Hood babbles
Mar. 18th, 2012 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katrisimsSo in the end of the picspam yesterday, I believe I promised you some "hood babbles". Well, in the end I got my maintenance stuff done yesterday, so now I get to babble some and play more.
My maintenance included taking a full backup, removing gossip, downloading few hacks and defaults I've been meaning to, and installing the three SPs my sister got me for my birthday last month. That seems to have gone smoothly. In addition, I stumbled onto something pretty neat just a couple of days ago and realized it was EXACTLY what I needed.
I might have shown you before; this is what Alphabetia looked like yet yesterday evening. But, this is not what it looks like anymore!
I may have cursed it before: back when I started this legacy, I was, despite having plenty of simming experience, quite a noob. It's mostly a matter of luck that I didn't (to my knowledge, anyway) do any VBTs in the beginning, but there were some mistakes. One of them is that since I didn't have the empty templates back then, my hood contains hundreds of characters, of which still less than 100 are mine. To my understanding, even though I haven't done VBTs, the sheer amount of characters might choke the game at some point and necessitate a rebuild. But, so far I've had no problems. *knocks on wood*
Another mistake that I'm aware of, and that has been bugging me for quite a while, was my initial choice of neighborhood template. I just picked one that looked pretty in the preview picture and didn't think of it more than that. Well, I got to regret that decision fairly soon. When I made the decision to play the whole hood, and started placing the various households, I found that prettiness doesn't equal playability.
You may have noted from the above picture that the inhabitation is heavily concentrated on the righthand side of the hood, while the lefthand side is mostly empty. That isn't because of any clever planning on my part, but rather because I simply could not place a flat lot on most of the lefthand side. The game would not allow me to do that, full stop. I realized that if and when my hood keeps growing, I'm going to run into trouble, simply because I'll run out of places to put my houses to, even though there's supposedly plenty of space on the template.
When I realized that with FT, there came a cheat that lets the player modify the hood in-game, I got my hopes up. Maybe I'd be able to tweak Alphabetia enough to make it more playable. That, however, was not to be. For some reason, there are a few features that I just haven't gotten to work. One of them is the item shifting that came with AL. I follow the instructions, and nothing happens, the item stays where it is. That I can live with. Another is setting lot lightning. When I type the cheat code to change the lightning, I get a cryptic error message on the cheat console, and again, nothing happens. That's slightly regrettable, since it'd be nice to be able to take not-so-dark pictures on Downtown lots, but oh well. And the third, you guessed it, turned out to be the terrain modification. I get the selection of a terrain area show up okay, but no matter how much I punch the keys that are supposed to alter the terrain - you guessed it, nothing happens.
I'd almost lost hope on ever getting a reasonable terrain for my hood, when just a couple of days ago, I was surfing sims sites, and stumbled onto a nifty little tool called HoodReplace by Mootilda. I read the description and the thread quite carefully, and came to the conclusion that if it worked, it would be the salvation of my hood. As I was going to make a backup soon anyway, I made a mental note to try it.
I knew right away what terrain I wanted to use. I was very happy with the nice, flat terrain in my photoshoot hood, so copying that would be the perfect option. So I made a backup, fired up HoodReplace, double checked that my options, crossed my fingers and pressed "copy". And copy it did. Here are a couple of pictures for your amusement. (Or at least mine.)
This is what the result looked like after the first run. The terrain was there, but there were some minor issues, such as my main legacy household being at the bottom of the river. :D
A couple of houses, including Adson and Rebecca's ended up on top of the mountain. They looked kinda cool there, but for playability's sake I didn't leave them there.
All that might look kinda scary, but as the instructions said I would, I was able to grab each house in turn and put it next to a road as I wanted them.
Like so. The black areas under some lots and in the river at this stage probably have to do with big differences in elevation; houses I picked from the river and from the mountaintop had them.
As instructed, I placed the houses on their spots and re-ran HoodReplace, and repeated the process a couple of times, so the oddities in terrain elevation would stabilize. And they did.
And this is what the hood currently looks like from a distance. Much better, eh? I'm quite happy with how it turned out. And the best thing is, this one should have much more space for new households than the previous one. On the righthand side we have the houses that I play rotation style, and on the left, on the other side of the river, is my unplayed land, which includes Sal's house, Adson and Rebecca's house, count Pao's house and a couple of premades that I've plopped on empty lots for reachability reasons or so.
Alright, while I'm on it, let's have a closer look on the rotational part of the hood.
