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Scholar
Original Poster
#1 Old 25th Nov 2015 at 2:38 PM
Default Holidays in sync
It's been a millions years since my Sims traveled to any exotic destination. My gameplay style has changed a lot and now I play short rotations (1 day) which help me to keep my households synchronized.
But what to do when a household leaves for some deserved time out of the hood?

Can you save and keep playing later or quitting cancels the trip?
Is the date/time updated when they return or you must adjust it manually?
Can you leave some Sims behind and play them while others go on a trip? (I have the community time mod.)

Well, in general: how do you play holidays and keep your hood in sync?
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 25th Nov 2015 at 2:56 PM
You can save, and leave. You'll have to load the family from the vacation destination, and other families can't stay in the same hotel, but it's no problem.

Time is the same as community lots, they'll come back the same day they left at the same hour, so if you want time to have passed in the real hood you'll have to do it manually. Not sure how it's affected by community lot time though, perhaps that's taken into account and you'll have to watch the empty house for the time they were away.

You can leave Sims behind, yes. Time works differently on vacation though. I imagine it's so that you don't leave one Sime home and make the vacation longer by going to community lots and coming back. I forget how it shows itself, but either the returning Sims come home at the time they left the community lot, or the vacation clock timer remembers the hours passed. No idea how that will play with community lot time either.
EDIT: Reading answer below mine I realize I may have misinterpreted your question. You can't play the household on their home lot. I thought you meant if you could take some on community lot visits at the vacation destination and leave the rest at the hotel.

For me, holidays is something I do to get some extra time with my Sims, so I will play it separately from rotations. Sims don't age while on vacation, so time is frozen for the Sims. It's a matter of player-taste if it bothers you to know they passed time elsewhere and then return the same age and same day.

Creations can be found on my on tumblr.
Mad Poster
#3 Old 25th Nov 2015 at 2:56 PM
You can save and keep playing later whilst your sims are away on vacation - once they check in to a hotel or campsite, or arrive at their vacation home, you can save the game and they will still be there when you come back to play again.

The date/time is not updated by the game when they return, you have to update it manually.

You can't leave sims behind and play them whilst other sims from that household visit a vacation destination. If I want to send a few sims from a household on vacation whilst continuing to play the rest of the household at home I move out the sims whom I want to send on vacation, I move them in to a tiny lot with just a fridge/toilet/shower (to stop them from repeatedly rolling the wants to buy these things) and a telephone and then send them on vacation from there. That way they can go off and enjoy their vacation whilst the rest of the family/household stays at home and I can continue playing them. When they return from vacation I move them back in with their original household, and I make sure to adjust their ages so that their aging remains in sync with the rest of the family (and the 'hood).

You can leave some sims at a campsite/hotel/vacation home and send the rest out to a community lot, though, whilst they are all on vacation. The Community Time mod doesn't always work as expected when sims are on vacation, though.
Mad Poster
#4 Old 25th Nov 2015 at 3:41 PM
If you send all or part of a household on vacation, and send another household to the same subhood, the household members can meet each other on community lots in that destination - even the ones who stayed home. However, if you send a family on vacation, and leave them there to go back to the main hood, sims on vacation can still show up on community lots at home. A little hiccup in the programming that never got fixed.

Therefore, I save with the family on the lot at the end of their rotation, finish out the rotation, then return to each family I want to send on vacation and send them. The vacation neighborhoods then get a free subrotation, played much like my University subrotation, with each family played for roughly one day of their vacation in turn, using teleporters if I want them to visit each other (you can't invite anyone to join you on a vacation lot by phone once you're there, more's the pity), until everyone has used up their time, at which point I sent them home and save the lot ready for the start of their next day's rotation.

My theory of sim time passage is, that every day is a composite, functioning much like days in normal human memory. Most days in most lives are very like each other and get compressed into routine events - all that work/school/housework/sleeping runs together into a sense of time passing. Certain events take up more space in our memory because more or bigger things happened. This is why the time scales of University and Vacation are different in the game - because the time is finite, we are more conscious of it passing, therefore we cram more into it, therefore it takes up more space in our memory than the larger spans of time spent on the daily grind. So there's no need to synch vacation time with ordinary time.

And if a need does arise for story reasons (if I wanted Roxie Sharpe to elope with Mr. Big while her boyfriend Jonah Powers was on tour with his band in Three Lakes, for example), that's what the aging off cheat is for. I would give more days to the sims who stayed home, rather than subtracting them from the sims who took the trip. As far as I'm concerned, Vacations exist to give me more time with my favorite sims, without giving them absurdly long lifespans and/or huge career boosts in relation to the rest of the neighborhood.

I can barely tell what day it is in my real life. Keeping close track of time in my sims game would be way too much work and would frazzle rather than relax me.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#5 Old 25th Nov 2015 at 9:44 PM
I would do the same as laura, move the sims who want to take a holiday out to a temporary lot and then call up the holiday/vacation from that lot.
You might want to pay attention while they are away of what time it is when they leave a site seeing place and return to their base hotel, that they arrive back at the proper time as you may need to adjust it manually, I've been doing that at uni with set hour.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Scholar
Original Poster
#6 Old 26th Nov 2015 at 9:11 AM
Thankyou very much everybody!
You gave me plenty of great ideas. Now I gotta much all this info and figure out what suits me better.


@Peni:
I love your theory.
Einsten would agre time is relative xD
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