More Awesome Than You!

Some interesting news from Lemmy & Binky regarding Indy Stone and the future of the mod.  Apparently they are handing in the towel, and offering up the mod for someone else to take over.  This was an excerpt from the mod's listing (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=356632) over at MTS:


While I only used the story portion of the mod for a short time along with AM's core, I know they had a good following.  Certainly makes AwesomeMod's Story Mode version stand out a bit more, now that it is available.  It will be very interesting to see if someone else in the community has the cohones and skill to take up where they left off.

That's disappointing to hear. I liked lots of the features of Indie Stone and being able to use it with Awesome Mod was almost perfect.   :'(

And a very bad news for those who don't intend to use Awesomemod.

Well, to be fair, Lemmy and Binky are drawing fire on two fronts here. On the one hand, EA's latest patch won't install for them (which makes any further mod development pointless and obsolete if they're still running from 1.2.7) and on the other, you have a lot of ungrateful arseholes lining up to bitch and moan about the lack of updates.

Do they have the Mac digital download for which there isn't a patch available yet or can they just not figure out how to get the patch to work? I really hope it's the former and that people who can code for a fairly complex mod would actually be able to problem solve and figure out a way to patch.

Psst...Pescado...anything in Indy you'd like to take for awesome? :o

On a more serious note, it's a shame that they're stopping development on it, because it was a godsend, especially in the early period. No more OAP neighbourhoods. We still have a ray of light to hold onto though, in that AwesomeMod is really beginning to be put to good use with it's Storymode overrides.

Will be interesting to see the direction it will take, should a new team of modders take up the task. If not, RIP Indy.

They don't really elaborate except to say that even on a fresh install, the patch won't work (so presumably they must be working with the PC version), but in the thread linked by the OP, Lemmy does point out that they've not had the time to really investigate it further. Another posting further down gives another clue to their abandonment of the mod - namely they've got a big project going on which needs their full attention and they can't spare any more time updating ISM, hence the offer to hand it over to someone who can.

That part sounded sincere!

Have they put their source up for download?  I'd like to get in on this.  I've been playing ISM+AM for a week now, and I have a lot of good ideas about tweaks I would like to make to it. 

People can be demanding and ungrateful for sure, but when they leave a project unfinished for a significant length of time, especially when it becomes unusable due to a patch, then people are going to grumble. I think a lot of us are kind of spoiled too with Pescado's constant toiling away and frequent updates.

As for a continuation, you know, I like aspects of both ISM and ASM and in other areas I feel like they go to two different extremes (ie too much obvious arbitrary and random events that don't always make sense vs too much of a demand for realism for events I'm never going to see and don't care about; too much spawning and updates vs not enough etc).

We've got a top down and bottom up approach, but what about a middle path or a hybrid?

Accept no Kewian-based substitutes!

Well, you could actually show up and make suggestions, but I'm not really certain how you can have a "middle" path. Either you take character motivations for actions seriously, or you don't. One results in "demand for realism", as you put it. Other just spews forth totally random shit that happens without any apparent explanation. You really can't have it both ways: Either something happens for a reason, meaning it has to have underlying realistic motivation, or shit just happens for absolutely no reason, because it said so. There's no middle ground to this.

Am I the only one who read this and thought "Why WOULD anyone be paying you?" Also, I'm not really sure what I think about two people who started something and couldn't follow through with it for more than a month or so - a quick glance at TS2 modding would have clued them into what a time sink it is.

I don't think it was about the money, I think they wanted more gratitude.  But come on, you really like something, a patch comes out and breaks it.  You want it fixed.  You don't think back to the good ole days when it did work. People's memories aren't that long.

I don't know.  The complainers remind me of the people that show up on your doorsteps without costumes on Halloween and, as you're reaching for more candy to give them, bang the screen doors and go, "Hurry up, I ain't got all day!"  Yes, people can be that way, but I can't blame L&B for being pissed off and exhausted about it.

Yes but the point I tried to make to you many times is I don't play the whole neighborhood and thus things like how Joe Schmoe gets a promotion doesn't matter to me. I don't know if he actually went to the library and read up on skill books when I wasn't looking or the game just upped his skill level or it promoted him without the skill level. Furthermore, I don't care. Same with cribs. I don't give a shit if some house I will never look at has a crib. Who cares? It just creates more tedious work for me because then I have to go 'Oh damn, I wonder if they aren't breeding because I don't have enough cribs in town. Better go look in all the houses *heavy sigh*'.

I also don't really care if sims who are paired off are a good match for each other or not. You know what? I know plenty of bad matches in real life and some have mind boggling stayed together for a very long time.

I feel like some degree of random stuff that happens that I don't see is okay. Random shit happens in life. I just want the neighborhood to be alive and running itself without a lot of input from me.

The thing is though that Indie Stone ruins the suspension of disbelief because the degree of promotions is excessive and it has sims do obvious nonsensical things like have Goths move from their 300k home to a 100k one. I may not play those houses, but those are the kind of things that hit you in the face and you can't help but notice.

A facade is perfectly fine with me as long as it looks reasonable on the outside to the observer. I don't ever intend to go inside. It's like the rabbit holes. Who the hell knows what's in there. Who the hell cares? In reality we all know it's nothing at all, but the outside of the building and sound effects give the illusion there is something inside. It ultimately doesn't matter that there is not. The game is just about making you believe what's going on and keeping your suspension of disbelief up. I don't care at all about the numbers or what goes on behind the scenes as long as gives the appearance of normal neighborhood activity and I don't have to go chasing after all the houses and organizing the whole town. This isn't Sim City and I don't want to play Sim City.

Suspension of disbelief.  Way to put it.  I actually think those things can be addressed though through some fine-tuning and user feedback, like what you posted.  What they have now is a VERY good first step.  As I posted once before, I would prefer a hybrid approach.  But, yeah, I don't care how they get their promotions or their new homes when I'm not looking as long as it doesn't slap me in the face with its unbelievability.  I try to come to the game with a certain level of suspension-of-disbelief as it is.  I would just like to be met part-way.  ISM should operate on the basis of making things that COULD happen DO happen, but just without the necessity of playing out all the behind-the-scenes details.

Yeah, that's how I feel. I don't necessarily need events to really happen but I want them to seem reasonable to me as an outside observer and I also want those events to happen on their own and the neighborhood to take care of itself without any input from me other than indirectly when my sims interact with other sims.

Here's the thing, I'm not opposed to those behind the scenes events really happening or the math adding up etc. Again, I don't see it so it doesn't matter to me how it happens just that it happens.

All I know is with ISM I had a population explosion and it was really out of control and my game started to slow down and get really laggy after a while with so many sims in town. Sims were moving to town like crazy and breeding like rabbits.

ASM is the other end of the spectrum for me. It hasn't generated many sims (admittedly I started a new game and nuked everyone and started from an empty hood) and quite frankly I have not has a single birth in this neighborhood that I didn't initiate.

