Unless ElPresidente did something truly odd in the latest version of his version of the framework, it shouldn't be an issue. I use the Delphy framework, but I used the Pescado framework before that, and I have both of those mods, along with AwesomeMod and a bunch of others, each in their own sub-directory, under the "Hacks" subdirectory. It all works fine. Try using Delphy's, if you're not already.

I guess this is not so much a "miss" as a "why the fuck didn't they put that in to begin with", but a cheap freaking laptop would be nice. The ability to use items from inventory is really one of the best features about TS3, so why why why isn't there a cheap laptop option - like maybe equivalent to or slightly more expensive than the cheapest computer. It's doubly annoying given how badly hacking pays as a "career"; it's a fourth of their starter money if I want to have my Computer Whiz sims go hack in the park. A cheaper gaming console would be nice, too.

Whoever was talking about lack of social games was dead on. I really miss Myshuno, the dart board, the hand-held gaming system and especially the mp3 player from Uni - the "rocking out" animation was so great. Pretty much anything (especially anything cheap) that Sims could do together and build social/fun with is missing, except for chess. I suppose I can accept them not wanting to put in too many items from expacks, but there was so little in Uni anyway and they already gave us cellphone.

Ella: Thanks, this is great! Seriously awesome work.

In re: modded rabbitholes themselves, as far as I can tell, both the terrains (.SC4 equivalents) and rabbithole buildings themselves are straightup ripoffs from Sim City Societies. Riverview adds new skins for some of them, so it may yet be possible to have custom ones? I know they talked up a huge deal about SCS being moddable through C#/XML, and they were supposed to add building modding tools at some point. Hopefully they'll actually follow through on it, once the relationship between SCS files and TS3 files is figured out (or whatever EAxian voodoo the former is pickled in to turn them into the latter).

Of course knowing EA, once we do finally get rabbitholes they'll use it as an excuse to not give us non-rabbithole restaurants and shops in the OFB expansion, just more "missions" and boring crap to stare at for hours while our Sims "run their own businesses".

A lot of really good LCD monitors won't go over 60FPS. My system is pretty damn high-end (quad processor, 8GB RAM, 2x GeForce GTX 295 videocards), but I never go over FPS because my monitor (equally high-end) doesn't support anything higher - ironically, generally the higher quality/res the LCD, the lower the refresh rate.

And with completely maxed settings, my game handles perfectly smoothly but still has really shitty-looking lighting in game (in CAS, it's fine). I think the in-game camera has a tendency to fuck up the saturation too much, especially at dusk/dawn.

Pretty much. The lighting in TS3 is absolute ungodly shit.

There is a system of swapping out low-res textures for higher-res ones once you close in to a certain distance, which might be a factor if you're not zoomed in really fucking close on your Sims all the time. Sims generally always have looked better in CAS, what because of all the zooming in.

Entirely new patterns. See here: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=342998

And here are all the new patterns themselves: http://www.modthesims.info/browse.php?f=588&showType=2&gameOrig=1&gameUni=1&gameNL=1&gameOFB=1&gamePets=1&gameSeasons=1&gameBV=1&gameFT=1&gameAP=1&gameFFS=1&gameGLS=1&gameCLS=1&gameHMS=1&gameTSS=1&gameKBS=1&gameIKS=1&gameHHS=1&gameMGS=1&gs=2

The HP and aikea ones are really, really well done, in particular.

I'm using HP's skins, No Build Sparkles, & No Zzzs mods, plus Rick's No Intro mod, the Cyber0ps version of the n00dz patch, and basically all the custom patterns from MTS along with Awesomemod. Everything seems to be working fine. Haven't tried Cyber0ps mods yet (since they personally seem cheaty and not in line with how I play), nor Rick's console command unlocker. Treeag's unlocker specifically will not work.

Those are, btw, all the mods I'm aware exist for TS3 at the moment.

If I recall correctly from my lurkerings, she was the crazed spammer who posted like a billion shitty challenges in Planet K 20X6, then kind of BAWW'd about it when her threads got canned. Plus spammed a lot of highly excitable bilge in general. Which at least suggests a potential shtick, along the lines of running at high speed into glass walls. Kind of like rake-in-face, except not.

