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

[rufio]

This is neat!

I tried it out, and added some of my sims, but I ran into a few issues related to my gameplay style.

1) My first born-in-game sim in my hood is a spawned plantsim, but that isn't an option in the New Sims and Pets events. Spawned plantsims start out as toddlers - no baby stage - and then from toddlers age directly into adults, so this makes a big difference with the age calculation.

You need to go to the Settings and check next to all the EPs you have - the options for EP-specific events/etc. don't show up otherwise.  If check next to Seasons, there is a plantbaby event, provided you have plantsims to spawn from.

2) My second born-in-game sim is the result of the PregnancyForAll hack, and has two mothers instead of a father and a mother, but that isn't possible to add with your interface. I have other sims with two fathers.

Since a lot of people use TJ's hacks, I intend to make options to make the program cooperate with PregnanyForAll, etc, but I'm working on other stuff at the moment and it's not there yet.  You can always type in the second mother's name in the dialog in the appropriate place - the baby will have someone else listed as a parent, but the event will say the right thing and you can change the baby's parents in the family tab.

3) My rotation is one full season. Would it be possible to add something to the time-sensitive events to know which day out of the rotation an event happened on? So if I set a rotation to be 5 days, it would ask for day ____/5. This would make the aging calculation more precise.

It actually doesn't matter when they grow up in the rotation as far as the calculation is concerned - they still age 5 days in the five-day rotation whether they grow up during that time or not.  The only thing is whether they grow up before six PM or not; it the former case they just lose a day.  If you want to specify the exact day for aesthetic purposes and keeping the events in order, though, I can do that after I get done with the rest of the tabs (and the importing from SimPE stuff I'm doing now).

[rufio]

You need to go to the Settings and check next to all the EPs you have - the options for EP-specific events/etc. don't show up otherwise.  If check next to Seasons, there is a plantbaby event, provided you have plantsims to spawn from.

Is that under the New sim menu? I had Seasons checked.

Yeah, if you have Seasons checked there should be a "new plantbaby" (or something along those lines) even in the New Sims and Pets category on the update page.  I'm in the wrong OS right now, but I'll reboot to verify that it's there. [ETA: Just checked, and the event is there.]

If baby 1 is born on day 1/5, and baby 2 is born on day 5/5, and then the rotation is ended, they will be considered the exact same age unless manually edited. Baby 1 will age up to toddler during the first rotation, but baby 2 will still be a baby at the end of the rotation - but SimSheet assumes they age up on the same day.

Yeah, you're right about that.  I use a one-day rotation, so I don't notice stuff like this.     I'll fix it for the next update; for now you can just adjust their ages manually.

[rufio]

At long last, I come bearing an update.  However, this one should be considered to be in testing, for a variety of reasons:
- I added some major new features, over a long period of time and I'm sure there are things I forgot to fix in the mean time.
- I changed some old code, and I've probably forgotten enough about how it works that I may have accidentally broken something.
- The Aspiration Tab is still under construction, and I don't feel that should really go in a "polished" release.
- The new SimPE import feature requires a version of SimPE that has not been publicly released.
- There are still some minor issues I have to work out with Inge.

Anyway, what this means is that if you want to download SimSheet (savefile version 0.5) and the new un-released version of SimPE that it needs in order to import sims, you'll have to send me a message or email me (email might work better, since I have a pretty small inbox here).  In spite of what I said above, I really don't believe that the program is more likely to contain errors than the previous versions, but it doesn't hurt to be careful anyway.  The worst thing that will happen is that your data will get lost, but probably not much of it as the program automagically makes a backup whenever you open a file, and as long as you save periodically it shouldn't be a problem.

Some notes about this new version of SimPE:  Inge has strongly advised me that I (and anyone else who downloads it) should under no circumstances use it for anything other than testing SimSheet.  In the event, you won't even have to start it yourself; you just need to tell SimSheet where to find it on your disk and it should do the rest.  When you import, you will also be given a choice of neighborhood by the name of the subfolder of the Neighborhoods folder (e.g. N001, N002, etc.)  Inge says that Castaway Stories and whatnot also have N001s, so you should probably only load a neighborhood that is unique to your TS2 (at least until the issue is sorted) or SimPE might get confused.

