time in a bottle

The inner-workings of aging, rounds, and real time seasons in Lakeside Heights:

How they get old:

1 Sim day = 1 year in Lakeside Heights. Most Sims will live an average human lifespan of somewhere between 70-90 years, unless they die earlier of something tragic and unexpected ;)

My ages are modified as follows, using Inge's age group tweak mod.

For an elder who transitions at 60 days, enter these numbers into your SimPe BCON file (note that the number you enter will be one less than the age bar shows). Feel free to add or subtract from each age group as you like:

Babies: 2 (bar would say 3, but I manually age my babies after 1 day)
Toddlers: 3 (bar will say 4)
Children: 7 (bar will say 8)
Teens: 7 (bar will say 8)
Adults: 41 (bar will say 42, or the equivalent of 19 years old, for your adults who didn't go to college. For your adults coming back from college, you'll have to manually adjust their age to 37 days remaining (the equivalent of 23 years old) because they will come back as 42 days remaining.)

And this is how the ages are reflected in my game:

baby, age 0, 1 day
toddler, ages 1-3, 3 days
child, ages 4-11, 8 days
teen, ages 12-18, 8 days
YA, ages 19-22, (uni bar)
adult, ages 19-60, 42 days (uni grads are adjusted to 37 days remaining upon graduation)
elder, ages 60... (variable)

Because I play my game in neighborhood time (more on that below), these days are really only an approximation of their age for the game to use, since they'll roll specific wants according to where they are in their life-stage. More importantly, I'm interested in keeping their age according to neighborhood time. This means none of my Sims will age transition within an update (or play-session, for those of you who don't blog your neighborhoods), but they'll celebrate one birthday every year like we do in real life (meaning they'll get one year older, not that I'll throw them a party or anything, lol!). And they'll age-transition at the above specified transition points (1, 4, 12, 19, 23, and 60).

Every single resident of Lakeside Heights is kept in sync, from their birth to their death, in a very meticulously kept spreadsheet. Every Sim will be played and aged 2 years each round - if a Sim is not played during a round (because they're boring, or moved away, or whatever) they will still be aged (by means of the multi-painting or sim blender).

[Keeping track of all of them: an in-depth look at my tracking spreadsheet.]

This is so incredibly nerdy, I know! But it actually doesn't take too much effort once set up, and it helps me keep track of everybody.

2 year rounds:

Because I usually run at least 24 households, and because 2 Sim-days is a manageable amount of time to play when you have a real-life toddler in the house, I have devised a system of real-time seasons. It's fun! I really enjoy playing this way and getting to see the seasons change more often.

The rounds work around the school years for the sake of my students. Uni students will be played four semesters every round (2 years, broken up into four updates). So the round will begin in August, and end in July two years later, with approximately 24 updates, each household "adopting" one particular month of the 2 years (depending on exactly how many households there are, there may be two families in one month).

When the round changes, time will carry on through the year as it has been, but the families will begin being played for their next turns, and everyone will be two years older than they were at the start of the round. For simplicity's sake, I don't keep track of the actual birth-months for these Sims (that would be crazy!), but instead we imagine everyone in Lakeside Heights has an August birthday, and two Augusts in each round ages everyone two years. This two-year jump is not usually weird because you will see Sims often taking part in the stories of other Sims, so though their age bar is not progressing when they are visitors, we imagine that they are aging continually.

Every August (twice in each round), I'll go down the line in my spreadsheet and add one year. They age one year every August, whether or not their family was played in that year. Likewise, they'll age again in the second year of the round, even if their family was played in the first year. But don't worry, I've got it all worked out on my spreadsheet, and I'll let you know how old they are supposed to be at the top of each update. That way when you're reading current entries, you'll know how old they are now, and when you're reading backdated entries, you'll know how old they were then.

Real time seasons:

Like mentioned above, there are somewhere around 24 family updates each round, and each update taking place in one particular month of the 2 years.

For example:

August 2076: Bradshaw Family
September 2076: Lind Family
October 2076: Nova Family [... and so on]

I use the in-game weather machine to change to the appropriate season.

An advantage to this is that babies can have real birthday years (I don't go so crazy as to track their actual birth month though!). Couples can celebrate actual anniversaries (again, just the year, and not down to the actual month), and know how many years they've been together, as opposed to just "a really long time..." A couple can get pregnant, and then have their baby nine months later in neighborhood time. And best of all, all records are kept in the actual updates, so I don't have to track anything :)

And the most fun part of the new round though is new random events! My random events are rolled using Random Stuff, and you can swipe my random events file here. I usually roll 4 random events for each round, and I'll tell you what the events are, but you have to wait to find out who they happen to ;)

additional notes: All of this real-time business will probably make your head spin if you've never read about a Sims 2 neighborhood kept in neighborhood time rather than Sim-days. The best way to understand it probably is to browse through some of these updates, follow from one to the next and take note of how the time progresses.