The Good, the Bad, and the Randomly @Toaded
J. M. Pescado:
So after several days and a certain amount of poking at it, here's our scoop: The Good, the Bad, and the Randomly @Toaded.
The GoodThe BadFrom the neck down, CAS is technically superior to TS2's in every way.The wardrobe selection is cripplingly limited and restricted. From about the nose up, things go downhill fast: TS2's upper headbrow generator is far superior to TS3's, especially in the eyebrow and forehead department. Puddingface is always a problem.New Sim Genetics engine largely nonexistence. TS2 had a simple Mendelian genetic model. TS3 has NO real genetics. A sim inherits a feature, apparently 50/50, from one of its parents. The analogue features of male/female often produce disturbingly bad results. when a genetic feature is expressed on the wrong gender. I have not had an opportunity to experiment with what happens if a sim changes its hair in a mirror and then breeds: It is distinctly possible that visible features are instantly genetic and that the game has no record of a sim's "natural" look at all.Graphically, TS3 is much better than TS2 when displaying sims (well, with the exception of the Puddingface, but that is aesthetic and not technical). Lighting appears superior to TS2.Game can appear excessively dark. Graphical quality of many objects is inferior to that of their TS2 counterparts. Example: Bar glasses are now hexagonal instead of round. No doubt this is deemed an acceptable degradation in quality, but it shows how they're getting away with this: Many objects are probably using lower-poly model versions.All observations made using maxed graphics, so don't blame my hardware. TS3 really cuts corners in objects. I notice this even though I am not at all a connoisseur of objects!There is much more gameplay in the base game than in TS2's base game.Gameplay is not a toy. Games are things you beat. Once you mine this out, there's nothing left.Open neighborhood and ability to move around and save on the move is an improvement that unlocks new gameplay potential.Legacy Playstyle may be practically enforced. There are troubling rumors that the "Story Progression" disable to keep your sims from messing up on a large scale may, in fact, NOT ACTUALLY WORK, and while the behavior may be reduced, sims left unattended begin to randomly spawn with random other sims and disappear or die. Random sims will flood any available unoccupied house.Trait system seen as an improvement over personality bars system.Most traits remain cosmetic at best. Doing an "Extreme" version of an action is not really any different from the regular action, other than that a comical descriptor is attached to it. Very few traits actually produce visible behavioral changes, except for the insanity traits, which are essentially a justification to allow a specific sim to be more irritating than usual.Job-based gameplay greatly enhanced over TS2Results do not always make sense: You frequently receive lower-ranking townie as your "boss".Most objects arbitrarily recolorable.Cripplingly small assortment of actual objects. Recolorability is frequently used as an excuse to provide only awful defaults, resulting in the user effectively having to pick his own colors. Those not artistically inclined will find this far more difficult than before. Actual selection of objects is cripplingly limited, as the actual number of usable objects is even less than base TS2!Build mode technically superior to TS2'sMarred by flighty user interface. It is very easy for the game to misplace things or otherwise do things you don't want them to do. Rooms can end up misdrawn or misplaced due to unresponsive tools which have been overly sfx'edBinning, deleting, killing, or moving in sims does not appear to cause runaway bloat anymore...at least, it APPEARS not to. Only when we dig inside the files can we truly confirm that there is no detritus. But at least I can't see the filesize expanding wildly, and staging an evacuation of your One Fambly doesn't appear to destroy too much.Neighborhoods aren't likely to last that long anyway. At least it appears you can rip up a fambly and move it without too much devastation, due to the fact that the lack of a memory system eliminates the need to retain residual data about sims.Sims slightly smarter, less likely to pee on the floor.However, their object usage behavior, particularly with, say, chairs, is flat out retarded. An example an obvious case: Place a bar on normal home lot. Observe how all your sims now decide they MUST go and take up dining table slots to drink...even if you've provided them with plenty of in-room seating on proper barstools AT THE BAR. The stupid chair-seeking behavior is FAR inferior to TS2's, where sims would prefer the best in-room chair over any chair outside the room, and avoided unnecessarily leaving the room. In TS3, sims will traipse all over the house to find an arbitrary chair for reasons manifestly inscrutable...and there isn't even a comfort motive to justify this behavior anymore!Money in basic gameplay is no longer trivially easy to come by.Free Cash Handout on Move Out shoots this firmly in the foot, just like the 20K handout, except now you can abuse the exploit with only a few clicks every time. Your sim fambly can never, ever, move out or otherwise seperate without accidentally exploiting this. If you want to intentionally not exploit this, you will have to use the famblyfunds cheat. If it's there and still works. Of course, there's little point in advancing homes beyond "furniture scattered across a lawn, because of the IDIOTIC CHAIRSEEKING BEHAVIOR which basically eliminates the usefulness of room partitionment and frequently turns it into a liability. At best, a FEW rooms benefit from being seperated...most other rooms may as well be the Chairs On The Lawn Room: It's not as if being in lawn-furniture stops your sims from thinking the room is now well-decorated...in fact, they are more likely to believe a room is well-decorated as lawn-furniture than as actual rooms! Relative cost of walls is greatly increased by the the decrease in money, anyway, so the cost-benefit ratio of walls is decreased, especially since benefit can be negative.
