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Post by MonaSolstraale on Aug 30, 2024 16:31:52 GMT
Well, I have the idea of my main PoV character inviting the rest of the main cast over for a backyard barbeque, so they can socialize and get to know each other... and so I can introduce them, and some important details about them, to the readers. The trouble is, as my wife astutely pointed out to me last night, is that in real life I hate social gatherings like that. Basically, at a backyard barbeque of coworkers and friends, I am always the guy hiding in the kitchen talking to the bored kid... which is, in fact, exactly where my simself is in that scene. Ultimately, I don't know how to do small talk, so I don't know how to write small talk. I'm sure I'll figure something out... I like your humor 😂 It's nice that your wife is contributing with sparring.
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Post by GlacierSnow on Aug 30, 2024 22:47:07 GMT
luciusstorm and MonaSolstraale , if you're using mods, I find that Bakie's " Invisible Fence" is awesome for keeping sims standing during a conversation. Just use it to block off access to anything they can sit on, and they'll stay standing (with autonomy off) and talk for as long as you like. It can only be used on lot unfortunately, so it doesn't help if you're out in the off-lot areas, but I use it all the time for my story. I couldn't have done certain chapters without it (at least not how I wanted them to be). I also do the save at the start of the scene, take screenshots, quit without saving, and restart the scene to take more screenshots thing Mona mentioned. That's pretty much standard procedure with SAM these days. Especially for outdoor scenes and scenes in rooms with windows. The outdoor lighting just changes too fast. luciusstorm - I can relate! To the difficulty in starting, the dead-ends, and being the person who would be hiding in the other room during the party. Would it be possible have a different character host the BBQ, your sim to go reluctantly, and then have the bored kid be the one to drop a bunch of exposition about the other characters to your POV character (possibly to your POV character's great annoyance)?
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Post by luciusstorm on Aug 30, 2024 22:57:22 GMT
luciusstorm and MonaSolstraale , if you're using mods, I find that Bakie's " Invisible Fence" is awesome for keeping sims standing during a conversation. Just use it to block off access to anything they can sit on, and they'll stay standing (with autonomy off) and talk for as long as you like. It can only be used on lot unfortunately, so it doesn't help if you're out in the off-lot areas, but I use it all the time for my story. I couldn't have done certain chapters without it (at least not how I wanted them to be). I also do the save at the start of the scene, take screenshots, quit without saving, and restart the scene to take more screenshots thing Mona mentioned. That's pretty much standard procedure with SAM these days. Especially for outdoor scenes and scenes in rooms with windows. The outdoor lighting just changes too fast. luciusstorm - I can relate! To the difficulty in starting, the dead-ends, and being the person who would be hiding in the other room during the party. Would it be possible have a different character host the BBQ, your sim to go reluctantly, and then have the bored kid be the one to drop a bunch of exposition about the other characters to your POV character (possibly to your POV character's great annoyance)? I'll have to check out that mod. The trouble with the BBQ is that my PoV character is definitely the host... unless I try to reshoot the whole thing and that opens up a bunch of other plot problems (not to mention I'm terrified of more technical problems, since my game is buggy). It's a good suggestion though. I'm stuck looking at the scene in one way and clearly I need change my angle if I'm going to get it to work. I just need to figure out the correct new angle. Thanks!
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Post by MonaSolstraale on Aug 30, 2024 23:23:16 GMT
GlacierSnow I use tons of mods. Maybe I should check it out 😊 luciusstorm I've had all the images ready for a birth scene for almost a year, then discovered PandaSama's birth mod. It required completely new recordings. So I agree with GlacierSnow that a new angle can be quite refreshing...But a buggy game is annoying 🙄
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Post by EvilBnuuy on Aug 30, 2024 23:47:56 GMT
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Post by kelloggjkellogg on Aug 31, 2024 8:49:17 GMT
I've only recently started using pose mods because I was getting fed up with women manspreading when they sat down. I wanted a scene where a female character was sitting down but looking elegant and the manspreading didn't look right for that scene.
