Less Pet Warfare

[J. M. Pescado]

As tested by Fat Gwilly People, now possible to keep more than one pet without them immediately fighting and running away.


lesspetwarfare.zip

Less Pet Warfare for TS2Pets
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado)

Congratulations to: Draklixa!

Special Thanks To:
Hobbsee the Scrawny Pencil Neck
Fat, Hairy-Bellied Ness
Rohina the Ugly Butted
Fat Gwilly People

INSTRUCTIONS:
Place in your MYDOCU~1\EAGAME~1\THESIM~1\DOWNLO~1 directory.

FEATURES:
Adds rel-level sanity checks to hostile pet interactions. Pets should no longer
repeatedly attempt to kill each other for no apparently sane reason and then
run away despite having high rel.

COMPATIBILITY:
This hack is fully compatible with all FFS hacks. For TS2Pets.

SIDE EFFECTS:
May cause computer damage, incontinence, explosion of user's head, coma, death,
and/or halitosis.

WARNING:
Do not open, crush, dispose of in fire, put in backwards, short-circuit, or mix
with non-awesome hacks - may explode, leak, or catch fire, resulting in injury
and/or death.

[professorbutters]

BAH BAH BAH BAH BAH.  This was driving me insane.  I just had to give away a Sim cat to Dagmar Bertino because she and her son were fighting and driving down the relationship for no reason at all.  My people Sims loved her and now they all have a big fat unfulfillable "Snow Mau joins the family" want.  So this will come in handy down the line.

Any idea why cats always try to Run Away the day they're promoted--needs high, relationships high, doesn't matter?  Other than the fact that the very idea of cats working is obscene?

PB

[Zazazu]

Is shiny.

How about pets running away despite the fact that their relationships are nearly 100/100 with all family members just because a stray beats them up? I had one like that who it took me four generations to get back, and he promptly died the day after being added back into the family.

[Kitiara]

Pets suck. Kill 'em all.

[Tigerlilley]

Why did you bother posting?

[professorbutters]

I hope this isn't technically necromancy, but I don't see anyone else discussing the particular mod. 

I have had it in since it was posted.  It doesn't seem to prevent the kinds of constant "challenges" and borderline fights with consequent Pet Relationship Damage and potential for Running Away.  (Also, heaven forbid my pets should meet a LOTP.  *Instant* RunAway, only stopped by pausing the game and temporarily enabling cancelpetactions and controlpetson.)  For some reason, my adult pets always pick fights with their parents.  The cats live in a special room with at least one bed, bowl, and toys per pet, plus a couple of snaps.   There doesn't seem to be any way of "assigning" them a bed or a bowl--they just think any bowl or bed some other Pet is using is theirs.  Then there is a Challenge and hissing, and pretty soon the relationship is dipping into the negatives.

I just wanted to report back on what's happening with this and asking if there's something I should or should not do to prevent the challenges, fights, and relationship damage.

PB

[J. M. Pescado]

Increase their rel to each other and the fighting should stop.

[jsalemi]

There doesn't seem to be any way of "assigning" them a bed or a bowl--they just think any bowl or bed some other Pet is using is theirs. 

There are assignable pet beds -- I'm pretty sure Inge has some over on www.simlogical.com.

[Avalikia]

After encountering my dog's OCD style desire to chase his mother, I added this hack.  (He already chased his father completely off the lot.)  There is no change in his behavior with this hack, despite the fact that their relationship is at Pack level (which I managed to obtain using cheats - he autonomously tries to chase her pretty much any time he has nothing in his queue and no pressing needs).  There's isn't any Maxian dumb-code encouraging dogs to be hostile to relatives, is there? 

[Nec]

I am thinking it must depend on their personality. I had two dogs that were 100/100 pack and they ended up being -100/-100  enemies, and one ran away, within two sim weeks. Aggressive and/or independent pets must have some behavior that overrides this hack.

[J. M. Pescado]

After encountering my dog's OCD style desire to chase his mother, I added this hack.  (He already chased his father completely off the lot.)  There is no change in his behavior with this hack, despite the fact that their relationship is at Pack level (which I managed to obtain using cheats - he autonomously tries to chase her pretty much any time he has nothing in his queue and no pressing needs).  There's isn't any Maxian dumb-code encouraging dogs to be hostile to relatives, is there?

