More Awesome Than You!

"SimGuruLyndsay answers community questions about story progression and describes it's inner workings."

(Translation, we attempt to shut you sheep up by having someone explaining what is about without going over its OBVIOUS FAILINGS and end up with the usual "take into account player feedback" line so they looks as they care)

http://www.thesims3.com/myBlog.html?persona=SimGuruLyndsay

Its good for a laugh.

The remarks about overpopulation are interesting.  I wonder what the population limit is...?  If I know EA, then my guess is that it's a stupidly low value to enable the game to run on lower-spec computers... without, of course, any possible adjustment for higher-spec computers.

*sighs*  I really hope they aren't that clueless.  I'm no coder or computer guru, but even I can see that what happens in the vanilla game is totally fuxxored.  Hm... pretty telling that they didn't even mention the presto babies, now that I think about it.

I guess it really is just blatant lies in the form of marketing spin.  Terrible.  If Dragon Age, ME2, and SW:TOR weren't being made by BioWare/EA, I'd boycott the EA fuckers.

If overpopulation is the reason for the random moving outs, then why couldn't they get rid of the pathenogenesis and the random moving outs?

Overpopulation is a bullshit answer. If that were the case, why were so many random move-outs immediately followed by random move-ins? 

I like the way they try to dress annoyances and bugs up as features.


Translation: We couldn't be arsed making it make sense, so now it's 'to stir things up'. We totally meant to do that!

I do believe overpopulation is the key, I only had random evacuations after I started my large breeding experiment, but I don't think there's an off switch. So it kicks sims out, but then the game decides that the population is getting a little low, so it brings more in, but it keeps kicking sims out as well. On and on and on.

Even with Awesomemod, I get random move outs.  I think I'm losing MATY households that I moved in.  If I put them there, I want them to stay there.  I lost Jordi, Fairlight and Ellatrue yesterday.  I really didn't want to have to make everyone sacred.  Perhaps it's the only way to keep them safe.

No, I didn't touch that, but I will re-check my aweconf settings.  That's what I mean - it shouldn't happen.  Nevertheless, I got a bunch of "household moveout" notices in the last 1am shuffle.

Personally, I like the fact that they use the word "sometimes" to mean "almost all the time". When I was just using a vanilla game, there usually did not appear to be any rhyme or reason to the way my sims moved around, or who they moved in with.

Did you then look for them in the 'hood? The notices report on attempted story action. Ones that are prevented by your config won't actually carry out.

I'm going to check "edit neighbourhood" to see if they still exist.  I'm hoping they just relocated.  


Ah, well that's good to know.  Chances are they are still kicking around then.  Problem is that lately I don't get enough game time to really test things properly over several sim days, and I often find I don't know what's going on between sporadic game sessions.

Obviously story progression isn't working out so well after players get a few generations in. Silly EA, feedback should come before release, not after.


Overpopulation questions:
Who knows the population limits, where I can find the setting and is it hardware specific or the same for everyone? If necessary, and I expect it is, I'd like to make my own changes to the EA presets that always over or underestimate the abilities of my hardware, just like in Sims 2.

Is there a set range of children, adults, elders and is this number variable in relation to how many of each age group a player has created, or am I overestimating EA by even thinking that?

(I know, I know...search function. Sorry in advance for asking what's probably already answered. I searched but couldn't find.)

I cursed the day EA bought Bioware.  Bastards.

That article actually sounded very reasonable, and it does generally describe story progression quite well.  But the article is very superficial, just like story progression.  It's as if that article had been given as a design spec to some poor schmuck coder without any further thought put into it all the little gotchas that somebody with a little sense might have foreseen.

You know, when people design things by committee, you often get results like this, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what happened here.  Everybody assumes somebody else thought through the details and so nobody does. 

