I’m in the Guinness book of records?…

Okay, I didn’t actually set the record, in fact it’s more like a mention.Well you can see for yourself :P

Well in fact they have pretty old numbers as that was back in 2007. As of august 2008 things really changed though..Now the movies with the most views at least the ones I could find are:
[youtube search results here]

Barbie Girl - Aqua by panda16p2 which has 13.2 views

Girlfriend - Avril Lavigne by natalieeey1 - 11.6 mln views

And then there’s Skater boy with 7.7 mln

Although, if you think of it the actual view count is rather impossible to measure, I mean, movies are watched not just on youtube right. But come to think of it, the record I could be pretty close to is the most watched Sims 2 movies channel.. One day, who knows, maybe it could be :P So well thought i’d share this with you, been getting around to blog about it for ages lol And thanks again to the anonymous person who signed my guestbook and told me about it ;)

[This post will not contain any useful information. just some contemplations on the Sims 3. Guess I just needed to vent]

So.. It sure is gonna be a blast to play.. Can’t say I’m a very demanding player, so whichever way they expand the gameplay, I think i’m gonna be happy and apart from questions like ‘what kinda machine would you need to have to handle sth like that??’, I don’t have any worries. Sims game really is what you make of it anyways.

Now when it comes to stuff like moviemaking….
The graphics.. yeah kinda disappointing.. they did improve the look of the buildings and added more polys to the sims, the gradual change of the lighting is really cool too (the sunset is awesome!), but I don’t see too much improvement on the way the objects are rendered.. It’s not ‘jawdropping’ enough and at times it does remind sims 2 alot.
And since Sims 3 is gonna be around for like 5 more years.. so just imagine how lame it’s gonna look to us in 2014!

But.. come to think of it.. if you compare sims 2 with no cc at all and sims 2 with cc you can tell theres a big difference. Hope it’s gonna be the same with the Sims3

You know what I’ve been wondering about this screenshot? the woman in red dress. Because if you look at it, the whole screen taken with smooth edges off, and her outlines seem really smooth and even if you look at the shading, it looks waaay better than comparing to the other people on the shot. (click on the image to see the full size version and you’ll see what i’m talking about) Was she one of those 3d prerendered models just edited into the image?..

It’s also been a disappointment to see that they still haven’t fired their clothing designer lol and the faces are somewhat clay looking, but whatever. Thank god at least the members of the community have some talent.
So, seeing that there are no more ugly edges on the faces, lets suppose the sim ppl will look whichever way we want. Amen.

The open neighborhood thing is sure gonna be hella fun for the game play, but I really hope you can just freeze everything and still have the full control, cuz I wouldn’t want to find my actors old and married with 5 kids while I was filming on the other set lol.

And lastly, the animation.. not much can be said about it yet.. but I duno, when you watch that ‘lil movie which came with FreeTime…  It does seem like some of the animations are gonna be recycled. And that is really creepy. Why EA just can’t change the direction in which it’s going from from dorky and funny to serious and realistic, cuz this is what ppl actually are looking for. (compare success of Helena and NANM and you’ll know I’m right )

And this is my Sims 3 wishlist [aka 'dream on'?]
haha I’m wondering how many of these will actually be in the game.

MUST haves:

- ANIMATION EDITOR!!!

- Scaling and vertical rotation of the objects, ability to raise and lower objects without having to edit the damn meshes outside the game and then wait half an hour till it reloads!

- don’t think that’ll happen, but it would be really cool if you could edit package files without having to quit the game. like you save it, click somewhere in the game ‘reload’ and it just reloads the file you just edited.

- at least 20 preset camera positions. Would be cool to have them show up on the screen and name them too.

- key frame based camera control and easier config

- ability to modify the lighting through USERFRIENDLY interface

- save game ‘lite’ option. tell the game to memorize positions and actions of the Sims. basically the same thing like saving the game, but without having to reload the lot (or w/e that will be in sims3)

- it would be nice to set up multiple cameras and tell the game to record from various angles simultaneously

- ability to change the color of the objects in game (I’m SO glad it’s actually gonna be there)

- at least some basic mesh editor
………………………………

Personal wants:

- decent singing and rocking out animations
- Acoustic guitar and I want to be playing guitar in different poses
(sitting, standing.. (damn i just thought of sth!)
 here!
 
well.. it’s better than nothing? :P

Okay back to the list:

- Public transport
- living in apartments
- gradually growing hair? :P
- there will be weather, right?
- Better romantic interactions
- more violence, diseases, wounds, bone fractures, traumas all that fancy stuff
- Skateboards!
- Cars with the option to drive anywhere on the lot
- Wind!
- it would be cool if there was some sims 2 sims importer. you know just stuff like general features like name and family tree.. I’ve been playing my family for years it would be cool to still have some of the sims in sims3.. but I would definitely survive without it.

