Hope, this has not been posted before:

http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/dis...eeded-for-ep/p1

SimGuruLyndsay responds to the concern about playing with a larger family while one of those sims have a shop/ an active career.

by which you mean completely fails to actually explain how it will actually work.

Yeah, you're right, Andygal. I hope she responds to his second comment (the ability to queue stuff up for sims at another lot), but over all i think this response shows there will be no adjustement for family play. AGAIN.
I like this EP theme, but i don't like this focus.

Well you can assign your sim at home to take care of minor functions from the sims portrait, such as maintaining needs and a few other things I can't recall. I'm not sure a queue is really needed. Also, in ambitions you could send your sims to an open career and stay home with your other sims. Much like any other career. I wonder if it's going to work the same. If so, then there wouldn't be much of a problem.

If it makes you feel any better, I just went camping for a week. When I returned, the house was still standing and everyone was fine. I'm sure your sims families will survive a work shift without you. :P

Of course a queue is needed. When i want anyone to work on their aspiration (especially children), they won't do this through those options. The focus is one Sim and that's not cool for family players, that's my whole point.

I already only take my sims to other lots while the others are at work/school or they are working on a skill or they can do what i want them to do on the other lot. It's already affecting my playstyle (i would love to take the children to the park more often, but their parents have to do stuff at home) and this EP won't help with this situation.

Is it possible for a sim in an active career to be left alone while I control their housemates/family members on another lot?

I think the answer lies right in the way you came to your question: there is no story progression, inactives don't get pregnant on their own.
So for a doctor to deliver babies it would either require you to make these pregnant during rotational play, or implement story progression or create fake mothers-to-be who turn up daily from the limbo of out-of-world Sims, have their child, and then take it and disappear in limbo again, never to be seen anymore and culled from the population pool right afterwards. Now which of these scenarios is more likely?
The first one is unpredictable, because it depends on you, the player , to make it happen. And this means (pointless) work for you (you would have to make them pregnant just for your doctor to have something to do) and something that cannot be planned from the developers. It's unlikely therefore to happen.
The second would require a complete overhaul of how the game works so far. So, more than unlikely, too.
The third scenario is the easiest and implies the least problematic consequences, so the pregnant ladies will just be another group of roles that are dished out randomly to make the neighbourhood appear to be "vibrant" and full of (fake) pregnancies.
I wouldn't even be surprised if the regular, or played residents are excluded from these pregnancies and that they are restricted to the out-of-towners.

Thats not a bad idea really. If the game creates a new baby for any random unplayed sim, and that baby has some genetic consistency to it, it adds a bit of story progression that doesn't have to be the player's own planned and executed work.

It was talking about all game prices, the standard pricing for all games. You are right, it wouldn't have effected TS2 prices...but what I am saying is before the PS2/Xbox generation, the games were $50 already before the hike up to what is now $60, that was the standard price ($50), in the article it says EA is moving up from that price, which is what I am saying. That TS2 at launch was $50. In 2000 the prices were $50, this is years before TS2.

Whether it is next-gen or not does not mean much. As N64 charged $70 for some of it's titles and our current Standard price is $60. The publishers kind of eased their way into that price and found out that people were willing to pay that extra $10, the generation doesn't really matter when it comes to that stuff. It is how much they can get away with charging you and during that time early 00s they were charging $50.

Alright, I used the wayback machine to look into the past for the price. http://i.imgur.com/fblxGTo.png?1

EBgames had it for 49.99

I'm wondering that as well. I like the idea of active careers but how are you gonna take care of the rest of your household if you have to follow your sim to work. I'm hoping it just works like a regular career (where it gives you the "work hard, meet co-workers, ect" options) if you're not on the lot with them.



Wow....what a nice way to not answer the question and, instead, raise more questions XD

Well I know what she means. I remember us talking about the same problem in TS2 with a view to getting a mod together for it. There were all sorts of gotchas.

I know what she means too (I think).....I just wish she could have actually answered the question because I was wondering the same thing.

I thought that was an answer. Looked like it to me. The answer is they couldn't solve it.

They couldn't solve it, so how is it going to work?

I never owned a N64. Here is a list of games I bought in the 1990s, and their prices. These are all PC games, and Sega Genesis games. I remember the prices, because I was so poor at the time, buying any game was a big deal.

PC Games:

Wing Commander 2: $54.99
Ultima Underworld: $59.99
Ultima 7: $54.99
Wing Commander 3: $72.99
Strike Commander: $64.99

Sega Genesis games:

Sonic the Hedgehog: $69.99
Phantasy Star 2: $99.99

(those were basically the only two games I could afford)

Cartridge games were always pretty expensive. Game prices didn't start to drop to the "$20" level you mentioned until games on CD became very common.

These days, most of the games I buy cost less than $10 on Steam.

