Story Mode

[Motoki]

Spun off from the Questions/Tips thread

I've already modified the fundinit rules to initialize them with more funds to simulate their pre-moving-to-your-neighborhood existences, so that older sims and larger households receive a larger chunk of starting funds, making it more likely they can afford an appropriate home, but THERE WILL BE NO HANDOUTS. Additional tweaks when I rewrite storymode will make it so the spawned sims will have a composition that better fits the neighborhood they are being spawned into...but again, I will never, ever, ever, give anyone a handout, as this is against my religion. I am taking an opposite approach to how EA and IndieMod are implementing story mode, however. Instead of the "Story" being driven by a heavy-handed top-down autobalancer that attempts to force the story to conform to a prebuilt image, I am writing it as a "ground-up" motivator, where sims function as active actors that CAUSE events to happen, rather than passive victims upon whom events are inflicted. The EAxis Progressor, for instance, arbitrarily decides a number of random events, then picks similarly random victims upon which to inflict them. Of course, this provides no sense of direction because the sims themselves are not steering their fates in any way, they are simply passive victims of an uncaring random toad machine. IndieMod takes a somewhat more advanced approach, in that it attempts to pay somewhat more attention to their traits, but ultimately is still a top-down driven model in which a dictatorial machine forces the sims and neighborhood to conform to a preordained average composition. IndieMod leans heavily towards the "Story" part of Story Progression, so will very visibly create a sense of STORY, if by "story", you mean "something you can be notified about in a dialog box". It also does a much better job, apparently, in maintaining viable neighborhoods over the long term, presumably because it is essentially a top-down driven balancer, cramming characters into predefined "stock roles" like "town bully", "slut", etc. The prototype driver for AwesomeMod, however, will not incorporate any such driving mechanisms, nor will it include a colorful and verbose headline generator: We focus on the "Progression" aspect, where sims progress according to their goals as determined by their wants and personalities, aimed at "show, don't tell" style where possible (for obvious reasons, this is not always possible simply because giving sims micro-directions is massively computationally intensive), but superfluous "random toadings" are to be avoided. A side effect of this is that I need more test victims, because without a top-down driven balancing system, there is no guarantee the results will be "stable": Your neighborhood could explode into overcrowdedness, or it could die off as a ghost town...and this will all occur likely because of the conditions you build.

In theory, I like the idea of a bottom up approach and show don't tell. In practice, I'm not so sure how this will work. I mean, I'd like to see the town floozy in action instead of just hearing about her, but at least in my game non controllable sims don't do a hell of a lot. They just sort of stand there until I interact with them most times. At best they'll play in the sprinkler or with the VR headset or something equally inane like that.

I feel like at least Indie fakes a living breathing town to some degree. I'm not sure I think the computer controlled sims can be pushed to do a hell of a lot more, but maybe. I'd like it if they were more autonomous but realistically I don't know how feasible that is.

Maybe at least those sort of town news notices that Indie does could be pushed into the gossip social so that it feels more natural and less like the omniscient voice of god announcing the events of the world. Right now gossip mostly just talks about promotions so I feel like that could be expanded more and provide a way to get news on the goings on in the town in a somewhat natural way.

[J. M. Pescado]

In theory, I like the idea of a bottom up approach and show don't tell. In practice, I'm not so sure how this will work.

Yeah, that's the issue, really. So my system will, instead of merely producing text-events that never happened, occasionally will push LIVE events, so that you will actually witness the sim doing that thing...and if you interfere, maybe it won't happen.

I feel like at least Indie fakes a living breathing town to some degree. I'm not sure I think the computer controlled sims can be pushed to do a hell of a lot more, but maybe. I'd like it if they were more autonomous but realistically I don't know how feasible that is.

Indie does a decent job faking a living, breathing town, yes. Unfortunately, when you see things from my perspective, you realize what a hollow facade it actually is. The town does not TRULY live and breathe, it merely functions as this kind of undead clockwork monstrosity that goes through all the motion to produce a semblance of life, without truly breathing at all. For many, this is satisfactory, and even better. But not to me.

Maybe at least those sort of town news notices that Indie does could be pushed into the gossip social so that it feels more natural and less like the omniscient voice of god announcing the events of the world. Right now gossip mostly just talks about promotions so I feel like that could be expanded more and provide a way to get news on the goings on in the town in a somewhat natural way.

Ah, yes, the promotions. Indie apparently hands them out like candy. Me? My plan is a bit more basic: I tell them to get a job. I set them to skill at work, and prod them to occasionally do something skilly when their personality and circumstances warrants it, like a low-intensity version of SupCom Work/School. From there? They are on their own! Show, don't telll.

[Enelen]

Maybe at least those sort of town news notices that Indie does could be pushed into the gossip social so that it feels more natural and less like the omniscient voice of god announcing the events of the world. Right now gossip mostly just talks about promotions so I feel like that could be expanded more and provide a way to get news on the goings on in the town in a somewhat natural way.

Maybe I missed some essential update to the Awesome Mod, but my sims keep gossiping about others that have romances and even mentioned someone that couldn't get to the loo in time (my bad, I kept trying to woo her with my active sim). One sim from my non-active family decided to get a career behind my back, but somehow that never came up. They're all having babies now on their own, though I was the one that got them married, so I guess if I played long enough without playing close attention to them, they would start to die out... I think I'll just go and do that, my brain hurts from reading MATY for hours. You guys are insane, but probably best viewed from the outside... err... never mind.

