This is a bit picture heavy. I wanted to finish off the external building work for the square around the pond. The real pond is surrounded by roads and a mixture of residential and commercial properties. There are also plenty of trees. I have taken liberties by including two community lots and a number of houses of my own design. I posted the row of three storey houses which make up the first side of the square.
On the opposite side I also created some more three storey houses. These are not so grand in as much the front is rendered but the sides and back are just plain brick. This is not uncommon. I would say the current sim owners have done much to gentrify their homes.
The other property on that side of the Square is a neat little bungalow.
I have moved the location of the school. In real life it is nowhere near the pond. When I first looked at pictures of Devizes school I thought how grand it looked. It turns out the Council had purchased a small manor house in 1925 and used the land that came with it to create a fairly sizeable school. By UK standards that is. I really did not want to try and crowd this into one lot. So the manor house which today acts as classrooms for the senior school has been put on one lot and the playing fields on the lot behind it.
Also on the same side as the school I decided to put the Headmaster's house. I have absolutely no idea if the headmaster (yes it is a he) of Devizes school has a house but it is not uncommon to find school houses attached to the school or close by.
On the last side I decided to indulge myself by building a mock Tudor. As I said when building Fenbury this was a very popular design of building in the 1920s and 1930s. Hubby and I did look at buying a house with timber cladding until a builder friend went to look at the cladding and then gave us chapter and verse on how expensive and difficult it was going to be to repair it. Nonetheless these buildings are very attractive and stand out among all the brick and render buildings we have in the UK.
Now I have decided for Throxton not to build a hospital as such. I have decided on a Doctors' surgery instead. Quite a large number of surgeries are in converted large houses. This happens right across the country and stems from the fact a lot of doctors had surgeries in their own homes pre NHS. Hubby can remember going to his doctor who had one of the grand houses in Castle Combe where the original Dr Doolittle was filmed. In fact he can also remember being taken to see the filming but that is another story. In Throxton I have gone for a early 20th century style which has touches of the Arts and Crafts movement about it.
One last thing. Devizes did have two hospitals. Roundways was the local hospital for the mentally ill and would have been far too big to fit on one lot. I am not sure the other hospital is still open. Many of smaller hospitals in Wiltshire have been closed with services now centred around Swindon, Salisbury and Bath.
One second last thing. I intend the Square to mark one of the boundaries of the world rather than trailing off in many housing estates which make up the outer perimeter of Devizes.
I no longer use Origin or My Page. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter as Bettyboop711000. You are welcome to contact me as I explore options for a PC sandbox life simulation game.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
I like that you experimentin with materials and architecture elements. I like house with green details, it looks really cute. Symetrical houses looks very historic, old, proud and representative. It kinda gives the background to this town.
I'm only not convinced by the size of houses. They're all very large and you may have big problem with furnishing it. You can of course use hidden room mark from debug mode, but placing it in almost every building may make interiors disappointing compared to the outside. Big interiors may also discourage you from finishing world. It's good to know that interiors are like 50-70% of making worlds. It's good to plan how much time approximately you'll spend on every stage of world making, so it won't prolong into infinity.
Of course it's only hint, create a world in the way you like the most. I only tell what works in my case and what seems to works in many others world makers cases. It's not necessarily my cup of tea, when it comes to this world, but I keep fingers crossed, that you'll finish this project one day and you'll be satisfied with results and proud of work you have made. It would be pity if it end unfinished. Too many worlds already ended that way.
Hello @chojrak I had to chuckle when I read your comments. Taking your last point first let me explain. I am not overly worried how long Fenbury and Throxton take me. Building worlds is my hobby and as I am both retired and disabled I have plenty of time on my hands. The only risk comes with my health and, potentially, my burning out yet another laptop. Besides my principal, right from the start is I am building these worlds for me. When I look at the work of other builders I do seriously wonder if my work is good enough to be uploaded.
The materials I use for my builds and the design of the houses comes from observations in real life and images found on the internet. Tall, three storey semi-detached and terraced homes are among the most common designs found in urban areas in the UK. Land for building has always been at a premium and in the old days people would have wanted their properties within town walls for protection.
There will only one sim family living on each lot. So one side of each building will be sectioned off with room markers from buydebug. Although attic spaces have windows there will be no access to them so I shall not be decorating them. For the unused parts of a building there will be a floor covering, wall paint and curtains at the windows. This will give the impression that the unused part of the building is occupied.