I have a little screen grab trick to get around smiling sims having a serious conversation. If you notice that whilst the smiley sim is talking, the listener often looks stone faced and passive. So I take the screen shot looking at the listener whilst you only see the back of the head of the speaker and that way the stone faced sim is the focus of the shot, implying this is a serious conversation.
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Post by GlacierSnow on Aug 31, 2024 10:39:56 GMT
I have a little screen grab trick to get around smiling sims having a serious conversation. If you notice that whilst the smiley sim is talking, the listener often looks stone faced and passive. So I take the screen shot looking at the listener whilst you only see the back of the head of the speaker and that way the stone faced sim is the focus of the shot, implying this is a serious conversation.
kelloggjkellogg I use this trick too! And often if you're quick with the pause button, the listening sim will briefly open their mouth a little while listening (kind of a "uh-hu, yeah" sort of thing). So a lot of my screenshots where a character is "talking", technically in the game they were actually listening.
But because my story is done with comic book style speech balloons for the dialogue, I typically need a lot of screenshots to do the whole conversation, so it's hard to get enough variety with just that approach. And lately, even the listeners have been grinning for me. I used to have a much easier time getting serious conversation screenshots. I have no idea why it's gotten so hard recently.
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Post by luciusstorm on Aug 31, 2024 12:16:15 GMT
kelloggjkellogg, that's a good trick. I pretty sure I've used it too but I don't know that I've really planned to use it, if you know what I mean. I'm going to remember that one. I think I've cracked my problem. I'm trying to introduce the Sigworth family but I realized, I don't really know them. They're important to my plot, but I never really thought about them as characters. I think I need to go back and play them for a bit, get into their heads a bit. Never would have figured that out if I hadn't been looking for a new angle, so I really appreciate everyone's help.
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Post by queenofmyownfantasy on Sept 2, 2024 12:16:27 GMT
To start things off, here are my first questions:
What aspects of simlit creation do you most enjoy?
What aspects of simlit creation do you most commonly find yourself frustrated by? I also really love this forum, it feels like we've gone back to the good old days 💖 The aspects I most enjoy are writing the story itself, coming up with the plot, the twists and turns, the hows and whys of things that unfold, and getting to know my characters' motivations in doing that. I had a eureka moment just last night when trying to answer one of the biggest questions of Evergreen that will be answered in Gen VIII. I just love that tingly excited heart-skip I get when I posit a theory and know that it's the one. The aspect I'm most commonly frustrated by is the game 😂 I've hit the classic Save File Error in my Evergreen save and nothing pains me more than having to play out the game over and over and over because it couldn't save and then it crashed. It caused me to take a six month hiatus from writing between Generation VII and Generation VIII (luckily I'd got super ahead of myself) and even now I'm still holding my breath every time I save 😂 I love keeping the game as accurate to the story as possible i.e. maintaining the family tree, playing out the events like marriages and babies for real, and seeing the town evolve, so it makes me sad to think I'll probably have to do a hard reset at some point to keep the story alive. I wanted to ask what is something you've previously learned about your writing process that's had a positive impact on your writing moving forwards?
Do you mean error 12? I had it too at some point and what helped me was Regul's savecleaner ofc, I don't know if it will truly work with long long looooong running saves, but it works for now. And do you already know Nraas porter? It allows you to move basically half towns to a new savefile. I am not sure it if also moves houses, but those you can easily save in the library. Acottonsock has a tutorial on it.
(Anyway, sorry for the short off-topic, I just saw this and was like "hey maybe I can help")
To answer a question - I really need to LOVE my sims aka my characters, I need to feel the need to defend them to the moon and back. I had another quite long-running legacy for a while, I got to 8 generations (My founder was an offspring of a forumlegacy I played a generation of so that gen counts as well, and the 7th gen of my own actual legacy had just become YA). I love my gen 1 - 4 heirs, 5 was ehh, and then - 6. I ended up ragedeleting everything (and then stupidly accidentally perma-deleted it from my desktop trashcan) because between being a depri teenager and having nowhere to confidently post it - Dutch forums had died out and my english was NOT good enough to post it in international spaces -I also just didn't truly love my last real heir.
