More Awesome Than You!

I've just been catching up on my Open For Business news and I'm really disappointed that they aren't going to be dealing with the issue of time when on a community lot. I don't know whether I'm just being retarded, but I thought that the one thing they were going to focus on with OFB was the 'unfreezing' of time when on a community lot.

I think that it was something that they should have addressed with NL. You'd take your sim Downtown and by the time they got home they'd could have gotten engaged with a stranger they'd met on the trip, with time pretty much exactly the same as it was when they left home.

I know that some people where dead set against time continuing whilst on a community lot, but I thought that a work around this would be an option to have it turned on/off in the control panel (much like freewill, or visible neighbours, etc)

I really am quite frustrated at this news, it was one of the core selling points for me, and what better opportunity than the open for business expansion pack.

Rant over.

What do you guys think???

I think it's just too complicated. Imagine you have a family with kids. Dad goes to the community lot at 6pm to spend the evening bowling with buddies and returns 6 hours later. Mom stays home with the kids. If time advances for dad on the community, when he returns it should be midnight. What happens to time for mom and the kids? Do they just loose six hours? What happens to their needs or skills that they were gaining during those six hours?

Their needs should stay the same, but the time should be the same as the person who went the community lot (you chose to 'control' that sim and go to the community lot). And anywho, it would be an option as to whether to have the time as it is now, or as I would like it. I'd choose my way, you'd choose yours and we'd all be happy.

The age span is already too long, especially the teenage years. If your teenager chooses to have a business, you're going to be playing that sim so much, you'll get sooo bored! 

It could be done so that you first play the sim that goes away and when they go back home you get to play the people who stayed at home for the same amount of time and then the other person would come back. At least that's how it could work gameplaywise, I don't know if it could be technically done.

That way, teens could also throw parties and send their parents away for the time, that would be cool :)

That would be cool... my problem is that their motives always drop so much when they go to community lots, and it takes extra time to get them up to speed when they get back, so I like the fact that time freezes on community lots. I would like to see as an option as well, but maybe it would make things too crazy- the same way following them to work would make the game crazy, or having them visit a neighbor's home would make it crazy...

That's not a terribly compelling argument: What happens when a sim goes to work? Same deal: The sim remains off-world while time passes until the hour of return, then the returning vehicle appears and deposits your sim with the motives and skills he left the community lot with. Why's this so difficult to grasp?

That's an artifact of the time freeze. If they returned 6 hours later drained like that, it'd be time for them to go sleep anyway! You wouldn't look so great either if 6-8 hours worth of activity were crammed into the space of a few minutes.

That's why I only send them in the evening, so I can keep the energy balance right. I guess the main thing that irritates me is how much their hunger drops, and I hate having them go to a restaurant or make hotdogs because they waste so much time ordering, waiting for food,etc- and I get annoyed when they make those damn hotdogs for everyone on the lot, too.

Get Crammyboy's zzzCBOY_NoCommLotFoodServe hack (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=1494.0).

And actually, I think it woulda been cool to have time work the way peeps have suggested, that the sims who went to the comm lot actually experience time loss so that when you return to the residential lot, those sims are considered "off-world" and won't return until the equivalent number of hours they spent on the comm lot have elapsed. It can't be that much harder to do. Someone should suggest this to Maxis, if it hasn't already been. I can't see why they would refuse to implement this, it can't be all that much more difficult to incorporate. :P

Ste

That could be annoying as well.  What if you went to a community lot and left the toddler with the nanny or your old granny.  Do you really want to have to play that ?  I think Kerry has it right when it should be an option like free will

*looks puzzled* what's this "ordering food?" thing, is it like stealing food only without the stealing?
(too much Ethiopian means all my sims now obsessively snarf food rather than pay for it ;D).

Lack of time sync is something that has vexed me since it's been possible to go to community lots, especially because the solution is so obvious and not difficult in a technical sense. The most annoying thing is that the lack of time sync effectively destroys any and all semblance of game balance, and I mean meta-balance, the entire flow of the game. Sims do at least age in sync in the main hoods' (when sending a fraction of the family out) but at university sync is lost! the obvious solution makes all sync work correctly. bah! bleh!

And something else that annoys me is every expansion pack makes the game easier, by giving your sims more activities to boost moods and skills while also allowing them to pull the requisite time to perform the activities out of their ass. In any game there should be meaningful choices, doing everything shouldn't be an option. The Sims 2 has become a game where the success of your sims depends ENTIRELY on the amount of real time you devote to them, this should only be the case with aging off.

