Sunday 26 November 2006

Pic of the day: First floor, with cafeteria (in the background), common room and three apartments. The bathtub is for bathing toddlers, who don't take too kindly to showers.

Sims2: Apartment complex

Usually when I play the Sims 2, I start a new neighborhood with only one created sim. This "founder" is typically unique in some way, such as skin or eye color that don't naturally exist in the game (or in our world, for that matter). I then have him (or very rarely her) marry one of the many single sims that are already in the game, and have a few children. These again marry other townies and have children. To save time, I have lately had them in one house, just letting the family grow with grandchildren and daughters-in-law and uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews and second cousins once removed to the university but coming back.

This time, I am doing it differently. I am starting with several different founders, with different skin and eye color, but nothing outrageous. (Well, some of the eyes are, but you don't see it at the normal screen resolution.) I then have lots of babies, mostly by aliens. (When aliens abduct a male sim who is adult but younger than 6 days from elder, they return pregnant with an alien baby.) My plan is to have the alien offspring breed with the local population. Then, after a generation of two, I want the descendants of the aliens to start marrying each other and create an alien community out in the desert. Or at least that is my plan now. The sims tend to have their own opinions, of course.

Again for convenience, I gathered the different families in one large building. Actually they were still singles by then. What I envisioned was originally an apartment complex, but it ended up as a closer community than that. It is possible to download special doors that let only a limited number of selected sims go through them, such as members of a family. But I found this neither necessary nor convenient. For instance, you would then not be able to have guests in your apartment, without programming the doors before they came and after they left. Instead I ended up with something more similar to the dormitories in the Sims 2 University, with a cafeteria on the first floor and a large living room next to it with musical instruments. The residents still had fairly large apartments with bedrooms, couches and a small home office with a desk, a chair and a computer. Even though all the apartments had the same basic plan, wall and floor coverings were chosen after they moved in and selected to fit the personality of the resident.

This has worked amazingly well. Over time I have hired a cook and a maid/janitor, both of them based on the all-in-1 NPC by Christianlov on Mod The Sims 2. I haven't hired the nanny though, as one of the sims maxed his robotics skill and created a Servo robot, whose artificial intelligence exceeds that of the sims themselves. While the sims will try to feed a crying baby with a stinking diaper, the robot will instead change the diaper first. If the crying stops, case closed, and the baby is put back in the crib. Sims will carry babies with them randomly and drop them in front of the fridge after feeding them. I guess nannies may be even better, but it is hard to see how. The robot is doing quite a good job at it, and will also spontaneously do chores like a maid. As the families grow, there is often an opportunity for this.

The Hestia Complex is three floors high and have four apartments on each floor, except for the first floor in which there are only three, as the fourth and much of the corridor is taken for the cafeteria and common room. Each apartment has easily room for four people, but I don't have that many, as my computer simply does not have the processing power to handle fifty sims at once. It slows to a crawl around 30, less if one of them is a robot. This makes me suspect that the artificial intelligence is what really stresses it... the video card is probably not the bottleneck anymore, as it used to be on my old computer. I play with free will on, and generally let my sims do their own things by default. If I see they are in trouble, I will intervene. If I see them just hanging around idle, I may set them to something productive, like fulfilling one of their wishes or someone else's. But for the most part, they do fairly well on their own.

I make the strategic decisions, like alien abductions. ^_^; I also have to decide things like jobs and marriages, because sims will never do this on their own, but they have preferences which I try to follow. sims can spontaneously fall in love, for instance, and I would not want them married to someone they don't love. But the sims will take care of their biological needs on their own, socialize on their own, seek out fun things like instruments or chess boards, and stay stuck to them until dire need or player intervention sends them scurrying.

All in all it is a hectic but fun lifestyle. I hope to introduce you to some of my sims there soon, and let you follow their descendants as they make their way into the simulated world.