More Awesome Than You!

Are you planning on creating a new neighborhood for Nightlife or make major changes the one your playing now?

With the upcoming vehicles and the associated garages, most houses will have to be redesigned to locate the garage at the front of the property.

I can't wait to start building houses with half walls.

I don't know about a neighbourhood, but I usually create a dummy house with dummy sims to test new things - like downloads, and expansion packs.

Most of my houses already have garage space included, but the garages are currently used for something else - this shouldn't be too much of a problem. I won't be giving all my sims cars anyway. I can't say this is a feature that I'm that excited about. In fact, due to lagging, if I haven't got more RAM by then, I don't think the expansion will be of that much use to me as commercial lots always lag.

It will be nice to have easier half walls - hopefully this will also make modular stairs easier to create and less crowding in terms of landing space, but I think this will be hoping too much.

I've already planned ahead and sited out a garage attachment site for all the major ancestral homes. Hopefully there won't be too many new obnoxious "must have" objects that will never be used. Like those instruments. Because there's no way we ever use all 3 of the new instruments, yet everyone's gotta have the entire set. Maybe if that sinkhole bug gets fixed, I'll be able to make a large enough basement to bury all this crap in.

Sinkhole bug?

Drill a large basement. Then witness what your lot looks like in the neighborhood view. The terrain around the house will look like it's getting sucked into a sinkhole, starting with the stairs to the porch looking like they're suffering from a bad case of receding gumlines. It looks quite awful, and limits the size of the basement to a somewhat arbitrary figure often much smaller than the foundation of the house it's being drilled under.

Ta. Will remember that, although I tend to avoid basements to a certain degree as they make picture taking difficult.

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i'm hoping for more new musical instruments.  i'm hoping they'll come with more mature animations.  yeah, silly me.
as to the sinkholes, yes, it's ugly, but i see the neighborhood screen as pretty disfunctional anyway.  it also doesn't properly render the invisible wall/wall window or the transparent floor tiles.  so i do the glass houses and huge  basements and have my fun on the lot.  would be nice though if that could get fixed.

I'm not planning on making a new hood for NL - but the hood I play nearly all the time - a generation/legacy type of thing where I play each house in rotation - anyway, in that hood, I'm working on getting the current generation married/pregnant with first child. There's 24 couples. So by the time I play though all of them, their kids should be my "Nightlife Generation" just as the parents were kind of my "Uni" generation, and their parents were my "there weren't no new-fangled EPs in MY day, kids don't know how easy they got it nowadays" generation.  :D

Now if the generation that is currently in utero/non-existant reaches adulthood before NL comes out - I won't "save" them for NL, I'll just keep playing. But I doubt I will get them all matured before mid-Sept - if it indeed comes out on time.

I usually do a "dummy" lot too, to test out the new things/interactions.

Huh. That's interesting.  I suck at building, but my sweetie is a builder extraordinaire, and he adores basements.  I've never heard him bitch and moan about this effect, and I've never noticed it when looking at his neighborhoods.  Maybe because he landscapes a huge amount?  I'll have to ask him to pull up one of his neighborhoods when I get home.

Phyllis

The Sinkhole Effect is completely undetectable while playing, and appears only as an unsightly eyesore in the neighborhood view.

Yeah, I understood when you initially explained it that you were talking about a neighborhood view effect.  I'm at home now looking at one of my sweetie's neighborhoods, and neither of us can see what you describe -- and he's got plenty of houses with full basements.  Any chance you could post a screen shot of the effect?  We're curious as hell.  If it's too much trouble, no worries; we'll live ;-)

Phyllis

Lol, it reminds me of a Bulgarian slogan: "the fish is still in the water, but the frying pan in already hot on the fire".

I pre-orderred NL long ago, but I don't think I'll install it, and wait for JM's approval and fixes. The least that bothers me is the garrage - I want a game clean from bugs...:).

