Life Stories Welcome Package?

[J. M. Pescado]

Just the registration incentives that I know of so far, but IIRC he (Numenor?  I think?) said the game *does* appear to be susceptible to modding and custom content, contrary to previous reports.

Well, if it's a compatible rippable format, it's worth looking into. But frankly, there's no really good reason *WHY* you'd want to mod that specifically, since it's just a more primitive, stripped down version of the real deal that somehow manages to demand higher system requirements anyway. More like cannibalize it for anything that happens to be unique...

[KatEnigma]

*sigh* It doesn't actually require higher system requirements- that's a misconception started when people compared the requirements for TS2 WITH a standalone video card to the specs of LS without one. The only thing that increased was the RAM on a laptop, and I consider that just  half honesty for a change.  I am puzzled why they think laptops need a faster processor than a desktop, since monitoring the battery shouldn't take up that much extra power, but even so, last I checked 1.8 GHz was still less than 2.0 GHz. 

TS2:
If you have a non-T&L capable video card (an Intel Extreme Graphics or a Radeon 7000/VE Series) then you need at least:

    * 2.0 GHz processor or better
    * 256 MB RAM if Windows Vista, XP, Windows ME, Windows 98, or Windows 2000
    * At least 3.5 GB of hard drive space

LS:

    *  OS: Windows XP
    * CPU: 1.4 GHz (1.8 GHz laptop) or faster
    * RAM: 256 MB (512 MB for laptop) or more
    * Disc Drive: 8x or faster DVD-ROM drive
    * Hard Drive: 2.7 GB or more free space
    * Video: DirectX 9.0c compatible (see below) Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible

If you also take into consideration that it has most of the things from NL (not the annoying flashing lights, thank goodness) then it's even more of a difference, since NL requires a 2.4 GHz processor if you don't have a real video card.

I'm not saying it's still not a cut down version of TS2, or that it would be worth modding for, but it bugs me that everyone keeps saying the requirements are higher. 

I'd be interested in someone ripping out some of the new furniture sets and the Plasma TV from LS for TS2.

Edit: I take back what I said earlier, I can do some very basic tire kicking.  I tossed all floors, walls, clothes, and makeup from my TS2 downloads folder into LS. A package file is a package file.  (Yay, I don't have to have ugly Sim clothes!) I also put in one chair recolor since cashcraft makes her things identifiable by file name, and it showed up like it should have. The only challenge with objects would be, of course, that a lot of what I have are recolors of Maxis meshes that aren't in LS, and I don't feel like spending the weekend with Simpe trying to sort through them.

[SaraMK]

I've played for about three hours now.

The gameplay is virtually identical to Sims 2. The story is kind of amusing in its own way, but the goals are so freakishly stupid that the amusement comes from reading the text, not from actually playing. The graphics are extremely good considering you would think they should be worse (they're pretty much the same quality as TS2). The main thing though, is that it plays like a dream. All settings maxed, and no signs of any lag whatsoever.

I should, however, say that I'm playing on a desktop, not a laptop.

As far as objects, there are a few unique items, but not anything I would go to the trouble of extracting and making available for TS2.

[Assmitten]

And that was going to be my next question, about "harvestable" objects. I would imagine that anything unique is already available at MTS2 or something.

[Sagana]

Ugh, why did they put out another game that's basically exactly the same game? If all they wanted were stories, they could easily do an addable engine like the TSR one. This is just something else to worry about being compatible and who is making what for what.

I've seen screenshots where someone put custom skins in and they work fine as well.

As far as I can tell, the only real difference is that it opens in windows mode :p And has some keyboard shortcuts it'd be nice if they bothered to put in the 'real' game. Oh and there's no in-game camera so if you wanna do stories you hafta use screenshots of whatever flavor.

[lindaetterlee]

Yay, They are pretty basic stories. Nothing really worth your time. Though I do love the Homes. I wonder if they could safely be moved to TS2? Also Life Stories does not have any cars.

[Assmitten]

Oh and there's no in-game camera so if you wanna do stories you hafta use screenshots of whatever flavor.

Not to nitpick, but would you want to do storytelling with something so structured? Just curious.

[SaraMK]

Okay. Here are my findings so far.

About Life Stories Lot Binned Houses

The six houses located in the LotCatalog folder of Life Stories can be safely moved to the LotCatalog folder of The Sims 2. They will show up in the game and sims can be moved into them. However, I have not tested whether everything works okay, and I have tested them only with all EPs installed. I have determined that at minimum you must have Uni, NL, and OFB. Content such as wallpapers and floors will vanish, as will most furniture, but the houses themselves are intact.

Here is a picture showing the Singles moving into the Contempo Cottage. Debug mode was on and no errors were generated on load.