I couldn't find a good story and motivation for him, consistent personality, he didn't became "real" the way many other sims do. I also didn't like his wife I made for him, she was a very incoherent and bad character. His story was an incoherent mess. Then I also didn't fully adore any of his children and the rest is history.
With my current family something similar almost happened. I was going to take the easy way out and match my sim Bianca to a University life townie (asala Karam) and continue with either her daughter she already had or her nephew (My heirrules are...Needs to descent from my founder), and I played a whole simweek playing out that scenario. But it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like an ending for her that I LOVED. So I literally thought a whole night over it and the next day I went back to the save right before she left for university & made Bree, who I absolutely loved and I absolutely adore the two as a couple, and now I (logically) absolutely love their son!
To answer other questions: What aspects of simlit creation do you most enjoy?
When something happens that just makes you go - Aaah, fate! It's still a game with AI-like little pixelcharacters that pretty much have their own will. But occasionally, things happen unexpectedly right - like the game and the storyline you had thought out are really on the same plane of existence. I also really enjoy putting in little easter eggs referring to my previous own attempts, or to other stories I follow. Like after my plantsim was born and her parents mentioned having done research towards what she is, I wrote:
The locations mentioned are what I imagine the real-life equivalents (I call my Hidden Springs Alpenfrühle and it's in Switzerland) to be of the towns I know other TS3 players who have/had plant sims played in at the time.
When my sim Bianca travelled to Bridgeport, I also added a reference to the womanizer- vagabond character an old friend played her rags to riches with in Bridgeport.
What aspects of simlit creation do you most commonly find yourself frustrated by? Sims running away during a conversation, not staying put at the table etc. Or stuff like the camera panning away when there's a fire somewhere.
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Post by GlacierSnow on Sept 2, 2024 12:27:13 GMT
queenofmyownfantasy I can really relate to what you say about needing to really love your characters. This is so true for me too. I can have a really interesting plot planned, but if I'm not falling in love with the main characters in that plot idea (or if some side character is appealing to me more than who I am "supposed" to be writing about) I just can't keep going. I have to follow whichever characters I really LOVE. I definitely run into the problem of needing to change my direction with the story because of this. Part of why I'm so delayed in getting more posted on my story right now is because I seriously had to rework my approach to Season Two to get back onto a plot arc that lets me use my favorite characters more.
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Post by lizzielilyy on Sept 3, 2024 17:29:52 GMT
Do you mean error 12? I had it too at some point and what helped me was Regul's savecleaner ofc, I don't know if it will truly work with long long looooong running saves, but it works for now. And do you already know Nraas porter? It allows you to move basically half towns to a new savefile. I am not sure it if also moves houses, but those you can easily save in the library. Acottonsock has a tutorial on it. (Anyway, sorry for the short off-topic, I just saw this and was like "hey maybe I can help") To answer a question - I really need to LOVE my sims aka my characters, I need to feel the need to defend them to the moon and back. I had another quite long-running legacy for a while, I got to 8 generations (My founder was an offspring of a forumlegacy I played a generation of so that gen counts as well, and the 7th gen of my own actual legacy had just become YA). I love my gen 1 - 4 heirs, 5 was ehh, and then - 6. I ended up ragedeleting everything (and then stupidly accidentally perma-deleted it from my desktop trashcan) because between being a depri teenager and having nowhere to confidently post it - Dutch forums had died out and my english was NOT good enough to post it in international spaces -I also just didn't truly love my last real heir. I couldn't find a good story and motivation for him, consistent personality, he didn't became "real" the way many other sims do. I also didn't like his wife I made for him, she was a very incoherent and bad character. His story was an incoherent mess. Then I also didn't fully adore any of his children and the rest is history. With my current family something similar almost happened. I was going to take the easy way out and match my sim Bianca to a University life townie (asala Karam) and continue with either her daughter she already had or her nephew (My heirrules are...Needs to descent from my founder), and I played a whole simweek playing out that scenario. But it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like an ending for her that I LOVED. So I literally thought a whole night over it and the next day I went back to the save right before she left for university & made Bree, who I absolutely loved and I absolutely adore the two as a couple, and now I (logically) absolutely love their son! To answer other questions: What aspects of simlit creation do you most enjoy? When something happens that just makes you go - Aaah, fate! It's still a game with AI-like little pixelcharacters that pretty much have their own will. But occasionally, things happen unexpectedly right - like the game and the storyline you had thought out are really on the same plane of existence. I also really enjoy putting in little easter eggs referring to my previous own attempts, or to other stories I follow. Like after my plantsim was born and her parents mentioned having done research towards what she is, I wrote: The locations mentioned are what I imagine the real-life equivalents (I call my Hidden Springs Alpenfrühle and it's in Switzerland) to be of the towns I know other TS3 players who have/had plant sims played in at the time.