No, but I can tighten the condition check AGAIN, I suppose. Stupid EAxis.

[Avalikia]

It seems that my game is intent on testing this hack; another puppy from a different family grew up and is exhibiting similar behavior, and it's now being compulsively aggressive to the other dog in the household.  Actually, after further observation of both cases, it seems that these two individual dogs are overly hostile to all other pets.  They both have aggressive personalities, but both have been trained since puppyhood to be playful and I have a lot of dogs in this neighborhood that are aggressive personality/trained to be playful - they behave completely differently.  For example, all the other dogs in the neighborhood will sniff or even play with the mailman but these two chase the mailman.  Both of these dogs have clone-like siblings who are quite pleasant, actually.  Maybe I should be reporting this as a bug, but it's weird because this is now the second dog with this problem so it's not like a one-off borked pet, I have no other pet related hacks, and you'd think this hack would do something.

[J. M. Pescado]

Should be fixed now.

[Avalikia]

I tested the latest edition on my original hostile dog today; no change.  What can/should I do now?

[J. M. Pescado]

I tested the latest edition on my original hostile dog today; no change.  What can/should I do now?

You're certain there was no change? Do they HATE each other? Try improving their relationship towards each other?

[Avalikia]

If they were Sims, they'd be best friends at this point.  The other two I referred to before would be friends (with a positive ltr too - I've bred them to eachother, actually).  I should say that I'm not allowing either hostile dog to actually act upon it; I've been playing with petactioncancel on and cancelling all the "chase" actions that keep popping up - it requires constant monitoring the whole time the dog is awake, but it means their relationship isn't suffering at all.  So yeah, no change.

Edit: Oh, and for the record, yes I'm sure that I actually did get the new version and not a cached version of the old one, and yes I manually checked to make sure it's in proper location on my computer.

[J. M. Pescado]

Force an error the next time this happens and attach the log.

[Avalikia]

Okay, here you go.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[J. M. Pescado]

Can I get a screenshot of the relations panel?

[Avalikia]

I can do better than that.  Here's a screenshot of Soot's relationship panel while she's autonomously growling when she clearly shouldn't be.

[J. M. Pescado]

Is this dog an adopted wolf? Because it looks like it might be a wolf, which therefore means "retained undesirable NPC behaviors".

[Avalikia]

No, this dog was born-in-game.  One of her parents was a wolf, the other parent was born-in-game and the offspring of two wolves.  The other dog in the picture is a wolf.  The black dog at the very end of the relationship panel is her littermate.  All of the aforementioned dogs/wolves are all rather nice and don't go chasing around other dogs/wolves.  The only other hostile dog/wolf in the neighborhood happens to be her uncle, who was also born-in-game.

[J. M. Pescado]

Are we talking about pets from the same fambly? Less Pet Warfare only covers pets in the same fambly. Foreign visitors are irrelevant.

[Avalikia]

As depicted above, Soot's favorite victim is Pooka and they're in the same family.  The other aggressor's favorite victim is his mother, who lives in the same family.  They're both also much more aggressive to visitors than the other dogs/wolves in the neighborhood, but I don't see that as much of a problem - in fact I find that hilarious.

The way these two behave is distinctly and obviously different from all the others, but I'm a relatively smart person and I still see no reason why.  It makes me think they're borked somehow, except they'd both have to be borked in the same exact way and individual borkedness is usually a one-off event - I don't believe it's a neighborhood meltdown because I've behaved myself with this particular neighborhood, which is relatively new with less than 100 character files.  It's really quite baffling.

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, I am at a complete loss to understand exactly why these two specific pets behave unusually. The only explanation I can think of is that the behaviors are launched externally somehow, and thus bypass the standard check trees. Try controlpetsing them and seeing if the action to order the behavior manually exists? If the menu option appears when it normally shouldn't be occurring, something else is at work. If the menu option does not appear but the behavior occurs anyway, something is externally launching it.