Premades and Precepts

Now that I’m back at uni and have a whole lot of extracurriculars on my plate, my attention has drifted from Sims stuff. I did just install High-End Loft Stuff a few days ago and played for around … ten minutes. I’ll get back into it some time, I suppose; I have a couple of interesting mod concepts that are half-done, and one huge one that’s about 1/5 completed, although the upcoming Ambitions EP may throw it for a spin. (more…)

This is just a fun little revisit about a post I made exactly ten months ago: So, what will suck in The Sims 3? Let’s see what was fixed, what’s fixable, and what still sucks.

• Inconsistent world style. Especially careers. There is a definite shift towards ‘realism’ in the presentation, yet TS3’s writing still sticks to the far-out whimsical style of TS2 when you can become the World Leader of a town with a population under 100.

Realism mods might still be thin on the ground, but for the most part few players have taken an attitude towards the unrealism being detrimental to the game. Personally, I found it was not so much the whimisical style that put me off, but the surprising lack of quality in the writing, and also the lack of attention to detail to constructing a believable, fictional world. The release of World Earth Adventures proved that I, and probably a few other players, are in the minority when it comes to caring about the fact that Sims world != real world.

• In game advertising. Especially having to pay for it. Take a hint, game companies – gamers (well, PC gamers I’d like to think) don’t like to see advertising except in certain contexts (e.g. sports games). They’ll respect it less if all it does is add to the game company’s revenue, not drop the price meaningfully for consumers or provide some tangible benefit. Example: they could give discount codes for the Store to players that leave ads on. Reward people!

Non-issue, as TS3 shipped without ads, and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever be introduced in the future. I was pretty pleased they used Simlish in-world banners as replacements.

Instead EA is much more focused on advertising their own Sims store in the game, as the addition of Shop Mode last November proves. I guess they just couldn’t strike a good enough advertising deal with anyone, so they resorted to shilling their own stuff.

• The missing features. Not just pets and weather. Specifically: guitarist-ism. EA, please think of the pianists, the drummers, and most importantly the BASSISTS. And give brass and woodwinds some love too.

Yes, think of the bass guitarists. It should have added fuel to the fire when revealed that a lot of missing features are already coded into the game (those images I put up are barely the tip of the iceberg), but most players take this in their stride.

• Four month delay, and they STILL wait to release the neighborhood editor? Come on it can’t be that hard to do in that time.

Ha ha. I was only beginning to get whiny about it, and seven months passed before Create-A-World was released.

• Crappy textures and copied stuff. Yes, it’s meant to be a low-spec game, but not everyone appreciates “gameplay > graphics”. I do, naturally. I actually like that TS3 sticks close to the graphic style of its predecessor, but some screenshots and videos show outright duplicates of objects and animations. Don’t make TS3 “53% new game.”

Yup. And let’s not forget that most of TS3’s reused objects have fewer features than their TS2 counterparts did (e.g. the toddler play table).

• Lack of custom content. EA’s the type of company to whom ‘modding’ is a foreign concept. More advanced creators will undoubtedly be frustrated from the lack of concern.

On this point I was wrong: there was no lack of custom content. In fact TS3 modding was quite storied. First came the advent of core modding, with the rapid rise & fall of Indie Stone and ongoing development of AwesomeMod; the subsequent boom in scripting mods and TS2 conversions; the release of more mod tools; the patch that broke .packages; the patch that broke Sims3Packs; the patch that broke both; and so on.

• The dodgy save system. On a PC game this is inexcusable. Limiting save numbers and tying them to a single family seems like a recipe for fiery-ball descruction …
• There was no save limit, but certainly more than a fair share of fiery ball destruction with Error #s all around (the # depending on the patch level, or indeed any unknown factor). AwesomeMod added an autosave function.

Overall? The things I complained about were for the most part alleviated, although the release of TS3 brought many other issues to the fore. Over time, the game will mature with more mini-titles adding more gameplay, objects and features.

Here’s a plug for a mod I whipped up a couple of weeks ago while the weather was incredibly hot and I was bored. I uploaded it to CS3 yesterday, take a look: the Hot Coffee mod. I mean ‘hot coffee’ literally, of course.

Basically, it adds dozens more ‘elements’ to the random drink recipe generator for the coffee/beverage machine. My currently active Sim’s favorite drink is an Iced Filtered Macchiato with Passionfruit Swirl. Mmm.