This relies on the assumption that they keep those babies, though. My assumption, however, was that neither the mother nor the baby will remain: one Brandy Stardust will arrive at the hospital in the morning in order to have her baby there; once she leaves the hospital, Brandy Stardust takes her baby with her and makes off for the alien space after having sold the baby to the Soylent Green corporation. My guess is that you will neither see Brandy Stardust nor her baby anymore for as long as your save lasts.
This is the most reasonable way to approach this, especially with regard to the population cap, as you certainly wouldn't want the 180 limit cluttered with 50 hospital babies and their 50 mothers.
And in order to avoid that Bella Goth, for example, ends up with 10 new children to keep your doctor busy at work, residents are exempt from this role. Brandy Stardust will be from Foreignia, a town in eternal limbo and never be allowed to move into Willow Crack, Granita Falls or any other playable world. Besides, this eases the code from also thinking about who the brat's father should be. Single mothers, fatherless children, both destined to vacate the country after delivery, seems like the most efficient solution.

One might say that these babies age and their mothers, too, but how would you modify these careers for those who play with aging off? Exclude delivery of babies for this setting? Too complicated and unsatisfactory, because you're limiting one group of players.

I try hard to remember how daycare worked in TS3. But wasn't it there, too, that fake, freshly created pudding parents with fake children turned up and left them in your care? And quite often then were gone from the world at the end of the day and forgot to take their toddlers with them, because they were actually all just for show. I think to remember at least that there are mods that force the game to actually only hand in real children from the pool of residents and not those fake ones.

Edit: On second thought, another scenario could be that the new world where these careers take place is only populated with the "customer-patient" group of Sims and not actually playable. So everyone who turns up in the hospital is from there and they can have anonymous children galore because you won't be able to play them anyway and residents from other worlds just show up as visitors but won't be able to do anything that affects their lives at home. So, your patents are restricted to that new town, a bit like the population for the Hot Date downtown.

i guess it's starting to show how strong their foundation is

Will there be different branches in the careers?

Medical could be Doctor/Nurse/Admin

Law enforcement could be detective/police/prison officer

Science could be natural biologist/unnatural?

Correction: EP's were $30 with the Sims 2, and if I recall correctly, $20 with the Sims 1.

Yeah, but they solved it in 3 with the active careers. Thanks to SP and open world, your firefighter sim could be off fighting fires, while spousy was off earning money working the sweat shop office job, and little Johnnie was still getting something that passed for an education in elementary school and even managed to get his homework done before the adults got home from work. And no time travel paradox to solve, or reconciliation of whose day counts and whose doesn't.

Then again, I guess Lyndsey forgot about that minor feature that 3 offered when running a family around a map.

I just checked this out for you. Say I'm playing the Goths. I can take Mortimer to his new career as a doctor. But I also want to work on Bella's charisma. While I have Mortimer selected, I can click the icon in Bella's portrait. I can select her skills and have her work on her charisma. The only limitation I can see is that she needs to have the skill established and the tools to build the skill need to be available on the lot, like a mirror. I can also have her stop that and build her relationship with her acquaintances, whether they live on her lot or not. And when her needs start to tank, I can have her maintain those. I can even have her tend the garden.

I can also transfer control to Bella's character no matter which lot I am at, and I assume that I can control Mortimer from the same feature at his career. Now I say assume because, I honestly don't know. I can use the portrait control to maintain him from any of the current venues, but who knows what the expansion will be like. If it works like ambitions, I expect no problem.

This already existing feature is going to give me way more control over Bella than a queue will. I can change things on the fly and adapt to her needs without having to be on the home lot. With a queue, I may have her set up to build charisma, and talk to Alexander when she's done. What if her bladder drops in between? If anything, I would like to see them add more features and control to the portrait control feature. For example, serving a meal isn't something I saw available. Maybe Mortimer is old fashioned and expects dinner to be ready when her gets home?

Here's another concern I thought about, although it doesn't affect me but I'm sure rotational players may be concerned about this. If I have for instance, the Pancakes Family as my main household, they open up a home store, and you know they're doing their thing and then all of sudden Cassandra from my Goth household comes in and buys a couch, then she heads home. If I switch households will her purchases be reflected in the family inventory? In her inventory? Or will it all just be an allusion?

How did this work in Sims 2, did this ever occur to/for anyone?

EDIT: @Grox that's really insane that we used the same family for examples

As I recall, in TS2, items purchased from a business actually did appear in that Sim's inventory when you switched to play them. Which was a bit weird, because it seemed like they could buy items they couldn't even afford, so my poor Sims would have grand pianos in their inventory or other oddities.

I'm no expert at rotational play, but that's how I remember it working. It's been a while, though.

That's right. I remember that now. The sims didn't actually pay for the stuff and you could sell it back in buy mode for a profit.

Regarding active careers, a tidbit from the official forums (grabbed off Twitter); Lydnsay replies to a post, and states that there's an inactive element, and our sims won't be required to go to work everyday.... or something. Here's the link for those who wish to read it - http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/dis...omment_13274077