How can we de-lard fat townies?

[Doc Doofus]

I'm not asking for a mod.  I'm asking, is there a way with the utilities at hand?

Here's the latest failed technique that I tried.  Select fat townie using awesomemod.  Direct them to the 24-hour spa treadmill.  Go back to playing my fambly.  Check on the 24 hour spa a couple of days later... AND...  The fat townie is still on the treadmill, and still just as fat as when she started!  In other words, weight loss can't occur unless the townie is selected WHILE she is exercising.  What a pain.

So, next I tried the following: Wait until midnight, when The Fambly I'm playing is put to bed for the night.  Select the fat townie again and make her exercise until dawn.  Tada, that works!  BUT...  When I go back to my fambly, I find that their motives have not refreshed overnight, even though they were in bed, and they are too worn out to perform at work or school.   Not good.  But better.  At least I can fix their motives.

Any thoughts?

[Heinel]

I used the body sculptor on Malcolm Landgraab.  So far he has not reverted.

[J. M. Pescado]

Any thoughts?

The reason you're seeing the behavior you're seeing is a feature in the game called "simulation resolution detail". Normally, your active fambly always runs at "high detail" simulation. In "high detail" simulation, the game will directly calculate all motives and actions as you would see them. When a sim is NOT part of the active fambly and cannot be seen, however, the game calculates them in "low detail" mode. In Low Detail mode, no actual actions are taken, and the sim just abstracts out the refreshment of motives, recalculating them when a sim transitions back to high-detail mode. Motive-deltas are not run for interactions, so any interaction that has termination condition based on motives simply runs forever. This is basically the game's method of saving power, under the grounds that if you don't care to look at it, the game doesn't need to calculate it. Obviously, there are a few situations in the cracks show and you see this, as in the case where you househop.

You can decrease this behavior by either directly observing the sims you wish to affect, thus forcing the game to decide whether the cat is actually dead or alive, and increasing the number of "Active Lots" which remain activated (which will punish your computer).

AwesomeMod also includes some amount of countering to this: If your sim is running under the influence of "Supreme Commander", the game is ordered to always simulate in high-detail. Obviously, running 40 sims under Supreme Commander is going to impose a performance hit on your computer, but it is your choice to do.

As for the actual issue of trying to change a sim's natural shape? Forget about it. It's a totally pointless exercise. The present system is basically skewed towards one of two mutually exclusive design goals. On one hand, you have the desire of the player to have his sims remain as created, and not radically change form merely because you are forced to gain a skill or because the sim autonomously performed an action which did it. On the other hand, you have, obviously, the player's desire to change what he is given. These two mutually conflicting goals are difficult for simple minds to resolve, so EAxis has chosen to implement it favoring the "original creation is inviolate" method. The result is that the basic physical law of Conservation of Mass is ignored right before your eyes and sims will rapidly revert to being fatasses even in the absence of food.

AwesomeMod is looking into a better compromise solution that will balance between these two goals.

[Doc Doofus]

so EAxis has chosen to implement it favoring the "original creation is inviolate" method.

Let me understand this...  IF I do change the townie's weight, for instance by just playing him as the active family until he loses weight through normal game means, the game itself keeps track of that sims "original creation" in some way so that it will revert back to fat at some point after I switch back to my primary family?  If that's what you mean, then the question becomes, where is this "original" weight value kept, so that we might change it?

You can decrease this behavior by either directly observing the sims you wish to affect, thus forcing the game to decide whether the cat is actually dead or alive, and increasing the number of "Active Lots" which remain activated (which will punish your computer).

Ah!  Okay then.  I run with 2 active lots in my settings.  I thought this only made the game cache a second lot for rendering purposes.  It certainly seems to make it easier to flip back and forth from the park to home to the park to home again without having to always re-render everything.  (I strongly recommend 2 lots for anybody's system who can handle it.)  But you're saying that it also means it allows the game to try to keep track of 2 household's motives. 

What I should try doing then is to put the lardo on the treadmill, switch back to my primary family, put them all in bed, and just relocate the camera to WATCH lardo run while my primary family is still selected and snoring.  They're asleep, so it's not like I have to protect them from themselves...

Shaynemadank!

[J. M. Pescado]

I'd also have to check to make sure there is not a coded lock on non-actives gaining anything. For instance, you can watch your inactive sims work, but they cannot gain work performance without AwesomeMod. Similar to comm-skilling of TS2.

As for trying to do it just to make Lardo lose weight? Forget it. The moment Lardo leaves your sight, he will revert.

[Jaeger]

I'd also have to check to make sure there is not a coded lock on non-actives gaining anything. For instance, you can watch your inactive sims work, but they cannot gain work performance without AwesomeMod. Similar to comm-skilling of TS2.

