Awesome Story Driver Beta-Testing reports

[Falin]

I simply cannot coax any of my non-played sim families to breed.  Nothing I do makes any babies happen.

I even created a new married couple, both with the "Family-oriented" trait, and both with the "Surrounded by Family LTWs.  I put them in a house together with spare bedrooms and a crib and a kid bed in it, and so far they have gone though all of Young Adult and about 20 days of Adult without having a baby.

I haven't had a single baby born in my neighborhood.  What can I do to make this happen, short of jumping into all my families and forcing Try for Babies everywhere?

[moondance]

If the story mod spits out a notification to the player that a sim is pregnant, and the player does not go and add a crib to the sim's home, the mother could just have a spontaneous miscarriage. Like internal dingos. That would work, AND it would offend various people (BONUS!). More realistic, too, because IRL, people generally buy cribs after they become pregnant, not before. 

Seriously though, I'd prefer to just have the ability to globally set a maximum number of children per household, and maybe be able to set some special cases individually.  My reason is that if my neighborhood starts to get overpopulated, I don't want the "solution" to be that I have to run around from house to house deleting cribs...and then add them all back again when the neighborhood isn't populated enough.  It seems that the result is the same either way--adding or removing cribs is simply a clunkier way of raising or lowering the maximum number of children per household setting.

How about some sort of evil compromise:
We can configure the maximum number of kids per household.
If we select and make active a household that has babies/toddlers and no cribs we have 2 sim hours to add cribs.
If cribs are not added in the allotted time, the social worker comes--or the dingos, whatever--and takes not only the babies but also any other children the household has--because it's an unfit home.
The parents are sent to jail on child neglect/abuse charges.
The repo man shows up and confiscates most of the family's net worth--to pay fines and lawyers.
The sims are forever after randomly boo'ed and hissed at by random sims on the street, and occasionally attacked. They find it VERY difficult to make friends.  They are also unable to get a job in medicine, law enforcement, or politics. Their job performance climbs VERY slowly in ALL careers--as a consequence of their bad reputation.
All this can apply to houses that have children and not enough BEDS, as well, because that's just as bad, really.
This way, those of us who play the entire town have a real incentive to make sure that there actually are cribs and beds, while people who play legacy style with just one household aren't bothered with buying cribs for sims who are--for them---NPCs.

[Motoki]

I simply cannot coax any of my non-played sim families to breed.  Nothing I do makes any babies happen.

I even created a new married couple, both with the "Family-oriented" trait, and both with the "Surrounded by Family LTWs.  I put them in a house together with spare bedrooms and a crib and a kid bed in it, and so far they have gone though all of Young Adult and about 20 days of Adult without having a baby.

I haven't had a single baby born in my neighborhood.  What can I do to make this happen, short of jumping into all my families and forcing Try for Babies everywhere?

Nothing. You wait. That feature hasn't been implemented yet. In the meantime you either manually make them do it or you can run Indie for a while then you will plenty of babies, trust me.

[rhodaloo]

I noticed that I was continually getting notices that two families are continually trying to find a house to move into and fail.  Since I can't find a house with their name on it, am I to assume that they are homeless?  I finally configured awesomemode so that I don't get notices as I was tired of the popup.  Now when a sim reads the newspaper, I see 5-6 notices each that Family "X" and Family "Y" has moved.  Is this a bug or a feature?

[spatdrastik]

rhodaloo are you using indie? because it spams multiple copies of every family in your library into your town, they start out homeless but many will end up in houses. Within a generation or two there will be dozens of them.


**No babies born in my hood either, but plenty of cribs...My child sims at this point only know each other and there are only 3 teens in the entire neighborhood(from a few days with indie) that I can find that don't belong to my main family. Not much in the romance/marrige dept either, the single sims are still single and the few who have married are old and childless.

At least I don't have swarms at the school lol

[rhodaloo]

Pulled out Indie mode once I learned it wasn't going to be supported.  I only have awesomemod and it's story progression now.

[spatdrastik]

Pulled out Indie mode once I learned it wasn't going to be supported.  I only have awesomemod and it's story progression now.

Open a cheat box and type "listhomeless". If you played this hood with indie for any length of time there are probably a shitload of homeless clones and recent versions of awesomemod is doing a much better job of putting them into houses.

l

[Bouncing Pink Ball]

...We can configure the maximum number of kids per household...

^ I like this idea. Plop in any needed beds (or don't, if so preferred) and leave the households to do their thing. A middle ground between control freaks and laissez-faire players.

The only thing I want to add is about the bed issue actually; when my sims marry now, they inevitably move in with an existing household that has spare beds, so I guess anything beyond crib addition will cause homeless folks, or those without extra beds in their current home, to merge with families. That means that maintaining a realistic number of beds per household would require hands on monitoring of all the households so that beds were only added as spawn outgrew cribs. To much for me, so I guess the cribs for realism bit isn't so important anymore.