I’m not in the sharpest of moods right now, due to it being the day after Friday, so apologies for rambling incoherence.

Anyway, I got a public response to my pointed letter on paysites! Yay for corporate sincerity.

Jeff Green writes:

Well, the fact that we link to many of these sites ourselves, as you say, gives you the answer to part of your question: These sites aren’t doing anything wrong. Part of why The Sims is so dang popular is this ability to create and trade objects with other gamers. There are a ton of sites that do this completely for free, too, offering thousands of items at no cost at all. So, really, you don’t have to "put up" with anything. You can ignore the pay sites and go to the free ones. Or, make your own stuff and sell it yourself.  Capitalism FTW! God Bless America!

I posted the following (long) comment to the post on ea.com. In case it fails moderation, I’m posting it below.

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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)

Trawling through the TS3 scripts, one finds a lot of interesting code, no doubt implemented in anticipation of cashy expansion packs.

For instance, pets are all but confirmed.

The fact that ages are defined for the same animals as in TS2 seems to reduce the chances of a Farm EP. I mean, farm animals age too.

Also, Piano?

Did they cut pianos from the game? You know, I’m 99% sure one of the Store hairs was shown in a preview video somewhere as part of CAS. As if you needed more evidence that EA is out for the money.

I’ve been attempting the Prosperity Challenge with a cleaned-out Sunset Valley and have run into a weird snag. Apparently, whenever you apply for a job, the game either generates new (unhoused) Sims to be your co-workers and boss. However, it also appoints Sims living in the ‘hood to fill those roles. Meaning that sometimes a Sim from a “Prosperity family” gets a job I did not want for them to have.

What’s more, Story Progression is OFF and I’m using Awesomemod. Now, I did modify the “Demographics” XML in the game’s GameplayData.package to encourage households to get jobs…maybe this is how the game reacts. But it’s a frustrating mechanic.

I think in my last post I complained about Story Progression townies always being unemployed? If I didn’t, I’m complaining now. Well, now that I’m attempting a Prosperity playstyle the problem’s reversed. My Prosperity Sims keep getting high-level jobs at random places (and which don’t match up with their career LTW). *Sigh* EASS, what will you do next…

By the way, with this little Challenge I was trying the aging idea posted here by Rebeka. Thanks, Rebeka! Anyway the idea is to turn SP off (obviously) and leave aging off for all but one round (which I haven’t gotten to yet).

Yay me. I ninja’d a copy at 8:30 in the morning because I didn’t preorder (or rather, they delayed the preorder by a FULL DAY and it would have cost more). I wasn’t the only one buying it at that time, oddly enough, though I was the only single guy there.

I’ve been pretty busy over the past few days, while most of my free time has been taken up with playing TS3 (of course) as well as mucking around with the .packages using S3PI. Already I’ve made a few basic hacks for personal use: an aging hack to reduce the duration of Toddler- and Elder-hood, a hack to reduce the chance of genetic mutations, and a hack to stop families moving out. I don’t know what effect the last one has on long-term Story Progression though, so I’m currently testing it out.

Anyway, I won’t post my full thoughts on the game here because it would just repeat what others have said over the past two weeks. At first the game didn’t “hook” me like TS2 did, but I’m warming to it. I will make a few comments though:

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I’m not really a ‘news blogging’ person but Rod Humble (Head of Sims and EA Play, and the guy who wrote the no-DRM open letter) mentioned a few interesting things in this forum thread. I’m just picking out the interesting stuff that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

• “… we open up a whole bunch of the game to modders that I think will impress people. Not sure where this idea that [modding] was harder came from. Newer, yes, different yes but not harder.”
• “I assure you, there will be fully featured very large expansions.”
• “Similar to Sims 2, the new formats will start out hard and get easier as the team works with the modders and updates/releases tools.”
• “Meshes are at the high end of hard (as you would expect). I just went down and asked the (very tired) Sims 3 team leads. It is very high on their agenda.”
• “Making meshes to put in the game is not that hard, its getting everything to work perfectly throughout the game that is the tough part.”
• On availability of nude/no-censor mods: “Given the priorities of modders, learning the system, testing time, audience demand etc I would say ………. Day 1.”
  

That seems to confirm post-release tools (neighborhood editor FIRST please!) and technical support for modders.

Also, Rod Humble thinks Sims players are perverts. Aren’t we all? :)