Sims in Testing

Alternate life: Pets

2011-10-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

I'm due for an update on the story blog, but then Pets came out. I could not resist.

As I always do for a new EP, I made a new family from my story characters. This one stars Paula and Alex.

Aw, look at them out for their first ride together.

The animations for the horses are gorgeous. I took a couple of videos that I mean to put up somewhere (probably on Tumblr). The animations are just so awesome and smooth and realistic.

The first ride went okay. Both sims got a skill point in riding their first time out, so things were a little less awkward by the time they got home.

Well almost.

Oops. Rico was in a bad mood, so he tossed Alex. Yay, that's one for their memories.

Rico is supposed to be Alex's horse. Don't they look good together?

But at some point, things went all to hell and everyone ended up deciding who they were going to bond with. (Isn't that always the way?)

Beauty started running around the house, bringing up her racing skill, so Alex has started training her as a racing horse. She actually wants to race, and had a wish to join a beginner's racing competition. Who am I to say no to that?

She broke out into the lead on her first race and managed to stay there and bring home their first win.

They celebrated that night with a hug.

Rico also raced (actually, he entered a competition before Beauty), but he came in third. Still respectable, but he's taken to jumping. And Alex, being this is improbable sims world is doing both, racing and jumping. He's self employed as a horseman, so these shows get them money which they need. (Although I'm cheating up a storm for needs and stuff, I am not giving them money unless they need to take out a loan, which they'd have to pay back, plus interest.)

I also made sim versions of our cats.

They look pretty close, but Trouble, the gray cat, has his stripes backward. My trouble has dark fur and light stripes. Plus a white chin. I'm going to have to fix that soon.

This shot above had my boyfriend and I laughing. The animations looked exactly like the way our cats play. Even had one cat on the ground, swinging a paw as the other prepared to pounce. Such amazing animations!

Another shot of Trouble rolling around in the bathroom. (All that's missing is someone's unmentionables. My cat is a perv.)

Yep, I went there, lol. Alex and Danger.

Good kitty. (Perverted subtext? I don't think I know what you mean.)

Alex, of course, is very much in love with Paula. Try to keep these two apart. (Okay, it's not that hard, since after Alex's long day, he usually smells and is tired.)

I meant Beauty for Paula.

But she hasn't been riding as much as Alex has. She stays at home writing. (It was what she wanted to do on the first day along with ride.) I did make her make a little garden, so she could start growing treats for the animals and making fresh food for the family.

Also, I love this shot. The new world is beautiful!

After a while of keeping the horses locked up, I let them out so they could run around and be free. They stay near the house. The problem is that they get hungry.

Instead of going back into her little pasture and eating her hay, she chose to eat Paula's tomatoes. Bad Beauty!

Plant gone! Helpfully, a tool tip tells you, when you hover the mouse over the plant, who ate your plant. Later on, the other tomato plant got eaten by Rico.

I am in love with Appaloosa Plains! I think I'm going to have to move over the other alternate life families and have them join Paula and Alex here. Wild horses now roam all over the place, plus you're likely to run across dear. Have not see a racoon yet, but I'm waiting!

The Saga of the Two brothers

2011-06-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

How better for me to play Generations than to create families of the sims of two of my favorite characters?

First up, Brandon and Pat.

And poor little Melissa in the cutest creepiest PJs ever.

Her parents are so cute it's gross. They're going to be embarrassing when she's older.

As in another incarnation of him, Brandon is a firefighter.

But this here is one of my favorite pictures of him. He got home after work and Pat and Melissa were gone. So what's he do? Start playing with Melissa's toys of course. Childish sims are so cute!

See? How cute! I should share video of him doing this. He starts making noises and everything while he plays.

Another gratuitous shot (as they all are). Brandon had just woken up and stepped into the living room and Pat went up to compliment him on his appearance. He's wearing boxer shorts here, so I guess she likes that. I love his thought bubble like he's thinking how lucky he is to be married to her. Awww!

The whole family out for a stroll. I love the stroller though they take it out at stupid times sometimes. Like I sent someone to teach their baby to walk on the front yard and after they stepped down the porch brought out the stroller to walk a few feet. Still it's so cute when I send the entire family shopping.

And of course we're dealing with both brothers. For some reason, I thought it'd be fun to give Jimmy glasses. Perhaps that's just a personal bias?

And if I'm dealing with Jimmy, then I'm dealing with Mary too.

But in this alternate reality, they already have kids. Remember the last one? Unfortunately, she went invisible, most likely due to some sort of corruption.

So let me introduce teen Kaya (v. 2.0) and Allison.

Kaya is not Mary's, she's only Jimmy's daughter. This is actually cannon. She's mentioned here (for those who read Ruin). Jimmy was a young dad. It wasn't his choice if you can believe it, he was jumped by the girl and Kaya was the result. He was only about 15, and I imagine that Kaya is now 15 here.

In the sims story in my head, she's just come to live with Jimmy and Mary. Right now she isn't sure how she feels about Mary or her little sister, as cute as her little sister is.

Here she sets up a prank just for Mary. Jimmy, with some crazy innate father second sense, came downstairs to scold her, but when he got to the bathroom...

Mary shooed him out and sealed her doom. He went off to go clean.

Oops. Sadly, she went back and washed it all out. It would've been awesome if she'd left her hair pink like that!

Kaya is actually a pretty good teen most of the time. She asked to go to a friend's house and they did homework together.

Kaya also has the very large master bedroom/study, which I think her father gave her partially out of guilt. It's her own space, plus because the other two rooms are on the other side of the house, Jimmy and Mary can be near the baby.

Kaya's room/the study:

I'm not great at decorating. I just wanted to have some fun, and Kaya strikes me as a girl with some personality who likes bright bold colors.

I left my sims alone while setting things up, and wouldn't you know it, both brothers knocked up their wives!

Mary and Pat ran into each other at the bookstore. Gah, I LOVE pregnant sims! Plus it's nice that in Sims 3, both women recognize each other as sisters in law. They're family, basically.

Mary announced her pregnancy to Pat.

And Pat looked appropriately excited for her. I just thought it was cute. Did she think Mary was just getting fat?

Then she threw this face. Like she's saying, "Those boys."

Next time on "As the Sims sim":

Brandon has a minor heart attack. Facing fires is nothing compared to his wife having a baby. (Also, he was asleep and it was three in the morning, why did he feel a need to hop out of bed and change into his work clothes to face this crisis? Training?)

Bonus-- bath time shots!

What? You thought I meant of the babies? ;) I'm just showing off the chest hair.

Pose Boxes

2011-04-25T07:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted here! But I haven't really been playing the game. It's a lot of work to get a story chapter out every week with pictures. Which is a shame because one of the fun parts of TS3 happens to be getting the pictures, and I've been breezing through that part to just be sure I have something up every week.

So I have started testing out the pose player. I've got the updated version now, and it's pretty awesome. You can add poses to a list to be used again and again. And instead of looking for a specific box like in TS2, you just have the one box and you type in the name of the pose you need. Sometimes this can be really handy or really not handy. Many poses do not have any sort of description, so it's hard to know what pose it is until you use it.

Many artists include the picture of a pose with the name beside it, so I've been keeping the pictures that come with the pose files. I've also got a notepad file where I'm putting in the names of poses. If I can, I put in the description too just to help me out.

The other day, I saw this pose pack and I had to use it. (I knew exactly who for too.)

I've been wishing to pose them forever on the floor of the meadow. In my head, they used to meet on the meadow and then just lay side by side. The closet I could imagine were the TS2 animations of sky watching (and later on cuddling under the clouds/stars). Nothing like that at ALL in TS3. Why would they take that detail out among the ones they did take out? Maybe Generations will put it back in?

Anyway, this is what I came up with.

Using the earlier link floor pack from Club Crimsyn. It's not bad, but here's the thing- the artist can mold the faces. And since there is no over lay yet, the face that goes with the pose is just the face with the pose. This isn't really Brandon's face. So that's the main issue I've got with the poses on pose boxes. Even if the pose looks great and natural because of the care an artist took (and these poses were pretty neat), they will still look stiff and unnatural because of the faces.

And I really deal with faces.

So I decided to give is another shot with a different pose pack from My Blue Book. Pose Set 003- Couple Poses. She says she worked hard on them, and it really shows. I think she did a great job with it considering how difficult it must be to pose one sim, let alone two and get them to line up!

My favorite picture:

It's adorable, but still those faces frozen like that.

But then I suppose my own attempts at couple posing like this have been the same for the most part. It's why I end up having weird camera angles to hide strange eyes or the fact that two sims may be going through one another. Like the first couple of pictures in this chapter.

But still, my favorite pictures of Pat and Brandon happen to be the standard EA animations. Catch them between animations, move them around a little and you have unique poses with unique faces and they will generally turn their heads to face each other. The Pose Player will also play those standard animations, so I still need to do even more experimenting.

I guess I just don't see myself becoming a major poses downloading whore. Though I do note the good ones I like and see possibility for future reference.

My sims have become alcoholics

2010-11-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

Okay, Late Night is pretty fun. I get the feeling sometimes that the developers are actually paying attention to the community and listening to what they want in the game and then trying to implement them but in a way that's different from what came before. I don't really have anything too specific, but I just get that feeling.

Anyway, onto Bridgeport!

Confession here, Mom just upgraded her graphic card in her computer and gave me her old one that was like SUPER powered. (I didn't even know she really knew she could do that.) Man, it's a huge difference between this one and the 8800GT! So Gayl, if you read this, I'll be sending your card back soon.

First up, of course I had to play around with the sliders. I was bemoaning the fact that the men all had the same torso no matter the muscle mass, so I was glad to see the change! (It works on the women as well, but women already have so many custom sliders that their body variety is huge compared to the poor men.)

So first up, regular Brandon with my default skin. I've always liked this skin for the face and the way the abs on the body are just shadowed. Never have been a fan of painted on abs, but these work for me for the most part.

Here is Brandon with the new slider maxed out.

I wanted to see if the default skin really gets in the way. I'd say no, but this skin doesn't look great on larger sims, so I think I do need to edit this one or something to get rid of those abs.

Also, Ick. I'm not a fan of large muscly men like this.

What I settled on. Something in between. Brandon is supposed to have more mass than his brother and be shorter. Jimmy will probably have a bit more muscle since he uses his body much more often than Brandon .

So for this EP, I decided to use Brandon and Kyrene. Who better to explore downtown Bridgeport?

New things I love- one fancy drinks actually do something. I actually like that sims will gain the party animal trait or the insane trait after drinking. I sent Kyrene out, and we almost had a bar brawl.

I also love that sims can form groups again. They can go to bars and order drinks for the group or a round for the bar. The bartender/mixologist will put the drinks on the bar counter, then the sim can actually deliver drinks to people personally.

Here's Kyrene picking up a tray of drinks for her and the guy she's with.

Sims can now stand around while drinking and talk! They'd sort of do it before, but now I can direct them to. I can have them flirt and do other things as they drink.

Also, they can eat at the bar. This is also just a gratuitous shot of Brandon who met up with Kyrene after his work was over.

Brandon has managed to become a minor celeb. See, he was working as a fireman, and he met another minor celebrity there. He managed to impress her, and so he gained a star. So far it got him a slight discount on one drink, he got into one club without having to bribe the bouncer, and he managed to get recognized which gave him a little moodlet.

But Kyrene is the one in the movie start career! I really need to get her on that.

My one complain is the proliferation of stupid elevators. I guess it makes sense. I mean, if you live on the 18th floor, you're not going to run up that many stairs. Still, it seemed silly when there was a house fire in a high rise for Brandon to do this:

Especially considering how difficult it can be to get out of an elevator.

Smooth. Good thing he's cute.

The other funny thing is that both Brandon and Kyrene can think of nothing other than drinking. "Have a drink" is a persistent want that keeps rolling up for Brandon. Sometimes even having a drink at two different places. But then anyone reading Ruin probably won't be surprised to hear that about Brandon or Kyrene, lol. Next up will be some creative woohoo.

So my hacks page has been updated. And if anyone uses the invisible furniture I whipped up using Buzzler's script, I did fix them for Late Night. They're over here.

Of creepy gnomes and other things

2010-11-08T00:35:00.001-08:00

I really want to play Late Night, but that's going to take some work. Most of the hacks I use are updated, but not the Chaos Mod painting yet. I'd like to take a few pictures before I update with the latest patch and make the Mod Painting completely (or possibly only mostly) unusable.

So I decided to play some more Ambitions. (Starring Mitchell and Paula which I last showed way back here.) It started out with a fire.

Yes, that's the maid deciding she doesn't get paid enough for this and walking away. She's a horrible maid anyway. I've watched her snacking on food and brushing her teeth.

Finally found a gnome! Kinda. Mitchel actually made him. I've been watching where he appears each day.

Mitchell managed to create a time machine finally. And we had a little adventure in the past.

He came back with a little surprise.

For something completely different- TS3 on the DS

2010-10-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

I need to talk about this, but I have no where to talk about it.

The Sims on consoles have been overwhelmingly disappointing. The first round, they gave it a good try with TS2 on the PS2, but it was lacking something. The play was very goal oriented because for some reason anything that comes out to the consoles absolutely must fit into some neat little box. You can't have an actually open sandbox type game without putting missions or goals as part of the game.

Playing on consoles is boring anyway. Unless you're new to the Sims or you don't have a working PC, there's no point in playing on the console.

(I will add here that the only fun version of Sims on the console I have ever played is Castaway on the Wii. Goal oriented, yes, but it was also really fun and well done and I actually liked it better than Castaway for the PC.)

So I really can't see a reason for playing Sims on a console. Until TS3 on the DS which promised to be closer to the real thing. I wouldn't have bothered personally because I had my doubts, but Mom got it as her free game at a Best Buy sale and handed it over to me.

I have to say that I'm impressed! They have managed to keep all the best elements of TS3 and give me pretty much what I've always wanted.

Being on the DS, the graphics are just so-so of course. But game play does manage to capture the best elements of the DS as well. Like you can use the touch screen to customize your sim.

This is Chris, my shy klepto with a want to be a master thief. I know, not much to look at, but you don't really have to see their faces all that often. The experiment with her was to see how open the game really was. Could I create a sim that didn't live at home?

Yes, it turns out you can. I've hardly had her stopping off at her lot at all. She only has the basic necessities at home- a bed, toilet, fridge. Nothing else.

It's actually an open neighborhood. She can take showers at the gym and eat hot dogs on the grill at the park and then nap on park benches.

Here she is taking a jog through town. She's much too stylish for sleep on park benches though. So she has a number of boyfriends around town. Once you've got a boyfriend, you get free use of their house any time, even when they aren't home apparently.

Since she's a klepto, I had hoped originally we could steal items for her home, but it doesn't work that way. She can only rifle through drawers and steal money. That's kinda lame. I'm hoping making her a master thief will give her some extra ability and she can steal properly.

The building tools are also awesome. It's a touch screen, so they give you the ability to draw walls and add onto houses. You are limited though to one floor and by the number of objects you can put in a house.

A different house with a married couple. (Interestingly to note that thanks to the open neighborhood they were married by the town light house on the look out point.) This house is close to the object limit. I guess 'cause there's a lot of deco objects throughout the house?

My favorite room in the house is the study.

The painting is Olivia's. I'm having her be a stay at home sim working on alternate ways to earn money. (I'm having way too much fun with their story.) Apparently, you can take paintings and then use them to decorate walls. I haven't given it a try yet, but she has the option to sell or take the paintings and there's a family inventory, so I'm assuming she can then hang them up.

Down sides: No woohoo (so all they get for being the klepto's boyfriend is some lost money and an occupied bathtub), no way to switch characters in the same save file, the save files are also not connected so my shy klepto will never meet my over worked prince and his stay at home wife, and no way to switch homes that I can see.

Oh, and you know, no same sex flirtations. I won't even go there, but that's really annoying and limiting.

Also, loading screens. But the upside is that you can spin the plumbbob. That's kinda fun!

I don't know if sims can die. I starved one guy once and he was zapped over to the hospital. Also, I don't know if I can kick sims out or not. I'm working on the drama, and I'll see. That would be a way to keep things fresh in a save file. Let a relationship deteriorate, and then kick out the old sim and play with the new one.

Anyway, I'm impressed. I wouldn't really sit and play this at home, but I do get a lot of playing done at work.

TS3 lighting

2010-10-19T23:41:00.001-07:00

So I thought that I was already using a lighting mod in my game, but apparently I was not. Laura reminded me about it, and then Tamo brought it up again in her blog post.

So I thought I would update my mod and found I didn't have one. Oops! Let me tell ya, the mods actually make all the difference.

Take for instance the chapter from the week before last. Night time and fire, what could go wrong? But it seemed too bright to me.

This is the original shot.

Here is what it would've looked like if I'd had the lighting mod in.

Makes me want to retake those pictures!