I feel like I have really had to do a lot of nudging and switching households and forcing things to happen and creating new sims etc to really get this neighborhood going and I'm still doing it and it's still not what I would consider stabilized and self sufficient.

I agree with Motoki and the Doc on this.
Or, to put it otherwise : I don't need rational sims or event.
The Indie Stone mod would just need a litle more features, like the possibility for some sims to have children without marrying - or illegitimate children, elder sims retiring from work or rich sims staying unemployed if they don't have a work LTW or the workaholic trait.
In short, events should respect the traits of the sims.

When you play only one family, you don't need more - events are a background. Bu I know that I will be happy to find AwesomeStory when I'll want to play six families at a time.

As long as I can tweak AwesomeStory to my specifications the way I can currently tweak EA story, I won't particularly care what method is used. That ought to be fairly easy for Pescado to add in, right? Then oddballs like Motoki and I can turn off the crib thing and still use the better logic.

I also agree with Motoki.  I only play one family, unless you consider nudging along a couple other top breeding stock couples to time birthings for future romance options, and I personally love ISM's randomness.  It's amusing and reminds me of how real life can be so strange sometimes.  But doesn't it just figure that Victoria Andrews finally kicked that deadbeat Beau out after giving her six children in a 1 BR 1 Bath house?  Hehe.

The problems I had with "ancestral" families moving around I solved by simply going into the options and setting it so that they can't move in or out anywhere.  Then if I got the message that they had married, I'd decide which generation needed to move out of the ancestral home if there was no room.

The problem with immigration I solved by simply turning it off completely.  I play on epic lifespan, so, so far, this has not affected my town's population.  There are plenty of births happening all the time, however, and I like that.

The problem with homeless townies is still an issue, but that is an EA issue.  When my game starts to take longer and longer to save, I just destroyalltownies and it goes back to normal.  My one family doesn't really run into these legions of homeless clones, and if so, how would they know one from another?  It's a nonissue to cull them, just a minor annoyance at at this point.

It is a sad day for me, and I hope that ISM just keeps working like it has been hand in hand with Awesome.  I like ISM over what Mr. Pescado is working on for story progression, no offense to him, just because I don't want to futz with all these rules and regulations.  I micromanage my own life, I don't want to do that for my sims.  I just want to see them live out their random and sometimes weird life stories.

Yeah, see, that's the thing. Without a system of motivation that WORKS, there are NO BRAKES ON THE SYSTEM. Without a clear sense of WHY things happen, the computer can do nothing except spew out random crap utterly devoid of context or bounding. Which is why you GET utterly nonsensical behavior. Without something DRIVING the system under the hood, without a system of RULES of WHY THINGS CAN HAPPEN, what you have is a chess game where the pieces are moved at random by a toddler with no understanding of how the game is supposed to play.

After installing AwesomeStory, I managed to have one spontaneous pregnancy.  Unfortunately it occurred to my matriarch the one time I switched lots so I could check on one of her adult children. There was much raving, ranting and gnashing of teeth on my part as it had not occurred to me to make any family sacred. At least the baby's father was the matriarch's husband.  ::)

Need to put cribs in all the houses keep up the gene pool?  *Sigh*

Maybe my life has been unusually picturesque, but honestly, it does feel like whatever supreme being is placing those pieces is indeed a toddler.  I would have never guessed that the love of my life would be nineteen years younger than myself, just as an example.  :)

Well I think it depends on what you are talking about. Some things need rules to operate on to make sense. Like sim families generally shouldn't be moving to a cheaper home unless there is some good reason. That is a very blatant and noticeable thing.

But other things like romance to me is fine being random. I don't think it matters if they are compatible or not. In fact, it's kind of realistic if some couples weren't so compatible.

And how do I know that some townie sim who just got a promotion wasn't sucking up to the boss and then asked for a promotion while at work away in a rabbit hole? I don't. It doesn't matter as long as the amount of promotions in town is tweaked to not seem excessive.

I don't know, maybe I just don't have a very logic and mathmetical oriented mind and maybe I just feel like the end justifies the means as long as the town seems alive and runs itself okay.


Haha I was totally thinking that too, that sometimes life does seem like some toddler is just moving pieces around randomly.

Actually, with immigration set to "off" for the entire time, and using just the sims that were already in Sunset Valley, the population in my game is stable and reasonable. There are a few families that breed like rabbits, but others that have only one or two children, and quite a few babies grow up and never marry or reproduce themselves, so it's evened out pretty nicely. I tried the same thing with immigration "on" though, and yeah, it was a mess. 

To me, "somewhere in the middle" between Indie and Awesome would mean something like this:  Indie is just pure chaos.  Awesome is pure logic. I think realism falls somewhere in between. For instance,  Indie regularly pairs YAs up with elderly mates for no good reason. I'd imagine that the finished ASM would never allow this to happen. Personally, I think it should happen once in a very great while--if the YA in question has a "gold digger" LTW and the elderly mate is rich, it would make perfect sense. A "family-oriented" sim who marries a "dislikes children" sim should stand a really good chance of winding up divorced after one or two children. Two "dislikes children" sims who marry one another should have an extremely small chance of ever having a child at all.

I think that one of the things that Indie did "right" though was to make it so configurable, and pretty easy (if annoying) to set up to suit almost anyone's taste. No two people are likely to agree on how much romance is too much or how much is not enough, for instance, and Indie lets the player decide between a range of progression speed settings, or turning things like romance off altogether. 

I think their point was more that people don't have a right to ISM updates. Which I agree with. It's completely their prerogative to update or stop updating.

Also, from reading the thread, it sounds like they got a real life opportunity they weren't expecting, which is why they couldn't devote time to trying to make the patch work.

And I'm looking forward to trying AwesomeMod storymode out, though. I'd probably never take the plunge otherwise, so in that sense I'm glad.  :P

I assume there's just no way the story mode engine could tell what you'll notice. I know it would annoy me if the story mode for example randomly promoted a neighbour in the sports career if I've just seen him doing nothing but scratching his butt all the time... Cheating in gaming engines is okay but it has to be done in a way the player doesn't notice it. And EA being EA did crap to cover up his cheating. I agree with Pescado that there's got be sense in it, amazingly enough "early" messages from the devs show that they probably actually had a bottom-up approach in mind very similar to Pescado's. I've got no problem in cheating from time to time by adding randomness to "microscopic" actions, there's randomness in real humans' actions too, but I find the idea of giving control to a top-down random event generator repulsive, no matter if somebody tries to beat some sense into the events afterwards or not.

I agree partially. I think there should be no check if Sims are compatible but instead only a check if they're non-compatible, like a good Sim wouldn't get off with a bad Sim for example. But I wouldn't have a problem if one Sim of a couple loves the outdoors and the other hates it, I've met enough couples consisting of a party boy/girl (mostly girls actually...) and a couch potato. Some of them split up, some of them didn't.

