More Awesome Than You!

I can do basic things with SimPe.  I have some mini-golf items made from the aspiration reward.  As far as I've seen, sims won't autonomously use them.

Is this a simple thing to change?  Is it covered in any of the tutorials?

It is simple to make something autonomous, but making it autonomous and not obsessive-compulsive is a different story. For a "fun" object like Golf, there are two basic levels of autonomous usage: OCD, and Ignored. If you set it at a sane level, it will be ignored, and you may as well not have bothered. If you set it to OCD levels, it will take over your neighborhood as the most obsessive thing in the game that sims will form multi-sim pileups to mess with. Your call.

For an example of an object which sims will obsess over, look no further than the bowling alley.  They can by default have maxed out their Fun motive and so long as their other motives are okay they will still autonomously bowl.

Typically if you want sims to obsess less over an object, you put an autonomous check in the Guardian BHAV, and then check the relevant motive.  If the sim is acting autonomously, and their motive is still too high, you then return false which means the interaction is not done.  If the sim is not acting autonomously i.e. their action is a result of the player choosing the interaction, you then go on with the rest of the routine as normal.

Some of these routines actually have the relevant autonomy and motive check already, but the motive check level is set at 100, which means the interaction can be done even when it won't gain the sim very much motive refreshment.

As above though, when you make something unable to be used above a certain motive level, sims tend to find something else to obsess over.  So you really need to fine-tune to find the point where they will use the object in an average day.  Or not.  You can effectively ban autonomous interactions with particular objects, if it helps give sims less things to obsess about.

This will be an owned business, so OCD is fine.  I'm going to lock customers out of the bathroom.  My idea is for them to play golf a while, then leave.

Actually I think differently about this.  I edited a couple of objects to make them more autonomous and they didn't go to the OCD level.  In SimPe, I

opened the TTABs.  For different functions of the object, there's a different set of TTABs.  I edited all the functions for autonomy (the hiigher the number, the less autonomy -- I think the highest number is 64). 

Then I also edited the motives for each function.  These are not the actual motives satisfied by the object, they are the motives that the sims think wilkl be satisfied by the object function.  So if the sim is low in energy, and the motives TTAB is set to tell it that it will get energy from this particular function of the object, the sim is more likely to do that function.  The "Min." column tells the sim what to expect as the minimum positive end level and the "delta" column tells how much the sim is told to expect it to change by.  The "type" column is where you can specify which kind of sim characteristic is going to think that the greater change will take place. I have the code for the types on my computer somewhere (I can't recall whether I finally found it at SImPe or at MTS).

Since these are far from the only things governing how a sim will autonomously use an object, it takes some trial and error to get this to work the way you want it to.  But I did it, and I'm really in deep water when it comes to this stuff: I only know the most superficial things. 

I can't offer advice, but if you manage to tweak them into autonomous, I'd be happy if you could post them. I think I also have those minogolf thingies and would love to see my sims play on their own.