arrested development

November 2041 - Abhijeet Turner is 32, Whitney Riley is 31, Keiran Riley is 7.

Since Whitney works until evening at the CIA, Abhijeet has been watching Keiran after school until his mom comes home. He never thought he'd be a father, but he loves spending time with his son.

2041 census

Population: 55
Arcadia: 43
New Athens: 12

Babies: 2
Toddlers: 6
Children: 17
Teens: 1
Young Adults: 0
Adults: 20
Elders: 9


Even though there aren't any more children in this generation than in the last one, they are a lot more spread out in age - 12 years as opposed to 6. I'm hoping that this will make this generation less boring than their parents. I think the problem is that most of my Sims are happily married with children, but their children are too young to have much drama. I may have to start adding Random Events to make my neighborhood more interesting and dramatic. How do people handle Random Events in their neighborhood? Does anyone have any advice on how to include them?

love is in the air

Spring Semester 2028 - Jackson Cooper, John Smith, Tom Smith, and Abby Stein are 21; Rachel Cooper, Madison Miller-Kim, and Pierce Phillips are 19; Jamie Smith is 18.

One spring day John suggests that he and Abby go on a date to the park.

"Shouldn't we go home? It's starting to rain." she suggests.

"In a minute." This isn't just another date, he has something specific planned.

townies are taking over!

I may have to abandon this neighborhood and start over because my game is full of townies. I found the hacks from MoreAwesomeThanYou that stop townies from being respawned, but I think it might be too late for my neighborhood. Right now I'm at 735 characters, and my hard drive is getting more and more crowded every day. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there an easy way to permanently delete the townies?

Height and Aging

After reading Laura's discussion on Sim height and aging, I've decided to use the stretchskeleton cheat to make my Sims different heights. Since I'm a huge math nerd, this meant I had to do several calculations.

First, I looked up average heights for men and women on Wikipedia. (My idea of tall vs. short is pretty screwed up because of the wide range of heights in my family; I'm 5'1", but my little brother is 6'7".) According to Wikipedia, the average height for men is about 5'10", and the average height for women is about 5'4". Therefore, I decided to assume the default adult height is 5'7". This means the average stretch factor for a man is 1.04, and the average for a woman is 0.96. So my conversion chart looks something like this:

5'0" = 0.90
5'2" = 0.93
5'4" = 0.96 (average women)
5'8" = 1.0 (default adult)
5'10" = 1.04 (average man)
6'0" = 1.07
6'2" = 1.10
6'4" = 1.13

I haven't figured out toddler and children heights yet because my neighborhood doesn't have any children yet, but I'm planning to base their heights on age. When they become teenagers, I will transition them up to their adult height.

I'm also working on an algorithm to determine a child's height based on his or her parents' heights, but that's still in the works.