More Awesome Than You!

Spun off from the Questions/Tips thread


In theory, I like the idea of a bottom up approach and show don't tell. In practice, I'm not so sure how this will work. I mean, I'd like to see the town floozy in action instead of just hearing about her, but at least in my game non controllable sims don't do a hell of a lot. They just sort of stand there until I interact with them most times. At best they'll play in the sprinkler or with the VR headset or something equally inane like that. :P

I feel like at least Indie fakes a living breathing town to some degree. I'm not sure I think the computer controlled sims can be pushed to do a hell of a lot more, but maybe. I'd like it if they were more autonomous but realistically I don't know how feasible that is.

Maybe at least those sort of town news notices that Indie does could be pushed into the gossip social so that it feels more natural and less like the omniscient voice of god announcing the events of the world. Right now gossip mostly just talks about promotions so I feel like that could be expanded more and provide a way to get news on the goings on in the town in a somewhat natural way.

Yeah, that's the issue, really. So my system will, instead of merely producing text-events that never happened, occasionally will push LIVE events, so that you will actually witness the sim doing that thing...and if you interfere, maybe it won't happen.

Indie does a decent job faking a living, breathing town, yes. Unfortunately, when you see things from my perspective, you realize what a hollow facade it actually is. The town does not TRULY live and breathe, it merely functions as this kind of undead clockwork monstrosity that goes through all the motion to produce a semblance of life, without truly breathing at all. For many, this is satisfactory, and even better. But not to me.

Ah, yes, the promotions. Indie apparently hands them out like candy. Me? My plan is a bit more basic: I tell them to get a job. I set them to skill at work, and prod them to occasionally do something skilly when their personality and circumstances warrants it, like a low-intensity version of SupCom Work/School. From there? They are on their own! Show, don't telll.

Maybe I missed some essential update to the Awesome Mod, but my sims keep gossiping about others that have romances and even mentioned someone that couldn't get to the loo in time (my bad, I kept trying to woo her with my active sim). One sim from my non-active family decided to get a career behind my back, but somehow that never came up. They're all having babies now on their own, though I was the one that got them married, so I guess if I played long enough without playing close attention to them, they would start to die out... I think I'll just go and do that, my brain hurts from reading MATY for hours. You guys are insane, but probably best viewed from the outside... err... never mind.

Really? I wish mine had more variations in their gossip. I feel like all I ever hear is so & so got a promotion.. :P

I've been trying to get my head around this concept of Indie being an "undead clockwork monstrosity," and how things like marriages and births could actually be witnessed.  I may making too many assumptions here, but I think those two things are the "live events" that most story-minded people care about and why they feel Indie provides a "living, breathing town."  Too many of us have seen our towns turn into retirement center ghost towns, with the only options for procreation being either fiddling about with making couples (and coupling them) ourselves, or enabling parthenogenesis. 

I don't actually mind playing just one family and letting all but the heir move out, but when I move those young adults out and they never marry and rarely have children without my intervention, it gets sad.  I don't care about Indie's messages regarding what's going on with other Sims (though I don't mind them, either) -- I can catch it in the newspaper, if I'm interested.  What I care about is that the town isn't one huge, childless lonely heart's club and that I don't have to do anything to make it come about. 

I find myself curious about what witnessable events you'd have come about, and how you define a living and breathing town if not by having a pairing, procreating, employed population.

Don't get me wrong; I think the things you do with Awesomemod are ... well ... awesome.  This whole philosophical aspect of Story Mode is just interesting to me, that's all.

Exactly. I mean I think Pescado's philosophy is all well and good, but I feel like right now I am having to jump through hoops to get people moved in and keep the population going.

I also don't need to see every wedding or birth or what not. It's fine for me if these things happen behind the scenes and either I find out through an announcement or gossip or just running into those sims or maybe I never even do.

I agree with the bottom up philosophy about the jobs to some degree. I don't necessarily think the game should be cheating everyone through job promotions, but it also needs to make sure they go to work and perform well too, which seems not to be happening much of the time.

Relationships I'm fine with as random pairing method. Relationships are arbitrary anyway. I guess you could match traits but then how many couples do we all know that are opposites and end up together anyway? I think the only thing there is maybe the people with committment issues shouldn't be settling down so easily, or maybe not until they get older. And likewise those who hate kids shouldn't be having 4 or 5. But other than that, I think random pairings is fair game. There just need to be pairings period. If you get too stringent and picky everyone dies an old spinster and the town is dead.

Actually, the gossip is one of the few things I can't complain about (too much) -- I have no comm lots in my game, hence no promotions, and whenever my sims gossip about something (as opposed to just "gossip", without popup), it'll be somehting real -- a birth, a death, or (a little too often for my taste) about Sim X being totally broke. Oh, and one sim peed herself at some point, they also gossiped about that. The only thing I haven't yet checked for is whether or not they actually gossip about something they know, or whether they're telepathic -- right now it would be hard to tell, since the town is so small (five households), it would hardly make sense for them to not know when someone has died.

In a word, it seems to depend on what is actually happening -- if you want different gossip, you need to make different things happen. I don't know if it is possible to enable new "gossip-able" topics perhaps (perhaps when a relative has maxed a skill or something), or restrict some (in your case, promotions -- in my case, I might want to eliminate the constant "broke" whining at some point).


Other than that, I don't think I'll ever use any sort of automatic progression anytime soon, but one aspect that I'd like to see and that I believe is closely related to it would a stricter handling of motives in general. Right now, it seems that the game resets everything all the time (I don't know when exactly, maybe every full hour?) depending purely on the time of day and nothing else, and even *that* seems to be broken. I often find myself manually adjusting motives to where they should be -- like when a sim has gone to bed at 10PM, and I select their lot at 5AM, and they have "Sleep until fully rested (6AM)" in their queue, it makes no sense that their energy is still nearly bottomed out. This is getting really old. The same thing happens when a sim has a visitor over, and they chat etc., and I select the visitor immediately after they leave -- their social will be half-empty again.

Can't this be handled differently? I know people say that EA are doing this sort of thing in order to "save processing power", but seriously, calculating the energy level of a few sims? That's something any pocket calculator should be able to handle, no? In my eyes, they probably tried to make everything nice and easy for the "one fambly" players (i.e. reset the social bar, so that the sims are more compelled to ineract with each other), but completely ignored what happens when people play the entire neighbourhood. This is manifest in so many ways .. plants on inactive lots never get weeds and never need to be watered (all that updates is their growth), sims that are out fishing all day still have nearly full energy meters at 11PM, sim basically never need to eat unless you happen to play them in the morning or evening, etc etc.

I can actually somewhat understand that inactive sims just stand around staring holes in the air when you check in on them -- I believe it would become very taxing if the game actually played all the animations of all sims, particularly in "normal-sized" neighbourhoods of 100-200 sims. But would it be possible to just silently keep track of the motives instead? So that it is recorded when they've just visited their uncle and chatted for an hour, consequently their social cannot be half-empty? Perhaps even remove random food from their fridge/inventory throughout the day whenever their hunger meter gets low (as an inexpensive way to "fake simulate" cooking)? At the very least, I'd like for the game to take into account whether or not inactive sims can even *possibly* fill certain motives -- sims on a lot with no shower or sink shouldn't have high hygiene just because it is 8AM, for example.


As much as I love the unified time, I more often than not feel like I have to battle the game for a halfwhat realistic sort of progress -- and sometimes more so than in TS2. The motives thing in particular makes it feel like the game is "auto cheating" all the time.

I use Indie Mod right now because I like it better than default and I've heard many people complain about too many Elders with AwesomeMod, but I'll probably switch back to awesome once Awesome has story mode fixed etc.  However, using the latest Indie Mod, I definitely don't see promotions being handed out like candy -- in fact I probably see more messages about people being demoted.  What IS lacking is any sense that the promotion or demotions mean anything -- there is no why they got fired (a.k.a. maybe they skipped work to adulterate with their boss's wife,etc!).

So here's a vision of how I'd like to see AwesomeStoryMode as it interacts with the player vs. just the under the hood mentality.  Basically things should weave into the player's experience without hitting them over the head with the idea that what just happened is a result of Story Mode.  For example, say your sim Alice is friends with Bob.  Bob is a couch potato so one day he skips work to stay home and watch TV and then gets fired.  Since Bob is friends with Alice, maybe later that day he calls up
Alice to complain about getting fired, which would happen just like a regular phone call, and perhaps you don't even answer the phone with Alice so you never know anything happened.  Maybe if y6ou do answer you got a pop up option (sort of like Sims 2 job challenges) where you can either try to make Bob feel better, or maybe you tell him he should stop being such a lazy shit.  Then again, maybe that optional stuff is a little much for version 1, but I'd definitely like to see story mode events have player interactivity.

Another example would be say Alice is distant friends with Karen, and Karen decides to get married with her boyfriend.  So then Karen sends Alice a wedding invitation (via the mailbox since they're distant, or by phone if theyre good friends, in person if they are best friends etc), which sets up the date and time the wedding will happen at.  So then you can either have Alice show up at the wedding, or maybe you dont and then Karen gets mad at Alice, etc.

I'm pretty sure this is probably already a lot of what Pescado has in mind for this, but figured I'd throw in my 2 cents...

I don't think straight up random relationships is a good idea at all.  Best I can think of is semi-random based on who the sim knows and is friends with.  If a sim doesn't know many viable partners then Awesome can sort of queue that sim up to be more likely to visit a community lot when your sims go there, or maybe even stop by your house to visit so that they DO meet people, etc.  Rather than force sims into totally arbitrary relationships, arbitrarily force the sim to make semi-arbitrary relationships :P.

I can live with 'telepathic gossip'. We don't see sims when they go to work so I figure they just overheard something from a coworker or something like that.


Well that's just it, I feel like I shouldn't have to make things happen for gossip. It should be things going on in the neighborhood in families other than mine. So if I keep getting the same types of gossip over and over again then it either means that the neighborhood is unbalanced and there's too much of one story action going on or that the gossip is not picking up all the actions going on that it could be.


Well I would go with that except I don't think that sims are especially good at making friends and relationships on their own without player intervention. I guess you could go with coworkers or people who frequent the same types of places they do. *shrug* I don't think it can or should get too complicated though.

I'm honestly fine with a little Wizard of Oz magic behind the scenes I think some backstage sacrifices need to be made because you simply can't process a huge amount of actions for every single sim in the neighborhood on an constant basis. So if it involves making some instant friends or relationships for them, so be it. I mean heck as player if you get all the various charisma bonuses you are practically BFFs with someone as soon as you meet them so if a playable sim can do it then why not a nonplayable?

I understand what you mean, but honestly I believe that's how it already works, in fact -- I know for sure that the one death my sims were gossiping about (I've had only one, so far) was a death I didn't witness -- i.e. it happened in a household that was not the active one at the time.