I'm almost surprised a modding solution hasn't ever been found, like putting returning sims in some kind of statis for the off-world hours or something. There is probably an obvious reason why it's impossible.

Are you out of your minds???

The freezing time in the community lot is the most helpful event in the game. I have a community lot with beds and restaurant (buffets tables), and showers, and I keep my sims there a couple of days, until they are max-skilled. Then, when returning home, they are at the same day they left.

Thus I don't have to waste time on skilling at home, and let the sims have a good time, play with the kids, or entertaining friends.

Don't you dare to ask the opposite!

OFB will be thrown immediately to the trash, if Maxis changes  the freeze time at the community lots.

Wow, gali, I can't believe I never thought of that.

I like the fact that you can send Sims out at 9pm, have them party their asses off til 6am, and then send them home and to bed and they can make it to work the next day. I wish RL was like that!

Well that's the price you pay for being irresponsible and leaving your child at home, exposed to the "care" of the Nanny. :P

Either leave a sim old enough that is capable of caring for the younger ones or hire a nanny "for now" and cross your fingers the house doesn't burn down. :P I think that would make for some very interesting gameplay. lol.  :D


/me throws gali's copy of OFB in the trash for her. lol.  ;D

Seriously though, I wouldn't mind if there was an option and/or cheat to turn time sync off, but I still think it's just a tad too cheaty for me. As pointed out, things like this make the game far too easy. In barely a little over than a sim week, you could easily get promoted up to the top of the careers. Where's the challenge in that? I agree with Grater in that the "pulling time out of their asses" bit just kind of annoys me. It should be more of a challenge to achieve these goals during a sim's lifetime. Anyways, I wish it were at least an option, so those who like to cheat still can. :P

Ste

Why can't you just have your sims meditate for the amount of time they were away?

And I don't think the teen years last too long. Since I have the InTeen (with the independant days at the end of the stage) they are my favorite time. I never play Uni so I pack some of the young adult type behaviors into the end of teen and begining of adult stages. I get a little bored with the toddler and child years. I usually just speed up time or use InSim to subtract days for everyone when I am tired of a stage.

Tedium.

Huh. The Sims is too easy if one approaches it as a goal-based game, but I don't think that's what it really is. It seems to be meant to appeal to people of all ages and abilities and allow them to play out all sorts of scenarios with little pixel people. The thing about time-sync was not likely to be looked at as , "Does this make the game harder?" but as, "Does this make the game more fun/interesting to play?" I don't really have an opinion about it though, as I can think of ways that it would add to game play and ways it would be really freaking annoying.

I figure if one wanted to simulate it now they could find some hack to make the motives of anyone returning home from community lots static, then stick that sim or sims on Macrotastics Procrastinate for however long until they would have realistically come back.

I'm glad time freezes on community lots because the time/activity ratio is so inaccurate. Say I take my Sim to a downtown lot at 7 pm and he flirts, has dinner, chats, and slow dances. Although IRL those activities should take about 2 hours, by the time my Sim is done it is something like 4am! It would be unrealistic in a different way, you wouldn't have "time" to do any activities on comm lots if you wanted to be in bed by a decent hour. They'd have to change the passage of time on community lots - like slow it way down or something like that if you wanted to have a meaningful outing.

Don't forget the 40 minutes to an hour it takes to walk down three flights of stairs.  ::) Time passage in the game is far from realistic anyways.

You know I keep hearing about how evil the nannies are, how useless yaddy yaddy yaddy da.  But I've never had a problem with them.  Ok I keep my expectations low.  So long as the Social Worker doesn't show up (I have never even seen her) I'm happy.  I do remember some excessive bathing back when I played the sims without any baby hacks.  Now I have Inge's hack and I have no problems with the nanny at all.  And she cleans the house too !

I agree with Gali...I like the time freeze at community lots.  It's really helpful to send my Sims downtown or something on dates or outings and get all platinumed up before a big event that may bottom them out (like giving birth for a Romance Sim) or something like that.

I've never sent them down to community lots for skilling though, even though I have the community lot skilling hack.  Maybe I should do that, I've just always avoided it due to the loading times.

I would like to be able to send sims off the lot for an uncontrollable date or something, while they left the Teen(s) or children with a nanny (god save them) and then the Teen could have a party or something.

I'd have to say I like the time freeze, but I've also been using  TwoJeffs' Static Energy Statue on every Community Lot for over a year.

/rant on

I want that damn clock slowed down!! thats what I would love the most!

