MTS:About
Who are we?
ModTheSims2.com is a site dedicated to tweaking, changing and generally messing about with the Sims 2 game to provide an experience far beyond basic gameplay.
The site was started by Aobh (Irish) and Delphy (English) - Aobh being the girl and Delphy being the boy for the chronically confused. After the success of their first modding site, ModTheSingles, and with the good fortune of getting an advance copy of The Sims 2, it really was only a matter of time before ModTheSims2 was born. Aobh has since moved onto other things, and we all wish her luck in whatever endeavour she chooses.
Initially thought of as simply a technical resource, MTS2 grew very rapidly once the game was released in September 2004, becoming the premier Sims 2 modding site on the internet, where many of the breakthroughs and developments in the community happen. We where the first to do object recolours, both of existing recolourable objects and original Maxis creations (the CEP project). We have an extensive Wiki with details on the vast majority of the Sims 2 file formats, and we where also the first to put custom 3d meshes into the game.
MTS2 is at the cutting edge of Sims 2's development as a highly moddable game, but above all, our philosophy has always been to provide the resources and downloads at no cost to the end user. Yes, thats right - it's free. We exist solely on the generous donations of the userbase, but we don't require you to give anything.
We have a dedicated staff that run as a close-knit team, and are always looking at ways of improving the site to the casual browser, while keeping it in the same style of openess and fairness that it has been built on.
Technical details
MTS2 runs on vBulletin 3.0.7 with the following hacks installed: - Thumbnails on Forumdisplay by Delphy - Reported Posts v2 by Erwin - Auto-move deleted threads to archive by Delphy - Auto-close threads in certain forums by Delphy - Adult verification opt-in and out by Delphy - Welcome PM by rob_daemon
The MTS2 template is by Delphy and there are multiple hacks in the backend to produce the look and feel.
Network map:
http://www.delphster.net/mts2/MTS2Network_Nov05.png
The machines are as follows:
FRONT END SERVERS www5 aka portland - dual opteron 242 with 4gb ram www2 aka charlotte - p4 2.8ghz with 2gb ram
These serve as the "front end" to clients connecting in from forums.mts2 or www.mts2. All they do is run vBulletin.
FILE / IMAGE SERVERS thumbs - p4 2.8ghz with 2gb ram. This machine serves all the thumbnail requests via custom written scripts (ie not using the vbulletin attachment method). files - AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 1gb ram. This machine serves all the files, on an unmetered 10mbps connection. www1 - p4 2.8ghz with 2gb ram. This machine serves all static content (images etc), this wiki and is also used as a backup machine
BACKEND SERVERS db - dual opteron 242 with 4gb ram, running mySQL. This machine purely runs mySQL and serves MTS2 and S2C. It has dual NFS links to both thumbs and files. www6 aka houston - p4 2.8ghz, 2gb ram. This machine currently serves only as a central upload point and has dual NFS links to thumbs and files. It runs a customised vBulletin attachment system to split incoming uploads onto the required server. All image files and thumbnails go to thumbs. All rars, zips and sims2pack files go to files. This ensures that each of those bandwidth heavy servers has content locally on thier drives, improving speed.
Site owner
Delphy (otherwise known as Stuart) is the modder and arch geek of the site - he's fiddled with everything from Impossible Creatures, to the two Homeworld games, The Singles and a ton of other stuff that he can never remember. Delphy is an admin over at the Relic news forums and even had the good fortune of being flown to Canada for the ICU (Impossible Creatures University), courtesy of Microsoft.
Currently working as a resident geek at a local firm, Delphy spends his evenings, nights, mornings and mid-afternoons peering at his monitor, playing his mp3's WAY too loud and buying more gadgets :)
Delphy will mod anything that breathes (including the hot water boiler, his PDA, other peoples PDA, anything cable related...).
His current homepage.(not any more try http://www.delphster.net/ Blacksmith 20:21, 23 December 2006 (EST))
That's all...
I hope you like this little insight into the ideas behind MTS2. Feel free to post in the Site Wishlist forum if you want to see anything else included on the site!
Regards, Delphy
This article is imported from the old MTS2 wiki. It's original page, with comments, can be found at http://old_wiki.modthesims2.com/MTS:About