When my sim Bianca travelled to Bridgeport, I also added a reference to the womanizer- vagabond character an old friend played her rags to riches with in Bridgeport. What aspects of simlit creation do you most commonly find yourself frustrated by? Sims running away during a conversation, not staying put at the table etc. Or stuff like the camera panning away when there's a fire somewhere.
Yep Error 12 is my nemesis. I will take a look at that link thank you so much! I'm at a point where once the main story is done and I'm onto Gen 10 it'll be time to start a new save file if I can't fix it. I do know about Porter but didn't have much success with it, like Traveler my game didn't quite agree with it. I completely agree, with Evergreen I've had gens that flew onto the page and others that really dragged their heels and those only survived because I loved my characters. I definitely have favourite gens and could probably rank them from most to least favourite but absolutely, if I didn't love my characters or at least how I'd created them, I'd lose interest so fast. I love that idea of dropping in references and easter eggs, it really makes the world come alive and everything feel connected. I think the best stories have just the right amount of underlying explanation and detail so not everything is spelled out but the reader isn't sat there like how is this even relevant? Also, yep, I have been so mean to my Sims with their autonomy for some shoots and I literally had a Sim die and pan the camera away in the middle of a critical shot. If he wasn't already dying I'd have finished him off just for that .
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Post by EvilBnuuy on Sept 3, 2024 22:32:49 GMT
GlacierSnow and queenofmyownfantasyI am COMPLETELY on board with 'I really need to LOVE my sims aka my characters, I need to feel the need to defend them to the moon and back.' I am someone who loves most of my characters to some extent, but (Glacier will laugh at this because they'll know exactly what 2 characters I'm talking about) I have a habit of getting massive plot inspiration for side characters and turning them into mains. The original main character of my story...I keep insisting she's still the main character, but, uhh... On top of this, I am also someone whose attachment to things is unreliable. I will either feel absolutely nothing about it, or I will be uncontrollably obsessed, same with my story characters. One side character who became a main became so because of his impartiality as a physician, which was interesting to bring to the forefront of a story where most characters have a clear-cut opinion on the situation with the witches, it was interesting to have a character who really had no choice in not (outwardly) picking a side. I also felt this when playing the legacy I did a while ago. I cared a lot more about certain family members than others. Eventually I stopped writing the story for it because I got too ahead of myself with gameplay and forgot the context of all the screenshots I took. I like your ideas with plantsims all over the world and how they may differ. I also have some rough applications of story worlds to rough IRL analogues where there otherwise aren't any. I have had Granite Falls stand in as rural Ireland and eventually as rural Romania. I absolutely love Easter Eggs in stories, whether it's to your previous works, others' stories, or to just things you're a fan of. My current story has callbacks to my previous stories on occasion, and references to other games and series etc. that I'm into. I always make sure that nothing is lost if someone doesn't get the reference, though. I only throw in references if they don't affect the understanding of the story and characters. I sometimes find it a bit jarring if there's constant references to other media that are required to understand a story, unless it's references to games or lore within the same universe since that's understandable that a SimLit might have references to older Sims games that I've never played.