I've seen quite a few mood buffs for Excitable Sims, actually. Usually it's something social, like when you've invited over a friend/lover, or threw a party, etc etc. It pairs pretty well with Popularity/Romance style traits, since the game makes you do a ridiculous amount of social maintenance and it's pretty easy to force a "double dip" on all the stupid shit they roll up.

Definitely includes work; Loner Sims will generally get a negative moodlet at any workplace, although specific courses of action (Relax in Specimen Closet was one, in Science, and there's at least one more) will alleviate it. Pretty much anything where they'd be alone, so all of the options at the bottom of the list that are some variant of "fuck about on your own to try and RNG some Opportunities" seem to work.

Installed the Reloaded version, played it a bunch, and then uninstalled it and installed a legit (though unpaid for) copy when it came out. No problems in any respect, although I didn't bother keeping any of my saves.

Should be, yeah. The only thing you'd have to watch out for is if the modders decide to start using those priorities for something else in order to assure compatibility between mods (like the old zz_* filenames for TS2).

This is only for mods and community based-CC, though, not the EA store crap. Although maybe people will come up with a way to load those from Resources.cfg too; that'd be nice, given that the Download Manager is apparently a braindead piece of shit.

Actually, you can totally do this if you have your Resources.cfg set up properly. I already have mine set up to snarf packages from folders one level down from the standard Mods/Packages directory that all the MTS, sims3tools, etc people seem to be working as a default. Works fine, I have the into-skip mod, HystericalParoxysm's patterns, the hidden traits unlocker, etc etc up and running in my game, and they all live in their own little anal-retentively named and organized sub-folders. It's just, you know, subfolders in the actual installed program directory of Sims3, not the blob of crap it spews into your home directory. My Resources.cfg looks like this (the relevant lines are "Priority 498" and what's just below it):

Inge's Teleporter Cat for Apartment Life handles those functions quite well: http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2_Teleporters.htm

Yep! Plus, pretty much all my RL friends who play the game at all are basically all about using it as a torture/humiliation simulator. Locking Sims in rooms with no doors and starving them, burninating them, and of course the infamous pool ladder trick - Maxis put in a joke about that in TS2, FFS!

One of the guys where I work actually made Sims of all our interns and took great glee in making them pee themselves, etc. It was hilarious.

How the hell is that any different than TS2, though? In both games, the Want trees are pretty much completely deterministic, and adding "life" or individual personality to a Sim pretty much comes 100% from player imagination and creativity. What the text says when you click on a shower to play that animation really doesn't say anything in terms of storytelling or whatever. Whether you come up with a cool personality and plotline for any given Sim is mostly going to come from you, because in both games there's not all that much going on that's not going to be the same across every single Sim you have.

Now, TS3 currently sucks for storytelling and sandbox play because Story Progression Toggle is borked; but if that gets fixed, honestly, it's probably going to be a slightly better game for storytellers, because if you're the type who likes to make up the story of your Sims as it happens through random stuff in play, the space for random crap is a bit bigger in TS3, because of Traits and the random missions at jobs, having actual bosses/coworkers - but that's really just a matter of slightly more inspiration fodder, really; unimaginative people will still probably fail it up and write crappy stories; creative people will come up with amazing ones no matter how barebones the game is. Have you ever read a Legacy? 99.9999999% of them are boring as shit and basically the same thing, because the lives Sims are pretty invariant (skill up for career, get promoted, acquire mate, breed, raise spawnlings, die, repeat with next generation) and most "Storytellers" don't bother to make up enough of a personality for their Sims. More random shit occuring = more stuff to get inspired by, or directions to take the plot, although in the end I think the quality of most TS3 stories will probably be as bad as those in TS2.

If you're talking about just using the in-game engine to make dolls of your pre-existing characters and act out the storylines you want through animations, that's machinima, and whether TS2 or TS3 is better for it comes down to the aesthetics of the Sims + animations + CC, not any of the ways the game handles personalities or Wants or any of that shit. Your complaint about the gameplay itself makes, like, no sense, because for machinima people, the gameplay aspects pretty much just get in the way, which is why there are poseboxes, animation mods, etc etc, and really SRS BSNS storytellers are always cloning their Sims willy-nilly and constructing enormous sets that they don't actually play.

