More Awesome Than You!

So here it is as a Seasons repost (although it's supposed to be compatible with versions down to NL), including a patch for the completely useless SS heat/cold warning and sudden-death abduction. By default, you get a warning once every 5 hours if a kid exceeds 50 heat or cold. However, this is useless, since the warning itself does nothing, and the SS shows up instantly when you pass -95, which can essentially happen as "sudden death". Imagine a sport where you're told the game will last 2 hours, only at some random point halfway through the match, the referees put the game into sudden death mode and the next person to score is automatically declared the winner. Only nobody is notified of this until it is triggered. That's how it works now. Naturally, this is not awesome. So here it is, working awesomely.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/terror/blue.gif)
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/zip.gif)sshack.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/seasons/hacks/sshack.zip)

Realistic Social Worker Hack (v1b) for TS2NL v1.0p1 - TS2Seasons
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado & Doctor Boris)

Congratulations to: Draklixa!

INSTRUCTIONS:
Place in your MYDOCU~1\EAGAME~1\THESIM~1\DOWNLO~1 directory.

FEATURES:
This hack makes the Social Worker behave more reasonably. The Social Worker
will only be summoned for child abandonment if a child-aged sim is left
unattended for extended period of time, such as if all adults are very dead,
or if the unattended sim is a toddler and therefore should not realistically
be left home alone at all. The bizarre metric of "child-hours" has been
eliminated.

The social worker will not be summoned for a child receiving bad grades unless
the number of bad children outnumbers the number of passing children: No more
adopted bad child causing all your good children to be taken away because he
came with a failing grade from when he was taken away before.

The Social Worker will continue to be summoned if you intentionally abuse your
children by starving or neglecting them, so you can still get kids taken away
to fill the adoption pool if you want.

Parents will also no longer be physically prevented from going to work if
children are present on the lot. No more having to miss work because the stupid
nanny refused to show up until 15 minutes afterwards.

Heat/Cold failure and warnings no longer random and useless.

COMPATIBILITY:
This hack is compatible with all FFS hacks. Tested for TS2PETsp0.
Not compatible with other social worker modifications.
Not for use with the original game.

SIDE EFFECTS:
May cause computer damage, incontinence, explosion of user's head, coma, death,
and/or halitosis.

Oh my god.... BAAAAH! BAAAH! BAAAAH! BAAAAH!

I always hated how the social workers works. I remember being left alone at home for sometimes up to three hours when I was nine, and I was a very stupid child. I managed not to catch myself on fire.

Bye-bye paladin's "fix".
Hello Pescado's fix.

If I have a child with a 'D' but the others has A's and C's, then the social worker shouldn't come right?
I'm getting pop ups saying the child isn't doing well in school and could be taken away. So are these just
mere threats?
(this is with the old ss hack, haven't tried this shiny yet)

Yep - the message is an empty threat. .
I've played with the old version since it first came out and even if it gives you the warning, as long as the number of passing children outnumber the failing children, she will not come.

It's nice to see the sshack with its own thread.
The original Social Worker code was so silly - the fact that she comes and takes all the kids when only one was failing was incredibly frustrating. 

And, I'm happy that I don't have to worry about whether I need to choose Paladin's hack or Pescado's anymore in regards to the freezing/overheating problem.  :)   
I like to keep the the number of "awesome mods" higher than the number of "non-awesome mods" in my downloads folder.

All the messages are really empty threats. The SS trigger is really "sudden death". You can leave hunger in the "warn" range forever, nothing will ever happen except another warning in 5 hours or so, but if you drag to -100, the SS will appear at the same cycle as the warning. In practice, this is not noticeable in the case of motives and grades, which normally decay gradually, first dropping into the warning range before failing out entirely, but this is not so with temperature, which can instantly fail from a previously acceptable state in less than one cycle's time.

Oh thank you so much, especially for this:

That has always got on my nerves ¬_¬ Also, I don't understand why a child should be taken away just for failing grades at school - does that happen in the States? Cause it sure as hell doesn't happen in Britain; if a kid's doing badly they get extra help in the form of teaching assistants, for instance :P

I'm glad the temperature thing's fixed too - not the parent's fault if they want to build a snowman!