I'm using the darker version of the mod. I want my nights pitch black. In the Wildlands, even though there are buildings, there really aren't many lights except for fires from pits, bonfires and oil lamps. Probably a few other ingenious inventions floating around.

This doesn't affect the indoor lights too much. But the windows do appear darker which makes a big difference. Before I was desperately trying to hide that the rabbit holes I was using for decoration actually have lights. Now it's really not noticeable except for the marquee on the movie theater.

Also, this mod affects the light at sunset, the fog, over cast and stormy. This will either be really awesome or a pain to work with. Generally, it' nice to have consistency from picture to picture. If it starts out sunny, I'd like it to stay sunny. I'm pretty sure the Relativity mod will prevent things from changing at all when I don't want them to though.

Also, I added a new default hi-res moon which is gorgeous. It probably won't be seen very often, but still, I like knowing it's there looming over us.

Test pictures

2010-08-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

So I've mentioned before that after I create a character, I give them a test run in the sim world to see how well they match up with the character I see in my head. Some come out perfectly the first time, and some I have to edit quite a bit.

Pat is one of those that came out fully formed, perfectly. While looking for pictures of her body, I ran across the original test shots I ran her through after I made her. These were also Brandon's test shots as an adult.

But, of course, it wasn't until these pictures below that I was absolutely SURE I had them down perfectly.

Love LOVE this shot, because it looks like he's trying to cajole her into doing something. I would bet he does this to her from time to time when they're alone, just the two of them. They aren't often alone, not if Pat has her way. But if he stops by when they're cleaning up or closing, I can see Rita (Pat's mom) excusing herself and taking Melissa with her. (I think she'd make it very obvious that she was leaving them alone, and she'd invite Melissa in on this very obvious not so secret secret. I can imagine Melissa giggling about it even if she isn't completely sure what is going on and needs her grandmother to explain it to her which would bring up some awkward questions from Melissa later I'm sure.)

And of course, he wins here. Did she ever really have a chance?

Kyrene was made at the same time, and so Brandon was also used for her test shots.

Kyrene's first try. So not her. It was her eyes, so I sent her back to CAS.

What I love about Kyrene's sim is how expressive her face is. She can look dangerous, sultry, and sad with very little facial movements.

Three days?

2010-08-25T23:32:00.001-07:00

Don't know why, I guess I've just been killing time. But it was three days to make three sims.

It started with this guy.

I'm calling him Luke right now. He is Kyrene's father. He knew Henri when they were both teens; I'm certain of that. But they weren't exactly friends. Though I see Luke as being somewhat laid back, even in his youth, so it was probably more like a slightly unfriendly competition between the two men-- err, boys really at the time.

And then the Revolution happens and they run across each other again, and together, the two of them were the founders of the Southlands. Now they're good friends. Luke is Henri's adviser and his partner, though his role is probably less visible.

I see him being a pretty intimidating man, very much like Henri. He can definitely back up his words. But he's also got that laid back streak that I think surprises people.

One of the surprising aspects of this man who is very much like Henri and at the same time very much not like him is the fact that he fell in love. So of course I had to make her.

I don't have a good name for her yet. Kyrene's mother was a complete surprise to him. She really came out of nowhere, and it was really lucky for Henri and Luke.

I don't think he was this nervous before in front of a woman or this nervous since.

I love her eyes. They're not my normal defaults. They're actually Tamo's Ultra Plain Tri-color Eye Contacts.

Luke, of course, required that I download more tattoos. I actually see him having a tattoo of some sort on his face. His hands have tattoos by Newone that say "Free Mind" which is actually very fitting and slightly important. I also downloaded a bunch of new Ambitions tattoos.

But there are a couple he's missing. The older Luke will have a tattoo ring from his bonding with Kyrene's mom that will match her tattoo ring, and I think I'd like to make that face tattoo. It's not going to be large, but very small.

Body shapes or Shirtless men!

2010-08-21T10:59:00.000-07:00

*ahem* Well, one of the plus sides of TS3 is the ability to sculpt the bodies as well as the faces. So without much more needing to be said (it's really all in the title of this post) I'm going to start with our main three guys: Henry, Brandon and Jimmy.

Right away, I can tell it's hard to tell the differences. One of the problem with TS3 men is that they all have muscle definition around the shoulder, the forearms are shaped the same, the backs have the same (for lack of a better word) dents. It's just the mesh it seems. These are things that don't change no matter how flabby a male sim is or how muscular.

What does change is the upper arm, the shape of the torso, width of the body.

Here's a comparison where you can see the arms. Jimmy actually has a smoother arm. He's less muscular than Brandon and Jimmy. In my head, Brandon is much more compact, somewhat short but blocky. Henri is tall, but it's clear Brandon gets his muscles from Henri. Meanwhile, of the three of them, Jimmy is actually a bit more lithe. (But only of the three of them.)

Here's a shot from the back. See what I mean? The body mesh will all have the same depth of the spine regardless of muscle mass when I'd expect that Brandon's spine would probably be a bit deeper than Jimmy's. Well, it almost looks like it is, but I think that's just because of the angle of the light.

From this picture, you can see the curve to their backs. Brandon and Henri both have waists that are more defined. Jimmy's more straight up and down. His waist is actually a bit thicker than Brandon's. And Henri, being the oldest actually has the thickest waist, but I couldn't easily get a comparison shot of that. You'll have to trust me on that.

Oh, well actually, this is a good comparison shot of the waists. What I mostly wanted to show here is that Aaron is a giant.

Aaron is taller than Henri and as muscular as Brandon. His waist is actually a bit smaller though, despite that he's older. I imagine that Aaron moves fast and he's strong.

Another comparison shot of the torsos. Jimmy's starting to look flabby next to those three.

So then my next thing was to show you Alex between Brandon and Aaron. Alex is one of the guys who's actually very lithe. He's young, but he's scrappy. Ignoring the fact that his skin tone is ripped, and only looking at the shape of his torso, there's not much to him. I imagine that Alex is very wiry. He's young, but he hasn't had a very easy life. He's got one of the thinnest waists because he's one of the youngest. He also isn't actually very muscular in CAS. See the line of his torso is pretty straight compared to Brandon's.

A side comparison makes it more clear I think. I'd also like to point out how pinchable Aaron's butt is right here. I am pretty sure that was intentional on my part when I was sculpting him. I gave him a little bit more butt because it makes his waist look more defined.

Of course my two favorite guys. Mitchell is actually taller than Angel and thicker. Angel is the older one, but he's naturally more agile because of his power (or ability I suppose would be more accurate). Angel has more muscle mass though. You can see it in his arms.

Poor Mitchell. I can hear him asking in my head, "Can I put my shirt back on now? It's cold."

With the guys, the differences are subtle. Even when it comes to heights, it's hard to make changes that are drastically different. I find that if you make them too tall, they look weird. The original slider hack I'd been using that was by Delphy extends the sim skeleton similar to the way we used to in TS2, but I find that's not a good way to do it. It ends up distorting the body and distorting the skin on the body.

Jonha had some sliders in testing here which break the sliders down, so instead of one slider, you have to use a minimum of three- one for the torso, one for the legs, and one for the arm length. It's a pretty clever system actually, since in real life people don't always have the same proportions. (Like Jay and I noticed a while ago we have almost the same torso length but his legs are way longer making him 6' to my 5'4".)

But as always, the fun ones to play with are really the girls.

I think the differences are obvious. Paula, coming from the Neutral area where her biggest concerns were studying and hanging out with friends, is an average size. She's got a little belly, she's wider, and her boobs are big because she has some weight to her.

Maria is the smallest. She's more of an athletic body. Her breasts are smaller, her waist is less defined, she has less of a butt. I see her always being like this even when she's older.

Kyrene is more voluptuous of course. She has hips and breasts. She's muscular, and she's not skinny. But it's unfair to compare her to these two since she is a full grown woman. You can compare her to Pat though.

With Pat, I flat out admit I spent some time on her butt. I have no good reason for it but that I'm rather proud of the way she came out. She's got a waist and hips that flare out a bit. I imagine she's young, but she's healthy and strong.

Looking for pictures of Pat, I've come across some Brandon and Pat ones I should probably share one of these days. They were the original test shots that let me know I had Pat down perfectly.

Let's NOT do that again!

2010-08-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

But I probably will.

This update probably had the largest cast of characters so far. And by that I mean actual characters I care about, not just background characters.

Maybe this will only be amusing to me, but what the heck. More behind the scenes fun so you can see what I put up with when working with these sims. Sometimes it's very much like working with my cats.

So these shots are actually before Chapter 22. I moved all the sims I would need to a special lot, and then had to wait. The sun was setting, and there's no way to turn back time in game or set the hour (unless that's a feature of one of my hacks that I don't know about which is possible).

With a lot of time on their hands and all needs static, these are the tales of the sims behind the stories.

Let's start with these two. I left them alone, and they were the ones that started everything. They were flirting up a storm, and no one had any objections to it. Luckily. I just knew that things were out of control when these two started up.

I hoped around watching the others for a bit. Angel and Mitchell were chatting around back. These two are always drawn to each other. If there's a group of sims, I am sure to find these two near each other.

And just because we never get enough Angel:

Also around back, Maria and Paula were chatting when Maria stopped to do something that confounded Paula.

From this angle, it's still not clear. (Kidding of course. It's actually the start of the martial arts idle. I just love Paula's face and thought bubble, and the way Maria looks like she's guarding something precious.)

The brothers were having one of their normal conversations.

It may look like Brandon's calling Jimmy a blockhead, but he's actually telling his brother that he's upset and that's how he made him feel. Because Jimmy was insulting him again.

Meanwhile these two were still at it:

Get a room!

I then had the boys spar for the fun of it.

Henri happened past. (He's still at the normal apartment lot that Paula's always on.) He didn't look impressed. Perhaps he'd have some tips to share if he wasn't standing on the other side of the fence?

Paula was also watching. I think she was a little concerned because Brandon got his butt beat.

I guess she was cheering kinda loud, because Jimmy came over to have a talk with her.

She looks a tad worried. But as they talk, she finds he isn't all that bad.

And it even ends in smiles.

And then Jimmy calls her a yeti. (Or maybe her mother or her mother's family. It's all the same to him.)

How hurt does she look? Nice Jimmy! (But is it bad that her hurt face makes me laugh? She's so cute. She's like, "A yeti? I'd never say anything like that to you.")

Morning FINALLY came, and I needed to make sure that these silly sims would stay out of the shots I needed for the first chapter.

THAT is how you corral some sims.

So remember how Alex tackled Paula?

Yeah, that was a romantic move. I was very surprised that it worked. Sometimes my teens and adults refuse to play along and humor me even after I tell them that it's going to be completely innocent. But these two were all game for it. I don't think Paula could say yes fast enough.

Well, there was someone who didn't like this obvious mischief between an adult and a teen. Thanks to Awesome Mod, Alex actually got arrested. I had to reset sim to get him back for the next update.

And I will leave you with a randomly snapped picture from the most recent update.

These were just random idles, but I'm sure that Paula's just made a joke that Alex couldn't get and she finds rather funny. I would guess this happens a lot, but there's still a charm to it. They're each in (and from) their own worlds, and somehow it still feels like it works for them even if Paula has to try and explain her jokes (which never works out very well).

The Village's First Fire Fighter

2010-08-17T21:39:00.000-07:00

To those who know Alex, this is appropriate, right? How cute is he?

Thanks to Laura, I've been in a mood to build something. So I revisited my village. There are things that I don't like about it, plus I happen to now have some really neat hacks by Ani_ at MTS that I want to start using.

Now that we can actually put down lots and do some minor editing in game, I've been tearing up lots, and replacing some of the buildings I put in as place holders. So one of the first new buildings I put in was the fire station that came with Ambitions.

When I first popped in on Alex, things weren't going too well. Apparently while I was playing someone else, Alex got robbed. When I found him standing around in the park, he was not very happy. Stuff of his got stolen, and he was mad at some woman named Malinda Maroof who is apparently one of the homeless NPCs that wander around, because I don't know her.

The man clearly needed a change of pace. So he quit his job.

And flirted with the girl who sells food in the park. Apparently he's the town cassanova. (No seriously, it's a plug in that comes with Twallan's Story progression.)

He reported in for a half day of work as a fire fighter.

And he spent that half day working out because he has no athletic skill. Who knew? Some sims I cheated and gave skill points to. Not him though. Somehow he was missed completely. Poor guy.

So he jogged home.

The woman in the truck is another one of the town firefighters.

But in the park we found Malina Maroof that he was so mad at. She just looks sneaky, doesn't she? Didn't bother stopping to talk to her, but it's interesting to see her around town.

I didn't get pics of it, but Alex lives in a shack by himself with a single bed. It's a small house that didn't even have a bathroom. I added an outhouse in the back.

Alex lives completely alone, very much in the woods. Nearest to him is another run down house that's full of the local prostitutes. So I guess though he's lonely, he's not really alone. Though they're not the ones we want for him, right?

Doesn't he just seem lonely?

So for right now, Ruin saps pretty much all of my extra energy. Well, you know the energy I choose to give to it. It's not like I am always working on it. So I'm just exploring the village and the game and all my mods. As I'm playing, I'm taking notes of what is going on around town, just to test out the story progression.

So right now, using Speechless' method, each day is a month, age wise. With things on high free will, a lot of stuff happens! But I like that. I think part of my problem with TS2 became I slowed down too much. It is fun to play the same sims and develop their character, watch them grow. But that's why I write. To develop characters that I can play with and watch grow, who have secrets to impart to me when the time is right.

So then I figure I play sims to see stuff move forward. I like change, and the game still makes me laugh. Especially some of these pop ups. I'm not good at organizing, so I think I'm going to be a little all over the place because I don't have any set method right now. I'm just hopping around when I see someone I want to catch up on or when I get some particularly juicy notice about someone.

This play session actually started out with someone else.

On the 17th play day of my village, Paula and her mother moved into a more fitting home. I also found out that Paula hadn't been doing her homework, so she had to stay up very late to finish.

She had a few things on her mind. She wants to write a science fiction novel. They don't have a computer at the moment, so she has to do that at the library right now. She also wants to learn to paint.

And lastly, she wants to be friends with somebody. Right now she's enrolled in art school. (This is part of Twallan's Career Mod which allows for some interesting custom careers.) I don't think there are a lot of other kids in her school. So she's probably lonely right now. It's just her and her mother.

Oh, and Henri. But she rarely gets to see him. He is a great adventurer after all.

A couple other interesting notes: Kyrene got married. She became Kyrene Black, but the town bike (Audrey, who also happens to be one of the town prostitutes) seemed to get in the middle of that quick union. They were only married for a couple of months, and they divorced last night. Kyrene had been living with Henri (nothing funny, just staying there while she was getting her feet on the ground in town), and her husband moved in with them.

Well, last night, after divorcing her husband, she moved out and moved in with Jimmy and Aaron! Jimmy had been a romantic interest of hers before she up and got married. This Kyrene is very flighty apparently. And she's now left Henri with a strange house guest.

Last but not least:

I really am not quite sure what services he was offering, but it can't be good. I'm making a note to check on him and Henri next time I pop in.

Lots of dirty pictures!

2010-07-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

Because I'm a perv and proud of it!

All right, so the most recent chapter I think deserves some behind the scenes info. Mostly, how it was done. These were just some shots I took because I was curious. I had an idea and wanted to see if it could be done.

Basically, I wondered if using the OMSPs, I could make it look like one sim was sitting on the lap of the other sim. Well, then somehow that moved into "what if they're naked?" And there was probably some snickering.

Anyway, enough of me, some actual pictures.

First, I pulled out the picnic basket, my go to prop. Then I had them both sit down. I moved the sims off the blanket, and Kyrene is actually sitting on a couple of low fancy OMSPs. In order to get Kyrene's hands moved though, I had to get her to chat with Alex first before I put her on the OMSPs because once they're on the OMSPs, things get a little weird.

I loved this shot. She's just talking, but she looks a little sad-- yes I'm going with sad. This is not the first time I've caught an oddly sad look on her face (which is super odd since she's not posed, she's just talking).

The shot of Alex tipping her over is actually them on the couch.

Full shot:

Actual shot:

Kyrene is once again on a fancy OMSP. Using the Chaos Mod Painting, I had Kyrene do the "bored to death" animation, so she would fall flat, and I told Alex to take a nap, and then it was just a matter of timing.

I'm really just trying to push Photobucket now. I'm almost daring them, lol.

Okay, so this was actually my second shot at making dirty pictures. These two were the subject of another photoshoot that was a spur of the moment what if thing, and I don't foresee using them, so I'll present them here.

You have to use your imagination for these. These pics are also highly suggestive, but I think they would be the sort to be heightened with some text.

I imagine that she searches him out, probably finding him with a small group. It doesn't take much to get him alone. Her smile is promise enough. They probably seek out an abandoned room in one of the abandoned buildings. He hikes her up, kissing her, sliding his hand under her skirt as she wraps her legs around him, throwing her arms around her shoulder. And well...

