Premades and Precepts

I’ve posted in the past about my fondness for using random generators while simming. For the moments that your own creativity doesn’t cut it, it’s always fun to defer to a random number and a list of elements; it’s all the better when the power of computing and other people’s work does the work for you!

OK, I’ll get to the point now. I’ve added several more random generators to my links, mainly for my own reference, but there’s probably somebody out there who will find them useful too. Hover over the links for a short description of what you can do with them, but note that not all of the links have descriptions. I’m lazy.

I found out through Simprograms that Jeff Green, former member of Department Sims over at EA and current EA.com editor, has a Mailbag where you can send in questions. Questions on anything! I thought to myself, there’s no way I’m passing up such an opportunity to rant a little about Sims paysites. The world must know…

Anyway, here’s the contents of my short letter, preserved for online posterity.

(And in case it ever gets a response…but I’m not very optimistic.)

Dear Jeff,
I love The Sims 3, but we fans of The Sims have had to put up with paysites for years. These sites make a tidy profit from selling unlicensed user-made content and mods. As a lifelong PC gamer and modder, it disturbs me that The Sims is virtually the only modern PC franchise where paysites operate so openly and rampantly. I’m not seeing a Dragon Age or Battlefield 2 paysite taking off any time soon, either – it’s just The Sims where you’re ‘allowed’ to stick a price tag on your pixels and get away with it. My question is, why does EA turn a blind eye to Sims paysites? Selling modified game files breaks all sorts of IP laws and the game’s license agreement to boot, so it’s entirely within your rights to be cracking out the legal threats and busting these scumbags. Instead, I see paysites getting endorsed on the official forums and their representatives invited to fan events. What gives?
–Ryan D.

Additional remarks:

• If you search Google for “dragon age paysites” and “battlefield 2 paysites”, guess what? All roads lead to The Sims. That’s how idiosyncratic this problem is.
• If anything the second-to-last sentence is too hot for EA! However, it is factual. Here’s my evidence should I need to back the claims up:

TS3 forum sticky: Custom Content Sites – Share em’ with us! [sic]

• Save parsimonious.org, all the sites listed withhold a portion of their content from non-paying customers. I believe this advertisement is a pretty prominent endorsement of their continuing operation.
• The PMBD definition of paysites: “a paysite is any site that offers user-created content that you must pay for, whether through a donation or a subscription. If it is not freely available to all, it is a pay item.”

Another sticky: SIMPOSIUM Write-ups and Reviews from the attendees

• Both The Sims Resource and Holy Simoly are paysites whose agents attended this recent event. This was just the most recent one: paysites have attended past events, and if nothing changes, future Sims events too. It’s a bit like a cop inviting a gang lord on a skiing trip, isn’t it? (Don’t tell me, I suck at analogies).
• TSR is definitely the worse offender of the two, being an incorporated business and all. That’s just the tip of the murky iceberg that is The Sims Resource.

That’s all I’ve got today. Well, seeing Jeff Green’s name makes me want to go and watch some Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I think I will now. You know, I keep meaning to actually post some screenshots of my TS3 games or something up on this site. I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to it.

So recently I’ve been delving deep into the the game’s localisation String Tables in hopes of reworking some of the game’s worst writing.I don’t know about other players, but to me a lot of the writing seems stilted and strangely-worded, as if EA outsourced the job of writing the English text to some foreign country.

Funnily enough, the recent 1.3 patch claims it corrects “several spelling and grammar mistakes”…it fixes exactly five! It also removes “Amanda” as a male name, if that counts as a grammatical error…

Anyway, I wrote a little C# program to make editing large chunks of game text slightly easier. It’s called the STBLizer and it lets you work with the strings in a CSV spreadsheet format, and simply import and export them to/from the STBL without needing to make changes one at a time in the other STBL editors currently available. You can download STBLizer from Mod The Sims. I thought that while I’ve been posting links to it on various sites, I might as well plug my shiny new tool on my personal blog while I’m at it.