No. It's a purely Maxian game mechanic to force players to actually send their kids to school. Otherwise there wouldn't be any incentive to do it at all, because sim-school, much like real-school, is worthless! You'd think the private schools in Simland would be better, but they're only a marginal improvement on public school. Everyone knows the Pescado Military Homeschooling Program is More Awesome Than You. TEN-HUT!

Or even it is, even in our present fascist police state, nobody loses their kids for letting them build a snowman. Yet. I'm sure they'll make it illegal eventually when "terrorists" find a way to use snowmen in their plots.

thanks.  ;)

Thanks, i let one of my sim kids make a snowman and the next i know it shes taken away. I went out of the lot and i didn't save. Now i am extremly carefull.

I just had the "kid is getting too hot" message pop up on one of my lots.  It was summer, but late evening.  The kid in question was in bed, sound asleep, but his temperature gauge was all the way in the red.  So I had him get up and take a shower.  It did cool him off, but I'm glad I had this hack so there was no danger of the SS taking him away.  (This feature of the sshack is what *finally* convinced me to install it.  I've known about this hack for a long time but never had any desire to use it until Seasons came out.)

I have no idea what the kid was doing before he went to bed (I'd just come onto the lot and frankly didn't pay attention to him until the warning popped up) but I think it's awfully strange that Sims can overheat while lying in bed asleep.  For what it's worth, I do have the warmthfix installed.

I have heard that if the bedroom is in an attic and it's summer that sims can overheat just from sleeping.  Another dumb maxis mistake.  Apparently there's a pretty big problem with attic rooms now.  Too hot in summer, too cold in winter.  If roofs aren't put on just so, then it can rain and snow inside.  They really need to fix the build problems when they have a patch.

On another note, thank you so much for making this, JM.  I literally quit playing after threats from the ss for my kids building a snowman and came here to request you make a hack to fix it.  To my delight, you already had!  I guess I can understand your site title!

That sounds a lot like real attics, yes. Are you sure Maxis did it WRONG?

LOL!  You're probably right, J.M. and Maxis was just trying to make them more realistic like the crying babies.

I honestly can't say I've noticed babies wailing any more than they usually do.

I agree with J.M.  I keep reading posts saying that babies and toddlers are crying all of the time, but in my game they are no different than they were pre-Seasons.

Well, I have had 5 babies born in my game so far (not all to the same household) and only the first baby cried all the time.  I would have them play, cuddle, cuddle, play, feed, cuddle,cuddle then put in crib. The first time the babies diaper needed changing, I had the adult change it then put the baby back into the crib as the baby had just been put into the crib maybe 15 sim minutes before (just long enough for the parent to walk out of the room and down the stairs which were a few steps from the door).  Before the parent could even exit the room, the baby started crying again and it showed he needed his diaper changed again.  I thought, what?  So I had the parent change the baby (on a changing table both times) and put the baby back into the crib.  Just as the parent was straightening back up and before she had even stepped away from the crib, the baby started crying again and again, it showed that the baby needed changing.

I decided to age him to a toddler using testing cheats.  He was fine from that point on.

That is the only one out of five that I have had a problem with.  And no, I didn't have any hacks in my game which could have caused it as at that time, I only had your nowhatsthis (that drives me nuts!) in my downloads folder since it was a brand new game and I wanted to play it vanilla for a while to see how things went.

I'm not sure that all the other people who have posted about crying babies had the same situation happen, but that's what happened in my game.  Could have just been one of those random glitches that everyone gets now and then and not at all what everyone else means.  Don't know.

I had a warning about a baby with low social ("Children need social interaction..." etc) in one of my houses today.  I have raised hundreds of Sim-babies and never seen this before.  Kids and toddlers, sure.  Babies, never, until Seasons came out.  I think they changed something.  Maybe it's personality-based, so that more outgoing babies need to be cuddled and played with a lot, or something like that?  Just a guess, but it might explain why some people are seeing this and others are not.

I've been selecting babies in debug mode, and discovering that their comfort can also sometimes be low (as well as fun and social).  Which is weird, toddlers aren't affected by comfort at all, so why should babies be?  As far as I know, there is no way to raise a baby's comfort.

Karen and Kyna, I think the baby I had was actually just a random glitch, but I have read other posts on other sites that have said the same thing you two said.  I went to Sims2.com's bbs and on it all Maxis says is that they will fix it in the patch.  Now though, many of the posters are saying that they would rather Maxis didn't fix it as crying babies that need play and socializing is so much more realistic.  I agree that it is more realistic, but personally, I would rather the babies behaved like they always did in previous games.  They are only babies for such a short time in the game and once they are toddlers, they are much more demanding.  I would rather my adult sims were able to spend those couple of days before toddlerhood doing more important things than playing and socializing with the baby.  But that's just me, I have three kids of my own and the older they got, the better I liked them.  So I'm not a baby person.

My sims spend the same amount of time with their babies now as they did before Seasons, cuddle/cuddle/play/feed/bathe/cot (crib) rinse and repeat when baby next wakes up, adjust slightly for nappy change and baby should be A-Okay.

Since I heard the crying baby thing was a social thing, I get them up, play, feed, cuddle, then back to bed until next bottle or diaper change. And I have had no screaming babies.

The effect is largely imperceptible in the present version of the Baby Controller, which kinda handles this automatically anyway.

I once tried raising a child without buying a crib.  The baby did ok, but that was the fussiest toddler I'd ever seen.  At the time I suspected that toddlers DO have a comfort score, but it's not shown.

If these kids have a comfort score, shown or not, then being in a crib should raise it.

Hook

I noticed this incessant crying as well.  I found that in Seasons babies simply do not like being left in their cribs.  So now I simply leave them out of their crib, if they are not sleeping.  That has solved the problem, although it's more annoying.  Previous to Seasons, I'd leave the baby in the crib except for a feed, change, cuddle, play session.  Which in real life would be perilously close to child neglect.  I wish they would just come up with a baby chair, or some other means to simply "park" your kid when he isn't sleeping.  Leaving it on the floor seems, kinda cold.

I think the Seasons patch fixes the baby crying problem anyway, plus a couple of other bugs (though not all of them, and certainly not the worst of them).

What are you talking about? Babies love floors.

I remember saying something about this back at VariousSimmers.  I said something about leaving the babies on the cold hard floor, and Pes says that prepares them for life, which is cold and hard.  :D

Children are like your future: Short, brutish, and nasty.

Should we go ahead and picture a boot stamping on a human face - for ever?

What?

Wow.  5 posts in and you already make no sense.

WTG!

I had this problem also and read elsewhere that it was low social but that did not always solve it. So I too made the babe selectable, found it was comfort and solved it with a bath. My babies seem to need bathing if for some reason their diapers are not changed stat. Which makes sense. With the baby controller I find mom or dad will seem to know when the baby is about to let go and be standing by the crib ready to whisk them onto the changing table. Anyway bathing raises the comfort and if the social is ok they will hang out in the crib quietly. I wish we had a little basket to put them in or something.

I just had a strange experience with a child almost-but-not-quite starving to death at home, on a lot that I'd opened a home business on earlier that same day.  The kid comes home from school with a D grade.  When her hunger gets low I try to make her get leftovers from the fridge, or even a snack, but the action keeps dropping out of queue.  Her hunger got about 98% into the red, still no sign of SS.  Aren't they still supposed to come if the kid is in actual danger of starving to death?  At any rate, she never did quite go into actual death by starvation.  It seemed like the hunger bar got stuck at about -99% (almost but not quite all the way in the red).  After several Sim-hours of watching her walk around like this, apparently starving but still trying to interact with family members, etc., I figured there must be something about the home business that was interfering, preventing the SS routines from kicking in.  I eventually quit without saving.

I have the latest versions of Macrotastics, BRY, BUY, sshack, etc.  I actually saw the social worker on another lot earlier this evening so she does still come.  Is it possible that the presence of a home business is keeping the SS from coming, and/or keeping the kid from dying?

If you are referring to Viewer's "Should we go ahead and picture a boot stamping on a human face - for ever?" comment, that is a very famous George Orwell quote. (Also the title of a Bad Religion song, not that I particularly like them or own anything by them.)

Made perfect sense in the context of envisioning the future as a cold, hard place much like a floor a baby has been dropped upon.

No, but a nanny might cause that.

It might...except that there wasn't a nanny on this lot at the time.  No need, as I had two pregnant Sims in the family at the time and there would always be someone at home.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or just 'the way it is'.

I screwed up with my main legacy family. The youngest son had turned from a toddler into a child, but didn't get a chance to go to school before I switched houses. The other other house, some cousins, had a snow day. It was a good opportunity to take some pictures, so I summoned the other kids there, including the legacy house kids. Since only the house you're in is getting the snow day, the other kids are supposed to be in school (this is why I summoned rather than just invited). About halfway through taking pictures of the kids being cute in the snow, I got a message that Ian (the affected kid) had skipped school and lost a letter grade. Oh well.

Back in the main legacy house, through a series of stupid mistakes, I ran the lot debugger's 'Force Error' while the kids were at school. Little did I realize, this apparently knocks school out of their queue and sends them back home. It was too late in the day to drive them to school, and I ended up getting the message that Ian again had skipped school and lost a letter grade. This brought him down to F.

Luckily, his brother had good grades, so all was well with the world. Or so I thought.

That day also happened to be his brother's birthday. So, the elder brother turned into a teenager and suddenly I got the 'dun-de-dun' music and the social worker showed up to take Ian with her. Essentially, once the elder brother turned into a teenager, the house was no longer considered to have an equal or majority number of kids with good grades.

In the end, I quit without saving and went into SimPE and gave him a D+. I don't particularly like cheating with the main legacy house, but I wasn't about to lose a kid over my stupidity. Eitherway, I wasn't sure if this was a bug or, as I said above, 'just the way it is'.

Yup, just a nice combination of really bad moves: the "can't go to school" effect of moving in at 0800, the fact that your child aged up to a teen and thus was now ignored by the SS controller, and all those other factors combined together. With NL, you can take them to school even on move-in day using an ownable car, but without it, you're just screwed.

with InSIM you could have fixed his grade right away  ;D

Yeah yeah yeah. :) I'm getting closer to downloading Insim. It sounds like it would just make life easier with a bunch of little things I'm doing constantly.

Thanks for answering, Pescado. I figured it was a 'just the way it is' type of thing, but thought I'd mention it.

I'm conducting research into fixing the "school issue". Perhaps it will become a Fix like "Fix Work State".

You should post this story on the BBS, so the people there can point and laugh, and explain to you the error of your ways. :)

Hook

How long are we supposed to have to rectify overheating before the SS arrives?  My legacy kid and baby were taken about a sim hour after the warning, it might have even been less than an hour but it definitely didn't exceed that.  I was trying to cool the kid with a water balloon fight, but obviously that didn't work well enough  :(  I'm only posting this because I thought the time seemed far too short between the message and the SS turning up, I wondered if the last Seasons patch (patch 3) might have messed with it.

I have to find a faster way to cool the poorer family kids down, they don't all have swimming pools and fruit juice after all.  He was only fishing darnit!

It depends on whether you have SShack installed or not. If you have SShack, you will receive about 3 hours after the onset of the first warning to deal with the matter, which basically doesn't come until your sim passes out or freezes. If you do NOT have SShack, the warning is useless and completely ineffectual, as the SS will show up the moment your sim gets close to the pass out/freeze point, with no useful warning at all, as the arrival of the SS is not at all triggered to the warning due to the "sudden death" nature of temperature failures. It's just like how if something were to drop a child's "critical" motives like hunger or social to -100 instantly, the SS would immediately appear, even if there had not been a warning. The warnings are not actually functional at all, but give the appearance of such because hunger and social normally do not make abrupt changes. However, temperature DOES make abrupt changes in response to certain activities, and is not a gradually decaying function, so the warning tells you nothing.

have you tried making them have a drink of water? that always cools my sims right down

Sleepycat - I'll try the water, thanks!

J.M. I have the latest version of SSHack in, I'm pretty sure it was nowhere near 3 hours between the warning and the SS showing up but I'm going to try and set it up deliberately now just to make sure, my sense of time can be skewy.

Edited to add:

My sims are playing hardball and refuse to go past 84 now, this might take longer than I thought  ;)

Okay, the Necromancy guy is cool.  Why does everyone say he's scary?  (Assumption: in-joke.)

I would like to know if this is compatable with Inge's social worker hack.  I have hers in right now and this out, under the assumption that it is not.  I am non-awesome, of course, and totally clueless about programing in general.  I currently have Uni, OFB, Seasons, and FT.