The first three are just them making out with her on OMSPs.

The fourth shot (with him between her legs), Kyrene is actually doing the Party Animal idle, y'know where they throw their hands in the air? And then she's on an OMSP to line her up. Alex is doing one of the amorous animations, the one where he wraps his hands over someone's waist. I sort of liked the line up for that shot, but hated that he wasn't doing anything.

The last two are just amorous hugs, Kyrene also on OMSPs so it looks like he's lifting her up.

So that's pretty much it. Just involves a weird idea, and some play testing. I think that's enough dirty pictures of these two, not that either of these two would mind. You'll just have to imagine the dirty pictures yourself!

I just needed to

2010-07-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

Well, this I felt I needed to do. We have company over, so I feel like my normal level of focus (which is bad) is REALLY bad. So I'm reading, but not able to come up with good comments because my brain is lazy.

So I've mentioned that along with my nerdy love of office supplies, I seem to have a love for downloading office furniture for Sims which is silly. No one in Ruin even has an office. But then somewhere along the way, someone (I think Laura or Carla) mentioned Henri would probably have an office.

And then I realized, yes he probably would. And Carla is right, it probably would be dirty and dusty but full of stuff.

I'm no decorator, but here it is. At least what I have so far.

I imagine that he basically would have taken over a room that already had the furniture in it. He hasn't really added much to the place. The type writer was probably where the computer is now, and when he got the computer he just moved it out of the way without caring enough to clear out the space.

Oh the computer? Well, I think, if things go as planned, we'll get to that. It is definitely meant to be an anomaly. I don't think Henri can actually use it very well himself. Probably he can do basic things on it, but he doesn't really use it very often.

If anything, this is a room he uses to hide out in and ponder things. Jimmy and Brandon would know about it and know that if he's in here, they should probably redirect anyone looking for him. Probably only Jimmy would be able to enter the room to talk to Henri, and even then I see him appearing with a small smile and the expectation that Henri would be a little grumpy for being disturbed.

So this made me think about Paula's room too, from before.

I think that side table was something she meant to do herself. She probably bought it herself with money she made from a part time job and with the intent that she'd paint it and make it something of her own. It's supposed to be her desk, but she pretty much just started putting stuff on it, and slowly it started to get covered in a mound of stuff.

But it was her first "big" purchase. (Probably only $20 from a garage sale, and then the offer of a favor for which ever friend brought the truck.)

I actually see her as being very normal and friendly in her old life. A regular student, probably gets mostly A & Bs, except in math, which absolutely stumps her.

I wanted to have a personal touch in her room, of course. Which meant that before I could stage Paula's bedroom picture, I had to stage some other pictures with Paula and a younger version of her mother.

They have to go somewhere!

2010-06-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

I can't keep these under wraps because I think they're too cute. And I don't want to put them on the main blog, I don't think.

If you don't read Ruin, this will probably make no sense. And even if you do read Ruin, you'll still be confused, I assure you, lol!

Who could that little boy be? Just in case...

As for the woman, you've seen her already.

Ah, if they could have taken pictures...

Just one of those times where stories from the past are pouring forth, and having TS3 there to help illustrate helps me focus. It's handy to have faces to put to the characters in my head. It gives them a bit of extra dimensionality other than in my head. I really want to reach out and hug that little boy considering all that I know. This was probably the only time one could even think of doing something like that.

I don't know what she did...

2010-06-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

...but Mary totally upset Brandon's family and got kicked out of his house. Oddly, between her and Jimmy, he's the mean spirited one that always insults people including his brother, yet she gets tossed out.

That's Melissa kicking her out. Before that it was Melissa's little sister who had an issue. I suppose it's a glitch, but still pretty funny. Sweet Mary causing a ruckus! Look out!

I just adore than an entire family can go for a visit. Here's Jimmy taking little Kaya over to Brandon's.

Here's the little family before Kaya aged up.

Here is Kaya aged up.

Still hard to tell who she looks like, but she has Mary's eye color, and it looks like Jimmy's nose.

Their life is a little too peaceful. It's very nice to play. Mary is an author, but she also takes a lot of photographs. I've been having a lot of fun with that, and she makes quite a bit of money at the consignment shop I've added to Coconut Island. She's the bread winner of the family, that's for sure. Jimmy comes in handy to fix stuff and cook.

I've been having the most fun with Ambitions starring:

Yep, Paula as...

...a ghost buster. Okay, this is the dramatic shot she asked me to use. Really, she spends a lot of time chatting up ghosts now-a-days, reassuring them that their loved ones are okay and then convincing them to move on. And every so often, she breaks out the zapper and zaps them or gets into a little fight. (So far she's won all her fights.)

Paula lives with Mitchell who's an inventor which means he gets to blow up stuff for scrap!

Blowing up toilets that clog constantly is so much more efficient than actually fixing them. It's also a great stress reliever. He often gets the urge to blow up plumbing that doesn't work perfectly, but he doesn't often get to blow them up. (Paula threatens to turn her zapper on him if he doesn't behave. Someone's gotta keep these inventors in line.)

So for fun, I sent them down to the salon where Paula got her first tattoos and Mitchell got a make over.

The neat part is that this actually unlocks some new clothes, so there is an actual incentive to do this other than the moodlet. I sort of wish we could choose their clothes though. Paula also got a make over, but we hated it so there are no pics of that. (Seriously, even she didn't seem impressed!)

Paula apparently got bored while Mitchell and the stylist were talking. So she autonomously grabbed someone and offered to do a make over.

Surprisingly this is the outfit she started out with, not the one Paula put on her.

I can't remember what Paula put her in, but it was comparable to this. She was not happy. I didn't see the problem personally. I also didn't get a picture.

This is the stylist. Who wouldn't want him to tell them how to dress?

Paula loved her tattoos so much, she had the want to get another one. Somehow, it seems she made Mitchell think he wanted one too. So I had them head to the salon again, but it was too late.

This was when I learned that after about 6pm or so, everyone goes home and the shops close. Well, they came all the way into town, so Paula was not about to leave without getting or giving a tattoo.

"Sit," she said.

"What? Oh no, no no."

"C'mon."

Some dealing must have gone on. I wonder if at this point she agreed to let him blow up one piece of plumbing. I think he's just much too nice to really say no convincingly.

Yeah; he didn't really stand a chance, I'm sure.

He got some tattoos all right. Nothing that he could really show off to anyone, of course. Then to add insult to injury, Paula broke the chair, and Mitchell fixed it.

He figured it was best to stay on the good side of the tattoo artist who he'd ask to remove Paula's work.

Here you can see some of her "work." I think Mitchell has learned a very valuable lesson in a very painful way.

Big week for TS3 story tellers!

2010-06-13T03:01:00.000-07:00

Lots of exciting news this week.

Over here, Goggalor reported his findings on the fog emitter from Ambitions. We have weather! And lots of other cool things.

There are some issues when it comes to placement though. Sometimes it's high up and far away from the lot. I haven't quite mastered it yet, so I still have to fiddle around with it to get it to work.

It seems that the fog emitter can pretty much produce any effect in the game, which is pretty handy story telling-wise. This will require lots of play testing I think as some effects loop, some only happen once, and some won't happen at all.

And I just found out while I was updating my hacks that Jonha has some more height sliders in testing. These finally make a sim shorter. The issue before was that sims would get this weird bendy knee thing going, so Delphy could only release the taller slider.

Jonha's way around this is to have separate sliders. So instead of one height slider, you make sims shorter by shortening their legs, their arms, and their torso.

In this picture, Paula and Brandon are the normal heights for sims their age. (For anyone who doesn't know them, Paula's the black haired teen girl, and Brandon's the black haired man.)

The girl in red has been shortened just a bit. And waaay in the back, Henri, the oldest male, has been lengthened to the tallest height using Delphy's slider. I might be able to use Delhpy's slider in combination with Jonha's to actually make him taller if I want.

Aaaand lastly, Buzzler at MTS released a vanishing objects script. At my request, he added classes for some items that are handy for us story tellers, and I them made clones of the necessary objects and enabled them to take advantage of the vanishing script. They're in the comments, post #23.

Real Image:

Invisible couch:

Invisible lounge and invisible chair:

My game was working at driving me nuts tonight for the first time, so I couldn't really test out the bed like I had wanted to. I know the bed's too high for the sofas, but I'll find something it matches up with or I'll just fake it.

Alternate Life

2010-05-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

For those who follow this and Ruin, I'd suggest reading Ruin's most recent chapter first for the full effect. You don't have to, but I'd recommend it.

Details:

Carnaxa showed me this world called Coconut Island. You're meant to make a living off of alternative means like painting, writing, gardening, collecting.

It amazing, and I can't stop playing it. This is the most I've played TS3 ever.

Mary came to the island with no skills. Jimmy came with full athletics, martial arts, moar fight and assassination. (You should be going, "assassination?? Moar fight?" Yep! In TS3, skills can actually be added like careers in TS2. I haven't completely explored this yet.)

She writes and gardens, he cooks, fishes, and does general handy work around the house.

Of course I plopped down another visitor for them from the sim bin. An older version of Jimmy's little brother. Which of course means that the girls he was talking to...

And those last shots: Sim births take a couple of sim hours. Since there's no hospital on the island, they can only wait. After his initial freak out, Jimmy wandered off to garden, then he went to bed. That's why he's suddenly shirtless in the pictures where he's snuggling the baby.

Their daughter's name is Kaya.

Sims as a storytelling tool 2: Where do they all go?

2010-05-16T23:19:00.000-07:00

Laura brought this up, and it's a good question. Basically, she wanted to know how I wrangle in the cast of characters I've got. Since she's not a TS3 player yet, this will be semi-heavy on the TS3 explaining.

First off, this happens to be the main benefit to using TS3 versus TS2 for storytelling. From my studies, you can pretty much do anything you want to your sims without anything really horrible happening. The reseting tricks are a bit different (like you do not want to use move objects and delete your sims), but really, they're more like dolls and it's really easy to move them around and do things that in TS2 are HUUUUUGE no-nos.

That took me a while to get used to, and then I started experimenting.

With Sims 3, you don't get different neighborhoods, you get different save game files. It's like the old school RPGs where you'd do a save as and be able to save games in different save states in different slots.

I'm thinking like Monkey Island and King's Quest type games. Remember how you'd make extra saves just in case you needed to go back or you got stuck and realized you needed something? TS3 is actually the same.

When I first load up the game, this is what I see. It's a listing of all the save games I've got. There's a lot more than four, you just have to hit the arrow. The description box would be filled if I had a description for the house lot. If I were smart I'd do that rather than rely on my memory.

"Beginning 3" got it's name because there was Beginning 1 and Beginning 2 which have since been deleted. Basically, when I made some drastic changes, rather than deleting the save file, I made a new one so I could go back. (From memory, Beginning 1 was the file I used to try and make the video. The sims were set up in a way I was sure I would have to revisit.)

Notice Mary is older. This was the file I most recently used. Also, it's the one where I have Paula from her story living.

Another save file, notice Mary is younger here. This one I did some drastic changes to the street because I took a lot of shots above ground and didn't want it to be obvious she is on the exact same street Paula lives on. Also, I had to move Paula's home lot so an Older Brandon and Jimmy wouldn't appear in the background of shots.

Hopefully that makes sense if you're not a TS3 player. Each game can be the same world in a different state of play or it can be a completely different world.

Once I get in the game, this is what it looks like from overhead. I started Ruin and Paula's story before there was the World builder. So I had to try and make it look like a different place from the street view. I try very hard to hide the fact that they're right next to the river.

Paula, Brandon, Jimmy, Angel and Mitchell, Henri, and a bunch of other characters actually live in that large building at the top of the street. Awesomemod makes it so that you can have more than 8 sims in the household.

Mary lives on the lot right now that's just a park. It's easy to package up lots with sims in it. Since they don't have memories, there are no complications with it. You can package them up for use later if you think it might be necessary.

This picture also shows you the old sim bin, now called the "library." I keep sims I've created there also in case I need them elsewhere. I've been in another save file and found myself going, "Dang, I need the teen Brandon, but I don't want to re-create because I fear inconsistencies. *looks through bin* There he is, just like I left him."

Here's another important tool. Inside CAS, there's the old premade sim bin. The difference is that these pre-made sims are created in CAS, then saved to the bin for use or editing later on. When I load them up in CAS, all their details are saved like their personality traits, their favorite foods and their bios even.

These work also as extra backups. When I go into my document folders, there's a saved sim folder where you will find all these guys listed by first and last names.

Very handy. So I back this folder up pretty regularly because for me, the faces are more important than the lots really.

As far as the other details like aging and all that-- they don't really age that quickly. I do forget to turn off aging all the time because I have been playing quite a bit lately.

Each time I update, they might loose a day of their lives. Maybe. Usually, I save at a particular time of day and then when I'm done, unless there was something that was difficult to set up, I don't bother saving.

Plus, I bounce around a lot from one save file to the next.

Since the world I'm using is so large, I rarely ever run across any other sims unless I summon them in. But I will say Michael, Edith, Gina and the rest do live here, so I get notifications about them from my story progression mod. Like Michael's hit level 1 in gardening. I think it's sweet he's taking an interest in Edy's hobbies :)

And somewhere in the world, Cheryl lives. She's in the military track in one of these save game files and doing pretty well!

Sims 3 as a story telling tool.

2010-04-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I had an entry I started with the hopes of sharing some tips or something, but it really became me just blathering on.

So here's version 2.0, improved and with hopefully less blather!

I've been using Sims 3 as a story telling vehicle for about six months now. I don't even play the game still.

So here is the trick: When I go in to take pictures, I go in with a loose idea of what I hope to accomplish. That's it. I have my sims run through a scenario, and I just take pictures, pausing and looking at various angles. I keep open the screen shot folder and peek at what I've taken to be sure that it will work.

So then a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned on twitter that I had a very awesome sim shoot. Yup, the pics for the most recent entry were taken a month ago. I'm not usually that on it, but sometimes I get on a kick and have to play out scenes.

And this is what came out of that:

Is there anyone out there wondering how I did that? Anyone?

Well too bad, you're going to hear it anyway!

This is an idea I had for a very long time. Basically, I just pushed two beds together using the move objects cheat. The sims will stay with the object if you move the whole thing. So I had Jimmy relax on his bed and then moved it.

The next step was actually from something I noticed before. Remember that shot of Edith rolling over looking mad? I realized that sims actually move from a relaxed position to a nap position. So I told Jimmy to nap.

The rest was all luck. Mary happened to be facing away from the wall. I told Jimmy to nap, and he happened to turn towards the wall. What the hell made them turn in the right directions? Was it where I probably subconsciously clicked? Was it right and left handedness on their parts? I don't know, but it worked.

And in the end I came away super happy.

A lot of old tricks still work. There are no invisible bar stool recolors yet, but they aren't really needed since you can recolor the cushions to match and take shots from interesting angles. Bar stools are level with arms of sofas and beds.

Also, I downloaded a chair that has no back so that I can have sims sit closer on the couch so it looks more natural. (That would be Old Sam's Comfort Chair from La Luna Rossa.) This is also handy for sitting on coffee tables.

You can get sims to sit on the ground by using the picnic basket and having sims sit on it. Then you actually move the sims. They'll usually turn towards each other and continue chatting or whatever you were having them do. And you can pause and have them look around by moving their target. (Like in this shot. I just moved Brandon who is the person she's actually looking at.)

And my last trick... a lot of shots I get just having sims talk and then moving them around when they make a move that I can see working in another fashion. This is actually a trick I picked up from Laura of Lakeside Heights.

All of the following shots are just sims chatting, and I moved them.

Customization in TS3

2010-03-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

*ahem*

PLEASE pardon me while I geek out here. Jay started to laugh at me when I told him how awesome this was. "You only get this way for nerdy things," he told me. I know! I'm a nerd!

It has taken a very long time to get used to TS3. And now that I have, I'm convinced more and more of its awesomeness, and less and less convinced that they set out to mess shit up.

For instance- it is as simple as pressing down the "alt" button to move stuff around off grid including at angles other than 45 degrees. This includes sims when used with the move objects cheat.

Not only can you color pretty much everything, but you can freakin' color pretty much everything. I rather enjoy giving sims who are of age a little gray without having to go outside of the game. Or giving my elders a little color or different shades of gray or letting them completely color their hair.

Now with the release of Create a World, we can build our own worlds from the ground up, including terrain paints and the sounds and road textures (and multiple road textures in the same world too). The sounds that are included are amazing and include the sound of low water, knee deep water, broken glass, concrete, different dirt and sands, grass and dry grass, and more. I am huge on sounds like footsteps for some reason.

But that isn't all. It is SO much easier now to actually mess with the INI files and make yourself a world with custom water color at different times of the day, change the size of the sun and the moon, and when it rises. A tutorial is here. And you can mess with the INI files while the game is running to see the effects.

