Life Off the Grid: Sims 3 feature previewed in Stuff Pack

A 1-tile table centered on a 2x3 rug? What universe are we IN? :O

Yeah, it’s old news. OK, I’m slow. I got the Mansion and Garden Stuff Pack for Sims 2 shortly after it came out. I did not, however, spend a lot of time reading about it online, because *shrug* it’s a stuff pack. What is there to say? You like the stuff or you don’t like it.

Only last night did I happen across a reference to a stunning new feature in this stuff pack: a cheat that gives you the same high resolution object placement grid used in the Sims 3 :O A single tile from the old system is divided into sixteen tiles with this feature turned on.

You turn it on by opening the cheat console (ctrl-shift-C) and typing “setQuarterTilePlacement on”. After that, ctrl-F toggles quarter-tiles off and on. With quarter tile placement, you can center a two-tile TV on a three-tile sofa, the simmer’s holy grail :)

And yes, you’ve always been able to turn the grid off entirely, using “boolprop snapObjectsToGrid off”, but that left you with NO grid, which made it hard to align things precisely… just like in the Real World, which is sadly gridless :(

I’ve noticed some limitations with this cheat. For instance, it doesn’t apply to doors and windows, which is not surprising, but it also doesn’t work with rugs, which is odd. In some locations, you might not get quarter-tile movement; for instance, moving the TV or the sofa away from the wall to prevent it from clipping through curtains, the smallest increment I could get was a half tile, although on the other axis (along the wall) I could move in quarter tiles.

M&G offers a roof angle button!

That’s not the only major interface improvement in Mansion and Gardens — the only stuff pack since the first to actually include new game features. There’s also a button in the build mode roof area with a roof slope angle chooser that lets you assign any roof slope from 15 to 75 degrees independently to any roof in your building.

The new roof slope button overlaps in functionality with the old RoofSlopeAngle cheat, but is significantly easier to use; you click the button to get the angle slider, choose the angle, and click on the roof section you want to change.

Now you can make funky roofs like this

The new functionality offered by these two tools is both slightly better and slightly worse than the corresponding features in the upcoming Sims 3, based on what we’ve been hearing from the folks at the Creator’s Camp at EA last week.

The roof angle button is  there, but applies to all roofs on the building at once. The smaller grid is standard, and you can also turn the grid off altogether (and rotate stuff freely) by holding the ALT key. (These feats are possible with cheats in Sims 2, but not at all convenient… Sims will not reliably interact appropriately with objects at odd angles, and it’s difficult to align objects against diagonal walls.) You’ll be able to place a lot more items on top of tables, dressers and so on; the stringent limits on “clutter” in Sims 2 have led to a lot of creative hacking by people trying to get around them. But alas, the wonderful feature that came with Apartment Life that let you move decorations vertically on walls is being omitted.

Some improvements that you might expect aren’t happening. Stairs can increase width up to four tiles, but windows can’t, for instance. We’re told windows come in several sizes, but there are never enough; up to now I’ve relied on modders like Mary Lou and Tiggy for full, versatile sets. The spiral stairs we finally got in Apartment Life will be gone again, but we managed before that using Marvine’s excellent spiral stairs. Hopefully modders will step up to the plate again; and though the object file formats will certainly be different, a mesh is a mesh, so I’m optimistic that a lot of our classic modder-created content will be updated for Sims 3. Here’s hoping that EA has not placed new roadblocks in the way of modders and hackers, as some people fear. If not, any gaps in will be filled soon enough.

With many more brand new capabilities — like draggable walls and roofs that automatically redraw when walls are moved, vastly more versatile stairs and recolorable (almost) everything — I think we’re taking several steps foward in Sims 3 in terms of build mode functionality, even if we’re taking one or two steps back. And no doubt EPs will add back missing features like individual roof slopes and vertical picture placement, and perhaps even desirable new features like resizable windows.

Before we’d had reliable info about Sims 3, I was expecting that the game would take the next conceptual step in terms of item arrangement, and just give us physics. No grid, no clipping; objects go anywhere they fit, as long as they’re supported. If every RPG and shooter can include physics these days, it’s hard to understand why a game which is mostly a 3D dollhouse to a lot of its players can’t. Perhaps the roadblock was the detailed animations in Sims interactions. Aaaaand I guess something had to be left for Sims 4 :)

Advertisement