#meta sims

[echoweaver]

In general, I haven't been able to bond with my sims in Sims 4. As a contrast, my eternal legacy is called the Samples because I named my test Sim Susie Sample when I first got TS3 and then couldn't let go of her.

I'm not sure why this is. There are many things about gameplay that are objectively very good.

I will say that TS4 has the opposite problem that TS3 has -- too many inactives show up on community lots, and they're too boisterous. I sent Mortimer Goth to the library, then half the town piled in and started a party. Morty tried to introduce himself to the guy at the computer across the table, and by the time his action rolled around, that guy had left the room, and Morty was in a group conversation with three different people.

I've seen mods to increase the sims on community lots. Are there any to REDUCE the sims on community lots, or at least make them behave a bit closer to the mood of the lot? Since TS4 has a role sim librarian, they should be running around shushing everyone.

I'd love to see the behavior I got in that TS4 library in a TS3 nightclub.

I usually play in TS3 with walls up, and for some reason, I can't get a good angle for that in TS4. The proportions of everything are different in some way. But I like seeing the walls and getting a sense of the room while I'm playing, so that

OTOH, I LOVE the attraction system in Wonderful Whims. I tried to think of how you could code something like that for TS3, and you really can't, can you? This is the alternate side of having color presets for everything -- a sim can find a particular eye color or hairstyle attractive in a potential partner. TS3 sims don't even know if they're wearing their favorite color or not.

I wonder -- what kind of info CAN you read from a TS3 sim in a mod? Can you get general body weight and fitness level? Is it possible to retrieve the RGB value for things like eye color? You might be able to categorize eye and hair color by doing simple math on an RGB value -- like whether the R, G, or B value is larger.

So... my dream attraction system would be a combination of the systems I see in TS3 and Wonderful Whims -- like, you have preferences but your attraction to other sims evolves with experience. In TS3, the game does an instant god-mode comparison when you walk in the room and tells you which sims are attractive based on things you don't even know about them. In Wonderful Whims, attraction is entirely physical (I think).

But... maybe you like green-eyed redheads, so any stranger with those qualities is attractive to you. So you're attracted to someone with the physical traits you like when you go out to a club. You dance with her and get to know her, and then you discover she has a totally incompatible trait with you. That would allow us to have relationships that have natural success or failure. Sims don't have much reason for their relationships to go sour if you don't intentionally inject drama.

I'm talking like I would ever write this mod, but I'm still 80% done with my Warrior Cats mod and on mandatory modding vacation.

Still, it would be pretty awesome, wouldn't it?

[echoweaver]

In Sims news, I have now officially completed Victoria's generation. Since she had kids so late, the heir is about to age to teen. I do the official "torch-passing" at the YA birthday, but Vickie's story is essentially done.

That feels so incredibly momentous. Vickie has been the patroness of the legacy for five or six real years. It's not quite as crazy as it sounds because I was on hiatus from the game for about three of those years, and a bunch of the other time I wasn't playing much. But even so, that's been the status quo for a very long time.

Now we enter Generation 8, within spitting distance of the actual end.

I'll try to actually get some posts written to bring the story up to date.

Yeah.

[echoweaver]

Hmmm. So the Crossover install of Sims 3 failed again. My first tests were spectacular, but subsequent ones started crashing regularly. I'm not sure what changed or if the first ones were just lucky. Crossover now supports EA App, and Sims 4 is reported to work. I could theoretically attempt to install EA App and see if Sims 3 would work through it.

But, grump, forums indicate that it is still not possible to run games from EA App without an internet connection at startup, even if you switch to offline mode after that. My home internet connection is fine, but I've enjoyed being able to play my games on airplanes and on vacation. The attempt to keep games online that don't need to be online really enrages me. I don't know if the motivation is more data gathering or tracking legally purchased licenses, but they can stick it in their ass.

Do you know if anyone has pirated Sims 4 to function without one of these big brother apps?

OTOH, I'm now comfortable with using Games4TheWorld's pirated download, and it works fine. In fact, just to make myself feel better, I use their installers with my own licenses, since the only reason I'm not installing a legally obtained copy is because I want a standalone offline game. I sat down and spent a couple of days converting my store content to packages as well.

