Let me begin be saying something briefly about myself. I live alone, I am old enough that if my oldest grandson made a stupid choice, I'd be a great-grandmother. I am a freight handler at a superstore. It requires me to memorize where everything in a specific department goes, then I pull it off pallets and put it there, one bottle, jar, box, or package at a time. I am a widow.

I play only a handful of the thousands of video games available. I am a history geek. Oh not so much that I learned the ancient languages, but enough so that until my job took a serious toll on my joints and the nerves that power the muscles, I did recreations of Medieval illuminations. Hence the reason I bought a game called The Sims Medieval. I realized it was a fantasy game. I followed all the pre-release material.

What I am not, is a modder. This became abundantly clear to me as I spent the morning looking through lines of code in one part of one file, out of many, many, many files. After fifteen minutes my eyes were bleeding. After half an hour my brain was bleeding. After an hour I was nearly comatose and could barely knuckle-drag myself into the kitchen for tea. My final cohesive thoughts at that moment in time went something like, "this is so not happening in this life time." This thought was accompanied by a curious sizzling-bubbling sound that I suspect was my brainstem at the beginning stages of final destruction. I'm still recovering.

So to all those who look at those lines of code and think, 'I can do this better'; who see lines of code as a morality play of modern life; who can look at a file and think 'this is going to be so cool'; I thank you. To those of you that look at a mediocre game as a personal challenge; to those of you who think that not blinking for an hour is normal; to those of you who can increase the interest time in a game from days to months; I thank you. And to all of you who do this for little more than personal satisfaction and hearing someone say 'hey, that's really cool, great job'; I personally thank you from the bottom of my heart and soul. I realize that most of you probably do this for yourself first. But there is no rule that you must share what you did, yet all of you do. And that is perhaps the finest part of what you do. You do a really great job. All of you.

Hear, Hear Ladyskye. I agree thanks heaps to all that contribute.
Another oldy who enjoys the game.

Not Old, (or a lady) but I don't think I could play this game (Or any other for that matter) without mods. You Modders are Super Hero's!

As a modder I'll start out by saying thank you to the other modders. There are some very talented people in the TSM family.

Second, I mod for myself first. I get a thrill out of figuring out how things work, but I also play games thinking how I would do things differently. I love the fact that EA keeps the sims games mod friendly. I honestly love modding sims games as much as I love playing them.

Last, to everyone who wants to learn how to mod, I encourage you to do so. It seems like a daunting task when one begins, but there is a lot that goes into making a game. If you notice, most modders stick to certain types of mods, Shimrod does a lot of retextures, Simmodder sticks with xml and tuning, I usually stick to scripting. These games aren't made by one person, and one person could never make all the mods (although I'm trying). Everyone here is very helpful providing information to those who ask. Also, plenty of help can be found from the Sims 3 modders, which modding for is very similar. I encourage you to pick something you want to do, and ask questions. I didn't start out knowing how to this stuff, I've been modding the sims since TS2. It takes time, but I, and I'm sure others are willing to help anyone learn to mod that they can.

I totally agree! Thanks to all the modders who work so hard to make mods.

This thread is so classy. Well done ladyskye.

And thanks to all the modders. You make our games bearable!

To all modders out there I could not have said it better my self...You are all a great help to us and with out you and your mods we would be lost, boared or thowing out computers at walls out of anger. Thank you for makeing our sims games all the better :lovestruc

Couldn't say it better than Lady Skye put it, so I'll just steal that and say thank you too =D

And in reply to Grim's post, thank you, it makes me feel not so silly for asking my noob questions about meshing =)

I think I appreciate the modders in the TSM community even more than the TS1/2/3 modders. (Not that I didn't appreciate them at all I did and still do) it's just there's so few modders for TSM, but they keep throwing mods out at a rapid rate, and when you think of all the shiny new stuff we now have, compared to how many modders we have it's really quite astonishing, and it is very much appreciated.