[Motoki]

Maybe I missed some essential update to the Awesome Mod, but my sims keep gossiping about others that have romances and even mentioned someone that couldn't get to the loo in time (my bad, I kept trying to woo her with my active sim). One sim from my non-active family decided to get a career behind my back, but somehow that never came up. They're all having babies now on their own, though I was the one that got them married, so I guess if I played long enough without playing close attention to them, they would start to die out... I think I'll just go and do that, my brain hurts from reading MATY for hours. You guys are insane, but probably best viewed from the outside... err... never mind.

Really? I wish mine had more variations in their gossip. I feel like all I ever hear is so & so got a promotion..

[phyllis_p]

In theory, I like the idea of a bottom up approach and show don't tell. In practice, I'm not so sure how this will work.

Yeah, that's the issue, really. So my system will, instead of merely producing text-events that never happened, occasionally will push LIVE events, so that you will actually witness the sim doing that thing...and if you interfere, maybe it won't happen.

I feel like at least Indie fakes a living breathing town to some degree. I'm not sure I think the computer controlled sims can be pushed to do a hell of a lot more, but maybe. I'd like it if they were more autonomous but realistically I don't know how feasible that is.

Indie does a decent job faking a living, breathing town, yes. Unfortunately, when you see things from my perspective, you realize what a hollow facade it actually is. The town does not TRULY live and breathe, it merely functions as this kind of undead clockwork monstrosity that goes through all the motion to produce a semblance of life, without truly breathing at all. For many, this is satisfactory, and even better. But not to me.

I've been trying to get my head around this concept of Indie being an "undead clockwork monstrosity," and how things like marriages and births could actually be witnessed.  I may making too many assumptions here, but I think those two things are the "live events" that most story-minded people care about and why they feel Indie provides a "living, breathing town."  Too many of us have seen our towns turn into retirement center ghost towns, with the only options for procreation being either fiddling about with making couples (and coupling them) ourselves, or enabling parthenogenesis. 

I don't actually mind playing just one family and letting all but the heir move out, but when I move those young adults out and they never marry and rarely have children without my intervention, it gets sad.  I don't care about Indie's messages regarding what's going on with other Sims (though I don't mind them, either) -- I can catch it in the newspaper, if I'm interested.  What I care about is that the town isn't one huge, childless lonely heart's club and that I don't have to do anything to make it come about. 

I find myself curious about what witnessable events you'd have come about, and how you define a living and breathing town if not by having a pairing, procreating, employed population.

Don't get me wrong; I think the things you do with Awesomemod are ... well ... awesome.  This whole philosophical aspect of Story Mode is just interesting to me, that's all.

[Motoki]

I've been trying to get my head around this concept of Indie being an "undead clockwork monstrosity," and how things like marriages and births could actually be witnessed.  I may making too many assumptions here, but I think those two things are the "live events" that most story-minded people care about and why they feel Indie provides a "living, breathing town."  Too many of us have seen our towns turn into retirement center ghost towns, with the only options for procreation being either fiddling about with making couples (and coupling them) ourselves, or enabling parthenogenesis.  

I don't actually mind playing just one family and letting all but the heir move out, but when I move those young adults out and they never marry and rarely have children without my intervention, it gets sad.  I don't care about Indie's messages regarding what's going on with other Sims (though I don't mind them, either) -- I can catch it in the newspaper, if I'm interested.  What I care about is that the town isn't one huge, childless lonely heart's club and that I don't have to do anything to make it come about.  

I find myself curious about what witnessable events you'd have come about, and how you define a living and breathing town if not by having a pairing, procreating, employed population.

Don't get me wrong; I think the things you do with Awesomemod are ... well ... awesome.  This whole philosophical aspect of Story Mode is just interesting to me, that's all.

Exactly. I mean I think Pescado's philosophy is all well and good, but I feel like right now I am having to jump through hoops to get people moved in and keep the population going.

I also don't need to see every wedding or birth or what not. It's fine for me if these things happen behind the scenes and either I find out through an announcement or gossip or just running into those sims or maybe I never even do.

I agree with the bottom up philosophy about the jobs to some degree. I don't necessarily think the game should be cheating everyone through job promotions, but it also needs to make sure they go to work and perform well too, which seems not to be happening much of the time.

Relationships I'm fine with as random pairing method. Relationships are arbitrary anyway. I guess you could match traits but then how many couples do we all know that are opposites and end up together anyway? I think the only thing there is maybe the people with committment issues shouldn't be settling down so easily, or maybe not until they get older. And likewise those who hate kids shouldn't be having 4 or 5. But other than that, I think random pairings is fair game. There just need to be pairings period. If you get too stringent and picky everyone dies an old spinster and the town is dead.

[pbox]

I wish mine had more variations in their gossip. I feel like all I ever hear is so & so got a promotion..

Actually, the gossip is one of the few things I can't complain about (too much) -- I have no comm lots in my game, hence no promotions, and whenever my sims gossip about something (as opposed to just "gossip", without popup), it'll be somehting real -- a birth, a death, or (a little too often for my taste) about Sim X being totally broke. Oh, and one sim peed herself at some point, they also gossiped about that. The only thing I haven't yet checked for is whether or not they actually gossip about something they know, or whether they're telepathic -- right now it would be hard to tell, since the town is so small (five households), it would hardly make sense for them to not know when someone has died.

