dicreasy2 | Some thoughts on ageing. (Reply)

One of the things I’d been giving a lot of thought to while I was working on the last part of my rebuild, is ageing. Ageing in the sims has never made any sense to me whatsoever. I remember being confused by the length of the different age stages the very first time I played the game. My teens were teens longer than my children were children? And my adults became elders while their children were still teens or younger? It was all a little odd to me.

When a sim becomes an elder, it all looks as if it’s going to become clear, since rather than a countdown, we’re now given a proper age in days, which looks like it should agree with an age in years. Only, when you think about when a sim ages up at the other life stages, it doesn’t. A sim becomes a toddler at 3, a child at 7, a teen at 15, an adult at 30. Only if you take the 55 days old that an elder apparently is, and take off the 29 days of adulthood, then you get a sim becoming an adult at 26, a teen at 11, a child at 4, and a toddler at 0 days old. Goodness knows what happens to the three days they’re a baby, since using this logic, they’re born at -3 days. It’s a mess and makes no sense whatsoever.

The only thing that made sense to me with ageing, was that sims were pregnant for 3 days, mirroring the trimesters, but that three days threw out the rest of the ages even more, and I’ll talk more on it in a bit.

The upshot is that this odd way of working out ages, means that it’s nearly impossible to work out what age a sim would be if they were human, and even more difficult to work out age gaps beyond saying teen, child etc.

Now, I got used to it, and in fact I stopped thinking about it too much for a long, long time. I could accept that sims were sims and didn’t act like we do, and it was all fine. However, my sims are no longer just sims. They’re far more than that: they’re also characters in a story, a story that I have tried to ground in reality. So, ages, and age gaps have started to become more important to me. It matters that Sarah Jane is six years younger than Bethany, whereas it never mattered that William and Henry were four sim days younger than Charlotta and Anne. It’s now important and I don’t like the fact that the age gap between Emmi and her brothers, or A&A’s youngest children and their eldest children, isn’t quite right. Emmi should actually be about 14 years younger than Bertie, (he was a young teenager when she was born), but, even with me adding extra days to her child span, she’s only 10. Zane and Mickey should be just coming up to their teens, not already in them, but because I’ve already shown them as teens in story, I’m going to have to fudge these slightly.

Luckily, I can fudge Emmi’s age slightly by using clothes to bridge the gap between childhood and the more structured clothing of a 15 or 16 year old (this is why I made the pinnys in the first place). I can also send her to the Acadamie at a younger age than I can send a boy to uni.

But, this isn’t the way forward for the next four or more generations. Unless I do something about the age spans, I’m going to keep running into problems. So, I decided that the only way forward, was using a proportional ageing mod. I did look at Hat’s mod. That one takes the fact that pregnancy is 3 days long to reason that four days equal one year. I like the logic, but it’s just far too long for a sim to live. I’d never get done with the legacy.

My next thought was to make my own, using three days equals one year as the basis. This is because I’ve been playing a three day long rotation, and so it’d make sense. However, I was talking about it with Cait, who’s been having similar thoughts. We both realised that three days was still too long. Likewise, we realised that one day equalling a year was too short, so in the end we both agreed that two days equalling a year, not only made sense and gave us both time to get to know our sims and characters, but wasn’t so long that we would never make progress.

The only problem with this, is that in game, pregnancies are three days in length, meaning using this logic, a sim would be pregnant for eighteen months. Madness. Making an ageing mod is easy, but I didn’t know if you could make a mod that decreased pregnancy length, and remembering to speed up pregnancy with the blender or tombstone of life and death, is something I know I’d forget to do all the time. Luckily, I did a bit of digging, and found that the code that governs pregnancy length had been found and extracted. I now have a mod that shortens the length of a pregnancy to 36 hours, meaning that my sims’ ages can be completely proportional.

The two new mods, mean that I can easily keep track of how old a sim is, but more importantly I can keep track of how old a character is. The only thing is that I need to change my rotation in order to make this work how I want. At the moment, I’m playing a three day rotation, but I’m going to switch to a two day rotation. However, since the mod means that my sims will live just under twice as long as sims using the Maxis ageing, I need to think about how many houses I’m playing. I’ve been playing very slowly the past three years. Partly that’s because I’ve been losing sims I’ve not wanted to lose, or aged up sims I’ve not wanted to. Partly it’s because I’ve been working on making the hood better, culminating in me rebuilding it. And partly it’s because of the fact I’m really apprehensive about the upcoming plot.

Adding more time I need to play into those reasons isn't a good thing. I need to do something to make the new rotation go faster, and because of that, I’m going to have to take a good look at who comes to the new neighbourhood. In some ways this depresses the hell out of me, because Jasper Skinner is just as much a descendent of Gabe as Bertie is. I don’t want to have to abandon these sims, but at the same time, if they’re not central to the plot or haven't made an appearance, or if I don’t even enjoy playing them, why should I put them in the new hood, in the new rotation that’s only going to get bigger as generation five grows up?

I know for certain, that Alexandra's family, Vicky, the Harrisons, the Roselands, Robert's family, Anne's family and Susannah's family will be coming over. I either need them for the story, or I love them too much not to, or I have plans for who they can marry. And there are others I'll bring over too. I'm still debating on bringing over the Skinner boys and their families, but I reckon I should hopefully be able to get the households down to 22, not including the university lots. Any other sims that I need for the story, such as Dean and Billy, might find that they only exist in the dummy hood and not the real one.

Right so, rambling on ages and mods over, and I can hear you asking "does this mean that your break is over?" Well, kinda. I'm still pretty burnt out, but I no longer feel like running screaming when I think of the game, and I've even been feeling the want to play a bit. The thought of making any cc does still make me scream though, so for the time being, I'm going to dabble with my rotation if I feel like playing. I have about 16 lots still to play before I can package up the Greek houses and get them into the new hoods. I'm hoping that by the time I get to that point, I want to work on the rebuild again. It's not as if I don't want it done, because I do. To tell the truth I'm fed up to the back teeth with it and how long it's taking. I want to be able to play the shiny new hood with everything as accurate as possible. I'm also starting to want to think about telling the rest of my story. These are all good things.