Story Mode: A Random @Toading: Congratulations to Draklixa!

[Roflganger]

So, there's some sort of hidden limit to how far you can change a Sim's fatness / fitness variables through game actions?

 - Gus

I don't think you're following.  There is a chance that a Sim will, as part of a specific Story Progression event, be changed from their genetic physique.  This change, when inflicted by Story Progression, is irreversible.

Changes that occur because of ACTUAL events, such as working out, or overeating, ARE reversible.

The default Awesomemod config setting stops these "Bus Mutilations" from happening.

[MaclimesZero]

I am very confused about the ENTIRETY of the Story Progression thing.

The randomness of it all is absolutely maddening! I understand the need for randomness, on a general level. Life is unpredictable sometimes. But in more or less predictable ways. A male Flirt with Fear of Commitment may get beat up by a jealous boyfriend, or he may be successful with a woman, or he may strike out, or he may die in a fire in his home. These are all acceptable outcomes.

But I left Flirt to his own devices for only TWELVE HOURS of game time, and came back to find he had a baby. Either he knocked up some Sim with the shortest gestation period in all of the animal kingdom, or he adopted. NEITHER ONE makes any sense. Also, he could have at least bought a crib? Something? It was creepy to visit his home to find him puttering on the computer while the baby was lying on the floor of the kitchen, unattended.

When you turn your back on these Sims, all reason is replaced with madness. It's driving me nuts.

[Ezura]

I have a different, unrelated question: WHY THE HELL IS YOUR AVATAR SO STUPID-LOOKING? Is that YOU? Because if it is, you look like an utter moron.

I wish that was me - the real me looks more like your avatar!

Think that's Alizée (french singer).

Yep, that's Alizée.
I'm not a diehard fan, but a part of her song "I'm fed up" just sums up exactly how I feel about Sims 3.
"I'm fed up with being fed up!
 Poor me!"

(I think I could have chosen another picture though, but I love that smile!)

[Gus Smedstad]

I don't think you're following.  There is a chance that a Sim will, as part of a specific Story Progression event, be changed from their genetic physique.  This change, when inflicted by Story Progression, is irreversible.

You're right, I'm not following.

I thought it worked like this:
Each Sim has a Fatness and Fitness variable.
You can set the initial values of these variables in Create A Sim.
Cardio exercise reduces the Fatness variable.
Strength exercise increases the Fitness variable and decreases the Fatness variable.  Though presumably it doesn't change the Fatness variable as quickly, otherwise what's the point in having both options on TVs and Stereos?
Eating while full increases the Fatness variable.

The part I'm not getting is a distinction between the current Fatness / Fitness and a "genetic" fatness / fitness.  Or how a change by the Sim Mutilator is different from changes from game actions.  Just repeating "it's irreversible" doesn't clarify this, since I don't see how this prevents changes to Fatness through exercise.

 - Gus

[asmadasrabbits]

Sims will always tend towards their genetic weight, so if you have a really fat sim workout and get thin they will get fat again if they stop working out for awhile. The change from working out and overeating are temporary, but the change by the "Sim Mutilator" will be a change to their genetic weight and therefore permanent.

[Roflganger]

When you create a Sim in CAS, or when the game creates a random Sim, the fitness and fatness levels that you (or the game) assign at creation define the Sim's genetic physique.  This is the "norm" towards which Sims will always trend if you do nothing such as exercise or overfeed the Sim.  To use an example, imagine a Sim who is set in CAS to the far end of the fatness and muscular scale.  If you put them in the game, work them out until they are at the low (skinny) end of the fatness scale, and then do nothing, over time they will normalize back towards the far (fat) end again.  In other words, the changes brought about by exercise or eating are reversible.

Now, Story Progression in the unmodded game can "mutilate" the Sim, in essence giving them a brand new genetic physique. This would be like bringing the Sim back into CAS and moving the sliders. According to Pescado's figures, this change can occur within a range of .5.  But for illustration purposes, let's say it doesn't have a limit.  At some point, at random, Story Progression could then theoretically move the Sim to the "skinny" end, permanently redefining their physique - the new norm towards which they will trend.  This is the change that Pescado says is permanent and irreversible.