In a word, it seems to depend on what is actually happening -- if you want different gossip, you need to make different things happen. I don't know if it is possible to enable new "gossip-able" topics perhaps (perhaps when a relative has maxed a skill or something), or restrict some (in your case, promotions -- in my case, I might want to eliminate the constant "broke" whining at some point).


Other than that, I don't think I'll ever use any sort of automatic progression anytime soon, but one aspect that I'd like to see and that I believe is closely related to it would a stricter handling of motives in general. Right now, it seems that the game resets everything all the time (I don't know when exactly, maybe every full hour?) depending purely on the time of day and nothing else, and even *that* seems to be broken. I often find myself manually adjusting motives to where they should be -- like when a sim has gone to bed at 10PM, and I select their lot at 5AM, and they have "Sleep until fully rested (6AM)" in their queue, it makes no sense that their energy is still nearly bottomed out. This is getting really old. The same thing happens when a sim has a visitor over, and they chat etc., and I select the visitor immediately after they leave -- their social will be half-empty again.

Can't this be handled differently? I know people say that EA are doing this sort of thing in order to "save processing power", but seriously, calculating the energy level of a few sims? That's something any pocket calculator should be able to handle, no? In my eyes, they probably tried to make everything nice and easy for the "one fambly" players (i.e. reset the social bar, so that the sims are more compelled to ineract with each other), but completely ignored what happens when people play the entire neighbourhood. This is manifest in so many ways .. plants on inactive lots never get weeds and never need to be watered (all that updates is their growth), sims that are out fishing all day still have nearly full energy meters at 11PM, sim basically never need to eat unless you happen to play them in the morning or evening, etc etc.

I can actually somewhat understand that inactive sims just stand around staring holes in the air when you check in on them -- I believe it would become very taxing if the game actually played all the animations of all sims, particularly in "normal-sized" neighbourhoods of 100-200 sims. But would it be possible to just silently keep track of the motives instead? So that it is recorded when they've just visited their uncle and chatted for an hour, consequently their social cannot be half-empty? Perhaps even remove random food from their fridge/inventory throughout the day whenever their hunger meter gets low (as an inexpensive way to "fake simulate" cooking)? At the very least, I'd like for the game to take into account whether or not inactive sims can even *possibly* fill certain motives -- sims on a lot with no shower or sink shouldn't have high hygiene just because it is 8AM, for example.


As much as I love the unified time, I more often than not feel like I have to battle the game for a halfwhat realistic sort of progress -- and sometimes more so than in TS2. The motives thing in particular makes it feel like the game is "auto cheating" all the time.

[quetzilla]

Ah, yes, the promotions. Indie apparently hands them out like candy. Me? My plan is a bit more basic: I tell them to get a job. I set them to skill at work, and prod them to occasionally do something skilly when their personality and circumstances warrants it, like a low-intensity version of SupCom Work/School. From there? They are on their own! Show, don't telll.

I use Indie Mod right now because I like it better than default and I've heard many people complain about too many Elders with AwesomeMod, but I'll probably switch back to awesome once Awesome has story mode fixed etc.  However, using the latest Indie Mod, I definitely don't see promotions being handed out like candy -- in fact I probably see more messages about people being demoted.  What IS lacking is any sense that the promotion or demotions mean anything -- there is no why they got fired (a.k.a. maybe they skipped work to adulterate with their boss's wife,etc!).

So here's a vision of how I'd like to see AwesomeStoryMode as it interacts with the player vs. just the under the hood mentality.  Basically things should weave into the player's experience without hitting them over the head with the idea that what just happened is a result of Story Mode.  For example, say your sim Alice is friends with Bob.  Bob is a couch potato so one day he skips work to stay home and watch TV and then gets fired.  Since Bob is friends with Alice, maybe later that day he calls up
Alice to complain about getting fired, which would happen just like a regular phone call, and perhaps you don't even answer the phone with Alice so you never know anything happened.  Maybe if y6ou do answer you got a pop up option (sort of like Sims 2 job challenges) where you can either try to make Bob feel better, or maybe you tell him he should stop being such a lazy shit.  Then again, maybe that optional stuff is a little much for version 1, but I'd definitely like to see story mode events have player interactivity.

Another example would be say Alice is distant friends with Karen, and Karen decides to get married with her boyfriend.  So then Karen sends Alice a wedding invitation (via the mailbox since they're distant, or by phone if theyre good friends, in person if they are best friends etc), which sets up the date and time the wedding will happen at.  So then you can either have Alice show up at the wedding, or maybe you dont and then Karen gets mad at Alice, etc.

I'm pretty sure this is probably already a lot of what Pescado has in mind for this, but figured I'd throw in my 2 cents...

[quetzilla]

Relationships I'm fine with as random pairing method. Relationships are arbitrary anyway. I guess you could match traits but then how many couples do we all know that are opposites and end up together anyway? I think the only thing there is maybe the people with committment issues shouldn't be settling down so easily, or maybe not until they get older. And likewise those who hate kids shouldn't be having 4 or 5. But other than that, I think random pairings is fair game. There just need to be pairings period. If you get too stringent and picky everyone dies an old spinster and the town is dead.

I don't think straight up random relationships is a good idea at all.  Best I can think of is semi-random based on who the sim knows and is friends with.  If a sim doesn't know many viable partners then Awesome can sort of queue that sim up to be more likely to visit a community lot when your sims go there, or maybe even stop by your house to visit so that they DO meet people, etc.  Rather than force sims into totally arbitrary relationships, arbitrarily force the sim to make semi-arbitrary relationships .

