r/Paralives

I know the developers said they’ll put a family tree/genealogy feature out sometime soon…unfortunately this means I have no clue who the baby daddy is in my polycule which made me LOL as the baby arrived. Maybe features will be distinctive as they grow?

as someone with curly hair and who wants to make parts with curly hair but has ZERO mod making abilities i am BEGGING the mod making gods out there PLEASEEE make some good curly hair custom content!! for the white and poc girlies alike!!! also bangs 🙏🙏

i genuinely scour the workshop every day — there’s like two good ones but they barely look like curly hair 🥲

I’m copying and pasting this from a previous post in the ftm subreddit.

I’m 21FTM (female to male). I grew up (and unfortunately still live in) a super strict, controlling, and religious household. Because of this. I wasn’t able to start exploring my identity until I left for college a few years ago. With the help of some peers, I realized I am a trans guy, and I’ve since changed my name and pronouns.

Through this, I’ve realized that throughout my life there’s always been signs, even when I didn’t know it. Things like longing to shop in the men’s or boys section as a kid/teen. Or always being told I need to act more like a girl, sit nicer, act nicer, ect. Hating my feminine aspects but trying to force myself to like them.

Ever since I’ve transitioned, even with all the rough stuff that comes with it, I’ve never been happier. I’m myself, even if my “loved ones” don’t approve, I’m truly myself.

But I’ve still had some self-doubt here and there, and my parents definitely getting my head from time to time, and it can be hard to ignore their words sometimes.

A game called Paralives came out recently. I’ve been playing The Sims 4 for over 5 years, and occasionally I would try and make a Sim-self, but it never looked like me, the aspects and ratios were always wrong. But Paralives, I was able to make a para that looks so similar to me it’s eerie.

While making it, I did some experimenting and gave it long hair, a bigger chest, and other feminine qualities. I couldn’t stand to look at it. It looked wrong, it made me feel gross, looking at a para that looked like me but feminine.

It’s funny, but creating myself in a video game helped me get rid of some of the self-doubt. I know it won’t get rid of all of it, I’ve got my unsupportive parents to thank for that. But it helped give me more proof that I truly am doing the right thing.

It feels a little silly saying all of this, that’s a video games helped with my dysphoria. But thank you Paralives for helping me feel good about my identity and who I am!

Sooo yeah, here I am living my best lesbian programmer gremlin Paralife, when I meet this pretty girl and decide to try romancing her (by the way, I just got the game last night, but I absolutely love it and I'm so glad I got in on the EA).

Anyway, it was pretty easy to go from strangers to Lovers that live together, but imagine my surprise when I control Solene for the first time and click the Flirty mood cards. "Aww, how sweet, she is thinking of propos-- wait, who the hell is 'Kian'?"

Yep, my brand new serious girlfriend was busy thinking about proposing to her boyfriend just moments after agreeing to live with me.

I am not entirely sure if this is a bug or not because the game does support a spectrum of relationship styles, which I think is a great way to be inclusive. I personally am very monogamous though and so is my Para, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out because my Para is set to get the highest possible jealousy setting.

Is there a way to see what other Paras are set to for the Relationship Style setting? Because either Solene is set to the one that seems to be hinting at polyamory, or the game doesn't check if a Para is in an exclusive relationship before letting you start a new one. And I mean, the word "exclusive" does seem to imply monogamy.

Maybe it's intentional. Cheating is a thing is real life, so who knows.

The ability to shift a character's voice pitch was a feature in other life sims that I missed having, especially since there are currently not very many voice options in early access. So, I took it upon myself to mod it in!

##Voice Pitch Control

This is a script mod that adds a slider in the paramaker 'ticket', next to the voice options which can be used to adjust voice pitch. You can modify the pitch of child paras and older.

Hope this is of interest to you all!

I'm a really old player and an even older builder. Because I was a Lego child and a teenager who drew cities and houses on graph paper. And who read the latest news from the computer gaming world waiting for a building game. When SimCity came along, it was meant for me. And for those who are (old school) like me: remember when, after the infrastructure was laid out, you'd run the game and some sims (the only ones back then) would appear with building materials and the houses would start rising from the ground? I used to think, "I wish I could design and build these houses." In the late 90s, I distinctly remember a segment on the evening news (yes, it was actual news) announcing that Will Wright was promising the release of The Sims. And I was like, "finally!". But then life happened, and years went by without me being able to or even thinking about playing. Eventually, a friend built me my first adult-life computer, which he delivered to me with a CD of the first Sims, even though Sims 2 had already been announced. I only played the original Sims for a year, but I played for many, many hours. Since then, I've played everything.

Strengths of all these games (for me, of course):

Original Sims – the chaos; the build mode; the neighborhood view and concept; the thrilling difficulty of careers and life in general; the Goth family and their ghosts; the soundtrack (which I've never stopped listening to, because it's great music in any context and outside of any game).

