Sims, birds, and bees

[anyeone]

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.

The object orientation of the game is irrelevant.  Register a delegate between sims when they get joined (or fall in love while living together, you get the idea).  When a sim because pregnant, it fires an event.  The delegate on the spouse picks it up.  If the spouse picking up the "my partner is pregnant" event is female, trigger the WTFBBQ interaction.  If the spouse is male, no reason to be suspicious.  You could actually do something similar to have sims "notice" when their child's genetics is not within the realm of possibility for their union, but that is a little less important IMO.

I'm an object oriented developer, so I call bullshit on object orientation being the reason this doesn't work.

[J. M. Pescado]

The object orientation of the game is irrelevant.  Register a delegate between sims when they get joined (or fall in love while living together, you get the idea).  When a sim because pregnant, it fires an event.  The delegate on the spouse picks it up.  If the spouse picking up the "my partner is pregnant" event is female, trigger the WTFBBQ interaction.  If the spouse is male, no reason to be suspicious.  You could actually do something similar to have sims "notice" when their child's genetics is not within the realm of possibility for their union, but that is a little less important IMO.

It is not quite that simple. Even assuming that a sim "knows" that his partner (if female, males normally only get this through alien abductions), is supposed to only become pregnant if a woohoo has occurred 2 days ago, the problem is that the game does not presently support any kind of timestamping of events, nor does it tend to keep track of many such "duplicate" events, which tends to put a lot of holes in its ability to make a deductive reasoning. Even if it did do this, people have enough corner cases to render nearly as many false positive results as real ones. The number of edge cases in this is simply massive, and there's no way of knowing whether or not this is, in fact, allowed or not, since sims don't really have any kind of decisionmaking of any sort. Ultimately this sort of thing is going to have to be left up to the player.

I suppose it would be possible to add an interaction to bust someone once the sufficiently obvious may have been proven, so that the player can choose to invoke it at his choosing.

[lovemysims]

What if an object appeared on the lot when the husband was not the father. It could be the test results (like an at home DNA Test) and have very high advertising. If the Dad got there 1st it would set off the cheated on reaction. But if another sim makes it there 1st they can throw it away. that way there is an element of surprise.

[anyeone]

The object orientation of the game is irrelevant.  Register a delegate between sims when they get joined (or fall in love while living together, you get the idea).  When a sim because pregnant, it fires an event.  The delegate on the spouse picks it up.  If the spouse picking up the "my partner is pregnant" event is female, trigger the WTFBBQ interaction.  If the spouse is male, no reason to be suspicious.  You could actually do something similar to have sims "notice" when their child's genetics is not within the realm of possibility for their union, but that is a little less important IMO.

It is not quite that simple. Even assuming that a sim "knows" that his partner (if female, males normally only get this through alien abductions), is supposed to only become pregnant if a woohoo has occurred 2 days ago, the problem is that the game does not presently support any kind of timestamping of events, nor does it tend to keep track of many such "duplicate" events, which tends to put a lot of holes in its ability to make a deductive reasoning. Even if it did do this, people have enough corner cases to render nearly as many false positive results as real ones. The number of edge cases in this is simply massive, and there's no way of knowing whether or not this is, in fact, allowed or not, since sims don't really have any kind of decisionmaking of any sort. Ultimately this sort of thing is going to have to be left up to the player.

I suppose it would be possible to add an interaction to bust someone once the sufficiently obvious may have been proven, so that the player can choose to invoke it at his choosing.

I agree that trying to keep track of the timing for heterosexual pregnancies might be unnecessarily complex, but in the case of the pregnant lesbian - the fact that she got pregnant at all shows there was infidelity with respect to her female partner, so if there were delegates listening timing wouldn't necessarily matter.

*shrug* I just think there are some little things that could be added that would go a long way.  I doubt Maxis will ever do it, and it's probably too complex to hack around (I don't attempt to write hacks for the Sims, I leave that to others more awesome than I) but I don't think that it would be too difficult were Maxis to decide to introduce that logic.

