SimSheet (a sim-tracking program) [Now with Aspiration and LTW tracking!]

[Inge]

I'm not sure what you mean or how you want to express age?  It's not as simple as in a human where age=years since being delivered from mother.  If you need days left in agestage which is not related to how old the sim is (ie how many days he has lived) then I am going to have to ask Peter if he can add a field to the output (assuming he can find where it's coded which he hadn't done after spending an hour looking this morning).  And we have to check with the authors of the other database that it won't break their tool.

[rufio]

The way I measure the age in my program is the traditional years-since-birth method, but the age of a sim can get subtracted and added to depending on when they grow up and whether they drink elixer, etc.  So it's not literally the number of days they've been played, but the "place" they are on their own internal timeline.  So a teen can go to college at 19 sim days and immediately being 29 sim days old.  Or someone can drink elixer at 40 days old and go back to being 37.  Since the age transitions happen at particular places in the timeline, the "days until transition" would give me that information, but there might be something else that would work too.

[Inge]

Those Sim Days ages don't really mean anything to anyone with a customised game.  There are all manner of hacks that make lifestages longer or shorter, and what about people who play with ageing off?   I think the only useful information other than lifestage is days left - which is when they would definitely go up to the next stage unless the player does something about it (like using the aging off cheat, or getting a reward, or using a hack).   We'll have to try and get it for you in a form you can use.  But first, can you use what I already gave you to populate your database?  Because if not, then I am reluctant to ask Peter to waste time.

Also I was getting errors having the CSV produced from an entire hood - not sure if it ran out of memory or max filesize or what.  So I would appreciate knowing if any other reader here is using the CSV ok with the other Sims database tool?

[rufio]

Well, it's pretty easy to manipulate the numbers to make lifestages different lengths and represent aging off and so forth.  It's just easier to keep track of it as a single int, just in my program.  I can probably/definitely use what you gave me to get the rest of the info, and if there's no number for days until the end of the lifestage, I can just set it to the first day of the lifestage given in any case.

[Inge]

Or let the user edit it manually for now.

[rufio]

Well, they can already do that after the list is loaded.

One question, though - do you think this should be a full import of absolutely everyone in the neighborhood, or just playables, or a user-selected list?  I could do the first just to test it out, but for later I'm thinking some more elaborate interface where you could select just the sims you want.  At least, that's what I'd want.

[Inge]

I'll let everyone else answer that as I am unlikely to use this - I rarely play

[Kyna]

And we have to check with the authors of the other database that it won't break their tool.

Ooh, which other database?

If you mean Sims2DB, then it's SimPE import function hasn't worked since SimPE for Pets came out.  Pegasys stopped updating it before Pets.  Is there another database, and if so, WCIF?

[Inge]

No that's the one I meant.  So it was the exporting of the data from SimPE that broke was it?   And that's why she stopped doing Sims2DB?

[Kyna]

No.  She stopped playing sims.  Apparently she went over to Second Life or something.  Since she no longer plays the sims, she has no reason to update the database, which needs updating every time there's a new EP (with it's consequence of an updated SimPE).

SimPE didn't break Sims2DB, and that isn't why she stopped updating it.  It's the other way around.  The data import no longer functions for Sims2DB because she hasn't updated it.  The DB doesn't know what to do with all the new fields that came with Pets & later.

Before she locked her forum, but after she said she'd stopped updating, I asked her "if I load the SimPE CSV output into a spreadsheet, which fields would I need to delete to make it readable by Sims2DB".  She said it was far too complicated for a layperson to understand as apparently the fields in the CSV are all over the place (depending on which EP each character was last updated by), and refused to provide an answer.

[Inge]

In that case *assuming* that Peter can actually find the place in the source(!) we'll have to work with Rufio to provide to order the data he needs (I hope I have Rufio's gender correct).  So in that respect we would not be pro-active but only output the fields requested.  May be able to do something interactive - the database outputs a file and that contains the requests.  May be able to specify only certain sims in that case.

[J. M. Pescado]

Clearly, Pegasys has failed us. You must not!

[Roux]

Roux - actually, I can only let you change the lifestage lengths globally - keeping track of individual age transition times for different sims (if that's what you're asking about?) would be kind of nightmarish.  Would changing things globally help any?

Skirting the technobabble, since it's over my head. A global change wouldn't work for me, because the number of days they have as an adult is variable. As Inge said, what matters (at least in my customized game) is the life stage and the number of days they have in that stage. Age is just a number.

Well, they can already do that after the list is loaded.

One question, though - do you think this should be a full import of absolutely everyone in the neighborhood, or just playables, or a user-selected list?  I could do the first just to test it out, but for later I'm thinking some more elaborate interface where you could select just the sims you want.  At least, that's what I'd want.

I'd only want to track playables, but I could see scenarios where someone might want their townies as well. A selection interface would be ideal. What would be awesome would be to select playable/townie/NPC first (like with little checkboxes), then be presented with the list of sims, grouped by family or something. That way you wouldn't have to pick through a list of hundreds of characters to get the few dozen you want.

[rufio]

That's a good idea about the importing, Roux.  I don't think I could really do what you want with the differing lifestage lengths without having to rewrite how age is stored.  I guess you could always change the ages so that they are the right number of days away from Elderhood?

