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Create-A-World 2.0 - Adding Vacation Hoods.
tea_and_blues
Posts: 889 Member
Create-A-World is a fantastic tool, and currently it's underutilised. If EA ever fixes the glitches in WA that corrupt sims and their family trees when they travel often, then the ability to add worlds as alternate destinations to China, Egypt and France would be fantastic. To be fair, the most hard-working modders in the sims community have not been able to fix the eventually game-breaking family-tree destruction that WA brought to TS3, so it's clearly a deeply embedded problem that EA are presumably (a) working on (b) at a loss to resolve because they built the game's coding infrastructure so badly in the first place. It's increasingly safe to say the sims has been built for short bursts of gameplay, and not for legacy play. Someone should tell the marketing team...
Such observations are important to make, but enough of the downside. There's a lot of really great stuff that you've given us, EA. CAW is definitely one of them, and I use it all the time. I've basically become a dedicated "world builder" and that's what the community recognises me as. The underpinning philosophy of The Sims these days is that it's a game based around sharing. With lots, sims, and even the ability to share Ambitions tattoos, it seems there were two glaring omissions in World Adventures. Firstly, we cannot currently make out worlds into subhoods of our main one. Setting up the infrastructure to do this would take a lot of work and a substantial patch, but it would increase the gameplay value of WA by an enormous margin. Secondly, we are subject only to EA-made adventures which, while witty and fun, are linear and unchanging: There was no 'adventure creation tool' in WA, and that fact floored me. It seemed to be contrary to whole theory of the game.
So here're my ideas in bullets:
- Leveraging off the adventures in WA, allow us to export CAW worlds as adventure destinations. The lot types (basecamp, etc) are already there.
- Introduce an 'Adventure Editor' to CAW so that we can type plenty of text and a small number of commands (eg, "Return a flamefruit to randomly assigned NPC in this townie house" OR "Explore the Tomb of the Llama" OR "Befriend three Niua Simoans"). These adventures would be associated exclusively with that CAW world.
- User-made adventures would then generate from an exported world's basecamp mailbox.
I think this would be a natural, powerful, and extremely simply way to boost CAW. I imagine it would also encourage another boosted cycle of WA sales, as players would suddenly have access to tropical vacation hoods and all manner of exotic locations. The fact of the matter is, before I realised CAW's (quite acceptable for a BETA) limitations I conceptualised my popular 'Niua Simoa' (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=387272) as a vacation hood. I'd still love to make a vacation hood in a similar vein one day.
However, if EA doesn't plan to address the deep-seated errors that prevent long-term neighbourhood stability (primarily family tree corruption, and the inventory corruption that happens if sims gather too many items) in the game as it stands, then those sales and that increased gameplay aren't a realistic hope for EA, nor for the players.
Such observations are important to make, but enough of the downside. There's a lot of really great stuff that you've given us, EA. CAW is definitely one of them, and I use it all the time. I've basically become a dedicated "world builder" and that's what the community recognises me as. The underpinning philosophy of The Sims these days is that it's a game based around sharing. With lots, sims, and even the ability to share Ambitions tattoos, it seems there were two glaring omissions in World Adventures. Firstly, we cannot currently make out worlds into subhoods of our main one. Setting up the infrastructure to do this would take a lot of work and a substantial patch, but it would increase the gameplay value of WA by an enormous margin. Secondly, we are subject only to EA-made adventures which, while witty and fun, are linear and unchanging: There was no 'adventure creation tool' in WA, and that fact floored me. It seemed to be contrary to whole theory of the game.
So here're my ideas in bullets:
- Leveraging off the adventures in WA, allow us to export CAW worlds as adventure destinations. The lot types (basecamp, etc) are already there.
- Introduce an 'Adventure Editor' to CAW so that we can type plenty of text and a small number of commands (eg, "Return a flamefruit to randomly assigned NPC in this townie house" OR "Explore the Tomb of the Llama" OR "Befriend three Niua Simoans"). These adventures would be associated exclusively with that CAW world.
- User-made adventures would then generate from an exported world's basecamp mailbox.
I think this would be a natural, powerful, and extremely simply way to boost CAW. I imagine it would also encourage another boosted cycle of WA sales, as players would suddenly have access to tropical vacation hoods and all manner of exotic locations. The fact of the matter is, before I realised CAW's (quite acceptable for a BETA) limitations I conceptualised my popular 'Niua Simoa' (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=387272) as a vacation hood. I'd still love to make a vacation hood in a similar vein one day.
However, if EA doesn't plan to address the deep-seated errors that prevent long-term neighbourhood stability (primarily family tree corruption, and the inventory corruption that happens if sims gather too many items) in the game as it stands, then those sales and that increased gameplay aren't a realistic hope for EA, nor for the players.
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Comments
Nice idea, however, I would prefer they add the ability to assign sims to houses and ghost to tomb stones in Create A World without having to create a separate saved game file first. Its really annoying to me, to have to create two separate files, and only being able to have the map uploaded to the exchange, if at all. Plus, a travel destination that doesn't already have sims living there would be kind of boring and lonely.
Having the ability to pre-populate worlds with our own characters is also an obvious step that EA could make with CAW. People find it really confusing having to download a separate save game just to get that. However, world file sizes are already basically too big for the exchange to handle. I get my worlds hosted on Modthesims - definitely the best sims fansite of all. I try to host small ones of the exchange though. Because people keep asking me to put them up here, but the launcher won't upload big files.
I thought the patch was supposed fix that problem. Too bad it didn't, apparently.
My game's fully patched, with WA and HELS. Usually it breaks off dead sims which isn't so bad, but I think the broken sims are messing up the gamedata for your hood. Twallan's storyprogression can fix the broken sim data, which prolongs the life of your hood, but it leaves the sims isolated and no longer on any family tree. So your sim's brother is no longer shown as a relative. You can use Twallan's supercomputer to reattach the sims that break off, but they break off in such large numbers after a while that it becomes incredibly tedious.
Basically, you can't play a legacy AND play an adventuring sim. Not without tearing your neighbourhood to pieces.
That's upsetting. EA should fix that. In the meantime, the map I'm working on right now, its going to have all the World Adventures community lots, excluding the base camp, in addition to all the lot types from the core game. Its also going to have a lot specifically for legacy families. So maybe you could have one of your legacy families living there after I finish it. That way, you won't have to even leave town in order for sims to learn Kunfu or Nectar making, and they'll even be a few tombs to explore in and around the town.