Hi All:
For a while now I have been using consecutive saves on my USB Thumb drive. I noticed when I was playing Skyrim that the game keeps consecutive saves and you can backtrack. This becomes important if your character dies off...and Skyrim is more of a blood and guts game.
The same principle works with Sims 3 though. If you save these files you can backtrack. I guess that becomes important when you move family members out.
Here's one scenario: I moved one son and his family out; then I played as a different household. When I returned to my main family, one of the Sons was GONE! He had died! I didn't even look for the urn. Story Progression! The son that died had the "Daredevil" trait, so he probably set himself on fire or something. It made me so mad that I just went back to a previous save and started from there!
The advantage is I can go and experiment totally with the game without losing my peeps!
This also could enable me to play several ongoing games.
So when I move the children out of the parent's home...(I have one very overcrowded house! There is a way to have more than 8 people in a house...total noise and confusion!) I can save a file for each child and play as them. What happens in the game with story progression won't match the other games but at least I will get to play each one and not just LOSE them!
I suppose I could go into Edit Town and save the family members of the other houses to the Library and pop them back in their houses with the right number of children. Then they can visit each other. The problem is they don't remember who their related to! They forget everyone who is not part of that household. (Twallan's Mastercontroller can change that tho.)
Not sure...don't want to let my kids go. I'll figure it out.
But I like having these saves. They're a great tool.
I also keep and Journal in the same folder, just a Sims3.rtf (rich text) file, to explain what I'm doing and what state the game is at when the file was saved. It helps me keep track of what each .sims3 file contains.
Marfaud