[seelindarun]

I find it astounding that EA decided to give sims a brand new gene for fatness but decided to wipe out those for hair, skin and eyes that they had before.

I'm not crazy about parthenogenesis but in nature, a population isn't stable with 50-100 individuals even if they mate like animals do (without regard to compatibility, marriage, age group).  If you put conditions on mating like sims must not be commitment-phobic, in the same life-stage, have romance (compatible traits), you need a much larger population before it will become self-sustaining.  Depending on how many incompatible trait pairs there are, you might need thousands of sims to randomly generate enough compatible couples in the same age group.

As a compromise, I suppose I'd increase the rate of random one-night stands resulting in pregnancy.  It's a little better than parthenogenesis and less taxing on resources than proper story-telling.

In a related vein, I think the relatively small population numbers is part of why a high rate of genetic mutation makes sense.  Since there's no genotype for hair, skin or eyes, the total gene pool is limited to exactly what you see.  If some colours were more dominant, the recessives would be completely wiped out from the pool in a generation or two.  In nature, recessive genes can persist in the pool indefinitely even when they aren't expressed, as long as the species has two alleles.

Ass-pull preserves some genetic diversity in the absence of recessive genetics when the neighbourhood is close to its full capacity at a couple hundred sims.

[J. M. Pescado]

(I think I could have chosen another picture though, but I love that smile!)

Well, pick a different one. The smiling offends me and makes me want to murder you.

I find it astounding that EA decided to give sims a brand new gene for fatness but decided to wipe out those for hair, skin and eyes that they had before.

Well, not really. The skin genes pretty much exist as they did in TS2, only instead of SX, you can choose an entire continuum. Hair/eyes no longer have genetics because with the ability to arbitrarily pick any shade or combination, there's no way to determine which is the "recessive". Making the customized colors behave differently would bring back Custom Genetics Are Evil where they would superdominate everything and generally be BAD to put in your game...and if everyone used it, the system would be the same as what we have now!

I'm not crazy about parthenogenesis but in nature, a population isn't stable with 50-100 individuals even if they mate like animals do (without regard to compatibility, marriage, age group).

Strictly speaking, animals can be quite picky. Random mating is one of those simplified assumptions akin to spherical cows.

If you put conditions on mating like sims must not be commitment-phobic, in the same life-stage, have romance (compatible traits), you need a much larger population before it will become self-sustaining.  Depending on how many incompatible trait pairs there are, you might need thousands of sims to randomly generate enough compatible couples in the same age group.

Strictly speaking, the population dynamics in real life wouldn't likely be self-sustaining, either. In suburban middle-class America, presumably the setting the game attempts to simulate as its baseline, the reproduction rate is actually below replacement replacement in real life. It's those stupid stinky poor people who are overbreeding.

In a related vein, I think the relatively small population numbers is part of why a high rate of genetic mutation makes sense.

They should have put a nuclear power plant right there in town. Then no one would question the mutation rate. In fact, in the future, I could do this, setting the mutation rate to be higher when your sims are living next to the nuclear power plant.

Ass-pull preserves some genetic diversity in the absence of recessive genetics when the neighbourhood is close to its full capacity at a couple hundred sims.

THe neighborhood capacity is larger than you think, really. They're using either longs or ulongs for NIDs now, meaning there's enough NIDspace to have a population of at LEAST 4 billion, and if they're using ulongs, the population can exceed the Earth's. Your computer will choke long before then, but there is certainly no obvious upper bound like in TS2.

[smokeverbs]

THe neighborhood capacity is larger than you think, really. They're using either longs or ulongs for NIDs now, meaning there's enough NIDspace to have a population of at LEAST 4 billion, and if they're using ulongs, the population can exceed the Earth's. Your computer will choke long before then, but there is certainly no obvious upper bound like in TS2.

That's a staggering thought. 4 billion babies, laying on the floor, while their not-parents play EA sports on their computer.

[Zazazu]

Well, soon enough we'd have major issues with sims being able to actually do anything, like in that school zerg rush video. That was just with 50 twelves and sixes.

