Nevermind that this is already official, now it's ULTRA OFFICIAL!

Thank god we had you here to tell us.

Lifetime Rewards are now categorized and have a drop-down filter. I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere.

There's also a "Be Frisky" interaction now which is, I think, just the Tickle animation but applied "romantically"?

Bachelor parties are silly. The sims come, they dance, do general party stuff, and then a random Party Dancer from a small pool (probably 2 or 3 for each gender) comes, puts down and turns on a boom box, and dances the basic dance with a spotlight shining on them. The spotlight looks stupid, the dance is stupid, and the dancer has no AI but to dance for hours, after which they party like everyone else for a while if they like the party.

They really need some better dancing AI.

Apart from that, though, it is a cute new party type. You can ask a sim to give a toast, and spray others with "Fizzy Nectar", and my party went from 5PM to 7AM before anybody decided it was time to leave, so they are overnight parties too.

Oh, and sims are given a few days off after a wedding "to get settled" now.

so basically they somehow saved the same floor twice and now the game doesn't know which one to read at any given time?

Nope. The shiny version is considered an alternate floor tile, not available in the catalog. It has no preset designs, and even if you save a design to it, it doesn't keep the shiny.

There are 6 new tiles in Generations. 3 seem to have shinyness as a default (upper left, upper mid, lower left), none are this one in particular. Each of the shiny ones has the others as design choices, but they lose their shinyness when you change the design. (see second picture) The other 3 styles are not shiny and can't get shiny by any means.

Well, you're getting old, so I guess you can't be blamed for being blind.

See that giant, blatant sheen on the tiles in both images? That shinyness.

So I placed the Basically A House lot down and moved in a family to find...the tile floors were shiny. This isn't a base game thing, right? I don't remember it. In Base Game + All other expansions, only certain textures were shiny- like the flat black leather texture. But this is a stone texture, and the shine is consistent across the floor rather than across individual pieces.

Either way, base game or not, the floors are very odd:

-If cloned, they stay shiny
-If placed from the catalog, they are not shiny
-They can be designed just fine and keep their shinyness
-The shinyness is not connected to the design, as copying the design to other floors doesn't make them shiny.




(Note that the tiles closer to the camera in the second shot are not shiny, despite being the same floor with the same design)

There are no buttons anywhere to enable this, "Help" doesn't bring up any cheats that might do it, there's no object to do it. The shine is a little extreme but it'd be nice to have for any floor you wanted.

after spending some time with some adults, I can say that this really does feel like there is absolutely nothing but furniture to this expansion. I have noticed only...4 new interactions between the two adults, not counting "ask on date" (which seems to do nothing but give date icons to each sim). Maybe it feels like an expansion with kids and teens, but an expansion shouldn't require a kid or a teen present for you to realize the game has changed beyond what a patch could give you.

Pillow fights being back is nice, but is that really all to here is to it for the adults?

Home Videos are kind of...horrible.

They're cute, and they work, but when controlling a sim taking them, they move extremely fast. The videos also record in widescreen if you're using a widescreen resolution, but only play in widescreen if you play them on a widescreen TV. They are smushed on 4:3 TVs. I assume that means that on a non-widescreen resolution, your videos will be stretched on widescreen TVs.

But peeing gives them a positive moodlet, which gives them more focus, which is a net gain on how well they're doing on the quest.

So you're complaining...that they automatically keep themselves...happy? If that is somehow an issue, turn free will off, because I hate to break it to you but the whole point of free will is to let sims take care of themselves a little bit.

Of course. Their increase was from 20 to 25. They average around 27 on Very High detail, so this helps the game run much, much nicer for them when they are in a crowd situation or on a populated lot. The non-immediate sims are no longer allowed to cause much strain on the computer, even though they've got the details on Very High. (They run on High normally anyway, though, where they get >30FPS, but it does drop down a bit there with crowds too)

I had a friend with a crappy computer do a quick, not-fully-conclusive-since-I-didn't-give-many-fucks test on this. I had them line sims up, one per every other tile for 64 tiles and played with a regular Very High setting. Then I had them load the same file, but with Very High set so the LOD settings were the same as Low. Their FPS from that 32-sim scene went up by 5!