Anyway, there are two main new features in 0.5:

#1: Importing sims from SimPE
There is now an option on the List Management Dialog to import from the TS2 neighborhood files via SimPE.  You must have the correct version of SimPE installed for this to work (I will give you a link).  You will have to specify where on your disk the SimPE.exe file is located, and a neighborhood to import from, and click "Import".  (The default location is "C:\Program Files\SimPE\" but you can set it to something else in Settings.)  There will then be a few minutes while SimPE compiles a list of the data for all the sims in that neighborhood, then a few popups from SimSheet telling you how many sims there were, and then you will get a dialog which lists all of your sims next to little check marks, at five sims a page, divided into Playable, Townie and NPC sections.  Because it would be a royal pain to get the information for which sims are paranormal creatures out of SimPE, you'll have to specify it yourself, in the dialog.  You also get the option to change the name of the household, because SimSheet considers sims that live in households with the same name to be living in the same household and you might want to change that.  After you've checked off all the sims you want to import and set their additional information correctly, click on the "Import" button, and there will be a brief pause while the program imports all the sims.  I would recommend importing dead sims and townie/npc sims who have contributed genes to playables, as otherwise the family trees will not be intact.  ETA: Another issue with the importing is that Inge has not yet figured out how it is that the game calculates the ages of Elders, so for now SimSheet assumes that your Elders are slated to die at 84 days (IIRC, the oldest possible age) so your imported Elders might be slightly older than they are in your game and you'll have to fix them manually if it bothers you.

#2: Filters!
Once upon a time I tried to make it possible to filter sims, but because of Windoze phail I had to take it out.  It finally annoyed me enough not having the filters than I reimplemented them.  The way I did it is something of a hack, and it causes a half second or so of lag when updating the display, but hopefully it's not too bad.  If you click on the Filter button, you'll get a dialog with a lot of checkboxes, which are all checked by default.  Unchecking a box will block all sims with that characteristic from being displayed.  Checking a box does not necessarily mean that all sims with that characteristic will be displayed, as they may be blocked by other characteristics whose boxes are unchecked.

#3: Miscellaneous Other Crap
Including, (but I'm probably forgetting something) witches and their alignments, fixing the bug that alegria found, adding some new events on the update page.  It does not include hobbies.  Hobbies will come when I get the GUI on the Aspiration Tab to stop driving up the wall.

I'm especially interested to see how well the Family Tab handles very large families, so if someone wants to import their gigantic hood and take a shot of the family tab for me, I'd appreciate it.  If you want to help me test, or just want to use the new import feature, send me a message or an email and I'll get you the links.

[Inge]

- There are still some minor issues I have to work out with Inge.

Lol!!!  You'll have people buying popcorn...

[ingeli]

I will certainly test, I would also love for the possibility to export selected data from SimPE to other databases (for me its my SharePointServerList/Access DB).

[Inge]

Actually it might be useful to air the "issue" here as we reached a stalemate.

SimPE provides Rufio with "days left in current lifestage".  She wants actual days old either instead or as well.  We did actually discuss this earlier in the thread, and we persuaded Rufio that days left in current age were more importand than actual life duration.

Now, it's not that Peter minds also supplying total days old, but neither of us know how to find that information.  Any ideas?

[tunaisafish]

As I see it, if there isn't a field in the simdata that records how many days they've lived, then you don't export it.
I wouldn't expect an export function in SimPE to make stuff like that up, or guess.

Bob becomes an elder in 7 days means everything to anyone that plays.
We all know the if we keep Bob happy he can pull magic juice from his butt and put off becoming an elder indefinately.

[rufio]

The specific issue is the age of elders - because there are different numbers of days in the elder stage for different sims, "X days until death" does not give a universal single age.  That's also not how it's displayed in the game - if you hover over an elder's age bar, it'll show "70 days old" or something along those lines.  I don't have a problem using days until transition for the other age groups; I just want to be able to get that "70 days old" number that the game has come up with somehow.

