Nearly a Year Ago Now

Oh wow, it's been nearly a year since my last post. I've been keeping pretty busy with my small business, Smallhouse Models.

I was devastated when I realized I couldn't finish my Pleasantview Renovate for my Creator Anniversary last July, but the project isn't scrubbed, it's just on the back burner. I moved out of state two weeks later and needed the time to pack. After the move it didn't seem as urgent because I missed the deadline.

I wasn't about to let another important yearly tradition slip past me. This year the calendar contest's theme is simply to embody that month with a sim in the scene. I've previously entered a January, July, and October months in years previous, so as an added challenge to myself, I can't repeat months I've done in years past. This year I got the idea to depict Groundhog's Day, so that's what I did. Move over Valentine's Day, you are so overdone.

Finally Fixed My Sunken Pets Bug!

Pets has never been my favorite thing to play, mostly because it has never worked right for me. The vast majority of the time my pets are half sunken into the ground, and when they aren't I've never been able to get a single one of them to go to their job. Last night I finally took the time to track down what was causing my sunken pets issue, mostly because 2 of my 3 testing lots both happen to have pets on them, and it was starting to get annoying. After 2 hours of the half and half method with an initial false positive, I believe the issue was Atavera's Animated Windows Fix. Strange huh? I thought so until I opened it up and found a few pie menus that were directly specifically at big dogs and cats. I unticked them, and removed a few of the pie menu stuff that doesn't have anything to do with anything (unless it's dogs sleeping in the bay window, which I've never seen, but I'll forgo to have open-able windows). While I was there I also took the Wash Window off only neat freaks, and made it available for everyone, because it's a fun thing to see. So far my pets are still above ground and I hope that really was the issue. The interactions they have are so cute! Maybe some day I'll figure out what's keeping them from going to their jobs. (Though, pet jobs as a concept is still pretty weird to me, so maybe I won't bother.)

Hood Corruption Scare & Move Hood Tutorial

Currently, my game is on life support. Not all my hoods, just my favorite one. Pleasantview. Recently I was playing different families to get my hood back into some sort of time sync with itself and when I'd stop playing for the night, something would go wrong and the save wouldn't complete. The next time I'd load the game, Pleasantview would be missing. I have very recent backups, so I only lost a day or so of playing, but it's still frustrating to lose anything. I'd restore from backup and occasionally I'd get a head, but other times not. I tried removing all my CC to see if that was causing the issue, and sadly, no. I still was getting corrupt saves. Hood corruption is by far the scariest thing a long time sim player can face. This hood goes back to 2006 for me!

I knew I had to do something drastic and quick before I lost access to the hood for good. I made a duplicate of N001 and loaded it. The plan is remove all the sims to a new neighborhood. You'd think it would be easy, but it's not and there are so many ways to mess something up and corrupt both hoods and lose sims in the process. Just making look-alikes of my sims won't cut it. Most of them aren't that pretty looking to begin with, I need to save their history, their relationships, their played past. The key here is that everyone on a single lot will retain their relationships with everyone else on that lot. I needed to create a "Noah's Ark" lot and stuff it full of EVERY sim in the neighborhood I wanted to save, AND all their dead relatives. Upon Simpe inspection, my Pleasantview has 667 sims in it. (I love that fact, it was 666 when the corruption was first noticed, I had a devil of a time getting little Nico Caliente born and saved.)

See how to fix this for your own hood after the cut.

Age and Time Syncing my Hood

So I've been recently wanting to actually play my game lately, and I realized that my hood is seriously out of time sync with itself. Cassandra Goth is older than Nina, Dina, and Don. Alexander Goth is nearly their ages. Some of my CAS families have gotten out of sync with their adult siblings, and somehow Skip Broke is now older than Beau. I went through my entire hood, Uni, Downtown, and Subs (Belladonna is my business district), and wrote down all the families and how old everyone was and tried to figure out how old everyone should be instead. I'm now playing Nina, Dina, and Don to catch them up, as they were the worst offenders, and then I'll be working on catching up the rest of the smaller anachronisms. (fun word, but rarely useable) After that I'm planning on resetting all the seasons and days of the week for everyone and see if I can't get some sorta semblance of real time going on. I had this in mind when I was recreating my Calendar, and included these options in it's debug menu. I'm not sure yet if I want to play in rotation, a week at each house, or play by who is supposed to have the next birthday. That sounds more fun personally, but it also means that my elders will get flat out neglected. (like they aren't already!)

On the subject of never playing my elders, I've come up with an interesting retirement home idea. I've tried to make one once before but didn't really have much success with it because of the limits of the number of sims you can have in a family. I've seen retirement homes get done with the Uni Myne Doors, which is very helpful, and I've seen them get done as apartments, but that still only gives you a small number of old folks to be plodding around the facility, not like real ones at all. Then it dawned on me to combine them. Using the Myne doors and apartments as 'wings', you could have 32 sims living on the lot, each with their own room! Now that's closer to a full house! Some lower end machines would likely through a fit over it, but I don't have a lower end machine, so this could be fun. The only other problem is that sims tend to stay hidden in their apartments, but Inge has Apartment Indicator Pictures that force sims out of their apartments, so this sounds like a plan now!

Playing Oprah: Giving Away Cars

So, it's not really a project per se, but I just spent some time going through all my families in Pleasantville and the surounding subs deleted ugly Yomoshoto cars and replacing them with awesome new cars I finally got around to downloading, choosing the right recolors, price fixing, and editing to show up in parking lots. After some careful math/research, I've concluded that to correctly price a sims car you need to take the price that car would be today (if it's an older car you find what the used price would be) and divide it by 3. This puts all the CC cars inline with the original ones and it keeps them on a relatively correct scale with each other. Likely the creator didn't bother with keeping things like comfort and fun in check, but all in all, that's not actually a problem for a car.

After I did my research on all the cars I had downloaded (26), some of which were harder to find, I edited their cost in simpe and tweaked the two values required to make them show up in parking lots. I decided that not all my new cars should be allowed to show up, mostly the fancier older ones, and I kept that in consideration while working. Then I tested it out, discovered I had a bug that prevented me from being able to go to comm lots, spent about half an hour tracking that down and nuking it, and finally I was able to send a delegation of sims to a community lot with parking spaces. Lo and behold, it was beautiful. All the sexy new cars I downloaded and what a pretty range of colors and shapes and styles. It was so real and wonderful looking I spent another half an hour just regenerating them and watching the pretty dance of cars in front of me. So happy! I'll do Strangetown and Desdirata later, I need sleep.