As a travel world/resort town, Hidden Springs is successful, minus actual stuff to do.

The vacation homes are large enough, the pools, hotels and gyms are the center entertainment, but, there's nothing new or special about going there. France has Nectar, China had Sim Fu, Egypt had... Egyptian Stuff. What does Hidden Springs have?

Sickly-green colored people

Bless them.

That's something thats always annoyed me with a couple of the store worlds, they would make perfect holiday locations and I think even the description of Barnacle bay and Hidden springs, along with the lot names in Sunlit tides all mentioned the word vacation, but they're only homeworlds

That's what Twallan's Traveller is for

We shouldn't need Twallan for a basic travel feature. We have a decent substitute now, but if EA's pumping out Travel world, they should have added a travel feature.

This is a venue/world EA should do. They could include two premium items: a ski lift and a ski run. Your sims take the lift to the top of the hill and ski down the ski run. However, most Sims objects cannot be placed on slopes -- to make this work, these objects would have to be placed on slopes. Or they could do a whole ski mountain slope as an object. Still, confined to a 64 x 64 lot, it woul be pretty lame.

A whole town could be built around this. Think Aspen, Colorado.

Usually, ski towns have all sorts of weird stores, lots of bars and nightclubs. It could be a real rockin town. Definitely not Mayberry.

Ski towns have a summer season as well. Many of them have things like music festivals. (Again think Aspen, with its world renown music festival.) There is also hiking, fishing and other outdoor activities.

Plus a town like Aspen (a real town, as opposed to an artificial ski resort like Vail) can have some rather unique architecture.

id love to put a winter resort/hotel type in sunset vally but the question is where would be a good spot i do want it to have views because i know i want to put a beach type of one on the beach there hopefully i will be able to get it to extend to the water so they can surf and such there and i can include a surf and boat rental shop in it.

Not much, as it is, but it should have much more.

Another interesting fact about Hidden Springs is that it has a lot of routable terrain in places where other worlds have none.

With Velocitygras's "Any Lot Size" mod I made a couple of lots that resemble ski slopes and tried to place them around the world. I found out that the best place for this is near the military base (a 64 x 64 lot; the base can, of course, be scrapped and a hotel built on the site). There I managed to place three 20 x 64 slopes, one 10 x 60 slope and a standard 40 x 40 lot which could be used for a snow arena or something like that. The result is a system of ski slopes like the one one can see in a real ski resort.


A closer look at a part of the complex. The walls are there only to make the slope lots visible - do not try this at home, kids, as a tree is quite sufficient if you want to stop in a hurry. I also added a small bar because a bar at the bottom of a ski slope is, of course, obligatory.


Yet another 10 x 60 slope can be placed under the very top of the mountain; this one was probably meant for extreme skiers. I am sure that all of this and more was planned by the original designer(s); then most of it was scrapped and a third-rate team was brought in, giving us the ugliest main square in all of the worlds.

The same goes for "green people". The "Fairyfolk Park" next to their forest is an obvious indication of what they were meant to become. The only one of their objects that remained in Hidden Springs was the Fountain of Youth, but at least we got the rest of them back with Supernatural; all of them (as well as some of SN buildings) fit very well with their part of the world.

As for the skiing part: I don't believe that Eaxis will do anything about it. We can just hope that a modder will.

Alaskan, North Pole or even Nordic, there is a big gap out there in the worlds available. I don't think there has ever been a 'killer' cold world released, couple of decent ones, but there is a niche there to be exploited. I love snowy climates myself. Or has anyone turned a regular hood into a snowy one by way of climate control? In essence, you could make the Irish Rinn Fada look Scandinavian by giving it colourful roofs and applying snow to it. I need a good snowy world, I got lots of sunny ones, which is great, but still.

I think there's one called the Everglades or Neverglades, something like that? It was worked on since 2009, released like last year I believe? Around showtime if I remember correctly, I could be wrong though. I just know the world is in existence and it doesn't look that bad.

Actually Neverglade is a good choice to turn into a snowy place. I might just try that.

slopes and heightening terrain always annoyed me a lot. i try to avoid uneven ground.

It's useless anyway if the terrain is sloped. I need a flat one. Moonlight Falls and Lucky Palms are great with that.

I guess I wasn't precise enough. When I use the word "skiing" I mean "Alpine skiing", and slopes ("ski runs") are obligatory for that. What you probably meant was "cross-country skiing" which requires (mostly) flat terrain.

I never thought of that but now that you've mentioned it, there is one empty flat 64 x 64 lot in Hidden Springs, at the end of the fairy town, where a circular track could be made. Yet another set of animations, etc., would be needed, of course. I wonder if the original designer(s) had that in mind as well.

I wonder -- and it probably is possible -- could you mod out swimming/sunbathing and replace them with snowboarding and snowball fights?

Cross-country is not particularly difficult to do; sims appear to be total noobs though, don't know how to use the skis properly.

Sorry to necro bump.

