Fat Dormies
jolrei:
Freeeow, sagana! Clubs, groups, professors in offices. Just thinking about the work involved in setting that up makes me tired. No, wait...I'm tired because I never bother with sleep. Seriously though, I have enough trouble finding time for Sims to skill, eat, socialize, woohoo three different other sims per day, etc. without making additional clubs for them to go to. And I have yet to work up the energy required to build an entire custom uni.
A faculty lounge and offices for professors sound interesting. Do the profs stay in their offices? What do you use to set their schedule or is that part of the manage groups thing. (see, I show my complete ignorance).
I really like the idea of having to leave the dorm to study, skill, work out, etc. I found it really annoying that you could pretty much go through an entire uni career and never leave the dorm (apart from the automatic-go-to-class-disappear-for-a-bit-and-return-a-better-person thing).
Gus Smedstad:
Making Uni interesting is definitely worthy topic drift.
Uni community lots are sort of like the influence system for me. I liked the idea, but ended up not actually liking it in practice. My problem with community lots is that if I send just one or two Sims, I end up bored very quickly. Watching someone skillng / doing homework is not interesting, so I end up fast-forwarding until they're done. Not to mention the time dislocation for Uni community lots.
I could of course make an all-in-one student center and send everyone there... but at that point, is that really that different from building all the facilities on to the dorm lot?
It's true that I'd prefer that my Sims leave the dorm for most things, for aesthetic reasons, but for the reasons I've listed above, it hasn't worked out very well in practice. Maybe I should take a shot at making a mini-campus on a single lot, with seperate buildings for the dorm and the other facilities. I'm not sure there's room to do this well, even on the largest lot.
I don't mind spending time building things, since that's fun in itself. More fun than watching a bunch of Uni students, actually.
Profs with offices? I can't imagine how you made that work. Sounds sort of interesting, though.
I didn't know about the working vending machines. A short search showed TSR has some for coke, beer, and snacks, but they're all extremely cheaty, with +50% energy or +100% hunger.
- Gus
Zazazu:
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2007 May 18, 19:34:09
It's true that I'd prefer that my Sims leave the dorm for most things, for aesthetic reasons, but for the reasons I've listed above, it hasn't worked out very well in practice. Maybe I should take a shot at making a mini-campus on a single lot, with seperate buildings for the dorm and the other facilities. I'm not sure there's room to do this well, even on the largest lot.
On the 6x6 lot, maybe. It all depends on how many floors you want to go up, how many different types of facilities, and how many dormies you want...plus how true to normal dorm design are you going? I generally make one or two suites for my playables (often the rooms are shared, just put two Myne doors in) and then a bunch of 1x2's or whatever depth works with the rest of the design for the dormies. Premiere Dorms (custom, yum) has 16 1x3 "rooms" for dormies, and the size of these rooms was the excuse I used to move my two playables in together.
On a 6x6, a quad with four sub-buildings is doable. You could basically have a 2x2's space for each building, plus the fluff in the middle for a lawn & garden with gazebo and circular path around it with paths going in the four cardinals....maybe some flower plots breaking up the large paths.....hmm. Now I may have to send another spawn off to college. Eve is a Knowledge sim, after all, and two of her possible intendeds are professors. Depending on her LTW and who she gets a jones for, she may go. I have strict building rules while I'm doing my alpha challenge. No buildy-poo in the Uni until another spawn goes.
Hook:
Quote from: Gus Smedstad on 2007 May 18, 19:34:09
I didn't know about the working vending machines. A short search showed TSR has some for coke, beer, and snacks, but they're all extremely cheaty, with +50% energy or +100% hunger.
Jolt Cola! All the sugar and twice the caffeine!
Hook
Sagana:
It wasn't really all that hard to set up. I don't do a lot of building, unless I can't find something I like - so a lot of it was just refitting lots I'd downloaded, and I've been doing a bit as I went along. It's not spectacular (I'm not that great at the overall look stuff) but it's fun and it works.
As for the profs and their offices, I cheat. I have insim and I teleported them in, made them selectable, had them choose their office space/door, put their office hours in the little story section and unselected them and set the lot to community again - the same way I put dormies into the dorms. I dunno if they'll stay. I haven't really played the lot enough to find out, but if they don't, that's ok, I can always teleport them in if they should be there.
Not having enough time to skill, study, socialize and woohoo is a good part of the point. I'm tired of them *all* having 4.0 (or close) grades and graduating top of the class and everything. Even as it is, it's still too easy - they're all A students and they're hardly doing anything :p Anyway, I want some of them to be more interested in socializing than grades and maybe some will even flunk or drop out (without me quite so actively making them.)
The clubs are what's making the community lots work. There's 8 people (that's my computer limit for groups) so when they go to a community lot, there's always a bunch of them, plus the 'whoever shows up on lots' group so there's usually a lot going on. Also it gives me the opportunity to think of more interesting ways for them to skill - the swim team for body (the coach - the one that comes and yells at the sims to work out - is coach of the team and it turns out he's scared of the high-dive. I found it really funny to watch him, so I get that kind of new and interesting stuff), the wine/food club for cooking, the science geeks stargaze or play with microscopes or whatever I can think of to have them do.
And I've got the dorms gender-divided also, so they go to the community lots to date or have study dates or meet each other in the library. So it's not all just skilling. Though I still fast-forward through the fascinating "I'm reading a book now dood" I do that in dorms or at home too, but there's less of it. And if I'm bored with them skilling, I've got other things they can be doing. (Also I only send sims with wants to do straight skilling/research/write term papers and those are generally only the knowledge sims - everyone else tends to be more interested in other stuff too.)
I don't like "everything in one lot" community lots. I like different places with different atmospheres and for them to have to move around. Part of what I'm trying to do is pass the time and that takes up more of it. And yeah, I *hate* the time dislocation - but at least the semester still passes (that's why they're not allowed to go off-campus - I don't want to drag it out.) I can use the Uni clock to set the time back properly or sync them up if it gets too far off. And they aren't allowed to go to class twice or exams twice (hates that :p) I wish time worked correctly in this game, but dunno any way to really make it.
For the vending machines, I have the ones from MTS2 with the fixes that were put up in the "oops I broke it" section (most of the cheaty and broken stuff taken out) - great thread on how to fix stuff there also. They still overwrite each other, but that doesn't matter much. They look ok and they keep a sim from starving if they really need a boost. If I don't want them to caffeinate, I leave out the energy machine (it still gives a pretty good boost, but not much better than a regular espresso I think - it's a separate machine.) I also have a serious cheat-y one from the pc-mod board that I use in the cinema to make hamburgers and the like (as I can't *buy* a lot and run an OFB business on campus which seriously seriously ticks me off) and I only let playables get the not-so-cheaty stuff out of it. It's ok with me if dormies waste their non-existant money (I know they don't have any, I made them) on cheat-y types of food.
It would be much better if time made more sense and if OFB businesses were possible on the Uni lots, but it would also be much better if EA/Maxis fixed Uni so it was fun instead of boring. This way at least I'm not just dreading playing them through and tempted to just uninstall it after 2 semesters. I'm having fun - so far at least. I may get bored again, but if I manage to give the different sims that go to Uni enough personality, I'll have more unique things to do.
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