More Awesome Than You!

I'm sure you're all aware that your Sims can spend hours, days, weeks, months, etc. on community lots and return home hardly 10 minutes after they left their home lot. It would be nice if this could change, so here's my idea.

Basically, the hack should keep track of how long a Sim stays out on a community lot. If he/she goes to more than one, add the amounts of time together. Once you use the phone to "Call Taxi" or you use the car to "Drive Home," it should return your view to the home lot like normal and delay that Sim's return by however long their outing was.

An example: Say Joe Smith decides he wants to hit the local club for the night. He leaves his house at 4:25 PM and spends five hours at said club. Upon choosing to "Drive Home" from the lot, the player is returned to the home lot and Joe Smith returns home at 9:25 PM, five hours after he originally left.

This type of hack could pose some problems, such as spending a week on a community lot and having to wait a week for a Sim to return, especially if they happen to get to their birthday sometime in that time. However, if you (the player) decided to download such a hack, surely you would have the sense to not spend so much time on said community lots. Downloading is a choice, and with that you take whatever gameplay risk comes with that. (I'm not saying download stuff and deal with BFBVFS's, as that is a completely different topic, i.e. "dysfunctional" things.)

So, is this type of hack possible? Given that my experience with modding The Sims 2 is next to none, I can't possibly make a good assumption regarding this.

This has been asked for quite a few times before on various forums.  I would have thought it was possible, after all they spend time away from the lot when they're at work, but I'm not a modder so I don't know about the technical ins & outs of it.  In one of the questionnaires I did on the main site they were asking whether players wanted time to pass on community lots, so maybe Maxis are planning something.  There is already a mod that allows time to pass while a Sim is on a community lot, I think it's Squinge's, although that's not quite the same thing. 

I would like a mod like this, too.  The only drawback with it would be if your Sim spends days on end at a business.  I tend to do that with mine as I prefer to get someone to manager in one go so I don't have to go there again, because it's so boring.  Ideally, it would work for leisure trips but not business, otherwise I think it would be too problematic.  There would also be the problem of fitting trips out around working hours, unless they could go to work from the community lot (which would add even more realism, esp. if at that point the game returned to their residential lot automatically).

I think maybe this is all too sophisticated for TS2, but I'm hoping they bring in things like this in TS3.  We definitely need more realism in the game.

There could always be a cap added too, even user-configurable. So, say you set it to 24 hours and your Sim will return at 24 hours max and not any later.

That's kind of going farther than I'd like right now, though. Right now I'd just like to know from someone with experience if this is even remotely possible.

I'm not an experienced modder, but I have a minder how the game muddles through things.  And barring specific maxian code to the contrary, it shouldn't be that hard to build in a return-delay.  They mentioned repeatedly that "unified time" was one of the things they wanted to ship with OFB, I have a feeling the problems you mentioned above were the reasons they considered it unworkable.  Well, those and issues related to how many sims exist in the house at any given moment.  (Having to juggle different sim departure/arrival times would be doable for the computer, but a pain for the player.)

Of course, if someone more awesome than me can point out technical hangups, I'll pipe down.  But at the moment, I'd say to keep an eye on player comfort and edge cases for the "problems" inherent in the whole game.

exactly what i want too :-)
i´ve been working around it by making the sim meditate for as long as he was gone, so i can pretent he just returnt wenn he stops meditating.
If you can´t make a sim return later, what about just freezing him for the spent hours? Like forced meditation or something, is that possible?

I remember looking at this and thinking that the lot transition code is hellishly complicated as is. Any further modification may require a team of modders to work the bugs out.

Though it sounds like a pretty basic mod on the surface, there's a lot of basic problems that would need to be worked out.  If only one or a few members of the family went to a community lot, what about those that didn't go?  What were they doing during that time?  Suppose one of the people left behind was a pregnant Sim who would have the baby while they're away?  Or if you want to pretend that the others were standing there frozen while you were gone and simply change the time, what about Sims coming from or going to work?  What if you were gone during 6:00pm and all the Sims on the community lot aged and the ones at home didn't?  Or should they age too?  Or should nobody age even though that will pretty much give everyone an extra day of life?  There's probably a lot more issues as well, but those are all that I could think of off the top of my head.  It would be a real headache to sort it all out for anyone who wanted to make a mod like this.

The obvious answer is that the sim remains off-lot with his icon at "at a community lot" until it is time for his return, just like when he goes to work. So that's pretty simple. Implementing it in the quagmire that is the community lot code...not so simple.

Somehow, I figured this'd be the case. It's Maxian code we're dealing with, after all.

I'm pretty sure Maxis would probably never implement this idea (if they even could), because some players probably wouldn't like having to adjust to a "harder" game (since you can literally max out skills on a comm lot without aging a day). Maybe they'd add it with a toggle option, but that would be sort of lame IMO.

Since no modder exists that is more awesome than JM, I think I can safely rule this idea out for the time being...  8)

Well, it's not IMPOSSIBLE, it's just not simple, not easy to test, and not currently a high priority. It might be up for consideration at some point, though.

Somethin' interesting to look forward to, I guess.

Sometimes I wonder if Maxis even understands their own code...

I've tried reviewing it, but I tend to have to stop because of the risk of brain hemorrhage.

It would probably be easier to do a whole new lot transition object from scratch, except that it would probably require Maxoids to code it.  :P

I've just remembered that I have a mod that enables Sims to go for a spin in their cars and stay away as long as you want them to.   I use it mainly for Romance Sims (for obvious reasons), but it could just as easily be used for this purpose.  In fact, I think that's what I intended using it for and I completely forgot I had it!

It's one of Squinge's (had to go through about 10 pages to find it!) and you can find it here: http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=8887

Well if he could combine that, so that the sim never rematerialised with his car in the first place till the time had elapsed that would be good.   I always get annoyed having to hire a nanny and then she doesn't seem to leave until the time the parent left the community lot anyway, even though the parent came back almost immediately.

That's very interesting. It's almost like the Nanny sort of has this feature implemented, albeit in a different way because of the circumstances. Someone may want to look at that.

Ancient Sim, I'll take a spin with that mod (pardon the pun) and see if I could use it as an alternative for the time being. If it's not such a pain to do, it might just work.  :) Lazyness knows no bounds though, so who knows...