That said, I can understand it is boring for you when gossip is so dominated by one topic, as you describe. It could surely use some way of tweaking. (I've never looked for any gossip-related XMLs though -- perhaps it is already tweakable?)

I guess I feel like forcing the gossip to vary its responses is sort of like attacking the symptom rather than the cause, but I'm looking at it from the perspective of the story mode and what's going on in the town. So to me if they keep gossiping about the same type of event happening to various different sims then it makes me wonder why that is happening so much. I makes me think something is out of balance with the neighborhood.

There are some things on modthesims I didn't mention on the Indie Stone thread, because they are less about how the mod works and more about my personal tastes vs. the creators.   But here are some of my observations from it.

I ran in wolfing mode and kept the camera on the central park in the city. I figured out really quickly how Indie Stone worked by doing this. The first thing I noticed was that I saw two sims talking to each other near the swingset, and then one vanished and the other sim walked off. I got some random message that a sim had an untimely death.  It was a bit creepy and funny at the same time. Less funny but more common, I remember watching a sim sit at a picnic basket in the park and while she was eating and seemingly minding her own business, she got married and concieved a baby! This happened a quite frequently.

Even though the events are forced by the game, you could see the results in towns, townies were randomly walking around with their buddies and making out with each other.  While their relationships were artificially constructed, the behavior resulting from the construction was real. That was my favorite part of the mod. It was great to look around town and see the townies behaving like people and interracting in somewhat realistic ways. It really did put a certain something in the neighborhood that wasn't there before.

And yes, three or four times I saw pregnant sims going into labor in town.  Once was in the library and I got to hear the horribly annoying screeches that children make when they see labor. (Seriously, they sound like they are getting disemboweled while alive. It's really annoying)  This leads into some of my gripes about Indie Stone. 

I hate the baby generating madness.  Even with his tweaks to calm it down,  it seemed odd that the sims would constantly be getting pregnant and making babies all the time. I got a zerg swarm at the school within 2 sim weeks.  It gives my game sort of a fundamentalist religious flavor that I don't like.

I don't like that there is a town floozie but no manwhore equivelent. Also don't like that it seems to be pretty rigid about making straight couples -- I've read reports that people said it broke up gay couples and put them into straight relationships. I   am not sure of the details about that, but if it's what people have been describing, it gets a thumbs down from me. 

Still, I like the idea of rolls being assigned and sims and "helping" the engine make a story, but the samples of text I've read are kind of cheesy. I never actually produced a floozie or a geek or whatever, but I read the samples of their interractions on line. It needed to be much shorter and less "whiny" -- especially the flavor text about a woman who became single and she was all forlorn and alone. Pul-eez. I know it was just flavor text, but I didn't like the flavor.

I agree on the philosophy of Pescado regarding this - sim driven story lines are better than "story driven" sims. Will be very interesting to see what comes out of it.

Hmm, that kind of stuff should really be staying behind the curtain. There should be a check to make sure it is not happening while said sim is being observed.


Yeah, I mean it's not perfect but it's still interaction and change rather than stagnation and stasis. I don't think this game is ever going to be a proper, realistic neighborhood simulator so I think some shortcuts are fine as long as they aren't too blatantly obvious like conceptions while picnicking.  :D


I've seen this happen even without Indie. At least I think it was when I wasn't running Indie that it happened a couple of times. As a side note, if you take the pregnant sim dropping her kid to the hospital you'll get a big moodlet bonus for a whole day. ;)


Agreed on both counts. If you play Riverview then you have Don Lothario in your town and we all know about him! Actually, Indie paired him off with another sim in my game, he took her last name (this was before they made an option selectable to always choose the man's last name. woman's last name or just random) and had them have a kid. I feel like it doesn't really look at certain traits either like a sim's commitment or baby issue traits or a sim's past history of having interacted romantically with the same sex.


Yep, again, It's perfect but to me it's preferable than a completely broken system or a super harsh survivalist no cheating and no soup for you system where everyone ends up a grumpy single elder and the only population expansion going on is in the cemetery. :P


It sounds good in theory. I am curious to see if he can make it work in a reasonable fashion that will keep the neighborhood turnover going pretty well without a lot of player interaction behind the scenes with cheat codes and making other households temporarily selectable and other hoops to jump though like that.

Part of me feels like expecting this game to make the AI controlled residents behave in anything resembling a realistic and harmonious fashion is fighting an uphill battle, but I'm open to see what Pes has in mind. He's pulled off some pretty complex stuff before.

I downloaded Indie Stone for the first time yesterday and played it last evening, in Riverview. I set the story progession to the fast setting. Some of the announcements I got were the Newbies and the Jones' were expecting their second baby and the McDermott's were expecting their third; Rainer Kowling moved in with (?) Spenser and a day or two later there was an announcement that the two were married; and the Cowan family moved into a bigger house. When I checked, Kowling was actually living in the Spenser household and the Cowan's really did move. Too early to tell if there are any babies. No promotions or demotions at all, although only about 2 or 3 sim days passed while I played it. While one of my sim's was in the library the Broke's were flirting with each other so I wouldn't be surprised to see they are soon expecting another baby also. I do think I will turn the speed of progression down to slow, though, or things will get crowded pretty quickly!  ;D

Overall I have to say that I liked it. I haven't played with it long enough to tell if it's blatently ignoring traits. Supposedly there have been checks added for that but I doubt if they're very stringent ones. I was focusing on one of my sim's downtown and I got a popup that my sim at home got a call and another sim wanted to chat with her on the telephone. The sim in question was standing a few feet away from my sim who just got off work, so, no, her evil twin is who actually called my other sim, haha. I imagine this would be normal EA programming actually, since sims who are "at work" can often be seen standing around the park, but yes, it would be nice if there was a check to see if the random sims chosen for these actions were not actually in view. 

For now I will probably trade off using AM and Indie whenever the mood strikes (I don't use Supreme Commander so I can do that), but I'll also be interested to see what you can come up with for your story mode. I wouldn't mind having the ability to influence events, but I'd prefer to not have to micromanage everything in the 'hood, either.

The untimely death thing seems fine for me as long as we see the sim die and the sim they were talking to has the appropriate reaction.  The marriage is something that should be schedule ahead of time rather than randomly decided.  Player sims get engaged first, so story mode should follow the same progression - have two sims get engaged and when they do set a date for the wedding.  On that date they get sent to a wedding venue and have the wedding.  But you should be able to go and see it if you want to.  I don't want things happening behind the curtain at all, they should be happening so you can see them (this is what Pescado means with 'Show, Don't Tell').

Yeah, that's the problem we have right now. 

I take this as a thread about general philosophy, rather than a comparison of two different mods, and that's how I would prefer to address it. 

I don't think it's feasible to expect the sim townies to ever come near enough to playing themselves to make a viable neighborhood.  The basic tools just aren't there in the game.  But it can and should be improved.  Thus I think a two pronged approach would not just be compatible but is even necessary.  There has to be some kind of god-like mechanism in the background to give the overall town progression some kind of balance.  The only question is just how heavy-handed that mechanism should be.  Indie seems to be very heavy-handed, like with the town floozie aspect, which seems to be going above and beyond the call of duty and earns my respect.

Let me go back to what I always wanted from The Sims.  The first time I played GTA Vice City (possibly the best game ever), I thought to myself, Why can't the Sims be like this?  The realism was just breathtaking, even if you had played GTA3 before.  It looked like a whole f'ing metropolitan city with crowded streets and sidewalks and people tanning on the beach and hookers walking the streets at night.  But one reason they could do such a huge and realistic simulation is that NONE OF IT WAS PERSISTENT.  As soon as you turned left, then turned right again, the cars and NPCs that you saw before were all gone or changed.  As soon as you stopped looking at something, it completely ceased to exist, freeing up precious CPU cycles.

And that defines the very problem that EA has had to address in Sims 3, because the Sims must have some kind of persistence after you turn your back on them, although not necessarily graphic rendering.  This may help explain some of the terrible tradeoffs they made, such as the godawful third-rate graphics, the lack of memories, and the huge holes in story progression.  Story progression really should have been the easiest and cheapest part of the game for them to work on, because, since it is nongraphical and takes place in the background in a batch stream manner, it should have taken little effort to implement, ONCE THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED IT TO DO.  And that's the only excuse I can possibly make for EA -- that they never reached a consensus on what story progression should do such that it was ever properly designed.  The actual coding for it should have been a breeze.   

I wrote my own simplified design pseudo-code in THIS POST for how relationships, marriage, and baby-making could be implemented in story progression to work more effectively than it does now.  One page. 

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15531.msg453987/topicseen.html#msg453987

It would be nice if the townies were intelligent enough to meet people on the street, date, fall in love, all in full high-detail simulation.  But I don't think that can be done for a couple of reasons.  First, the people they meet aren't that random, and secondly, unless your chosen Sims are on community lots 24 hours a day, there is little chance of townies getting enough face time in high-detail to approach that.  Some kind of jet-assisted-take-off device is necessary to finish the job. 

And I think that's what story progression needs to do.  Those actions we see townies do in the game should be CONSISTENT with story progression as far as they go, but they should not be the story.  Like, "Wow, look at those two making out -- they must be in love."  That kind of thing.  The actual choice of who they fall in love with is less important, I think, than that they do have a chance of falling in love, at least enough chance to keep the population size and age distribution stable.

And we should also keep this in mind -- as computer power increases, as new EPs come out and the game expands in scope, it's likely that the size of the town and the number of max townies is going to increase over time, to the point (I don't know when, but I assume it will come) that we do have a big metropolitan city like Vice City with many thousands of distinct Sims leading their lives, too many for us to micromanage with ctrl-click.  If you think that that is where we are eventually going, as I have always thought, then you have to realize that some kind of sensible background story progression is essential.  If and when the time comes that we have computers that can render and calculate in real-time the actions of every Sim in Riverview and do it at a snappy speed, we will probably already have moved on to something bigger and more complicated than TS3.

I don't even necessarily think it needs some method of 'maintaining an overall balance'.  If we're going to take a theoretical view of this, I think the best way is to make an engine that produces behavior that is both chaotic and interesting (those tend to go hand in hand).  You start the town off at relative equilibrium and as more and more things happen to the sims living their it *will* get more complicated, as marriages lead to jealousy and fights divorces, people being fired, houses being robbed, etc.  Then, once you have an engine that can successfully do that, you build in feedback mechanisms that pull the chaos back towards order.  So if the engine leads to everyone being angry at each other until every sim is fighting in the street with every other sim, you put in a police force that locks up sims who get in too many fights etc (this is sort of like how real society works).  The point is that you make it able to generate interesting *first*, and only then can you attempt to make it not go out of control.  Otherwise you fall into the trap of trying to make interestingness happen within a narrow set of constraints, not all of which everyone will agree on.

After reading in the other thread about what Pescado has in mind, I'm pretty optimistic. I can't do anything this week, but if testers are still needed after this coming Sunday, I can most likely help out, and would definitely like to.  #grah is alright with me; I go in there about once or twice a year, and no one ever remembers that I was ever there before, which I find kind of cool for some reason. 

