Premades and Precepts

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)

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.

(more…)

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:

(more…)

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.