More Awesome Than You!

The scope of this mod thing...
The BCM is supposed to be a tool that helps you in the effort of sustaining your 'hood, and getting it back into shape if things went bad, i.e. if whatever Storymode you use, didn't/doesn't manage to sustain you 'hood. You'll still need a Storymode to create couples, because Parthenogenesis is bad, m'kay, and the BCM will only pollinate sims who have a valid pollinator in store.

If you basically like ASM, but don't like the crib dependency, this might be the solution you seek. The BCM doesn't perform checks for crib presence (or bed slots). I'd still recommend to place at least a couple of cribs, just for means of immersion.

Be aware, though, that the BCM can only increase the birth rates in your 'hood, so there's a possibility it will lead to over-population in the long-term. I thought about implementing automatic and/or random abortions, but I think this would be just as bad as BusKills.

What this is...
This is an object-less scripting mod. All interactions are added to all Hi Def Mirrors listed under "Birth Control".

The added interactions are...
- Raw Data
Just some numbers I found helpful in the progress of making this. Might come in handy if you use the other interactions or mess around in your neighbourhood manually.

'Normalized Birth Rate' is pretty much the same as the 'Buzzler Factor' in twallan's NRaas Supercomputer. The exact numbers might differ a little, though, because I did some additional tuning to it. Chances are, if the figure wasn't as useless as a barrel of skunks before, it is now.

'Demographics' Deviance' shows you the discrepancy between the current numbers of Sims in every lifestage and the number of Sims a theoretically perfectly stable 'hood would have. Elders aren't taken into account, because the goal is to reach a stable amount of fertile adults.

'Current Limit of Reason' is yet again based on an awful lot of completely dirty and possibly invalid math. It tells you how much births per day your hood needs to sustain itself, plus one. Sustain-o-Mat uses this figure.

- Pollinate...
Exactly what it says: Takes a random female Sim of the chosen type and pollinates her. See below for rules.

- Mass Pollinate...
Exactly what it says: Pollinates all female Sims of the chosen type. See below for rules.

- Specifically Pollinate...
Lets you choose from a list of all female Sims of the chosen type. See below for rules.

- Sustain-o-Mat...
Activate/Deactivate Sutain-o-Mat to auto-pollinate Sims. Depending on the mode setting pollinations will be executed at different times. Every night at 2:30 am for the classic mode, and spread over the day for smooth and maintain mode. Configurate the scoring system it to your likings. Use the ShowScoredBCMVictims cheat to see how the potential victims are scored. Sustain-o-Poll does the same thing as Sustain-o-Mat, only it's doing it only once and immediately.

Classic Mode is pretty much the same thing as the gentle mode in previous versions. Smooth Operator Mode is based on the same principles but will spread the pollinations over the day. Maintain-o-Mat will try to uphold a certain, adjustable population.

- List Of Untouchables
Use it to protect sims from the fangs of the BCM. If you use the AwesomeMod, this is kinda pointless, since making the concerning sims sacred is more convenient and will have the same effect.

- Inform on Births
Well, what could that mean? I wonder...

- Extract Stuck Chicken
Allows you to abort specific pregancies. Despite the name, there are no checks if the chicken is really stuck. All Sims with a true IsPregnant-Flag or a non-invalid Pregancy-Handle are listed.

- Dragons' Dance
If you've read Douglas Adams, you'll get the idea. If not, your loss. See below for rules.

The pollination rules...
Victims are only Sims which are female, are YA or Adult, aren't pregnant already (Duh!), aren't homeless or ServiceNPCs, live in households with less than 8 members, don't belong to the currently active household and aren't marked chosen/sacred with AM.

All pollinations come in plenty of flavors. FYI: 'Married' is just a further limitation to 'partnered', since 'partnered' means married, engaged or going steady.

Some advice...
Have a look at the current number of victims and the current BR, before doing anything. Stupidly pollinating a massive amount of Sims, resulting in clusters of equally-aged Sims in the future, is what you don't want! That is, unless you're desperate to re-populate your hood. What you want is a smooth demographics distribution, so if NBR is significantly lower than 1 and there are lots of victims available, be hesitant to perform Mass Pollinations. In that case it's your choice if you want to intervene manually by Single-Pollinating Sims or if you want to give Sustain-o-Mat a chance.

The usual thanks...
Big thanks to twallan for enduring my questions, and for answering them, too.

Compatibility
Supported for game version 1.24 aka code version 0.2.0.154.


Bug reports and general feedback are appreciated.

Disclaimer...
Do I really need to tell you to make a backup of your 'hood, or that this comes without a warranty? If your answer is 'Yes, you do!', please don't download the file and just go away.

Updates
2011-07-26 - Updated to game version 1.24.

Woa! I can't believe you did it, just what I needed, without infinities or so... :o
Ready to pollinate my infinity Buzzler hood! 

Only Pescado gets away with cryptic, unspecified commands  :P

So, what does Dragon's Dance do..?

There's a little known app on the web that helps you locate information. Here, let me show you: www.google.com

Should've expected that really, chastisement fair in this case. Although, that said, google was of no use in finding the answer as was Wikipedia. Shall try it and if anyone would like to know they can then ask me.

I've tried the Dragonsdance and I see tant every fertile woman is now growing. I'm only waiting for the births to know who is/are the fathers.