You're overestimating.  The geriatric community syndrome that some people ascribe to awesomemod is actually an EA problem.  EA story progression never tried to keep a smooth demographic balance.  Since you start a brand new game with most Sims as young adults, you have a bulge in the demographics that drags the game towards geriatrics, and then a mass die-off, to be replaced by a new surge of replacement game-made young adult townies, to continue the cycle.  A better way to do things would be to have story progression create new townies of different ages with the goal of having a flatter demographic curve. 

So thats the official answer...

The fact that they have left it two months to comment on a gamebreaking bug/feature makes it smell like damage limitation.
If they couldn't even find out that a crucial game setting was non-existant before launch, let alone patch the problem on launch day, then what faith are we supposed to have in these answers?

Population balance? Simply put in a neighbourhood population cap then. You're game designers.

People spend hours making sims in CAS, and then they disappear?
And thats supposed to be part of the game??

I actually had hopes of creating a thriving town. Doesn't sound safe to even go above 50 sims at the moment, and that is a sorry reflection on the way the game was designed, and for whats supposed to be a groundbreaking simulation.  >:(

I'm no fan of EA propaganda, but the "overpopulation" in the blog linked to above, is clearly defined as a variable dependent on the machine. Pescado has already declared that the game engine's register for character head counts is a 32 bit number ... or was it a 64 bit number?

I was bemused by the EAxoid's declaration that story progression doesn't evict from the town sims who are in a "relationship" with the player's sims. All the same, I am glad I am a satisfied customer of Awesomeware.

That's what I figured was going on. It seems obvious to me that the game should generate new sims from a variety of age groups, removing some townies and moving in new families of different ages as necessary to keep the town demographics in a normal range and allow for plenty of social interactions, like a good number of townie kids for the tots to chum with or various ages of singles for relationships. I could even see logic in allowing players to plan games with neighbourhoods of mostly young couples or geriatric retirement towns if they so desired. The way it's working now, including booting out player-created sims, feels like a major oversight that should have been accounted for early on in story progression development. At worst, pre-release testing should have caught it.

I have no doubt that there are population limits, my doubt is only that the reason Sims get deleted (emigrated) is in an effort to balance that population.  As I said, in the base game, I'd get move out AND move in reports in the same newspaper - if population was the reason for the move OUT, then there should certainly not be a simultaneous move IN.  And I was getting move outs within a few days of starting a new game, long before any population concerns could be kicking in.  

 ^ Interesting. Is there a difference in the age or gender of the sims moved out and in or is the game replacing same with same which, of course, is totally pointless and means design flaw. I haven't payed attention enough in game to notice.

I honestly couldn't say at this point - I haven't played an unmodded game since a few days after AwesomeMod was released.

It seemed to me like it was Last in - First Out.  The last created townie gets bussed out.  But maybe that's just an artifact based on newly created townies (including new CAS townies) having few or no relationships.

I know it pissed me off.  Mortimer Goth's family line was dying out, and I didn't want to play him (I had my own fambly to play), so I created a new wife for him in CAS and moved her into his house.  She disappeared from the neighborhood before morning.  Same thing with another family.  It wasn't good enough to just make new roommates and move them in and wait for nature to take its course. -- you had to play with them long enough to get them married.

This was all before awesomemod.

My biggest problem came when I decided to populate the town with sims of my own making to try to get them together.  I popped in John Shepard the Astronaut (yeah, I know, but he's cute) and then one of my single gals across the street.

So I play her for awhile, then switch to him.  He's got two babies with no mothers just lying on the floor.  Then I switch back to her, and she's got three strangers living with her in her 1 BR 1 Bath house.  Yay.

Needless to say the game got no more playtime from me until I discovered this site.

Story progression is a good idea on paper but what was implemented was just chaos.

In TS2 the townies population was keep roughly the same, if a townie dies another replaced him as TS3 simply tries too hard in doing things it should not.

Story Progression should just check to maintain demographics and not give a damn about window dressing like jobs and relationships, those things are usual invisible to the player so the game can do some ass pulls and get away with it.

