The calendar
Calendars are iffy things. They’re pretty much critical for running ‘governed’ hoods and they add a nice sense of immersion – readers can sense the time passing. However, the real world doesn’t translate well into the Sims’ when it comes to the calendar.
I like to world-build from a Sim perspective. Sims only perceive life in days and weeks (due to weekdays/weekends). So, the easiest calendar is one that counts what are known as ‘Sim Days’ from day 1 onwards. I don’t find this terribly immersive, although it works.
In TS2 I decided that 20 days would equal a ‘year’ (a tropical year I guess) due to the 5 day seasons. Complicated. It obviously messed up the days of the week with respect to seasons, especially because I played 3 day periods Prosperity-style). I ended up having to chart out the seven year cycle with a spreadsheet.
Complicated 5-day season calendar system
THEN I realised that I had to synchronise the weather all the lots. (Whenever you move onto a new lot the season resets to ’1 day left in summer’.)
But then, I saw some other Sims websites (like Lakeside Heights), that use the ’1 day = 1year’ system. It produces nice ages with real-looking years. The other benefit of using ‘year-like’ days is that genealogy looks more realistic for use in family trees.
Now that TS3 will have no seasons, for my Hood Project I plan on a simple date system, days only.Time will be measured Sim Days and Weeks. And the first day can even be SD 1900, as a tribute to SimCity 2000.
