This is not likely to happen, even with petitions and the reason is that it would force those with LN to have ST once their clubs and such were converted to venues and it would generate a 1000 whinet posts about how, unless they buy LN, they can't get those clubs change to venues in their game.
Each EP is made to standalone so you don't need one for the other to work or make sense. Not everyone who has LN has ST or everyone that has ST has LN.
That is why you can build your own venues in LN, even copy the buildings if you want and change them to venues or just add them from the bin. Or add on to a club or dive or whatever so it has a part of it set up as a venue with a stage etc.
There is not any real reason to take those clubs and such away from those who only play LN and have not ST and would have no use for venues - the real estate would be worthless for them. And there is not much reason to expect ST owners to but LN just to get extra venues.
I don't think you quite understand, stormwench. Nobody would lose anything they currently have. We're not asking that anything about the lots be changed, we're asking that SHT performers recognise LN lots as if they were performance venues if both packs are installed. That can happen without making LN owners require SHT, there's no technical challenge in that. If you just have LN, then the SHT interactions simply do not show up, and the SHT objects are not in the game. Your LN lots would still be there, and still act just like LN lots. It's that simple, and EA has done this sort of thing before between EPs.
People seem to be drastically over-estimating how complicated the coding for this would be. If you look at how the game is designed - if you look inside the gameplaydata.package and elsewhere, then you quickly see that most of the work towards this change is already done.
A world like Hidden Springs doesn't have enough lots of the right size to harbor all Showtime lots -- let alone the full complement of all lots from earlier EP's. Worse yet, it isn't even possible to place empty lots of sufficient size for the bigger ones!
I don't think you quite understand, stormwench. Nobody would lose anything they currently have. We're not asking that anything about the lots be changed, we're asking that SHT performers recognise LN lots as if they were performance venues if both packs are installed. That can happen without making LN owners require SHT, there's no technical challenge in that. If you just have LN, then the SHT interactions simply do not show up, and the SHT objects are not in the game. Your LN lots would still be there, and still act just like LN lots. It's that simple, and EA has done this sort of thing before between EPs.
People seem to be drastically over-estimating how complicated the coding for this would be. If you look at how the game is designed - if you look inside the gameplaydata.package and elsewhere, then you quickly see that most of the work towards this change is already done.
Not to mention they've done this for TS1, TS2 and TS3 albeit for TS3 at a very abysmal level. That EPs should be mainly standalone is a pure TS3 era trend. Both TS1 and TS2 offered plenty of integration with not only the base game but also previous EPs. The TS3 EPs are becoming more and more like an isolated product and this is a terrible move considering that most simmers buy all the EPs and the game as whole feels disjointed with all kinds of features all over the place.
TS1 and TS2 fit like some sort of puzzle. TS3 doesn't.
I was hoping that Starlight Shores would be another city (like Bridgeport) instead of a suburb, so those with LN could have vampires & food trucks & celebrities & the movie lot included! I would definitely like to see the bars/clubs & venues be able to work together, tho...great idea!!
Examples people often bring up are the TS2 Spectral Cat or hybrid occult states. I miss these inter-EP quirks like crazy, and I wasn't even a TS2 player! :P (Started simming only in 2009).
But perhaps let's not derail the petition by discussing integrated EPs in general. Baby steps. EA is very hostile to the idea of doing any significant integration between TS3 EPs, so lets stick with the smaller stuff here. We could start a thread on EP integration in general in Ideas & Feedback, if one (or 60) doesn't already exist.
It's obvious sometimes that the SimGurus are literally overwhelmed by the volume and vitriol of the feedback they get, so we need to be quite focused on this as a single issue so that they can: "See a problem. Make a fix." Rather than: "See 70 problems all at once. Feel lost and confused and incapable of doing a thing to solve all 70." I definitely think that's how they react sometimes, and who could blame them.
Our problem is lot creep. I guess that's the term for it.
Bring up, perhaps, issues related to lot creep. Other ideas for countering it effectively and efficiently in terms of game design, without the horrible solution that Generations attempted (which was no new lots at all).
Also, for islands/coastal towns- beaches should count as "Large Parks" for Showtime venues- \
Plus, it'd be extra sweet if they could make the SHT stages work for LN band gigs, but I suspect that'd take a bit more coding. Not too happy that I need 2 stages per bar now, one for private club performer, one for band...
At this rate the petition looks set to hit 100 signatures within 2 days. :P The little that it's worth, the little it might achieve, it at least gives SimGurus a sense of the community's feelings on the lot creep.
I was saying on ModtheSims.info earlier that the game isn't really being designed like a sandbox title. If it were, we wouldn't have seen 9 hard-coded bars that do extremely similar things and all of them required to advance the Mixology skill and Band career, we'd have seen one new tool to let us make any number of bars we imagined, with some neat presets to keep casual players from feeling overwhelmed at the creative scope.