There are a few better . Then again, AwesomeMod now has its own solution for that (custom name lists)

Random Title Generator (Internet Archive) – I got some great dramatic/fiction titles out of this. Examples – The Unwilling Tales, Ravaged Edge, The Ragged Dreamer, Wanton Winter.

Fantasy Novel Title Generator – Actually I can’t remember at the moment whether Fantasy is an available genre, but whatever. Finally, you can put names to the vaunted God and Illusion Cycle: The Dream of the Children, The Lollian Rogue, The Discord of Adian, and Master and Empire (coming in Summer 2010).

Random Speculative Fiction Title Generator – you gotta hit this one a few times to get some interesting titles. Like Killing of the Worm, Dark Station, Ghost Vendetta, and my personal favourite: Sword Spam!

By the way, I was planning an update to the lot rotation experiment I had going on. I got up to the middle of the seventh round, but I was let down by two things: boredom with the Sims themselves, and a lack of good housing in Riverview. Unfortunately I’m not that great a builder, and the complex decoration in the building options puts me off a little. Also I don’t like massive lots – another reason to wait for the World Builder to come out, I suppose.

So, I’ve wiped Riverview and I’m currently playing one of the random families that decided to sneak in while Story Progression was left on.

I added a couple of useful links to the sidebar under ‘Need Names?’ I’m typically uncreative when it comes to naming stuff, and when prompted to give something a name I will run off and try to find a random name generator.

I’ve recently come across two:

For artwork names

http://noemata.net/pa/titlegen/ – For naming Sim paintings. Who can resist ‘Pathological Echo’, ‘Sketch of Drunk Figure’, or ‘Nude Deciphering the Orange Field’?

For star names

http://direpress.bin.sh/tools/sf_name.html – choose ‘Space’ in the Type dropdown box and ‘Star Name’ in the one below it to get random star names. Examples – ‘2426 Jing Xiu’, ‘Scatha’, ‘1372 Galli’.

A while ago, I received a family tree from a relative who asked us to help update it. Only problem was it was in an XLS spreadsheet – rather difficult to navigate, to put it finely. So I went looking for good, free family tree software. I learned about GEDCOM, tried out about half a dozen freeware solutions, and found out that 90% of genealogy software costs money and looks like it was written in 1998.

Nevertheless, I ended up with two excellent pieces of free software: GenealogyJ and GRAMPS.If you like keeping Sims family records, both are good free choices.I know that there are popular services like TribalPages but I specifically wanted software that could keep a local database, and perhaps export to a website or better yet, a graphical family tree.

Here’s a little comparison of GenealogyJ and GRAMPS.

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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. (more…)

Back in my TS2 days I experimented with elections, using a program called OpenSTV to collect ballots and tally the votes. OpenSTV is based on the STV or preferential voting system, but can count votes in many other ways too. (You have to click “Show All Methods” in the Methods menu to access some of the others. Also, get Java.)

Here’s how my system worked: each household would have one candidate, typically the one with the most political interest. All single-Sim households get one candidate between them. I would look at each Adult/Elder Sims’ relationship and record their vote – ranking each candidate on relationship score with a few guidelines:

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I just wanted to put in a shout-out for Hook’s RandomStuff. I’ve been using randomstuff for ages for choosing names and even randomizing appearances in TS2. Basically I configured the text file to give a number for each preset – face 4, brow 6, eyes 10, nose 12, etc. Unlike townie generation, which just chooses from a pool of 27 faces (I think) you can create unique-looking Sims in CAS very quickly by randomizing the presets.

It will be interesting to see how face generation works in TS3. Hopefully the engine is a little more chaotic and each facial feature will be randomized, rather than getting the same couple of dozen faces. I’m not big on obsessing with genetics (that’s a topic for another whole post) but I like seeing variations.

As for TS3, from what we’ve seen of the screenshots, Sim faces are overall smoother. Although they’re all premades… I wonder if we’ll be seeing the return of the ‘uglyface townie’ phenomenon. Personally I prefer plasticky soulless-eyed wax dolls over the angular faces, ridiculous noses, and red mohawks/mismatched outfits of TS2′s townie generating. Well, the last may still return.