It is so very unrealistic that it drives me batty unless I "cheat" when it comes to keeping my sims needs up (I play with their needs using InSIM so they only get hungry or tired etc... when I want them to) so I don't have to deal with them taking forever to take a piss!  >:(   

/rant off

Theres been times that I wished time did pass on community lots and times I am very glad it doesn't, so I would like it if we could have both options available to chose from whenever a sim goes to a community lot (with maybe an option to set a lot for one or the other) 

Maybe... we should just resign ourselves to the fact that this is a game, and sims are strange creatures that live in an even stranger world where time does not work the same way that it does in our Universe. :P I mean really, they do use portals to travel between lots, which they could end up magically deleting by juggling coffee cups or reading books. Sims apparently must travel via timewarp, and these portals are actually wormholes that in fact warp time and space. They live in pockets or bubbles in their timespace continuum, where time and space seem to slow down enough that we actually can observe their behaviour. Otherwise, when sims are warping between lots, they travel at the speed of a loading screen. :P

So I acquiesce to the naysayers and detractors of syncronized time with comm and res lots. I can only imagine that if Maxis ever did attempt to implement it, they'd probably do an unsatisfactory, backasswards job anyways. ::)

The way I envision it, is that it should work as Pescado had described (I think he had already mentioned this prior to it being brought up in this thread), with the sims on the comm lot being "set away" upon returning to the res lot. None of this macrostatics idle or procrastinating would be necessary. It would be as if the sims were away at work or at school. Their motives would be frozen at whatever their state was when you exited the comm lot, and upon return they would unfreeze at that same point, arriving in the same manner they left (via car or taxi). You'd just have to store the state that they were in, as well as recorded the length of time they were gone upon exiting the comm lot and then set their motives static and place them off-world upon returning to the res lot, then set them back on world and unfreeze their motives when the appropriate time has elapsed. While you're waiting for those sims to return, you basically just play the lot as is, to sort of catch up to those sims time. If all the sims on the lot left, then basically the time would speed up until they returned, just as if everyone in the house were away at work or school.

As for making sim time work the same as real time which is essentially what you would be asking for, if you wanted sims to walk up and down stairs within minutes rather than sim hours :P then the game would REALLY be slow! Basically, you'd be asking to literally play a Full 24 hours (Earth hours) to be equivalent to sim hours. I think that would be a Very BAD and Boring idea. :P People complain that it takes too long to do things to begin with, and now you want them to correspond to Real time? Then, in order to play through a life cycle, you'd have to pretty much fast forward through everything, which sort of defeats the purpose. Yes... time is screwy in the game, but it is a game, and sims are not human. As reluctant as I am to admit that, and yes I am a self-contradicting, hypocritical bastard, at least this part is something that I don't think can be realistic changed.

Ste

I would also prefer to have the time advancing on community lots. You know, just like in University when time advances for each individual student separately. The time should advance only for the sim that's visiting a community lot. I can't imagine what would happen to kids growing up at home if you play one parent at a community lot for several days in a row and the time advanced at home without you really playing it much.

I expect it should start badgering you to go home to the kids after 5-8 hours, altough not actually force the issue. Also Nannies should stay indefinitely in case you do want the parents to have a long holiday from the kids. Also if the only adult at home dies while all other adults are out, a Nanny should turn up instead of the social worker.

Yes. I would like time to become more realisitc for my sims first, and then get the option to have "unfreezed" time when going to community lots. I usually don't go to community lots just because when they get home, most of their needs have depleted, at whatever time. I hate to have them "readjust" again. Also, yeah I agree that it's going to be nice to be able to play the teens at home while their parents are out grocery shopping or whatever.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=85710

Thank you for the link but from reading the comments Merola's Time Control Clock seems to be abit buggy with NL, concerning slowing down time and needs decay, so I'll skip trying it. I did grab Carrigons slow motive decay hack to try though  ;D

I tried Merola's clock before NL came out, and the problem I had was with the carpool leaving early.  I tried to slow time by 50%, and somehow this resulted in the carpool leaving after 30 mins Sim time because of some kind of internal clock "ticks" that the game uses instead of going by the clock we see on the screen.  So I quit using it.

The problem with that clock is that the game is hardwired on many levels for a 30 "tick" to a minute clock speed. For instance, many items that wait for "an hour" to occur, wait 1800 game ticks, which is a game "hour". Forcibly fiddling with the global timing indicators simply results in weird, aberrant behavior, since those globals are indicators, not "truth". Setting the global hour attribute back an hour is no different than setting your clock back an hour. You haven't really changed what time it is, and you're STILL late for work.

Time, the Grim Reaper, and Mailboxes. The Holy Trinity of Stuff It's Bad to Mess With. Don't do it.