#ctss

[mystiffox]

— a light you can(not) feel.

from Cross: The Star Sans by @overflowofcrows Song: Jigsaw Falling Into Place

i've finished this storyboard a while ago and only recently put them together into a video. might polish this up at some point but!! shoutout to simple/crow i am their #1 star!cross fan

the animatic/storyboard doesn't have big spoilers (its mostly abt the first chapter) but still. read the fic. please. if you love tragic found family just click on the first link above u can do it anyway extra doodles below:

and these notes on the animatic from my insta lol

im normal about these two i swea

[overflowofcrows]

I was so excited writing this chapter! I hope you guys enjoy it too!

[worldruins]

Meet the Remnant, my "slugcat" oc. Because I have no sense of moderation, it has an entire campaign loosely mocked up in my head- I don't have the modding ability or time to make anything of it but I enjoy thinking about it! The two iterators on the sheet are the central npcs of the campaign.

Remnant is larger, more aquatic, and faster on all fours than a slugcat. It struggles to use the same tools, carries items in its mouth, and can eat batnip and bubble weed. And, though it doesn’t know it, it is one of the last four of its kind left.

More about the campaign below VVV

BONUS: Remnant obviously resembles a slugcat, and they are sort of a slugcat ancestor! The genomes of the pipe slugs slugcats evolved from had remnant DNA as well as the simple tool-worm base that ancients used for many creatures. The blueprints were present in the modified organisms, and over several generations and mutations began to express themselves once more. Anyway…

To start, the Remnant is living with their family in an idyllic natural landscape much like survivor and monk at the beginning of their campaigns. The incident kickstarting their journey would be them wandering off from their kin and- gameplay starts here- getting lured off by something interesting, before the wall closes quickly behind them and the player realizes they have been trapped. They find themselves in a crate lined with wet plant matter, which gets shaken and turned around for a bit before settling down. It continues with a gentler rattling and remnant is clearly being taken somewhere, but the game acts like you're in a den and, once you've eaten the food set out for you in there, you sleep.

You are woken when the train carrying you crashes. You are able to escape and wind up in a light drizzle. Numerous overseers, some purple and others seafoam green, follow you around. The artificial, dilapidated surroundings are alien to the remnant.

During the first cycle an overseer will direct you to the nearest den, but you don’t have a rain timer until the first time you hibernate. You’ve never experienced rain like this before, after all.

The fact is that the remnant and their family are primal fauna, from the old world before bioengineering and iterators. They have spent their whole lives in a carefully controlled environment, maintained at first by ancients and then the systems the ancients left behind. The mass ascension happened, and nobody really knew what to do with these creatures- depending on the species, animals in captivity were generally released to fend for themselves or set for years of being maintained by machines scheduled in advanced, automated to care for them.

Remnant is taken when the iterator Ink Stained Palms orders a specimen of one relatively hardy species to study and potentially have the rest delivered to their regions. Something goes wrong- their delivery is sabotaged by their semi-active former senior, Calls To Stony Skies. And out Remnant goes into an alien land, with each of the two rival iterators trying to lure or force it to go to them.

This generally takes the form of projections like Iggy uses to get the slugcats to Moon, though it’s two different kinds of overseer guiding you in opposite directions at the same time. There may also be introduced environmental hazards- some of the chases in Little Nightmares come to mind- to corral you toward wherever the iterator causing it wants you to go.

ISP was the one who was getting the remnant delivered to her facility. They’re a bioengineer interested in long-term ecosystem restoration. It’s come to believe there’s a natural ‘balance’ to the world that could, in time, let living things leave the cycle of their own accord if it was realigned properly.

CTSS is in a condition not unlike spearmaster moon, though his decline has been steadier and over a longer period of time. They’ve been replaced by another iterator as group senior, and derailed your journey in the hopes of using a rare animal as collateral to get ISP’s help. Watching the remnant’s struggle to survive, however, he ends up very attached to it and can’t bring himself to kill it as he originally planned to.