[Inge]

Why do you think the value is relevant to anything though?  It doesn't tell you their actual age in days does it?  I think it's just calculated at runtime based on the age in days at which elder usually starts, plus the length in days it usually lasts, minus days left.

[rufio]

I'd imagine it's relevant to people who want to keep track of how long their elders live, and to people like me who get OCD over how old all of their sims are.  (Why do you think I made this program?)  It's not a big deal, it just feels incomplete without it.  If the game calculates this at runtime, what numbers does it use?  It can't be the same for every sim, since they all die at different ages.

[Inge]

Presumably you have researched this in-game as thoroughly as you can, so you can probably throw more light on it than I can, as it's not something I have taken much interest in.  What age in days is an elder reported as being when they first age up?  Or if they are all different ages, then what age range have you seen, for the day of becoming an elder?

[rufio]

I never remember to check when the adults I actually play age into elders, but I did go into a test neighborhood and age up a sim from toddler to elder with debug cheats to verify the number of days to transition, etc.  The sim was reported as being "54 days old" when it transitioned to elder.  If you add up the number of days in all the transitions to that point (i.e. 3 + 4 + 8 + 14 + 29) you actually get 58, which makes me think that the game somehow does not count the three days of babyhood in the sim's age.  (Now that I look at my program, though, there seems to be an off-by-one error here as it lists a game-age of 54 to be equivalent to 59 days.  Will look into it.  ETA: Fixed.)  As I said, I haven't paid much attention when my playable adults age to elder, but I seem to recall similar numbers.  I've seen elders die at anywhere from 74 to 84 days old.

ETA: Actually they seem to be missing 4 days, so that's either babyhood + 1 day, or they started counting at 1 instead of 0.  My math skillz, let me show you them.

[Inge]

So what about Sims who have had extra days in normal adulthood due to elixir etc, or sims in games where the player has had a hack to alter the relative lengths of each age?  I don't think days since birth are stored anywhere in the game, I think it is stored as days left like in all the other ages, but calculated to be expressed as age so that the death will not be so predictable in the game.

In order for you to perform the same calculation, you will need to ask the player to input the number of days in each age stage that they are playing with (you can store some internal defaults for the convenience of those players who are not using a hacked agecons).   You can do that for them then.

[rufio]

So what about Sims who have had extra days in normal adulthood due to elixir etc, or sims in games where the player has had a hack to alter the relative lengths of each age?

I don't know; I didn't think elixer would have any effect on the number days at which someone becomes an elder, but clearly I am not on the same wavelength as the game when it comes to aging.  I'll do some more experiments.  As for the aging hacks, I don't have any so I'm just assuming that they work as expected (and the sim winds up elderfying at Toddler Stage + Child Stage + Teen Stage + Adult Stage + 1 as in the default).

ETA:  Just did an experiment with 4 adult sims.  Aged them up five days using insim, then had two of them drink Elixer.  Then used insim to age them all up to Elder.  They were all listed as 54 days old.  Did the experiment again with no Elixer and everyone in low green aspiration (I put everyone in platinum for the first experiment so the Elixer would work).  Same result.

In order for you to perform the same calculation, you will need to ask the player to input the number of days in each age stage that they are playing with (you can store some internal defaults for the convenience of those players who are not using a hacked agecons).   You can do that for them then.

Right now I just have the defaults.  I do plan to give an option to configure the number of days in each lifestage (or set different lengths for different sims) but that's going to involve many complicated and no doubt frustrating GUI objects so I'm putting it off for the moment.

[tunaisafish]

Right now I just have the defaults.  I do plan to give an option to configure the number of days in each lifestage (or set different lengths for different sims) but that's going to involve many complicated and no doubt frustrating GUI objects so I'm putting it off for the moment.

Have you thought about a config file for these constants?
If you don't have one yet then that may be just as much work as GUI, but you can probably think of more to put in there.
I'm sure that the people that edit their BCON's to change the defaults wouldn't mind editing a textfile.