Inge, I'm not sure it'll be necessary to rewrite the CSV-making code to seriously change th order, etc., because after all, the data is tagged - I can just use Qt RegExps to match, say, "*Aspiration=(w*);*"  and extract the parenthesized text as the aspiration.  I just want to make sure that the data really is what I think it is.

And I actually am female, but I think it's probably my own damn fault for using a nick that ends in o.

[Inge]

But the CSV output is massively bloated (for a start labels should only be in the first row!) and is failing to finish without erroring even on my small test hood.  It needs rewriting anyway.  It's going to be faster and more reliable if it only outputs data that will be actually used.  Also there are loads of fields missing as it's not been updated for the last several EPs.  What's more it doesn't give you DaysLeft which all your potential users are going to want.

[rufio]

Well in that case, rewrite away.

My program currently needs this information:
1. Name
2. Age (days until age transition + lifestage would work fine)
3. Human/dog/cat etc
4. Vampire/zombie/etc
5. Aspiration (and now secondary asp for FT)
6. Alive/dead, and ghost color if applicable
7. Household (I might put this into the importing interface though, since all the different households need to be different strings and in the game they often aren't).
8. Townie/NPC status and/or presence in the adoption queue or being runaways.
9. Uni information (whether they are a YA, major, etc)

In the future, I'll also need information about Careers, Hobbies, and parents and children.  I don't know what the best way to make references to other sims in the list in a text file it - in my save files I just use the number of the other sim's position in the list as it appears in the file, but putting references to other sims in information having to do with sims at least means I'd have to run through the list a second time to connect up sims that came later in the list (if that makes any sense?).  Maybe the family information should come afterwards and be unassociated with the information for individual sims.

[rufio]

There's a new "version" up, the main difference in which is that you can specify which EPs you have.  The savefile is a slightly different format now; see the ETA in the first post.

[Inge]

NeighborID is probably the most reliable cross-reference to an individual Sim.

[rufio]

Then it'll have to include the NeighborIDs too.  I don't see any reason to use them beyond importing from the CSV, though, especially since the sims that aren't imported won't have them.

[Kyna]

Well, that depends on whether users of your program want to import SimPE data simply to add the sims, or if they also want to import to update the information on sims they have already added.

Personally, I'd like it if the data could be updated by the CSV.

Not sure if the following links will be useful for you or not.  I don't want to keep harping on Sims2DB, as I know you are not writing Sims2DB, you are writing something that suits your playing style.  But on the off chance these links are useful ...

Pegasys had several threads here about successive versions of Sims2DB.  Here's the second one.  I'm linking this one as it contains a lot of input from MATYzens regarding what we'd like to see in such a database.  This was before data could be imported from SimPE. 

After this thread the "what would you like to see" discussions took place at her forum which no longer exists.

Sims2DB is still available at MTS2, although I haven't read the discussion there.  Wow, I hadn't realised it had been 2 years since it was last updated.

[rufio]

Alright, since people seem to want that or at least be used to that from Sims2DB.  None of this will get written anyway, though, until I can see what the new CSV is going to look like.

[Inge]

I already told you - you spec it.  It's for *your* tool so you say how you need it.  Make yourself a test one, and when it works, pass it to me as the template.

[Li'l Brudder]

Hey, Inge, I think I might take the character file reader idea farther.  How is the character file data structured?

[rufio]

Ok, well, this is how I would do it, more or less:

"Jeanine Bren",NID,Female,Adult,5,Knowledge,None,Alive,White,Human,Normal,"Bren",Playable,"Literature"

The first quoted section is the full name.
NID is where you put the NeighborID.
"Adult,5" means "adult, 5 days until elder".  This can of course be replaced with "53" which is the actual number of days old as I track it.
The "None" is where the secondary Aspiration goes.
The "White" is the ghost color.  It's irrelevant for living sims, so some kind of default value can go there for them.
Human = Human/Small Dog/Large Dog/Cat
Normal is the set of paranormal qualities.  So you could have "Alien" or "Vampire-Alien-Zombie", etc.  I use a single integer for all those flags in my savefiles, but I think this should be more human-readable.
The next quoted section is the household name.  Different households should have different names.
Playable = Playable/Townie/NPC
The last quoted section is the past or present major.

I don't have a test function to parse this, but it's based off my own function for reading sim data in from the CSV format in the savefiles, so it should work just fine on my end.  Would this work for you?

[Inge]

Rufio, best to start with the NID as that would be the unique identifier.  If you want the other values translated before they reach you, that can be done, but of course it will lead to a much bigger file and be slower to read and write.  Ideally your tool would take care of its own translation - and then it can be adapted for other languages more easily.  The sim's name of course obviously stored as a string, but the problem with the CVS passing you that string, is that it will be the American name, and not necessarily the name your user knows the sim by.  You might be better off just taking the NID and opening the character file yourself to get the right name out - unless the initial query does take language as a parameter of course.

Lil'Brudder, as far as I know the only relevant info in the character file is the name - for the purposes of this database.  (The rest of the stuff is mainly genetic details).  All the stuff about their aspirations and skill levels etc is in the neighborhood file.