Well I've pretty much decided, based on feedback here (plus my own while playing the game) the dates will no longer be restricted to a real date format, but will be more flexible so that you can enter text (such as "Sim Day 211"), plain numbers, or dates if you choose. This does mean that the sorting will not necessarily work with dates in the standard format (mm/dd/yyyy) unless you put the year first 2005-11-12, etc. but I think everyone conceives of dates in different ways and the database is not meant to impose a certain way of thinking.

Sims you are trying to create a relationship for. Having a duplicate floating around in the database won't harm the database but it will always try to link up the *first* person who has a given name and won't connect subsequent Sims with the exact same names. So you can have them in the database but not do much with them.

So if you started a new neighborhood, moved in your first family, they'd start on Sim Day 1. Let's say you play them for 5 Sim Days. Then you start another family. Do you start them on Sim Day 1, or Sim Day 5? I guess you get to choose when that family enters the neighborhood, some would be in on the beginning, others would arrive later. Hmmm. It's interesting. But I'm pondering how one could try to calculate Sim Days for a neighborhood that's been up and running awhile.

Edited to add: Also what do you do with "aging off" if you play that way? Do the Sim Days advance?

Thanks for your input, Lynda.  Gives me food for thought. 

Katemonster,

Thanks for your feedback! You pointed out something that was an oversight on my part - that the rank will be different depending upon parent. Hmmm. There's no easy way to correct this - everything in the add-a-child part is tied to the *child*, not the parent and making it otherwise would be a major reworking. Thus, I should probably remove the rank field, which would force people to use the Birth Date field to rank the children, but I know people find the Birth date field and date fields in general awkward.

This brings me to the whole conundrum (and it is a conundrum for me) about Sim dates/Sim days, because real-life dates don't seem to express what's happening in the game, but when one uses Sim days to mark certain points in time, it's too relative... to say, for example, a Sim is born on Sim Day 15 - day 15 relative to what? The mom's age? The father's age? The household age? And later on to have in a birthday field "Born on Day 15"  out of context seems strange.

Benes (ha ha  ) to anyone and everyone who has some good suggestions in this area.

Having the Mother and Father field titles a drop down is a good idea, however it's a bit tricky so I don't know that this will be implemented right away. For properly assigning *blood* relationships, it is important that the Mother be in the Mother field and Father be in the Father field (and not vice versa).  However, you have reminded me that for gay relationships and adoptions I need to look into this further (otherwise the database might say that a gay man is a grandmother, which of course doesn't make any sense).

More reports, statistics, all doable. Graphing, not really doable, unfortunately. If I could do family trees they would be very very static not dynamically generated like true family tree software, or even the in-game family trees generated by the Sims 2.

It appears I've got relationship thing working - except in the case of adoption and gay partners (which I will try to resolve). Also just to let you know up front - at least right now, it will only be blood relationships, not "step" or "in-law" or "wife of," etc. Right now what seems to be working is determining:
mother, father, brother, sister, half-brother, half-sister, uncle, aunt, half-uncle, half-aunt, nephew, niece, half-nephew, half-niece, cousin, grandmother, grandfather, granddaughter, grandson, great grandmother, great grandfather, great granddaughter, great grandson. Cousin will only be first cousin. It will flag other relatives but other than these will be noted as "Distant Relative." (So a 1st cousin 3ce removed would simply be a "Distant Relative").

Umm... soon ??  In Sim days or realtime? 
I was originally hoping by Nov. 1 but I'm not quite so sure of that date anymore. But yes, barring unforseen circumstances, you will be able to transfer the data you've already entered into the new update. 

One thing I am excited about is that it appears I've got the relationship indicators working. In other words, you'll be able to see how Sims are related by: father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, etc.

Vecsta or anyone else who has had this issue -

I have tried reproducing this problem several times and can't. The only way I get a similar result is if there is another Sim with the exact same name. I suspect you may have had duplicate names in the database. I should have mentioned this earlier, but as Zythe recognized, the database goes a little funky with duplicate names. At least one character in the first or last name needs to be different. I think I'm going to add a warning message when somebody tries to enter a duplicate name.

If this is NOT the problem, please let me know, and please provide any extra detail as to how this problem occurs.

yes, yes, Yes, YES! I forgot about this. I would like to have more authentically overweight Sims. IMHO, their "fat" is just slightly pudgy to me And thick, beefy Sims. I'd like to be able to alter body type like we can faces - sliders on different sections such as hips, chest, legs, etc.

Yes and somebody has requested "In Love With"s too. I'm thinking that there will be a whole 'nother tab dedicated just to social relationships and chemistry. I suspect the Tabs are going to get a little bit smaller so that I can squish a couple more in.

Yes, like Lynda describes, the lower box is meant to be a "record" of what happened in the relationship, and the upper box "Marital Status" is the current status. You can't enter directly into the Marital Status because it's a calculation based upon what is listed in the lower box.

