More Awesome Than You!

I recently completed my collection of Sims 2 EPs after not being able to afford anything for a long time.

The installation of BV brought with it a sharp contrast between the lifespans of sims and the seasons.  Each season lasts about 6 days so a single seasonal year is 24 days.  I have started a project and am having a fair bit of success so far in altering the way this behaves.  Thanks to Inge Jones I aquired the age BCONs and have altered them to adjust the age differentials.   Once I did this it brought into conflict the time a woman is pregnant.  So I found the BCON which controls this and found out that it was a bad thing to alter this.... so I made my own and changed the pointers in the necessary BHAVs to link to the new BCONS and now a pregnancy lasts 18 days.  :)  This of course started to tick me off since with the original way it was handled a pregnant sim went on Maternity Leave when they started showing.  So I altered the way that was handled and now a pregnant sim can work till they are 20 hours from delivery (this will prevent them from being at work when they are supposed to deliver) They can also leave the lot right up to this point as well.  However I am still having a small problem with this routine.   A pregnant sim will get maternity pay on their days off while they are showing and will not remain on maternity leave after the birth (so if you want the sim to stay home after the birth they have to quit work).  The increase in lifespans also makes some other alterations necessary and I was hoping for feedback and help with that.  I tried out the Harder Jobs package and while it is an improvement I was hoping maybe an even harder one could be made that slowed advancement even farther (as well as perhaps cutting the starting levels in half for college graduates, so they start at 4 or 5 instead of 8 or 9).

I am also interested to know if anyone is interested in me posting this mod here. 

Sim lifespans set by the mod are as follows:
Normal Sims:
Baby         age  0   - 1       (24 days)
Toddler     age  1   - 05     (96 days)
Children     age  05 - 12     (168 days)
Teens       age  12 - 20     (192 days)
Adults       age  20 - 64     (1056 days)
Elders min  age  64 - 67.5  (84 days)
Elders max age  64 - 104   (960 days)

Plantsims:
Toddler    age     0 -    1   (24 days)
Adult       age     1 - 100   (2376 days)
Elder min  age 100 - 150   (1200 days)
Elder max age 100 - 200   (2376 days)
These ages were decided upon with the consideration that plants, if given proper care, can live for upwards of 500 years but when coupled with the human physiology would probably experience a shorter (albiet longer than a humans) lifespan.

Also pet ages were brought in line with this model.
Puppy/Kitten      age 0 - 1      (24 days)
Adult                 age 1 - 7      (168 days)
Elder min            age 7 - 8.6   (40 days)
Elder max           age 7 - 10.3 (80 days)


If anyone has any suggestions for improvements to the ages here please let me know.


Special thanks to Inge, Peter, J.M.P., Quaxi and all the others who have made this insane attempt possible.

it sounds interesting, and it looks like you've taken care of all the external factors. But how well does it play with ACR? Have you tested it with custom careers? How does uni fit into all of this?

Don't get me wrong, I am very, VERY interested in this hack, but I am also very hesitant adding something to my precariously balanced hacks without knowing how it's going to play with the big ones I can't live without.

Your sims are babies for 24 sim days? And teens for 192? How do you entertain them for that long, play them for that long without getting bored?

I am all for the more realistic lifespans, and getting everything in tune to the seasons sounds awesome, but I would grow mighty sick of my sims before they finally hit old age and died.

I second both comments: I'm intrigued by the idea of syncing a Sim's lifespan to the duration of seasons.

But just imagine a toddler actually being around for 96 days: the little one would have maxed out all the three skills it can master (charisma, logic & creativity).
Even worse: children lasting 168 days would be able to max out everything including all the badges (given you have Monique's computer to have them learn those business related ones).

That's bad - I think.

So learning speed should be altered, too.

Toddlers can now train mechanical with the toddler table introduced in FT, so that's 4 skills the toddlers would max out.  And my simkids already max out all skills (if there's a body reward/education bookshelf on the lot), as well as the two badges they can train without a hack (gardening & fishing).