Compare:

We have the normal water shipped with the game. It's like a murky blue. Then there is the water color that I made for Ruin.

For Ruin, I wanted the water to have a different tinge to it. It's almost purple at its base color. It almost look iridescent to me.

The color of the water can be changed for every state and for different times of the day. And best of all, you can do this while the game is running. As soon as I save, the color of the water changes.

I can change it for the world alone once I'm done, but I find that there is a plus side to swapping out the INI files. If I wanted, I could keep the sea looking like a separate color from the lakes in town. Changing the INI files changes both.

But I haven't really decided yet.

Okay, so random playing with it here is my finding. GAH! It is so awesome!

So I was playing around last night, just testing the color capabilities. Right now I'm just playing with the water.

As the sun began to set, I wanted the water to move into a slightly more redish tint. It was close to 6pm, and in Sims 2, that means sun set to me. With the lighting mod, I loved that redish glow everything got, so that's probably what I'm thinking about when I wanted this tint.

This was the moment that I found out that the sea color is a blending of the two values that sit at different times.

Wait, does that make sense? Here's what I mean.

Ok, in my Sky_ClearSea ini text, this is what I have. At 1600 (4:00), the sea is more lavender in color. At 1800 (6:00) I tinted the sea to be more redish. Originally, I thought this meant that the sea would be those colors until it hit that time of day. (Did I really picture it suddenly changing color as soon as 6:00 hit? Yes, yes I swear I did.)

But no, that isn't what it does. It moves from lavender-ish in color to redish in color. So when I was messing around with the coloring at 5:30, messing with one block or the other actually affected the coloring of the sea because it was using both values to calculate the color of the sea.

That is not all. It also does the exact same thing over two files when the sky is changing. There are files for each state of the sky. There's partly cloudy, stormy, overcast, and clear.

While my sims were sleeping, I was wanting to mess with the sea color at night. I wanted to make it pitch black. But I kept having a redish tint to it.

It's kinda hard to tell in this picture, but you can sort of see it. If you looked at it overhead, you'd definitely see it. I was very confused.

So I looked up at the sky. It turns out that it was moving into a partly cloudy cycle, so the two values I needed to mess with were in the Sky_ClearSea file and the Sky_PartlyCloudySea file. And of course, I then had to think about the extra values that the sea was heading towards. You know, what color it would be at 4:00am.

There's more that can be customized, including the lunar cycle, and cloud color, and stuff with the sun and the moon, supposedly reflection colors too. It's pretty amazing. I'm thinking my next building will have to be a proper scientific building, or maybe I'll just set one up in one of the apartments over the market, and we'll have to make a point of watching the moon and the sun.

If I do this right, I could probably mimic seasons and just swap out the INI files. Since I can do this while playing, it's much less of a hassle than using a package file.

Anyway, whoops. I let the inner geek out. Well, I suppose we all know that's a risk when we get talking about Sims. I still have a game play update coming up, and I have to do some testing because there are some things I am not satisfied with in the village and I need to go back to CAW.

Village Tour

2010-03-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

Now that the village part is over and done with in Ruin, I thought I'd finally give a tour of the village.

A little background info (you can skip over this part if you want): I created the village for the story in Ruin. The world of Ruin is basically one land mass, most of which is in a dark age where people are struggling to survive. (Cheery, I know.)

The village I made is located in the very south of this map deep in the Southlands area which is very much like the beginning of a kingdom. They live pretty comfortably compared to some of the others. Before the Revolution, it was a self sufficient city with the village as support, so it just needed some adjustment after the Revolution to remain self sufficient while being protected.

(Click to enlarge)

Not too impressive from overhead, but you can see the layout of the town and the land from here. It's very simple.

This is along the road that the tribals would walk on to get to the village. On the outskirts of town, we have a couple of run down structures (Sheila's Decay and One Day Later). Two are houses and one is actually a community lot which is the criminal warehouse (Behind the Junkyard).

I imagine that there are people living on the outskirts of town, strays who are barely managing to make it. They can't join the tribe, and the village, with its limited resources that it doesn't want to share, won't accept hem as fully fledged towns people. So they have to live off the land, hunting and gathering and living off the good will of anyone kind enough to possibly share with them.

Game-wise, these are just sims that I don't play. I pretty much stick them there and let them figure it out.

Of course, also on the outskirts is a farm (French Country Farm). I'm sure they need to keep an eye out for those people outside of town who aren't towns people.

Game-wise, Angel and Mitchell are living here. Spawners here include lady bugs (I thought that was particularly clever of me-- they're in the crops), and common seeds.

Forest over here that includes a lot with a swimming hole inside a lake (The Wilderness Pools). I'm sure there are more spawners over here.

This is the meadow. I have it set up as a community lot. I found out a while ago that sims cannot have picnics just anywhere, it has to be a lot. So I put this random lot out so that sims can go and have nice picnics with their families.

The graveyard which includes a small church. Trying to harken back to the middle ages a bit with the villages and stuff in Ruin.

These two are the guardians of the underworld. I'm working out a story about it that is said to have taken place before the two brothers destroyed the world. The male is always looking to the female. The two statues would never be placed in any other way or it would be bad luck.

Interesting to note that these two can also be found in Neutral justice/judgment rooms like the one we find Paula at in chapter 1 of her story.

Pat's place, still technically on the outskirts of town. Pat's father built it with his bare hands and friends a couple years after the Revolution. (Story wise, for those who don't know, Pat's Place is a bar run by Patrice Sherman.)

This is where Gloria, the village leader lives. They don't really have a proper form of government after the Revolution, though they probably did before the Revolution. Gloria wasn't exactly elected, though she was kinda. She pretty much stepped up and was willing to deal with Henri Smith (leader of the Southland's tribe) as she knew him from the Revolution. And everyone agreed that she handled him best. (Because you definitely need to know how to handle him.)

Her residence is huge, but only because she takes in people. Gloria cares for her towns people. If someone were tragically orphaned, she'd still consider them one of her own and would take them in until they could stand on their own.

The market includes a book store and grocery store and the junk shop. Above I pretend are apartments.

Yes, that's a day spa and the corporate tower. They're mostly place holders for now until I stop being lazy and build my own or find some.

Old building from before the Revolution. The Southlands ran like a city, and the village was an important part of it. (Mostly, the upper class/those in power lived in the city out of gorgeous homes.)

The ring of pink blooming trees is said to bring good luck to those who stand inside it and profess their love for one another. Weddings can be held here. Sometimes couples enjoy just relaxing and having a picnic.

Artists come and paint here in front of the lake. I have an eisle set up so that sims can paint outdoors. It works really well. When a sim is done painting, they can choose to take the painting home with them.

They have no words for this, but we call it a beach. It's said that the world was destroyed by two brothers and that they now sleep under the sea unaware that people live above them.

There is a fence before you get to the beach of course because pre-revolution, people from the Neutral Territory lived here. They originally had access to the beach blocked off because of the old story. It makes them nervous. Still, even though people now go down to the beach and watch the sea, they are solomn and respectful. They don't swim or fish.

(Game-wise, they can fish. I have a mix of common and rare spawners.)

Phew, if you made it all the way through then here's a reward:

Pat & Brandon

2010-03-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

First year (5187), seven months in, Brandon and Pat take a little vacation to France. Pat was the one who wanted to go. Her dream is to have a cellar full of wines worth $10,000.

So of course one of their first stops was the nectary.

As far as Pat is concerned, there really isn't anything more romantic than sharing a good drink with a good friend. Especially if that friend is Brandon. They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and it's pretty much true for Brandon. But he can cook already, much better than her. So the next best thing is a drink that warms the belly and lowers what few inhibitions Brandon has.

Pat's pretty sure there's a reason there seems to be no couches at the nectary.

As they sit there, sipping at the sweet cheap wine, they remember their quick adventure at the museum chuckling as quietly as possible, still worried some official might find out. There would have to be some fine, maybe even jail time.

Or maybe not, because there wasn't anything inside. Pat's pretty convinced that it's only a replica.

Brandon's convinced (even more so now) that Pat's a little crazy.

That night they stay at the Nectary in a beautiful old hotel room with a fireplace.

Pat knows exactly where this is heading. She's not surprised when she sees Brandon lighting the fire in the fireplace before coming to bed.

It is a little early for bed, but they aren't really planning on sleeping.

That night, she scoots up to him, laying a cheek on one of his shoulders. In his half sleep, he pulls her arm over his side and holds her there with one large forearm practically pinning her to his side. Not that she really minds.

The next morning, they get up early. The sun isn't even up when they head into town to get some crepes. They take a seat on a bench in the town square and watch the sun rise.

Brandon does surprise her a little when he scoots over and puts an arm around her shoulders.

They've only spent a day there, and yet somehow, it seems more than enough. They both decide to go home early knowing there is a little someone waiting for them who will be wondering what they brought home for her and why they even had to go anywhere. Somehow, without her, there is definitely something missing now.

The take home:
An expensive bottle of wine for Pat's collection
A cheap bottle of wine for their next picnic (or personal play date)
A couple of new grapes for Pat's garden
A disposable camera
And a new dress for Pat that Brandon doesn't know about yet

Ah these two. I figure it's okay, I'm not spoiling anything you weren't really aware of after reading the story. In this alternate reality, they are living in the same house with Melissa, but they're not married. They're not even going steady. So I sent them to France because Pat wanted to go, and I hoped Brandon might roll a want for her.

Other than wanting to friendly hug her, he didn't really. But that's okay, I enjoy toying with these two.

What were they really thinking about when Pat snuggled up to him? Pat was thinking about Gardening, and Brandon had the right idea, but I can't guarantee he was thinking about Pat.

Soon-ish I'll put up a little game play post with my little findings. I've been having fun surprisingly, though clearly I'm not playing very quickly. Time is passing though. Pretty much, I'm just going to do write ups when a story pops into my head while playing.

Details about these two:

Brandon - Age 23 (Birthday: 2/5188)
childish, daredevil, flirty, friendly, good
LTW: Heart Breaker
Political Lvl: 3 (He got this job on his own, and he's been doing great at it.)

Pat Age 24 (Birthday: 6/5188)
good sense of humor, green thumb, never nude, perfectionist, vegetarian
LTW: Bottomless Nectar Cellar (Collect of nectar bottles worth 10,000)

Sim to share and a game/peek

2010-02-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

First up I offer a sim!

This sim was inspired by a good friend who gave me a link to this doll. I wanted to create a sim to resemble her.

I was playing with her looks, so this was the last outfit I actually had her in:

It's definitely a store outfit. Part of the steam punk set I think.

Heck if I know where I got the hair from. Pretty sure it's one of Miss Bonbon's recolors which can be found at GOS. The eyes are actually contacts by Heiret which I can't seem to find, but they were linked over at My Sims 3 Blog. And the eyeshadow here is Tri-tone shadow by arfmoo at MTS.

That's it. I didn't use any slider hacks so she should be fine in anyone's game. I gave her a random name and some random traits.

Sim to share (Mediafire link) Just put the file in your savedsim folder and she'll appear in the pre-made sim folder of CAS with traits and everything.

Also, over at TSR (I know, players are all, "TSR??" But I like the forum. Generally friendly and pretty drama free even if it's a little stifling with so many rules), we had a discussion about the faces of sims. That's why I was asking on Twitter what faces people recognized easier.

Even before I liked their faces, I could tell TS3 faces apart right away. With TS2 sims, unless they look really unique or they're my sims, I can't tell them apart. Give them different hair, and usually they look the same to me.

I think that shows in my sim creations. I can see the differences and I have a lot of fun molding them.

For the story, I play around with the faces, and I don't rely on the game's aging system to age their faces realistically. Instead, I tweak them to make them look older or younger. They're story sims after all, so they aren't meant for playing really. I've even gone so far as to age up toddlers with the edit in CAS feature of the supercomputer, edit their faces, then age them back down and save.

So here's a little game. I saved some story sims to the bin and de-aged them. Lets see how well I did it and how distinguishable they are.

There's probably only one that is really randomly tossed out there, but you've seen her. Once on this blog, and very recently in the story blog. ;)

Sim 1

Sim 2
(TS3 toddlers will eat you. Do not turn your back. Seriously. *walks you backwards to the next pic*)

Sim 3

Sim 4

Setting up!

2010-02-20T12:48:00.000-08:00

Wow, thank you Laura for this link to Speechless' blog. I never would've figured this out before hand.

So, I think this will actually be much easier. If each day is one month, so that twelve months is one year, that means I can properly set up sim birthdays and pop in to see them on their months. So that's what I'm working on right now.

For the keeping track of days, so far I average about one sim day per play session so far. But I've mostly been editing relationships and the town.

I have noticed though that you can hover over the time and see how many days into what week you are like so:

So far so good. *knocks on wood*

Everyone is linked up now-- as in all the family members. 'Cause you know, I've got Brandon, Henri, Jimmy, and all the rest. That includes their mother and Killer too.

So here's the rudimentary calendar. I've picked a random number for the year going based off the story in my head. (Basically, about 5,000 years ago the world ended. So the stories say. ;) )

To keep track of the current "month" I figure I can move the *current* around each day or so. If that doesn't work, I generally keep a lot of stuff in my head, which is pretty dangerous. And I can always check the world date just to verify. I'm sure I'll mess up at some point and miss someone's birthday.

Taking a cue from Carla, I've used a similar, but simple organization system. Each family gets a note, and under each note, I write down information. So far I have their ages and birthdays, their traits, and their lifetime wants. For houses that I play, I also take notes on impressions of them and any other detail that I might find important.

Whatever pops into my head. (Though I will say, Michael really is the town thug. He was selected through story progression for that role, and he managed to shake down nearly one grand from one character already, lol!) I do that a lot when I'm working on the story anyway.

And looking at the pictures, I think I might have messed up and lost a day. When I was on the desktop, the poor thing crashed more than once, so I lost at least a day. That means I'll probably have to redo all of these, but I've got the important info down.

For a short while, I was worried I'd done something wrong with my world, but no, seems my computer just really couldn't handle it. Probably just too many trees for it to render. Works perfect now that I'm back on the laptop though.

Still working on things, perfecting things. I've made a list of hacks. This'll help when another patch comes out and it's time to update.

Michael & Edith's household

2010-02-19T10:34:00.001-08:00

Where to start with these guys? They are not necesarily the same ones you know from the story. These are alternate reality Edith and Michael.

They live with the Old Man. He has a name, but Michael started calling him that before he even took them in and it pretty much just stuck. He used to roll his eyes and repeat his name which would make Edith laugh, and a laugh from her in those early days was a rare thing. It became a game after a while that Old Man and Michael both secretly enjoyed just to hear Edith laughing.

When they came to town, they had nothing. The city leader set them up on the site of a failed construction project. They were just thankful for anything at the time. Michael has nothing but complaints about it. Meanwhile Edy sees all the possible good that can come out of it. She wants to grow a beautiful garden and use the fresh fruits for her cooking.

New to their little group is Selene Toma. She doesn't say anything about her past, and that makes Michael highly suspicious. He was very against letting her stay with them, but Edy made a plea so convincing that the old man couldn't refuse her. (It's not easy to refuse a girl who rarely makes requests and then asks for something for someone else the first time she does.)

But rest assured that Michael sleeps with one eye open as the three teens share a room.

On this night, the teens are working on their homework after school.

Michael and Edith sit at the kitchen table together pouring over their work. It's no trouble for Michael. She knows he'd be done already if it wasn't for her slowing him down, but he never complains about it. (The one thing he doesn't seem to complain about.)

What she doesn't know is what is actually slowing him down. It's not stopping to help her that's the problem. It's that she has a habit of drawing attention to her lips when she thinks by nibbling on her pencil.

Dirty thoughts in her presense always make him feel a little guilty even if they're caused by her. He scratches the back of his head and looks away towards the ceiling, trying to banish the thoughts and focus on his work, but you just try thinking about formulas with her sitting so close poking at her sweet lips with the tip of her eraser.

By the time they actually do finish, it's about time for bed. Everyone in the house is really exhausted. Her from all the cooking, cleaning, and homework she did, and him from work and the exertion of trying to keep his thoughts distracted from distraction.

They fold up their notebooks and put them in their backpacks which they leave by the door so they can run off and catch the bus tomorrow at the last minute like usual.

And that's the moment when Michael slides something out of his backpack and turns to her. "I got you something."

It's a book on gardening that makes her smile. Not a cheap book, he probably had to use a day's wages to get it for her. She'd been ready to just spend a lot of time at the library after school.

Before she even takes the book from his hands, she throws her arms around him unexpectedly. "Thank you." It's the nicest thing he's done for her-- or anyone really.

That's when Selene comes out from hiding to head to bed. "Oh get a room, you two." She rolls her eyes. She did her homework in the Old Man's room because she can't stand to watch Edy and Michael working (or not working) while together. Sure, she's here only because of Edy's moving plea, but it doesn't make things better. In some ways, it makes it worse.