Actually I registered here to make the suggestion that Pescado and Indie should join their efforts. After reading this thread I am rather disappointed. There seems to be a ideological debate about how to deal with certain things.

I have a practical view on the issue: I played with the awesome-mod for some time now, liked most of his features, was happy that those clone babies were gone, was very happy to be able to switch households on the fly whenever I felt to do so. However, as the game progress with the clone babies gone the town runs into a demographic catastrophe sooner or later. And that is BAD. Similar problem with careers: vanilla Sims presents you singles without a job, but with a clone of themselves on their arm every now and then. Awesomemod presents you singles without a job and no babies.

IndieMod fixes the demographic issue very well and make sims going for jobs as soon as it makes sense. Why don't use it? If Pescado is going to demonstrate that he is able to write a story progression module that generates a living town over many generations just by micromanaging the sims in it, good luck. And make a science paper out of it once finished. The idea is very ambitious.

For the time being players like me are faced by the decision whether to have a stable, colorful neighborhood or a one-generation-and-then-start-the-next-game-neighborhood, as you can't have both mods in the game, just one. I really love the way the awesome-mod allows me to play more then one household, but frankly speaking: its storymode "improvements" are not improvements, they are just removing the rather unsophisticated solutions to certain problems EA has built into the game. The Indiemod is a better solution here, awesomemod is not. If I put a couple in love into a house - why on earth won't they have children? None of those couples I tried managed to get a baby so far this way, and I tried several times, each time waiting until pregnancy was no longer an option.

What you are saying boils down to "Pescado should dump his own goals for what a story mode should do, so that the peasantry may have its AM caek and eat ISSPE, too." There are a couple of issues with this, though. Pescado has already stated in a few places that the suggested collaboration had stalled in Indie's camp, not with him. He was waiting on them to get back to him with some adjustments that would make the two mods compatible. So if your irritation is that you'd like a solution sooner rather than later, you need to take that up with Lemmy and Binky.

Also, when Pescado fixes something, he does it so that the fix works the way he believes the game should have done in the first place. Based on discussion I've read, while everyone agrees that the Indie Stone mod is a quantum improvement over the so-called "story mode" shipped in the game, it doesn't work the way it ought to do. Now, if he's going to devote his time and effort to a project to make the game better, why on earth should he do it by supporting a method that doesn't do what he wants? It's not like he's getting paid for any of this.

I've enjoyed the discussion so far, and agree that the story should be Sim-driven as much as possible, but that there are going to be limits imposed by the game itself, and by the resources available to it (what's under the computer's hood), which will vary wildly from user to user. I think experimentation is going to be the only way to really find out how much can be done by an individual background Sim, versus what will need to be arbitrarily done to it by the story engine.

My suspicion is that, while EAxis are unarguably incompetent boobs who can't debug their ways out of paper bags, there are probably EP-minded reasons behind some of the current failures. Thus I'm concerned that the first or second EP that they spit out is going to completely break all of the hard work involved in this project. But that doesn't mean I think it should be abandoned. It's worth the effort.

You can switch back and forth between using the two. I mostly use Awesomemod because I like the features, but when I start feeling like my neighborhood is stagnating then I play with Indie for a while and it always gets new people moving to town, marriages and babies being born. Then I go back to AM again after a bit of that. After a while I find Indie almost starting making too many new people and babies and what not, the opposite of AM, but I hear there's an option to slow that down so I may need to look into it the next time I play.

Note that you supposedly cannot take AM out once enabling Supreme Commander, however perhaps it's that I have both the brave and insane traits, but I have been running with SC and then swapping AM in and out for quite some time now without issue.

Anyway, for me swapping between the two is the best solution I can come up with for the time being.  :-\


I know this wasn't addressed to me but I would never tell someone how to make their mod. They do it in their own free time and first and foremost they should design it for themselves and the way they want to play (assuming they do play; you'd be surprised how many modders don't). Believe me, I've been there, done that with a large modding project for another game and had people telling me how my own work should be and it's rather  >:( inducing. I feel like everyone should mod, even if it's just something small or minor, just to get a feel for what it's like on the other side of that fence.

Anyway back to the issue at hand. I don't think Pescado should design his mod around Indie Stone, no. I think it wouldn't hurt to look at what they're doing and maybe borrow some aspects he likes or thinks works well, but sounds like he may have already been doing that. I also think a way to modularize the two mods so they could be used together would not be a bad idea, but from everything I've read he's been extremely receptive to that idea and is waiting on their end to get back to him with what he would need to do that.

I think he should definitely do it his own way. I just don't have a lot of confidence that he is going to be able to do everything the way he wants to the level of detail he wants and have it all work and play nice because of this:



Amen.

And yeah, I do think there was a little bit of the car coming out of the shop with a couple of booby trapped things here and there that will have to be 'fixed' at a later date by paying the shop more money. :P

There's plenty of room for that. I'm still pursuing a compatibility program with the Indie developers, but to mainline them into the AwesomeMod development process would be like towing a barge with a speedboat. Plus, while I'm perfectly willing to create interoperability, I intrinsically distrust third-party solutions. For those of you for whom everything involved is a third-party solution, you'll be fine with the interoperable linkup so you can have the best of both. When they get around to it. For ME, I want a system that *I* built, that works according to MY vision. Ultimately, I think you'll be satisfied with my answer to things, but if not, that's why we offer you the choice by creating this interoperable link. Or would, anyway, if they'd finish their end of things. :P

Yeah, we're looking to avert a demographic crash through alternate means other than parthenogenetic clones, only rather than being a top-down driven system, I'm just going to increase the aggressiveness level of the romance events, while stripping the superfluous fat from the rest of the event system. Sims seem to befriend and antagonize each other just fine without needing behind-the-scenes help, judging from the fact that all of my sims seem to accumulate random friends despite never attempting to speak to anyone.

Well, nothing stops them from getting a job once they're in the game, other than their total lack of motivation, really.

Look, the foot-dragging is NOT my fault. I am still waiting for them to implement their end of the deal, after which I reckon it will take only a few hours to implement the switching systems and it will be ready for the first intrepid testers to take a swing at it.

Why? Because Story Mode is stupid and prefers to spam random "antagonize" and "befriend" fluff instead of DOING THE BUSINESS, because it seems to perceive your contributions to the neighborhood population as sufficient to satisfy its demographic needs

Well, that was speculative based on some extreme tests. I prefer to side with caution, so the discretionary warning is that uninstalling is dangerous if you have anyone running in SupCom. It is presently believed that if you cancel ALL interactions, the system should be able to cleanly unplug, but again, this is unsupported.

Yeah, I do always at least make sure no one is macroing anything or has SC actually running when I save before I swap out AM. I'm insane but even I'm not that insane. That would just be asking for trouble.

Pescado has said before that he hasn't had time to really improve story mode yet, just remove all the stupid stuff from it. Have patience and we will see an New and Improved Story Mode from him in the future

Thanks for the answers. I did not know of the efforts already taken place to achieve compability between the two mods, and got the wrong impression from the MTS site that Indie is happily taken code from Pescado. It would be very nice to see the two mods getting compatible. I apologize for causing the impression that I want to criticize Pescado. That was not my intent. The initial statement starting the thread made me think that Pescado did not like the Indiemod and would not bother about people who want to play with both. As that is obviously not the case I will just wait until things have been sorted out.

The other point I made is about Pescados ideas being "ambitious". I am still thinking that Pescados project has a high risk to fail. If I understand his ideas correctly, Pescados story mode implementation will be some sort of the good old life game, where the overall structure developing is determined by the micro behaviour of the single elements. From that game we know that obtaining a somewhat stable situation over generations is a good piece of luck. You can have all sorts of developments from a fast-dying-out population over a locally or overall cyclic population to an exploding one. For the purpose of the game only the stable populations would make sense IMHO. Of course one can fix odd developments by moving families in and out of the neighborhood whenever there is a need for that. But that is what the EA code does, and people don't seem to like it. There is a lot of ranting about "where are my families?" in the sim forum I normally read. And as the families the players want to stay in the neighbourhood not only include those actually played but as well those that are friends of the families actually played, the number of families available for moving out may be very limited.

The concept to simulate the population toward a stable condition by applying statistical heuristics  like the Indiemod does has the advantage that stability is built in right from the start. It is nothing you have to hope for, you can expect it.

The other problem I see is that micromanaging all sims in the neighborhood will overwhelm ordinary PCs. Although it would be nice to be able to watch initially dating sims, first kisses and all that stuff, I am more interested in having interesting sims to meet by those that I play. The Indiemod does deliver them.

Pescado, I did not understand your comment that the sims are not motivated to get jobs :-) If I start a new family one of their first wishes is always to get one. If I would have to create a concept how to micromanage sims by the PC I would follow the path created by the wishes that appear. Most often they make sense.

That might be a good idea in my opinion. I just noticed it, too, that their wishes seem to make sense in TS3. For example, the sim I was just playing got an order to befriend another sim, and poof, he has a wish to befriend her. Then he gets a promotion, and he instantly gets a wish to befriend the boss. He needs a skill for promotion, there's a wish to improve it (or buy an object that lets him improve it). I was like  :o This is very different from TS2 where they always got a wish to improve a skill you just improved instead of something they needed. Too bad it only works for the selected household...

I was thinking the other day about the storymode difficulties and trying to think of "bottom up" instead of top-down solutions. I hade a small spark of an idea.

By not having an open neighborhood, TS2 gave townies plenty of time to build social lives with each other.  When you loaded up a public lot, they were forced out of the woodwork into wherever you were. If you didn't socialize with them, they would socialize with each other.  Eventually, they would form friendships or make enemies based on their social interractions.  Sometimes this would create a little drama -- I remember in my games Benjamin Long and Marissa would always have a slap fest  and frequently saw Goopy getting the stuffing kicked out of him by several different female sims. Whenever I'd marry a townie into my family, they'd always come with several friends of various different levels. It wasn't much of a story, but the sims were interracting with each other in such a way that I think some people would like the townies in TS3 to interract.

Unfortunately in TS3 there is too much space for the townies and they are pretty much forced to hide in their houses when you're not out in public.  Maybe there could be some sort of beacon-like item you could drop in certain public places. When the beacon was on,  non-active-household sims and townies would be encouraged to  congregate in an area with a beacon whether or not there were active playing sims there.  (Loner sims would have a stronger resistance to the beacon than others, of course)  Once they were all together, they'd be left to socialize on their own.  

With a mod similar to ACR, but toned down a bit so the sims don't all break down into constant public orgies -- they'd just be able to romantically interract with a close friend (or multiple friends, or nobody at all, depending on their traits).  I think this might be a way to handle the social aspect of story mode.

I know when the town is more crowded, that they will end up congregating in places on their own, but they still don't do it enough to really develop friendships and when you destroyallhumans, they barely do it at all.  I think a beacon that sort of forced the townies to congregate in one location if they weren't busy working, sleeping or doing whatever it is they need to do, they'd get more socially active and have more opportunities to make their own stories.


EDIT: And I think this would work even better if there was some way they could drag each other away from chess set, laptops or reading.  Why is it once someone sits at a chess-table you can not interract with them in any way except to play with them? Townies should be able to break each other from the chess trance.

Err, the game already did this but Pescado felt it was a stalkery 'feature' and squelched it, though you can turn that off in the awesomeconfig. However even if you do they really do a piss poor job of interacting with each other when you are not interacting with them, if you ask me.

And I too also kind of miss the various feuds and slap fest dramas from TS2.  ;D

I've had Sims slap and fight autonomously.  It only happened once, though, in the park.

One of my playables starts fights autonomously nearly once a day. He hangs out at the gym. He's Evil. He likes to pummel people when he's done pumping iron, presumably to test the new muscle tone.

You haven't been around the community much have you? Look at the Armory. He has a lot of experience in hacking/modding. Look at the shear scope of Awesomemod so far. You really think he can't beat story progression into submission with a hammer? If so, I'll take that bet.

Yeah, I have 100% confidence he'll come up with something and quite workable at that, though I suspect he may have to compromise or scale back from the original plan in some areas. We'll see. But I've no doubt he'll produce.

My townies seem to socialize fun when they show up on lots I visit.  Eating at picnic baskets together, swimming, etc.

Me too... there's no doubt that Pes will come up w/more awesome additions to AM... and he appears to be an excellent "hammersmith" so will be staying tuned for upcoming new elements... and am also very excited about the new Awesome IndieStone Mod collaboration that will bring a whole new level of gameplay to EAxis' half-a$$ed attempt at global story progression...  ;D  :D  8)

I know aboutt the stalker thing that is configurable -- I mean the townies are strongly compelled to show up when you are NOT there.  Sort of force them all into a corral with very little to amuse themselves with so that they have to turn to each other for fun. I think it would give back the fishbowl effect that the townies had in sims2 that kind of forced them to interract with each other a whole lot more than they do now.

Zazazu and Motoki, Pescado will produce something better and bigger than the competition.  I have been hiding in the dark since Pescado came on the scene.  He is one of the best modders and hackers in the SIM Community.  But, when it comes to Awesome Mod.  He has to put away things he dislikes and will not do since there Can Only Be One Core Mod.  With this Indie Story Mod, this will be the first time since the beginnings of SIM 1 and 2 Modders and hackers will work together.

Core Hackers for SIMs 3 all of them all need to work together.  Awesome mod can be made better with everyone working together.  The SIMs Community will be better without the Drama.  No Drama just mod and hack and help each other out and give credit to where credit is due.

They are awful at socializing. Most times if I take two or more members of the same family to the park they wind up socializing with one another and ignore all the new people at the park. Occasionally a single sim will spend hours sitting on a picnic blanket alone.  

I also miss the feuds, and I still really hate the fact that sim relationships are automatically mutual. The "I love you, you love me" situation isn't nearly as much fun as "You love me, I can't stand the sight of you" that happened frequently in my TS2 neighborhoods.

Well the stuff the TS2 townies did was all done of course while they were being observed. None of it was really done behind the scenes unless you count relationship deterioration.

To me it doesn't matter if the cat is dead or alive, so to speak, until it is actually being observed. If we're not seeing the townies then they really don't need a high level of simulation run. I think having friendships and hatreds between sims grow over time, perhaps based on factors like who lives near other or works together or what not is sufficient and then save the big antics of full interactions based on those relationships for when they are being observed.

If you've got 50+ sims all running in the background poking, slapping, telling jokes etc and then the other one reacting to that all in real time while the game still has to render and compute the main family and its guests and any interactions they are doing I could see that causing a system drain real quick.


Yeah and see this is the thing that needs to be worked on. Not them doing this sort of stuff in the background where I can't see it. But when I am watching them then yeah, they need to do something, not just stand around. As kewpie pointed out, in this respect, townies autonomously interacting with each other on a lot the player is currently playing, even TS2 was better.


It would not be The Sims community without some drama. I am quite sure some is coming somewhere sooner or later. I already noticed Cyberops stuff was removed from Carrigon's board for some reason.  ::)

But yeah, like I said, I think Pescado will produce and he's amiable to cooperating, which of course is totally dependent on other parties doing the same.

All he needs to do is what he dislikes and does not want to produce.  Take for instance Teen/Adult he needed to do it.  Doubted I know many did not like it.  But, he did it to keep many of the community happy.  I can tell there will be many more things coming from Awesome Mod which Pescado dislikes and does not want to do.  But, in the end all the community members will be happy and Awesome Mod will truly be awesome. 

I agree there seems to be some level of logic in the generation of wishes, and while I don't know how important it is to focus on the wishes themselves, it does indicate that the personality trait system is at least partially functional for something besides active behaviors. This is the aspect of the relevant wishes that makes them promising; that there is information which may be used by a story engine behind the scenes to influence progression.

There seem to be several key issues for a decent story mode. Not only does processing of background progression have to be worked out, but also storage of the data. As was mentioned below and elsewhere, non-active Sims do exhibit some superficially autonomous behaviors. The goal isn't just to have Don Lothario constantly flirting with anything on legs and being slapped (do TS3 Sims do the slapping thing?), but for there to be consequences beyond that moment.

The problem here is that the behaviors aren't really autonomous; they're pushed by the game when the Sim is "on the stage." In order for there to be progression in the way a true simulation would progress, this kind of pushing has to be made to happen at regular intervals to all Sims in the neighborhood, and that requires processing of the events before the next logical development can be pushed. I don't think it will even matter if the Sims are directed to appear on the same lot, except when it satisfies a relevant progression element (like the wedding scenario discussed), because these aren't real people. They don't have to actually meet in order to meet while we're not looking. So, a "beacon" might be interesting for other purposes, but I don't see it as essential or even useful for the sake of neighborhood background progression.

I haven't looked at the game code at all (to say I've got minimal experience in coding would be generous), so I am making assumptions about the game's functioning based on what I've read and observed. I have no idea how difficult it will be to construct an engine that calculates probable events, pushes a trigger to a given Sim, processing the results and using them in the next probability equation, and also determines how any other affected Sims (boss, fiance, etc.)  should be triggered so that the effect cascades through the community, and does this in a constant cycle. Maybe it won't take as much processor power as I'm envisioning, but I fear my little Macbook might not be up to the task. It's also going to require the saving of lots of data, which, considering some people are already having problems with ridiculous save times and file sizes, is disconcerting.

All that said, I think the wealth of beta testers available, their skill, and their experience working on previous mods will lead to something much closer to real story development than either the unmodified game or Indie Stone can offer, even if it takes a little time.

Well said Cherita, I totally agree.  With Story Progression EA just did not take there time with it.  I believe it was Story Progression and not marketing which is why they pushed back the date.  EA I think did a rush job on story progression.  And, it will take hackers like Indie and Pescado to completely fix it. 

Apparently they can. I saw it happen in a Youtube video, though it has never actually happened in my game, even when slap worthy things happened. It's a drastic change from TS2 which was a total slap fest. I swear if you looked at a sim cross eyed you'd get slapped in that game!

Story Mode has been working pretty well for me, with Awesomemod as my One core mod, but I started with a new town using an empty template, so maybe that has something to do with it. After the initial setup, I moved some of the premade sims from the Library into houses, as well as a few custom families. Some of the Library families already had children, or were pregnant already, but they've also been regularly popping out babbys. Some of the families never spawn, but the ones that do seem to make up for this, having 4 or 5 kids apiece. I've noticed a pattern with jobs. After I cheat the game-created sims into houses, one sim in each household gets a job after a few days to a week (sim time), but not immediately, and I've never seen more than one sim per household get a job.

When I first started playing the neighborhood, Story Progression was creating a new family per night, some small, some OMGsixchildren!!! Now, it's every second or third night. Many of those are singles or couples, and I cheat them into houses. Some of the original Library sims have turned elderly, in the meantime, and I expect to see death notices for them soon, but the majority of story progression notices that I get are befriendings, antagonizations, and jobs, with a few "new baby" notices mixed in. Not once have I seen a notification that a household has moved. It's possible that the sims just aren't far enough along in their careers to afford new houses (yet). My town doesn't seem to be stagnating, at all, and is keeping a good balance. I must admit, though, that I'm surprised to see procreation from some of the households. I created a roommate situation with a few of the MATY self-sims. Typpi now has a perpetually spawning harem. :D

This is all I ever see.  Literally half of my town plays musical houses almost every night.

Me too. Also note that you won't actually see the notification that they moved unless you turn on the debug storymode notification messages, which are disabled by default. However if you get 1am pauses in your game you can rest assured that is what is causing it.

EXCELLENT POINT.

For anybody not familiar with the game of Life, it's discussed here:
http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

Life uses a bottom-up simulation.  There are a few elegant rules that spawn great complexity, and the interest is in the chaos that arises from the simple beginnings.  Unfortunately, chaos, although interesting, is the typical (even desired) result of A-life simulations.  But a village simulation like TS3 requires some kind negative feedback mechanism to prevent chaos.  (Like, too big, too small, too old, too unemployed populations).  And that is best instituted from the top-down level.  

So top-down and bottom-up are BOTH REQUIRED.


Ah, that's the exciting part of it.  I'm actually looking forward to that collision of wills.  EA has engaged in these battles before with their customers about how their game ought to work.  It's more fun than the game itself!  Personally, I want this to be so successful that it remains permanently stuck 10 inches up EA's rectum, turning slow circles.  I would like them to scratch their heads wondering how they can make THEIR EP compatible.  However, that is not likely.  It's just going to be a hilarious shit storm when they come out with their next EP.  


No, I really, really doubt that.  From what the vibe I am getting from Pescado's comments about story progression, it sounds like they didn't keep things simple enough.  I still strongly believe that Story Progression had to be the simplest and easiest part of the programming project for the Sims 3.  The fact that they did such a horrible job at it tells me that they just never bothered to QA it or think it through, and probably had people throwing in ad hoc ideas to the point where it became poorly functioning spaghetti nonsense.

Story Progression needs to be made simpler.


Yes.  I love the sly social commentary about the sims community implicit in the way he implemented it.

Well, there are two control factors involved.
1. A population cannot explode because they are constrained by their living environment. The kind of environment you structure for them will directly affect their behavior.
2. A population that dies out simply fails the evolutionary test and will be replaced by new random immigrants. (The evolution simulation alone makes this interesting!)
In any case, this project is as much a science experiment for my amusement as it is intended as a Story Progression simulator. For those who want the statically anchored village,the IndieMod option, once the linkage is complete, should satisfy them.