The lodge in Hidden Springs certainly does look like a good resort building, but it does need a lot of tweaking to make it work as a resort. I had to move the whole thing to the edge of the lot so I could fit in some small resort bungalows else you can't turn it into a resort, and I had to remove the table with the games console as it was stopping sims from being able to fix the TV and move the counters as the overhead cabinets were preventing sims from cleaning the counters.

Other changes I made to the lodge to improve it was add another level so I could put in a massage/sauna room, gym, TV room (moved the TV from downstairs to the upper floor and put a piano in its place), added another long balcony to house a wedding arch and bar, built an indoor swimming pool with a pool bar, hot tub and fire walking pit, made the long balcony behind the 2 bedrooms personalised balconies and dressed the rooms up as honeymoon suites, and extended the front garden to house a small ice rink. I only used a number of store items (mostly free holiday items) and maybe one or two from Seasons and Late Night. I really fancied putting in the snowboard half-pipe but it's way too huge and ugly for a resort. Overall it's not impressive but it works as a resort. I pretty much kept to the existing theme rather than redecorating it all.

I'm currently stressing it to see if there's any routing issues before I make it downloadable. I do see some worker sims foot stomping and waving and not showing what they're having issues reaching and being reset by nraas mods.

Edit: Very hard to stress test it when the game lags in general and that's without using CC spare a few nraas mods. I tried an unedited world and that lagged like hell. I think the resort is fine and it's just Sims 3 being horrendously coded by cheap labour devs. The game hasn't crashed so far nor have I had any critical lag spikes that would indicate that the lot is unroutable. I don't know how to add a thing to the site so I've just planted it on my webserver for now which you can download from http://www.geekgirl101.org/sims3stu...Lodge.Sims3Pack

From what I can recall the store content includes content from Sunlit Tides, Serenity Retreat, Tower of Flower Power, Spa Necessities, Perfect Privacy Screen, Edwardian Expression Kitchen- Delicacy Server Stand, Rustic Staycation Whirlpool Station, More Holiday Presents, Whisker's Night of Five Aces, and Happy New Year '11.

One of the problems with EA is that they do a lot of half-assed stuff and never seem to complete anything. As a result they leave a lot of easy money on the table, and then bitch about development costs. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! It's a major reason why I was not interested in The Sims 4.

Several obvious examples:

World adventures: They could have released World Adventures 2, 3, or 4, all using the same engine as the first World Adventures, and the development cost would have been minimal. Characters could visit other locations, such as India, Mexico, Pirate Island, go on an African safari, climb Mt. Sim, etc., etc., etc. Once the basic engine is done, as it was in World Adventures, adding new worlds to explore could have been done with a minimal investment.

Ambitions: Again, once the basic engine was done for creating careers and new missions, it would not have been hard to add even more new careers and create an Ambitions 2 or an Ambitions 3. For example, a police detective could have easily been cloned from the Private Investigator, creating an entirely new police career. Same with being a super spy. How about a mad scientist, cloned from the inventor career?

Pets: A lot of time was spent on figuring out how to create and animate animals. But once that was done, making new animals would not have been as difficult. For example, how about an entire EP about zoo animals? Combine it with World Adventures for an African safari. Or how about and EP about farm life, with new plants and new animals.

Island Paradise: This is just another example of the problem. How difficult would it have been to create an entirely new EP called Winter Paradise which would have been about winter resorts and vacations? Seasons gave us limited ice skating, snowball fights, making snowmen, and a snowboard half pipe. Just add ski slopes with ski lifts (a gondola, a chair lift, a puma lift, a T-bar and a rope tow) and slopes to ski down. They could have had a bunny slope where all of the sims snowplow down the hill, and more advanced slopes, up to the dreaded black square, where sims could have gone down moguls. And perhaps even a ski jump. The truly adventurous could take a helicopter to a truly awesome and difficult slope. Nordic skiing could have been done by just creating a new type of walk. They could have had snowboarding slopes, and even sledding or tubing slopes. Top it off in a resort hotel with a sauna, massage tables and good meals, and a new town (like Aspen) with all sorts of interesting shopping. This would have been an awesome EP, and EA already had most of the pieces to make it.

But instead they decided to spend a fortune developing a stripped down and dumbed down Sims 4, which by all accounts has not sold all that well and really is not all that fun to play.

...I would probably have bought all of those. They sound amazing, honestly. Especially farm life. Gosh darn it I want cuddly pixel sheep.

While I agree that EA loves to release half-assed stuff, the things that you're suggesting are not as easy to make as you make it.
For example the zoo... well not every animal has the same animations, an elephant doesn't walk the same way as a gazelle for example. Plus you need to take in account the work of the artist, it's not all about coding, not only about writing a semi decent engine and then slapping random stuff in there. And creating models and new textures takes its time... sometimes even more time than programming if you want quality stuff
For example creating a new Indian world or Aztec world would require new textures, new models, creating a new world, and trust me, creating quality world isn't easy, it requires a lot of time, lots of attentions to details, checking every time that the routing works, etc.

Since I've first seen a deer jumping around like a gazelle (a while back, I guess) I would have no problem seeing an elephant doing the same. Or a rhino. Besides, a deer doing that is just a stupid mistake while an elephant would look appropriately crazy.