Elder bug + fresh meat

[kutto]

Hi everybody. As you can probably tell, I happen to be a new member. I've been lurking for about a week, and I found this is a fun community, and Pescado is not only awesome, but deliciously evil as well. 

Anyways, on to my bug. A while ago, I had two of my sims get together. One of my playable sims move in a townie. I made absolutely sure that they stayed the same age. I thought it would be neat. The problem started once the two got close to death. When I noticed that they were about 1 or 2 days from death, I payed more attention to them in order to get a platinum grave. the first bug is that one day, they got younger, but they day counter aged them appropriately. The next day, the age bar flung forward to the right day, but something else happened. One sim died, but the other didn't. I am 100% sure that they were the same age. Is the game programmed to do this, so as not to give Death too many thigns to do?

Sorry if this is confusing. I really look forward to these forums. Thanks.

[BlueSoup]

I noticed that too, the other day when I was aging my Sims to stay in time as well.  Their ages started off the same, but then were different on the bar when they were elders except I knew they had exactly the same number of days remaining.  They died at different times though (he died at exactly 6pm, and she died at around 3am when she got up to clean the bathroom)

[J. M. Pescado]

Unlike the lengths of other age stages, the Elder stage is not of fixed length. The age bar, however, is proportional, not linear, so one elder's age bar may be for an age of 20 days, another for 30 days. Both will be the same age bar, but the one with a 20-day duration will fill faster, since it will be full in 20 days instead of 30.

Sims begin the "drop dead" action when 1800 rolls around when their internal value says "0 days remaining". However, this value is not directly displayed in game. Age durations of other ages generally display as N+1 days remaining, where N is the internal value. However, a sim who happens to be sitting down will not transition or die until he happens to be standing up at the hourly tick. If your sim is consistently sitting down at the top of the hour, he may hold off death for quite some time.

[MutantBunny]

I read someplace that the length of their lives is influenced by how happy a life they've led, how many of their wants and apsirations have been fulfilled. Somehow that goes into the calculation of the number of days of life.

[J. M. Pescado]

I have noticed that sometimes an elder will gain extra days to live, sort of like a parole, and this will cause the age bar to apparently "Reverse", even though the "Days Old" number remains the same.

Simple math tells us why: 24/25 is clearly represents a larger fraction than 24/30.

[kutto]

Wow, there is a lot of math involved in the elder stage!

Now that you mention it, I found it odd that the second sim died at 7. I was kind of disheartened at 6 when she didn't die (after they didn't synch death, I just wanted her gone). At 6, she was sitting. I learned something new today.

[syberspunk]

You can probably read a bit more detail about aging in this thread for TwoJeffs' Age Duration hack. There is some randomness involved, and some of it is due to aspiration. I haven't observed the long term effects of the hack, but it seems to work fine so far in testing. I tweaked my version to keep randomness for adults and elders just cuz I likes all sorts of randomness and surprises.

Ste

[jsalemi]

Yea, I love TJ's aging hack -- it makes much more sense for the adult stage to be longer and the elder to be shorter that the maxis default settings.