More Awesome Than You!

I'm looking to make the ballet bar look less shiny to sims and give just a touch more fun (from 1 to 2, as it is actually draining fun on most sims for me). I'm sick of my visitors coming over, ignoring everything else and gravitating to the ballet bar, but I want it out for my dancer to practice on. However, my experience in hacking is limited to tweaking the mods of others and switching about references in BHAVs. I can't for the life of me find what I need to edit for the ballet bar. I can't find a tutorial or another less-advertising hack to use as an example. I can find the item in the objects.package, browse the catalog description, look at the textures, and view the OBJ data. That's about it. Can someone point me in the general direction, or towards another hack that lowers advertising on something....anything?

Jfade has lots of 'less shiny' hacks on djssims.com, such as one that makes the 'juice' bar and espresso bar less attractive. Maybe you can download them and examine his code.

Even better, perhaps jfade will come here and offer suggestions. I love his less shiny fixes.

What? Huh? I'm awake I'm awake!

It's actually pretty simple. Just open the TTAB resource, click the Interaction that is being annoying, then click the motives tab. Scroll through the motives and see what's listed. Usually the items that are addictive advertise very highly for fun or hunger, but not always. Anyhow, what you're most concerned with is the delta part. That's what tells the sim the amount of benefit they can expect to gain from the object for that motive.

What you need to do is just reduce it to a lower number OR eliminate the advertising altogether. I tend to eliminate it for the really pointless and annoying objects you'd never expect them to use unless directed to do, because I like free will on but don't like them to do stupid things, so... :P If you want to compare it to another EAxis object that doesn't advertise as highly, but that they still use autonomously, just go to the object workshop and clone the item you know has a good balance of autonomy, and copy the advertising values.

Once you change the values in the motives tab, be sure to click "Copy motive to all" otherwise some age groups will still be addicted while others aren't. :)

TTAB! Gah. I excel at looking in the wrong place.

Is there anyway to lower the advertising on custom TV stations, or adjust who is attracted to it? A few packs ago I created a custom channel just to see if I could, only to have sims obsess over only that one.

If you get it figured out Zazazu, I would love to have it if you don't mind sharing it.

Delta is the sliding-scale difference in respect of the Sim's personal attribute.  So it's only applicable if you have a "type" set.  For example, something like a ballet bar is likely to be more attractive to  a sim with an active personality.  In the fun row of the matrix you might set Min to 10 - it will be at least 10 fun score to any sim, Type to 3 (active) and the Delta to 20.  This would mean all sims think it's 10 points worth of fun, but a sim with full active points will think the ballet bar is 30 fun points and therefore be more attractied to it than a lazy sim.   If you reduce the delta you simply make less difference in the attraction for the different sims.   To make it overall less attractive you'd reduce the Min field.  However, increasingly the attraction is overridden by code in the test BHAVs.

Ah, OK. Most of the more annoying objects I've looked at have had a type set and a high delta and not-so-high min, so I never lowered the min too much, just messed with the delta. Thanks for the clarification though. :D And yeah, I've noticed that too, I don't know what they've started setting the attraction in the BHAV now, it's rather annoying. Still, if there's no advertisement at all in the TTAB, they won't even attempt to use it autonomously and therefore never get the attraction changed from the test BHAV, will they?  ???

No, that's right.  It's odd.  It doesn't matter *which* motive row you set as long as not all rows are totally blank.  After that you can do all the rest of the tweaking in the test tree.  And I guess you have to turn autonomy on for that option, even if you just go right ahead and turn it off again in the test lol

High min will make the object homogenously obsessive to everyone. Excessively high delta will produce the same effect as even a fraction of that value is compulsive.