#eli words

Just posted a review to Steam, posting here as well cuz why not.

Recommending with caveats. The game is really rough but also really promising, so don't buy in at this point unless you understand this and can be patient and willing to laugh things off as you submit bug reports.

If you have the money to spare and wanna support a legitimate competitor in the Life Sim space as it develops, you should pick up Paralives during the EA period. It is absolutely a work in progress and really rough in a lot of places (some basics are super under-developed, some other parts are unique innovations of their own with a lot of potential) but it's also got a HUGE amount of potential and I'm very excited to see where things go from here. There's obvious passion here and you can also see the influence other games have had on the features and direction of the game.

There's a lot of potential and flexibility in build mode. Not being limited to 3 floors is awesome, the way that rooms cut into steep terrain is neat, 3d terrain paint is sick as hell (3d grass!). Parametric controls on most of the furniture and building tools is really cool. Being able to make custom color palettes or change out materials is really cool. While the number of assets to work with currently is a bit limited, there's still a ton of stuff that can be built and the system seems flexible enough to accommodate a lot of custom content as well. Paramaker mode is also super flexible. Gender and body type being disconnected is great and I love that you can pick between having breasts or pecs and feminine or masculine hips. Custom colors on hair and clothes? Also great.

I spent like 6 hours just looking at everything in the Paramaker yesterday and what is there currently is pretty astonishing. There's also a huge amount of potential for modding between what parameters are exposed to us to tweak in the Control Panel (most? all of it?) and I spent a while going through that and unrolling different options. People who are already familiar with modding for Unity games will probably have an easier time figuring this stuff out. I was trying to add some custom patterns yesterday and crashed the game a few times which was annoying - modding documentation could use some fleshing out. I've been reporting bugs and making suggestions as I hit issues and the bug reporting flow is very easy. I hope the team has a good method of wrangling and organizing all that data (off topic but I think this is a good usecase for LLM tool assistance that reduces labor without replacing jobs).

The negatives: Performance needs a lot of tuning (the game makes my fans run pretty hard but I don't think anything is particularly taxing so it might be the draw distance and possible lack of LODs so everything onscreen is being rendered at all times? just guessing here). I think the gameplay is still very underbaked (understandably) but the character creation and build mode are complex enough to make up for that, and this is fine for me as someone who primarily makes characters and builds in other games of this kind anyway. Camera control and movement need a lot of work and getting the camera to stay on the right floor with you is tricky, lots of bouncing out of place. Terrain cutting seems to just fail sometimes - my paras were eating together at the dining table, next thing I see is the terrain is now halfway into the room and the para closer to the wall is now standing on top of the terrain and still talking to the other sitting para. There doesn't seem like a lot To Do in live mode currently. Fires can start but there's no way to really deal with them outside of using a cheat. If your motives are critically low, you get blocked from even doing anything to resolve that. Routing is buggy as hell, objects are missing collisions (a para will stand inside of a bookshelf as they're reading, autonomous pushups clipping halfway out the wall), NPCs don't seem to have a lot to do and seem to just stand around for you to talk to them, group behavior is odd (tell a para to use the toilet and everyone else in the group will also try to use a toilet). Lighting needs work, especially interior lighting. I'm glad that ceilings were added as a toggle to keep rooms from being lit by the sun but placing lights is odd and they don't always turn on. Materials seem to be missing bumpmapping and specular/roughness and look very flat currently, out of place next to the relatively detailed paras.

I need to spend more time in live mode to really get a feel for it but I like what I've seen otherwise. I have been playing the Sims games since 2000 and I really want other games to succeed as well.

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I'm also finding myself more frustrated with people not reading back in a chat before talking, not using the search function in discord (unlike Google search, this one still works decently). There's currently a major bug affecting mods loading correctly and people are popping in every few minutes to say "is it just me or are mods broken?" and this could be helped at least a bit by pinning a message about it or having some auto-reply function but this isn't at all unique to this game. I'm not used to the frequency I guess - my main Sims modding haunt isn't super active (especially now that there's a new game in town).

