Apartment Life Borkiness, or how i ended the world in 1 hour.
jwaas:
Quote from: Gastfyr on 2008 September 15, 23:17:34
[If] ... when the sim is cured ... [is] too close to the time the game was going to do the check to see if he's healthy again, maybe it gimps up.
Entirely possible. I'm trying to remember whether I've ever tried using Grandma's Comfort Soup to cure a sick Sim, but I think not.
Since I basically had apartments working reasonably well, I'm now trying moving more than one family into the same apartment building, expecting plenty of already-reported borkage. So far so good, though it is awfully weird to see "my" Sims being basically like NPCs. Have yet to test whether "my" Sim schoolchildren walk automatically to school when they are NPCs. It has also occurred to me that it is not beyond the realm of possibility for one of "my" Sims to die while an NPC, since I don't trust Maxis at all to take better care of them than I can.
The only apartment weirdness I'm seeing is that the neighboring apartment interactions seem never, or almost never, to work. Knock On Door results in either "Goopy doesn't feel like hanging out right now, try again later," or else Goopy and his apartment become visible, my Sim goes in and looks at Goopy (who just stands there), then leaves. Ask Goopy To Come Out results in him walking out of the apartment, then immediately turning around and going back in. Not very neighborly in either case. I am actually holding out some small hope that this will go the way of Sims spontaneously combusting in the hottub in SNS, and be fixed with the Maxis AL patch.
...
I know, I know -- there's only one word to describe me holding onto a hope like that:
Sagana:
Although it seems like neighboring apt. dwellers are always not home, not in the mood, already hanging out in the community lot, in bed or at work/school - when they are available visiting another sim or inviting them to come out works fine in my game. The apt. lights up, my sim heads in and then must be directed to interact or chooses to do something stupid.
"Oooh, you have a toilet just like mine! I have one too! Only mine is blue and yours is white. White is such a wonderful color. I must go closely examine your toilet. I went potty before I left the house (my mommy trained me well) but let's see if your toothpaste is more fun than mine. I think I'll go through your medicine cabinet and brush my teeth now." At least she brushes.
Um, yeah, I don't have 'no what's this' in yet, but even if I did, they'd choose something else stupid to do. Anyway, not that I've tried it a lot, but when told to interact, they do fine. And sims invited out can come over and have coffee or a meal or whatever at my tiny lot as well. As long as they're directed.
Mootilda:
Quote from: GayJohnScarritt on 2008 September 14, 13:24:16
During the L&P phase, i remember a tidbit of information that was mentioned.
Quote: "Different living experiences based on the surrounding communities impacted by rent and noise" http://www.simprograms.com/?p=429
Yet this wasn't mentioned in either of the chats nor since release. It makes me wonder if they left code-remnants (GASP!) in the game relating to what type/quality of lots surround the apt lot?
Questions arising that need answers: (My gaming comp is on the fritz, so unable to play me sims right now).
Would leaving the custom lot as residential until after placement and then making it an apt building alleviate the dreaded borkness?
Do surrounding lots actually have an effect on the rent prices?
Could this be the reason why occupied apt lots can not be moved?
Would changing surrounding lots after setting up occupied apt lots, bork those apt lots?
I believe that EA disabled moving occupied apartment buildings, because they were having problems keeping all of the clones in sync. I also believe that this is why you can't (safely) modify an occupied apartment building (walls, doors, etc).
Just to be clear: An unoccupied apartment building looks very much to the game like a standard residential lot. However, when a playable sim family moves into the apartment building, the game creates a new clone of the apartment building to hold that family's gameplay information. The new lot is given the apartment name, followed by the family number. When a second playable family moves in, a second clone is created. And so on...
Because the occupied "apartment building" is now up to 5 almost-the-same-but-still-different lots, the game has special logic when you click on an occupied apartment building (in the neighborhood view), to allow the game to decide which of the clones to give you access to. The actual apartment building lot becomes inaccessible until all playable families move out.
It's possible that you could move an occupied apartment lot by using SimPE to modify the Top and Left fields in the Lot Description for every one of the clones. Of course, you should backup before trying this and be sure to change Top and Left to the same value for all copies of the lot.
As far as the feature: "Different living experiences based on the surrounding communities impacted by rent and noise"... I suppose that it would require some testing to determine whether this feature was ever implemented. My guess is: no. I believe that EA ran out of time to complete everything and sent out the survey to try to decide which features to cut. I haven't been able to find anything about this feature in the released product documentation.
Sparkleuk:
I posted about this in another forum and someone recommended that I repost my problem here, in this thread.
I'm having problems with the sims' thumbnails altering all the time. After my initial irritation I got used to it and put up with it, even quite liked it but I've noticed that my sims' phone books now take an age to load. A similar effect happens when I try to look through their relationships panel. I assume this is because the game is having to load the latest portraits for everyone that sim knows?
I know others have bought this up already, but the reason I'm mentioning it again is because I've just lost two sim days worth of play at a house because the game crashed when loading up a sim's 7 page phone book. That wouldn't be a problem but I'd redesigned the house, landscaped it and made a whole load of new friends. I was planning to leave the house and save the very next morning as I needed to move their son back in with them.
Inge:
I usually save at fairly short intervals when redesigning a house, as the building process seems to eat up tons of memory (must be all those undoes). You don't have to go back to hood to save, there is a save icon in the player control panel.
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