At this time the only way to change the relationship is to click on "Add/change partnership." Because of the way the DB is designed right now, you can't change it from "Married" to "Divorced" for example by selecting the partner and changing it. Otherwise it wouldn't automatically change on the partner's side. I wrestled with how to design the whole partnership aspect in the database, there are different ways with different trade-offs.

On a different note, yesterday I spent a long time working on adding ways to track relationships to other Sims. It's not too difficult to establish who is related by blood to another Sim.  It's harder to establish how (grandmother, uncle, etc.) This part will require a lot of testing if I can get it working... 

Agree with what others have been saying here. Some of these requests are probably available in the mod community, I just need to go look for them because so far I have been playing my game pretty vanilla:

- more toys and objects for toddlers and kids, and things like baby swings/bassinets for babies. I never stuck my babies on the floor and I always end up getting two cribs, one for upstairs, one for downstairs 'cause I don't like seeing the Sims' babies on the floor.
-  more hair, especially men's, ethnic, authentic curly, and salt & pepper for middle-age/elders. A lot of elders I know are not 100% gray! I know some of these are available in the community, I just need to look for them.
- A grand piano, available in at least black, white, and wood-color.
- More upscale items for wealthy Sims. What about a tennis court with interactions / animations? Basketball hoop for the kids/teens/adults.
- Autonomously performing WITHOUT that "checking for tips" interaction!
- More interactions. And this may be a nit, but I would love the whole jealousy/affair interactions to be a bit more complex. I don't think one "flirt" interaction should constitute "had an affair with."
- More landscaping! New bushes and trees.
- How about in addition to the novel writing/painting, an option to become a music composer and "sell" the music?

I'm not sure these all constitute a "pack" but they are things I'd want to see in upcoming EPs.

I think (have to go back and check) that if one or both parents are "born in game" then the child is set to "born in game" otherwise, it's left blank because the child could be a CAS (or a Maxis-made Sim). Maybe the default should be set to "born in game" .... lemme think about that.

Me too! I really should be playing the game, at least to help improve the database  !

Yes that's a glitch the husband is supposed to be set to male. Will be fixed; thanks for pointing it out.

Oh, and yes if you set the status of the husband to "Dead" it will say she is widowed in the Marital Status field up at the top. It won't say it in the Spouse(s) box, however; that will stay "Married".

One thing I've noted is that *right* after you insert a picture, in order to go to the full-screen view, you need to click somewhere else first, then click directly on the picture. (Which is a bit annoying, so I just fixed it - in the next release you won't even have to click somewhere else first. Thanks for pointing me to this.)

Does this solve your problem?


-- Peg

I'm sorry that this happened. Just so I can understand better, were there a lot of other things happening on your PC at the time you were updating the record? I don't think it had anything to do with updating the LTWs but just that for some unknown reason, FileMaker runtime locked up at that time. Although this can happen, it is pretty rare (not that this makes you feel any better, though).

In any case, let's try to fix it this way. Press Ctrl-Shift at the same time you click on the Sims2DB.EXE file. It should open up a dialog box asking you to select the damaged file. This will recover the file and should fix the problem.

Please let me know if this works.

Thanks,

-- Peg

One easy way to make the date fields (birth, marriage, death, etc.) more flexible would be to make these text fields, not true date fields. So you could then enter "12 days before Elder" or "15 Sim Days."

In the process, however, you would lose the ability to sort or search by "after" or "before" a certain date.

We can still keep track of when a Sim was created in the database, but this wouldn't necessarily be the "birth" date. So in essence there would be two fields, a Birth date which is however you want to enter it, but not sortable, and a Creation date which is the date that the record was created.

Thoughts? Comments?

Thanks all for your comments! I appreciate all the feedback. I'm noting everything, and here's a quick reply to address some of your questions/suggestions:

- A report by age level will definitely be in the next release.
- I looked at the format of a Gedcom file. I can definitely set up something to import names, gender, and basic information about individuals from a Gedcom file. Importing the relationships would be much trickier. Not necessarily undoable, but I'd have to look into it further.
- Adding the default Pleasantview, Veronaville, etc. data is a good idea.
- I'm pretty sure having the surname updated in the Spouse relationship can be done. One quick question, though, for historical purposes might you want to keep the original name, for example Kennedy Cox is engaged to Jennifer Burb; the next entry is Kennedy Cox is married to Jennifer Cox; is it okay if the previous entry now becomes Kennedy Cox engaged to Jennifer Cox?
- Witch, about having to reenter the data which didn't show up in list view... Can you reproduce this? If so, can you tell me what sequence of steps produced this problem?
- To completely delete a child you have to delete the entire Sim record (by clicking on Delete Sim at the top of the screen), otherwise you can "unlink" the child by clicking on Add/Change Parents and blanking out the Parent fields... does this make sense?
- I'm not sure what you mean by "genetic" character traits, with record numbers. What are these record numbers?
- Just to let you know, clicking on the thumbnail picture will take you to a full-screen version of the picture.
- I will look into everything else you all have mentioned as well, such as the tabbing, dialog box order, etc.
- Joanm, I don't know what to say about nothing happening when you click on the Sims2DB.EXE file. Double-clicking should definitely start the database. Did you move the Sims2DB.EXE file from the folder with the other files? Does anything happen at all?

