Sims, birds, and bees

[anyeone]

Here's an example of how Sim AI could be improved.

Jonah and Iriana are brother and sister.  When they were both teens, Jonah fell in love with Tosha Go.  They dated for a short time, but then Tosha cheated on him...with Iriana.  After slapping Iriana around a bit, Jonah seemed to have "gotten over it" and eventually the brother/sister relationship was repaired.  The two lived in the dorm together and became the best of friends... or so Iriana thought.

Fast-forward a few years.  Iriana becomes joined to a lass named Gretchen and they adopt the lovely Elise. Unfortunately for Iriana, Gretchen's sexuality is a bit more... flexible... than her own.  Jonah saw the unique opportunity for revenge and seduced Gretchen while Iriana was at work, getting her pregnant. 

Gretchen soon delivers a little baby girl, Raleigh, and Iriana takes to it like it is her own, with no suspicion whatsoever that Gretchen has been playing around.  Perhaps she believes in immaculate conception through lobster thermidor?

[vaughje]

Maybe she's like those abused women who just block it all out.    I hate lifetime.

[BeckerCheez]

Yeah I have a parallell universe of a neighborhood that has clones of Don Lothario and Chloe Curious in it.  Oddly enough, Chloe had Don's baby, even though Don changed aspirations and has a wife and daughter of his own.  As things turn out, Marisa Bendett Lothario does not know that Don had been fooling around with Chloe, and Chloe's and Don's son, Barry, does not know who is daddy is.  Oh well, ignorance is bliss I suppose.   

[gali]

"As things turn out, Marisa Bendett Lothario does not know that Don had been fooling around with Chloe, and Chloe's and Don's son, Barry, does not know who is daddy is." [Chee-Z]

Fathers and sons/daughters ALWAYS know who is the father/son/daughter - that's how the game is programmed....

You can say that, talking about Real Life - not The Sims. 

[BeckerCheez]

I look in Barry's relationships and it shows in his Family section only his mother and his aunt.  In his all relationships section, it does not show that he's even met his father.  Maybe it's because Don was not there when Barry was born (they live in separate households).  Or maybe I'm looking at it wrong or something, who knows.   

[Jysudo]

Yes, I think that its crazy that sims could find out that they are being cheated on by viewing roses or thank you cards that dates give to their lovers/spouses and yet didn't know the kid is not theirs.
 

By the way, my fav vamp's lover died 3 generations ago. But his family members still disapprove of him looking for other lovers and always get double negatives when they caught him making out with other sims. If this is not crappy AI, I don't know what it is.

[Ellatrue]

Well, the kid won't fill their wants, and it won't show them as being related to the child- but they don't get a negative memory either :p

[skandelouslala]

I always hate this too.  I guess it's where your own imagination has to come into play.  You'd think there'd be a way to program it in there..but then again it wouldn't be possible for it to pick and choose how it was recognized...it would be an all or nothing deal, like it is now anyways. 


I had a house in Pleasantview where I got fed up with this.  I had Heath Broke & his wife and Valente Dreamer (offspring of the famous Broke & Dreamer families of course).  Valente always had a thing for Heath's wife so I eventually gave in and let them had a fling.  Thanks to Inteen I had a lil accidental pregnancy happen.  Valente Dreamer had maintained the family's dark skintone of course and the Brokes still their light skintone (you probably know where this is going lol)...so I figured if the baby "looked" enough like Heath my storyline would be that he raised his wife's love child with his best friend being none the wiser till later down the road.

Well the baby was born with the darker skintone.  Here we have a house full of skintone 2 sims.  And the wife pops out a skintone 4 baby...and all the while Heath is standing there cheering lol I don't think so.  I had to improvise and start a war between them.  It seemed only right.  Let's face it... if you and your partner are one skin color and you go pop out a kid that is a completely different color...somebody is going to be wondering what the heck is going on lol


Jysudo...3 generations and they still disapprove...wow.  I didn't know that went on for so long.
That's okay... I have a male sim that is somewhat angry about his brother hooking up with a cheerleader.  Being that one is romance and one is pleasure they've had this issue a lot when it comes to the romantic rival thing.  However..the brother is gay so I'm trying to figure out why he cares what women his brother is hooking up with lol

[Unnicknamed]

This behaviour it's ok for me, one of my sims have a baby with the Social Bunny, so she don't have to explain how in the hell that happen.

[J. M. Pescado]

Your problem is that you're expecting sims to make a logical deduction based on indirect observation.

They're not programmed to do this, so there's no real mystery: Unless a sim witnesses an act directly while not too preoccupied to do so, as far as he's concerned, it didn't happen. Attempts at deductive reasoning invariably make even less sense: See "flower rage".

[anyeone]

It wouldn't be that hard to program an interaction where if a homosexually joined sim gets pregnant, the partner treats it as a cheating interaction.

[VacantBlue]

I always thought that it would be nice if they added a paternity test option.  You could have a Sim call and request a paternity test on a baby or toddler.  If the Sim who called was not on the family tree of the baby in question - then the paternity test would be negative and the Sim would react as if they caught their spouse/lover cheating.

This way you could make the decision if the significant other discovered the truth or not.

Currently I have them catch the significant other cheating and just take pictures for my storyline.  Then, I pretend that it is because of the child, but it would be nice not to have to pretend anymore...

[Paperbladder]

TS2 is Object-Oriented.  Sims themselves are objects and they interact with objects using a method system.  Heck, even Social Interactions are still objects and they haven't even bothered to change it since S1.  In other words, they aren't "sentient" and won't be capable of "sentience" in this Sims Cycle.

