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 Good	The Bad
From 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 TS2	Results 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's	Marred 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'ed
Binning, 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.

[rufio]

Oh yeah, I'm sure he's not going to make mods just because the peasantry whines that they want them.  I'm just trying to make it clear that that wasn't what I was doing.  I'm probably not even going to be playing much TS3, though if Pescado does make mods for it I might reconsider.

[J. M. Pescado]

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.

It depends on which threshold is reached first. It's sort of a race to see how my dislike of the game ramps up. Observe the following sample:

As you can see, the red irritation line races against the black patience line and the green power line. If the power line catches up with my level of irritation, I become a modder. If the red line hits my patience first, I quit. Graph is sample and not to scale.

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?

I wasn't the one who did the decryption. As for turning TS3 autonomy algorithms into TS2 hacks, TS3 autonomy algorithms still suck, they just have more braking conditions...which is essentially what the unreleased Macrotastics-based AI did, only BETTER!

[rufio]

...which is essentially what the unreleased Macrotastics-based AI did, only BETTER!

Did?  Did you stop working on that shiny?

[eevilcat]

Modability (including creation of CC) is probably the one feature that has contributed most to TS2's longevity so I'm stunned that EA could have gone so wide of the mark on this one. I did suggest ages ago that they might go down the route of licensing a tool for the creation of CC and this would certainly fit with that. Does the digital signing effectivlely replace GUIDs for uniquely identifying content? I expect that EA would rather be in control of the master database than let a third party do it as in TS2/SimPE.

[MuertoElBarto]

Support the Municipality! Donate to the Awesome Empire.

Where at?  I figure I'm overdue anyway.  Is the subscription link valid?  Cheeseserver?  

[nekonoai]

USE YOUR THUMBS! 

Someone's working on a mosaic hack? sweet.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Ah, don't forget the buggy game speeds that some appear to be having.  This isn't delusional (maybe...most likely) as I've noted after a few hours of play last night that while my female sim was off watching a soccer game at the stadium, hours were going by at the same pace as the normal speed, yet I had switched it to the fastest.  I played around with the different selections of speed, and this game wasn't having any of that.  Everything stayed at normal speed.

I've yet to have the tribblebabies happen to me, and the speed is the only thing giving me hell.

[devilsrope]

Re: the seating issue, I had a sim living in a home without any seating. She took all her meals to the bathroom and ate sitting on the toilet.

[Inge]

She's lucky she had a toilet.  If we don't give our sims toilets I wonder if they dash out of the house to use a public one?

[Aner-Dyfan]

No Inge they pee themselves, the counter to this is to install Steel Bladder bonus trait, they never need to use the toilet again.

[Xuriel]

Barf! I won't touch TS3 AT ALL if there are no mods by Pescado or TwoJeffs.

I'm also ready to partake in open warfare if EAxis gives T$R's "artistes" access to their encrypted codes. Not that something like that would ever happen, right? Right? 

[Mootilda]

I think that it's much more likely that EA will host TSR at the Sims 3 Store.  That way, they can skim a bit off the top.

[Aner-Dyfan]

Xuriel in fact that would be a really good thing to happen, TSR is easier to infiltrate than EA studios. Meaning the codes could be given to the people who need them most.

[rufio]

That's exactly what I was thinking, Aner - EA gives their proprietary CC-making tool to TSR, and three days later coconut has it up for general-purpose download.

[Xuriel]

Oh dear! I forgot all about coconut!! There is hope!!!

*dances awkwardly*

[Insanity Prelude]

It's hard to believe even EA could be so retarded as to prevent/discourage CC-making in a game series where one of the major draws so far has been CC.

And damn, does it ever need it, what with the lack of furniture.

[Soggy Fox]

I agree on the lame things with sims 3 - Examples of shortcuts [I've got a high comp, these are not problems with my machine]

Lattice is -not- alpha-ed.  It is black for spaces, not clear.
Some of the textures are incredibly blurry.
Familyfunds -does not- work, however, the cheats that do work - motherlode, kaching, moveobjects on/off, snapobjectstogrid on/off and testingcheatseneabled on/off.  For builders, we were told there would not be a floorelevation cheat - we were told wrong - however, there is some lighting issues that make hiding the deformed walls much more difficult.  However, it is usable, and not -super- noticeable.

When you say that modding it will be something in the nature of problematical, do you mean just game behavior mods, or new objects?

And my problem with CAS is that the hair styles more or less universally suck, and there is no way to make thin, natural-looking brows.  Clothing is somewhat limited as well, but the separates are much more fun to use in 3.

[Xuriel]

Insanity Prelude:

My guess is that they want to be able to monopolize all CC and charge for them themselves. If they block all third party content then all the sheeple will have to go and get all their shtuff at the Sims 3 Store. Kaching!

[Inge]

Yes this is getting a bit out of hand.  It's only the *scripts* that are gonna be problematic.  The actuall choreography of what the sims do.   All the rest looks open and moddable.   Even the things like the rate the sims get hungry and their bladder fills, and how attractive different objects are, are moddable.

[Sigmund]

Ah, don't forget the buggy game speeds that some appear to be having.  This isn't delusional (maybe...most likely) as I've noted after a few hours of play last night that while my female sim was off watching a soccer game at the stadium, hours were going by at the same pace as the normal speed, yet I had switched it to the fastest.  I played around with the different selections of speed, and this game wasn't having any of that.  Everything stayed at normal speed.

AHA! I've noticed this too, and wondered if I was just going crazy. The speeds definitely seem screwy-- the game also drops down to three sometimes when I choose four, even though I usually choose this when my Sims are at work or sleeping.