Autumn Cornucopia Just noticed that Maxis has released another object for us: an Autumn Cornucopia. Like the Halloween objects earlier, it's just decorative. I haven't tried it out yet so don't know if there are any other features with it.
Right, notice how their employees spend their time doing this sort of thing, instead of making the patch like they should be.
And like you want the graphic artists to do programming? Somehow I think that there is no use putting someone in a position where they have to do work which they are not trained to do. Much better that the artists continue doing art work and the programmers keep working on the patch. And it's not like there isn't a work around (since you yourself posted it for us in the modding section. Thanks for that. People should be very pleased to have that.)
Sure, why not? It's not like this situation could get any WORSE, even if they had 12 year old children doing their programming. Pssh. I'm not trained to do either, and I still managed. Yes, but the fact that I have training in none of the above, and still managed to isolate and hack around the problem, is proof of how simple this is.
That all depends on those children of course. As a trained programmer I can tell you, you don't want to see my art! Except when you think of programming as an art of course
J.M.P. if you think it is ssoooo simple why don't you do it yourself? unless you can do it yourself i wouldn't talk so "Big" of yourself if i were you!
Um, he did do it himself. He figured out what was causing the jump bug and made a mod that keeps it from happening.
Am I the only one who's a bit annoyed that the objects they let you download so far are a) gigantic; the Halloween stuff is just a good-looking waste of space b) so tiny you have to zoom in until your eyes bleed Honestly, why place, for example, the 'bowl of fruit' on a table. I play the game at a reasonable zoom but the bowl is still almost invisible. The same goes for the various vases. They are so tiny! And, uhm, perhaps this is a mini-rant, but: a cornucopia. Yeah. Of all the things I could think of that they could have designed ( bed, table, chairs, a different stove, different counter et cetera ad nauseaum ), they made a bloody cornucopia. Thank you, Maxis, for fulfilling my non-existent need to decorate my houses with little straw horns filled with various fruit and corn. </rant>
I guess it's just easier to make entirely new, completely useless objects, than it is to make objects that are merely slightly different, and also have no real innate function, except by virtue of being inanimate and flat, like a counter or a table, eh? Nevermind that for half the world, it's spring right about now.
Half the planet, JMP? Don't use imprecise information. Half the globe doesn't signifiy relevance. Seasons are only significant outside of the tropics. The southern hemisphere is mostly water. It is therefore spring only in Southern Africa, Australasia and the various ~nesias and all points south of Rio in a content that vanishes rapidly into a rocky point. I can't be bothered to look it up but I'd bet that these regions don't account for much more than 10% of the world's population.
And I point out that Australia is a significant portion of the playerbase, for whom this download has very limited relevance. Actually, the relevance is pretty limited even for those of us for whom it *IS* autumn. Because as Ningengirai pointed out, this download *SO* fills our non-existent niche to decorate our Sim homes with straw horns filled with inedible, and presumably plastic, corn and fruit. Maybe if we had the ability to use these fruits as projectile weapons or consumables, this would have been interesting, but as it stands, it's a great example of Maxian inefficiency and time wastage.
JM, you may not be classroom trained, but you have some training in this area (self taught if nothing else.) At the risk of inflating your ego more than it already is, you have a lot more ability than the average person in this area. Many people have tried to do what you have been able to do but only a handful of people seem to have figured out how to fix it. Also, keep in mind that the hacking you have done still has not figured out the underlying problem, only a short cut to how to fix it. They need to work on fixing the underlying problem so that people can have the use of their Sim's memories back again. (Those memories seem to be more important than one might think. Since installing the patch, one of my sets of twins is no longer interested in anything her sister says. She continually puts her fingers in her ears and seems to do the "la-la-la. I'm not interested in listening to you" routine.) As you've mentioned before, the "hardwiring" may be where the real change needs to be to fix these things.
Okay, changing the subject a little bit: Has anyone actually played with the cornucopia? Maybe it does something surprising, like the "christmas cookies" did when it made Santa appear in TS1??
Good thought! Maybe it makes any trees on the lot, that have an alternate autumn tint change color ...
Actually, it's the other way around: We *HAVE* figured out the underlying problem, but lack the effective tools and documentation with which to devise a more effective fix. At the moment, the editing tools at our disposal are rather crude, not unlike duct tape....but I was always pretty good with duct taping. This is not memory-related. Your problem is that your sisters share practically no interests, so find it impossible to hold a conversation. Having discussable memories can only very slightly mitigate this, as a memory topic is never "rejected" as such, but with younger sims, they won't have anything to discuss. Besides, if you have the jumping bug, you can't hold a discussion *ANYWAY*. If you DON'T have the jumping bug, why are you applying a fix for a problem which doesn't yet exist? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. With better tools, I'm sure we could fix fully and completely with ease. It is, of course, not in Maxis's interest to give us these tools, as we'd simply use them to make them look like even bigger fools. So, we're stuck with whatever tools we can reverse-engineer, which already do a fine job of making Maxis look incompetent and foolish. Yes, yes we have. We disassembled the thing thoroughly, and have concluded that it is thoroughly useless. There is absolutely no code that does anything substantive contained within the object. It is pretty much useless.
Interestingly enough, these two adult sisters do share the same interests (courtesy of them reading the same magazine.) It seemed very strange since they had always had such animated conversations in the past. Looking back, however, they did seem to be dominated by topics such as the house symbol, the stacked books symbol, and other memory related symbols. By the way, although *this* family doesn't have the jump bug, I have others that do, which is why I used the patch. It's not like you can just put the patch into a single family.
You might not have used enough magazine: Sims with preexisting interests don't entirely lose them merely off of one magazine, and it generally takes more than just one or two compatible topics to avoid bad conversations, due to the absolutely horrid selection algorithm used for picking the topic. As our understanding of BHAVs improves, I should probably be able to write a better algorithm for topic selection that will avoid the constant "try bad topic, try same bad topic again, try same bad topic still again" irritance.
... but I wonder what is the point of having a game where all the action is perfectly predictable. I have some sims who quickly catch-on to the 'bad subjects' with new aquaintances ... others are just utterly oblivious and they will plug on regardless. In the middle ground as the ordinary sims who general take 2 or 3 bad-vibes events before they cotton on. This is like real people. Some folks are natural social stars while some others piss off almost everyone they meet. I generally don't waste my sims time on socializing with a sim who does the fingers in the ear bit. It's goodbye and good-riddance ... there's plenty more simfish in my simsea.
It's a video game, Mirelly. Everything already *IS* perfectly predictable. I'm just substituting STUPID predictability for slightly more intelligent behavior. This is purely random. There's no code that actually supports this, it's more a confluence of interests effect. Heh, well, I guarantee if you tried to talk about boring stuff with somebody, and he actually did the fingers in the ears bit, you'd catch on pretty quickly also. The thing is in real life, most people don't express their disinterest quite so blatantly as Sims do! I'm pretty sure if you tried to talk about your favorite topic, say, Money, with somebody, and he actually stuck his fingers in his ears, turned away, and went "Blah, blah, blah!" at you, you'd realize he was definitely not interested, too!
The sister's interest charts are identical, interestingly enough. (I checked it before I wrote this reply.) She's now back to talking to her sister, so maybe it was just a fluke that it happened. (She also had the "phone list deletion syndrome" which I haven't had the courage to go check yet. I'm told that it goes away on its own with time.)
