Slowing Down Sim Time
AuKestrel:
Quote from: karen on 2007 May 07, 10:29:52
And that's pretty accurate in my case. I have about 35 families at the moment with 176 playables. It takes me about a week to play all the families in rotation, one Sim-day at a time. My oldest elder is 78 and one day away from dying of old age. He was one of the "cheesecake twins" born just after OFB came out, in March 2006. So he has lasted more than a full year (real-time).
Wow, how do you have the discipliine to only play one day at a time? I always want to know what they're going to do the next day, esp. if there's a baby on the way or something. I try to keep myself to a week at a time in each lot I play but then I look up and oops it's already Weds. of the next week. Do you just "stop" at 6:00 a.m. each day or something like that?
Sagana:
It's not so much that their lives are too short (although it takes them so long to do everyday chores/stuff that it can be hard to accomplish certain things) but that the time sequences don't match well - particularly since seasons.
I don't play one sim at a time, I play generally around 6 families for 3 or 4 days each (depending) and use the lot sync timer to make sure I keep the times more or less the same per round, if I get over-involved with some family or something.
But I want the kids to live at least through a whole 'seasonal' year, which means I need to set seasons to 4 days (easy) and have the kids stay kids about twice as long (not so easy). Toddlers would live through about half a year, and that's ok - I don't think I could stand them any longer than 8 days as toddlers. And also, I want the young adults that go to Uni to have a fall semester, a short winter break, a spring semester, and a slightly longer but still short summer break (during which they could have accelerated classes if they're very anxious to graduate.
And, I want to play in sync - say a fall semester at Uni, then the 4 days of fall at home, then winter break where the young adults might or might not come home for xmas, sometime play the rest of winter in the regular hood without messing the time all up, then the spring semester, spring at home, etc.
The closest I can come to figuring out a way to make this work is play fall at Uni, have fall end whenever the semester ends (which I don't think comes close to 4 days, does it? numbers are not my strong point), then play fall at home and remove 2 days from everyone except the young adults at the end of the season, play my one day of winter with the young adults and the other 3 with everyone else and again set their ages back two days, etc. That way I'll double the child's lifespan and give them exactly one 'seasonal' year (4 seasons, each season 4 days - 16 days instead of 8) - I *think*...
I want them to age. I don't like playing with aging off at all - and I hope this doesn't make the game too much easier for me (that much more time to do things that are already too easy). But I do want kids to live at least through one full round of seasons and I want some way to sync up young adults that makes sense to me and that's all I can think of. And it does sound a bit like a recordkeeping nightmare (for me, I don't like recordkeeping that much) but Pes added that event timer to the lot sync hack and that'll help, I think.
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: aukestrel on 2007 May 07, 15:39:51
Wow, how do you have the discipliine to only play one day at a time? I always want to know what they're going to do the next day, esp. if there's a baby on the way or something. I try to keep myself to a week at a time in each lot I play but then I look up and oops it's already Weds. of the next week. Do you just "stop" at 6:00 a.m. each day or something like that?
You don't have to play "one day at a time". The Lot Sync timer lets you mark down days of "interesting" events (sim-time is not truly in days, but actually in now-days punctuated by critical events), so that you can, say, play 3 days on one lot, and then go do the interesting event on another lot you were about to overrun. It doesn't actually matter how many days are played, as long as critical events all occur in sequence.
Example:
It is day 4 on all lots. A critical event on lot A is scheduled for day 12 (ex: an age transition). A critical event is scheduled for lot B on day 8. All that matters is that you play the event on lot B before you play the event on lot A. It doesn't matter if I play 4 days on lot A and 2 days on lot B, as long as I play the events in correct order: The intervening space has no sense of time.
Karen:
Quote from: aukestrel on 2007 May 07, 15:39:51
Wow, how do you have the discipliine to only play one day at a time? I always want to know what they're going to do the next day, esp. if there's a baby on the way or something. I try to keep myself to a week at a time in each lot I play but then I look up and oops it's already Weds. of the next week. Do you just "stop" at 6:00 a.m. each day or something like that?
More or less. I stop in in the evening, usually, anytime after 6 pm when the age transitions occur. Sometimes if I'm waiting for some significant event, I'll play the lot through the night and into the next day, but I try never to go past mid-afternoon of the second day. I have been playing like this for quite a while (I'm on day 122 according to the lot sync timer) and it's really not difficult.
Cyjon:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2007 May 07, 06:40:30
Quote from: Cyjon on 2007 May 07, 03:40:26
I think the original intention was that when a child comes home from school the first time, he shouldn't get a grade boost for having no unfinished homework. He has no homework because he hasn't gotten any yet, not because he completed it.
This does not make very much sense, since having an unfinished doesn't penalize homework until you accumulate 2, anyway.
It's not the penalty, it's the bonus. You go up a letter grade if you have no homework. Since kids start with a C they would get a free bonus to B on their first day. I'm not saying it's a GOOD idea, just that was the logic behind it. A better way to have done it would probably have been to start kids with a D then give them the free day 1 bonus to a C rather than skipping a day and generally confusing the issue.
Quote from: aukestrel on 2007 May 07, 15:39:51
Wow, how do you have the discipliine to only play one day at a time?...Do you just "stop" at 6:00 a.m. each day or something like that?
That's how I do it. To keep track of events I have evolved from handwritten notes to two Excel workbooks (one for Sims 2 in general and one to track this particular neighborhood), two Word documents (one for narrative events and one for behind the scenes notes which generally involve me typing STUPID GAME!!! over and over) and Legacy (free geneology software which is very nice for tracking my sim generations).
Obsessed? Me?
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