An increase of 5FPS can be a big deal. And that big of an increase for a crowd- an oversized one, at that- means it's probably got a noticable effect in general if your computer isn't that great.

I wasn't using it as a verb.

Moodlets don't inter-connect motives but their whole purpose ois to have an effect similar to what you're talking about. Even if a sim is hungry and bored, they'll still use a skilling object as long as their overall mood- affected heavily by moodlets- is good. So if a sim who is vain and likes the outdoors goes outside after looking at themself in a mirror and there's music playing outside, they'll gladly work out even if they're hungry and bored and possibly even tired, because all they mostly care about is the overall mood.

Looking through the graphicsrules file in the /bin folder (latest installed expansion/stuff pack) I discovered that for each Sim Detail setting, there's also a LOD distance value, telling the game at what distance (I have no idea what unit of measurement is used here) a sim becomes what LOD.

Here are the Low settings:
RenderSimLODDistances "2, 8, 15, 100"
(This means sims from 0-2 distance are very high LOD, sims from 2-8 are high, sims from 8-15 are medium, and sims from 15-100 are low [and presumably any past that are very low])

And here are the Very High settings:
RenderSimLODDistances "25, 50, 100, 1000"
(This means the game waits until a sim is 1,000 away [again, no idea what unit of measurement is used here] to make them very low LOD, instead making sims from 100-1000 Low.)

But here's the thing. If you have the game on Very High sim detail, are you doing that for sims in the immediate area, or for sims far away from the camera? Why in the world do sims need to wait until they're so far away to be extremely low LOD? You can't see them well enough to know what LOD they're at.

So the solution here is to change the Very High RenderSimLODDistances settings. I made mine match the Medium setting. So now when my game is set to Very High sim detail, fewer sims are at higher LODs and the sims I can barely see/don't give a fuck about anyway aren't being given so much attention from my graphics card.

It won't make a major difference in performance for most, but this little change could give you noticable improvements in speed depending on your computer. Just be sure to back up the original file.

It was small for me (1920x1080 as well, and it does indeed look much crappier on lower resolutions) but I just moved my monitor closer. Tada!

Though a lot of the text is dark-brown-on-brown and is still obnoxious.

That's how it already works. More expensive usually means faster motive restoration, basic crap works poorly and it takes an eternity to restore motives.

The problem I'm having is the motives seem to drop so slowly to begin with that the length of time it takes for stuff to restore your motives is negligible in comparison. For example, totally made up numbers, if the motives dropped so that you had ~8 hours of free time in a day, you'd have 16 hours of motive-fixing and 8 hours of whatever. This is how it felt to me in Sims 1/2. But if they dropped so slowly you only needed to dedicate 16 hours of motive fixing every 40 hours, you've got 24 hours of free time to do whatever in between- that is how it seems to be to me in Sims 3. That's 24 hours of free time in 40 hours instead of
14 hours of free time every 40 hours. With such little free time in the second situation, buying new stuff makes things much easier because it gives you more free time. But with so much free time in the first situation, buying better stuff only serves to make the easy even easier instead of making the mildly difficult easier.

I mean I haven't sat here and done all the math to figure this crap out, but I know this much- Hunger, Energy, and Bladder dropping with specific durations is more desirable for me than Hunger, Energy, and Bladder slowing down as they get lower based on the moodlets you have from them. I already made the mod, I timed Hunger so you need to eat twice a day and Bladder so you pee 3/4 times a day, and in a few days of play I found myself having a lot more fun, because my sims had to be attended to more often than once per day per motive per sim. That is how I like to play- I like my sims to EARN their skills, earn new stuff, and earn an easier life. Not start with an easy life and make their way to an easier one. That's the whole reason I've got a bills mod that means they can't even spend all the money they start with on their house like in the base game. My sims have hard lives when they start out. They dont have 100 simoleons in their wallet and then earn enough money to pay for 6 weeks of bills within the first two days.

