#sims3challenge #sims3legacy #sims3story #thesims3

EDIT: This site has closed down. Too bad :(.

Hey there. A couple of simmers have created a community for narrative Sims stories that I think has promise. What does it need most? Some more Sims 3 players!

By “narrative story,” I mean Sims stories with plots rather than observational ones where you as the player talk about what’s happening the game. This blog is a narrative sims story.

There are some really impressive Sims 4 stories posted there — and I do mean impressive. The only Sims 3 story that is being actively updated is by yours truly.

This place formally launched February 1 of this year, and it’s still growing. If you like to write or read narrative Sims stories, I recommend you check it out. If you like to read or write Sims *3* I doubly recommend it :).

Here it is: Simswriters.com.

I’m Echoweaver there, same as every place else. (Except EA, where I’m Echowever because they won’t like me fix the typo.)

This is just a note to say that I finally got around to exporting Generation 6 and putting them up for download. You can now meet all your cross-pollination Sample needs.

The only download links up right now are to the Exchange, but they are all CC-free. My previous freewheeling attitude toward custom content on the Exchange produced a lot of frustration for the nice people who wanted to add Samples to their games, so I have changed my ways.

I have exported CC-rich Sims3Packs of these sims as well and .sim files. I’ll load them up on my server sometime Real Soon Now and make those options available as well.

I also finally added Sky’s story to the Story So Far page.

ETA: I believe that a great deal more of the downloads will actually work now. When in doubt, use the package and sim files. If you don’t know how to install them, I’m happy to help.

In the interest of encouraging more comments, because — hey, who of us doesn’t want confirmation that someone reads these things — I have reenabled anonymous comments.

In exchange, I’m turning on comment moderation. I’m going to try it only for old posts, but if I get spam on the new stuff, I’ll turn it on for all posts.

What I’d LIKE to have is the option for comment moderation or captcha ONLY for anonymous comments. I don’t understand why this feature doesn’t exist. I shall grumble at Google about it.

So, in the short term, those of you already commenting shouldn’t notice any difference. We’ll see how it goes.

You should know that the NRaas volunteers stepped up and really got it done. The updates to the final Sims 3 patch are up for download and exhaustedly tested. I didn’t even end up getting involved in the coding — several people with actual experience with Sims mods stepped in and really made it happen. 

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.

I’m off for a 5-day Caribbean cruise and knitting convention. Woot! 

$8 for Black Friday! Woot! Now I have shoulder dragons. I’m stalking the site to see if the Renaissance Fair will go on sale so I can get the black dragon unlock.

This venerated blog reached 25,000 hits today.

Most of those are actually hits, I think, rather than referral spam. Google seems to have done a great job of stripping most of that stuff out in the last few months.

A huge fraction of those hits are generated automatically by blogs by lovely people who have put me on their auto-updating blogroll.

A bunch the hits are most certainly spiders for web search engines and other such ilk.

A decent number are traffic from Google’s error in indexing a picture from this blog as the first hit for a kind of fetish wear. I won’t repeat it here for fear of attracting more traffic that is disappointing for everyone involved. (Imagine you clicked a link expecting to see fetish wear and got a Sims video game blog?!)

But some of them are people who read actual posts!

Thanks, all of you actual people who read actual posts.