Each drink of elixir adds up to 3 days to the 'days left' field, but won't age them down a level.  I don't think there's a way to track that automatically.
From what I remember, the time until death for elders varies dependant on how they lived their life.  I think the constants for these bonus days are in the same BCON that controls the span of each lifestage.

Looking forward to playing with this program when I have more time

[rufio]

Have you thought about a config file for these constants?

Not really, to be honest.  I complain about making GUIs, but the truth is that I love making stuff that looks cute and user-friendly.  Besides, if I make config files, then I have to use them when I do testing and as it is I'm already building up 10-15+ text files open simultaneously and forgetting which ones are which and accidentally opening ones that I already have open getting complaints from gvim.

Each drink of elixir adds up to 3 days to the 'days left' field, but won't age them down a level.  I don't think there's a way to track that automatically.

I don't use a lot of elixer in my game so I haven't wound up testing it very much, but I know that and the program should be able figure it out.

Looking forward to playing with this program when I have more time

Thanks.   I seem to only do updates when something else big is going on, don't I?  The last one came out the day AL came out, and this one is on election day.  Everyone's probably watching the news.

[coralleane]

Can't believe I didn't notice this was updated yet (..never can that notify function to work correctly).  I'd love to test it out, I'm dropping you an email to get it, rufio. 

Edited to add:  Got it now, but whenever I try to import, I get an error message that says "cannot find output file.  Check that you are using the AL version of SimPE" - I'm using the one included in the email.  Presumably I'm being dense and have missed a step somewhere along the line.  I went into settings in SimSheet and changed the location of SimPE to the location where I've got the test version installed, and ticked the expansion packs that I have (which is all of them).  My understanding of rufio's post was that I wouldn't need to load SimPE at all, simply tell it to import, so that was what I did next, but all I get is the error message.  Suggestions?   

[rufio]

Is your game installed on the C drive?  SimSheet looks for C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Rufio\ExportedSims.txt, which is the file that SimPE is supposed to create.  If it doesn't find it, you get that error.  Either that, or you've directed SimSheet to the wrong version of SimPE, which didn't know to create the file.  If SimPE created the file, but put it somewhere SimSheet didn't know to look for it, then just create the path above and move it there.  I'll try to fix it so that in the future it knows to look on other drives, too.

[Inge]

If SimPE created the output file you should find a folder called My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Rufio and there should be a couple of other folders and a text file under it.  Are those there?

[coralleane]

Is your game installed on the C drive?  SimSheet looks for C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Rufio\ExportedSims.txt, which is the file that SimPE is supposed to create.  If it doesn't find it, you get that error.  Either that, or you've directed SimSheet to the wrong version of SimPE, which didn't know to create the file.  If SimPE created the file, but put it somewhere SimSheet didn't know to look for it, then just create the path above and move it there.  I'll try to fix it so that in the future it knows to look on other drives, too.

If SimPE created the output file you should find a folder called My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Rufio and there should be a couple of other folders and a text file under it.  Are those there?

Okay, sorted.  The game is on the C: drive - however, because it was only a test version of SimPE, I installed *that* in the EA Games folder under My Documents, which is where I run a few other Sims programs from.  I didn't realise it would cause an issue, but what happened was that it created the list in My Documents/EA Games/SimPETEST/Rufio instead of in the TS2 folder (which would be My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/).  Moving the folder manually seems to have worked so far; the character list has come up and it's time to wade through the list.  So in summary, not having it in a top level folder seems to have been the problem.  Thank you both for your help.

[rufio]

Ok, newly update version of SimSheet should be able to detect ouput files on whatever drive, as long as they're in the EA Games\The Sims 2\ directory.  Testers, please redownload.

