World Builder

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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.