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/ingame.jpg)
As you can clearly see in the above shot, this is a standard rectangular pit, with a one-square thick wall, paved on the outside in the concretium square. The ground is clearly perfectly level both inside and outside the pit.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/sinkhole.jpg)
However, in the neighborhood view, you can clearly see some unexplainable terrain warpage. The foundation rim hovers over a black abyss, and the interior of the pit clearly appears to no longer be flat. The concretium, previously seen to be perfectly level, now appears strangely curved, a placement that is impossible without cheats.

I haven't given it much thought up until now. I think that I too will wait and see what problems people have. I will be just as happy holding it my hand and looking at the new box. I am very easy pleased even though my husband might argue otherwise.

I most excited about the neighbourhood view when you are on a lot. To me, this is the only reason why I'll buy and install NL.

I think it's a bit premature to really speculate about Nightlife. For starters, it doesn't actually exist.

True, but now that my game actully works (thank you) I am looking forward to nightlife.

Well, don't look too forwards to it. Stay tuned for all new forms of brokenness to appear every expansion pack.

I'll probably start with a new installation without Uni, if that's possible, just to see how it plays by itself.  But I'm in no hurry to buy it, a lot of the features don't interest me much.  If I wanted vampires, there are plenty of games with them already, and they don't interest me at all.  As for cars - they'll probably all go getting stuck in the portals and mess up my game!

So much doom and gloom people!

I have to admit that I sometimes wish I was back with just having bought The Sims 2 and having no idea about how buggy this game is. Ignorance is bless as they say.

No point staying away from these forums now. My mind is already contaminated.

I shall never look forward to an expansion pack again.

I know the feeling, sometimes ignorance really is bliss, and over at the official BBS those are some of the happiest idiots around....

I'm going to hold off on getting Nightlife, and will instead wait and watch everyone else stress out about how buggy it is first. Then once He Who Is More Awesome Than Any Of Us has lovingly created all the shiny awesomeness that will make it nice and fixed and playable, THEN will I go out and part with my hard-earned moolah for it.

Besides, I don't give a crap about vampires, and now have a phobia about cars thanks to this forum.  :D

Even with Sims 1 you had to be careful with cars!

Zephy, what's the significance of the car in your avatar?

It was suggested to me by a fellow member - the Zephyr Zodiac was a 1960's Ford!

So what is the real problems with cars in the game? They are just an object yeah?

No, I don't think they are always "just an object".  They are certainly sometimes recognised by the Hack Scanner as hacked objects.

I'll say that I'm going to wait for a while before buying nightlife, because I have RL University to worry about, never mind my work, my social life, my health...

But then I'll probably break down the day it's released, buy it, and just play with my established families. :-[

Meh... I don't get the whole social oriented expansion packs.  If I'm playing a house of more than about 3 or 4 sims, keeping them in the green, getting them through school/work, etc., is hard and time consuming enough (if not tedious and repetitive after a while).  When am I supposed to find time to put them in cars and drive them all over the neighborhood going on dates?

I'm at least pleased that they understand everyone plays the game differently and tries to include new things that appeal to most players.  As long as the new construction tools and objects don't cause my game to explode in a fiery ball which can be seen from space, I'll be happy.  Vampires might be entertaining, too...

aaaaah Dsk, this is why they invented "motherlode". You just gotta have a family that lives for pleasure with no money worries once in a while.

I was looking at the cars on simslice yesterday, sims can get in - several at once - and do what I don't know ;) - but their fun & social go up. Simslice even have hacked helicopters that sims or townies can ride in, or so they say, I'm not game to try and I don't think their downloads are free anyway. So they're definitely hacks rather than just decorative objects.

Thanks for posting the pics, El Presidente, sir.  I guess that explains why I've never seen it.  Once my sweetie has completed his houses and done all his landscaping and neighborhood decoration -- about which he is extremely picky -- those effects are masked.  I showed him the pics and he said he had, indeed, noticed what they showed, to some extent, on any house with a foundation before he had finished with it.  The visuals helped; the sinkhole analogy just wasn't working.