Currently, I have sixteen households (the main house included) in the main hood rotation, and two in the college hood rotation. Quite soon it should be eighteen houses in the main hood, as the remaining gen. C college kids graduate.
Just for the fun of it, I numbered the houses according to my rotation list, so you can see who lives where. This is how it goes:
1) The main household (Baudolino, Marylena, Cho, Prof. Eric, Dirk)
2) The Phillips household (Aurora, Andrew, Bobby, Mehrissa, Camilla, Callie)
3) The Riley household (Bill, Ira, Claire, Trevor, Dory)
4) The Thayer household (Bonnie, Thomas, Clyde, Margaret, Bruce, Donovan)
5) The Bruenig household (Marsha, Bailey, Cissy, Erik, Dean, Dane)
6) The Custer household (Barry, Laura, Corinna, Weldon, Dallan, Damon)
7) The Jalowitz household (Chris, Cyrus)
8) The Cameron/GilsCarbo/London household (Beth, Sean, Carl, Veronica, Audrey, Devon, Daniela, David)
9) The Patch household (Bianca, Ramin, Carla, Kevin, Darren, Dale, Dana)
10) The Thayer/Fairchild household (Bill, Sandy)
11) The Lillard household (Chloe, Ryker, Derek)
12) The Ruben household (Calista, Joshua, Dewey, Donny)
13) The Mendoza household (Aadam, Joy, Barbara, Tara, Cory)
14) The Mendoza/GilsCarbo household (Beatrice, Brenda)
15) The Hamilton household (Chip, Sunny, Damien)
16) The Thayer/Fuchs household (Clarissa, Glen, Daniel)
In college we have Nicholas, Christa, Cliff and Connor, all of whom should be graduating this rotation and moving back to Alphabetia.
So overall my hood stats are as follows: 16 households in the main hood rotation, 2 households in the college rotation. Currently in total 77 sims are played, 3 more related sims are practically unplayed (Sal, Adson and Rebecca), and 9 sims (Author, Count Curtis, Adrian, Nicole, Charlie, Arthur, Meadow, Abraham and Kendra) are deceased. Thus the total not including pets is 89 sims.
The current head count of generation D is 19: 16 boys and 3 girls. From the households that are a generation behind we have so far three new members to gen. C: two girls and one boy. Several sims are again pregnant, so we'll see how the counts are after next rotation.
So such is the state of Alphabetia currently. :)
My maintenance included taking a full backup, removing gossip, downloading few hacks and defaults I've been meaning to, and installing the three SPs my sister got me for my birthday last month. That seems to have gone smoothly. In addition, I stumbled onto something pretty neat just a couple of days ago and realized it was EXACTLY what I needed.
I might have shown you before; this is what Alphabetia looked like yet yesterday evening. But, this is not what it looks like anymore!
I may have cursed it before: back when I started this legacy, I was, despite having plenty of simming experience, quite a noob. It's mostly a matter of luck that I didn't (to my knowledge, anyway) do any VBTs in the beginning, but there were some mistakes. One of them is that since I didn't have the empty templates back then, my hood contains hundreds of characters, of which still less than 100 are mine. To my understanding, even though I haven't done VBTs, the sheer amount of characters might choke the game at some point and necessitate a rebuild. But, so far I've had no problems. *knocks on wood*
Another mistake that I'm aware of, and that has been bugging me for quite a while, was my initial choice of neighborhood template. I just picked one that looked pretty in the preview picture and didn't think of it more than that. Well, I got to regret that decision fairly soon. When I made the decision to play the whole hood, and started placing the various households, I found that prettiness doesn't equal playability.
You may have noted from the above picture that the inhabitation is heavily concentrated on the righthand side of the hood, while the lefthand side is mostly empty. That isn't because of any clever planning on my part, but rather because I simply could not place a flat lot on most of the lefthand side. The game would not allow me to do that, full stop. I realized that if and when my hood keeps growing, I'm going to run into trouble, simply because I'll run out of places to put my houses to, even though there's supposedly plenty of space on the template.
When I realized that with FT, there came a cheat that lets the player modify the hood in-game, I got my hopes up. Maybe I'd be able to tweak Alphabetia enough to make it more playable. That, however, was not to be. For some reason, there are a few features that I just haven't gotten to work. One of them is the item shifting that came with AL. I follow the instructions, and nothing happens, the item stays where it is. That I can live with. Another is setting lot lightning. When I type the cheat code to change the lightning, I get a cryptic error message on the cheat console, and again, nothing happens. That's slightly regrettable, since it'd be nice to be able to take not-so-dark pictures on Downtown lots, but oh well. And the third, you guessed it, turned out to be the terrain modification. I get the selection of a terrain area show up okay, but no matter how much I punch the keys that are supposed to alter the terrain - you guessed it, nothing happens.