[ProfPlumbob]

is this why 99% of the time Sims are just standing aimlessly inside their home(or sometimes outside, wtf?) doing absolutely nothing but watching the air pass in front of their face? 

Will this even be fixable so sims will actually live out their lives and not stare at the air while "God" rolls a die?  It sounds like a game limitation rather than crappy programming.

this has been pretty disappointing, I really wanted to be able to watch other sims live out their lives and instead they don't do much of anything other than what a chance card tells them and even then you don't get to see it happen.

I'd love to be invited to birthday parties, new baby arrivals, weddings...SOMETHING that makes you feel like you're actually apart of this town they said was so full of life. 

[Roflganger]

The amount of computing power that would be needed for the game to actually render all the Sims doing actual things would be staggering.  Why bother when you're not looking at them half the time?  However, I agree that it would be nice to be able to attend key events, at least for the Sims that your actives have a high relationship with.

I don't know how feasible it would have been to implement, but I could handle the sheer randomness of Story Progression if there were, as Pescado says, some sort of build up.  For instance, in a better world:

The game does its randomizing, and determines that Martha and Bob are going to be partnered.  The newspaper could say, "Martha and Bob spotted getting snuggly at the movies."  For pregnancies, "Has the flu hit Sunset Valley?  Rumor has it Martha Random was seen puking at the park!" Or for mutilations, "Bob Random shares his secret diet tips!" or "Our snoop spies Bob Random pigging out on ice cream and cookies."  Where relevant, these reports would happen a day or two before the actual event hits.

For those stupid made up deaths, they could go a step further.  The game could mark a Sim for death, and hint in the newspaper that "Bob Random is off to Pleasantview to represent Sunset Valley in the Lightning Rod challenge, the world's most dangerous sport".  A day later, the game flips a coin to determine whether Bob actually dies or not and reports the results accordingly in the paper.

This at least creates the illusion of some actual story.  If they can't show us, they could certainly do a better job of telling us.  In an ideal world, I'd love to see something like a gossip channel on TV with still shots of key moments from the previous week - Bob Random blackened by lightning or Martha slumped over a toilet, but I imagine that would be harder to implement.

I'm sure someone would say "Well, you make up your own story" but if they're taking the storytelling out of my hands by creating these random events, then they should finish the job.

[Ezura]

(I think I could have chosen another picture though, but I love that smile!)

Well, pick a different one. The smiling offends me and makes me want to murder you.

I was very tempted to take that offer, but I want to live long enough to see what remake expansionpack EAxis will do first. 



I don't think I would want to see other Sims rendered doing all of those things in town... flirting, getting married, walking around pregnant.
I've gotten used to never being apart of other Sims happy times.
I'd rather have it that my Sims magically got a girl/boyfriend, magically got married and then they magically had a baby.
Like the system is now, "It happens, but you can't see it happening".
That is much better than the current system where they sit inside their house unemployed and lonely for the rest of their lives.
I'm tired of never seeing my Sims in the news unless I forced them to do something or they died in some way.

In a way, they could have made you apart of other Sims lives by taking advantage of the Rabbit Holes.
For example, if a friend, let's say Mary, was picked randomly to have a baby, then you would get a message that you could join Mary at the hospital to be there for her.
Then your Sim would walk into Rabbit Hole hospital, after a while a message would pop up "Mary had a baby boy that was named John", then your Sim would just walk out of the hospital and Mary would come out with the baby.
Everything would happen magically, but in a way, you were at least apart of the event.

Roflganger, I like your idea about the newspaper hinting things to happen!

[Gus Smedstad]

When you create a Sim in CAS, or when the game creates a random Sim, the fitness and fatness levels that you (or the game) assign at creation define the Sim's genetic physique.  This is the "norm" towards which Sims will always trend if you do nothing such as exercise or overfeed the Sim.

That's the piece of information I was missing.  It also explains some of the behavior I was seeing with my rescued fatty.  I stopped paying attention to her for a while, and she started to pork out, and I was wondering how that happened.

I find this model very annoying.  Granted, gluttony is something you really have to do deliberately, and Sims will tend to exercise on their own, so a relatively simple model would end up with a household full of thin, muscular Sims every time, which is undesirable.  Still, I think they could have done a better job with fitness / fatness decay without forcing it this way.

