More Awesome Than You!

Or is it?

Ever since TS2 finally escaped the Maxian halls of code fuckery I have wondered why the sim creation tool was supplied in two inequitable flavours: the fully aspirated stand-alone Body Shop and the appallingly inadequate in-game CAS studio. Tweaking a sim's features in CAS is impossible due the fuckwits' built-in  urge to gurn at the camera at every instant. Hitherto, I have tried to excuse this lamentable bit 'o stupidity by hypothesising that the demands of animation forced the programmers to remove the most useful (and only anatomically apt) physiognomical sliders from the sim designer interface. But I have outgrown such generosity.

Does anyone awesome share my view that shipping the game with Body Shop and CAS was pointlessly stupid and that it was done without any discernibly logical reason or benefit to the end user?

Personally, I could forgive them for including both, if only they hadn't committed the unconscionable atrocity of not making Sims packagable from within CAS.  :p

Not really. Bodyshop takes so long to load that I use it only when I must. If CAS had the functionality of Bodyshop, I assume it would have a terrible effect on the game load time. CAS is good enough for some purposes. It is a weird system, though.

This is the only good thing about the split, in my opinion.  I load Bodyshop with a 4GB cc folder full of everything that ever caught my fancy, but the game itself with only the cc needed for the resulting packaged sims.  It means scanning for duplicates rather often, but that's a decent trade-off for keeping the Downloads folder sm... well, not as big as it could be.

Bodyshop was a promotional item, like the Creature Creator was with Spore. It was release some months before the game itself was released. Some compatibility changes were made between the downloadable version and the game release, and minor compatibility updates have been made to BodyShop every release, or at least it was recompiled each time.

But nothing in the functionality seems to have changed between the free release and now. The same problems are evident, animations only use the first frame, compression gets misconfigured and so on. At least there are fixes for a few of the problems. BodyShop appears to be something that stays around because it was part of the first game release, and no one wants to hear complaints that it was "taken away". But the lack of investment in development in almost five years should be sufficient statement to reveal the prospects of them ever improving it.

Well, they'd have had a regular riot on their hands if they *had* taken it away, since they haven't provided any other tools for creating clothing, genetics or accessories.  I'm sure if they had just stopped supporting it, somebody would have come up with a viable alternative (not sure whether it's possible to actually make new BodyShop content from scratch using SimPE alone?), but it would have caused a tremendous uproar in the meantime.

It's possible to create and assemble skins from scratch, without using Bodyshop, but Bodyshop is the only thing that lets you preview the skin as you are making it, without reloading the program. Trying to make an all-original skin WITHOUT bodyshop would require you to constantly restart the game after every modification, which would be a royal pain in the ass.