I'd almost lost hope on ever getting a reasonable terrain for my hood, when just a couple of days ago, I was surfing sims sites, and stumbled onto a nifty little tool called HoodReplace by Mootilda. I read the description and the thread quite carefully, and came to the conclusion that if it worked, it would be the salvation of my hood. As I was going to make a backup soon anyway, I made a mental note to try it.
I knew right away what terrain I wanted to use. I was very happy with the nice, flat terrain in my photoshoot hood, so copying that would be the perfect option. So I made a backup, fired up HoodReplace, double checked that my options, crossed my fingers and pressed "copy". And copy it did. Here are a couple of pictures for your amusement. (Or at least mine.)
This is what the result looked like after the first run. The terrain was there, but there were some minor issues, such as my main legacy household being at the bottom of the river. :D
A couple of houses, including Adson and Rebecca's ended up on top of the mountain. They looked kinda cool there, but for playability's sake I didn't leave them there.
All that might look kinda scary, but as the instructions said I would, I was able to grab each house in turn and put it next to a road as I wanted them.
Like so. The black areas under some lots and in the river at this stage probably have to do with big differences in elevation; houses I picked from the river and from the mountaintop had them.
As instructed, I placed the houses on their spots and re-ran HoodReplace, and repeated the process a couple of times, so the oddities in terrain elevation would stabilize. And they did.
And this is what the hood currently looks like from a distance. Much better, eh? I'm quite happy with how it turned out. And the best thing is, this one should have much more space for new households than the previous one. On the righthand side we have the houses that I play rotation style, and on the left, on the other side of the river, is my unplayed land, which includes Sal's house, Adson and Rebecca's house, count Pao's house and a couple of premades that I've plopped on empty lots for reachability reasons or so.
Alright, while I'm on it, let's have a closer look on the rotational part of the hood.
Currently, I have sixteen households (the main house included) in the main hood rotation, and two in the college hood rotation. Quite soon it should be eighteen houses in the main hood, as the remaining gen. C college kids graduate.
Just for the fun of it, I numbered the houses according to my rotation list, so you can see who lives where. This is how it goes:
1) The main household (Baudolino, Marylena, Cho, Prof. Eric, Dirk)
2) The Phillips household (Aurora, Andrew, Bobby, Mehrissa, Camilla, Callie)
3) The Riley household (Bill, Ira, Claire, Trevor, Dory)
4) The Thayer household (Bonnie, Thomas, Clyde, Margaret, Bruce, Donovan)
5) The Bruenig household (Marsha, Bailey, Cissy, Erik, Dean, Dane)
6) The Custer household (Barry, Laura, Corinna, Weldon, Dallan, Damon)
7) The Jalowitz household (Chris, Cyrus)
8) The Cameron/GilsCarbo/London household (Beth, Sean, Carl, Veronica, Audrey, Devon, Daniela, David)
9) The Patch household (Bianca, Ramin, Carla, Kevin, Darren, Dale, Dana)
10) The Thayer/Fairchild household (Bill, Sandy)
11) The Lillard household (Chloe, Ryker, Derek)
12) The Ruben household (Calista, Joshua, Dewey, Donny)
13) The Mendoza household (Aadam, Joy, Barbara, Tara, Cory)
14) The Mendoza/GilsCarbo household (Beatrice, Brenda)
15) The Hamilton household (Chip, Sunny, Damien)
16) The Thayer/Fuchs household (Clarissa, Glen, Daniel)
In college we have Nicholas, Christa, Cliff and Connor, all of whom should be graduating this rotation and moving back to Alphabetia.
So overall my hood stats are as follows: 16 households in the main hood rotation, 2 households in the college rotation. Currently in total 77 sims are played, 3 more related sims are practically unplayed (Sal, Adson and Rebecca), and 9 sims (Author, Count Curtis, Adrian, Nicole, Charlie, Arthur, Meadow, Abraham and Kendra) are deceased. Thus the total not including pets is 89 sims.
The current head count of generation D is 19: 16 boys and 3 girls. From the households that are a generation behind we have so far three new members to gen. C: two girls and one boy. Several sims are again pregnant, so we'll see how the counts are after next rotation.
So such is the state of Alphabetia currently. :)
