Complete Coffin for Fansee (Vampire Bed)

MLC, I like the chair per se, but I agree with Lee that it doesn't really look IKEA like.

Are are you talking about the Jules chair? I haven't seen anybody put the game version on wheels, but IKEA have done it themselves. (Swedish page, sorry - IKEA in English does not compute for me.) So there's an IRL precedent for doing it if you want to.

I have a music box question for my crew mates: Should Sims be able to turn the music off? Right now they can, but I can't decide whether or not I want to keep it that way. You see, if you turn off the music too quickly - as in, within the first ten or so seconds - it causes a problem with the animation; not a "ZOMG error!" problem, but an "it looks weird" problem.

And here's why...(Click to View)

When you stop an animation, there are two ways of doing it. Either you just stop it, and that's that; then the object freezes in mid-movement and stays that way until you run the interaction again. Or, you can stop the animation and then run a "reset to zero" kind of animation, that returns the object to its original state a little more gracefully. This is the way I favour myself.

Problem is, it isn't possible to run different reset animations depending on when the previous animation is stopped; you can only go "stop animation X, then run animation Y", not "if animation X is stopped at time index Q, then run animation Y, but if it's stopped at time index R, then run animation Z". My reset animation has the vampire sitting up and looking at you ('cause that's how the other animation ends), then turning its head and lying back down as the coffin lid closes. Works great as long as you stop the previous animation when the vampire is already sitting up - but it looks a bit weird if you stop it before the coffin lid has opened fully, since the vamp and the lid will first "jump" up like a jack-in-the-box (vamp in the box?) and then promptly lie back down/close.

Now, this wouldn't really be a problem if I could be sure people would use a bit of common sense and not turn the music off as soon as they start it - but you can never count on people using common sense. Of course, I could simply add a note to the upload saying that "if you stop the music before the vampire is sitting up, it might look weird" - but as we all know, your average downloader only reads the title of the download, if you're lucky, so then I'd get a heap of "it looks weird waaaaaah!" complaints anyway.

Opinions? (I'll upload a version to the group if you want to try it out for yourselves, BTW.)

Yes! That chair...the one I can never remember the name of, lol. I saw Ikea's version yesterday and have my version just about done.

The music? I've had a few music boxes and I've honestly never let the whole thing play..but that's real life. If you're going to have something like that in a game, I'd say letting the whole thing play is the point of having it in the game when it's as cool as a vampire sitting up and looking at you.

Actually, I wouldn't have remembered what it was called, either (I'd expect an IKEA chair to be called STOL or SITTA - "chair" and "sit" - or something like that, not Jules) if I hadn't had my game running and could check. But yay, Jules on wheels! I'm looking forward to it!

I must admit, I haven't had a music box since I was four or five or so, and I can't for the life of me remember if I let all of it play or not (I do remember the little dancing ballerina inside, though). I probably didn't. But yeah, why have a music box in game if you're just going to turn it off? Also, it runs for less than forty seconds. I know kids these days have zero patience, but... maybe they can stand forty seconds of classical music anyway? (And the Sim is perfectly free to wander off and do whatever in the meantime, I don't have him/her go to idle.)

I remember my children listening to music boxes and deliberately rewinding them to listen over and over again!

Karen, that sounds encouraging. Then maybe kids won't be bored to tears if they have to listening to music playing for forty seconds without being able to turn it off after all - because I'm leaning towards that more and more.

I'm also leaning towards having more than one music selection - Bach's Toccata in D minor would make excellent vamp-waking-up music, too, IMO.

Yes, Bach's Toccata would certainly be good vampire music too (listening now, and enjoying ). Is there anything modern that would work too? Twilight music? I don't listen to pop music - I'll consult my daughter (she's into vampire stuff and music and see if she has any ideas).

More music choices. I like that idea.

Twilight music? Please NO! These ain't no Twilight vampires. The two classical pieces you've chosen sound perfect though, Nix. Very vampirey. And I agree it's best to let the whole song play rather than messing up the animation by stopping it early. The player has to direct the sim to use this object anyway, right? So it's not like the music will be randomly playing all the time.

@Karen, the problem with modern music is that there's copyright and stuff on it (well, technically, there's copyright on classical music as well - on the recordings, anyway), so it's best to steer clear of that. Better safe than sorry.

@MLC, great! Now that I know how to add music to an object, it would be a shame not to put it to good use.

@Fansee, yep, a Sim has to actually turn the music box on - and when the music has played for all of 39 seconds, it stops (and the vamp goes back to sleep), it doesn't loop or anything. So the player has to take active part to get the music to play.


Hmmm... now I had another idea, what if the music box increased the environment score for all Sims in the room when it started playing? Or would that be silly?

Had forgotten about copyright issues - doh