Michael glares after Selene, but Edy manages to catch his attention. She thanks him again, slightly leaning towards him, the corner of her mouth turned up in a very shy and yet welcoming smile, like she knows what he'd most like from her as a thank you.

And that's when Old Man stomps in, kicking the dirt from the build site off his boots. Michael catches his suspicious glare. "It's time for bed, you two. School in the morning."

I know you must be wondering. The only reason Michael and Edy can share a room is because you know Selene would rat on them in a second if there was any funny business. Besides, while Michael probably would have no shame, Edy has more than enough for both of them, and so nothing would ever happen. At least not there where people can see it.

***********

And so there was a scene from one of my first proper play sessions where I actually focused on a family instead of bouncing around checking things out. Also, sorry about the lack of Selene's picture here. I thought I'd taken a shot of her somewhere. Guess not. Oops, poor kid.

Selene and Edy jostled for a place at the dinner table to do their homework, and Selene finally settled for hiding out in the other room. When Michael got the want to kiss Edy for the first time while they were working on homework, I knew why. Awkward!

So I'm going to play with the life span on long though I keep bouncing between that and epic. But I figure that on epic, I might as well turn off aging. On long, they get like 100 some sim days per age group.

Time to experiment

2010-02-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone remember TS3 Amberle?

I have not really been playing Sims 3. Various reasons, mostly that the neighborhoods were too large to control I think. I need to know the sims in town to have it have meaning for me.

So, with the creation of this little village world for my story, I've decided to give this another go and actually try playing the game the way we do TS2. I want to create a town, fill it with Sims that I care about, hopefully give it room to grow. (Though I didn't give it a lot of room, I admit. There's not even 30 lots on this world.)

The sims I'm using to populate it are some-- strike that, most of my story sims. Because they are faces that are familiar to me and that I can spot around town.

A couple of hacks I've picked up to help with game play:

Twallan's Story Progression and Sim Selector

The Sim selector is very essential right now. It allows you to hop from household to household without having to press all those extra buttons. (For any non TS3 players- you normally have to go to the main menu, select Edit Town, then select "change household," then you have to select the house hold you want to play). Now, with this mod, I just click on the sim I see walking around town and I can pick "make sim active" and then I'm seamlessly playing that sim's household without having to go to their house. No issues so far, and I've hopped around town on it's first actual test runs.

Still have torn lots

The lot tearing is a lot worse than I thought, to be honest. But I'm going to just ride with it. My fix had been to just delete a lot and plop a new one down, but somehow that doesn't seem to help at all (In fact it my have made it worse in the case of my meadow).

Mmm, pie!

With World Adventures, I love that we technically get shops in a way. You can buy food, and then eat it right there. So here is a semi-random sim enjoying pie. You can also buy a plate and eat it elsewhere, so I've got some outdoor eating areas. Same thing for the nectar. You can buy a bottle and then share it later on elsewhere.

I have managed to find some really gorgeous lots. Like this one which I have very near my forest.

It has a hidden little secret in the center of the lake. Sims can swim in it. (I did a little renovation though to try and make it mesh into the surroundings a little bit more because it had a fence around it.)

Here are three of my teens enjoying a dip in the pool. That's Selene (not introduced yet), Michael, and Julia (who was Killer's odd girl that stood behind him).

Right now I'm just wandering around patching up the town. Indispensable right now are MelissaMel's Rabbit Hole signs. But they're a little tricky. Place them wrong and sims either can't get in or end up getting stuck.

Here's my school that's right outside of the library. I had an issue where it was too close to the road, and sims all got stuck. I had about three standing there on top of each other. Paula just doesn't know. Teresa (the girl in front) is still traumatized about being one with two other people.

Lots of work to do still decorating the town. I think I have managed to completely gorge myself this weekend properly. It was all fast food and sims this weekend. Weekend well spent I think after the beginning of my week.

Listing of Hacks

2010-02-13T19:26:00.000-08:00

Listing of Hacks
(Updated 6/1/2011 for Generations)

Essential:
Twallan's Hacks In particular: Master Controller, The Animator, and The Story Progression
Pregnancy Length (set for nine days) Not working with Generations currently
No Martial art clothes (Includes a mod for no work clothes-- tempting!)

Lighting Hacks (choose one only of course)
Outdoor light tweaks v1.5 by dDefender (This is the one I am using)
Outdoor Light Overhaul

Defaults:
EA Face Overlay Fix (I use it to get rid of the default overlay lips. Much better faces!)
Asian Skins by 234jiao
Odd socks (because my socks don't match in real life, why should my sims?)
Hi-Res Moon

Handy:
Less coughing choking
Autonomous Gardening (which includes less hygiene loss)
Jonha's new CAS sliders (hips, bust, butt, etc.)
More Height Sliders in testing (Includes shorter)
No Pregnancy Chime
Carpool disabler
Cooking on Community lots
Buy Take Out and Order Food at Restaurants
Scribbling Pad (Allows for writing of reports and novels the old fashioned way)

Adds to play:
The Working Sim's Bed
Shop from Inventory (To make Ambitions shops more like OFB from TS2. One word: AWESOME!)

Modded Objects:
Statue of Life
Money Bags (To give sims in the same household separate funds in case one is only a renter or something like that)
Rabbit Hole Rugs

Story stuff:
No Camera Fade
Aikea's Camera Mod
Buyable fire
Tiny Texture Replacers by HystericalParoxysm (I don't use them all, but it's handy she's put them in one package and one post with links to all the replacers)
Vanishing script by Buzzler. **You need the script and an object that takes advantage of the scrip.
Invisible furniture by me (Sometimes I actually come in handy)
The Relativity (To slow time down. Good for story picture taking.)
Fancy, stackable OMSPs (Sims can be placed on these)

Haven't tested these with Generations. It's possible these no longer work with the latest updates. :(
Chaos Carrier
FoodeX
PhoniX

Currently testing:

More Waking Hours
No Excitable Idles

Contemplating:
The Multi Owner's Door Version 2 (like the dorm room door in TS2's Uni)
Lot Sizes Mod

Not needed, but you never know!
Less Hygiene decay and more fun from gardening (not needed with the auto gardening mod)
Extra Sliders
Autonomous Teen Woohoo (not needed with latest Woohooer from Twallan)
No Uniforms to work

Out of date, but possibly still handy for those not up to date
Autonomous Repairs (Out of date as of WA and not being updated)
Delphy's Height Slider (this one only makes taller, Johna has a better version of this mod broken into pieces)
Chaos Mod Painting (NOT updated for LN! Try Twallan's Animator)
Absimiliard Realistic Aging (Not needed with Generations since you can set the length of each stage)
aWT's Slider Hack (Use only if you aren't using Awesome mod.)

Programs
Clean up Sims 3 Packs

No good reason

2010-02-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

Just what the title says. Last night I decided to fire up the game and play dress up with the dollies. And then did some very minor posing.

I love playing around with TS3 for pictures because it's so easy to grab and move them around. That's one thing that they really got right.

Still wish they had something like OMSPs for sims though so I could have Paula sit cross legged on the couch because whenever I see her hanging out on Brandon's couch in my mind I see her sitting there cross legged.

The woman isn't important. She may or may not show up one day in a story, though she's faaaar in the background, even in the back of my head. Still, I have some ideas swirling around her. (The sim isn't really important either, pretty sure she's just a premade sim dressed up in a very sheer dress made by LemonLeaf.)

So how unique are my sims? Can you recognize the guy? If you did, give yourself some chocolate. He was just the closest one to my mouse pointer in this case. Though I'm sure there would be a connection between him and her. At least there is in my head.

I'm thinking about playing around with character bios for fun. Lately I've been in a tell not show kind of mood. (Who knew that happens?) But I'm still playing with the idea. I'd have to be very careful with it, don't want to give away too many secrets. Mostly, I'm thinking I'd do bios for the side characters that are important, but you won't see very often 'cause they're too distracting.

So the pics against the black background is pretty much for those possible bios. I had a lot of fun with WA too. I needed some ferocious looks, so I set them to spar and then moved them around.

Lot tearing Boo

2010-02-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

I'm lucky I don't have this issue. My world is so small that there are few lots. (Maybe 15? I have never counted.)

But if anyone stumbles across this blog and somehow doesn't know about the lot tears, I'd like to throw up this link about lot tearing and now about saving which I got from Poida of Wasteland. SO sad! I guess once I'm done with this world, there will be no meddling with it or adding onto it.

Right now, the problems are easy to fix. I guess the deal is that you'd have to sculpt, then lay down the roads, and then lay down the lots. Yikes. That would take some serious in depth planning so that you aren't figuring that out in game.

And that is probably a little too much for me! But that's probably why they took so long to release the tool.

Though I will have to say I disagree with LeeMortis. Even with these issues, I am very glad to have this tool. It has come in very handy.

And a sneak peek... at my lot tear.

Boo lot tear. Luckily, it's been easy so far to fix. Minor ones I've just decided to completely ignore. This tear was in a pristine picture taking area, and the lot is completely by itself, so I can't screw this up. Even if I do, the world is mostly done and I've already exported it, so so even if something happens to my saves, I'm pretty good. *knocks on wood*

World previews

2010-02-02T23:18:00.000-08:00

All right, I admit I had some issues with Create a World. But nothing that's been too discouraging. The very worst was last night. I think I just spent way too much time editing in game. I have to use that sparingly. Either just to look or to place a lot here or there. And when I save, I need to walk away from the computer.

So some first peeks, at least the ones I am happy with. (Click to enlarge.)

Huh, floating shadows. I hope that doesn't become a problem! But I'll work with it if it is. I don't want those hills completely bare.

Also, near the mine, I have made a lot to put down a special tomb just for my own amusement.

This is one of my favorite views. Near by I've put a community lot just so sims can have picnics on a hillside meadow that will overlook the town. I did not get pics of this meadow unfortunately. And I also have to test it to be sure that sims really can use it the way I intend them too. (Not for the story, just for my own fun again.)

I love this far a little too much. The building in the distance is actually a little french farmhouse I downloaded.

Whenever I need inspiration

2010-01-17T13:18:00.000-08:00

I make sims. Or at least, TS3 sims. I have never enjoyed making sims so much before. Something about the puddingness of TS3 makes the sims really appealing to me. Like I can reach out and pinch their little cheeks.

So the other night I made this guy here. He'll make an appearance in Ruin at some point (as a random background character, nothing more), but he's content to hang out and wait. True to his character, he's patient and rather laid back. He doesn't talk much, but he does smile a lot so he appears friendly at least.

I loved that thread where Stacy/Medlymisty asked about obsession. Yeah, been there. I don't usually talk about it though. Never outloud to anyone. I don't gush about the characters or even talk about them, which I guess is good because I hope that makes you want to read. XD

But I do get obsessed with characters of mine and I want to know more. The only way I know how is to look at their lives and dig. Generally, I start with the present, then hop into the past. I basically decide that I want to know what is going on with this character.

Recently, I had an old character appear out of no where and completely disobey me until he had to be written into the story. (Thanks dude.) This one here sort of waved his hand, "Aw, you don't wanna know more about me." Yes, yes I would. "Nah, it's okay."

But I got really really curious then. Why's he being so coy and mysterious?

Then I saw a scene where this guy was talking to one of the characters from Michael & Edith's story. And this new third character appeared out of no where. Truthfully, I don't know that I want her to be a part of his story. I worry that I repeat themes too much and I'll get stuck on the same one over and over again.

But then I stop and think, "Well, so what?" My story, my world, right? If this is his story, his secret that I somehow stumbled upon, well then that should be that.

Things about him that I know: His blond hair and blue eyes stand out. There aren't a lot of blonds in my world. He is friendly; it's disarming. He's dangerous and has a lot of status in both the Wildlands and the Neutral Territory. So he's one of my few characters who gets to dress nicely.

Which makes me realize that I need more nice clothes for males. My trusted sites don't have much it seems. Of course, I can also use some nice hairs for males. I seem to like hair that falls into faces.

She is utterly human. No powers, though I imagine she has an artistic streak she's never been able to mine, so it's hidden even from her. She's quiet, but curious about the things around her. There are a lot of things she knows she doesn't know and couldn't imagine, but she will do what she has to. She has a strong sense of responsibility and is thankful for whatever she has.

I can definitely see a story. (geeze, can't I always?) Don't know what to do with these side stories. There aren't usually many as most end up getting absorbed into the main story. Maybe, if things work out, I might start a separate blog or something for the side stories that are separate from the main. I have to admit, I sort of hate doing that. That gets messy. I'm not nearly organized enough.

2. Terrain Sculpting and Painting

2009-12-29T20:36:00.000-08:00

Another part to my World Builder (Create a World) for Everyone thing. Because everyone should be able to create a world!

So time to sculpt. It's pretty much all about trial and error. Using the sculpting tool is pretty much the same as trying to paint something digitally. But once again, if I can do it, other people can too.

So my goal here is to share some tricks I learned trying to sculpt my neighborhood.

Scale

This will be THE single biggest problem you will face. Uh, I assume. Because it is very difficult to gauge how big your world is in comparison to your sims.

My first tip: Figure out where your center of your world will be. In my case it was very simple.

I am only going to have one center to my world. So the first thing I did was plop down the largest lot possible (64x64) so I could get a sense of how big BIG really was.

Later on, I deleted that center lot after I'd done more sculpting. But to start, I think it really helped me find the center and where I wanted to focus.

The Tools

So you definitely know where to find the tools now. Take some time to play around with them.

They work pretty much exactly like the paint brush in any art program such as GIMP or Photoshop.

The "brushes" themselves are pretty self explanatory.

This is what I really want to call your attention to:

You can change the type of brush you want to use (circle or square) and the size. The strength (which will later be the opacity for the paints) can be adjusted so that the tools do very very little. I've found an excellent working range to be within 5 to 20 at most in general. Unless I'm going cray trying to make a cliff.

Falloff can be a helpful little thing too. Compare:

The top one is with Falloff at 100%. The bottom is with Falloff at 0%. I've usually got fall off at around 20% too while I'm sculpting.

So I'm not great at sculpting from a flat terrain, but for the sake of doing it to say I've done it, I want to make something simple. How about a beach with a high cliff or sand dunes? ('Cause I've got plenty of experience with beaches with high sand dunes.)

So I'm going to start with a flat terrain for the sake of this tutorial, but I found it so much easier to start with something close to what I wanted.

First things first! (Or Where is the Sun?)

Before I start sculpting, let's find out where the sun is, if you care about such things.

So if you care do this first:

1. Go to view> Time of day

This box will open up on the side.

Feel free to have fun with this. It gives me pretty much the same amount of joy as the changing sea level button.

If you are working on a flat terrain, you'll want to make a mountain or something so you can see the shadows.

Play around with it to figure out where your sun rises and sets.

Personally, being a West Coaster, I would like the sun to set on my beach.

Here I start:
It's like laying down a sketch before actually drawing. I've only used three tools here-- hill (steep and gentle) and valley, at 30% strength and 100% falloff. I have the start of the hills and I see the spot where I want the beach to be.

Now time for some fine tuning.

First thing I'm going to do is put down a lot. So I know the scale.

Right click on "World Layers"- the one with the globe next to it. And add a new layer.

Click on the lots tab and select the first icon. That's to add a lot.

Then I'm just going to plop a lot down on my beach. (Because for the purpose of my tutorial, the beach is the center of my world.)

When putting your lot down, it's a little disorienting at first. You start by clicking on the ground where you'd like a corner to go, then stretch your mouse to the next corner and click to place it (like you're putting a sheet on a bed, it that makes sense, you want to go from one corner to the other).

Like so:
If you look in the bottom right hand corner, you will see how large this one segment is. In this case, I'm shooting for 40x40.

Then you pull down and you get your box.

You can delete this later on. This is just for reference right now.

My basic tips for sculpting:

-Remember that everything is fixable. You can undo (ctrl + z) or just layer tools on top of others to create interesting effects.
-For more effects that are usually a little more severe (like mountains or steep hills), use a larger brush and a weaker strength
- the smooth tool (both of them) are your best friends

Anything that looks too severe, you can smoothen with the smooth tool. The key to a natural beach edge seems to be the smooth tool.

After a couple of minutes I have this:

Not impressive, but I only spent a couple of minutes on it. Plus I'm building for just one sim.

I would like to point out that I actually had to move the lot. That's because I was too close to the edge of the world. When you're too close to the edge of the world, your tools will not work and you'll have to move the camera.

Now that I have pretty much what I want, I'm going to get rid of the lot. I'll add that back later. After I paint.

Paint

Painting is awesome. Really.

Ok, so you're going to start out with only four paints at first. But there are more that come with Create a World.

First we go back to the terrain tools and click the first icon.

You'll get this of course.

Click "add layer." You'll see this:

Name your layer, then hit the browse button to pull up a list of image files you can use. Notice that you can select sounds for your terrain paints. This really amused me greatly. Love the sound of a sim walking on the beach.