[Motoki]

Actually, the gossip is one of the few things I can't complain about (too much) -- I have no comm lots in my game, hence no promotions, and whenever my sims gossip about something (as opposed to just "gossip", without popup), it'll be somehting real -- a birth, a death, or (a little too often for my taste) about Sim X being totally broke. Oh, and one sim peed herself at some point, they also gossiped about that. The only thing I haven't yet checked for is whether or not they actually gossip about something they know, or whether they're telepathic -- right now it would be hard to tell, since the town is so small (five households), it would hardly make sense for them to not know when someone has died.

I can live with 'telepathic gossip'. We don't see sims when they go to work so I figure they just overheard something from a coworker or something like that.

In a word, it seems to depend on what is actually happening -- if you want different gossip, you need to make different things happen. I don't know if it is possible to enable new "gossip-able" topics perhaps (perhaps when a relative has maxed a skill or something), or restrict some (in your case, promotions -- in my case, I might want to eliminate the constant "broke" whining at some point).

Well that's just it, I feel like I shouldn't have to make things happen for gossip. It should be things going on in the neighborhood in families other than mine. So if I keep getting the same types of gossip over and over again then it either means that the neighborhood is unbalanced and there's too much of one story action going on or that the gossip is not picking up all the actions going on that it could be.

I don't think straight up random relationships is a good idea at all.  Best I can think of is semi-random based on who the sim knows and is friends with.  If a sim doesn't know many viable partners then Awesome can sort of queue that sim up to be more likely to visit a community lot when your sims go there, or maybe even stop by your house to visit so that they DO meet people, etc.  Rather than force sims into totally arbitrary relationships, arbitrarily force the sim to make semi-arbitrary relationships .

Well I would go with that except I don't think that sims are especially good at making friends and relationships on their own without player intervention. I guess you could go with coworkers or people who frequent the same types of places they do. *shrug* I don't think it can or should get too complicated though.

I'm honestly fine with a little Wizard of Oz magic behind the scenes I think some backstage sacrifices need to be made because you simply can't process a huge amount of actions for every single sim in the neighborhood on an constant basis. So if it involves making some instant friends or relationships for them, so be it. I mean heck as player if you get all the various charisma bonuses you are practically BFFs with someone as soon as you meet them so if a playable sim can do it then why not a nonplayable?

[pbox]

Well that's just it, I feel like I shouldn't have to make things happen for gossip. It should be things going on in the neighborhood in families other than mine.

I understand what you mean, but honestly I believe that's how it already works, in fact -- I know for sure that the one death my sims were gossiping about (I've had only one, so far) was a death I didn't witness -- i.e. it happened in a household that was not the active one at the time.

That said, I can understand it is boring for you when gossip is so dominated by one topic, as you describe. It could surely use some way of tweaking. (I've never looked for any gossip-related XMLs though -- perhaps it is already tweakable?)

[Motoki]

I understand what you mean, but honestly I believe that's how it already works, in fact -- I know for sure that the one death my sims were gossiping about (I've had only one, so far) was a death I didn't witness -- i.e. it happened in a household that was not the active one at the time.

That said, I can understand it is boring for you when gossip is so dominated by one topic, as you describe. It could surely use some way of tweaking. (I've never looked for any gossip-related XMLs though -- perhaps it is already tweakable?)

I guess I feel like forcing the gossip to vary its responses is sort of like attacking the symptom rather than the cause, but I'm looking at it from the perspective of the story mode and what's going on in the town. So to me if they keep gossiping about the same type of event happening to various different sims then it makes me wonder why that is happening so much. I makes me think something is out of balance with the neighborhood.

[ForkInToaster]

There are some things on modthesims I didn't mention on the Indie Stone thread, because they are less about how the mod works and more about my personal tastes vs. the creators.   But here are some of my observations from it.

I ran in wolfing mode and kept the camera on the central park in the city. I figured out really quickly how Indie Stone worked by doing this. The first thing I noticed was that I saw two sims talking to each other near the swingset, and then one vanished and the other sim walked off. I got some random message that a sim had an untimely death.  It was a bit creepy and funny at the same time. Less funny but more common, I remember watching a sim sit at a picnic basket in the park and while she was eating and seemingly minding her own business, she got married and concieved a baby! This happened a quite frequently.

Even though the events are forced by the game, you could see the results in towns, townies were randomly walking around with their buddies and making out with each other.  While their relationships were artificially constructed, the behavior resulting from the construction was real. That was my favorite part of the mod. It was great to look around town and see the townies behaving like people and interracting in somewhat realistic ways. It really did put a certain something in the neighborhood that wasn't there before.

And yes, three or four times I saw pregnant sims going into labor in town.  Once was in the library and I got to hear the horribly annoying screeches that children make when they see labor. (Seriously, they sound like they are getting disemboweled while alive. It's really annoying)  This leads into some of my gripes about Indie Stone. 

I hate the baby generating madness.  Even with his tweaks to calm it down,  it seemed odd that the sims would constantly be getting pregnant and making babies all the time. I got a zerg swarm at the school within 2 sim weeks.  It gives my game sort of a fundamentalist religious flavor that I don't like.

I don't like that there is a town floozie but no manwhore equivelent. Also don't like that it seems to be pretty rigid about making straight couples -- I've read reports that people said it broke up gay couples and put them into straight relationships. I   am not sure of the details about that, but if it's what people have been describing, it gets a thumbs down from me. 

