Tag Archive | simantics

Simfail: Bloopers!

I’m creating a new tag “Simfail,” for my ranting about Sims technical glitches and laughing at the absurdity this game generates. I’ve gone back and relabeled all my past game glitch ranting.

Included in the new tag will be bloopers, inspired by Redhead Creations and her Cagley legacy blog, where she always includes a few outtakes. I’m still going to include absurd things in the posts where they apply, but some stuff is just too absurd to be woven into any story.

So, without further ado:

Adjo has a preview of what life will be like for his nephew Charles

A quiet evening at home. With no furniture.

(It’s kind of bizarre that Sims 3 renders people when you look through the window, but not anything else. I think that might be a setting I could change, but then again, I’m not sure my computer could take the extra work, which is probably why it does that to begin with.)

Simfail: Town Reboot

Jun13

Another tangent for technical gripes.

I replayed the three-birthday about eight times. The game kept freeze-crashing in the middle. The story in the post is the most amusing version, and also the only version where I got through all three birthday cakes, but it crashed before I could save. Antonio died at the party during about half the attempts.

Eventually, I got through the wretched birthday party day, but the game was still painfully unstable. After trying a bunch of things to fix corruption in the save file, I finally gave up. I used Twallan’s Porter mod to export the Samples and all the families with which they had significant relationships. Then I created a brand new copy of Sunset Valley, placed the exported house, and imported all the families. That seems to have stabilized things.

That means that starting about now, you’ll see references to the Bauers (Antonio’s widow and son), the Ursines, and the Williamses alongside a bunch of familiar Sunset Valley initial characters.

Simfail: Jared Is Even a Jerk in Death

Apr8

So here’s what really happened.

I replayed Jared death four, count ’em, four times. He decided to die the morning of the wedding, and his death sequence took over two game-hours to complete, causing the lovebirds to miss their own wedding. I ran the death through twice from my save point, and it was clear that the timing had already been calculated. The mood hit for missing your own wedding, on top of watching a family member die, is almost enough to make a Sim jump off a cliff.

Sheesh. Talk about the resident asshole taking a parting shot.

So I decided to see if I could fudge things. I turned off aging so that Jared would last through the wedding, then I turned it back on. Only this time, after two days he didn’t die. But he also seemed to have lost all of his volition. He left work abruptly and literally stood in the parking lot all day, then came home in the evening to stand in the entry hall of the house. He would do something if I told him to, but he had no free will at all.

And the weirdest part is that he disappeared from the family portrait on the load screen. It appeared that half the game thought Jared was dead, and the other half didn’t. Not entirely unlike the Lance’s girlfriend bug, come to think of it. This game clearly has some separate data structures it doesn’t always keep in sync. Serves me right for trying to tweak fate, I guess.

Then next day, he left work again after one hour, and this time he actually did die in the work parking lot (at the age of 100 days). His gravestone appeared, but his spirit didn’t get sucked into it as it was supposed to. He just stayed as a ghost in the parking lot, again with no volition, and in the evening returned to the same spot in the entryway.

Seen here just after he’d peed himself. Didn’t think a ghost could pee himself? Think again.

Only now he was cluttering up the house, still with no volition, and I couldn’t control him. He wouldn’t go back into his grave, so he hung around like furniture all day, peeing himself, and I couldn’t get rid of him.

At that point, I just gave up and returned to my original wedding day save point, let him die on schedule, took the mood hit, and married the lovebirds afterward. Posts from this point continue from the replayed timeline, with a couple of particularly cute shots from the first time through.

Damn Jared.