Though they might want to, CTSS can’t save the remnant from a more insidious fate. The air, the soil, the water itself is toxic to you, whose kind has lived countless generations shielded from the heavy metal byproducts of industry and the artificial metabolisms of those great boxes in the sky. Ascension is an option, but so is going to ISP, whose body itself possesses a complex with artificial environments much like the one you began in. It can’t protect the remnant fully, but it can offer them a longer life. There are multiple endings to the campaign, based on the order you visit the iterators in.

If you read all this thank you so much and feel free to send questions!! About my little guys.

[picknmixsims]

Object Relocator - Updated

Object Relocator V3.3

Editing the Title and Description of an item will now remove any associated "comment" bloat (eg, "Edited by Sims 2 Categorizer" or "Batch 2 translation").

Added a new right-click context menu option "Tidy Catalog Strings". This removes all but the default language (EN-US) strings from the catalog (CTSS) resource and also any associated "bloat comments" for every selected object. If you have objects that have been corrupted by the "Sims 2 Categorizer" program, this action should fix the problem.

Changing the price for a fence no longer crashes if the cost entry in the associated STR# entry is missing. If the STR# resource isn't available in the .package file, this will be noted in the log file.

Added a mode to not include sub-folders when reading objects, by default this is off.

Thanks to lucydique for providing examples of the problems caused by the "Sims 2 Categorizer".

[s1ndle]

The lost Sims of The Sims (for Console)

The Sims for Console has always been a particularly fascinating game, to me at least, for how well it captures the gameplay and feel of the original PC Version. After reading through Drew1440’s exploits with looking through the data and managing to convert aspects of the original console version with ease, I decided to take a look for myself!

And to spare people from an (un)necessarily long post, the rest of it is below the cut!

After some trial and error and lots of searching, I managed to find out that they were using files that originate from the GameCube version of Bustin’ Out (something that they never mentioned, mind you!). Which somehow contains nearly everything from the original console version! The original freeplay neighborhood, the neighborhood used for Get a Life, the neighborhood used for the 2-Player PVP minigames, even the .IFF files for the objects! It was all present within the files of Bustin’ Out, and easily accessible too!

I poked around the UserData folder, which contained the lots and sims for the freeplay neighborhood from the original console version, and saw that there was a total of 23 User files, but the neighborhood only had 12 playable sims by default, which of course begged the question of: Who are these 11 extra sims?

I opened each of the User files one by one in IFFPencil2, a program that lets you open and edit .IFF files from The Sims 1. By looking at their OBJD and their CTSS entries, I was able to determine exactly who was who, and charted them out using a very professional looking spreadsheet, featuring comic sans:

Now I had a list of all the sims in the neighborhood, I could easily tell who was likely to be unused because in the original console version, sims could only have their names WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. Sadly two of the User files were completely blank and had no extant information, but that still left exactly 9 sims with extant information.

The thing about these sims is that we don’t have any information as to what their purpose was exactly, they could have been created as a cast of original sims to populate the freeplay neighborhood before Edge of Reality ultimately ported the population of the PC neighborhood over. They could have also been created as a means of testing the new Create-A-Sim system. They could have even been created purely for fun with no intention of including them in the game to begin with. We may never know the answer behind why they are present, but nevertheless, they are here.

Another interesting note about these User files, they are otherwise blank! With no careers, personality, skills, or interests to speak of! They also don’t have any family assigned to them either, meaning that their family names are also unknown.

One of the files that eventually piqued my interest was ALLCHARACTERS.rsp (the caps are important!). This file contains the data that determines what a sim looks like in-game by defining the upper and lower bodies that they use, along with face type, hair, skin tone, among other things. And this file just so happens to contain a lot of entries for sims from the original console version, including the freeplay sims. In fact this file is almost made up entirely of entries for sims from the original console version.

But one of the most interesting aspects of this file is that there are entries for sims that don’t exist in the final game, including 8 of the 9 unused sims from the freeplay neighborhood! So not only was there further information on their existence, but also the exact data needed to recreate their appearances, so that is exactly what I have done!