Still, I like the idea of rolls being assigned and sims and "helping" the engine make a story, but the samples of text I've read are kind of cheesy. I never actually produced a floozie or a geek or whatever, but I read the samples of their interractions on line. It needed to be much shorter and less "whiny" -- especially the flavor text about a woman who became single and she was all forlorn and alone. Pul-eez. I know it was just flavor text, but I didn't like the flavor.

[ingeli]

I agree on the philosophy of Pescado regarding this - sim driven story lines are better than "story driven" sims. Will be very interesting to see what comes out of it.

[Motoki]

There are some things on modthesims I didn't mention on the Indie Stone thread, because they are less about how the mod works and more about my personal tastes vs. the creators.   But here are some of my observations from it.

I ran in wolfing mode and kept the camera on the central park in the city. I figured out really quickly how Indie Stone worked by doing this. The first thing I noticed was that I saw two sims talking to each other near the swingset, and then one vanished and the other sim walked off. I got some random message that a sim had an untimely death.  It was a bit creepy and funny at the same time. Less funny but more common, I remember watching a sim sit at a picnic basket in the park and while she was eating and seemingly minding her own business, she got married and concieved a baby! This happened a quite frequently.

Hmm, that kind of stuff should really be staying behind the curtain. There should be a check to make sure it is not happening while said sim is being observed.

Even though the events are forced by the game, you could see the results in towns, townies were randomly walking around with their buddies and making out with each other.  While their relationships were artificially constructed, the behavior resulting from the construction was real. That was my favorite part of the mod. It was great to look around town and see the townies behaving like people and interracting in somewhat realistic ways. It really did put a certain something in the neighborhood that wasn't there before.

Yeah, I mean it's not perfect but it's still interaction and change rather than stagnation and stasis. I don't think this game is ever going to be a proper, realistic neighborhood simulator so I think some shortcuts are fine as long as they aren't too blatantly obvious like conceptions while picnicking.  

And yes, three or four times I saw pregnant sims going into labor in town.  Once was in the library and I got to hear the horribly annoying screeches that children make when they see labor. (Seriously, they sound like they are getting disemboweled while alive. It's really annoying)  This leads into some of my gripes about Indie Stone.  

I've seen this happen even without Indie. At least I think it was when I wasn't running Indie that it happened a couple of times. As a side note, if you take the pregnant sim dropping her kid to the hospital you'll get a big moodlet bonus for a whole day.

I don't like that there is a town floozie but no manwhore equivelent. Also don't like that it seems to be pretty rigid about making straight couples -- I've read reports that people said it broke up gay couples and put them into straight relationships. I   am not sure of the details about that, but if it's what people have been describing, it gets a thumbs down from me.  

Agreed on both counts. If you play Riverview then you have Don Lothario in your town and we all know about him! Actually, Indie paired him off with another sim in my game, he took her last name (this was before they made an option selectable to always choose the man's last name. woman's last name or just random) and had them have a kid. I feel like it doesn't really look at certain traits either like a sim's commitment or baby issue traits or a sim's past history of having interacted romantically with the same sex.

Still, I like the idea of rolls being assigned and sims and "helping" the engine make a story, but the samples of text I've read are kind of cheesy. I never actually produced a floozie or a geek or whatever, but I read the samples of their interactions on line. It needed to be much shorter and less "whiny" -- especially the flavor text about a woman who became single and she was all forlorn and alone. Pul-eez. I know it was just flavor text, but I didn't like the flavor.

Yep, again, It's perfect but to me it's preferable than a completely broken system or a super harsh survivalist no cheating and no soup for you system where everyone ends up a grumpy single elder and the only population expansion going on is in the cemetery.

I agree on the philosophy of Pescado regarding this - sim driven story lines are better than "story driven" sims. Will be very interesting to see what comes out of it.

It sounds good in theory. I am curious to see if he can make it work in a reasonable fashion that will keep the neighborhood turnover going pretty well without a lot of player interaction behind the scenes with cheat codes and making other households temporarily selectable and other hoops to jump though like that.

Part of me feels like expecting this game to make the AI controlled residents behave in anything resembling a realistic and harmonious fashion is fighting an uphill battle, but I'm open to see what Pes has in mind. He's pulled off some pretty complex stuff before.

[Tangie]

I downloaded Indie Stone for the first time yesterday and played it last evening, in Riverview. I set the story progession to the fast setting. Some of the announcements I got were the Newbies and the Jones' were expecting their second baby and the McDermott's were expecting their third; Rainer Kowling moved in with (?) Spenser and a day or two later there was an announcement that the two were married; and the Cowan family moved into a bigger house. When I checked, Kowling was actually living in the Spenser household and the Cowan's really did move. Too early to tell if there are any babies. No promotions or demotions at all, although only about 2 or 3 sim days passed while I played it. While one of my sim's was in the library the Broke's were flirting with each other so I wouldn't be surprised to see they are soon expecting another baby also. I do think I will turn the speed of progression down to slow, though, or things will get crowded pretty quickly! 

Overall I have to say that I liked it. I haven't played with it long enough to tell if it's blatently ignoring traits. Supposedly there have been checks added for that but I doubt if they're very stringent ones. I was focusing on one of my sim's downtown and I got a popup that my sim at home got a call and another sim wanted to chat with her on the telephone. The sim in question was standing a few feet away from my sim who just got off work, so, no, her evil twin is who actually called my other sim, haha. I imagine this would be normal EA programming actually, since sims who are "at work" can often be seen standing around the park, but yes, it would be nice if there was a check to see if the random sims chosen for these actions were not actually in view. 

