However, you have to admit, it looks bland and boring. I challenge you to go to anywhere ever and find a room that has nothing on the walls. Find users of that room and see if they find it boring. Most will. So why bore your Sims? Decorate those rooms!

This is also a good excuse to mention that while The Sims has a pretty good house building suite of tools, The Sims 2 (which has gone gold since our last editorial) looks set to add to it. Therefore I reckon if you can build something like a Hot Date downtown area, you should have no problems with the new suite from September 17th.

Put some outdoor lights in to maintain the room score after 6pm Sim Time

The Sim day light-wise runs from 7am-7pm, therefore for Hot Date you will need to provide substitute lighting for outdoor areas. As in real life, artificial light is nowhere near as powerful as natural light so expect to install quite a few lights. Don't bother lighting up every little portion of the outside area of a downtown lot - waste of time. In this screengrab, we've put in some garden lights along the wall either side of the bench and some old-fashioned lights, one of which is outside the fence so nobody should now wander off around the back.

Use plants to restrict access to portions of the lot

We don't want Sims to wander off down the back of the lot where there's only room for one Sim at a time because they'll all get stuck and you'll have no way of getting them out, even more so if your Sim is one of those stuck.

Therefore what we've done is put in two cone shaped plants either side of the lot. Sims are now incapable of getting down there. This technique can be used to block off any area you wish for whatever reason, both at home and elsewhere. At home, if you have objects in the restricted areas, Sims will still try to use them so keep an eye out. If you're a sadist, you could block the toilets off in this way too. But you don't want to do that... :)

A bit of grass gives way to some paving and you can build a nice entrance

Now let's concentrate on the exterior of our lot. Firstly, grass is nice where used effectively but doesn't do for us what other designs might. So put some paving down for visual effect if nothing else. A few manholes too, for realism.

This is one of the nicest things about building in The Sims 1; if you build a wall like this with columns on it and extend it endlessly, the game will automatically create column points for you at appropriate points. Therefore wrap it around the entrance to the complex avoiding the huge extractor fan we installed for the dance room, give it a floor covering and there you go! Obviously you could roll the walls back in to make a bigger entrance too.

Plants are king so install loads of them to look pretty

And a few minutes later, this is what we've come up with for our outdoor area. A few things to note here:

• Plants wrap nicely around corners, especially those in the brown boxes and look neat
• We've also installed a modern looking water fountain and one of the wells from Makin Magic into the entrance arena, plus added some stringed lights to illuminate this area too
• Street lights have been added. They provide light in the same way as any other light does so why not use them? Be careful with these though, Sims seem to want to wander around them into the road and get in the way of oncoming traffic.
• Awnings. Awnings are cool. Use them over all downtown entrance doors. End of story.
• Street signs; you should be able to see a hanging sign on the nearest wall and an advertising board in the middle of the pathway. Sims will walk around them and not into them (unlike people in real life).
• No more grass! Gravel instead. Nice change if nothing else.

This outdoor entrance area is now complete. Let's work on the inside now.

Indoor decorations - brighten the place up a bit

Plants can be used indoors as well. A whole tray of the things is lined up against the kitchen walls and there's another plant pot by the entrance to the toilets. For the sake of it, we've dropped a Christmas Tree into the corner as well. Because we can.

Indoor decorations are a matter of personal choice and whatever takes your fancy. You can do silly things here (for example, we've stuck a moose's head over the doorway despite the fact that there's supposed to be no room up there) but this part of decoration is dependent on what you want to achieve visual wise.

Me, I've put a couple of lumi-clocks on the walls and mostly pictures. You can fill the gaps in any diagonal walls now with objects such as the cute little stuffed bear that comes with Hot Date - take note that while you can't actually put an object on a diagonal, you can make little "pockets" and put stuff in there. Also take note that if you want to be able to follow conversations of your Sims, don't install big pictures or lights that block the bubbles!

A fishtank (the big ones, not the piddly little things you get at home) is also a worthy addition to any downtown area, plus you can feed the fish in the outdoor pond as well. In a nutshell, the key is to balance it; not loads and loads of stuff that makes it hard to get around, but not too little to make it look bare. Basically - less is more. Just don't go mad.

Take all the walls away, zoom out and this is our finished lot

And now this is what Lot 23 looks like now we've finished with it. A very nice functional lot which not only looks very pretty, it functions very well and there's plenty of things for Sims to do. Obviously you may come back at a later time to edit and/or demolish it and start again. You can download this house from my files section - click here.

And that finishes this editorial, I hope you've enjoyed it and/or found it useful. I hope to be writing similiar material to this in regards to the new stuff in The Sims 2 so I hope you can join me for that.