Roof artists

Are there any roof artists on this forum? I dabbled in roof art at one point in time but was never as good as the people who did it for "a living"

Screenshots would be nice.
:)
 
Although roof art was cool, I don't think it was a good use of a second floor... Though in the original there wasn't much benefit from a second floor because of the low object limit, so it's understandable. Hopefully our VM will be able to withstand enough furniture to correctly furnish a two story house.
 
I think it comes down to the bandwidth, really. But we'll have less players, and will thus requires less bandwidth.
 
I've pondering this for some time but due to less players, maybe lot owners can own more then one land in the future?
 
That would also be interesting, adding the property market as an aspect of the game... We'd need to carefully balance lot prices and potentially add bills per lot though to make sure that if they wanted to buy all the islands they'd need to have a lot of money.

It would be cool to see people designing and selling houses for profit. I think the game needs to promote more creative ways of getting money.
 
Yeah, I agree with Rhys.
Basically, I think what was the undoing of TSO was that six years after the release, they still relied on skilling as the main challenge in the game. Not cool.
I mean, skilling had it's charm, and combined with the workstations it wasn't too bad, but when you've been doing it for six years...
 
Not to mention the real estate system wasn't implanted until after EA-Land. So, by the time there was another source of in-come (that and ATMs), the game was already on it's last leg.
 
I didn't like how a sim that wasn't logged in for very long periods of time was still able to maintain ownership of the special lots (islands and such).
 
Maybe a pruning system would be needed? I don't recall TSO ever having one. I wouldn't go full deletion but allow for 90 day recovery. I remember when an owner left said lot the roommate next inline would have full ownership. Happened to me a couple times.

Come to think of it: with deeds in place, it would be easy for the original owner to recover her lot if a roommate or MOMI, if pruning system is added, once the Sim is recovered.
 
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How about weekly bills depending on lot type which deduct from your simoleons while afk? If you run out of money the property is taken off of its space and will need to be relocated. (nothing on it lost... just the city position)

This way island positions will be reserved for the dedicated players who are willing to take either a financial hit for a cool position or who are willing to sell the lot soon for profit.
 
How about weekly bills depending on lot type which deduct from your simoleons while afk? If you run out of money the property is taken off of its space and will need to be relocated. (nothing on it lost... just the city position)

This way island positions will be reserved for the dedicated players who are willing to take either a financial hit for a cool position or who are willing to sell the lot soon for profit.
I like that. Property tax kind of goes along with my governmental suggestion, this would be a great feature.
 
I know a lot of millionaires in the game who got bored pretty quickly with all the money - might explain the roof art boom. So, adding taxes would help in that regard.
 
Yeah, we need to make it harder to live a rich lifestyle so people don't top out at a millon simoleons and get bored. We can have bills per object TS1 style that accumulate only during time the lot is active, to avoid punishing players who take a break too much. That way people will need to sustain their 500 typewriter lots with multiple roommates earning more money than they can by simply afk farming the money objects, but of course this will rely on more fun and creative ways to earn money.

Once we've finished the game we should really look into ways to let people earn money without afk farming multiple sims but instead doing something more "gamey" to keep the fun in the game...
 
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Yeah, we need to make it harder to live a rich lifestyle so people don't top out at a millon simoleons and get bored. We can have bills per object TS1 style that accumulate only during time the lot is active, to avoid punishing players who take a break too much. That way people will need to sustain their 500 typewriter lots with multiple roommates earning a money than they can by simply afk farming the money objects, but of course this will rely on more fun and creative ways to earn money.

Once we've finished the game we should really look into ways to let people earn money without afk farming multiple sims but instead doing something more "gamey" to keep the fun in the game...
I totally agree.
 
Sigh, unfortunately I remember visiting skill lots the year I began my hiatus and everyone was afk farming, and I was excited to make a decent pay at one of the jobs.
 
I've also had the idea for a massive gameplay overhaul that disembodies the players from the sims to encourage roleplay (talk through sims for roleplay, talk through "god" chat to other players) and move the focus of the game to something similar to the idea of a real The Sims experience but online, but because of how big a change that would be we would have to leave the original game up on another server and definitely wouldn't be a focus until the game engine were 100% finished.

Sims would also have permadeath (that plus increased danger would be fun >:) ) but there would be a kind of inheritance system since the player doesn't die that their properties would be passed down to the next sim they make/any children they had and they would have to roleplay the reason for that, eg "oh i was his 5th cousin and he had no other relatives" and they could do whatever they wanted with the new sim's personality. Of course this is all concept and would have to be planned out thoroughly to provide a fun and "maxis quality" experience, and again probably wouldn't happen for a very long time! It's definitely something I would like to try at some point.
 
I think that's a great idea, RHY3756547 but it would also be nice to go back to the traditional gameplay of TSO for a while. I think bills are a good idea too, I find that sometimes when money accumulates too fast in sims that it can get quite boring. We need ways to keep our sims poor but also have the option to get them rich too.
 
Yeah, things like this require a lot of fine tuning that I think Maxis didn't get back to after the game didn't do as well as they expected.

The traditional gameplay is what we're resurrecting so it should always be available and separate from any experimental redesigns we try...
 
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