I'm not even sure I'd want to play with time synched to pregnancy (1 sim day = 3 months)

176 days of adulthood would almost be tolerable, but the other ages .... I play the game a lot and the aging and dying element (which makes possible various dynastic playstyles) was the primary factor in making TS2 desirable for me. I wouldn't have bought it on graphics alone. TS1 and I were in a state of mutual ennui that could only be fixed with a sea-change in game mechanics. Aging did it, for me at least.

I'd be very interested is a such a project as this if it could bring levels of customisation to the table, such as a config text file where the durations, in days, of various life stages could be altered. If this could further be enhanced by a mod which enables full customization of seasons then I'd be even more interested.

I've always wanted a mod that would let me change the length of the seasons. If I could, I'd set

Spring 5 days
Summer 6 days
Autumn 4 days
Winter 3 days

A net reduction of 25% in year length, with a 25% reduction in the free knowledge gain autumnal boost. Winter is a useless season when sims have such ineffectual outer wear, the family boost is pointless too.

I'm ramblin' ....

I've contemplated realistic scaling before, but the end result is that the game quickly reaches extremely painful numbers. I mean, 1000 days of adulthood may as well be forever. Consider: 1 sim minute is about 1 second. A sim hour is about a real minute. So call it about half an hour per day, given that you will probably pause a bit to give orders occasionally, loading times, etc., and to make this simple. This means we're talking about 500 hours of continuous play per family. This is on the order of about 3 weeks of continuous play. If you are an unemployed lazy sleeping slacker, this is a month of playtime. Per family. Feel the pain.

It's an interesting concept...

Legacies would be a little difficult to play though.  ;D

I'm feeling it. This is a nifty project, but personally I couldn't bear it. I almost always skip the infant and toddler stages.

Also feeling the pain. My legacy hood has, oh, twenty-odd families (although half of those are single adults with 9-5 jobs and no lives), in sync. Takes me two real-time days to play one 'hood day. It's already going to take a good year or so to reach Gen 10... and I'm a student with a five-month summer holiday coming up.

This sounds like something that I might conceivably install at the very end of the legacy, when I will switch from generation-mode to story-mode: it would save me turning aging off in the neighbourhood to ensure that everyone was born in sync. In that respect, I'm interested: however, that neighbourhood is a special case, since it is being played with the intention of a story-mode at the end. I wouldn't use it anywhere else - it'd just take too long to play through.

For normal play, I'd rather see a minor expansion in length coupled with a reduction in the times the seasons take. Still interested in this version, but only under very special circumstances, so my overall verdict is a 'no'.

That does seem to be an awful long life to give your sims, but if that's what you want then why not! Sadly I can't help you with your questions, although there is a thread already in the podium called "harder, harder jobs" which discusses making careers harder so you should check that out if you haven't already.

As someone else already mentioned you would need to adjust the skilling rate to make it more realistic, also what about relationship building/decay? Would that need to be adjusted to take into account the longer lifespans?

Those are both very good points.  This mod does need something that makes it harder to do several things, mainly by increasing the time it takes them to do those things.  I have started a new family with just two adults and had them produce offspring.  This family was then played until such time as the child was able to enter college. During that time I intentionally avoided overskilling my sims and focused instead on the child gaining aspiration points.  


The adult and elder ages could be cut down a bit for gameplay sake without messing the balance too much.  Reducing the age a sim transitioned to elder to 50 would change the time as an adult to 720 days,  or this could be reduced to 600 and they transition at 45.  The elder lifespans could be shortened as well, giving them say a minimum of 2 years as an elder and a maximum of 15.  That would be 48 to 360 days in that stage (variable based on game factors)  All the age spans are clearly marked in the BCON so that anyone with a minimal knowledge of SimPE could set them to what they wanted them to be.


I don't have ACR in my game and admittedly this mod WILL conflict with anything that effects pregnancy.  As for custom careers, it doesn't effect the career itself only the way the game determines if a sim can leave the lot during pregnancy.  Young Adult sims are a special case, they are only young adults while they are in college and transition to adulthood when their 4 years there is up (I considered trying to sync that to the seasons as well but have yet to find the way to do that).  My mod doesn't effect them in any way, unless maybe you have a hack that lets them get pregnant then they will be pregnant for 18 days but still able to leave the lot up till 20 hours before delivery time.  Since I don't have any hacks which effect pregnancy in any way this hasn't been an issue for me.  