In a game like this, the rabbit holes seem...not that big of a deal. I can't be the only one who likes the stories and the detailed drawings you get for major events in the forest. I've never played one of those older heavily-text-based adventure games, but the choices and such from events in the "rabbit holes" seem like they derive from games like that. In a good way.

For those interested in making conversions, S3PE doesn't seem to have any problem exporting files from the game, and all the hair files can be found in the various fullbuild packages. I can't get any other programs to open anything, though.

So...people are going to you to report issues with my mod because you made a similar one and they just happened to know this (but used mine instead despite yours doing more)?

Are you retarded or do you actually expect me to believe you?

That's just the thing. THese solutions are just not doable. You show me a program that can batch edit objects, or open every object at once and let me click through and change them and save them all at once, and I'll gladly multiply the prices of everything in the game. But at present that would take an unbelievably ridiculous amount of time. It's just not plausible. I did it already to every single tree in the game- and it took me hours, thanks largely in part to how s3oc does not hold a cache and has to load all the objects every single time. Doing it to every object in general? It's not going to happen.

Unless somebody can come up with a magic multiplier that auto-spends twice as much money on everything or something. I asked Pescado to look into such a multiplier and he had no interest, unfortunately.

As for motives filling too fast, that is also EXACTLY the problem. The dumbest, most incompetent sim can fillt heir hunger in an instant. Cooking skill is abso-fucking-lutely worthless except for moodlets. Things like that. But nobody seems to know how to fix that. i've wanted to retool the way hunger works since the week the game came out but have no idea where to start. I'd love it if an apple only filled 5 hunger and meals filled more or less based on the moodlets they gave. But nobody has really looked into this to get something like that to happen.

Moryrie- "I've seen people take issue with one of your mods, therefore I assume based on how sandy my vagina is today that your billing mod probably sucked too." One person reported an issue- one. And I could not reproduce it. Nobody else experienced it. It was an issue on their end. The only other dissenting comments on the TV was yours where you cried that boohoo you did it first and to other TVs.


Anyway, whatever. It's my idea. I want to do it. I think I'll enjoy the game more if I can't spend the whole game day skilling with no interruptions. I just thought other people might agree and would have some input. Apparently the input is "Thanks for trying to make the game a little more difficult, but fuck you, you are retarded because I don't like that idea."

Yeah, I fucking know. I made it. And I spent quite some time working out the details tod etermine just how much harder the bills would make the game.

You guys are having an astoundingly difficult time understanding that I don't want grinding to take longer. I want grinding to take just as much time as it does now- but to be interrupted by motive issues. Like in. The sims. 1.

Well, yes, it very much does.

What you're proposing is making everything the same, but making the grinding take longer. The difference thre is you don't make as much money because you can't get promoted nearly as easily, so you take longer to get more stuff, which doesn't make things any easier. Bigger, better house = no real change whatsoever. Working to build a bigger home is meaningless.

What I am proposing is making the grinding take the same amount of time, but limiting how often you can grind by making the motives more urgent and something you need to deal with more often, and once you DO get more stuff, it gets easier to raise your motives, so you can grind more often. Bigger, better house = Faster, easier moneymaking. Working to build a bigger home has meaning.

I implore you, open The Sims 1 again and note how gradually you start to get better things, and the impact those better things have on how much easier it is to raise your motives. The Sims 3 does not work this way to nearly the same degree. Better stuff doesn't matter all that much because you can raise the biggest motives in no time (hunger, bladder, hygiene) with barely a difference between objects of higher or lower quality. That difference would be more meaningful if the motives had more of an impact on what you could do and when, as opposed to your sim only caring about anything when they're literally starving.

The difficulty modifiers only apply to skills and jobs, dont they? With those upped, all that changes is I spend the same amount of time constantly grinding for skills, but it takes more grinding. So it's still super easy to get your mood up, and then you grind forever. :\

I don't know what I said that made it seem like I don't know that.

The goal here is to make it so that sims can't be level 10 of all skills and get to level 10 of 4 jobs and have a megamansion with one lifetime. The goal is to make it so sims can't constantly grind for skills and simoleons with 2 hour breaks to boost motives when they aren't sleeping. I thought some people may be interested. If you are not, I do not really...care.