I'm appreciating all of your comments and viewing it all as constructive.

I realize that entering all the data of preexisting Sims is a bit laborious. However, it is impossible for me and the database to pull data out of the Sims 2 program. I am not a programmer persay but a former database programmer (most notably FileMaker). On the other hand, if there is any way to export several of the fields using something like SimPE into a tab-delimited or comma delimited text file, then I could incorporate a script to import that data in.

I think the best way for someone who already has tons of Sims is to simply start entering data with the Sims you're playing now and slowly add in each household as you play them. I would not recommend anyone who has a hundred Sims or more to try and enter it all in at one sitting ! Well, you could try, but...

Thanks everyone for your comments so far and I will look into the problem with the reports button/returning to the data entry.

Phew, the initial test (alpha/beta/gamma?) version of the Sims2DB database is ready!   

Please go to http://www.sims2db.com/sims2dbv05.zip to download.

Unzip the files into a folder, and then click on the Sims2DB.EXE file to start the database.

I'm not limiting testers but haven't publicized it anywhere else than here...

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, look down a few postings to the one entitled "Database is almost ready..."

Cheers!

I can TOTALLY relate...

I was hoping to have it up by yesterday evening, and then I realized I had to find a place to host the darn thing, because Geocities Free won't cut it. (It's not a really big file, about 4 MB zipped, but obviously I can't upload it to the official Sims site, etc.) No worries... my plan is by this evening!

In reply to Lauraglenn: yes there will be printable reports available. There is one semi-customizable Excel-like view (called a table view) where you'll be able to position and resize columns and this can be printed. I also have a couple of other printable reports but this is is kind of the tricky part because there are so many possible ways to present the data. I fully expect that these reports will be tweaked and more reports added.

I think the way I'll personally use the database is to print the reports and use these also as a form to add more data. Or just review it before I start playing. I don't think I'll switch back and forth during play but take notes and then enter in afterwards. It was kind of weird I started playing yesterday after a 10-day hiatus and I had no idea to do with the one family I was playing, I'd sort of forgotten who they were and had lost momentum.  Previously I'd been playing (not just that family) at least a couple of hours a day every day.

I'm hoping to have a release available for testing in the next day or two. I can already tell that there will probably be a lot of possible enhancements... things keep popping up in my head.  I started this project because I too had downloaded a genealogy program and entered all my data - but it is a trial version expiring in one day and I didn't feel like paying for it. Also I found it cumbersome to enter data that's unique to the Sims 2. I do love the tree charting aspects of the genealogical software though.

As far as the date field in the marriage/birth, it's a bit of a holdover from my working with the genealogy program.  If it turns out very few people really use that kind of data, maybe it'd be removed or deemphasized. (I do recall one person saying they kept track of their Sims' birthdays and only let them age on their actual birthday!) But it might be fun to track how long you've been playing a particular Sim - in real days. It's harder to figure out Sim days, especially if they've been drinking the green juice. 15 days till Elder, but one's gone through 3 bottles of Elixir? Hmmmm. Good question.

Unfortunately,  and this is the biggest drawback, it does not pull in any data, so you need to enter in all the data manually. I have to confess it is a bit time consuming (extra for me, because every time I've added a record I have found a new thing to tweak). If you have a lot of Sims it will take awhile. Now that I've entered in my data I can see I am managing about 40 Sims, and 15 households plus a couple of dorms. I know many people have a lot more Sims than that.  It's time for some of these Sims to transition... 

However, once most of the data is in there, it is a breeze to update.  If your Sims aren't having twins every other hour, no problem. 

I do wonder whether a tool like SimPE has a function whereby some of the data could be exported out, but I have to confess I tend to use very few hacks/mods and have not yet installed this software. If it turns out there's enough interest in it I will pursue it further.

Okay, for a little more info, here's a sample screenshot...

Well I've been putting a lot of time into this Sims 2 database... it's been an interesting project! Anyway as I've designed for more than just myself (trying to make it user-friendly, navigable, etc.) I would love to have a few testers before I figure out how to distribute it (totally freeware, of course) more widely. So if you're interested in testing it, please let me know. It's designed on a few-years-old version of FileMaker Pro but you won't have to have FileMaker to use it. 

If this is not the proper forum for discussing this, please point me to a better place! Cheers. And now I'm off to actually *play* the Sims 2, which I haven't in over a week!!!

Hello - this is my first post on this forum...  Anyway, I'm designing a database to be used to keep track of my Sims... I don't have nearly as many Sims as most of you do but still I found myself losing track of who was what and where... naturally the database is turning out to be a little more complicated than I expected.  And I made a vow that I can't play any more Sims 2 until I've made good progress on the database, so I'm having major Sims withdrawals.

Anyway if others are interested, I plan to make it available when it's done...