Plans for Nightlife

[vecki]

I'll say that I'm going to wait for a while before buying nightlife, because I have RL University to worry about, never mind my work, my social life, my health...

But then I'll probably break down the day it's released, buy it, and just play with my established families.

[dsk]

Meh... I don't get the whole social oriented expansion packs.  If I'm playing a house of more than about 3 or 4 sims, keeping them in the green, getting them through school/work, etc., is hard and time consuming enough (if not tedious and repetitive after a while).  When am I supposed to find time to put them in cars and drive them all over the neighborhood going on dates?

I'm at least pleased that they understand everyone plays the game differently and tries to include new things that appeal to most players.  As long as the new construction tools and objects don't cause my game to explode in a fiery ball which can be seen from space, I'll be happy.  Vampires might be entertaining, too...

[Darkstormyeve]

aaaaah Dsk, this is why they invented "motherlode". You just gotta have a family that lives for pleasure with no money worries once in a while.

[witch]

No, I don't think they are always "just an object".  They are certainly sometimes recognised by the Hack Scanner as hacked objects.

I was looking at the cars on simslice yesterday, sims can get in - several at once - and do what I don't know - but their fun & social go up. Simslice even have hacked helicopters that sims or townies can ride in, or so they say, I'm not game to try and I don't think their downloads are free anyway. So they're definitely hacks rather than just decorative objects.

[phyllis_p]

However, in the neighborhood view, you can clearly see some unexplainable terrain warpage. The foundation rim hovers over a black abyss, and the interior of the pit clearly appears to no longer be flat. The concretium, previously seen to be perfectly level, now appears strangely curved, a placement that is impossible without cheats.

Thanks for posting the pics, El Presidente, sir.  I guess that explains why I've never seen it.  Once my sweetie has completed his houses and done all his landscaping and neighborhood decoration -- about which he is extremely picky -- those effects are masked.  I showed him the pics and he said he had, indeed, noticed what they showed, to some extent, on any house with a foundation before he had finished with it.  The visuals helped; the sinkhole analogy just wasn't working.

Thanks again,

Phyllis

[HRH Posie]

Drill a large basement. Then witness what your lot looks like in the neighborhood view. The terrain around the house will look like it's getting sucked into a sinkhole, starting with the stairs to the porch looking like they're suffering from a bad case of receding gumlines. It looks quite awful, and limits the size of the basement to a somewhat arbitrary figure often much smaller than the foundation of the house it's being drilled under.

Thank god I'm not the only one to have witnessed that.  As much as like having basement rooms for storing career rewards or useless crap, I hate what it does to the house.

[JenW]

I personally couldn't care less about the cars. I don't want them. I hoped we wouldn't get them. For the most part my Sims will probably not get them. IMO cars are a neccessary evil in real life and I wouldn't use one if I didn't live in the urban sprawl capital of the world (or at least it's got to be in the top 10).

I probably won't create a new neighborhood just for Nightlife, but I'll be adding downtowns to some of my neighborhoods. I don't know how much I'll end up going there (I suspect the dating thing, at least initially, will be more than I'll want to deal with on a regular basis. But then I thought the same of college and now all my teens go.) but it'll be nice to have them there. As a builder I'm tickled with the idea of new types of buildings to build. I can't wait to build a nightclub and restaurants.

Jen

[J. M. Pescado]

aaaaah Dsk, this is why they invented "motherlode". You just gotta have a family that lives for pleasure with no money worries once in a while.

Pssh. By the time you hit 2nd or 3rd generation, you'll have more money than you know what to do with even if you don't cheat. Just the fact that the parents cough up $40K minimum for the two of them when they pop their clogs is enough to make a family disgustingly rich in a few generations, without anything else. Throw in a few chance cards (carefully researched from the War Room), and even this 40K becomes a mere drop in the bucket.

Meh... I don't get the whole social oriented expansion packs.  If I'm playing a house of more than about 3 or 4 sims, keeping them in the green, getting them through school/work, etc., is hard and time consuming enough (if not tedious and repetitive after a while).  When am I supposed to find time to put them in cars and drive them all over the neighborhood going on dates?

My guess would be, "In the ridiculously overblown span of time that Uni takes place in". Greening and work/school become relatively trivial once you have all the Uni boosts and an understanding of the awesomeness of Macrotastics. Still, you do have a limited time to do all this dating stuff in, given the relative brevity of the adult lifespan. Given that work, school, and motivekeeping are trivialized, socializing is about all you HAVE. Well, except that I've trivialized that, too. I'm sure AutoSoc->Romantic will make any date a freebie win.

[Ancient Sim]

I've got a new version of Pleasantview ready, with some adjustments made to relationships (e.g., Skip Broke has been brought back to life and is now the brother of Dustin & Beau, not the father), but whether I will play it or not I'm not sure.  I may just start a totally new one, without all the Maxis buggy families.  What worries me the most is all the new characters that will come with the expansion (and future expansions) now I know that it isn't the number of characters in play that causes neighbourhoods to go belly-up, but the total number of characters, alive or dead.  There are so many new ones introduced with each expansion that it sounds as if nobody will ever be able to play the same neighbourhood from start to finish. 

[J. M. Pescado]

Technically speaking, it's not the fact that there are many characters which cause a neighborhood to go belly-up. It's the fact that boneheaded coding failed to account for this possibility, resulting in a "too many iterations" error, that then spreads when the error occurs during something critical, resulting in corrupted files. All of these problems are inherently resolvable, especially given that they can simply create functions to prevent this in hardcode, but they choose not to, instead repeating the same error even after it is apparent that they are at least partially aware of the problem. Furthermore, "too many characters" is also often a tip-of-the-iceberg problem. It's just not the number of characters alone which causes problems, but the fact that you have a million metric tons of garbage in those files as well.

[Ancient Sim]

Sounds like the way to go is to start with a totally fresh neighbourhood once the expansion comes out.  In some ways, having to wait 2-3 weeks after America gets it is an advantage in that a lot of the glitches & bugs will have been modded-out by then.  Quite a few of the Uni bugs never reached my game because they'd been discovered and dealt with by the time it arrived over here.  It's probably going to take quite a while in any case to remove all the mods that are no longer necessary because of the patching - then again, they'll probably only patch a couple of the least annoying things and leave the others.

[MutantBunny]

So maybe NL will address this "too many iterations"... Ok. Proabably not.

I am looking forward to NL. I know I have no 'real life' life..... But so what, I deal with it. I am looking forward to all it's new features to explore and then to see what everyone creates off of these.

I have one main hood (and I kept Strangeville to use as my experimental grounds) I will load the game up (after creating backups) and have at it. I will expore the Maxis city, then make my own and dump theirs.

I love the insturments that Uni gave us. My four memeber 'band' will play for tips downtown when NL gets here.

And I hope that NL will not be that half baked half completed shit they have given us so far. Hope.