Actually NPCs do grow older, but I think at a slower rate.  My family had a newspaper girl who grew up to a teenager (becoming the babysitter), and then grew up to an adult and became the repairwoman.

Bosses are career level 5, and LTWs are 9 or 10, so that would never happen.


I like the idea, but you could add a bit of qualification to it... if the sim has some of the skills toward the job they could get *offered* to be promoted to level 5/boss, but at the cost of some sizable simolean investment (aka starting their 'own' business).  Otherwise the game would wrangle in a new sim to be the boss.  Seems like a reasonable middleground.

Question about family splitting -- if one of the splitting sims has kids with a non splitting some (e.g. they remarried someone else), does the splitting sim always take the kids with them?  Or can there be custody battles?  Family-oriented wins and commitment issues loses etc?

AFAIK, Sacred doesn't do anything when you are playing the household.  The whole point is so that you can set the families you want to play as Sacred, which makes them immune to Story Mode when you aren't playing them.  You don't have to switch it on and off.

Minor typo, i meant sims 3 as well.

Even so, your example hardly qualifies as broken.  LTW's were only a miniscule portion of the gameplay in sims 2 and you could play the majority of the game without your example bug stopping your game cold.  An example of a game *actually* being broken would be Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which had a CTD for the majority of players preventing them from getting past the first half of the game.  That is broken.  Your LTW thing is a bug.

If you think Sims 3 was 'freakin broken' when it was released you have no idea what you're talking about.

Try a different web browser.

Non-story mode related, one of my sims wanted to get it on with her father in law.  Kinda weird.

It will be based on the currently selected age lengths, exactly as it says.

I also have no problem with using launcher for sims3pack files -- the one thing I can think of is that I have the EA store digital download version (which has a slightly different launcher .exe i believe).  Wonder if the people having trouble are DVD users...

The game has only uniform time for the town.  There is no other option and it's nigh unlikely that there ever will be as it would be a lot of work just to make it do something that people mostly bought sims 3 for it to not do .

Don't forget Doctor Claw from Inspector Gadget, you see more of the cat than you ever see of Dr Claw.

Face it people, cats are our Evil Overlords and dogs are stupid.

Speaking of the pedo option -- will non-active sims ever autonomously initiate a pedo interaction if they're loaded on a visible lot?  I don't particularly plan to have my sims go pedo, but I wouldn't mind if the parents had to teach kids not to take candy from strangers so to speak.

My townies seem to socialize fun when they show up on lots I visit.  Eating at picnic baskets together, swimming, etc.

I don't even necessarily think it needs some method of 'maintaining an overall balance'.  If we're going to take a theoretical view of this, I think the best way is to make an engine that produces behavior that is both chaotic and interesting (those tend to go hand in hand).  You start the town off at relative equilibrium and as more and more things happen to the sims living their it *will* get more complicated, as marriages lead to jealousy and fights divorces, people being fired, houses being robbed, etc.  Then, once you have an engine that can successfully do that, you build in feedback mechanisms that pull the chaos back towards order.  So if the engine leads to everyone being angry at each other until every sim is fighting in the street with every other sim, you put in a police force that locks up sims who get in too many fights etc (this is sort of like how real society works).  The point is that you make it able to generate interesting *first*, and only then can you attempt to make it not go out of control.  Otherwise you fall into the trap of trying to make interestingness happen within a narrow set of constraints, not all of which everyone will agree on.

The untimely death thing seems fine for me as long as we see the sim die and the sim they were talking to has the appropriate reaction.  The marriage is something that should be schedule ahead of time rather than randomly decided.  Player sims get engaged first, so story mode should follow the same progression - have two sims get engaged and when they do set a date for the wedding.  On that date they get sent to a wedding venue and have the wedding.  But you should be able to go and see it if you want to.  I don't want things happening behind the curtain at all, they should be happening so you can see them (this is what Pescado means with 'Show, Don't Tell').

I don't think straight up random relationships is a good idea at all.  Best I can think of is semi-random based on who the sim knows and is friends with.  If a sim doesn't know many viable partners then Awesome can sort of queue that sim up to be more likely to visit a community lot when your sims go there, or maybe even stop by your house to visit so that they DO meet people, etc.  Rather than force sims into totally arbitrary relationships, arbitrarily force the sim to make semi-arbitrary relationships .

I use Indie Mod right now because I like it better than default and I've heard many people complain about too many Elders with AwesomeMod, but I'll probably switch back to awesome once Awesome has story mode fixed etc.  However, using the latest Indie Mod, I definitely don't see promotions being handed out like candy -- in fact I probably see more messages about people being demoted.  What IS lacking is any sense that the promotion or demotions mean anything -- there is no why they got fired (a.k.a. maybe they skipped work to adulterate with their boss's wife,etc!).

So here's a vision of how I'd like to see AwesomeStoryMode as it interacts with the player vs. just the under the hood mentality.  Basically things should weave into the player's experience without hitting them over the head with the idea that what just happened is a result of Story Mode.  For example, say your sim Alice is friends with Bob.  Bob is a couch potato so one day he skips work to stay home and watch TV and then gets fired.  Since Bob is friends with Alice, maybe later that day he calls up
Alice to complain about getting fired, which would happen just like a regular phone call, and perhaps you don't even answer the phone with Alice so you never know anything happened.  Maybe if y6ou do answer you got a pop up option (sort of like Sims 2 job challenges) where you can either try to make Bob feel better, or maybe you tell him he should stop being such a lazy shit.  Then again, maybe that optional stuff is a little much for version 1, but I'd definitely like to see story mode events have player interactivity.

Another example would be say Alice is distant friends with Karen, and Karen decides to get married with her boyfriend.  So then Karen sends Alice a wedding invitation (via the mailbox since they're distant, or by phone if theyre good friends, in person if they are best friends etc), which sets up the date and time the wedding will happen at.  So then you can either have Alice show up at the wedding, or maybe you dont and then Karen gets mad at Alice, etc.

I'm pretty sure this is probably already a lot of what Pescado has in mind for this, but figured I'd throw in my 2 cents...

You're doing something wrong.  You're thinking, 'I don't want to make them my active house'.  The active house gets the money.  So you move out some sims, select them as the active house, then they get the funds in the move out menu so then yes you *can* buy them a house.  And once you move them out you just switch back to the family you were playing before.

It's possible.  You just do it.  Have you tried doing it?

Your point in posting this is?

The patch has been tested... patch your game.

I also use Firefox and I have zero problems loading this site, and I'm a compulsive refresher with 4 different forum threads open at once...

Just curious what the status is as far as the No Parthenogensis option and towns keeping a stable population.  I'd heard that having that option enabled basically meant that very few kids end up being born but that it was being worked on so I was wondering what the situation is...