echoweaver

[echoweaver]

I'm seeing plenty about this stuff from mainstream media. I read some Substack, but I hardly need it. I switched from the Washington Post to the Guardian after Bezos fucked with the opinion page, but I still get WaPo's newsletter and see their headlines -- their newsroom is still fighting the good fight. I don't know when Bezos will next decide to fuck around with them, but they're going to go down fighting. They're fighting so hard that I'm deeply conflicted about whether to subscribe again.

NYT is covering this stuff, though I don't remember it feeling quite so urgent from them, that's true.

Being from Boston, I read the Boston Globe, and they are also shining a spotlight on border behavior.

Of course, the Guardian is British journalism, and I think it serves as a good counterbalance for American stuff.

I say this with a lot of urgency. We can NOT abandoned verified journalism and retreat to pundit commentary. That distrust of mainstream media is what made the Right so easy to control -- anything with verifiable facts is automatically suspect, and people end up flocking to information sources that feel trustworthy to them but are just feeding them propaganda.

We still have solid, ethical, independent journalism. We need to be subscribing, reading, and supporting them or we will be in the same information landscape as the Right.

I take a lot of news vacations right now while my world is on fire, but even with a few steps back, I know this shit is happening at our border. I certainly know that ICE is jumping out of unmarked vans and grabbing legal residents off our streets. We are fucking scared, but we're not being held in the dark.

[echoweaver]

Sigh. I would use it. I'd probably hate myself forever, but I would use it. Glad I don't have the choice.

here's a hot take i think it is human nature to think you could use the death note responsibly. i know making fun of people who are like "rip to light but i'm different" is a meme at this point but when people are like "i would NOT use it" i'm like well you can think that right now, because it's an entirely fictional weapon that is not in your hands in this very moment. death note reduces the entirety of human history to what is a shockingly succinct trolley problem: if you could press a button and kill the people who YOU think are making the world a worse place, would you do it? the only way to opt out is to exist in a vacuum, to have no investment in the state of the world. but the personal is political. when push comes to shove i do think absolute power corrupts absolutely, except for me, who would only kill oligarchs and billionaires and politicians with bad vibes

[echoweaver]

I feel personally attacked. Sob.

[echoweaver]

I love being tagged, and then I only do about 1/3 of them. And then when nobody tags me I'm sad. Because that makes any sense?

I like that the community knows I'm here, even if I really suck at actually participating. I will try, I swear.

If you ever tagged me to do one of those tag game thingies and I never did it:

1) Thank you, seriously. Those are fun and being included shows that my followers care enough to want to learn more about me.

2) Very sorry about that, it’s extremely likely that I said to myself “Cool! But I’m busy at the moment, I’ll have to do this later today or tomorrow” before proceeding to just straight-up forget, now it’s too far back in my notifications and/or your blog to find again.

[echoweaver]

Ok, so there's basically no reason I couldn't be using my huge content dry spell to repost the rest of my ISBI. So I'm friggin' going to do that already. I haven't wanted to play that save until I could post the new content, and then I'm not even advancing it. That's by far my easiest/fastest save to play, and ISBIs are almost always hilarious.

Another thought -- I'm playing along with the Samples legacy, and I think I realize another thing; no more full households. There's so much gameplay that benefits from more concentration than I can provide when trying to track a whole bunch of sims simultaneously. I'm trying to let myself leave the elder generation on autonomy, but it's hard. And soon there will be babies, and o.O.

My plan for my Decades challenge and Riffin free play is to move out sims organically and then play households on rotation. I haven't actually managed to move anyone out in either save, but I'm optimistic about that as a new play style for me.

[echoweaver]

I distracted myself with a little project I could finish quickly. I made Spooky Day costumes out of the Movie Stuff pack, then added the two fairy costumes from Faire Folk Apparel.

I could put them up for download but I don't wanna take screenshots. 😭

[echoweaver]

I was trying to discuss the eternally longed-for mod for children riding horses with a hopeful modder, and I still only find this tutorial on YouTube for age-converting animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmHLZa3GxWE&t=41s

I am deeply grateful to Painted Wings Production for making this video. I practically freeze-framed through it when I initially learned to convert animations. The problem is that it's actually only half of what you need to know. And it also speed-runs through the process. And ...this might be cruel, but don't ever need to hear the phrase "baby children" ever again.

I started with that video, but @thesweetsimmer111 taught me how to convert animations properly, including IK targets and CLIP effects.

I find it interesting that nobody has ever recorded a more thorough video.