As for trying to do it just to make Lardo lose weight? Forget it. The moment Lardo leaves your sight, he will revert.

Really? I had an athletic simmie that would train lardos at the gym while his wife would woohoo with his friends behind his back. She was getting back at him for having kids with Brandi Broke and some other girl I can't recall. Well, when you train simmies you also become fast friends and since she can call friends of the household, she would call up his trainees and woohoo them while he was away. Those ex-lardos came to the house as thin simmies.

Now, I was snapping back and forth from the house to the gym checking on them, cueing actions for the missus.

Doc, waylay lardos that come into the gym with an athletic sim and train 'em (you also become fast friends with 'em).

[Doc Doofus]

Well, I have to test what JMP said about the lardos reverting as soon as they are out of sight.  It hasn't happened yet, but it needs more testing.

I DID try the experiment of directing a non-fambly lardo to exercise, then switching back to fambly while they slept but keeping the cam eye on lardo at the gym.  That part DID work -- she did lose weight, and it seemed to stick during later examinations.  But maybe they're just lulling me into a false sense of security, eh?

What I want to try next is this: 

1. Put three treadmills on the fambly-lawn.
2. Direct three or four non-fambly lardos from three different households to work on those treadmills.
3. Switch back to the primary fambly and take care of business as usual for a day.  On the one hand, this makes it easy to watch the lardos exercise AND to keep an eye on my fambly.  But I wonder if it's even necessary to watch them at all, if they are on the fambly lot when they do the exercise. 

[Playful]

Any recent findings on this?

[Doc Doofus]

I didn't try three at once, but I did select a next door neighbor and send him over to exercise on the lawn.  It worked -- he lost weight.  But when he got fatigued, he walked into the house and took a shower as if he had already been invited and woke up the family with the guest-behaving-badly moodlet.

Everybody I have done this with kept the weight off.  So there doesn't seem to be any problem with it.

Next idea:  I was thinking, since I don't want them walking in the house, maybe I could build a small community lot right across the street from my chosen fambly's house, one with big open windows -- or just no walls or windows at all.  That way I could keep the camera's eye on everybody. 

This might also make suggest a strategy for impregnating neighborhood Sims, because I'm finding that also to be a strategic chore.  As it is now, I'm doing lots of selecting back and forth in order to make sure the fambly gets a good night sleep AND to get two townies to knock boots at another house across town.  That's a complicated ballet.  If I were to make a little community lovenest with bed across the street, I could direct them through the necessary romance actions in order to get them ready for Try for Baby while keeping an eye on the fambly.

And one very annoying thing I have discovered -- the Try for Baby pie-menu option doesn't go away once the targeted Sim is already pregnant.  If you aren't there to hear the Rockabye-Baby music when it plays, you have to guess at when it has succeeded.  I kept repeating it over and over until I realized the reason I wasn't hearing music was because the Sim was already pregnant.

[bottles]

I used a debug interaction on a maid (shift+ctrl+click) and made her fat instantly. I didn't check, but since it works this way for water level and weediness of the plants, I assume you would get the option to "make thin" a fat sim. Will it just revert when they are out of sight? I'll call up my maid later and see how she is.

[Grumblesnort]

It's interesting that this method has worked to make fat townies thin. I actually saw Judy Bunch drop a considerable amount of wait jogging on the treadmills in the gym. Unfortunately, I'm having the opposite problem. I made one of my Legacy sims marry Cycl0n3 Sword, making him a permanent part of the always-active family. I knew he was thin, but upon closer inspection, I was horrified by his anorexic physique. I'd read a passing comment around here somewhere around how someone's sim was "getting fat", so I put two and two together and started feeding him five or six ice creams after his dinner. It beefed up his chicken legs to normal size, and I thought all was well. By the next sim day, he was back to staggering around on toothpicks, though he'd never exercised in any form or had his Hunger bar drop below half at any point. I tried twice more, feeding him tons of food to fatten him up to an average size, but he'd just keep going back.

After a while, I gave up. I figured he'd eventually die, taking his stupid name and eating disorder with him, but his twin daughters seemed to inherit his stick figure, along with massive heads from who-knows-where. There is no way I'm going to raise and/or play through a generation with bobble-head sims, so I may just drown them all and have my sim marry and spawn with a nice round porker from town, or maybe that nice fireman NPC that put my sim out before she crispified. Fat to thin may work, but forget about the other way around.

[VacantBlue]

Unfortunately, I'm having the opposite problem. I made one of my Legacy sims marry Cycl0n3 Sword, making him a permanent part of the always-active family. I knew he was thin, but upon closer inspection, I was horrified by his anorexic physique. I'd read a passing comment around here somewhere around how someone's sim was "getting fat", so I put two and two together and started feeding him five or six ice creams after his dinner. It beefed up his chicken legs to normal size, and I thought all was well. By the next sim day, he was back to staggering around on toothpicks, though he'd never exercised in any form or had his Hunger bar drop below half at any point. I tried twice more, feeding him tons of food to fatten him up to an average size, but he'd just keep going back.