Though I have considered ripping apart the kitten killer and figuring how it works so that I could enact a twisted version that would fit in with the ages on my mod.
This of course would require a whole lot of skill I don't have at this point.   The idea would require a way to convert a playable sim into an NPC without any interaction by the player.  This is because the mod would compare the ages of the teen sim which had been in a sexual relationship with that of their partner.  If sim A had been a teen less than 144 days (18 years old) then it would check the age of their partner sim B.  If sim B had been a teen less than 144 days nothing would happen.  However, if sim B was over 18 (a teen for over 144 days, a young adult, an adult or an elder) then they would get a special token (statutory rape) and after this if they engaged in romantic relations with the teen in public then they would be charged with this and converted into an NPC and hauled away to jail (the animations for catching a thief could be used here) The mod would need a way to determine if someone else saw them engaging in one of the romantic socials in order to charge them only if they got caught.  There could be added a way for the teen to get them in trouble by calling the cops and reporting the activity as well... (all the more reason not to do it... you piss them off you go to jail)

At this point, you're definitely stepping on toes - partly by introducing unnecessary bloat, and partly because of those of us who use Inge's prison set. You convert my criminals into NPCs, the first thing I'm going to have to do is convert them back so I can send them to the right place, and I won't be happy about it.

I like the idea, but please don't bloat it with this sort of crap. If I want a penalty for statutory rape, I'll enact it myself.

If I ever figured out how to do this it would be added as an optional side package so that only people who wanted to add this twist would have to add it.  Any mod that has a multitude of features that may or may not be playable for some people should seperate the features into different packages so that the users can decide which features to incorporate into their game.

The age lengths are simply insane, seriously. Have you tried playing a standard family (two parents, two kids) at these age lengths at all, or are you just spitballing this? These lengths would really only work for a player who only planned on seeing up to three generations in a neighborhood ---ever. Even if they played for six years.

I'll stick with my shorter teen and elder and longer adult stages, thank you.

I started a family with just two adults in CAS and played them in the game till their offspring was able to go to college.  I understand that this isn't for everyone.  In fact instead of wasting server space with something nobody wanted I specifically started a thread to ask for constructive suggestions and find out if in fact anyone was interested in my posting it.  J.M.P. had a good point that 1000+ days as an adult is a long time.  Fortunatly that is an issue that is easily fixed by anyone with a minimal understanding of SimPE since the BCONs are clearly labeled to allow people to understand what can be done to customize the mod for personal use.

Each age has a min and max setting.  By default these are the same but they can be set to different values and then the length of time in any single lifestage would be variable based on factors determined by the game.  The ammount of time a sim is pregnant is also labled in the appropriate BCON and can be adjusted to the user preference... So how someone would use this, if at all, is up to them entirely.

If you are not interested you don't have to use the mod.  However, I am not "spitballing", I have given this a lot of thought and work so far.  Spitballing is when you just make something up and fire without any consideration.

Fair enough. In that case, I am interested, and you may be able to talk me into creating a new TS2 folder to test, but I wouldn't be using it seriously for quite some while.

Well, I do play with lifespans scaled to pregnancy. Uni is also proportionate to pregnancy--close enough to make no nevermind anyway--which makes it convenient, since that means I have no need to alter the firm-coded data. However, I do not focus on skilling or aspiration acquisition (as I've posted repeatedly, I'm always looking for ways to knock that down) and I have no make-things-easier objects at all--no skill-building career objects, no snapdragons, no wishes...nada. Also, every moment on a vacation or community lot is counted and deducted (at least for adults), and when my elders transition I roll a die to determine how long they will live. Some outlive their children, and are set to perma-red, because that's pretty much what happens in RL--they never get above green again--others die within a day or two of transitioning. Keeps it random and interesting.