Anyway, the default images that come with CAW (Click to enlarge):

You can use any of these images. You can add more so long as you save the image as a DDS. (Most programs will need an add on to do DDS.) And you can always go back and edit the "layer" by right clicking on the layer you want to edit.

I'm going to keep it pretty simple for right now. I'm going to test out the Autopaint feature. It paints based off the height of the terrain and uses the first two layers of the paints.

(After doing that, CAW went a little wonky. I couldn't see the terrain paints, but if I zoomed out they'd appear. So here's another tip: When in doubt, close the world you're working on and re-open.)

This is a snippet of what I get:

Don't be discouraged, it looks worse than it is from far away, and it's a good base.

With the paints, opacity is really important. You can paint and repaint and paint over things until you get the effects you want. (I've detailed my findings in this entry so I won't go into it again. Basically, don't be disturbed about how bad it looks from far away. Up close it looks a lot better.)

Now I'm going to do a quick hand paint!

Uh... not the best, but you get the idea.

Daytime view. I actually suggest sending a sim in not just for testing but just to see the view.

Sunset. You can't be alone with a sunset like that!

Really, I think you get the idea. Hopefully I've shared something that will help someone.

Sneak Peek or What I did Last Night

2009-12-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

I had time to kill and didn't want to do anything else with Create a World last night.

So what did I do? I made another Lost Lander (from the Lost Territory).

His face is not important. It's not really anything impressive. No, the impressive part on this sim are his tattoos.

That chest tattoo actually started out as a colored tiger (from here). Well that looked unrealistic to me, especially considering the world Ruin. There aren't exactly modern tattoo parlors we're dealing with here. In his case, I imagine each tattoo means something and was done by a friend (by that I mean close tribe member). Having so many means he lived a "long" time for a Lost Lander and earned a lot of honor, so he's probably 19 or 20. It's a tough life out there in the Lost Territory.

The back of the tattoo. All I did was take a lot of images from other tattoos and put them all together on this one as a stencil.

I've learned how to use s3oc, s3pe, and the CTU tool. Because this isn't the first time I had to recolor something. The first time was for Killer, though it was not his tattoos. See if you can spot it.

And before I forget! One issue that has cropped up is the whole no custom skins thing.

Alright, so normally my sims have painted on abs like Killer up there that I think are a nice medium between the flat belly that sims have and the hint that they might have muscle.

I use Asian skins by 234jiao, the originals. I think it softens up the sims face very nicely, and the body looks natural for the most part.

But I wanted this Lost Lander to look a little harder. He's been fighting his entire life, and actually Killer should look this way too, but I didn't figure this trick out in time for that photoshoot.

Gratuitous shot for no obvious reason. (Other than it's gratuitous!)

So here's the trick: TS3 saves stuff in your cache files and really holds onto that information. So if you put new skins in and don't delete the cache, you won't see the new skins unless you send them to the dresser.

Now I deleted the cache files, but they still had on the old skin. (I should have taken a pic of Henri next to this guy so you could see it.)

So I sent this guy to plan an outfit. The new skin appeared and so I mucked around with his outfits.

When we finished planning his clothes, he still had the old skin. So I had him change outfits, and then he had the new skin!

I think it gets tricky after that. Basically, the game will remember that he is wearing a new skin so long as I don't change his clothes in the dresser. I don't know if the game will remember if I click on him and have him change his clothes, so that's something to test.

This isn't a trick I would use often. Just in this character's case, his body is supposed to be hard and should bear scars, but I wasn't about to tackle scars last night after cleaning up that damn tiger.

Basics of the program

2009-12-27T16:40:00.000-08:00

Part of my little World Builder for Everyone tutorial.

There are a LOT of buttons and options which makes things hard to find sometimes. So I say take some time if you haven't yet to browse through everything CAW has to offer.

When you open the Create a world program for the first time, you should see this (click on any image to enlarge):

The first box, World Layers, is going to be very important. You can right click on a lot of the stuff in this box to make new options appear. Like being able to add a description, name, and picture to your new world. Or adding new layers.

The second box, Metadata, contains all the objects, spawners, trees, and effects you can place in your world.

The box below the Metadata box, Property Browser, will give you info on lots. This has come in handy when I forgot how large a placed lot was.

Then is the rendering box. There you'll see your world.

Create a new world

This is the easiest step. Go to file> New World. I tried opening a few worlds just to play around with it and see what defaults they gave us.

Now we have a world. The world layers now has info. Now the fun can begin.

Lots of Buttons

There are a lot of options under each of those three little tabs: Roads, Lots, and Terrain. So click around.

I will call your attention to the Terrain tab right now, because I kid you not it took me a bit to figure this out, so if I can save anyone the stupidity, then I have done my job.

Click the terrain tab. You'll see four options under it.

The first one opens up a box which shows you this:

Now here's the stupid part: There are buttons there. Paint opens up first, but next to it is sculpt. I swear to god I didn't notice that the first few hours I was playing with it and I was ready to ask where those tools were.

So there. Don't let this program make you feel like an idiot. Because maybe you at least found those right off first thing, and here you are reading a tutorial by a girl who spent an hour or two trying to find the sculpt tools.

Back to this, because the button next to the painting tools is also awesome and powerful.

With that you can raise and lower the water level on your world. Here's what you do, click it, then click on the land where you want the water to be. Like say you have a beach, but you want the water to be further up, click on the beach where you want the water to be.

Don't like where the water ended up? Click on the button again and then click on the land. Each time you want to raise or lower the water, click on the button again and then click the land. ((I totally see story possibilities for this. You can have the same neighborhood go through a drought or a flood just by editing it in CAW so long as you save the world!))

Go crazy with that button. It's fun. Swear.

Last thing to point out, which also made me feel utterly stupid:

Utilities buttons. Took me forever to figure out how to grab objects and move and place them once I'd put them down. Quick rundown:

The arrow/selector tool is handy. Doesn't move anything, just selects it. If it's a lot, you can look at the property browser to see the stats. You can select anything, and then hit delete to get rid of a lot, object or road section.

Be careful though. Gets tricky a little later on when you have more decorations in your hood.

The second button allows for you to move your object. I found it is really handy. When you click on it and then click on a standing object, you get this:

You can move the object on the x, y or z axis. I have found that to be really easy for placing, especially when it came to placing rocks to craft a beach. Mostly because you can grab one axis by highlighting the line (red, blue or green) and then using the mouse.

(For anyone happening along who might not know what a z axis is- you can move the object up and down.)

If you have a road placed and you use this tool, you get this:

This was another DUH moment, but I don't feel so bad because a lot of people will not know this. Using this tool, this is how you can move the roads.

Love it! The roads do not have to conform to 90 degree angles anymore.

Ok, back to this:

That third icon is the bane of my world building. I will avoid using it at ALL costs. Place an object right the first time, and try to never use it if you don't have to.

Maybe I'm just being a touch dramatic. Maybe. Click on it and click on a 3D object and you get this:

The idea is that you can now rotate the object in space. Neat, probably handy for some stuff. You can grab at the points to twist an object so that it lays on its side or upside down. I've used it to try and pull some objects just to rotate them a little this way or that and had them do all sorts of crazy things. It seemed simple to me, but I think I'm going to blame CAW for my ineptitude with this one button.

When you first place an object, just like in Sims, you can hold down the mouse button and twist and turn the object until it faces the way you want. So I make sure to do that right the first time!

Anyway, that's the quick rundown for anyone who's really lost or just confused like I was at first. Once I figured all this stuff out, I think it made the rest a lot easier. Course it took like half a day for me to figure this stuff out, so hopefully I can save someone's hair and pride with this.

World Builder For Everyone

2009-12-27T13:32:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I want to start a very simple tutorial for the rest of us. I am close to building my first world which is ity bity. So I can't claim I'm an expert. But if I can do it, everyone else can do it too, just takes some patience and some clear directions!

What I want to do is to start posting up chapters, each one a mini-lesson.

They should go in this order (which is subject to change as I'm working off the top of my head right now since I'm away from my simming computer):

1. Basics of the program
2. Terrain Sculpting and Painting
3. Placing Roads and Lots
4. Placing everything else (also known as decorating)
5. Exporting your Neighborhood for use in game

That's it so far. Each lesson hopefully won't be too long. There are a lot of shiny buttons, but what I would like is for anyone reading this to come away with a basic knowledge of the program so you can start the exploration of creating your own world.

Before the lessons begin:

CAW Walkthrough by Rain. The first section is particularly important. Before you create your world, have an idea of what you want. I would suggest to start small. By the end of this tutorial, have plans to have a small and functioning city.

First tip: Remember that with TS3, nothing is truly required. In my story hoods, I did away with the schools, city hall, restaurants, theaters, pretty much everything that might distract them, and my sims have suffered no ill affects. So be free to experiment.

In my little "village" I wanted it to have a small city feel to it, so a cluster of commercial buildings, a few parks maybe, a school, a city hall, and a meeting place. There would be apartment buildings, and a few houses on the outskirts, and some other surprises.

Make plans, do some sketches, get ideas. But I would say don't have too clear an idea of what you want, just a general idea so that you'll feel free to experiment without frustration.

World Builder 2

2009-12-26T10:09:00.001-08:00

Holy crap! I am tackling a very small world right now, and it is overwhelming.

The amount of stuff you can do! I certainly wish I was more organized mentally.

So here's the thing, I keep on looking at all the stuff I need and jumping all over the place. But I think the key to good world building will be focusing.

Last night I tweeted that I felt like Slartibartfast when he was making the fjords. And I do! Since last night I was just working on the beach and the beach alone. It's a small beach, but I have to paint it, place the rocks, place the effects which include the ocean surf and some crashing waves. All of this is a lot harder than it sounds.

When painting, at first it looks weirdly disorienting. From the high up view, it look splotchy and unnatural. That's just because you're so far away, you're getting a view of where the paint is.

For example, here is a rocky mountain on the beach I'm working on. I couldn't help going, "Yeesh!" And spent a little time trying to make it better, smoother and more natural.

So I think I tried to zoom in, and then I saw this:

It looks exactly the way I wanted it to look. Grass dispersed on shale like it's growing through the rocks. When I peek at the world in game, it looks even better, more detailed and more natural.

Another example, the ground near a farm I worked on last night before actually focusing.

It was driving me nuts. I wanted the ground to be dirty with sparse grass growing, not perfectly green and lush.

Up close, this is what I have, which is exactly what I wanted.

Edit in game is an annoying misnomer to me. For one, unless I'm missing something (and I might be), you can't actually edit it further than checking to see if a lot fits. Which is pointless anyway because if you have anything installed in your game, it takes forever to load. An hour or more for me, and that was only with the few sims3packs I have installed.

So to get the game to load so I can take a peek with the "edit in game" I have to remove all my downloads. Including the lots I picked up specifically for the project.

Then once I am in game taking a peek, I cannot tilt the camera out of its default setting. The controls are there, but they don't work. It's a little hard to see if the rocks I placed on the beach are floating when I'm looking down at them from above.

On another note that is awesome-- they have our trees. They call it "Monterey Cypress". I think I'm a little too excited about that.

World Builder

2009-12-25T01:42:00.000-08:00

I have been playing with this thing all day. I seem to be able to figure things out when I have a certain idea in mind because I won't rest until I do!

So World Builder is awesome. Seriously awesome. Difficult and frustrating, but still really awesome.

Amazing benefits: Being able to upload your own textures. Being able to use more than one type of road in one neighborhood. Being able to upload custom road and sidewalk textures. I can see those coming in handy!

Takes a while to get used to the controls though.

Getting used to scale is difficult. What I did was plopped down a large lot so I would know how big is BIG.

On the plus side, you can put up a grid and tell things to snap to grid. Makes placing intersections and roads SO much easier!

But I can see having to spend a lot of time working on one neighborhood to get it right. I've come a long way during the day, but I haven't painted the grounds yet, and the paints I have are kinda limited. (Just shale, grass, and two kinds of sand apparently. There's probably more that came packaged with World Builder, like the extra roads.)

Overall- two little tips to make it easier that I've learned from my play:

Remember the magic of the right click, and don't forget you have layers off on the side. A lot of options can be found by right clicking on the layers (like adding and editing a description by right clicking on the first layer.)

When working with World Builder, You'll want to see the neighborhood in game. It takes forever to load UNLESS you just remove all your Custom Content.

I do have some Sim3Packs missing, but I hear there is a work around, which I'm trying. I haven't actually tried playing the game though to see if it works because I'm been trying to build all day!

Also, had a little too much fun dressing up and taking pictures of Mr. Brown Suit sim the other night while taking pics for the next two updates. He really came out well, and I cannot claim the credit. His father was a little too pretty, and his mother was a sim I created. I think I only had to touch up his eyes because they were too large and innocent for the character.

Another sim!

2009-12-01T06:36:00.000-08:00

I have come to believe that TS3 sims can either be really bland or very interesting if you play with their features right.

Maybe it's just me though. Maybe I'm only interested in the characters I create because they're interesting to me. When I nail the visuals for a character in my head, I know it and I can't help coming back to look at them the same way I do after I lose myself in a piece of writing and then can't believe it came from me.

So I made another sim two nights ago. Two more actually, but the other one is lacking something, and I'm not sure what at this moment.

This one came out perfectly. I've run her through test shots, even started playing with her last night, and got a little too involved. Before I knew it, I was actually playing Sims 3. I just can't believe it.

More World Adventures

2009-11-22T21:57:00.000-08:00

They started out the morning early. Henri was nice enough to make french toast. While in China.

"Seriously? French toast? Isn't that, like, a slap in the faces of the Chinese? And you're using chop sticks? Seriously?"

He's used to ignoring her by now having to take a lot of test shots with her already. Besides, at least she isn't talking about the red sparkles anymore. Though she still gets a moodlet from him every time she glances at him. WHich is gross, she's 16 and he's close to 50 now.

So he thought he'd take her into one of the ruins. (As something of a reward for NOT mentioning the stupid sparkles.) She's not exactly the bravest. Every sound made her jump.

Though she did get a hang of it after a while. Even stuck her hand in some of the holes in the walls to help him look for secret switches.

She won't be doing that again for a while.

It seemed she needed some toughening up. And Henri sim is the perfect one to do it.

"Uh, like this? Maybe this would work better if I had some proper gym clothes on. I might feel, like, fiercer or something."

It took some time. A lot of yelling on his part. Finally, she was worthy of the white belt.

It seems that when given the white belt, you're also taught exactly how to pose and look awesome with it.

"Did you get the picture with the camera? I wanna put that up on my wall. You didn't? What were you doing?"

Practicing. I told you, he's rather used to ignoring her by now.

If he wasn't sparkling, this would be a fantastic shot!

Fun trivia (so I think): the draw distance on my game is always set to short/minimum because I can't build my world yet. I don't want you to see that Michael and Edith actually live on a hill looking over a "village" that's supposed to be miles away, or that the Southlands is actually just one street in the middle of green rolling hills.

Anyway, I mention that because of the mist in the background of that last shot.

New body sliders!

2009-11-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

For the curious, because this is awesome! (I am not using any slider hacks at the moment.)

Here we have bust and height. (This is the tallest you can go without a slider hack. With a slider hack, it appears to get dicey and deformed. The one on the left is a regular sized sim. No slider for shorter yet.)

Butt.

Small bust and butt.

Here compare:

Both are the same at the least in thickness and least in muscle tone, but one has less booty and less bust, sort of hard to tell at this thickness.

Can also do this to the men even.

Oh and there is a waist slider. Just don't have a lot of time to mess with this until this weekend or tonight after I take a nap. XD

I know a couple of sims who can use some fixing!

Where to get right now (both are still in testing):

Height sliders
Body sliders

World Adventures Featuring

2009-11-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

Henri Smith of course. Because of all the characters of Ruin, he would SO be a world adventurer.

Look, he's even sparkling with excitement.

Why is he really sparkling? I think it's because I tried out the "man candy" lifetime aspiration reward. Yeah, nice, but uh no. I'll have to wait on that one until someone (I'm going to bet HP at MTS) makes a replacement texture for that. Even if the sparkles glow red.

Some pics from the underground:

This pic in particular is awesome. Know why? Because he's soaked, and the water is dripping off him. For about an hour or so game time, he dripped water everywhere and left puddles if he stood somewhere too long. Somehow, I will find a way to use that effectively.

I didn't get a chance to play long enough last night. We just made it through one underground catacomb. Which was awesome. Until I realized that the catacombs will never change unless I change them. So after we explore all of the catacombs, I'll probably never do it again.

Oh well. I mostly got this for the extra animations. In particular the fighting animations which will probably come in handy soon.

Oh and for the basement tool. There is one tribe that was supposed to live underground, and I would love to see if with the new basement tool I can appropriately do that. I suppose I can make a structure above ground and make it look like it's underground, but that somehow didn't seem as fun a challenge.