Pollinate a specific sim would be nice. If AwesomeStory decides to leave a couple childless, I'd like to use the mirror to select the woman from a list and get her pollinated by her husband, without having to switch households.

Pollinate all childless sims (meaning only married women) would be useful to.

The Pokemon move "Dragon Dance" raises Attack and Speed by one stage.  Perhaps the command speeds the births up?

Updated to Version 2. See first post for changes.


Didn't know that. It are fact? You know from your learnings?

You guys really know how to spoil someone's fun.

Ok, the basic idea: There's a planet. On this planet be dragons and humans. Whenever the dragons dance in the sky, the humans get all horny and crazy for unknown reasons. So when the Dragons dance, half of the humans rush into the woods together with the other half of the humans. The next morning all humans wake up all sweaty and exhausted not remembering anything.

Read Douglas Adams, you guys. It's great fun... well, except the last of the Hitchhiker's series, just pretend it doesn't exist.

Hmm, this is more within the scope of twallan's Pollinator. The primary purpose of this one is that you don't have to choose a specific Sim. This is no rejection, though. I'll think about it.

I'll see about it. I really can't give a time scale, though.

No, not really. I see you failed to acknowledge the presence of a certain yellow orb displaying its tongue in a non-serious fashion.

Anyway, before this topic becomes too hostile, would like to let you know I do appreciate this obj.

@simwit: After a little digging in the dlls, I can say it shouldn't be much of a problem to implement your wishes. Expect it in the next update, probably Saturday afternoon (CET).

Or, maybe I didn't and it's just that I rarely use yellow orbs myself, thus leading you to the impression my non-serious statement was actually meant serious? ;)

Great. This mirror will be very useful then. There's bound to be a few couples I'd like to have children, even if el presidente decides otherwise.

I have a backlog of thanks-buttons to click. Gonna do that now. Hope it doesn't backfire.

EDIT:
I don't really want anyone to read this, but I suddenly felt the stupid urge to edit this old message, just to add that clicking on a thanks-button leads to a page cannot be displayed error. I was at least expecting an insult, to be honest.

And is the icon on the thanks-button a sheep? I only noticed that today, and if it means what I think it means, well fuck me sideways!

But thanks anyway.

Psst...


Should be stick?

Excellent mod, AM storymode is being slow with pollination in my current game. Would it be possible to extend the pollination availability also to females who have fiancees and boyfriends? We need some single mothers out there!

Now only if it would have the option to abort. Buskill turns to bus abort. I have a pregnant elder ghost (don't ask) and need to get rid of the spawn. It doesn't come out EVER, elders aren't supposed to breed. Can't edit in CAS, it gets stuck, so abortion should work.

GIEV ABORTIONS NAO!

If you have AwesomeMod in your game, try the falconpunch command to abort the spawn.

You know, when I saw "birth control mirror", I expected something more...Captain Falcon Themed.

Updated to Version 3. See first post for changes.
Unfortunately I couldn't really test all new interactions. I couldn't find a hood with married&childless Sims (shouldn't be a problem, though, the check is stupidly simple) or Sims without partner but with multiple romance interests (this is more severe, because I couldn't test if the Phonelist to choose the potential daddy is getting built correctly). I'd appreciate it, if someone would test this in his/her game.

Done. Took a little longer because I didn't want to upload an "intermediate" update with just these two options.

You're lucky, I had this on my ToDo anyways. I'm usually extremely bad in obeying orders...

Originally, it was just meant to be a device to 'control' as in "monitor'. Because that would have been totally lame, and because I could, I added stuff. With V3 there's at least some Captain Falcon Flavour on board... :)

My first Buzzler mirror pregnancy is a fact, but when I try to specifically pollinate a childless (married or not) sim I get no victims available. To make absolutely sure there were childless married sims I played until a teenage girl became a YA and was married by AwesomeStory. Immediately after the wedding message I still couldn't get a childless (married) sims list. I can still get her pregnant by selecting married sims, but there seems to be a problem with listing childless sims.

I'm just upgrading to version 3 but not tested yet. Former versions worked perfectly fine for me and I want you to say that this is a revolutionary tool in TS3, at least for me, that love to take all under my control. So, I have one question before to destroy something in my new buzzler hood (there is now an oscilation from 0'95 to 1,30 in factor): Is it possible to choose the group of victims in a random or mass pollination? What if I only want to pollinate married or couples living together? Are the 5 flavors to pick and choose, activate/deactivate some flavors? I like some single simmies in miscarriage to put the cherry up in realism but I don't want a hood full of bastards.

Yes, pretty stupid mistake on my part, based on a wrong assumption. Should be fixed now.

You can choose the same 5 five victim types for Random Pollinations, Mass Pollinations and Specific Pollinations. There are no activate/deactivate Interactions in BCM except Sustain-o-Mat, though, therefore the distinction between "married", "childless" and "married childless".

There's a bit of redundancy in the choices (or a little more, depends on your POV). "partnered Sim" lists all Sims with a valid partner (married, engaged or at least going steady), "married Sim" additionally checks if the Sim is married to her partner, "childless Sim" checks for the number of children. "Single Sim" is the only exception, since it's checking for Sims with no valid partner but romance interests instead.

I could implement "couples living together" without difficulties, but I think it'd be kind of pointless. Married Sims live together anyhow, and they're pretty much the only partnered Sims which the Storymode pushes to live together.