So, I'm assuming the Body Sculptor changes a Sim's genetic values?  That would explain why it exists, beyond convenience compared to exercise or force-feeding.

The amount of computing power that would be needed for the game to actually render all the Sims doing actual things would be staggering.

Given that TS2 had problems with simulating 10+ Sims on a much smaller playing field, I think it's impressive that it renders and simulates as many as it does.  Computing power has of course increased since then, but it's clear they're doing some intelligent abstraction of remote events, yet they're still reasonably convincing when you swap rapidly between two distant locations.  The abstraction does show a bit when you do something like look at a remote location when it's been idle for a long time.  If a kid visits another house, and you swap to the kid, everyone is pretty much standing around doing nothing when you first look.

 - Gus

[ciane]

The thing that really bothers me most is the random addition and merging of families (even if there is room). I want the single guy to live alone. How else can I plan a romance?
I do not mind young adults moving away from home, but why chose another household to join rather than an empty house?
Also, if I never play or talk to a family, I don't mind them leaving town to be replaced by some family with which I might associate.
So options to leave existing families alone, allow random YA moves outs, and/or let untouched families leave the hood would really be awesome.

[Alex]

The thing that really bothers me most is the random addition and merging of families (even if there is room). I want the single guy to live alone. How else can I plan a romance?

Yes, this is probably the most annoying of these. For example, in Riverview there is a single woman who lives alone in a house on the town center island. One day, an entire family of SEVEN sims moved in and literally took over. This just destroys the story set up, and of course why would a woman who actively prefers to be alone allow a whole freaking family to move in? I could understand if she "changed" and allowed a close friend to move in, but this...

There was another instance where the wealthy Jones couple, who live in the humongous mansion on the hill, suddenly moved into some crapshack with two other sims who had just moved into the neighborhood themselves and probably had never even met. It's just so utterly unrealistic. If a family moved house because, say, a baby was on the way and the current house was too small then I could understand. Or if a sim's spouse has died, and they wished to move in with relatives or close friends so as not be alone then that would have some storytelling to it too. But this nonsensical merging with strangers, and in houses that have no actual room for them is just highly irritating.

[hooptytrib]

What Roflganger said.  I'm curious:  just how much information are we looking at in a day?  I expect it is enough that popups on event would be maddening, and FAST.

Events essential to omniscience:  AddSim, ChangeRelationship (romance only), Create Household, Create and Move in, Emigrate, Kill, Merge, Move In/Out, Split.

Ideally we will want to know of these the moment they happen, but a daily report would certainly be better than the nothing we have.

Doubly ideal?  setconfig ApproveToads true.  Veto power is grail-shaped.

[Marhis]

The difficult thing is tuning the right amount of information carried on: too less would lead to the aforementioned disappointment about not knowing what's going on, too much would lead instead to nagging the player to death.

[Roflganger]

There's definitely potential for event spam, but my concept confines information to the newspaper, which is where you already find out about most of these events anyway.  (Not to say that the paper couldn't do with some serious improvement, because it could).  But key events - deaths, births, marriages - should get a popup of some sort, at least for Sims to whom your actives are close.  Major life events don't happen every day, and there are rarely multiple in a single day, so I think major life event popups would be fairly unintrusive.  

[Mandapotpie]

There's definitely potential for event spam, but my concept confines information to the newspaper, which is where you already find out about most of these events anyway.  (Not to say that the paper couldn't do with some serious improvement, because it could).  But key events - deaths, births, marriages - should get a popup of some sort, at least for Sims to whom your actives are close.  Major life events don't happen every day, and there are rarely multiple in a single day, so I think major life event popups would be fairly unintrusive.  

Well they do sort of have that, at least for deaths. One of my sims was friends with an elder through work and a week or so into gameplay, I got a pop-up that said "so-and-so is old and won't live forever" and a suggestion to go visit her. Then a couple of days later (after I had ignored said pop-up), I got one that said she had died. It doesn't do it for births and marriages, or at least I haven't seen any, but it will do it if a friend of the family is dying.

[seelindarun]

I find it astounding that EA decided to give sims a brand new gene for fatness but decided to wipe out those for hair, skin and eyes that they had before.

Well, not really. The skin genes pretty much exist as they did in TS2, only instead of SX, you can choose an entire continuum. Hair/eyes no longer have genetics because with the ability to arbitrarily pick any shade or combination, there's no way to determine which is the "recessive". Making the customized colors behave differently would bring back Custom Genetics Are Evil where they would superdominate everything and generally be BAD to put in your game...and if everyone used it, the system would be the same as what we have now!

I should have been more specific, but I was already TL;DR.  I was referring to the abolition of an attribute for hair-/skin-/eye- colour genotype.  In TS2, even skin had a distinct genotype with 2 alleles, so recessives could be passed on.  In later expansions this was changed with respect to skin, so sims could only pass the phenotype, but in principle I could use SimPE to enforce proper inheritance because the attribute was available to set.  In TS3, there is no separate genotype for anything except fatness.  The elimination of a genotype for hair is fundamentally why hair inheritance is fubar -- it's not an issue of being unable to determine what colours should be recessive.

A stupidly simple solution to the hair colour problem could have been to set an arbitrary number of bases, similar to the default palette in CAS.  Let those represent genotype and set recessives/dominants accordingly.  Adjustments to those shades would simply represent the phenotype (not available for inheritance with respect to hair).

I'm not crazy about parthenogenesis but in nature, a population isn't stable with 50-100 individuals even if they mate like animals do (without regard to compatibility, marriage, age group).

Strictly speaking, animals can be quite picky. Random mating is one of those simplified assumptions akin to spherical cows.

We don't need to bother refining our assumptions, because additional conditions to mating push the self-sustaining population number higher, not lower.  Similarly, I thought it safe to ignore my uncertainty about a theoretical limit on the number of sims, because I can already see in gameplay that simulating 200 sims is a load on the equipment.  Even in TS2, it was possible to have far more sims than we wanted.

Strictly speaking, the population dynamics in real life wouldn't likely be self-sustaining, either. In suburban middle-class America, presumably the setting the game attempts to simulate as its baseline, the reproduction rate is actually below replacement replacement in real life. It's those stupid stinky poor people who are overbreeding.

You are right about this (immigration also pads numbers) but that's mainly because American and Western European couples have smaller families.  Marriage is still the default by a huge margin.  In the game, we could tune compatible couples to produce up to 2-6 spawn, and it wouldn't seem like a glaring departure from reality.  I think the larger problem is getting enough compatible mating pairs without having to generate a base of a thousand sims.

However, even if you stomp the numbers problem into submission, genetic diversity can't be preserved in the scenario above without ass-pull, immigration, or nuclear plants.  That goes back to the absence of recessive alleles in the genotype.  There's a reason why evolution has favoured the preservation of recessive gene information for species which do not reproduce at high rates.  Even a population of thousands will lose genetic diversity through selective breeding, and dominant characteristics, if you allow those factors to operate.

[J. M. Pescado]

We don't need to bother refining our assumptions, because additional conditions to mating push the self-sustaining population number higher, not lower.  Similarly, I thought it safe to ignore my uncertainty about a theoretical limit on the number of sims, because I can already see in gameplay that simulating 200 sims is a load on the equipment.  Even in TS2, it was possible to have far more sims than we wanted.

Well, in TS2, the population of the game could never pass 32767, whether those sims were living, dead, deleted, or merely considered but never instantiated, they would all deplete the NID pool unless the SCID was reset, as each such incident increased the SCID by 1.

In TS3, this system has not changed, but as the maximum SCID count is 18 quadrillion, it is not reachable even if you made 100 sims a second for the next 5 billion years.

You are right about this (immigration also pads numbers) but that's mainly because American and Western European couples have smaller families.  Marriage is still the default by a huge margin.  In the game, we could tune compatible couples to produce up to 2-6 spawn, and it wouldn't seem like a glaring departure from reality.  I think the larger problem is getting enough compatible mating pairs without having to generate a base of a thousand sims.

Well, in TS3, without attractances, a "compatible mating pair" amounts to "randomly chosen male with age >= 18" and "randomly chosen female with age >= 18 and < elder".

