More Awesome Than You!

I have about five new houesholds that came out of nowhere.  I guess I wouldn't mind so much if they came out of the bin- where did they come from???  Where in blue blazes is Kaylynn Langerak and her older brother.  They moved away--but where-are they coming back-  I spent a long time on them.  I kinda like the realism of it but what keeps my favorite Sim from up and moving??

The game created them Ex Recto.

Absolutely nothing. They can, and will, randomly disappear, possibly forever, just like every other sim. You can mitigate this by getting AWESOMEMOD, which will make it so you can actually turn that shit off and it will WORK, but for a working, non-destructive storymode that leaves your shit alone...

Wait for the next edition.

I'm glad you are working on it.  Makes me feel better.  That function in the game seems possibly explosive for the neighborhood.  I like it, but it needs to be managed better.  If maybe the Sims moving in are limited to the bin.  It would be nice not to have to move them in if I don't want to.  Then if a Sim moves away, they will go back to the bin to be recycled?

The bin is not really the same as it was in TS2.  Households in the bin are pretty much "copies."  All save games have the same bin, and any households you place from the bin will stay in the bin so they can be re-used elsewhere.  Similarly, you can copy households into the bin without actually removing them from the neighborhood (I'm pretty sure.  I've not actually done this).  The bin copy, of course, will not have any relationships with outsiders.

Personally, I would be kind of irritated if another crappy family got copied into my bin every time someone I don't care about moved out of the hood.  As it is, you either play with Story Progression and accept the fact that you don't own any sims that you aren't playing as and they will do whatever the hell they want to, or you turn story progression off (with Pescado's hack) and accept that you don't have a "dynamic, living neighborhood."

Pescado already said that he is going to look into some way of indicating households of your choice as "off-limits" to the Story Progression, so you can have a "dynamic, living neighborhood" and still have more than one family that you still have complete control over.

If you like story progression but want to have absolute control over your sims, your simply restricted to one playable household per save game.

I normally play one family and make some friends for them and what not in Sims 2.  So for Sims 3 I had some time and thought I would recreate all of Pleasantview starter families and move them in around the neighborhood to see how different it would be.

At the end when I got sick of playing the neighborhood I had:

Mary-Sue died from drowning, Nina Caliente starved to death, Lothario's moved away, The Dreamers moved IN with the Clavell's, Some old man moved in with the Caliente's, the Newbie's had 2 more kids, the Burb family super aged so they were 2 age zones older than everyone else, Matlapin's (Darleen Dreamer) also moved away, and Mortimer and Bella both cloned babies.

I expected chaos...but wow.  So now I am back to just caring about one house.  Everyone else is backdrop.

I had a strange thing happen.  I went into a single old women's house(one that had moved into town)and she had an infant on her doorstep that was a stranger-he was the adopted son of Gobias Koffi- who had just died.  Was he visiting her house with his baby when he died?  Without memoies how are you suppose to know how this things happened?

You're not supposed to bother, m'kay? Go collect ores and gems for more XP, so you'll level up. And eventually got the Sword +1 you need.

According to The Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970203658504574191553273411052.html), "The first time game designer Rod Humble viewed The Sims, which allows players to control a virtual family through the minutiae of their daily lives, he was confused. "I didn't get it," he says about one of the best-selling videogame franchises of all-time. "It's a game about watching other people sitting in front of a computer." A co-worker quickly attempted to explain the game to him. "He said that I didn't really understand this game, but I really should."

Apparently, he still didn't get it.

I don't mind them dying or aging or moving to another house, but I would be miffed if they just moved completely OUT OF THE GAME.  If the game is searching for Sims to clear out for population control reasons, I would prefer it choose Sims that don't have high relationship values with other sims. 

Perhaps it would be okay if they are still callable on the phone...  Are the Sims that move away still callable?  Do their thumbnails disappear from the relationships panel?  I haven't seen this happen in my own game yet.

Doc: This already happens. Sims that are known to your currrent sims have a penalty applied to their chance of disintegration and random death. However, the "one fambly" centric approach means that only relationships to your current ONE TRUE FAMBLY are counted.

That explains the shit-eating grin he gives me when he drops off the unwanted Free Time computer.

This is weird.  The adoption method is completely different then in TS2.  I had the Keaton boy(now man) adopt a baby girl, then proceed to leave town, and leave the toddler with his eldely mother, who only had two more days to live.  Of course the lady dies and they take the now(little girl) away and the house closes.  So I went to another house that also had an eldely couple but had much longer to live, adopt a little girl thinking that I would get Tennielle(the little girl).  I didn't, I got a different little girl.  Every day that the bus came, it would say that it was here for Sarah and Tennielle.  Apparantly, the game created a single man and plunked her in with him.  He wasn't her adoptive parent, a stranger.

That's exceedingly creepy.

(http://i44.tinypic.com/20svoes.jpg)

What happens if I "bin" pre-made families - will they randomly move back in or will they always go back to the house they had before (as long as it is still there and not occupied)?

If I Bin all of the neighborhood so there are no Sims - how does this game react?

Story mode won't take families out of the bin.

The bin is more like "copies" of families that you have created.  It's not neighborhood specific.  In TS2 the bin was essentially "homeless" Sims... but in TS3 is really just a repository of templates for YOU to use when you are adding families to the neighborhood.
When the games moves families into the neighborhood, they appear to be randomly generated, or if not they are built from some pre-existing templates that aren't in the bin.

 It probably would be wise to wait for the final verdict from Prescado before you do that.  The memories were the big problem which Sim 3 doesn't have.  How will it treat family relations and such is the question.  I already had to reinstall once(what a bear).  I'm not willing to try it out.

Interesting - thanks.

I may Bin (move out) a couple of families and see what happens - but leave the rest of them. There are a couple of houses I would like to tinker with.

I personally will stick to wantonly evicting and deleting unwanted townies as I replace them with other more suitable sims.  I expect I will find out whether this is a bad thing to do.  I realize it's a bit like finding out about fire by sticking my hand into it, but sometimes a bit of experimentation is needed, I fancy.

Until I can create my own 'hood from scratch, I don't consider any instance to be my real game. It can't be mine if everyone else has a Riverview or a Sunset Valley, even if I've bulldozed all the lots and have different families living there. So if it gets bunked up, no loss.

Have you noticed the odd living arrangements Storymode tends to create?  In an attempt to fix a bug with the radio, I had to go from house to house to remove radios from households I am not playing, and I saw things like 4 and 5 people living in a one bedroom home.

I also am kicking myself for not disabling the BUS killings of Sims.  One of the sims in my family has been chatting up this other sim for a while.  She calls him up and asks him to meet at the park to hang out.  She gets there and then I see the "Grady Effman has passed on, old age comes for every sim, blah blah.." message.  Thing is..Grady wasn't elderly.  I am not even sure if he was an adult, he could have been a YA.  I removed his grave from the mausoleum in hopes of seeing him one night and finding out what happened to poor Grady. 

I now don't think that the deletion of townies is a major problem.  I have deleted a number of my sim's former friends (including workmates, one of his bosses, and a girl he was hitting on), after moving MATY sims into their houses and evicting the townies to the clipboard.  They  just vanish from the relationships panel as if they never existed.

I tend to agree with you.  Isn't the game basically deleting people when the move out of town.  They still stay in the family tree but are deleted from the relationship panel.