On second thought I'd actually prefer if there were no checks at all and incompatible couples would just break up; I never liked how most playable Sims in Sims2 were pretty much untouched before marriage (who's got the endurance to do it otherwise?). Would add a little spice if Sims needed to go through a couple of relationships bevore finding the right breeding mate. They could even grow more desperate accepting formerly unthinkable partners... ;)

ISM did have something like this, I believe. Family-oriented Sims have more children, too. And people are more likely to get jobs which fit with their traits.

As for considering traits in people getting together -- I don't think that's necessary. I know a lot of 'non-trait-compatible' couples IRL who work together just fine. Obviously 'commitment issues' should greatly reduce the chance of people getting married. But apart from that, why shouldn't a good Sim and an evil Sim get together? It's combinations like that which make the game fun. What I really dislike is the incompatibility of ages. The way my game's working out, almost the entire neighbourhood is related in some way, and I find it intensely creepy when a young adult fresh out of teenager-hood marries his elderly second cousin.  :-\

Well, there's no rule preventing that, so I don't see what's so intrinsically wrong with it. On the other hand, I'd watch your back. He probably has the Gold Digger LTW and intends to see you buried in the back yard.

Yeah, see, "unless there is some good reason". Pretty soon there is a pile of reasons and exceptions that makes the code to FAKE the reason longer and slower than ACTUALLY HAVING THE REASON. Witness the original EAxis moving-around code. This is the original code, with no sanity brakes. Then witness the resulting 0100 lag that occurred when sanity checks were then imposed on a top-down system. This is top-down driven logic at work: The game has decided it WILL DO THIS ACTION, and does not want to take NO for an answer. The bottom up action is that it decides WHO will do the action, and then decides WHAT to do afterwards.

It is random. Just not totally random. I did think of that. What it does is that it basically assigns a weighted compatibility list, then picks a result at random with the weights assigned. They won't always end up with the perfect choice, but higher-compatibility results are weighted over totally incompatible results, and some of the compatibility boosters are "circumstantial" rather than intrinsic. For instance, "sharing a workplace" boosts the weighting, even though these this factor is not intrinsic to either sim. It just functions as compatibility boost because it is an abstraction of their increased odds of coming into contact at all. I could have just made it "pick a random person", but that wasn't as much fun, really. Plus, undirected shotgun romance like that doesn't result in any "lock on". This is what EAxis does: Undirected shotgun romance events. The problem is, this doesn't really work to form actual couples because it is like putting a mob of skittish, shotgun-wielding blind folk in a stadium and then telling them that you've released a hungry tiger into their midst.

That happens already in the game.

See, here's the catch: Tuning the rules to create a "fake facade" of the real thing can quickly become a larger, more difficult, and more computationally intensive effort than simply CREATING THE REAL THING. THIS is the issue you're missing: When you try to create an entirely FAKE facade of the REAL THING, you end up having to invent wholesale so many additional rules to make sure the facade LOOKS real...that it would have cost less for it to simply *BE* real. It's like trying to create the appearance of a factory of immigrant workers by renting a building, installing some fake machinery, and then hiring a roster of minority actors to play the roles...which would have cost more than simply using an actual factory with actual immigrant workers.

Maybe to YOU. Me, I always have plan for everything.

I guess I need to be convinced of that, still.  But you're doing the coding for AM, and I haven't looked at the actual code (probably may never do so) so I can't actually argue with you too much on the point.  But the "more computationally intensive" part of your statement doesn't make any sense to me.  I have an admittedly preconceived notion that there has to be some terribly gross inefficiency somewhere that is being overlooked to create that kind of computational expense.  Chess is computationally expensive.  Millions of board positions may be analyzed by a good chess program in the seconds before it makes its move.  You can hear your CPU fan trying to cope with it.  There aren't millions of things in Sims 3 story mode to evaluate, so the problem would seem to not be the large number of evaluations that are made but rather some terrible inefficiency in the way any evaluation is made.

You know, what you say makes a lot of sense in theory, but in practice here is my experience with top down vs bottom up:

Top down:

Pros: Stuff gets done. Neighborhood will run on its own mostly.
Cons: Things sometimes appear to not make sense or have a good reason. Sometimes too much gets done.

Bottom up:

Pros: Everything that happens makes sense and has a reason. You can watch some of the events happen.
Cons: Because of all the rules not much happens. Progression is slow. Neighborhood may require some maintenance and editing.

At the end of the day, if nothing else at least with top down stuff gets done.

I need to try and figure out a way to do a wolfrun on the fastest speed with ASM and see what happens long term.

Hmm, got to think about this. I know there's a no bill mod. And there's ways to keep an individual sim/selected household with again off and static motives while the rest of the town functions as normal, right?

At the end of the day, you're dealing with ISM that has had a month or so's head start vs. an Awesomedriver that is in its first public test run. You should be happy it works at ALL!

I will consider integrating the Wolfrun thing, but part of AwesomeStory is aimed at making the game do stuff while you PLAY it. It is also somewhat more sensitive to existing bugs in the existing gamesystems.

Probably. Show up and lemme know what you find.

I am glad it runs!  ;D I'm just worried everyone is going to grow old and die and not have enough damned kids to keep the hood going.  :-\

The wolfrun thing is really more for testing the long term viability of a story mode driver than for actually playing it, so I think right now it would be useful. Later on down the line probably not as much. So far what I found is this:

No Bills is one of the Cyberops mods http://www.customsims3.com/forum1/YaBB.pl?num=1247107086

If you shift click on the mailbox you can select make needs static (for just that house)

Veezee has an xml hack to stop opportunities and phone calls (not sure if it's even needed for a sim with no job that doesn't know anyone) http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15908.0.html

The one thing I couldn't find was a way to turn off aging just for an individual sim or household. You can turn it off in the options of course, but that turns it off for the whole town so it's all or nothing.

Indie must have finagled something so that any sim with the last name "Wolfrun" wouldn't age, but everyone else would, but I'm not sure what they did. Their source is public domain now though.

Anyway I'm turred and off to bed, was hoping to set something up and let the game run ASM all night and see what happens but I'll do it another day. I'll poke into chat tomorrow.

In quantum theory, the Schrodinger's Cat thing is great: cat is alive and dead at the same time. Cool. It doesn't work that way in binary. It's either random, or it's not. You can't have it be selectively random--how on earth would the program possibly decide what needs to be random and what doesn't for any given player or situation? There's too much variability. You're just asking too much of a game, and of AwesomeMod. Really, I'm sorry, but you cannot have it both ways, and in binary, there is no "middle road 1" or "middle road 0".

I'm afraid that's just the way it is until we have true quantum computing.  :)

I don't know about that..   I think Pescado could easily convince Schrodinger's cat to cough up a hairball on command, whether it was dead or alive at the time.