Decorating is taking the most time on Fenbury. I suspect it will for Throxton as well. I am not a gifted decorator so I only tackle one house at a time and then go off and do something else for a while. This way, hopefully, all my house interiors won't look the same
I no longer use Origin or My Page. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter as Bettyboop711000. You are welcome to contact me as I explore options for a PC sandbox life simulation game.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
This week I have been working on some starter homes which will lead up to one of the biggest builds in the world. I am not ready to share yet and would rather leave it until the bigger build is completed. The other build I have been working on is the military base. Devizes has a long association with the military and one of the most well known military buildings was the Le Marchant Barracks. Built in what I would describe as high Victorian style the barracks were a complex of buildings on the edge of the town. What makes them unusual is the Keep which looks exactly like the inner keep of a castle but in the distinctive local brick rather than stone. I have simplified it somewhat in order to keep the principle parts on one lot without it dominating the town. The actual barrack building in real life is much, much longer and there are a number of brick huts behind it which I have decided not to include in Throxton. As for the Keep I have modified the external decoration.
Le Marchant Barracks no longer belongs to the Army. It was sold following successive mergers of regiments which made the barracks redundant. It did function for a while as a training base for reservists, then was used for warehousing and was eventually sold again. As a listed building the Keep was then repurposed as residential appartments. It does have a tie to my hubby's family. During WW1 it was here his grandfather and great uncle reported for duty when they volunteered. At the time the barracks were occupied by the Wiltshire Regiment. During WW2 the barracks did service as a prisoner of war camp. This is something I learned on my searches. Either as a soldier or a prisoner of war the barracks would have appeared an imposing sight.
I no longer use Origin or My Page. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter as Bettyboop711000. You are welcome to contact me as I explore options for a PC sandbox life simulation game.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
A little story to amuse while you recover from your Thanksgiving feast.
I don't know how it is in America but in the UK we are very fond of giving out nicknames. So for example if you are from the city of Liverpool you are known as a Scouser, Geordies come from Newcastle and Brummies from Birmingham. We not only do this for cities but for our counties too. So if you were born in Wiltshire you are known as a Moonraker. Here is one version of the reason why.
Smuggling is one of the oldest activities known in the UK and this tale is set around the time the newly independent Americans decided to write themselves a constitution. At this time smuggling in the UK was particularly prevalent. Not unsurprising when the taxes on imported goods were so high and various conflicts with our neighbours across the English channel made goods such as tobacco, brandy, silk, tea and other luxuries hard to come by legitimately. It was, therefore, a very profitable business for the smugglers and costly for the Government of the day in lost taxation revenues.
All along the south coast of England there were plenty of places for goods to be brought ashore without anyone in authority being able to stop it. Eventually it dawned on the Government of the day that prevention was better than a cure and a series of measures, both at sea and on land, were put in place. This was done principally by borrowing vessels from the Royal Navy and extending the powers of the existing Department of Customs and Excise. It meant the smugglers could no longer transport contraband without the risk of being intercepted, either at sea or when landed in the UK. As a consequence the smugglers got a great deal more inventive about how they transported the goods particularly when delivering to waiting customers who lived in land. Here ends the boring bits and starts the beginning of the tale.
One dark moonlit night a band of West Country smugglers were being pursued across Wiltshire by some Excise men. Whether they had come across Salisbury plain or had brought their contraband from Bristol nobody knows. On this particular night, according to legend, they were carrying kegs of French Brandy. Just outside Devizes they realised the Excise men were close to catching them up and the penalties for being caught with contraband goods included transportation. So I imagine one of the brighter members of the gang suggested they ditch their cargo.
So they pushed the kegs into a large nearby pond. By the time the Excise men arrived a few minutes later the gang were all gathered round the edge of the pond. Now in those days it was considered that folk living in the West Country were none too clever. Indeed the term local yokel is still an insult today. So the leader of the Excise men looked at this group of smugglers standing around a pond in the middle of the night and wondered what they were starring so fixedly at in the middle of pond. Only to his mind they were probably local yokels because they wore smocks and some even carried rakes. Getting down from his horse he asked one of the gang what they were all doing when they should have been safely home tucked up in their beds. In reply he was told they were trying to rake that "girt" cheese out of the pond.
So the Excise man looked at the cheese and being of superior intellect and realising very quickly that the cheese was nothing more than the full moon's reflection in the pond, he laughed. Then he went to share the joke with his companions and shortly after they all rode away. Once they were out of sight the smugglers used the rakes to pull the kegs to the edge of the pond to be lifted out. Then they too went on their way laughing at the Excise men.