Don't take the NBR/BF thing too serious. I wanted it to react fast (so an algorithm would have something to rely on), therefore it's pretty much bound to oscillate to some degree. That's why I always say "significantly" higher/lower than 1. If it's uniformly oscillating between 0.95 and 1.3, your population should be increasing, though, probably pretty slowly, might take weeks to show. Is that with Sustain-o-Mat activated?

Activated. And it seems to work by itself. It is a great, great, great mod, believe me. My questions didn't where to bother you, but to learn to use it.

I've recently installed this and it is helping so much. My hood has been aging up, partly due to my having a heartbreaker sim this generation. I think he caused too many broken hearts so there are a bunch of single sims who are not romancing.
I had 124 sims, and 51 are elders. There were about 25 each ya and adult, rest kids. In order to get a jump on the next generation, I have been running around when ASM gives me a romance notice and using Twallan's pollinator on a victim. This makes it easier to do that. I bumped my BF up to about 2 right now, it should come down as the kids age up.
I'll let you know how the hood turns out.

Updated to Version 4. See first post for changes.
'Inform on Births' is Alarm-based, and triggered every 20 minutes. This is kind of like a retinal operation performed via the rectum, but I couldn't think of any other way, while keeping this thing a non-core mod... Therefore there's a really slight chance it will miss a birth under certain circumstances. Really slight, though.

I think I didn't really get it last time. ;) Sustain-o-Mat is now configurable, too. You might want to give the gentle mode a try.

You are not using an EventListener to handle birth announcements? 

Look up Sims3.Gameplay.StoryProgression.Notifications:  That class has many examples of various messages sent out from the system that you can catch.  One of them being baby birth notification.

Check out EventTypeId for a full list of all the messages you can catch.

Cheers. :)

It appeared to me, that all this stuff is adding the Gossip to the active Sim, too, and I didn't see a way to avoid that. So, yes, I'm not using an EventListener right now.

I'm simply pointing out an example of use.

My suggestion is create your own listener in your mod and do whatever you want in the callback function.  Namely display a notification of the birth.

Cheers. :)

Oh, boy, is it just me, or did this conversation just take an embarrassing turn? Like a million voices suddenly raising in laughter, and a single voice becoming silent in embarrassment?

Just two klicks more and it would have been obvious... in my defense: This stuff is pretty voluminous, and it's easy to get on the wrong track, at least if you got roughly a week of experience on your shoulders. ;) Well, on the other side, I could have looked at your code, too... speaking of which: I've seen a lot of checks in your code after using SimDescription.CreatedSim. Can this actually return a null value, unless something's seriously borked?

Sims, such as homeless and Service NPCs, which are NOT currently out and about in town will have a CreatedSim == null .

Cheers. :)

Updated to Version 5. See first post for changes.
I think, I consider this thing done for now. So unless there are bug reports, or something is in need of additional tweaking, or there's a request which really intrigues me, I'll spend my time on something else, maybe a different mod that is haunting my thoughts, or maybe I actually play the game myself a little...


Good to know. Queries.GetObjects<Sim>() gets all Sims, right? If not, my backup method is useless...

Thank you Buzzler for this mod.

I have a question though: I had problems with my last game that NO babies were born at all anymore so I stopped playing that and started a new game. I removed all the cc (except Standalone Computer and nomosaic(can't stand the blur)) to test if its the cc. The stroy progression was slow but sims were at least moving into town. No marriages or babies though. Then I put this mod in (second version available). I did not pollinate anybody nor did I turn the Sustain-o-Mat on. After playing a while one of the NPC sims that was already married had a baby (can't remember which on). Then Blaire Wainwright even got married and pregnant and Pauline Wan also got pregnant. By now I had version 4 of your mod in my game. I configured the Sustain-o-Mat to be inactive for all options and the the mode thing was on gentle. I'm using it only for informational reasons (as I do the Supercomputer)

Now to my question: Has the babies being born have anything to do with your mod (with everything being off) or is the EA Story Progression actually working now and it was an issue of my old save game that I didn't have anything happening ?

It gets all instantiated sims, yes.  It won't get all the SimDescriptions in town, unless all the residents are currently instantiated. 

Non-homeless should be instantiated all the time, unless some bug accidentally disposed of them. Or they happen to be a toddler left at home without a babysitter. :P

Good Day. :)

I cant't tell you what the EAxis Storymode does, because I don't know. I can tell you, though, that this mod doesn't do anything unless you activate Sustain-o-Mat or Pollinate Sims manually. Even if there were some sort of blunderous bug in there, causing the Sustain-o-Mat to be active all the time (and I guess someone would have noticed by now), you'd still see the corresponding notifications.

Ok, I guess if someone manages to form a valid Romance or partnered relationship to an uninstantiated Sim, he deserves to encounter script errors or one of my "Something's seriously borked. You should panic now!" messages. ;)

Thanks ! Than my story progression actually seems to work for now. I have not gotten any corresponding notifications.

I have played around with this for a while now.  It does seem to lead to an ever increasing population.  When I had over 200 sims, I had to cull the neighborhood manually, moving out a number of families.  I found at this point, sims would gather in places like the City Hall where the Grim Reaper would have a mass reaping.