What I want from a story progression mode is a large enough demographic so all my sims have age appropriate sims to associate with.  Babies and toddlers are irrelevant because they are not going to interract with my babies and toddlers.  (Although it would be nice to have a toddler birthday party with other toddlers.)  However, my children should have other children to bring home, visit or go home with.  My teens and young adults  should have enough teens to invite to a party, hang around with and date.  Adults and elders don't seem to be a problem.
There should be a minimum of 6 children, 6 teens and 6 single young adults in the game at any given time.  The the population falls below this, a new family should be moved in, consisting of 2 parents, a baby, a toddler and, perhaps, a child or a teen.  If there is a shortage of young adults, a household of young adults, a la Friends, should be moved in to share a home.
When a teen ages to a young adult, he should be moved out of the home and, if available, to a home of his own.  When young adults age to adults,  they should be matched with and married to another not incompatible adult and be given a baby, a toddler, and perhaps a child.
Without a story progression mod, I do this manually (by adding more sims to the neighborhood) -- I jusit wish we had a real character/family editor

My only hope is that someone comes up with a good story progression mod that works just as great.

I think that it's more likely that someone else will take over development of Indie Stone, since they wouldn't have to start from scratch.

We'll just have to wait and see whether anyone is willing to take on that kind of commitment.

I personally like the "bottom up" approach better.

I have a town I started from an empty town and populated.  I want to see the interactions make sense.  If I did a "wolfrun," to me that would be to see what would autonomously happen with the characters I created over several generations.  I like that ASM will simulate that fairly well, maybe as well as it can be simulated without ridiculous amounts of cpu being needed.

I think there is room for some hybridization in the sense of randomly or semi-randomly creating opportunities for romance.  Have a number of singles who aren't doing anything else at the time "decide" to go to the same community lot.  Make the AI for their starting romances have some knowledge of how to do that.

But then let them sort out who ends up with whom.  I don't think a Good and an Evil sim should end up as mates except in extraordinary cases.  Some people in this "singles bar" should strike out.  Those with the Loser trait should rarely find romance with much of anyone.

It would be nice to have an attraction system like the one that existed in TS2's Nightlife expansion, but without it just let compatibility, which isn't just similar traits, sort things out.

One thing, though:  Please let us turn off aspects of story mode as in ISM for specific households.  That's the one real advantage, to me, in ISM-- probably the only one once ASM is debugged and all.  There's a character I created who's supposed to be a housewife, but ASM keeps getting her jobs, even though the fambly doesn't need her working.

Are you sure that it's ASM doing it? In ASM, there are several reasons why a sim would get a job:
1. The sim has an LTW which involves working. If you gave your "housewife" an LTW to work, then clearly she does not really want to be a housewife.
2. Ambitious/Workaholic sims want to work.
3. If your fambly is running into "Very Low Funds" mode, they will seek work, since the alternative involves losing their home and starving to death on the streets.

There are also additional reasons which fall OUTSIDE of AwesomeStory:
1. The EA Job Engine always wants to provide sims with coworkers and bosses: If your presently active household needs to roll these, a random sim, generally one who is unemployed, will be suddenly dragooned into this job to fill this role. This is NOT a story-mode job progression and is not controlled by AwesomeMod directly. Unfortunately, existing, "unemployed" sims tend to be indiscriminately dragooned for this.

Well, consider: In order to create a "facade" of "Sims go to work and get promoted", I could just randomly hand out promotions or firings like EA/ISM does. But this has the result that everyone pretty much zooms straight to the top, and there is no apparently sensible logic of why this has happened, and furthermore, you may have just looked at it and know this COULDN'T have happened. This is computationally very cheap, but the results are utter nonsense.

Conversely, I can write a parallel engine to keep track of exactly when someone has been promoted, not promote them too often, etc. This involves the creation of an entirely new ruleset, the creation of an entire new data structure to index and track this information, and soforth, all very time-consuming to create, and incurring additional CPU cost to index, track, and compute. Alternatively, I could just SEND THEM TO WORK. Then we ALREADY HAVE a ruleset that has ALREADY been written and we are ALREADY paying for. Furthermore, the results are then intrinsically accurate: The game is playing by the same rules you are, and this can be done for no additional cost in programming and computation because the game is already doing this.

Well, terrible inefficiency is the rule of any top-down bureaucracy. A top-down story progression system, for instance, is like a system where the government decides what you work at, what level you are to be promoted to, and soforth. Guess what? This is called "Communism", and, to no great surprise, it is HORRIBLY INEFFICIENT!

Her LTW is the 20 friends one.  I knew I was creating her as a housewife and thus didn't give her a professional want.  She's not Ambitious or Workaholic.  And the fambly is doing pretty well financially.  That's due to cheats; but nevertheless, they have a good amount of money.

It is very possible that she was "drafted" by the basic TS3 engine to be a co-worker, though.

I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm getting close to wanting to try the Awesome story driver.  The whole charity system thing is what is pushing me over the edge.  However, I don't want to have to go around placing cribs and doing other things to households that I have no intention of playing just to keep the town's population balanced.

Mr. Pescado, could you please make a version for single family players, or at least have settings where we can disable this crib annoyance and anything else like it?

And I'm not really sure if I should be posting this in this thread or in the requests thread.

I think I found a way to combine the two story drivers. Here's how I did it:

Configure the AM file so that IndieStone driver is enabled and AM Story driver is disabled.
Delete your script cache.
Start/load game as normal.
Type showconfig to check that the options above are set.
Type setconfig UseIndieStoneDriver false
Type setconfig UseAwesomeStoryDriver true
Check showconfig again to make sure that you got them switched.

What happened to me then is that AM story driver started working, but Indie did not stop, and the two ran together. You can configure Indie options to your liking and run both together for your ideal game experience. For example you can turn off careers and relationships in Indie and let AM handle those, while still enabling Indie to make babies. You can use both drivers at the same time for relationships and careers, even, although it may lead to some job hopping as Indie assigns someone a job and then AM makes them quit. However the two drivers seem to run together just fine, I had no crashes or other weird game behavior.

Seconded. :P

If you encounter serious bugs while doing this, please don't report them. This sounds like a very, VERY bad idea.

I must make a vote also. I play maybe no more than 3 families, but don't play Supreme Commander. Disable the crib requirements will lessen the pressure of having to control households so we don't have to worry about them.  Right now, even after adding cribs to the lots and playing for 4 sim weeks, not one of the married couples or single sims have had a child.  My poor family kids wouldn't have a buddy if I haven't added sim families with children to the hood.

I guess the way the story mode settings are more favorable for those who play Supreme Commander, but doesn't help the gameplay of simmers who play one major family.

That is not supposed to happen and represents a fatal error that will hang or crash one or both drivers eventually.

Fourthed. I like the idea of a top down approach, but I don't want to have to get involved myself to make sure things work. I just want them to work.

Maybe instead of  the cribs, the births should be controlled by traits, so that the family oriented will have more children, the ones who hate children will have less... I don't know, maybe give all the traits a number of desired children and draw an average... It would be more realistic, too, because if a family wants kids and they don't have cribs for it, but have the money, they will buy one, no? I know sims cannot buy things on their own, but we don't have to know what they do in their homes, do we? We can just assume, that they bought that crib, if they have so many children...

I was all for the crib control, too, until I actually went to play with the ASM and after two hours of placing cribs, still haven't finished with the hood  :o Still, if someone created a cribbed hood, that would be fine, too.

See, that's the problem with the Sims since the beginning, though -- I want to just start playing and keep playing and have things work, but EAxis doesn't even provide us with playable houses for our sims to live in, so I end up spending hours building a functional house for my sims before I can actually play the freaking game (appartment life was worse, since I had to build entire custom apt buildings since the ones that shiped with the EP were made of utter fail).  Now, in TS3 it seems I have to force funtionality onto a whole hood full of houses as well as comm lots (hell, comm lots generally sucked in TS2 as well, and I was always doing edits, especally those godawful vacation hoods).

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I actually don't hate the crib/bed requirement in ASM.  I mean, I do hate having to go through every house and manually add cribs and extra beds, but I do like the realisim in the end.  I often have my playables visit thier friends' houses, and so to me anyway, it matters what that house looks like.  For my own suspension of disbelif, it helps if a houshold of 8 sims including 3 todlers and 2 infants has more than just one double bed.  Yes, in real life people can and often do raise thier babies and todlers just fine without cribs, but in TS3 the only other option is letting them pass out on the floor, and, well, they do a hell of a lot of crying before that finally happens.  So really, it's not Pescado's stupidity here, but EAxis for insisting that todlers and infants can't co-sleep with thier parents or curl up on the couch for a nap.

Also, EAxis made a game where supposedly the whole hood would progress and age happly around your controlled sims, growing and ageing and having kids.  But the houses all those pre-created sims live in are not set up for such a senario, so sims have babies and leave them lying in the front yard at night.  Very realistic.   ::)

I have been spending hours this evening working on my "template" SV save, adding cribs and beds to everyone's houses.  It's borning, takes forever, and highly frustrating.  But I don't blame Pescado for how he coded ASM; I blame the f-tards at EAxis who should have just given us that living, breathing, fuctional world they advertized.

I had the Indie mod installed for a while before I checked it was not updated and took out from my game. From start I had the suspicion that This would be the mod that would give up after a while once it was very strange placed (made from somewhere else, hosted at MTS2). I had seen enough of people that one day or another get issues and throw the towel.
To be able to carry out modding from start to end, you should also be able to maintain your own site, independent of donations or not. This is a HOBBY, guys. Hobbies are from principle, very expensive.
Second, this is the BASE game and from previous experiences we know that the base game is not playable. We all know that format, shape, engine and all about will change probably dramatically.
I took out Indie mod and didn't notice any need for it.
Some of the features that were very uncomfortable, were already corrected - like the parthenogenesis for example.
Another feature that I suppose will need to be changed is the moving out rotations. This is something that the user can make self and would be much more logical. You would move your sims when space is critical in the house they live.
The way it is now is really a nonsense. As I control practically all the houses in a special way I found out lately, the game started to separate my couples. I constantly found my couples in different houses though there's no logical explanation like break-up or bad relationship.
This is not giving dynamics to the game but giving everytime more illogical to claim.
In fact I don't really care that events are shown to my eyes, I just require that there's a REASON for the happenings. I agree with Pescado, EA is giving a sense of a toddler playing chess.

I disagree. I don't want to have to monitor and worry aboutr moving all the damned sims in town when needed. I don't want that responsibility. It's not how I play my game and it is tedious to me. If I want to control a whole town I will play Sim City.

I just want them to move sometimes in some manner that makes some kind of sense and has some reason while also not having the number of the moves be excessive. As long as the whole town isn't moving every night and sims aren't making totally nonsense moves like moving from a 300k house to a 100k one, then I am fine with it.

To me I would like story mode to take care of the town and run it and have it be dynamic so that I can sometimes observe the townies and have my sims interacting with them if I choose. That would be the ideal for me .

If it gets to the point where I am constantly having to switch houses and set things up, get them to do things, move them when needed, make sure they have the right furniture bla bla then I don't even see the point of Story Mode. That's just like TS2, keeping the town going by rotating playing different houses.

I agree with the not wanting the whole town to move.  The 300k to 100k thing, I suppose I agree, but I'm not as upset about it.  The problem with awesomemod is that when you first enable it, the very first night, and the next few subsequent nights, it tries to OPTIMIZE the housing situation according to some formula, with some massive migration pattern.  And that its totally unrealistic.  People may change hotels overnight, but not homes, which are a long-term investment in the real world; even when real people are unhappy with their current home, they are slow to move because of the logistics and financial hurdles.  A better way to handle it would be to restrict it to one or two optimizing household moves per night.  And there should be some rational decision making process that would keep them from oscillating between the same two houses.

If you're getting mass migrations on first activation, your neighborhood is *VERY* out of whack. The situation should settle into a logical state once neighborhood balance is properly achieved.

Yeah, well, the neighborhood doesn't normally consist of mindless drones that suddenly acquire the glimmerings of intellect and reason at the sudden press of a button, either.

That is actually reflected in the system already: Sims have a cooldown between points at which they can move.

Happens already. Are you sure you're using AwesomeStory and not EA? EAxis has practically no sanity constraints. AwesomeStory will only move if their house is inadequate to contain their population, or if their home is bought by another sim trying to move up.

It's been a while since I started a new neighborhood from scratch using the latest awesomemod.  But when I started Riverside with awesomemod, the very first night it was musical houses.  I'm sure AM has gone through a number of iterations and improvements since then.  But I sort of regret that I didn't got to see the original neighborhood the way it was set up, with sims in the houses EA made for them with EA descriptions in them.  (I can always make another Riverside to look at it.)

Although I've really resonated with a lot of the things that Motoki and Doc Doofus have said, I've come back to the AwesomeMod.  I've noticed the musical houses in my new Riverview game too, but I'm reassured knowing why it is happening.

In another thread, I posed the question as to whether the unmodded story mode could be adequate for those like me who play only one family.  Doc Doofus said I'd come back to the AwesomeMod as soon as a Sim moved out of town that I cared about.  And now he gets to say he told me so.  I had made TS3 versions of Skip, Brandi, and child-age Dustin Broke, and played them using the unmodded story mode.  When the three boys had grown up, I decided to play Beau and leave Dustin and Caleb (as I always called the youngest) to their own devices.

Soon Beau started receiving phone calls from a Dustin Ursine.  Turns out he had married some homeless townie, taken her last name, had a daughter, and moved in with some random family, but without his wife and daughter.  All attempts to get Dustin's wife to move back in with him failed.  Finally it was all I could do to change Dustin's last name back to Broke, and his daughter's as well for family tree purposes.  Both he and his wife had the Commitment Issues trait after all.  I can live with that, I said.

But then Caleb completely disappeared.  I'm guessing he likewise married a homeless townie, and took her last name so I wouldn't notice when they moved out.  The last straw was neighbors living on empty lots containing only a mailbox and garbage can.  They'd come home from work and disappear into an invisible house.  I must really be non-awesome not to have noticed this BS earlier.

If the 0100 lag is all I have to put up with to stop this nonsense (and said lag is much better than it was the last time I ran the AwesomeMod), plus I can have my no-CD crack and be able to edit Puddings in CAS, for now I consider it worth the tradeoff.

I think this is the part where I say "Baaahhhh."  :)

In that case, I'll turn on Awesome story mode too.  From reading the beta-testing thread, it seems the only issues so far are the cribs thing (which I may or may not care about) and the Sims-standing-around-complaining-about-motives thing (of which there's always some anyway, even in a vanilla game).

ETA:  Didn't work, I had it completely hang on me after doing nothing I thought particularly special.  Unfortunately I couldn't get a saved game file for examination as even the side-scrolling was completely dead.  I'll revert back to both ISM and ASM disabled with the remainder of the AwesomeMod on, and go back to lurk mode.

Stupid question here:

Is ASM now actually integrated into Awesomemod or is it still a separate driver?

Integrated

Great. In that case, I'll give it another shot then. The last time I tried it, it threw up a load of "fragrant error" messages, pointing to a nonexistent driver.

Um, no, you're not the ONLY one here and I'm doing an arm pump and a resounding YES! YES! YES! over it!

Okay, now before I offer my head up to the chopping block to everyone who hates this (you can execute me later) I'll explain why it was I suggested this in the IndieStone forum.

I set up a Legacy family on a Sunset Valley map, everything in the default state EXCEPT the former Sims, which I obliterated with AM. At that point, ISM and AM couldn't do their thing together, so I played my Sim with AM running for several Sim days and every couple of days I would check for homeless families and move them in.  It took some tweaking on my part, making sure appropriate housing was available for these families then using the familyfunds cheat to get them the money they needed to move in to their new homes then I switched over to using ISM to keep the town alive (this was before ISM and AM could run together) and turned off immigration. All was going REALLY, REALLY well UNTIL certain of these Sim families started reproducing. I have a habit of moving single Sims into starter houses, married couples into larger houses that will accommodate having children, etc.  The problem came in when the single Sims started getting married and having families.  A lot of these other families are friends with my Legacy family and it also helps for these other families to have children for potential mates within the One Fambly.  Since these families are friends with the Fambly I play in that town, I occasionally have Sims I'm playing visit their friends and of course there's the whole "so and so would like to go over to whats-his-name's house after school" messages.  What I ran into under these circumstances were that my visiting Sims could often not even get into the house because while I had my back turned, these couples living in one-bedroom houses were having three or four kids, and my visiting Sim couldn't even get in the doorway!

To my mind it isn't that big of a deal to put in appropriate housing and make sure there is at least one crib in a house where families are going to live.  As someone mentioned a while ago nearly all of the default houses that come in the towns aren't even suitable for families, so I'm all the time tearing down and building or plopping new houses, and when I do that I add the number of beds and cribs that are suitable for the house size.  At the same time, I can understand why this bothers other people. I am into mostly playing the one Fambly but doing a bit of micro-managing on the side doesn't bother me--in fact, I much prefer it to not.  I want the towns I play to evolve into MY towns and not what EA shipped with the game.  That alone means much building and customization goes on during my play time when I'm not actively playing the Fambly.

Ideally for me single Sims start out in starter houses. They get married and move into a larger house (they do, at least with ISM, combine their funds when they marry so it doesn't make sense they stay in a tiny house when there's a larger one down the street empty, and once in a while a newly married couple will move to a larger house).  With AM no family can move into a house that doesn't have adequate bed space, so it made perfect sense to me for them not to be able to have children if there are no cribs in the house. It gives me a way to fairly simple way to quickly apply birth control on families that I think need it (they already have more kids than they can support, they're close to being elders and will leave orphans when they die, etc.).

I'm just wishing I was in a position to actually play today and try the new AS. I've been too busy with other things this past week and haven't even started my game for at least six days.

I'll now offer my head for the chopping block for all of you who are hating the mandatory crib thing and will also add to the requests for your sake that it be made optional. It's something I need to save some of the little sanity I have left, but it's also something that will no doubt drive a lot of others insane.

To me it is a big deal. It's forcing people to play in a manner which they don't want to play the game. I don't want to mess with the other houses. If someone wants to make a redux neighborhood with cribs (and while they're at it, just better houses in general) I will happily download it, but it's not something I want to be bothered with. He's modifying the game in way that really should have the neighborhood set up in a different way and I don't want to be the one to have to set it up.

If it means dingoes eat some of the damned babies so I don't have to be arsed with this crib nonsense then fine. Have it at dingoes. I support you. I just want the neighborhood to take care of itself while I play the one family and not have to run around playing Sim City mayor.

I think that most of us who are against the mandatory crib thing are looking to have it made optional, not to be removed altogether.

I get that some people like to spend a week or more setting up their neighbourhood to be exactly right before they actually start playing.  I'm not one of them.  I want to create a sim (or family, or a bunch of families, depending on what I feel like playing), place them on a lot, and then get straight into playing the game.

With TS2 I used to make all my own townies, downtownies, dormies, social townies, hobby mavens, vacation townies, locals & NPCs.  I would put the townies/downtownies into jobs, give them appropriate skills, give them sexual preferences, make sure all the non-playables were dressed reasonably and give some of them turn-on features such as glasses or facial hair or makeup.  If I'd known how, I would have saved these background sims to templates so that I didn't have to keep repeating the process every time I started a new hood.

Setting up the sims who existed primarily as background for my playable sims in TS2 wasn't fun for me.  It was a tedious chore that cut into my actual game playing time.  It's not a chore I care to repeat in TS3.  I just want to place & play without a lot of fiddling around getting the 'hood exactly right.  This is why I have a story mode mod in my game (ISM once it was compatible with AM, now switched to ASM) - to do the tedious background stuff for me.

So yeah, it'd be great if the crib thing could be made optional.

A compromise could be allowing non-played families to have one baby without a crib, and then needing a crib to have more. Give us an announcement "so and so just had a baby, they need a crib!" so we can go and edit their house if we want them to continue reproducing.

I guess having this at the bottom of my post probably made it pretty near invisible:

I enjoy a particular play style that appears to be a hybrid between what a lot of people play. I would never want to enforce my play style on anyone else.