To be honest, overpopulation is not as much a problem as underpopulation. Given the way I design, the environmental constraints will halt the population growth well before overpopulation becomes a factor. Since sims are not able to directly modify their environment without the player's intervention, to some degree the player's own actions define the neighborhood's flavour. If the neighborhood winds up as a retirement community, the player will know it is because he caused it!

Actually, the micromanagement is not as intensive as you'd think. It is often more computationally intensive the way Story Mode does it than the way I do it: Case in point: The Nightly Musical Houses Shuffle that is normally imposed by Story Mode hammers your computer far harder than ordering 30 sims to run high-resolution Supreme Commander simulations.

Yes, but here's the thing: While the wishes appear, sims do not, in any way, act upon their wishes, and simply hang around listlessly in Story Mode until forcibly dragooned into a random job by the job boss-and-coworker engine.

I do have the notifications enabled. I see lots of antagonizing and befriending, some new jobs, and some new babies, but no promotions, demotions, firings, or moves. It's a new town, though. This will probably change over time.

Kinda funny to come on here today and find these thread, when the IndieStone mod vrs Awesomemod thing has been what is mainly on my mind lately.  I have been a very serious Awesome devotee, until I found the Indie mod two days ago. Since the, I've been kinda going back and forth, playing out with one for awhile, then quitting without saving and playing out with the other.  I've noticed that my "townie" (i.e., any Sim not being actively played by me, in my definition) Sims get promotions and demotions like crazy, have had a massive flood of babies, and the romance has been so heavy that there were no non-NPC single guys when I got around to finding my Sim a man with the IndieStone mod, while with the Awesomemod, the soap opera drama stuff takes a backburner, and the majority of the storyline notices I get are attempted move-outs and move-ins.  Too bad for me, I like soap opera drama.   ;D  But I dearly miss my other Awesomod benefits while playing with Indie, like the Smarter Chair Finder, No Magic Scrolls, etc.  I'd love more than anything to see the two combine somehow, though I understand that it won't be in the vein that I would hope to have.  So, here's my question: how badly will I fuck up my game by switching back and forth between the two mods?

Mine are barely reproducing now, but moving like crazy. I blame myself, though. I had a bug unrelated to Awesomemod. I chose to kill it in a particularly rough way that I knew was going to bork things up, without realizing that it would have effects other than those for the specific sim. At the end, I had approximately 30 new homeless households. Oops.

I built myself a nice little economical 3 bed/2 bath home that would sleep six under $14k, and filled one section of Riverview with copies. I placed families. And I placed families. Then I merged singles and placed more. That night, story progression went bonkers. After one more night, it has calmed down.

I don't know why my game is behaving so differently from other people's games. I even placed a family on a vacant lot, yet they haven't moved, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them has a job. My active sim once passed their lot while collecting rocks, and they were all just standing by the mailbox. I often see them at community lots, even when my sim is at home (she lives across the street from the bookstore, where I regularly see non-playable sims visiting). It's possible that my game is borked somehow, but since the sims are staying put, I'm not really complaining. I have no 1 AM lag, btw.

IndieStone mod was designed to counter the retirement community situation. Massive births was a deliberate decision. It will be toned down as things are balanced better. Of course the speed at those changes cannot be compared to what Pescado does. As has been pointed out several times, Pescado is just quicker by too much of a factor to really compare.

Actually, no. The goal of A-life generally is to create emergent patterns, and not be chaotic. Chaos is desired because from chaos comes new order. If it was unpatterned chaos, it would quickly be pushed aside as having no ultimate value to the development of A-life.

Bottom up works just fine alone. It's just a matter of finding the perfect set of simple rules to ensure that things stabilize in a believable state that is required. I believe Awesomemod is taking that approach, and I believe that it will be accomplished.

Turned Story Progression on in a save copy of my regular small hood that never had story progression on it quickly got to work moving in new random generated sims and creating chaos. Basically every few minutes the game would freeze (similar to that freeze people report when textures are loading), but everything would freeze not just sims. Then it got worse to the point of screen not able to move (scroll on edge on) even with pausing. Turning story mode off fixed it immediately. I wish there was a way to just work story mode with the sims I already have (so they can breed on their own), instead of trying to generate new ones to fill the quota en masse. Like ala notownieregen

That's about what I've been thinking. I think they threw in "story progression" at the last minute to try and cover the fact that their living, breathing town full of sims who lived their own lives was actually full of zombie sims who did nothing but sit on park benches and read about Raymundo all day.  So they changed the release date and threw together a random event generator--calling it "story progression" to make it sound better.  When they realized that their random event generator didn't do anything worthwhile, and the new release date was fast approaching, they said "screw it, our customers are stupid anyway," and threw in the ability for sims to clone themselves.

Ya know, I thought I was kidding when I wrote this, but it actually seems more reasonable than if they actually meant for it all to work the way it does. 

Moondance we are onto something.  You make it even more logical.  That it was when they found they have Zombie Sims reading Rambo Part XXXVIII The Rambundo.  So Story Progression was made for all those who read Rambundo to become a John Simbo.  

And, you hit it right on, that is exactly what it is a random event generator.  OOooooo Ahhhhh I'm a mental retard who loves Story Progression since it generates a stupid moronic event.  And, EA knows you loves SIMs you will buy SIMs 3 and has a random event generator which was made by a mentally retarded EA Staff Member.    

I know you have better things to work on, but I would dearly like a story progression where all they do is act on their wishes  ;D Then I could make myself a coffee, sit out in the park with a wolfingrun (or equivalent), and watch. Would be fun. Sadly, I don't think that is moddable, though...


The evolution simulation is pretty much the only thing TS3 has over TS2. And it doesn't work  :(

Also, I know this is still not the requests forum, but I think random moving ins should be configurable on/off, so that if a population I created wants to die off despite my efforts and your storymode hack, then I would get a ghost town with empty houses I can use for my sims rather than random townies taking over and stealing the show... That is pretty much what EA gave us, no? I should be able to make a house and leave it empty so that it would lure my young sims in to create their own families, but now if I make a house, a townie will always move in at the next update. In fact, empty houses and empty beds/cribs could act as birth regulations: if I have living space and a loving couple, they will spawn kids. If the young adults have either space at home or an empty house, they will marry and move in together. With traits and a little randomness added in of course.

_{Then you could just drop the Awesome name and call is TS4  ::)}

It looks more like they spent much time "tuning" other aspects of the game play, at the active sim/household level, and ran out of time for developping the "neighborhood" gameplay/gameflow. It also looks like some decision takers thought the players didn't want any kind of story progression anyway, and would rather play TS3 as they played TS2, without using story. Sacrificing story design to respect the deadlines seemed not a big deal...

EA (and most of the industry) have problems understanding what building big games for a lot of customer means. They made a lot of work on "user content and creativity", but they still think they can produce a "one for all" game play, satisfying everyone - what TS2, Spore and TS3 showed is that, if you create a game that attracts a great number of layers, you HAVE to give the players way to personalize the game play itself, to easily configure each point of the game.

Back to the point. There are many ways to design a "story progression". Some players only want to have a "changing" neigborhood, where they can play without having to find jobs and lovers for everyone in the city. IndieStone does that well. Pescado has another approach, it is a good thing and will please other kinds of players.

The only problem is that as long as the highlander rule can't be cheated with, a player will not be able to take only what he wants from a modder. IndieStoneMod and AwesomeMod are not so much "mods" than different versions of the full game.
With TS2, the players could customize their gameplay by chosing the precise mods they wanted... At present time, gameplay customization on TS3 is just chosing between different "visions" of the game by different authors.

The Highlander Rule is not something inherent to TS3, though. It's true of any software that if you throw multiple instances of how to handle situation XYZ at it, all of which have equal priority, the program is going to barf. Even with TS2 mods like default skin replacements, this was true.

A more accurate description of the issue is that each modder (of the major mods we're discussing) has tackled so many different pieces of code that they were bound to have at least one or two overlapping. People keep requesting new functions and fixes to be added to AM, and Pescado obliges where he can. Each one of those additional core changes is a potential conflict with something else done by another modder. If you want to have more a la carte selection for which mods you use, you're going to have to either persuade el Presidente to modularize his fixes, wait until someone else does it for you, or learn to do it yourself.

I don't really see a problem with having a Packages folder full of single-function mods. You just better make sure they're very descriptively named.

Actually, the underlying problem is imposed by the structure of TS3. Like in TS2, a given resource by TGI must be overridden in its entireity. However, in TS2, there were many resources, all distinct: A given modification required only that you override a small set of BHAVs, possibly only one, out of tens of thousands. An analogous situation exists in TS3, except that there are only about 3 BHAVs, and they are frequently interlinked. There are also many modifications in TS2 which could be performed by modifying only BCONs, which in TS3, are analogous to the many XML mods. While not as numerous as TS2 BCONs, XML tunings are still many and frequently seperate, so the potential for conflict is not quite as glaring here.

The problem is that because there are only the equivalent of about 3 BHAVs, any change to the game essentially modifies these. Since a resource must be overridden in its entireity, this means that even a "minor" core mod is still a full core mod, and cannot be made compatible with another core mod. XML mods, are, of course, compatible with most things, except in cases where AwesomeMod has specifically also commandeered an XML tuning, such as Socializing/Careers/Traits.

Some research has been performed into improving the compatibility of core mods, but so far the requirements of those methods require that the core mods be assembled in a non-plug-and-play format that requires the user to assemble his own custom core mod from components, and furthermore, subjects the creator of the modifications to a number of constraints which are not suitable for advanced modification methods. As these present limitations are simply not acceptable for the purposes of AwesomeMod, we have not adopted this strategy at this time.

As far as story progression, EA used this as one of the selling points for the game.  Remember all of that hooplah about what you do on one side of town affects what happens on the other side?  All that hooplah appears to be unadulterated B.S.

In my more recent games, I simply have turned on TS2 aging (i.e. only the active lot ages) under the theory that the N.P.C. just are color for the background.  After all, the town itself does not "age" -- new buildings being built, old buildings being torn down.  It's a quick and dirty solution, but it does maintain the demographic balance.

It seems that another quick and dirty solution would be simply to create a few families to serve as NPC's and move them into an unoccupied house.  I started to do this in TS2:  creating an orphanage of children, a group home for teens, and otherwise creating households of sims who otherwise were missing from the game.

I like AM and keep it installed for other reasons.  It has a lot of really neat features, like being able to turn off the sort for clothes, or preventing books from acting like magic scrolls.  Some of these little things bother me a lot more than EA's failure to implement a functional story progression.

Ugh, I had like the megapost from hell where I kept responding and then cutting and then pasting it into the next one etc etc and somewhere along the way I lost it. I wish you guys weren't so god damned anal over the double post thing. I still never get why people care. Who gives a crap? Responding to a different topic is okay to do in another different topic as far as I am concerned. /rant.