Everyone knows that in the country nothing ever remains a secret for long and the story of how the smugglers had fooled the Excise men soon spread. Hence the term Moonraker was coined, long before it came to the attention of the makers of the Bond films. As for the smugglers the tale ends with them delivering the brandy to their happy, and presumably grateful customers.
There are various locations for this tale. I have chosen Devizes because I have included the very pond in which the kegs were supposed to have been hidden. It's official name is the Crammer Pond and how it came by that name is subject to debate. Nonetheless the citizens of Devizes are proud of their pond and it's "history".
I no longer use Origin or My Page. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter as Bettyboop711000. You are welcome to contact me as I explore options for a PC sandbox life simulation game.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
An update before Christmas then I must concentrate on RL things to be ready for the season.
This is a simplified copy of Devizes Museum. I first visited it when on a school trip at the age of 8. What makes it different from many museum buildings is the fact it is made up of a number of substantial red brick houses which have been adapted to house the exhibits. The result is a rabbit warren of rooms on different levels. The range of exhibits is vast from prehistoric finds to a room full of stuffed birds, including the long extinct Dodo. Both terrifying and fascinating to a small child.
Devizes has a plethora of teashops. At one time there was a teashop in the Castle Hotel. It had previously been a pub and is now a restaurant which is part of the renovated hotel.
One of things that annoys me about some EA worlds is the lack of starter homes. I did not include that many in Fenbury but decided a few more for Throxton would be a good idea.
I have created a leisure centre based on the one in Devizes.
As the real building is somewhat utilitarian I have enhanced the copy so the sims have somewhere worth visiting.
One building I have been working on for some time in St John's Church. This is the oldest church in the town and the building of it was down to one of the first inhabitants of Devizes Castle who was a bishop. It has certainly had plenty of money lavished on it in the past for it is very ornate. I have obviously simplified the decoration. I have still to add the crypt, some windows to the tower and other decorations. The actual graveyard is no longer used and much of the site today is grassed over.
I no longer use Origin or My Page. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter as Bettyboop711000. You are welcome to contact me as I explore options for a PC sandbox life simulation game.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Let's just say what I think of the store Castle Kit could be written on the back of a postage stamp and would not be fit to publish here. Originally I had not planned on adding Devizes Castle to the world but it is an integral part of the real place. Despite the fact it is built into a hillside and is a private residence so getting photos of the interior is proving difficult, I thought I would give it a go.
From the pic you will see I have started with the gatehouse. It is one of the few bits of the original castle. I want to add a door but can't see how to do it other than draw a wall which then does not work with the bits of the kit, even with MOO. Any help with this would be much, much appreciated.
I no longer use Origin or My Page. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter as Bettyboop711000. You are welcome to contact me as I explore options for a PC sandbox life simulation game.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Well I have abandoned the idea of using the store Castle Kit completely. Even though I have created the castle as a residential lot I feel it makes Throxton unbalanced. I already have one big lot in Roundway House and the Castle makes the second one. I shall therefore be leaving one of the properties unoccupied and will be interested to see if the game provides "tenants".
Anyway I thought people might want to see what I have been doing. The actual castle building in Devizes is not the original Norman castle. That was burnt down fairly early on. The second castle lasted quite well until the English Civil War when it was somewhat badly damaged by attacking Roundheads. Sometime in the mid to late Victorian period it was rebuilt and has been used as a family home since. As a private residence it is not open to the public and photographs of the interiors are rare. One thing to note that the inner courtyard has been converted to gardens as well as the grounds immediately outside the walls. Throxton Castle is still very much a WIP.
I no longer use Origin or My Page. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter as Bettyboop711000. You are welcome to contact me as I explore options for a PC sandbox life simulation game.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Comments
On the opposite side I also created some more three storey houses. These are not so grand in as much the front is rendered but the sides and back are just plain brick. This is not uncommon. I would say the current sim owners have done much to gentrify their homes.
The other property on that side of the Square is a neat little bungalow.
I have moved the location of the school. In real life it is nowhere near the pond. When I first looked at pictures of Devizes school I thought how grand it looked. It turns out the Council had purchased a small manor house in 1925 and used the land that came with it to create a fairly sizeable school. By UK standards that is. I really did not want to try and crowd this into one lot. So the manor house which today acts as classrooms for the senior school has been put on one lot and the playing fields on the lot behind it.