This may be due in part to the SLAM lifespan package, which I installed (centi - Real Life).

As a result, I have turned off the automatic feature.  I do pollinate manually.  I check the population on a fairly regular basis and have been trying to maintain it at 90.  (This still may be on the high side, but it is a darn sight better than 200+!)  When the number of sims falls below this number, I manually pollinate a sim.

This might actually be a more simple formula for maintaining a population.  A sim dies -- another sim gets pollinated.  Since sims tend to have a fairly constant life span, it should keep things somewhat in proportion.  However, if one of my played sims gets preggers, I probably would let the system go wild to boost the population of similarly aged sims.  After the infant ages up, I would just let the population decline back to the target number.

Your population size started at 90 and then increased to 200? How long did this take? How did the amount of fertile adults develop?

I'm not absolutely sure about it, but this shouldn't be the case. All calculations are based on the actual values.

This would work, yes, but to me this awfully smells like cheating. Nevertheless, if you really want, I can implement something like that. You'd have to test it, though, 'cause I really lost interest in TS3 in the meantime; I didn't play more than an hour after releasing V5. That's why it took me so long to answer and why there's no other mod from me. ;)

Would it be possible to have the options to specify a sim to be pollinated by a random male, and to be able to specify a sim that will pollinate a random female?

Sometimes I have a sim that is either near the end of their fertility or life and want them to have one more kid beforehand, but would prefer not to choose the partner all the time.

Well, technically that would be possible, but I don't really see how that would be useful. If you specifically pick the mommy, it can't be that much of a hassle to pick the daddy too. To pick the daddy first might be useful - although it might be sexist and seems kinda weird to me - but since I'd have to boot up my cerebrum to do that, I want a petition of at least three people who claim they would find that useful. ;)

I, for one, would find that useful. This is my current way to have a male impregnate a female:

- Use Twallan's computer to pick a female (no partner, no kids, right age group), selected at semi-random
- Pick the male I want
- Inseminate using that computer

Using your mirror to pick a random female for my chosen male would make the process a little easier and more random for me.

Wanted to release that a lot earlier (the stuff about the petition was actually a joke), but I was low on time, low on mood, and high on migraine for the last week.

Updated to Version 6. See first post for changes.
'Sustain-on-Death' is the sustaining method outlined by tjstreak. I added a counter for births and deaths, so SoD only auto-pollinates Sims if there are more deaths than births. The configuration of Sustain-o-Mat applies to Sustain-on-Death too. Like announced this one is pretty much untested, because I simply don't feel like playing the game for a couple of hours to see if it really does what it's meant to do. And it's still too cheaty for my taste. ;)

Be aware that 'Second Victim - Random' really means random. Unlike in 'Sustain-o-Mat' there's no bias towards closer releationships!

Just had the opportunity to play again and had an elderly guy knock up some female before death.  Thanks so much!  I would've understood if you weren't joking but grateful that you were ;)  Thanks again!

I didn't really dig into the .DLLs to find out what exactly happens when Sims die, i.e. whether or not they get deinstantiated. Since you explicitly wanted to have old folks spread their genes before dying, I didn't install any sanity checks on how far a Sim might be on the edge. At any rate if the prospective father gets deinstantiated during the pregnancy, the offspring will have no father at all. (Parthenogenesis, yay! I wonder if this is what happened to Jesus' daddy...)

Since this is due to the (totally hare-brained) way the EAxis devs have implemented pregnancies, there isn't anything anyone can do about it. Well, actually it could be changed by a core mod, but I'd consider that awfully risky.

My BCM isn't working.  I can set configuration settings which always provides confirmation of the changes, but nothing else works.  Pollination commands do nothing.  Even selecting 'Raw Data' does nothing.  I only have ASM and Supercomputer mods installed.  (I had others but after removing them all, there was no change.)  The only other thing wrong in my game is that my pregnant Sim did not change to maternity clothes nor showed an enlarged belly, but the pregnancy proceeded normally otherwise.  Does this mean that my game is borked in general and your mirror is not broken?

Is twallan's supercomputer actually working without showing any oddities? If so, maybe the BCM file you downloaded, is simply borked. I'd suggest redownloading for starters.

If the mod file is ok, this is pretty bad, because it's almost definitely due to script errors preventing the code from being (further) executed. There's a slight chance, it's caused by a rare "constellation" in your game I didn't anticipate, but I doubt it. Especially Raw Data doesn't do anything sophisticated, so my guess is, that there are some dangling references in you game (i.e. non-null and invalid at the same time). That would be bad. Make that really, really bad.

If you upload your save file, I'll have a look at it.

Yes, twallan's supercomputer works fine.  I redownloaded the BCM file with no change unfortunately.
So, there's a save file uploaded for you at ftp://ftp.kludgemush.com/incoming/ called BorkedBCM.zip.  My population was on a downward spiral so I ended up pollinating all females in a relationship using the supercomputer.  I need your tool to keep it going.  I don't know why ASM alone is not keeping my population going.

Updated to Version 6.1. Please redownload, because the squished bug existed at least since V2.

@Buckets: You could have warned me that the composition of colors on the active lot is quite ... unusual. ;) There definitely was a bug in the code, but it's fixed and should work now. I'm a little confused though that this didn't come up earlier. What I can't say for sure is whether or not your 'hood had anything to do with it, i.e. if it is completely free of borkedness.