I've started making neighborhoods with a crib in each house. The one I have finished so far is SV with no residents, (I used "destroyallhumans"). I'm going to make an SV with residents intact with cribs, and a Riverview with cribs with and without residents. I was going to post them in the Pudding Factory as I got them finished, but they are too big to post. If anyone wants them, I'll figure out a way to get them to you. I can't afford a premium filesharing account atm.

This will inevitably lead to population decline. Two parents = 1 babby means each generation, without intervention, the population halves. Eventually the only thing left will be playables who are all so intermarried incest is the only option.

Doesn't the crib rule cease to block future spawn if the youngest is a child+? My basic townie homes have six bed spots and one crib. A couple should be able to have four kids if they start early, with only one kid ever in a crib at a time.

I agree.  The crib thing is a perfect example of unintelligent sim behavior that isn't worth improving.  It is very costly to fix manually or, if even possible, automatically, and, in most cases, simply not observable to the user.  It's a change with low to no upside and high costs.

Even if you could have the sims place cribs automatically, odds are that the placement of the cribs would break believability more than having a proper number of cribs would increase it.

I don't think it would necessarily be that hard to spawn cribs in good locations.  Spawn them next to a bed.  Even if that's clumsy, it's not unrealistic.  Even when people don't keep their babies right in the bedroom, they keep the babies in hearing distance of their sleeping arrangement, even if it's just a baby monitor.  When you first get a baby home, if you haven't had one before (I've only had one so I can only speak for myself, heh), you find yourself arranging things in a hurry and that can include jamming a crib anywhere it will fit in the room, even blocking doors and TVs.

In TS2, when children got home from school, they would instantly try to place their homework on or as close to a desk as possible.  If the same object-of-a-type search routine is in TS3, a similar thing could be done for cribs.  Instead of identifying an empty spot close to a desk, it could find the closest empty spot on the floor close to a bed.  (The facts that cribs are two-tiles, though, might ruin that whole idea.)

I disagree. It's the player's choice if they want the population to decline, and if not, Solmyr's suggestion means they would know which households to provide cribs for and when. This would make it easier (less hassle) to avoid population decline. Maybe it's possible to go further:

A warning when two sims start trying for a baby: "X and Y are trying for a baby... they're going to need a crib soon if they keep that up." Nice to know these things anyway.
Then when the baby pops, if a suitable spot with sufficient surrounding space can be found in the house, a crib could be spawned (and money deducted from household).
Otherwise the player can get another crib warning. If that's ignored, after a couple of nights of the baby sleeping on the floor, the social worker does their thing and takes the kid...
Then there may be a better home (with a crib) available, otherwise it's a drive up to Riverview with a sack and a bunch of rocks.

What people don't seem to realize is that cribs are actually FOUR tiles.  When I jumped from house to house to place cribs I usually had to delete a piece of furniture simply because the Maxis houses don't usually leave four unobstructed tiles anywhere inside a house, especially not in the bedrooms.

That is the *WRONG* place to be putting a crib.

I know why you say that Pes, but the other options in a lot of those EAxis houses are just as wrong: In the kitchen/dinging/living room right next to the TV/seterio (so babies/toddlers will constantly be worken up by the loud noises), and out on the deck/lawn (which just looks stupid).  I suppose there's always the bathroom...   :P

Or no god damned cribs at all! :P

Bummer.   

  I did like  ISM  interface.   But  AM has way more meat.

I specifically said, "without intervention". If you play like I've been, ignoring the other people until you need to interact with them, the neighborhood will shrink in population until within a few generations, you have no children to meet at school. I suppose immigration could solve that problem, but why create it in the first place, when 2 parents = 2 babbies results in a stable population?

I have changed completely my way to play and stablished a standard for houses that pleases me and I got almost all houses in the game to follow my standard. It seems that the game really try to disbalance and the player has the challenge to balance it again. You have to have the correct distribution of deaths and births, what the game cannot do self and cause massiv irregularities on births/deaths. If you do not this self, it clogs your game with townies and moving families that you don't want. I tried to make this balance self and it became a lot easier with the NRAAS inseminator. I can Sims have babies without the long process of sedution imposed by the game. This way I do not marry anyone, just make them best friends and inseminate them.
The city keeps an excess of single sims what avoids creation of new townies and enough babies to replace the previous generation that become elder and elder to finally die. This way I didn't have the game to produce one only Sim except maids that I contract very often. I also keep the maids pool spining correctly because I marry every good looking maid to my elders and create this way the necessary number of married couples and also a guarantee to continue the male family tree.
This is what balances my game and I'm already in the third generation (I play the second long aging, so my sims live about 210 days).
I'm satisfied with the results. Besides I have modified every damn xml mod to give autonomy to the sims in all matters that are boring for me. For example, I autonomized all the gardening process, so my Sims water, weed and harvest automatically. I have only the distributor task of selling the product and finding out the correct seed to plant and care for distributing the perfect or whatever fruits to Sims that have Green thumb. I'm doing the automatization to every task that normally bores me and act like the supermarket chain owner or the Seed Bank Manager of all kinds. It is working and I HAVE fun with it. As said before we are all different.

Would like to point out this is not Communism, this is dictatorial government much the same way our military is run.

Well, yes, and then again, no. Perhaps you're right about communism in its purest and most academic form, but practically, it involves a top down central government system that is in fact much the same as that exhibited in fascist systems. Just look at what happened to the Soviet Union; the government tried to coordinate everything, and that was completely inefficient.

Woo for high school history. :)

Is there alleged communal ownership of property in the TS3?  No?  Well, then it's not communism.  It's definitely centralized economic planning, though. 

Perhaps Sunset Valley is at war with Riverdale?  If so, then they are on a war footing and may have a war czar directing the economy.  No new townies and babies means no new conscripts for the Glorious War Effort.  And they need to keep the police department well-stocked with sims in blue uniforms to crack down on dissidents and root out Riverdale sleeper agents.  You never know what kind of incriminating evidence you'll find in somebody's trash can.  What if one of those sleeper agents had a ticking nuclear timebomb?  Can you afford to take that risk?  I suggest the Mausoleum would be a great place to hold and interrogate suspects pending their show trials.

I was explaining Pescado's comment, which I believe was just referring to the "top-down" governmental system, which is a feature of practical communism.

But goddamn, my mind is now filled with amazing visions of TS3: War. I would much prefer that to Vacation.  :P

Well, households are really communal units. Except for business deeds, Sims don't have any personal property rights at all. Everything belongs to the household. Just look at how easy it is to kick a Sim to the curb and render them homeless.

Yes! Yes there is! Haven't you noticed how sims have a very limited concept of personal property which doesn't extend past anything not on their person?

I have the very latest awesome mod, should I install ISM now?

This sounds awesome... I want to buy it.

