What I've Been Working On #001

Hey all, first I just want to say thank you for being so patient with me on updates this last month!  In an effort to be more transparent with what I'm working on, I'm going to start providing intermittent status reports about how I've been spending my modding time.  

Sidesaddles

As soon as Horse Ranch came out, I began working on a Sidesaddle mod, but didn't want to share too much until I was sure it was possible.  I hadn't done anything with animating walkstyles yet, and there are literally hundreds of animations that would need to get overrided. 

At first, overriding the walkstyle caused the horse to default to this:

Getting to this point even took weeks:

Originally, I tried to make it so that you could click on the horse and select "Go for Sidesaddle Ride".  This worked, sort of, but wound up causing problems when returning to a normal horse walkstyle, and ultimately I realized a more graceful way would be to override the Locomotion Builders so that Sims automatically use the sidesaddle animations.  

Overriding all the horse/sim animations would take me months, so ultimately the mod will only override the walkstyles, but I still think this is an improvement for historical simmers.  I would say I'm now about 80% done with this mod and hope to finish it by the end of the month or early November.

Secret Occults

I paused on the Sidesaddle mod once it got too far into October so I could focus on finishing an occult mod before Halloween.  It's always bothered me that the lore around Occults in the Sims isn't consistent.  Sometimes, it seems like all the Sims know that vampires are real, but then don't always believe in mermaids?  What if you want to play as a Sim who's hiding their occult status?

So this mod aims to override some of the occult interactions and make discovering magic an event in the game.  So far, I've made it so Sims react to occults when they're in their dark form if appropriate and when using their special powers.  Sims can also believe in occults or not.

(Yes, Caleb was shocked to find out Lilith is a vampire!  This was in early testing haha.)

There are some other features I'm working on implementing now, like an Occult Enthusiast trait.  

This is still in progress but I'm hoping it'll be done in time for Halloween!

Until next time,

~ JS