LotCatalog for Life Stories: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims™ Life Stories\LotCatalog

LotCatalog for The Sims 2: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\LotCatalog


About Life Stories Neighborhoods, Houses, and Sims

I'm currently in the process of assessing whether the Life Stories neighborhoods and their houses can be made fully playable in Sims 2.

Here's my progress so far:





Getting to this point is trivial. You simply dump the three neighborhoods from Life Stories into the Neighborhoods folder of Sims 2, taking care not to include the Tutorial or the NeighborhoodsManager file, which would cause the game to crash when loading a neighborhood.

The houses crash on load. Yanking the families out is successful, but the empty houses still crash on load if they were occupied (others load okay). The sims themselves can be placed in empty lots with no problems.



However... this is how it works WITHOUT changing ANYTHING inside the files. Once a little editing is done, things get better.

When Version Number is deleted and Number ID's are replaced with Sims 2 versions (yanked from original Maxis 'hoods), the occupied houses load with no problems. However, only two houses were tested, so this is not for 100% sure. SEE INSTRUCTIONS AT END OF POST (it turned out to be not quite this simple).

Here's a shot of What's-his-face-Kincaid in his house, which loaded just fine.




The point of this whole post was... This game is so much like Sims 2, that you can even PLAY it in Sims 2. Sheesh, Maxis.



INSTRUCTIONS

Note: You have to complete the stories before you can do this. Otherwise some of the lots will continue crashing.

Note 2: Many (but not all) of the lots go into a loading loop (and never load). To solve this, you must load each lot (occupied or not) in Life Stories, make a small change, and save. Vincent and Riley's lots need to be loaded at least once more after they reload into free play mode after completing the story.

Note 3: Your Sims 2 game must have Uni, NL, and OFB in order to accept the neighborhoods. Otherwise either the neighborhoods or the lots will crash on load. Life Stories includes bits of all three EPs.

Step 1:  Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\ and remove your Neighborhoods folder (to somewhere safe, of course).

Step 2: Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims™ Life Stories\ and COPY the Neighborhoods folder over to C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\

Now your Life Stories neighborhoods are under C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\ Neighborhoods

Step 3: Open C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\ and delete the file called NeighborhoodManager.package and the folder called Tutorial.

Step 4: Open C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\ and you will see three folders called N001, N002, N003. Inside each one is a file called N00#_Neighborhood.package. Open these in SimPE.

Step 5: Delete Version Number. It will be an item on the very bottom of the list on the left-hand side. When you click on it, it will appear on the right-hand side. Then you right-click and choose Delete. Then save the file.

Step 6: I've made extracted ID Numbers available for download: http://www.box.net/public/75d090iaah After downloading this file, unzip it and you will have three folders called 1, 2, 3.

Step 7: Open one of the N00#_Neighborhood.package files and find ID Number on the left. Click on it and it will come up on the right. Right-click and select Replace. Browse to the folder called 1 (downloaded from me) and select either of the files inside. Save. Open the next file, and replace ID Number with the one from the folder called 2. Then do the third file.

[J. M. Pescado]

The point of this whole post was... This game is so much like Sims 2, that you can even PLAY it in Sims 2. Sheesh, Maxis.

So does "Life Stories" have anything new that is NOT in some version of TS2, and NOT a simple remesh/recolor of an existing functionality?

[Emma]

This should have been released before The Sims 2 really, sort of like a taster of what's to come. I can't see the point of it

[KatEnigma]

Pescado: No, there's no new objects, just the usual remeshes. But the computer you get in Vincent's story is WAY cool. I'll be glad to see that extracted to plug into TS2.

SaraMK: What happens to the bushes? I see that they didn't disappear, so do they need trimmed, or are they like the plastic ones?

[J. M. Pescado]

What about actions? Those are often technically objects also. Socials represent the possibility of an object.

[Sagana]

Not to nitpick, but would you want to do storytelling with something so structured? Just curious.

Me? naw, I don't want the dang thing at all. I don't even want it to exist. But there is a completely 'free-play' mode, so if someone wanted to tell stories, they can without it being all structured.

Only 4 want slots, no Uni, no bills, plastic plants, no fear slots. It's 'lets make the game easier' time - doh, why? It's too easy now.

Apparently testing cheats works exactly the same and even comes up with the testing cheat options that make no sense (like the option to add someone to the secret society). I heard there are two new careers and career rewards - anything good to steal out there?

[J. M. Pescado]

Highly pillageable.

[Sagana]

There's also different music on the piano.

And some 'family goals' thing that sounds vaguely like a rolls-over-more-often lifetime want (ex. have family members max a skill, have family members get into private school). If there's new interesting code, could you steal that out? (and the ones for the shortcuts too? ('H' to fix a meal etc.)

The new free handout is now 40k instead of 20k. :p

Apparently there is a cameraman mode somewhere - just people are having trouble finding it.