I do hope people start to temper their expectations for Paralives - I've been seeing a lot of (at this point) unearned glazing of the game for features that are hinted at but not actually functional (relationships, things to actually do on community lots (restaurants and shops have the bare minimum of functionality rn), emotions, etc) and the things that do exist need a lot of work - builds are precarious because you can accidentally remove all the floors or all the walls in a way that undo can't recover. I get the frustration, I get how jaded people feel over the state of TS4 and the larger Sims series, and I understand how exciting it is to have something new that could (maybe, someday) unseat The Sims as THE lifesim that scratches that itch of ts2+ts3+ts4 combined, but we're very much not there yet. I want people to be more honest with the game as it is and not confuse it with what it could be some day. I worry that these sky high expectations combined with ever shorter attention spans will lead people to try to speedrun what little content there is (like people are doing with Tomodachi Life) now and declare the game trash or a cashgrab and not the work in progress it clearly states itself as.

Still VERY unimpressed with Inzoi so far. I was super underwhelmed with the demo a few months ago (performance was awful, apparently my videocard is the minimum requirement for the game according to specs on Steam). I found the livestream yesterday really difficult to watch between audio issues, the interpreter struggling to keep up/translate everything the lead dev was saying, and my absolute dislike for genAI being shoved into everything.

I'm willing to give it another try though since there's another demo period and I think there's more on show now. They're doing demo key access in exchange for linking krafton and twitch and steam accounts together & watching 15 minutes of a qualifying Inzoi livestream. Jumped around trying to find someone doing something other than CAZ mode (and streaming in english) and landed on IronElixa's stream and stayed longer than those 15 minutes. She seems less credulous about the realities of the game than other videos I've watched (more of a general gamer than an influencer who needs to gas up the game as part of a contract or whatever).

More and more it's looking like a Make Situations for Your Guy and Take Pretty Screenshots and Make Them Do a Trendy Dance than like.. a real game? And I think I'm pretty open to lots of interpretations of what counts as a game, generally. I know I need to stop looking at the youtube comments under the stream. People are really living on some other planet. The streamer agreed that it's like a GTA Online without the adult content.

I've also got in progress bg3 cc like finishing up laezel's spots, tattoos/scars for Karlach (possibly chest glow), Halsin's tattoo, better eye situation for Wyll

of course, this is on top of the billion buildbuy cc projects I have going as well

here's Wyll's eye, learning how to make contacts I guess

gloves for Izutsumi

I have a convention in a month and a lot of art I was trying to get finished before then but procrastination keeps hitting hard. I started watching Breaking Bad yesterday and found that so engaging that I didn't make much progress on the stuff I was multitasking with (I usually have a show or podcast going while I draw, work in blender, or play ts4). Sleep's been bad so focus is worse than usual and I have so many things I wanna do that I often just. Don't. Very frustrating, I imagine many of you can relate since most of us seem to be some flavor of brainweird here on simblr (and tumblr as a whole).

I started working on a 70s/80s style dishwasher for ts4 and I think that looks pretty good, but I also had some Simblreen stuff I need to finish in time for the 2 Simblreen weekends, less ambitious than last year, but still. I also was doing Dungeon Meshi cc, mostly personal edits but maybe sharable in the future, and then I was ALSO working on BG3 stuff like Lae'zel's body and face markings, Wyll's face scars and his stone eye, some clothing edits to make them vaguely fantasy rpg compliant (leather, rough cloth, silks, etc), Karlach's tattoos and scars and infernal bits, etc. I was also doing Promare cc and Hunter x Hunter cc (both of these were why I started learning to Make stuff besides recolors in the first place).

((Another reason was that being an artist in this age of genAI, anti-human algorithmic social media feeds, rampant online censorship of anything queer or vaguely nsfw (and actual nsfw), dropshippers, disinformation, art theft, and devaluing of creative fields like animation, film, and the games industry has been incredibly demoralizing and I needed to learn something new that I could see I was making progress with. I'm glad I started learning Blender as it's something I'd always wanted to explore, and it's been rewarding to me helping other people with their projects as well.))

I was hoping to work on some cc today but this is okay too. I spent a good chunk of work time yesterday watching hbomberguy's plagiarist evisceration.

edit

gave the ikea display bi lighting