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.

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.

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)

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’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’.

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.

GRAMPS:

• Requires Python
• Tricky to install if you have Windows – I had to follow these directions.
• Really easy to use
• No fancy graphical reports (which I could produce. I think you need GraphViz but didn’t work for me)
• Good textual features – most common surnames, ancestry
• Graphical pedigree view is nice
• Has its own database so you don’t need to save (can export to GEDCOM though)
• Outputs a comprehensive HTML site with info, pictures, ancestors, etc. of every family member. My favourite feature.

GenealogyJ:

• Requires Java
• Steeper learning curve than GRAMPS
• Makes terrific graphical family trees, can even include portraits
• Complicated interface
• Easy to  mess up and delete your work if you don’t know what you’re doing
• Uses the industry-standard .GED database – have to remember to save!

My recommendation? I would go with GenealogyJ, even though it’s marginally more difficult to use. GRAMPS definitely produces a prettier website though.

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.

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:

• Sims always vote for themselves at #1
• Sims vote for family and lovers before (best) friends
• Sims vote for same-sex friends over opposite-sex friends (I call this the ‘bros-before-hoes’ rule)
• Sims never vote for their enemies/negative relationships
• Sims might vote for a 0/0 acquaintance, depending on the number of other Sims they’ve ranked, to reflect voter apathy.

These weren’t rigid rules, and a bit of randomness was sometimes involved (e.g. donkey voting).

The great thing about OpenSTV is that it lets you test out several different vote counting systems. Although it’s designed around single transferable voting, that system works terribly with neighbourhoods of Sims. There are too many coin-flip ties.

I personally found the Borda count best; it provides a numerical rank for each candidate, much like the ‘community score’ on some other Sims websites.

The system I was using, in retrospect, has quite a few flaws. Most Sims just vote for their housemate. And voting based on friendships isn’t the most realistic model. Maybe I’ll think of a better way to simulate politics by the time I get to work on my Hood Project.

Finally, here’s an example of the system in action, using Pleasantview as a test hood.

Election title: Pleasantview Council
Method: Borda without ballot completion
Number of total ballots: 13
Number of invalid or empty ballots: 0
Number of ballots used in the count: 13
8 candidate running for 1 seats.

 R|Cass|Don |Darr|John|Herb|Dina|Bran|Mary|Exha
  |andr|LOTH|en D| BUR| OLD| CAL|di B|-Sue|uste
  |a GO|ARIO|REAM|B   |IE  |IENT|ROKE| PLE|d
  |TH  |    |ER  |    |    |E   |    |ASAN|
  |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |T   |
=====================================================================================================================
 1|  49|  47|  41|  46|  39|  37|  42|  63|   0
  |------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  | Borda count totals.

Winner is Mary-Sue PLEASANT.

Probably who you expected to win, right? ;)

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.