My computer has been in the repair shop for a week and I finally got it back yesterday. Because of its sudden onset of problems, I was unable to pause my games before I took the computer to the shop. I fully expected that when I checked in on them yesterday that all 5 families would have progressed to the point where the older peeps had grown old and died, the children reached age 19 and went off to college, or they died of starvation. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they all were pretty much where I had left them and only a few "years" of time had passed. The children who were nursing when I left them last week were now about 5-6 years old. I guess time must have stopped for my families while the computer was being worked on.


I did think it was cute though that once I went to visit each family, they immediately sent me an e-mail asking me where I had been, that they had been feeling neglected. LOL

Welcome back Jenny!

I'm really glad to hear that your family isn't doing too badly! A year for the game is 3 hours and 30 minutes so after a week your families really shouldn't have been there, you really lucked out!

It's kind of weird though, because the game saves the last time you had it open and then when you open it again it applies all the time that has gone by. It only applied about 22 hours

Make sure you check that your computer's time is correct, sometimes that will make the game act a little bit odd.

Oh well, not going to continue questioning good fortune too much Best of luck with your little families!

This could have happened if they had to take the battery out of the computer for the repair. Not sure if it would work that way or not but it is a theory.

I thought about that too, but the game doesn't really run when it is closed, a time is just recorded in the save game files and it calculates how much time has passed according to the current time of the computer. Unless they messed with the game by opening it, it shouldn't have been affected

Usually a battery will only reset the date and time if you switch it to a new one, but who knows what they did, Lol. Make sure to check your date and time Jenny!

I could be completely wrong though!

If you do see that the date and time is not correct, make sure you pause your families and exit the game before correcting it. Time does not pass when the families are paused.

I noticed on my day off I go into my game first thing in the morning and when the mom had a baby the night before the kid is 3 years old. Thats after say 11 to 12 hours. When I had a mom with a baby and not played my game for say 24 hours and I play and find the kid is age 3. So I think that it does not matter how long you leave the game as I beleave that game is created to slow right down. So I beleave LDW have done a great job in case of emegenceis IE computer break downs etc. So als well that ends well

PS Oh another thing the more often you play the game the faster they grow older like if one player decideds to play every few hour, during the day time, say morning then noon then evening. They will have aged slightly faster than you would if played every 24 hours. I only play my game once a day now and the family live a lot longer age slower. Now that I know what happens after reading this post I might play it every 48 hours but I make sure they got lots of food first and all healthy.

I just ran a little test to see what happens after the game has been unattended for a week..

The family with a nursing mother had an extremely disgustingly messy house but the daughter was only 4 years old.. which means the correct amount of time was applied, but it only affected the house itself as opposed to the people in it. I forgot to check the fridge to see how much food was left in it though >_<

The other family that has a married couple with the wife not nursing also had an extremely dirty house and lost about 1100 units of food.

I think you're on to something Ann, that's a wonderful feature for the game! Thanks so much LDW.

Also, I'm running version .05 from BigFishGames, perhaps it helps to know which versions this applies to since there have been weird differences in games from differentiating companies.

Thank you, Lyssaria. I am running version 1.00.05. I got the game from LDW. My computer date/time is correct. Of course, the tech may have reset it when he was done repairing the computer if it was incorrect.

All my houses were very messy when I returned to them last night. Lots of wrappers, socks and dirt smudges, and of course the lawns were full of weeds. It took awhile to clean some of them up, as one family had 4 members and the rest were all less. In fact, since I knew it would take the one lady awhile, I married her off to the next guy who proposed, so then hubby could help too. And one couple were elderly and moving quite slowly and all the kids were gone off to college, so I left the mess until they died and let the next generation clean it up, lol.

That proves it then, the game was designed to have time have a slower effect on your peeps depending on how long you are gone. A year should be 3.5 hours, but if you don't long in for a week a year could be more like 48 hours or something lol.

The problem is that the mess in the house and yard will still pile up, and the food will go away depending on how long you're gone. Not sure what would happen if you come back and all the food is gone.. would they pass away from starvation or would slower time have saved them?

Jenny, I think part of the reason your peeps didn't age more was that when the computer was down so was the clock. That gave an effect of their being on pause. I'm glad your families survived.

Thank you, Lewanda. As was discussed above, even though the peeps did not age much, the house/lawn accumulated a lot of clutter during that same time frame. Dunno why things happened as they did, but glad I didn't have to start over. I at least expected to be at the point of starting a new generation for each family--the ones who had kids, that is.

When we were going through different versions of the game I save some families between the version .02 and .03. Later I deleted those families from my game. Then one day (much more than just a few weeks later)I found the folder where I'd saved their files and thought I'd see if they were still alive since I didn't know back then to pause them before saving. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all still alive...even though some were sick. They didn't have much groceries left, and the houses were nasty but all were alive.

The same thing happened to me.

I was 2 or 3 generations ahead of a backup file I found on a pendrive. I decided to see how things were, just for the fun of it, and to my suprise they were all alive - some were a bit sick (not gravely ill though) and the house was dirty - but that was all.