Uh, as long as you ignore the weird mess going on down in the bottom part, it's starting to shape up

Hi Bulbizarre! It looks good, and it certainly must be a lot of work.

Until recently I was trying to earn a living as an Access database programmer/developer. But in last few years the work has really dried up, and my aging mother's deteriorating health has effectively made me her full time carer. I'm rather busy preparing for RL Christmas just now (and despite Simonut and Mr. Scrooge) I'll try to make sure my Sims (at least some of them) get a little bit of fun at Christmas too . But I'll try to make time in the New Year to get a proper look at your database, and see if I can suggest any improvements. Access 2010 is the version I use, so I should be able to open it ok. Don't expect too much of me though. My Access skills have got a bit rusty over the past few years, and your database looks very professional in your screenshots.

Although it was my job, I haven't made much use of Access for my Sims. The only database I use for them is a random name generator that I use when I can't think of a name for a new CAS Sim. Born-in-game Sims are about as rare as hens' teeth in my game, and I don't use the name generator for them -- I try think of a name for them in consultation with the parents. (i.e. I open the lot and look at the parents -- I may even talk to them -- and rack my brain trying to think what name they would give the child. The name generator database predates me starting to play the Sims. I originally wrote it to populate demo databases with dummy but realistic-looking data. It originally generated dummy street addresses and email addresses as well as people's names.

I've made little use of spreadsheets either. I think I only have one that I use for my Sims. A couple of my Sims run an OFB nightclub. The game was debiting them for the cost of wages and other expenses when other Sims visited the club. But it wasn't crediting them with the income from the "bandatron" machine and other payments for "adult" services. The nightclub was haemorrhaging money every time other Sims visited it. So I created an Excel spreadsheet to calculate roughly how much income they should receive for the visit, based on the entry price, the average number of visitors in the club, and what payments were made for these "adult" services. Whatever the spreadsheet calculates I then pay to the owners using FamilyFunds. I must say that having to do bookkeeping, or at least auditing, for every owned business, does rather put me off using OFB more.

Other than that I really just keep a note of what my Sims are up to by using the game's Storytelling feature, aided by some Microsoft Word tables, which are really a form of street directories.

@AndrewGloria - your neighbourhood is likely far smaller than mine, so definitely less of a need there.

That name generator is pretty cool though. I often use Nameberry's Name Hunter because it generates ones with a similar feel.

I think that OFB not crediting business owners when playing a different household is a common glitch in the game. I've seen other threads about it.

I feel like family sims would be traditional, so I tend to look at their family tree and pick from there. Knowledge sims would go for a high-brow reference, like "He's named Marcus for the great general Marcus Aurelius." Popularity sims chose names that fit in. Pleasure sims usually chose names that are related to their hobbies. Romance sims are wild cards with names. Fortune sims want names that travel well and sound rich. Grilled Cheese sims have yet to procreate in my game, but if they ever stop eating grilled cheese long enough to fuck, they'll name the baby after cheese.

Well, if someone knows how to do them in OpenOffice's (or LibreOffice's) database, I'd be interested to know, but I've looked through the help and have not seen anything like that.

My main neighbourhood, Veronaville, is not tiny, but I presume that Oakbrook is much bigger:

Veronaville
3 sub-hoods
- Downtown
- Bluewater
- Monopolis (Monopoly Game Town)

41 Families (excluding townies, Downtownies, NPCs and "Default")
420 Sims
- 115 Playables
- 99 Townies
- 93 NPCs
Most of the rest are the dead ancestors of the Maxis Sims from Veronaville, Downtown and Bluewater. No Sims have died on my watch. As a result of my aging-off playstyle, the population is remarkably stable. There have only been two babies born in Veronaville in the seven years I've been playing it. There's been one wedding, four birthdays, and no deaths at all. The population growth is almost entirely due to new families moving into the area (i.e. new Sims created in CAS). So I suppose I really don't need a database to keep track of my Sims in Veronaville: quite a bit of my knowledge of them is really just kept on my head.

As I said, my name generator database pre-dates me playing The Sims. I used it for my Sims because I had it already. All the names in it I put there myself, so there really shouldn't be any I don't like. When I first used it for a Sim there were over 700 surnames in it. And the very first name it generated for a Sim was "Simm"! As a result I have an adult townie in Veronaville called Niall Simm, and his teenage son Hugh Simm. (Inspired by the Tricous, I like having townies who are related to each other.) Does the fact that I already had the name "Simm" in my database, long before I actually bought The Sims, suggest that I might have always been predestined to become a Simmer?

115 playables? I have upwards of 600 (maybe 700, considering I just added a few more subhoods). So yeah, a little bigger.

Work is still progressing on my database albeit slowly. I did finish another section of my Playable Sim form

Mine is pretty basic, but kind of requires a key to follow. The color coding all means stuff to me, but basically, names are in order of which they were born in game, A & B are first and last names, D is miscellaneous notes, E is which subhood they live in, G is the last date I played that sim, I-J are their parents' names. It's mostly made up as I go, like when I think "I should keep track of who is currently pregnant" and then I add column F with pink for pregnant and baby name ideas. Gen 1-2 didn't even have the parents' names listed.

I'm a database manager IRL and I honestly didn't want something as complicated as my job entails.

You know what I'd like? Someone to redo the "Sim Tracker" that Reba Lynn released. Since her death, it's been available but does not work properly and was never updated.

Remember when I made a sim management program that figured out every possible way sims were related to each other?



Alas, the program had some problems and it was too ambitious a project. If I had to go back to it, though, I'd strip it down to just the family browser, because that was a hoot.

Five hundredth cousin, fifty times removed.

Actually, it only goes up to 20th cousin, 20 times removed, and after that it just says "distant cousin" and "many times removed". But that's only because I didn't feel like writing something to generate the written-out word of the number for arbitrary numbers, which is definitely something I could have done. I just didn't think it was likely to be necessary.

I once saw some code that was supposed to automatically convert numbers to text, except there was a (I think) off-by-one error so instead of "thirty" you got "twenty ten."

@kestrellyn - Is it bad that I kind of want to see how your SimSheet would handle this?

What on SimEarth is going on in that Family Tree? Especially in the middle!

I was doing some experiments with heavy inbreeding.

The main thing that page can't handle is multiple spouses. Anything else it should handle just fine. It will tell you *all* the relationships, though. It doesn't have to visually draw the tree, so it shouldn't fail the way the game did.

Finished another section.



I added a dropdown to the top of the households subform to jump to specific households. (Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to make it just show the households for the specified subhood just yet. I'm working on it.)

Still ongoing.

Same! I still use it, but it's extremely slow on my laptop and the university/education tab can't be updated because it keeps copying over other sims' information.

I've never used a spreadsheet before but am going to try one out so I don't have sims aging up to elders before their grandparents do. (A common occurance in my hoods in years past). I'm also interested in seeing how @Bulbizarre is making out with their Access database. It's way too complicated for me to do, but that doesn't mean I don't like looking at it!

I'm still cobbling it together.

It looks awesome! I'm amazed by the detail, you've obviously put a lot of time into it.