Its crap, face it. You can't polish a turd.

So I started a fresh new game in Twinbrook, everything untouched. I'm in the "Choose Household" menu, I want to play with the EA townies in this save. And as I click through the premade households I notice a new one that hasn't been there before: a Bayless family with 7 greenish-grey adults in a big manor, no household description. I choose them as active household out of curiosity which immediately makes the interface vanish (like when you press tab key) and the camera won't move or even zoom in on the house, it just opens the roof but stays in the zoomed out edit town view. Again, I had literally just started this new save and not played at all yet, so I have no idea how this family even got there! Had to quit the game, started a new Twinbrook game again, no creepy family anymore.
My question is, what on earth happened?! I'm seriously a bit spooked!

This may not be it, but the symptoms you describe are what can happen if we start a new game or load an existing one from the Main Menu after having played a different save but without quitting all the way to the desktop (or Origin if relevant) first. The game tends to not clear out the contents of RAM properly in between game sessions without a total quit and reload, so the data from one save can get superimposed on another with all kinds of mismatched results.

The presence of the NRaas Traveler mod makes this glitch potentially more severe and more likely to happen, but it can and does happen without the mod as well.

Ok, I'll bite. What's not turd then? Do not dare to link me some tropical world.

I think I have already complained about my dislike towards effects, today this happened:



I simply had max zoomed out off a lot, nothing more.

I think it looks a lot like the default Bridgeport lighting, which is miserable, unflattering and dated. Goes with the whole gritty city theme but I just dislike it so much. I've found adding a lot of extra bloom and ambient lighting effects helps, though. Even lifeless fog can look good when it's overexposed.

I have a girl Sim who is a child, when she was born she was given the Hydrophobic trait by the game.

I found out that when you direct such a child to go on a Submarine adventure in the bathtub, she'll balk but do it, but will not get the positive moodlet afterward--and will start to cry afterward.

I hate that trait. Once she gets enough Lifetime Happiness points I'm changing it (I don't always cheat. LOL)

BLOOM ---- BLOOOOM!!!!!

I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate bloom. I think TS3 already has too much bloom and you want to add MOOOOORE?

The funny thing is that the way bloom is used in TS3 can be realistic... in certain cases. Many reflective objects will react to light this way in real life, such as a car in broad daylight, especially during hotter times of the year. The problem is that it's applied to basically everything. Which is how you end up with desk lamps or couches to seem as if they're glowing.

If it was more, well... exclusive then I'd like the effect a lot more. But the way it's used in game, I agree.

Sent Mortimer and Bella off for another romantic trip to France

the Rose Campgrounds have no men's bathroom had to buy Mortimer the steel bladder LTR

That's one solution. Or you could have changed his gender.

But am I oversimplifying things by suggesting going into Build/Buy Mode on the lot in question and replacing one of the doors with either the male version or one that is not gender restricted?

If that was supposed to be a screenshot of one your sims in one of your games, I am going to start kicking myself for ignoring all these lighting, bloom, shader settings discussions over the years...

You know it doesn't sound like a lot, but in the moment going into build mode is like, so much work.

As for discoveries, I've been messing with icarus' Transmogrifier + tomb objects. I was hoping that putting the tomb object scripts on regular deco items and such would allow for unlimited tomb themes. Unfortunately I also discovered that making tombs is hard and confusing. So far the only useful thing I've found was that you can turn wall hangings into readable plaques which is actually pretty cool because you can put any custom message on any painting or photo.

Thing is, bloom works. The more exposed you want your scene to be, the more bloom you'll need. And since TS3's lighting engine is incredibly bad at realistic outdoor atmospheric lighting, you kind of have to do it yourself. My aim is to light my Sim words as if there is a giant radioactive ball of immense heat up in the sky that is so immense and powerful that our entire society both literally and figuratively revolves around it. So when my Sims go outside on a sunny day, yes, I suppose it should strain their eyes. If you're going to have HDR and an adaptive exposure filter to deal with this light strength, you'd be silly not to go the whole way. Now of course my monitors are nearly 2 years old so the sharp edge has worn off by now, but turning them up to 75% brightness is still well worth it in TS3.

But Igazor has a valid point in that the more you can have your game look like a screenshot from a movie, imperfections and everything, the better. I'm pretty stoked to finally have a realistic, believable videotape look and holy crap, I want to use it so badly. Putting it together is a bit of a process but it looks properly legit so it's the sort of thing I'll gladly inconvenience myself for. You could have your game look au naturel, as the human eye sees, or you could embrace the dramatic nature of it all and give it a film look. I tend to choose the latter.

