T w e n t y S i d e d
Lorretta and Michael only have two weeks left, and even that hinges on Kelly not going into labor before her due date. It’s Kelly’s first baby, meaning that Lorretta is hopeful they actually do have that long, if not a bit longer.
In that time, they have to finish the nursery, and ideally Lorretta would like to put in a new washer and dryer. The current appliances are rattling in an alarming way, and the washer is leaking water at random intervals with seemingly no correlation to what happens around it. If it only spat water when overloaded, or when put on a certain setting, it would be easier to live with or even implement a rushed fix. As it is, it’s simply dubbed temperamental, and will need replaced.
We haven’t been furnishing the house so far. I usually don’t furnish in these projects until I land on whatever the houses ‘current’ state is, that’s when I put in furniture and actually make the sims that live there. But…there’s new baby furniture I want to check out, so let’s do it.
Lorretta is having Kelly look at pictures of the space and pick where things go from afar. So let’s look at this through Kelly’s eyes.
The room is a pretty odd shape, but lends itself to a nursery pretty well. She’s thinking that where Lorretta is standing in the picture (behind the camera) would make a good place for a built-in wardrobe space. She sends Michael to IKEA equipped with measurements for some inexpensive shelving to install there. She wants the crib on that far wall, the only one without a window or door in the way. Changing table would go beside the wardrobe for ease of access. The area under the windows would be for a glide rocker, and toys. Let’s see how her vision plays out in reality.
Well that was an infuriating forty five minutes. I hate that I love this game. A few things were a problem here. I guess glider chairs all simultaneously exploded in 2002 in this universe, The Sims 4 only has rockers. The changing tables are all gigantic, presumably to make room for the accompanying animations, so, fine. Also, they haven’t provided any baby clothes to be hung in the closets, so the ones you see here are all adult clothing which I’ve sized down.
The new toys are incredibly limited, I have one of almost every single available baby toy in that room and it still looks bare. I can’t wait to ‘buy’ seven expansion packs to fix that.
The other issue is of course the color-picker. The baby furniture is some of the worst I’ve seen when it comes to variety. The décor and toys all come in overly vivid, bright colors and the furniture only comes in super limited naturals. Plus, the fabric of the changing table and cribs all change with the wood, and unlike many other pieces, don’t have several options of wood to fabric. When choosing an adult bed, for instance, you usually have black wood as an option, and then with the black wood you can have the pink blanket, the yellow blanket, the blue, and the green, and then repeat for every other color of wood. It’s a horrible system which I imagine takes up an insane amount of storage, but the baby stuff has managed to find an even lower bar and only have a single color per type of wood and none of them match. Gah!
Whatever, what am I gonna do? Stop playing The Sims? And even if I did, it wouldn’t help anyone or fix the broken system.
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That’s a much more honest reaction than me going ‘i hate this game’ and then continuing to play for an hour or more, i might have to steal that
Oh, I absolutely love the tree decal on the wall!
If it’s any consolation, that’s pretty much what IRL baby clothes are like – at least when it comez to pants and jackets. Main difference being the animal ears on the hoodies. And the fact that they can cost as much as or even more than adult clothes. For a piece of clothing they’re going to outgrow in a matter of months :D
Heh. I don’t know if it’s the same for Sims 4, but in 2 there was a system where sims and pets would get more attachment or sense of ownership or something, to particular objects the more they used them. So the fewer toys they have, the more they’ll use any particular one, and the better they’ll like the ones they have! See, it’s actually good!
…Yeah, I’m kidding. That’s kind of disappointing, that there’s a whole stuff pack or whatever for baby stuff and that’s all there is. And I guess those books on the wall are purely decorative–not a special type of bookshelf that lets a sim take down one of those types of books?
That’s such a shame… of course, a lot of people’s answer is “get into modding”. You know how popular recolors are! I’ve done some of that myself.
On the one hand, I love how extensive and active and creative the sims modding community is… on the other hand, I feel like EA leaves a little too much to be filled in or fixed by modders. Like ah, well, it doesn’t matter that there aren’t really enough options for how this furniture looks–someone’ll fix it! Just wait a couple of weeks and there’ll be six different recolor sets! It feels like the base game is incomplete and it’s basically a game for modding.
It makes it worse knowing that Sims 3 had that apparently wonderful Create a Style system, and that they didn’t keep it for 4. I mean, come on, that’s perfect!
There are a couple of things wrong with the furniture layout, which I can see as an actual parent with a baby right now.
The changing table is blocking the wardrobe. If there are drawers and the changing table is right in front of them, you are not going to open those drawers.
Secondly, the diaper trashcan is across the door from the changing table. You need it right beside it so you can throw the diaper in it without having to take your hands off the baby. There’s no “just keep the dirty diaper somewhere on the table until you finish” because that’s an object your baby is 100% sure to zero in on and try to grab. And if you take your hands off the baby even for a second to do something else the baby is assured to try to roll over. And the pedal of these trashcans ALWAYS gets stuck at some point, so what you think will be a second off the baby suddenly is five seconds or ten seconds and that’s just more time for the baby to find a way to get hurt.
Thirdly, you seem to have a bookcase for kids’ books across the crib. Maybe that’s fine for a man to reach but a woman will have a hard time reaching and going around is iffy with that nursing chair in the way. What will happen is that the mother and grandmother will simply leave the books somewhere else more accessible NOT on that bookcase. My wife constantly makes me aware of things I leave out of reach from her.
Ultimately, though, those are very believable mistakes for parents to make before realizing the reality of the situation and giving up a bit of aesthetics for practicality.
Your complaints don’t seem to be related as much as these being mistakes from new parents as they are problems with the game’s grid layout. You can’t just set two items wherever you want, they have to be put where the game allows you to. Plus, as Bay pointed out, there’s extra space needed for the game’s animations. And, as it was mentioned last time, the game leaves, for instance, the chairs way too far from the table when no one is sitting, so there’s still going to be extra space that’s impossible to use.
I don’t have any special insight into The Sims’ programming, but in theory it needn’t be that bad if done well. You just need to define (say) a “wood surface area” and a “blankets surface area” for the bed model such that they can have separate textures assigned at instance initialization. Then you just load up all the various wood and cloth textures into memory, and can generate new instances of the model on the fly with different permutations of each as required. It’s not storing a black wood/yellow blanket bed and a yellow wood/black blanket bed separately, it’s storing a single bed model and both kinds of wood and blankets textures and mixing them as needed (with just two options as presented here this isn’t really much more efficient, but it gets vastly more efficient the more texture options there are as the combinatorial explosion gets underway).
Is that “ABC” in the Simlish alphabet, above the crib?
I thought at first that it was some sort of mystic runes.
Finally caught up on the site again after weeks (or months or… I don’t know, time blurs away) of being too sick to manage it. Fantastic read, still invested in these chars and love seeing the house changes.