All that means I can probably upgrade my Mac to Apple Silicon and install via Parallels and be fine. It's an expensive proposition if I'm not 100% sure about it. Apple is such a price-gouger. But for all that, they really are great computers. My work computer is a M1 release from the first year of that chip, and I might've installed Crossover and Lord of the Rings Online, and I can testify that those chips are SWEET.

[echoweaver]

Ok stupid TS4 question - are there keyboard commands to tilt and rotate the camera outside of tab-mode?

I spent a ton of time finding skin and eye defaults I like. 😅 I haven't found a lot of skins that feature elder detailing, but I've found some I really like. (Actually, most skins I looked at don't even feature screenshots of elders, so I assume they didn't put a lot of attention there. Heh.)

Then built the entire Riffin-Singleton extended household before deciding that was silly because if I liked playing them, it would just be confusing. I did have a vague idea that I could switch the story to TS4, but I don't know enough about the game to know if I'd want to.

So then I thought I'd play some premades, but apparently you can't start a game without creating a sim first. So I randomized a YA female and then edited her a bit, and now I love her.

But now I can't figure out the camera controls 😅. Are there keyboard commands for tilting and pivoting the camera outside of tab-mode?

Also, can you use MCCC to pull random townies into CAS? How do you do that?

Bringing 10 years of power user expectations to a new game is a bit absurd.

[echoweaver]

Is there a mod to keep TS4 sims sitting while they're eating? They keep getting up with their plates, having standing interactions, and then sitting down at different places to continue eating.

[echoweaver]

OMG, there's content coming.

And it's even Samples content!

🥳

[echoweaver]

I'm just super not in the mood to write at the moment.

🤷‍♀️

I am playing, though.

I played a bunch of TS4, and I have thoughts. I love my sim, but I'm also having trouble staying engaged with it. I love that all the neighborhoods are basically stitched together into one uberhood, so I can go visit anywhere at any time. OTOH, all the loading screens and teleportation between lots leads to a sense of disconnect.

I really like how sims can talk to each other while doing almost anything else. More TS3 interactions COULD support conversations, but almost none of them do. 😡

OTOH, I went on a date to a cafe, and I kept ending up in "Awkward" group conversations when I tried to romance my date. Sometimes other sims are just not invited to join in the conversation. Sure, I'd expect the other cafe patrons to get awkward if we started making out, but not when I'm just rolling down the romantic interactions. Fortunately, my date seemed to be receptive regardless.

I love, love, love the clubs system.

I have the Wonderful Whims attraction system, and I REALLY want an attraction system in my game. But my sim was never attracted to anything. When I looked up her preferences, she just liked men with piercings. There were at least 2 other slots for preferences that were unfilled. There aren't a ton of men with piercings, and the only one she had a conversation with was married to another man, whoops. Finally, I added a piercing to a single guy she had naturally built a strong relationship with, and then he started showing up with TWO piercings -- one on either side of his nose. So did he autonomously add the other one?

The reproductive system stuff in Wonderful Whims is really great, very natural. Except the part where my sim got Flirty because of period hormones. From my personal experience at least, that NEVER happens. I guess other folks have a different story. 😆

And here's a stupid thing -- I want to move out of my little starter home, but there are so few lots overall and much fewer empty residential lots that I'm having trouble figuring out a next step up home to move into. I can place one, but it just seems weird to being having trouble upgrading my home.

Finally -- you can only get 3 wants a time? In TS3, you can lock in 4, and with an NRaas tweak, you can also fulfill the 2-5 unlocked ones you have floating around at any given time. My sim is a Glutton, and at least half of her wishes are to eat snacks. Sometimes she wants to talk to people. I've gotten my first big life want to ask a guy to be her boyfriend. I like to follow my sim's wishes around, and so far that hasn't done much.

[echoweaver]

I didn't realize you got the infant life stage without Growing Together. That's pretty cool because that expansion wasn't sufficiently discounted during Cyber Monday for me to get it. Sounds like their functionality in base game is very limited, but as a veteran of TS3 babies, I don't find this terribly daunting 🙄.