The Randomly @Toaded
Despite all the doom and gloom, it looks like there may be a ray of hope (Even though "ray of hope" is the kind of name I would give to a combat lazor.):
It looks like the way TS3 is structured MAY in fact be highly moddable, perhaps more so than TS2. Here's where it all goes to shit: Unfortunately, the scripts are also compiled, encrypted, and digitally signed. We have had success in breaking through the encryption, but unfortunately, they are also digitally signed to SPECIFICALLY PREVENT THE GAME FROM ACCEPTING THIRD-PARTY MODIFICATION. We have also been able to partly decompile them: However, the scripts are implemented as monolithic blobs. This makes it very difficult to do any kind of small contained mod, meaning you are only table to use mods from ONE source at a time, effectively. The other major problem is that the decompilation process produces code that is full of errors and will not compile. We're talking thousands of errors that must all be fixed. And this will be a pain in the neck that has to be dealt with every time patches come out or expansions are made. yay. Maintenance hell. Also, you pretty much now have to be a "real programmer" to even attempt modification: Code in TS3 is much lower-level than TS3's SimAntics bytecode. It is much more powerful, but also that much more inscrutable. What does this mean? Hard to say, it's not an issue which personally affects me. Will we get more because "real programmers" can apply their existing skills, or will we get less, due to the massive incompatibility issues, the fact that you essentially have to choose to play either EAxis, or Awesomemod, and not some mix-and-match combo of Awesomeware, Jeffyware, and Squingeware like you'd like to in TS2. At least the support will be less of a pain in the ass.
Of course, none of this matters: Scripts are digitally signed with private keys to permit only official modification. It is possible to hack the game to make it WORK, but there's no telling what conflicts it could cause down the line, as EAxis will surely try to shut it down, and the techniques used to achieve this hackage may not sit well with, say, the Evil That Is SecuROM. Yes, SecuROM may prevent you from being able to mod your game now. On the other hand, you can have your fucking no-censor without any of this. All you worthless sheep can get it from the guy who made it when he posts his result and GTFO. You make me physically ill. Naturally, if cracking is required to make such a thing work, discussion of hacks will likely end up utterly verboten in the "Light" community that is non-Awesome circles. Support the Municipality! Donate to the Awesome Empire.
rufio:
So, are you going to attempt TS3 mods, or are you giving it up as too much of a royal pain? It doesn't really surprise me that they apparently went to a lot of effort to prevent third-party mods, but it's still kind of disappointing.
ETA: Something else I'd wanted to ask you, when you'd decrypted the game code: Since TS3 sims seem to be better at autonomously taking care of their needs, would it be possible to turn TS3 autonomy algorithms into TS2 hacks?
MaryH:
It does not surprise me that EA has truly locked down the code. They were surely horrified at all the "mature adult" hacks that were available for TS2, and so decided to put all the modders who were or could be responsible for such travesties out of business.
I wouldn't blame you, Pescado, if you do not want to dig into the code. It would serve the players who buy this half-assed piece of whatever it is right.
It would only validate EA shitty coding and perhaps put your awesomeness in legal jeopardy to do so. It's up to you, and we're not the ones who are going to have to sit up late nights trying to unmanglelate the borkedness.
I pity anyone who thinks it's easy to hack or mod any game, especially this one, which was designed not to be modded.
However, more power to you, if you should do so.
I truly will be in awe of your powers if you actually can do it without going insane or getting caught by EA.
rufio:
Can they actually take any legal action against him for distributing mods? But yeah, like she said, I totally understand if you don't think it's worth it.
phyllis_p:
I can't imagine JMP ever doing something he didn't want to do :-) If he takes on the code, it'll be for the personal satisfaction of defeating it. And if anyone can wrestle it to its knees and behead it, it's JMP.
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