Welcome to our second playtest tour of the same world!
Someplace I have a shot of the residents in front of these two lovely houses. They tell the story of two very messed up sims.
You see, Joanne Bookabet and Tomas Sample-Royale have been in love with each other since at least Tomas’s graduation from high school. Let’s just assume it didn’t start any earlier than that, since Joanne is a lot older than Tomas. The problem is that they can’t stand each other. They got together, made passionate woohoo, had huge fights, broke up, filled my queue with stalking notifications, got back together, became engaged, got pregnant, and broke up before the baby was born. (Tomas was carrying the baby because Jo is well into Elderhood at this point.)
Now they move in to the houses next to each other. They can’t live with each other, can’t live without.
So tragic. And messed up.
Also, they ended up with two kids. I checked and thought Tomas’s pregnancy had been wiped out by the move. So I used MasterController to create an insta-baby for them. The next day, I got a notification that Tomas’s had given birth.
Huh.
Now let’s move on to our test household, shall we?
Meet the Weaver-somethingorothers.
Maxwell Weaver-Doctor, elder son of our dearly departed Zuzu Weaver and David Doctor. He’s a YA.
Dexter, their younger son. He’s a teen.
And here’s my simself! Echo Weaver is an elder who is a couple of days past the end of her lifespan but still going strong. Her career has gone well, but her love life is one big catastrophe. She’s dated and broken up with half the males in Avalon and has been engaged about three times.
Poor Echo.
And who is this?
OK, I have a confession to make. Remember when I said that I was getting Forest Sample and Sean Flynn together, but I was going to turn off their ability to make babies because neither of them should ever be near babies?
I deliberately left Forest and Sean as romantic interests because they don’t have the kind of relationship that calls for fidelity. I just set Story Progression to keep them living in the same house.
Sean, Forest, and Sean’s elderly wife Cynthia lived together happily until Cynthia died. Then Sean got together with Lionel Ursine-Langerak, one of two sons of Adjo’s daughter Charmaine and Maya Langerak. So Sean’s now dividing his woohoo time between a 5th generation Sample spare and the grandson of a 3rd generation Sample spare.
(Still with me? Don’t worry, that history lesson is totally irrelevant anyway.)
Forest? He spent a long time dating Jeannette Crumplebottom, his first cousin once removed. Yay for creepy. Then he, um, got together with Echo Weaver. And got pregnant with her baby.
Turns out I forgot to turn off their fertility after all.
So this is Rosalie Weaver, who I rescued from the house of vampires with commitment problems. I moved her in with her cousins and very elderly mother. Her cousins will take much better care of her than Forest would.
And for the purpose of testing, I’m going to age her up to child.
She’ll stay a baby in the actual save.
Here she is! Why did everyone inherit Charles’s hair after I gave up and assigned it to Sawyer’s broken genetics?? I should’ve given Sawyer Amy’s hair. Amy’s hair was awesome.
I can definitely see Forest in her. I think his genes will turn out better when she’s older.
OK, I have to confess that I hate Dexter’s hair with the flaming passion of a thousand burning sons.
Much better.
Echo and the Sims U mascot seem to have a thing for each other.
See? She even noticed him while playing video games.
Let’s have them interact.
“Hey honey… want to teach me to be an annoying university mascot?”
“Are you kidding? You have no idea how much hard work and training it takes to wear this suit! And I barely know you!”
I guess I underestimated mascot pride.
Hey, hey, calm down. She really didn’t care about your job that much.
(There’s some interaction with the mascot where you can ask them to teach you to be a mascot. Don’t do that with a low relationship. Now I’m really curious what it does.)
Rosalie makes friends with papergirl. There are no residents in the town at the moment, so her social opportunities are limited.
And off to test stuff! Maxwell checks out Monmouth Archives, the local library.
The books are just fine.
Dexter has a wish to plant an apple, so I send him to the grocery store to buy one. He goes via the LLAMA outside the new combined hospital/science rabbithole. I kept some of the steampunk charm with the little observation tower.
I just needed a change, and a 40×40 lot for that awesome steampunk complex I was using for the science center got repurposed for the EA store Renaissance Fair.
The science center is still called the Sufficiently Advanced Technology Center for story purposes. That’s the best name EVAR for a science center in the Sims. It’s Einstein. Look it up.
If I ever land Midnight Hollow, the fabulous steampunk observatory science center goes into Avalon immediately.
After going through the LLAMA, Dexter takes a cab to where he’s going.
I’m in love with the LLAMAs, but I only put in two, and they’re causing me a lot of routing grief. People keep taking the LLAMAs and then route-failing when they come out. I should probably remove them. But they’re one of the cutest things ever.
Looks like the grocery store rabbithole rug is working fine. Also the bookstore.
Then, like a good boy, Dexter sits down to do his homework in the middle of the shopping square.
Echo gets is her fabulous old lady car to go to a gig audition.
The proprietress of Performance Park is impressed.
Or maybe she’s just hot for Echo.
Then Echo works her wiles on the proprietress of the Fiddler’s Green pub venue.
The two of them really hit it off.
While I was doing something else, somebody started a water balloon fight.