The challenge of keeping relationships up over a long life is good, and seriously occupies the time, as does routine maintenance--activities of daily living. (Incidentally, I haven't been playing with ACR very long, but so far, so good.) My sims always have time to play redhands or catch butterflies, and since I'm not playing beat-the-clock, I don't care if they goof off. Even so, having played this way since the base game, I personally don't think that scaling lifespans to the seasons is viable from the perspective of playability. Since a four day year strains my ingenuity, I don't even want to consider a twenty day year. I just figure they're on a planet about as far from a hotter primary as Ceres is from Sol...

I've always thought the Seasons were too long; perhaps, instead of prolonging Sim ages, why couldn't you just shorten the Seasons?

With the original durations that would mean each season would be one day.   Hardly enough time to even warant a season change since you are unlikely to get the effect of the season in such a short time.  However, I could look into finding the BCON that controls how long the seasons last and making that accessible... Then people would be able to adjust the whole selection to their tastes.  Provided they had some familiarity with SimPE.  I will look and see what I find about that.

Awrevell, while I may be a bit blunt at times, my comment was meant to be constructive. Basing age length to season length would really only be feasible, or rather playable, by a very small portion of players. An non-plant sim is going to be alive for an average of nearly 2000 days by your model. Pescado's already given general statistics of sim time v. real time. By the time a sim grows completely from womb to tomb, you're talking about 48,000 minutes/800 hours of playtime for just that one sim's life. And how many games of kicky bag are going to occur in that time? How many times are they going to burn their pancakes? My point, my main point, is that it's a helluva lot of repetition with the same pixels.

So what are your options? You can shorten Season length and tweak ages accordingly, still coming up with larger numbers, but not as far beyond what the normal player could take. The problem then is that at a certain point (I'd say a length of three days or less) the season blending effect is going to make it so that you have no discernible winter. Then you've kind of lost the point of the mod, haven't you?

Time in the Sims is screwy. Heh, beyond screwy. Jobs generally last for fewer hours than in the real world. Peeing takes a year and a day.  The teen stage (13-18) is almost twice as long as the child stage (5-12). Elders, based on EAxis coding, can live longer as a tottering diaper-changer than as an actual breeder. I agree with you that how it works as coded doesn't feel right. I'm all for changing it. I just don't see more than 10 or so players ever wanting stages as long as you are proposing, for the reasons I've listed before.

Now what you could always do (to save yourself headache, etc) is just take TwoJeff's AgeDuration hack (http://www.simbology.com/mods/ft/AgeDurationHack.zip) and tweak it as you'd like. Make it how you want it in your game, and enjoy. I just don't see the point of doing work that's already been done.  :-\

(And of course you can post it here...put it in Peasantry.)

Paladin (http://www.simwardrobe.com/) also has a Seasons and Weather Controller (under Other Objects) that lets you tweak the duration of any season.

No need to search :) Seasons length 9:9 day for each season(reason-3days for each month of season) was posted long,long time ago here:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=241473
And this exactly BCON that you want to find.Open in SimPE and change 9 to any length you need.Too simply,but effectively. ;)

I have a neighbourhood in which every season lasts three days and I feel that the seasons are still very much there to experience. I adjust the season length with the weather controller. When the season changes, I immediately select for it to only last three days.
I play it pretending each day lasts a month instead of a year. Started this, because I had a couple I really didn´t want to reach elderhood. Everyone around them did, though and it started to feel strange.

I tried playing with a day being a week in realtime, but it was way too slow for me. I freeze the pregnancy with insim, so every stage will last three days. Everything is in sync and I love it. The long pregnancy really bothered me, because siblings were always too far apart. The toddler stage still is kind of annoying. Especially as my toddlers always start to run out of wants. After about 20 or 30 days toddlerhood, they start forgetting, who their parents are and only have wants for skills. The fourth slot is usually blank. Also taking care of toddlers gets really repetitive, as there is so little they can do.

I wouldn´t want to adjust the length permanently, as I don´t play my other hoods like that. Sometimes I want things to happen faster. If I play with normal time, I just let sims be pregnant only for a day. As the uberlong gestation period really is very annoying.

Did anyone else who is playing with very long lifestages have problems with the toddler wants?

