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.

Seasonal Views Calendar Contest

The theme for this year's calendar contest is Seasonal Views. Basically, make a pretty landscape picture without any sims in it. I entered January and July. I ended up winning July, but because the January winner had already won another month (and you can't be a winner twice) my second place January got bumped up in her place, and July went to it's second place winner as well. That's perfectly fine by me, I liked my January entry better!

It's Nano Time!

Ok fellow crazys! It's November again, so pick up your pens and kick it up into high gear at your keyboards.

Last year I fell prey to the holidays being in the end of the month. I have a plan for this. I'm going to use the previous year's word counts to fill in days I can't get anything written. I'm hoping that I'll be able to write enough during the early part of the month to 'finish' halfway through the month. I have about 25k from before, so I'll still be pacing the same as everyone else for the first half of the month. I still need to do 1,667 words a day. I'm already likely going to miss today and possibly Saturday because I'm still wrapping up Halloween activities, but we'll see how the weekend goes.

The New and the Old

I've been trying to follow the TS4 news, and I have to say, I'm cautiously hopeful. I'd really love to rejoin the current game sim community again and mod and create for TS4, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the base game play, UI, and graphics don't suck so horribly to keep me away. I'm still jealous of the gorgeous TS3 landscapes, but the pudding faces kept me away. I did find mods and what nots to try to fix it all, but it just wasn't enough in the end.

I'm feeling the pressure to finish up some of my TS2 projects. If I do make the switch, they will likely never get done. In addition to all the new projects that are listed up at the top, I have a number of older projects that I want to do updates for. I promised a Pet Coats tutorial and more Halloween Costumes for my trunk. SexySims versions of my correlated skins and my own ethnic correlated skin set are long overdue (may or may not be released, that who project got a lot of heat due to my poor presentation of it.) Updates to my Playground set, apparently it has trouble being used on comm lots and the slides are seriously broken with AL. I also wanted to add more windmills, fix the bugs in my Tiny Tike Dresser (as that set *is* my most downloaded thing, it's a little embarrassing for it to be so buggy now, freaking EPs breaking things.) And lastly add a witch family to my SciFi Families and flesh out my Fairytale 9-5s a bit more, at least put in the career outfits. I likely won't ever get around to doing the Teen/Elder version nor the Villain one.

So much to do still! Now that I've moved to an apt much closer to my work (regained a full hour thanks to a shorter commute) and I'm living on my own (and so making my own schedules) I hope to have more time once again to spend on sims. I do miss making things for the community. Keep your fingers crossed! :)

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!