Perhaps I should try to do this myself. I recorded a tutorial once for my job and the edited out about 40k "ums". I'd have to re-learn how to record my voice and screen. And perhaps TSS could review it and tell me all the stuff I am still missing. 😅

I should totally take on another project to go with all the other ones I have going on... Then again, it is incredibly difficult to talk about animation conversions and figure out what the other person understands without some kind of example to point to.

[echoweaver]

Notes from recategorizing a bunch of new cc: Tuxedos are not Outerwear.

That is all.

[echoweaver]

Right now, I'm playing. In fact, I'm playing more than I have in maybe a year? I am also doing some low-key modding, but mostly simple new projects to build skills. I gotta be tender with this burnout or it's never going to go away.

BUT.

Vickie's two eldest kids are now teens. So close to handing off to Gen 8! Imagine if I actually finished this legacy....

And I realize -- holy crap, even with all the cc I've downloaded over the years, my male teen clothing options are really sparse. Males are neglected in cc over all, plus teens are extra-neglected because they're not even a separate mesh in TS4. I think I even have more elder male clothes than teen male.

I've been skimming through finds simbrs looking for male teen, and the picking are really thin. I'd love some links to teen male cc if folks have them.

BTW: I play Maxis Match for clothes, which means I don't use fabric with a lot of ripples and folds because I find they don't animate well.

[echoweaver]

Today in modding, I upgraded the Warrior Pets mod to the development tool I'm using now (JetBrains Rider). I used Visual Studio for years, but then I naively upgraded to discover that the new version blocked the creation of new .Net 2.0 projects. Then Microsoft discontinued the Mac version. I was continuing to mod by using Battery's template creator, which I would be using anyway, but still.

So, no actual progress on Warrior Pets, but at least now I'm capable of making progress? That's, um, meta-progress.

[echoweaver]

More on the Save Game Settings mod.

So, we drop half the settings in the original mod because the game is already storing them per-save.

I've determined that the Celebrity settings are stored for the entire game. Also, to my surprise (why does EA keep surprising me), the "Opt Active Family Out of Celebrity System" option actually disables the ENTIRE Celebrity system rather than just preventing the active family from gaining celebrity points, which is what I assumed it did. I don't know how this differs in practice from the Celebrities demographic checkbox. (It looks like maybe inactive sims can have celebrity points; it's just hidden from the user? I have no idea.)

The Supernatural demographic settings may also be, but I haven't verified yet.

The primary thing of course is the lifespan settings. I have those working for personal use, but the only place I've been able to apply the settings I'm storing is after NRaas looks at them. This results is not one but TWO prompts asking if you want to adjust the manager speed -- one when it notices that the ini settings don't match what your save game was using, then again when you reapply the settings from the save. In both cases, you can click No/Cancel and leave the drivers alone, but the effect is clunky and alarming for a user who didn't personally code it.

I asked Chain_Reaction for advice and got an ear(eye)-full about how doing this was a bad idea he'd already looked at and decided not to implement. He claimed that abruptly changing the lifespans by large amounts could bog down the AgingManager. I'm not sure how large an amount he's talking about. In theory, what I'm doing is an automated version of opening the EA Options dialog and changing the lifespan settings there each time I load a save game. Maybe if I set the total lifespan to 10 million, it could cause trouble, but while I'm not bounds-checking the values, at some point my mod is no longer responsible for your bad decisions.

Chain spends a notable amount of his limited time providing tech support for poorly-written mods that side effect the NRaas suite. I suppose if someone set the lifespan to 10 million, they'd be at least as likely to end up on the NRaas forums asking why their game is frozen as coming to me. Which makes me wonder if his concern is not me saving lifespan values in the save game but the prospect of setting lifespan values to arbitrary amounts....?

At any rate, he's not going to help me figure out how to avoid those prompts. I can pull down the NRaas suite from Github and paw through it myself. I've considered that for a couple of small changes I'd love to make and possibly submit as pull request. (The one that comes to mind is married names. I can have all couples take Bride's name, Groom's, older spouse, younger, or hyphenate, but what I actually want to randomly select all of those options to simulate a bunch of different personalities making different choices in my town.) However, I'm not going to take that on anytime soon, and I can't guarantee that examination of the NRaas code is going to yield a solution.

OTOH, I have the mod running in its current clunky state in my personal game, and I'm already not sure if I can live without it. I think all the non-lifespan settings can be effectively managed with some high-order NRaas-fu, so really the lifespan is the only must-have feature.