Have you tried having him do strength workouts on the weight machine? 

The cardio workouts like jogging will cause a loss of fat, but the weight machine will cause a muscle gain which should help with the anorexic look.  Not sure how well the muscle sticks - most of my Sims work out on a regular basis; so, they have not lost any muscle over time.

[Grumblesnort]

Have you tried having him do strength workouts on the weight machine?

I hadn't made him work out at all, for fear he'd lose the ice cream blubber. I did, however, play around with a clone of him in CAS, and adding muscle without sliding the fatness up at all left him looking odd-shaped and still scrawny. I'll try out strength-training workouts in the game, though. With any luck, maybe it'll balance it out by itself with a good chub to beef ratio.

[Doc Doofus]

I married Sw0rd off to Blair Worthington and have been playing them for a long time now, with multiple life-fruits to extend their lives.  I had to fix Blair's little squiggly-line mouth with CAS, but other than that small tuning, they have had very good looking children.  By TS3 standards.

Blair with daughter by Cycl0n3:


As I said I was going to do in previous post, I tried building a community loveshack across the street so I could try to more easily manage keeping the fambly in sight while directing two townies to fall in love, marry, and procreate.  it worked.  The fambly motives DID make progress while they weren't selected.  As you can see, I kept an eye on the fambly house from a distance while focusing on the lovebirds (Kaylynn Langerak's single surviving daughter and a new sim I made.)  However, the motives of the fambly didn't increase as quickly as they should have if the fambly (of eight) was selected.  Since they are all using the expensive beds, I wonder if the game isn't still simulating their motive increase rather than calculating them out from the circumstances of the objects used.

Loveshack seen across the street from the fambly home:


Same image, but with the townies selected.  You can see the sleepers through the window.  I managed to get all the townie business across the street taken care of before 6am:

[bottles]

I used a debug interaction on a maid (shift+ctrl+click) and made her fat instantly. I didn't check, but since it works this way for water level and weediness of the plants, I assume you would get the option to "make thin" a fat sim. Will it just revert when they are out of sight? I'll call up my maid later and see how she is.

shift+ctrl+click "make fat" seems to have stuck. The maid came back a few days later, and she's still a pasty land whale.

[Chocolate Milk]

By the next sim day, he was back to staggering around on toothpicks, though he'd never exercised in any form or had his Hunger bar drop below half at any point.

I had a similar problem with a fat adopted daughter. Even the body sculptor changes didn't seem to be permanent.

Luckily, her kids seemed to take after their father.

[Billmonaghan]

I've been playing about 13.5 Sim weeks with Sims 2 style aging, playing a household for one week before moving to another:

I had Erin Kennedy train Madison VanWatson in the gym and it didn't seem to have any effect that week, but a Sim week or so later Madison showed up very slimmed down and has kept the weight off since.
 
Judy Bunch was kinda chubby but she's slimmed down a lot too and I've had no one training her. Beau Andrews, on the other hand, hasn't changed at all and Clair Ursine hasn't slimmed down much, if at all.

I think what's happening is I've played a few households with Athletically inclined Sims and when they go to the gym, a bunch of other Sims show up there and start exercising and benefit, including Madison and Judy. So I think you can get townies who don't have traits making them averse to exercise to shape up simply by having your Sims spend time at the gym.

[J. M. Pescado]

Yeah, the stalker effect tends to cause everyone in the town to follow you around like a bunch of deranged stalkers. I should look into a killswitch on that, so they will behave like themselves, instead of STALKING YOU. The stalker behavior is *REAAAAAALLY* creepy when you radar tag the neighborhood so you can watch them do it. It's like this swarm of red bubbles converging on your location anytime you move.

[Motoki]

The whole body shape thing in this game is really fuct.

I have a sim who keeps getting fat no matter what I do. I think it must be because he came to me as an adopted fat kid so that is how he first started out (he was wearing a hideous watermelon outfit too and he looked like a walking watermelon!).

He's had a 10 in Athletics for quite some time now, has all the bonuses from jogging, cardio and strength workouts for many hours, doesn't overeat, works in the military career path etc etc. He is far more fit than any other sim I play and yet some of them sit on their asses all day and are thin and he is fat no matter what. I even tried re-editing him in the CAS via the cheat and it still reverted him back to fat in a short time. I guess the game must save a sim's original body shape even if you you re-CAS them.

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes, that's basically how it is. The currently in testing AWESOMEMOD implements a Solution that should satisfy the two mutually opposing goals here.

