Saturday 5 May 2007

Pic of the day: A bunch of perfect strangers. OK, nobody is perfect, but perfectly strange. And it isn't even Strangetown, but...

Pleasantview town

Back in 2000 when The Sims first came out, the few houses were by a road called Sim Lane, which went in a large square looping back on itself. When The Sims 2 came out, some of the same families were present in a neighborhood called "Pleasantview". Neighborhoods could now have names, and there were three of them readymade with the game. Of these, it seems Pleasantview is the most popular, followed by Strangetown. The pre-made inhabitants of Pleasantview are quite ordinary people, not aliens or mad scientists like in Strangetown. There are quite a few of them too, but also plenty of empty houses for sale (although some of these are rather expensive).

I have created many new neighborhoods for Sims2, but also played in a couple different versions of Pleasantview. After the release of Seasons, the latest expansion pack, I have mostly played in a Pleasantview. This is the same one I used shortly after University was released, the firs expansion pack. I have mentioned this fairly recently, how it has a family descended from me and my female rib clone. (A good idea, if Sims2 is to be believed, as we have wonderful children. Not all of them pretty but very sympathetic.) There are also various other characters I have created for this or that reason, such as a novelist and this spring the intellectual farmers.

Pleasantview proper was starting to get crowded, what with my imaginary children finding sweethearts and starting their own family, and all the rest. Luckily I have two expansion packs that let me create subhoods (sub-neighborhoods): Nightlife adds the option of "downtowns", whereas Open for Business lets you add "shopping districts". There is really no difference between the two, unless you want there to be. They basically add a new neighborhood that shares the people with the main neighborhood and each other. Sims can travel from one to another and even move. I did that with my farmers, creating a new subhood named "Farmington". So far there is just that one farm, plus a graveyard and a flower shop (right next to the cemetery, their name is "Last Stop Flowers", with the slogan "Because you didn't buy while they lived".)

I had already installed one university ("La Fiesta Tech") two years ago, and later the standard Downtown and the standard Bluewater Town shopping district. Both of these come with a number of people, many of the Bluewater sims playable, although I generally don't play them. So there were already a number of sims in addition to the small village we started with. I then added three seasonal subhoods: "Summersun Isles" (eternal summer), "Skylift Heights" (winter) and "Silvercrown Valley" (fall). Silvercrown got its name because that's where old professors go to die. Silver hair, got it? But it is also a place for sims who want to learn skills faster, the seasonal benefit of fall in the Seasons expansion. I created a few new sims to live in these neighborhoods, but very few.

While making an earlier custom neighborhood, I had discovered the Townie and NPC creator. I am not sure what expansion it came in, I have all except Pets installed on this machine. It is one of the testing cheats, and looks like a dead tree. It lets you set three parameters: Age, gender and skin color (any one of them can be set to random). Then you tells it to make townies, one at a time. Townies are sims that you don't control. They show up on community lots (shops, parks, restaurants etc) and may also be colleagues of your sims, in which case they may visit after work. Some are school children or teenagers and will come home with your sim children after school. A subgroup of townies live downtown and will show up there mostly; they are of course called downtownies. You can choose to create either townies or downtownies with the dead tree. For each, you get to look at them and decided whether to keep them or abolish them. (The menu choice says "kill" but they are actually never created, so won't show up as ghosts or being resurrectable or fill up your character files folder.) You cannot look at their personality, alas, but at least you can see how they look before you decide. If you have more than enough old black men but not many women, for instance, you may wish to reject one and keep another.

I made a bunch of these new townies after I had installed the new face templates, which make new sims look more normal (less exaggerated) and generally a little prettier, although not perfect. There are, I believe, several such replacement templates, but I only have one I found on Mod The Sims 2. I played for a while and met most if not all of these new sims. Then I downloaded the 10 000 names mod, which generates names of new sims from US census data rather than from the pretty limited name selection that comes with the game (which was based on names of the developers of the game, it seems). After this I've made another dozen or two more sims.

My Characters folder for Pleasantview now has 591 files in it. This is still under the limit of what you could have in the original game before it crashed from overpopulation (around 750) and starting with Nightlife you can have at least 1500, possible much more. I really shouldn't call Pleasantview a town until I have more than 1000 sims, but already it is normal for me to send my sims to the mall and chance upon sims I don't recognize. This is a welcome change from when I first got the game, and you would see the same few faces over and over again: Komei Tellerman, Sophie Miguel, Tosha Go, Ben Long, Melissa Fancey... my Sims-playing readers will remember all of them and recognize them on sight. But who is Manuel Howe, Cara Walton, Phoebe Nanale and Emmy Bradshaw, just to mention some that are in the mall right now? I don't know, and that's the charm.

More sims to make friends with, more sims to fall in love with, more sims to feed to the cow plant because they are irredeemably evil... OK, actually I rarely do that anymore. I have found that even the most irritating sims usually have someone they will love, if I can just find them, and live out their natural lives in peace and happiness. I usually don't allow them to breed, though. I want a Pleasantview that is really pleasant, where people make friends and not enemies, where everyone can great each other with a smile. The ideal small town. But the truth is that even if I didn't have a job, didn't have a faith and didn't have hobbies besides Sims2, I could play it for years just with these 591 characters. With 1500, it would surely take the rest of my life. Unfortunately for my Sims LJ readers, but fortunately for the rest of you, I don't plan to spend my entire life playing Sims2. Just enough to spruce up my journal with the occasional Sims entry. It is one of my most popular topics, after all.