Left alone in the house, Rosalie occupies her time by watching credits scroll on TV.
Then she has a wish to learn to paint, so I let her.
Echo heads to the Lady of the Lake Park.
The previous version of this park boasted a little cottage with a spa rabbithole. Now the spa has an outdoor massage pavilion with the Aurora Skies massage table and the arboretum.
Echo goes look for fairies. She doesn’t find them, but she does find that the rabbithole works fine.
(I didn’t test the massage table, but routing to it turned out to be a bit tricksy in game. I need to tweak its location a bit.)
I reward her with a massage. The spa is now a rabbithole door, which prevents sims from ending up behind the building when they try to leave. It’s a really tiny spa OK?
Hey! Coffee under the sea now has a barista bar!
After a few tests, the all-in-one restroom is routable. I could probably get rid of this, since I mostly placed it there to give Sky interesting places for public woohoo.
I’m still getting this route fail, and I don’t know what it is. I love Coffee Under the Sea, but it’s possible this whatever-it-is is causing some game lag. When Sky’s career is over, I may have to wave goodbye to this lot.
Echo’s out for another audition, this one at Serenity private venue.
This is a download from the Exchange, and I think it’s really classy.
Yep. They want her to perform here too. Echo’s booking her schedule pretty far in advance now. Too bad this playtest game will be over before she shows up for this gig.
Dexter appears to have had a problem with the LLAMA. For this very reason it’s hard to give those things up.
He doesn’t let his personal tragedy keep him from planting that apple, though.
Maxwell is off on a different mission.
Yes, he adopted a horse!
Maxwell and his trusty steed whose name I already forgot.
Oh, no, to go into the barn, you’re supposed to take a right and go through the equestrian gate, not go through the human door.
There’s so much wrongness in this picture.
Horse is pretty upset with Maxwell about that door.
And Maxwell’s pretty upset about it too.
OK, I give up. Nobody is willing to route through the lot as intended. The only way to make the barn accessible to is tear out the door and a segment of wall.
Though it doesn’t really look bad that way.
Figuring how to get the horse into the stall took most of Maxwell’s day.
Meanwhile, Echo found a rocking chair.
Never figured out what this route fail is either.
She performs for tips. In an empty park in a neighborhood with no residents yet.
Dexter goes to school for something. Yep. Works fine.
Then the full moon rises over Avalon 2.0…
The proprietress of Performance Park tries to out-zombie a zombie.
Another devours poor Dexter’s garden. I really wish I had the pea shooter now. It was awesome. Advanced order rewards ought to SOMEDAY become purchasable.
Echo decides to make dinner. Again.
And again.
And again.
At this point I realize there’s actually NO COUNTER in this kitchen.
Fixed.
But Echo still can’t cook.
Turns out I have finally run afoul of the SocialJig2Person glitch. I’ve read a ton about these. If a sim resets in the middle of an interaction, it can leave behind an invisible object that prevents sims from routing through the middle of the conversation.
You can see the invisible object in Buy Mode. You can delete it with MoveObjects On. You can also delete them en masse using MasterController, but you’d have to look up the instructions how to do that.
Finally Echo can cook.
I should have known better.
Fortunately, Echo is Brave.
She also has bad eyesight. Poor Dexter and Rosalie.
The horse doesn’t like something about the back yard.
Or maybe it just likes to complain.
Echo heads to watch a game at the stadium, which is now a lovely tournament tent from Dragon Valley.
It is pretty entertaining to send the camera into the tent. That dark box in the middle is the actual rabbithole.
For some reason I didn’t get a shot of it, but I’m now using La Guardia police/military rabbithole from Dragon Valley. I renamed it Tintagel Keep. It is just perfect for this world. I also dropped the charming consignment store Pirate Pete’s Treasure Box in favor of putting a regular consignment register in the alchemy consignment store. Now the ground floor of that building is regular consignment, and the top floor is Alchemical consignment. You’ll see more of that lot coming up. I really like it.
And here we are at the Sample Memorial cemetery. I realized there was no real reason to have a separate cemetery for the Sample spares.
However, it seems to have a problem. The fish are swimming in midair in deep pit. I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be water….
I don’t have the picture, but I did test to see if you could fish for these guys. No, you can’t.
This turned out to be difficult to fix. This lovely cemetery lot is a download, and I modified it slightly to move the entrance from the long side to the short side. That involved adjusting the pond one square to the left. The lot is at a high elevation in Avalon, and it absolutely would not recognize the pond water level. I eventually saved the modified lot to the library, dropped it in Isla Paradiso near sea level, tweaked the pond, and resaved it. The water remained when I put it back, so long as I didn’t edit the pond again.
And I close with Echo performing to an empty park in a town with no residents.
Oh, actually, there is one lady. Perhaps she was generated so that Echo would have a volunteer for this trick.
Does this trick EVER WORK??
Fortunately, I’m about to shut down this game, so none of this EVER HAPPENED.
There are a few more things that I tested but didn’t include in this post that you’ll see when I play.
I am really in love with this second draft of Avalon. I’m glad I didn’t talk myself into moving to a different world. At the very least, I’m getting to pull in cool rabbitholes from those worlds.