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Post by MonaSolstraale on Sept 3, 2024 23:13:04 GMT
GlacierSnow and queenofmyownfantasy I am COMPLETELY on board with 'I really need to LOVE my sims aka my characters, I need to feel the need to defend them to the moon and back.' I am someone who loves most of my characters to some extent, but (Glacier will laugh at this because they'll know exactly what 2 characters I'm talking about) I have a habit of getting massive plot inspiration for side characters and turning them into mains. The original main character of my story...I keep insisting she's still the main character, but, uhh... On top of this, I am also someone whose attachment to things is unreliable. I will either feel absolutely nothing about it, or I will be uncontrollably obsessed, same with my story characters. One side character who became a main became so because of his impartiality as a physician, which was interesting to bring to the forefront of a story where most characters have a clear-cut opinion on the situation with the witches, it was interesting to have a character who really had no choice in not (outwardly) picking a side. I also felt this when playing the legacy I did a while ago. I cared a lot more about certain family members than others. Eventually I stopped writing the story for it because I got too ahead of myself with gameplay and forgot the context of all the screenshots I took. I like your ideas with plantsims all over the world and how they may differ. I also have some rough applications of story worlds to rough IRL analogues where there otherwise aren't any. I have had Granite Falls stand in as rural Ireland and eventually as rural Romania. I absolutely love Easter Eggs in stories, whether it's to your previous works, others' stories, or to just things you're a fan of. My current story has callbacks to my previous stories on occasion, and references to other games and series etc. that I'm into. I always make sure that nothing is lost if someone doesn't get the reference, though. I only throw in references if they don't affect the understanding of the story and characters. I sometimes find it a bit jarring if there's constant references to other media that are required to understand a story, unless it's references to games or lore within the same universe since that's understandable that a SimLit might have references to older Sims games that I've never played. I can definitely also recognize that side characters can become more interesting than the main character itself. Maybe it happens when you have reached a layer of the onion, where there is no longer so much inspiration to draw from the main character. Maybe because one's basic idea is not that exciting in the long run, even if it seemed brilliant from the start. You can get so caught up in your own idea that it kills the joy. It can be liberating to focus more on a side character for a period of time so as not to go completely dead in the story. I think it's ok, although it might seem confusing to the reader. I really like the new oxygen it can provide and I love switching between the different characters because it helps to draw the individual's personality more sharply. I have no professional background, so that is probably the reason why I have now zig zagged my way through my current story in the fourth year. I would love to be able to write a bestseller, but the most important thing is that I have fun with my project. That and being able to forgive yourself for the mistakes you make along the way.
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Post by EvilBnuuy on Sept 3, 2024 23:48:37 GMT
MonaSolstraale This is so accurate your last paragraph. Besides, you don't need professional knowledge to write a great story, and you should know, your story is great! You are definitely right. For me, a part of it was the fact that...If I only had the main character's point of view, it would have made for a less interesting story. I don't think every story has to show all sides of something, I think it's fine for a story to sometimes just show the one side for multiple reasons (one being it's sometimes fun to have one unreliable narrator and try to fill in the gaps in their thinking yourself.) But in terms of my own story - considering mine is called Divided it made sense to show multiple sides of the conflict in complex ways. Which is why I ended up making the story have multiple points of view from all across the spectrum of points on stances on the witch-hunts and why people get involved in such things and beliefs.And even some of them have no belief in the cause and just do it for the money and such. That, and wanting to do something more morally 'muddy' than my previous stories, it's been fun and sometimes difficult to write such messed up characters.
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Post by MonaSolstraale on Sept 4, 2024 0:06:15 GMT
EvilBnuuy Thank you for your encouragement 😊 The witch hunt is a cruel time period where all free thinking was banned. I think it is an admirable project to describe the conflict from several points of view. If we are ever to be able to learn from the past, we must be able to recognize ourselves in it and not just see it as a finished chapter.
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