Fun with genetics

2009-10-25T16:43:00.000-07:00

And bring other characters to life.

I have to admit that it's taken a LONG time to get used to the way TS3 sims look. They still look weird sometimes, but I am greatly enjoying making sims now and playing around with genetics. For Ruin, TS3 fits it perfectly with the style and mood I'm generally trying to create.

So I spent some time this afternoon (wasted some I should probably say) making sims and having sims have babies just to see.

The very first was Henri Smith, aka The Original Experiment, the First Experiment. He's the one credited with starting the revolution. (I don't know how true that is yet because I've only heard it from the mouths of other characters I was writing about never his.)

Henri is meant to look his age. He's about in his 50's or so (haven't sat down with pen and paper but that's about right). That's much older than most, but he's always been rather clever, and he's revered by Experiments-- a reverence that's been passed down to their children. He's the one who holds the south together and keeps the really bad ones from the Lost Territory out.

Next up-- Vivian Bennet.

Ah Vivian... she's probably in her 30's-- almost 40's now, but this is meant to be an old picture of her. I don't think she was an experiment. Most likely, she was another Edy, living in the labs her parents worked in. After the revolution, a lot of those people had to scrabble to live, and Vivian was no exception.

Mostly, I needed her because she and Henri had a son.

Brandon Smith. This one was interesting. I just wanted to see what would happen when mixing two sims since I'm not playing the game really at all.

Brandon had to have a little work done to be presentable. When I made Henri, I made him to look his age. Brandon-- a teen-- looked a little rough. Looked like he had a 30 year old's head on a teen's body. I took out the crease around his mouth, and tada-- he looks his age. I also had to adjust his eyes. He got Vivian's eyes-- large and innocent. But they were a little too large. I also changed his eye color. Originally he had Vivian's.

Woman #2

Cheryl Roberts (that name may change). She's a Neutral Politician. Haven't done much writing about her yet, but the sense I get is a strong woman out to change things which makes a few people uneasy/unhappy.

She has one daughter.

Paula Roberts (who has yet to find out her last name is technically Smith) is also a teen-- somewhere around 16 I think. This sim had a crazy jaw. Like she'd been taking steroids in the womb or something. I definitely had to slim the jaws a little. I love that she has her father's eye color. That was definitely a small detail I remember about the character. She shares the same color with a brother of hers who obviously isn't Brandon. It's the only thing I think she shares with her father or that other brother.

All I can say is thank goodness for Awesome Mod and the "edit sim" cheat. Among others.

Oh and let me insert my frustration with the edit relations stuff in CAS. Ok, you know how complicated it can get when you're trying to link up different age groups? like in TS2, you can't make elders and adults be spouses even though they can get married in game?

Yeah, try linking up this family! I had three kids (one I didn't include here because he's not related to Henri), two mothers, one father, with multiple age groups. Because, for those that don't know, YA is now a standard category and different from plain ol' adult. I found that I could not link one child to two different parents unless those parents were spouses. And I couldn't make Brandon his brother's brother because his brother is YA and Brandon is teen.

So in the end, I just linked all the kids to Henri-- even the one who isn't technically his. Story-wise, when I get to it, it'll just be easier that way.

Afternoon well spent I think!

Comic Books are my inspiration

2009-10-18T22:16:00.000-07:00

Edith continues to draw me in with her perpetually worried expressions. See?

Cute. Though, I guess she should be worried considering all she's been through.

So while I was playing around taking pictures for Chapter 6, Edith and Michael were chatting on the bed. At some point, Edith rolled over while still talking to him apparently to take a nap.

Or maybe she was just pissed at him. Either way, I love how sims can now do two things at once, like chatting and cooking or holding a baby and sitting.

I hate how limited the animations are. I swear that TS2 had more animations with the base game. At least, I know it had more intimate interactions which had all sorts of uses. TS3 seems to have more conversation animations-- I know it has more conversation options depending on traits and actions and all that.

Went home to clear out some stuff today and dug out ALL my old comic books. It's a lot of comic books. While I was flipping through a few, I was all-- "Oh. This explains a lot about Ruin." I really am obsessed!

I generally refrain from talking about the story unless I am writing to myself to figure things out. So I just want to say that the last chapter (number 6) really came out better than I expected. Was sort of putting it off I think probably for a few reasons.

With this story, the whole world its set in, its so old, something I thought up for fun over the course of years and clutched closely never sharing. Its hard to throw it out there-- some part of myself that is a little bit truer than anything else I've ever shared. But working on this one is just so comfortable!

I also found one of my printed binders full of stories and characters from the same time and the same world. One very large printed binder. There are two more just like it somewhere.

The responses have really been wonderful. Thank you those of you who're taking the time to read my little story.

It's up

2009-09-17T20:23:00.001-07:00

Sorry to those of you who are subscribed to this blog and my Sims 2 blog, but I want to cover all my bases. So Chapter 1, among other things, are up.

Working with Sims 3 as a screen shot tool is as frustrating as it is fascinating! Most of the time I've just gotta play and see what I can do. Sometimes it can help facilitate writing when I can see a scene in my head and not describe it.

OH, also, I found out how to get around the whole school thing. Just delete the school and the kids will forget all about it. Ingeli from Simverses (you might know her old Sims 2 'hood Windlebridge) has play tested and not found any adverse effects.

More testing

2009-09-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

Interesting! Now I see what Morning Monday was talking about when she mentioned that sims move their head during pause. Originally that totally creeped me out that sims would move once I've paused. But I didn't realize how awesome it can be.

While Sims are hugging, I can turn on move objects, grab them, hold down alt to turn off the grid, and reposition them. Their arms move naturally, their eyes and their heads even reposition themselves. Very nifty!

They still make some uber creepy faces. Sometimes if I reposition them weirdly, their eyes roll up into their heads. And there isn't a way to make sims taller outside of aging them up.

Oh, and there isn't a reliable way to age sims down. That's a tip to anyone wanting to use TS3 to tell a story. I used Awesomemod's edit sim feature to age a couple of sims down, then had to reset sim 3 times until they looked normal. Pescado does warn that he won't offer support for it.

The other semi-nice part to not having memories is that there is less to screw up. I can copy and replace sims all I want so far as I know. I can have two of the same sims in a neighborhood or more accurately save file.

Another weird thing I've noticed while trying to get things set up, the gap between child and teen is huge! Especially since I don't know of a way to stretch the skeleton. Teens look more like adults.

Anyway, I won't show any of the test shots. I'm still working on the story, so I don't know where it will go or if I'll need those shots. So I'll just leave off with this one as a tribute to Laura because of course the first thing I did was make two sims hold hands.

Dear Sims 3,

2009-09-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I haven't even fired up the game in a very long time. I apologize, but I'm not exactly sure what in the world I want to do with you!

Collecting is sort of annoying. AND sometimes you sims seem to have issues with time management. AND listening. But men look like men, and sims can be portly or thick or strong.

So I decided I would fire up the game last night and try my hand at designing sims with an idea in mind. There is possibly a very weird and unique story that could come out of this if you stop being a Prema Donna, Sims 3.

Sincerely,
Foxy

So, inspired by Marooned on Tuesday, I've decided to give Sims 3 a shot as a story telling vehicle. I wasn't really playing it for the game very much. And I really don't care what the heck happens to the sims I was playing. I really can't seem to bond to them. (Sorry Agnes, and Varina, and Amberle 2!)

So last night I made a group of four sims-- three teens and one kid (thank you Awesome Mod). In front here is Edith. She's a good sim, a natural cook, and some other stuff that I can't remember. Oops. I should take some notes.

Edith and co. live in a world that is most definitely not ours. And it's definitely not Riverview or Sunset Valley (though technically they are living in Riverview right now). It's one I started working on when I was in high school free writing for fun. Trying to recreate it with Sims 3 is going to prove difficult, but I am more than willing to change my ideas around for the game. Somehow the game and I will have to compromise!

But good pretty characters can kind of be boring. So I do need some pretty not good characters too.

That's "Michael." He doesn't really have a name, that's just what Edith's always called him. He is a mean spirited Genius who is very charismatic. That was sort of Edith's downfall. That and the fact that she's a good person.

Once I made them all, I was excited to get them in the house and see how they would react. Would Michael act the way the character in my head does?

I am happy to report that he really does. Being mean spirited and charismatic, his conversations seemed to bounce around. He spent some time talking nicely with her and then he would make faces like this:

He made fun of good people to her, which made her feel like a blockhead and gave him a little smirk.
But he seemed sorry about it. They're supposed to be friends after all, and she looked really insulted. (I didn't notice if he got a good moodlet for it.)

Anyway, there are a lot of other issues right now with the whole story (things I will have to change and elements that make no sense when jumping in), but it promises to be an interesting project for me to test my creativity and to test what can and can't be done with the game. I'm seriously giving it a good go, deleting houses and things like mad. Adding in my own sims and all that.

Of course, one problem I forgot for my actors being so young-- they still have to go to school five days out of the week. That cracks me up when I consider what Michael is supposed to be. He's really too smart for school. But there are penalties if they don't go it seems. And I haven't found any hacks yet for no school.

Agnes Crumplebottom

2009-07-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

When I started up Agnes' lot last play session, I found her here-- at the Windfall Motel, a place meant for homeless sims to have a place to eat and rest. It's the last place I expected her to be drawn to, but then things in her life have probably never gone the way she's expected.

Her sister, Cornelia Goth, gave her a call while she was here. Doesn't she look thrilled? "No, Cornelia, I don't see the sun getting ready to shine through the clouds. No, I don't want to talk about it."

Cornelia calls her often, usually at least once a day, to check up on her.

I can't blame Cornelia.

She lives alone in that large house and has so far shown little interest in getting to know any of her neighbors.

Agnes usually enjoys painting and has written a non-fiction book which did reasonably well. Her agent is now asking for something spicier, maybe a drama or a love story or both. But Agnes can feel her creativity slowly drying up in the same way as her small fortune left to her by her husband.

She felt the only thing to do was to take on a part time job at the book store.

That didn't last long. She was soon fired (my first sim ever to be fired-- what an honor), and so now she can't hide herself away in the bookstore anymore. It would just be too awkward.

Agnes has felt the need to go through some changes. I'm going to use that as an explination for her garb in the next part here. (She also wears pants sometimes with a sweater. Highly unusual for her.)

One night, she heard something from down stairs and saw something glowing in the front yard. She'd heard about it, but couldn't believe it. Her Darling had come back from the dead. She had no time to dress herself properly; she did not want to miss him.

"Darling, is that you?"

"I don't want you to see me like this!" He turned away from her as if to run, but he only stepped closer to his grave.

"No," she whispered. He'd only just appeared, and he seemed ready to leave her alone again. "Darling, why did you leave? Why did you leave me alone?"

He halted his progression towards his headstone. "I didn't leave," he said with a voice that softly echoed on the air. "I was taken before my time. By the Reaper. I only come out at night to check in on you, my dear."

"The Grim Reaper?" Agnes had read books on death which had taken her into the myths and the Grim Reaper. "There's a way to beat him, I know there is. I read it in a book once."

Her darling shook his head, "You and your books."

But he stayed and listened to her until the sun almost came up.

Dissonance

2009-07-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

"Are you even listening to me?"

"Nah, I'm pretty tired."

He just couldn't be mad at her. For one, his problems with his latest love interest was definitely not her fault. And two, it was just impossible. The second he thought he was mad at her, she would give a smile or a hearty laugh with a raunchy joke.

It was a little weird that she slept in his bed. Nothing ever happened, accidental or otherwise. "I hate sleeping alone," she said. "You know me and Mom always shared a room. My room's too quiet."

It was rather inconvenient, but he said "no" to her as well as he held a grudge with her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Things with Cycl0n3 were going great. He even came over to the house when Kamil was at work.

He went to work in the afternoon and was gone usually until late. Varina couldn't stand the quiet house, so she invited Cycl0n3 over.

One thing lead to another, and they were soon giving her new (used) bed a good test. This was certainly something she could NOT do with Kamil in the house. Suddenly she was glad for his late night shift.

Things became weird the night he came home and caught her saying good-bye to Cycl0n3. Cycl0n3 was completely oblivious with his casual, "'ey, man. See ya later."

Varina was starving, so she made a stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Kamil sat at the counter reading his charisma book. He didn't say a word to her when she sat down next to him. For a short while, she imagined it would all be okay. Maybe she was making too much out of nothing. Why would Kamil care if she had someone over? He was always going out for drinks with his girls. And he was always talking about his girl problems with her. (Like that Patricia Wan-- she was nothing but trouble.)

"So what was that?"

"What?"

"I thought we agreed we wouldn't bring people home."

Anyone else overhearing the conversation wouldn't understand, but she knew exactly what he meant. He hadn't brought over any of his girls. Of course Varina was always home working on her paintings, so it was a rather nice courtesy he was extending her so she wouldn't have to hear anyone shouting his name and their deity of choice.

"Well, it was quiet. And you know I can't be in a house like this by myself."

There wasn't much more to say after that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Good night!" Varina hopped off the barstool, tossed her dish in the sink, and skittered off to her room before he could even attempt to come up with something to explain his behavior. He wasn't even sure what was going on with himself. Maybe it was all Patricia Wan's fault.

He raised a finger in the air after Varina had closed her door. There was plenty to say, but he really wasn't good at these things. Maybe Cycl0n3 was just using her. She shouldn't rush things with him. And why was this the first he was hearing or seeing about this guy? Shouldn't he be the first person that any love interest of Varina would meet for approval since he was her best friend and roommate?

He went to his room to grab his guitar then back to the living room to softly play. The rough strings brushing against his fingertips always helped focus him in a spot where the thoughts couldn't reach him. Maybe it was better this way. Things usually fell into place in his life. It was how things worked. But if things were being difficult, then clearly he was heading in the wrong direction. The next time he saw Patricia Wan, he would end it completely (after seeing if he could get a few simoleons off of her first). Then maybe he'd treat that cute new girl at work out to a few drinks or a movie.

It was a few hours later when a half asleep and partially terrified Varina climbed into his bed. "I had a nightmare," she said before she crawled in and fell asleep."

He was still vaguely aware of her in the early morning as the sun fell on his covers.

******************

The thing with Patricia Wan is that she was in a relationship with their boss, Hank Goddard. Well, I installed the Indie Stone story progression mod (which is now compatible with Awesome mod), and so while I was playing a pop up told me that she had gotten married. And Kamil wasn't even invited to the wedding!

Meanwhile, I've been watching their wants for clues. The picture where Kamil looks like he thought of something to say just a little too late, he was actually licking his finger and doing the "Hot" animation while thinking of Varina, but he didn't have any wants related to her. He did want to woohoo with Patricia though. His wants now are seeming to turn more towards a new person of interest who I know nothing about yet.

As for Varina, her wants are pretty cute. She hasn't had any romantic wants until she got the want to woohoo with Cycl0n3. Otherwise, she just wants to be his friend and talk to him alot.

Scenes from the lives of the Silverrings

2009-07-14T21:03:00.000-07:00

Trigger bonded with Felicia the day before she was to age up. He caught that butterfly just for her, and can't wait until the day they can both go hunting for bugs.

The party was HUGE. Trigger knows a lot of people, more than I expected! But the adults seemed to care very little about Felicia's aging up.
Trigger was the most excited (and only one celebrating).
Tada-- little Felicia as a toddler. I think she takes after her father the most. It'll be hard to tell until she gets older though, I think.
The family sitting down to breakfast.
I love taking the toddlers outside in Sims 3.

Felicia is a genius virtuoso. Too bad that when she's a kid she won't be able to play any instruments like the piano.

Also, in other news, remember my original test family with Maggie and Norm? Maggie's dream was to become Leader of the Free world. I am proud to announce that all on her own, she has managed to do it! She reached the top of the political career. Amberle read it in the paper. I was doubly happy that it was a sim I knew.

Cyclone

2009-07-11T01:42:00.000-07:00

"All right, so I've been thinking..." Varina says as she opens the fridge to pull out a stack of ready made waffles. Kamil doesn't say anything in protest. "I said that I've been thinking. This is the part where you should protest or even sneak off to your room." She glances back at Kamil who sits at the counter on the cheap bar stools they were lucky enough to get for cheap.

But he says seriously, "What about?"

Varina shrugs, surprised that he wants to hear her thoughts. "Ok, so I'm not liking this work thing. I'm doing pretty good at the painting. I think I'm just going to focus on that."

She's prepared for him to protest-- they don't have a lot of money. They don't even have a couch yet. "Can I see one? You haven't shown me any of your paintings, you know."

So after breakfast, once he's changed into his one fancy suit, she lets him see her most recent piece.

"It's pretty good, if I do say so myself-- and I do because I, like, will have to sell it and stuff."

Something is clearly wrong now. He leans in a little too close, closer than he ever has before. "It's really good."

"So you don't mind my quitting to devote proper time to it?"

