More Awesome Than You!

I know the code exist for University, however, not being a modder, I have no idea how difficult this would be to mod.

I wish you could opt to rent instead of buying. So what I envision is no cash down to move in a house of any size, bigger monthly bills, and of course when you move out you get only the value of the items your purchased if you leave them behind.

I suppose I could achieve the same effect with the money cheat, but it's more fun to do it within the game.

Man, have you checked out Inge's new mortgage shrubs? When you place 'em, it gives money into the account, and takes it away when you sell them.  Place enough of them on a lot before placing a family and you can reduce the cost of the house as much as you want.  IIRC, the shrubs even accrue interest charges.
http://www.simlogical.com/

I swear, it's the absolute BEST thing I've downloaded in a long time. No more cheating to afford a stove! They can just "borrow" the money and pay it back. Inge is my new hero. *ducks for cover*

Inge is my hero too and I am not even sleeping with her. I swear.

Those shrubs are an awesome idea.

Are you implying that MokeyHokey is?  :-X

Heh. If Inge were an NPC, Inge would definitely be a gardener. All them shrubs. Can you pee on them?

Although I, personally, won't use it, since I don't believe in borrowing money like that. I prefer to have poor sims suffer in abject misery and poverty instead. It amuses me and is more challenging.

I wonder what kind of NPC I'd be....
Probably a repairman, and get electrocuted regularily.

Ooo very intriguing..me thinks this one is worth checking out.

I too like to see my sims suffer and have to work their way up the hard way, but sometimes I have certain little stories going on where my sims need something bigger and better and I hate truly cheating to get it.

I agree.

Believe me, at $10 interest/rent per shrub per day, your Sims can quickly run short if they don't manage their budget well!

So what's supposed to happen if they run out, or if the shrub catches fire?

They're supposed to be fireproof.  But they're also supposed to be billproof but they seem to be being billed anyway so I might need to fix something...

In the sense that their value is negative and they detract from the value of the lot, potentially leading to the lot having negative value and resulting in the payment of negative bills?

Yes, but I had thought that setting their Can't be billed flag would exclude them from the calculation.  Otherwise what's it for?

Beats me. Maybe it's not used for anything. I notice Maxis apparently quietly borrowed the "Cannot Be Stolen" flag for the "can't be rotated" flag.

I was looking at the trash can OBJD and I notice it has a '1' in field 0x37 which is labelled "unused"

Does that produce the desired effect, thus contradicting the fact that it is unused?

It's used - I looked in the code for calculating bills, and it does skip an object with that flag set.   However, other things like unpaid restaurant bills are also added apparently, and there are discounts marked "unused"

Anyway it leaves me with the possibility that either my flag is getting unset somewhere, or something else is reducing the bills.  Interestingly, the amount shown when hovering over the bill is different from the amount shown on the menu.

I'm going to try on another lot.

However....I must say....

Thanks Inge, this is great!  ;)

:D   Well the billing seems normal on another lot I just tested over several days, in spite of having 10K worth of mortgage shrubs.   There must be something odd going on with the lot I was playing.

Wow. Um. I think I'll leave that alone. Really.

Did I mention that I LOVE these shrubs?  ;)

Do you think the $10 per day per shrub is about right?  Should it be higher or lower?  I think that is 1%

I downloaded the shrubs the other day, but what I would like is an alternative one with a higher value.  $1000K isn't really enough if I want my Sims to improve their lot (pun intended) to a decent degree.  I'd much rather have 3 shrubs than 30 if I wanted them to borrow 30K, for instance.  I tend to use smaller lots and all those shrubs would just take up too much space. 

To follow on that suggestion, and I don't know how easy or difficult it would be to do this, but could you have two shrubs?  This one at 1,000 and a second one at 10,000. That way, with a combination of the two shrubs, you could really customize the amount of the loan - along with decorating the yard.  ;D Also, for larger loans, you might be able to pay back a couple of thousand simoleons but not the full 10k. This way you could reduce the interest charge by paying off part of the principal.

As far as the 1% charge..I wouldn't mind seeing 2 or 3%. I'd like the sims to be able to take a loan, but I'd like there to be a little bit of a disincentive to it. It would make it possible for a growing sim family to move to a larger lot if they needed to, but there would also be a financial "incentive" for sticking it out in the older home.

How possible would it be to actually set the amount and % for any given shrub?

This would be indeed a nice work around.

What I REALLY would like is the possibility for a sims to won more than one lot. For a story I'm making, a sim lives in the family mansion but also has an apprtment down town. I wonder if it's possible to have a sim own two lots so I wouldn't have to move him in and out everytime I want hime to change lots.

Also I was thinking he could be billed for the appartment automaticaly every few simdays at a certain time. I'm not sure if this is possible, maybe with OFB? Since sim can got to their businesses and still be playble?

Virgali
Maxis bragged that you could do this before the release of the core game.  Of course they also bragged about weather and a bunch of other stuff that never materialized.  They said you could own your own vacation house as well as your main house.

I tried replying to this a few hours ago but I pressed the wrong button and all was lost.

I shall make another shrub for $10,000 and look into making the interest rate a BCON value so it can be easily edited according to personal choice.   That will affect all shrubs from that file though - I don't think it's practical to have a menu and set each one separately.  So you'd  be able to have the $1000 shrubs at one rate and the 10,000 shrubs at another.  Of course you can also aways edit the OBJD to change the price, too.

Woo hoo!

Thanks Inge!

The point was it was meant to be something very simple - with nothing to go wrong.  Unfortunately it's already getting a bit more complicated because the billing has started playing up again and I am having to set the price up and down when you go in and out of live mode :(

Bear in mind that players will want to place some of these while they are initially building a lot, and under those circumstances the menu cannot be used.

The new plant is now available and I fixed both so you can edit the amount charged, and they turn into $0 price during live play, and revert to -$1000 etc when you go into buy mode!   At least now the bills don't get confused.  I think that's a Maxis bug, actually.

A Maxis bug? Surely you jest!
Just thought I, too, would do my bit to irritate JM by thanking Inge. Benes for you!!!