More Awesome Than You!

Here's an example of how Sim AI could be improved.

Jonah and Iriana are brother and sister.  When they were both teens, Jonah fell in love with Tosha Go.  They dated for a short time, but then Tosha cheated on him...with Iriana.  After slapping Iriana around a bit, Jonah seemed to have "gotten over it" and eventually the brother/sister relationship was repaired.  The two lived in the dorm together and became the best of friends... or so Iriana thought.

Fast-forward a few years.  Iriana becomes joined to a lass named Gretchen and they adopt the lovely Elise. Unfortunately for Iriana, Gretchen's sexuality is a bit more... flexible... than her own.  Jonah saw the unique opportunity for revenge and seduced Gretchen while Iriana was at work, getting her pregnant. 

Gretchen soon delivers a little baby girl, Raleigh, and Iriana takes to it like it is her own, with no suspicion whatsoever that Gretchen has been playing around.  Perhaps she believes in immaculate conception through lobster thermidor?

Maybe she's like those abused women who just block it all out.  :P  I hate lifetime.

Yeah I have a parallell universe of a neighborhood that has clones of Don Lothario and Chloe Curious in it.  Oddly enough, Chloe had Don's baby, even though Don changed aspirations and has a wife and daughter of his own.  As things turn out, Marisa Bendett Lothario does not know that Don had been fooling around with Chloe, and Chloe's and Don's son, Barry, does not know who is daddy is.  Oh well, ignorance is bliss I suppose.   ::)

"As things turn out, Marisa Bendett Lothario does not know that Don had been fooling around with Chloe, and Chloe's and Don's son, Barry, does not know who is daddy is." [Chee-Z]

Fathers and sons/daughters ALWAYS know who is the father/son/daughter - that's how the game is programmed...:).

You can say that, talking about Real Life - not The Sims.  ;D

I look in Barry's relationships and it shows in his Family section only his mother and his aunt.  In his all relationships section, it does not show that he's even met his father.  Maybe it's because Don was not there when Barry was born (they live in separate households).  Or maybe I'm looking at it wrong or something, who knows.   :D

Yes, I think that its crazy that sims could find out that they are being cheated on by viewing roses or thank you cards that dates give to their lovers/spouses and yet didn't know the kid is not theirs.
 :-\

By the way, my fav vamp's lover died 3 generations ago. But his family members still disapprove of him looking for other lovers and always get double negatives when they caught him making out with other sims. If this is not crappy AI, I don't know what it is.

Well, the kid won't fill their wants, and it won't show them as being related to the child- but they don't get a negative memory either :p

I always hate this too.  I guess it's where your own imagination has to come into play.  You'd think there'd be a way to program it in there..but then again it wouldn't be possible for it to pick and choose how it was recognized...it would be an all or nothing deal, like it is now anyways. 


I had a house in Pleasantview where I got fed up with this.  I had Heath Broke & his wife and Valente Dreamer (offspring of the famous Broke & Dreamer families of course).  Valente always had a thing for Heath's wife so I eventually gave in and let them had a fling.  Thanks to Inteen I had a lil accidental pregnancy happen.  Valente Dreamer had maintained the family's dark skintone of course and the Brokes still their light skintone (you probably know where this is going lol)...so I figured if the baby "looked" enough like Heath my storyline would be that he raised his wife's love child with his best friend being none the wiser till later down the road.

Well the baby was born with the darker skintone.  Here we have a house full of skintone 2 sims.  And the wife pops out a skintone 4 baby...and all the while Heath is standing there cheering lol I don't think so.  I had to improvise and start a war between them.  It seemed only right.  Let's face it... if you and your partner are one skin color and you go pop out a kid that is a completely different color...somebody is going to be wondering what the heck is going on lol


Jysudo...3 generations and they still disapprove...wow.  I didn't know that went on for so long.
That's okay... I have a male sim that is somewhat angry about his brother hooking up with a cheerleader.  Being that one is romance and one is pleasure they've had this issue a lot when it comes to the romantic rival thing.  However..the brother is gay so I'm trying to figure out why he cares what women his brother is hooking up with lol

This behaviour it's ok for me, one of my sims have a baby with the Social Bunny, so she don't have to explain how in the hell that happen.

Your problem is that you're expecting sims to make a logical deduction based on indirect observation.

They're not programmed to do this, so there's no real mystery: Unless a sim witnesses an act directly while not too preoccupied to do so, as far as he's concerned, it didn't happen. Attempts at deductive reasoning invariably make even less sense: See "flower rage".

It wouldn't be that hard to program an interaction where if a homosexually joined sim gets pregnant, the partner treats it as a cheating interaction.

I always thought that it would be nice if they added a paternity test option.  You could have a Sim call and request a paternity test on a baby or toddler.  If the Sim who called was not on the family tree of the baby in question - then the paternity test would be negative and the Sim would react as if they caught their spouse/lover cheating.

This way you could make the decision if the significant other discovered the truth or not.

Currently I have them catch the significant other cheating and just take pictures for my storyline.  Then, I pretend that it is because of the child, but it would be nice not to have to pretend anymore...

TS2 is Object-Oriented.  Sims themselves are objects and they interact with objects using a method system.  Heck, even Social Interactions are still objects and they haven't even bothered to change it since S1.  In other words, they aren't "sentient" and won't be capable of "sentience" in this Sims Cycle.

The fact that they're forced to act upon objects and relying on an attenuation values on said such objects for their AI/AS, makes them complete morons and only able to figure out if someone is "cheating" by seeing an object that relates to another sim or witnesses the event.  I guess memory pillaging could help in figure out who's cheating with who if sims were allowed to pillage it, but then it would probably produce some undesired effects and they're probably missing data in their current state.

Sims are social creatures, one would think that if one of them saw the spouse of their best friend cheating, they would call their friend or even drop by as a matter of urgency.

However as has quite rightly been pointed out, Sims are also morons.  They probably wouldn't even know about making babies if we didn't tell them to ;)

Weren't Sims originally supposed to be able to find out about cheating via other Sims who witnessed the event? I swear I can remember reading that detail, or seeing it in a promo video or something. AFAIK this doesn't happen.

I did have one incident way, way back when I first got the base game -- Don Lothario finished romancing/woohooing one Caliente sister and sent her home, and about an hour later the other sister showed up and yelled and slapped him silly. That could be one of those preprogrammed events though. Anyway.  :P

Sims also have one-track minds -- I had one male sim walk right past his girlfriend making out with another guy because he was on his way to the toilet.  Didn't even react until he came out of the bathroom and 'realized' what was going on.  It was rather amusing...

That was supposed to be by way of memories, and I'm not sure who was EVER supposed to get those memories or if anyone other than the spouses gets them now.

My sister did that storyline with DJ Broke and his wife, a Romance sim who got herself knocked up by her only black boyfriend. Sister made him shout at his wife continuously until she walked out. Leaving the baby. Now that is stupid behaviour.

I always thought this too.  At least with NL installed they recognize it and their relationship drops with the offending parties though, usually just for spouses of family members though IIRC.  I guess that is somewhat realistic.



They can via gossip but it's extremely rare for it to even come up, especially when you would like for it too.  B/c apparently gossiping about burned food is WAY more interesting than the latest affair going on in the 'hood.

Yes there was a promo video for the game narrated by a Maxoid showing a birthday party with hubby, hubby's old girlfriend, wife, and wife's sister in attendance.  Hubby went off with old girlfriend and started making out with her.  Wife's sister witnessed this, got embarrassed, went and told wife who then suffered a major Aspiration loss.  Hubby apologizes, then old girlfriend kisses him in front of her, and seconds later the wife's sister and the old girlfriend are duking it out in a cloud of dust.

You're also right in that this kind of thing rarely happens, if at all.  The reason why is because in order to communicate the affair to the wife, she and her sister have to gossip and the subject of their gossip has to be the event she witnessed.  In practice it appears that gossip can be ANY memory that the sim has witnessed or been told about by another sim.  So basically, if the sim has been played for a long time this amounts to A LOT of memories of which any can be randomly picked.  The chances of landing on the "juicy" stuff is pretty small.

The video was a bit misleading about that.  It sort of implied that if the sim witnessed some kind of cheating event and they had a meaningful relationship to the injured party who was on the lot at the same time, they would immediately go and report the behavior to them.  That's clearly not what happens.

Ahh. But, theoretically, if I had Sim Witness and Sim Cheated-On gossip until they dropped dead -- or just got lucky -- Cheated-On COULD find out? They just prefer to talk about burned spaghetti.

What about chatting? I know I've seen Sims casually bring up their cheating over breakfast....

They don't, sorry.There isn't a programmed reaction specific to the memory being passed. Meaning that even if a sim talks about the cheating with the person being cheated on...nothing. Another reason why it's not often a gossip topic is because it is classified as a green, "positive" memory, and sims prefer greatly to gossip about negative memories. Since the cheating is a green memory, it is rarely talked of.

It was nixed altogether then. Damn, I thought so, but it's still disappointing. I really liked the idea of being able to tattle on people.  :P

I'm going to have to disagree with Pescado unless my game just went wonky twice.  I've had sims seemingly react to gossip of their cherating spouse, knife thing over their heads and all.  Very rare, but it has happened in my game twice.

If the gossip memory is good, maybe having them brag about it instead?

I know I just looove seeing a Sim's teenaged daughter congratulate him on cheating on her mother...

