External Photo album storytelling application - A Sims 2 Blog Program



The in game photo album or storytelling feature lets you create neighborhood or family stories with snapshots you take during game play. However, unlike the Sims 1 game, the photo album is not available outside the game in the storybook format, with the exception of albums uploaded to the EA games sims2 web site.

The "Sims 2 Album" provides you a photo album storybook viewer outside of the game. This way you can view and edit your community or family story without having to load up the entire game.

Furthermore, anyone that has ever created a large story with many pictures knows how ridiculously slow the in game story photo album feature is. Also, others may also experience problems trying to export their stories to the web site.

Here's what you can do now!

Build your storybooks and family albums faster and with greater control. Export your storybook to an HTML web page. Create your own Sims 2 Blog from your family or neighborhood stories. Bundle your storybook to share with others. Organize and edit your storybook pages. backup and save your storybook to prevent data loss.

“Sims 2 Album” is now in the Alpha testing and development stage. All of the core features are included in the Alpha releases. Alpha means there are bugs. Please report bugs and errors you get to me using the Sims 2 Album thread on modthesims2.

Your feedback and comments are appreciated.

I am grateful that the people at Maxis made the storytelling files XML format!

CHANGE LOG:

http://transamerican.net/s2album/changelog.txt


Please note that the official thread for downloading the evaluation versions for beta testers is now:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...0944#post420944

OFFICIAL WEB SITE:
http://www.transamerican.net/s2album

Help and Documentation:
http://transamerican.net/s2album/helpfile.html

A changelog is available here:
http://transamerican.net/s2album/changelog.txt

List of known defects available in the bug-track file:
http://transamerican.net/s2album/bugtrack.txt

DOWNLOADERS NOTICE: Most users will want to download _only_ the file with “install-exe” in the name. This is the FULL INSTALLER. Unzip it and then click on the install.exe file inside to start the installation process.

ftp://ftp.robotz.com/pub/pg/s2album/

This is brilliant!

Occasionally a picture/associated text seems to be skipped in the story, but I haven't checked whether that is an error in the original also.

I look forward to the export feature: once I can create an alternative copy of the stories, I will be able to delete the huge quantity of pics I have in my Storytelling folder - along with their xml files - which has grown to a ridiculous size.

Thank you so very much for this.

I have been waiting for something like this for awhile. Thanks

I hope this one will be working better than the Simsblog one. I couldn't get Simsblog to work properly due to some problems one of which were my non-English language settings for Sims 2.

I tried your tool, and up to now it's working for me. Great idea, thanks.

I'll test it right now! it seems great!

Awesome... will test

It seems to be cutting the captions short.

Wow, thanks! I'll test this out sometime. I'm espechally looking forward to HTML export!

Yes, if there were CRLF's in the text it was cutting them short. I have corrected this with the 0.2.0 version I am releasing today. Thank you for the feedback!

japanese karate seizure robots ahaha

works fine, thanks!

lol, it says it has expired. Oh well, I'll check out the adress given.

"document contains no data"... However it might be my browser. But a readme file would have been nice!

Sorry about that. The zip file here has been updated. grab it and you should be in business. thank you

Great program! I've been looking for a program of this sort for ages!

I have had a couple of problems -- I tend to write family history-type albums, most of which are VERY long. (File size 266 KB+, hundreds of photos, (and I'm only on the third generation!))

When I try to load these albums, I get an error, "Unexpected Record Length", or sometimes it just loads up to 99 pictures.

Could you alter the program to allow it to handle an unlimited number of entries?

Yes I will work to make it handle larger albums! Please let me know how big your albums get (# of pages) so I can have an idea. Thank you.

My largest current album (which I'm still working on) is now at 483 pages. This is only the beginning of the third generation of the family, so, say a limit of.... 30,000 pages? Is that possible?

I think I'm going to have to write a little less about my sims! LOL

This is great! Thanks

We make long stories too. One suggestion is that you create more than one album. Use the save_as option to save the album as BOOK1 after say 200 or 300 pages and then start on BOOK2. We make a new book when each of our key generations turn into elders. It is fun that way, we even use a graphics program to make cover pages for each book.

I will also increase the array sizes but there is a limitation. Thank you for your feedback!

Thankyou SO SO SO SO Much!!!
I'm banned from the sims 2.com BBS,
and a chatroom that I'm usually on,
so I'll spend my time here!!!

Where do I put this? Just in downloads!
I'm guessing there, but then again, I don't know anything!

This is great for me in particular as the PC I play TS2 on has no internet connection and I can't upload to my SimPage, or do anything else with my albums for that matter. Big :thumb: to you for giving users like me an alternative and big :yas: to Maxis for removing HTML export in the first place!

Wow, this is a great tool. I'm so glad someone made this as I love making stories and the current way to do it makes the process a bit tedious. I'm downloading now and will give full feedback tomorrow after I've played around with it for a few hours.

Ugh! Why is this site like lavendar now?
Update 27/3: Okay, so I played around with it but not long, maybe about 15 minutes, so I'm not going to ask many questions until I use it some more. My only question for now is that I noticed that the program opens storybook files and the way I make up my stories, I use photos from different families in the same neighborhood and in one case, different neighborhoods, to make a story. Would I be able to put together a blog/album that is separate than the family ones or at least have a family album that includes pictures from the other families?

When we first purchased the game we were sore about the fact that there was no longer a web/html photo album. The Sims 1 game had the storybook in HTML format. Sims 2 does not.

Since then I have revised my opinion. The XML format is actually more flexible. They didn’t have to use a standard format like XML, they could have made it all secret and proprietary like Microsoft does. But the Maxis people were both wise and kind. The XML format of the storybook files is great and I extend kudos to Maxis for making the storybook files XML!

Now all you need to do is use my program to save the storybook as a web page and tada! You have your own web site with your neighborhood or family story complete with snapshots and text.

In the future I also plan to offer an option to export using the W3C's XSL standard.

Thank you for your feedback. Please share the program with others and let people know it exists. Post your suggestions for interface improvements and feature requests here.

Thank you.

After multi problems - I cannot get to the transamerican site at all... I managed to get the prog from a mirror site on geocities. Installed ok.

BUT once loaded it does not seem to do anything? ANd of course all the help files are on transamerican... so I am back to copying the pics again.

There are buttons at the top of the prog screen, but the open one does not seem to do anything at all, though the save does eventually open a save dialogue, after some time.

Any helpful suggestions would be much appreciated. I would really like to be able to use this program.

Wow! This sounds like something that I'm going to love sinking my teeth into! Any notes on when you think a beta and final version will be out?

I'll test it soon! Thanks again!