the framework. Fire and I encountered some hiccups here too, since there were some leftovers in the database. The packages hadnāt been properly deinstalled before running the upgrade script, which was another source of the errors. I tried fixing them manually but one of the packages would continue to just break the site no matter what I tried, so we settled for an alternative.
Some more work was put into SSL and making the forum secure. Once again some settings seemed to just break the page and each time I had to go back in the database and manually fix what had gone wrong. It was tedious but by now I knew my way around quite well.
@fireflowersims handled a lot of the server administrative work and DNS settings. I know very little about that part so having @fireflowersims there was great and they made sure the page is reachable at the correct address.
So yeah, I hope the site stays online for a long time now. Itās such a big part of our community and communities history. I used to download so much from there when I was younger. I wanted to give back to the community I love so much. That was the reason I spent many many hours digging through code and old forum threads.
Jules, I cannot emphasize enough just how cool you are for having done all of this work to get GoS back online! I'm glad I was able to provide a good new space for GoS to live from now on and assist with all the DNS. It was a trip alright, and I'm glad we could work together on this!
You are a hero and I (and I bet so many others) am so grateful for your skill and dedication! ā„ļø
Massive shout out to @julessims and @fireflowersims for saving a community pillar! š You both rock and thank you for the open communication and also giving some background on the fixes!
I only posted a small amount of things on GOS back in the day but I'm gonna try to upload them all the same.
This is an old recolour of one of SussisSoGoodSims baroque dresses on this Queen Victoria wedding dress mesh by Aligeth to make a kind of distressed early Victorian evening gown.
Like many of us, I grew up with Garden of Shadows. To me, it was more than just a forum. It was a place I could ask for help, learn new skills and, best of all, find amazing content in any style I could possibly want. I loved the board names, the people, the themes; everything, really.
And I admit I was more than a little heartbroken to find it gone.
After mulling it over, I decided that I wanted to preserve what I possibly could. I spent a few hours yesterday running through strategies and ideas about how to best go about it, and the best I could come up with was, well, exactly the same.
So, here it is: the Garden of Shadows mirror forum.
I've only just started, but I hope to add a little bit to it every day. The primary focus will be on preserving all the knowledge and custom content. I'm tackling it myself, but if you feel so inclined, you're more than welcome to join in.
--
PS. I am not here to offend, break Terms of Use, or to step on any toes. This is simply an effort to preserve content and knowledge for a game I have played and loved for over twenty years. Thank you ā„
I find that there aren't many historical clothes for toddlers that aren't just mini-versions of what adults wore, and while that's often pretty accurate for older children I wanted my toddlers t be wearing something more reminiscent of what they actually wore.
That tended to be dresses for boys and girls, and for the mid-late 18th century, and sometimes a bit earlier, I saw a lot of paintings with these simple white, chemise a la reine type dresses even when everyone else had more colourful and complicated clothing. My favourite is this one of a woman using the sash on her son's gown to keep him in place.
So I tried to make something like that. There are two versions, one with long sleeves and one with short. They are unisex, both are categorised as everyday and formal, the short sleeved ones are also underwear and sleepwear.
The textures used are by Kalynn (I think I spelt your name wrong on the tool tips sorry!) and Heget. And the mesh is by simphany (not included).
In game previews:
Poor Kaylynn has to deal with this spawn of Don (there's a third one too!) She loves them though.
Swatch:
MESH NOT INCLUDED as per Simphany's wishes. Get it here.
Download 18th Century Toddler Gowns (compressorized)
After a long, unwanted semi-hiatus due to work, illness and creative block, I come back with something I finished up before the hiatus even began. Classy, I know.
Anyway, @deedee-sims made this lovely CF peasant top and shorts meshā¦ And I thought it was the perfect shape for a type of undergarment Iāve seen in so many vintage ads and photographs- combinations! Or, at the very least, a chemise tucked into a pair of drawers. That in mind, I made up a texture for the outfit with the help of some old photographs (basically just slapped some lace, buttons, and a bow over Deedeeās own texture), and I borrowed @yandereplumsimās tudor lady stockings and garters.
Everything is done up in all the Yeti colors, plus pink (I donāt remember if itās from an action or not) because petal is pretty but just too orangey for me whenever I use it.
The awkward preview is a result of removing all my build cc and remembering too late that Iād hidden all the maxis walls, floors, and terrainsā¦ oops.
These say Edwardian, but they should work pretty well for 20ā²s, too.
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
blakekathryn
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
jacobvanloon
