Gameplay: How do YOU keep track of sim lifes?
sarianastar:
The only time I keep track is for whatever family I'm actively blogging. In this case it's my 4 year old Primogen family, which started off as a legacy challenge and continues to be a legacy story. I have a Primogen family tree on Tribalpages.com, but it's missing a lot of stuff. Mostly I throw the main line in there for a traceable path. I also have a small notebook so I can keep track of a few things. Their college major, graduation level (Summa, Magna etc) what NPC they married, and the NPC's original last name and who the heir is.
I have another notebook for jotting down story possibilities, or bits that I want to remember for future story entries. I've been blogging the Primogens since Generation 11 (which was the Gen 10 heir from the first, non blogged Legacy challenge) and now I'm on Generation 23 of the same family line. So my tribal pages helps me immensely, tho I only put their names. There's a few photos but that got mindnumbingly tedious, so I quit bothering with putting pictures in there.
I also have a little notebook for keeping a short summary of each chapter, so I can refer to it when writing the next one. It has the chapter header (G5-ch12) and what filename I'm on. I name each chapter alphabetically a1-1.jpg and so on. Each html file is in order, so it helps me keep track. primogen1, primogen2.html etc. And there's 2 or 3 lines about what happened, because my Remembering software has some borkiness to it, and rather than tax the software, my notes help me keep from uninstalling it completely :)
sleep:
Quote from: ingeli on 2008 August 25, 16:31:07
The advantage I see with GenoPro is the options for saving pictures both for individuals and for events (weddings ect) and places (houses).
ingeli, I am trying to put pictures into my very new family tree. Your site seems to use the thumbnails from in-game - how do you get them into Genopro? I've tried a few different ways to get at them, and can't figure it out. Do you use SimPE? Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.
I couldn't see any way to contact you from the Windlebridge site, so I'm trying this way.
ingeli:
Hi - what I do is that I take pictures in game, as a rule when I fix the look of the sim, in "mirror mode" - I think makes a better portrait picture than the thumbnail you can extract with simpe. You can also turn it a bit to not always be a straight on pic, but a little profiled one, which can be more flattering to certain sims.
Then I edit it in PSP so that the size is always the same (100x150 pixels) and upload it to my site. After that I put the url-address to the pic as the picture source in Geno Pro. For example: http://websitename.com/sim_pics/*filename*.jpg - basically you can use any url adress where you can store your pics for this, and if you have it saved locally on your comp, just put in the address of the pic file (for examle C:\\Mydocs\images\filename.jpg), thats even easier. To make html-reports in GenoPro the pics need to be in jpg-format, it doesnt work with gifs.
You have the option to have several pictures of a sim (or an event or a place) in genopro, if you have more than one the program will generate a nice little show-pics application.
Quill:
Wow. Everyone has such a variety of playing styles. And you're all very OCD!
I've been playing the same hood since I got the game when it first came out, and I'm still only on what is actually part of the first generation of kids starting college. Obviously their parents are actually the first sim generation, but these kids are the ones who I've gotten to "raise" if you will. They're the second group to go to Uni, as their older brothers and sisters have already graduated and started families. It was when I realized that the 3rd generation was the same age as their aunts and uncles that I knew I needed to reorganize and stopped playing my favorite sims until I could get everyone properly aged for their generation.
I have a limited amount of playing time and tend to not want to spend too much of it on organization, which is how things got to be such a mess. I keep track in-game by hyphenating my sims' last names when they marry (in SimPE), and their children currently carry the hyphenated names. When the 3rd generation starts to marry I'll have to be a lot more organized.
Outside of the game I use MyHeritage Family Tree maker, which is really easy to use and free. It can export my sims' records into Excel if I want an easily readable list. At the moment there isn't much in there other than the sims' names and relationships.
I also have several Excel spreadsheet lists of the current group I'm playing; one lists all the females and another the males, their hair colors (I'm trying to keep a range rather than end up with all brunettes) their aspirations, and any other important info. I use these for planning who they'll marry, as I usually have them fall in love in Uni and wanted to make sure they all had partners. I don't use any townies or NPCs, so I have to balance my sims pretty carefully if I want them to have a significant other! There will probably be a few who I'll just ignore after they graduate except to age them with the other sims.
My goal at the moment is to catch this group of sim kids up to their siblings. From there I may experiment a little bit more, but I'm having more fun playing around with hair and clothing recolors at the moment, so who knows if I'll get there before Sims 3 comes out!
I also have a list of names I liked from one of those name your baby websites so that I don't have two or three of the same name. I can sort them by gender and by whether or not I've used them before. Whenever I have a new simbaby, I find a name I like on the list and mark it as used. Does anyone else have a list of names?
coralleane:
Quote from: Quill on 2008 September 05, 06:09:57
I also have a list of names I liked from one of those name your baby websites so that I don't have two or three of the same name. I can sort them by gender and by whether or not I've used them before. Whenever I have a new simbaby, I find a name I like on the list and mark it as used. Does anyone else have a list of names?
No, although I probably ought to since I tend to end up looking around me for inspiration. I ended up calling one "Noobor" since that sounds vaguely like the Simlish they use when they have a baby, and I've occasionally resorted to names from games that are lying around on the desk... Khalid Moo was recently born, for instance. I occasionally reuse common names (Martin Marener's grandson was also Martin Marener, for instance, although I think that's the only time both first name and surname have been identical - quite often I'll use a variation/diminuative within the same family line since people do get named after relatives, so Lana was a tribute to her great-grandmother Laine, Leopold was named after his mother's uncle Leo...)
As for organisation, I'm crap at it. The neighbourhood I play is Pleasantview, and I've been playing it since the day the game came out. I didn't start off organised and, while I could seriously do with some way of keeping track now, the thought of trying to get it sorted is a nightmare. I have a family tree on TribalPages for the Mareners, but unfortunately hit a snag recently when Lana and Penny were the first non-straight couple to get married, and TribalPages has no option for same-sex unions last I checked. Maybe when Rufio's program is fully working with SimPe I'll give that a shot - I have on occasion tried listing stuff like Lifetime Wants or making a few notes, but I'm never consistant. I did recently write down generation lists for my two main families so that I could see who should be at roughly which lifestage at the moment, and I'm trying to get the second family in line with the first, which is a bit of a slog since I started it simply to see how quickly I coud fulfil the Have 10 Children want, and didn't stop at ten, so there's one father, three mothers and eleven children, and he also fathered one into the primary family. (Which was mostly my impetus to finally get on and play this family: the dad was still an adult and the son was an elder and is about seven days away from death.)
Have I rambled enough yet? Yes.
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