It's artistic. It represents the blackness in their souls.

I've always got opportunities even if I ignored the phone ringing. They just come up anyway after some rings.

There are certain compromises you have to do when designing a game, in regards to realism. The most popular one, is "Lives". Another one is time advancing faster. In a game like The Sims, the more time advancing reaches closer to realtime levels, the more boring the game would be. Sure you would have enough time to do all the preparations before heading off to work, but if it takes 1-2 hours to max all your needs, what about the rest of the day? Are you going to keep reading a book even though your fun is already at max? Are you gonna visit a community lot? Watching your Sim do certain activities, like reading a book or talking with another, is not as interesting as doing it yourself in the real world. Also, in the real world we have so many different day filling activities to engage in, that it would take EAxis 20 expansions to add them all in. Lastly, there's technical issues. A feature like this would require the addition of more, faster game speeds, something that only a few powerful PCs would be able to handle.

Is that directed to me? I never said motives are tedious, on the contrary, I said they're incredibly easy, and I'm not proposing that the needs be removed from the game via a hack, I just tried to start a discussion about what if motive bars where never in the game to begin with, how would the gameplay feel like if the only info we had were from the moodlets.

I guess the only thing I suck so bad at, is expecting people to read the whole thread before replying.

Yeah it's not a matter of making a mod for it. The thread is meant for more of a theoretical game design discussion.

Well, I have no affiliation with other "people like me", nor with the EAxis development team, so I think the game is relatively safe, at least from me...

I agree that it's satisfying watching all the bars green at the same time, proving that you are a time management expert, or the feeling of accomplishment you get when after upgrading an item, a bed let's say, you watch the bar fill up faster than before. That was until Sims3. Now, there are moments where my needs are far from satisfied, yet my mood bar is ready to burst in green joy from all those positive situational moodlets like cozy fire, comfy, clean, amazing meal, amazing vista, decorations, etc. So I feel like filling the bars has no point any more. Are you satisfied with how this system turned out? Do you have other ideas for improvement? I'm interested to hear.


Yes, there are definitely not enough negative debuffs, or their duration is too small. Are moodlets moddable by the way?


The point isn't to make it more difficult, but different.


Sure, it's easier to plan ahead using the bars. But perhaps it would be interesting to having to figure out ourselves what to do before work - one way would be by looking which moodlets are missing - instead of having it all dictated by the bars: "HAVE BATH!" "EAT!" "SHIT!". Don't moodlets have a "grace period" between their positive and negative version anyway? Except those like the coffee moodlet expiring while on red energy, of course.



I'm not 100% sure... but the vibe I get is that mood is only affected by moodlets. Perhaps babies use the old algorithm for mood calculation. Also, at that point yes, it would be weird and unsettling to lose this control, but I try to imagine if motive bars where never in the game to begin with (and moodlets were always in), so long as to never resolve to actually missing them.

I think the addition of moodlets (buffs) makes gameplay more involved and adds meaning to previously meaningless actions (like washing teeth). But did they go far enough?

One of the annoyances of The Sims is that sometimes it feels like a "fill those bars before X!" race. But with the addition of moodlets, are bars necessary? Mood isn't directly tied to them, but through these moodlets which trigger when their percentage falls below or rises above certain levels (excluding moodlets which are tied to certain items, like the plasma tv moodlet).

Now I know that we have the option to switch to a different panel in order not to watch the bars, but still... its difficult to give up control that easily when it's only one click away . But what if bars where completely removed/hidden? What if satisfying the sims' needs was done only through the moodlets? No more bars to dictate us how to play, which of course isn't mandatory, but perfectionists as we are, we always want to see them bars on the green. But since the mood is affected only by the moodlets, it doesn't matter whether a bar is only half full, as long as its negative moodlet hasn't yet kicked in. You don't know if your sim wants a bath? Check the moodlets. If he doesn't stink then he doesn't need one. But you can still have one in order to become Sparkling Clean. Same with food, and sleep. Everything really.

Do you agree that this would make gameplay more interesting and fresh?

That's brilliant. "Viewing" decorative items placed on fireplaces result in complaining that the FIREPLACE is in the way. That's gotta be the finest example of programming I will ever see.

WHERE are the fireplaces? I have wasted 10 minutes looking for them. Am I that blind?

Nevermind...

New bug I found: If you have more than 2 opportunities involving the same building, running through one of it, also completes the other one. In my particular case, I've had the "Case the joint" carrer opportunity at the science facility, and the "Discover a star" skill opportunity, and after I completed the star one by finding it with the telescope and then going to the science facility, I noticed the "Case the joint" has been completed as well.

