Book Adventures

I thought I might share this with you, I found it fairly interesting.

Recently I decided to pull a list of books from the game in gamecode (meaning they weren’t in English yet), and see if I could get a definitive list of books ingame (I’m about 3/5 of the way there).

Partway through, I was looping through the books. I was then looping through the strings. There are about 500 books, and 50,000 strings. If you can do the maths, do. If not, I was averaging approximately 25,150,000 iterations. 25 million. I ended up reducing it to around 50,500 iterations in the end.

For the interested or insanely curious, I posted the list over here. It’s not complete – I’ve done 354 books out of 503.

Something went wrong, HOW DO I FIX IT!?

What an insane title. If something went wrong in your game, and you’re struggling to fix it, here’s a brief guide. Choose one, two, or all of the options:

1. Installed a Mod lately? More often than not, a recently installed Mod that was made for a different patch level than that which you are on will cause your game to act in weird ways. Uninstall it, then try again.
2. Press Ctrl + Shift + C, then type “resetsim *” without quotes. This helps with routing – but make sure no Sims are doing anything important (cough babies cough)
3. Factory Reset, as described here.
4. The 50-50 method to removing Mods, found here.

Those are the four basic principles. If nothing else works, go to a site like Carl’s Sims 3 Forum, ModTheSims, or thesims3.com and ask for help.

Welcome to Let’s Play Sims 2.0

Welcome

To Let’s Play Sims 2.0

Let’s Play Sims was founded in 2011 and in this time it has gone through various incarnations.  I’ve had times on blogging and off blogging, and I think that today, it’s finally time to launch Let’s Play Sims 2.0.

This theme is Twenty Thirteen which is the base WordPress theme, but I believe that it’s a beautiful theme and deserves to represent us.

You can follow us on Twitter, where you’ll find our posts posted automatically.

Thanks for reading the blog, happy simming, and welcome to Let’s Play Sims.

Script Modding Adventures

Just thought I’d post a quick tip for anyone new to script modding. It’s a conundrum that I’ve certainly come across.

Scenario: You are browsing the script, and find kSomeRandomValue = 100. You think this is odd, and remember seeing kSomeRandomValue in the XML, so you go back and check and – sure enough, it is. But this time, kSomeRandomValue = 75. So what’s used? You could do it the hard way and test in game, but I’ll just tell you the answer.

The XML is given priority. As a general rule of thumb, if there is no equivalent XML value, the variable you declare in the script is correct. However, if there is an XML value, that is loaded instead. That is the aspect of Tunable Modding that probably confused me the most. It means that any old joe with s3pe could go all meta and mod the mod, changing kSimWillSpinOnReactionToANyanCatGangnamStyleHarlemShakeThing to true.

Split Screening your Laptop and TV to enjoy Sims 3 bliss

Long title, eh?

Intro

As I am typing this, my Laptop and TV are hooked up. I have this blog running on the TV, while another site I frequent is open on my Laptop. If you think this is trickery, or are interested to see how this is achieved, read on.

It is honestly very easy to do this. I use a VGA cable, because my HDMI is hooked up to Satellite TV, and we have no other plugs in the house.

Howcast explains the basics of setting up your TV and your laptop here. If you’re unable to watch it, here’s how I did it:

First of all, take a VGA Cable. These have 15 points on each end, in three rows of five. They are often plugged into projectors to display a large version of what’s on screen.

Plug one end into your Television, and one into your Laptop. It will often be plugged into the back of the TV, and the side of the Laptop.

Next, you want to switch to PC viewing on your TV. To do this, you should get your remote and locate the input button. It will sometimes look like an arrow pointing to a box, but consult your TV manual to find out. When you do successfully find the PC Input, you’ll see a duplicate of whatever is on your PC. Now press F4 (Fn + F4 on some computers), select “Extend”. If done right, you’ll see a black screen, followed by your desktop – with NO icons, nothing except the background. Your PC is now on the “left” of your TV, so to speak. If you want to move something there, drag it all the way to the right, off your PC’s screen, it will adapt to the widescreen.

DO NOT CLOSE IT WHEN YOU ARE DONE! You must drag everything from the TV back to the PC, else it will be lost until you extend it again. Then you can F4 back to Duplicating the display, or unplug the VGA. I like to play Sims on one screen and have Chrome/Excel open on the other to manage my Dynasty.

It’s been a while…

So it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I’ve been busy with other projects, working on a sample, beta application for school, furthering my Modding knowledge and relaxing (it’s Summer!). Since we’re well into the new year, I thought I’d breakdown what I’m planning to do this year.

1) Develop and Release a Sims 3 Program. I don’t know the specs yet, but it’ll be similar to Delphy’s Dashboard or s3pe. I already developed a small application to clear caches, but I want to make something bigger.

2) Start Pure Scripting Modding. I finally downloaded Visual C# and have wanted to get my hands dirty for a while. I made a sample Mod, the Pausinator, just to make sure I understood what to do, and it seems to have turned out OK.

3) Blog More. ’nuff said.

Yeah, so that’s it for now. Good to be back, and I’m working on a little Mod, for release hopefully next week (though knowing me, it’ll be next year )

Happy Simming.

Custom Books are now live!

That’s right folks! You may remember me rambling a bit recently about my custom books and, as promised, here they are, at Leefish. All the books I mentioned earlier are included and yes, I’m working on some new ones to include. You were warned.