The fact that they're forced to act upon objects and relying on an attenuation values on said such objects for their AI/AS, makes them complete morons and only able to figure out if someone is "cheating" by seeing an object that relates to another sim or witnesses the event.  I guess memory pillaging could help in figure out who's cheating with who if sims were allowed to pillage it, but then it would probably produce some undesired effects and they're probably missing data in their current state.

[Marvin Kosh]

Sims are social creatures, one would think that if one of them saw the spouse of their best friend cheating, they would call their friend or even drop by as a matter of urgency.

However as has quite rightly been pointed out, Sims are also morons.  They probably wouldn't even know about making babies if we didn't tell them to

[sudaki]

Weren't Sims originally supposed to be able to find out about cheating via other Sims who witnessed the event? I swear I can remember reading that detail, or seeing it in a promo video or something. AFAIK this doesn't happen.

I did have one incident way, way back when I first got the base game -- Don Lothario finished romancing/woohooing one Caliente sister and sent her home, and about an hour later the other sister showed up and yelled and slapped him silly. That could be one of those preprogrammed events though. Anyway. 

[jsalemi]

Sims also have one-track minds -- I had one male sim walk right past his girlfriend making out with another guy because he was on his way to the toilet.  Didn't even react until he came out of the bathroom and 'realized' what was going on.  It was rather amusing...

[akatonbo]

Weren't Sims originally supposed to be able to find out about cheating via other Sims who witnessed the event? I swear I can remember reading that detail, or seeing it in a promo video or something. AFAIK this doesn't happen.

That was supposed to be by way of memories, and I'm not sure who was EVER supposed to get those memories or if anyone other than the spouses gets them now.

[sadiebutterfly]

Let's face it... if you and your partner are one skin color and you go pop out a kid that is a completely different color...somebody is going to be wondering what the heck is going on lol

My sister did that storyline with DJ Broke and his wife, a Romance sim who got herself knocked up by her only black boyfriend. Sister made him shout at his wife continuously until she walked out. Leaving the baby. Now that is stupid behaviour.

[skandelouslala]

Sims are social creatures, one would think that if one of them saw the spouse of their best friend cheating, they would call their friend or even drop by as a matter of urgency.

I always thought this too.  At least with NL installed they recognize it and their relationship drops with the offending parties though, usually just for spouses of family members though IIRC.  I guess that is somewhat realistic.

Weren't Sims originally supposed to be able to find out about cheating via other Sims who witnessed the event? I swear I can remember reading that detail, or seeing it in a promo video or something. AFAIK this doesn't happen.

They can via gossip but it's extremely rare for it to even come up, especially when you would like for it too.  B/c apparently gossiping about burned food is WAY more interesting than the latest affair going on in the 'hood.

[AllenABQ]

Weren't Sims originally supposed to be able to find out about cheating via other Sims who witnessed the event? I swear I can remember reading that detail, or seeing it in a promo video or something. AFAIK this doesn't happen.

Yes there was a promo video for the game narrated by a Maxoid showing a birthday party with hubby, hubby's old girlfriend, wife, and wife's sister in attendance.  Hubby went off with old girlfriend and started making out with her.  Wife's sister witnessed this, got embarrassed, went and told wife who then suffered a major Aspiration loss.  Hubby apologizes, then old girlfriend kisses him in front of her, and seconds later the wife's sister and the old girlfriend are duking it out in a cloud of dust.

You're also right in that this kind of thing rarely happens, if at all.  The reason why is because in order to communicate the affair to the wife, she and her sister have to gossip and the subject of their gossip has to be the event she witnessed.  In practice it appears that gossip can be ANY memory that the sim has witnessed or been told about by another sim.  So basically, if the sim has been played for a long time this amounts to A LOT of memories of which any can be randomly picked.  The chances of landing on the "juicy" stuff is pretty small.

The video was a bit misleading about that.  It sort of implied that if the sim witnessed some kind of cheating event and they had a meaningful relationship to the injured party who was on the lot at the same time, they would immediately go and report the behavior to them.  That's clearly not what happens.

[sudaki]

Ahh. But, theoretically, if I had Sim Witness and Sim Cheated-On gossip until they dropped dead -- or just got lucky -- Cheated-On COULD find out? They just prefer to talk about burned spaghetti.

What about chatting? I know I've seen Sims casually bring up their cheating over breakfast....

[J. M. Pescado]

They don't, sorry.There isn't a programmed reaction specific to the memory being passed. Meaning that even if a sim talks about the cheating with the person being cheated on...nothing. Another reason why it's not often a gossip topic is because it is classified as a green, "positive" memory, and sims prefer greatly to gossip about negative memories. Since the cheating is a green memory, it is rarely talked of.

[sudaki]

It was nixed altogether then. Damn, I thought so, but it's still disappointing. I really liked the idea of being able to tattle on people. 

[skandelouslala]

Ahh. But, theoretically, if I had Sim Witness and Sim Cheated-On gossip until they dropped dead -- or just got lucky -- Cheated-On COULD find out?

I'm going to have to disagree with Pescado unless my game just went wonky twice.  I've had sims seemingly react to gossip of their cherating spouse, knife thing over their heads and all.  Very rare, but it has happened in my game twice.

[Swiftgold]

If the gossip memory is good, maybe having them brag about it instead?

I know I just looove seeing a Sim's teenaged daughter congratulate him on cheating on her mother...