For now I will probably trade off using AM and Indie whenever the mood strikes (I don't use Supreme Commander so I can do that), but I'll also be interested to see what you can come up with for your story mode. I wouldn't mind having the ability to influence events, but I'd prefer to not have to micromanage everything in the 'hood, either.

[quetzilla]

There are some things on modthesims I didn't mention on the Indie Stone thread, because they are less about how the mod works and more about my personal tastes vs. the creators.   But here are some of my observations from it.

I ran in wolfing mode and kept the camera on the central park in the city. I figured out really quickly how Indie Stone worked by doing this. The first thing I noticed was that I saw two sims talking to each other near the swingset, and then one vanished and the other sim walked off. I got some random message that a sim had an untimely death.  It was a bit creepy and funny at the same time. Less funny but more common, I remember watching a sim sit at a picnic basket in the park and while she was eating and seemingly minding her own business, she got married and concieved a baby! This happened a quite frequently.

Hmm, that kind of stuff should really be staying behind the curtain. There should be a check to make sure it is not happening while said sim is being observed.

The untimely death thing seems fine for me as long as we see the sim die and the sim they were talking to has the appropriate reaction.  The marriage is something that should be schedule ahead of time rather than randomly decided.  Player sims get engaged first, so story mode should follow the same progression - have two sims get engaged and when they do set a date for the wedding.  On that date they get sent to a wedding venue and have the wedding.  But you should be able to go and see it if you want to.  I don't want things happening behind the curtain at all, they should be happening so you can see them (this is what Pescado means with 'Show, Don't Tell').

[Doc Doofus]

Too many of us have seen our towns turn into retirement center ghost towns, with the only options for procreation being either fiddling about with making couples (and coupling them) ourselves, or enabling parthenogenesis.

Yeah, that's the problem we have right now. 

I take this as a thread about general philosophy, rather than a comparison of two different mods, and that's how I would prefer to address it. 

I don't think it's feasible to expect the sim townies to ever come near enough to playing themselves to make a viable neighborhood.  The basic tools just aren't there in the game.  But it can and should be improved.  Thus I think a two pronged approach would not just be compatible but is even necessary.  There has to be some kind of god-like mechanism in the background to give the overall town progression some kind of balance.  The only question is just how heavy-handed that mechanism should be.  Indie seems to be very heavy-handed, like with the town floozie aspect, which seems to be going above and beyond the call of duty and earns my respect.

Let me go back to what I always wanted from The Sims.  The first time I played GTA Vice City (possibly the best game ever), I thought to myself, Why can't the Sims be like this?  The realism was just breathtaking, even if you had played GTA3 before.  It looked like a whole f'ing metropolitan city with crowded streets and sidewalks and people tanning on the beach and hookers walking the streets at night.  But one reason they could do such a huge and realistic simulation is that NONE OF IT WAS PERSISTENT.  As soon as you turned left, then turned right again, the cars and NPCs that you saw before were all gone or changed.  As soon as you stopped looking at something, it completely ceased to exist, freeing up precious CPU cycles.

And that defines the very problem that EA has had to address in Sims 3, because the Sims must have some kind of persistence after you turn your back on them, although not necessarily graphic rendering.  This may help explain some of the terrible tradeoffs they made, such as the godawful third-rate graphics, the lack of memories, and the huge holes in story progression.  Story progression really should have been the easiest and cheapest part of the game for them to work on, because, since it is nongraphical and takes place in the background in a batch stream manner, it should have taken little effort to implement, ONCE THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED IT TO DO.  And that's the only excuse I can possibly make for EA -- that they never reached a consensus on what story progression should do such that it was ever properly designed.  The actual coding for it should have been a breeze.   

I wrote my own simplified design pseudo-code in THIS POST for how relationships, marriage, and baby-making could be implemented in story progression to work more effectively than it does now.  One page. 

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15531.msg453987/topicseen.html#msg453987

It would be nice if the townies were intelligent enough to meet people on the street, date, fall in love, all in full high-detail simulation.  But I don't think that can be done for a couple of reasons.  First, the people they meet aren't that random, and secondly, unless your chosen Sims are on community lots 24 hours a day, there is little chance of townies getting enough face time in high-detail to approach that.  Some kind of jet-assisted-take-off device is necessary to finish the job. 

And I think that's what story progression needs to do.  Those actions we see townies do in the game should be CONSISTENT with story progression as far as they go, but they should not be the story.  Like, "Wow, look at those two making out -- they must be in love."  That kind of thing.  The actual choice of who they fall in love with is less important, I think, than that they do have a chance of falling in love, at least enough chance to keep the population size and age distribution stable.

And we should also keep this in mind -- as computer power increases, as new EPs come out and the game expands in scope, it's likely that the size of the town and the number of max townies is going to increase over time, to the point (I don't know when, but I assume it will come) that we do have a big metropolitan city like Vice City with many thousands of distinct Sims leading their lives, too many for us to micromanage with ctrl-click.  If you think that that is where we are eventually going, as I have always thought, then you have to realize that some kind of sensible background story progression is essential.  If and when the time comes that we have computers that can render and calculate in real-time the actions of every Sim in Riverview and do it at a snappy speed, we will probably already have moved on to something bigger and more complicated than TS3.

