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User Interface Suggestions!
Klepto
Posts: 15 Member
Since the game is only a year away, the team probably can't include everything we suggest, but I'm SURE they can include changes to the user interface. My suggestions are:
-Allow us to choose what category of clothes (e.g. accessories, shoes, outfits, tops, etc.) we want to change before loading all of the clothing. It's always really annoying in the Sims 3 when you just want to change their earrings, but you first have to sit through a couple minutes of loading every single shirt you have.
-Allow us to adjust makeup, hair, and accessories both by outfit, or locked across outfits. Especially for accessories, like if I want my sim to have a wedding ring, I don't want to have to go to each individual category and add a ring, I should be able to add it to all outfits, same for glasses, socks, etc.
-Have a search system in build/buy mode where you can type in the name or category for an item. It's very annoying when you get a new item but can't figure out where it's been categorized, and this would help a lot.
-Favorites tab in CAS, for each category. That way you don't have to load a bunch of outfits you never use, just to get to that one dress you love.
-Be able to make your own categories in CAS, CAP, and build/buy.
-Allow us to queue up more than 8 actions, maybe 10-15? Also, we should be able to move around the order of actions by grabbing them, and we can cancel them by right clicking on them. It's annoying to accidentally click on an action and delete it.
-Have an option to fast-foward through an entire queue of actions, as well as one to finish just the current action.
-Provide us with more and better cheats and make them more user-friendly. For instance, if you want to give us limited facial sliders, at least include a cheat that allows us to increase the slider range. Or if you don't want household funds to be adjustable from CAS, at least give us a user-friendly cheat to do that from edit town mode.
-Make switching between households seamless without losing wants/inventories, etc. There are many mods in the community, like AwesomeMod and NRAAS mods, that already allow this with TS3, so it's obviously feasible.
That's all I've got for now. What do you guys think, and do you have any suggestions for GUI or coding changes for TS4?
-Allow us to choose what category of clothes (e.g. accessories, shoes, outfits, tops, etc.) we want to change before loading all of the clothing. It's always really annoying in the Sims 3 when you just want to change their earrings, but you first have to sit through a couple minutes of loading every single shirt you have.
-Allow us to adjust makeup, hair, and accessories both by outfit, or locked across outfits. Especially for accessories, like if I want my sim to have a wedding ring, I don't want to have to go to each individual category and add a ring, I should be able to add it to all outfits, same for glasses, socks, etc.
-Have a search system in build/buy mode where you can type in the name or category for an item. It's very annoying when you get a new item but can't figure out where it's been categorized, and this would help a lot.
-Favorites tab in CAS, for each category. That way you don't have to load a bunch of outfits you never use, just to get to that one dress you love.
-Be able to make your own categories in CAS, CAP, and build/buy.
-Allow us to queue up more than 8 actions, maybe 10-15? Also, we should be able to move around the order of actions by grabbing them, and we can cancel them by right clicking on them. It's annoying to accidentally click on an action and delete it.
-Have an option to fast-foward through an entire queue of actions, as well as one to finish just the current action.
-Provide us with more and better cheats and make them more user-friendly. For instance, if you want to give us limited facial sliders, at least include a cheat that allows us to increase the slider range. Or if you don't want household funds to be adjustable from CAS, at least give us a user-friendly cheat to do that from edit town mode.
-Make switching between households seamless without losing wants/inventories, etc. There are many mods in the community, like AwesomeMod and NRAAS mods, that already allow this with TS3, so it's obviously feasible.
That's all I've got for now. What do you guys think, and do you have any suggestions for GUI or coding changes for TS4?
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Comments
Ooooh, I like this idea!
Please keep posting!
Yes! We definitely need that feature. That way when you make families you don't have that awkward beginning of young adult stage parents with child-age kids, implying they must have had kids in their teens, haha. Adjustable ages from CAS would be fantastic.
Also, they should let us go into CAS from the main menu! It's absolutely ridiculous that we have to spend minutes loading up a world just to play around in create-a-sim.
But categories is a strange one, but I may be misunderstanding you. Not in build buy, I believe you can already make your own folders, correct me if I'm wrong there, if I am, that's a way it can be implemented. But in CAS, we already have clothing categories for everything really. I mean, I wish formal was a bit more flexible, some dresses were available in everyday, for example, or included more casual looking items for less fashion conscious sims, or outerwear had more variation. And I also don't understand how this extends to CAP.
People also need to remember this is a game, not real life, so needs to have some gamey mechanics. Yes, it's annoying, but otherwise it's gets easy and you can practically plan out a sim's entire day when they're asleep. That's why I'm against the action queue extender and, to a lesser extent, the wish thing. Also, there is a fast forward button, unless you mean to literally skip to the end, but remember the game needs to calculate every sim in that moment's actions.
And the cheats are user friendly, not as much as TS2 was with the sim modder and the tombstone of l and d, (miss that SO much). Can you elaborate more on this one maybe? Because you can give a family more money in town mode, or just turn off paying for houses altogether.
For the search in build/buy, I think items could have tags and when you search for something, like "poster" it would bring up all of the posters, not simply all of the wall decorations. Or if you searched "flower" it would bring up all of the plants, objects, and decorations that included a flower in them.
I guess what I mean by make your own categories, is that it should be a sort of extension of my favorites suggestion. Like you could take all of the everyday tops that you feel are costumey and make a 'costume' sub-category. So if you wanted to dress up a sim in a costume, rather than loading every single everyday top, you could just go to your custom 'costume' category. Or you could make a wedding dress sub-category in formalwear, or a jeans sub-category in everyday bottoms, etc. This could also allow you to dress your sims in clothes out of the pre-set categories, so if you wanted to put a swimsuit as everyday, just add it to a sub-category and select that while in the everyday section. I just think it would become particularly useful as you get more and more outfits from EPs, SPs, and the store, maybe more so then it would be with just the basegame outfits. Sorry if my explanation made it more confusing, that tends to happen...
For build/buy, I just meant they should keep the category system in the base game, as they didn't add it until a later patch in TS3, I believe. And for CAP, I just mean that we should be able to add sub-categories to favorites. I'm just a bit jaded from waiting forever for the game to load patterns, clothes, etc. when I only ever use the same 20-30 options, haha.
As for the speed up function, again I just meant they should keep the current feature where it speeds through the current action (like sleeping) but also add a second button to speed through all of the queued actions (like sleep, eat breakfast, brush teeth, go to work). It's a feature of AwesomeMod that I enjoy and would like in the base game of TS4.
And finally, for the cheats, I meant it more as just sort of a general comment than a specific request. I hope they keep the current user-friendliness of cheats, and expand upon it such that it at least begins to approach the functionality of game mods. I'm not expecting them to give us as much freedom, because obviously most players would just break their game if they had more debugging options, but I would like a bit more flexibility. And as for giving families money in edit town mode, haha, I guess I've just never figured out how. Familyfunds doesn't seem to work for me in edit town mode, i.e. giving a family in the bin more starting funds, but honestly I haven't tried in a while, so maybe I'm just remembering my frustration from when this wasn't an option in the Sims 2. Nonetheless, I would like it in TS4 regardless of whether it is currently in TS3.
Hope I've made myself a little bit more clear, I do tend to ramble, haha.