I understand some things are more complicated, as what happens when a residential lot becomes empty? does a Sim family moves in or it just stays that way but that is a issue they created, in TS2 there was a stable townie population that lived outside the neighborhood and so it was impossible for it to accidentally die but TS3 puts too much emphasis on the neighborhood Sim population and so it creates the "isolated community" syndrome and all the problems it carries.

64-bit. Meaning the theoretical upper limit for sim-population is 18 quadrillion, and therefore, the sun will explode before you ever reach it. :P

I'm not sure what's confusing about it. It's not TRUE, though. The game WILL do so.

The problem is that their definition of "the player's sims" doesn't match ours.  Their definition is "the currently selected family".  We mean "every sim we've added to the neighbourhood plus every premade family we've decided we want to play".

If the currently played family doesn't have a relationship with every other household that we're interested in, then we're liable to lose sims we want to keep.  This becomes an issue whenever we add a new family to the neighbourhood (because they haven't had the opportunity to meet someone from every wanted household yet), and also when we want to simulate a normal town, where family A knows families B & C, but family B doesn't know family C - whenever we play family B we're at risk of losing family C and vice versa.

Also, I wonder what their definition of relationship is?  "Have met" doesn't seem to be enough as pre-AM I had sims disappear from the relationship panel when the family was moved out of town.  Does this mean they have to be friends or that the relationship level must reach some magic number?  What about enemies we want to keep in the game, will they be lost because they have a negative relationship (and therefore the relationship level is below that magic number)?

I think we should all just be grateful that in their infinite wisdom they didn't decide to emigrate the active family's sims.

Their definition of "doesn't" doesn't match ours, either.

Heh. That's a load of liecake, by the way. I had the household containing one of my sim's spawn and spawn's-mother leave the hood for good. (This was before AwesomeMod closed the borders, and also before I started switching households.) His other children are 6s, 12s, even 18s, and this much earlier spawn is a perpetual 0 in his family tree.

It wasn't a formal relationship with the mother, just 'love interest', but I'd think parent-child would be a sufficient 'relationship' to anchor the kid, at least.

...actually, maybe I should check. Do homeless sims age? The fact that the kid still appears in the family tree is a little odd.

Thanks for the first belly laugh of the day.  :D

Sims that are vaporized from the hood entirely don't age, and exist merely as a piece of dangling corrupt data because the EAxis deleter doesn't properly clean up after itself, something AwesomeMod fixes.

Also, thumbnails frequently go unupdated for length periods of time.

I chased it up, because I was curious, and the mother is still in the world. The toddlers aren't in her household. Probably vaporised. It's no big deal, I've been planning to torch it and start over for a while now.

Ugh!  The original code in TS2 and TS3 is such utter trash, it's infuriating.  F-minus.


Although there's a multi-quadrillion hard cap on the population, I doubt that's the "population limit" mentioned in the article.  It must be a soft cap variable defined somewhere, and players must be hitting it, because the (allegedly) "population control" move-out code is being readily invoked, as evidenced by the many people complaining about random move-outs.  Unless it's just an aspirational limit, not necessarily defined anywhere, that the original code is intended to achieve.

So I guess my question is: with "No One Gets Out Alive" enabled in Awesomemod, is any consideration given to a "population limit" when new Sims are added to the hood?  What about in Awesome+Indie?

this is the most complete bullshit i ever read. the reason i searched for a mod, was because for the third time, a off-house family (he lived with his sister, and had a family with a sim in another house) had "moved out to a better place". after putting hours and hours in that family, i just had to google for a mod. (found 'the awesome mod', and, now i can dictate my gameplay to taste :P).

suddenly realize why so many of my friends have grudges against EA. ;P

..and about balancing. couldn't it also be some kind of check of the balance of the gene pool of the city? like, some calculation is done on the current population and how it would turn out in the future, and if it would lead to a over-population of a certain "family of genes" they get evicted. and then some other family moves in, with "fresh" genes.

