I wouldn't say that The Sims is LGBT-friendly for one simple reason. Where's the T? There's pretty much no option for transsexual sims - aside from mods or roleplay - and that's not even getting into the full QUILTBAG experience. Same-sex romance and marriage are a great step forward, but that's the only step it takes.

She explicitly stated that the anime stuff would be in an expansion pack, not the base game.

The thing about the empty town is a good point. There could be something that quickly fills in the town based on the initial sims, so that everyone has a similar aesthetic, instead of a few good-looking sims in a sea of pudding.

Let's be brutally honest. People don't care about the T part. Transsexuality is a confusing thing, and even if it wasn't, it'd be very confusing to implement. And besides, it's only a gender change, you can already do this in CAS.

Okay... This thread took a rather odd turn. We went from discussing programming to gender identity. Shouldn't we just stick with what's important at this point?

Confusing? People are born with an innate gender. Sometimes they get the wrong genitals to go with it. What's confusing about that?

And what do you mean, 'only a gender change'? If you're trying to do a story about or around an actual reassignment process, that means making gradual changes to simulate it, which means dozens of tiny differences to work with. And some of that just can't be done in CAS. For example, you need to use mods in order to have a woman with facial hair. And there are limits to how masculine you can make a female model, or how feminine a male model. For that matter, you can't have a female model without breasts. Even if you use a mod to pretty much get rid of them or make them look exactly like pecs, the shirts all have boob-shine and boob-shadow, so it still looks like they have them. They also have that with the pants, so altering the pelvic region can't work properly, either. Not to mention that stupid head-tilt in TS3. Female models tilt their heads to their right. Male models have them looking straight ahead. It's such a pain in the ass because it makes it far too obvious. And why do they even have that in the first place? It's ridiculous.

I do actually have a few ideas for making a system that would easily allow gender reassignment, as well as expand the possible range of model types. Put the physical traits for femininity and masculinity - like hip size, fat content, broadness of shoulders, bone definition - on two sliders. One end is neutral, the other is one of the genders. The gender the game considers them can be on a checkbox. The lazy people can just go in, check a box and they become male or female. For the people who want to put in work, that would make it far easier to have a wider range of characters, from neutral-looking women to femme men. Of course, Panda would have to approve this, but it wouldn't be any more complicated than the average slider.

Still figuring out the slider system. Most of the fiction genre-related expansion packs are optional, but you might find it has some benefits.

The International and Situational-related expansion packs would be very similar to past Sims expansion packs and store content. But my goal is to make this a free game.

The decision for starting with an empty neighborhood was to give more creative control to the players.

I genuinely wonder what you mean by that. I've never heard of this head tilt and to be honest, I don't know what it would look like. Are you saying female Sims have skewed heads? Can they not look straight forward?

Go into CAS, pull up a female sim, and zoom in on her head. It will be tilted to the side, meaning that the middle of the forehead is more to the right (your left) than the chin is. Then change it to male. The head is not tilted.

Maybe your meshes are messed up, I'm not seeing that at all. Seriously, that sounds pretty messed up to me.

About the expansion packs utilized in the series:

First are Situational Expansion Packs. They bear a great deal of resemblance to the Standard Expansion Pack of The Sims Series. New dimensions to the game are added.

Second, International Expansion Packs, which add worlds, items, clothing, hair and new functions based on the locale.

Third, Theme Expansion Packs, which add functions based on the entertainment genre as well as clothing, hair and gameplay dimensions.