In the future, I hope EPs are designed as if The Sims were a sandbox title. Because it is. It's partly because Maxis was so good at making user-friendly sandbox titles that it became such a pioneering studio. But EA hasn't extended the sandbox elements in any dramatic way other than CAS and the tomb building tool. Most of what we have is stuff introduced by Maxis with cosmetic tweaks. EA hasn't really designed The Sims 3 very efficiently considering it's a sandbox title, or they'd be putting a lot of the creative work directly into the hands of their players, where the "prolific 1%" take over.
We never should have seen 9 lot types that do *slight* variations of the same thing in Late Night, nor for that matter 4 in Showtime. I hope the very least this petition does is ward off that sort of bloaty, unnecessary design in the future.
Comments
Each EP is made to standalone so you don't need one for the other to work or make sense. Not everyone who has LN has ST or everyone that has ST has LN.
That is why you can build your own venues in LN, even copy the buildings if you want and change them to venues or just add them from the bin. Or add on to a club or dive or whatever so it has a part of it set up as a venue with a stage etc.
There is not any real reason to take those clubs and such away from those who only play LN and have not ST and would have no use for venues - the real estate would be worthless for them. And there is not much reason to expect ST owners to but LN just to get extra venues.
People seem to be drastically over-estimating how complicated the coding for this would be. If you look at how the game is designed - if you look inside the gameplaydata.package and elsewhere, then you quickly see that most of the work towards this change is already done.
A world like Hidden Springs doesn't have enough lots of the right size to harbor all Showtime lots -- let alone the full complement of all lots from earlier EP's. Worse yet, it isn't even possible to place empty lots of sufficient size for the bigger ones!
Not to mention they've done this for TS1, TS2 and TS3 albeit for TS3 at a very abysmal level. That EPs should be mainly standalone is a pure TS3 era trend. Both TS1 and TS2 offered plenty of integration with not only the base game but also previous EPs. The TS3 EPs are becoming more and more like an isolated product and this is a terrible move considering that most simmers buy all the EPs and the game as whole feels disjointed with all kinds of features all over the place.
TS1 and TS2 fit like some sort of puzzle. TS3 doesn't.
I was hoping that Starlight Shores would be another city (like Bridgeport) instead of a suburb, so those with LN could have vampires & food trucks & celebrities & the movie lot included! I would definitely like to see the bars/clubs & venues be able to work together, tho...great idea!!
But perhaps let's not derail the petition by discussing integrated EPs in general. Baby steps. EA is very hostile to the idea of doing any significant integration between TS3 EPs, so lets stick with the smaller stuff here. We could start a thread on EP integration in general in Ideas & Feedback, if one (or 60) doesn't already exist.
It's obvious sometimes that the SimGurus are literally overwhelmed by the volume and vitriol of the feedback they get, so we need to be quite focused on this as a single issue so that they can: "See a problem. Make a fix." Rather than: "See 70 problems all at once. Feel lost and confused and incapable of doing a thing to solve all 70." I definitely think that's how they react sometimes, and who could blame them.
Our problem is lot creep. I guess that's the term for it.
Bring up, perhaps, issues related to lot creep. Other ideas for countering it effectively and efficiently in terms of game design, without the horrible solution that Generations attempted (which was no new lots at all).
Also, for islands/coastal towns- beaches should count as "Large Parks" for Showtime venues- \
Plus, it'd be extra sweet if they could make the SHT stages work for LN band gigs, but I suspect that'd take a bit more coding. Not too happy that I need 2 stages per bar now, one for private club performer, one for band...
I wish EA would do more to make expansions more combined with one another...if that makes any sense
I was saying on ModtheSims.info earlier that the game isn't really being designed like a sandbox title. If it were, we wouldn't have seen 9 hard-coded bars that do extremely similar things and all of them required to advance the Mixology skill and Band career, we'd have seen one new tool to let us make any number of bars we imagined, with some neat presets to keep casual players from feeling overwhelmed at the creative scope.
In the future, I hope EPs are designed as if The Sims were a sandbox title. Because it is. It's partly because Maxis was so good at making user-friendly sandbox titles that it became such a pioneering studio. But EA hasn't extended the sandbox elements in any dramatic way other than CAS and the tomb building tool. Most of what we have is stuff introduced by Maxis with cosmetic tweaks. EA hasn't really designed The Sims 3 very efficiently considering it's a sandbox title, or they'd be putting a lot of the creative work directly into the hands of their players, where the "prolific 1%" take over.
We never should have seen 9 lot types that do *slight* variations of the same thing in Late Night, nor for that matter 4 in Showtime. I hope the very least this petition does is ward off that sort of bloaty, unnecessary design in the future.