Thanks again,

Phyllis

Thank god I'm not the only one to have witnessed that.  As much as like having basement rooms for storing career rewards or useless crap, I hate what it does to the house.

I personally couldn't care less about the cars. I don't want them. I hoped we wouldn't get them. For the most part my Sims will probably not get them. IMO cars are a neccessary evil in real life and I wouldn't use one if I didn't live in the urban sprawl capital of the world (or at least it's got to be in the top 10).

I probably won't create a new neighborhood just for Nightlife, but I'll be adding downtowns to some of my neighborhoods. I don't know how much I'll end up going there (I suspect the dating thing, at least initially, will be more than I'll want to deal with on a regular basis. But then I thought the same of college and now all my teens go.) but it'll be nice to have them there. As a builder I'm tickled with the idea of new types of buildings to build. :) I can't wait to build a nightclub and restaurants.

Jen

Pssh. By the time you hit 2nd or 3rd generation, you'll have more money than you know what to do with even if you don't cheat. Just the fact that the parents cough up $40K minimum for the two of them when they pop their clogs is enough to make a family disgustingly rich in a few generations, without anything else. Throw in a few chance cards (carefully researched from the War Room), and even this 40K becomes a mere drop in the bucket.

My guess would be, "In the ridiculously overblown span of time that Uni takes place in". Greening and work/school become relatively trivial once you have all the Uni boosts and an understanding of the awesomeness of Macrotastics. Still, you do have a limited time to do all this dating stuff in, given the relative brevity of the adult lifespan. Given that work, school, and motivekeeping are trivialized, socializing is about all you HAVE. Well, except that I've trivialized that, too. I'm sure AutoSoc->Romantic will make any date a freebie win. :P

I've got a new version of Pleasantview ready, with some adjustments made to relationships (e.g., Skip Broke has been brought back to life and is now the brother of Dustin & Beau, not the father), but whether I will play it or not I'm not sure.  I may just start a totally new one, without all the Maxis buggy families.  What worries me the most is all the new characters that will come with the expansion (and future expansions) now I know that it isn't the number of characters in play that causes neighbourhoods to go belly-up, but the total number of characters, alive or dead.  There are so many new ones introduced with each expansion that it sounds as if nobody will ever be able to play the same neighbourhood from start to finish. 

Technically speaking, it's not the fact that there are many characters which cause a neighborhood to go belly-up. It's the fact that boneheaded coding failed to account for this possibility, resulting in a "too many iterations" error, that then spreads when the error occurs during something critical, resulting in corrupted files. All of these problems are inherently resolvable, especially given that they can simply create functions to prevent this in hardcode, but they choose not to, instead repeating the same error even after it is apparent that they are at least partially aware of the problem. Furthermore, "too many characters" is also often a tip-of-the-iceberg problem. It's just not the number of characters alone which causes problems, but the fact that you have a million metric tons of garbage in those files as well.

Sounds like the way to go is to start with a totally fresh neighbourhood once the expansion comes out.  In some ways, having to wait 2-3 weeks after America gets it is an advantage in that a lot of the glitches & bugs will have been modded-out by then.  Quite a few of the Uni bugs never reached my game because they'd been discovered and dealt with by the time it arrived over here.  It's probably going to take quite a while in any case to remove all the mods that are no longer necessary because of the patching - then again, they'll probably only patch a couple of the least annoying things and leave the others.

So maybe NL will address this "too many iterations"... Ok. Proabably not.

I am looking forward to NL. I know I have no 'real life' life..... But so what, I deal with it. I am looking forward to all it's new features to explore and then to see what everyone creates off of these.

I have one main hood (and I kept Strangeville to use as my experimental grounds) I will load the game up (after creating backups) and have at it. I will expore the Maxis city, then make my own and dump theirs.

I love the insturments that Uni gave us. My four memeber 'band' will play for tips downtown when NL gets here.

And I hope that NL will not be that half baked half completed shit they have given us so far. Hope.