Also on the same side as the school I decided to put the Headmaster's house. I have absolutely no idea if the headmaster (yes it is a he) of Devizes school has a house but it is not uncommon to find school houses attached to the school or close by.
On the last side I decided to indulge myself by building a mock Tudor. As I said when building Fenbury this was a very popular design of building in the 1920s and 1930s. Hubby and I did look at buying a house with timber cladding until a builder friend went to look at the cladding and then gave us chapter and verse on how expensive and difficult it was going to be to repair it. Nonetheless these buildings are very attractive and stand out among all the brick and render buildings we have in the UK.
Now I have decided for Throxton not to build a hospital as such. I have decided on a Doctors' surgery instead. Quite a large number of surgeries are in converted large houses. This happens right across the country and stems from the fact a lot of doctors had surgeries in their own homes pre NHS. Hubby can remember going to his doctor who had one of the grand houses in Castle Combe where the original Dr Doolittle was filmed. In fact he can also remember being taken to see the filming but that is another story. In Throxton I have gone for a early 20th century style which has touches of the Arts and Crafts movement about it.
One last thing. Devizes did have two hospitals. Roundways was the local hospital for the mentally ill and would have been far too big to fit on one lot. I am not sure the other hospital is still open. Many of smaller hospitals in Wiltshire have been closed with services now centred around Swindon, Salisbury and Bath.
One second last thing. I intend the Square to mark one of the boundaries of the world rather than trailing off in many housing estates which make up the outer perimeter of Devizes.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita
I'm only not convinced by the size of houses. They're all very large and you may have big problem with furnishing it. You can of course use hidden room mark from debug mode, but placing it in almost every building may make interiors disappointing compared to the outside. Big interiors may also discourage you from finishing world. It's good to know that interiors are like 50-70% of making worlds. It's good to plan how much time approximately you'll spend on every stage of world making, so it won't prolong into infinity.
Of course it's only hint, create a world in the way you like the most. I only tell what works in my case and what seems to works in many others world makers cases. It's not necessarily my cup of tea, when it comes to this world, but I keep fingers crossed, that you'll finish this project one day and you'll be satisfied with results and proud of work you have made.
The materials I use for my builds and the design of the houses comes from observations in real life and images found on the internet. Tall, three storey semi-detached and terraced homes are among the most common designs found in urban areas in the UK. Land for building has always been at a premium and in the old days people would have wanted their properties within town walls for protection.
There will only one sim family living on each lot. So one side of each building will be sectioned off with room markers from buydebug. Although attic spaces have windows there will be no access to them so I shall not be decorating them. For the unused parts of a building there will be a floor covering, wall paint and curtains at the windows. This will give the impression that the unused part of the building is occupied.
Decorating is taking the most time on Fenbury. I suspect it will for Throxton as well. I am not a gifted decorator so I only tackle one house at a time and then go off and do something else for a while. This way, hopefully, all my house interiors won't look the same
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita
Le Marchant Barracks no longer belongs to the Army. It was sold following successive mergers of regiments which made the barracks redundant. It did function for a while as a training base for reservists, then was used for warehousing and was eventually sold again. As a listed building the Keep was then repurposed as residential appartments. It does have a tie to my hubby's family. During WW1 it was here his grandfather and great uncle reported for duty when they volunteered. At the time the barracks were occupied by the Wiltshire Regiment. During WW2 the barracks did service as a prisoner of war camp. This is something I learned on my searches. Either as a soldier or a prisoner of war the barracks would have appeared an imposing sight.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita
I don't know how it is in America but in the UK we are very fond of giving out nicknames. So for example if you are from the city of Liverpool you are known as a Scouser, Geordies come from Newcastle and Brummies from Birmingham. We not only do this for cities but for our counties too. So if you were born in Wiltshire you are known as a Moonraker. Here is one version of the reason why.
Smuggling is one of the oldest activities known in the UK and this tale is set around the time the newly independent Americans decided to write themselves a constitution. At this time smuggling in the UK was particularly prevalent. Not unsurprising when the taxes on imported goods were so high and various conflicts with our neighbours across the English channel made goods such as tobacco, brandy, silk, tea and other luxuries hard to come by legitimately. It was, therefore, a very profitable business for the smugglers and costly for the Government of the day in lost taxation revenues.