Alicia

Ariel

Ol' Joe

Jeffy

Laurie

Fred

Dez

Danielle

Sadly Michael (not to be confused with MICHAEL BACHELOR, who is present in normal gameplay and playable) did not have an entry in ALLCHARACTERS.rsp to facilitate a recreation. :(

The process of doing this was actually pretty straight-forward once I had everything laid out. By looking at the freeplay sims in-game alongside their entries in ALLCHARACTERS.rsp, I was able to determine the the mesh indexes (upper body, lower body, face style, etc.) started at 0, while anything to do with color, except for skin tones, started at 1. Using that information and just counting along as I scrolled through items in Create-A-Sim, I could chart out exactly which items corresponded with their respective mesh index, which I double-checked against existing in-game sims for the sake of accuracy.

There are plenty of other sims with entries in ALLCHARCTERS.rsp who seem to be leftover from the original console game and also seemingly unused, and I do want to recreate them as well, but for right now at least, it’s just the sims from the freeplay neighborhood.

[blueheavensims]

Saturday, April 20th at 13:00 (GMT -6)- SimPE: A Beginner’s Guide (Part 2) An introductory course to SimPE. Intended for those who’ve always wanted to get into creating, but find SimPE daunting. Part 2 includes:

• Review/ Intro to Object Resources • The CTSS • The OBJD • The GMDC • The TXTR • The TXMT • Other Important Resources The workshop starts on Saturday, April 20th at 13:00 (GMT -6). As always, materials will be provided in the workshop resource post.

To join Sims 2 Shenanigans, click here:   https://discord.gg/tkNzjgsSTS

Already joined and interested in the event? To RSVP or check the event thingy for your local time, click here: https://discord.com/events/904954828940275753/1216755084940152853

[retrocompmx]

Un día como hoy (3 de noviembre) en la tecnología

El 3 de noviembre de 1971, se publicó de forma interna, la primera edición del sistema operativo conocido hoy como Unix y con él el primer manual de programación de este sistema. Comenzó su desarrollo en 1969 de la mano de Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy y Joe Ossanna en los Laboratorios Bell. Escrito originalmente en lenguaje C y Ensamblador, es un software propietario del que han salido forks tales como BSD e Illumos. Este SO fue influenciado por CTSS y Multics. Hoy pertenece a The Open Group, un consorcio de industrias que buscan un estándar común #retrocomputingmx #Unix #anniversary

[segmed]

Segmed is excited to announce our participation in CTSS 2024!!!

We’re thrilled to be part of this year’s Clinical Trials Strategic Summit (CTSS) to share how we are bringing imaging to healthcare and research. Segmed is transforming the future of clinical trials through real-world imaging data (RWiD) that powers smarter, faster, and more effective decision-making.

[mystiffox]

— the apple's falling from the tree

from Cross: The Star Sans by @overflowofcrows

star!cross makes me incredibly ill with the tragic found family vibes ... (lays on the floor)

also song inspo was Driver's Seat by Madds Buckley

also have some doodles too (slight spoilers on the fic's lore below! to explain some of my thoughts on clothes n stuff)

does Cross have a star necklace in the fic? no, probably not. did i show off about my thoughts on a star necklace to Simple anyway? yes, yes i did. anyway idc where u think the necklace is from (whether its a gift from dream or a remold of his broken heart necklace, who knows atp) now ONTO THE GANG (+ Error and Fresh)

to preface this: im mostly assuming for most of the lore beyond the crumbs given to me. so, i'd imagine that when the fight ended with the gang losing, Dream and Ink immediately jailed them up. they both seem keen on keeping the gang alive, so they probably would've tried to help them with anything to make sure of it- that is, if any of the gang would even accept it in the first place.

i'm making a small guess that if there were any wounds, they used what they had to take care of it, aka ripping out parts of their own clothing to use as makeshift bandages. dream might've gave them some supplies (out of pity.. or something) but whether that was not enough or not used, i won't know

even if it was enough, there's still the factor of inevitable outburst/breakdowns from any of the prisoners. i'd imagine it'd be so hard to calm any of them down because the gang were too used to being close together that using touch became the usual grounding method— so putting a barrier between them makes it infintely harder for everyone.

i think Nightmare doesn't use his jacket anymore. it probably feels like shit/too itchy and ragged to wear and reminds him of a past he wishes he could forget. (he must feel so helpless seeing all his boys suffer after taking care of them for so long... like a lost father trying his best and seeing how much he's failing at the same time.. man.)

