Some Announcements

Hey, everyone! Sorry for not posting in a while, but I now have a few things to update you on. I've tested my mods for the last patch, and have a couple other announcements related to Patreon and where I'm at in terms of modding.

The Oct. 11th Patch

First and foremost, all of my mods seem to be compatible with the October 11th patch, with some caveats:

• Bad Translations is now slightly out of date and will be missing some strings, but since this is a joke mod, I'm not prioritizing updating it.
• Show Sim Info is still experiencing some issues, many of which have already been reported. Most prominently, this includes an issue where filtering sims by relationship actually filters them by gender instead. This is not a new issue, but I just wanted to let you know that I am aware of it.

I understand that people have been waiting for me to fix the existing issues in Show Sim Info, and I appreciate your patience – I will explain why it's taking so long in the following section.

Where I've been & where I'm going

I know that I've been a bit MIA lately (no Patreon posts, no mod updates, no updates to S4TK or any new modding tools...), and I'd like to apologize for that. The truth is, I am very burnt out from The Sims, and I'm just not as interested in working on mods or tools as I was just a couple of months ago.

I have not been making much progress on anything Sims-related, and that's why I have not had a dev diary post in about a month. This makes me feel rather guilty, since I have you guys supporting me here on Patreon, and the guilt is certainly not helping in terms of bringing my motivation back.

It's time for a break...

So, I'm officially taking a break from modding. I should have announced this sooner, since I've essentially been on a break for about a month, but later is better than never. I want to be clear – I am not leaving modding forever, I just need a break until my motivation comes back. I've been a fan of The Sims since I was a child, I'm a software developer outside of The Sims community, and I'm very active in the TS4 modding scene as well, so I'm sure it'll come back eventually.

I am very sorry to those of you who are looking forward to the things I've mentioned that I'm working on, such as the S4TK desktop app, updates to Language Barriers, the Simway mod, and the maintenance of Show Sim Info. These are projects that I am still interested in in the long term, I just cannot bring myself to work on them right now. If I forced myself to work on them, they would be half-assed, which is not how I like to do things.

I won't be "gone" gone

Even though I'll be taking a break from modding, I will still be around on Discord to respond to bug reports. If any of my mods break, or if any bugs in S4TK come up, I will fix them – I wouldn't leave you guys completely in the dust like that. I'm just not going to be working on new products or features for a while, might take longer to test after patches, and won't be looking into existing bugs in Show Sim Info.

Additionally, I'm still going to be working on other things while on this break. I have a whole list of things I want to learn, including new programming languages, 3D modeling, and more about video game development. To aid my learning and to keep me somewhat focused on The Sims, I'm going to be integrating TS4 into all of the things that I am learning. For instance, I'm creating serializers for various TS4 resources in the languages I'm learning (e.g. I just created a STBL parser in C the other day), and I will be sharing these with you all via the S4TK GitHub organization.

What this means for Patreon

While I won't have anything directly Sims-related to share with you for the immediate future, I will still be posting every now and then about the progress I'm making on these new learning goals of mine, and they will make up the content of my dev diaries going forward.

Finally, I want to say that I completely understand if you want to cancel, downgrade, or refund your pledges here on Patreon. Thank you guys for supporting me in the first place, it means a lot.