Yes, and making motives drop faster makes it harder to succeed.

This is how Sims 1 was. I went back to Sims 1 after getting frustrated with Sims 3 being far too easy, and realized the reason it was too easy is because of the motives. in Sims 1, you spend so much time managing motives that you rarely get a chance to work on skills (Although that was more because cheaper objects took forever to raise the motives, and less because of how fast they dropped, but I can't go through every single object and change these things.) If you have a job, it's even worse. You really NEED to buy better stuff to have an easier time. But in Sims 3, motives can all be filled in a very short time and then you have the rest of the day to make 10,000 simoleons with no troubles whatsoever.

So I'm trying to make things drop faster so you have to spend more time dealing with motives. I don't want my sims to be able to stand and fish at the river for 15 hours straight before they finally have enough bad moodlets that they refuse to do it anymore.

I am working on a mod to alter the way the game works with Decay rates. As it is, the game is just too easy for me. This is my main problem with it. Your sim can eat one apple and be good for two days, for example. Motives drop too slowly and fill too quickly and there's no reason to improve any of your furniture or even pay attention to your sim.

So to start, I'm messing with decay rates.

By default, decay rates GO SIGNIFICANTLY SLOWER the lower a motive is. From -100 to -81, the hunger motive drops at less than 1 per hour. But from 100 to -31, it drops at almost 12 per hour. What this means is that a "starving" sim can "starve" for over 20 hours before they die. This is closer to realism, but it's also totally destroying the whole "gameplay" thing that, yes, is hidden in the game behind all the immortal sims who are fully satisfied from a damn apple.

In my initial test I made hunger drop at a constant rate. That way, when your sim was at 0 hunger, they were absolutely halfway to starving instead of 40 hours away from starving. In this experiment, it took 16 hours for my sim to go from 100 hunger to starving to death. That was with a decay rate of 12 per hour. So I need to make the rate a little faster if I want sims to have to eat more than once per day.

The thing is, should the decay rate be constant? Or should it slow the higher the motive is? Meaning if a sim eats food, and becomes full, they stay full for a while- perhaps with a decay rate of 10 from 100 to 60. Then when their motive is below 60, it goes to full speed (20, perhaps? That means 8 hours until starvation), meaning the more often you eat the less often you have low hunger motives. I'd also probably make negative hunger motives show up earlier so that you are encouraged to keep your hunger full and not let it go below the halfway mark.

I guess what I'm saying with all this explanation is I need ideas. In a harder more sims-1-style game, how would YOU like the motives to work? Constant rate? Slower when full? Negative moodlets showing up earlier? What do you think of these ideas?

Here is my test file which changes nothing but the Hunger and bladder decay rates to be constant (for all ages including baby, toddler, and elder, though the rates are different for them). Hunger drops at 12 per hour and bladder at 15. Hovering over the motives with AM installed tells you the current number and the rate of drop. This is to get a feel for how much faster the motive drops when it doesn't slow down.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1xfcl1345ckghg5

I think they optimized loading a bit, both initially and in-game. When I go to a lot now, the sims on it are usually low quality and then eventually become regular, high quality. I have never seen this happen before the patch. As a result, things are consistently smooth instead of slowing down to load a lot and all the sims on it- seemingly because it's doing it gradually with sims, when before it would only gradually load the lot (with objects not popping into view or being devoid of texture for a little bit as the game streamed them).

In fact, I personally never saw a sim or a car in low LOD mode. They were always high LOD. But I've already noticed today alone that sims will enter into low LOD mode as they walk a certain distance away, and cars will do the same.

It won't mean anything for download times, but if your problem is hard drive space, you can remove the updates yourself. I just made backups myself a few days ago, all you have to do is make an iso (or in this case, download one), open it in MagicIso or a similar program, and delete the "Updates" and "MacUpdates" folders. The updates are absolutely unecessary as part of the install process itself, so they install just fine and are usually quite a few GB smaller.

Actually, as long as no sims in your game have any ties to the vacation hood (relationships or whatever), you can copy the nhd and exportDB files from the save file into the save files of any new worlds, and get the edited hood no problem.

You just have to make sure that you edit the world from a fresh save and never let any sims do anything in it before you save it. If you take a sim there and so much as talk to another sim, you can't properly transfer it over. So just start a new game, go to edit town, edit the world you want to edit, and only move a sim over if you want to edit the sims in the hood- but do not, do not, absolutely do not let the sim do anything but stand still in one spot.

It works flawlessly.

Oh, I totally missed that one. That's close enough that it shouldn't cause any problems.

however, it seems that after a few tries, the game does take on the 1280x1024 res, and it looks great.

No, it just stretches. Which is kinda blowing my mind because it seems like there's no rhyme or reason to which resolutions function properly, stretch, or letterbox in some way.

It should be noted my "monitor" is a TV, but it's a TV intended for use as a TV/monitor anyway. And I still am not sure if the catalyst control center can help at all or not.

I'm...not sitting 3 inches away from it. It's, like, 30% of my field of view. And I would like to use that resolution because it is 16:9 and won't have the minor distortion you get from using 16:10 on a 16:9 screen.