All along the south coast of England there were plenty of places for goods to be brought ashore without anyone in authority being able to stop it. Eventually it dawned on the Government of the day that prevention was better than a cure and a series of measures, both at sea and on land, were put in place. This was done principally by borrowing vessels from the Royal Navy and extending the powers of the existing Department of Customs and Excise. It meant the smugglers could no longer transport contraband without the risk of being intercepted, either at sea or when landed in the UK. As a consequence the smugglers got a great deal more inventive about how they transported the goods particularly when delivering to waiting customers who lived in land. Here ends the boring bits and starts the beginning of the tale.
One dark moonlit night a band of West Country smugglers were being pursued across Wiltshire by some Excise men. Whether they had come across Salisbury plain or had brought their contraband from Bristol nobody knows. On this particular night, according to legend, they were carrying kegs of French Brandy. Just outside Devizes they realised the Excise men were close to catching them up and the penalties for being caught with contraband goods included transportation. So I imagine one of the brighter members of the gang suggested they ditch their cargo.
So they pushed the kegs into a large nearby pond. By the time the Excise men arrived a few minutes later the gang were all gathered round the edge of the pond. Now in those days it was considered that folk living in the West Country were none too clever. Indeed the term local yokel is still an insult today. So the leader of the Excise men looked at this group of smugglers standing around a pond in the middle of the night and wondered what they were starring so fixedly at in the middle of pond. Only to his mind they were probably local yokels because they wore smocks and some even carried rakes. Getting down from his horse he asked one of the gang what they were all doing when they should have been safely home tucked up in their beds. In reply he was told they were trying to rake that "girt" cheese out of the pond.
So the Excise man looked at the cheese and being of superior intellect and realising very quickly that the cheese was nothing more than the full moon's reflection in the pond, he laughed. Then he went to share the joke with his companions and shortly after they all rode away. Once they were out of sight the smugglers used the rakes to pull the kegs to the edge of the pond to be lifted out. Then they too went on their way laughing at the Excise men.
Everyone knows that in the country nothing ever remains a secret for long and the story of how the smugglers had fooled the Excise men soon spread. Hence the term Moonraker was coined, long before it came to the attention of the makers of the Bond films. As for the smugglers the tale ends with them delivering the brandy to their happy, and presumably grateful customers.
There are various locations for this tale. I have chosen Devizes because I have included the very pond in which the kegs were supposed to have been hidden. It's official name is the Crammer Pond and how it came by that name is subject to debate. Nonetheless the citizens of Devizes are proud of their pond and it's "history".
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita
This is a simplified copy of Devizes Museum. I first visited it when on a school trip at the age of 8. What makes it different from many museum buildings is the fact it is made up of a number of substantial red brick houses which have been adapted to house the exhibits. The result is a rabbit warren of rooms on different levels. The range of exhibits is vast from prehistoric finds to a room full of stuffed birds, including the long extinct Dodo. Both terrifying and fascinating to a small child.
Devizes has a plethora of teashops. At one time there was a teashop in the Castle Hotel. It had previously been a pub and is now a restaurant which is part of the renovated hotel.
One of things that annoys me about some EA worlds is the lack of starter homes. I did not include that many in Fenbury but decided a few more for Throxton would be a good idea.
I have created a leisure centre based on the one in Devizes.
As the real building is somewhat utilitarian I have enhanced the copy so the sims have somewhere worth visiting.
One building I have been working on for some time in St John's Church. This is the oldest church in the town and the building of it was down to one of the first inhabitants of Devizes Castle who was a bishop. It has certainly had plenty of money lavished on it in the past for it is very ornate. I have obviously simplified the decoration. I have still to add the crypt, some windows to the tower and other decorations. The actual graveyard is no longer used and much of the site today is grassed over.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita
From the pic you will see I have started with the gatehouse. It is one of the few bits of the original castle. I want to add a door but can't see how to do it other than draw a wall which then does not work with the bits of the kit, even with MOO. Any help with this would be much, much appreciated.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita
Anyway I thought people might want to see what I have been doing. The actual castle building in Devizes is not the original Norman castle. That was burnt down fairly early on. The second castle lasted quite well until the English Civil War when it was somewhat badly damaged by attacking Roundheads. Sometime in the mid to late Victorian period it was rebuilt and has been used as a family home since. As a private residence it is not open to the public and photographs of the interiors are rare. One thing to note that the inner courtyard has been converted to gardens as well as the grounds immediately outside the walls. Throxton Castle is still very much a WIP.
Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita