More Awesome Than You!

While eating breakfast this morning, I was thinking about TS2 and, more specifically, the way relationships work in it. Then an idea hit me. As we all know, in the unmodded game, all romantic relationships are a slow steady climb to 100-70 followed by the Sims in question falling in love. It's not particularly realistic, especially not for Romance sims, because there are no one night stands or casual relationships. I realise that there are mods like ACR to improve on this, but to be honest, I think they're too complex for their own good.

Anyway, the idea I came up with is: Each Sim would have an "Arousal" meter. Basically, most of the romantic interactions, like flirting, kissing, slow dancing and the romantic hugs would gradually fill the meter. (the speed at which they fill up for both parties would be determined by their mutual chemistry, so they'd both fill up at the same speed) Then, if time passes and no further interaction takes place to keep filling the bar, it would gradually empty again.

Anyway, once the bar is full, both Sims would accept higher-level interactions, like Make Out and Woohoo, (even if their relationship was only 80-20, for example) that normally wouldn't be accessible till 100-70.

I realise that this idea isn't perfect, but it's simple and functional and I haven't been able to poke any significant holes in it yet. But that's why I'm posting it here. Fire away.  :)

It is not feasible as it would involve major retooling of the entire user interface. Suggest it for TS2. Right now, the closest proxy would be noinstantlove.

That's what he was doing, silly Pes.

It would be a really cool idea, though.

I know, I just like to yank his chain.   ;)

Have you tried flamingo hacks? I highly doubt it's more complex than it should be. (In fact, I've been mulling over how to properly mitigate its effects.)

I think the major flaw with the idea is that most others don't share your opinion that ACR is too complex. There are many settings to modify the behaviour of particular sims, but if you feel that it is too complicated you can just stick it in and see what happens. The complexity of the hack accounts for the diversity of reactions, which I still find amazing (For example: Melody Tinker could still not bring herself to do teen woohoo after making a booty call to her boyfriend, with my current generation of teenagers thinking very different about this issue).
I could be wrong, but my guess is that you read the description for ACR but haven't tried it out yet.

Apart from that, the original attraction system that is in the game already allows for romantic interactions below a certain relationship level, if the attraction between two sims is high enough.

The only difference I can see would be the introduction of "temporary" attraction as a result of romantic interaction, meaning that one sim might hop into bed with another on one particular night, but not the next day when the magic has passed. I quite like that idea. ACR does not have such a feature, the timer goes down steadily unless they get to woohoo, although it usually works like that.

The love potion effect comes pretty close to the temporay attraction thing. Together with ACR, it can result in some really interesting combinations ^^. It's a pity that the potion can never be used autonomously, but on the other hand, it gives you at least a little bit of control ;D.

No way!  Pescado would never let himself be taken in by lies and propaganda  :o

I find it too complex because it is cluttered and lacking in usability (too many dialogs, for example). I admit that it is a personal and subjective choice, but I rather doubt that most others do not share that opinion.

I don't like ACR much myself, as I have a more controlling playing style.  But if you want sims to WooHoo without being in Love, just use the Love Tub.  It only requires a Best Friend relationship for WooHoo.

ACR trades simplicity for flexibility, I think.  That's not to say that your flamingo system lacks flexibility, dizzy.  I think you've chosen to assemble a number of simple, modular hacks under one umbrella.  I quite like this approach since it allows me to add one easily understandable modification at a time.  Even if the suite got quite large, it's easy to start where you need/want to.

However, I think ACR adds some extensions to the game that are necessarily complex, like probabilistic pregnancies and woohoo on sofa, which is an un-Maxian location.  If you want these sorts of things, I think you have to expect that it's going to come in a big package.  On top of that, ACR lets users modify many of the parameters it uses for these behaviours.  Obviously, if you weren't looking for the big heart of the mod, ACR is hard to take in one swallow.

It does, from what I hear, have way too many dialogs, and has a distinct feeling of poor integration with the rest of the game, like something clumsily bolted on.

I find ACR has added a whole new dimension to the game, it doesn't feel bolted on but more has enriched the game. I love the surprises and the autonomous behaviour, I love the fine tweakability, I like my sims getting random gender preferences. But then I'm a heretic and play with free will on.  :D

Dialogs? Are you tallking about internal dialogs, stuff I don't get to see as a player? The adjuster has an elaborate pie menu (which could possibly be simplified a little) and I have the option of many settings to control the behaviour of my sims, but they are easy to understand and it's up to me to use them since ACR is working fine with the default settings. Personally, I think that it has become even better since more options were added (for example to make settings static/dynamic separately) but there is only a handful of sims were I feel the need to make adjustments.
Apart from that I agree with witch and would even go so far as saying that it compares to an expansion pack for what it is adding to the game. It is definitely much more than a WOOHOO!-hack and I am not saying that it isn't complex. That's why it is so good since complexity doesn't automatically translate into overladden and complicated.
Of course there is a certain chance that your opinion is based on personal animosities, but since we are not on the child's board I guess I can trust that this is not the case.

Oh, and why are flamingos so frequently mentioned here? What role do they play?

Flamingos don't play any specific role, but they're a popular choice of item to use as a controller for hacks, and independently of hacks, kicking them is one of the top sources of fun in the game, and thus they play an important role in the aforementioned Sport of Kings.

I've thought about an arousal meter before - but in my head it was more like a motive bar which went down when someone attractive/the one sim was in the room, (which depending on personality/aspiration,) down quicker if they watched a "porn" channel on TV or read a porn magazine or did anything remotely sexual, ie, kissing. It would go up if someone unattractive (or their mother!) was the only person in the room, or if their partner was stinky or put makeup on (as per their turn-offs). When it gets too low the sim would whinge until you made them wank/play with a vibrating thingy/had sex, each of these filling the bar to a different level. If it was too high the sim wouldn't be able to have sex but they could be aroused by foreplay/clothing (ie, underwear or swimwear or formalwear as per their turn-ons) etc.

Obviously there's no way EAxis could implement this into a game with less than a 15 rating anyway, so it remains but a dream... it would make more sense than the pointless environment score though.  I would suggest someone hacking that, but the thought of hacking an entire motive, which has probably tens of thousands of custom objects affecting it, makes me worried. The only feasible way this could be done is if they introduce a new "customisable" motive in TS3, which you can set yourself and then get anybody creating CC which would be likely to affect this custom motive to list which custom motive they're creating it for.

Which again is extremely unlikely.

I think they are talking about pop-ups.  There are status pop-ups.  There are try-for-baby pop-ups.  There are pregnancy scanner pop-ups.  There could be even more, but almost all of them are user-invoked.  For me, one of the reasons it feels bolted-on is because there is no way of sleekly reporting these bits of information in the UI, so I use those pop-ups a lot.  As other posts in this thread indicate, the whole notion of a sex need requires a pretty serious mod of the UI.

I like and use ACR, but I still think of it as the autonomous one-night-stand, oops-we're-preggers hack.  I put up with the inherent clumsiness of a mod that extends the game in huge, never-intended directions.  If some players want a little bit of randomly autonomous woohoo with the wife, or a modest change in the autonomous flirting Maxis gave us, I'm not surprised that they find this hack is too much.

It's healthy for the modding community that there are different hacks, different models for sex drive.  Dizzy's hacks I think, use personality to make certain sims initiate romantic socials more often.  They don't try to model a dynamic motive, but just make some sims sluttier than others.  In some ways, it looks more natural in gameplay than the iron-fisted timer TJ uses.

Is there a way to hack the social motive for some sims, so that it's satisfied only a little by friendly socials but more strongly by romantic ones?

I keep wanting to rewrite the motives system to create a sexual need as well as distinguishing between needs and motives for the other settings.  For example there should be a setting for how full the bladder is, but that would not be the same as the motive to use the toilet - for example an untrained child will let go of its bladder contents long before it has any motive to seek out a toilet.

And the hunger need should take about 2 weeks (human equivalent) to get to rock bottom, while the motive will be deep red after only two days.   And juxtaposing nutritional with bladder fullness, in all cases where the bladder is over a certain fullness, the toilet motive will be higher than the food motive.

I'm glad to see so many interesting replies.  ;D

No, I haven't, care to point me in the right direction?  :-X

You're right, I've only read about it and looked at some of the documentation, but from everything I read I got the distinct impression that it's fiddly. Plus, the whole notion of autonomous romance bothers me, as the control freak that I am.

I think the EAxian obsession with pants-wetting is largely fetish-based as opposed to real-world, which is why, if you look at the actual numbers, child sims are the LEAST likely to EVER pee their pants, considering they have the rock bottom LOWEST decay rates.

The dizzy brain dump (ver 10c) (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9535.0.html) in Peasantry

Is it possible to override one of the current useless needs? Like environment, for something like Inge was talking about?

No, changing or overwriting existing motives does not appear to be possible. There might be unused motive slots, but I have no idea how one would edit the GUI to display them, or how safe this is.

Ah, t'was a thought.  :D

That's the whole problem with TS2. Other games' files are more or less straight forward. TS2 files are not only often very strange, but interlinked in ways that boggle the mind. It's as if the developers thought of something and just stuck it somewhere - without rhyme or reason.

They get customers to play-test for them, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the coding was done by interns. =p

Straightforward, yes, and largely unmodifiable without actually physically replacing entire datafiles, meaning mods become a package deal.

What do you mean, "as if"? It's been publicly admitted that this *IS* what happens.

However, creating hak packs and modules still seems easier to do in those games than it is to deal with almost any file in TS2.

As for the admitted thing, I've never heard of EAxis admitting to anything. It's usually everybody else or their systems that are messed up, never EA itself. So that's refreshing to hear. Other than that, the file placement is like my kids' tidying up procedure:

"What's in this drawer? Oh, forks, knifes and such. A perfect place for my socks."

I think I read in the article that Ste posted for Castaway about the developer stating the the Wii version would run better because it was coded strictly for the Wii and that there was no leftover code from the previous console games. So if they make their console games by just shoving new code over old, suffice to say that they do it for the PC version.

And from what I have heard Pes say, there is leftover code from the Sims ONE in the code for Sims 2.

There are leftover images from Sims 1 in Sims 2 as well, not shown in game, but in the UI whatsit packages.

Lots of the "code" in TS2 is code straight out of TS1, just somewhat modified here and there.

If you want an example of a game that does mods the right way, I would say Doom 3 is just about ideal. EA games tend to be the type where you have to replace huge files with modified versions of those files.

One of my kids has that game (Doom 3). I haven't really played it, it seems so dark most of the time. I'll have to snoop around in it, some more I guess.

What always made me laugh though is the name of Dr. Malcolm Betruger. Betrüger is the German word for Traitor, or Betrayer. I guess naming him Malcolm Betrayer would've been too obvious.

Right now I'm desperately trying to find my Diablo and Diablo II discs. I can't find the Baldur's Gate series either. Bummer.

What I'd like to see, honestly, is some sort of mod that makes the environment motive harder to fill. It would be nice if there were more of a point to decorating.

I agree with you about the environment bar - mind you, I have trouble filling that bar right up.  It always stops at about 95% full.  Is there a guide anywhere on exactly how environment score is calculated?

Someone posted earlier that the lovetub lets best friends woohoo without being in love.  Are they going to fall in love more easily in the hottub too?  If that's true it could explain some of my confusion about sim romance and how it's changed with added EPs.  I know I'm using lovetubs less than I used to.  I'll have to try that with those stupid, frigid sims who refuse to fall in love with anyone.

Inge's idea is interesting.  The food example is really a short term/long term issue isn't it?  My take on priorities is that there are a lot of places in the game where we need different measures for short and long term.  We have two bars for friendship, but we really need two bars for aspiration as well and some long and short term romance bars would be good too.  Maxis might well have thought base game was already complicated enough without adding another set of double indicators for romance.  We've got mods to make romance decay that contribute some sort of long term aspect to romance.   Does anyone think we're getting a new long term aspiration bar with the Free Time?  They've got pics of something that might be a new aspiration bar - or the old one in a different place on the screen.....

When it comes to Environment, I'd rather see a less compartmentalised effect (or, say, a Motive that matters). As it works now, Floor score gives you x% of the total, Wall score is another n%, and yer various furniture, decos, state of cleanliness, and whatnot make up the rest. But while I agree that all the paintings in the world shouldn't overcome a tatty-ass stained linoleum, it irks me that even if I've placed a very attractive $6 hardwood floor, all the $4,000 sculptures I can buy still leave the score unmaxed. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like the floor or wall's percentage threshold be lower so that you don't *have* to use a very expensive Wall to max that silly Motive.

On one hand, I guess it's kind of nice to have a Motive that we can just set-and-forget which, barring green-stink plates or busted pipes, won't decay on us, but I've only seen 3 situations in which it really comes into play at all. One, the Headmaster scenario, in which a grown man will walk into your bathroom and holler like he's just scored a touchdown. Two, a critical drop, where a Sim will stop cleaning up to whinge about how the room could really use a good cleaning-up. And three, a non-Plat Sim's overall mood on leaving for work. But even if you've planted trees, flowers, and sculptures all around the front of your lawn to raise the score, the second they step over the sidewalk to get into the car, that score is guaranteed to plummet. So the concept of an Environment score is kind of intriguing and fairly realistic if you're trying to mimic RL, but in execution it's pretty much phail.

The problem with making "environment" harder is that it's entirely subjective, anyway. Also, plastering your house in paintings has a very tangible effect on how crappily your game runs. Making it harder will make it nearly impossible to get a decent "environment" score, and you'll be left wondering why the sims always think the room sucks no matter how fine it looks to you. Besides, sims do not have an aesthetic sense and cannot actually distinguish "tatty linoleum" from fine carpet by any method other than some manner of price.

