More Awesome Than You!

Story Mode: How it works, why you should hate it.

HOW STORY PROGRESSION WORKS
Basically, a score timer counts up. When the score reaches a certain point, up to 18 (default) random story actions will be considered and some of them will randomly happen. None of these actions truly *DO* happen and there is no built up. It is a major violation of the Good Writing Rule of "Show, Don't Tell".

TERMINOLOGIES
SelectRandomHouseHold: This indicates a household chosen by the library function "SelectRandomHousehold". A household chosen by this function is picked at random from a list of all households in the neighborhood except your current household and the Service NPCs. Some households are homeless, but can still be chosen by this. A custom predicate may be specified that excludes some candidates.
SelectRandomSim: This indicates a sim chosen by the library function "SelectRandomSimDescription". A sim chosen by this function is picked at random from any household in the neighborhood other than Service NPCs or your current active household. Sims not part of a household cannot be chosen. A custom predicate may be specified that excludes some candidates.
SelectRandomLot: This indicates a lot chosen at random from the list of all lots in your neighborhood. The lot may be commercial or residential.
Items chosen at "random", but not using these specific terms, are chosen by a local function and not by the aforementioned library functions. A custom predicate may be specified that excludes some candidates.
CanSupportPopulation: A test of whether a lot has at least one fridge and a number of beds >= population.
CanSupportHousehold: A test of whether a lot CanSupportPopulation(number of sims in household).
MoveOut: Household is evicted from their home lot. They receive no funds to compensate for the value of the lot, and their household funds are not otherwise changed.
MoveIn: Household is moved into target lot. They do not have to be able to afford the lot and do not pay for it, their household funds remaining unchanged.

WHAT CAN HAPPEN
Here is a list of the random crap which can happen in the default game.

AddSim
A sim is randomly added to a random household that is not full. This can either be a sim of random age(unknown range), or a baby. If it is a baby, two parents will be chosen. If two parents could not be found, parthenogenesis occurs.

ChangeFitness
A SelectRandomSim is chosen and permanently mutilated, having its prebuilt fitness/fatness characteristics altered at random by up to 0.5. This change is permanent and irreversible, unlike changes produced by actual in-game exercise or gluttony.

ChangeRelationship
One of three modes chosen at random: "Befriend", "Antagonize", "Romance".
Two different SelectRandomSims are chosen. If the relationship change is Romance, the SelectRandomSims will be valid romance candidates. Relationship improves or worsens depending on the mode chosen.

Create Household
A random household of composition defined by "MakeTypicalFamily" is created as a fambly of homeless vagrants.

Create and Move In
As above, but they also MoveIn a SelectRandomLot that is Non-Empty, Residential, Uninhabited, and CanSupportHouseHold.

Emigrate Household
A SelectRandomHousehold is permanently disintegrated. All sims contained within cease to exist.

GetJob
A SelectRandomSim that is unemployed will receive a random job of random level.

KillSim
A SelectRandomSim that can die will randomly and instantly die from one of the 4 (5 for elders) available random deaths.

LeaveJob
A SelectRandomSim with a job will instantly quit/be fired/retire, regardless of performance or goals.

MergeHouseholds
Two different SelectRandomHouseholds A and B will be chosen such that their combined population count does not exceed 8 (nontunable). B will MoveOut from its house if any and all members of B are dumped into A. B's household data, including inventory and funds, are lost.

MoveInHousehold
A SelectRandomHousehold that is homeless will be randomly MoveIn to a SelectRandomLot that CanSupportHousehold.

MoveOutHousehold
A SelectRandomHousehold that is not homeless and has no one who is pregnant will randomly MoveOut and become homeless.

PromoteDemote
A SelectRandomSim who has a job and is not the "Boss" will be randomly promoted or demoted regardless of performance. They cannot be promoted past the top level or demoted below level 1.

SplitHousehold
A random member of a SelectRandomHouseHold who is not pregnant, and a YA or an ex of an existing member of the household will be kicked out and become a new, homeless household. The funds of the original household are not affected. The new household of the kicked-out individual receives a 20K handout.

ThrowHouseParty
A SelectRandomHousehold consisting of at least one YA or older throws a party. This is the only event that isn't harmful!

I'm most interested in the fact that "A custom predicate may be specified that excludes some candidates". Does that mean that it might be possible to come up with Story Progression that actually makes sense? Parts of Awesomemod address this, but only in a "disable x from happening" way - which I'm thankful for, it's definately a start. How much further can we take this? And why hasn't Eaxis offered you obscene amounts of money to come program for them?

Questions:

1.  What causes the "score timer" to increase?  Is it based on Aspiration point accumulation in the present household, or time, or some random recipe known only to EA?
2.  How does "MakeTypicalFamily" work?