********

Encounter after removing IS, reinstalling and loading up ASDbeta:

(1) After playing three - five sim days, my game slows to a crawl, sometimes causing the sims to freeze in place then skip ahead a few sim minutes and freeze again. Saving, quiting the game and restarting brings speed back to normal until I hit the magic three to five day mark again and the stop motion world returns.
(2) At least one complete freeze per human hour of play. Game can only be exited via task manager.
(3) Entire game appears slowed; returning to 'home' from town lots loads up an empty house that slowly fills with blank and the textured objects, rabbit holes load noticeable slower so that switching to see a sim about to leave work gives an empty lot with until the building eventually appears.

Is the story driver running in sync with the timeline I'm using (not epic, but one step down) as IS was able to? I never had a slowdown problem previously and I'm wondering just how much is going on in the background. From my understanding, IS wasn't as picky about setting up events, hence wasn't as busy running calculations.

Game specs: ver 1.4.6.00002
Awesome Mode: updated August 9, story mode and supreme commander enabled
Machine specs (not terrific, but meets suggested requirements for TS3): Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop, Intel core duo CPU (150GHz), 4 GB ram, Nvidia GeForce 86000M Gt card, windows vista 32-bit os  All latest drivers installed and unnecessary processes killed prior to running game.

Would it be helpful for testing purposes if I were to reinstall without the latest patch and disable supreme commander?

[speedreader]

As I have stated before, I am a 'neighborhood' player.  I thought it was interesting that freezes only occur in my game if I have been playing the same house for more than 2 Sim days, and usually just after that point.  If I hop around the neighborhood (I use edit town for my hopping because it reminds me to save my game and I like to look at who is in the house before I jump) I can play for hours with no freeze.  Sims are no longer pausing forever so that is much better.

Crib issue:  
Moondance, you have some evil issues, yes?  
Even though I jump around, I don't think I like this control.  Whoever said people buy cribs after they become pregnant has a good point.  The idea to have a time limit after the popup announcement of pregnancy is a little scary to me because I tend to let my game run while I make a sandwich, do laundry etc.  I could eaily miss the message.  Announcements in the newspaper would help with that - incentive to read and no one to blame if I miss an announcement.  Is this an IS feature, 'cause I've never seen announcements in the paper.  Further, if the messages are using lots of game brain, they could all be turned off and we would still know neighborhood events.  

Speaking of neighbohood events, with AMS turned on I am not getting messages that so-and-so died.  I did get those messages running the EA game.  

Edit: CRS Syndrome

[TrueLou]

Pulled out Indie mode once I learned it wasn't going to be supported.  I only have awesomemod and it's story progression now.

Open a cheat box and type "listhomeless". If you played this hood with indie for any length of time there are probably a shitload of homeless clones and recent versions of awesomemod is doing a much better job of putting them into houses.

l

Awesomemod does indeed do a fantastic job with homing the homeless, one thing you may want to bear in mind is that whenever the game generates a homeless family they have a default face for male and female. It took me a while to realise this as they all have different hair and skin tone, but if you select them and look at them in profile you will see that they are all clones. I was using Indie when I discovered this so I started using their 'Pull genetics from library' feature and made a shitload of my own sims to widen the genetic pool. Running your game for an extended period with the game generated families as your backdrop will eventually lead to clone town, this would only be a problem if you were intending on marrying any of them in I suppose. Me, I prefer variety, so sticking with Indie for the time being.

[Falin]

I simply cannot coax any of my non-played sim families to breed.  Nothing I do makes any babies happen.

I even created a new married couple, both with the "Family-oriented" trait, and both with the "Surrounded by Family LTWs.  I put them in a house together with spare bedrooms and a crib and a kid bed in it, and so far they have gone though all of Young Adult and about 20 days of Adult without having a baby.

I haven't had a single baby born in my neighborhood.  What can I do to make this happen, short of jumping into all my families and forcing Try for Babies everywhere?

Nothing. You wait. That feature hasn't been implemented yet. In the meantime you either manually make them do it or you can run Indie for a while then you will plenty of babies, trust me.

Ahh, I wasn't aware that baby-having wasn't implemented yet.  Thanks for the info!

What you suggested is exactly what I ended up doing.  I turned IS on for about 6 sim days and watched about 7 billion babies happen, then turned it off and cleaned up the Homeless mess it made.

[rhodaloo]

Pulled out Indie mode once I learned it wasn't going to be supported.  I only have awesomemod and it's story progression now.

Open a cheat box and type "listhomeless". If you played this hood with indie for any length of time there are probably a shitload of homeless clones and recent versions of awesomemod is doing a much better job of putting them into houses.

l

Best I can tell they aren't being put in houses.  I'll go do a search using "homeless" to see if I find any threads that offer suggestions.