Overpopulation is an issue. I did an experiment starting a new hood, then destroying all humans, made a wolfrun character and run the game on speed 3 shortest life span with Indie Stone running silly fast event updates.

At first the game ran very very smoothly with no one in the hood. It seemed to run well for a while but Indie was working overtime moving in lots and lots of sims.

At some point my game started to run like ass. I tried lowering the resolution and turning down graphical settings and it did not help.

It seems that just like the number of sims on a lot, the number of sims in a town has a threshold beyond which your game will lag and be horridly slow. That threshold, like the sims on a lot threshold, probably varies based on system specs but it definitely does exist for everyone. Move enough sims into your neighborhood and your game is guaranteed to run like ass.

Indie does do random deaths but its very, very rare. I had one sim reported murdered for feeding ducks in gang territory. They feathered him.  :o

You can set Indie to Emigrate people out of the neighborhood but by default it is turned off.

I am not sure what a good solution is? Move outs? More random deaths? Having less houses in town so not as many sims can move in?


I have noticed that deleted sims still retain file data even with awesomemod. I evicted some doppelgangers then deleted them from the family clipboard supposedly forever every indiciation of them is gone. They are even off family trees. Yet one I poked around in the neighborhood workshop the save still has references to them.

What is the preferred method for uttlerly obliterating a sim so that it leaves nary a trace in the save file?

It's funny you should mention that, because I think many people have now come to the conclusion that error 13 is caused by EA's catass code cloning and homeless functions.  It seems the game will continually do both until your save file is too big for itself to handle.  (As evidenced by this thread on the ISM forum:  http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=357023.  I'm sure there are similar threads here.)

This is completely unacceptable in a retail version.

EDIT:  I think regularly scheduled "nukimpostors" and "destroyalltownies" sweeps would help, though they do grind your game to a halt and that would freak out many people who are not familiar with these things.

EDIT AGAIN BECAUSE MY MEMORY IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE:  Also, right after destroying townies, my Rock Star had an autograph session, and only three people showed up.  His performances indicator was at the very highest level and it was held at 4pm on a Saturday.

Quoted so the question won't get lost.  I'd like to know as well.

So the safest way to play is to be with storymode off? Note that I don't have awesomemod nor Indie.

I've been muddling through a lag issue with my town for the last week or so.  What I eventually found was there are some objects that like to hang around in the background and use up CPU time, even though they are essentially junk.

In my game, I found that I had 869 CarLimo objects running in the background.  After mass deleting them, my town of 123 sims significantly improved in speed, almost back to fresh town speed.  After a while the CarLimo objects start piling back up, but now I have a way of cleaning them out.


While I working through a lag issue with my game, as a test, I removed every sim from my town and bulldozed every lot.

The resulting save file was still 44MB in size.  The largest part of the file was the SNAP elements...  The face pictures and family photos for each sim that ever existed in my town.  These are retained for the genealogy, even though there was no one in town to access that data.

Good Day. :)

How did you locate and remove these? I'm starting to get a lot of lag in my game. My population is probably higher than yours...I'd suspect we're talking about 250 and dropping as I've disabled immigration and spawning for now.

You can use my AwesomeMod Variant to locate and squash the cars.  The thread is in the "Pudding Factory" forum.  It's one of the main reasons I posted the variant mod, in case others want to attempt a cleanse.

Use the "objectstats" console command to list off the various objects and their counts.  If your lag is caused by the CarLimo, as mine was, it will be listed there.

For comparison, start a fresh town and perform an "objectstats" on it.  The counts you receive from that town should give you a concept of how many global objects there should be in the world.

Then use the "cleanobject CarLimo" command to remove all the limos from the system.  Do it at night, in case one of them is actually being legitimately used.

After that, you can return to the regular AwesomeMod if you wish.  You need only use my mod to clean out the junk.

Remember to backup prior to cleaning though.  If you cleanobject on the wrong thing, you can seriously screw over your town.

Good Day. :)