While I'm at it, does anyone know why 1280x720 can't seem to be forced? It always reverts to 1024x768 like that part of the config file is wrong or something.

The main problem is that when you're looking through a long list of extremely similar objects, it can be a little hard to tell at a glance what is what, especially with the size of the thumbnails and the poor lighting of their pictures. I'd like to be able to look at the catalog and be able to tell without trying too hard what any given item is, like in Sims 1 where, because of the way objects were made and the lack of true lighting, everything was extremely visible in the catalog.

It doesnt help that the CC and expansion icons are oversized.

I thought I found a setting that would fix it, but no luck. However, 1280x800 works and scales (for some reason, even though other 16:10 resolutions don't) and forcing 1280x720 doesn't seem to work- it reverts to 1024x768 (which also, for some reason, scales).

It doesn't look too bad but you can tell it's a little tiny bit distorted.

The UI *isnt* bigger with a lower resolution and the black boxing, because it's displayed at 1:1. If anything, it becomes smaller. Significantly so.

2 is a legitimate idea, however.

Edit: Or not. Black box. :| I have no idea why it isn't forcibly upscaling, maybe it's a Catalyst Control Center setting.

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/111/resomolutions.png

Mind circling that one for me?

And before anyone says it, 16:10 or 85:48 is not "close enough"- any resolution other than 16:9 gets displayed on my monitor at 1:1, so in a box in the middle of the screen instead of over the whole screen. I think that's a pretty legit reason to be using the only existing 16:9 resolution.

Well, for one thing. 1920x1080 is the *only* 16:9 resolution, so...

I doubt it, but I was wondering if there's any way to use a smaller UI for a bigger resolution (though I doubt the UI works in such a way), or make things forcibly bigger, or something...

I play at 1920x1080 and the UI is really really tiny, it doesn't grow to compensate or anything. I was hoping a higher res would mean bigger thumbnails (though now that I think about it, a lower res gets bigger thumbnails usually, I had it backwards) but instead I've got these tiny, worthless little things and it's impossible to navigate the catalog without leaning close to the screen or clicking each individual object to see the expanded view.

It doesn't help that the thumbnail lighting is horrendous. The light should be directed on the front of the object, but EA doesn't think that makes sense.

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/968/ts3sp032011020421312124.jpg
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/149/ts3sp032011020421332693.jpg

No img tags on the pictures because at a lower resolution than 1920x1080 you're not going to be able to tell what the problem is anyway.

Eh, it's got around 40 items (but I didn't bother scouring the enormous deco section to count those), which is more than some of the sims 2 packs had and in line with the other packs. I think people expected more build stuff though.

The outdoor stuff is distinctly outdoors-y though, which is the big selling point to me, I think. Any other fridge or stove looks ridiculous outside, but these new ones are right at home in the yard.

I thought it came with a new radio station, though? Nothing new shows up on the stereo. 

How does steam solve an issue of lengthy reinstalls? You realize that to reinstall a steam game you have to...redownload it. Right?

I've tried that one twice and both times the live camera was default.

I'm looking for the best most comprehensive live mode camera out there.

I'm too used to Sims 3 camera and I can't tell what exactly is wrong with Sims 2 camera, and I need something to make it feel *better*. I have "Live Camera Fix" from MTS, but it's not quite doing it.

I think it might be the way the game doesn't like to pitch and rotate at the same time, but I doubt there's a fix for that.

congratulations

Can anyone tell me the setoutfit command? I can't find it anywhere and it would be pretty useful.

I thought it was setoutfit everyday.1 sleepwear.1 or something like that, but it doesn't work.

I also seem to remember a code that put all clothing in all categories, but I can't find that one either.

Just reinstalled BB, diner didn't show up. I'm going to go with "latest patch altered it, so it doesn't show up in a new install".

Diner appears fine for me, too. They did update the diner, though, with the latest patch- so maybe if you install after the latest patch, it doesn't show up properly because it has been altered? They fixed the ambient noise to be appropriate.

Weeks later, still can't manage to get it to work.

If anyone CAN get it to open, would you mind just...doing it for me?  All I need is the texture for the sand changed to the sunset valley sand texture, it's a 5 minute process and then an upload. I'd really appreciate it.

I understand the differences. I am simply presenting the idea that it's a lot easier to know what you've got with the month system (Since yours is cluttered and not organized anyway, as you've stated) and that you don't have to spend time redownloading the same information each and every time there's an update (I fully understand that it's an "addition"/overwrite system, that does not change the fact that for a 50mb update to one of your files, someone has to redownload the entire thing again, which is a waste of time and bandwidth- however little extra bandwidth it might be).

Although I have to ask, how does fewer packages = more space? You're not limited to the number of files you put in your mods folder...

I'm not discounting your system. I'm sure lots of people like it (although I will note that I think a big reason for that would be that the download thread is a complete fucking mess of downloads and it's impossible to find anything, and your system keeps it in one post every month or so), I'm just proposing this alternative that is, quite frankly, a lot easier. One link, one download, and you've got the entire store and don't have to redownload any of it on a regular basis.