LESS WHINY: GET IT, BITCH. That's EXACTLY what Less Whiny was specifically originally made to quash.

Yes, yes, we all know and love Less Whiny. Bitch was simply pointing out an instance where the Environment motive *would and is designed to* come into play.

There actually is tatty-ass, stained linoleum in the catalogue and is priced accordingly to make sure it drags down the overall score. I know very well that the Sims have no aesthetic sense. Otherwise they'd never wear that Maxis default shite. But in an otherwise well-appointed room, with appropriately expensive wallpaper and furnishings, I don't feel that a $6 wood floor should necessitate the hit that the overall score will take. That's all's I'm sayin'.

Yeah sims have an aesthetic sense - remember Gali did a test with red and blue and decided sims liked red better?  ::) :P

she did? where?

I like those wood floors, maybe that's why I can't max a room score.  So how much do you need to spend to max the floor's contribution to room score?

since we're on the subject of environment score, I've been wondering for a long time:-
Do environment score and price have a strictly linear relationship?
Does the environment score go down as things depreciate or stay the same?

I don't pay much attention to the environment score, but it has to depend on something else apart from walls, floors and expensive furniture. Size of the rooms and - most importantly - amount of windows/light?
I usually choose cheap floors and walls and I usually get a high environment score. I very rarely buy them expensive paintings and sculptures I use even less. My houses always have lots of windows though.

True, it doesn't matter, but it just bugs me:
a) not knowing how the thing works and
b) getting to 95% and not being able to max it
It seems like the kind of thing there ought to be a definitive guide to somewhere...

Yes, doren, I forgot to mention the size of the room and having enough windows/lights - thank you   :D

I do pretty much consistently have a high enough room score to make the Headmaster do the "Hooray, you're potty trained!" cheer without having the snazz the place up for his visit. I'm also pretty much stuck around 95% too, but I  keep using the $6 floors that I prefer to the more expensive ones.

Yeah, I always drag the headmaster into my bathrooms and bedrooms. Expensive toilets, showers, and beds = yayz.

Headmasters love my kitchens. They seem to like expensive counters.

The headmaster actually requires a combination of good rooms and bad rooms for optimal tour milking. The headmaster halts the tour upon reaching or surpassing 40 points. A "good" room will get you about 10 points. An "excellent" room would get you about 15 points. Shitty rooms net you less than 10 points. So what you need to do is show up good rooms until you get to about 30 points, show him shitty rooms until you get to the 35-39 range, and then finally show him an "Excellent" room to get a 50+ point score.

What I'd like to see, and I know it's impossible, is a chance for relationship scores to go down after woohoo, especially in the theoretical case that it happens due to high arousal and not due to high relationship.

Or if the man's arousal meter was far higher than the woman's when they began :D

Ah hah! Cathartic!  :D

Now that sounds like another good idea!

What I would really like to see is the attraction score dropping (especially for those 3 bolt couples) over time of being together. While many couples do still find each other hot after so many years, the honeymoon phase does end - sims are in perma-moon, and it drives me nuts.

This gives me an idea...

It would be cool if the attraction would go up and down over time. Also, it should plummet while Sims have babies and toddlers. I like that Sims moon over their spouses as elders, it seems realistic to me.

Hmm...now I am curious.  ::)

I don't know about plummeting when they have babies, though. It has been a long time since I had any kids, but I don't recall that causing me to be repulsed by my spouse, or vice-versa. Maybe I was lucky or something.

It's fairly common for women to lose their sex drive after giving birth. It doesn't always happen though.

I think it might be the sleep deprivation.

Well you don't really want people rummaging around down there when you're dripping with lochia.

It's also a side effect of anti-depressants some women get put on for post-partum.

Sorry, but 'rummaging'!  :D

True, I would say just in the baby stage though.

Another idea to throw out there, if the sim is tired or stinky or uncomfortable, it should lower their arousal meter.  They could even reject advances if the arousal meter is empty.  How funny would this be - you've got a stay-at-home sim wife, who is stinky and tired and has been running after toddlers all day, and the sim husband comes home and tried to put the moves on (thanks to ACR), and he gets a big fat reject, and maybe even a lecture too :) 

Your punctuation does not meet Grammar Day standards. Emoties are not periods.

Grammar Day 2007 - thank you for participating.

Nice job you're doing there Rohina!  ;)
/me remembers to punctuate before winking.

I was thinking more of sleep deprivation than anything. People don't tend to have much time for their marriage when they have babies and toddlers.

Well if like darcee said tiredness and hygiene was a factor, you could make them sleep-deprived by leaving the baby in their room anyway. That would make more sense because it wouldn't affect everyone in the same way.