Higher Hot Air Balloon

Rise above it all with Hot Air Balloon, and when we say rise, we actually mean it this time!


EA's hot air balloon was, put nicely, a huge letdown. The "barely one-level high" height of the animation made the balloon barely worth using. Some people worked around this by placing the balloon on highrises or platforms, but this made 'traveling' problematic because the balloon was unable to land back on said platform.

I got irritated. And when I get irritated, I fix things (or try to fix things, break them horribly, then fix them). So I poked around in the file of the balloon and discovered that, at one point, EA must have planned to include an option to 'go higher' and 'go lower' as there were different height animations! Except...they never coded it in. I merged the takeoff animations together to make a single "highest height" replacement and did the same for the landing. The idle, woohoo, and pull rope animations are replaced to be at the new height. Sims are correctly able to do all the things they could do before (sightsee, propose, drink, etc) just from a worthy height off the ground!

This is a default replacement and only includes the CLIP files as overrides therefore you must own and have the Hot Air Balloon from the store installed. The following clips are the resources that have been replaced.

• CLIP 0x4CDE548140F0B192
• CLIP 0x09FFE070528024D7
• CLIP 0x54D21B25FE0D835C
• CLIP 0x5A44D53432362FFB
• CLIP 0x523A75E8A1F3B8DD

Note:
I am not an expert animator (not even a great one, really) so the transition between low, medium, and high heights is somewhat noticeable. I did what I could to remove any duplicate frames so the balloon doesn't stop and pause completely between heights but I'm sure it could be more seamless.

Special thanks to TheSweetToddler who explained how I could get Blender to cooperate!