Hi,

I have to agree that this seems to be a very long time for the sims aging. Why not just turn aging off and then age each sim as you like. Simlogical has a great hack that stops aging, and you use her cake to age the sims up. The sims still can get pg (late can't spell this late in the night)...

I can't imagine having a sim be pg that long, having a baby be in the baby stage that long...I hate the length of pregnancy (in the game already),  it takes forever, and the baby just lies there and cries. I speed up pregnancy to 2 hours, and have them take the baby to the hacked cake (at simlogical) and make the baby a toddler. If I think the toddler is really cute, and some are, I don't age them up for an extra day or two. I have yet have a teen make it much past the 8th day as a teen, and I send them off to college. Adults, if I like them I leave them alone and just play them. If I can't stand them, they get aged and the grim reaper is called, again with the hacked birthday cake.

What is going to happen when you get kids that just won't do homework? Sheee...I barely am able to stand them for the 7 or 8 days they are kids?

Hope this isn't to ignorant (sp again), but it seems to me you could just stop aging altogether, and age up as you like.

Still though, its great folks like you that make the stuff that makes the sims worth playing.  So thanks for the effort, and there are probably folks that will enjoy what you are doing.  Gee this sounds so crabby...I must be in crabby granny mode.

By the way, I do like kids, just not the way EA did them. Real babies are cute and sweet, toddlers drive you nuts with the no no stage...and are cute as well, and kids do their homework because mom and dad say so.  Teens are funny and sweet, I homeschooled my last two...and we have wonderful relationships. My first two are great adults, and I love them much. My grandkids are the best, of course, because they are mine.

eccentricgnat, please don't mistake MATY for a family-friendly forum. Just a word to the wise.
*witch taps the side of her warty nose meaningfully

Because then Sims start aging out of sync.

It all depends on how you play, of course, but if Sim A is five days older than his brother, I expect him to stay five days older than his brother until one of them dies, goddamnit. And part of the reason I'm interested in this, for my one particularly bizarre 'hood, is that it opens up the concept of real birthdays. Sim A was born in Spring, but is still the same age (in years) as Sim B who was born in Winter. And I'm too lazy to keep track of who was born when manually, so slowing down aging suits me better.

I totally couldn't do a slow ageing. I have managed to stay with a family long enough for a sim to die as an elder maybe once or twice since I started playing the game. I've never even managed a proper second generation.  ::)

I get bored with the 'hood by about the 3rd generation - I mean lush hood, desert hood, concrete hood, beach hood, flat vs. mountainous - the opshunz!  They are too enticing.  I get tired of looking at the same houses, on the same terrain.

If I was then also looking at the same sims for aeons as well, I would never make it past the first pregnancy.

Edit:  And Uni!  Think how long a semester would be.  It's hard enough to last through 4 semesters without my mouse finger itching to hit the College Clock and skip one or two.

It would be virtually impossible to stop most sims from fulfilling 2-3 LTWs, thus making the majority of the population permaplat by the teen stage.  Many of us feel that permaplat sims are less than completely interesting (trans: dead bloody boring).  This looks like a recipe for universal permaplat-ism.

Some of this could be handled through making it take more time to make friends, fall in love, woohoo, skillinate, etc., but then you're stuck watching sims do really dull things for longer.  I am less interested watching my sims read a book than do some other things.  In fact, it is usually the transition points between activities where the interesting stuff happens (i.e. between putting away a book and going to the terlet is the lulzy surprise realization that "hey, I gotta go now, OMG, OOOPS!"  Consequently, lengthening the amount of time it takes to do things is not something many of us would want, I think (mind you it might improve the "time spent on terlet" to "actual day time available" ratio).

Longer lives means more time to piss off the Oversoul. I just had my first cleansing. Not allowed to do much more playing, though, until I get caught up on blogging, so I'm building up a region of Prospect Beach.

eccentricgnat, some of the things you are doing manually can be hacked, you know? I used to do my shorter lengths manually and it got annoying. TwoJeff's Age Duration Hack I linked to earlier works. I'm attaching my modded version, as I do the exact same thing with teen ages as you do.