Sims 2 – generations, of course; the neighborhood view and concept; the ability to create maps in SimCity and import them into the game, creating cities from scratch (which really made up for the limitation of the neighborhoods); build mode (except for the roofs being too high, which was fixed in one of the last stuff packs); seasons; vacations, hotels, beaches, and sims getting tanned after being out in the sun and coming back with that glow; greenhouses; apartments; animations; personalities. Maxis started its greedy career here, but each EP was independent, the collections (of building materials, furniture, etc) were vast and complete, the colors matched (always the same blue, always the same white, always the same red)… there was still a certain respect for players.

Sims 3 – the open world, the open world and, can I say it again?, the open world; the view and concept of a CITY; the color wheel; the texture catalog; the light design (never seen anything more beautiful before or since); the camera! Above all, in Sims 3, almost (almost) nothing good that had been previously introduced by the original Sims or Sims 2 was lost (and just a detail: the release of S3 was scheduled for February 2009, but this date was canceled and moved to June of the same year).

Sims 4 – The sims were finally truly beautiful (and toddlers adorable); lighter saves and fewer crashes thanks to dividing the cities into small neighborhoods; university sims having the option to stay at home or go to a dorm but still go home for the weekend; the build mode due to the flexibility of dragging, copying, and moving, which gradually improved until it became incredibly fun.

Weaknesses:

Original Sims – the city (from SimCity) was lost; sims didn't age, only died in tragedies, and there were no generations.

Sims 2 – The memory system was heavy and made the game run poorly; saves were heavy and crashes were common.

Sims 3 – There were never apartments and hotels as good as the ones in Sims 2 again, neither for building nor for playing; the saves were incredibly heavy and the game in general was prone to major errors and crashes. No matter how good my computers were, I had serious problems to the point of giving up playing and forcing myself to enjoy the next game. The store.

Sims 4 – practically everything was lost. Not even a basic neighborhood view, and the concept or possibility of creating and improving a neighborhood was out of the question. The base game barely even had careers. With no open city and sims confined to their houses again, it was a massive, massive bore. The build mode: collections that weren't collections, colors that didn't match (get a colorizer so you can html code your colors, there are some free ones on the web since the 90s!), collections split between two, three, or more packs… seriously? The decoration mode: generally horrendous objects. Not even a basic bookshelf to build libraries until, of course, Book Nook. This is just a summary. I could write a thesis on the horrors of S4. Tons of bugs, never fixed; action queues lost just because you went into build mode to put a painting on the wall. And something I can't forget: when the game came out and the first criticisms emerged, the company replied to the community: "If you don't like this one, there won't be another." As players, we ceased to exist.

Paralives

As promised in 2019, Paralives has brought back an countless list of gameplay pleasures that I lost in 2014, and so far, I feel it is the rightful heir to the game started in 2000—because it does it justice. At the same time, it is its own game and has brought important innovations to the genre, the most important of which, for me, is feeling I'm playing in Europe (I know the game is from Canada, but Melino is an absolutely European city). The other is the scale of the houses and things in general: it is so much more realistic than any other game I've tried (even when I think of House Flipper). I've already managed to recreate two houses from my real life, something I could never do before. The advanced editing tool is genius. And it is so, so fun to play! The saves are light, and the game can be paused without losing the action queue. Yesterday I finished a house and finally lowered the camera to see the houses lined up on that street, and I thought about how much I have missed the city. And something new that was never present in any of its predecessors: the ability to truly decorate the Paras' houses with countless small objects.

The lighting is still basic, but very promising because the cardinal points are there and quite noticeable (I'm that builder who, before designing a house, checks where the sun rises and sets, so I can have morning light in the bathroom, daylight in the kitchen, and afternoon light in the reading room). I hope Paras will sit down to read ASAP. A dream: a macroeconomic sub-mod that influences careers, prices, etc.; and a mayor where there can only be one at a time (I already have 4 chefs at the fancy restaurant). I'm mainly a builder, but I also play live mode a lot to test the houses and, frankly, Paralives hooked me because of how interesting career progression is and how each one is different and branches out into varied and distinct sub-careers, so right now I have almost as many hours building as I do in live mode. A detail I love: each Para knows different recipes and might never learn some of them.

I've noticed several improvements since launch. The main one is in the Paras' movement around the city, which is increasingly fluid and seamless. Lately, I can queue up ten or more actions and just forget about the Para while they do everything I planned.

The Paralives team keeps a close eye on the community. The game is already a huge success and it will get even better.

After playing for a while, I turned aging on for NPCs. Since I'm on long life span, it wasn't clear for a while if the setting was operating properly. Finally there was an obituary in the paper! Then two more! Now I see one every few game days. And someone dropped dead right in front of her when my Para visited the beach.

Am I a horrible person for feeling gleeful and looking forward to more obituaries?

Now I have a question. For those playing in this manner, with aging turned on for everyone, what strategies are you using as the population of the town steadily declines? I'm looking for ideas.