Well I don't want my hood kept arbitrarily stable.  I expect there to be some sense in what happens or I lose interest in the fact it's happened.  It's not hard to repopulate a shrinking hood

can we still use ISM with AM ?

Easy way to tell. Go here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15185.0.html) (it's the awesomemod thread) then click the link for configuration which takes you here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ts3/awesome/config.php). Then read the very top section for Story Mode Drivers.

Thank you  :)

I guess you have never dealt with corporate America?  Big businesses try to create cookie-cutter jobs so their management can micro-manage everything.  They create policies, procedures and practices which everyone is required to follow.  No one is allowed to exercise any independent judgement.  These policies, procedures and practices are developed by some nameless wonk at a corporate headquarters across the country.

Then they lose money hand over fist and expect the government to bail them out with taxpayer funds because they are "too big to fail." So I guess you have described capitalism as well.  In Capitalism, one man exploits another.  In Communism, it's the other way around.

In true capitalism, there is no bailout, so they would just fail in a big fiery ball visible from space. This serves as a lesson to others.

Actually, it's Leninism.  Marx actually calls for the withering away of the state.  But then, few who talk about Marxism have actually read Marx.  Otherwise, they would understand that the term "capitalism" was actually coined by Marx.

You see, according to Marxist theory, places like Russia and China were not suitable for Communism because they economy had not sufficiently developed.  Nations had to go through a capitalist period to develop the economic structures necessary for socialism.  In 1917, Russia was still a feudal society where serfs had (at least legally) just been liberated.  Lenin, and then Stalin, came up with the notion of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat where the government would create the infrastructure needed for Socialism.  Of course, this is diametrically oppposed to Marx's actual teachings, where the development of Socialism is the natural and INEVITABLE result of the historical dialectic.

What we have is not true capitalism, but best described as Lemon Socialism.  Others might call it Crony Capitalism.

But anyone who thinks that true Capitalism is either possible or desirable is sorely mistaken.  The Efficient Market Theory is just as much an ideology as Marxism, and just as flawed.  After all, both Marxism and Social Darwinism (i.e. capitalism) are both 19th century ideologies.  While the 20th century was not the most pleasant period in human history, we did learn something during the past century.

The Efficient Market Theory, actually has very little empirical evidence to support it and it's conclusion that its results are desirable are based entirely upon questionable value judgments.  Generally, when people don't know how something works or what the results of a policy might be, they fall back on the Efficient Market Theory.

A great example of a horribly run company which, in true capitalism, wouldn't make it and will fall to competition. A good corporation will use a more horizontal style hierarchy, use better management practices, encourage their employees to be creative, and give incentives to their best workers to be productive. Causing them to be ahead of the market and will result in better results all around.

Both examples have their extremes which will fail, always remember that.

Yes, that's why I said 'practical' communism, because communism in real life is quite different to the idealistic version. Oh, and like tjstreak indicates, the features of practical communism are often the features of humans failing to live up to ideals in general, so it's not surprising they're exhibited all over society.

Edit: And exhibited in the Sims 3 and IndieStone. :P

That feature is not finished and is only available to designated testers.

As the history books have shown both true Capitalism and Communism have been both detrimental to their societies. Since it is only part of human nature to fight against the oppressors, both governments eventual crumble into some sort of government that lies between true Capitalism and Socialism as can be shown by two big nations of our days, Russia and the United States of America. What is the best form of government? Only future history has the answers for that.

I sadly have to say that the U.S. has really regressed down the line toward Socialism. With big spending budgets lately, yeah that is Socialism and yeah oppression. Take from the rich and give to the poor. But take from the middle class and give to rich like they did with that last large spending bill. What was that? Was that some kind form of Capitalism, or something else?

Will when it comes to the sims type of government. Will let's see sims main aim is collecting wealth, main goals reach the highest rank of their career branch. And gossip about who is rich? Will that would be Capitalism. Share food with neighbors freely, a Capitalist would never do that though. So I would say a medieval sort of government. Where do anything you can to acquire wealth, but show off that wealth by giving big feast and parties and inviting the neighbors.

That is Kleptocracy. That's not really an -ism. It's not really an economic policy at all.

Sure they would. Humans have been sharing food before economics were even invented, as a form of pro-economics. Before people invented food preservation, one man could not eat an entire antelope. Today, they more take the form of communal, social events which really have nothing to do with economics.

Kleptocracy! Wow learned a new word, thanks for the correction. I learned something new today. I always like learning something new. All these new forms of words today used in politics. Government corruption hum that is even more terrible.

I hope Awesome Mod can include all features of Indie Stone Mod, except that all included features MUST be configured by pressing "Ctrl+Shift+C" beforehand, and they may be configured by typing "setconfig" afterward and be viewed from using "showconfig" afterward!

That is a very sad thing, because I really like that mod...
Even though the "core" package of the Awesome Mod makes the "mod" package of that mod be compatible with "Sims 3" 1.4.6, problems are encountered when the config is going to applied on all households...
So, it is very sad that the problems will not be solved in short time...
I have the read the detail above, but I think the creator of the Awesome Mod can ask for the source code of the Indie Stone Mod, because I think he has expertise and endeavor to merge that mod with the Awesome Mod (or to improve that only...).
However, I think the best way of continuing the development is to make that mod be open source...

Pescado has his own Story Progression system available in Awesome...  So it's incredibly doubtful he'll pick up IndieStone and start maintaining someone else's work.

Good day. :)

Don't you have problems with "Tweaks"->"Genetically modify Active Sim" option?
I can set everything perfect except sims's weight and muscle. I set a fatty sim to maximum fat and maximum muscle and in the game after a minute the sim looked like exactly before I changed her look.
I changed her look 4 times, she changed back in game 4 times.. This happened with other sims too.
I think that option doesn't work anymore..

Don't you have problems with "Tweaks"->"Genetically modify Active Sim" option?
I can set everything perfect except sims's weight and muscle. I set a fatty sim to maximum fat and maximum muscle and in the game after a minute the sim looked like exactly before I changed her look.
I changed her look 4 times, she changed back in game 4 times.. This happened with other sims too.

Edit:
I tried editsim with Supercomputer too and the same happened as with Indie Stone.
I made a sim max fat and max muscle, saved, but in the game after few seconds sim looked like exactly the same like before editing.
I think my game has problem but I don't know what. Any idea?
What can cause this strange thing?

Was this a sim you picked up out of the townie pool? I have the same situation when I try and edit a game generated sim,but no issues editing one I made from CAS.

The manual specifically instructs you not to attempt to alter a sim's weight values in editsim.

10. "editsim <SIM NAME>": As above. EXPERIMENTAL and UNSUPPORTED.
     Can edit facial features and favorites. Do not attempt to change a sim's
     weight, age, or traits using this command. No support will be provided
     for this command: YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!
Damn my selective reading,guess my quest for a chunky boss to harass blinded my good sense.I shall go to my dunce corner now.