There's a lot that pisses me off about TS3, but in terms of the storytelling sandbox specifically, the "it is game, not toy!!111eleventy!1" argument makes no freaking sense. Lack of CC, SPT, potential unmoddability, yeah, sure, but I really don't get where "zomg it forces you to do grindypantsery!!!" comes from. Not much more than TS2, really.

I build in Base Game environment all the time, and I have a bunch of families specifically for testing. Honestly, base game to base game, TS3 is markedly superior, if you look at gameplay features it has to begin with, that were added to TS2 in later EPs - ie, what you get for "free" with each barebones game:

- Lifetime Wants/Wishes
- Inventory
- Car/Vehicles (not that it really makes a difference in 3 per se),
- Walking to lots (again, ditto, and it's annoying you really can't choose)
- Cellphones
- Gardening
- Fishing
- Collectioneering (which also serves a useful function like BV beach combing, where your broke-ass CAS Sims can get money essentially "for free")
- Custom novels
- Community lot weddings
- Various superpowers/perks from assorted grinding (aspiration and hobby perks in TS2, the skill challenges and some of the trait superpowers in TS3)

The community lots in TS2 base game are amazingly shitty, too: you can't plonk the vast majority of even base game items that would be useful, there's no restaurants ala NL, the only really worthwhile thing you can do on them is gain Body from swimming (epically slowly, although a bit better if you use hacked collection to plonk some of the career rewards), Cooking from grilling shit, get free food from the aforementioned grilling, and public Woohoo for Romance sims. Oh, and free hygeine. Pretty pointless if you're playing anything other than the Ghetto Superstar challenge, or something that forbids you Aspiration Rewards, such that folding time becomes necessary. Now, it's true, the TS3 community lots suck an ass compared to the NL level of functionality, and are nothing compared to the awesomeness of OFB owned businesses, but in a lot of ways even the rabbithole buildings are way better than base game TS2 community lots. They just... really fucking sucked.

TS3 Base Game completely falls down in the area of items/hairstyles/clothing: TS2 just had more. Much, much, much more, and honestly, for all people bitch about Maxis fug, a lot of it wasn't all that bad, especially the furniture. The people accursing EA of intentionally holding shit back are almost certainly correct. Also, for what it's worth, although most of the "advanced" CC came from the modding community and various poking around, the TS2 base game had a lot more provision for CC when it came out - the ability to make wallpaper, terrain paints, floors, and crappy MSPaint recolors of existing Maxis body shop meshes were provided with HomeCrafter, Body Shop, etc. CAST makes up for it in a lot of ways, but a lot less so for Body Shop stuff compared to anything else.

Everything else you'd be comparing, like the awful genetics in TS3 or b0rked Story Progression Toggle, the Rabbitholes, the ability to create and import your own neighborhood terrains, etc, is pretty much a matter of innate game design/engine coding and not liable to change much with further EPs. Although hopefully someone, somewhere, somehow, will be able to fix SPT.

Hard drive space is trivial; if this is really your concern, you probably ought to upgrade your hard drive.

That said, in my experience it's probably not worth the hassle. TS3 is essentially a stripped-down TS2 given an aesthetic makeover, but with extra bugs, and a small handful of marked improvements and shinies that you will find yourself really missing when you inevitably go back to TS2 (be it from aesthetic disgust, shitty SPT behavior, lack of hacks/non-rabbithole community lots, [X] feature, whatever). CAST is shiny, the rabbithole options/career branches/opportunities for jobs (and only jobs) are shiny, Traits are shiny, some of the new Inventory functionality is shiny, the skill challenges are shiny, unless you are a bedamned 12 the ability to have Sims with different body types is shiny... but it's all rhinestones sprinkled over a steaming pile of EAxian stupid shit. Unless you're sure that none of the shinies will have any allure for you, all that will happen is you'll find yourself playing TS2 and feeling a sense of relief, but kind of wistfully wishing you could give your 53rd Knowledge Sim with the Nature OTH some Traits, and trying in vain to find the CAST button when confronted with a Maxis item that would go perfectly in your living room, if only it was in the right color/style.

SimplyWhatever was going on about it specifically in a way that indicated complete ignorance of Pescado-approved aging increments, though.

You do realize that '12s' does not actually refer to twelve year olds, right? Right?


Just fucking kill yourself.