I don't think the mod in its current state is a good idea to release someplace like MTS, but I suppose I could make it available for download to use at your own risk for savvy players who happen to read this my simblr.

Any thoughts?

[echoweaver]

Ugh. I have always been aware of what a mess the Sims 3 store was, but wow it really is a mess. I think I have downloaded everything and converted to packages for my new computer. I have double-checked a couple of different ways, and I did find stuff that were promotional or achievement rewards that I missed on other passes. I'm still getting an objects replaced notification when I load the Sample save, but at this point I have to conclude that either I cleaned out a cc object or I'm missing some store object so insignificant that I really don't care.

And then when I find something I do need to download, I have to rename my Sims 3 folder because the store does not allow you to download anything without running Sims 3 inside EA App. Then, when I'm done downloading, I have to go into my process manager to kill the two sneaky processes that EA App leaves running when you close it. UGH. I'm not as optimistic as some in the fandom about how Inzoi or Paralives are going to rival Sims, but it would be nice if Paralives at least ends up being fun because an indie software developer is much more likely to be trustworthy about what they try to do on my computer.

It feels good to have converted everything into packages, though, even if it's been a stupid amount of work. Now I can go in and fix the CASP settings for store content myself -- get all the ballgowns out of Everyday and the torn jeans out of Formalwear, turn off Valid for Random on the circus costumes... I basically can spend the rest of my life fiddling with my content config if I want to.

[echoweaver]

Update on In-Game Options:

@zoeoe-sims just proved (or forced me to prove) that the values in Options.ini involving Season length aren't actually being used. That stuff is already being stored in the save.

There are values for this stuff in Options.ini, and the lifespan data is being written to and read from this file. But the Seasons data is just pretending to do this. There's code reading those values from Options.ini that sure looked like it was initializing season length and lunar cycle length, but apparently those methods are either not being run or they're being overridden by some other method. Changes made in to Seasons data in the options dialog is not written back out to Options.ini either.

I don't know why my brain is so broken about this. Making an options dialog where half the settings are game-wide and half are save-specific is hardly the most bizarre thing EA has ever done in this game.

Welp, I get to drop the settings in this mod that I couldn't get to work anyway! We won't talk about the work I put into making the dialog for those settings in this mod. I'll just sit in the corner and sulk for a little bit before going back to being excited that this thing is way closer to release than I thought.

[echoweaver]

Progress on the In-Game Options mod:

OK, what I have learned from more extensive testing:

1. The season length and lunar cycle length really don't work. I'm going to have to look for another way to set them that doesn't write to the ini file.

2. The lifespan lengths work great, but I'm setting them on loadup after NRaas StoryProgression runs, so I'm getting the, "You seem to have changed your lifespan" prompt twice on every load -- once for loading the lifespans from options.ini and then a second one for loading the lifespans from my mod. I have a good idea how to fix this one.

[echoweaver]

Me Again: I've spent a week updating Sunset Valley, and I like what I have.... but I realize I don't actually care about this town. I want the people. I could totally just Porter the Sunset Valley sims into a custom neighborhood that is better designed for all the expansions. Hmm.

Anyone have any suggestions for a marvelous suburban or urban-suburban neighborhood with solid support for all expansions?

Hmmm.... maybe suburban because I want horses. But I suppose one could still have a towntown with high rises.

[echoweaver]

Anyone reading this ever created a custom career?

If so, has anyone used a collection journal metric as a custom career metric?

Tangentially, I've been playing with my update of MissyHissy's IT career with Logic swapped out for Arsil's Programming skill. It seems to be working. That's something I can put up for download.

I have so much done or mostly done stuff.

🤷‍♀️

[echoweaver]

Me: So, I want to do some long-term testing on my In-Game Options and Stat Standardizing mods. I should start a new game and play for a while. I haven't played in Sunset Valley for about 10 years, and I kind of miss it. That should be quick to set up, and I can play one of the townsfolk. I can even download one of the nice existing updates to the world.

Also Me: Rejects all existing world updates and spends two solid days updating Sunset Valley herself.

Also Me 2: Rebuilds Mirabello Plaza by hand from a reference image so that I could use de-rabbitholed theater replica by Sims Shai. I am not running Zerbu's Active Careers, mind you. I just love the idea of turning the theater into a live show venue and open theater using Ani's Open Cinema. Also I just love that lot.

Also Me 3: Thinks that it would be awesome to do the same kind of open rabbithole replica with the day spa, using the stack of spa-themed store content. But I'm not actually a builder, so I'm not sure where that comes from.

🤷‍♀️