Lol.  The colours in all the rooms are based on the occupants' favourite colours.  I agree, it looks outlandish but they love it!   ::)

Thanks for looking at this issue and fixing it.  I can't test it because my desktop just completely crashed.  Can't wait though.

I've got the new v6.1 and it works great!  Thanks.  But I put a mirror (with the birth notification active) in one household, switched to another and bought a mirror for it.  Then I set the birth notification to active on it.  Now I get two messages for each birth.

Looking at my code I see that I forgot a couple of static modifiers (Yeah, well, it was my first encounter with C# and object oriented programming.). That means variables which were meant to be global for all BCMs are actually unique for every BCM, so it's possible to add the BirthListener multiple times. I will look into it; I might as well simply revamp the whole thing into an object-less mod.

I keep reading this thread title as 'The Birth Canal Mirror'.   ::)

I keep reading this as some kind of contraceptive item or technique. Also, #grah requires moar WITCHY POOFS!

Updated to Version 7. See first post for changes.
I hope next time I say something silly like "simple revamp the whole thing into an object-less mod" somebody is kind enough to slap me with a fish. What a pain...

Fixed.

That's an association I don't take responsibility for. Really, I don't even want to imagine what a "Birth Canal Mirror" might look like ... too late, I just imagined some kind of periscope. Thank you very much!

There's no way out of it for me, is there? I couldn't have called it pollinator or anything, because twallan already had something like that. Next time I meat Doc Brown, I'll kick him in the nuts, steal his De Lorean and influence myself to name it "The Mirror That Does Things To Women".

Thanks for the objectless update, very nice!

But I've got an.. uh.. hunch that the BCM is responsible for a lot of crashes to desktop I've been having lately (usually right after switching to a sim from a different household, when the camera starts to zoom all over the town, roughly about every 20 minutes or so, and more frequently if I switch a lot). This occured to me when I updated to version 7 and the mirror was initially disabled - and I had not a single crash for several hours. After turning it back on it crashed just 20 minutes later.

Any chance something bad can happen right when the active household changes?

@orion: Well, I think there's nothing in there that could cause a CTD, but if you upload your 'hood, I'll have a look at it. I can't give you a timescale though, because RL is keeping me busy lately.

Hm. The crashes currently aren't very frequent and my hood file has become unwieldily large (is there a way to clear out old data, e.g. sims that died 500 years ago and noone knew anyway?), so I rather not upload it - maybe when it crashes every 20 minutes again, it'll be easier to reproduce as well.
I did notice though, that the interaction on the mailbox to return a stolen item causes a crash that seems identical. Do sims autonomously perform that interaction? If not, it might even have been an insane, kleptomanic sim, choosing the interaction randomly every now and then when the camera happens to sweep by his house.

is this comp. w/ WA?

No, right now it's not even compatible with version 1.6.6 of the base game. I'm going to look at it tomorrow to make it compatible with 1.6.6. Hopefully it's going to be compatible with WA as well then, but I don't have WA and it's not really a must-have to me.

thank you buzz!!!!

Updated to Version 8. See first post for changes.
What I wrote about the AgingManager applies to this mod too. Should work with 1.6.6/1.7.9 (and WA) now, but I'm not absolutely sure. Please report errors, if they occur.

thank you so much hun!!  You make my game sooooooooooo fun!!!  Can I have your sim babies? :P

hi im going to regret asking as im sure im going to sound like a tool, but i have a "stuck chicken" as you put it and would love to see if this will fix it but cannot find it in game.  i read it is no longer an object, but was wondering how i go about unsticking this darn chicken? i dont normally use mods so this is a first. cheers!

@krustie: Click on the rectangular mirror that costs 300§. Then click 'Birth Control' and 'Extract Stuck Chicken'. A menu will pop up which lets you select the afflicted (or soon to be afflicted) Sim.

If you don't have a 'Birth Control' menu on the mirror, the framework isn't installed correctly.

Updated to Version 8.1.
This is not a feature update but a bugfix. Thanks to Tangie for pointing it out; I appreciate it.

I'd be really surprised if this was actually the first time the bug occured, though. Kinda thought-provoking. You people probably wouldn't even tell me if my pants were on fire...

If it makes you feel any better, the only bug I ever see is that the Mirror does not save settings between game sessions.

Updated to Version 8.2.

Fixed. And yes, it makes me feel better. A little.

Buzzler, I lol'd. Several times. Well, one was actually a snort but that's ONLY because I have a cold.  ;)

I wouldn't feel too badly about it, really. It happened because I decided to try the Dragons Dance thingie (I adore Douglas Adams), and I probably wouldn't have noticed it but just got curious. If it had happened to others I suspect they were just so desperate to populate their 'hoods that they really didn't notice or care. Otherwise they probably use one of the other options, since those are what I also use most of the time. So thanks, baa baa and all that, for making and maintaining this mod.

Updated to Version 9.
This is a massive revision, but you guys probably won't notice much of it, since the interface didn't really change that much. There's a lot of new or changed code, so it's entirely possible that new bugs show up.

When I saw Sustain-o-Mat pollinating a freshly baked YA, who looked like a punk, had a music LTW and no family-oriented traits, I was fed up with the random pollinations. I dropped them completely in favor of a scoring system. Next thing to implement will be to actually show the pollinations happen.

Regarding folks who actually use Sustain-o-Mat: Please use the ShowScoredBCMVictims cheat and tell me, if it makes sense to you. Or to be precisely, just tell me if it doesn't make sense to you and why. BTW: All scores and all settings have a range of 0..1000. When changing the settings, a window will pop up with a bit of explanation. The Redneck score is a constant value which will override the scoring if a sim has been identified as a redneck. The other numbers besides the total score showing up when using the cheat are: JS - Job Score; FiS - Financial Score; FaS - Family Score; AS - Age Score/Compressed Age Score; WS - Wish Score; RS - Risk Score

I'm still dumbfounded that people instantaneously asked about the Dragons' Dance but never ... as Zorg said: "I hate warriors, too narrow-minded. I'll tell you what I do like though: a killer, a dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would've immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun."

ShowScoredBCMVictims works.  It makes sense, especially when trying to configure the Sustain-O-Mat.  FYI, I had a sim with FaS1200.  Is it supposed to be that high?

What I'd like to know is how exactly a sim's score becomes that of a Redneck.  I have one sim whose score is 50.  She has a FaS of 500, which is her only high number.  Edit: I was rushed when I wrote this earlier, so let me rephrase...  I'm interested to know exactly what data churns out the overall score.  I have three females who are 50s, two 12s and one 1.  But what does the 50 represent?  A sim who is flirty, low FiS, high FaS, etc.?  Or is it just a random number and they just by chance hit on it?

Is it also possible to configure the Sustain-O-Mat with regards to the financial score?  Last 'hood I used BCM on I had lots of poor families who would overstuff the houses, and only the men could work with any regularity.  I like how your scoring system takes into account "this" first and "that" later, and I think that taking a good financial score into consideration could influence the decision to have more babies.  (Of course, if this is already into effect and I just haven't played with it long enough to see it, I do apologize and thank you in advance.)

Also, I would just like to add that I really like the way you changed the Raw Data.  It's much easier to read, along with the fact that I get a much better snapshot of what my population looks like, e.g. more females vs. males, not enough cribs, etc.

Edit: Sustain-O-Poll shows thumbnails of women who are pregnant and the father, but there are no names, words, etc.  When I mouse over the thumbnails they do not mention who the women are, so I didn't automatically know them since I haven't played them.  I wasn't sure if that was supposed to happen.

Updated to Version 9.1.


No, I'ts supposed to be capped. It is now.

The number itself is in fact random. You can change it in the configuration section of the pie menu. 50 seemed to work well, since most unplayed sims score pretty low. The question whether a sim is qualified to be a redneck is not random, though. There are 6 clues right now: 1. low net worth ((lot cost + family funds) divided by number of sims in the household); 2. less beds than sims in the household; 3. job level of 2 or lower; 3. no sim in the household has a job level higher than 4; 4. 3 siblings or more; 5. 3 children or more;

If 4 or more clues are true, the sim gets the redneck score. I admit it's kinda crude right now. I would appreciate suggestions on how to improve it.

There's a lot of variance in the financial score and it had a tendency to dominate the total score at first. I changed the weighting then. FiS and JS are weighted onefold, FaS is weighted twofold, and wishscore is weighted threefold. The age score gets applied to the mean of these scores. That makes sense to me. I think money alone won't make anyone wish for offspring.

Poor sims in overstuffed houses should automatically score lower, since their net worth is lower, their job score tends to be lower, they lack beds and cribs etc. On the other hand, I didn't want the scoring system to score rich sims higher per se. The score is supposed to represent the possibility of a sim to have a child now. We all know that poor families breed just the same, right? Often more, since they tend to place more value on family than on personal (work-related) development. It made sense to me in the 'hoods I tested it in. You tell me, if it makes sense in your 'hood.

No, this was not supposed to happen. The complete message string was right there, but I forgot to pass it to the notifier instead of the empty placeholder, which was just there to shut the compiler up. It is fixed now.

It might be too easy with what you have currently for a sim to be considered a redneck.  For example, a new couple who married and lived in the parents' house finally move into their own.  Usually the game moves them into a house with no pin money (clue 1).  They are young, so they have low level jobs (clue 3 and 4), and one of them may have three siblings.  They could be rednecks based on the math, but they could also be workaholics, athletic, ambitious, etc.

Is there any way to use traits as part of the equation?  I envision a redneck with much of the above and also someone who is a couch potato or slob, and maybe party animal (they love that liquor).  If that is possible, perhaps the threshold could be raised to five or more clues.

Of course, I'm just throwing out some ideas.  I intend on tweaking the scoring system for now to see what works best for me.

Well, yes, that is true.

Put that way, that does make sense and that is how my 'hood operated.  It just so happened that the 'hood I first ran the BCM on had a more genteel flavor to it.  I thought that more money would make it at least easier on families to sustain several children.  However, the way it works currently is more realistic.

Edit: Raw data says I have six pregnancies.  Sustain-o-Poll only shows two couples.  Should it be showing all six?

Trying to model "poor sims are clowncars" tends to negatively affect your game neighborhood composition as sims is a highly materialist game where sims depend on objects for their basic survival and cannot improvise. The result is a bunch of inadequately cared for sims that pee on themselves and die.

No, the value of the lot/house counts, too. There are usually no houses worth less than ~15k and the threshold is 5k per sim, i.e. 10k for a couple. This clue is actually pretty hard to "achieve".

Sure. Wish score and risk score are entirely trait-based.

Sustain-o-Poll shows you couples? It's supposed to pollinate sims. That's what it does here, anyway.

I say let them die. TS3 has too much of the marshmellow fairy land as it is, anyway. That and I have my WIP banking mod running, which I use to let families in inadequate houses take out a loan to move to a better home. Then I watch them struggle to pay it back and if they fail to pay their installments on time, the experimental WorkThemDead class gets them in its steel grip.

The redneck thing isn't really meant to model "poor sims are clowncars", though. Not on a regular basis, anyway. With the default settings, rednecks will almost always score lower than suitable non-rednecks. And sims living in houses that can support their family will score higher. Even more, if it can support one more member or if they have a free crib.

It appears to.  Raw data shows six pregnant.  Sustain-o-Poll shows two couples.  Raw data still shows six pregnant.

I looked at the code and found no apparent flaws. I checked it in the game: Raw data found one pregnant sim. Then I used Sustain-o-Poll and it pollinated one sim. Afterwards raw data found two pregnant sims. Everything seems to be in order.

It kind of confuses me that you write "Sustain-o-Poll shows..." You're talking about the "x got knocked up by y" notifications, right? You could try to take out BCM (delete the script cache), then start your game and let it run for a couple seconds, save and quit, and finally put BCM in again.

Yes, when I wrote that it "shows" I meant the notifications pop up.  Sorry for my explanation error.

I did as you recommended and now it is working as intended.  I'm usually meticulous about deleting the scriptCache every time I install a new mod.  Perhaps I failed this time.

Similar things happened here, too. To a lesser degree, though. Sometimes the object from the new version seems to get "disturbed" by the object of the old version (which gets saved with the savegame), despite the script cache being deleted. Seems to happen, when there are only minor signature changes, i.e. too minor for the framework to treat the mod as an entirely different object.

Updated to version 10. See first post for details.
You'll need to update BCM to version 10 to use it with game version 1.12/2.7/3.3/4.0. Also BCM version 10 is not backwards compatible with older game versions.

Updated to version 10.1.
Please update. There's a bug in V10 which prevents to load worlds after loading a world once (applies to WA destinations, too).

BTW: This bug is present in the obsolete version 9.1, too. I won't debug that version, though, because I don't want to and the code doesn't even exist anymore.

thanks for the update Buzz!!

I'm a little confused on the scoring system - could someone explain it to me in more detail?  For instance does a higher overall number mean the person is more or less likely to be pollinated?  It appears that the individual numbers being higher increases the odds of pollination, but the overall score being lower increases the odds of pollination.  If a sims' overall number is at or below 50, is that person considered a redneck (assuming I'm using the default settings)?  If someone wants to give me the actual formula that would be cool. 

Below is my assumption on how the different scores are influenced, are these correct?

Job Score (JS) - based on level of job

Financial Score (FiS) - based on total value for household, including house, lot, stuff and cash on hand

Family Score (FaS) - based on single/married, number of kids already have

ReS - I have no clue what this is.  Is this the raw Redneck score?

Age Score/Compressed Age Score (AS) - first number gets higher as you age, the second one is bell-curve-ish

Wish Score (WS) - higher if family oriented or showing want to have babies

Risk Score (RiS) - higher if flirty, hopeless romantic, great kisser, party animal

In all cases higher score means higher chance of pollination.

The other way around: If a person is considered a redneck, the redneck score (50 by default) will be applied. Only rednecks get that specific score. After that there's no special treatment for rednecks.

Level and income, the latter probably being inaccurate for the new career types. Plus, there's a little malus for part-timers.

divided by the number of sims belonging to the household.

Plus mali/boni if the sim or her partner are polyamorous, live in the same household, are overstuffed, have a free crib.

That is the Relationship Score. Kinda sneaked in unannounced with either the update for the Ambitions patch or the bugfix. It's a measurement for the age and trait compability of the couple in question.

Age score is already bell-curve-ish and with the default age shifting it's a pretty good approximation of the RL distribution of the age at which women give birth (in the so-called First World nations). Since this score is actually multiplied with the sum of the other scores and not just added, there's the possibility to lessen it's influence with compression. That simply means all age scores will be shifted in direction of the middle, i.e. 500.

There's no wish to have babies, not for inactive sims. It's entirely trait-based with a whole lot of randomness for insane sims. Wish score alone is actually pretty crude, but I think together with the other scores it gives a pretty good assumption of the overall situation of a sim and the likelihood of him/her developing the wish to breed.

Basically yes, as it is also entirely trait-based. The only trait taken into account of the ones you stated is flirty (and unflirty). The others are more like indicators for the question whether or not the sim is likely to omit contraceptions or fuck up at using it. Like genius, absent-minded, dumb (if AM is present), daredevil, loser, lucky/unlucky and a few more.

Thanks for the clarification!  What about situations where I played a family and left them with a want to have a baby before I switched to another family?  Does that affect their score at all?

No, it doesn't. I'm aware that this is AwesomeMod's home turf, but I don't take it for granted that everyone uses AwesomeMod. So to me inactive sims having wishes at all is a special case. Inactive sims having the wish to breed is an even more special case. The result is a very special case, that really is too rare to be taken into account. Plus, IMHO the spawning of wishes isn't really that sensible anyway, so there's not much of point.