[coralleane]

Yep, that's sorted it.  Also, behold my twisted family:

http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties.jpg

Actually, having just looked at one of his children's family ties page I think I have spotted a problem - unfortunately due to some sloppiness I have two Sims called "Alice Marener" and two called "Martin Marener".  Instead of reporting two Alices and two Martins in the family ties, it *seems* to be counting the two Sims as one.  Not sure if this is a known problem yet. 

http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties-bon.jpg

http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties-leo.jpg

Leo (the second example) was the son of the first Martin Marener and the father of the second one.  SimSheet reports him as both Father/Son.  The less said about poor Bonnie's family ties the better, I suppose, but if you look at Martin's line, it's reporting four different relationships, whereas most of the rest of her relatives have only two.  I think. (Except Casey, whose existence is partially responsible for the fuckery in the first place since he was the product of an irresponsible fling between two first cousins once removed... the rest is due to her father, who is Casey's half-brother, marrying his second cousin Jemma, who, incidentially, is Casey's first cousin.. and second cousin once removed.) Bonnie's ties are a thing of.. perverse beauty.  I can't stop staring.   

(Moral of the story: stop making cousins breed, idiot!)

Actually, looking back over this, I'm frankly amazed the program coped with this on *any* level.  My brain certainly can't.  But I *think* the double name thing is a problem.  I've tried manually editting the names on the first list-of-sims tab and it doesn't seem to have made a difference.  Off to fiddle more.. I've just had an idea.

[rufio]

Yep, that's sorted it.  Also, behold my twisted family:

http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties.jpg

Thanks for posting that.  It is gloriously twisted, and also I can see some bugs in there - his wife should be at the top of the list and instead she is at the bottom, and the Great-Great Grandfather relationship (with Martin Marener) should be listed before First Cousin, Twice Removed.

Actually, having just looked at one of his children's family ties page I think I have spotted a problem - unfortunately due to some sloppiness I have two Sims called "Alice Marener" and two called "Martin Marener".  Instead of reporting two Alices and two Martins in the family ties, it *seems* to be counting the two Sims as one.  Not sure if this is a known problem yet.

Yeah, the family tab just sets up the chart with names and corresponding relationships, not references to sims.  I was kind of hoping it wouldn't be an issue, but I probably should fix it.  I don't think it'll be very hard to change; it's just that I had to write four inter-recursive functions for that page and I wanted to make the easy parts easier on me at the time.

Leo (the second example) was the son of the first Martin Marener and the father of the second one.  SimSheet reports him as both Father/Son.  The less said about poor Bonnie's family ties the better, I suppose, but if you look at Martin's line, it's reporting four different relationships, whereas most of the rest of her relatives have only two.  I think.

Yeah, it's definitely not possible to be someone's Great-Great-Grandfather and their Great-Great-Great-Grandfather at the same time, to say nothing of the First Cousins varying times removed.  Actually, it is possible, if she was descended from him multiple ways.... oh jesus.   

Interestingly, are there two Auryns too, or is that just a really strange relationship?  She would have to be directly descended from both Auryn herself and one of Auryn's siblings.  There are a few others on there that look suspect to me (Curtis?  I don't know what to think of Casey, who in any case should be listed as Uncle before Cousin.) and there's definitely some generation-hopping going on in there.  Beautiful.  My family trees are disappointingly boring in comparison.
 

Actually, looking back over this, I'm frankly amazed the program coped with this on *any* level.  My brain certainly can't.  But I *think* the double name thing is a problem.  I've tried manually editting the names on the first list-of-sims tab and it doesn't seem to have made a difference.  Off to fiddle more.. I've just had an idea.

Yeah, those shouldn't be editable - it's just a display.  Have to fix that too.

And thanks for the compliment.  You should see the inter-recursive functions I had to write (in the familypage.cpp source file, if you're initerested).  It took a while for my brain to get around those too.

[Inge]

You need to always handle the sims through their NID, only looking up name for display purposes.  The NID is always unique.

[rufio]

Sims that are entered by hand do not have an NID, so that doesn't work except when importing from SimPE.  Anyway, the table on the family tab is for display purposes.  Sims with the same name are not actually listed as having the same relationships in the actual data - it's just wrongly displayed that way.

ETA: New version uploaded, which should fix the problem of sims with the same name being displayed as having the same relationships.  Since this is just a display issue, you don't have to reimport anything.