While playing my ongoing save recently at uni, this thought came to me. I've been wondering if EA had intended to introduce yoga as a side activity with UL.

Both the sorority house and the gym at University have rugs placed in such a way that they're very obviously supposed to represent yoga mats. With the gym in particular, they're set up so as to represent a yoga class type of room. I could normally chalk this up to being one of those things EA does to "fill out" a world with seemingly pointless decorative representations of items. However, since its release we've become aware that a fair chunk of content was in fact stripped out of an already meaty pack at seemingly the last minute. Why is anyone's guess, but this gives credence I think that they were looking into adding it and ran out of time or whatever and simply didn't remove what were probably just placeholders. University's wide open outdoor spaces would also have been the perfect time to add such a feature I think. Maybe it just didn't fit in with any of the social groups and they simply scrapped it because of that. If they had only been in a single spot in the whole neighborhood, then I might would be like yeah just a coincidence. But I don't think so.

I wasn't going to make a whole thread for this, but since yoga is a fairly popular side activity in The Sims I wanted to know what people thought. Do you think it was only ever intended to be decoration, or interactive?

Yeah, I've used that one before. I think someone else is working on a newer version.

Anyway, I'd normally be inclined to agree, but in this specific case I'm not so sure. Take the Sports Bar Venue. There's basically nothing left of it, the only evidence we have that it existed at one point is the concept art, one of which also suggests there was going to be some type of server/restaurant system included, which likely ended up being stripped out to sell piecemeal in the store as the BAU Bistro only a few months later.

The small amount of things that we're certain of that were taken out, since there could've been more, plus UL releasing fairly close to the end of TS3's lifespan makes me think they at least considered it and probably ended up leaving it to the store team who got shafted shortly thereafter. I still vaguely remember them claiming they were sticking around for a while after TS4's release before EA rather abruptly cut them loose.

*crawls out of the cave I’ve been wallowing in* Hello yes, that someone is me. Funnily enough, that “yoga studio” room in the university gym was part of what inspired me to create an updated yoga mod (shameless plug of the thread here). I converted the yoga animations from TS4 and made the script just fine, but I’ve sort of hit a wall with assigning the routing slot to the custom mat.

That aside, I always found it odd that Eaxis dedicated such a large amount of space in the gym to a deco-only room and wondered if they had indeed planned yoga as an activity but it didn’t make the cut. Similar to the jogging track in the gym as well (though that’s been rectified with a mod). I’ve also seen the concept art with the sports bar/restaurant and thought the same...

I also know there was some talk about candle making supposedly coming in supernatural (hence the beeswax) and jewelry making in ambitions (because of the gem/metal collections) in a forum post, but I couldn’t find anything else to even slightly confirm either rumor.

Though it does make wonder what other features might've been left on the cutting room floor

You can make candles with this canning station overhaul - https://modthesims.info/d/580462/ca...aug-2-2016.html
You can make jewelry with the Artisans Glass Blowing Station - https://store.thesims3.com/setsProd...=OFB-SIM3:71911

Ah, I thought I remembered seeing your thread over in the modding forum. I'm sure you'll figure it out.

I didn't know about those things being considered for other packs, even if it was just ideas being tossed around. Supernatural had a lot of content that wasn't focused on occults, like rocking chairs, so candle making could've definitely made sense there. And I could absolutely see jewelry making having been in Ambitions, that one was almost certainly a scrapped concept that the store decided to pick up later.

I know a lot of people tend to think of TS3 being quantity over quality, but hearing and discussing things like this makes me sort of sad that there was still so much that could've been added to the game by the end of its lifespan. I remember in another thread I've made where igazor mentioned that supposedly EA had left traces in 1.63 that they were potentially considering an upwards of three or so more packs after ITF, but we'll likely never know for sure.

I used to be obsessed with cut/hidden content in The Sims 3 (and TS2 as well).

One thing that I remember being rather excited about was when someone discovered code that pertained to a fully functional beach ball. Since we didn't have any water activities for the pool, I was thrilled and eagerly awaited more information. I thought that Seasons would surely have it, and then when that came to nothing, I switched my hopes to Island Paradise. Unfortunately, the beach ball went the way of the candle-making that was supposed to be in the Supernatural expansion.

I never heard anything about a functional beach ball, but I'm intrigued. I'd love to hear what else you may have come across that didn't make it into the game (I like learning about that kind of stuff too).

On the topic of content that was possibly left out of University Life. There's _xml files in the code referencing three party types that aren't in the final expansion: a Tailgate Party (which I assume was for jocks), a LAN Party (for the nerds), and a Victory Party (not sure about what that one was for). There's also a Masquerade Party _xml file, but that ended up coming with the limited edition Partaeus Maximus statue. I read that these parties can be enabled via MasterController (can't believe I've never seen them before), but they're not too different from your standard party. I do wonder what they would've been like if they had made the final cut. Oh the possibilities...