[knitro]

I personaly like the phone call/paternatiy test idea...make it cost a bit of cash too, as it would IRL..so our trailer trash simmies, would just have to keep wondering...hehehe

K

[jsalemi]

I agree that trying to keep track of the timing for heterosexual pregnancies might be unnecessarily complex, but in the case of the pregnant lesbian - the fact that she got pregnant at all shows there was infidelity with respect to her female partner, so if there were delegates listening timing wouldn't necessarily matter.

See, but that's not necessarily true, either -- there are 'same-sex pregnancy' hacks out there, so a lesbian CAN be pregnant if you're using one. So there may or may not be infidelity involved.

[anyeone]

Well, if Maxis had coded the logic in, then same-sex pregnancy hacks would need to work around it.

Maxis shouldn't code around hacks - hacks should code around Maxis. 

[J. M. Pescado]

I agree that trying to keep track of the timing for heterosexual pregnancies might be unnecessarily complex, but in the case of the pregnant lesbian - the fact that she got pregnant at all shows there was infidelity with respect to her female partner, so if there were delegates listening timing wouldn't necessarily matter.

Not necessarily true. She could have been pregnant already before they met: Remember, no timestamps.

[syberspunk]

I agree that trying to keep track of the timing for heterosexual pregnancies might be unnecessarily complex, but in the case of the pregnant lesbian - the fact that she got pregnant at all shows there was infidelity with respect to her female partner, so if there were delegates listening timing wouldn't necessarily matter.

Not necessarily true. She could have been pregnant already before they met: Remember, no timestamps.

Additionally... what if people wanted to work in surrogate mother or male donor stories? For example... if male same-sex couples hired a female sim to be impregnated and carry their child. Or if female same-sex couples hired a male friend as a sperm donor. In this case... it shouldn't necessarily be considered an infidelity. This would probably be far too complicated to code into the game without actually setting this up as a kind of scenario I suppose. Although sims have memories, they are essentially 'two dimensional' for lack of a better description. Sims can't really learn from their memories. In many cases, memories don't have that much of an effect besides acting as gates to other certain interactions or space holders to fulfill some specific goal. Sims pretty much just have an idea of what was a good memory (something to brag about) or bad memory (something to cry softly about ).

The original jealousy system was a hacked up headache of a mess that even Pescado couldn't wrap his head around. I wouldn't want to throw in any other unnecessary monkey wrenches. The game just doesn't have well-designed 'A.I.' Sims are just utopiancreatures, where mostly everything is just a happy event for everyone, at least as far as having babies are concerned. Even having alien babies is at first a shocking but then ultimately happy event to be shared by all. 

Ste

[J. M. Pescado]

Although sims have memories, they are essentially 'two dimensional' for lack of a better description. Sims can't really learn from their memories.

Actually, that's really overstating the case. Sim memories are not even two-dimensional, they are one dimensional. In order for something to be TWO dimensional, it has to have two different axes, like an X and Y axis. Sim memories only have an X axis, the good/bad strength.

[syberspunk]

Actually, that's really overstating the case. Sim memories are not even two-dimensional, they are one dimensional. In order for something to be TWO dimensional, it has to have two different axes, like an X and Y axis. Sim memories only have an X axis, the good/bad strength.

It's funny that you said that. I originally wrote it to say one dimensional... and then I edited myself thinking that didn't seem right. But I guess my original thinking was correct to begin with. Oh well, I think the gist of what I meant to say comes through. Memories are just like bits, with basically a good or bad 'value' and don't really have significantly long term effects.

It would be nice if things were a bit more complex, that they could actually program far more complex, realistic behaviours such as these, but the way it stands, it's just not possible. Maybe something that they'll might develop for Sims 3?

Ste

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, if you have my stuff, SOME memories actually have an impact on sim behavior. The Fight Club uses the fight memories to track battle experience, the Fire Mod uses the fire memories to decide whether or not a sim is used to things being on fire and thus reacts decisively to deal with the problem rather than freaking out, etc. The memory concept really could have been used a bit more. As it stands, it's mostly a cosmetic feature.

[KnightSkyKyte]

Well... that explains why one of my sims is constantly congratulating his spouse for cheating on him.

But it IS annoying. He should NOT be congratulating his other half for it.

At least I know there's very little that can be done about it, besides a re-write of the whole code...