Bit of bloom, bit of fuzz, fairly decent video filter with a nice blending method, and some stock 80s pop music with a highpass filter on it. Voila, fairly decent clip. Could be better, but it'd take longer.

In fact, that's just random footage I took last year. I didn't even do any tweaking on the filters or the shaders, I just used the same settings I use for everything. Jittery picture and everything. So yeah, could look better, but you get the idea.

I had a new interaction (for me). One of my Sims is an interior designer and was sent to a job at her fiance's mom's house. I wanted her to become friends with her future mother in law so I clicked on the mom and an interaction for "ask for son's hand" came up. So after my Sim fixed up the room as per her job assignment, she schmoozed the mom of her husband to be and the mother was "overjoyed" to welcome her into the family. There's always something new in this game.

Today I discovered that when the beloved family pet bird dies, other pets feel the loss and wish to mourn. And, in fact, can be the ones to kick off a chain of bawling as other sims notice and join in.


The mourning/howling animations were appropriately sad.

Oh no that is heart-breaking. I still remember all these years later when my first sim horse died, the grim reaper came to collect and gave the horse a hug and that was the exact moment when somebody suddenly started cutting onions in my room.

I must have never played Sunset valley when the seasons came out nor paid much attention to how the snow melts but this roof looks so pretty to me. I did not know the snow melts away like that.



And this image of Sunset Valley makes me crave dairy:
https://i.imgur.com/wCJhsow.jpg

Not as realistic but can't blame the game for that. I'd imagine making the transition from snow to spring is not easy.

I would hope/like to think that your horse lived a full and eventful life surrounded by sims who loved them.

Not so sure about my pet bird, my minor pets certainly get enough attention from their owners but they never seem to live long enough relative to my human sims' ages. Of course I never know how long they have lived before my sims acquire them or if that's even relevant (probably not) but the first thing I did after I couldn't take seeing the sad mourning and howling any longer myself and gave my sims other things to do was go into NRaas Retuner and double the age lengths of pet birds.

I discovered that I'm much better at building than I used to be, and it's because of playing TS4 exclusively for the last 4 years (on and off, because it could barely hold my interest outside CAS and build mode)

I'm a very tactile learner, and the hands on "grabbing" feature helped me understand how things like pitch worked. my building got much more sophisticated and while I wanted to go back to TS3 for a very long time, I didn't because I assumed I'd get frustrated that I couldn't do custom roofs or decent layouts or stuff like that. It turns out not to be the case. While I can't grab and move stuff, I can use the sliders and other tools in roof options and after years of learning cool TS4 tricks, I quickly figured out how to get the sliders to do what my "pulling" did in TS4.

I also used to SUCK at layouts. And it was a serious PITA for me trying to resize and fix room size and shape, and figure out where certain rooms should go. In TS4, I spent a long time moving stuff around and playing with layouts. And even though I can't yank stuff around willy nilly anymore, I learned how to do decent layouts over the years. So now I don't need to pick up and move rooms around nearly as much. I kinda know what works. Also, since I don't need to autoroof anymore, layout isn't as important to me as it was before. I don't have to figure out how to make house layout to "trick" the autoroof into making what I want.

--
My create a sim experience is way better for the same reasons too. Back in the day, my TS3 sims were rubbish because I didn't understand how to use sliders to get looks I wanted. I'd just move them around until I got something I liked. I never had a plan in mind. So all my sims looked the same. After playing TS4 and "pulling" I learned how different sliders could make certain things happen. Also, the game came with much better presets than TS3 to work with when it came to POC sims. Before, if I wanted to make an east asian sim, I had no idea how the sliders worked to get the eyes right. In TS4, I had a perfect sample of an eye, and I figured out what sliders made the eye look the way it did and I could make my own. Now I know how to get better sims in TS3, I'm still learning which sliders and contour masks/makeup I'll need to get the same facial effects I could do in ts4. but there's a HUGE difference in my sims now, I might even have some good enough to share here on MTS in a month or so.

I discovered that the WA worlds are still screwy, despite ellacharmed's fixes of them. My France tour apparently stopped spawning items, and won't let me actually change levels in buildings... let's hope a save-reload helps.

I got a chance to play with the Resort Management system in Island Paradise and successfully got the little shithole shack's reviews up, which made me realize that deciding to major in Hospitality Management might've been a wise decision for me after all

Running a resort was one of the most fun games I've ever played.

I'd honestly like to see a Game Pack for the Sims 4 that reintroduces the hotel/resort management system. Knowing how TS4 works though, they'd probably end up being restricted to one town, you wouldn't be able to build your own, etc.

No "Probably" about it! Look at the difference between Sims 2 Open for Business and running a business in Sims 3.