I just wasted the better part of an hour.  >:(

Oh well, I guess I will paste the god damned replies in Word or something and assemble them all together at the end to make you posting nettiquette queens happy.  ::)


This is an irritating design on their part. Now stupid little things like Interacting with the Grim Reaper or squelching the bathroom privacy rules have to be a "core mod". :P


I like the XML mods. They are really, really easy to deal with. Any idiot who takes 5 minutes can learn them. They are basically just text. And you can thankfully edit most aspects of the game with them. In this respect, I think it's a step up from TS2 modding.


Yeah, but you can still override it by setting different permission levels in different directories and then giving another XML mod higher permission than Awesomemod. The Teen Woohoo mod in the Pudding Factory does this and it works just fine.


That's disappointing but it makes sense. You need to mod in a way that makes sense for you and shouldn't be forced into methods that are not efficient or conducive to your goals.


Oh that's usual gaming company par for the course marketing lies to brag about how great its supposed AI is. They always do that. I remember Ultima Online bragged in the late 90s about how it's npcs were so life like it fooled one of the developers into thinking it was a real person. They stand around and say a few generic things. I could be drunk and half asleep and I would still never mistake them for a real person. Ditto for Elder Scrolls Oblivion and all it's bragging about it's 'Radiant AI'. :P

Actually, to this day I still think the npc schedules of Ultima 7 way back in 1992 is some of the better town/life/people simulation stuff I've seen and that's sad. That was almost 20 years ago.

I thought about that after I left for work; the modularization wouldn't be possible if all that stuff is part of the same piece of behavior. What people seem to be asking for is a way to change different aspects of behaviors that have been interwoven into the same routine by EA. It's the pieces that can't be separated that everyone is wanting to separate, and I wasn't thinking about just how few of the seemingly unrelated behaviors were really independent in the code. (Like I said, I never have looked at it and probably wouldn't know what I was seeing if I did.)


It sounds like a nightmare to try to support, too. When you look at what they've done, does it make sense the way they tied it together in such a big knot? I mean, does it look like there was a legitimate purpose for the design, or does it really look like an effort to thwart third party modification?


Indeed. When I first read about the story progression, I actually thought I'd want to keep it turned off and just play in the old TS2 style. But now that I've messed with just the little taste of progression that we do get (neighbors aging, random births), I'm actually more interested in having real progression. I want the little surprises of new couples getting together and reproducing, or breaking up. I want to have my Sim talk to an acquaintance and learn he's in a new career or romantic attachment. I even want to occasionally have my Sim be surprised to discover that his potential mate has suddenly adopted a rugrat (just not every time in every game--I'm looking at you, Christopher Steel). Every other aspect of TS3 is so similar to TS2 that without story progression, I really don't see a reason to play this one over the other.

Same here; this is particularly true for Mac users. Perhaps I was a wee bit lazy, but I never got into actually modding TS2 (apart from lights and suchlike) since the workflow alone was so tedious (let alone learning how to actually do stuff, and then do it) -- I'd have to boot the other machine, connect, transfer files, start SimPE, yadda yadda .. just to LOOK AT something. Now I can simply open any package in TextEdit and see what the values are, right on this machine, while the game is running -- and it's all so obvious and self-explaining that I had already tweaked a lot of things before I even *had* the game. There seems to be a little trend towards Java now, as well -- I don't think I've ever seen any TS2 Java tools.

Re. the so-called AI, somebody on here called it "Artificial Stupidity" lately.

(And I'd be surprised if anyone would take issue if you replied to the god damned replies in separate posts .. you're not going "**bump**!! ne1? ne1?" after all. I believe I've been doing that too, and I've yet to be slapped.)

Yes, issues would be taken. There is no reason why double-or-triple posting is warranted. Motoki obviously knows where the edit button is. An alternative is to post, then wait for a bit for someone else to say something.

Feh. If someone has something to say and it's relevant then who the fuck cares? I was on some other board related to a TV show and people were nazis about that, though most boards I've been on no one cares.

I don't see the hurt. It's not like it's asking the same damned thing over and over again and going ne1? ne1? bump bump bump.

My mind works in a way that I respond to one thing at a time. When I start having to cut and paste and organize stuff to the point it feels like an essay to pacify a few prissy people it's irritating.  >:(

I honestly think people should just get the fuck over it and you know what? Next time I will just hit reply, reply to that person, then reply and reply to the next person instead of losing the better part of an hour trying to organize it all into one.

And whoever doesn't like it then TOUGH SHIT!!!

More things, like sims having affairs and fights, ect used to happen more in my game of sims 2 apartment life...........  I played this game to death  ( Sims 3 ) for a few weeks but with nothing happening, other sims not not upgrading furniture, or even buying new stuff for their homes, I have got fed up with the game, AwsomeMod makes it a lot better, although I miss the memorys and other stuff, like attaction and having a crush on a sim.  I think, the first pack EA produce should be a gameplay pack where there are more things going on, rather than having the player, seeming to interact with zombies.

Even when the sims almost create a story on their own, the game stops them in their tracks.
I had a male sim who was happily married to his second wife. They had three children of their own, and his daughter from his first marriage.
He worked with his ex-wife, so despite their divorce, their relationship bar was in very good shape. Then he rolled up the wish to move in with his ex-wife.  My thought was "oh, that could be interesting," so I decided to indulge him, and invited her over. I had them talk and joke around a bit, but there was no option to ask her to move in.  Then I saw an option for him to ask her to "just be friends." I'd never seen that option before, so I gave it a try. The "ex-wife" icon in their relationship disappeared and was replaced with "best friend," and THEN the option to ask her to move in appeared. I had him ask her to move in, she accepted and the entire family lived in perfect harmony. How boring is that?

I had WWF in my neighborhood in SIMs 2 there were non-stop fighting.  With families when they had a baby *poof* instant cribs and beds.  And, lots of furniture.  EA really needs to fix this game up badly.  And, I do not think a patch will do it.  It will need to be one large expansion pack.  Memories actually caused the lag in SIMs 2 and I for one do not miss it. 

And, Moondance your neighborhood sounds like Zombie Valley or Zombieview.  Boring.   

Holy crap, that really is lametastic. What a wasted opportunity for drama! I'm not really into soap-opera or Springer-esque style gameplay, but when it's a random thing like that, I'd enjoy it if things were realistic. Oh well.


Was this with, or without, the FightClub mod? My neighborhoods were lively enough, but they weren't full of pugilists.

I wish I had WWF in my neighborhood. At this point I would be ecstatic if I had that. Hell, I had two townie sims that were not under my control autonomously talk to each other last night and I about wet myself with joy. It was the first time I even had that much interaction. Sad. :(

I agree w/you here and think the "pettiness" of some online posters is really un-amazing to put it lightly... as long as you are adding info or w/e to the discussion then if should be fine to double post... geez... there are so many more important things to address than this microscopic issue...   ::)   :P

My experience with Story Mode, pretty much with AwesomeMod in the whole time, though early on there weren't as many of the limiting features.

I finally investigated the status of some of the townie families the game spawned when I first set it up after gassing the default Sims out of Sunset Valley. The Bradford father had moved out by himself into the trailer; when asked about his relationship status he replied he was single, but his wife still had him listed as her husband. I ended up kicking him back in with his family to free up the house, because there wasn't any indication he moved out because of a divorce or argument, and he was good or best friends with his wife. I just set them as spouses again, though it doesn't want to show up on his panel for some reason. He's stayed put so far.

Then there was Garland Bateman who was living with Beth Ingram and, I discovered, their two daughters, one who started as a teen and one who started as a kid but is a teen now. One had the mother's last name and the other had his. They were engaged and I don't know how long they'd been engaged, or if they started that way, but obviously the Story Mode never pushed them to marry and they never did anything about it, so I had them get married manually through the menu option rather than the cheats. Oddly, though he proposed the marriage, he and the whole family took the mother's last name, even the daughter who was born with the father's.

All the other townie families are apparently already married. They spawned or were created with a couple toddlers early on, which are now children, but there haven't been any new kids with them for a long time now, and so the only new kids have been with my playables. I had one pregnancy early on come from Story Mode with one of my pre-married CAS playables, and the rest I had to get going on my own.

I have had two Sims so far form romantic relationships on their own, both from "sacred" families with a non-sacred townie, so I don't know if Story Mode pushed this on them from the townie side before the notification option or if they actually did it on their own. However, I've played about 20 Sim days over the past couple nights, and I haven't gotten one single Story Mode notification at 1:00 AM. Now that they can't move houses like they used to (hurray for persistently moving out to become homeless and leaving your toddler with your roommate) I actually took "sacred" off my playables to see if something would happen. Nothing yet, but it's only just started.

I've been playing on a mix between Long and Epic and the toddlers I started with out of CAS have just become teenagers. And, apart from the usual random antagonizing and befriending, and one parthenogenesis baby that was shot down before it got off the runway, that's all that's happened. I turned on the Bus Kills one time to see what would happen, and a random homeless Sim I'd never met or even seen around was killed each night, so I turned that off again, because I imagine they'll just spawn more if they kill them all...

So I guess all this is to say - I really hope for Awesome Story Mode, because it sure seems to be needed :P

Re. the so-called AI, somebody on here called it "Artificial Stupidity" lately.
[/quote]


That's pretty darn acurate. In the beginning when created sims were losing jobs or being moved into oblivion, I started calling it 'story aggression'. Lately I've personally been fond of the term 'Artifical Inanity'.

Yeah, that's one of the fun bugs. When a SplitHousehold event occurs on a household where someone is married, the game tries to assume they broke up. However, the relationship is only severed unilaterally, so ONE party thinks they're broken up, the other one doesn't, and now the neighborhood has a bad pointer thing going on. Things can go rapidly downhill from there until a (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/bfbvfs.jpg) results.

Ahh, wonderful. Maybe he'll just have to meet with a fatal accident, then...

Speaking of 'effed up situations in the neighborhood, in my game Don Lothario married and had a kid (I know, right?) and then he and his wife soon after the baby's birth became elders. Well Don just croaked and the mom is at 92 days so she's got one foot on the grave and the other on a banana peel. The girl just turned into a teen so she's only a day or so into the teen stage with the rest of it left to go.

What happens if the mom dies before she becomes an adult, which seems likely at this point? Will some social worker come and take her away to Simbuktu behind the scenes when I don't see it?

Nothing. I don't think the SS takes 12s.

So the game would just let her function as a single teen townie with no source of income? Odd.

I hadn't noticed if it assigns random part time jobs to teens but it doesn't seem to. I know my sims don't seem to have bosses or coworkers when they work part time jobs.

The game doesn't consider a source of income a prerequisite for survival, since a sim can survive for a very long time on no income just purely off of saved cash.

And there is this Motoki... since she's a Lothario and should be considered "One of the Founding Famblies" in Sim History...  you could take pity on her and make her a young rich heiress or something like that... or age up Malcolm Landgraab and have her marry him since he should be rich... even tho he's pretty mufugly... might have to send him to the plastic surgeon to "have a little work done"...   ;)   :D   ;D

There's a few caveats, though: You can't just override, you have to splice the files together. Otherwise, a fatal error occurs and your game crashes.

