It Couldn’t Last Forever

So, if you don’t spend half your idle time hanging out on the NRaas forums the way I do, you might not know that Twallan resigned with the new year. He posted a lovely resignation letter on the NRaas wiki and has not returned since. Twallan’s second-in-command, SimAd, is organizing some of the most concerned forum members to keep the community together and support the mod suite.

Really, it would not be so horrible. The NRaas mod suite is fully mature and exhaustively debugged. Most of us ought to be able to just keep running what he wrote, supporting each other on the forums, and all would be well.

EXCEPT.

EA has announced that they are working on a new patch to fix issues with Soaring Heights and to do one last pass through the game to fix bugs.

That means, assuming that Twallan doesn’t relent and come back to help us update after the patch is released, a small group of developers are going to try to update the NRaas mod suite ourselves.

I volunteered to help. Partly because I have a problem setting boundaries and partly because I can’t imagine playing without these mods.

I expect that this will be the last patch. Sims 3 is pretty much at the end of its development lifetime. So if we can get through it, we should really have smooth sailing for the rest of the time we want to play this game. (I am very interested in Sims 4, but I have no intention of being an early adopter. It’s hard for me to face installing the next game before the Samples are done. I. Will. Do. It.)

I do hope that EA does a good faith job in fixing a stack of long-standing bugs rather than just fixing stuff from Roaring Heights, but if that’s true it means that the mod suite might take a lot of work to update.

At any rate, I have a huge stack of backposts for pretty much all three challenge blogs at this point, but I may not actually do any more playing for quite a while once the patch comes out.

5 thoughts on “It Couldn’t Last Forever

  1. I have mixed feelings about getting Sims 4. On the one hand, EA's Mac support is somewhat worse than awful– but Maxis is coming back to help, and they were pretty good with Mac support. But then again, they're part of EA now and were a part of the recent SimCity debacle. So I don't know. But I'd probably need a new computer anyway, so I'll think about it later.

    I accidentally patched before I learned about Twallan retiring. Oh well. I'm so behind anyway, the missing mods might not matter. 🙂

  2. The stuff I've heard about Sims 4 has me pretty excited actually. And it's not the really big splash stuff. It's the work they've done to make things like routing work. That said, I am not an early adopter, and I don't expect to buy the game on release or maybe even in its first year.

    Twallan updated all the mods to match the last patch, so you should update. The Wiki is up-to-date, and some small work is even being done on the mods by new volunteers. The big deal is that there is one (probably the last) upcoming patch that has been announced by EA. We don't know when it's going to happen, and we won't have Twallan to burn the midnight oil making everything work when it's released.

    I feel pretty good about getting Twallan's mods through the patch release at this point, though. The community has really rallied to make this work.

  3. Thanks. At this point, I'm not sure I'm even going to be involved in the mod update. Modders with more time and familiarity with Sims work are showing up and making commitments. I'm TOTALLY FINE with that. I haven't gotten into Sims modding because I kind of like leaving work at work, you know?

    At any rate, I think the future, at least through the patch release, is pretty bright.

  4. Oh, you really did mean the new patch. I didn't find out that it had hit until the afternoon, since I don't play during the day.

    The good and bad news is that it's a really small patch that only fixes stuff with Into the Future and a couple of store items. The good news is that the NRaas mod updates are already almost done. The bad news is that any longer-standing bugs are now permanent.

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