The object orientation of the game is irrelevant.  Register a delegate between sims when they get joined (or fall in love while living together, you get the idea).  When a sim because pregnant, it fires an event.  The delegate on the spouse picks it up.  If the spouse picking up the "my partner is pregnant" event is female, trigger the WTFBBQ interaction.  If the spouse is male, no reason to be suspicious.  You could actually do something similar to have sims "notice" when their child's genetics is not within the realm of possibility for their union, but that is a little less important IMO.

I'm an object oriented developer, so I call bullshit on object orientation being the reason this doesn't work.

It is not quite that simple. Even assuming that a sim "knows" that his partner (if female, males normally only get this through alien abductions), is supposed to only become pregnant if a woohoo has occurred 2 days ago, the problem is that the game does not presently support any kind of timestamping of events, nor does it tend to keep track of many such "duplicate" events, which tends to put a lot of holes in its ability to make a deductive reasoning. Even if it did do this, people have enough corner cases to render nearly as many false positive results as real ones. The number of edge cases in this is simply massive, and there's no way of knowing whether or not this is, in fact, allowed or not, since sims don't really have any kind of decisionmaking of any sort. Ultimately this sort of thing is going to have to be left up to the player.

I suppose it would be possible to add an interaction to bust someone once the sufficiently obvious may have been proven, so that the player can choose to invoke it at his choosing.

What if an object appeared on the lot when the husband was not the father. It could be the test results (like an at home DNA Test) and have very high advertising. If the Dad got there 1st it would set off the cheated on reaction. But if another sim makes it there 1st they can throw it away. that way there is an element of surprise.

I agree that trying to keep track of the timing for heterosexual pregnancies might be unnecessarily complex, but in the case of the pregnant lesbian - the fact that she got pregnant at all shows there was infidelity with respect to her female partner, so if there were delegates listening timing wouldn't necessarily matter.

*shrug* I just think there are some little things that could be added that would go a long way.  I doubt Maxis will ever do it, and it's probably too complex to hack around (I don't attempt to write hacks for the Sims, I leave that to others more awesome than I) but I don't think that it would be too difficult were Maxis to decide to introduce that logic.

I personaly like the phone call/paternatiy test idea...make it cost a bit of cash too, as it would IRL..so our trailer trash simmies, would just have to keep wondering...hehehe

K

See, but that's not necessarily true, either -- there are 'same-sex pregnancy' hacks out there, so a lesbian CAN be pregnant if you're using one. So there may or may not be infidelity involved.

Well, if Maxis had coded the logic in, then same-sex pregnancy hacks would need to work around it.

Maxis shouldn't code around hacks - hacks should code around Maxis. 

Not necessarily true. She could have been pregnant already before they met: Remember, no timestamps.

Additionally... what if people wanted to work in surrogate mother or male donor stories? For example... if male same-sex couples hired a female sim to be impregnated and carry their child. Or if female same-sex couples hired a male friend as a sperm donor. In this case... it shouldn't necessarily be considered an infidelity. This would probably be far too complicated to code into the game without actually setting this up as a kind of scenario I suppose. Although sims have memories, they are essentially 'two dimensional' for lack of a better description. Sims can't really learn from their memories. In many cases, memories don't have that much of an effect besides acting as gates to other certain interactions or space holders to fulfill some specific goal. Sims pretty much just have an idea of what was a good memory (something to brag about) or bad memory (something to cry softly about :P).

The original jealousy system was a hacked up headache of a mess that even Pescado couldn't wrap his head around. I wouldn't want to throw in any other unnecessary monkey wrenches. The game just doesn't have well-designed 'A.I.' Sims are just utopiancreatures, where mostly everything is just a happy event for everyone, at least as far as having babies are concerned. Even having alien babies is at first a shocking but then ultimately happy event to be shared by all.  :D

Ste

Actually, that's really overstating the case. Sim memories are not even two-dimensional, they are one dimensional. In order for something to be TWO dimensional, it has to have two different axes, like an X and Y axis. Sim memories only have an X axis, the good/bad strength.

It's funny that you said that. I originally wrote it to say one dimensional... and then I edited myself thinking that didn't seem right. But I guess my original thinking was correct to begin with. :P Oh well, I think the gist of what I meant to say comes through. Memories are just like bits, with basically a good or bad 'value' and don't really have significantly long term effects.

It would be nice if things were a bit more complex, that they could actually program far more complex, realistic behaviours such as these, but the way it stands, it's just not possible. Maybe something that they'll might develop for Sims 3? ;)

Ste

Well, if you have my stuff, SOME memories actually have an impact on sim behavior. The Fight Club uses the fight memories to track battle experience, the Fire Mod uses the fire memories to decide whether or not a sim is used to things being on fire and thus reacts decisively to deal with the problem rather than freaking out, etc. The memory concept really could have been used a bit more. As it stands, it's mostly a cosmetic feature.

Well... that explains why one of my sims is constantly congratulating his spouse for cheating on him.

But it IS annoying. He should NOT be congratulating his other half for it.

At least I know there's very little that can be done about it, besides a re-write of the whole code...