This one:
is obviously borked, as before Awesomemod I would consistantly have households where #sims was significantly greater than #beds, my fave being the lot that no matter how many times I would delete the extra sims, it would grow to 6 youngadult/adult/elder and 2 babies/toddlers, and yet still have only ONE single bed.

Well, MergeHouseholds does not appear to check that.

Here's the thing: There are two functions which add sims that do NOT check that: Neither the AddSim nor MergeHouseholds events carry a check for CanSupportPopulation. Any households can be added to or merged independently of space limits. Read the actual info: If it does not say there is a check, then there is not one.

Predicates are specific rules defined in the event. For instance, a predicate may stipulate that a something cannot be chosen twice, or that sims cannot be pregnant, or that lots chosen must be Residential, or whatever, without altering the core logic of the SelectRandoms. Basically, it's an additional restriction unique to a specific action, which still calls that function, rather than using its own logic (AddSim does not use a SelectRandomHousehold, for instance, but has its own logic).

To answer those questions, I would have to unravel the logic of them first. They are not related to the active household, however. The short version is that the "Timer" functions similar to the ACR "timer", only instead of "must have sex NAO", it's "MUST DO A RANDOM TOADING NAO".

It appears they worked so hard on the town AI, to make it into a living breathing town. Just put random occurence everywhere and call it a day. It probably took them half an hour to write the code for that. They put so much thought into the traits and the create a style and then they did a very sloppy job on the real importat aspects of the game. I am actually contemplating reinstalling my Sims2 game.

Are you going to fix it?  Just curious, because if you did it would, naturally, be awesomesauce.

Depends on what you mean by "Fix it". I have already added options to awesomeconfig to tweak many of the story options. More to come soon, perhaps. Suggest what you want to hate.

From the things not already addressed by Awesomemod, here are my pet hates:

CreateHousehold without MoveIn (and other events that result in vagrants). 
MergeHouseholds - I'm constantly going into Edit Town to split out the stupid move-ins that take place.
AddSim where the Sim is some random non-spawn.

Oddly enough, ThrowHouseParty is the one feature I actually like (assuming there's a chance for one of my actives to get invited), yet have never encountered.  Didn't even know it was possible until I saw it on the list.

That is because it is the single entirely benign event that actually adds life to the neighborhood and enables the player to participate in it: the decision to have the party is arbitrary, but the actual party itself is subject to player participation. Everything else is a blatant violation of good writing, and thus makes a terrible story: All the other actions are simply told to you, you are never shown them and cannot participate in them in any way. It is as if the story was "And Trogdor smote the Kerrek, and all was laid to burnination." as the story instead the just a tagline: One day you have a Kerrek, and the next day your entire neighborhood is on fire and the Kerrek is dead without any warning. You never actually got to see Trogdor smiting the Kerrek and laying all to burnination.

This explains why I have a household that has the name of my original household, but which contains Sims that are not in any way related to that household.  They got a random Move In and the old Sims died of old age.

It also explains why the Sims I moved out to be with their spouses all died without spawn.

I'm not sure the existing model is fixable.  I hate parthenogenesis, but a stable population model would require that reproduction work like aging.  Every time a Sim dies of old age, the game should build a list of suitable households, those with two romantically involved adult Sims and additional space available, and add a baby to a random household from that list.  If there are biological bars to real reproduction (same sex or two old), we can assume it's an adoption.  Or just don't include those households in the first place.

It needs to be event-driven.  The completely random approach means odds are that births simply won't match deaths if you restrict parthenogenesis.  Given what you've said earlier about other Sims code, I get the idea that the Sims design team thinks in terms of polling instead of events.

When two Sims develop or improve a romantic relationship, there should be a chance that one Sim moves to the other household.  That'd be a much more natural progression than the current Move Out / Merge Household approach, which requires a series of unlikely events to get this common and expected change.  Though I'd put a bar on this happening if either Sim has the Commitment Issues traits.

 - Gus

Strictly speaking, a stable population model doesn't require the existence of children at all. Just replace a household with a newcomer anytime an existing one goes extinct. It's a method used in many games that don't even have children. As a side benefit, it'll prevent the giant logjam that reportedly afflicts the school building with sims unable to actually get to school.

I second Gus's idea of adding babies to households in an intelligent manner. Would it be possible to make two flavors, one adding children and one adding adults? Assuming, of course, that making the code intelligent is possible.

I'd love that, if and only if I can exclude households from the rolls. Right now, I'm playing three houses and going through townies to do random deaths, births, marriages...what Story Progression was supposed to do, but right.

Hmm.  Okay, let me look over the various points again.  I think you've done some editing since I read it early this a.m., and I'm more awake now, too.

...

1. The most glaring thing, to me, is if you would make ThrowHouseParty actually work, or trigger more often or something.  I've played two versions of Sunset Valley to the 4th generation now -- one without Awesomemod and one with -- and have not been invited to a single house party.  This would have been particularly nice for my guitarists, since one of their challenges is to play at a certain number of parties.

2.  I like Gus Smedstad's assessment/suggestions.  It would be nice if AddSim could be tweaked somehow so that a) the YA+ who is moved into the household is one with whom someone in the household has a romantic relationship, and b) those in romantic relationships would spawn together more often.  I know you put the option in Awesomemod to kill parthenogenesis, which means that the addition of a baby to an existing household would require two parents, but it does not happen frequently enough.  My town always starts dying and I end up enabling parthenogenesis again for short periods just to increase the younger population.  I realize that children are not necessary to a stable population model, but I do think that for some of us this was an attractive possible feature of the game.  I know I can make new households to replace ones that go extinct.   However, I'm one of those folks that don't actually like making my own Sims.  I'd like the game to do it for me and to keep track of that sort of thing for me.

3.  It would be nice if GetJob would trigger more often, or if jobs were just automatically assigned when YA-hood is reached.  I hate that most of my town seems to be unemployed.

I think you're already addressed with Awesomemod the other things that annoy me, and whatever is left doesn't annoy me.

I would like new children, but there should be a cap.  For instance, there don't need to be more than five or so babies at once, and there should be a breeding freeze if the number of children goes up to ten.  That will prevent overcrowding at the school.

I agree with Gus Smedstad and phyllis_p's posts. 

In my opinion, AddSim is desirable only for new babies with two parents (pregnancy is preferable), ChangeRelationship is useful for making new marriages (and maybe a few enemies), GetJob seems fine, MergeHouseholds is good only for sims who marry (using SplitHousehold if they initially belong to larger households), and ThrowHouseParty is fine at any time.  Everything else needs to be killed with fire.

Before I name the things I want to hate, is disabling things our only option at this point, or can those predicates be edited/expanded to add sanity to the programming? Don't get me wrong, killing by fire is better than nothing - I'm just hoping that a good game can be salvaged out of this mess.

I wondered that too. I don't mind a random death once in a great while to add something to the game. But it does it too often etc. Most of the ideas sound good in theory, if they had any kind of checks on them at all.

This may be useless information, but it seriously bothers me and I hope at some point it can be fixed.

I wanted the House family swimming over at the exchange. I moved them into a house with the requisite number of beds and, after editing House to my liking (turned that fugly thing into a hawt, yee), I got them all medical career jobs and let them go, with the exception of having one of my kids go molest house from time to time. Most of them have, of course, the medical career wish.

When Select Sim was added to Awesomemod, or I just noticed it in a new update, whatever, I finally took control of House to check up on the happy family. The results? Everyone still has their med job at level one or two, except for Wilson (HAW!) who is now a World Renowned Surgeon and has eight points of logic. ...wut?

I assume this is because Wilson is the only one who spent any time on his logic, I believe the others had one or two points each, which is likely what's keeping them back. Again, I never played Wilson, never even talked to him with my active family. Why and how was he the only one to level logic? He certainly seems to be a rare case.

What I want to know is, is there any way to:
- Have sims work on their career-requisite skills, if nothing else.
- Have sims auto-apply for a job based on their lifetime wish, if applicable.

Again with Select Sim, I've been bouncing around npcs and discarded family fugs. Way too many discrepancies there... like the poor old lady, I don't remember whom, who wanted all her life to be an astronaut, but retired in her Journalism career at level two. It's just so sad. :(

Wow, I had no idea how awfully bad story progression was programmed!
No wonder it destroys all my family trees by selecting some random Sims to spawn clones instead of making my Sims get married and have kids.
It's disappointing, because story progression was the one feature I looked forward to most in Sims 3.
When I first started playing, I would make characters from movies I liked and see who they would get married with and stuff - utterly pointless!

Thanks to you I can still play the game Sims2 style! (what's the point playing sims 3 style if nothing actually happens?)


Yeah, I noticed this "feature".
My Sim, Jared, was dating a woman, Carla, who I tried getting pregnant. She told me she didn't feel like it, so I went home.
(like always, because she was always in a bad mood. Asked her for several days to try for a baby with the constant "I don't feel like it". I've noticed neighbors never takes care of their needs and are grumpy anytime I make romantic interactions at their house. At my house, they are suddenly fine)
Of course, the next day I visit her, I see a baby on the floor..... she wasn't even pregnant!
And the baby was a clone spawn, she was the only parent.
It was odd though, because she was living together with a man, Sherman, but they weren't in love.
But Sherman wasn't chosen as the father.
He actually spawned his own clone...  :P
(Both Sims were created by me, babies were spawned on Story Progression)

The broken marriage thing is also glaringly obvious after some time, that only newly moved in Sims gets married.
"The Stupid family moved in."
"Very Stupid and Extremely Dumb got married!"
Of course, Extremely Dumb never existed before, because they are instantly added with the Stupid family upon move-in to the neighborhood.
Add fake marriage announcement and it looks like a marriage took place and that Extremely Dumb actually lived somewhere before Stupid moved in.

Now I understand why EAxis pulled the memory function -  they didn't want us to see their mistake!

I have a different, unrelated question: WHY THE HELL IS YOUR AVATAR SO STUPID-LOOKING? Is that YOU? Because if it is, you look like an utter moron.

I've taken in a fat townie and slimmed her down through exercise.  Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by "irreversible," but it sure appears you can change these numbers through gameplay.  Though it does not work on Sims who are merely guests, rather than currently part of your household.

 - Gus

Yes, but she was probably "just fat" rather than mutilated via StoryProgression.

So, there's some sort of hidden limit to how far you can change a Sim's fatness / fitness variables through game actions?

 - Gus

I don't think you're following.  There is a chance that a Sim will, as part of a specific Story Progression event, be changed from their genetic physique.  This change, when inflicted by Story Progression, is irreversible.

Changes that occur because of ACTUAL events, such as working out, or overeating, ARE reversible.

The default Awesomemod config setting stops these "Bus Mutilations" from happening.

I am very confused about the ENTIRETY of the Story Progression thing.

The randomness of it all is absolutely maddening! I understand the need for randomness, on a general level. Life is unpredictable sometimes. But in more or less predictable ways. A male Flirt with Fear of Commitment may get beat up by a jealous boyfriend, or he may be successful with a woman, or he may strike out, or he may die in a fire in his home. These are all acceptable outcomes.

But I left Flirt to his own devices for only TWELVE HOURS of game time, and came back to find he had a baby. Either he knocked up some Sim with the shortest gestation period in all of the animal kingdom, or he adopted. NEITHER ONE makes any sense. Also, he could have at least bought a crib? Something? It was creepy to visit his home to find him puttering on the computer while the baby was lying on the floor of the kitchen, unattended.

When you turn your back on these Sims, all reason is replaced with madness. It's driving me nuts.

I wish that was me - the real me looks more like your avatar!


Yep, that's Alizée.
I'm not a diehard fan, but a part of her song "I'm fed up" just sums up exactly how I feel about Sims 3.
"I'm fed up with being fed up!
 Poor me!"

(I think I could have chosen another picture though, but I love that smile!)

You're right, I'm not following.

I thought it worked like this:
Each Sim has a Fatness and Fitness variable.
You can set the initial values of these variables in Create A Sim.
Cardio exercise reduces the Fatness variable.
Strength exercise increases the Fitness variable and decreases the Fatness variable.  Though presumably it doesn't change the Fatness variable as quickly, otherwise what's the point in having both options on TVs and Stereos?
Eating while full increases the Fatness variable.

The part I'm not getting is a distinction between the current Fatness / Fitness and a "genetic" fatness / fitness.  Or how a change by the Sim Mutilator is different from changes from game actions.  Just repeating "it's irreversible" doesn't clarify this, since I don't see how this prevents changes to Fatness through exercise.

 - Gus

Sims will always tend towards their genetic weight, so if you have a really fat sim workout and get thin they will get fat again if they stop working out for awhile. The change from working out and overeating are temporary, but the change by the "Sim Mutilator" will be a change to their genetic weight and therefore permanent.

When you create a Sim in CAS, or when the game creates a random Sim, the fitness and fatness levels that you (or the game) assign at creation define the Sim's genetic physique.  This is the "norm" towards which Sims will always trend if you do nothing such as exercise or overfeed the Sim.  To use an example, imagine a Sim who is set in CAS to the far end of the fatness and muscular scale.  If you put them in the game, work them out until they are at the low (skinny) end of the fatness scale, and then do nothing, over time they will normalize back towards the far (fat) end again.  In other words, the changes brought about by exercise or eating are reversible.

Now, Story Progression in the unmodded game can "mutilate" the Sim, in essence giving them a brand new genetic physique. This would be like bringing the Sim back into CAS and moving the sliders. According to Pescado's figures, this change can occur within a range of .5.  But for illustration purposes, let's say it doesn't have a limit.  At some point, at random, Story Progression could then theoretically move the Sim to the "skinny" end, permanently redefining their physique - the new norm towards which they will trend.  This is the change that Pescado says is permanent and irreversible.

I find it astounding that EA decided to give sims a brand new gene for fatness but decided to wipe out those for hair, skin and eyes that they had before.

I'm not crazy about parthenogenesis but in nature, a population isn't stable with 50-100 individuals even if they mate like animals do (without regard to compatibility, marriage, age group).  If you put conditions on mating like sims must not be commitment-phobic, in the same life-stage, have romance (compatible traits), you need a much larger population before it will become self-sustaining.  Depending on how many incompatible trait pairs there are, you might need thousands of sims to randomly generate enough compatible couples in the same age group.

As a compromise, I suppose I'd increase the rate of random one-night stands resulting in pregnancy.  It's a little better than parthenogenesis and less taxing on resources than proper story-telling.

In a related vein, I think the relatively small population numbers is part of why a high rate of genetic mutation makes sense.  Since there's no genotype for hair, skin or eyes, the total gene pool is limited to exactly what you see.  If some colours were more dominant, the recessives would be completely wiped out from the pool in a generation or two.  In nature, recessive genes can persist in the pool indefinitely even when they aren't expressed, as long as the species has two alleles.

Ass-pull preserves some genetic diversity in the absence of recessive genetics when the neighbourhood is close to its full capacity at a couple hundred sims.

Well, pick a different one. The smiling offends me and makes me want to murder you.

Well, not really. The skin genes pretty much exist as they did in TS2, only instead of SX, you can choose an entire continuum. Hair/eyes no longer have genetics because with the ability to arbitrarily pick any shade or combination, there's no way to determine which is the "recessive". Making the customized colors behave differently would bring back Custom Genetics Are Evil where they would superdominate everything and generally be BAD to put in your game...and if everyone used it, the system would be the same as what we have now!

Strictly speaking, animals can be quite picky. Random mating is one of those simplified assumptions akin to spherical cows.

Strictly speaking, the population dynamics in real life wouldn't likely be self-sustaining, either. In suburban middle-class America, presumably the setting the game attempts to simulate as its baseline, the reproduction rate is actually below replacement replacement in real life. It's those stupid stinky poor people who are overbreeding.

They should have put a nuclear power plant right there in town. Then no one would question the mutation rate. In fact, in the future, I could do this, setting the mutation rate to be higher when your sims are living next to the nuclear power plant.

THe neighborhood capacity is larger than you think, really. They're using either longs or ulongs for NIDs now, meaning there's enough NIDspace to have a population of at LEAST 4 billion, and if they're using ulongs, the population can exceed the Earth's. Your computer will choke long before then, but there is certainly no obvious upper bound like in TS2.

That's a staggering thought. 4 billion babies, laying on the floor, while their not-parents play EA sports on their computer.

Well, soon enough we'd have major issues with sims being able to actually do anything, like in that school zerg rush video. That was just with 50 twelves and sixes.

is this why 99% of the time Sims are just standing aimlessly inside their home(or sometimes outside, wtf?) doing absolutely nothing but watching the air pass in front of their face? 

Will this even be fixable so sims will actually live out their lives and not stare at the air while "God" rolls a die?  It sounds like a game limitation rather than crappy programming.

this has been pretty disappointing, I really wanted to be able to watch other sims live out their lives and instead they don't do much of anything other than what a chance card tells them and even then you don't get to see it happen.

I'd love to be invited to birthday parties, new baby arrivals, weddings...SOMETHING that makes you feel like you're actually apart of this town they said was so full of life. 

The amount of computing power that would be needed for the game to actually render all the Sims doing actual things would be staggering.  Why bother when you're not looking at them half the time?  However, I agree that it would be nice to be able to attend key events, at least for the Sims that your actives have a high relationship with.

I don't know how feasible it would have been to implement, but I could handle the sheer randomness of Story Progression if there were, as Pescado says, some sort of build up.  For instance, in a better world:

The game does its randomizing, and determines that Martha and Bob are going to be partnered.  The newspaper could say, "Martha and Bob spotted getting snuggly at the movies."  For pregnancies, "Has the flu hit Sunset Valley?  Rumor has it Martha Random was seen puking at the park!" Or for mutilations, "Bob Random shares his secret diet tips!" or "Our snoop spies Bob Random pigging out on ice cream and cookies."  Where relevant, these reports would happen a day or two before the actual event hits.

For those stupid made up deaths, they could go a step further.  The game could mark a Sim for death, and hint in the newspaper that "Bob Random is off to Pleasantview to represent Sunset Valley in the Lightning Rod challenge, the world's most dangerous sport".  A day later, the game flips a coin to determine whether Bob actually dies or not and reports the results accordingly in the paper.

This at least creates the illusion of some actual story.  If they can't show us, they could certainly do a better job of telling us.  In an ideal world, I'd love to see something like a gossip channel on TV with still shots of key moments from the previous week - Bob Random blackened by lightning or Martha slumped over a toilet, but I imagine that would be harder to implement.

I'm sure someone would say "Well, you make up your own story" but if they're taking the storytelling out of my hands by creating these random events, then they should finish the job.

I was very tempted to take that offer, but I want to live long enough to see what remake expansionpack EAxis will do first.  :P



I don't think I would want to see other Sims rendered doing all of those things in town... flirting, getting married, walking around pregnant.
I've gotten used to never being apart of other Sims happy times.
I'd rather have it that my Sims magically got a girl/boyfriend, magically got married and then they magically had a baby.
Like the system is now, "It happens, but you can't see it happening".
That is much better than the current system where they sit inside their house unemployed and lonely for the rest of their lives.
I'm tired of never seeing my Sims in the news unless I forced them to do something or they died in some way.

In a way, they could have made you apart of other Sims lives by taking advantage of the Rabbit Holes.
For example, if a friend, let's say Mary, was picked randomly to have a baby, then you would get a message that you could join Mary at the hospital to be there for her.
Then your Sim would walk into Rabbit Hole hospital, after a while a message would pop up "Mary had a baby boy that was named John", then your Sim would just walk out of the hospital and Mary would come out with the baby.
Everything would happen magically, but in a way, you were at least apart of the event.

Roflganger, I like your idea about the newspaper hinting things to happen!

That's the piece of information I was missing.  It also explains some of the behavior I was seeing with my rescued fatty.  I stopped paying attention to her for a while, and she started to pork out, and I was wondering how that happened.

I find this model very annoying.  Granted, gluttony is something you really have to do deliberately, and Sims will tend to exercise on their own, so a relatively simple model would end up with a household full of thin, muscular Sims every time, which is undesirable.  Still, I think they could have done a better job with fitness / fatness decay without forcing it this way.

So, I'm assuming the Body Sculptor changes a Sim's genetic values?  That would explain why it exists, beyond convenience compared to exercise or force-feeding.


Given that TS2 had problems with simulating 10+ Sims on a much smaller playing field, I think it's impressive that it renders and simulates as many as it does.  Computing power has of course increased since then, but it's clear they're doing some intelligent abstraction of remote events, yet they're still reasonably convincing when you swap rapidly between two distant locations.  The abstraction does show a bit when you do something like look at a remote location when it's been idle for a long time.  If a kid visits another house, and you swap to the kid, everyone is pretty much standing around doing nothing when you first look.

 - Gus

The thing that really bothers me most is the random addition and merging of families (even if there is room). I want the single guy to live alone. How else can I plan a romance?
I do not mind young adults moving away from home, but why chose another household to join rather than an empty house?
Also, if I never play or talk to a family, I don't mind them leaving town to be replaced by some family with which I might associate.
So options to leave existing families alone, allow random YA moves outs, and/or let untouched families leave the hood would really be awesome.

Yes, this is probably the most annoying of these. For example, in Riverview there is a single woman who lives alone in a house on the town center island. One day, an entire family of SEVEN sims moved in and literally took over. This just destroys the story set up, and of course why would a woman who actively prefers to be alone allow a whole freaking family to move in? I could understand if she "changed" and allowed a close friend to move in, but this...

There was another instance where the wealthy Jones couple, who live in the humongous mansion on the hill, suddenly moved into some crapshack with two other sims who had just moved into the neighborhood themselves and probably had never even met. It's just so utterly unrealistic. If a family moved house because, say, a baby was on the way and the current house was too small then I could understand. Or if a sim's spouse has died, and they wished to move in with relatives or close friends so as not be alone then that would have some storytelling to it too. But this nonsensical merging with strangers, and in houses that have no actual room for them is just highly irritating.

What Roflganger said.  I'm curious:  just how much information are we looking at in a day?  I expect it is enough that popups on event would be maddening, and FAST.

Events essential to omniscience:  AddSim, ChangeRelationship (romance only), Create Household, Create and Move in, Emigrate, Kill, Merge, Move In/Out, Split.

Ideally we will want to know of these the moment they happen, but a daily report would certainly be better than the nothing we have.

Doubly ideal?  setconfig ApproveToads true.  Veto power is grail-shaped.

The difficult thing is tuning the right amount of information carried on: too less would lead to the aforementioned disappointment about not knowing what's going on, too much would lead instead to nagging the player to death.