[SarahKjrsten]

I actually rather like it. My Sims games stopped being playable on my laptop after I installed Pets, and when I left for school I couldn't pack the desktop, so I left the full sims games with my sisters and bought this one. It's really great to still be able to play the sims even when my laptop couldn't handle the sims before.

[miros]

Um, you never thought of reinstalling up to OFB and leaving Pets off your lap top?  That way your sisters could still play with the Pets cd and you'd have everything else...

[J. M. Pescado]

Only 4 want slots, no Uni, no bills, plastic plants, no fear slots. It's 'lets make the game easier' time - doh, why? It's too easy now.

To be fair, fear slots don't really do much anyway. It's all but impossible to fulfill them outside of intentional torture and abuse. We've actually TRIED to make a modification to make them more achievable, but after filtering as many implausible ones as we possibly can, fears remain all but impossible to fill.

[Sagana]

Well you can hit them by accident and take a hit, but mostly it's pretty negligable (I didn't wanna change that diaper, wah, wah, wah) so ok I'll give you fears and raise you a 20K to 40K handout when you habitually remove even the littler one from your game (as I understand it, least I do from mine). Life stories is meant to be easier I think. Oh and by the by, limit of 4 people in a family too.

[KatEnigma]

Well you can hit them by accident and take a hit, but mostly it's pretty negligable (I didn't wanna change that diaper, wah, wah, wah) so ok I'll give you fears and raise you a 20K to 40K handout when you habitually remove even the littler one from your game (as I understand it, least I do from mine). Life stories is meant to be easier I think. Oh and by the by, limit of 4 people in a family too.

I figured the handout would be more, as all the Sims sitting in the Simbin had 50K or more. Which was convenient when I was plopping them into houses and giving them phones before going back to the lot I was playing. I hadn't run into the 4 people in a family bit yet, but it makes sense. Once again, it's forcing people down to limits they should have put on themselves if they were on a weaker computer.

I tried opening the cheat box in the usual way, and couldn't.  How do you do that? (Or should I just copy over my userstartup file) Not that I plan on playing it for terribly long. Once Seasons comes, I'll relegate it to the laptop, especially after all the content has been pillaged for use in TS2. 

[Simsbaby]

The cheat box seems to only open in neighborhood view now, which is kind of annoying. 

[SaraMK]

Answers to random questions (too lazy to quote):

The bushes become regular bushes that come with the Sims 2 game, so they will function the same way as those.

The reason you can't open the cheat box is because you are in story mode (Riley or Vincent). Cheats are not allowed. If you go into the free play neighborhood, you can open the box in any house and use all cheats. It opens the same as in Sims 2: Ctrl-Shift-C. The reason you can't use cheats in story mode is that you might screw up the story and the whole thing will blow up. The same way, many socials are locked and not available, and relationship scores won't rise past a certain point in some cases (when trying to win Mickey back, you can't get past 71/51 with friends and crush... no best friend or love no matter what you do).

Pescado: The only new social I have seen so far is the gift giving, which is actually cool. Sims give your sim a prezzie and it gets placed into your inventory. The animations are new and well done. No new objects, just re-meshes.

Camera man mode: Hit the U key! It took me a few minutes to discover this. The right/left/up/down keys are different and the arrows don't work properly. When in the game, hit The ESC key and you get a list of all the keyboard shortcuts for movement.

[Scratch]

I've played for a few hours today... I tried the story mode and got bored fast... bleh. 

Do i have to do the stories to unlock custom content...? objects?

I put in some skintones that use custom meshes and clothing that use the same meshes and those seem to work.

But i added in a few custom objects and none of it showed up.... I'm going to try some of the hacks and see which ones work and i'm definitely going to try ACR and see what happens...

I'll report back later...

[KatEnigma]

I just did another quick experiment. CEP works (and death to all creators/modders who don't properly label their damn creations so you can tell what they are) as does putting in completely new meshes with their recolors. I don't know if you have to complete one of the stories to get at CC, since I didn't try until I'd finished with Riley's, but the main problem, as previously stated, is going to be that not all objects from TS2 are in LS, so anything based off those meshes aren't going to show up.

About camera controls: They've also changed what the Tab key does, to rotate the view up and down, you now need to hold Shift-S and Shift-W (or middle click and rotate, but I'm used to tab)

Is it just my imagination, or did one of the fansites talk about them adding gift giving to Seasons, finally?

[dizzy]

You might have read that here:

http://www.thesimszone.co.uk/editorials/index.php?ID=59&Page=3

Besides all the seasonal gameplay, there are a few more things new in this EP that will improve the gameplay. The inventory of a Sim is no longer limited to a specific Sim. A new interaction allows you to give a gift from one Sim to another. Only items in the inventory are available to give away.