In my initial playtest I sped up time during the less boring parts (such as when someone was sleeping or skilling) and everything was fine when I played with a small family.  However, I gave what has been said here a lot of thought and added one of the larger family patches to my game and played a large family (I only created 8 characters for the family but wanted to test the pregnancy durations with a large family so I added the patch).  Much to my chagrin I discovered that the more people on the lot the fewer the occasions to use time acceleration and the more interminable the time became.  With that in mind I started to play with the numbers and want to get further oppinions on the following proposal.

Seasons 4 days in length for a 16 day year.

Humans
Pregnancy 3 trimesters 4 days each for a total of 12 days.
Babies age 0 - 1 years old for 16 days total time.
Toddlers ages 1 - 5 for a total of 64 days.
Children ages 5 - 13 for a total of 128 days.
Teenagers ages 13 to 20 for a total of 112 days. However they can go to college as early as 17 so it can be cut down to 64 days.
Young Adults attend college and semesters are scaled according to seasons as well for 128 hours per semester (1/3 of 16 days) Students of course being the dedicated studyaholics that we know they all are will attend during the summer semester as well and skip spring break ;) to get done school faster, completing a 4 year degree in under 3 years (making them eligible for adulthood at 20 surprisingly enough the same time as a teen who does not attend college.)
Adults ages 20 - 45 for a total of 400 days.
Elders ages 45 - anywhere from 50 to 65 for a max of 320 days.

This will give a total of around 1040 days for each sim

Plantsims
Toddler age 0 - 1 for a total of 16 days.
Adult ages 1 - 50 for a total of 784 days.
Elder ages 50 - anwhere from 75 to 100 for a max of 800 days.
Total possible days = 1600.

Well, if it suits your gameplay style, okay.  For me, over 1000 days per sim is interminable.  I would never make it to the next generation.  My current practice of just elixiring my favourite sims until I get damn tired of them, and then letting them die seems preferable to me.

I used to do that, and turn off aging as well.  However, I got tired of playing the game and having a child conceived at the begining of a season and turn into a toddler at the begining of the next season.   This same sim would become a child and a teen before a seasonal year had completed.  This to me was just wrong, a baby that never sees it's first snow till it becomes a teen is so sad, the "child" who never got to build a snowman or make a snowangel... I decided these were things I could fix... and started working on that...

It is worth noting that even though time has been decelerated in this mod it is still possible to "let" bad things happen to your sims.  I mean we all know that we wouldn't make them happen but hey, if they decide to watch the clouds right after we throw in the satelite hack... it wasn't our fault ;) 

However, I have considered looking into making more ways for a sim to die in this mod... like modding the "take a spin" social to include a chance of an accident where the car is destroyed and the sims die horribly.   The spirit of the mod is to allow an improved interaction between sims and the seasons,  it is not intended as a way to cheat death with the sims. 

This would be 40 kinds of awesome. Not 41...just 40. If the car is seen skidding past the lot in a ball of fire, then it would be 41.

Oh, yes please! Please!

This game seriously needs more bad stuff. Especially since my 'clinical depression' mod ain't looking like being finished any time soon.

I, for one, am all for more (non-bizarre)ways for sims to die.
Bring on the mayhem!

I am pretty interested in this mod. I never played with aging off, but I usually want my sims to live a little longer than they do. I'm not sure about them living that long, but, hey, if I don't like it I can remove it. I don't see the length of life as a bad thing, though. It would probably take me so much longer to populate my hood, which is a good thing.

And to more accidental deaths...WOOT!

If you don't sync all your households to the same season (personally, I don't), your sims do get to experience a range of seasons in each age group.  It's just that they're not playable when they are visitors on another lot.

It doesn't snow where I live.  If we want to see snow, we need to visit the ski resorts interstate during the snow season, or go overseas.  If I want my sims to experience a season that they're not going to see in their current lifestage, then I'll send them on vacation - it just seems normal to me as that's what people where I live do when they want to go skiing.

If I wanted a sim to be able to see all 4 seasons in a lifestage, I could do that with 3 shopping districts all set to a different season cycle to the main 'hood and to each other.  Then my sim could go to community lots in those subhoods to experience stuff like making a snowman or building a sandcastle on a beach in summer.