Dust is almost always wrapped in a blanket, the hoodie completely zipped up as if he was trying to hide in it, keeping himself as small as possible (knowing his own breakdowns are the biggest And loudest)

Horror is probably yanked back to the memories of when he was back in his home au, quietly starving and losing all the progress he had with the gang.. trying to press himself against the barriers in hopes that maybe he can feel the others on the other side of it.. (one of his outbursts would be why he ripped off the sleeves of his jacket id assume)

Killer too.. unable to get to anyone and just. with his soul going haywire sometimes, having no available output that he's forced to ride it out on his own And in front of everyone.. yeah, you get the gist for those three

Error's a mess of threads- picks at his clothes and sews em back up, just to have a reason to move his hands. he's not too worried i'd say- it's a little reminiscent of the antivoid, and he's experienced insanity already (not to say it doesn't tug at his own soul-strings to see it happen to everyone else)

Fresh might be the "cleanest" out of everyone, with barely any visible tears, but i have a good feeling his body language is different. maybe the cap is now worn correctly. maybe he took off his jacket. he's tense. his guard is up. because a parasite would never want to be locked up in one place, right?

god.

God.

they make me so sick (message is mine btw)

[overflowofcrows]

Forgot to post this on Tumblr too gjskgkskgn

6 Mutual Style Challenge!

Top row: redflowercrown (IG), tyrium (IG), @mystiffox

Bottom row: @darkmuffinstudios, inkywellcrows (IG), @yo-honne

[dzismis]

O konflikcie Hezbollah-Izrael

Ranstorp Magnus Strategic advisor (CTSS) at Swedish Defence University Ważne szwedzkie doniesienia o rzekomym ataku Izraela na Hezbollah za pomocą eksplodujących pagerów.W maju 2000 r. IDF wycofa się ze strefy bezpieczeństwa w południowym Libanie. Wiem o tym, ponieważ przez kilka lat pośredniczyłem w rozmowach między Izraelem a Hezbollahem, które doprowadziły do tego wycofania. Innymi słowy,…

[shadowlinktheshadow]

I HELD. A CAT TODAY

AHHHHH

NEVER DONE IT BEFOREE

LAST TIME K DID I GOF SCRSTVHED :((

[picknmixsims]

DBPF Library - Critical Fix

This affects the Object Relocator and Outfit Organiser apps with resources that include accented characters.

Tracked down a bug in the DBPF Library when saving STR# based resources (STR#, CTSS and TTAs) that contain accented characters. The issue was that the length of the string was being incorrectly calculated and written out too short. This caused either an attempt to read off the end of the .package file, or an attempt to read an invalid UTF-8 character as the reader ran on to the next resource. Both outcomes cause the string to be truncated a few characters early.

Fixed bug when writing strings with accented characters in them

Allowed for EOF exception when reading broken strings with accented characters in them

Allowed for bad UTF-8 character exception when reading broken strings with accented characters in them

The fix not only squishes the bug, but also includes code to alleviate any problems introduced.

Apologies for that.

Many thanks to lucydique for help in resolving this

[blueheavensims]

Saturday- July 29th- Object Lessons An encore presentation of one of our first basic object creation workshops.

This workshop includes: • Using Object Workshop to clone an object • Replacing the mesh in the GMDC • Replacing the TXTR • Editing the CTSS • Editing the OBJD and giving your object a GUID As always, materials will be provided in the workshop post.