Just about every head of career should be able to gain celeb status I hope.... I hope my "Leader of the free world" won't be denied access to a night club

I would agree that Sims need to be overall more cognizant not only of places but other Sims as well. (I find it odd that they go into any fridge they find or chat casually with a sim they divorced two sims days earlier. Wt?)

Kiwi Tea had a similar interesting idea about having modular apartments that were each individually a lot but had premade floors and ceiling so they could be stacked. I thought that was a very interesting and sensible idea and liked it a lot as it would allow players to determine the size of their apartment buildings and it seems like something that could work well in tangent with your idea of rooms for the common areas.

Also, I wonder how real is that limit of 8 sims per lot. A lot of people use bigger household mods without ill effect so I'm wondering if the more realistic limit was 12 then perhaps could we have modular floor units that were actually 2 apts of 6 or 3 apts of 4? The families though on one floor (lot) could be sparated in their living quarters by the doors being assignable to a particular family.

I've built pseudo multi-family lots in the past with assignable door mods and thinking this could be another possibilty overlooked/not delivered by EA.

I think the main point is that they want to be able to the market the game to as crappy PCs as possible. EA hairs are mostly 2000-5000 polys where as custom hairs are usually 3000-10000 ( for reasonable ones ) most people can run a 8000-10000 poly hair without problems but EA wants to game to be as least taxing as possible

MTS Staff Note:

Man, I don't know what's in the air or water or something lately but I'm having to pull out this big purple text a lot lately for people snarking wildly at each other.

BE NICE! Or I will come to your house, put my dirty feet up on your couch, and make your mother bake me a pie while wearing my skimpiest underwear. That is, your mother wearing my underwear, not me wearing skimpy underwear. I'll be wearing dirty sweatpants.

If you can't be kind, courteous, and graceful with your posts, then DO NOT POST. No snarking, no snapping. For some of you, this may be the equivalent of shooting lollipops and rainbows out your arse, but if that's the mood ya gotta put yourself in to post nicely, then do that. Or don't post.

For those of you that are getting this friendly reminder again, this is just another, perhaps not so friendly reminder - if I see the same names cropping up time and again in arguments, those individuals might just lose the ability to access the forums they're constantly kicking up arguments in. You know who you are. Cut it out.

Now, let's get back to the lovely conversation we were having about the upcoming expansion, Late Night. Cucumber sandwiches, anyone?

Nom nom nom! Thanks for the sandwich!

I think that it'll be interesting to see how EA actually handles a city, so far we haven't seen very much and I think that it's extremely unlikely that it'll be completely urban. If EA does it well then a city would be a fun place to live!

I REALLY hope that it is mostly proper City. That would be so cool, and a first for The Sims (I mean EA created Neighbourhoods, I'm sure there were some for TS2 that were custom made). I know its not going to be completely Urban, as Grant mentioned little cottages and such, I guess they will be in a suburb.

But yeah, REALLY looking forward to a Cityscape.

I always wondered why many CC hairs seemed more complex than a lot of the EA hairs. I do understand that EA probably does want to cater to the medium range strength of PC's, I mean just look how dated the graphics seem compared to a lot of other games out now and TS3 is only a year old. It seems though as the game progresses, graphics (at least somewhat) slowly begin to improve, as in new hairs released through the store and in SP and EP's become a little more complex compared to the base game stuff. It's already confirmed that the Sim's bodies will be improved a little come the release of Late Night.

I think it has more to do with a quantity over quality issue than anything else.

They've got to put an entire game/expansion together and test it all. So the time spent on things like hair and overall detail of objects probably gets thrown into the "bare minimum effort" bin. It probably also helps knowing that there are after market modders who will take the time to make a really nice skin or object.

These things get done by more or less unrelated teams, so that's not an issue.

You're right. The textures in EA hairs are awful. The store objects often have gloppy textures as well. Rather ugly work all around and an indifferent execution.

I like that we are finally getting an urban landscape though its unfortunate EA couldn't commit to it 100%. It'll be a mixed landscape since Rodiak mentions in one of the iinterviews that we'll still have cabins and cozy cottages. So one part of the new hood will be more suburban than urban.

It seems they put most of their focus on the vampires in this EP.

This is actually intentional. High-frequency textures cause texture flickering in motion if you don't use a high rate of anisotropic filtering, and if the frequency is wickedly high, only super sampling can stop the flickering. The majority of sims players won't know how to enforce either.