To be perfectly honest, this sounds nightmarish to me. I can barely handle three sim-days of pregnancy, with pregnant sims nearly dying due to their hunger and energy bottoming out at the same time, not to mention the morning-sickness during the first stage of pregnancy, with the puking after every meal, and the subsequent need to flush and clean the toilet. No, thanks. Also, the child, teen, and elder stages are already too long, IMO. This hack is an interesting concept, but it's not for me.

Since I play with 1 day = 1 year, helped by making pregnancies one day long with a hack instead of 3 (for humans anyway; immortals get to keep 3 days for longer gestation period), I always just figured that the Sim world just has seasons that are four years long. It's not this world, anyway, so hey.

Though I do wish for more random ways for Sims to die that don't involve me making them do out of the ordinary stupid things - car accidents, for sure. It's kind of too bad Inteen isn't updating because I've always wanted a random "die in childbirth" to go along with the miscarriage possibility that doesn't involve me -choosing- outright to kill them. I've done this a few times when the story called for it, and there are some lovely headstones in the park's lake thanks to my mad scientist vampire zombie, but it really spices up an otherwise boring family's story when the random unexpected occurs, especially if it means things I never see or do like the social worker coming or kids being orphans.

'Die after childbirth', too. Every once in awhile I have a sim mom die the morning after childbirth of either starvation or disease.

Sorry for the long delay in responding.  My computer melted down and I had to con my sister out of one that needed refitted and am now back online.  As a result of the meltdown I am starting from scratch on this project again.  I had made some inroads into identifying where I needed to insert the code for killing the sim when they went cruising before it happened though... and the meltdown might have taken away the product of my labor but it couldn't take away the knowledge gleaned from working on it :)   I like the idea for die in childbirth as well and will look into makeing that a reality.  I will address the violent morning sickness that continues through out most of the pregnancy and tone it down so that it will be less likely to cause total motive failure. 

The first draft of the Seasonal Aging Project is now posted in Peasantry at http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,11789.0.html
This version does not include any accidental death mods as I am still trying to figure those out.

This sounds interesting. I'm currently playing my first Legacy and noticed that it was a pain that the adults aged too fast (and as elders as well) because they would technically die (if no Elixir or cheats are used) before their children grew into adults (which isn't realistic). The hardest part was my founder wanted 10 Kids (which I fufilled, thanks to tons of Elixir). It would be nice to have the adults and elders live longer in order to see grandkids, but I agree with others that having babies/kids around that long would really get boring. Is this tweakable to custom tastes or are those values fairly set?

You can tweak any of these mods if you have SimPE. It's fairly easy, just watch out because the values are in hex (converters are easy to find and converting yourself isn't too tricky either :))

This thread and the accompanying discussion inspired me to do something like this myself. ^_^ I used TJ's hack as a base 'cause I wanted the adult stage to get the aspiration boost instead of elder and didn't want to change that on my own. Anyway, the way I've done it is to make seasons 3 days long, then to basically have baby-toddler-child as one year (2-3-7), teen as one year (12 days), YA as one year (this also will lower the number of 100% perfect graduates! Every semester is one day, there's a one day break between year 1/2 and year 3/4 and a 2 day break in the middle. I'm forcing exams at 5pm and I can't wait to start this because it will be hilarious micro-management-of-the-sims-I-like breakdowns-and-motive-failure-for-the-ones-I-dislike fun), adult as '3 years' (32-34 days random, -2 to +8 for asp, so actually 2.5-3.5 years), then finishing with elders (who I hate to play >_<) having a random 6-12 lifespan on top of all this. The total average lifespan is just below "7 years" (81 days, I think - but I think more people will get a bonus than a penalty on the adult stage, so it's basically 7 years), and I think this is fairly similar in days to the basic lifespan. It's just more skewed to adults, and makes sure that the sims experience enough of each season.

I haven't tested this properly yet but I'm really looking forward to it. Now I've finished making my 3 million genetic skins and default replacements I can actually play again! Woo! ;D