Thinking about all the tiny details that they put into the game, including the ones that got lost, we can with no doubt say that it's the most detailed (but also most mysterious) game of the franchise.

Yeah, it was such a huge step up from sims 1 as well, even the base game.

Such a shame that nothing has really come close since. Now imagine if they had skipped sims 3 and spent all of the time they've spent on sims 3 *and* 4, working on a different version of sims 3 that would be released now.

The community would probably start throwing bitchfits if there were no games released for 5 years.

I quite liked TS2 the way it was originally presented, it was a little more cartoony plus the unreleased hairstyles are just fabulous in my opinion

look what I've got

I just remake the beta hairstyle. these are some pics of my creation. and still lot of them on my laptop :3

I did the UI too

as you can see below

Just done with the sims 2 beta hair.. as you can see below

remake from the trailer.

Wow, I really want this hair and t-shirt

The meshes are better now... I like it! It just needs proper texturing that matches Maxis textures. Ofcourse, It would be even cooler if they were animated, but that's hard work. I'll be happy enough to se them properly textured and posted as a set, here on MTS.

Can we have a link once you're finished?

Better yet, upload it here!

Found this little gem whilst ruffling through Base Game's Objects06 to replace some textures. It's called "tempui-ui_txtr_1024x768.png"

Particularly the man and woman evolution, do you think there were additional life stages?
Maybe it was infant, toddler, kid, teen, young adult, adult, middle-aged, elder, death?

Nah, those evolution images were produced quite late on. I don't think they are intended to show additional life stages but just different stages of the same life stage, if that makes sense?

I honestly don't think anything was lost, it's just that games go through many iterations before the team lands on the final product. It's very normal for the early versions of a game to look completely different from the finished version. The aspirations and fire-breathing toddler commercials were produced very early on; it's likely that these were never made using the game itself because the game wouldn't have been anywhere near that polished at the time. They were concept videos, created in the same way as cutscenes for other popular games at the time, in a totally separate 3D editor. The aspiration one is a little later because you can see it uses actual content from the final game. But the other trailer I think was just produced as an idea of what the sims 2 would be, rather than being based on anything they'd actually developed at that time.

I remember the old neighborhood and lot UI, but I've never seen the CAS second beta UI untill now. I like that the family tree was a part of the UI even while you created a sim, and I like that there was a "custom" clothing category, not mixed like it is now. They should've kept the old UI. It's a bit cleaner.

I just wanna share my family. it was from the trailer, but couldnt make it

so i decided to remake it . Taa daa

another screenshot

Hey guys, its me again..

lol this is the final result of my meshes.
also the recolour

Hey @spendel, do you mind using the Edit button to add on to your previous posts? You've made 3 consecutive posts now...

You have done a though

OMG!! Where have you been? you are my inspiration!! :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc

thats why i decided to recreate all unused hair in the sims 2 by myself.

Yes, and there was a lot talked about in early interviews which later got scrapped, but reintroduced with later expansions. Other examples are driveable cars, and weather - I remember a Will Wright interview where he said they couldn't stop it from raining inside the house. Now, if you look at the actual implementation of weather in Seasons, there is actually no physical rain, it's just a camera overlay. The camera knows if it's inside the bounds of the house and stops the overlay from appearing. The sims just react based on two factors: 1; it's raining, 2; their house is not weatherproof. Snowfall and rain puddles occur randomly but only outside. So it makes me think that with the first design of TS2 they were extremely ambitious and tried to make everything in an incredibly detailed way, and just either came up against hardware issues, or simply ran out of time. One of the problems with The Sims in terms of graphics and animation compared to, say, a scripted game like Tomb Raider is that The Sims has to be endless. With something like Tomb Raider, if you have a problematic item which is (to use sims terms) high poly, all you do is you make sure that it doesn't appear in any scene with another high poly item. If you have a graphical interaction which is hard on the processor, like reflective water, you make sure that when reflective water is around, everything else is less demanding to compensate. You can restrict certain animations from playing in certain situations, so they never clip or warp. With a game like The Sims, you have to make sure that everything is compatible with everything else. You have to make sure that if a user has loads of high-demand items on a lot that it isn't likely to crash when some graphic effect happens (which isn't always successful - I'm sure everyone knows the lag when a witch arrives on a community lot!) Higher-powered graphic effects were also added in later EPs. Seasons and higher add the water effects which are very hard on lower end machines, but by 2007 this was less of a concern than it was in 2004.

You can also see a shift when the development team changed, too. The earlier expansions were full of surprising and interesting things. Little details. The later ones still had cool ideas but they didn't have quite the same charm, I don't feel. And just disappointing laziness too, like elder outfits which just use the adult body shape, and teen careers just being the first three levels of the adult one, even when it doesn't make sense. Annoying coding which forces sims to flock to the "new stuff". Seasons is still my favourite expansion but there's a definite shift after OFB, which I believe is when Maxis began to focus on Spore (but don't quote me on that.)

Someone once explained to me how the rain was supposed to work. That was before seasons, apparently the leftover code from the rain was accessible somewhere in the files and she said it seemed like Maxis was trying to create the rain as many, many little objects and said that she can't imagine that to work on all but the best systems (at the time).

But you are 100% with Sims 2 they were extremely ambitious and they poured their heartblood into it and that is why that game, much more than Sims 3 (let's not even talk about TS4) is so excellent, and vibrant and charming and has enjoys such a long lifespan.
Us all being here, and the Sims 2 and it's expansions still being modeled in Game Stores, prooves that.

Hey i found something interesting in the beta videos such as trailers and gameplays most of them use The Sims 1 Rave music or the Hip Hop From the final game

Anybody have a link to the trailer about teenage (Beta-)Don and teenage (Beta-)Dina. It showed teenage Don making out with a succession of female teenage sims, but frequently returning to Dina.
I really liked the song in that trailer. I think it was a simlish pop song.

Thanks, yep it's the song! Though it was a bit faster in the trailer, or I'm just remembering it differently.