T w e n t y S i d e d
Alright! It’s finally reno day for the downstairs. What used to be a just kitchen is becoming an entirely self-contained studio apartment. Having a playable separate home space wasn’t possible when this series first started a year and a half ago. But now, The Sims 4 For Rent pack has finally released and you can section off different parts of a build to be separate households. You just have to ignore the $40 price tag, and the fact that it’s deeply and broken and almost unplayable. The bugs include but are not limited to: Tanking frame rate on lots with rentals on them, landlord sims receiving little to no payments if someone moved out or in within a in-game weeks time (several playing hours) and every renting sim inexplicably baking several cakes a day, slowly filling your residence with cake.
But, you know, other than that, it’s great.
As for our reno, this space is small.
Like, we’re probably going to have to fight to fit a functional home in here, small. In my head, this is an entirely reasonable studio apartment space, but from my experience of building micro homes in The Sims, this is an amount of tiles that’s going to give us grief.
So, with the old kitchen out of the way, let’s break this down. Bathrooms need a minimum of three tiles and that is only if you use a trick to put the shower in the middle of the walking path.
…No, that isn’t going to work for this. Our goal here is to see how our family would build this, and our family aren’t Sims building minmaxers. Their first thoughts aren’t going to be to put the shower in front of the door. So, the next smallest bathroom is three and a half tiles.
Four tiles is also functional like this, but three and a half takes up less space, and makes the corner shower look more reasonable. Five tiles is where we’ll find our first ‘real world’ half bath shape that is actually functional.
To be clear, there are smaller bathrooms in the real world, of course there are. But, I do want this house to function as playable in The Sims when we’re done with it. So, this is the best compromise.
This back corner seems like the best spot for the bathroom. Maybe we can get away with this four and a half tile shape and save us a weird nook to deal with later? Only time will tell.
Well, this apartment certainly is…long. That should be the end of needing any walls or doors, so next we just have to actually find a layout for this place. I will be putting in temporary furniture for now, since we don’t know who the space will eventually go to.
This is tempting…double beds never fit in micro homes. It would be interesting if it did in this one because of the strange shape. We’ll have to use a sim to see if it’s functional.
Alright, put myself in here to test, moment of truth…
Woah…really? That works? You’re not going to throw a fit? This is a magical moment. Now we just have to check they can make it into the bathroom.
We have a winner! The bed can totally go there! Actually, hold on…
Woo! We have a wall! This isn’t a studio, it’s a one bedroom!
That wall might seem wasteful considering our space, but it actually does us a huge favor. Putting a double bed in that back area lost us some wall space to a walking path. This wall gives it back to us, and offers space for a kitchen.
On one hand, a closet under the stairs offers storage space this apartment really needs, on the other, it loses us some wall…We’ll have to see if the kitchen can fit like this. For a functional Sims 4 kitchen, you need a fridge, a clear countertop, a stove and a sink. That’s four tiles of items, with need for space in front of all of them.
This shape isn’t ‘Sims approved’ so to speak. To make a kitchen take up this little room you have to work outside of the grid, so it needs tested.
We get the ingredients, we cook them, plate them, and wash up after. Woo! The kitchen works!
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
I haven’t played with the Sims like this since I modded 2 to add skins and add genetic codes to them so they could all naturally occur in game depending on the parents. It’s a different kind of tweaking but this is just as interesting.
I remember reading about microhouses in Sims… was there an expansion or pack devoted to this or was this just something players did as a challenge?
It was a challenge which EA then utilized for profit and made a pack. It came with a few useful items, but for the most part is fairly unhelpful when actually trying to build a microhome. The murphy bed, for instance, which came in the Tiny Living pack still takes up six tiles when in bed-mode, and therefore isn’t really…helpful, at all, in trying to save space. It can also kill your sims as a random event, and when the pack released it came with a bug where it did so constantly. Also, when they patched out the constant deaths they replaced most of the deaths with an effect a sim would have for six in-game hours where they won’t put the bed up or down due to fear. Meaning you could have a sim so afraid of their bed that they instead just repeatedly pass out on the floor.
If EA only cared half as much about quality as they did about money…
Does the bed still work with the wall though? It could be that a sim could only access it from that side
Good catch, you were right. Luckily we don’t have to rearrange anything, it just needed a bb.moveobjects command (free movement) and moved a few inches out from the wall. Works great now.
“from my experience of building micro homes in The Sims, this is an amount of tiles that’s going to give us grief.”
It’s possible that the way to think of Sims houses is as if you were building it as a Hollywood set. In other words you have to get cameras and about 30 workers in there several times a day.
Which is why houses in film always seem enormous.
For computer games I suspect it’s a problem with pathing. There’s probably code to check that the Sim isn’t looping, and going into a small room and then reversing direction probably looks like a loop.
Haha!