Well, it's more that the methods simply are not compatible. The present splice method simply doesn't permit me to *DO* some of the stuff I've done.

I've read this discussion with interest, and I think I'll finally ask the burning question I've had for about a week now, even though it may mark me as terminally non-Awesome:  Is it possible that the default EA Story Mode may be adequate for those of us who actually play Only One Fambly?

I'm a huge admirer of Pescado's work in general and the AwesomeMod in particular, but am not running it right now.  I used it for a while because I liked things such as the facial slider multiplier and the squashing of the teen curfew helicopter police.  I have downloaded the Indie Stone mod but have never tried it.  Right now I'm running only various XML tweaks to take the place of some of the AwesomeMod features that I liked.  In addition to this, the Indie Stone mod conflict detector tells me I'm running two core mods, namely Delphy's facial slider hack and klanly's InSimenator-like "duma" mod -- but strangely, it says there is no conflict between the two, and my game runs fine.

As I type, I just married off Lawrence Lum's son (or Theodore Lum's grandson), after starting with the bin Lum family in a fresh hood with Normal lifespan and the setup described above.  I've watched the hood around my family, and unless I'm missing something, have seen nothing unusual.  Sims have moved into and out of the town, which doesn't bother me -- I'll take my chances with my Sims losing friends.  (Though I do wonder where Sims go when they move out, as it doesn't seem like EAxis to delete them cleanly and non-destructively).  Single Sims are spawning clone babbies, which also doesn't bother me -- if I were playing a single Sim, he'd be allowed to adopt, so the townies might as well also be allowed to do so.  In public, I certainly see Sims interacting in the stupid hilarious ways I've come to expect -- I even saw my first TS3 fistfight in the park yesterday.  I do miss the AwesomeMod protecting my Sims from random bus firings, deaths, and body shape changes -- but I figure if my Sim gets fired, oh well, there are other jobs; if he dies, I will have a one-parent household and a greater challenge; and if he gets run over by a bus, my third-generation Lum family has long since had the body shape changer reward item.

Most importantly perhaps, I have no lags, at 1:00 a.m. or otherwise.

I would use the AwesomeMod again in a minute if there were a "Light" version that left the default Story Mode (mostly) untouched, but gave me the benefits I miss such as described above.  I will probably reread this thread and other similar ones because I'm sure I'm just not noticing all the problems with the default story mode, which is why I'll keep playing this Lum family through at least one more generation and watching the hood while I do so.  In the meantime, I'm certainly open to suggestions/macros/pointing-and-laughing regarding what I'm missing by using the default Story Mode, or if it indeed could work OK if you're running Just One Fambly.

One last question:  I read earlier how the AwesomeMod could lead to a dying geriatric town, which it did indeed do a couple of times for me.  I also read that this is probably the player's fault, unless I misunderstood.  If true, this is fascinating and chilling.  I would especially love to know what I did wrong in those cases -- probably I focused too much on my Sim's career and should instead have made sure he got married and spawned lots of kids.

If you're really only interested in playing one family, you're better off with Indie, or with AwesomeMod with parthogenesis allowed, or with no mod at all.

I'm more or less only interested in playing one family for the bulk of my play time. I still feel like I want more out of the townies than what the default story mode does but maybe I am expecting too much. :P

I run Awesomemod (with parthenogenesis off) the bulk of the time then every once in a while if I feel like the population is getting a bit thin or old I'll swap it out and let Indie run for a bit.

The gameplay features/fixes/tuning in Awesomemod really makes a big difference for me and even when I run Indie I get bothered not having it.

I feel like AM in its current state doesn't do a ton with story mode, though I do feel like it is a bit stringent in some areas. Still, the 1am thing can be worked around by changing all the house names to include the name of the family residing there thus making it an ancestral home. If you do that and turn parth off and maybe every once in a blue moon let Indie run for a couple of sim days I think it works pretty well with story mode. Or as well as can be expected at this point in time. I'd still like to see more out of townies but maybe by design we just never will.  :-\

In TS2, I had no problems with going from house to house, playing my Spares/Multiple Famblys, yet I find myself without the strength to play my Spares is TS3.  I know what the reason is, but it's humiliating to admit it.  I find myself unwilling and/or unable to give up the 'fantasy' of believing what EAxis promised us with TS3.  A living/breathing/evolving community around our 'One Fambly'.  Until I can resolve that personal conflict, I'm unable to 'Switch Households'.

And yet, I'm also unwilling to give up AM and all of it's fantastic features.  So I continue playing a hood until the point when tumbleweeds start blowing down Main Street.  Then I scrape it and start all over again in a new hood.

I'm really not finding the 1:00 moving around that everyone talks about.  At most, every night I get maybe 4 or 5 events. Most of those are "befriend" or "antagonize".  I started in an empty town and deleted all characters.  Then I created my Legacy Sim and am on the 6th generation.  I still only get a couple of move ins or family creations a week.  I never get marriages, and the births they announce at 1:00 are sims that I can't find.

Also, sims I send out into the wild never do anything again.  No promotions, births, marriages...nothing.

Side note:  Just last night, I had the announcement of a birth baby named with only Stars again, and I have the absolute latest awesomemod installed every time I start the game.

Do we know what the Indie mod enables to pair off townies? I get notifications at 1 AM of townies making enemies and friends, but what does it take to make married couples? I'm obsessed with marriage at the moment, because my pre-married couples didn't have any problem producing babies, but I haven't got any for a while, and now when I took a quick tour of the townies, I could see that they have enemies and friends, but no love interests, and no new marriages...

Also, I thought that the musical houses problem was fixed in the latest Awesomemod... at least now I don't get any. No idea what I did, I re-downloaded the aweconf for the SC, and the whole mod for good measure, in case something was changed and I missed it, and all my townies stay put now. So you are saying it's only luck and they may start moving again any time now?

I used Indie last night for the first time and I was surprised when it married two guys and moved into their own house.  That was great!

That is pretty much all I get in my neighborhood at 1am are moves and nothing else. And this was after the AM that supposedly fixed it. I guess I should finally get around to just ancestral homing everyone. :P


I've noticed that too. That the sims I create and move in but don't play these core mods ignore them entirely. I wonder what's up with that.


I have no idea. It seems arbitrary though. I'm sure whatever means they use would not be Kosher with Pescado and his stringent demands for realism. ;)


Really? Wow that's pretty cool. Especially since I've hear a number of people complaining about the lack of that with Indie.

Now the real test is if it get them to adopt on its own without any player intervention. Hell, if it does that I might even switch over to Indie more often.

I'll keep my eye on them and if it does have them adopt I'll report back.  I noticed it when it first said Cyclone Sword (sp?) was dating some guy last name Boyd I think, then it said they married, then they moved into a house together.  So I'll watch them off and on without selecting them, and see if it progresses.  Cyclone is an elder and Boyd is a YA.

It's funny how often those arbitrary pairings are either just perfect (Bella and Mortimer,) or are so wrong that they are funny (Agnes Crumplebottom to Iqbal Alvi.)  Interestingly, Indie seems to like to pair VJ Alvi with Lisa Bunch, which is exactly what I always did when I was doing my own matching.  But, it also annoys me by pairing a lot of adult and YA men with elder women.  I don't mind so much when it's the other way around, but the whole point of matching them up (for me) is for breeding.

I think you hit the nail on the proverbial head in terms of why I'm playing only one family too.  That, and I just can't be bothered to micromanage that many spares -- and also, to some extent, because I'm still watching this game and trying to figure out how it works.  Really, I'm doing the same thing over and over again, and trying to keep an eye on the hood in general at the same time:  (1) Get male YA married, give the Mrs. plastic surgery if needed, feed her lots of apples, and spawn The One Manchild; (2) Age baby up to a toddler immediately, then up to a child as soon as he has learned all three toddler skills; (3) While advancing parents' careers, start the child on making friends (maybe I can find him a potential mate even at this early stage); (4) Age child to teen as soon as he's getting an A; (5) Increase teen's skills and school performance (parents will become Mature Adults by this time); (6) When teen ages to YA, age parents to elders and kick them out; (7) Repeat from step 1, moving into a nicer house at the same time.

I'm getting more and more curious about the Indie Stone mod, though it sounds so heavy-handed that I think I'd like it less than the AwesomeMod.  In the meantime, I'll keep experimenting with the more-or-less-unmodded Story Mode.  One thing I've noticed already is that I have had zero need for babysitters, due to the enforced maternal leave which lasts well into The One Manchild's 6 stage, and even then one of the parents is bound to come home about the same time as the 6.  I am not exactly what you'd call progressive, and still find this very insulting and annoying.  But I know others have commented on this already.

What I've done for now to keep my town alive:

1.Play with AM until you feel like you need some more townsfolk. Save.
2.Disable AM, enable Indie. Delete script cache. Reload the save.
3.Config Indie options for Silly Fast story progression, relationships allowed, childbirth allowed, household moving not allowed (if you prefer to keep everyone put). You can also enable reports for all to see what's going on.
4.Play with Indie until you get enough marriages and new babies to satisfy your needs. At Silly Fast setting playing for half a day to a day will get you tons of that.
5.Disable Indie, enable AM. Delete script cache. Reload the save. Continue playing with all-new townsfolk relationships.

This seems to work fine for me so far. I don't use Supreme Commander though and assume it would not allow this kind of mod hopping, but if you are not into controlling everything then the above should get you by.

That's more or less what I do, but I don't even bother to delete the cache and I find Indie on normal speed is sufficient, though I guess if your goal is simply to power breed the town as quickly as possible and get back to Awesomemod as quickly as you can then the fast mode would probably be best.

Pescado warns that enabling Supreme Commander may make you unable to remove Awesomemod with your save in the future, however in my experience of A LOT of swapping out with Awesomemod running, then not running, then running again I have not had any problems even with Supreme Commander enabled. Of course your mileage may vary. You will also want to make sure that when you save and get ready to take Awesomemod out that all SC functions on all your active sims have been canceled and no one is currently running using any SC macros before you save and exit the game.

No.  The first time an important non-fambly sim moves out of town forever with no way to recover them, you'll be frantic to abandon EA Story Mode.  As for the other miscellaneous bugs, you might be able to live with them

I had the geriatric community problem before using AwesomeMod.  I had to run vanilla for the first two or three weeks because of a recurring VooDoo Crash using the older versions of AwesomeMod.  That's gone away, and I'm strictly AwesomeMod now.  But even when I ran vanilla, I still had the geriatric problem.  I think it stems from the fact that almost all the starter families in a new game are YA's, and they all reach elderhood at the same time without yet dying to make space for the vanilla game to generate new townies.