That EA intentionally gives us bad textures is evident but I'm inclined to agree with Beer76 that it is indifference on EAs part rather than some technical shortcoming on the part of the players.

Since a lot of Video Game players play a variety of games it's common to let settings like anisotripoc filtering and antialiasing be application controlled. And interestingly enough other 3D games don't seen to have the bad texture problems like TS3 does.

8 Sims per household is likely a deliberate set limit as controlling over 8 Sims is complicated, some people might like the "extra" challenge but I think they just want to make players do not get overwhelmed.

The lot limit is how many Sims are allowed to be in the lot, that scales to your machine specs, take AL were the limit was 4 households per Apartment lot, considering the 8 limit that means they could be 25 Sims in the same lot (8x4+1 ... the 1 is the landlord),that is a LOT of Sims, with Pets the total would be 25 Sims and 8 (2x4) Pets.

I dont recall TS3 lot limits, rabbit holes shown you can have many because they are simply routing in-out of the lot that is less taxing as having 20 Sims in the same lot with the AI running.

Edit:


Then you have that POS engine called Unreal Engine 3 (the unreal being how crappy can it be) that shows how to have constant texture loading issues.

Also Anti-Aliasing with UE3 is something nobody expects, just look at Mass Effect (1 and 2).

After a few days to cool down from my pet peeve, i'm actually really looking forwards to this expansion. Bands, nightlife, apartments, a form of vampires, and so forth.

It will be nice for my Sims to have something to do during the night. I like the atmosphere at night in the Sims, they have done a good job with it, and it's always a shame there is so little to do. This will change that.

My only problem is it's affecting my enjoyment of the current game. I'm looking at all the features yet to be added, and it's making the current game feel lacking. =(

I started a family with the aim of having the daughter be my first Vampire... and she's like three days (with 'Long' lifespan and frequent periods with Aging Off) off being an Adult. Her YA stage seems to have gone in a flash, not to mention she has a small fortune in Gems, has been a catburglar, a mid-range ghost-hunter, and mastered athletics without a problem. She's pretty much too old for my vision of how I wanted my first Vampire to be. Suppose i'll have to make another character for that closer to the time, because if I keep playing her as I am she will have mastered all careers, be fully skilled, and be the wealthiest Sim in the world by the time Late Night is out.

I could see how that plays out; and let it be her rebellious son or daughter that becomes the Vampire. I can put that off indefinatly and it wouldn't matter how rich/skilled/experiance this paticular character gets. >.>

I hope so, too. You could make a celebrity scientist sim and name him Albert Einstein! I thought I read something somewhere that indicated that might be the case, that being a celebrity was supplemental to being any other career, but I can't find it anywhere for the life of me. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking?

Pretty sure your right... if I remember the Twitter Q+A correctly, Grant indicated that it would be sort of like "Influence" in TS2 where you had to work to build your celebrity status, that sounds almost "skill like" to me.

I wonder if our teenage sims will be able to stay up past curfew so they can try and sneak into clubs?

What I want to know is how late these late nights are going to be, considering most lots become empty at 11 PM. How are they going to tweak this? How are other sims going to be at going to bed at 3 AM and getting up at 7 for work?

There's a potential bug.

Sims stay up all night and pass out on the streets at 6 in the morning.

This made me laugh, I can see it already, "Sorry mister president, not cool enough".

I hope EA takes into consideration that celebrities can take common folk with them to cool parties. So if a celebrity is in a group going to a nice nightclub, they should be able to get everybody entered, even if the celebrity is not in the active household, but just a member in the group.

Celebrity status might be cool. My concern is the paparazzi. Anyone remember the crazy stalker fan (I think that was it?) who would peek in your windows and such in Superstar? They bugged out my lot EVERY TIME and made it nearly impossible to play my famous Sims.

"Exclusive" clubs sound cool but I dunno, I admit that I find real-life celebrities shallow and often ill-informed and unintelligent. Not sure this will be a draw for me. Interested to see the implementation.

Sorry, misread this at first. The texture problem then is the game engine EA used?

I'm not a fan of Late Night, but I do know DJ Booths are important for clubs, and although I plan to get the expansion and practically never use it, I do think it sucks for people who DO want to use the expansion for it's after-hours purpose to suddenly lack an essential club element

I never had a crazy stalker fan in Superstar, but I guess if the paparazzi are too annoying, putting them back in order will probably be one of the first mods to come around.

Finally an EP I'm actually excited about. From the list of things it seems it's got everything I want in a sims game so I'll be a happy camper.