Skold With Nightlife up and running on my PC I have found any number of tiny wee errors in my existing neighborhood and my thoughts turned to starting over ... again (I started over after installing Uni ) Anyway I created a new 'hood called High Oak. Next, using Body Shop I made a couple of young adults and moved them in to a dorm. I had made them as ultra compatible as possible and I played them through 8 full semesters graduating both with first class honours degrees (they attended the European style college so none of that happy-crappy latin and greek houses ) My aim is to run a sort of legacy based on the first born of each generation. The story will not properly begin until Joy Spencer and Gunnar Skold produce their first child. I have set myself a rule that I can only add CAS sims on a one for one basis, pro-rata the legacy line's births: so if Joy and Gunnar have two kids I can add two new young adults to the campus (and graduate them and them play them until they have at least one teen and one child to fluff out the 'hood with non-NPC's). By the way, I have dumped most of JMP's hacks ... the only one I really need is the manual navigation hack ... most of the other stuff can be managed then if free will is off . To kick things off I have some pics showing: the moment that foreign exchange student Gunnar first copped eyes on the gifted Orphan Joy at the High Oak College Dorm that crucial first conversation sharing a meal in their first home a trailer park on the edge of the campus after they'd got engaged lastly two shots of them in their home in High Oak having dinner and as can be seen their first child is on its way ... Joy has already made it to the top of the culinary career and is in perma-plat which will be handy ; Gunnar is a general but his lifetime want is for a golden wedding so his perma-plat is a long way off and who knows what'll happen
Nice pix! I too find it's handy to have rules. I used to only marry player sims but have since found that NPCs can be fun, too ... more random, and more like real life. After all, you can't design your mate, no matter how much you might like to. So my "rule" is, keep it simple. I have my base family and one other sim I allowed myself because I wanted to try out a vampire, though now I'm not so sure I really want him to become one ... we'll see. And of course every time someone marries an NPC that sim then becomes a player. If the NPCs get boring, or scarce, I will let myself design mates for people. And if this rule gets boring, I can always change it.
I started the Balimore neighborhood with two brothers and a sister. They married NPCs and had children. My original plan was to populate the neighborhood entirely with NPCs and the offspring of the original three. Then I got sidetracked and put in a couple of housefuls of actors for my movie but never married them or allowed them children so they just roam around like NPCs now. Then, sidetracked again, I started the Legacy family with one character, Duke. He and his descendents have married NPCs. Last, I created the evil Menendez family--Candida and Mercedes--just to make trouble for the Legacy family. But I prefer marrying from the NPC horde. I'm cautious, though. I get them to just move in first and find out more about them before committing myself. I moved a bunch of the teenagers into college. Sybil, in fact, married the teenage store clerk, George McCarthy. My neighborhood is crowded with families, various NPCs that have married each other or relatives and descendents of the six sims I created. (The movie actors are off limits for now.) For this neighborhood I don't expect to create more people--there are so many already, especially with the added Downtown. Still, I only seem to have 388 files, according to the neighborhood character count under properties, so a long way to go before the end of the world at 800.
Yep, sticking with NPCs. I liked making intricate family trees but they quickly got out of hand. You need a lot of families for that, because if you only have two and two of the kids marry all the offspring become cousins and therefore can't marry, so you have to create another family, and so on, and pretty soon it's out of control! I'm kind of hoping for a boy the next time around. My sims seem to always turn out straight, and I'd like to try dating some of the girls on campus, just for variety ...
That was my first problem with running a neighborhood. At the third generation level (1st crop of grandchildren) it was getting complicated because the few family trees had already become too tightly tangled together. My new plan to add a new CAS for every birth in the sole (core) family means that each generation will have fresh blood, if not for marriage and breeding then at least for socialisation -- to help oil the wheels of romancing an NPC. I have also realised that I have been guilty of operating within too narrow a spectrum of facial variety and my latest pair are quite distinctive and ... well. I also left free will on and although I got them engaged they are already so close to splitting up I am wondering where they'll end up.
I always play with free will on. After all, life is uncertain ... I can usually manipulate their little simmy lives the way I want, but I like the unexpected. C'est la vie.
I tend to play with free will off but I do turn it on on occasions: for example parties -- both official parties and less formal gatherings such as family get togethers ... I'm kinda kookie in that I insist on my families having at least one one sit-down meal together every 2 or 3 days. I actually like it much better since nightlife expanded the mealtime socialising and made eating a proper social occasion. Besides I like being mischevious and getting a sim to throw some food around. 's funny how that never seems to make a mess of the kind requiring a shower. Speaking personally ,I've been puked on by babies galore and never once felt the need for more than a quick rub-down with a Wet-Wipe but if you lob a handful of mashed potato and gravy at me I feel pretty sure I would need serious laundry and personal toilette attention ... still who ever said The Sims were life-like?
LOL! I thought about that too! I also love how they can fix the shower in full clothing and not get wet, ditto the babies who like to splash in puddles. Especially when you know they're wearing diapers. I took my baby to the beach once and let her get wet. I swear she gained ten pounds in ten seconds. Those diapers are absorbent! Also found it quite amusing when one of my sims fixed her shower in her undies. She pulled a big wrench out of her, ah, bottoms and I thought, man that had to be uncomfortable!
I remember wondering when the best time to wean my first one would be when we took him to the beach. He must've eaten half of it! When I saw the contents of his diaper the following morning I was seriously toying with setting up a brick factory ....
OMG too funny. Hope no one's too grossed out by all this mom humor. I've been told daily interactions with bodily functions makes one a tad insensitive to the delicate nature of others.
I think that only works for moms. I haven't been able to eat guacamole for the last 20 years thanks to my oldest kid!