[quetzilla]

I don't even necessarily think it needs some method of 'maintaining an overall balance'.  If we're going to take a theoretical view of this, I think the best way is to make an engine that produces behavior that is both chaotic and interesting (those tend to go hand in hand).  You start the town off at relative equilibrium and as more and more things happen to the sims living their it *will* get more complicated, as marriages lead to jealousy and fights divorces, people being fired, houses being robbed, etc.  Then, once you have an engine that can successfully do that, you build in feedback mechanisms that pull the chaos back towards order.  So if the engine leads to everyone being angry at each other until every sim is fighting in the street with every other sim, you put in a police force that locks up sims who get in too many fights etc (this is sort of like how real society works).  The point is that you make it able to generate interesting *first*, and only then can you attempt to make it not go out of control.  Otherwise you fall into the trap of trying to make interestingness happen within a narrow set of constraints, not all of which everyone will agree on.

[moondance]

After reading in the other thread about what Pescado has in mind, I'm pretty optimistic. I can't do anything this week, but if testers are still needed after this coming Sunday, I can most likely help out, and would definitely like to.  #grah is alright with me; I go in there about once or twice a year, and no one ever remembers that I was ever there before, which I find kind of cool for some reason. 

[tallinn]

Actually I registered here to make the suggestion that Pescado and Indie should join their efforts. After reading this thread I am rather disappointed. There seems to be a ideological debate about how to deal with certain things.

I have a practical view on the issue: I played with the awesome-mod for some time now, liked most of his features, was happy that those clone babies were gone, was very happy to be able to switch households on the fly whenever I felt to do so. However, as the game progress with the clone babies gone the town runs into a demographic catastrophe sooner or later. And that is BAD. Similar problem with careers: vanilla Sims presents you singles without a job, but with a clone of themselves on their arm every now and then. Awesomemod presents you singles without a job and no babies.

IndieMod fixes the demographic issue very well and make sims going for jobs as soon as it makes sense. Why don't use it? If Pescado is going to demonstrate that he is able to write a story progression module that generates a living town over many generations just by micromanaging the sims in it, good luck. And make a science paper out of it once finished. The idea is very ambitious.

For the time being players like me are faced by the decision whether to have a stable, colorful neighborhood or a one-generation-and-then-start-the-next-game-neighborhood, as you can't have both mods in the game, just one. I really love the way the awesome-mod allows me to play more then one household, but frankly speaking: its storymode "improvements" are not improvements, they are just removing the rather unsophisticated solutions to certain problems EA has built into the game. The Indiemod is a better solution here, awesomemod is not. If I put a couple in love into a house - why on earth won't they have children? None of those couples I tried managed to get a baby so far this way, and I tried several times, each time waiting until pregnancy was no longer an option.

[CheritaChen]

IndieMod fixes the demographic issue very well and make sims going for jobs as soon as it makes sense. Why don't use it? If Pescado is going to demonstrate that he is able to write a story progression module that generates a living town over many generations just by micromanaging the sims in it, good luck. And make a science paper out of it once finished. The idea is very ambitious.

For the time being players like me are faced by the decision whether to have a stable, colorful neighborhood or a one-generation-and-then-start-the-next-game-neighborhood, as you can't have both mods in the game, just one.

What you are saying boils down to "Pescado should dump his own goals for what a story mode should do, so that the peasantry may have its AM caek and eat ISSPE, too." There are a couple of issues with this, though. Pescado has already stated in a few places that the suggested collaboration had stalled in Indie's camp, not with him. He was waiting on them to get back to him with some adjustments that would make the two mods compatible. So if your irritation is that you'd like a solution sooner rather than later, you need to take that up with Lemmy and Binky.

Also, when Pescado fixes something, he does it so that the fix works the way he believes the game should have done in the first place. Based on discussion I've read, while everyone agrees that the Indie Stone mod is a quantum improvement over the so-called "story mode" shipped in the game, it doesn't work the way it ought to do. Now, if he's going to devote his time and effort to a project to make the game better, why on earth should he do it by supporting a method that doesn't do what he wants? It's not like he's getting paid for any of this.

I've enjoyed the discussion so far, and agree that the story should be Sim-driven as much as possible, but that there are going to be limits imposed by the game itself, and by the resources available to it (what's under the computer's hood), which will vary wildly from user to user. I think experimentation is going to be the only way to really find out how much can be done by an individual background Sim, versus what will need to be arbitrarily done to it by the story engine.

My suspicion is that, while EAxis are unarguably incompetent boobs who can't debug their ways out of paper bags, there are probably EP-minded reasons behind some of the current failures. Thus I'm concerned that the first or second EP that they spit out is going to completely break all of the hard work involved in this project. But that doesn't mean I think it should be abandoned. It's worth the effort.

[Motoki]

For the time being players like me are faced by the decision whether to have a stable, colorful neighborhood or a one-generation-and-then-start-the-next-game-neighborhood, as you can't have both mods in the game, just one.

You can switch back and forth between using the two. I mostly use Awesomemod because I like the features, but when I start feeling like my neighborhood is stagnating then I play with Indie for a while and it always gets new people moving to town, marriages and babies being born. Then I go back to AM again after a bit of that. After a while I find Indie almost starting making too many new people and babies and what not, the opposite of AM, but I hear there's an option to slow that down so I may need to look into it the next time I play.