However, even if you stomp the numbers problem into submission, genetic diversity can't be preserved in the scenario above without ass-pull, immigration, or nuclear plants.  That goes back to the absence of recessive alleles in the genotype.

Recessives are essentially "faked", through the existence of the ability to grab genetic attributes from the "grandparents". Ignoring the mutational asspull, there is a 40% chance that the genetics of the parents are simply completely ignored, and the trait is grabbed from the grandparents. Assuming we model the grandparents as homozygous dominant and homozygous recessive, and imagine that the parents in question are treated as heterozygous dominant, the odds of the "recessive" trait appearing is about 20%, roughly comparable to the 25% chance of this happening under the Mendelian model used in TS2. It falls to 16% in the presence of the mutation asspull. The presence of the mutational asspull creates an interesting effect on its own, though: Each generation, there is a 10% chance that the genetic information is destroyed and replaced with EA default information. In the next generation, there is a 10% of more twaddle, a 36% of grandparent information (clean this time), and a 54% of parent information (of which 10% is twaddle), for a total of 15.4% rubbish. It continues.

Observe this table:

Gen #	Twaddle Pct
0	0.000
1	10.000
2	15.400
3	21.916
4	27.379
5	32.674
6	37.500
7	42.013
8	46.187
9	50.066
10	53.663
11	57.002
12	60.099
13	62.974
14	65.642
15	68.117
16	70.414
17	72.546
18	74.524
19	76.360
20	78.063

[Ryslin]

It just occurred to me that Pets for this version is going to be a VBT. Random spawning wildlife.. run for the hills!

[J. M. Pescado]

It just occurred to me that Pets for this version is going to be a VBT. Random spawning wildlife.. run for the hills!

Well, it's not the problem it was in TS2, really. In TS3, having a profusion of other-sims isn't really something that horribly impacts your disk space, just your neighborhood aesthetic, and as the game has generally been decent with the look of animals anyway, and the maximum hardcoded sim count is 18 quadrillion instead of 32767, it's really a nonissue.

[seelindarun]

Well, in TS3, without attractances, a "compatible mating pair" amounts to "randomly chosen male with age >= 18" and "randomly chosen female with age >= 18 and < elder".

I agree this is what happens in the game, in fact this is the compromise you have to settle for in order to have something playable.  Many people may find it unrealistic to have an entire town populated by one-night stands, however.

However, even if you stomp the numbers problem into submission, genetic diversity can't be preserved in the scenario above without ass-pull, immigration, or nuclear plants.  That goes back to the absence of recessive alleles in the genotype.

Recessives are essentially "faked", through the existence of the ability to grab genetic attributes from the "grandparents". Ignoring the mutational asspull, there is a 40% chance that the genetics of the parents are simply completely ignored, and the trait is grabbed from the grandparents. Assuming we model the grandparents as homozygous dominant and homozygous recessive, and imagine that the parents in question are treated as heterozygous dominant, the odds of the "recessive" trait appearing is about 20%, roughly comparable to the 25% chance of this happening under the Mendelian model used in TS2. It falls to 16% in the presence of the mutation asspull. The presence of the mutational asspull creates an interesting effect on its own, though: Each generation, there is a 10% chance that the genetic information is destroyed and replaced with EA default information. In the next generation, there is a 10% of more twaddle, a 36% of grandparent information (clean this time), and a 54% of parent information (of which 10% is twaddle), for a total of 15.4% rubbish. It continues.

A small addendum to your argument above: Mendelian genetics saves recessive gene information even if it isn't expressed.  In your example, the odds of the recessive gene being saved in the grandchildren is 75%, including the 25% chance of expression.  So there's only a 25% chance of it being obliterated in TS2, compared to the 80% odds of it being destroyed in TS3.

Getting back to the main thrust of your argument though, I agree that the most irritating effect is that all genetic characteristics are subject to equal odds of destruction.  Stomping the twaddle improves the odds of saving 'real' information, but then the burden shifts back to the player to constantly inject varied genes into the family line if diversity is desired, since the loss of any chosen characteristic over 2 generations will wipe it completely.