And lots more I could go on and on. Anyways,  you know, now I have a feeling that the game I was looking forward to all this time was in fact Sims 4… damn.

-> There’s a free-moving camera in Bodyshop! You just press F3 and voila! Gosh I feel like such a n00b. Yeah.. sometimes read me’s can be *very* useful to read  

-> There’s a bunch of interesting settings in videocapture.ini file. You can change video capture resolution, also you can make antialiasing available when recording, change the codecs, fps and data rates. Pretty cool.
(the file is located in My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Config) 

-> Sims can watch TV from the toilet!
Yeah, looks like it’s one of those things that everyone knew about except me.

-> Voting for the best movie of March will be extremely hard
Way too many brilliant movies were released this month. Ones that I loved the most were:

So be sure to check these movies out if you still haven’t done so. All of them are a-m-a-z-i-n-g, but at the same time so different that it makes it impossible for me to pick just one. Anyways, whichever movie gets chosen, I’m sure that this time I won’t be disappointed.

-> Lots of items from the upcoming Family Fun pack were supposed to be in OFB.
There’s a discussion about it on the sims2.com bbs. One person from modthesims found the thumbnails of new items somewhere in OFB package files.
 

(http://modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1106669#post1106669)   

Maxis took out the meshes and textures of these objects they just forgot about the thumbnails.

So… family pack technically is a second CD from OFB… What a rip off! Well I don’t feel too upset about it, I don’t like ANYTHING from the FF maybe except for couple of objects that I totally could live without. But still if I were to choose I’d rather have these. I think I’ll dig through the packages I want to see this myself. I also was checking out the animation lists but haven’t found anything interesting there. I might have missed something though, but anyways it looks like all the interactions that are there were included in the game. There’s still no replies from maxoids in that thread.. it must be really tough to come up with a good excuse for this one.

[the discussion has been closed]

Oh well I’ve been playing the new EP almost non-stop for the last week. I always wanted to see sims making cash, not just seeing them  go there and back in a car pool and now I finally got what I wanted :)  At first I just had a plan to explore the new expansion very fast and then go back to shooting my movie… but the thing is that you can’t really explore it without actually getting into all this and playing it. So my sim addiction took over and I started playing the game completely abandoning everything else.

Here’s couple of screenshots from my game. Sorry about the plumbobs and all other stuff. I’m running a music store, I sell the instruments mostly which is quite profitable too.

I got a guy from nl movie woking as salesman. Not sure which one he is though lol but I gotta say he’s really good at this. I’m surprised he stayed with us for so long. Most of employees quit after a few days of working.

I love that desperate look that inexperienced cashiers give to the customers and then watching those reactions when they have to wait forever.. so funny 

Oh and btw meet my Servo! I was so disappointed with the way servos look when I first saw the screenshots. So I made one just to see what he would act like and then I was going to get rid of him.. but I had the agesims cheat turned on and decided to age him back.. and wow he turned into a normal looking sim! Then I turned him into adult again, gave him a makeover with allmenus on cheat and did some plastic surgery and now he’s bearable to look at.

 Actually, he’s a huge help around the house or the store.. well maybe except for the times when he gets broken and starts running around electrocuting people.  But good thing you can lock sims in a room so they can be safe. It was kinda cute when one time he got broken then repairman came and then Simple Plan’s ‘Perfect’ song started playing on the stereo.

Coz we lost it all.. nothing lasts forever I’m sorry I can’t be perfect lol

As far as moviemaking aspect is concerned, I’m not sure if they gave us really useful cheats or objects. Like what would I need a giant ninja statue for? or that gorilla suit?  Sure, elevators are really cool, I’m also very happy about the new foundations. The new interactions although not completely  controllable, but will definitely be pretty useful. But now I feel kinda  lost, coz I probably haven’t seen some of them and now I’m not sure  which ones to use in the movie.

So ok, I’m going back to shooting. Thanks god all the sets are loading, coz I’ve had some problems with some of my pleasantview lots. I just hope the patch comes out soon, coz now it’s just impossible to play the game without using cheats.  Thanks everyone for your support and all your nice words that make me motivated. I can’t say when the movie is finished. I’m guessing it will be the ending of March or beginning of April. But it’s just a  guess, I’m not really sure. This one is really hard to make because of  the lack of needed emotions and also because of the storyline which  is pretty achronological. This just means that I have to shoot everything first before I can get to editing. So well.. wish me luck :)

[the discussion has been closed]