It also makes the "Sparkling Clean" buff last longer; 2 days instead of 2 hours, if I'm not mistaken.
Also if your hygiene is 0, you still get the second worst debuff instead of the absolutely worst one.

I'm certain the method is similar to WoW (among other similarities - see item quality text color).
To be exact, the spawn points for EVERY item is fixed, it's the type of item that spawns that's random. Each spawn point has a list of potential items. When you collect an item, a timer in the spawn point goes off, and when it's completed, a new item selected randomly from the particular spawn point's item list, appears. For example, seed spawn points at the central park have common seeds in their list, apple, grape, etc, while the seeds in the lists of the points around the science facility are of "special" rarity.

I don't know about you but in my game, the maids aren't regular, I seem to be getting 3 different maids, 2 female and 1 male, and whoever comes each day seems random. As for their work performance, one of the female ones decided to take out and eat a can of beans or soup or whatever on my kitchen island counter, and as soon as she finished she ended her shift, not bothering to clean up after herself. I wonder, if I fire that particular one will only herself stop coming, or all 3 of them?

Actually every time you plant something, the sprout that comes out is of the next level of quality. Thus if you keep planting the same produce in cycles, you'll end up with perfect quality. However, I don't remember if I noticed that behavior before or after I took the gardening lifetime reward.

By the way, did you notice the text color of the quality levels? Someone at EAxis has been playing WoW. Plus, the concept of the moodlets.

Despite the fact that I'm an accomplished gardener (10 skill and omniplant seeds), I still haven't figured how the hell fertilizing works. I've tried fertilizing individual plants with perfect fertilizers, but they still grow with the same speed and yield the same quality produce with the rest of the batch I planted. Help.

At least you don't have to play Battleship and Twister with him.

I've solved my crashing problems by disabling smooth edges. My crashes were of the sort that after about 15 minutes of play, the system would freeze and my monitor would stop getting a signal, remedied only by a hard reset. Of course it's very weird, since I run more graphically intensive games with antialiasing without any problems.

The 2 types fish at the graveyard turn to vampire fish and deathfish respectively, after midnight, at the same time the ghosts come out.

Yep, that's it, thanks. How could I not find it? Ctrl-f is certainly the first thing that pops to mind when thinking "triangular tiles". Not ctrl-T or anything...

Can someone tell me where the triangular tile tool is? I remember noticing the tip about it on the loading screens, but I couldn't imagine it would be so well hidden to actually bother reading the whole tip for potential instructions.

While being at work as a criminal, there's a chance you get a pop up telling you that you have snatch something extra and you can find it in the family inventory. Could be a gnome, an obelisk vine, one of some specific types of painting, a statue (the 1,6k or the 12k one), or a combination of those.

I think I preferred them not working... One of my new gnomes decided to listen to music in the middle of the night, ported near the stereo, lied down comfortably and turned it on, waking up my sim next room and giving him "Rude Awakening". Guess who got kicked.

I KNEW I was doing something wrong! Thanks!

Probable bug: My magical gnomes stopped working sometime after moving to a new house (probably after the move itself, though I can't say for sure). Of course it could still be due to reasons unrelated to the move, like naturally stopping moving after some while, or due to another completely unrelated bug   Anyway I plopped down some new ones from the stol... I mean the family inventory, and they work fine.

One other thing. Does anyone else's game lag tremendously while having the inventory panel open? (regular one, not family inventory) Each time an item gets removed from or added to the inventory while it's open, the game freezes for a couple of seconds. I noticed it as item count was beginning to grow so it may be that the more items you have the slower it becomes, like the loop checking the objects, stacks and slots is a horrible mess of a code.

That's right. I got my omni plant seeds after completing the same opportunity, only with 10 perfect steaks instead of cheeses. Probably based on the sim's favorite food since mine's tri-tip stakes. When you complete that you get 6 omni plant seeds plus the option to order more via the mailbox.

In other news, money trees never seem to die. I started with a couple of them, and seed by seed (money trees drop seeds beneath them) I managed to now have 12 trees, without any of the original dying. Most of them are perfect quality, but I don't think that's the deal, since I've had other perfect plants complete their life cycle. Soon I'm gonna have a forest of them, and be able to practically live off them, since at the moment I'm getting more than 10k on a full harvest.

Has anyone have had their money tree die?