There's definitely potential for event spam, but my concept confines information to the newspaper, which is where you already find out about most of these events anyway.  (Not to say that the paper couldn't do with some serious improvement, because it could).  But key events - deaths, births, marriages - should get a popup of some sort, at least for Sims to whom your actives are close.  Major life events don't happen every day, and there are rarely multiple in a single day, so I think major life event popups would be fairly unintrusive.  

Well they do sort of have that, at least for deaths. One of my sims was friends with an elder through work and a week or so into gameplay, I got a pop-up that said "so-and-so is old and won't live forever" and a suggestion to go visit her. Then a couple of days later (after I had ignored said pop-up), I got one that said she had died. It doesn't do it for births and marriages, or at least I haven't seen any, but it will do it if a friend of the family is dying.

I should have been more specific, but I was already TL;DR.  I was referring to the abolition of an attribute for hair-/skin-/eye- colour genotype.  In TS2, even skin had a distinct genotype with 2 alleles, so recessives could be passed on.  In later expansions this was changed with respect to skin, so sims could only pass the phenotype, but in principle I could use SimPE to enforce proper inheritance because the attribute was available to set.  In TS3, there is no separate genotype for anything except fatness.  The elimination of a genotype for hair is fundamentally why hair inheritance is fubar -- it's not an issue of being unable to determine what colours should be recessive.

A stupidly simple solution to the hair colour problem could have been to set an arbitrary number of bases, similar to the default palette in CAS.  Let those represent genotype and set recessives/dominants accordingly.  Adjustments to those shades would simply represent the phenotype (not available for inheritance with respect to hair).


We don't need to bother refining our assumptions, because additional conditions to mating push the self-sustaining population number higher, not lower.  Similarly, I thought it safe to ignore my uncertainty about a theoretical limit on the number of sims, because I can already see in gameplay that simulating 200 sims is a load on the equipment.  Even in TS2, it was possible to have far more sims than we wanted.


You are right about this (immigration also pads numbers) but that's mainly because American and Western European couples have smaller families.  Marriage is still the default by a huge margin.  In the game, we could tune compatible couples to produce up to 2-6 spawn, and it wouldn't seem like a glaring departure from reality.  I think the larger problem is getting enough compatible mating pairs without having to generate a base of a thousand sims.

However, even if you stomp the numbers problem into submission, genetic diversity can't be preserved in the scenario above without ass-pull, immigration, or nuclear plants.  That goes back to the absence of recessive alleles in the genotype.  There's a reason why evolution has favoured the preservation of recessive gene information for species which do not reproduce at high rates.  Even a population of thousands will lose genetic diversity through selective breeding, and dominant characteristics, if you allow those factors to operate.

Well, in TS2, the population of the game could never pass 32767, whether those sims were living, dead, deleted, or merely considered but never instantiated, they would all deplete the NID pool unless the SCID was reset, as each such incident increased the SCID by 1.

In TS3, this system has not changed, but as the maximum SCID count is 18 quadrillion, it is not reachable even if you made 100 sims a second for the next 5 billion years.

Well, in TS3, without attractances, a "compatible mating pair" amounts to "randomly chosen male with age >= 18" and "randomly chosen female with age >= 18 and < elder".

Recessives are essentially "faked", through the existence of the ability to grab genetic attributes from the "grandparents". Ignoring the mutational asspull, there is a 40% chance that the genetics of the parents are simply completely ignored, and the trait is grabbed from the grandparents. Assuming we model the grandparents as homozygous dominant and homozygous recessive, and imagine that the parents in question are treated as heterozygous dominant, the odds of the "recessive" trait appearing is about 20%, roughly comparable to the 25% chance of this happening under the Mendelian model used in TS2. It falls to 16% in the presence of the mutation asspull. The presence of the mutational asspull creates an interesting effect on its own, though: Each generation, there is a 10% chance that the genetic information is destroyed and replaced with EA default information. In the next generation, there is a 10% of more twaddle, a 36% of grandparent information (clean this time), and a 54% of parent information (of which 10% is twaddle), for a total of 15.4% rubbish. It continues.

Observe this table:

Gen #	Twaddle Pct
0	0.000
1	10.000
2	15.400
3	21.916
4	27.379
5	32.674
6	37.500
7	42.013
8	46.187
9	50.066
10	53.663
11	57.002
12	60.099
13	62.974
14	65.642
15	68.117
16	70.414
17	72.546
18	74.524
19	76.360
20	78.063

It just occurred to me that Pets for this version is going to be a VBT. Random spawning wildlife.. run for the hills!