"Nah. I'm due for a promotion. We'll be fine for a while."

"Uh... ok..." Something is definitely wrong.

He heads off to his room, and she just shakes her head. Boys! Or at the very least Kamil who suddenly seems to think he's interested in her-- the girl who's like his sister. Maybe she's reading too much into it, but she's known him for a while and seen his moves and that was definitely a move.

Since she's quit her job, and Kamil heads in to work, Varina has plenty of time to herself. So of course she wants to visit the art museum! It's on her way out that she runs into a surprise. (It's upity Mr. Sword from this post-- at the bottom of the post.)

"You must really like art. This is the second time I've run into you here."

Does he ever! They stand around talking about art and making funny faces until the sun sets. She finds out that he's single and a little absent minded.

"So how can I be sure that you don't have a girlfriend? What if you've, like, just forgotten about her?"

He grins cheesily at her, "Well, then I'll just blame you."

The sun finally does set and they're still there, standing on the sidewalk in front of the art museum before they finally say good night.

The next day, they meet for lunch. She hasn't said a word to Kamil yet. It all seems too soon for her to say anything; she doesn't want to jinx it. But there was that weirdness between her and Kamil. Maybe she was only imagining it, but still she feels she should tread carefully.

**********

Kamil totally hit on her. I was surprised. I don't think that's a side effect of the Awesome mod. That was pretty neat. So I sort of want to give them more time to hang around and see what happens.

Cycl0ne was a surprise. I think he's just stalking her now, but they really hit it off easy. Maybe it's just because she is rather charismatic (and darn cute with her blue self).

Toughen up

2009-07-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

More than anything, Claire Ursine wants to be best friends with her daughter. But she's not quite sure what you do exactly.

Claire works hard to provide for the both of them. She is very careful at least to not let her young daughter know exactly what she does. Claire won't be going in for career day anytime soon.

She does what she can using her skills. Baking cookies is not her bag.

Where she gets the gifts from isn't important-- at least not to Claire and hopefully not to Kirsten either. But Claire is trying in the only way she knows how to reach out to her young daughter.

****************

Kirsten HATES mornings. She has to get her own self up.

She feeds her pet fish, Goldie, a gift from her mother. (It was kinda weird. It just was in her room one day. Kirsten still isn't sure if it's a boy or a girl, but goldie is a good name for either.)

She then feeds herself, usually cereal or toast and jam. Kirsten isn't allowed to use the stove, and her mother usually sleeps late due to late nights out. What she does is still a mystery to Kirsten, but it really doesn't bother her.

At school, Kirsten isn't exactly popular, but she has a few friends. She recently brought home Bella Bachelor, another kinda weird girl at school.

Both girls were excited. Without any parents around to bother them, they could do what they wanted.

They discussed their options. The beach is near-by, but Bella didn't want to get sand in her shoes. (Kirsten teased her about that for a good while.)

So they decided to play tag.

Let's just say they never got very far. Kirsten was rather annoyed. As soon as they get older and Bella gets more reasonable, these two could have some great fun. But Bella needs to toughen up first!

Kirsten and Claire cross paths in the evening while Kirsten sits down to some canned soup.

"How was your day?" Claire asks while trying to hide Kirsten's new surprise behind her back.

"Good," Kirsten says.

Ok, I'm thinking my next step would be to create my own town with sims I actually care about running around, with some extras in the library for the game to draw from.

It's neat when my sims read the paper and there are sims I know in the headlines. I think it's really cool. Don't know if I'll ever get around to re-building anything, but it would be a fun project I think. Maybe I'll work on it when I get bored or something.

Guess what day it is!

2009-06-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

I'm totally stealing this idea from Laura, but I played the game for a bit and of course I have a new sim dad today.

Happy Falker Satherhood Trigger!

They happily welcomed a young girl sim which they named Felicia.

Amberle also gave him a new desk and had one of his fish mounted. Doesn't a mounted fish over his desk just say "Dad?" Now we just have to get him into golf.

But that wasn't all. Amberle also made him his favorite food for dessert: cookies.

I should have gotten video of him eating his favorite food 'cause OMG it was cute! He had this dopey grin, and he'd clap his hands before he'd take another bite.

Also, these two had one of their first serious conversations while over lunch... but I was too amazed to get pictures. Having a baby has put some added tension on their relationship. Amberle seems a little perturbed that he can do whatever he wants while she has to stay home. So shortly after that, I had her take a "me" day. (For Amberle, that meant going fishing up near the mountains.)

Second Life

2009-06-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

So Amberle did it. She took the plunge.

She asked him on one of their very innocent dates. He was certainly surprised. What did he think they were working towards all this time?

The wedding was something of a sad affair as it was only attended by one person-- Aiden Jones who happened to be their boss.

I have always gotten the feeling that Aiden really liked Amberle. It was just bad timing that landed her in Trigger's arms instead of Aiden's. And now Aiden seems to feel he's just too old, so he's happy to support the married couple and wishes them well.

Married life in the little house by the river is amazing.

Now Amberle has someone to help her with her garden, someone to cook her breakfast in the mornings, and an extra tinkerer in the house to repair the things that break.

Sometimes she can't believe it. She'll stare at her ring and just sigh. When he's in the room, she feels so happy it simply hurts. It is possible for one bad luck sim to hold all that love in one sim heart?

Well, you know what follows after.

She just got the news, and she can't believe it. The first night, while Trigger sleeps, she slides out of bed to stare at her flat stomach. Hard to believe that while she sleeps, a little life is growing in there. Something that she and Trigger both created.

These two are SOOOOOO excited. I have to admit it's pretty cute. He right away got the want to read a parenting book and buy a stuffed animal (nevermind the fact that we hadn't added the extra room yet). They now both have the want to have a girl.

Both of them are in the science career, and Trigger has heard that eating watermellons ensures a girl. It is scientific fact-- he heard it at work. So she snacks on these little mellons like crazy.

Other cute wants: Amberle read a parenting book then wanted Trigger to read it too. She also randomly had a want for a high chair. And then Trigger, in the second day of the pregnancy rolled a want to specifically "Have a child with Amberle."

Notice, new eyes? These are SO much prettier than the flat colors from before.

Varina Jupiter and Kamil Eloy

2009-06-14T01:10:00.000-07:00

Meet Varina and Kamil.

They've just moved into Sunset Valley on a whim to follow their dreams. They've known each other since they were little and have always bonded over art. (I think there's some story about Varina dumping paint on him in the second grade, but Kamil really doesn't like to talk about it.)

Varina is blue. I suppose you could tell that, but she wasn't always. Her parents were sort of odd and artsy. It's probably where Varina gets it from. She believes that true art comes from stuggle and hardship and more struggle-- ok, not really. Really, she likes to have fun and she's sort of childish at times. But she is struggling.

So here's Kamil. He's going to be famous.

If not for his music, then probably for his skills. He's rather charming, and so far in his first day in Sunset valley, he's had three girls swooning (though one was a teen so she really won't count for a few more years) and met one over drinks. Kamil is generally lucky-- things just aways seem to go his way.

Varina tried to convince Kamil that they needed to just get a cheap house and they could move later once he moved up in his career. But Kamil would have none of that. "It's all part of the image!" Of course, Kamil won't be able to bring his lady friends home for a while.

So their first day was spent trying to make money so they could at least buy beds.

Kamil did what he does best. He started making friends. He's got this way with people, and so before you know it, even the most frugal sim is handing him money willingly.

Varina started by gathering precious stones. She found a few good ones, and so she was able to get enough money to buy them both beds.

It wasn't long before Varina actually managed to sell her first painting, so she treated Kamil out to some fried chicken at the local diner where the most recent incident happened.

Kamil was hanging out front minding his own business.

He says now that he sort of suspected something, but I'm sure that he had no clue. He was too busy day dreaming.

"AHHH!" It's probably not fair to say he screams like a girl, but he does.

Other random picture:

Varina went to the art museum. She didn't look impressed.

But while I was getting that shot...

THIS guy suddenly walked into the camera. Is it just me, or is that a smug smile?

Claire Ursine

2009-06-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

Claire called to me. A lonely angler living by the ocean, how could I not pop in on her?

She starts out larger, and I didn't snap a picture of her surprisingly. I started her on the treadmill right way because she had the want to work out until fatigued and I wanted to see how long it would take her to lose the weight.

Not long at all.

Oh you look fine Claire! Don't make that face. Though we should talk about that hat...

Claire works at the Outstanding Citizen Corp. It's a job she likes. People have always been looking down their noses at her since she was little. And her little bit of payback is to work her way up to master thief. She hates people, but it's okay because they hate her too.

When she left the warehouse, the cops were onto her, and they gave chase.

Ok, so what really ended up happening, I got a pop up that they were after her, and then she RAN to the car. It seems she knew that they couldn't hold her. The food is good anyway, plus she likes the solitude of being locked up for a night. She spent the night working out, but she was sick to her stomach the whole night. Maybe it was something she ate before entering the slammer. The evil cook at the warehouse is always trying new agents on anyone who mistakenly trusts him.

No, it turns out it was that one time on that one mission in the back seat with the look out. It had been a spur of the moment what-the-hell kind of thing. This was her take apparently.

I loved watching her stomach grow gradually over the course of the three days.

So that one day, when she was sitting down to burnt waffles, she felt a pain. The time and come, so she calmly called a taxi and went to the hospital. (Come to think of it, she probably really shouldn't have. She's a criminal! What if someone had recognized her?)

She came out with Kirsten.

So will she change her life for this little girl? Or will she continue down the same path? Claire had wanted a boy. Boys are supposed to be tough, but this little girl, swaddled in the delicate pink blankets the hospital gave her, has her worried. Could this innocent little thing be her heir?

Did Claire ever look so sweet and innocent like this? She must not have, because her earliest memories are of her father yelling at her and smacking her around. This girl she only wanted to protect and keep safe in the only way she knew how.

*********************

So I installed Awesome Mod and customized it. Sims can still randomly die from things that are not game play related, but they won't lose inventory (YAAAAAY!), they won't move, and they won't have babies with only one parent.

Now I can have fun visiting many different families and really getting involved. That bug from the last post was a real downer and I didn't want to play after I discovered that.

I've lengenthed their lives to 190 days now, instead of 90. That way I can keep story progression on, visit multiple families, and not loose too much time in their lives. I don't mind missing some days, but 90 days was too short for them to really accomplish anything.

Not cool man!

2009-06-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I decided tonight to give rotation style play a chance.

I just had a back and forth recently about an issue someone was having with sims she left alone who lost EVERYTHING in their inventory. All the food she'd grown-- some of which had been stashed in the fridge, and the rewards she'd earned which were in the sim's inventory were just gone.

So I decided to test this out. I made an extra save file and went to town.

In one sim night, I touched on four houses and went back to Amberle. Amberle had nothing in her inventory. Nothing.

The only option is to create save files if you want things to be saved exactly as you left them and with everything in their inventory. The problem is that each save file is essentially another 'hood. So if in one save file Angie has twins while I'm playing another house, and then I move to the save file where Angie is the active house hold-- she will not have twins. She'll be exactly as I left her.

This is another strike against the game for me to be honest. I get bored playing the same family over and over, but if I switch families, then ones where I worked all hard to get them special things in their inventories (like fruits or seeds) they'll all be gone.

What's weird, is that Amberle has been working on upgrading her tub. It's about 80% complete. When I went back it was still at 80%. So if the game could remember that, why can't it remember what she had in her inventory?

In Sims 2, NPCs would come with stuff in their inventories. Why couldn't they keep that feature? I really can't get that.

Living another life

2009-06-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

I've been focusing on Amberle's sim these past few days. Making her garden and cook, and having her fixing stuff has been really fun. As sims improve their skills, they can do more. Like Amberle can upgrade things so they'll never break. She's already upgraded the dishwasher so it runs silently.

So Amberle went to work one day when she was feeling unlucky, and there was an accident. It wasn't too bad, she came away only "slightly singed" and with a matching moodlet. XD

Her garden is absolutely coming along. The stuff she has growing: tomatoes, cabbage, grapes, limes, watermelons, onion, garlic, and apples.

She's still not a great cook though she does keep trying.

Amberle has been romancing her co-worker Trigger Broke. They went out to the bistro and ate inside which is fun because you can get change cards.

Amberle was served some bad food, but she kept quiet about it. The waiter noticed, and so their food was on the house plus she came away with some excellent veggies. Unfortunately, she got sick on the side walk.

Trigger didn't seem to mind, he still comforted her even though he seemed rather confused about it.

Maybe he was just surprised to have a girl this cute in his arms, because Trigger often does not know how to behave.

He's moody. He's rejected her kiss already once, but it might have been this night here where she vomited on the sidewalk.

Just WHAT is Billy (that guy on the right) laughing at?

Also, he's boring. She invited him to her birthday party, and he sat there reading a book rather than socializing! (Although, he does get points for bringing food to the party.)

Amberle was only thanking this guy for her promotion. I'm a little worried about this relationship. I don't like the way he's watching her. And he kept trying to get between them all night.

Also, everyone else who left said they had fun, but Trigger only said it was "...nice." Just like that!

Will these two get married? Amberle isn't a young adult anymore. It's time to think about starting a family.

Other cute pics:

The animation for the handy sim. I think her face is cute, and rather appropriately Amberle actually. XD I imagine that would be the look on my other Amberle's face the first time she surprises Henry by fixing his car or something.

This here was darn adorable. The maid for some reason decided she would brush her teeth while on the job.

The problem was that Amberle was going to take a bath and had just hopped in. Amberle screamed while in the tub, then climbed out.

I told her to take a shower once the maid had left, and Amberle had this thought bubble over her head:

Then I noticed she had an embarrassed moodlet!

My review and thoughts

2009-06-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

I really like this game. It's fun, there's a lot to do, and the customizing is SO FUN. (Seriously, take that tool away from me!)

BUT there is one huge problem for me. Maybe it's more a bunch of little problems thrown together and maybe it's more my problem than the game's.

I can't bond with these sims. While I'm playing I sort of care, but I care in the way I care about my Harvest Moon farmer. I just want my Harvest Moon farmer to reawaken the goddess, plant good crops, and have that baby.

It's the same in TS3. I find that very often, playing a sim isn't about the story, but about getting tasks done. Get that promotion, pass on those genes, get that garden!

Since I can't hop around to see what is going on in the other house holds without loosing out on what another family is doing, I can't really bond to anyone other than the sim I am playing. And even then, they are only a vehicle for me to do what I want. They are cute, and there are a lot of surprises, but all in all, I don't feel my sim has a personality.

Maybe I need to play more or watch my sims closer. Amberle sim is cute, but other than her moodlets, I can't really get any feeling from her. You know how romance sims walk that walk when they're going to hit on someone? Or how shy sims look at you with the "why me" when you tell them to do something like flirt with someone? Yeah, none of that. Or how I catch Alberta looking awkward or with her eyes closed in pictures like all the time-- none of that either.

Now, I don't want to sound pessamistic or like a regular Sims 3 hater. I really like the game. It's pretty fun. But I do find myself getting bored of playing one family, and then I find myself too scared to move on from that family to play another because they'll lose inventories and wants.

Also-- no memories! As we've seen countless times, those memories can be handy. Sometimes sims surprise you when you aren't paying attention. But when I visited Angie, I have no idea what she's been up to. Has she had her first kiss? Did she date anyone in high school? Why does she dislike that one sim so much?

I'm pretty sure the answer to all of those is no, of course. But I wish there was a way to keep in contact with sims like that. Like writing letters or something! Can you imagine how fun that would be? Angie moves out and I follow her. Her parents can send her letters letting her know what's going on in their lives. Like "Dad won the eating contest over at the Bistro!" or "Mom got a promotion. She's on her way to World Leader!" That way I would care about those sims and they wouldn't just become NPCs with no personality or lives.

Revisiting Angie

2009-06-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

I have done a lot with Amberle. But all of it has been pretty boring. It's go to work, work on garden (which she doesn't gain fun for-- Sims 2 sims love gardening!), go to sleep, and sometimes do other stuff inbetween.

I would like to play her like a legacy sim and continue on with the line.

But first, so what ever happened to Angie? She's an adult now.

So I checked out the home. I am playing with story progression on and high free will.

Both of the parents are exactly how I left them. Same jobs and same level of jobs too. Same skills even from the looks of it! Norm's garden is even in the exact same state I left it in.

Maggie has of course grown without me. Her traits are: couch potato and loves the outdoors (traits she had to start with), loner (trait I picked) and good and friendly (traits her mother happens to have). She has no job and is unemployed, but she does have some skills. Writing being one.

Also, sims dress themselves. Unlike Sims 2 where sims would stay the way you dress them, they will randomly change their clothes so even if I wanted to give her a better look she would randomly just change her clothes.

I'm kind of wondering what to do if they move. How would I find them again. Is there some hidden search feature? XD

The house even looks exactly the way I left it. Angie still has toys in her room. And no siblings.