[edalbformat]

I think there was a point in making fatness unchangeable once there are some characters that players would like to keep fat (as Bob Newbie for example). It will be good to have a balance in the case children are born fat in game, I agree. A question is "if you don't like fat Sims, why you create them?"
I recreated Mama Hick and chose to make her fat, once there's not much available from Sims1 to characterize her. I chose a not too extreme fatness but close and was very satisfied. I got a matrona with nice curves and a very delicious big butt.
Well, question of taste.

[Motoki]

Well I think the whole food system just needs an overhaul honestly for the fat/fit thing to work better. Right now if a sim eats ice cream for every meal or salad for every meal they will never get fat unless they eat twice in a row and get 'overstuffed'.

I think there should be healthy foods and unhealthy foods and that the sims should autonomously chose unhealthy ones if they are stressed or in a low mood or what not.

[jwaas]

Oddly enough, I just had the son of a very thin Sim and an average-to-slightly-muscular Sim turn out almost maxed out in fatness.  I couldn't tell until he became a teenager.  Luckily a visit to the body shape changer reward, on high power, made him look more or less normal.  Not sure whether this was an aberration or merely the "Conservation of Mass" principle in action -- I don't recall overfeeding him as a child, but perhaps I really do fail that hard.

Which brings up two questions:

1.  My understanding from the learnings collected here is that every Sim has a genetic body type, which he/she will tend to stay at.  Exercise or overeating causes temporary changes, but the only way to change a Sim's genetic body type permanently is with the body shape changer reward item.  Do I pretty much have it correct?  Or does even the reward item change only the set point, but not the genetics?  Or is this not yet known?

2.  Though this may be slightly off-topic, sending Sims back to CAS with the AwesomeMod seems to be the only way currently available to do one of the InSimenator functions in TS2, namely failproof "plastic surgery."  It soon became clear that plastic surgery didn't change a TS2 Sim's genetics -- Ben Longnose still had the genes for his, well, long nose, for instance.  Christianlov eventually developed a tool that dived into the "Characters" folder and fixed Sim genetics to match the results of plastic surgery.  Is it known whether this is also the case in TS3, for Sims sent back to CAS using the AwesomeMod?  Or do the results of such plastic surgery become genetic also?  (I don't remember this being discussed in the Rigorous Genetic Experiment thread.)

Thanks for helping me to increase my learnings.

[J. M. Pescado]

I think there should be healthy foods and unhealthy foods and that the sims should autonomously chose unhealthy ones if they are stressed or in a low mood or what not.

The concept of "healthy" and "unhealthy" foods is actually a myth. There are no such things as "unhealthy" foods. Although it is possible to eat a diet that leaves one malnourished because it is lacking in critical components, no single food item is intrinsically "unhealthy". Foods high in fat are, in fact, healthy, as fat is a high-energy-density fuel source. The PROBLEM is that people eat things that are high in energy, without either living high-energy lifestyles (such as running around in a jungle trying not to be shot), or cutting back their fuel intake to match their level of expenditure, thus making conservation of mass their enemy: Since these are high-energy fuel sources that digest very well, you will not simply shit them back out, and you do not burn these fuels and exhale them as carbon dioxide exhaust, so therefore, they just accumulate in your system, where inadequate storage facilities exist, and clog up in their arteries as a result. However, the food itself is not unhealthy, merely the quantities they consume without burning! Why does this happen? Because like idiots, they have conditioned themselves to believe that they should eat "regular meals" at specific fixed times per day, in specific portion sizes, rather than adjusting your fuel input to match your expenditure. Do you refuel your car every day, regardless of whether you've driven it anywhere? Of course not! You refuel your car when you have burned the fuel in the tank! What happens if you refuel your car when it already has a full tank? Well, with cars, the fuel overflows the tank and spills, resulting in a fire hazard. Similar, although less immediately drastic, things happen to animals, including people. There are no unhealthy foods, only inappropriate refuelling practices.

[Motoki]

Okay then I will rephrase that to more calorically dense food and less calorically dense food. 

There are some foods that while filling, are more fiber or water or other things that fill the stomach but don't actually provide a large amount of fuel to process and store and then there are some foods that are very dense in the fuel so that if you get full off of those regularly and aren't doing a ton of activity, you will have extra to store.

Basically, fruits and vegetables and such that are generally considered 'healthy' fall into the former while fried high fat/processed sugar foods tend to fall into the latter.

You don't really need to worry about getting overstuffed on most fruits and vegetables since they are not calorically dense foods but much of their mass is fiber and water. The stomach generally cannot hold enough to overeat to the point of having extra calories to store away.

So basically, yeah, getting overstuffed on salad and fruit like the sims do in this game is stupid. There's a huge difference between being overstuffed on fruits and vegetables vs being overstuffed on cakes and pies but the game doesn't consider this at all.