Thank you for all the work you've done on this mod, Buzzler. It's far easier to use this than trying to manually manage population.

I have a few questions. In the Maintain-O-Mat mode, is the number of current pregnancies used when calculating the neighborhood's total population? It seems that the BCM currently runs in fits and starts in this mode. It tends to overshoot the target population by about 7-10 sims and then has to sit idle until the population naturally settles back to the target, at which point it will overshoot by 7-10 sims again. This leads to a less than smooth population distribution. If current pregnancies are not counted as part of the population, making it so that they are would probably fix this.

Also, would it be possible to implement a super-smooth mode where a target population is set and the BCM tries to maintain a pre-calculated number of pregnancies? For example, if lifespan was set to 80, pregnancies lasted for 3 days, and a user wanted a population of 120, the BCM would keep the number of pregancies around 4.5 every day. This would make all of the numbers in the "Demographic's Deviance" table in the "Raw Data" function close to 0.

Updated to experimental Version 11
Hint: For all I know, Sustain-o-Mat might be completely fucked up now.

It was; I fixed it in version 11. Sorry about the experimental status. I was in the process of finally implementing real pollinations instead of the "Boom, you're pregnant!" stuff and didn't want to go back to the old code.

In a closed loop system you can only have one feedback value. Target population and target number of pregnancies would make it two values. I've added something to cap the number of simultaneous pregnancies according to your description though. Plus one to give Sustain-o-Mat something to work with. Capping it at the exact number would have the effect that the population could never reach the target population.

Don't overestimate the deviance stuff. It's nice if the values are close to zero, but having exactly zero deviance will probably never happen except by pure chance. That's because sims don't age smoothly but in fixed steps and all at the same time.

Version 11 withdrawn. Intermediate version 10.2 released.
V11 is still too bugged, and since I have currently a shitload of debugging to do, it might take a bit to get to it. Use V10.2 until then.

Is this going to be updated for 6.0+? My 'hood is so dead I doubt even zombie jeebus could make it suck less. I actually did THERAPTURE with only 1 sim as a chosen one and the exact crappy amount of sims came back.

V12 is compatible with LN6.0.

Thanks. It only said 5.2 on the front page so I wasn't sure.

This just started happening to me this evening, hope this can come in handy for you...

How unpleasant. The only way how this seems possible is if the SimDescription in question doesn't reference a household. This should never happen in the first place, especially since the SimDescriptions that get passed to that method get fetched from a household's list of SimDescriptions immediately beforehand. Seems like you have a dangling reference there. I've added a check that should stop the error from occuring and show a notification about it. Tell me if you get that notification.

Thanks!!  I will!

Does this mod work for the Vacation areas as well, or just our base 'hood worlds? 

I only ask because I've been playing a Chinese themed legacy recently, and simChina ends up almost deserted after the initial population starts dying off.  Not very many cribs were placed in the 'active' NPC houses, so they don't self populate very well.  If this will work for all Worlds under my control, then I'll probably pop it in.  Probably will anyway.

I've been using it for some time and it works wonder in home hoods. I've sent one of my sims for numerous vacations in the 3 vacations worlds and the mod never kicked in during the vacations. Even though it doesn't seem so mandatory to save them it would still be nice to see them having sprogs too.
BTW Buzzler, baaa for your mod; you saved my dying hoods.

Edit: Thanks for the tip LVRugger, didn't think the mod needed to be activated in the sub hoods too. I'll edit the vacation worlds to put a mirror in each camp.

I've had BCM notices when vacationing sims. You have to make sure there is a mirror in the country you are visiting.

Ah, well that makes sense.  Great! As soon as my internet stops insulting me every time I click the download link I'll plop down some mirrors everywhere.

would you like me to email the file to you since you are having crappynet troubles?

Will the birth control mirror be updated for the latest patch?

It has been compatible with the latest patch the whole time. Or are you talking about the garden thingy release patch that's probably gonna be released soon? I had people asking for an update about five minutes after a patch got released, but asking before it got released, is a new one.

Haha no the latest patch, the one released at the end of November.

Is the Birth Control Mirror still available for download? Every time I try to download I get the following error message: "The file link that you requested is not valid."

Seems like 4shared scrambled the file or something. I'll reupload it tomorrow - today's busy.

ETA: Try now.

It works now, thank you!

Buzzler, are you going to update this mod for generations/patch 1.22?  I'll have your sim babies if you do :P  I do love this mod!

I tried it with Generations. The game starts and it appears to be working fine, but Raw Data seems a bit off:
(http://i54.tinypic.com/34sp2xj.jpg)
Note the Deviance and NBR sections.

wow, so it would never self regulate just yet...lol

basbas, I've checked and the math should still be accurate. You've got a really short lifetime there and pretty short YA and adult ranges. The values seem to be ok in that context.

Ah, you're right. I fiddled around with the aging options in the latest patch, and I obviously forgot that I had done so.
Thanks.

so uh, i decided to try this out since it looks like it should be working...i'm fully patched, playing with base game and ambitions, and this doesn't seem to be working. no BC options in any mirror...

Buzzler, could you update this for the latest patch?  I would love you forever!