Well, it's not the problem it was in TS2, really. In TS3, having a profusion of other-sims isn't really something that horribly impacts your disk space, just your neighborhood aesthetic, and as the game has generally been decent with the look of animals anyway, and the maximum hardcoded sim count is 18 quadrillion instead of 32767, it's really a nonissue.

I agree this is what happens in the game, in fact this is the compromise you have to settle for in order to have something playable.  Many people may find it unrealistic to have an entire town populated by one-night stands, however. :P


A small addendum to your argument above: Mendelian genetics saves recessive gene information even if it isn't expressed.  In your example, the odds of the recessive gene being saved in the grandchildren is 75%, including the 25% chance of expression.  So there's only a 25% chance of it being obliterated in TS2, compared to the 80% odds of it being destroyed in TS3.

Getting back to the main thrust of your argument though, I agree that the most irritating effect is that all genetic characteristics are subject to equal odds of destruction.  Stomping the twaddle improves the odds of saving 'real' information, but then the burden shifts back to the player to constantly inject varied genes into the family line if diversity is desired, since the loss of any chosen characteristic over 2 generations will wipe it completely.

This is a fun idea, except that, being the pedant that I am, I have to point out that living in the same town with a nuclear power plant does not mean you're exposed to abnormal amounts of radiation. Only if the plant were to blow up would that be a concern.

So, I'm not sure if that's the solution I want to explain the high amount of mutations in the game.  :P

This is the only event that really makes much sense to me. Why couldn't random actions happen in a nicer way, rather than a killing-all-my-Sims-then-spawning-a-ton-of-babies retarded EAxis way? Oh yes, because they suck and they hate us.

I would like to see something like that, but saner. In Sims 2 the Awesomeware would pick random townies for coworker for the player's Sims. Something like that, but picking random non-player residents of Sims 3 to fill in coworkers would be nice. Of course, I prefer Sims getting random jobs over Sims dying or adopting 20 toddlers or being deleted or randomly moved. But I don't think I would like the game gives Sims jobs randomly, if I had an alternative option.

It isn't too far from the habits of the Bonobo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Sexual_social_behavior). But for most animals, there is very strict competition for mates.

Well, yes, we KNOW that, but it's the SIMS. We're talking about the kind of nuclear plant that employs Homer Simpson. You've seen the kind of chance cards we get. It's the kind of nuclear plant that in real life would get shut down for multiple violations of safety regulations.

In unrelated news, the next AwesomeMod will attempt to introduce some more control and sanity to the random event process. Sims that move will be moving not purely as a random process of nonsensicalness, but to upgrade their houses, and will do so as a natural consequence of becoming richer, so they will prefer to vacate crappy houses to move to more upscale places, especially if this will bring them closer to their places of employment. Sims will no longer move in with random strangers, instead preferring to move in with friends/fambly, and will capacity-check houses before spawning endless spawn. All this gives the player somewhat more control over the neighborhood population dynamics through the simple choice of what houses to build. Finally, the thing we've all wanted: The option to set a sim-fambly OFFLIMITS to the vagaries of story mode random event generation with the God's Chosen People mode.

Moar "came with the box" puddings need to have jobs, and I don't want to have to manually attach them.  That is what TS3's shoddy programming was supposed to do.  

I wouldn't care so much if they were randomly assigned automatically (I'm guessing unplayed puddings are too stupid to do things like write novels or paint for a living), as long as care was paid to any puddings with a lifetime wish of Being an Astromat, Massive Corporate Whore, or 5-Stair Chief.

Though, if the option were available, puddings given to writing or painting (Artistic/Bookworm traits?) doing their thing for a living would be nice.

Addendum: oh right, and could promotions actually ever happen?  My sims can get promoted in their sleep.  Why the hell can't puddings do the same?

I just want no more puddings!  Remember "Notowniespawn" from Sims 2?

I carefully created 10 big 8-man famblies of my own genetics and last names to populate my hood, and I've tried 3 times now to fight the story mode to get them to thrive.

Jobs is easy, if the game needs people for jobs, it will take them from the neighborhood (completely randomly, but that's ok).

Births is easy actually also...when they are married!  They seem to have no problem producing 2-parent spawn when they are married.

3 parts that makes my legacy hood difficult at the moment:

1) Mating pairs - Do not happen often enough, the reason was stated by his holiness in another thread somewheres.
2) YA's getting away from mom and dad - The moveouts almost never make sense.
3) Random idiot townies moving in - STOP THEM!

Periodically I have to stop, turn off aging/story-mode, force match up as many singles as I can find, move them out on their own (kick out), and gas the fat-assed jobless retards that worm their way into my gated community like cockroaches.

I'd like a way to just trust the story mode to do this.