Note that you supposedly cannot take AM out once enabling Supreme Commander, however perhaps it's that I have both the brave and insane traits, but I have been running with SC and then swapping AM in and out for quite some time now without issue.

Anyway, for me swapping between the two is the best solution I can come up with for the time being.  

What you are saying boils down to "Pescado should dump his own goals for what a story mode should do, so that the peasantry may have its AM caek and eat ISSPE, too." There are a couple of issues with this, though. Pescado has already stated in a few places that the suggested collaboration had stalled in Indie's camp, not with him. He was waiting on them to get back to him with some adjustments that would make the two mods compatible. So if your irritation is that you'd like a solution sooner rather than later, you need to take that up with Lemmy and Binky.

I know this wasn't addressed to me but I would never tell someone how to make their mod. They do it in their own free time and first and foremost they should design it for themselves and the way they want to play (assuming they do play; you'd be surprised how many modders don't). Believe me, I've been there, done that with a large modding project for another game and had people telling me how my own work should be and it's rather   inducing. I feel like everyone should mod, even if it's just something small or minor, just to get a feel for what it's like on the other side of that fence.

Anyway back to the issue at hand. I don't think Pescado should design his mod around Indie Stone, no. I think it wouldn't hurt to look at what they're doing and maybe borrow some aspects he likes or thinks works well, but sounds like he may have already been doing that. I also think a way to modularize the two mods so they could be used together would not be a bad idea, but from everything I've read he's been extremely receptive to that idea and is waiting on their end to get back to him with what he would need to do that.

I think he should definitely do it his own way. I just don't have a lot of confidence that he is going to be able to do everything the way he wants to the level of detail he wants and have it all work and play nice because of this:

My suspicion is that, while EAxis are unarguably incompetent boobs who can't debug their ways out of paper bags, there are probably EP-minded reasons behind some of the current failures.

Amen.

And yeah, I do think there was a little bit of the car coming out of the shop with a couple of booby trapped things here and there that will have to be 'fixed' at a later date by paying the shop more money.

[J. M. Pescado]

Actually I registered here to make the suggestion that Pescado and Indie should join their efforts. After reading this thread I am rather disappointed. There seems to be a ideological debate about how to deal with certain things.

There's plenty of room for that. I'm still pursuing a compatibility program with the Indie developers, but to mainline them into the AwesomeMod development process would be like towing a barge with a speedboat. Plus, while I'm perfectly willing to create interoperability, I intrinsically distrust third-party solutions. For those of you for whom everything involved is a third-party solution, you'll be fine with the interoperable linkup so you can have the best of both. When they get around to it. For ME, I want a system that *I* built, that works according to MY vision. Ultimately, I think you'll be satisfied with my answer to things, but if not, that's why we offer you the choice by creating this interoperable link. Or would, anyway, if they'd finish their end of things.

However, as the game progress with the clone babies gone the town runs into a demographic catastrophe sooner or later. And that is BAD.

Yeah, we're looking to avert a demographic crash through alternate means other than parthenogenetic clones, only rather than being a top-down driven system, I'm just going to increase the aggressiveness level of the romance events, while stripping the superfluous fat from the rest of the event system. Sims seem to befriend and antagonize each other just fine without needing behind-the-scenes help, judging from the fact that all of my sims seem to accumulate random friends despite never attempting to speak to anyone.

Similar problem with careers: vanilla Sims presents you singles without a job, but with a clone of themselves on their arm every now and then. Awesomemod presents you singles without a job and no babies.

Well, nothing stops them from getting a job once they're in the game, other than their total lack of motivation, really.

For the time being players like me are faced by the decision whether to have a stable, colorful neighborhood or a one-generation-and-then-start-the-next-game-neighborhood, as you can't have both mods in the game, just one.

Look, the foot-dragging is NOT my fault. I am still waiting for them to implement their end of the deal, after which I reckon it will take only a few hours to implement the switching systems and it will be ready for the first intrepid testers to take a swing at it.

I really love the way the awesome-mod allows me to play more then one household, but frankly speaking: its storymode "improvements" are not improvements, they are just removing the rather unsophisticated solutions to certain problems EA has built into the game. The Indiemod is a better solution here, awesomemod is not.

Why? Because Story Mode is stupid and prefers to spam random "antagonize" and "befriend" fluff instead of DOING THE BUSINESS, because it seems to perceive your contributions to the neighborhood population as sufficient to satisfy its demographic needs

Note that you supposedly cannot take AM out once enabling Supreme Commander, however perhaps it's that I have both the brave and insane traits, but I have been running with SC and then swapping AM in and out for quite some time now without issue.

Well, that was speculative based on some extreme tests. I prefer to side with caution, so the discretionary warning is that uninstalling is dangerous if you have anyone running in SupCom. It is presently believed that if you cancel ALL interactions, the system should be able to cleanly unplug, but again, this is unsupported.

[Motoki]

Note that you supposedly cannot take AM out once enabling Supreme Commander, however perhaps it's that I have both the brave and insane traits, but I have been running with SC and then swapping AM in and out for quite some time now without issue.

Well, that was speculative based on some extreme tests. I prefer to side with caution, so the discretionary warning is that uninstalling is dangerous if you have anyone running in SupCom. It is presently believed that if you cancel ALL interactions, the system should be able to cleanly unplug, but again, this is unsupported.

Yeah, I do always at least make sure no one is macroing anything or has SC actually running when I save before I swap out AM. I'm insane but even I'm not that insane. That would just be asking for trouble.