Story Progression likes to report fake babbys. I moved a custom fambly that I made, but never intended to play, into a random house that happens to have a crib in it. All three sims are unrelated and single. Two nights in a row, Story Progression reported a babby with an unknown name being spawned on that lot. The next day, I went to check it out. No babby. All three of the single sims were home. I removed the crib from the lot, and have had no more fake babby reports. Apparently, Story Progression senses a crib on a lot and tries to create a story around it, but without actually implementing the story action. This is lame.

There are several reasons why the Baby action may produce no visible results:
1. The action makes a sim pregnant. It takes a bit longer for the baby to actually pop.
2. On closer examination, there are no valid parents. Because parthenogenesis is not allowed, the baby fails to spawn on account of a lack of proper parents. Detecting this failure condition is much more expensive at ActionGen than it is to simply fail at Execution, so this invalid condition passes without note until the action is chosen attempts to run, whereupon it fails. This is all brought about by the incredibly bass-ackwards method of generating events, where the directive comes from the top-down without any regards for validity, instead of being launched from a sim deciding to do so after satisfying the conditions.
3. Aging is off. The game will not fire the baby-spawner while aging is off because otherwise the babies cannot advance.

Here's the answer to your question:

There are various tutorials for creating core mods.  Read them to understand the process.  Then, use that process to do the following:

Extract and disassemble the DLLs in the vanilla game.  Extract and disassemble the DLLs in the AwesomeMod.  Optionally decompile both sets to Mono or C#.  Diff.  Examine the differences and try to understand what they do.

Honestly, if you want to understand, this is your best option.  It's a lot of work, but well worth it if you want to become a "semi professional modder".

Gah! I started a new default Riverview and, like clockwork, at 1 AM I see moves, moves, and more moves. I've only recently started playing with storymode reporting enabled, and I now understand what everyone's been complaining about. I see reports for anywhere from 5 to a dozen famblies moving out of their houses EVERY SINGLE NIGHT, and it causes lag, especially when I'm playing the family with the large haunted house (Jones, I believe). It's just plain weird.

Okay weird question, but is anyone getting the 1am moves in Sunset Valley? Just curious because I seem not to be getting it when I play there. *shrug*

Yes, I am getting moves in Sunset Valley, but it seems to be settling to a smaller subset each night. Last night was only 5-7 moves, as opposed to 20-30 moves at the height of it.

Pescado does not take potshots at kittens.

Plus they make soothing noises to lure us into a false sense of security and eat our faces off if we die without refilling the cat food bowl - what's not to like?

Madame Mim, your statement is more accurate than you realize. My cat tried to kill me when she was a kitten. She'd lie on my neck, squashing my windpipe, and then cover my mouth and nostrils with her paws. I kid you not. I had to start sleeping under the covers, to avoid suffocation by cat. She eventually grew out of it, obviously, since I'm still alive.

It's not uncommon - she was looking for a warm place - why do you think they always recommend keeping cats out of new babies rooms?

I'm getting a lot less moving around and messages about antagonizing and a lot more useful stuff happening at 1 AM. Townies seem to be breeding and going to work. I haven't seen couples pair off in the wild yet, but I assume that's going to happen soon.

Agreed -- I am seeing about one storymode action per night in Sunset Valley now, usually friending or antagonising. Lagburst is about 10 seconds.

Oh, and if Pescado doesn't shoot kittens then clearly he is not as evil as he's cracked up to be! True evil hates kittens, for kittens are the most powerful manifestation of adorable in the multiverse.

Nonsense. Even bad guys like cats. Just look at Doctor Evil, or the Capital One Emperor.

Aww, what did Inge do to you, to deserve such a punishnment?  :D

More seriously; for code/xml dig beginners, definitely Inge&Peter's - Sims3Tools (http://www.simlogical.com/Sims3ToolsForum/index.php) - at Simlogical and wes_h's Custom Sims 3. (http://www.customsims3.com/forum1/YaBB.pl)

Don't forget Doctor Claw from Inspector Gadget, you see more of the cat than you ever see of Dr Claw.

Face it people, cats are our Evil Overlords and dogs are stupid.

So, anyway, even though nobody probably cares anymore now that they can have IndieStone with AwesomeMod, the Awesome Story Driver is still in development and almost operational. Anyone who wants to participate in the process should report to #grah.

Hell yeah.

I care. I like your ideas for story progression. Indie works for now, but there are many things about it I don't like.

While reading that, I just got the mental image of you standing, with your head down, hands clasped behind your back while your foot kicks at the dirt. :D

@fatkitty -- Have you seen Pescado's shark tank?

Same here. I'd much prefer an Awesome version of story progression that, you know, actually makes sense.

Where can I watch for the Awesome Story Mode? Will it be here in the Awesomemod section, the Pudding Factory, or elsewhere? Don't wanna miss it.  :D

It's in development, which tends to occur mostly in #grah, although I got sidetracked by a new discovery which allows AwesomeMod to withdraw from two previous XMLs it was using: AwesomeMod will no longer touch the traits or socializing XMLs, and thus will no longer conflict with anything that modifies them.

I'm sure there are many who will prefer AwesomeMod story progression to Indie, myself included.  I've been experiencing lots of strange things, none of which I like.  Can't wait to see what you come up with!

If awesomemod doesn't touch the socializing XML's anymore, does that mean we will need a separate XML mod for teens to get the romantic interactions? Will we still be able to give our sims more than 5 traits if it doesn't touch the traits XML?

Yes, and yes. Nothing changes, but the files involved are no longer conflicting as AwesomeMod no longer uses them.

Ok I get it, thank you for the clarification. :)

I just use Indiemod cause there's no alternative right now. I'm quite sure when awesomemod includes storymod, many will follow me in switching to that instead.

That's awesome news Pes (pun intended).  Very worth the time-to-sidetrack.

Your mods have worked for me in the past. I am sure that once the new awesome storymode is ready I'll be going back to just awesome. Besides I'm terribly lazy and I really only want to come here to update my game. I think most of us are just biding our time with Indiestone till yours comes out.

I've already stopped using the Indie Stone Mod. Some of the features are really nice, but the constant cloning of sims from the Library is just too obnoxious. I shouldn't have to delete the famblies that I've taken the time to create just so some retarded story progression feature can decide that it needs at least five copies of each fambly. Nope, I'm holding out for the Awesome version. Fuck Indie Stone.

That sim-bin cloning would drive me nuts.  I'm getting enough variety from the new homeless sims and npcs in my awesomemod neighborhood, so I don't see why I would want to recycle old faces.  I kind of LIKE fixing bad faces. 

I thought that feature was "turnoffable" in the options?

Yes, you can turn that feature off.  I did so immediately because I didn't really see any point to it.

I don't want to completely disable immigration, but only the Library cloning. I don't think there's an option for that. If you're thinking of the option to create breeding fodder from sims in the Export bin, that's something completely different, and it has nothing to do with the Library cloning.

So it keeps moving in duplicate copies of the families in your Library? That's weird. I've been playing with Indie for a while now and not experienced that... anyone else had this problem?

In my game, the doppelgangers always appear as homeless sims. If you use the Awesomemod, and have debugging commands and testing cheats enabled, you can type "listhomeless" in the cheat window (Ctrl-Shift-C). If ISM is creating clones in your game, you'll probably see them there. I only discovered them when my game was lagging horribly, and I decided to see if there were any homeless sims. As it turned out, there were multiples of every family in my Library. Once I deleted them using the destroyalltownies command, the lagging stopped.

I had tons of them--destroyalltownies killed over four hundred homeless sims.  I've found a solution that works for me. I've turned off immigration.  Now I only have four homeless families.  So far I haven't had any problems with the neighborhood stagnating. I occasionally befriend a homeless sim so that I can ask him or her to move in--and bring the family--and then move that entire family into a home of their own.  The game seems to keep a steady supply of these families, replacing them as needed so that there are always at least three homeless families. If that supply of new sims isn't enough, I suppose I can turn immigration on temporarily, let several families move in, turn immigration back off, and destroy the homeless. 

The bonus is that I've found that I enjoy playing the neighborhood more now that I can pretty much recognize every sim that lives there.  I'm pretty much playing the entire neighborhood, and with immigration on, families moved in so fast that there were just too many sims, and I couldn't remember who was who--and didn't care. Now that there are fewer of them, they are more memorable, and I like them--or dislike them in some cases--much more.

Wow, thank you for this info. I've heard about people talking about the homeless but I didn't realize it could cause lag. I put IS in shortly before it became compatible with AM and my lag has been increasing but I thought it was perhaps ghosts or something. I had over 100 homeless. I used destroyalltownies. Hopefully, it will help my lag.

Okay, we're about ready for field trials, so anyone who wants to be a victim should start appearing.

Me, me! I'll be a victim! Where do I sign my life over?

I am unawesome and have no idea where #grah is so I will wait until Awesome Storymode is ready for the peasants. I am looking forward to it though!!

Same here. I know where the server is, and I can even log in with a proper IRC client, but all I see are #ellatorture and #kikistan. I'm clearly doing something wrong.

Did you try joining it anyway? It might be "hidden", as in, doesn't show up in a list of channels.

Yeah - I get a "channel doesn't exist" message using /join #grah

Maybe the holy #grah can only be found by people who are worthy. I'm too frightened to even search for it, because I picture JMP as the emperor of evil and his moderators as his henchmen. I don't want to draw too much attention to myself (if it's not too late already) so I'll just be standing here behind the tall guy.

/me eyes simwit and cackles evilly

(ok, I fail at being seriously scary :P)
BTW I love the "holy #grah" definition. :D

    I made an appearance and asked about it, but was not granted an awesome story mode.  Mighty Pescadissimo seemed preoccupied with other matters.  Maybe we just await further instructions.  Maybe some other kind of appearance is required? 

Goes back to hoeing turnips and waits for the Black Death to kill off the aristocracy...

Please look in this thread - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15531.0.html (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15531.0.html).

If we mark a family as sacred, will they be safe from SP with the new Awesome Story Mode? I'd like to play more than 1 family, but I don't want my "one" family doing anything without my input. Except going to work/school.

Yes. Sacred is still Sacred. But don't turn that option on yet unless you're prepared to write off your neighborhood. It is not properly tested and several fatal bugs have just been found and fixed. Now writing a cleanup utility.

ok I'll wait. Thanks!  :)

Thanks, Pescado!  Question:  I assume this utility will clean up neighborhoods already affected by Supreme Commander, am I correct?  I just started a new neighborhood when we began testing Awesome Story Mode and really like the main family.  Hoping I get to keep them.

By the way, I love the way the Awesome Story Mode is working so far!  Have disabled Indie Stone.

Me too... and it's really one of my most favorite things to do... and then w/the tweak to genetics via AM... the new and improved sim faces can then have offspring that don't look like weird mutant children from some Wes Craven movie...   ;)

Also not using IS at all cause I ended up hating having spawned kids coming out of my ears !   :P

I actually got a really gorgeous sim out of two mutants. It was a pleasant surprise, because this happens sometimes in RL, as well.