[Lum]

Back to the babby issue:

Why not make something like 'breed like rabbits until X number of sims is reached' (enough to create a sustainable population), then for every sim elder or any other sim that kicks the bucket, have someone somewhere have a baby to replace the dead sim, so that the population remains constant.

As for the Job engine that also creates sims... well, I don't know, you're the Awesome ones, y'all would figure out something. Maybe pick an already existing sim to fill the vacancy so the engine doesn't create new ones unless somebody else dies?

(This would be very fun if we had a random death mod that killed and killed often. Random death has been a dream of mine since Sims 2.)

[J. M. Pescado]

I simply cannot coax any of my non-played sim families to breed.  Nothing I do makes any babies happen.

I even created a new married couple, both with the "Family-oriented" trait, and both with the "Surrounded by Family LTWs.  I put them in a house together with spare bedrooms and a crib and a kid bed in it, and so far they have gone though all of Young Adult and about 20 days of Adult without having a baby.

Noted, will investigate why it doesn't appear to be working, because it should be. Keep in mind, however, aging must be ON for babies to occur. If the babies cannot age, they will not be spawned.

Nothing. You wait. That feature hasn't been implemented yet. In the meantime you either manually make them do it or you can run Indie for a while then you will plenty of babies, trust me.

Actually, it SHOULD be in there.

(1) After playing three - five sim days, my game slows to a crawl, sometimes causing the sims to freeze in place then skip ahead a few sim minutes and freeze again. Saving, quiting the game and restarting brings speed back to normal until I hit the magic three to five day mark again and the stop motion world returns.
(2) At least one complete freeze per human hour of play. Game can only be exited via task manager.
(3) Entire game appears slowed; returning to 'home' from town lots loads up an empty house that slowly fills with blank and the textured objects, rabbit holes load noticeable slower so that switching to see a sim about to leave work gives an empty lot with until the building eventually appears.

Interesting. Will look into it.

[simwit]

All Hail The President! 

The first AwesomeStory pregnancy in my neighborhood.

Romance:
Angelique Lothario pollinated by Wesley Lothario

[chaos]

I found that many of the EA-built houses from the Library bin already have cribs in them, so I've been plopping them down in my new Sunset Valley that I began from scratch (only business lots, and all humans deleted). I also added cribs to several of the lots that I snagged from Riverview and the original SV, and am currently using the Awesome story driver, yet none of my unplayed sims are spawning, despite most of them having at least one crib and one spare single bed in their homes and/or having the funds to move to a larger home that contains cribs and plenty of beds. Oh, and I also did "wandhere" on every single house in the town. I like that the sims are no longer playing Musical Houses, as I apparently chose well for them, but I'd be much happier if my hard work was actually paying off, and my sims were squirting out babbyz. This is disappointing, but I refuse to go back to Indie Stone, because of the clone spam that the ISM produces. Le sigh.

Edit: I see now that AM has been updated to fix this problem. Yay!

[kimmyfrmtx]

Just downloaded updated to the newest AwesomeMod (8/10/09 15:36).  Happy to report 2 announcements of successful pollination of the neighborhood in 30 minutes.

[rainie]

As of this evening, I am also getting pollination notices with AwesomeStory.  Yay!

[Motoki]

Nothing. You wait. That feature hasn't been implemented yet. In the meantime you either manually make them do it or you can run Indie for a while then you will plenty of babies, trust me.

Actually, it SHOULD be in there.

Well when I complained to you in chat no one was breeding and the town was going to go extinct you said those features hadn't been implemented yet. And it's also been mentioned a number of times by multiple people that they weren't spawning, which you ignored, but whatever I'm just glad they are actually having kids now. Err, if they really are. I have to test it out.

[simwit]

They're breeding like rabbits!  

Four babies born on saturday, one on sunday, and more on the way. Should I get "baby born" notifications from AwesomeStory? I didn't get any. I had to read it in the newspaper the next day. However, immediately after a few women gave birth, they apparently got "pollinated" again without delay. They were clearly yearning for kids.

[speedreader]

I also have babies and more on the way.  Still stuttering.  Froze once, early on in play and I was hopping around using Ctrl Click.  I think I caused my own problem.  I did get laggy after a while but all was fine after a restart.

[Solmyr]

Do they require cribs then to have babies in AM storymode?

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes. The number of houses you stock with cribs presently determines how fast they can spawn kids, and the kind of fambly compositions you want to see.

[chaos]

I am happy to report that the ASD is working perfectly for me, now. Sims are being pollinated, and others are moving to better accommodations, so that they can begin being pollinated. Meanwhile, all of the flirty sims and commitmentphobes are slutting their way around town with anyone who's willing. Awesome!

[Solmyr]

Does/will ASM make it possible for babies to be born out of wedlock (would make sense for males with Commitment Issues).